Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth 9781119156574, 1119156572, 9781119156604, 1119156602

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The Wiley Blackwell Companion to  Karl Barth

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Wiley Blackwell Companions to Religion The Wiley Blackwell Companions to Religion series presents a collection of the most recent scholarship and knowledge about world religions. Each volume draws together newly commissioned essays by distinguished authors in the field and is presented in a style that is accessible to undergraduate students, as well as scholars and the interested general reader. These volumes approach the subject in a creative and forward‐thinking style, providing a forum in which leading scholars in the field can make their views and research available to a wider audience. Recently Published The Blackwell Companion to Religious Ethics Edited by William Schweiker The Blackwell Companion to Christian Spirituality Edited by Arthur Holder The Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion Edited by Robert A. Segal The Blackwell Companion to the Qur’ān Edited by Andrew Rippin The Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Islamic Thought Edited by Ibrahim M. Abu‐Rabi’ The Blackwell Companion to the Bible and Culture Edited by John F. A. Sawyer The Blackwell Companion to Catholicism Edited by James J. Buckley, Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt, and Trent Pomplun The Blackwell Companion to Eastern Christianity Edited by Ken Parry The Blackwell Companion to the Theologians Edited by Ian S. Markham The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature Edited by Rebecca Lemon, Emma Mason, John Roberts, and Christopher Rowland The Blackwell Companion to the New Testament Edited by David E. Aune The Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth Century Theology Edited by David Fergusson The Blackwell Companion to Religion in America Edited by Philip Goff The Blackwell Companion to Jesus Edited by Delbert Burkett The Blackwell Companion to Paul Edited by Stephen Westerholm The Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence Edited by Andrew R. Murphy The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, Second Edition Edited by Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology Edited by Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore Wiley Blackwell Companion to Wisdom Literature Edited by Samuel L. Adams and Matthew Goff The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Materiality Edited by Vasudha Narayanan The Wiley Blackwell Concise Companion to the Hadith Edited by Daniel W. Brown The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Christian Martyrdom Edited by Paul Middleton The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth (2 volumes) Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson

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The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth Barth and Dogmatics Volume I Edited by

George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson

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This edition first published 2020 © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions. The right of George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson to be identified as the authors of this editorial material has been asserted in accordance with law. Registered Offices John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK Editorial Office The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, customer services, and more information about Wiley products visit us at www.wiley.com. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print‐on‐demand. Some content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this work, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives, written sales materials or promotional statements for this work. The fact that an organization, website, or product is referred to in this work as a citation and/or potential source of further information does not mean that the publisher and authors endorse the information or services the organization, website, or product may provide or recommendations it may make. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a specialist where appropriate. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data applied for 9781119156567 (hardback) Cover Design: Wiley Cover Image: Grunewald Isenheim by Mathias Grünewald is licensed under CC BY-SA Set in 10/12.5pt Photina by SPi Global, Pondicherry, India

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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To Eberhard Busch

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Contents

Preface xi

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List of Contributors

xiii

Primary Text Abbreviations

xv

Part I  The Life of Karl Barth

1

Professional Timeline

3

Personal Timeline

7

1 Karl Barth’s Historical and Theological Significance Christiane Tietz

9

Part II  Barth on Doctrinal Topics

21

2 Barth on the Trinity Paul D. Molnar

23

3 Barth on the Filioque David Guretzki

35

4 Barth on Divine Election David Gibson

47

5 Barth on Revelation Matthew J.A. Bruce

59

6 Barth on Holy Scripture Katherine Sonderegger

71

7 Barth on Theological Method Kevin W. Hector

83

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contents

8 Barth on Natural Theology Keith L. Johnson 9 Barth on Creeds and Confessions David Lauber

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95 109

10 Barth on Creation David C. Chao

113

11 Barth on Providence Sung‐Sup Kim

125

12 Barth on the Incarnation Robert B. Price

137

13 Barth on the Atonement Adam J. Johnson

147

14 Barth on Christ’s Resurrection John L. Drury

159

15 Barth on Christ’s Ascension Andrew Burgess

173

16 Barth on Theological Anthropology Jeffrey Skaff

185

17 Barth on Sin Matt Jenson

197

18 Barth on Evil and Nothingness Wolf Krötke

207

19 Barth on Death Cambria Janae Kaltwasser

217

20 Barth on the Holy Spirit JinHyok Kim

229

21 Barth on the Church Kimlyn J. Bender

241

22 Barth on Preaching William H. Willimon

253

23 Barth on Baptism W. Travis McMaken

265

24 Barth on the Lord’s Supper Martha Moore‐Keish

277

25 Barth on Justification Shannon Smythe

291

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contents

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ix

26 Barth on Sanctification Jason Goroncy

303

27 Barth on Vocation Paul T. Nimmo

317

28 Barth on the Church in Mission Hanna Reichel

327

29 Barth on Participation in Christ Adam Neder

341

30 Barth on the Christian Life Marco Hofheinz

355

31 Barth on the Ethics of Creation Jonathan Lett

369

32 Barth on Love Gerald McKenny

381

33 Barth on Prayer Andrew Purves

393

34 Barth on Religion Michael Weinrich

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Preface George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson

R

eaders of Karl Barth often find his work at once familiar and strange. The familiarity stems from the largely traditional subject matter of his theology. The questions, debates, and doctrines that Barth considers have been the currency of Christian theologians for centuries. He talks about recognizable topics like the triune God, Jesus Christ, the church, and the Christian life. He cites the Bible regularly, nearly 15 000 times in the Church Dogmatics alone, and he interacts with the work of well‐known figures within the Christian tradition. All these things make Barth’s theology appear accessible to new readers, as if they have found a theologian who speaks a language nearly everyone can understand. But one does not have to read very far in Barth’s work before things become strange. Barth uses everyday language in new and surprising ways. He often places fairly simple claims in dialectical tension with one another to produce an unexpected and complex result. Major figures within the tradition might be cited approvingly on one page only to have central aspects of their work rejected and reconfigured a few pages later. Barth frequently produces innovative readings of Scripture that stretch the imagination. No one who reads Barth comes away without being challenged, provoked, and changed. We edited this Companion with these readers of Barth in mind. Our goal was to help them better understand those parts of Barth’s theology that seem strange so they can see the familiar aspects of his theology with new eyes. We sought to create a comprehensive resource that covers nearly every topic of interest related to Barth’s life and work. The diverse set of scholars who participated are experts in their subject matter, and they brought great care to their work. Each chapter was composed with the aim of providing both clarity and depth to the topic. New readers of Barth should find that the chapters serve as a helpful introduction to the most important questions, themes, and ideas in Barth’s work. Experienced readers should discover fresh insights and interpretations that will raise new questions and enrich their scholarship. This Companion is divided into two volumes and four parts. Volume 1 explores “Barth and Dogmatics.” Part I introduces “The Life of Karl Barth” through two timelines of Barth’s life and a chapter‐length survey of his historical and theological significance.

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xii

preface

Part II examines “Barth on Doctrinal Theology.” The 33 chapters in this section explore Barth’s thought on key topics and questions in dogmatic theology as reflected both in Barth’s early work and his Church Dogmatics. Volume 2 turns attention to “Barth in Dialogue.” The 22 chapters in Part III place Barth into conversation with major figures in the history of Christian thought in order to capture a true, critical dialogue between them. Part IV explores “Barth on Major Themes.” Over the course of 21 chapters, Barth’s relationship to a variety of movements, traditions, religions, and events are explored with the goal of placing his thought in its theological, ecumenical, and historical context. Projects of this size are the product of a community. We are grateful to editors and production team at Wiley‐Blackwell both for inviting us to take on this project and for supporting our work along the way. Special recognition should be given to Rebecca Harkin, Joseph Catherine, Benjamin Elijah, Jake Opie, Richard Samson, and Sandra Kerka. They were gracious and professional at every turn. We also want to express our deep appreciation to each of our authors for their contribution to this project. Several of them put other tasks on hold, or worked on short time frames, in order to meet the deadlines associated with this project. Special recognition should be given to Ty Kieser, who worked as an editorial assistant on this project while completing his doctoral studies at Wheaton College. Ty’s encyclopedic knowledge of this project proved to be invaluable time and again. His enthusiasm, work ethic, and joyful spirit kept this project from becoming overwhelming despite its size. In addition to bringing every chapter into conformity with the bibliographical requirements, he also raised good questions and contributed insights that made the work stronger. It was a privilege to work with such a fine theologian. One of the best days we experienced over the course of this project was the day Eberhard Busch accepted our invitation to participate in it. The importance of Professor Busch’s contributions to Barth studies over the past 50 years can hardly be overstated. His keen mind, gracious spirit, and willingness to share his knowledge – not to mention his close personal acquaintance with Barth – have strengthened and enriched Barth’s legacy. In honor of his lifetime of work, we dedicate this Companion to him.

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List of Contributors

Kimlyn J. Bender is Professor of Christian Theology at Baylor University’s George W. Truett Theological Seminary. Matthew J.A. Bruce is Visiting Associate Lecturer of Theology at Wheaton College. Andrew Burgess is Dean of Bishopdale Theological College in Nelson, New Zealand. David C. Chao is a PhD Candidate in Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. John L. Drury is Associate Professor of Theology and Christian Ministry at Indiana Wesleyan University. David Gibson is a Minister of Trinity Church in Aberdeen, Scotland. Jason Goroncy is Senior Lecturer in Systematic Theology at Whitley College, University of Divinity. David Guretzki is Adjunct Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Briercrest Seminary. Kevin W. Hector is Associate Professor of Theology and of the Philosophy of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Marco Hofheinz is Professor of Systematic Theology and Ethics at Leibniz University of Hannover, Germany. Matt Jenson is an Associate Professor at Biola University’s Torrey Honors Institute. Adam J. Johnson is an Associate Professor at Biola University’s Torrey Honors Institute. Keith L. Johnson is Associate Professor of Theology at Wheaton College.

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xiv

list of contributors

Cambria Janae Kaltwasser is Assistant Professor of Biblical and Theological Studies at Northwestern College. JinHyok Kim received a DPhil in Systematic Theology from Oxford University. Sung‐Sup Kim received his Ph.D. in theology from Princeton Theological Seminary. Wolf Krötke is Professor Emeritus of Systematic Theology at Humboldt University in Berlin. David Lauber is Associate Professor of Theology at Wheaton College. Jonathan Lett is Assistant Professor of Theology at Le Tourneau University. Gerald McKenny is Endowed Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. W. Travis McMaken is Associate Professor of Religion and Assistant Dean of Multidisciplinary Humanities at Lindenwood University. Paul D. Molnar is Professor of Systematic Theology at St. John’s University. Martha Moore‐Keish is J.B. Green Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at Columbia Theological Seminary. Adam Neder is Bruner‐Welch Professor in Theology at Whitworth University. Paul T. Nimmo is King’s Chair of Systematic Theology at the University of Aberdeen. Robert B. Price is Associate Professor and Co‐Chair, Department of Theology in the Talbot School of Theology at Biola University. Andrew Purves is Professor of Reformed Theology at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. Hanna Reichel is Associate Professor of Reformed Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. Jeffrey Skaff received his PhD in Systematic Theology from Princeton Theological Seminary. Shannon Smythe is Assistant Professor of Theological Studies at Seattle Pacific University. Katherine Sonderegger is William Meade Chair in Systematic Theology at Virginia Theological Seminary. Christiane Tietz is Professor of Systematic Theology as the University of Zürich. Michael Weinrich is Professor of Systematic Theology, Dogmatics and Ecumenism at Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany. William H. Willimon is Professor of the Practice of Christian Ministry at Duke Divinity School.

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Primary Text Abbreviations

ALA ATS BAP CD CL CRE CSC DC DO EE EP ESS ET ETH FI FOC FT FQI GA GD HCT HG HIC HOM HSCL KBA KD KGSG PRA PTNC RI RII

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Ad Limina Apostolorum Against the Stream The Teaching of the Church Regarding Baptism Church Dogmatics The Christian Life Credo Community, State, and Church Deliverance to the Captives Dogmatics in Outline Epistle to the Ephesians Epistle to the Philippians Eine Schweizer Stimme Evangelical Theology Ethics “Fate and Idea in Theology” The Faith of the Church Final Testimonies Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum Karl Barth Gesamtausgabe Göttingen Dogmatics The Heidelberg Catechism for Today “The Humanity of God” How I Changed My Mind Homiletics The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life Karl Barth Archiv Kirchliche Dogmatik The Knowledge of God and the Service of God Prayer Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century The Epistle to the Romans, first edition The Epistle to the Romans, second edition

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xvi ROD RSC TC TET TJC TRC TS WGT WTW

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primary text abbreviations

The Resurrection of the Dead A Shorter Commentary on Romans Theology and Church Theological Existence Today!: A Plea for Theological Freedom Theology of John Calvin Theology of Reformed Confessions Theology of Schleiermacher The Word of God and Theology Witness to the Word: A Commentary on John 1

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Part I

The Life of Karl Barth

Karl Barth Professional Timeline

1886 – Born 10 May in Basel, Switzerland. 1904–1908 – Studies at the Universities of Bern, Berlin, Tübingen, and Marburg. 1908–1909 – Editorial Assistant for Christliche Welt. 1909 – Ordained 4 November by his father in the cathedral in Bern. 1909 – Assistant pastor in Geneva. 1911–1921  –  Reformed pastor in Safenwil, a small industrial city in Switzerland. 1914  –  In August Barth is shocked to read a manifesto supporting the Kaiser’s war efforts signed by almost all of his theology professors. 1918–1919 –‐ First edition of Barth’s The Epistle to the Romans. Barth likens himself to a man climbing a dark bell tower who, reaching out to steady himself with the rail, grabs a bell rope by mistake, thus sounding an alarm that rings through the whole town. He writes: “The Gospel proclaims a God wholly other from humankind,” a God who dwells in “another plane that is unknown.” 1919 – Tambach Lecture delivered at a conference of religious socialists. Barth’s break with religious socialism. He protests against “secularizing Christ for the umpteenth time, e.g. today for the sake of democracy, or pacifism, or the youth movement, or something of the sort – as yesterday it would have been for the sake of liberal culture or our countries, Switzerland or Germany.”

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth and Dogmatics, Volume I, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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professional timeline

1921–1922  –  Second edition of Barth’s The Epistle to the Romans. He writes: “If Christianity is not altogether and unreservedly eschatology, there remains in it no relationship whatsoever to Christ.” It becomes a best seller through the present day. 1921–1930 – Professor of Theology in Göttingen and Münster. 1921 – Barth is appointed professor of Reformed theology at the University of Göttingen, and later to chairs at Münster (1925) and Bonn (1930). 1923 – Barth debates his distinguished teacher, Adolf von Harnack. 1924–1925 – Göttingen Dogmatics (published posthumously). 1924 – Zwischen den Zeiten. Beginning of the “dialectical theology” movement. Barth, Bultmann, Gogarten, Thurneysen, Merz. Dissolved in 1933. 1925 – October. Barth assumes a theology position in Münster. 1926 – First seminar on Anselm. 1927 – Christliche Dogmatik. 1928 – Collaboration with Heinrich Scholz. Beginnings of Barth’s Anselm book. 1929 – Meetings with Eric Przywara. 1930–1935 – The years at Bonn. 1931 – Fides Quaerens Intellectum. 1931 – Church Dogmatics. Barth begins the first book of his magnum opus. It grows year by year out of his class lectures; though incomplete, it eventually fills four volumes in 12 parts, nearly 10,000 pages in all. 1933 – January. Theologische Existenz heute [Theological Existence Today]. From broadside to journal. “As though nothing had happened.” 1934  –  31 May. The Barmen Declaration. Barth mails this declaration to Hitler personally. 1935 – June. Barth is forced to resign from his professorship at the University of Bonn for protesting against the treatment of the Jews and for refusing to swear an oath of loyalty to Hitler. Arrested and deported. 1935–1968 – Professor in Basel. 1935 – Increasing sense of isolation. 1936 – Attends lecture by Pierre Maury on “Election and Faith.” 1937– Gifford Lectures. The Knowledge of God and the Service of God. 1941 – Conversations with Bonhoeffer in Basel. 1942–1945 – Works against a Swiss law that prevented Jewish refugees from entering the country. His telephone is wiretapped by the police.

professional timeline

5

1944  –  Committee for a Free Germany. Communist‐led organization organized to support refugees from Germany. 1945 – Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt (19 October). Written under Barth’s influence but he considers it to be too vague. 1946–1955 – The postwar era: Between East and West. 1941–onward – Friendship with Hans Urs von Balthasar. 1945–1955 – Opposes German rearmament and nuclear weapons, both in general and in Europe. 1945–1950 – Works for reconciliation with Germany and stands against retribution. 1948  –  World Council of Churches. First Assembly in Amsterdam. Barth delivers plenary address. 1949 – “The Church Between East and West.” 1955–1962 – Final years of teaching and activism for peace. 1956 – Bicentenary of Mozart’s death. 1958 – Petition against nuclear weapons. In company with many famous nuclear physicists, Barth calls for unilateral nuclear disarmament. Declares preparation for atomic warfare a sin and a denial of all three articles of the Christian faith. 1962–1968 – The years of retirement. 1962 – Trip to the United States. Visits Chicago, Pittsburgh, Richmond, and Princeton. 1963 – Sonning Prize. Copenhagen. 1963 – Honorary doctorate in Paris. Laudatio given by Paul Ricouer. 1968 – Sigmund Freud Prize. Awarded by the Academy for Poetry and Speech in 1968 for the quality of his academic prose. 1968 – On 10 December Barth dies in his sleep.

Karl Barth Personal Timeline

1886 – Barth is born in Basel on 10 May. 1907 – Barth, age 21, falls in love with Rösy Munger. They plan to marry but are prevented by Barth’s parents. At their last meeting they burn their letters to one another. 1909 – Barth serves as assistant pastor in Geneva. Preaches from Calvin’s pulpit in the Auditoire. 1911 – Barth’s parents (mainly his mother) arrange his marriage to Nelly Hoffman (b. 1893), an accomplished violinist and a former pupil in one of Barth’s confirmation classes. 1911 – Barth leaves Geneva for a pastorate in Safenwil. 1913 – Barth and Nelly’s wedding day (27 March). He is 27, she is 19. 1921–1925 – Professor in Göttingen. 1925 – Charlotte von Kirschbaum meets Barth. She is 24 years old, financially almost destitute, and in poor health. Barth is 37. 1925–1930 – Professor in Münster. 1925 – Rösy Munger dies of leukemia. Barth spends a day in his study grieving for her. He carries a photo of her in his suit pocket for the rest of his life. He sometimes takes it out and weeps, even into his old age. 1926  –  Charlotte visits Münster and begins secretarial work for Barth. They soon realize, in joy and anguish, that they have fallen in love.

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth and Dogmatics, Volume I, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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personal timeline

1929 – Charlotte moves in with Nelly and Karl Barth and their five children in Münster. She lives in the household with them for 35 years. 1930–1935 – Professor in Bonn. 1931 – Barth begins the Church Dogmatics. 1933 – Theologische Existenz heute! 1934 – Barth writes the Barmen Declaration. 1935 – Barth returns to Basel in July, after the Confessing Church fails to support him with a teaching post. He is officially expelled from Germany by the police in October. Charlotte follows the family into Switzerland. From there they support the German Resistance and the Confessing Church. 1935–1962 – Professor in Basel. Early 1960s  –  Charlotte becomes ill, possibly with Alzheimer’s disease. In 1965 she moves to a nursing home in Riehen, where she dies 10 years later. Barth visits her every Sunday, often accompanied by Nelly. Nelly continues to visit Charlotte after Karl is gone. 1968 – Barth dies in his sleep on 10 December at the age of 82. 1975 – Charlotte dies at the age of 76. Nelly honors Karl’s request that Charlotte be buried in the family plot. 1976 – Nelly dies at the age of 83. All three names appear on one gravestone. Barth is honored with a feast day on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church (USA) on 10 December.

CHAPTER 1

Karl Barth’s Historical and Theological Significance Christiane Tietz

K

arl Barth allowed himself to be moved by the realities that surrounded him. It was the harsh and perplexing reality of the world that led him to ask about God in a new way. It was the poverty he confronted as a young curate in Geneva, not to mention the class divisions he encountered as pastor in Safenwil, that made him search for a hope against hope on the basis of faith (cf. Barth 1971, p. 306; GA 22, p. 730). It was the reality of World War I and the capitulation of many of his theological teachers to German zeal for the war that made him doubt their theological presuppositions and develop his disruptively “dialectical” counterproposals. It was the reality of his teaching post as a professor that made him move away from a merely dialectical critique to devel­ oping a full‐scale dogmatics. And it was the reality of the Third Reich that made him lift up the relevance not only of the First Commandment as a theological criterion but also of Jesus Christ as the self‐revelation of God. Although Barth argued that God and the Christian faith were not merely cultural or historical phenomena, his thinking arose in response to immediate historical circumstances that betrayed, he felt, a certain crisis of modernity (cf. Gestrich 1977, p. 6f). Barth and the other dialectical theologians were not the only ones who discerned a crisis in modernity. Many intellectuals at that time like Ernst Bloch or Paul Tillich felt similarly. But the distinctive feature of Barth and the other dialectical theologians was their return to the theology of the Reformation (cf. Ebeling 1962, p. 1). For them that meant returning to faith in a God “whose existence radically questioned the world and oneself. Only God himself and his existence were no longer uncertain” (Gogarten 1937, p. 13 rev.). Some of their contemporaries regarded their approach as a departure from “modernity.” They suspected that here “‘modern man’ after the First World War had become weary of Enlightenment ideals and was now clinging to an idea of God that erupted from dark,

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth and Dogmatics, Volume I, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

10

christiane tietz

medieval depths” (Gestrich 1977, p. 1).1 Yet Barth and his friends did not understand their approach as a withdrawal from modernity and its rationality. They claimed that their concept of God as the Wholly Other was “the theme of the Bible and the sum of philosophy in one” (Barth 2010, p. 17; cf. Gestrich 1977, p. 2f.).

Return to the Bible, Focus on “die Sache” At the center of Barth’s new views lay his return to the biblical text. Of course, the biblical text was always – and also in Barth’s time – a subject of theological study. Yet because Barth regarded the historic‐critical approach to the Bible as insufficient, he tried something different in his two commentaries on Paul’s Letter to the Romans. The philosopher Hans‐Georg Gadamer considered Barth’s first commentary to be a ­milestone in modern hermeneutics, because it made clear that understanding a text means understanding “die Sache” or “subject matter” of the text. Here Barth undertook “a ‘critique’ of liberal theology which not so much meant critical history as such but the theological modesty which acknowledged that its results were already an under­ standing of Holy Scripture. Therefore, despite its refusal of methodological reflection, Barth’s Letter to the Romans was some kind of hermeneutical manifesto” (Gadamer 1972, 481 rev.) In his preface to the second edition of The Letter to the Romans, it not only became clearer what Barth meant by “die Sache” of a text but also what he regarded as the short­ comings of the historical‐critical method. Barth replied to the reproach that he was an “enemy of historical criticism” and little more than a biblicist (Barth 2010, p. 11). First he acknowledged the full “right and necessity” of historical criticism. Then he went on to register his dissatisfaction that historical criticism ended with an “interpretation of the text which I cannot call an interpretation, but only the first primitive attempt at an interpretation” (Barth 2010, p. 11). His own aim was first to bring out “what stands in the text,” yet then to think about it until “the barrier” between Paul’s time and ours becomes “transparent” so that “Paul talks there and we … listen here, until the conversation between document and reader is focused totally on ‘die Sache’ (which cannot be different here and there)” (Barth 2010, p. 13 rev.). In focusing on one and the same “Sache,” text and reader become present to each other. This is the critique that was finally necessary when reading a biblical text: relating and comparing all its statements with “die Sache” of which it is talking. In this regard Barth penned his famous line: “In my view, the historical critics need to be more critical!” (Barth 2010, p. 14) Barth’s perspective on the historical‐critical method was a response to the domi­ nance of historism in Protestant theology at that time (cf. Gestrich 1977, p. 2). In standing against it, Barth, Brunner, Bultmann, Gogarten, and Thurneysen were on the same page as Paul Tillich and Emanuel Hirsch (cf. Gestrich 1977, p. 16). All of them judged that historism had made the revelation of God into an inner‐worldly phenomenon. The extra nos of the divine Word had been abolished and preaching had

1  Gestrich’s allusion here is to Friedrich Karl Schumann’s Der Gottesgedanke und der Zerfall der Moderne, 1929.

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thereby become impossible (cf. Gestrich 1977, p. 16f.). Ernst Troeltsch’s historical method and its norms of critique, analogy, and correlation (cf. Troeltsch 1913) had dwindled God’s reality into a part of history. God’s absolute otherness could no longer be encountered (cf. Gestrich 1977, p. 21f.). With his critique of historicism and his concept of the transhistorical simultaneity of Sache and reader (through the text), Barth had rejected a simple linear conception of time. He was convinced that the whole existence of the church depended on its simulta­ neity with the living Christ. In his mature view, this simultaneity was the essence of Christian celebrations like Christmas and Easter. When celebrating these holidays, Christians presupposed “that prior to our remembrance, the One whom we remember is himself in action to‐day, here and now.” They presupposed that as such events once took place definitively there and then, they also in some form (secondary and dependent) “take place to‐day, and will take place again tomorrow” (CD IV/2, p. 112 rev.). This “realism” was grounded in Jesus Christ, the living Savior present then and present now. “He overcomes the barrier of his own time and therefore of historical distance …. He is present and future in his once‐for‐all act there and then …. He is among us to‐day, and will be among us to‐morrow, in his once‐for‐all act as it took place there and then” (CD IV/2, p. 112 rev.). Through his focus on “die Sache”  –  on the incarnate and present Christ who lived, died, and rose again – Barth was able to develop an understanding of the biblical text which expected that God would speak through it – not in the naïve sense of a fundamentalist biblicism but in reckoning with God’s active, in‐breaking presence when reading and studying the Bible. Barth’s methodological approach to the biblical text was rejected by distinguished theologians of his time. For example, in 1923 his former teacher Adolf von Harnack accused him of destroying the academic character of theology through his somehow naïve and devotional return to the meaning of the biblical text. In his eyes, Barth had turned the professor’s lectern into a pastor’s pulpit (cf. GA 35, pp. 55–88). Barth’s rediscovery of the Bible in fact led to a revival of biblical theology and of bib­ lical preaching among his contemporaries. And it led to a new interest in the church, as the Bible has its decisive meaning only in and for the church. The church was the community that lived from reading the Bible and from preaching its texts. Whereas cultural Protestantism emphasized the individual and his or her subjectivity, Barth’s theology brought the church back into the picture.

God as the Wholly Other In contrast to the liberal theological approach of his time that started with the human being, and in particular with religious self‐consciousness, Barth emphasized that the­ ology had to begin with God. This emphasis was prompted by the shock of World War I, which showed Barth that all human ethical concepts such as socialism or pacifism or even “Christianity” were part of the world and were not able to overcome the world as it is. In World War I, in Barth’s view, all ethics had “gone into the trenches” (GA 48, p. 186). No ethical concept was able to overcome this human catastrophe, be it the con­ cept of the state or of patriotism, not to mention socialism or even pacifism. Not unlike

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the sixteenth‐century Swiss reformer Huldrych Zwingli, for Barth everything human was “flesh” in its nullity and transitory nature (cf. Gestrich 1977, p. 47). Barth concluded that “world is world” and that all worldly gods have become “battlefield grey” (GA 48, pp. 193, 195). Only God, as he can be recognized in the life and work of Jesus Christ, is the one who brings the New. “He is entirely different …. from anything else which seems true and right to me” (GA 48, p. 201). Barth’s famous critique of religion, not least of the Christian religion, arose from his understanding of God as the Wholly Other who disrupts our self‐satisfied existence. For religion wants to quell this disruption. It recommends that we “trust in God …. as a quite attainable and helpful requisite for life …. Without blushing one talks about ‘Christian’ customs, families, organizations …. [In religion], the ‘divine’ has taken possession of God, making God into an instrumental value” (GA 48, p. 679 rev.). In religion, God is used as a means to satisfy our self‐determined needs. Barth concluded that there are no human criteria with which we can measure the immeasurable deity of God. The only criterion is this, that “God’s will” conquers us and “puts such a claim on us …. that we have to recognize and confess: this God is God” (GA 48, p. 202). No detached evaluation of God according to worldly standards is possible. Therefore, only God can reveal God. And only God can authorize any human word about God (cf. GA 48, pp. 567, 595). Although Barth’s decision to begin theological thinking with God could seem self‐referential, it was in fact a consequence of his insight that all other starting points for theological thinking were unable to get beyond the hopeless human situation. “Human beings as human beings cry out for God … Not again for something human, but for God, … for God as the redeemer of their humanity” (GA 19, p. 153). Theology could start only with God, because God, as the Christian church believed, had in fact revealed himself, by a great miracle, in Jesus Christ  – ­perpendicularly from above.

Barth’s Political Critiques It was Barth’s insight into the radical difference between God and world that enabled him to critique the politics of his time. He understood not only God’s gospel but also God’s law as different from what reason considered right (cf. Gestrich 1977, p. 49). We encounter both, God’s grace and God’s law, not in history, but finally only in Jesus Christ as God’s self‐revelation. As the Barmen declaration stated in 1934: “As Jesus Christ is God’s comforting pronouncement of the forgiveness of all our sins [Gospel], so, with equal seriousness, he is also God’s vigorous announcement of his claim upon our whole life [Law]” (Barmen 2). It is in fact God’s grace that judges human beings, revealing how little they live in accordance with God (cf. Gestrich 1977, p. 50). Barth understood his own political engagement, especially against National Socialism, as a consequence of the First Commandment, “You shall have no other gods before me” (Ex. 20 : 3). Only an exclusive orientation toward God could lead to an ade­ quate Christian life (cf. GA 49, p. 239). The totalitarianism of National Socialism revealed its true face in its disobedience against the First Commandment. From the necessity of obeying this Commandment, Barth summoned the courage to not swear an

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unconditional oath to Adolf Hitler, as it was demanded of him by the Nazis. Along with other factors, not least his outspoken speech on Reformation Day in Berlin in 1933, it was a decision that led to his dismissal as a professor in Bonn in 1935. In contrast to many theologians of his time, Barth argued that Jesus Christ as the only criterion for theology and church led to a definite conception of the church‐ community. It was constituted, he insisted, “not through blood and accordingly also not through race [Volk], but through the Holy Spirit and through baptism” (GA 49, p. 327). This ecclesiological principle led him to conclude that a possible exclusion of Christians with a Jewish background from the church (as was planned in the so‐called Arian paragraph of the Nazi state) would amount to the extinction of the Christian church. Barth was not the only one who fought against Nazi ideology. But he was one of the most prominent figures of the Confessing Church. When Barth told the rector of the University of Bonn in 1934 that he could swear an oath on Hitler only if he would be allowed to add the phrase “so far as it would be responsible for me as an evangelical Christian,” the rector reported Barth’s behavior to the cultural minister of state Bernhard Rust, commenting that he “got the impression that Barth is searching for martyrdom, and that Barth’s dismissal could perhaps become a desired signal for a new, large‐scale rebellion in the Protestant church. This is just a world‐famous theologian, the head of an immense number of followers all around the world” (Quoted in Prolingheuer 1977, p. 26). Long before having become a famous professor in Germany, Barth had been politically active. During his time as a pastor in Safenwil, he had advocated for Religious Socialism. He agreed with Leonhard Ragaz and Hermann Kutter that the kingdom of God concretely breaks into the world and its materiality concretely (cf. GA 22, p. 396). He was convinced that “the movement for social justice in the 19th and 20th century” was the “largest and most insistent Word of God to the present.” He saw it as a “very direct continuation of the spiritual power … that entered into history … through Jesus Christ” (GA 22, p. 387). Barth urged that the church had to speak out in unmistakable terms. He was convinced that Jesus and capitalism didn’t go together (cf. GA 22, p. 402). “There should be no social misery” (GA 22, p. 395). He joined the social democratic (socialist) party. After his return from Germany to Switzerland in 1935, Barth remained politically critical. In the Sudeten crisis, he encouraged the Czech people to resist Hitler’s aggres­ sion even with armed force (cf. GA 36, p. 114). During World War II, he fought publicly against the Swiss policy of neutrality, which he regarded as an attempt to curry favor with the Nazis. He was worried that Switzerland could lose its identity as a shelter for refugees and as a place where injustice was called by its proper name (cf. Barth 1940, p. 7). Barth therefore questioned unconditional pacifism, because it would be irresponsible not to resist Hitler’s expansionism with violent means. Yes, we need to pray and to work (ora et labora), as the order of Benedict tells us; but “to work … in this case unfortunately means: to shoot” (Barth 1945, p. 141). In response to these public statements, many accused Barth of being a warmonger. In the aftermath of World War II, Barth rebuked the church for joining in the ideology of western anticommunism. He felt that it cannot be “a task of the

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church to repeat with some theological argument, what every citizen can read nodding his head anyway in his daily newspaper” (GA 15, p. 164). He warned against the p ­ ossible rearmament, and in particular nuclear rearmament, of Germany. He expressed concern about the danger of returning to the old enthu­ siasm for war, of unnecessarily provoking the communist countries, and not least of sparking another world war. He increasingly opposed installing nuclear weapons in Germany and Switzerland. He called upon all citizens to “explain to their governments and their press by every possible means that they want neither to eradicate nor to be eradicated: not even for the defense of the ‘free world’, not even for the defense of socialism!” (GA 15, p. 392). Some of Barth’s contemporaries valued his brave and often nonconformist political statements. Yet others felt that his “interference” in politics was not what a Christian ought to do. The old saw was dragged out that Barth was mingling religion and politics. During World War II, Swiss censorship had cut back Barth’s freedom of speech and publication. After the war many felt that Barth used theology only as a framework for promoting his own political convictions. With an eye toward Calvin, Barth proposed a theological foundation for his political engagement and for the engagement he felt was incumbent upon the church. Everything depended on the reign of Jesus Christ. This foundation militated against any attempt to separate secular issues from the will of God. Because Christ’s reign extended over the whole world, analogies needed to be constructed between the gospel of Jesus Christ and the shape of social structures. It was an analogy between that freedom which Christ brings and a robust political freedom. This analogy supplied Christians with criteria to engage in political action (cf. Barth 1939). As much as possible the state needed to exist as a parable of God’s kingdom. Similarly, in the structure of its common life, the church needed to live an exemplary existence that unfolded what it would mean to live in accord with the gospel (cf. Barth 1960). Over against the critics who wanted to silence him politically, Barth was convinced that the gospel is “political from the very outset” (Barth 1960, p. 184).

A Theology Outdated? In the aftermath of World War II there was a general consensus that Barth’s theology had proven to be an incomparable bulwark against Nazi ideology. More recently, how­ ever, at least in the German‐speaking world, a perception has emerged that Barth’s the­ ology is outdated. Many German scholars would say that although his theology was relevant in its original setting, it has outlived its usefulness today. By historizing Barth along these lines, his theology is relegated to the dustbin of history (cf. Weinrich 2013, p. 17f.). Critics complain that his theology is self‐encapsulated without any relation to contemporary life. Tillich’s old reproach that Barth throws revelation down like a stone from heaven has been revived (Tillich 1951, p.7). The relation of Barth’s theology to modernity has reemerged. “The question of its place in the history of the modern era has become more and more a question of meth­ odologically fundamental meaning” (Pfleiderer 2005, p. 225). It is interesting that

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those who would reject Barth as outdated often return to theologians who represent the nineteenth century like Schleiermacher and Troeltsch (cf. Weinrich 2013, p. 18). These figures arguably stand at a greater distance from our times than Barth, whether temporally or otherwise. Some scholars have contended that Barth’s theology prevented a “constructive debate” of Protestantism with modernity (cf. Wagner 1995, p. 52). They skirmish against the “authoritarian” character of Barth’s theology and against those whom they called the “keepers of the Holy Grail” (Wagner 1975, p. 10). They claim that Barth’s success depended on a climate in which people were “hungry for authority” (Lauster 2008, p. 20) and that his theology satisfied “a religious and not only a theological yearning for a return to premodernity” (Lauster 2008, p. 18f.). They hanker back to an era when Christianity was culturally dominant and uncritically accepted. Barth’s ­“re‐mythologization of the idea of God,” argues Lauster, “his persistent insisting on the idea that God speaks, is an almost violent infantilization of the concept of God, which in many cases must have a repulsive effect, as it does not have any connection to modern critical thinking” (Lauster 2008, p. 22). Other scholars would claim that Barth was fundamentally connected to idealistic philosophy (cf. Pfleiderer 2005, p. 225) or even to Schleiermacher (cf. Duke and Streetman 1988; Leiner and Gockel 2015). Still others, like the Munich theologians Trutz Rendtorff, Falk Wagner, and Friedrich Wilhelm Graf contradict Barth’s own ­self‐understanding by contending that his theology was not a departure from but a “continuation of the theoretical formation of neo‐Protestantism or ‘liberal theology’” (Holtmann 2007, p. 13). His theology was not the explication of God’s objective reality but of the “subjectivity [Subjekthaftigkeit] of all reality” (Rendtorff 1975, p. 8). Or again, it was really a secret theory of authoritarian self‐consciousness that validated an “anti‐ democratic” mindset (Wagner 1975, p. 14). Barth’s claim to start with God’s self‐revelation in Jesus Christ was, for these critics, a misunderstanding on his part (cf. Pfleiderer 2005, p. 239, summarizing Wagner). Against his conviction that the Word of God, as attested in Scripture, imposed itself as the beginning of all theological thinking for the church, they contend that it was merely Barth himself who devised God’s ‘Word’ as the “principle of construction” in systematic theology (Wagner 1975, p. 16). They assert that even Barth could speak about God only in the mode of religious consciousness. Or in any case, even if Barth claimed that Christian self‐interpretation (Selbstdeutung) was constituted by something beyond itself, this interpretation remained just an interpretation (cf. Korsch 1989, p. 208). Despite Barth’s criticism of religion as a human, cultural product, his critique was itself little more than a cultural product (cf. Pfleiderer 2005, p. 228). His critics may allow that although Barth was self‐contradictory, he adequately summarized his views in terms of God as pure act (cf. Pfleiderer 2005, p. 230). Others see this idea as proof of his failure. In general such critics seek to discredit Barth largely by reframing his theology in unfavorable terms as opposed to actually grappling with his arguments. They seem to place little weight on the first article of the Barmen Declaration, by which for Barth everything stands or falls: “Jesus Christ as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture is the one Word of God whom we have to hear, and whom we have to trust and obey, in life and in death.”

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Barth’s Ongoing Theological Significance In 1950 Gerhard Ebeling reminded his contemporaries of the unsolved problems with which the theology of the nineteenth century dealt, which the dialectical theology ignored and which the theology of his time should deal with again (cf. Ebeling 1962, p. 9). Nowadays, in a time when the theology of the nineteenth century is being revived, theologians remind us not “to ignore rashly the question, if and how the critique of reli­ gion in dialectical theology … did formulate justifiable warnings which have not received attention in the gunsmoke of the post‐dialectical polemics of dissociation” (Laube 2015, p. 453). What are these warnings? Or, put differently, what is the theological significance of Barth for today? In the center of Barth’s theology stands the conviction that God can be known only if he reveals himself. No human path leads to God, no human effort, be it in recogni­ tion, be it in feelings, be it in culture, be it in ethics, can build a bridge from human beings to God. God does not stand at human disposal; human beings come “with empty hands” before God (Weinrich 2013, p. 21f.). Because of God’s radical other­ ness, it is only God who can bridge the divide. As a consequence, it is essential for Christian faith and for Christian theology that it does not lose this extra nos aspect of God. For Barth, to acknowledge this point goes hand in hand with acknowledging two things: the correspondence between Christian faith and its object and the sinfulness of human beings. The correspondence between Christian faith and its object means, for Barth, that faith is something incomparable. “Faith is a human activity which cannot be compared with any other in spontaneity and native freedom. But it is in a relationship. It is in rela­ tionship to its object, to something which confronts the believer, which is distinct from him, which cannot be exhausted in his faith, which cannot be absorbed by his believing existence, let alone only consist in it and proceed from it and stand or fall with it. The very opposite is true, that faith stands or falls with its object” (CD IV/1, pp. 741–742). Only a God who is absolutely extra nos can redeem us from our sinful self‐absorption, from being as Luther said human beings turned in upon ourselves (homo incurvatus in se). If God were something that we could already find in ourselves  –  as coinherent for example in our religious self‐consciousness – then we would never get beyond ourselves even in faith. On this point Barth agreed with Feuerbach. Subsequent to Immanuel Kant’s critique of theoretical reason, Barth stressed the fundamental difference between the recognition of God and any other human recogni­ tion. Our recognition of God was grounded in God’s recognition of himself. The truth of God’s self‐revelation in Christ presupposed the truth of God’s own self‐knowledge. By the same token, God’s self‐knowledge was the ground of his self‐revelation in Christ. “Only by proceeding downwards from the triune existence of God can we understand how God stands before us, how in his revelation he gives himself to be known and is known by us. The revelation of God, in which our human fulfilment of true knowledge of God takes place, is the disposition of God in which he acts towards us as the same triune God that he is in himself, and in such a way that, although we are human beings and not God, we receive a share in the truth of his knowledge of himself ” (CD II/1, p. 51 rev.). Barth did not try to eliminate the circle that ran from God to us and then back

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again from us to God. He did not claim to present the primary initiative of God in an unbroken way apart from faith. Instead he tried to honor it (cf. Weinrich 2013, pp. 22–23). Whereas theologians in the wake of Friedrich Schleiermacher interpreted all human beings as somehow religious, no matter how they understood themselves, Barth was able to accept atheism as a human reality without attempting to explain it away (cf. Tietz 2017, pp. 232–33). “We have a secularism,” he wrote, “which approxi­ mates to a pure and absolute form, and which therefore stands furthest from the sphere of the Bible and the church, when a person or several persons stand unwittingly in full isolation from the Gospel in its biblical and churchly form, in which it has never or only very inadequately reached them, and when they are in a frame of mind in which it is to be humanly expected that when it does reach them their reaction to it will be hostile” (CD IV/3, p. 118 rev.). Barth did not try to identify some secret religiosity in even such human beings but affirmed quite soberly: “Human beings deny God …, human beings are hostile to the Gospel of God” (KD IV/3, p. 133 [my translation]; CD IV/3, p. 119). Despite seeming to promote an “authoritarian” theology in the eyes of some, Barth was able to acknowledge how nonreligious, atheistic people understand themselves. He did not try to co‐opt them for religion. Barth’s conviction that it was nevertheless important to talk with nonreligious peo­ ple about the Christian God had its peculiarity in this, that it did not begin with ana­ lyzing and critiquing the godlessness of nonreligious people but with talking about the Gospel and about the reconciliation of the world through Christ which is true for every human being. As Ingolf U. Dalferth explained: “Nobody has to be religious, and not everybody is religious. But all human beings  –  and this is the decisive theological point – have to do with God. For this, one does not have to prove that every human being is religious, even if he or she claims not to be, but to show vice versa, that God is such, that God is present to all human beings, no matter how they understand themselves” (Dalferth 2001, p. 11). “There may very well be a godlessness of human beings,” wrote Barth, “but according to the Word of reconciliation, there is no such thing as a God without human beings, no such thing as a human‐less God” [keine Menschenlosigkeit Gottes] (KD IV/3, p. 133; CD IV/3, p. 119 rev.). One of the pressing issues of in contemporary theology is the search for an adequate hermeneutics of biblical scriptures. In his Church Dogmatics, Barth unfolded his scrip­ tural hermeneutics through explaining how the sentence “the Bible is the Word of God” should be understood (cf. Tietz 2016, pp. 296–298.). The Bible is a human word, a human testimonial to God’s revelation in Jesus Christ, which means that by the miracle of grace it can become an “address” to persons “in the here and now” (Körtner 1999, p. 121). The church believes that this address can and does happen. It believes “that Holy Scripture has … priority over all other writings and authorities, even those of the church” and “that Holy Scripture as the original and legitimate witness of divine reve­ lation is itself the Word of God” (CD I/2, p. 502). This is not a claim about a property ingredient in the Bible but about “a divine disposing, action and decision.” “When we make these statements we have to look back on something that has already taken place and forward to something that has yet to occur again” (CD I/2, p. 502 rev.). The divine inspiration of Scripture by the

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Holy Spirit, through the historical transmission of traditions, is a unique, once‐ for‐all event, complete in itself, that continues as a perpetual operation. It is an ongoing miracle in which the Spirit is present and operative to faith as the living Lord of God’s self‐revelation. Barth’s concept of the Bible as the Word of God is an actualistic concept. The sentence “The Bible is the Word of God” means that “it was” made to be so definitively once‐for‐all, and thus on that basis “it will be” made to be so continually again and again. The “is” represents a miraculous event, at God’s (not human) disposal, stretched out between past and future. The church’s memory and hope depend on the “is” of this ongoing occurrence. The church lives by the Spirit’s living and continual operation through the biblical text. Its faith depends continually and completely on this operation of grace as it points to the mystery of Christ. When God’s Word in and through the text is understood in this actualistic way, as an event in the power of the Spirit  –  upholding the centrality, the sufficiency, and the supremacy of Christ  –  a new hermeneutics becomes possible. Biblical interpretation can be sensitive to historical criticism (and thus avoid any substantial “is” which is no longer possible with a critical awareness), while at the same time granting the Bible a normativity in our time for the church. Ecclesial interpretation is enabled to avoid the mistakes of fundamentalism while reformulating the Reformers’ strong affirmation of biblical authority. Barth’s understanding of Scripture gives modern Christians courage to read the Bible again (cf. Bergner 2015, p. 307). If Christian theology wants to be faithful to its Christian substance (die Sache), it has no choice but to return to the biblical texts again and again. It must grapple with their historical meaning, yet at the same time hope that this witness from the past will become alive for human beings today, because the God of whom the texts give witness is the same yesterday, today, and for­ ever. Historicism reaches its categorial limit, because the subject matter of the Bible is in but not of history. Barth’s attempt to break open the dominance of historism in modern theology can be seen especially in his understanding of Christ’s resurrection as having only “a tiny ‘historical’ margin” (CD III/2, p. 446). That margin is disclosed in the story of the empty tomb and of the eyewitnesses. The resurrection is affirmed as having happened, in some strong sense, in time and space. Nevertheless, Barth stressed that although it took place in history, it had neither an ordinary historical cause nor an ordinary historical effect. With this complex and mysterious event in view, he emphasized that although theology works with the means of critical historical investigation, it also speaks about a reality that is different from this world, a reality that renews our whole existence, a reality that holds promise for the future of all things. Christ’s resurrection is thus the culmination of the basic theological fact that God’s reality comes to us only from God. It reveals the God of the promised future who encounters us even now, in the Son and through the Spirit, as the God who makes all things new.2 2  This chapter draws from my book Karl Barth. Ein Leben im Widerspruch (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2018). For the second on Barth’s ongoing significance, see Weinrich 2013, p. 17ff. All translations of German texts are my own.

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References Barth, K. (1939). Church and State (German Rechtfertigung und Recht, trans. G. Ronald Howe). London: Student Christian Movement Press. Barth, K. (1940). Der Dienst der Kirche an der Heimat. Zollikon‐Zürich: Evangelischer Verlag. Barth, K. (1945). Des Christen Wehr und Waffen. In: Eine Schweizer Stimme 1938–1945, 123–146. Zollikon‐Zürich: Evangelischer Verlag. Barth, K. (1960). The Christian community and the civil community. In: Community, State, and Church: Three Essays, 149–189. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Barth, K. (1971). Autobiographische Skizze aus dem Fakultätsalbum der Evangelisch‐ Theologischen Fakultät in Münster. In: Karl Barth — Rudolf Bultmann, Briefwechsel 1922–1966 (ed. B. Jaspert), 301–310. Zürich: Theologischer Verlag. Barth, K. (2010). Der Römerbrief (Zweite Fassung) 1922 (eds. C. van der Kooi and K. Tolstaja). Zürich: Theologischer Verlag. Bergner, G. (2015). Um der Sache willen. Karl Barths Schriftauslegung in der Kirchlichen Dogmatik. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Dalferth, I.U. (2001). Theologie im Kontext der Religionswissenschaft. Selbstver­ ständnis, Methoden und Aufgaben der Theologie und ihr Verhältnis zur Religionswissenschaft. Theologische Literaturzeitung 126: 3–20. Duke, J.O. and Streetman, R.F. (eds.) (1988). Barth and Schleiermacher: Beyond the Impasse? Philadelphia: Fortress. Ebeling, G. (1962). Die Bedeutung der historisch‐kritischen Methode für die protestantische Theologie und Kirche. In: Wort und Glaube, 2e, vol. 1. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Gadamer, H.‐G. (1972). Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik, 3e. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Gestrich, C. (1977). Neuzeitliches Denken und die Spaltung der dialektischen Theologie. Zur

Frage der natürlichen Theologie. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Gogarten, F. (1937). Der Zerfall des Humanismus und die Gottesfrage. Vom rechten Ansatz des theologischen Denkens. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Holtmann, S. (2007). Karl Barth als Theologe der Neuzeit. Studien zur kritischen Deutung seiner Theologie. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Korsch, D. (1989). Wort Gottes oder Frömmigkeit. Über den Sinn einer theolo­ gischen Alternative zwischen Karl Barth und Friedrich Schleiermacher. Zeitschrift für dialektische Theologie 5: 195–216. Körtner, U.H.J. (1999). Schriftwerdung des Wortes und Wortwerdung der Schrift. Die Schriftlehre Karl Barths im Kontext der Krise des protestantischen Schriftprinzips. Zeitschrift für dialektische Theologie 15: 107–130. Laube, M. (2015). Die Unterscheidung von Theologie und Religion. Überlegungen zu einer umstrittenen Grundfigur in der protestantischen Theologie des 20. Jahrhunderts. Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 112: 449–467. Lauster, J. (2008). Zwischen Entzauberung und Remythisierung. Zum Verhältnis von Bibel und Dogma. Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt. Leiner, M. and Gockel, M. (2015). Karl Barth und Friedrich Schleiermacher. Zur Neubestimmung ihres Verhältnisses. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Pfleiderer, G. (2005). “Inkulturationsdialektik”. Ein Rekonstruktionsvorschlag zur moder­ nität theoretischen Barth interpretation. In: Karl Barth in Deutschland (1921–1935). Aufbruch — Klärung — Widerstand. Beiträge zum Internationalen Symposion vom 1. bis 4. Mai 2003 in der Johannes a Lasco Bibliothek Emden (eds. M. Beintker, C. Link and M. Trowitsch), 223–244. Zürich: Theologischer Verlag. Prolingheuer, H. (1977). Der Fall Karl Barth: 1934–1935. Chronographie einer

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Vertreibung. Neukirchen‐Vluyn: Neukirchener. Rendtorff, T. (1975). Einleitung. In: Die Realisierung der Freiheit. Beiträge zur Kritik der Theologie Karl Barths, 7–9. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus. Tietz, C. (2016). Das Ringen um das Schriftprinzip in der modernen evangelischen Theologie. In: Jahrbuch für Biblische Theologie, vol. 31: Der Streit um die Schrift, 283–302. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Tietz, C. (2017). Problematisch, fraglich, zudringlich, unverzichtbar — Überlegungen zum Reden von Gott heute. Kerygma und Dogma 63: 226–236. Tietz, C. (2018). Karl Barth. Ein Leben im Widerspruch. Munich: C.H. Beck.

Tillich, P. (1951). Systematic Theology, vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Troeltsch, E. (1913). Ueber historische und dogmatische Methode in der Theologie. In: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, 729–753. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Wagner, F. (1975). Theologische Gleichschaltung. Zur Christologie bei Karl Barth. In: Die Realisierung der Freiheit (ed. Rendtorff), 10–43. Wagner, F. (1995). Zur gegenwärtige Lage des Protestantismus. Gütersloh: Kaiser. Weinrich, M. (2013). Die bescheidene Kompromisslosigkeit der Theologie Karl Barths. Bleibende Impulse zur Erneuerung der Theologie. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

Part II

Barth on Doctrinal Topics

CHAPTER 2

Barth on the Trinity Paul D. Molnar

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arl Barth knew that by placing the doctrine of the Trinity “at the head of all dogmatics,” he was in an “isolated” position in relation to dogmatic history, though not entirely so, because Peter Lombard and Bonaventure also took that position (CD I/1, p. 300). For Barth “the doctrine of the Trinity is what basically distinguishes the Christian concept of God as Christian” (CD I/1, p. 301). The doctrine had played a marginal role in modern Protestant theology. Kant, for instance, held that it made no  practical difference for living whether there were 3 or 10 persons in the Trinity (Moltmann 1981, p. 6) and Schleiermacher famously placed the doctrine at the end of his work on the Christian faith, because for him it was of no “constitutive significance for the consciousness of God” (CD I/1, p. 303 and Hunsinger 2011, p. 294). Barth’s aim was to reorient Protestant theology back toward the “great catholic tradition” (Hunsinger 2011, p. 294). His approach is generally acknowledged to have initiated a revival of interest in the doctrine that has continued up to the present day. As far as I can see, Barth never departed from the main trinitarian position that he offered in CD I/1 §8–12, despite various developments as his dogmatics unfolded. As he himself explained, in his doctrine of reconciliation he was simply approaching the doctrine he presented in CD I/1 “from a special standpoint” (CD IV/1, p. 204). Thus, early in the CD, he asserted that although the eternal generation of the Son expresses God’s love and God’s will not to be alone, “it does not follow from this that God could not be God without speaking to us,” because God’s “free and unmerited love” does not rest “on any need” (CD I/1, p. 139). Indeed, “God would be no less God if He had ­created no world and no man …. The eternal generation of the Son by the Father tells us first and supremely that God is not at all lonely – even without the world and us” (CD I/1, p. 139 rev.).

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth and Dogmatics, Volume I, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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In much the same way, the later Barth asserted that God “reveals Himself as the One who, even though He did not love us and were not revealed to us, even though we did not exist at all, still loves in and for Himself as surely as He is and is God; who loves us by reason and in consequence of the fact that He is the One who loves in His freedom in and for Himself, and is God as such” (CD IV/2, p. 755). Barth never abandoned these important assertions about God’s self‐sufficiency and God’s freedom. In this essay I will concentrate on explaining Barth’s doctrine of the Trinity as found in CD I/1 and I/2.

The Root of the Doctrine Barth recognized that the doctrine of the Trinity could not be found directly in the Bible, because it was a formulation of the church based on the biblical witness (CD I/1, p. 308). He saw it as a faithful explication of that witness which drew upon the language of different ages. As Aquinas observed, the doctrine was formulated to combat “anti‐Trinitarians” and other heretical viewpoints (CD I/1, p. 309). In Barth’s view, it must not be supposed in any age that the Bible contains this church doctrine (or any other) explicitly. Rather, to argue dogmatically in a proper way, “one must argue from a basis of Scripture that has to be discovered each time afresh, if one is not to argue as arbitrarily and untheologically as does the adversary [Arius, Pelagius and their historic successors, for example] would seem to do” (CD I/1, p. 310 rev.). For Barth, it is not merely the concept of revelation, but “the fact of revelation itself and as such” (CD I/2, p. 879) that serves as “the root of the doctrine” (CD I/1, p. 304). In the event of revelation, as attested in Scripture, we really have to do with God himself. To know God in Jesus Christ as biblically attested is to know God as he truly is. For Barth the form of revelation – the life history of Jesus as biblically attested – cannot be separated from its content – his being as the Word incarnate (CD I/1, p. 390). Consequently, we have to accept the simple presupposition on which the New Testament statement [of Christ’s deity] rests, namely, that Jesus Christ is the Son because He is – not because He makes this impression on us, not because He does what we think is to be expected of a God, but because He is. With this presupposition all thinking about Jesus, which means at once all thinking about God, must begin and end. (CD I/1, p. 415 rev., italics added)

Implications follow: First, “It is not true that in some hidden depth of His essence God is something other than Father and Son. It is not true that these names are just freely chosen and in the last analysis meaningless symbols, symbols whose original and proper non‐symbolical content lies in that creaturely reality” (CD I/1, p. 432). The foundation of God’s revelation as our “Creator, Mediator and Redeemer” is that “in Himself and to all eternity God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit” (CD I/2, p. 878, italics added). Second, therefore, “the reality of God which encounters us in His revelation is His reality in all the depths of eternity …. In connexion with the specific doctrine of the Holy Spirit this means that He is Spirit of both the Father and the Son not just in His work ad extra and upon us, but that to all eternity – no limit or reservation is possible here – He

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is none other than the Spirit of both the Father and the Son” (CD I/1, pp. 479–480). Barth is especially clear in holding together the Spirit and the Son when he argues that the Holy Spirit is the power of the risen Lord enabling us to live as Christians, that is, as those united to Christ and thus to the Father (See CD IV/ 2, pp. 369ff.). Barth held that “the content of the doctrine of the Trinity … is not that God in His relation to [humankind] is Creator, Mediator and Redeemer, but that God in Himself is eternally God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit” (CD I/2, p. 878, italics added). Third, because for Barth, God is really and eternally the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, these words are not simply symbolic or metaphorical terms constructed from our experiences which then could be changed by us for social, religious, or even political reasons. Instead, as already noted, their truth is determined by who God is in his eternal relations within the immanent Trinity. Hence “we cannot say anything higher or better of the ‘inwardness of God’ than that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and therefore that He is love in Himself without and before loving us, and without being forced to love us” (CD I/2, p. 377, italics added). This God can be known “only in the light of the ‘outwardness’ of God to us, the occurrence of His revelation,” that is, only in light of his economic trinitarian self‐revelation (CD I/2, p. 377). The triune God is thus knowable to us because that knowledge “is concretely realised by God Himself, in the Father and in the Son by the Holy Spirit. And by God’s revelation we, too, receive and have a part both in His self‐knowledge and also in His self‐knowability” (CD II/1, p. 68). Accordingly, we have true knowledge of God, as God gives us a share in the truth of his own self‐knowledge. Fourth, thinking about the triune God does not begin with our religious experience, nor with the idea that we can derive knowledge of God from religious experience. Barth rejected the Cartesian method espoused by Karl Holl, who wrote: “‘Nothing … is to be recognised as religiously valid but what can be found in the reality present to us and produced again out of our direct experience’” (CD I/1, p. 195). For Barth, we have no access to God on the basis of our experience. No possibility of knowing the triune God can be found in us, because “we do not find the Word of God in the reality present to us.” Rather, “the Word of God finds us in the reality present to us … it cannot be produced again out of our direct experience. Whenever we know it, we are rather begotten by it according to Jas. 1 : 18” (CD I/1, pp. 195–196, italics added). Barth turns to Scripture in order to make it clear that “the Christian concept of revelation already includes within it the problem of the doctrine of the Trinity” (CD I/1, p. 304). Accordingly, we cannot speak of revelation properly without bringing trinitarian doctrine to expression at the very outset. “God’s Word is God Himself in His revelation. For God reveals Himself as Lord.” This key assertion contains the seeds of trinitarian doctrine within itself. It refers to “God Himself in unimpaired unity yet also in unimpaired distinction as Revealer, Revelation, and Revealedness” (CD I/1, p. 295). God is the subject, the act, and the goal. As Barth famously explained, “God reveals Himself [as the Father, supra nos]. He reveals Himself through Himself [as the Son, extra nos]. He reveals Himself [as the Holy Spirit, in nobis]” (CD I/1, p. 296). This complex act of self‐revelation means that “God, the Revealer [the Father], is identical with His act in revelation [the Son] and also identical with its effect [the Holy Spirit]. It is from this fact … that we learn we must begin the doctrine of revelation with the doctrine of the triune God” (CD I/1, p. 296). “That God reveals Himself as the Lord means that He reveals what only He can

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reveal, Himself” (CD I/1, p. 307, italics added). Therefore, “the statement, understood thus, that God reveals Himself as the Lord … we call the root of the doctrine of the Trinity” (CD I/1, p. 307, italics added).

Revelation/Reconciliation In Barth’s understanding, God is his Word, and his Word is his decision or act  –  the decision and act in which God speaks to us by reconciling us to himself. This divine speaking cannot “be generally defined either by way of anticipation or by that of reproduction” (CD I/1, p. 144). Barth describes revelation as “the condition which ­conditions all things without itself being conditioned.” For Barth “revelation in fact does not differ from the person of Jesus Christ nor from the reconciliation accomplished in Him. To say revelation is to say ‘The Word became flesh’” (CD I/1, pp. 118–119). Barth argues that “the work of the Son or Word is the presence and declaration of God, which, in view of the fact that it [God’s speaking] takes place miraculously in and in spite of human darkness, we can only describe as revelation. The term reconciliation is another word for the same thing [this divine presence and speaking as revelation]” (CD I/1, p. 409 italics added). In Barth’s thinking revelation means God’s act of accomplishing fellowship with us in spite of our enmity toward him. And that means reconciliation. “God’s gracious lordship consists in an overcoming of human rebellion and human need.” Therefore, “revelation is in fact the same thing as atonement” in which God “turns the need of man to his salvation” (CD I/2, p. 871). Consequently, in all that Barth says about knowledge of and fellowship with God by grace through faith, he speaks of the fact that we cannot reach God on our own p ­ recisely because only God can restore that fellowship. This restoration is what he has actually done, and continues to do, in Jesus Christ, and through his Spirit. God alone enables us to live our new life in Christ here and now. Hence, Barth suggests that “the inconceivable element in revelation as such, in revelation as reconciliation which can be a reality only as it comes from God, is the fact of the Son of God who is the Lord in our midst, and therefore amid our enmity towards God” (CD I/1, pp. 409–410, italics added). Barth distinguishes the new work of the Son from the work of the Father as creator, because the Son’s work of reconciliation is “an inconceivably new” act of lordship of the one God. Reconciliation is an act “above and beyond creation” that overcomes our sin (CD I/1, p. 410). Thus, “the power of reconciliation,” Barth argues, “will be underestimated if the true deity of the Reconciler is called in question” as he believes Schleiermacher had done, by viewing reconciliation merely as “the crowning of creation” and then interpreting the Trinity “modalistically” (CD I/1, p. 410). Along the same lines, Barth rejected the traditional Augustinian idea of the vestigia trinitatis. He believed it was misguided to look for traces of the Trinity within the realm of creation. Attempts to find an “analogue of the Trinity … in some creaturely reality distinct from [God]” (CD I/1, p. 334) always means devising one’s own idea of God in the end. It fails to allow God himself to determine our thinking in accord with the biblical witness to his self‐revelation. For Barth God does not transmit traces of his divine being directly to the world or to humanity, not even to the humanity of Christ. Barth

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rejected the proposal that Jesus is the revealer merely in his humanity as such (CD I/1, p. 323). He did so because this idea smacked too much of the analogia entis while also setting up a second root for the doctrine of the Trinity, a root that Barth believed would compromise the root established by God in his self‐revelation. Just as truth “is grounded absolutely in itself,” so the eternal Trinity is antecedently God in himself. Unless our knowledge of God begins with God’s self‐revelation in Christ, it will always operate on the unfortunate assumption that it is somehow produced out of our experience and thus can be changed according to our experience (CD I/1, p. 196). It is just at this point that many debates about proper language for God continue to swirl. As long as it is thought that God can be known on the basis of human experiences of love, freedom, or self‐transcendence, or perhaps more technically, through the coinherence of God in religious self‐consciousness, then the possibility of knowing God will be ascribed to us. But then we will also assume that we can change our language for God without realizing that such assumptions inevitably mean that it is no longer the Christian God who is known. Why is this the case? For Barth the answer is straightforward, but with profound consequences: the root of our knowledge of God is God’s own self‐revelation as attested in Scripture. Therefore, Barth resists any assumption that we can know God without actually turning to Christ alone. As the eternal Son of the Father, Christ is God antecedently in himself; he alone reveals God to us in the power of the Holy Spirit, and he alone reconciles us to God in and through himself. Turning to any other basis fails to recognize that “God is known only by God” (CD II/1, pp. 179, 183).

Methodological Concerns In this regard Barth identified “the fundamental error … which influenced Protestant orthodoxy at almost every point” with “deducing the doctrine of the Trinity – theoretically maintained to be the basis of all theology – from the premises of formal logic” (CD II/1, p. 261). In his doctrine of God, not only Barth’s conception of God’s being in act, but also his presentation of the divine aseity and the divine perfections, were revolutionary and powerful, just because, unlike “Protestant orthodoxy” (as he understood it), he refused to abstract this thinking from the Trinity, which for him meant from “the act of divine revelation” (CD II/1, p. 261). Consequently, “there is no possibility of reckoning with the being of any other God, or with any other being of God, than that of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, as it is in God’s revelation and in eternity” (CD II/1, p. 261, italics added). Any attempt at “free speculations about the nature of His being” (CD II/1, p. 261) is therefore excluded, because the only way to know God with ­“apodictic ­certainty” is from the revelation of God as it meets us in Jesus Christ (CD II/1, pp. 161–162). For Barth, although faith is and remains a fully human act, the truth acknowledged and received in that act has its basis and meaning in the miraculous action of the Holy Spirit. This truth cannot be traced back to the human act itself (CD I/1, pp. 182, 451; I/2, pp. 242–243; II/1, pp. 345, 509; IV/1, pp. 646, 747–748, 761). For Barth “the Holy Spirit is … the divine reality by which the creature has its heart opened to God and

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is made able and willing to receive Him” (CD II/1, p. 669; I/1, p. 450). We need this miracle to know that God “is not only in Himself the Lord, the Creator, the Reconciler and Redeemer, and not only open to Himself as the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, but that He is all this for [human beings] also” (CD II/1, p. 129, italics added). It is a miracle of grace that God is open for us in this way, and that we are made open for God (CD I/1, p. 182; I/2, p. 240). Barth never separates the actions of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He stressed not only their eternal perichoretic unity but also the patristic principle that all the works of the Trinity ad extra are indivisible. Nonetheless “the Holy Spirit is differentiated from the Son or Word of God. The work of the Holy Spirit in revelation is different from that of the Son or Word of God. Though never separated from it, and to be distinguished only per appropriationem, it is still not to be confused with it” (CD I/1, p. 474). In revelation the work of the Son and of the Holy Spirit always constitute a unity‐in‐distinction. In contrast to much modern theology, Barth therefore never separates the actions of the Holy Spirit from Christ himself. In knowing God in Christ, we know God and enact our fellowship with God as established by God himself, through the reconciliation founded in Christ. This fellowship is made possible in us by the Holy Spirit through faith. “The work of the Holy Spirit means that there is an adequate basis … for our faith in Christ and our communion with Him, because He is no other Spirit than that of Jesus Christ” (CD I/2, p. 248). “The Holy Spirit is the power in which Jesus Christ the Son of God makes a [person] free, makes him genuinely free for this choice and therefore for faith” (CD IV/1, p. 748). Indeed, “it is the work of the Holy Spirit that the eternal presence of the reconciliation in Jesus Christ has in us this temporal form, the form of faith, which believes this truth” (CD II/1, p. 159). Hence, “the Holy Spirit is the authorisation to speak about Christ … He is the summons to the Church to minister the Word” (CD I/1, p. 455).

The Holy Spirit as Lord None of this of course would be reality for us if it were not the case that the Holy Spirit “remains Himself the Lord” and never becomes “identical with ourselves” (CD I/1, p. 454; IV/1, p. 646). Moreover, God the Holy Spirit is not “a third I, a third Lord side by side with two others. He is a third mode of being of the one divine Subject or Lord” (CD I/1, p. 469). Indeed, the Spirit is “the fellowship, the act of communion, of the Father and the Son,” precisely because the Spirit is this fellowship “antecedently in Himself.” As in time so also in eternity, the Holy Spirit is “the act of communion, the act of impartation, love, gift” (CD I/1, p. 470). Only on this basis, Barth suggests, is the Spirit this act of fellowship for us in revelation: “Not vice versa! We know Him thus in His revelation. But He is not this because He is it in His revelation; because He is it antecedently in Himself, He is it also in His revelation” (CD I/1, p. 471, italics added). This pivotal insight is one of the reasons Barth insisted upon a “sharp distinction” but not a separation between the immanent and economic Trinity (CD I/1, p. 172). To believe in the deity of the Holy Spirit means to recognize that “the Holy Spirit is with the Father (and the Son) the subject of creation. He is not just the Redeemer, so surely does

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redemption stand in indissoluble correlation with reconciliation, so surely does reconciliation reach its consummation in redemption. He is thus the Reconciler too, with the Son and as the Spirit of the Son” (CD I/1, p. 471). Because the Father is revealed through the Son, creation too “is shown to have happened through the same Word who became incarnate in Jesus Christ” (CD I/1, p. 471). On that basis “now the Holy Spirit is revealed as the One who in His own way co‐operates in creation too” (CD I/1, p. 471). God’s objective movement toward us in Christ as reconciler and revealer comes to us through “the work of the Holy Spirit” (CD I/2, p. 239). This is why Barth asserted that in our finitude and fallenness we know God by grace alone through his Spirit (See Hunsinger 2011, p. 298; CD I/1, p. 466; II/1, pp. 21–23). Thus, “grace is the Holy Spirit received, but we ourselves are sinners” (CD I/1, p. 466). “The assurance of faith by God’s revelation” rests always on the grace of the Spirit not “just at the beginning but in the middle and at the end too.” This assurance must be “sought in God alone and not anywhere else, not in ourselves” (CD I/1, p. 466). That is why we pray: Veni Creator Spiritus. Through the Spirit we are given to know that “what makes [God’s perfect being] divine and real being is the fact that it is the being of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and it is in the fact that they [the perfections of divine freedom and love] exist in this triune God in His one but differentiated being that God’s freedom and love and all His perfections are divine in this concretion” (CD II/1, p. 659). In other words, all the divine perfections (or attributes) exist eternally in God’s triune life and on that basis also for us in time. For Barth, everything to be said about God’s nature, being, and existence must always be understood as that of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. This trinitarian understanding is the gift of the Holy Spirit as based on the Word of God attested in Scripture.

Primary and Secondary Objectivity Barth has been accused of opening a “gap” between the immanent and the economic Trinity. This move supposedly led him to an arbitrary view of God’s grace (Lewis 2001, pp. 209–210). Such criticism arises, however, only among those who overlook some subtle distinctions in Barth’s thought. First, Barth distinguished what he termed God’s “primary” and “secondary” objectivity without separating them. He made this distinction in order to stress that God is and remains free in and for himself while also acting freely for us as creator, reconciler, and redeemer. Second, it is a mistake to suppose that Barth opened a “gap” between the immanent and economic Trinity, because he held that “first to Himself, and then in His revelation to us, He [God] is nothing but what He is in Himself,” namely, the triune God (CD II/1, pp. 16, 49–51). Third, Barth distinguished without separating God’s essence from his works (ad extra). For Barth, God in himself “is immediately objective to Himself ” and “mediately objective to us in His revelation, in which He meets us under the sign and veil of other objects” (CD II/1, p. 16). God’s “primary objectivity” refers to “His triune life as such” in which “God is first and foremost objective to himself.” In this way “objectivity, and with it knowledge, is divine reality before creaturely objectivity and knowledge exist”

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(CD II/1, p. 16). On this basis, we believe in God and know God truly through “His clothed, not in His naked objectivity [since God’s self‐knowledge is mediated to us]” (CD II/1, p. 16). Importantly, God “acts towards us as the same triune God that He is in Himself, and in such a way that, although we are human beings and not God, we receive a share in the truth of His knowledge of Himself ” (CD II/1, p. 51 rev.). Because God is God as one being in three modes (“persons”) and not in “any kind of parts,” God “exists in the unity of His existence as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as Creator, Reconciler and Redeemer” so that in knowing God in Jesus Christ we do not know only part of God but God himself in “His unity and entirety” (CD II/1, p. 52). Barth never posits a “gap” between God’s primary and his secondary objectivity. He distinguishes them because God who is objective to himself does not need us but freely and in grace chooses to have fellowship with us such that when we know God, we are in “the position of grace” (CD II/1, p. 21). That is why Barth held that knowledge of God in faith is just like any other knowledge, except that “the primary objectivity of God is to be distinguished – but not separated – from the secondary” (CD II/1, p. 21). Therefore the position of God as creator, reconciler, and redeemer and that of human beings who come to know God in faith and by grace can never be reversed, because we never can control God either in his primary or secondary objectivity. For Barth “the position of grace which is the position of faith, and in which God is known, is as such the position of subsequence which makes any disposal of the object [as in other human knowledge] impossible” (CD II/1, p. 21). In a similar way Barth made another important distinction between God’s essence and his works. Once again, Barth did not separate the immanent from the economic Trinity by opening a gap between them. Rather, he held that “though the work of God is the essence of God, it is necessary and important to distinguish His essence as such from His work, remembering that this work is grace … God gives Himself entirely to man in His revelation, but not in such a way as to make Himself man’s prisoner. He remains free in His working, in giving Himself ” (CD I/1, p. 371). Thus, God is who He is in His works. He is the same even in Himself, even before and after and over His works, and without them. They are bound to Him, but He is not bound to them. They are nothing without Him. But He is who He is without them. He is not, therefore, who He is only in His works. Yet in Himself He is not another than He is in His works. In the light of what He is in His works it is no longer an open question what He is in Himself … there is no possibility of reckoning with the being of any other God, or with any other being of God, than that of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit as it is in God’s revelation and in ­eternity. (CD II/1, pp. 260–261, italics added)

This thinking allowed Barth to hold, for example, that Jesus’ “sonship on the basis of which He can be the Revealer, the Mediator, the Reconciler, is not a mere contrivance of God behind which, in some higher essence of God which remains a mystery, there is no sonship or word‐ness in God, but perhaps an inexpressible and speechless it‐ness, a divine, a θεῖον with a different or unknown name” (CD I/1, p. 414). Again there is a distinction but no gap between who the Son is in himself to all eternity and who he is for us in time.

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Tritheism/Modalism Barth rejected any sort of tritheism, insisting that the early church refused to posit “three different personalities, three self‐existent individuals with their own special self‐ ­­ consciousness, cognition, volition, activity, effects, revelation and name” (CD IV/1, p. 205; I/1, p. 351). In this regard Barth famously preferred to speak of “modes [ways] of being” (Seinsweisen) in God, by which he intended to communicate what Augustine did when Augustine used the term “person” for lack of a better term for speaking of the three in God, namely, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, without falling into ­tritheism or modalism (CD I/1, p. 355). This terminology did not mean that he advocated modalism since he regularly insisted that God was eternally the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in and for himself. God would be the triune God who loves in freedom even if he had never acted as creator, reconciler, and redeemer. Barth argued that God was not merely triune in history (a modalistic idea) but that the distinctions within the Trinity were essential to God’s living and eternal being. For Barth, “modalism finally entails a denial of God” (CD I/1, p. 382). It leads to a search for a God behind the God who makes himself known as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Indeed, modalism not only posits a “hidden Fourth” behind the God who is eternally one and three, but for modalism, “the divine subjectivity is sucked up into the human subjectivity which enquires about a God that does not exist” (CD I/1, p. 382). For those who claim that Barth’s thinking was modalist, one has only to note his strong insistence that God’s modes of being are not to be exchanged or confounded. In all three modes of being God is the one God both in Himself and in relation to the world and man. But this one God is God three times in different ways, so different that it is only in this threefold difference that He is God, so different that this difference, this being in these three modes of being, is  absolutely essential to Him, so different, then, that this difference is irremovable. (CD I/1, p. 360)

Some have wondered how “modes of being” can love (Torrance 1996, p. 116; cf. Molnar 2017, pp. 442–443). Such a worry, however, presumes that Barth substituted “modes of being,” abstractly understood, for the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He did not. The idea of “modes of being” was a second‐order reflection on the church’s first‐order discourse about the “persons” of the Trinity. Barth’s thought about the Trinity was always dictated by the fact that the three in God always refer to these particular three. Consequently, there is no “possibility that one of the modes of being might just as well be the other, e.g., that the Father might just as well be the Son or the Son the Spirit, nor that two of them or all three might coalesce and dissolve into one” (CD I/1, p. 360). In the end Barth asserted that he had “no cause to want to outlaw the concept of person or to put it out of circulation” (CD I/1, p. 359). He only wanted to avoid tritheism, modalism, and subordinationism as would any theologian operating within the bounds of Nicene orthodoxy. With regard to tritheism, Barth held that for modern theologians the word “person” signified “individual personal self‐consciousness” in a way that would open the door to

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a tritheistic understanding of the Trinity. Considering that Jürgen Moltmann’s social doctrine of the Trinity led exactly in that direction, for example (cf. Molnar 2017, pp. 386 n. 26, 418–419), it seems clear that Barth’s reasons for following what he saw as Calvin’s rejection of tritheism and avoiding the more tritheistic perspective suggested by Melanchthon (CD I/1, p. 358) was well founded. Barth regarded the social doctrine of the Trinity as outlandish, saying “Modernism has no Doctrine of the Trinity. The notion of a ‘Social Trinity’ is fantastic!” (Barth 1962, p. 50). Barth was always concerned to avoid tritheism as well as modalism. He opposed any “division or inequality between Father, Son and Holy Spirit,” insisting that “Christian faith and the Christian confession has one Subject, not three” (CD IV/1, p. 205). He appealed to the Athanasian Creed to make his point. “In this Trinity nothing is before or after, nothing is greater or less. But all three persons are co‐eternal and co‐equal. No one precedes the others in eternity or exceeds them in greatness or transcends them in power” (CD I/1, p. 353; see also IV/1, p. 205). What Barth wanted to affirm, with the rest of Nicene orthodoxy, was that God is a unity in Trinity and Trinity in unity, precisely as the eternal Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There is in God no “threeness of essence,” and there are no “parts within the one Godhead,” because “the doctrine of the Trinity does not seek to triple, but rather to recognise in its simplicity [God’s one unique essence]” (CD I/1, p. 350). God’s triune being is indeed “simple,” since “within the Godhead there is no additional or subsequent being.” At “no time or place, then, is He divided or divisible.” God “is Lord in every relationship, because He is Lord of Himself, unconditionally One as Father, Son and Holy Spirit” (CD II/1, p. 445). It would be a mistake to assume, however, that “the simple,” as generally understood, is God (CD II/1, pp. 448–449). God’s uniqueness and oneness include the multiplicity of his perfections in his triunity (CD II/1, pp. 332, 463). We encounter and know God’s uniqueness only from an encounter with God himself based on revelation. That is what distinguishes Christian monotheism from all others; this “results from and consists in the fact that Jesus Christ bears witness to Himself and reveals Himself as the Son of His heavenly Father” (CD II/1, p. 455). Barth wanted to avoid any attempt to understand God’s unity from “reason” as opposed to revelation alone. He saw it as a sign of “antitrinitarianism” whenever it was claimed that theology “must confess the threeness on the basis of Scripture and the oneness on the basis of reason.” The task of trinitarian theology then becomes the attempt to “combine them, which it naturally cannot do because it is prevented already by the difference in the sources from which … it speaks of the two” (CD I/1, p. 352). Barth maintained that whenever this approach is employed, the revealed God’s unity as disclosed by Christ and through the Holy Spirit is always undercut, so that Arianism and other heretical ideas intrude. Such an approach leads to the notion that the ideas of one and three had to be counterbalanced, when in reality the one God is One precisely as he lives, acts, and subsists as Father, Son, and Spirit (CD I/1, pp. 358–359). For Barth, the eternal God is One only as he is Three, and Three only as he is One.

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References Barth, K. (1962). Karl Barth’s Table Talk (ed. J.D. Godsey). Richmond: John Knox Press. Hunsinger, G. (2011). ‘Karl Barth’s Doctrine of the Trinity,’ and ‘Some Protestant Doctrines after Barth’. In: The Oxford Handbook of the Trinity (eds. O.P. Gilles Emery and M. Levering), 294–313. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lewis, A.E. (2001). Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

Molnar, P.D. (2017). Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity: In Dialogue with Karl Barth and Contemporary Theology, 2e. New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark. Moltmann, J. (1981). The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God, (trans. Margaret Kohl). London: SCM Press. Torrance, A. (1996). Persons in Communion: Trinitarian Description and Human Participation. Edinburgh: T&T Clark.

CHAPTER 3

Barth on the Filioque David Guretzki

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here’s no indication Karl Barth attempted or was interested in solving the ancient ­filioque debate that gave rise to the schism between Eastern and Western Christianity. From his first mention in his early lectures in dogmatics through multiple references in later volumes of the Church Dogmatics, Barth was unwavering in his assertion that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son (filioque), Greek/Eastern opposition to the clause notwithstanding. Barth thus took his place in the long line of defenders of the Latin/Western position. Why did Barth so steadfastly defend the filioque and what, if anything, did he add to this perennial theological debate? Before answering these questions, it is helpful to review briefly the history of the debate itself. Barth’s own position will then be examined, followed by a concise consideration of Barth’s contribution to the filioque debate.

The Filioque Debate: A Brief Historical Sketch This is not the place to narrate the history of the filioque debate.1 Nevertheless, a very brief reminder of the debate sets the context for understanding Barth’s position. “Filioque”  –  Latin for “and the Son”  –  is metonymically used to represent a long‐ standing pneumatological dispute between Eastern and Western branches of Christianity regarding the relationship of the Holy Spirit to the Father and/or to the Son. The word and its attendant theological issues first became the focus of intense 1  Readers who need either a primer or refresher should consult one of several sources listed here. The most comprehensive monograph length surveys of the history of the filioque in German and English respectively are Oberdorfer (2001) and Siecienski (2010). Shorter article or chapter-length histories include Badcock (1997); Daley (2001a, 2001b); Guretzki (2009); and Ritschl (1979). The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth and Dogmatics, Volume I, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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consideration probably somewhere in the early fifth century when certain Spanish churches began including filioque in the Latin text of the Niceno‐Constantinopolitan Creed (381 ce), mainly in an effort to resist what was perceived as creeping Arianism, which did not affirm the full deity of the Son (Siecienski 2010, p. 6). Though the original text (in Greek) of the third article read, “[I believe] … in the Holy Spirit … who proceeds from the Father,” the Latin version of the Creed recited in Spain reads “who proceeds from the Father and the Son [qui ex Patre Filioque procedit].” Not surprisingly, when news of the interpolation reached Greek speaking portions of the church, this caused deep concern because it appeared that not only were Latin speakers adding a word to the Creed, they were doing so without ecumenical approval. Only an ecumenical council, it was believed, had the authority to alter the Creed produced by an ecumenical council. The third and fourth Councils of Toledo (589 and 633 ce) in the West, not “ecumenical” in the relevant sense, affirmed the filioque, resulting in relative peace for nearly three hundred years. After some localized theological skirmishes over the clause, in 810 Pope Leo III ruled that the filioque should not be included in the text of the Creed, even though the teaching represented by it was not unorthodox. Shortly thereafter, Patriarch Photius argued from an Eastern perspective in 867 that the intention of the Nicene fathers was to affirm the Spirit proceeds “from the Father alone” [Greek: ek monou tou patros]. Thus, Photius insisted the filioque is not only a creedal interpolation but is theologically misleading at best and heretical at worst (Photius 1983). Pope Benedict VIII set a series of events into motion that would eventually contribute to the Great Schism between Eastern and Western churches. In 1014, he officially endorsed the filioque clause for use in the Latin liturgy, even while insisting that the Greek version of the Creed should remain untouched. It was then that the filioque became Catholic dogma. Although not the only issue at stake in the social, political, and theological differences between the Greek East and the Latin West, the filioque was the central issue that led Eastern and Western factions mutually to excommunicate one another on 16 July 1054 (Lossky 1985). In some quarters, there has been a “hardening of the categories” in both West and East, with some on both sides arguing aggressively either for or against the filioque. For others devoted to ecumenical dialogue and healing, important attempts have been made to find a way through, over, or around the issue. Furthermore, there have been significant efforts expended in the direction of resolution since the death of Karl Barth,2 the subject of this essay. But as of this essay, the theological dispute remains formally on the ecumenical books.

Karl Barth’s Developing Position on the Filioque It is beyond dispute that Barth defended the filioque and therefore is rightly identified as standing firmly within the Western trinitarian tradition. Though Barth first adopted the filioque with, apparently, only minimal understanding of the ecumenical arguments for 2  See especially the international and ecumenical panel of essays presented in Vischer (1981) and Habets (2014). For a short summary of more recent efforts, see Siecienski (2010, pp. 206–213).

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or against it, he eventually grounded his defense of the filioque in ways somewhat discontinuous from the Western forefathers. Further, though Barth consistently ­ defended the filioque throughout his life, there is good evidence that his understanding of the importance of the filioque underwent some change over the course of his theological career. In this regard, Barth’s stance on the filioque, though formally unwavering, may be developmentally and materially understood in three phases, namely, in latent, emerging, and mature phases.

The Filioque in Latency There is no known mention of the filioque in Barth’s published work prior to 1923. However, there is good reason to believe Barth was predisposed toward the filioque early in his career if for no other reason than Protestants generally, and Reformed theology more specifically, had generally confessed and held to it. Indeed, in most Protestant ­traditions, the filioque is virtually a theological given (Marshall 2002). Indeed, there are signs of Barth’s latent predisposition toward the filioque as early as his famous Romans (Römerbrief) commentary. Here we focus on the second edition of Romans (RII). Not surprisingly, Barth nowhere delves into the filioque dispute in Romans. The book is, after all, a biblical commentary and not a work of dogmatics. However, as I have argued at length elsewhere, the second edition of Romans is marked by a dialectical christocentric pneumatology that, although not explicitly defending the filioque, is ­nevertheless already implicitly and structurally filioquist in orientation. Most telling is that when Barth discusses the Holy Spirit, both the ontic and noetic functions of the Spirit are primarily denoted in reference to Jesus Christ (Guretzki 2009, pp. 55–73). That is, both the nature of the Spirit and his work (which in Romans appears to be primarily, though not solely, noetic in focus) is spoken of relative to Christ. The Spirit is and does what he does as a “procession” from both the Father and the Son. Ontically, the Holy Spirit in Barth’s Romans is both to be distinguished from the human spirit while simultaneously wholly identified as the Spirit of the Father and the Spirit of the Son. On the one hand, Barth characteristically insists that the Spirit is “completely the Other” and “has spoken and acted in direct contradiction of everything that I can say or thou canst hear … He is completely the Other.” (RII, p. 275). In this regard, we “worship Him as the third Person of the Godhead” (RII, p. 274). On the other hand, Barth also contends that the Spirit has no independent identity apart from the Father and the Son. The Spirit is nothing less than full deity because he is identified fully as the Creator Spirit together with the Father and the Son. Furthermore, the Spirit is the ground of spiritual fellowship between the Father and the Son – a union of love between Father and Spirit (RII, p. 495). Here the Augustinian/Thomistic c­ oncept of the Spirit as vinculum amoris, (“bond of love”), or vinculum pacis (“bond of peace”), between the Father and Son is evident, even if not explicit, in Barth’s early thought (Migliore 2000). If the Spirit is fully identified with Father and Son antecedently in his ontic existence, then the Spirit, according to Barth, is also the noetic Spirit of revelation. The Spirit is the one who enables human “apprehension of revelation,” as Barth characteristically put

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it. For Barth, a primary work of the Holy Spirit is to make Jesus Christ, the living and eternal Son of the self‐revealing Father, contemporaneous to humans in their own history. In this way, Barth views revelation as that moment in which “we are apprehended and known by God [the Father]” in Jesus Christ (RII, p. 282). To summarize, in the early stages of Barth’s career, he either appeared to be unaware of or unconcerned with the filioque debate per se. However, it is evident that Barth’s pneumatology was already on a filioquist trajectory. This was due in part to his location in the Reformed tradition that was largely pro‐filioque in orientation already, but also in view of the emerging pneumatology evident in Romans. There Barth portrays the Holy Spirit as ontically the eternal Spirit of the Father and the Son, and functionally and noetically the Spirit of the Father’s self‐revelation through the Son. In both ontic and noetic functions, the Holy Spirit of the Romans is, implicitly, the Spirit who proceeds from the Father and the Son.

Barth’s Emerging Position on the Filioque One of Barth’s earliest, if not the earliest, mentions of the filioque occurred in June or July 1923. Barth was then lecturing on the Reformed Confessions as the Chair of Reformed Theology in Göttingen, which he took up in 1921 (McCormack 1995, pp. 292–294). Barth’s first passing mention of the filioque is in a lecture on the Reformed confessions. Barth’s theme in this context is Christology, under which he identifies three presuppositions: (i) The reality of God – which he identifies with the Father; (ii) The outward revelation of God – which he identifies with Jesus Christ; and (iii) the inward revelation of God – which he identifies with the Holy Spirit (TRC, p. 157). That the Father is real, that he reveals himself in his Son, and that he reveals himself through the Son by the Holy Spirit is the flow of Barth’s argument. Barth identifies the Spirit by which the Father draws humans to himself as none other than “the Spirit who is not only [the Father’s] but is also the Spirit of the selfsame Son” (TRC, p. 158). Thus, it is from within a discussion of God’s revelation of himself through the Son by the Spirit that Barth finally says, “Christianity knows no other Spirit than the Holy Spirit, proceeding not only from the Father but also from the Son (filioque!)” (TRC, p. 158). Although this barely merits attention as a discussion of the filioque itself, Barth’s parenthetical appeal to it at this point is significant. This is because for Barth, the procession of the Spirit from the Father and the Son certainly pertains to the question of who the Spirit is, but it is a question that can be answered only in reference to how it is that the triune God first reveals himself. The filioque, in other words, is first a statement about Barth’s perception of how God reveals himself, only after which can one say something about who God is in his eternal triune being. As we will shortly see, this two‐step move is fully consistent with what Barth does when he finally gets around to discussing the filioque in a more formal way. After settling in at Göttingen, Barth begins to lecture formally in dogmatics, the record of which we now have as the Göttingen Dogmatics (GD). The entirety of the GD was constructed on what Barth clarifies as the ground and presupposition of all

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Christian speech, namely, Deus Dixit  –  that God has spoken and continues to speak. Succinctly put, if God has not first spoken, then all God‐talk is but “scholarly metaphysics” (GD, p. 292). Furthermore, Barth establishes what one could, with good reason, identify as one of his fundamental dogmatic rules to which he holds consistently his whole life: “God’s relation [to humanity] … is necessarily contained and grounded in God’s being. All that the Father does and the Son does, the Spirit does with them” (GD, p. 128). In other words, the knowledge of God is grounded upon a discernment of what it is that God as Father, Son, and Spirit does. Or to use the common turn of phrase, the economic Trinity – the workings of Father, Son, and Spirit toward the world – is identical to the immanent Trinity – the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the depths of their eternal relationships. In short, God reveals himself in his action, which corresponds to how he really is in eternity. Having clarity about these two presuppositions – the priority of God’s self‐speaking and the correspondence of God’s action with his triune reality – helps to get at the significance of how Barth eventually discusses the filioque in GD, even though it may well have been that even Barth didn’t yet fully understand his own dogmatic moves. He admits that the ancient debates about the meaning of “procession” and “generation” have a degree of obscurity about them such that he confesses to never “having heard or read anything very plausible about it” (GD, p. 128). Reading Barth on the filioque in the GD leaves one with the sense that he was struggling to make sense of it all. Nevertheless, Barth remained convinced that the Western position is superior, and his critique of the Eastern insistence that the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone was barely veiled in his rhetorical questioning. He asks: Do we have in the Greek view an unsubjugated remnant of sub‐ordinationism, as though the Father were more and greater than the Son? Or is it a reflection of the very mystically oriented piety of the East which, bypassing the revelation of the Son, would relate man directly to the original Revealer, the principium or fount of deity, as though one could and should do this? (GD, p. 129)

As already intimated previously, it is significant that even Barth’s critique of a non‐ filioque position is posed as a question about revelation and not directly as a question about “eternal relations” per se. When Barth turns to an explicit discussion of the filioque in GD, it is minimal; but it is noteworthy that he again connects it to the question of revelation, and more specifically, to his earlier discussion on the threefold Word of God. For Barth, God’s Word comes in three forms: revelation, Scripture, and preaching. Barth lays out what he sees as the relationship of these three forms: Scripture is not revelation, but from revelation. Preaching is not revelation or scripture, but from both. But the Word of God is scripture no less than it is revelation, and it is preaching no less than it is scripture. Revelation is from God alone, scripture is from revelation alone, and preaching is from revelation and scripture. Yet there is no first or last, no greater or less. The first, the second, and the third are all God’s Word in the same glory, unity in trinity and trinity in unity. (GD, p. 15)

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The structure of the relationship between the three forms of the Word of God functions for Barth as a structural analogy for the interrelationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (Guretzki 2009, p. 87). Just as Scripture comes from revelation, and preaching comes from revelation and Scripture, so, too, the Son comes from the Father, and the Spirit comes from Father and Son. In other words, how God speaks (Deus dixit) in his threefold Word is analogous to how God subsists in his threefold existence as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Barth intentionally aligns “proclamation” coming from revelation and Scripture with the Spirit coming from Father and Son. As he put it, “Christian preaching … proceeds from revelation and scripture (as the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son).” (GD, p. 16). To be sure, the analogy for Barth is not simply accidental or coincidental but a legitimate analogy to be observed. At this point Barth’s defense of the filioque is more formal than material. That is, he does not defend where or in what specific ways the record of revelation witnessed to in Scripture and in the preaching of the church points antecedently to the eternal God. Nevertheless, he is convinced of the structural parallel: The Word of God as it comes to humans is of the same structure as the eternal relations of the triune God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Barth’s Mature Stance on the Filioque Understanding Barth’s mature view of the filioque must necessarily focus on his extensive discussion in the first half‐volume of the Church Dogmatics. Although Barth makes repeated mention of the filioque throughout the remainder of the CD, limitations here will restrict us only to an examination of the first half‐volume.3 Fortunately, his essential understanding of both the filioque’s defense and its dogmatic function remains consistent throughout the CD. It is clear what had previously been a topic of minimal or tangential interest, in the CD now becomes a full apologia in favor of the filioque. However, before unpacking Barth’s defense of the filioque in CD I/1, it is helpful to observe both continuity and discontinuity between the GD and the CD. This will enable us to see the final steps of Barth’s maturation in his understanding of the filioque. Two features are common in both GD and CD. First, although it may be stating the obvious, it is worth noting that Barth did not change his mind on the filioque in the intervening decade between Göttingen and Bonn. Moreover, if his commitment were tentative in the GD, in the CD it has become an all‐out conviction. The second notable point of continuity is that the filioque arises for Barth as a feature of his doctrine of revelation. In the GD, the filioque is mentioned by Barth relative to his fundamental dogmatic premise of Deus dixit – God has spoken. Similarly, in the CD, Barth discusses the filioque within the framework of his doctrine of the Word of God (CD I/1 and CD I/2) and, note well, not within his Doctrine of God (CD II/1 and CD II/2). This is especially significant to note against the backdrop of where the historic debate on the Spirit’s

3  For examination of other appeals to the filioque in the CD beyond I/1, see Guretzki (2009).

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procession arose in the early middle ages: as a debate or as a feature of the doctrine of God, or more specifically, the doctrine of the Trinity. Whereas for medieval theologians, whether Greek or Latin speaking, the question of the procession of the Spirit is a question about the eternal (or “immanent”) Trinity, for Barth the question cannot be answered without pushing back a step to examine the (characteristically modern) epistemological question of how it is that we come to know about the nature of God, that is, the question of revelation. Thus, for Barth, the order of dogmatic discussion must move from the doctrine of revelation to the doctrine of God, and not vice versa. When it comes to discontinuity, however, the difference between the GD and CD is subtle but real. Although Barth carries over his use of the threefold form of the Word of God, his material characterization of the relation of the three forms has shifted noticeably. Whereas in the GD Barth sees a definite “geometrical” relationship between the three forms of preaching (or proclamation), Scripture, and revelation – with preaching proceeding from revelation and Scripture – in the CD Barth advances what I’ve called a more “perichoretic” relationship between the three forms whereby each form is seen as intertwined and interpenetrating the other two. Barth calls this a “schedule of relations” that is worth citing here: The revealed Word of God we know only from Scripture adopted by Church proclamation or through proclamation of the Church based on Scripture. The written Word of God we know only through the revelation which fulfills proclamation or through the proclamation fulfilled by revelation. The preached Word of God we know only through the revelation attested in Scripture or the Scripture which attest revelation (CD I/1, p. 121). Although Barth continues to see a necessary connection between the way God reveals himself and an ability to speak of God’s own triune nature, the immediate parallel to the filioque, so evident in the trinitarian geometry of the GD, is lost in his account of the perichoretic relations of the CD. This is somewhat problematic. Though Barth continues to find a revelation/Trinity analogy, he construes the relations of the three forms of the Word in considerably different ways. By the CD Barth insists, “we can substitute for revelation, Scripture and proclamation the names of the divine persons Father, Son and Holy Spirit and vice versa, that in the one case as in the other we shall encounter the same basic determinations and mutual relationship” (CD I/1, p. 121). What is clear, however, is that after the discussion of the threefold form of the Word of God in CD I/1, Barth ceases to appeal to their relationship as an analogy to the Trinity in the remainder of the CD. Consequently, though Barth originally saw in the doctrine of the Word of God and its threefold forms a kind of theological grounding for the filioque, in the later ­volumes of the CD that is no longer grounds for the support of the filioque, Barth’s ongoing defense of it notwithstanding. What, then, are Barth’s grounds for defending the filioque? It is to this question we now turn. Barth’s fullest discussion of the filioque in his whole corpus occurs in Church Dogmatics at §12, “God the Holy Spirit” in section 2 titled, “The Eternal Spirit” (CD I/1, pp. 476–487). Consistent to Barth’s pattern, he begins the section by noting, “The Holy Spirit does not

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first become the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, in the event of revelation…. What He is in revelation He is antecedently in Himself. And what He is antecedently in Himself He is in revelation” (CD I/1, p. 466).4 Despite the change in how he sees the relationship of the three forms of the Word of God, he nevertheless continues to demonstrate his commitment to his dogmatic rule of correspondence between the “revealed” and the “real” God: God is as he reveals himself to be. Consequently, when Barth eventually deals with the filioque in this section, it is with this dogmatic commitment firmly in mind – that whatever it means for the Spirit to proceed from the Father and the Son must be asserted because that is how the Spirit functions in the event of revelation. As he puts it, “If the rule holds good that God in His eternity is none other than the One who discloses Himself to us in His revelation, then in the one case as in the other the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the love of the Father and the Son, and so procedens ex Patre Filioque” (CD I/1, p. 483). With this rule of correspondence in mind, Barth rejects the view among some in Orthodoxy “that the Filioque, in any possible sense, can be said only with regard to the opus trinitatis ad extra [‘external work of the Trinity’], but not the inner life of God” (CD I/1, p. 479). On the contrary, for Barth the “incomparably saner” view in the East comes from those who see the filioque as a “private opinion which had wrongly been given the status of dogma” but which also could not be seen as ongoing grounds for continuing division between the Eastern and Western churches, if for no other reason than the Creed does not, nor could not have, negated the filioque as some in the Eastern tradition after Photius were apt to do (CD I/1, p. 479). Indeed, Barth perceived the latter position, in his day, as the “prevailing view in Eastern Orthodoxy today” (CD I/1, p. 479). Negatively, Barth refuses to establish the details of the filioque on either philosophical or ecumenical grounds. Barth believes that one cannot settle the question of whether the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone or from the Father and the Son by clarifying the meaning of the term “procession” itself  –  as if by understanding the semantic meaning of procession one could settle from whence the Spirit really proceeds. That the Spirit is said to “proceed” and that the Son is said to be “generated” according to the Johannine witness and upon which the patristics relied in their accounts of the doctrine of the Trinity is, for Barth, a “fact” of revelation, witnessed to clearly in Scripture. However, these ancient terms are not subject to further linguistic, etymological, semantic, or philosophical clarification if only greater effort was given to the task. The terms do not provide a description of what the divine persons are like, but simply that the one generated (the Son) and the one proceeding (the Spirit) are not one and the same. The terms, in other words, serve to differentiate the Son and the Spirit – that they are different but not how it is that they are different. As Barth put it, “[w]e can state the fact of the divine processions and modes of being. But all our attempts to state the How of this delimitation will prove to be impossible” (CD I/1, p. 476). Furthermore, Barth refuses to follow an ecumenical strategy of dealing with the “filioque problem” as if it is a puzzle to solve, or an argument to be won or lost. He is fully 4  This doctrine of antecedence was the key to Barth’s insistence on the Filioque. The Spirit could not “proceed” from the Son in time if he did not already do so in eternity within God’s immanent trinitarian life. “The Eastern doctrine does not contest the fact that this is so in revelation. But it does not read off from revelation its statements about the being of God antecedently in Himself ” (CD/1, p. 480).

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aware that “from the Son” was not in the original text of the Creed and that this was a major factor in the Great Schism between East and West. He even admits that the later Latin interpolation of filioque into the Creed was “not in fact a shining testimonial to the Roman Catholic theory of the certainty of the Church’s teaching authority as concentrated in the hands of the pope” (CD I/1, p. 478). Nevertheless, Barth resolutely rejects the idea that because “from the Son” was not in the original Creed that therefore the truth of it must therefore be rejected. As he insisted, “there was no necessary reason — the factual reason adduced [i.e., that is was not originally in the Creed] is not a necessary one — why the filioque should not have been in the original creed” (CD I/1, pp. 477– 478). That the church split over this question is for Barth a moot point, and the solution to the division has nothing to do with defending one or the other side, or with finding a compromise or middle way. For Barth, all that matters is whether filioque is true. So why then did Barth accept the filioque? The rationale for Barth is rather simple: because revelation demands it, whether a great swath of the church historic accepts it or not. Barth is convinced, in other words, that the biblical witness to revelation consistently points to the Spirit’s conjoint working in the economy together with the Father and the Son, and that therefore, due to the correspondence between economic and immanent Trinity, the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son eternally as well. What does Barth see as the demands of revelation? Certainly, it does not simply mean finding Scriptural verses that do or do not support the filioque. For example, Barth is well aware that John 15:26 speaks of the Spirit as one who proceeds (Greek: ekporeuetai) from the Father and that the passage does not explicitly say that the Spirit also proceeds from the Son, though it does say that the Spirit is sent (Greek: pempsō) by the Son from the Father, a point of some interest to Barth (CD I/1, p. 480). In any case, he insists that taking this verse as evidence against the filioque is to take it in isolation from the many other passages that also call the Spirit the “Spirit of the Son.” Such exegetical appeals for Barth already point to why he sees the Eastern position as suspect, mainly because such a practice is “speculation which interprets individual verses of the Bible in isolation” (CD I/1, p. 480). On the contrary, he points out, the Spirit is said also in the same verse to be sent by the Son from the Father is evidence that the Spirit, if the rule of correspondence holds, proceeds from the Father and the Son and not only from the Father. More important for Barth than adducing select biblical texts to uphold the teaching of the filioque is to discern the entire pattern of God’s personal self‐giving in revelation through the broad contours of the biblical narrative of God’s history. In that regard, from what event in the economic history of God’s revelation and salvation corresponds to the eternal procession of the Spirit from the Father and the Son? For Barth, it is the event known in Scripture as the “outpouring” or “descent” of the Spirit most clearly spoken of, though not exclusively, in the account of Pentecost narrated in Acts. As Barth argues, In the context of the New Testament witness the non‐identity between Christ and the Holy Spirit seems to be necessarily grounded as possible. Thus we find the Holy Spirit only after the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ or in the form of the knowledge of the crucified and risen Lord, i.e., on the assumption that objective revelation has been concluded and completed. (CD I/1, p. 451)

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For Barth, the outpouring of the Spirit is not a restricted either forward or backward from the event of Pentecost but is evident both in the form of Jesus’ promise to send the Spirit (e.g. John 7:38 f., 14:26; 15:26; 16:7) and in the fulfillment of the promise in the actual coming of the Spirit at Pentecost (e.g. John 20:22; Acts 2:2; 10:44; 1:15). Thus, the outpouring of the Spirit for Barth is the event in which, in past, present, and future, the Spirit testifies (noetically) and makes contemporaneous (ontically) in the people of God, the church, the presence of Jesus Christ. Barth anticipates those critics who point to other revelatory events as evidence of economic action of the Spirit toward the Son. What about the conception of Jesus by the Holy Spirit in Mary, or the alighting of the Spirit upon Jesus at his baptism? Do these events not reveal that the one can also read a “procession of the Son from the Holy Spirit”? Barth’s responds to this line of inquiry by distinguishing between the actions of the Spirit toward Jesus as it pertains to his divine versus human origins. Barth explains, “The work of the Holy Spirit in relation to the Son in revelation … is not of such a kind that it can be described as commensurable with the eternal begetting of the Son by the Father or the eternal breathing of the Spirit by the Father and the Son, so that another eternal relation of origin can and should be read off from it” (CD I/1, p. 485). Instead, “what the Son ‘owes’ to the Spirit in revelation is His being as man, the possibility of the flesh existing for Him, so that He, the Word, can become flesh” (CD I/1, p. 486). In this, Barth argues that the economic actions of the Spirit toward the Son in birth, baptism, and resurrection in no way have anything to do with the eternal origin of the second person of the Trinity but are rather an action of “confirmation” that in the Son God has been united with creation in a communion of love. Positively, Barth’s distinction between the origins of the human and divine pertaining to Jesus Christ properly resists notions of adoptionism in which Jesus the man is said to “become” the Son of God by the action of the Spirit at some point in temporal history. Barth soundly rejects any such temporal “begetting” of the eternal Son. Moreover, Barth upholds the radical newness (novum) of the incarnation in the history of salvation – that Jesus truly and fully does take on human flesh at some point in history. Negatively, however, it is difficult to avoid at least some hints of Nestorianism in Barth’s approach – a dividing of the human and divine in Jesus Christ. This is paradoxically contrary to Barth’s insistence almost everywhere else in the CD that the humanity of Christ has full revelatory significance to our knowledge of God. Moreover, from a methodological perspective, Barth’s “exception to the rule” makes it more difficult to know how fully he himself is willing to follow his rule of correspondence to its fullest extent. Does the economic history of God reveal God as he really is in eternity? If so, why then can we rule out that the Spirit’s action toward Jesus Christ  –  the fully divine, fully human one  –  as an event that does not reveal something of the immanent Trinity? To be fair, all proponents of the rule of the triune economic‐immanent identity are forced to qualify the rule in some way, but it is evident here, at least, that Barth’s commitment to the filioque leads him to “read in” conclusions to revelation and not the other way around. This is not necessarily a fatal move for Barth’s defense of the filioque but it is a weakness of which he neither was aware nor made any attempt to overcome.

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Barth’s Enduring Contribution to the Filioque Controversy Despite his lifelong and ardent advocacy for the doctrine of the filioque, one should not pretend that in some way Barth “proved” the filioque. Nor should he be viewed as one who brought about a solution to the ancient debate. What, then, did Barth’s approach contribute to the ongoing dispute? Although more could be said than what has been proffered here, three things can be said by way of conclusion. First, Barth nowhere gave evidence that he thought the filioque was even a problem that needed to be solved. This was not because he was unaware of the ancient problem, but because he did not believe that some kind of mediating, compromise, or synthetic solution could be found that upheld both the Eastern and Western perspectives. It is no overstatement to say that Barth believed either the filioque was true, or it was not – full stop. Either the Spirit does indeed proceed both eternally and economically from the Father and the Son, or he does not. Such a position against the backdrop of modern ecumenical debates on the filioque is generally not popular, let alone polite. Yet Barth seemed to care more about whether the doctrine was dogmatically and scripturally defensible rather than whether there was a way to unite divided ecclesiastical bodies. One may or may not agree with Barth’s approach, but it is an approach that still needs to be considered. The filioque may be definitively proven to be right – or wrong – but Barth does not consider that a mediating or synthetic solution may yet be found, various attempts to do just that after his death notwithstanding. Thus Barth raises the question: Has ecumenical discussion on the filioque sometimes moved too quickly to find a compromise or mediating solution rather than continuing to focus on whether the filioque, as a theological assertion, is true to revelation and therefore true to God in his eternal identity? Barth’s approach, at least, should push present and future theologians to still consider that question. Second, Barth’s defense of the filioque is distinctly modern. From start to finish, Barth deals with the doctrine of the procession of the Spirit as first a question of revelation and epistemology – about how it is that we know what God is like – before it is a question of what in fact God is like. In this regard, Barth’s defense of the filioque is somewhat novel, or modern, in the history of the debate in that it is was grounded in matters of “theological epistemology,” even if Barth would have been loath to call it as such. Consequently, Barth’s contribution to the filioque debate must stand as one who, as a modern theologian, sought to answer a “premodern” question on modern terms. That doesn’t mean Barth thought that the epistemological questions that drive modern thought prevent one from making a claim about the eternal God himself. Barth’s defense of the filioque as a question about revelation (theological knowledge) first and ontology or theology second indicates that Barth refused to accept epistemology as a barrier or gap to the knowledge of the true God. Whether modern (or postmodern, for that matter) thinkers see epistemological questions as marking the limits of human theological inquiry, Barth is at least one modern theologian who refuses to accept that limitation and modern readers can ill afford to ignore one of the greatest, if not the greatest, modern defenders of the filioque as a theological assertion arising from analysis of revelation, and not simply as an assertion of medieval metaphysics.

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Third, and perhaps most important, Barth’s approach to the filioque is fundamentally Protestant in that he is concerned at a much greater level about whether the doctrine aligns with God’s historical self‐revelation attested to in Scripture than whether the doctrine unites or divides the church. It is not that Barth does not care about the unity of the church – he not only cares about it but believes it and declares it throughout his written corpus. Rather, Barth is more concerned that the proclamation of the church, whether in the form of preaching, creeds, or confessions of faith, aligns with and is a witness to this revelation, even if holding to that confession means disagreeing even with those in the church. Premature or forced levels of dogmatic agreement on such a fundamental issue such as the filioque cannot, for Barth, take precedence over faithfulness to the Word of God. This doesn’t mean that Barth is in principle opposed to the possibility of dogmatic unity on the question as much as he is practically opposed to unity for the sake of unity. The filioque divide, in other words, cannot and should not be solved if it means speaking or saying something that does not materially and evidently arise from an examination of the witness of Scripture to God’s self‐revelation. Barth did grant in passing, however, that it might not be impermissible to affirm, with appropriate qualifications, that the Spirit proceeds from the Father “through the Son” (per Filium) (CD I/1, p. 484), a phrase that some have seen as holding ecumenical promise. References Badcock, G.D. (1997). The Filioque controversy. In: Light of Truth & Fire of Love: A Theology of the Holy Spirit, 62–85. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Daley, B.E. (2001a). Revisiting the “Filioque”: roots and branches of an old debate, part one. Pro Ecclesia X: 31–62. Daley, B.E. (2001b). Revisiting the “Filioque”: part two: contemporary Catholic approaches. Pro Ecclesia X: 195–212. Guretzki, D. (2009). Karl Barth on the Filioque. Farnham: Ashgate. Habets, M. (ed.) (2014). Ecumenical Perspectives on the Filioque for the Twenty‐ First Century. London: Bloomsbury. Lossky, V. (1985). In the Image and Likeness of God. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Marshall, B.D. (2002). The Defense of the Filioque in classical Lutheran theology: an ecumenical appreciation. Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie

und Religionsphilosophie 44: 154–173.McCormack, B.L. (1995). Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909–1936. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Migliore, D.I. (2000). Vinculum Pacis: Karl Barths Theologie des Heiligen Geistes. Evangelische Theologie 60: 131–152. Oberdorfer, B. (2001). Filioque: Geschichte und Theologie eines ökumenischen Problems. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Photius, I. (1983). Mystagogia Spiritus Sanctus. Astoria: Studion Publishers. Ritschl, D. (1979). The history of the Filioque controversy. In: Conflicts about the Holy Spirit, 3–14. New York: Seabury Press. Siecienski, A.E. (2010). The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy. New York: Oxford University Press. Vischer, L. (ed.) (1981). Spirit of God, Spirit of Christ: Ecumenical Reflections on the Filioque Controversy. London: SPCK.

CHAPTER 4

Barth on Divine Election David Gibson

Introduction By any standard, Karl Barth’s doctrine of God’s gracious election in Church Dogmatics II/2 is a monumental achievement. It is so, not only as an articulation of doctrines ­correlated with each other to form an elaborate cathedral of thought, but also because it manages a magisterial engagement with the church catholic, culminating in a development of Reformed theology through a sustained exercise in biblical‐exegetical reasoning as the proper mode of dogmatics. An exposition of such grandeur has drawn high praise from Barth interpreters. “When the history of theology in the twentieth century is written from the vantage point of, let us say, one hundred years from now, I am confident that the greatest contribution of Karl Barth to the development of church doctrine will be located in his doctrine of election” (McCormack 2000, p. 92). In a similar vein: “I still hold the Gotteslehre of CD II/1 and 2 to be the high point of Barth’s Dogmatics. … That second volume of Church Dogmatics surely ranks with Athanasius, Contra Arianos, Augustine, De Trinitate, St. Thomas, Summa Theologiae, and Calvin, Institutio, as a supremely great work of Christian theology” (Torrance 1990, p. 124). If the brilliance of Barth’s treatment may be granted, it is less clear where the true value of his contribution lies. Is his doctrine of election to be prized for its recalibration of Reformed double predestination to an understanding of universal election, based on a richly expressed pretemporal Chalcedonian Christology in coherence with the doctrine of God? Or is it, rather, nothing less than a thoroughgoing revolution in the doctrine of God that takes Christian theology to postmetaphysical heights with a radically new divine ontology? Positions such as these – with various nuances along the spectrum – are part of a lively and contested ongoing debate within Barth studies.

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth and Dogmatics, Volume I, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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In what follows, we will (I) provide a brief sketch of the precedents and development of Barth’s doctrine of election; (II) trace the basic shape of paragraphs §32–§35 in CD II/2, chapter VII, “The Election of God”; before (III) attempting to show how Barth’s doctrine of election exists as a worked example of the Reformed Scripture principle animating a coherent unfolding argument within the Church Dogmatics. To show this we will attend to a persistently neglected aspect of Barth’s doctrine of election  –  his attention to the biblical materials – both to help illuminate the full contours of his doctrine and to show that provocative readings of Barth on divine ontology should be resisted despite their powerful claims to lay hold of Barth’s best thoughts. We will conclude (IV) with an evaluation of Barth’s contribution.

(I) Precedents and Development From its earliest iterations Barth’s thought on election germinated in the soil of the Reformed tradition. In his first year as Honorary Professor of Reformed Theology at Göttingen (1921–1922), Barth delivered 13 lectures on Paul’s letter to the Ephesians that reveal his critical appreciation of Calvin on this subject. Barth operates with profound sympathies for Calvin’s close textual work, while also registering his great unease with the anthropological and psychological concerns of Calvin’s doctrine. The Reformed tradition, for Barth, takes the wrong point of departure. The apostle Paul “is concerned about the double predestination of the human creature in God, not about the double predestination of the human creature. His outstretched finger points above, not below” (EE, p. 95; Barth 2017). Nevertheless, Barth’s subsequent exposition in the Göttingen Dogmatics (1924–2015) contains notable similarities to the Calvinist tradition of Pauline exegesis (Romans 9 “teaches eternal, unconditional twofold predestination,” GD, p. 453; Barth 1991), with a stated deviation being Barth’s account of temporality. Barth rejects a concept of election as a decree occurring in a pretemporal past to save a fixed number of individuals. He prefers instead an actualistic understanding of election whereby God is involved in a continual interaction with individuals in the present as part of the divine decision of electing and rejecting (Gibson 2008, p. 137). Barth is self‐ conscious about this move: “And I for my part am fully aware that it is no secondary matter if I deviate here but that it will have the most far‐reaching consequences. This is the rent in the cloak of my orthodoxy, for which undoubtedly I would at least have been beaten with rods in old‐time Geneva” (GD, p. 453). In June 1936 Barth traveled to Geneva for the Reformation celebrations and the International Calvin Congress on the theme of Calvin’s doctrine of predestination. There Barth heard Pierre Maury deliver an address titled “Election and Faith,” which had a profound effect on him, an impact quickly registered in lectures Barth gave in Debrecen, Hungary in September 1936 on the subject of “God’s gracious election” (Barth 1936). Incubating there was a pervasive christological grounding for election that reaches full flower with the publication in 1942 of Church Dogmatics II/2. While wishing to remain in the Reformed tradition and adopt many of its foundational premises, Barth now expounds his profound reorientation of the doctrine to a christological center that issues in a completely new understanding of both election and double

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­ redestination. He explicitly rejects not just his earlier moment‐by‐moment actualism p in offering a more complex account of eternity and time but also the classical landscape of eternal, individual, double predestination. Yet his self‐consciousness remains: the publication of CD II/2 gave Barth “much pleasure, but even greater anxiety,” for “I would have preferred to follow Calvin’s doctrine of predestination much more closely instead of departing from it so radically. … But I could not and cannot do so” (p. x).

(II) The Election of God §32 The Problem of Election The commanding nature of Barth’s treatment is evident in a reading of the orientation, foundation, and place of the doctrine of election in §32. Barth titles the paragraph “The problem of a correct doctrine of the election of grace,” but it is immediately apparent that he is attempting to deproblematize election precisely by treating it as a dogmatic question. That is to say, Barth resists arguing from either psychological problems that the topic tends to generate in the modern mind (i.e. human freedom or fairness), or with particularly historical problems (i.e. the relationship of Israel and the church). Barth manages to deal with all the problems generated by election in Scripture and the tradition without making them the ground of his exposition. Partly this is achieved by style (in the setting of excurses into small print punctuating the main text), but largely it is a matter of theological judgment. To use a phrase of John Webster’s borrowed from a different context, Barth instructs us that election is a “distributed doctrine” (Webster 2016, p. 150). It is a doctrine “straddling both theology and economy” in that it involves both the divine being and the divine willing, as well as the relationship of these to created economic reality in the gracious work of election. What distinguishes this approach in Barth’s hands is his unwavering concern to move election away from general doctrines of God and general doctrines of anthropology by ensuring that the identities of the agents involved in election (God and creatures) are considered only in their relation to Jesus Christ. In the election of grace, in Jesus, God determines himself for fellowship with humans, and also, in Jesus, determines humans for fellowship with himself. Election may not be treated by beginning with church tradition, nor with the pedagogic usefulness of the doctrine, nor the datum of human experience, nor even with God’s omnipotent will. In each case, wherever these moves are made, dogmatics is mired in general accounts of divinity and humanity before moving to the particular. Rather, Barth insists the entire sweep of biblical revelation directs us to both a particular identification of the one who elects to be self‐determined and self‐ limited as the God for us in Jesus Christ, and to a particular identification of the man Jesus Christ as the elect man in whom and to whom elect humanity is united. The particular always informs the general. The struggle of the continental Reformed tradition to understand the witness of Scripture to divine election necessarily involved adopting a position on this question: should Christ be understood in relation to the decree of election as its foundation, its origin, or merely as its executor? Barth’s exposition of the doctrine of election unfolds

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against the historical backdrop of a Reformed tradition he regarded as having gone ­seriously awry  –  despite its best efforts and against its best intentions, it effectively reduced Christ to the role of election’s executor by emphasizing a secret electio Patris (election by the Father). A hidden God we can never know stands as the author of election behind a Christ appearing in time as “the organ which serves the electing will of God” (CD II/2, p. 65). The Reformed doctrine of election leaves us with a decretum absolutum: “The christological reference was warmly and impressively made, but it is left standing in the air” (CD II/2, p. 65). For Barth, the classic Reformed doctrine of election has severed the link between Christ and election, and so he seeks to recover it.

§33 The Election of Jesus Christ Barth’s doctrine of election “is arguably the classic instance in the Church Dogmatics of Barth working out his conviction that the church’s talk of Jesus Christ is to furnish the ground and content of all theological doctrine” (Webster 2000, p. 88). If the Reformed tradition had a concept of Christ and the decree, in Barth’s doctrine Christ is the decree: “He is the decree of God (Gottes Beschluß) behind and above which there can be no earlier or higher decree and beside which there can be no other, since all others serve only the fulfillment of this decree” (CD II/2, p. 94). “Jesus Christ is himself the divine election of grace” (CD II/2, p. 95). This means for Barth that Jesus Christ is both the one who does the choosing in election and he is himself the chosen one. The concept of Christ as the electing God involves, as Barth sees it, a radical concentration of the Reformed christological motif in election by going significantly beyond the notion of Christ as the first of the elect according to his human nature. Christ as the object of election in Barth’s thought advances beyond the Reformed position due to the weight Barth attaches to Christ being elect to suffer (with the death and resurrection of this chosen One being understood in universally actualistic and representative terms), but it is the weight Barth attaches to Christ as the active subject of election that makes his contribution so distinctive. This idea of Jesus Christ as the subject of election, so basic to Barth’s doctrine, has proved to be one of the most difficult and debated phrases in his entire corpus. What is driving him at every point is the desire to show that “the doctrine of election is the sum of the Gospel because of all words that can said or heard it is the best” (CD II/2, p. 3), and the reason election is gracious, free, and gospel is because it is the decision of God to be God for us, and not against us. Barth uses the word “election” in an untraditional way to describe the self‐giving of God in the sending of the only‐begotten Son to a lost but loved world, alongside using it in a more traditional way to describe the object of that saving work as the man Jesus Christ. Barth reads a text like John 3:16 and sees it to speak wonderfully, and concretely, of election (CD II/2, p. 26). Whereas the Reformed tradition held to a truly electing and free will of God, for Barth, “It must be shown, then, that it is Jesus Christ himself who occupies this place” (CD II/2, p. 75). In so doing, what emerges is Barth’s christological redefinition of double predestination. “In Barth’s hands, the term comes to refer not to a decision of God in which the human race is divided into the elect and the reprobate, but to God’s self‐election

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and the election of humanity, both actual in Jesus Christ” (Webster 2000, p. 91). Again, note the gospel incentive: if Jesus Christ is both the chooser and the chosen, Barth seeks to answer the problems generated by a Reformed tradition that sees the Father sending the Son into the world to execute a decree of election that nevertheless somehow took place behind the back of the Son, so that in the revelation of Jesus that occurs in the world there would remain a Deus absconditus (hidden God). This hidden God chooses some and rejects others and sends Jesus to save the some – but who is he? How may we know he is for us? Barth is generous in his reading of the tradition. He recognizes that for Calvin, especially, Christ is the speculum electionis (mirror of election) – the place God has given us to look if we would know that we belong to him. And yet it is not too much to say that Barth’s own proposal is an attempt to save the Reformed doctrine of election from itself by so construing it as to provide the gospel certainty of genuine assurance of salvation. Calvin’s failure to see that Jesus Christ is both the electing God and the elect man “is the decisive objection we have to bring against his whole doctrine of predestination” (CD II/2, p. 111). Indeed, “all the dubious features of Calvin’s doctrine result from the basic failing that in the last analysis he separates God and Jesus Christ, thinking that what was in the beginning with God must be sought elsewhere than in Jesus Christ” (CD II/2, p. 111).

§34 The Election of the Community The double‐predestination of Jesus Christ means a radical new direction for the doctrine of election. Barth judges that one of the most significant problems in the Reformed tradition has been its failure to make individual election take its proper place. In §34, which unfolds as a detailed exegesis of Romans 9–11, Barth argues that he is keeping to Holy Scripture which, unlike the classical doctrine, “is in no hurry to busy itself with the ‘many’ men elected in Jesus Christ, either in the singular or plural” (CD II/2, p. 195). Rather than the focus on individual destinies Barth works instead with the concept of a “mediate and mediating election”: the community (die Gemeinde). Barth chooses this concept because it unites as one the realities of Israel and the church. As one community, this fellowship of God’s people is “determined from all eternity for a peculiar service (Dienst)” (CD II/2, p. 196). This language of vocation is vital for Barth’s exegesis of Romans 9–11. He argues that the community is marked by both particularity (Besonderheit) and provisionality (Vorläufigkeit). Its particular character consists in the fact that it has to witness to Jesus Christ; its provisional character consists in the fact that it “points beyond itself to the fellowship of all men in face of which it is a witness and herald” (CD II/2, p. 196). The self‐determination that takes place within the divine being to elect humanity is the determination from which the entire covenant of grace flows, so that creation itself is predicated on the divine decision to be God for us in this particular way: for Christ to be the electing God and the elected man, there must be a humanity. This means that although divine election is worked out in history, the ground and origin of election’s inner life is immanent and not economic – it is the preexistent Christ who shapes and

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forms the dynamic of election in the economy of grace. Barth argues that God “elects the people of Israel for the purpose of assuming its flesh and blood,” and that “the election of Israel occurred for the sake of the Son of God and Man” (CD II/2, p. 207 rev.). Barth applies the twofold determination of Jesus Christ to the one community of God. What God chooses for himself in Christ – rejection and judgment – he determines for one form of the community (Israel); what God determines for humanity in Christ  –  fellowship and mercy – he determines for another form of the community (the church). For Barth the election of the community of God is the witness of history to the election of Jesus Christ. Israel in its historical existence must bear witness to what God has determined for himself in Christ (judgment); the church in its historical existence must bear witness to what God has determined for humanity in Christ (mercy). Radical new directions abound in light of this formulation. Katherine Sonderegger is surely right to say that part of what is most innovative here is that Barth has placed his Israellehre within his doctrine of God (Sonderegger 1992, p. 45). The grandeur of this conception of election is well stated: “The Christological center of Barth’s doctrine brings election into the living relationship of the Trinity, where the community, its history, and finally its individual flesh, rejected and assumed, find their meaning and source. No longer a doctrine of individual salvation, election now unfolds the eternal giving and receiving of the Son, through whom the covenant with creation is realized. The decision about the individual, and indeed, of the community and all creation, cannot stand alone. These decisions are secondary to the decision made in Christ, and are made real only in this primary, divine drama of self‐giving and self‐revelation” (Sonderegger 1992, p. 51).

§35 The Election of the Individual When Barth arrives at the election of the individual he is acutely aware that he is finishing where he believes every other treatment of election has (mistakenly) begun. For him, Jesus Christ is both the promise and the recipient of individual election. Yet this does not at all negate individual election and Barth’s discussion here even surpasses in length his treatment of the election of Jesus Christ. He is explicit: “There are no predestined families and no predestined nations … There are only predestined men – predestined in Jesus Christ and by way of community. It is individuals who are chosen and not the totality of men” (CD II/2, p. 313). Barth retains the traditional language of elect and rejected individuals but refracts it through his radically Christocentric lens. Jesus Christ reveals what distinguishes the elect and rejected from each other, but also what unites them: in Jesus we see what an elect person is (“it is he who is the man distinguished by this special relationship to God” [CD II/2, p. 351]) and what a rejected person is (it is Jesus who “is cast out from the presence of God by his righteous law and judgment, and delivered to eternal death” [CD II/2, p. 352]). At this point one of Barth’s most interesting thoughts appears as he finds the OT to be replete with pairs which distinguish election and rejection – animals in the rituals of Leviticus, Saul and David in 1 Samuel, and two prophets in 1 Kings 13. This is in fact

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one of Barth’s boldest moves, for he seeks to show how such figures, often interpreted as examples of two different types of activity on God’s part, instead derive their meaning from the one person of Jesus Christ, so that election and rejection are always typological of the same antitype, the election and rejection of Jesus. This further allows Barth to assert that the elect and the rejected are determined for different forms of service: the elect bear witness to the election of Jesus Christ and as such call the world to recognize its election in the community of God; the rejected too (which Barth analyzes in great detail by considering the person of Judas Iscariot) serve the divine witness to election by representing humanity in need of the gospel of grace, by showing what is overcome by the gospel, and in showing how lost humanity may have a future because of the gospel. Judas himself performs an apostolic ministry in his handing over of Jesus to death, and Jesus himself remains for Judas even while Judas is against him. “The situation between Jesus and Judas which is only a heightened form of the situation between Jesus and all other men – between God’s election of man, and his necessary rejection – is … the open one of proclamation” (CD II/2, p. 476).

(III) The Scriptural Impulse in Barth on Election This skeletal overview of election in Barth contains hugely significant moves in the history of doctrinal thought. These are often considered in great theological and philosophical depth by Barth scholars who nevertheless pass quickly over the primary mode of Barth’s exposition of election: biblical exegesis. Barth’s work as a biblical interpreter is well known, of course, and even within his massive Church Dogmatics the role of the Bible is well understood. Francis Watson observes that “If the Church Dogmatics does not persuade its readers to reread the Bible, then – by its own standards – it is a pretentious and presumptuous failure” (Watson 2000, p. 66). We should expect to find within Barth’s mature thinking a centrifugal force from his text to the biblical text, so that we fail to read him well without engaging with his reading of Scripture. “As Barth’s conceptual framework takes hold he does more and not less exegesis. It is as though the doctrinal framework stimulates rather than – as in too many contemporary theologies – suppresses exegesis” (Bartholomew 2008, p. 171). Barth’s doctrine of election is a classic example of this procedure, containing as it does a breathtaking amount of close and careful reading of extended portions of the OT and NT which punctuate his main text, not as ancillary to his main exposition but rather constituting the very heart of what he is seeking to say. Yet it remains the case that this material is rarely treated in depth when Barth’s doctrine of election is expounded and such neglect has been a regrettable feature of much of the contentious debate surrounding Barth’s doctrine of election. The result is the ongoing “marginalization of the scriptural impulse in Barth” (Wood 2007, p. 93) in genetico‐historical accounts of Barth’s development and the corresponding failure to see how Barth’s interaction with the Bible along the way sheds light on the meaning of his more radical statements. Consider the vexed matter of Barth’s view of Jesus Christ as the subject of election. For him, election is “that which takes place at the very centre of the divine self‐revelation,”

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with Jesus Christ himself as the decision and self‐determination of God’s own eternal being (CD II/2, p. 59). Such talk of the eternal being of Jesus Christ has proved notoriously puzzling. One influential explanation is that advanced by Bruce McCormack (2000). McCormack argues that for Barth, “election is the event in God’s life in which he assigns to himself the being he will have for all eternity.” Barth operates with an “actualistic” or “covenant ontology” where essence “is given in the act of electing, and is in fact, constituted by that eternal act” (McCormack 2000, pp. 98–99). He claims for Barth an extremely radical position: the incarnation of the Logos constitutes the being of God in eternity. Over against a Hegelian conception of the “constitution” of the divine being, McCormack argues his sense of the term: “as a consequence of the primal decision in which God assigned to himself the being he would have throughout eternity (a being‐ for the human race), God is already in pre‐temporal eternity  –  by way of anticipation – that which he would become in time” (McCormack 2000, p. 100). This position leads McCormack to suggest that in terms of the logical relation between God’s triunity and his election, the latter must actually precede the former: “The decision for the covenant of grace is the ground of God’s triunity and, therefore, of the eternal generation of the Son and of the eternal procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son. In other words, the works of God ad intra (the trinitarian processions) find their ground in the first of the works of God ad extra (viz. election)” (McCormack 2000, p. 103). Unsurprisingly, McCormack’s reading has spawned a significant literature, both for and against (see the essays in Dempsey 2011; Hunsinger 2015). Yet apart from a single reference by McCormack (2000, p. 94), Barth’s exegesis of John 1:1–2 that appears in CD II/2 §33, part of the very heart of his core thesis, is summarily ignored in the literature on this debate. The general absence of exegetical discussion is a telling indicator that this material is viewed as ancillary to Barth’s argument, contrary, however, to what Barth himself says in his preface: “I have grounds for thinking that to some my meaning will be clearer in these [long expositions of some Old and New Testament passages] than in the main body of the text” (CD II/2, p. x). Regardless of whether or not Barth’s small print is clearer than the main body of text, their close connection is vital. McCormack asserts that Barth defends his conception of Jesus Christ as the subject of election with his exegesis of John 1:1–2, but this proceeds too quickly through Barth’s argument. It is certainly true that Barth’s conception of Christ as subject is drawn from this exegesis, but the Prologue exegesis is not there in the first instance to make the immediate point that Christ is the subject of election. Nowhere immediately preceding the exegesis in §33 does Barth refer to Christ as the subject of election, and nowhere in the exegesis does Barth make this exact point; rather, his precise aim there is to prove that “the divine predestination is the election of Jesus Christ.” Once Barth has done this, only then does he elaborate a double reference in this concept, so that Christ is both the subject and the object of election (CD II/2, p. 103). In this way, in the Johannine exegesis itself, the relationship between triunity and election is parsed with self‐determining conceptualities. Barth intends to show that God’s self‐ determination is to be a God who is turned toward the human race, so that the primary referent of “election” must be Jesus Christ as the personal expression of this “turning towards” humanity.

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This much is clear when Barth links his treatment of John 1:1–2 with a range of NT texts that all describe God’s giving of himself to humanity in the person of Christ. For example, the fullness of the Godhead dwelling in Christ as seen in Colossians 1:19; 2:9 is an instance where “the concept of election is quite clear” (CD II/2, p. 99). It is this movement, in Christo, toward humanity that for Barth counts as the election, the decree, the decision of God. But it is a movement of God outside himself, a description of who God is when he turns toward that which is not God. It is not a movement that is ontologically constitutive of the divine being (for a more detailed presentation of Barth’s exegesis, see Gibson 2009a, pp. 41–49). This is further supported by how Barth both introduces and follows his exegesis. Immediately before his close reading begins, Barth states that Jesus Christ “is the free grace of God as not content simply to remain identical with the inward and eternal being of God, but operating ad extra in the ways and works of God” (CD II/2, p. 95). The ad extra should not be ignored when, in the exegesis, on the basis of houtos, Barth wants to locate Jesus Christ as “in the beginning with God.” After the exegesis, Barth comments on this Anfang that Jesus Christ “was not at the beginning of God, for God has indeed no beginning. But he was at the beginning of all things, at the beginning of God’s dealings with the reality which is distinct from himself ” (CD II/2, p. 102). In other words, when the eternally self‐sufficient God turned toward humanity, the way this turning is described is by the name of Jesus Christ. The turning itself does not constitute the divine being or the triune nature but is a determination of how the divine being is going to be ad extra, toward the creation. This turning is the election of Jesus Christ. This does not imply, of course, that God is not like this ad intra; merely that for Barth it does not constitute God ad intra. It is precisely because Barth’s talk of “the beginning” is a “temporal” referent that we must be cautious about understanding the “eternal being of Jesus Christ” in an ontologically constitutive way in Barth. Indeed, when he comes to engage with the tradition on the issue of Christ as subject of election, Barth asserts: “Between the eternal Godhead of Christ which needs no election and his elected humanity, there is a third possibility which was overlooked by Thomas. And that is the being of Christ in the beginning with God, the act of the good pleasure of God by which the fullness of the Godhead is allowed to dwell in him” (CD II/2, p. 107). One very significant feature of this material is the role that it plays in locating Barth’s theology of election as part of a coherent trinitarian argument right from the beginning of the Church Dogmatics. In II/2, Barth is continuing to operate within “a broad dogmatic context involving an extended development of a Trinitarian doctrine of revelation” (Wood 2007, p. xiii), so that what he works out in II/2 is fully consistent with his earlier exposition of the Trinity. Readings like McCormack’s recognize that both before and after II/2 Barth made statements “which created the space for an independent doctrine of the Trinity; a triune being of God which was seen as independent of the covenant of grace” (2000, p. 102). In other words, McCormack accepts that the understanding of the Trinity, which he claims is demanded by Barth’s doctrine of election, is at odds with the understanding of the Trinity that actually emerges elsewhere in the Church Dogmatics. This is a further serious weakness in his thesis. McCormack can only suggest that “Barth either did not fully realize the profound implications of his doctrine of

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election for the doctrine of the Trinity, or he shied away from drawing them for reasons known only to himself ” (2000, p. 102). This is hardly convincing, however, for in the exegetical treatment of John 1:1–2 Barth has not bracketed off his doctrine of the Trinity but rather is expounding it. He believes his exegesis contributes decisively to showing that God anticipated and determined within himself “that the goal and meaning of all his dealings with the as yet non‐existent universe should be the fact that in his Son he would be gracious towards man, uniting himself with him.” This was the choice of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in the beginning, and Jesus Christ was the subject and object of this choice (CD II/2, pp. 101–102). Repeatedly in this section Barth affirms that Trinity precedes election: “God did not stand in need of any particular ways or works ad extra. He had no need of a creation. He might well have been satisfied with the inner glory of his threefold being, his freedom, and his love” (CD II/2, p. 121).

(IV) Conclusion Debate over Barth’s doctrine of election in the areas outlined in this chapter is likely to continue and even more likely to dominate the primary way Barth on election is received. It would be unfortunate, however, if several other key aspects of his treatment were not admired and appreciated, just as the critical questions to be asked of his presentation also extend beyond the relationship between election and Trinity. In Barth’s reading of the tradition, there are at least two important questions related to the issue of Jesus Christ as the subject of election. The first is whether Barth’s presentation really manages to capture all that has gone before. In Calvin there are grounds for thinking that Barth overlooks a significant piece of evidence for Christ as the active subject of election. A case can be made that Barth bases his reading of Calvin on the Institutes, not Calvin’s Commentary on John’s Gospel, and although there is some ambiguity in the former, in the latter the concept of Christ choosing before the creation of the world is crystal clear (Gibson 2009b, pp. 448–465). But if we grant that this kind of presentation is lacking in the tradition in the way that Barth regards as so supremely important, then the more interesting historical question is undoubtedly why Christ as the subject of election was not present precisely in the form that Barth constructs. Barth’s treatment of John 1:1–2 and texts like it, such as Colossians 1:17–19 and 2:9, involves a prima facie broadening of the semantic range of election to include the self‐determination of Jesus Christ as electing God and elected man. Is Barth here strikingly original or strangely novel? It is an open question as to whether this move is valid as the prior exegetical foundation to considering texts such as John 6:70; 13:18; 15:16, 19. The exegetical issues to be faced here turn on the kind of “choosing” that Christ is the subject of in John’s Gospel: is it a salvific choosing or a choosing for vocation? Barth engages with the tradition in terms of how it has (or has not) understood Christ as the subject of election in these verses but has little to say about the particularistic Christ that the tradition sees emerge from them. If Christ himself excludes some from his choosing, on what grounds is Barth right to hold that the election carried out by God in God’s movement toward humanity is universal?

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The same exegetical focus should guide consideration of the universalistic emphasis in Barth’s doctrine of election. Barth’s universalistic accent undoubtedly cannot be pressed as a form of incipient universalism; at several points he strenuously rejects the doctrine of apokatastasis (restoration of all things). Yet as Berkouwer says, “It is remarkable that in the background even of Barth’s joyful doctrine of election shadows are to be found. These shadows fall specifically at that point where he extends the lines of election and rejection into eschatology” (Berkouwer 1956, p. 117). This is to wonder whether, with his stress on the freedom of divine grace, Barth has relocated the problem of a Deus nudus absconditus from the realm of the pretemporal decree to the eschatological realm by leaving us unable to say for sure what God may or may not do at the end of all things. Many interpreters will feel Barth’s reverent agnosticism here is a suitably devout reconfiguring of the scriptural witness into a very different hermeneutical whole (Hunsinger 2000, pp. 246–249), whereas others will contend that the universal aspects of the witness have been accorded a primacy that forces other voices into subjection (Crisp 2008, pp. 300–322). For Reformed theologians the exegetical reasoning of Barth’s work should be taken as its greatest strength, even by those who yet want to register concerns. At the very point of divergence from the tradition Barth models the right way to engage with the tradition. Although he wished to follow Calvin, he could not, for, “As I let the Bible itself speak to me on these matters, as I meditated on what I seemed to hear, I was driven irresistibly to reconstruction” (CD II/2, p. x). The reconstruction Barth offers remains a peerless exercise in exegetical dogmatics that evades a common Reformed error of solo Scriptura (the Bible as the only authority) and instead displays the classic understanding of sola Scriptura (the Bible as the supreme authority). Even at points where he is likely to be most controversial (for instance, in what his material may or may not contribute to Jewish‐ Christian dialogue), Barth’s vast exegetical output forces interpreters to wrestle with the fact that, before he has done anything else, he has tried to listen carefully to what the text is saying. The result is an attempt to display the gospel as the best of all words because God elects humanity for glory and himself for judgment. Barth’s doctrine of election portrays “an exchange graciously weighted in the creature’s favour” (Sonderegger 1992, p. 53). It is “a condescension inconceivably tender” (CD II/2, p. 121). References Barth, K. (1936). Gottes Gnadenwahl. Zurich: EVZ. Barth, K. (1991). The Göttingen Dogmatics: Instruction in the Christian Religion, vol. 1 (ed. H. Reiffen); (trans. G. Bromiley). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Barth, K. (2017). The Epistle to the Ephesians (ed. R.D. Nelson); (trans. Ross Wright). Grand Rapids, MI: Baker. Bartholomew, C. (2008). Calvin, Barth, and theological interpretation. In: Calvin,

Barth, and Reformed Theology (eds. N.B. MacDonald and C.R. Trueman). Milton Keynes: Paternoster Press. Berkouwer, G.C. (1956). The Triumph of Grace in the Theology of Karl Barth. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Crisp, O. (2008). Karl Barth and Jonathan Edwards on reprobation (and hell). In: Engaging with Barth: Contemporary Evangelical Critiques (eds. D. Gibson and D. Strange), 300–322. London/New York: T&T Clark.

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Dempsey, M.T. (2011). Trinity and Election in Contemporary Theology. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Gibson, D. (2008). The Day of God’s Mercy: Romans 9–11 in Barth’s Doctrine of Election. In: Engaging with Barth: Contemporary Evangelical Critiques (eds. D. Gibson and D. Strange), 136–167. London/New York: T&T Clark. Gibson, D. (2009a). Reading the Decree: Exegesis, Election and Christology in Calvin and Barth. London/New York: Continuum. (Extracts from this work used by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc). Gibson, D. (2009b). A Mirror for God and for Us: Christology and Exegesis in Calvin’s Doctrine of Election. International Journal of Systematic Theology 11 (4): 448–465. Hunsinger, G. (2000). Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Hunsinger, G. (2015). Reading Barth with Charity: A Hermeneutical Proposal. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker.

McCormack, B. (2000). Grace and being. In: The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth (ed. J. Webster), 183–200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sonderegger, K. (1992). That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew: Karl Barth’s “Doctrine of Israel.”. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Torrance, T.F. (1990). Karl Barth: Biblical and Evangelical Theologian. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Watson, F. (2000). The Bible. In: The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth (ed. J. Webster). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Webster, J. (2000). Barth. London/New York: Continuum. Webster, J. (2016). Providence. In: Christian Dogmatics: Reformed Theology for the Church Catholic (eds. M. Allen and S. Swain). Grand Rapids, MI: Baker. Wood, D. (2007). Barth’s Theology of Interpretation. Aldershot: Ashgate.

CHAPTER 5

Barth on Revelation Matthew J.A. Bruce

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hristian preachers and theologians dare to speak about God. They do so because they trust, they have faith, that God has spoken and continues to speak in the church’s preaching and teaching, in Holy Scripture, and ultimately in the person of Jesus Christ. Simply put, when God speaks something is revealed, something new, something that would otherwise be hidden, unknown. Basic to Christian theology is the idea that we can speak about God because God first speaks to us. “Theology,” the discipline concerned with refining and articulating Christian doctrine, essentially means speech about God. Such speech about God happens, for the Christian, in the church, in the words and the deeds not only of individual Christians who belong to this community but also of the community as a whole. Theology is thus the activity of human beings reflecting upon and speaking to each other about God’s speech. It is human words about the Word of God. Like any theologian in the Christian tradition, Karl Barth affirms that human beings can know and speak about God. They can speak to others – both inside and outside of the church – about who God is and what God has done, because God has already spoken and continues to speak to them. The movement runs from actuality to possibility. God is known, and therefore can be known, through his self‐revelation in Jesus Christ. Barth defines theology as “the scientific self‐examination of the Christian church regarding the content of its distinctive talk about God” (KD I/1, p. 1; CD I/1, p. 3).1 By “scientific,” he means that theology seeks to explicate the identity of God in an intellectually disciplined manner. It is a rule‐based inquiry. It focuses on particular questions as they arise from its subject matter. By “self‐examination,” he means that this discipline is internal to the church. It is an exercise in ecclesial self‐evaluation and self‐criticism.

1  All translations of the CD are my own; references are given to both the original and the standard English translation. The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth and Dogmatics, Volume I, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Theology for Barth exists in the service of proclamation. It seeks to ascertain that what the church proclaims about God corresponds to what God has actually done and said. It is the church double‐checking its own speech. It tests the church’s proclamation against the criterion of revelation. This is why Barth begins the chapter in the Church Dogmatics on “The Knowledge of God,” with the statement: “In the church of Jesus Christ, human beings speak about God and get to hear about God. About God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, about God’s grace and truth, about God’s thoughts and works, about God’s promises, endowments, and commands, about God’s kingdom and about the human way of life in the sphere of God’s lordship. But always and in all circumstances, God himself is the presupposition, the meaning, and the power, God himself is the subject who absolutely, originally, and finally, moves, bears, establishes, and actualizes everything that is to be said and heard here” (KD II/1, p. 1; CD II/1, p. 3; italics original). Theology is thus a “therapeutic” exercise. It examines how language about God is actually used by a particular community. It asks about the meaning of the word God according to this communal usage. And then it makes judgments about the faithfulness of this particular use of language to God’s self‐revelation. It is an act of Nachdenken, of thinking about the God who is spoken of as having revealed himself in the history of the covenant as fulfilled in Jesus Christ (see Jüngel 2001, pp. 9–11). Barth’s doctrine of ­revelation is based on the idea that Christians do not ascend to God but rather “follow after” God along the path he has chosen in the history of salvation accomplished as a covenantal history. It is a history bracketed by God’s work of creation and redemption, centered in the election of Israel, which culminates in Jesus of Nazareth, Israel’s promised Messiah. Barth does not ask whether knowledge of God is possible on the basis of general considerations. Some readers find this a curious feature of his work, and they are sometimes puzzled that he had little interest in apologetics.2 He does not begin with arguments defending human capacities to know about God in general, nor with proofs of God’s existence. Instead he moves immediately to the task of explicating the meaning of the word God as used in the language of the church. For Barth, the Christian faith has no need of neutral apologetic arguments. Christian theology cannot entertain the question of whether knowledge of God is a general human possibility. Nor can it attempt to prove the existence of God without calling into question its own basis. Barth believes that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ can speak for himself, and that he does so. This does not mean, however, that believers are not called to enter into conversations about faith with unbelievers. Indeed they must. But the believer “need not first condescend” and find a (false) neutral ground from which to argue and defend the Christian

2  Although he rejected apologetics when conceived as a neutral enterprise prior to faith and independent of it (KD I/1, pp. 28–29; CD I/1, pp. 30–31), he allowed for a supplemental, incidental, and ad hoc apologetics subsequent to faith (KD II/1, p. 6; CD II/1, p. 8). He believed that the best apologetics was a good dogmatics (KD IV/3.2, p. 1011; CD IV/3, p. 882).

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faith.3 For believers “require no special art in order to approach non‐believers; they are already in solidarity with them, for with their witness to faith they stand with them as poor sinners next to other poor sinners, over whom they are not superior.” As such, believers will enter into such conversations only “in the simple form of a witness,” engaging unbelief with belief. For believers do not even “have power over their own faith and… as such also do not have the power to conquer with their faith, to overcome the faith of others.” All that they can contribute, “in great inconspicuousness and unpretentiousness” “is only the fact of their faith.” Barth calls believers to engage unbelievers humbly, respectfully, and charitably, not seeking to Lord it over them, but simply to bear witness to Jesus Christ. But, it is also the case that the believer must so bear witness, for believers have no power over faith, that of others or their own, they “have no warrant to abandon faith again, even tentatively [for the sake of evangelism or apologetic defense], for the sake of the unbeliever, the believer can only unambiguously obtain and keep it in human insecurity but also in divine security, both of which are just given since it is a matter of faith” (KD II/1, pp. 105–106; CD II/1, p. 96). When they bear witness to their faith, believers will not seek to justify the faith by appeal to a general, neutral foundation. Faith is not truly faith, if believers suppose they have a found a “recipe” that guarantees successful evangelism or catechesis if properly implemented. The act of bearing witness is an act of prayer; a prayer that “the divine counter‐witness” might come, for without it, as they well know, they are not able to do anything. It is precisely by praying that believers do their work of bearing witness. They do so in obedience, “and therefore in the prospect of the power of the promise which alone promises a result.” But this means that believers do so “in the love for the other which alone deserves to be called love.” In their witness they have “no prospect of triumph” by their own efforts. If the triumph of faith actually occurs, as it can occur, it is “definitely not the triumph of the believer” (KD II/1, p. 106; CD II/1, p. 97). In his late reflections on mission, Barth affirmatively cites from Luther’s Small Catechism: “I believe that I cannot, by my own rationality or power, believe in and come to Jesus Christ, my Lord, but rather that the Holy Spirit has called me by the Gospel” (KD IV/3.2, p. 564; CD IV/3, pp. 490–491). A certain radical, methodological self‐doubt may be at the heart of much modern theology, influenced as it is by Descartes and postcartesian philosophy. Barth rejects this Cartesian method. His answer to the question of “whether God exists?” is not unlike that of Thomas Aquinas, who answered by first noting that it is in the Bible that God says “I am” (Ex 3.14; see Summa Theologiae Iª q. 2 a. 3 s.c.). The church confesses by faith that God exists and can be known, because he attests himself through the prophets and the apostles. Hence Barth’s definition of revelation: the “self‐revelation of God, i.e. as his revelation in Jesus Christ, as the Word that is spoken to us, that is given to us in the witness of Holy Scripture” (Barth 1948, p. 21).

3  Insofar as apologetics involves dispelling confusions or misconceptions, Barth had no objection to it. What he rejected was the attempt to assume a stance of false neutrality as a way of defending the truth of the gospel or some supposedly preliminary aspects of it.

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The Triune God Is the Self‐Revealing God Barth is only secondarily concerned with human epistemological capacities or human psychology and their relation to knowledge of God, though he is very concerned to address the problems of sin and creaturely limitation and their consequences for human knowledge of God. Barth’s primary concern is with the being and act of God. He is concerned with the fact that God reveals himself, with the means God uses, and with the content of revelation. For Barth, “true knowledge of the one and only God” is possible only because God acts “to make himself known. … He makes himself known through himself by distinguishing himself in the world from the world. Otherwise he cannot be known at all” (Barth 1938, p. 21, italics original; cf. KD I/1, p. 312; CD I/1, p. 296). God is the Lord not only of his self‐revelation in Christ but also of its reception. This is a basic principle of Barth’s doctrine: Human knowledge of God is an impossibility apart from God’s act of self‐revelation. The accessibility of God depends on God’s act of entering into creation in an objective, creaturely form in such a way that he can been seen and heard. Human beings have no natural ability to know God. They are part of creation and by nature are capable only of knowing objects that exist within and as part of creation. God in himself and as such is not an object within creation. He is hidden from human view, “located” on the other side of an “ontological divide.” God is known by human beings only because God wills to cross this divide and become “an object of our knowledge by taking from in the creaturely sphere” (Hunsinger 1991, p. 77). Apart from God’s gracious act of self‐revelation, human beings do not possess the power, the faculties, or apparently even the desire to know God. Balázs M. Mezei, in his treatment of the “cognitive origins” of revelation, points out that if divine revelation originates in the human mind, then it is “meaningless to speak of ‘revelation’” (2017, p. 29). He classifies Barth, along with other theologians who strongly emphasize the idea of revelation as the self‐revelation of God, as “non‐ conditionalists” because they do not attempt (and in fact discount such attempts) to explain the prerequisite conditions (e.g. human faculties, divine powers, etc.) that make revelation a possibility. For the nonconditionalist: “Revelation is what is in no way presupposed, assumed, prepared, or conditioned by the receiver of revelation. ‘In no way’ means here that there is absolutely no a priori capacity of receiving revelation. Not only are the conceptual structures missing, but even the mere possibility of such structures, not even the existence of a receiver of revelation, is considered to be a presupposition of revelation on this view. The very existence of the receiver of revelation is the result of the act of revelation itself, and whatever belongs to this notion of revelation is achieved strictly speaking by the act of revelation” (Mezei 2017, p. 29). According to this model, revelation is always an “event,” something that occurs but which cannot be fixed. Moreover, for Barth, the truth made available to human beings in God’s act of self‐revelation is always “mediated,” because it “is not directly accessible to us on the basis of general considerations or by our own innate powers of cognition or reception” (Hunsinger 1991, p. 76). To begin well, we must recognize that “the beginning of our knowledge of God … is not a beginning which we can make with him. It can only be the beginning, which he has made with us” (KD II/1, p. 213; CD II/1, p. 190). The problem that Barth perceives, and

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which motivates his work, is that much post‐Enlightenment theology proceeds in the opposite direction. It asks in abstract and general terms if knowledge and speech about God are even possible. And it often answers such questions by serving up lengthy accounts of prolegomena that seek to justify theology and demonstrate its possibility by appeal to nontheological standards. Barth rejects the methodology of such “modernist dogmatics.” He argues that such a procedure is built upon the false premise that “church and faith ought to be understood as part of a greater nexus of being.” It supposes that dogmatics must be seen fundamentally “as part of a greater nexus of scientific problems.” It supposes that even for Christian dogmatic theology “it is only from the general structural laws of science that the particular conditions for knowledge can be deduced and that particular scientific criteria for it can be recognized” (KD I/1, p. 36; CD I/1, p. 35; italics original). Barth disallows any such proposals. He sees this “greater nexus of being” merely as part of the greater reality within which the church is called to bear witness to the Wholly Other God who is revealed in Christ and his resurrection from the dead (cf. Webster 1995, p. 23).

The Problem with “Natural Theology” Barth’s rejection of natural theology comes to bear precisely at this point. He understands natural theology as any attempt to ground knowledge of God in some source that is distinct from God’s act of self‐revelation. He detects natural theology wherever there is a refusal to accept that human beings lack an innate disposition for knowing God. Natural theology, he contends, is to be found wherever knowledge of God is thought to rest even partially in human capacities apart from grace. Barth is convinced that whenever it assumed that human beings have some inherent disposition for God, even if minimal and weakened by sin, knowledge of God is bound to go astray. The misguided idea of a second source or basis for revelation competes with and finally compromises the true knowledge of God as received from God’s self‐revelation. The quest for knowledge of God apart from and alongside God’s self‐revelation is for Barth the problem of sin. The Fall narrative, as he reads it, concerns the attempt by human beings to seek knowledge of God independently of grace. It is to seek God elsewhere than where he has allowed himself to be found (see GA 47, p. 340; RII, p. 247). “The person who cannot and will not be deprived of the idea that a disposition for God is at his disposal, even without the grace of God, … is closed off to the disposition of God” and open instead to sin (KD II/1, p. 150; CD II/1, p. 135). The impetus behind Barth’s famous No! to Emil Brunner lies just here. Brunner proposed that human beings naturally possess some, albeit very limited, ability to know and do the will of God apart from revelation, or to some degree without God’s gracious intervention. The possibility of this nonrevelatory knowledge lies in a supposedly “necessary, indispensable point of contact” that belongs to human nature (GA 52, p. 471; Barth 2002, p. 85). In this affirmation of a point of contact, Barth finds the beginning of a path that will end in the rejection of the doctrine of human sinfulness. It undermines

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complete human dependence on God and ends finally in a refusal of grace. Above all, it fails to see the miracle of grace as the true point of contact. “The Holy Ghost who proceeds from the Father and the Son and is therefore revealed and believed as God, does not stand in need of any point of contact other than the one that he himself creates. Only retrospectively is it possible to reflect on the way in which he ‘makes contact’ with us as human beings, and this retrospect will ever be a retrospect upon a miracle” (Barth 2002, p. 121 rev., italics original). “Freedom to know the true God is a miracle, a freedom of God, not one of our freedoms” (Barth 2002, p. 117). With his “nonconditionalist” account of revelation as grounded in the miracle of divine grace, Barth contends that human beings cannot exercise mastery, epistemic or moral, over the knowledge given to them by God. As they are mastered by this grace, they are summoned to humble themselves in thanksgiving and obedience. God and the things of God are not to be pressed into service for purposes devised by human beings. God’s revelation is not something that human beings possess. It is not something that is at their disposal or under their control. Barth’s rejection of natural theology entails a “dis‐possessive” account of God’s self‐revelation. It serves to thwart attempts to co‐opt God in service of sinful human interests (see McCormack 2014). Natural theology in the technical sense as espoused by Brunner opened the door to Kulturprotestantismus in the political sense as espoused by the German‐ Christians under Hitler. Both posited a second source and ground of revelation apart from and alongside Christ. For Barth, the doctrine of revelation is ultimately concerned with what the Bible calls “repentance,” “the total life‐transformation that occurs with the implementation of a very determinate form of knowledge” (KD IV/3, p. 226; CD IV/3, p. 198). Such knowledge occurs because there is a “confrontation” with God in the person of Jesus Christ. This confrontation “is the basic form of revelation … the event in which reconciliation overcomes and destroys the distance between it and the human being, disclosing itself to the human being and making itself the subject and content of his knowledge” (KD IV/3, p. 210; CD IV/3, pp. 183–184). If this is the case, then the knowledge given in the divine act of self‐revelation does not involve the mere “acquisition of neutral information, which can be expressed in statements, principals and systems …. What it really means is the process or history in which the human being, certainly observing and thinking, using the senses, intelligence, and imagination, but also the will, action, and ‘heart,’ and therefore the whole human being, becomes aware of another history [which encounters the human being] in such a compelling way that the human being cannot be neutral towards it, but finds her‐ or himself summoned to disclose and given her‐ or himself to it … to direct themselves according to the law which she or he encounters in it … to demonstrate the acquaintance which she or he has been given in this with this other history in a corresponding alteration of her or his own being, action, and conduct” (KD IV/3, p. 210; CD IV/3, pp. 183–184). For Barth, knowledge of God does not begin with us, but it does begin something in us. It creates in us a desire to know, obey, and love God and, because we love God, to love our neighbors as ourselves.

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The God Known by Revelation Alone Barth’s doctrine of revelation has a twofold aim: (i) to demonstrate that human beings are actually able speak of God as God is in himself and (ii) to defend against false knowledge of God mistakenly thought to be available in extrascriptural sources. To fulfill this aim, Christian theology must begin with God and not with the human knower. This means beginning with the concrete reality of God, God’s being as triune. “If we really want to understand revelation from its subject, from God, then we must first of all understand that its subject, God, the Revealer [the Father], is identical with his act in revelation [the Son], and identical with its effect [the Holy Spirit, who actualizes knowledge of God within us through the miracle of grace]. This is the reason why we must begin the doctrine of revelation with the doctrine of the triune God” (KD I/1, p. 312; CD I/1, p. 296). Knowledge of God means being given a share in the truth of God’s own self‐ knowledge. “Certainly it is the share which God thinks proper and is therefore suitable to us. But in this share we have the reality of the true knowledge of himself ” (KD II/1, p. 55; CD II/1, p. 51 rev.). God knows himself to all eternity as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He knows his triune identity in the mode of “primary objectivity.” “He is immediately objective to himself – for the Father is object to the Son, and the Son to the Father, without mediation” in the unity of the Holy Spirit (KD II/1, p. 16; CD II/1, p. 16). This is the “direct,” “immediate,” and “naked” form of self‐knowledge that is proper to God as the Holy Trinity. This is the knowledge in which God give us a share through faith. “The triune God’s self‐knowledge is the basis for all creaturely knowledge of himself. Although it is mediated, it is no less true.” Barth terms this mode of knowing God “secondary objectivity.” It is the mode “in which God gives himself to be known” in a form that is “accessible to us.” (KD II/1, pp. 15–16; CD II/1, p. 16, italics original). Barth’s aim is to demonstrate that God is truly known, despite the mediated character of faith’s knowledge. When God reveals himself to faith in the mode of secondary objectivity, what is revealed truly corresponds to God’s own self‐knowledge in its mode of primary objectivity. Although we do not know God “directly, but indirectly,” our knowledge of God is nonetheless true, “for God does not have to be unfaithful to himself and does not need to deceive us about his true nature in order to become objective for us too, for he is first in himself, and therefore in his revelation to us, nothing other than what he is himself ” (KD II/1, p. 16; CD II/1, p. 16 rev.). At the same time, God’s act of self‐revelation involves an aspect of concealment. For God becomes an object of knowledge for the human knower only by becoming an object within the created order. God acts to reveal himself by taking form or clothing himself in a creaturely medium. God is therefore paradoxically unveiled in a veiled form. His self‐revelation exhibits a dialectical character. God is revealed in and through various creaturely means, most especially the humanity of Jesus, and yet this creaturely medium itself is a veil. God is never directly perceptible but remains hidden in the medium of revelation. He remains “wholly other” even in his act of self‐revelation. God never becomes identical with the creaturely objectivity that he uses as an instrument of revelation (see Hunsinger 1991, p. 77ff; McCormack 1995, p. 459ff). The medium,

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including the humanity of Jesus Christ, is never divinized. It never becomes identical with God but rather remains creaturely. “Revelation in the Bible,” writes Barth, “means the self‐unveiling, given to human beings, of the God, who of his essence cannot be unveiled to human beings” (KD I/1, pp. 332–333; CD I/1, p. 315; emphasis original). God reveals himself “such that the human beings concerned can say without any speculation or metaphor: Immanuel, God with us! Such that without any fiction or self‐deception, they can say Thou to him and pray to him. This is what self‐revelation is” (KD I/1, p. 333; CD I/1, p. 316). God can reveal himself to us, he can be God in this second way, without ceasing to be who he is in himself. He can do so because “the highest and final statement that it is permissible to say about the being of God is: God corresponds to himself …. The Dogmatics is an ingenious and diligent attempt to follow after in thought the movement of the statement ‘God corresponds to himself ” (Jüngel 2001, p. 36, trans. rev.). God as he reveals himself in history corresponds to who God is in himself in all eternity. The self‐revelation of God is secured by the doctrine of the Trinity. What trinitarian doctrine tells us, writes Barth, is that “the one who reveals himself … can in fact be our God and … can in fact be our God. He can be our God, because in all of his modes of being he is equal to himself, one and the same Lord. … And this Lord can be our God – he can encounter us and bind himself to us – because he is God in these three modes of being as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, because creation, reconciliation, and redemption, the whole being, speech, and action in which he wills to be our God, have their basis and prototype in his own essence, in his own eternal being as God” (KD I/1, p. 403; CD I/1, p. 383 rev.). Robert Jenson summarizes Barth’s view of how revelation presupposes the Trinity: “The scriptural witness to the particular revelation which Scripture claims to occur poses certain questions to us which when we try to answer them, lead to the trinitarian doctrine” (Jenson 1969, p. 99).

The Particularity of Revelation in Jesus Christ and the Question of “General Revelation” “Who God is and what it is to be divine is something that we have to learn where God has revealed himself and therewith also his nature, the essence of the divine. And if he has now revealed himself in Jesus Christ as the God who does just this, then it is not for us to want to be wiser than he and to assert that this is in contradiction to the divine essence” (KD IV/1, p. 203; CD IV/1, p. 186). This quotation, which brings out an important implication of how Barth views revelation, provides an opportunity to correct a certain misunderstanding. Barth’s theology is fundamentally christocentric. The person of Jesus Christ is the definitive locus of God’s self‐revelation. When this christocentrism is taken together with Barth’s rejection of natural theology, Barth is misunderstood, sometimes even by those who defend him, as having restricted revelation narrowly to the person of Christ alone. Barth is thought to teach that divine revelation does not really happen anywhere else in time and space except in the person of Jesus. Some have accused Barth of denying “general revelation” – a term he does not often use

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except eschatologically: “the promise of the general revelation of glory still to come” (KD III/2, p. 587; CD III/2, p. 489, italics added; but cf. KD II/1, p. 112; CD II/1, p. 102) – and according it no role in his theology. Barth does not deny general revelation or what he chooses to call an “objective knowledge” of God (CL. pp. 122–124). What he denies is natural theology. This denial has two parts: first, the idea is rejected that God can be known from nature alone, independently of God’s agency; and second, that this independent form of divine knowledge can be used as a bridge to arrive at God’s self‐revelation in Christ. When it comes to divine revelation, there is no way for Barth from the general to the particular, but only from the particular to the general. Moreover, there is only one divine act of revelation, not a general act in creation and another more specific act in the history of the covenant. Revelation as centered in Christ cannot be divided into parts. It is a complex and indivisible whole. Revelation is a single divine act centered in the particularity of Jesus Christ. But this center has an objective circumference that includes many and various aspects in itself. As Barth states in a slightly different connection: “There is no center without a circumference …. But the center establishes the circumference and not the reverse” (CL, p. 9). Only in light of the center, only in light of Jesus Christ, can the other aspects of divine revelation at the circumference be critically discerned and known. The discernment moves, in principle, from the center in Christ to the complexity at the circumference. In practice, however, the discernment process may move in any direction as long as the center is kept in view. The important point is that “Jesus Christ … is not only the ontic but also the noetic basis of the whole of Christian truth and the Christian message” (CL, p. 9). He is therefore also the ontic and noetic basis for each and every aspect of divine revelation at the circumference. He is the critical norm by which any supposed aspect at the circumference needs to be tested and critically appropriated. Several dimensions of what Barth sees at the circumference may be mentioned. First, far from being present only in the history of the covenant as fulfilled in Jesus Christ, God “has the freedom … to remain the one who he is in a seemingly conspicuous abundance of distinctions which need to be taken into account” (KD II/1, p. 356; CD II/1, p. 316). However, “despite the almost bewildering richness” of the diverse forms of God’s immanence in the world, there is “a hierarchy, a sacred order, in which God is present in the world” (KD II/1, p. 357; CD II/1, 317). Whether openly or secretly, Jesus Christ is “the center and apex” of all these various forms, and he is “also their principle, their possibility and presupposition within the inner divine life” (KD II/1, p. 357; CD II/1, pp. 317–318). Only from a center in Christ, therefore, can this confusing richness of presence be sorted out: “everything for which and in which God is free, is then to be understood by us as the unity of the freedom of his essence, it will then not disconcert us in its manifoldness, when we understand it thus – as deriving from Jesus Christ the Son of God, attesting him, serving him, conveying to him – as he is actually placed before our eyes and brought before our ears in God’s revelation” (KD II/1, pp. 357–358; CD II/1, p. 318). Only from God’s revelation in Christ at the center can God’s immanence elsewhere be discerned, even if that discernment must often remain tentative from a human perspective. Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the noetic basis for faith’s discernment of God’s immanence in all its abundant forms. He himself is the critical norm.

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Second, God may speak to the faithful in diverse ways apart from Holy Scripture. Barth affirms that God may actually speak and act, that he can reveal himself, in other creaturely forms than Jesus Christ. He wrote for example that “God can speak to us through Russian communism, a flute concerto, a blossoming shrub, or a dead dog. We would do well to listen to him if he does so” (KD I/1, p. 55; CD I/1, p. 60). Barth hastens to add however: “But, unless we regard ourselves as the prophets and founders of a new church, we cannot say that we are commissioned to pass on what we have heard as independent proclamation” (KD I/1, p. 55; CD I/1, p. 60). Once again, Jesus Christ is the critical norm. In a similar manner, Barth affirms that there are “secular parables” of the truth. He argues that there are “true words which are not spoken in the Bible or the church, but which have to be regarded as true in relation to the one Word of God” (KD IV/3.1, pp. 126–127; CD IV/3, pp. 113–114). God is free to reveal himself at times and places of his own choosing, but what is revealed, while different in form, will never contradict what is revealed in Jesus Christ. Secular parables must therefore be tested from a center in Christ by extended lines of consistency with the gospel. Moreover, although God is free to reveal himself outside of the church, the recipients of revelation – if they are actually grasped and transformed by the revelatory event  –  are not likewise free. All who encounter the self‐revealing God are called to be “in Christ.” This means that they are finally called to participate in the worshipping community that gathers around the Word of God (KD I/2, pp. 261–263; CD I/2, pp. 239–241). Finally, Barth affirms what he calls an “objective knowledge of God” as given in and through the natural order (CL, pp. 120–124). This objective knowledge  –  or what is more commonly called “natural revelation”  –  is also, for Barth, part of revelation’s larger circumference as centered in Christ. It is not a second revelation independent of Christ or alongside him. Jesus Christ is the one from whom “all created being and becoming derives” (CD IV/1, p. 48). Through him all things were created, and the glory of the cosmos is a reflection of his glory. Objectively speaking, the glory of God in the cosmos and the glory of Jesus Christ are finally one. The apprehension of this glory on the subjective side must also be considered from a center in Christ. The psalmist who speaks in Ps. 8 or Ps. 104, for example, is objectively a surrogate, Barth argues, of the human Jesus (KD II/1, pp. 125–128; CD II/1, pp. 113–116). In any case under the conditions of the fall, in which human beings are blinded by sin, the problem is not “the objective knowledge of God in the world” (CL, p. 122), but the culpable human failure to discern what human beings can and should know of God through the natural order. Objectively speaking, God “is very well known” to them and “not an unknown God” (CL, p. 122). The concealment is due not to the absence of natural revelation but to “human blindness” (CL, p. 123 rev.). “To the objective knowledge of God as Creator” – which is actually there – “there does not correspond with any reliability or continuity a subjective recognition and knowledge on the world’s part” (CL, p. 123). Not unlike Calvin, therefore, Barth affirms that natural revelation serves only to condemn the human creature who fails to apprehend God aright. Natural revelation or “objective knowledge of God” offers to such benighted creatures nothing that can be “generalized and systematized along the lines of natural theology” (CL, p. 122). To suppose otherwise always results in a domesticated God (CL, p. 130). Only

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from a center in Christ, through “the awakening power of the Holy Spirit” (CD IV/2, p. 20), and therefore by the miracle of grace, can God’s objective revelation of himself through the natural order be rightly discerned. It is again a movement from the particular to the general, in this case from Christ as confessed by faith to God’s objective revelation through the cosmos. References Barth, K. (1938). The Knowledge of God and the Service of God According to the Teaching of the Reformation. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Barth, K. (1948). Die christliche Verständnis der Offenbarung: Eine Vorlesung. Munich: Christian Kaiser Verlag. Barth, K. (2002). Natural Theology: Comprising Nature and Grace by Professor Dr. Emil Brunner and the reply No! by Dr. Karl Barth. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock. Hunsinger, G. (1991). How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of this Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jenson, R. (1969). God after God: The God of the Past and the God of the Future as Seen in the Work of Karl Barth. New York: Bobbs‐Merrill. Jüngel, E. (2001). God’s Being is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology

of Karl Barth. (trans. John Webster). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. McCormack, B. (1995). Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909–1936. Oxford: Clarendon Press. McCormack, B. (2014). Longing for a New World: on socialism, eschatology, and apocalyptic in Barth’s Early Dialectical Theology. In: Theologie im Umbrich der Moderne: Karl Barths frühe Dialektische Theologie (eds. G. Pfleiderer and H. Mattern), 135–149. Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich. Mezei, B.M. (2017). Radical Revelation: A Philosophical Approach. London: Bloomsbury. Webster, J. (1995). Barth’s Ethics of Reconciliation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 6

Barth on Holy Scripture Katherine Sonderegger

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ust what is the Bible? Perhaps surprisingly, that is not an easy question to answer – especially if the Bible under study is the one exegeted by Karl Barth. Barth not only read the Bible in a remarkable, rich, and path‐breaking fashion; he also characterized and defined the Bible as had few before him. Barth forged what in his early days he called the “Scripture principle” and put it to work in his torrent of publications, from early Scripture commentaries, to trial Dogmatics in the middle years, and to the heart of his Church Dogmatics, the great task of his maturity. The scriptural principle said that the Bible stood at the heart of theology and grounded and guided its doctrines. We might think of this principle as the Reformation teaching, sola Scriptura, transposed as a rule. Later on, Barth would speak of principles and rules only with reluctance. They were tainted by an association with the “abstract” –never an honorific in Barth’s idiom – and with the “systematic,” rarely a term of praise in the later Barth. But the aim expressed in this principle remained in force throughout his long career. Barth studied Scripture. As is often said, Barth made scriptural exegesis the cornerstone of his massive theological legacy, and the Bible is easily the most important, most prominent, most often cited book in the whole of the Church Dogmatics. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Barth did not shy away from extended commentary on the biblical passages, embedded in the running argument of his theological works. Some span 50 pages or more, at times in the small print of Barth’s discursive footnotes, called “excurses.” His exegetical style ranges widely: typology and figural reading; lower‐critical attention to biblical l­ anguages and variants; christological interpretation, especially of Old Testament texts; the stray higher‐critical debate, often with contemporaries; expressionistic and vividly colored expositions of Pauline thought; and broad thematic discussions, ranging over the whole canon of Scripture. Such remarkable exegetical work has sparked careful study by scholars, both in the fields of hermeneutics and of dogmatics, though only rarely by academic scholars

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth and Dogmatics, Volume I, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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of the Bible. Barth knew his Bible well and used it extensively, p ­ assionately, freely. But just what is this Bible Barth followed so faithfully? In one sense, of course, this is a plain question with a straightforward answer. The Bible is the Holy Book of Christians, composed of an Old and New Testament, binding together narratives, prophecies, prayers, and proverbs, letters to individuals and groups, gospel lives of Jesus, and visionary literature of an explosive End‐time. The Bible is a Book of books, on this account, and though Christian communities have quarreled about its exact roll call, the Bible, in the main, is a settled family of sacred texts. To this the Christian tradition has given the name, Canon; the Canonical List of Holy Scripture. We might take this as the commonsense answer to the indexical, “What is this book I point to?” Yet, even this plain and simple answer can be expanded or perhaps amended to include a not‐so‐plain characterization of this Book of books. We could speak, for example, of these books as ancient. In one way, the Bible contains ancient texts in a rather obvious fashion. The Old Testament  –  the Scriptures of the Covenant People, Israel – were written by communities, scribes, tradents who lived long ago, and whose language, thought‐world, and material history veer far from those we know firsthand and inhabit. The Bible might be an ancient book in all these ways: this collection could represent the cultural sediment of worlds long gone by. The Apostle Paul, to borrow a phrase from the young Barth, was a “child of his age;” so too the Evangelists, or their communities, and mysterious author of the Letter to the Hebrews; even more so, the visionary of the Apocalypse. As an ancient text, the Bible offers ­evidence for the culture, idiom, and events of the Near East, under the rule of long‐­ vanished empires, and the rise and fall of the great and the small within these peoples and nations. To understand such a book, the reader needs to learn something of the Israelite, Egyptian, Babylonian, and Roman histories. Reading ancient languages, studying comparative texts, holy and profane, building up a repertory of major dynasties and conquests in the region, and close examination of these texts and contexts: all these skills unlock a text that is defined as ancient, or perhaps better, as historical. The Bible as historical artifact stands as one of the principal definitions of Scripture in modern times, and one Barth treated with respect, but also with great reserve. The entire enterprise of “higher criticism,” the historical assessment, interpretation, and judgment of the Bible, rested on this notion of Scripture as ancient text, a legacy Barth would accept but only on the condition of radical transformation. We might also speak of the Bible as a religious book. This too appears to be a rather obvious truth, and can be applied, too, in a straightforward manner. The Bible contains rituals and instructions about holy places, holy vessels and garments; it speaks of priests and scribes and teachers of the tradition; it posts warnings about the profane and idolatrous, at times at peril of one’s life; its pages encompass prayers and liturgies, ancient victory songs and laments; and its principal characters speak of God, God’s majestic will and workings, and of lives broken on the hard mystery that is the holy God. The Bible rotates around the central axis that is the Temple, that in Zion and that One not made by hands, and sacrifice takes mortality and suffering and turns them over into religion. All this seems the very ingredient of religion, and the Bible seems to gain its dignity from the solemn tone of religious striving that is contained between its covers. But once again, a simple answer betrays, on examination, a not‐so‐simple depth. For it is just this

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idea  –  that Holy Scripture is a religious text  –  that stood at the heart of the liberal academic tradition Barth inherited from his teachers. In the Christian Faith, Friedrich Schleiermacher’s great systematic work, the Bible is portrayed as the distillate of the piety of ancient religious communities, the record of their longing for and awed experience of God. The focus of the Bible, that is, should be trained upon the “personalities,” the vivid characters and their salient modes of expression, who encounter the Holy and find their inner lives transformed by it. Parallel to the nineteenth‐century attraction to the “religious genius” stood also the attention to cultural forms and national identities, both typified in and perfected by their religious expression. From the time of Johann Gottfried Herder forward, the very notion of the nation was tied to religion; and for the liberal academic tradition, the cultus of a people was its supreme self‐expression and upward calling. Barth inherited this modernist vision of the Bible with enthusiasm in his early days and told with relish stories of great religious personalities in the Bible to his first catechism classes. But one way of understanding what is often termed Barth’s “break with Liberalism” – his pronounced struggle to “begin again,” as he often put it, in theology  –  can be understood as a ­thoroughgoing attempt to replace the notion of Scripture as religious with Scripture as revelation. This term, “revelation,” though in use throughout the post‐Reformation teachings on the Bible, gained fresh weight and purpose in Barth’s postliberal career. It stood for a radical reconceptualization of the Bible itself, just what it is, and what it is for. This was a hard‐won insight and deepened in color and dynamism as the Church Dogmatics unfurled. As with the Christian life itself, the Bible stands at the very center of Barth’s life work, his dogmatic task and its constraints. What does it mean to say that the Bible is principally revelation? The answer to that question will take us across Barth’s long career, from the explosion that is Barth’s early commentary on Romans, to his remarkable handling of texts from the Pentateuch, to his prolonged struggle with Rudolf Bultmann over the neuralgic complex, “faith and history,” to his innovative treatment of the earthly ministry of Jesus and most especially his resurrection from the dead. The entirety of the Church Dogmatics is needed to answer fully just what “revelation” entails. We begin with the most celebrated of Barth’s early Scripture commentaries, his Letter to the Romans, published in a second edition in 1922. The 1922 Romans is by far the most closely studied text from Barth’s early career. It earned the famous aphorism of “the bombshell in the playground of the theologians” from the influential Catholic essayist, Karl Adam; it changed everything in Barth’s life, and in time, everything in modern Protestant theology. Something seemed to be dislodged in the young liberal pastor in Geneva and Safenwil around the outbreak of World War I; by 1916 Barth was writing on the “New World in the Bible.” In that essay Barth famously depicts the Bible not as religious – “not our thoughts about God” – but instead as an alien and numinous disclosure of “God’s thoughts about humankind,” about God’s judgment, God’s sovereign will. The Bible, he comes to see, is a Book about God, not human beings who believe in God. Now, it may seem odd to say that a Book about God is not principally a religious text – what is more religious than God? – but Barth has particular and complex reasons for saying just that. A religion can be recognized by its constituents: in it, “God and the world are given to the self,” in Schleiermacher’s celebrated phrase. A religious state is an

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inward one, yes; but even more, it is an inward awareness that contains worlds. The whole of reality – the whole of the cosmos; the whole of the divine – indwell the religious self, such that the human sense of the inner and the outer, the passive and active, rest upon a deep and unconditioned dependence that in the end can only be called, God. Such a definition of religion followed the modern “turn to the subject” that began with the remarkable achievements of Descartes and Locke and made the human subject the gateway to all knowledge of reality; indeed to reality itself. The long shadow cast by Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy began, in truth, by the first light emerging from early rationalists and empiricists of the seventeenth century. Were the Bible to be religious in this sense, it too would be a work of and about the human subject, and God would be a Reality – a “Predicate,” Barth says – discovered within pious inwardness. Just this Barth rejects when in these early essays he declares the Bible a Book “about God.” The search for God in the Bible broke out like a fever in the Barth of the World War I years. He writes to his friend Eduard Thurneysen of filling notebook after notebook with reactions to Scripture’s sudden voice, speaking to him about God. Time and again in the early essays Barth strains to express the utter externality of God: we are to “look upward” to see what the Apostle Paul stares at; we are to see Almighty God “in heaven,” while we are “on the earth”; we long for an entire “world” that has not yet come, or will break out over us like a firestorm, an apocalypse; lines approach but do not touch; the God who draws near brings menace and death in His mighty train. The Bible reveals a God who cannot otherwise be known  –  there is no route, inward or outward, to knowledge of the true God apart from His willingness to be known. Now, during these years, Barth came to affirm that stricture in a radical fashion. The radicality of Barth’s position is the crucial measure, for after all, any Christian, any theist at all, might say that God could not be known or approached without God’s consent or welcome. Such an affirmation could in truth be little more than what we say of all living subjects: they must disclose themselves to us. Further, the long tradition of philosophical inquiry into the nature of deity, as old as the Timaeus, could also rest upon the prior conviction that the divine allowed itself to be thought, manifested Itself to the searching intellect. Such affirmations stood behind the scholastic tradition Barth came to call natural theology; yet nothing so imperiled the proper knowledge and worship of God, Barth said in those years, than the analogy of being and the natural theology of philosophers and Protestant dogmaticians. In a sweeping condemnation, Barth linked philosophical argument for God, medieval doctrines of analogy, and modern Protestant liberal accounts of religious experience together as one false idolatry before God. They were religion; not revelation, the Sovereign Self‐disclosure of the transcendent God. This radical conclusion followed from Barth’s deep anxiety that a human subject or people who found God embedded in their history, their inwardness, their openness to transcendence, or their longing for beauty, say, or the sublime, would find in those drives not Almighty God but their own ideals, dressed up in royal vesture. The projection theory of Ludwig Feuerbach, that is, haunted Barth in those years, and he held that the God known in religion was only the echo of ourselves, disguised and exalted into an empty sky. Now, philosophers of the tradition will notice that this is not an argument, exactly, but rather an intuition, a suspicion of an urgent sort: the relation between this

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“God” and the world, divine “Object” and human subject, was reversible, Barth warned, and the creature, not the Creator, would govern this upturned relation. In the celebrated words of Barth’s preface to the second edition of the Letter to the Romans: “If I have a system, it is limited to a recognition of what Soren Kierkegaard called the ‘infinite qualitative distinction’ between time and eternity, and to my regarding this as possessing negative as well as positive significance: ‘God is in heaven, and thou on earth.’ The relation between such a God and such a man, and the relation between such a man and such a God, is for me the theme of the Bible and the essence of philosophy” (RII, 10). This is not the whole story, of course. Histories of Barth’s early career will fill out a coherentist pattern that gives weight and cogency to Barth’s suspicions. But, here, we can say that what Barth discovered in the Bible during his years in Safenwil is a God who is beyond religion; the God who is LORD. This Eternal LORD could never be placed in a reversible relation with a creature, could never become a “predicate” of human piety, could never be known apart from the confession, surrender, and awe of the sinner, brought near to His holy presence. Just this is Revelation, and it marks the “crisis” of the human creature, the divine judgment that breaks out over a sinful world. It is the seed‐ bed of “dialectical theology.” In the 1922 Romans, Barth pours his notebooks, his spiritual wrestling, and his voracious reading into a commentary on Paul’s major letter to the church in Rome. Here Barth exhibits what a nonreligious reading of a biblical text looks like. In these early years, the revelatory Bible will stand as our contemporary, a voice addressing us, the readers, with a startling directness and urgency. Again, from the preface to the second edition: “When I am faced by such a document as the Epistle of Paul to the Romans, I embark on its interpretation on the assumption that he is confronted with the same unmistakable and unmeasurable significance of that relation (between God and creature) as I myself am confronted with, and that it is this situation which moulds his thought and its expression” (RII, p. 10). In the several later prefaces to the work, Barth speaks of his exegetical task as one of “utter loyalty”: he “stands by Paul’s side,” “determined to follow him to the very last word,” wrestles, with “much sweat and many groans” to see what the Apostle sees, to speak of the “Spirit of Christ” – the theme Barth now says of the Letter – as does the Apostle to the gentiles. Indeed, in an early flare‐up of a lifelong battle with Rudolf Bultmann, Barth asks, “Is there any way of penetrating the heart of a document – of any document! – except on the assumption that its spirit will speak to our spirit through the actual written words?” (RII, p. 18). This, Barth notes, invites comparison with doctrines of verbal inspiration, a sympathy he never tried to disguise. But once again, Barth radicalizes the tradition: everything Paul writes is “letter” not “Spirit”; over the whole spreads the judgment of the Holy God, and we await His electing verdict even as did the Apostle Paul, in the “ambiguity” of his own life and calling. Barth makes Paul his contemporary in just this sense: they both stand before God, having nothing they did not receive, justly seen as those who have sinned and fall short, and Paul’s own anguish about the Law captures, in other idiom, Barth’s own night‐wrestling with the religion of his day. Such a reading reminds historical critics of “eisegesis,” the importing of foreign ideas into the ancient world of the text. But Barth had no fears of such a charge; rather, he welcomed it. We bring our world into the text, naturally and

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necessarily, for we are the ones standing shoulder to shoulder with the ancient author. We make Paul’s world our own, even as his world lives on and is expressed in ours. Such is Barth’s historiography in that era: the past is meaningful, not chaotic, irrational contingency, when it is seen to follow patterns, to take up perennial questions, to ask after deep truths that will parallel one another, in striking, formal similarities. Without these, no understanding of the past is possible – Barth will go that far. Consider, as an example, a brief passage from Barth’s commentary on Romans 9–11. Here if anywhere we confront the Paul who is a “child of his age.” Yet in just these chapters Barth is most strenuous in his conforming himself to Paul, Paul to himself. Barth begins the chapter, “The Tribulation of the Church” with the following translation: “I say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my conscience bearing witness with me in the Holy Ghost, that I have great sorrow and unceasing pain in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren’s sake, my kinsmen according to the flesh” (Rom 9:1–3). As commentary, Barth writes: And now, in contrast with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, there is thrust upon our attention – Israel, the Church, the world of religion as it appears in history, and, we hasten to add, Israel in its purest, truest, and most powerful aspect. We are not here concerned with some debased form of religion, but with the ideal and perfect Church. Does the Church stand over against the Gospel as one point of view against another? Are we setting one company of men who think rightly over against another company who do not? Yes, undoubtedly we are. The Church confronts the Gospel as the last human possibility confronts the impossible possibility of God. The abyss which is here disclosed is like to none other situated on this side of the abyss which separates men from God. Here breaks out the veritable God‐sickness: for the Church, situated on this side of the abyss which separates men from God, is the place where the eternity of revelation is transformed into a temporal, concrete, directly visible thing in this world. (RII, p. 332)

This is a remarkable reading of Holy Scripture! The salient element of the apostle’s life here is his God‐sickness, his religion: the human possibility of visible worship of God, its cultus and practice. Paul is a Jew, yes. Barth does not erase the historical particularity but he does transform it. To be an Israelite is to belong to a larger movement within human culture, the upswell of religious text, ritual, and building; and in just this way, Israel is the church, the church, Israel. Barth is feeling his way here; the struggle to express the living force of Scripture for him is nearly visible on every page; the exegesis is wrung out of him. This is not quite history “by analogy,” nor a technical interpretation “under a description,” but rather an existential encounter with the text, striving to grasp what it means to speak of God and the creature in this way. Barth’s agonized question in his early essays  –  Is it true?  –  rings out on every page of the Letter to the Romans. During these years Barth’s identity as preacher stood out as the moment when the truth of the Bible demanded confession and exposition from the pulpit. Barth was a realist in his epistemology and metaphysics throughout his break with Liberalism: the Bible does refer to reality beyond itself, but not the referent historians customarily assume. The Bible, rather, reveals the encounter of the Holy God, the Absolute Origin, and the creature, all gathered together as one in their desperate waiting, hope against

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hope, on the Reality who is God. Nothing is ever past in such a reading; all is caught up in the Now, the Event, of God’s explosive Self‐disclosure. The Bible is revelatory Fire; and we are all seared by its scorching heat. No one could stand such heat for long. Barth himself recognized the restless instability of his early exegesis, and longed to find a more measured voice that did not lead, against all his efforts, to a religious, Schleiermacher‐like, reading of Holy Scripture. Barth sought an understanding of the Bible that would allow its historical character proper stature, yet continue to honor its revelatory power. Early in the Church Dogmatics Barth experimented with what is sometimes called an “actualist” account of the Bible and its interpretation. Traces of Barth’s early struggles persist through the long first volume of the Church Dogmatics; it retains the unchecked energy of a pastor now turned professor, troubled by a Bible that demanded his witness, even in the midst of his utter incapacity and need. In the massive second part to volume I, Barth takes up Holy Scripture explicitly, treating matters of historicity, of canon and canons of interpretation and the varying forms of the doctrine of inspiration. Barth shows his voracious appetite for work and study, often to great advantage throughout. His opening thematic statement to the section on Scripture shows the greater confidence and scholarly command Barth now brings to the topic. The Bible becomes something more than ­revelation, more than an antireligious text. Barth writes there: The Word of God is God Himself in Holy Scripture. For God once spoke as Lord to Moses and the prophets, to the Evangelists and apostles. And now through their written word He speaks as the same Lord to His Church. Scripture is holy and the Word of God, because by the Holy Spirit it became and will become to the Church a witness to divine revelation. (CD I/2, p. 457)

Barth has taken giant strides here. He begins where he left off in the 1922 Romans: the Word of God is God Himself, God as LORD; Scripture is revelation. But notice the movement: Now Barth can speak of something having taken place  –  the proper past tense can be used of the Word of God. To Moses, God spoke. Revelation itself can now be “tensed.” This insight will undergird the extraordinary treatment of time and eternity that is Church Dogmatics III/2 §47, “Jesus, Lord of time.” Revelation can enter into the past, can concentrate in central moments of Divine Self‐disclosure, and can extend into the future, till the end of the ages; and yet remain all alive to God. This complex adaptation of Barth’s pronounced focus upon the eschatological in his early years will pay handsome dividends in Barth’s doctrine of the threefold office, especially in Christ’s Office of King and Prophet. And, as if stung by the charge that, like his teacher Harnack, Barth favored Marcion, Barth underscores the identity of the God who spoke with the God who speaks, now to the church. Two more elements emerge from Barth’s thesis statement that show a remarkable deepening and innovation in Barth’s understanding of the Bible. They go hand in hand. The Bible, Barth now says, is witness; and its holiness stems from an event, the act of the Holy Spirit, by which it once and will once again become that witness. The Bible still retains the character of revelation, but it does so as an historical text that bears witness to the living Act of God. Barth could always cheerfully acknowledge the frail and fallible character of the Bible’s leading

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f­ igures: Paul inhabited the “letter” not the “Spirit.” But now Barth can turn that wholesale recognition of human finitude into a doctrine of Holy Scripture: as witness, the Bible both is and is not the Word of God. Consider the delicate way Barth handles the notion of witness. Barth is well aware of the traditional idea of a witness as source of evidence for settling legal disputes: testimony is central in a law court to establish the truth of contested events. Barth is willing to treat the evangelists, the prophets, and apostles as witness in this commonsense fashion. They are the ones who have seen these things taking place among us. In some such way the early rationalists, such as John Locke or Hermann Samuel Reimarus, viewed the biblical authors, to their benefit or shame. And under the pressure of modernism, the notion of witness turned over into an examination of the reliability and probity of the witness, the human subject, and not the subject matter, the event the witness claimed to see. Barth will have none of that. A witness, for Barth, is one who answers questions; simply that. An attorney, a judge cross‐examines a witness and he or she must give a report. The Bible as witness functions in just that way. The authors answer to Almighty God, the Judge: they give an account for what has taken place to them and for them, for their sake. Notice that Barth in this fashion has introduced several distinctions that give depth and resonance to his doctrine of Holy Scripture. We draw a line of distinction now between the text and the author or evangelist, prophet, or apostle. The literary quality of the Bible now comes into view. Barth can acknowledge the history of manuscript tradition, of tradents, and redactors; the Bible can have a written history. It can be a book. These written reports are not simply placeholders for the eyewitnesses; we are not simply looking at transcripts. Rather, the Bible belongs to the church in a particular sense: out of the community of believers, the testimony of the prophets and apostles is given literary form, combined, refashioned, and reordered in order to hand on what had been received. Two layers of fallibility are introduced, the witnesses and the literary text. They are each reliable – that is the church’s proclamation – but they remain, each in their own way, a human record, capable of error, even in faith and morals. In this sense, a double witness stands behind each biblical text, the historical recipient of revelation and the author or community that reports that reception. The intense flattening that brought Barth shoulder to shoulder with the Apostle Paul now opens up into a large landscape where historical figures, divine Self‐­disclosure, written texts and authors, and present‐day readers can each move, distinct from one another, yet enclosed within God’s mighty working. That mighty working is the Holy Spirit, Inspirer of both author and reader of Holy Scripture. Barth speaks of this divine agency as an event with both a past and a future: Scripture became and will become witness to divine revelation. Just this “actualism” is what Barth now means by the Bible as Word of God. We can hear echoes of Barth’s God‐hauntedness in this actualism: the struggle for the truth of God; the conviction that religion only sits by “empty canals,” a somber reflection on an explosion now cooled and hardened; a radical awakening to the Living God, the One who comes. These are caught up in this event‐like doctrine of inspiration; but they are changed. Now Barth can speak of a “Secondary Identity” of the Bible, an exaltation of the written word up to the Living Word, such that, in the Spirit, they are one. (We may expect that Barth’s lengthy study of the gospel of John while at Göttingen has alerted him to the

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theme of communion and unity among disparate realities.) The Bible has an identity: it is a historical, creaturely artifact. But it can be graced by a second identity: it can become Word of God. But this electric transformation, note, rests in no way upon the written text itself, or the historical agents who lie behind it. Barth holds firm to his radical rejection of the “religious personality”: there is no power inherent in the human word to lay hold of God, to convey or disclose or know the Almighty and Transcendent LORD. There is no “point of contact.” Rather, Barth says, the Elixir who transforms creaturely words into Heavenly Words is the Eternal Son, the true Word of God Himself. He is the One who has a “Secondary Identity” in its most proper sense. The Divine Logos can be Himself in a second way, can repeat Himself in a creaturely idiom, can make Himself known in the vehicle that cannot, on its own, bear that Reality or witness to it. With human beings, it is impossible; but with God, all things are possible. Barth here makes Holy Scripture witness in a thoroughgoing christological fashion. Even as the Incarnate Word is fully human, fully divine, so the Bible is utterly creaturely, historical, profane, but under God’s working, can become the very Word of God, the revelation of Jesus Christ. Now, this is a powerhouse of a doctrine of Scripture, a methodological tour de force. But it is no discovery of today that it provides little material help in reading the Bible as Christian Scripture. After all, it appears from the framework Barth provides that the telephone book could be as soon a revelation of the High God as could the canon of the Old and New Testaments: it is a completely unconstrained methodological relation. But Barth clearly does not consider the Bible adiaphora in that way! Rather, the long course of the Church Dogmatics testifies to how he prizes the texts themselves; the events they record; the teachings, prayers, and prophecies they preserve; and the broad historical sketch they offer of Jesus Christ; there is no substitute. What Barth carries out in ­practice, over many volumes and excurses, is a loving, attentive, and strikingly innovative exposition of concrete biblical texts, according to them the dignity of the church’s Book, the unexcelled witness to Almighty God. In practice, Barth broadens his definition of the Bible as witness to encompass a final, and more concrete dimension of Scripture as Holy Book: the Bible contains and just is, “saga” or “meaningful history.” Barth develops this notion of “saga” most fully in his doctrine of creation, the long third volume of the Church Dogmatics. Within the first part‐volume, Barth introduces saga as a means to understand the aim and tenor of the opening chapters in Genesis. Paradigmatically, Genesis 1 and 2 are saga; they narrate “meaningful history.” Barth characterizes this art form in this way: “I am using saga in the sense of an intuitive and poetic picture of a pre‐historical reality of history which is enacted once and for all within the confines of time and space” (CD III/1, 81). Like any definition, every word tells. Barth now insists that the Bible narrates history: it depicts events that happen once, only, and happen within our realm of time and space. In this part‐volume Barth insists on the historical character, however bracing and strange, of the act of creation; in later volumes, Barth draws once again on saga to underscore the historical nature of Christ’s resurrection. Against all counterproposals he hears from Bultmann and his students, Barth emphasizes that the resurrection is something that happened, to Christ and not to us, in our piety or existential awareness, and took place “there and then,” in a garden outside Jerusalem, in an empire soon to be turned upside

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down. It is not myth; indeed, nothing in the Bible can be that. But the literary genre in which these events, creation and resurrection, are told – and must be told – is saga, the “intuitive and poetic picture” of an event that lies deeper than any common historical deed. Now, this is because: not all history is “historical.” … In its immediacy to God every history is in fact “non‐historical,” i.e., it cannot be deduced and compared and therefore perceived and comprehended. But this does not mean that it ceases to be genuine history. … That [the Biblical history of creation] does actually contain a good deal of saga (and even legend and anecdote) is due to the nature and theme of the biblical witness. It also contains “history” but usually with a more or less strong wrapping of saga. This is inevitable where the immediacy of history to God is prominent, as in the histories which the Bible relates. (CD III/1, pp. 80–81)

Striking in this passage is the wide scope Barth imparts to the notion, saga: the Bible as a whole, in its historical witness, will express itself inevitably in the form of saga. In truth, Barth has given us a shorthand here for his mature understanding of the nature of the Bible. When we ask ourselves, What is the Bible? Barth now answers, and will answer throughout the late work of the Church Dogmatics: It is Saga, a Book of sagas. We should be quick to say that this new definition does not imply that Barth has discovered some newfound uncertainty about the Bible and its reliability. No, it is rather that he has now found the proper thought‐form in which the astonishing complexity of the Bible can be captured and expressed. The Bible, Barth now sees, is the “history of encounter” between God and humanity, most especially between God and Israel. It is a Book about God, yes; but the God who forges a covenant with a people of His own choosing and commands a world into being as the “external basis” of that covenant, guiding and prompting and chastening that people, until the promised Son should appear, and make visible all Israel as the light to the gentiles. This narrative of “immediacy” – Barth can now dare to use this term of high liberalism! – contains a relation in which only one of the relata, the creature, can be expressed in ordinary historical idiom. The Other, the Creator, remains LORD, and cannot be rendered in creaturely categories, the Kantian intuitions of time and space. Rather, the explosive encounter between these two – now the theme of the whole Bible  –  can be told only in a historical form unique to its ­surpassing and incomprehensible strangeness: Saga as the history of God with us, Emmanuel. This is what Martin Kahler famously called, Geschichte, “meaningful history,” the record of the past not as chaos or aimless contingency but as the ordered, significant, and hope‐filled unfolding of God’s Lordship over His creatures. Historie cannot capture such depth, by definition; it is the shallows of creaturely doings as if God did not see and stand guard. (Myth is even more powerless before this high task, for it concerns only what never happened, but only, as Celsus said, what always is.) The question that haunted the young Barth – how can the creature speak about God? – can now be answered with a term that at once preserves that early haunting and transcends it. The Bible gives us the idiom in which we can speak – saga – and it belongs to our realm, our lifetime and landscape, but it is unlike any history we know. The biblical saga can have errors, can have legends and odd folkways embroidered all along its edges, can show its literary seams and artwork; yet remain the Word of God, the foundation of all

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Christian thought and life. It alone speaks of God come earthward, and there is no greater story, no greater history in all creation than that. Barth has taken his readers on an intellectual journey from the Scripture principle to the Bible as the saga of God with humanity; he has redefined the Bible through “joyful discovery” and “much sweat and many groans”; and he has reshaped the entire terrain of “faith and history” through a remarkable liberty of exegesis and historiography. Barth’s doctrine of Scripture may not be his most well‐known achievement; but in many ways we should say, it is his most profound, his most lasting.

CHAPTER 7

Barth on Theological Method Kevin W. Hector

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he most important feature of Barth’s theological method is that it is a theological method, in the sense that his method is itself an instance of theology, as opposed to a more general method that is applied to theology. To explain what this means (and why it matters), this article will (i) sketch Barth’s theological method, (ii) contrast that method with one of its leading competitors, and (iii) consider some objections to which it appears liable.

Barth’s Early Method It would be fair to say that, when it came to theological method, Barth knew what he was against long before he knew what he was for (or, more precisely, before he knew quite how to be for it). To understand his mature views, then, it will be helpful to begin by considering his criticisms of Friedrich Schleiermacher, a theologian whose method embodied, for Barth, what he saw as the fundamental wrong turn that had been taken by liberal Protestantism. (With characteristic vigor, Barth thus informed his friend Thurneysen, in 1921, that he would have to open his new teaching position with a “declaration of war” on Schleiermacher.1) Barth’s objection to Schleiermacher’s method, summarily stated, is this: as Barth understands him, (i) Schleiermacher focuses on Christian piety rather than on the object of that piety, in consequence of which (ii) his theology lacks objectivity in the sense that it is unwilling or unable to judge the 1  So Barth: “wahrscheinlich werde ich mein Lehramt gleich mit einer Kriegserklärung an diesen Kirchenvater und religiösen Virtuosen eröffnen müssen” (“Barth to Thurneysen, 18 May 1921,” GA 3, p. 489); a few days later, Barth informs Thurneysen that “die Mündung des Geschützes” [the muzzle of the gun] is now sharply trained on Schleiermacher (“Barth to Thurneysen, 23 May 1921,” GA 3, p. 492). The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth and Dogmatics, Volume I, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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would‐be correctness of that piety; more important, (iii) it lacks objectivity in the sense that it relativizes the transcendence of God and Christ; and (iv) his theology ends up in this predicament precisely because Schleiermacher thinks theology should answer to nontheological, putatively general norms.2 These worries are fairly well known, but for present purposes they require a bit of explication, beginning with what Barth sees as the exceptionable role that piety plays in Schleiermacher’s theology. So Barth claims, for instance, that for Schleiermacher “the object of theology is a phenomenon  —  namely, so‐called piety  —  and though it is, of course, a spiritual phenomenon, its psychical givenness is like any other” (GA 11, p. 275; TS, p. 153); as such, he claims that “Schleiermacher thus makes the Christianly‐pious person into the epistemic foundation and content of his theology” (Barth 1968, p. 303; TS, p. 271). This is what Barth terms “Schleiermacher’s Copernican Revolution” (GA 17, p. 11; GD, p. 9), namely, his transformation of theology into a science focused on faith or piety itself; Barth thus hails Schleiermacher as a revolutionary of sorts, because he adopted for theology a “conscious and thoroughgoing and conspicuous anthropological approach in the center of its thinking and its statements” (1968, p. 302; TS, p. 270). Not just any anthropological starting‐point, however; Schleiermacher’s approach is especially disastrous, Barth claims, in that he seeks to base theology on a species of human feeling; this is disastrous precisely because such feeling exists, Barth thinks, “only in complete undifferentiatedness, qualitylessness, and timeless inwardness” (GA 11, p. 294; TS, p. 164). By contrast with other candidates for an anthropological starting point, such as knowing or doing, Barth argues that “feeling” lacks intentionality or objective purport, from which it follows that a theology based on feeling can never move beyond feeling. Hence its particular disastrousness. Its foundation in feeling would thus explain why Schleiermacher’s theology seems to Barth to lack objectivity. So Barth claims, as I already mentioned, that Schleiermacher’s theology lacks objectivity in the sense of a concern for truth, that is, that it lacks either the ability or the willingness to render judgments about the correctness of the prevailing piety; Barth writes, accordingly, that if “Schleiermacher’s dogmatics fails to consider the truth of its statements,” this is because his statements “intend to be nothing more or less than a faithful picture of reality, namely the reality of possible, permissible, and necessary states of the religious disposition” (GA 11, p. 292; TS, p. 163). Hence it is hardly surprising, Barth thinks, that Schleiermacher’s theology would lack concern for objective truth, for as Barth understands him, Schleiermacher has taken as his subject matter a phenomenon that lacks objective purport and is as such an essentially or constitutively anthropocentric phenomenon. Schleiermacher would no more ask about the truth of piety, Barth argues, than a cultural anthropologist would ask about the truth of indigenous peoples’ customs. This is not the only respect in which Barth thinks Schleiermacher’s theology lacks objectivity, however, nor the most important; much more troubling, Barth thinks, is that, in virtue of its (alleged) assimilation of all Christian words and deeds to pious self‐ expression, Schleiermacher’s theology cannot help but relativize or even eliminate the

2  I am here borrowing some material – in revised form – from two of my earlier essays: Hector (2015a,b).

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distinction between Christ and the church, between God’s Word and human words, and between the feeling of absolute dependence and the one upon whom we depend ­absolutely. Barth thus claims, variously, that in Schleiermacher’s theology “the dialectic between Christ and the community is dissolved and converted into an identity” (GA 11, p. 317; TS, p. 177); or again, that his theology “does not know, in the end, that in relation to God, man always has to let something be said to him, always has to hear something, which he always does not know and which he himself cannot, under any circumstances or in any sense, say to himself ” (KD I/1, p. 62, cf. p. 63; CD I/1, 61, cf. p. 62); or again, that his theology “extirpates the possibility of a proclamation, a ‘Here I stand and cannot do otherwise’ … [since, on his approach] every live round is removed from the barrel in advance, on the supposition that all and none are right” (GA 11, p. 311; TS, p. 174). The central worry here, accordingly, is that a theology based on piety turns God, Christ, the proclaimed Word, and everything else into a mere expression of piety, and so cannot begin to do justice to their transcendence or true objectivity. This, then, is Barth’s most basic objection to Schleiermacher’s theology. It is interesting to note, however, that Barth seems to think that although Schleiermacher ends up collapsing divine transcendence into human piety, this was almost certainly not his intention; his intention, rather, was precisely to do justice to transcendence, while also doing justice to the standards of properly modern, enlightened, scientific inquiry. As Barth sees it, Schleiermacher thought it was possible and in any case necessary to do justice to both – possible and necessary, that is, for theology to answer to intra‐Christian as well as generally prevailing norms – and it is this double‐ answerability that led Schleiermacher to ground theology in human feeling. Barth claims, that is, that in order to pull off such double‐answerability, Schleiermacher found it necessary to demonstrate that specifically Christian commitments are not incompatible with, and are even respectable by the lights of, science and secular rationality; Barth thus sees Schleiermacher’s theology as proceeding through two steps, the ordering of which is crucial: so he begins, Barth claims, with “the demonstration that there is also in fact room, in a general ontology or anthropology, for this ontic component, namely, the being of the church or of faith, and that human existence can also be actualized as faithful existence.” Only then does Schleiermacher turn to actual faith as a particular example or expression of this more general aspect of human existence, but the latter then necessarily, if perhaps inadvertently, provides a set of “rules … for the critique and correction of Christian speech” (KD I/1, p. 36; CD I/1, p. 37). More specifically, then, Barth sees Schleiermacher as trying “to understand human existence as a sum of ‘capacities’ or ‘tendencies’ or ‘activities’ of human self‐consciousness, and in this central position, in the form of ‘feeling’ or ‘immediate self‐consciousness,’ to find also an original disposition or footing for historically actualized piety, and with that, too, the epistemic principle of Christian dogmatics, as the self‐clarification of this particular, historically actual piety” (KD I/1, p. 36; CD I/1, p. 36). To Barth’s mind, accordingly, Schleiermacher’s approach perfectly exemplifies the sort of theology that Barth means to reject, namely, a theology that assesses Christian commitments in terms of a norm other than the Word of God; and, insofar as his theology ends up collapsing divine transcendence into human piety, it also exemplifies what Barth sees as the inevitable consequence of such an approach.

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Barth’s fundamental objections to Schleiermacher, accordingly, are (i) that Schleiermacher’s methodological focus on Christian piety cannot, in principle, do ­justice to the objectivity of theology’s subject matter, and (ii) that Schleiermacher’s subjection of theology to putatively general norms necessarily distorts  –  and even betrays – that subject matter. By the early 1920s, then, Barth had a clear idea of what he opposed in theological methodology, but it was not until the early 1930s that he had developed a method that had fully turned its back on Schleiermacher.

Barth’s Mature Method That brings us to Barth’s mature theological method as set forth, in 1932, in Kirchliche Dogmatik I/1. As is well known, Barth here claims that theology is the discipline wherein the church examines its talk – and only its talk – about God, specifically insofar as this talk means to proclaim the Word of God, and it does so in order to assess the extent to which such talk is what it means to be. All of this more or less follows, Barth thinks, from the nature of Christian proclamation itself: talk of God counts as “proclamation,” Barth claims, just in case “it directs itself to man with the definite requirement, encompassed by the definite expectation, that it has to speak the Word of God to them,” which is to say that, by definition, “proclamation is human speech in and through which God himself speaks like a king speaks through the mouth of his herald, and which thus ought to be heard and received as speech in and through which God himself speaks” (KD I/1, p. 52; CD I/1, pp. 51–52). In response to God’s prior address, accordingly, and in obedience to God’s summons, the church aims in its own speech to reiterate this address and summons, and trusts that God will speak through it. From this, Barth infers that “if human speech intends to be proclamation, this can only mean that it intends to serve the Word of God, that it intends to point to its imminent being‐spoken by God himself ” (KD I/1, p. 53; CD I/1, p. 52); such talk must aim, in other words, to be faithful to the Word it means to proclaim, and it thus renders itself liable to  –  indeed, positively invites  –  assessment by the criterion of that Word. That brings us to the discipline of theology, which serves the church precisely by providing such assessment, rigorously and methodically; Barth thus describes its task as “that of the criticism and correction of speech about God, according to the measure of the church’s own principle” (KD I/1, p. 5; CD I/1, p. 6); theology’s proper office is therefore judicial in nature rather than legislative or (heaven forbid) executive. On Barth’s account, then, theology is the discipline that interrogates the extent to which the church’s proclamation is what it intends to be, namely, the Word of God. From this account, Barth infers that theology is to assess church proclamation solely by the criterion of the Word of God; he thus claims that because “speech about God has the right content when it accords with the being of the church, i.e., when it accords with Jesus Christ,” it follows that theology “does not first have to find, let alone invent, the standard by which it measures. It understands and acknowledges it as given with the church … just as the man Jesus Christ is given to us, just as God gives himself in revelation to faith” (KD I/1, pp. 10–11; CD I/1, p. 12). Such criterial exclusivism is required, Barth thinks, because by its very essence proclamation intends to pronounce the Word

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of God, such that one would necessarily be treating proclamation as something other than it is if one were to hold it to a norm other than this Word. Hence theology can perform its service to the church  –  namely, to hold its proclamation accountable to the Word of God – only when it subordinates all other candidate norms to this one norm, for insofar as theology takes other norms to be equal or superior to God’s Word, it ends up tempting the church to exchange the God of Jesus Christ for a culturally respectable idol. With respect to such norms, then, Barth claims that “a proclamation which takes itself to be responsible on this or similar fronts, means betrayal to the church and to Christ himself ”; hence, “precisely because its actual responsibility [is to the Word of God], the church’s proclamation must be unconditionally free on all other fronts” (KD I/1, p. 73; CD I/1, p. 72). These claims about the sole normativity of the Word explain  –  and are illustrated by – Barth’s attitude toward the idea that theology should aspire to be a “science,” where science is a matter, roughly, of conducting critical inquiry into a publicly assayable object, and doing so according to methods that are recognized by a wider academic public (cf. KD I/1, pp. 8–10; CD I/1, pp. 8–10). Barth’s verdict upon such aspirations is hardly surprising: “theology so ordered,” he asserts, “must be disowned as theology. How can it be otherwise,” he asks, “if one intends to make the object of theology accessible to all with the requisite clarity, and represent it according to methods that are valid for all? However it may be with the concept of science, this object of knowledge does not tolerate this treatment” (KD I/1, p. 8; CD I/1, p. 10). Interestingly, however, Barth affirms that theology does have one thing in common with science, namely, a paramount concern with objectivity (KD I/1, p. 8; CD I/1, p. 9). But there is some irony in this affirmation, because Barth takes it that the peculiar object of theology (namely, the Word of God) is such that theology can either do justice to that object or submit itself to the norms of academic science – not both; Barth concludes, accordingly, that “not one iota can here be granted [to the norms of science] without betraying theology, for any concession here would mean surrendering the theme of theology” (KD I/1, p. 7; CD I/1, p. 9). On Barth’s view, then, theology is the discipline wherein church proclamation is held accountable to its own standard, namely the Word of God, and in keeping with this, theology necessarily subordinates to this Word (and may simply ignore) any other would‐be standards, including those of “science.” His theological method can thus be understood as a sort of immanent critique of church proclamation, but it would be truer to Barth if we understood it in theological terms, because what Barth is here proposing, finally, is that theology can be justified solely by God’s grace, and, accordingly, that theology can only ever be an act of faith in and obedience to that grace. The sort of testing Barth here commends, accordingly, is itself an act of faith, an act of entrusting oneself to God and so submitting oneself to God’s judgment; this is what Barth has in mind when he claims, for instance, that “in faith, the judgment of God is acknowledged and his grace is praised. In faith, self‐examination becomes necessary in view of one’s responsibility before God. … Therefore, dogmatics is possible only as an act of faith, in the determination of human action through the hearing of and obedience unto Jesus Christ” (KD I/1, pp. 16–17; CD I/1, p. 17). In Barth’s hands, then, theology is an act of faith, an act of letting oneself be determined by God’s grace, such that, for him, theological method must ever be theological method.

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Potential Objections and Responses We can fill out these claims by considering some objections to which they are liable. The first is entirely friendly: although Barth is certainly warranted in restricting his attention to the actual speech of the church, particularly its explicit proclamation of the Word, it seems that a theologian could profitably apply Barth’s approach to other, not strictly linguistic, aspects of ecclesial life. To be sure, Barth comes close to rejecting such a widening of theology’s scope, but what he ends up rejecting is only the assumption that nonlinguistic acts such as neighbor‐love could rightly be treated as proclamation (cf. KD I/1, pp. 49–51; CD I/1, pp. 49–50). That seems sensible, but it does not foreclose the possibility that theology could be in the business of holding not only proclamation accountable to the Word of God but holding other doxastic, practical, and emotional commitments accountable to that Word, too, insofar as these intend to be conformed to the Word and are in any case normative within the church. Again, this is not to suggest that Barth himself is unwarranted in focusing solely on verbal proclamation, only that that does not entail that those who share Barth’s theological commitments need necessarily share the narrowness of his focus, for otherwise, it would follow that Barthian theology could not, in principle, produce anything like Augustine’s theology of the affections or Thomas’s theology of practical wisdom. So amended, then, a theology would count as “Barthian” not only if it holds verbal proclamation accountable to the Word of God but also if it holds the church’s and individual Christians’ doxastic, practical, and emotional commitments accountable to that same Word. That brings us to a second objection. To understand what this is, consider that Barth claims, on the one hand, that the “normal and central factum to which dogmatics refers, will very simply be and remain the church’s Sunday sermon of yesterday and tomorrow” (KD I/1, p. 83; CD I/1, p. 81), and claims, on the other, that it is “neither appropriate nor fruitful for dogmatics to refer directly to church preaching as delivered yesterday, the day before, and the day before that”; rather, “in order to actually further the self‐examination of the church with a view to this its central function, [dogmatics] will refer to that form of yesterday’s proclamation in which it has already been examined, criticized, and corrected, i.e., the results of the history of dogmatics itself.” This move is warranted, Barth thinks, in consequence of the fact that “in its previous dogmatics the church has decisively expressed how far it could understood its actual speech about God, measured by the criterion of the Word of God, to be proclamation,” from which it follows that, on his account, “dogmatics is, finally, a conversation of dogmaticians among themselves” (KD I/1, p. 80; CD I/1, p. 78). The idea here, simply stated, is that theology can hold actual proclamation accountable to its norm by holding prior theologies accountable to that norm, precisely because these theologies are a sort of  distillation of past proclamation and are normative for future proclamation. Unfortunately, however, there are some obvious problems with this idea, one of which is that it is at odds with Barth’s claim that his approach to theology  –  an approach, recall, according to which proclamation is held accountable to the Word of God – diverges from the approach of his predecessors (e.g. GA 17, pp. 8–12; GD, pp. 7–10). He cannot have it both ways: if predecessor theologies followed an approach comparable to Barth’s own, then Barth could (perhaps) assess proclamation by assessing them, but then Barth

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obviously cannot claim novelty for his approach; if his approach is indeed novel, on the other hand, then Barth has little warrant for the claim that these theologies bear the requisite relationship to actual proclamation. It would appear, then, that Barth has here advanced two claims that don’t quite square with one another. Even if they could be made to square, though, there might still be a problem with his more basic claim, because it is not clear what would warrant Barth’s assumption that theologies bear the relevant relationship to actual proclamation, irrespective of a theologian’s judgment that it should so relate. That is to say, even if predecessor theologies had intended to hold actual church proclamation accountable to its norm, their so intending would not by itself entail that they stood in the relevant relationship to such proclamation, unless one of three further premises were true: (i) that actual proclamation continually seeks its norm from the theologies of its day (from guild theologies, that is, rather than folk theologies); or (ii) that theologians can simply rely upon their intuitions about what is actually being proclaimed; or (iii) that theologians who mean to hold proclamation accountable have found and practiced reliable ways of discerning what is actually being proclaimed. Premise (i) strikes me as obviously dubious, because I know of many pastors who positively resist guild theology, and in any case many who do accept guild theology do not accept the theologies of their day. Premise (ii), on the other hand, strikes me either as dubious or else as dependent upon premise (iii): if theologians continually test their intuitions about current proclamation against actual proclamation, then they are entitled to rely on those intuitions; if not, then they cannot so much as distinguish their intuitions from mere projection and are therefore not entitled to appeal to them. Hence, if a theologian means to hold proclamation accountable to the Word of God, it would appear that he or she had better find ways of discerning what is actually going on with such proclamation – his or her theologizing had better include an ethnographic or “field‐testing” component, in other words. Then again, there is nothing wrong with theologians holding theologies themselves accountable to the Word of God, and thus practicing theology as a “conversation of dogmaticians among themselves,” but one cannot claim of such theology that it thereby holds proclamation accountable. A second amendment to Barth’s theology, accordingly, would be to distinguish theology‐centered from proclamation‐centered theology and suggest that the latter requires theologians to engage in some kind of ethnographic work.

Positivism That brings us to the most serious objection raised against Barth’s theological method, namely, that it represents a kind of “positivism,” by which is meant, roughly, that his theology takes as its point of departure a datum that is merely given, a datum construed as if we could get a belief‐free grip on it and which could thus judge all of our beliefs strictly from outside.3 As such, Barth seems liable to the following objection: we are told that we must subject all of our theological commitments to the Word of God, but we 3  A charge brought against Barth by no less than Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who famously worried about Barth’s “Offenbarungspositivismus”; cf. Bonhoeffer 1998, pp. 413–416, 474–483.

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have no commitment‐free interpretation of (or access to) this Word; hence, it would appear either that Barth’s method must end up unwittingly canonizing his own interpretation of the Word, in which case he is measuring theological commitments not against the Word of God but simply against his own theological commitments, or else his method is quite literally impracticable. Barth has a ready response to this objection, explication of which will shed additional light on his theological method. To make sense of this response, we turn to Barth’s 1931 book on Anselm (FQI), which Barth characterizes as “the real document” of his farewell to “the last remnants of a philosophical, i.e., anthropological (in America one says ‘humanistic’ or ‘naturalistic’) foundation and exposition of Christian doctrine” (HIC, pp. 42–43); attention to this book will provide, us, accordingly, with what Barth terms “a highly important key to understanding the thought‐process which has suggested itself to me more and more, even in the Church Dogmatics, as alone suitable for theology” (GA 13, p. 6; FQI, p. 11). Though scholars continue to debate the book’s ­significance for Barth’s overall development, at least one point seems beyond dispute, namely, that Barth finds here a theological method that allows him to criticize any given theological commitment without having to appeal to putatively general reasons, ­warrants, justifications, etc., which enables him, in turn, to address the charge of ­positivism (cf. Fides Quaerens Intellectum, GA 13, p. 40). The crucial development here, simply stated, is Barth’s realization of the fact that theological commitments can be tested one at a time, in light of other theological commitments not then being tested, such that the relevant testing can proceed piecemeal rather than all at once (as if one were starting from scratch). On this approach, then, the proper theological procedure is one in which “now this, now that article [of faith] figures as the unknown x, for which the investigation solves by means of the articles of faith a, b, c, d, etc., which are presupposed as known (without presupposing knowledge of x and, in this respect, sola ratione). … These are the a, b, c, d, etc., on the basis of which the x … is thus shown to be ‘reasonable’ or ‘necessary’!” (GA 13, pp. 54–55; FQI, pp. 55–56).4 The idea, then, is that one can test, and so exhibit, the rationality of any of one’s theological commitments by suspending one’s belief in it, as it were, in order to determine whether it is supported by one’s other commitments – whether, that is, one can work one’s way back to it on the basis of those other theological commitments. If one cannot, then one must revise that commitment. But if one can, then one now stands in a different epistemic relation to it, for in that case, one would not only be committed to it but could relate that commitment to other commitments in such a way that one could see it as rational and even as following, by necessity, from those commitments. By following this procedure, then, each of one’s theological commitments – even those involved in one’s interpretation of the Word of God – can thus be tested, just not all at once. As Wilfrid Sellars famously claimed of philosophy, then, we might say that, for Barth, theology “is rational, not because it has a foundation but because it is a self‐correcting enterprise which can put any claim in jeopardy, though not all at once” (1997, p. 79).

4  Cf. a similar characterization of Anselm (situated within a discussion of theological method): KD I/2, p. 9; CD I/2, p. 8.

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We could cite countless examples of this procedure  –  this is one reason why the Dogmatics is so long – but for present purposes we will focus on just one, namely, Barth’s doctrine of the Trinity. Barth’s argument here, in which he uses theological claims about revelation, grace, and human incapacity in order to work his way back to, and so exhibit the logic of, the Trinity, can be summarized in the following terms. First, because revelation is not something that falls or could fall within the range of human possibilities, Barth argues that revelation must be an act of pure divine lordship, which turns out to mean that the possibility and actuality of revelation must be grounded wholly in Godself. That is to say, if humans have no capacity for revelation, it follows that both the subjective and objective possibility of revelation must be supplied by God. This claim, in turn, leads Barth to understand God “in Godself ” as the one by whom such a possibility could be supplied, and so as the one in whose being such possibilities are grounded: God must be the one who determines to reveal Godself, the one in and by whom God is revealed and the one who conveys this revelation to creatures. This is obviously a complicated series of claims. To understand what they mean and how Barth arrives at them, it will be helpful to begin with Barth’s understanding of revelation: “revelation,” for Barth, means “the self‐unveiling, imparted to men, of the God who, in his essence, is un‐unveilable to them” (KD I/1, pp. 332–333; CD I/1, p. 315). Two elements of this definition are decisive: first, that God unveils Godself, and second, that such unveiling is not “natural” – that is, that such unveiling is not a creaturely possibility, because we can neither tear the veil from God’s face, as it were, nor count God’s unveiling among the creaturely possibilities that God could actualize. Barth therefore claims that, “because the God who unveils himself is, in his essence, un‐unveilable to men, this means that God’s unveiling is a self‐unveiling: God does what men themselves can in no sense and in no way do: He makes himself present, known, and significant to them as God” (KD I/1, p. 333; CD I/1, p. 315). Barth’s understanding of revelation, and so his arrival at a doctrine of the Trinity, thus proceeds on the basis of the following claims: (i) that creatures have no capacity for God’s revelation; (ii) that God in fact reveals Godself; from which he infers (iii) that revelation must be grounded entirely in God’s own capacity. From these claims, Barth draws three implications. First, given that God is not unveiled to humans “by nature,” it follows that God can be known to us only insofar as God unveils Godself to us, which entails that revelation depends entirely upon God’s free decision to do so (cf. KD I/1, pp. 338–339; CD I/1, p. 321). As the one who freely determines to reveal Godself, God is, accordingly, the revealer. Second, if there is to be revelation, God must not only determine to unveil Godself, but must put this determination into effect by making Godself manifest to creatures  –  yet because creatures have no capacity for revelation, it follows that this making‐manifest, too, must be grounded wholly in God’s own capacity (cf. KD I/1, pp. 313–314; CD I/1, p. 297). If God is to reveal Godself, therefore, God must also be God’s own self‐manifestation or revelation. If God were only the revealer and the revelation, however, God’s self‐unveiling would never become an unveiling to anyone, so to speak; the third implication, then, is that revelation must be effectively conveyed to persons, but because, again, we have no capacity for revelation, it follows that this conveyance, too, must be grounded in God’s own capacities (cf. KD I/1, p. 314; CD I/1, p. 298). God thus completes the revelational

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circuit but does so wholly on the basis of God’s own capacities; as such, God is the revealer, the revelation, and the revealedness, or, to use more traditional idiom, God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Barth next argues that these three “moments” of revelation cannot be external to God’s being‐in‐Godself, which follows, he thinks, from two facts: (i) that revelation must be grounded in God’s own capacities, and (ii) that in revelation God reveals Godself. That is to say, if the capacity for being revealer, revelation, and revealedness were not internal to God’s own being, then (i) God’s self‐revelation would be grounded in something external to God, and (ii) God’s revelation and revealedness would not be God’s revelation and revealedness, which would entail that God had not in fact revealed Godself. In terms of the framework with which Barth is working, such consequences represent a reductio ad absurdum, suggesting either that God is incapable of revealing Godself, or that revelation is of something other than Godself. Barth claims, accordingly, that the logic of revelation, properly understood, entails that God’s capacity to be revealer, revelation, and revealedness is internal to God’s being itself. Barth then draws two further inferences from this logic. First, he argues that God’s capacity to be revealer, revelation, and revealedness not only must be internal to God’s being, but must not compromise the oneness of that being, for otherwise, if the revelation were not one with the revealer, nor the revealedness with the other two, then revelation would either be through or of something other than God. Second, he argues that the antecedent bases of these capacities must be distinct from one another: so the revealer must be distinct from the revelation, he insists, for otherwise God would no longer be the free subject of revelation and revelation would no longer point beyond itself; likewise, the revealer and revelation must be distinct from revealedness, for otherwise the “objective” side of revelation would be indistinguishable from the “subjective” side, and revelation would be identical with one’s appropriation of it. The logic of revelation is thus thought to imply (i) that God is revealer, revelation, and revealedness; (ii) that the capacity for being revealer, revelation, and revealedness is internal to God’s very being; and (iii) that these divine capacities are one with, yet each distinct from, one another. On the basis of God’s lordship in revelation, accordingly, Barth arrives at a trinitarian understanding of God’s being‐in‐Godself, arguing that if God has revealed Godself through three capacities that are internal to God’s very being, then such capacities are not merely the form of revelation but are likewise an essential part of its content. As Barth concludes, “God’s triunity finds a place not only in his revelation, but because in his revelation, in God himself, such that the Trinity is to be understood not only as ‘economic’, but also as ‘immanent’” (KD I/1, p. 352; CD I/1, p. 333). There is much more to be said about Barth’s trinitarianism, but this brief sketch should suffice to exemplify his theological method: by taking certain theological commitments as fixed points – commitments with respect to revelation, grace, and human incapacity  –  Barth works his way back to a doctrine of the Trinity and in so doing exhibits its rationality. To put it in the language of his study on Anselm, these fixed points serve as the a, b, c, d on the basis of which he solves for the unknown x of the Trinity. By this procedure Barth is not attempting to “derive” a doctrine of the Trinity; he is rather “testing” it to analyze and display its inner logic and coherence with a larger body of received beliefs.

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On the strength of this method, then, Barth has a ready response to those who would charge him with being a positivist: it is simply not the case that his theology takes as its point of departure a datum that is merely given, construed as if it stood apart from all of our beliefs, because it is precisely his recognition that a theologian’s appeal to any such datum will necessarily be colored by his or her beliefs about it – and that these beliefs will always fall short of perfect correspondence with the datum itself – that leads him to insist that theology must subject every belief to criticism. And for this same reason – because we have no belief‐free access to this datum – it follows that the only way to proceed is piecemeal, because we cannot test our beliefs against “the datum itself,” as if we could use the latter to judge our beliefs strictly from the outside. Barth’s approach thus resembles that of another great antipositivist, Otto Neurath, who ­suggested that “we are like sailors who must rebuild their ship on the open sea, without ever being able to disassemble it in dry‐dock and build it anew out of the best materials” (1932, p. 206). Thus far, then, Barth can rejoin that his theology takes up a critical stance toward every theological “datum” and, therefore, is not liable to the charge of positivism. There is a more radical version of this charge, however, to which Barth’s method remains liable: even if his method allows him to criticize any given belief, it does not allow him – in principle –to criticize his method itself, nor his choice of the Word of God as theology’s fundamental criterion. It would appear, therefore, that even if Barth can be acquitted of the charge of positivism at the level of particular beliefs, he remains open to it at a more fundamental level. In response to this more radical charge, Barth would likely argue (i) that this objection is itself “unscientific,” in the sense that if he were to accept its premise, it would render his theology unsuitable for investigating its subject matter; and (ii) that to accept the objection’s premise would be to succumb to the idolatrous temptation to put another god before God (Barth 1933). Bottom line, then, if being a “positivist” in this sense is wrong, then Barth does not want to be right. With respect to method, accordingly, Barth claims (i) that theology is the discipline that measures Christian talk against its own criterion, namely the Word of God, and just so is an act of faith; and (ii) that it proceeds piecemeal, testing each theological commitment in light of all the rest in order to determine how far it is “rational” by the lights of theology’s own subject matter. Barth tries, in this way, to do justice to theology’s objectivity – that is, its obligation to be determined by the Word of God – without thereby falling into an uncritical positivism, and, just so, to move beyond Schleiermacher once and for all. References Barth, Κ. (1933). Das erste Gebot als theologisches Axiom. Zwischen den Zeiten 11: 297–314. Barth, K. (1968). Nachwort. In: Schleiermacher‐Auswahl (ed. H. Bolli), 290–312. Siebenstern Taschenbuch: Munich.

Bonhoeffer, D. (1998). Widerstand und Ergebung: Briefe und Aufzeichnungen aus der Haft, Dietrich Bonhoefffer Werke Band 8. Gütersloh: Chr. Kaiser Verlag. Hector, K. (2015a). Theology as an academic discipline: reconciling evangelical theology and theological encyclopedia. In: Karl

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Barth and the Making of Evangelical Theology (eds. C. Anderson and B. McCormack). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Hector, K. (2015b). Karl Barth. In: The Routledge Companion to Modern Christian Thought (eds. C. Meister and J. Beilby). London: Routledge.

Neurath, O. (1932). Protokollsätze. Erkenntnis 3: 204–214. Sellars, W. (1997). Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

CHAPTER 8

Barth on Natural Theology Keith L. Johnson

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arl Barth defines “natural theology” as any approach to dogmatics in which claims about God are grounded on an account of divine revelation other than God’s revelation in Jesus Christ. This kind of theology typically operates on the basis of two related presuppositions: (i) God’s act of creation establishes a union between God and humanity that is distinct from the saving union God establishes with humanity in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit; and (ii) humans possess a natural capacity to know God that remains intact after the human fall into sin. Barth rejects natural theology because he rejects these presuppositions. In contrast, he believes (i) the only union between God and humanity is the saving union that God establishes in Christ and the Spirit; and (ii) due to the effects of sin, humans have no capacity to know God rightly apart from God’s saving grace in Christ and the Spirit. The best way to understand Barth’s rejection of natural theology and its underlying presuppositions is to tell the story of how Barth developed and refined these two convictions over the course of his career.

Theology of Crisis Barth’s early theology is shaped by his belief that if theologians derive knowledge of God by reflecting on creaturely realities, then this knowledge will be determined by human ideals rather than the reality of God. Barth’s conviction on this matter solidified during World War I after many of his former professors publicly endorsed the German war policy on the basis of their theology. Their theology had been shaped by a general account of human religious experience, a historical‐critical approach to Scripture, and a perceived connection between culture and religion. Now Barth saw them appealing to these same things to justify their political position, and he was deeply disturbed. As he wrote at

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth and Dogmatics, Volume I, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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the time to his former professor Wilhelm Herrmann: “we learned to acknowledge ‘experience’ as the constitutive principle of knowing and doing in the domain of religion … Now, however, in answer to our doubts [about the war], an ‘experience’ which is completely new to us is held out to us by German Christians, an allegedly religious war ‘experience’, i.e. the fact that German Christians ‘experience’ their war as a holy war is supposed to bring us to silence, if not demand reverence from us” (Schwöbel 1981, p. 115). Barth’s remark implies that Herrmann has allowed his political ideology to shape his theology instead of allowing his theology to shape his ideology. This reversal leads to idolatry, because human ideals have determined his claims about God. As Barth later reflected, it was during this period that Protestant liberal theology finally “unmasked itself ” to him as a human‐centered enterprise (Barth 1968, p. 264). As Barth searched for an alternative, he tried to explain how God can be known by humans while remaining beyond human manipulation or control. He addressed this problem by offering a theology of crisis where the transcendent God judges and negates creaturely history by breaking into it from the outside. This divine act occurs as “a pure, absolute, vertical miracle” that takes the form of an “undimensional line of intersection” between God and creation (RII, p. 60). At the center of this miracle is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The risen Christ exposes humanity’s unrighteousness and reveals the righteous God who is totally distinct from creation and thus unknown by humans. “The Resurrection is the revelation,” Barth says, “the disclosing of Jesus as the Christ, the appearing of God, and the apprehending of God in Jesus” (RII, p. 30). Because the resurrection is an event in history that cannot be understood on natural or historical terms, both God’s self‐disclosure and the humans’ apprehension of it are beyond human manipulation. Human knowledge of God is an “impossible possibility,” Barth says, meaning that it “exists as the possibility of God and as his possibility only” (RII, 62). Barth’s theology of crisis makes natural theology impossible because no union ­between God and humanity exists other than the union God establishes in and through the risen Christ who remains beyond creaturely history at every moment. Indeed, the relationship God establishes with humanity in Christ can hardly be described as a “union” at all, because it does not take material form and cannot be described in historical or tangible terms. “There is here no merging or fusion of God and man,” Barth insists, “no exaltation of humanity to divinity, no overflowing of God into human nature” (RII, p. 30). Because knowledge of God derived from any source other than Christ is by definition not knowledge of God but an exercise in idolatry, the possibility of any such theology is ruled out. As the years progressed, Barth began to worry that his theology of crisis left him no basis from which to make positive claims about God. He later acknowledged that, by closing the door to any kind of tangible or visible manifestation of God’s grace in creaturely history, his early theology failed to account for the reality of John 1:14 (CD I/2, p. 50). He also admitted that, in his quest to distance God from creation and avoid idolatry, he actually ended up defining God according to the limits of human rationality. The problem was that his claim that knowledge of God is impossible for humans depended upon a prior determination of what kind of knowledge is conceivably possible. By so strongly linking God’s being with the “mystery” that exists at the limits of human knowing, Barth’s early theology allowed these limits to determine the parameters of

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divine being (see Schmidt 1927; Asprey 2010, pp. 11–13). His early theology thus fell into the very error he was trying to avoid (CD II/1, pp. 634–635).

Early Dogmatics Barth attempted to overcome these problems when he began delivering his first ­lectures on dogmatics at Göttingen in 1924. He sought to demonstrate how God’s revelation can occur within creation without being transformed into creation and thus leave humans with no real knowledge of God at all (GD, pp. 58–59). Barth found the way forward by utilizing the dialectic of veiling and unveiling that he derived from the anhypostatic‐enhypostatic christological formula (see McCormack 1995, pp. 327–328; Jones 2008, pp. 19–26). This formula, which originally arose in the Alexandrian tradition in response to the adoptionistic tendencies of the Antiochian tradition, expresses the idea that the human nature of Christ has no personhood prior to incarnation when the Son of God assumes a complete human nature. This means that the person of the hypostatic union is one and the same subject as the Logos, the second person of the Trinity. Barth uses this idea to say that although humans encounter the real, eternal, and transcendent God as he unveils himself in Jesus Christ, they do so only indirectly because God remains hidden in the veil of Jesus’ human flesh. This dialectic enables Barth to affirm God’s revelation within creation while preserving God’s distinction from creation. Barth applies this doctrine to the problem of knowledge through the concept of the Word of God (GD, pp. 45–69). God’s revelation in Christ is a Word‐event, an address that occurs as an “encounter between an I and a Thou, between one person and another” (GD, p. 59). This is even true of the incarnation: “even in the humanity of Christ,” Barth says, “the content of revelation as well as the subject is God alone” (GD, p. 90). The Word became flesh, but the revelation is not the flesh but the eternal and transcendent God who speaks while hidden in the flesh. “If God speaks, then God speaks, and we have to do with the one Logos that the prophets and apostles received, the one revelation in the incarnation which the people of the Bible know and attest as either promised or m ­ anifested” (GD, p. 92). All revelation thus is eschatological: in whatever creaturely‐historical means humans encounter it, they are encountering the eternal God who transcends creation and history. The same revelation the prophets received before Christ – and the apostles received in Christ – humans now receive in the present through the proclaimed Word of Christ, a Word that breaks into time and history from above. Because this Word is a revelation of God, Barth insists that it cannot be seen as a “constant” feature of creaturely existence. Rather, God’s revelation stands in discontinuity with creaturely existence at every moment. Humans receive this revelation, not as a “given” of their existence, but as a disruptive Word that breaks into history and summons them to faith and obedience (GD, pp. 180, 191–198). As in his theology of crisis, Barth’s early dogmatics rules out natural theology by opposing the first presupposition that undergirds it. He still insists that God’s being is utterly distinct from creaturely being and that the only union between God and

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humanity is the union God establishes in Jesus Christ. He also believes that reflection on creaturely being in distinction from Christ produces an idolatrous projection of ­creaturely ideals rather than knowledge of God. But Barth’s refined account of divine revelation also produced new tensions in his theology in regard to the second presupposition undergirding natural theology, the one regarding the natural human capacity to know God. In his early theology, Barth simply denied that humans possess any capacity to know God at all. But now that Barth had to explain how God speaks to humans in history, he found it difficult to describe the event of divine revelation without also affirming the existence of a natural human capacity to receive this revelation. For example, during Barth’s lectures on the doctrine of God in the summer of 1925, he considers the possibility of a limited “natural knowledge of God” involving the human “capacity for coming up against the mystery” of God (GD, p. 349). He explains that the fact that God speaks to humans indicates that humans must possess the capacity to hear him. After all, if God speaks to humans – and God does nothing in vain – then humans must be “possible hearers of [God’s] Word” (GD, p. 340). “We have to be taken seriously,” he says, “as those whose blind eyes and deaf ears are still eyes and ears that can be opened for revelation.” He argues that “[t]o be capable of this knowledge is to be capable of participation in God’s self‐knowledge, of standing in the relation of revelation.” This capacity involves our “being aware of the limit of our knowledge in regard to God,” an awareness that “we can run up against the mystery of God, the mystery of the object, the mystery of our own limit, the mystery of our own necessary asking. The fact that we can do this can be for us a pointer to God” (GD, p. 341). These arguments indicate that Barth believes that humans can obtain limited, negative knowledge of God by reflecting upon their creaturely being because the capacities God gives humans in creation serve as the presupposition of God’s revelation in Christ. Indeed, Barth acknowledges that his new approach “seems to agree with philosophical epistemology,” but he denies that the actual content of the knowledge of God provided by philosophy is the same as that of revealed theology (GD, p. 341). On the basis of this difference, Barth believes that his rejection of natural theology remains intact. Barth deploys similar arguments in his dogmatic lectures in Münster delivered in the winter of 1926–1927. There he makes the case that “the hearing human is included in the concept of the Word of God just as much as the speaking God … One does not speak of the Word of God if one does not, at the same time, speak of the human who receives it” (GA 14, p. 148). This means that any account of God’s revelation always must be considered alongside an account of the created human capacities which serve the presupposition of this revelation. As in his theology of crisis, Barth still openly denies the possibility of a natural theology because he still rejects the existence of union between God and humanity other than the one established in Jesus Christ. And like his dogmatic lectures in Göttingen, Barth does not think that the affirmation that humans possess an innate capacity to reflect on the mystery of God undermines this denial, because he believes that the knowledge of God produced by such reflections is strictly negative rather than positive in character.

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Analogy of Being Barth’s judgment on this matter changes after an encounter with the Catholic theologian Erich Przywara. Barth invited Przywara to visit his seminar on theology of Thomas Aquinas in Münster in February 1929. In preparation for Przywara’s visit, Barth and his students read the first two parts of Religionsphilosophie katholischer Theologie, where Pzywara develops his doctrine of analogia entis (Przywara 1962, pp. 376–459). Przywara builds his version of the analogia entis on the foundation of Aquinas’ account of the distinction between essence and existence (Summa Theologiae I.3.3–4). Przywara summarizes this distinction by arguing that, like God, the creature has a unity of essence and existence, but unlike God, the creature’s unity is one of “tension” rather than identity. This tension, he says, stems from the fact that the creature’s essence is realized only “over or above [its] existence,” meaning that the creature cannot be considered as creature apart from its relationship with God, in whom it has its existence (Przywara 1962, p. 403). On the basis of this idea, Przywara concludes that humans are similar to God because they possess a unity of essence and existence, but even in this similarity, they are utterly dissimilar to God because – although the unity of essence and existence is one of identity in God – the unity of essence and existence is one of tension in humans. As he puts it, “since the relation of essence and existence is the essence of ‘being,’ so God and the creature are in ‘being’ similar and dissimilar — that is, they are analogous to one another, and this is what we mean by analogia entis, analogy of being” (Przywara 1962, p. 403). For Przywara, a key implication of this analogy is that, because human existence can be understood only in light of the human relationship with God, human existence itself serves as a revelation of God. He explains this idea by describing the human relationship to God as “open upwards” (Przywara 1962, p. 400). This phrase means that, on the one hand, the very fact of humanity’s existence testifies to God as its source; and, on the other hand, this testimony indicates that God is utterly distinct from humans because they remain dependent on God for their existence at every moment. So humans can reflect on their own being and know that God is both within and infinitely distinct from creaturely existence. Przywara worked out the implications of this idea for the knowledge of God by appealing to the Catholic principle “grace does not destroy but supports and perfects nature.” He argues that God’s revelation in Christ does not mean that creaturely nature is “abolished,” as if it has no role to play in the knowledge of God. Instead, God’s grace must be seen “doubly,” such that God’s grace in Christ presupposes, and perfects, God’s grace in creation (see Johnson 2010a, pp. 89–91). God’s grace in creation allows humans to derive knowledge of God through philosophical reflection, and this knowledge perfectly corresponds to the knowledge of God revealed in Christ. So although humans cannot know God fully though philosophical reflection alone, they can reflect on creaturely being and know something true about God; this knowledge then can be perfected and fulfilled by God’s revelation in Christ. Indeed, the analogia entis reveals that humans live in an “incarnation‐cosmos” where the pattern of God’s relationship with creation as a whole is one and the same as the pattern of God’s relationship in Christ. Once humans recognize the pattern through Christ, they can look

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elsewhere  –  including the human consciousness  –  and recognize it there as well (Przywara 1962, p. 442). Przywara presented Barth with a version of natural theology that Barth had never encountered before. Although Przywara joined Barth in affirming that God is distinct from creation, he used this distinction as the basis for a comprehensive metaphysics that unites all philosophical and theological thinking into a single system. The key to this unity is the identity between God’s grace in creation and God’s grace in Christ. This identity means that a human knower can reflect on either created being or Christ and discern the pattern of God’s relationship with humanity. The analogia entis describes this pattern, and Przywara’s account of the human as existing “open upwards” showed how reflection on one’s own human being could lead to limited but true knowledge of God.

Analogy of Faith After his meeting with Przywara, Barth remained convinced that any knowledge of God derived through reflection on creaturely being would be determined primarily by human ideals rather than God’s being. He also still believed that the union God establishes with humanity in the act of creation does not provide a second source for the knowledge of God alongside God’s revelation in Christ. But Barth now realized that he could not defend these convictions simply by appealing to God’s distinction from creation, because Przywara’s version of natural theology operated on the basis of this distinction. Barth developed a refined approach to the knowledge of God in his lectures on “Fate and Idea in Theology” and “The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life,” both delivered after his encounter with Przywara in 1929. Przywara is Barth’s silent conversation partner in both lectures, and they represent Barth’s first sustained criticism of Przywara’s analogia entis and his initial alternative to it. He argues that Przywara’s version of the analogia entis assumes that God’s revelation in Christ confirms and reinforces a “presupposed human capacity … given with our existence as such” (FI, p. 38). This assumption is problematic, Barth thinks, because it misunderstands both the content of divine ­revelation and the effects of human sin. God’s revelation in Christ does not reveal something that humans “basically already know” as a result of their creation. Instead, “God’s Word announces something new to them. It comes to them as light into darkness. It always comes to them as sinners, as forgiving and thus as judging grace” (FI, p. 39). This grace reflects the fact that sin does not merely cause a “disturbance” in the human’s ability to know God that “can quite as easily be … removed again” (HSCL, p. 24). Rather, sin produces an “irreconcilable contradiction” between God and humans. This means that God’s grace in Christ does not perfect and fulfill creaturely being but instead “cuts against the grain of our existence all through” (HSCL, p. 32). Humans cannot derive knowledge of God by utilizing their natural capacities to reflect upon their own created being. This knowledge takes place “only as a second marvel of God’s love, as the inconceivable, undeserved, divine bestowal on his creature” (HSCL, p. 5). Barth describes this bestowal as the human’s “openness or preparedness for God’s grace,” which occurs as “the special work of God the Spirit” as the human is “made fit by God for God” as God relates to the human through his Word (HSCL, pp. 6–7).

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Barth develops this account further in CD I/1 by appealing to the concept of faith. He explains that true knowledge of God occurs as God speaks his Word to humans who receive it through the faith that arises “independently of [their] inborn or acquired characteristics or possibilities” (CD I/1, p. 236). This faith is given to the human by God in the event of God’s revelation, and it serves as the “point of contact” between God and humanity. Here Barth appeals to the concept of the analogia fidei as an alternative to the analogia entis. He explains that humans would not be able to hear the Word of God unless there were “something common to the speaking God and the hearing person, an analogy, a similarity in and with this event for all the dissimilarity implied by the difference between God and humanity – if we may now adopt this term – a “point of contact” between God and humanity” (KD I/1, p. 251; see CD I/1, p. 238). This “point of contact” is not located in the human’s created capacities but in the faith that God grants the human in the event of God’s self‐revelation. “In faith,” Barth argues, the human “is created by the Word of God for the Word of God, existing in the Word of God and not in himself, not in virtue of his humanity and personality, not even on the basis of creation, for that which by creation was possible for [the human] in relation to God has been lost by the fall” (CD I/1, p. 239). Although sin renders humans incapable of knowing God by utilizing their natural capacities, God gives humans a new capacity to receive divine revelation as God speaks his Word to them. Barth describes this as the “capacity of the incapable,” and he insists that it is a “miracle that cannot be interpreted anthropologically” (CD I/1, p. 241). With this argument, Barth’s rejection of natural theology has become more comprehensive than in his earlier thought. He still denies the existence of a union between God and humanity apart from the saving union God establishes in Jesus Christ. But now Barth also explicitly rejects the notion that humans possess a natural capacity to obtain knowledge of God.

German Christians Barth’s refined approach to natural theology explains the nature of his opposition to the “German Christian” movement in the early 1930s. Hints of the coming conflict can be seen in Barth’s preface to CD I/1, written in August 1932. He laments that the “confusion” within modern Protestantism about theological method has led many Protestants to discover a “deep religious significance in the intoxication of Nordic blood and their political Führer” (CD I/1, p. xiv). Barth’s concerns about this trend grew in the following months as prominent German Christians openly utilized natural theology to defend the application of Nazi policies in the German Church. For example, in “The Original Guidelines of the German Christian Faith Movement,” Joachim Hossenfelder argued that racial distinctions reflect the order of God’s creation and the Christian faith “does not destroy race, but instead deepens and sanctifies it” (Hossenfelder 2015, p. 50). Similar arguments were used to defend the Nazi Party’s “Führer Principle,” which claimed that the Führer’s word stands above any written law and that the government’s policies and practices should reflect this reality. Within the context of the German Church, the principle effectively placed the word of Adolf Hitler alongside Scripture as a source of

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authority. After Barth publicly opposed these arguments, theologian and Nazi sympathizer Emmanuel Hirsch responded by insisting that divine revelation cannot be limited merely to Scripture. Rather, “by observing the signs of God’s presence in the historical reality in and around him, [the Christian] receives faith in the gospel, and in turn, out of his faith in the gospel he hears and understands anew God’s presence in the reality of life in and around him” (Hirsch 2015, p. 107). The implication of this appeal to natural theology was that the Christian’s interpretation of history – and p ­ articularly, the German Christians’ interpretation of the historical movement led by  Hitler  –  should stand alongside Scripture a source for the church’s understanding of God. During this same period, Barth noticed similar patterns of thought among figures associated with the so‐called “dialectical theology” movement. This movement referred to the theologians who aligned with Barth’s early criticisms of Protestant liberalism and joined him in seeking a new way forward. The unifying force for the movement was the journal Zwischen den Zeiten (ZdZ), which Barth had founded together with Eduard Thurneysen and Friedrich Gogarten in 1922. The journal served as one of the primary venues for Barth and his allies to publish their work. By 1932, however, Barth was concerned that several figures in the dialectical theology movement were turning back toward liberalism by embracing philosophical and anthropological premises that undermined the centrality of God’s revelation in Christ. This problematic theology was showing up in the pages of ZdZ, and in response, Barth sought to distance himself from several figures who published in the journal. To this end, in the preface to CD I/1, Barth emphasizes that his new dogmatics should not be associated with the dialectical movement or the figures within it (CD I/1, p. xv). Later in the volume, he makes it clear that Gogarten is one of figures with whose work he no longer wants to be associated (CD I/1, pp. 125–131). He specifically criticizes Gogarten for affirming that God can be known “in the orders of the reality of our creatureliness” alongside God’s revelation in Christ. This embrace of natural theology is problematic, Barth argues, because it undermines the centrality of Christ, ignores the effects of human sin, and allows human capacities to determine the content of dogmatic claims about God (CD I/1, pp. 127–128). In the year immediately after the publication of CD I/1, Barth’s worries about Gogarten’s natural theology began to converge with his concerns about the German Christians. Barth was particularly disturbed by two essays Gogarten published in ZdZ that employed natural theology to explain the church’s relationship to the state and the created order (Gogarten 1932a,b). Barth thought these arguments gave support to German Christian leaders, and he was concerned that readers of ZdZ might believe that he himself tolerated their policies. Barth’s concern was heightened in the summer of 1933 after his anti‐German Christian lecture, “The First Commandment as an Axiom of Theology,” was printed in ZdZ alongside writings from a German Christian theologian (Barth 1969). But the final straw came when Gogarten publicly endorsed the political theology of Wilhelm Stapel, who had argued that the law of God is one and the same as the law of the German people (Gogarten 1933a, p. 448; Stapel 1932, pp. 174–185). Shortly thereafter, Gogarten embraced the leadership of Hossenfelder and Reich bishop Ludwig Müller and reiterated his endorsement of Stapel’s thesis (Gogarten 1933b, pp. 8, 23).

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Barth viewed Gogarten’s embrace of the German Christians and their theology as a betrayal of everything for which they once had stood. In response, Barth decided to break ties with ZdZ rather than continue to publish his own work alongside that of Gogarten and other theologians who aligned with the German Christians. He explained this decision in his final essay, “Farewell” (GA 49, pp. 492–515). There he argues that the errors of the German Christian are merely a “concentrated form” of the same kind of theology he had been fighting for over two decades. “I cannot see anything in German Christianity but the last, fullest, and worst spawn of the essence of Neo‐Protestantism.” He laments that, instead of remaining alongside him in opposition to these errors, Gogarten had retreated by embracing Stapel’s thesis. “I regard Stapel’s dictum about the law of God as the complete betrayal of the Gospel,” Barth says. “I believe that this dictum is today much worse, because it is much more fundamental and much more concrete than it was in the era of Harnack and Troeltsch, which represents the erection of the anthropocentric‐god of the 18th and 19th centuries” (GA 49, p. 504). Yet Barth also insists that Gogarten’s betrayal should not be that surprising, because his embrace of German Christians ideology was the fulfillment of his earlier embrace of natural ­theology: “Gogarten’s entire path has led him with the highest degree of consistency to condone everything” (GA 49, p. 503). Barth issues similar criticisms of Emil Brunner in the same essay. Although Brunner joined Barth in opposing the German Christian movement, Barth believed that Brunner’s embrace of natural theology emptied this opposition of its power. He accuses Brunner of “a grievous return” to the theology they previously had rejected (GA 49, p. 501; see Brunner 1929). Their disagreement continued into 1934, when Brunner and Barth exchanged essays on the subject of natural theology. Brunner argued that Barth’s denial that humans possess a natural capacity to know God undermines the integrity of God’s act of creation. “Wherever God does anything,” Brunner insists, “he leaves the imprint of his nature upon what he does. Therefore the creation of the world is at the same time a revelation, a self‐communication of God” (Brunner 1946, p. 25). Although the human capacity to receive this natural revelation is “adversely affected” by sin, this capacity remains intact and operative. “The Word of God does not have to create man’s capacity for words,” Brunner says. “He has never lost it, [and this capacity] is the ­presupposition of his ability to hear the Word of God” (Brunner 1946, p. 32). Barth had encountered this kind of thinking in the theology of Przywara, but now the stakes were far higher because German Christians like Hirsch were using similar arguments to support their views. Barth responded with an angry essay that accused Brunner of offering a “theology of compromise” that will win the “loud applause” of the German Christians (Barth 1946, p. 72). He argues that, by affirming that humans have a natural “capacity for revelation,” Brunner no longer has any ground to oppose the German Christian arguments or their policies. “It is now purely arbitrary,” Barth says, “to continue to say that only Holy Scripture may be the standard of the Church’s message, that [the human] can do nothing for his salvation, that it takes place sola gratia, that the Church must be free from all national and political restrictions” (Barth 1946, p. 87). Barth insists that the only way to avoid the errors of the German Christians is to reject the possibility of any kind of natural theology. In light of the lessons he learned from Przywara, Barth knew that this rejection can be maintained only by

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arguing that humans are incapable of knowing God rightly at all apart from the saving grace of Christ. “The fact that we become hearers and doers of the Word of God signifies the realization of a divine possibility,” he says, “not of one that is inherent in our human nature. Freedom to know the true God is a miracle, a freedom of God, not one of our freedoms” (Barth 1946, p. 117). This “miracle” occurs as the Holy Spirit creates a capacity for knowledge within the human that never becomes a possession of the human (Barth 1946, p. 121). As Barth puts it later: “The miracle does not cease to be a miracle. It will remain a miracle to all eternity of completed redemption” (CD I/2, p. 245; cf. pp. 242–270).

Creation and Covenant During the same year of Barth’s dialogue with Brunner, Catholic theologian Gottlieb Söhngen offered an insightful criticism of Barth’s analogia fidei. Söhngen argued that, even though Barth concedes the existence of a point of correspondence, an analogy, between God and humans, by basing this analogy on the human’s faith in Christ rather than human being, Barth ends up setting “faith against being” (Söhngen 1934, p. 120). This opposition undermines Barth’s affirmation that believers participate in Christ, because a participation in Christ is by definition a participation in being, namely God’s being, in and through Christ (Söhngen 1934, pp. 131–133). For Barth’s claims about the analogy of faith and participation in Christ to work, therefore, he must presuppose an already existing analogy of being between God and humans. As a result, Söhngen concludes that Barth’s account of divine revelation still operates under the implicit assumption that humans possess a natural, created capacity to receive God’s revelation. In CD II/1, Barth acknowledges Söhngen’s point: “we can only observe that there is every justification for the warning that participation in being is grounded in the grace of God and therefore in faith … we certainly must not neglect to take heed to this warning and comply with it” (CD II/1, p. 82). Even so, Barth still rules out the idea that the insights of natural theology can be brought together with knowledge derived from God’s revelation in Christ: “We cannot be sufficiently eager to insist, nor can it be sufficiently emphasized in the Church and through the Church, that we know God in Jesus Christ alone, and that in Jesus Christ we know the one God.” Barth sees this claim as the key to practicing theology faithfully, and he insists that every theologian is summoned again and again to make a “decision on this point” (CD II/1, pp. 318–319). A theologian’s claims either will be grounded in their own creaturely ideals or these claims will be grounded on what God has revealed in Christ. “Any deviation,” Barth says, “any attempt to evade Jesus Christ in favor of another supposed revelation of God, or any denial of the fullness of God’s presence in Him, will precipitate us into darkness and confusion” (CD II/1, p. 319). Yet Barth knows that, in order to maintain both his affirmation of Söhngen’s argument and the exclusivity of God’s revelation in Christ, he has to explain how humans can possess a created capacity to receive God’s revelation while also holding that human knowledge of God is determined solely by God’s revelation in Jesus Christ and not also by knowledge of God gained through the exercise of these capacities to reflect on God’s revelation in the created order.

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Barth addresses this challenge by arguing that both the created order and human being are determined by God’s decision to reconcile the world in Jesus Christ. He develops this answer most fully in CD II/2, where he claims that Jesus Christ is both the subject and object of election and thus the beginning and end of all created works. He argues that every created thing is determined in its inner depths by God’s decision to enter into covenant with humanity in Christ. “There is no such thing,” Barth says, “as a created nature which has its purpose, being or continuance apart from grace, or which may be known in this purpose, being or continuance except through grace” (CD II/2, p. 92). This means the created order is intrinsically defined by the covenant of grace, because it exists to be the space where this covenant is executed (CD III/1, pp. 42–329). Likewise, human being is intrinsically defined by the covenant, since Jesus Christ himself is the ontological ground of human existence, and true human being is found only in him (CD III/2, pp. 132–202). “It is not that [God] first wills and works the being of the world and [the human], and then ordains [the human] for salvation”, Barth says. “But God creates, preserves and overrules [the human] for this prior end and with this prior purpose, that there may be a being distinct from himself ordained for salvation, for perfect being, for participation in his own being” (CD IV/1, p. 9). So humans are intrinsically determined by their relationship to Christ, who as the fully human and fully divine mediator, also remains distinct from them in his unique relation to the Father. This means that although Barth can say that humans have a created capacity to receive the revelation of God, he also can hold that this capacity is not a human possession but resides in Christ himself as Christ relates to humans in grace in order to bring them to the destiny for which they were created. On the basis of this account of the relationship between creation and covenant, Barth argues that rational reflection on creaturely being in distinction from God’s revelation in Christ does not even give humans true knowledge of creaturely being much less knowledge of God. Human knowledge of God must be based solely upon God’s ­revelation in Christ rather than the claims derived from natural theology. “The meaning of [God’s] deity … can be learned only from what took place in Christ,” Barth says. “Otherwise its mystery would be an arbitrary mystery of our own imagining, a false mystery” (CD IV/1, p. 177).

Other Lights Barth’s account of the relationship between God’s covenant of grace and his act of creation not only allows him to maintain his affirmation about the centrality of Christ for the knowledge of God, but it also enables Barth to argue that the “divine form of life is not alien” to creaturely being (CD III/1, p. 185). He argues that, because creation was made in, through, and for Christ and the covenant of grace fulfilled in him, the being of creation must correspond to the work of Christ in the world. On the basis of this correspondence, Barth embraces a qualified role for natural revelation in theology without embracing natural theology (CD IV/3.1, pp. 3–165). Barth explains that, because both creation in general and human being in particular are defined by God’s saving decision in Jesus Christ, any account of God’s revelation to humans must begin

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with Christ (CD IV/3.1, p. 38). A proper account of Christ’s saving work must include his ongoing action to make the reconciliation accomplished in him “concretely active and perceptible” in history (CD IV/3.1, p. 10). Because Christ is present and active within the created order that is intrinsically defined by him, it must be the case that he can and does declare himself in and through this order. It is “perhaps incontestable,” Barth explains, “that there are real lights of life and words of God in this sphere too, that He alone is the Word of God even here, and that these lights shine only because of the shining of none other light than His [light]” (CD IV/3.1, p. 96). Barth cautions that not everything in creation reveals Christ. Although Christ can and does take up created realities to declare himself, the created order has “its own light and truths and therefore its own speech and words” that are distinct from Christ’s revelation (CD IV/3.1, p. 139). So although natural revelation is both possible and actual, the church must carefully test the truths it receives from nature before it accepts them as revelatory of God. The criterion of this testing is “the whole context of the biblical message as centrally determined and characterized by Jesus Christ” (CD IV/3.1, p. 126). For Barth, three implications follow from this claim. First, because insights drawn from natural revelation stem from Christ’s action, they “cannot be combined” with the biblical revelation of Christ to form “a system superior to both Him and them” (CD IV/3.1, p. 101). Second, because any natural revelation occurs through the agency of Christ, any purported revelation can be counted as true only when it corresponds to what already has been revealed about Christ in Scripture (CD IV/3.1, p. 98). This means that God’s revelation in Christ, as attested in Scripture, still strictly determines the church’s knowledge about who God is, what God is like, and the nature of God’s relationship with humanity. Third, because Christ is the active agent of any revelation that occurs in and through the created order, the church must be willing to pay attention to this revelation and incorporate the insights it receives from it into the church’s own faith and practice. These insights may even serve to “illuminate, accentuate or explain the biblical witness” more clearly for the church within its own particular context, leading it “to preach the one Word of God in its own tongue and manner” better than it could otherwise (CD IV/3.1, p. 115). These arguments show that Barth remains consistent in his rejection of natural theology even as he embraces the possibility of natural revelation. As in the beginning of his career, Barth believes that true knowledge of God must be grounded on God’s revelation in Jesus Christ and this revelation alone. He rejects the idea that God’s act of creation establishes union between God and humanity distinct from the saving union God establishes in Christ and the Spirit because he believes that the whole of creation, including human being, is determined by this saving union. He also thinks the notion that humans possess a natural capacity to know God that operates in distinction from God’s grace in Christ is based upon an abstract picture of human being. Humans have the capacity to receive God’s revelation, not because they possess an intrinsic quality given to them in creation, but because the resurrected Jesus Christ determines the true nature of human being. Although Barth now can embrace insights drawn from external sources, he refuses to accept a role for any kind of natural theology in dogmatics.1 1  This chapter incorporates material previously published in Johnson 2010b, pp. 632–650; Johnson 2012, pp. 1–23; Johnson 2013, pp. 129–156.

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References Asprey, C. (2010). Eschatological Presence in Karl Barth’s Göttingen Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barth, K. (1946). No! Answer to Emil Brunner. In: Natural Theology, Comprising ‘Nature and Grace by Professor Dr. Emil Brunner and the Reply ‘No!’ by Dr. Karl Barth (ed. E. Brunner), trans. P. Fraenkel., 65–128. London: Centenary Press. Barth, K. (1968). Concluding unscientific postscript on Schleiermacher. In: The Theology of Schleiermacher, Lectures at Göttingen, Winter Semester of 1923/24 (ed. D. Ritsch), 261–289. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Barth, K. (1969). The first commandment as an Axiom of Theology. In: The Way of Theology in Karl Barth, Essays and Comments (ed. H.M. Rumscheidt), 63–78. Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications. Brunner, E. (1929). Die andere Aufgabe der Theologie. Zwischen den Zeiten 7: 255–276. Brunner, E. (1946). Nature and grace. In: Natural Theology, Comprising ‘Nature nd Grace by Professor Dr. Emil Brunner and the Reply ‘No!’ by Dr. Karl Barth, trans. P. Fraenkel, 65–128. London: Centenary Press. Gogarten, F. (1932a). Staat und Kirche. Zwischen den Zeiten 10: 390–410. Gogarten, F. (1932b). Schöpfung und Volkstum, Vortrag, gehalten auf der Berliner Missionwoche, am 3. Oktober 1932. Zwischen den Zeiten 10: 481–504. Gogarten, F. (1933a). Die Selbständigkeit der Kirche. Deutsches Volkstum 15: 445–451. Gogarten, F. (1933b). Einheit von Evangelium und Volkstum? Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt: Hamburg. Hirsch, E. (2015). ‘What the German Christians Want For the Church, An Assessment of Karl Barth’s Attack’ (1933), in A Church Undone, Documents from the German Christian Faith Movement, 1932–1940 (ed. M.M. Solberg), 101–120. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

Hossenfelder, J. (2015). ‘The original guidelines of the German Christian Faith Movement’ (1932). In: A Church Undone, Documents from the German Christian Faith Movement, 1932–1940 (ed. M.M. Solberg), 45–51. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Johnson, K. (2010a). Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis. London: T&T Clark. Johnson, K. (2010b). Reconsidering Barth’s Rejection of Przywara’s analogia entis. Modern Theology 26: 632–650. Johnson, K. (2012). A reappraisal of Karl Barth’s theological development and his dialogue with Catholicism. International Journal of Systematic Theology 14: 1–23. Johnson, K. (2013). Natural revelation in creation and covenant. In: Karl Barth and Thomas Aquinas, An Unofficial Ecumenical Dialogue (eds. B.L. McCormack and T.J. White, O.P.), 129–156. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Jones, P.D. (2008). The Humanity of Christ, Christology in Barth’s Church Dogmatics. London: T&T Clark. McCormack, B. (1995). Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, Its Genesis and Development, 1909–1936. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Przywara, E. (1962). Religionsphilosophische Schriften, Bd. 2., 373–511. Einsiedeln: Johannes‐Verlag. Schmidt, H. (1927). Zeit und Ewigkeit, Die letzten Voraussetzungen der dialektischen Theologie. Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann. Schwöbel, C. (1981). Karl Barth–Martin Rade, Ein Briefwechsel. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn. Söhngen, G. (1934). Analogia Fidei, Gottähnlickkeit allein aus Glauben? Catholica 3 (3): 113–136. Stapel, W. (1932). Der christliche Staatsmann, Eine Theology des Nationalismus. Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt.

CHAPTER 9

Barth on Creeds and Confessions David Lauber

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arl Barth drew upon the formal creeds and confessions of the church without feeling constrained by them. He sought to defer to the church’s tradition whenever possible, but he also was willing to reconsider the claims of the tradition in light of a fresh hearing of the Word of God. This reconsideration involved discerning ways in which the church’s creeds and confessions correspond to the Word of God in Jesus Christ in light of the church’s ongoing witness to the world.

Creeds and Confessions in the Church Dogmatics In the Church Dogmatics (CD), Barth devotes two methodological sections to reflection on church confessions: CD I/2 §20, “Authority under the Word” and CD III/4 §53 “Freedom Before God.” In these sections, Barth acknowledges the genuine authority of the church and its tradition but argues that this authority is mediate, formal, and relative in comparison to the Word of God (CD I/2, p. 586). Barth defines a confession as “a formulation and proclamation of the insight which the Church has been given in certain directions into the revelation attested by Scripture, reached on the basis of common deliberation and decision” (CD I/2, p. 620). He develops four claims in light of this definition. First, confession occurs as a commentary on Scripture by which the church explains, expounds, and applies Scripture in its own words (CD I/2, p. 621). Second, the confession of the church “involves the expression of an insight given to the church” (CD I/2, p. 622). The church receives this insight in a particular time and place, but its confession speaks to the church universal. For example, even though the Reformers were working within a particular context, the confessions of the Reformation were trying to confess again “the one old faith of the Church” and

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challenge the whole church to accept it (CD I/2, p. 623). Third, confession arises out of a need for the church to make the Christian faith plain and public for the sake of its witness. “We cannot confess because we would like to confess in the belief that confession is a good thing,” Barth says. “We can confess only if we must confess” (CD I/2, p. 624). Fourth, confessions are geographically and temporally limited because they are the product of the human, historical church. These limitations mean that theologians cannot merely rehearse prior formulas, creeds, or symbols as they go about their work. Dogmatics requires an ongoing search for more clarity and precision. Barth uses the term “direction” to describe the importance and function of church confessions. He argues that, although theologians ought to be guided by church confessions, they need not stay bound to their precise language. The task of dogmatics is to understand Scripture and contribute to the church’s proclamation in the church’s unique place and time. This task requires that theologians articulate language and a way of thinking that can meet the challenges shaping the moment in which they live. They might appropriate the statements of earlier confessions, but they also are free to depart from earlier confessional statements in order to be faithful the Word of God spoken to the church in the present. Confessions are by definition fallible, provisional, and alterable; they function authoritatively “until further action … for a time, not for all posterity” (TC, p. 112). Barth stresses the positive value of confession as the confirmation, declaration, and impartation of what the church knows (CD III/4, p. 73). Confession takes place as a doxological and joyful act aimed at the honor of God rather than the defeat of one’s theological or ecclesial opponents (CD III/4, p. 82). This posture reflects the fact that the church is bearing witness to the God who is for humanity. The confessor is not “God’s detective, policeman, and bailiff,” but a purveyor of good news, such that even the condemnation of heresy, superstition, and unbelief occurs in service of making the gospel known and heard (CD III/4, p. 81). Barth insists that confession takes place as the work of the community rather than a solitary individual. This communal act of confessing is guided and enabled by the Holy Spirit who moves the church to speak the right word in its particular time and place through the church’s reading of Scripture under the “direction” provided by the confessions and creeds. The theologian serving the church “must and will confess precisely what the Spirit of Jesus Christ, the Spirit of Scripture, the Spirit of the community, allows, and commands him to confess – nothing more or less or other than what is laid specifically upon him at this specific time” (CD III/4, p. 86).

Confessionalism, Modernism, and Creeds Barth rejected a hasty dismissal of the language and ideas of traditional orthodoxy simply in the name of being modern. He notes that he “was once liberal and know(s) the charm” of brazen rejection of the past in the name of novelty, and he advises that theologians need to be humble and self‐critical as they engage with the tradition. “The more one listens and breaks free from the illusion that the world began with oneself,” Barth argues, “the more one will discover that the Fathers knew something, and that the

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scorned ‘orthodox’ writers of, say, the seventeenth century were theologians of stature. And it can even happen that alongside of them modern theological literature will be found a little insipid and a little tedious” (CRE, p. 182). Given this posture of appreciation, Barth displays little patience with theologians who reject creedal affirmations out of hand. “The criticism leveled against orthodoxy during the past two centuries is quite simply barbarian,” he argues. “It does not even know what it is talking about. Useless complications and subtlety were not shown by those ancient fellows but by the modern savants who did not try to understand and who did not understand” (FOC, p. 75). In contrast to the notion that the early church creeds go beyond and therefore distorts the New Testament portrayal of Jesus, Barth insists on a close connection between the dogma of Nicaea and Chalcedon and the New Testament. On this point he broke decisively with modern liberal theology and to that extent restored the “catholic” tradition to the evangelical churches, a matter of no small ecumenical significance. “I do not think it could be said that this dogma goes beyond what the New Testament tells us of Christ,” he insists. “Do the Gospels or the Epistles tell us anything other than this: that God was in Christ, that Christ was a man, that we do not have to seek God elsewhere than in him? The dogma of the early councils only throws into relief what the Bible says. …It forces us not to leave this straight way” (FOC, p. 80). In this light, Barth often depicts the creeds as serving a boundary or guard for the church’s interpretation of the biblical claims about Christ. He notes that, because even the biblical expression “God’s only Son” itself is liable to misinterpretation, the church’s confessions serve the important purpose of clarifying the church’s faith and exposing, challenging, and rejecting competing claims (CRE, p. 47). The second article of the Nicene Creed, especially the homoousios, confirms “the self‐evident presupposition of the Biblical testimony, namely, that the event, to which it bears testimony, is an initiative which takes place neither in human history nor in human thought – to speak with the first article: neither in earth nor in heaven, but in God himself. He does not reveal himself in another. He reveals himself through Himself. And He was reconciling us with Himself in this revelation, the Holy One who makes His dwelling here among sinners to be sinners’ Saviour is again no lesser, no other than the eternal God Himself ” (CRE, p. 47). Barth welcomed being labeled “traditional” and “orthodox” by his liberal colleagues if that means he “takes his bearings from the fathers” and learns from them. At the same time, Barth rejects any kind of confessionalism that insists upon maintaining the letter of prior content and language. He argues that the confessions exist “in order that we may go through them (not once but continually), but not that we should return to them, take up our abode in them, and conduct our further thinking from their standpoint and in bondage to them” (CD III/4, p. xii). Barth displays this approach most prominently in CD IV, where his Christology self‐ consciously moves in directions the fathers at Nicene did not anticipate. “We shall not serve the cause of the recognition which is necessary in the Church to‐day simply by retreating or paraphrasing or commenting on the decision which brought the controversy of the 2nd and 3rd centuries to a victorious end,” Barth explains. “We are reminded by Nicaea in which direction we have to look. Our own conclusions, which are formally independent of the dogma proclaimed there, have inclined us to look in the same direction. We will now try to go further in this direction, not losing contact with the

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dogma but again following our own path” (CD IV/1, p. 200). Barth makes it clear that his attempt to “go further in this direction” is not an attempt to improve upon the dogmas of the fathers or dismiss their formative influence; rather, it is an exercise in seeking further clarity on the same subject matter they proclaimed for Barth’s own time and place. A prominent example of Barth’s approach is found in CD IV/2, where he remarks about his alignment with and departures from the Christology of the fathers. “We have ‘actualized’ the doctrine of the incarnation,” he explains, “i.e., we have used the main traditional concepts, unio, communion and communication, as concentrically related terms to describe one and the same ongoing process. We have stated it all (including the Chalcedonian definition, which is so important in dogmatic history, and rightly became normative) in the form of a denotation and description of a single event” (CD IV/2, p. 105). Barth depicts his “actualization” of the traditional doctrine, not as a break from the traditional formulas but as their reformulation in order to adhere to the same Christ to which the tradition pointed. This approach reflects Barth’s tendency to refine and develop traditional concepts instead of either repeating or rejecting them. This approach acknowledges the significance and relative, normative authority of the church’s confessions, and it enables Barth to follow their direction into new ground without losing touch with the central insights that have guided the church for centuries. The approach to confessions in his dogmatic work is also evident in Barth’s account of the church’s formal confession as a commentary on Scripture and the expression of an insight given to the church in a particular time and place. Confession is forged within crisis; it is demanded of the church in order for the church to act faithfully and obediently. Confessions arise in a time and location of specific conflict. Facing new questions and circumstances the church confesses anew what the church has confessed in the past, but with greater p ­ recision and in recognition of the temporal limitations of its ­confession (CD I/2, p. 627). According to Barth, Reformed and Lutheran understandings of the status of confessions differ on this precise point. For Lutheran theology, the Augsburg confession functions as “the authority for the correct interpretation of scripture ‘for all posterity’” (TOC, p. 115). This is not the case for the Reformed church, which sees its confessions as always “open to discussion and improvement, as liable to be superseded” (TOC, p. 115). Reformed confessions guide the doctrine and life of the church until further action is necessary (TOC, p. 112). For example, in 1934 it was necessary for the Evangelical Church in Germany to confess the primacy and exclusivity of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ and Holy Scripture. This necessity arose in response to the new dogma of the “German Christians,” which demanded that the church embrace a new form of natural theology and acknowledge a new binding revelation of God “in the political events of the year 1933, and especially in the form of the God‐sent Adolf Hitler” (CD II/1, p. 173). Barmen’s protest against this new dogma of natural theology takes the form of a theological declaration that draws from the confessions of the Reformation, without simply repeating explicit formulas of that confession (CD II/1, p. 175). Barmen had to venture something new in order to meet the particular demands of the German Church conflict at the time and this venture was urgent because it was a “battle for the life and death of the Church” (CD I/2, p. 629).

CHAPTER 10

Barth on Creation David C. Chao

Introduction: The Problem of Christomonism Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (CD) is characterized as a whole and in its parts by a thoroughgoing christological determination where Jesus Christ is the one and only criterion for Christianity’s basic beliefs (CD I/2, p. 123). The rethinking of the whole of Christian doctrine from a center in Christ earned Barth’s theology the reputation for not only being “christocentric” but for being “christomonist” – that is, for denying the reality of creation and its creatures.1 Barth, especially in his later work, explicitly denied the negative implications of “christomonism” by affirming creaturely reality.2 In this essay, I treat Barth’s doctrine of creation in general and his twofold axiom of “creation as the external basis of covenant” and “covenant as the internal basis of creation” in light of the charge of christomonism. I focus primarily on the doctrine of creation as elaborated in the first part of CD III/13 and also discuss the first part of CD IV/1 as related to creation. In this essay, I use the language of “nature” and “grace” because Barth himself uses that language to talk about “creation” and “covenant” respectively. However, Barth’s preferred language is the language of “creation” and “covenant” because it adheres more closely to the concrete and historical language of Scripture and is less freighted 1  See for example Hans Urs von Balthasar’s criticism of the monism of the Word of God in Barth’s theology: “As we have seen, this monism of the Word of God, which invades the hostile world and is expressed in such Idealist categories as mediacy and immediacy, object and objectlessness, threatens time and again to swallow up the reality of the world” (Balthasar 1992, p. 94). See the shared concern in Berkouwer 1956, pp. 12, 12n6. 2  Barth rejects the negative implications of christomonism (see Barth 2017, pp. 214–215; cf. CD III/3, p. xi; CD IV/3, p. 713; CD IV/4, pp. 19, 23). 3  All references to this work are listed as page numbers parenthetically embedded in the text.

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with the abstract conceptuality of the scholastic theological tradition. At the same time, it is nearly impossible for Barth to remove all metaphysical language (of “essence,” “existence,” and “nature”) from his discussion of the reality and distinction of creation and its ordered relation to covenant. In order to understand the language Barth uses, the following are some preliminary definitions of “creation,” “covenant,” “nature,” and “grace”: “Creation” is all that is not God, created by God, absolutely dependent upon God for its existence, and ordered to covenant as its final end (CD III/1, p. 96). “Covenant” is the history of God’s relationship with God’s people, in and through Israel, that finds its fulfillment through the incarnation and atonement of Jesus Christ (see CD III/1, p. 66). Barth does not define the term “nature” but uses it in reference to the meaning employed by the scholastic theological tradition. He uses the term and resignifies it christologically. “Nature,” according to the tradition, is that which distinguishes and defines one thing from another, that which unifies the parts of a thing, and in human creatures, that which is an inner principle of rational action. “Grace” is the free, unmerited act of God that benefits and reconciles God’s people; Barth refers to a general and special or twofold grace of creation and salvation (CD IV/1, pp. 8–9). And lastly, we should add that “election” is an eternal and free decision of God to be in a covenant relationship with God’s people through Jesus Christ and is the gracious beginning of all the ways and works of God (CD II/2, esp. §§32–33). Barth generates his well‐known, twofold axiom concerning creation and covenant from his interpretation of Genesis 1 and 2. Genesis 1 and 2 are two independent accounts4 of creation that should be read together because both accounts deal with the same God, humanity, and world (CD III/1, p. 229). Barth interprets creation in Genesis 1 in terms of the stage and theater for God’s history with God’s people and, in Genesis 2, as ordered to its final end in covenant.5 The charge of christomonism is rejected because Barth affirms that creation is real and distinct from covenant and because covenant requires the reality and distinction of creation in order to establish the kind of relationship God has with humanity. However, this affirmation of creation’s reality and distinction is framed within God’s eternal covenant that is fulfilled in Jesus Christ. In the course of affirming the reality and distinction of creation and its ordering to covenant, Barth shows a formal similarity to the scholastic maxim that “gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit” [grace does not destroy nature but perfects it] (Aquinas 1948, ST I, Q. 1, Art. 8, ad 2). This essay will demonstrate how Barth’s doctrine of creation is consistent with many features within the scholastic theological tradition’s account of the essence, existence, and nature of creaturely reality but within a robustly covenantal (and therefore christological) framework. Not only does the affirmation of the metaphysical reality and distinction of creation prevent the objection of christomonism from getting off the ground, but Barth’s own view of God’s covenantal relationship grounded in the eternal, free love 4  Barth uses the term “saga” against “myth” to preserve the prehistorical and realistic character of these accounts, see CD III/1, pp. 81–85. 5  “Creation [is] not an end in itself, but rather the institution of the theatrum Dei gloriae [theater of God’s glory], the natural ground of redemption. Redemption [is] is the end of God’s way with the world, his glory in the realization of his mercy—the spiritual ground of creation” (Barth 2017, p. 210).

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of God for God’s people requires the real distinction between Creator and creatures. In the three sections that follow, I will offer an analysis of Barth’s twofold axiom of “creation as the external basis of covenant” (CD III/1, p. 94) and “covenant as the internal basis of creation” (CD III/1, p. 228) and how both these bases find their eternal ground in God. The analysis and exposition will show how the charge of christomonism fails against Barth’s doctrine of creation and how Barth’s views converge and diverge from the scholastic maxim that “grace does not destroy nature but perfects it.”

Creation Is the External Basis of Covenant (Grace Does Not Destroy Nature) Nature and Grace Are Different Christomonism, as rejected by Barth, is a metaphysical problem that denies the reality of creation. Thus, affirming the metaphysical reality and distinction between creation and God is the basis for any rejection of christomonism. If the Creator and creature are not metaphysically different, and share the same set of properties, then they are indiscernible and can be confused with each other, collapsed into each other, or swallowed up into each other – and thus the charge of christomonism applies. But if the Creator and creature are metaphysically different, and their relationship preserves that difference, christomonism is effectively rejected and grace does not destroy nature. Barth clearly affirms with the tradition that God and creature are metaphysically different. “God the Creator is always different in essence from His work … because no secret identity between God and the world is possible” (CD III/1, p. 89). There is no shared being between uncreated and created being. There is something really different in ­creaturely being: “we [human beings], in our own very different way, which cannot be compared with the being of God, but which on the basis of the divine being and life and act is a very real way, that we also are, and that we are in that we live in our time, and that we live in that we ourselves act in our own act” (CD IV/1, p. 7). There are a number of ways that Barth describes this difference. “Nature” is the technical language used by the scholastic theological tradition to describe that by which things are different from each other. Although Barth’s preferred idiom is to speak of “creation” and “covenant,” Barth also uses the analogous language of “nature” and “grace” as seen in the following text: There is, of course, a realm of nature which as such is different from the realm of grace. But for all its distinctiveness there is in it nothing which does not point to grace and therefore already come from grace; nothing which can enjoy independent life or exercise independent dominion. And conversely, for all the newness and particularity of the realm of grace, there is no place in it for anything unnatural, but from the creation everything is also nature. (CD III/1, p. 62)

Nature is not identified with grace and thus not reducible to grace. Nature and grace are really different. This difference is confirmed in the fact that nature’s existence is

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dependent upon God’s grace and is ordered to God’s grace. And the ordering of nature to grace does nothing to destroy or mitigate the naturalness of nature. It remains what it is – created and not uncreated. It turns out that despite Barth’s thoroughgoing christocentrism, he in fact has a traditional account of how created nature is distinguished from divine grace while being ultimately ordered to grace without losing its naturalness – all of which is formally identical to the scholastic maxim that “grace does not destroy nature but perfects it.” The key difference that Barth’s christocentrism makes in the doctrine of creation has less to do with his reflection on creation itself and more on how creation is eternally anticipated via Barth’s doctrine of election (see the section, “On God’s Free Love …”).

Creation Is a Presupposition and Preparation for Covenant What does it mean to say that creation is the “external basis” of covenant? Barth refers to creation as an “external basis” in several ways: a “stage” for the covenant story (CD III/1, p. 44), technical condition for covenant (CD III/1, p. 97), “necessary preparation” for covenant (CD III/1, p. 97), “equipment for grace” (CD III/1, p. 231), “formal presupposition” of covenant (CD III/1, 232), and “road” or means to covenant as its goal and final end (CD III/1, pp. 60, 97). Barth spends most of his time using “external basis” to mean creation as presupposition and preparation for covenant. In order to have a covenant, one needs to have a creation as sphere or theater for ­covenant to occur (CD III/1, p. 44). If covenant is fundamentally about God’s relationship with human creatures and the existence of human creatures requires the existence of creation, then covenant requires creation; because if there were no creation, then there would be no human creatures as covenant partners. Creation is the “indispensable presupposition” of covenant (CD III/1, p. 96). As the presupposition of covenant, creation “makes possible, prepares and lays the foundation for the work and Word of God” (CD III/1, p. 66). Moreover, for Barth, the covenant is a history of God’s relationship with God’s people. This history has a beginning in time and this beginning in time is creation. Creation precedes covenant history as preparation for and presupposition of that history. The language of preparation and ­presupposition all point to the continuity Barth wants to preserve between creation and covenant while maintaining their difference. Creation and covenant are not identical, they are different (CD III/1, p. 232), but in their difference they should not be separated. The language of presupposition also allows important formal distinctions into Barth’s strongly unified view of God’s act. Barth’s emphasis on the oneness of God and of God’s eternal act might tend to monism if it were not for the distinctions (e.g. external basis, internal basis) he uses to describe the acts of God ad extra. These distinctions take on the language of “presupposition” to allow for conceptual differentiations of the various submovements of God. Again, these distinctions prevent the collapse of the Creator–creature distinction and prevent the charge of christomonism from getting off the ground.

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The Covenantal Relationship Requires the Metaphysical Difference Between God and Creature The metaphysical existence and essence of the creature are the object of divine love. Not only does the divine love admit of metaphysical otherness, but once the divine love has decided to be in fellowship with humanity, the existence and essence of the creature becomes a necessary requirement of divine love. The existence and essence of the creature are no external necessity imposed upon God from without. And yet, the existence and essence of the creature are a necessity of God’s freely given love for the  human covenant partner (first through the election of Jesus Christ and subsequently in and through Israel and the church). “Inasmuch as the love of God did not content itself in that eternal covenant as such, in so far as the love of God intended to give the covenant form outside the divine realm, the love of God itself made this external ground of covenant, the existence and essence of the creature and of creation, necessary” (KD III/1, p. 107, my translation, italics mine; CD III/1, p. 97). As the object of God’s eternal love, creation is the technical condition needed for covenant (CD III/1, p. 97). But it is God’s eternal free love in itself that is the internal condition for covenant (see the section “God’s Free Love…”). The metaphysical distinction between creature and Creator is the presupposition of God’s love of the other. Without this metaphysical ­otherness, God’s love would not be the gracious love that it is. “The existence and being of the creature willed and constituted by God are the object and to that extent the ­presupposition of His love” (CD III/1, p. 97). What can be inferred from this statement by Barth? One inference is that the naturalness of nature is a prerequisite for the role of creatures as covenant partners. Barth fully affirms the existence, being, and nature of creation as created and not uncreated. And creation’s status is secure because it is the “indispensable presupposition” of covenant (CD III/1, p. 96). Moreover, God’s covenantal relationship is not threatened but confirmed by the being and nature of creatures as creatures. The eternal covenant is between two metaphysically different beings: the Creator and creatures. “In virtue of its being and nature, the creature is destined, prepared, and equipped to be a partner of this covenant. This covenant cannot be seriously threatened or attacked by the nature of the creature or its surroundings, nor by any attribute of man and the world. By its whole nature the creature is destined and disposed for this covenant” (CD III/1, p. 97). Without differentiating creation from covenant, there would be no covenant. Without the existence and being of creatures, there would be no “other,” no partner for God to be in covenant. The metaphysical reality and distinction of creation is a necessary condition for the kind of covenant relationship Barth affirms. The significance of these claims in relation to the charge of christomonism is that when Barth affirms God’s free love, it is a love that has eternally decided to be in a relationship with human creatures. Because human creatures by definition are metaphysically other than God, the covenant between God and creatures requires a metaphysical difference that must be maintained and secured in order for the relation to exist. There is no possibility of christomonism (the denial of the full reality of the creature) when the full reality of the creature (in all its metaphysical existence, essence, and nature) is a requirement of that covenantal relationship.

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Covenant Is the Internal Basis of Creation (Grace Perfects Nature) Barth’s language that covenant is the “internal basis” for creation is a statement of how creation is framed by covenant as its source and fulfillment. Creation is dependent upon covenant both for its existence6 and for its final end and perfection. After having established the metaphysical reality and distinction of creation, Barth then situates all of creation with God’s eternal covenant as its source and ultimate end. What is most distinctive in Barth’s doctrine of creation is not merely that it is ordered to and perfected in covenant, but that the trinitarian basis for the unity of creation and covenant cannot be lost. Barth is insistent that the first and second articles of the creed be read together. Fundamental to Barth’s strictures against natural theology is his anxiety about an independent basis for knowing God that would render revelation and the grace of reconciliation superfluous. This epistemological concern has its metaphysical basis in Barth’s rejection of an independent creation, which would have its existence from itself and be conceived apart from reconciliation. Although the doctrine of creation ex nihilo establishes creation’s absolute dependence upon the Creator God for its existence, Barth’s real concern is to establish creation’s dependence upon covenant for the fulfillment and perfection of creation.7 “Thus the covenant is the goal of creation and creation the way to the covenant” (CD III/1, p. 97). There is a twofold notion of absolute dependence: in terms of creation’s existence based upon God’s sovereign power and rule and in terms of creation’s fulfillment and perfection in covenant.

Creation Is Dependent on God for Its Existence “[T]he affirmation of the world’s dependence on God is an ‘essential element’ in the Christian confession, identical with the Christian doctrine of creation, only if it speaks of an absolutely definite God—who is also recognised as the Lord and Ruler of that history—and of the world’s dependence on this God” (CD III/1, p. 45). Not only is creation absolutely dependent upon God for its existence, but for Barth, it is important to know exactly who this God is. We are not talking about a mere God‐in‐general but the Lord and Ruler of history and the world. “Absolute dependence” according to Barth needs the further determination of God’s rulership in order to be a concept adequate to the God revealed in the scriptural narrative. For Barth, theological concepts must be determinate. And the ultimate determination and specification of God’s identity comes from

6  It is proper to say that for Barth creation is absolutely dependent upon God as its ultimate source and the eternal covenant as its proximate source of existence. The phrase “eternal covenant” occurs twice in CD III/1, §41 (see CD III/1, p. 97) where it is used analogously with eternal election. In this section, I address the texts in which Barth specifies God as the source of creation’s existence. In the following section, I address how Barth can speak of creation as internal to eternal election and thus dependent on covenant as the source of its existence. 7  “Salvation is more than being. Salvation is fulfillment, the supreme, sufficient, definitive and indestructible fulfillment of being. Salvation is the perfect being which is not proper to created being as such but is still future” (CD IV/1, p. 8).

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reconciliation – Christ’s atoning work on the cross. The identity of the Creator is identical with the identity of the Reconciler. Without this unity of identity between the first and second articles of the creed, one does not have a Christian doctrine of creation (see CD III/1, p. 45). Barth affirms that the creature owes its very existence to the creator. “The right of the Creator in respect of the creature is based on the simple fact that the latter belongs to Him, not by subsequent acquisition, but as an original possession, in and with the very existence which it owes to Him” (CD III/1, p. 36, italics added). Barth clearly understands that the creature’s absolute dependence upon the Creator ramifies creation’s entire reality. There is no point, no place, no time in which creation is never in absolute dependence upon its Creator. This is a crucial point because it addresses Barth’s fear of an independent creation. Barth cannot fear a metaphysically independent creation because the doctrine of creation out of nothing, which Barth affirms, secures creation’s absolute dependence upon God.

Creation Is Ordered to Covenant as Means to Final End Creation is ordered to covenant and depends on covenant as its final end: “Thus the ­covenant is the goal of creation and creation the way to the covenant” (CD III/1, p. 97). Creation does not ultimately aim at the kingdom, power, and glory of humanity but rather aims at the history of God in covenant (CD III/1, p. 90). There is no creation nor “natural system of reality” independent and withdrawn from the sphere of grace because the covenant of reconciliation is the final word of God for all of creation (CD III/1, p. 62). Barth justifies his claim that creation is ordered to covenant through his reading of Scripture’s drama of salvation. Because Scripture as a whole narrates one drama, creation is prehistory to covenant history and not independent from covenant history. The two creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2 are a prehistory of the people of Israel (CD III/1, p. 63). There is an internal relation between creation and the covenant history of Israel because the Creator God is the God of Israel (CD III/1, p. 65). They are the same God. “As Creator He is already the same as He becomes later as the God of Sinai and of Zion. And He will later reveal Himself on Sinai and in Zion as the same as he has spoken and acted there. The decisive commentary on the biblical histories of creation is the rest of the Old Testament” (CD III/1, p. 65). The means‐to‐end structure that orders creation to covenant takes on an instrumental character when Barth talks about creation as the stage and equipment for grace. Every story requires a stage upon which to tell the story. Covenant is the story of God’s relationship with God’s people – that God did not desire to be alone and elected a human partner to have fellowship. Creation is the stage upon which this story is told. Moreover, Barth understands that for grace to be grace, it must be received by something. Barth describes the order and relation between nature and grace as one of preparation. “Creation is one long preparation, and therefore the being and existence of the creature one long readiness, for what God will intend and do with it in the history of the covenant. Its nature is simply its equipment for grace” (CD III/1, p. 231). Creation and

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nature are the instruments of grace serving as its equipment. The instrumental quality of creation as means to the end of covenant, however, is no denial of the metaphysical reality, distinction, and goodness8 of creation. In this section, we have emphasized God’s grace in giving creation its existence that is fulfilled and perfected in covenant  –  all of which does not compete against the claims presented in the previous section that established the metaphysical reality and distinction of creation. Within Barth’s ­covenantal framework, grace does not swallow up and destroy nature but fulfills and perfects it.

God’s Free Love in Election Is the Eternal Basis of Covenant One Covenant, One Will, One God In the previous two sections, we discussed creation as the external basis of covenant and covenant as the internal basis of creation. Now we will discuss how Barth locates both bases eternally in God. The exegetical and historical relation of type (creation) and antitype (covenant) is taken into God’s eternity which is prototype (CD III/1, pp. 67, 68, 96). Barth’s views on covenant and its relation to the doctrine of God are framed against the weaknesses in federal theology’s view of covenants (see the small print section concluding CD IV/1, §57.2). Federal theologians (e.g. Johannes Cocceius) argue for multiple covenants stemming from an original covenant of works that is successively abrogated and then reconciled by the covenant of grace. Barth asks: How is the eternal God of the covenant of works related to the eternal God of the covenant of grace if grace is a response to the abrogations of the original covenant of works? By turning from a covenant of works to a covenant of grace, does God show Godself to no longer be righteous but now merciful? How then are the righteousness and mercy of God reconciled in the eternal being of God? Barth finds federal theology to be without an adequate response. Instead, Barth argues for one eternal covenant of grace that removes any ambiguity surrounding the question, Which God is the true God: the God of the covenant of works or the God of the covenant of grace? However, in order for one eternal covenant of grace to be grounded in the single will of an eternal God, Barth faces the challenge of making eternity contain creation without making creation eternal. In this section, we examine the claims Barth makes to support this interpretation of a single covenant, single divine will, and a single, eternal God. Federal theology serves as a helpful counterpoint to Barth’s view. Barth argues that the dualistic structure of covenants in federal theology introduces a fissure into God’s eternal being. Barth overcomes this problem by making Jesus Christ the beginning of all the ways and works of God and the one who is both elect and reprobate. Where federal theology equivocates as to how the one, eternal God can be the God of both the c­ ovenant

8  For Barth’s discussion of the goodness of creation see CD III/1, “The Yes of God the Creator,” for example pp. 370–372.

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of works and the covenant of grace, Barth unambiguously commits the divine being to a single eternal will and covenant of grace: It is not self‐evident but a new thing that in His unity with Himself from all eternity God wills to be the God of man and to make and have man as His man. This is the content of a particular act of will. …This is what we can call a decree… God’s free election of grace, in which even in His eternity before all time and the foundation of the world, He is no longer alone by Himself, He does not rest content with Himself, He will not restrict Himself to the wealth of His perfections and His own inner life as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In this free act of the election of grace there is already present, and presumed, and assumed unto unity with His own existence as God, the existence of the man whom He intends and loves from the very first and in whom He intends and loves all other [human beings]. …In this free act of the election of grace the Son of the Father is no longer just the eternal Logos, but as such, as very God from all eternity He is also the very God and very man He will become in time. In the divine act of predestination there pre‐exists the Jesus Christ who as the Son of the eternal Father and the child of the Virgin Mary will become and be the Mediator of the covenant between God and man, the One who accomplishes the act of atonement. He in whom the covenant of grace is fulfilled and revealed in history is also its eternal basis. (CD IV/1, p. 66, italics added)

The eternal preexistence of Jesus Christ is the content of this single act of God’s eternal will. Election signifies God’s desire not to be without humanity in God’s perfect triunity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit but to include in God’s own eternal existence the existence of humanity through the God‐man Jesus Christ (CD IV/1, p. 7). In the free election of grace, the existence of humanity is already present, presumed, and assumed into God’s eternal unity. Humanity is not an afterthought in God’s eternal will. God’s eternal will that elects Jesus Christ contains within that decision a determination to be for all of humanity. The key point for the doctrine of creation is that Jesus Christ cannot be eternally anticipated in God’s free election apart from the human nature of Christ and the creation presupposed by that human nature. God’s free election of grace entails an eternal decision that anticipates creation because the election of Jesus Christ requires it. It is important to note that creation is eternally anticipated and mediated by election and retains its creaturely properties. Creation does not become eternal on Barth’s account because it is mediated by election, covenant, and christology. God Is the Inner Basis of Covenant Creation is the external basis of the covenant. Creation is not the inner basis of covenant. Only God is the inner basis of covenant (CD III/1, p. 97). What does it mean to say that God is the inner basis of the covenant? It means that God’s free love has chosen Jesus Christ before the foundation of the world and is the ground for the eternal covenant that is realized in history. The outcome is that creation is eternally anticipated by election and historically fulfilled in covenant. In other words, when Barth talks about the eternal election of Jesus Christ – and his history in incarnation and atonement – that

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history of salvation requiring a created realm is presupposed by eternal election. By way of anticipation, the created history of Jesus Christ is internal to God’s eternal election of Jesus Christ. Creation, which serves as the stage for the history of Jesus Christ, is therefore not external to God’s eternal election. But this decree of grace, and the creative will of God founded on it, has its necessary inner presupposition in the fact that the unity, love and peace between God the Father and Son are not unsettled or disturbed but transcendently glorified by the fact that the Word of God becomes flesh, that in His Son God takes to Himself man’s misery and undertakes his redemption, thus addressing His love to another than Himself, i.e., the creature, and willing and bringing about the existence of another than Himself, i.e., that of the creature. That in His very humility and exaltation in human nature, in Jesus Christ crucified and risen and for His sake in the existence of the creature, the being of God should radiate and triumph – bigger and stronger than if He had kept His glory to Himself – is obviously the inner presupposition of the divine decree of grace and of the divine creative will founded upon it. (CD III/1, p. 58)

The eternal love, peace, and harmony between Father and Son are not only undisturbed but actually confirmed in the Son taking on flesh, suffering, dying, and being raised again. The salvation history enacted by the Son is no surprise and no disruption to the eternal Godhead because it is eternally anticipated and presupposed by election. Election, in itself, presupposes the history of Jesus Christ in incarnation and atonement that in turn presupposes creation as the stage for that drama of salvation. With Barth’s doctrine of election (and therefore doctrine of God), grace presupposes nature by way of the human nature of Jesus Christ. And because the human nature of Jesus Christ presupposes the realm of creation, creation (in all its otherness to God) exists by way of anticipation in eternal election. To claim that election presupposes creation, does not divinize creation; there is no loss of creation’s creaturely status. Creation is not so taken up into God as to become divine. Creation is not eternal. Creation is not absolutely independent. Creation’s absolute, metaphysical otherness is maintained even as creation is eternally contained by way of anticipation in election. The upshot is that creation preexists in election such that its reality as other is guaranteed and not compromised. Necessity of Creation Is Consistent with Divine Perfection and Freedom Barth explicitly uses the language of necessity to describe nature’s relation to grace. “Inasmuch as the love of God did not content itself in that eternal covenant as such, in so far as the love of God intended to give the covenant form outside the divine realm, the love of God itself made this external ground of covenant, the existence and essence of the creature and of creation, necessary” (KD III/1, p. 107, my translation, italics mine; CD III/1, p. 97). Creation stands in a necessary relation to election while being absolutely dependent upon God as source and final end. The relations of necessity and absolute dependence are not mutually exclusive but follow from different and compatible ­premises. Creation’s necessity is by way of God’s free love in election and is considered a

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hypothetical or suppositional necessity because it depends upon and supposes election (cf. Aquinas 1948, ST I, Q. 19, Art. 3, resp.). Creation’s absolute dependence is by way of God as source and final end. Creation is both absolutely dependent upon God and also necessary to the divine election.9 The creaturely realm is necessary for the actualization of the covenant of love but only as creation is a perfectly free act.10

Conclusion The first section of this essay shows why the objection of christomonism cannot get off the ground if the metaphysical reality and distinction of creation are not only affirmed by Barth but required by Barth’s view of covenant. The first two sections as a whole also show how Barth’s views are formally identical to the scholastic tradition’s view that “grace does not destroy nature but perfects it.” Barth’s divergence from the scholastic theological tradition is evident in how he frames nature’s relation to grace within a thoroughgoing covenantal framework grounded in God’s eternal election. Creation is the presupposition of covenant in that you cannot have a covenant without creation as its stage. But more basic than creation as presupposition of covenant is the claim that covenant is the source and final end of all things. First in the mind and will of God is God’s eternal decision for covenant from which creation follows. Covenant is eternal; creation is not. The status of creation is completely dependent upon the prior reality of covenant. The burden of this essay has been largely formal in following Barth’s lead to secure the grammatical priority of covenant in talking about creation while showing that Barth affirms creaturely reality and rejects christomonism. And this leads us to ask: If Barth has so clearly affirmed the metaphysical distinction and reality of creation, why does the charge of “christomonism” continue to plague Barth’s theology?11 I am confident that this criticism continues because not enough attention has been given to CD III as a whole. But perhaps some of the fault lies with Barth. Barth makes the formal and grammatical distinctions, but does he confirm this with enough material

9  “The creature does not exist by chance. It does not merely exist, but exists meaningfully. In its existence it realizes a purpose and plan and order. It has not come into being by chance but by necessity, and therefore not as an accident but as a sign and witness of this necessity. This is already implied in the fact that it is a creature and therefore the work of the creator, of God. …The act of creation as such is the revelation of the glory of God by which He gives to the creature meaning and necessity. …Creating it, God gives it meaning and necessity” (CD III/1, pp. 229–230, translation modified; KD III/1, p. 260). “The fact that the covenant is the goal of creation is not something which is added later to the reality of the creature, as though the history of creation might equally have been succeeded by any other history. It already characterizes creation itself and as such, and therefore the being and existence of the creature. The covenant whose history had still to commence was the covenant which, as the goal appointed for creation and the creature, made creation necessary and ­possible, and determined and limited the creature” (CD III/1, p. 231). See also CD III/1, p. 72. 10  “It is only God’s free love that makes Him bind Himself to [the creature]. In so doing, He does not in any sense discharge a debt. How can He be impelled by anything but Himself, in perfect freedom, really to love the creature which owes its existence and nature to Him alone” (CD III/1, p. 96). 11  See, for example, Horton 2011, pp. 146–147.

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content? To address this, one needs to turn to the material content of Barth’s theological anthropology (CD III/2), doctrine of providence (CD III/3), and ethics of creation (CD III/4) where his account of creaturely reality and human agency are given more explanation. References Aquinas, T. (1948). The Summa Theologica (trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province). New York: Benziger Bros. Balthasar, H.U.v. (1992). The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation (trans. E.T. Oakes). San Francisco: Ignatius. Barth, K. (2017). Barth in Conversation: Volume 1, 1959–1962 (eds. E. Busch, K. Froehlich, D.L. Guder and D.C. David). Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox.

Berkouwer, G.C. (1956). The Triumph of Grace in the Theology of Karl Barth (trans. H.R. Boer). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Horton, M.S. (2011). “Covenant, election, and incarnation: evaluating Barth’s Actualist Christology.” In: Karl Barth and American Evangelicalism (eds. B.L. McCormack and C.B. Anderson), 112–147. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

CHAPTER 11

Barth on Providence Sung‐Sup Kim

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arl Barth develops his mature doctrine of providence in volume III, part 3 of the Church Dogmatics (CD). Probably due to the general lack of interest in this doctrine, this part‐volume has received less attention than the others. Recently, however, new studies that engage with the whole part‐volume as a coherent doctrine of providence are surfacing (Kennedy 2011; Green 2011). It is fitting because Barth himself desires this doctrine to be “regarded as the real substance of this volume [3]” (CD III/3, p. xii). The entire third volume is titled “The Doctrine of Creation,” and two interdependent theses govern his discussions throughout this volume: “creation is the external basis of this covenant” (CD III/1, p. 96) and “the covenant is the internal basis of creation” (CD III/1, p. 231). This dialectical relationship of the “external” and the “internal” features prominently in Barth’s discussion of providence too, because “the history of the covenant which follows creation also needs an external basis,” and this “external basis is the sway of divine providence” (CD III/3, p. 7). The work of God’s creation cannot be understood without his work of salvation in and through the covenant. Likewise, God’s providence can be understood only from the perspective of the covenantal history that continues even today. In line with the dialectic of external and internal, it would be helpful to first see how Barth lays out the outlook of the doctrine by surveying and critiquing its history, especially of Reformed theology that stems from John Calvin and leads up to Friedrich Schleiermacher. We can then turn to his understanding of the internal, doctrinal relationship of providence with predestination and creation and finally to his material discussion of this doctrine.

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth and Dogmatics, Volume I, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Barth’s Critique of the Reformed Doctrine of Providence Underlying Barth’s discussion of providence is a deep sense of crisis that in modernity this belief has become so void of meaning to the degree that “providence” became a favorite word on the lips of Adolf Hitler (CD III/3, p. 33). Instead of laying the blame on external reasons, such as the rise of modern secularism and the experience of great atrocities, he asks what Christian theology has done wrong to weaken the faith in God’s good care of the world and to leave this faith to such abuses at wrong hands. He traces the seed of the problem back to the Protestant theology of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, indeed to the Reformers themselves: “the older Protestant theology was guilty of an almost total failure even to ask concerning the Christian meaning and character of the doctrine of providence, let alone to assert it” (CD III/3, p. 34). In other words, the doctrine of providence was never sufficiently Christian from the beginning; its decline in the modern era is only a natural development. Barth’s criticism falls especially hard on Reformed theology with its distinctive emphasis on the sovereignty of God. To be sure, Barth thinks that the Reformers such as Calvin and Zwingli had the right insight to emphasize God’s sovereignty over the creature, but they abstracted from the particular self‐revelation of God in Jesus Christ and failed to ground it properly. Their successors carried this tendency to the extreme with increasingly scholastic sophistication. According to Barth, the result was that the Reformed understanding of providence became more and more difficult to distinguish itself from ­faceless fatalism (CD III/3, pp. 115–116). Barth’s reading of the history that follows is characteristically sweeping but fascinating and deserves attention. A house built on sand had to face the beating of winds. The Reformed understanding of providence made the Christian obedience little different from a Stoic resignation or Islamic submission. It was inadequate to suppress the “murmuring of the clay against the potter (Rom. 9:20f), the revolt against a capricious sovereign rule, and the despair or frivolity which is the inevitable consequence of this revolt” (CD III/3, p. 116). The result was the rise of the Counter‐Reformation, which retreated to medieval synergism. Lutherans, too, became increasingly dissatisfied with the overly logical doctrine of providence in Reformed theology and accused Calvinists of apostasy to Islam. Among Calvinists, too, arose a revolt led by Arminius. Further challenges came from the school of Saumur at the end of the seventeenth century and from the Enlightenment, which reverted to “a fairly crude semi‐Pelagianism of a pietist‐­ rationalist type” (CD III/3, p. 116). Reformed theology certainly did not remain still but launched a counter‐counterattack, which according to Barth, reached its climax in Schleiermacher, who declared “against all forms of synergism the great conception of the sole dominion of God and the absolute dependence of the creature” (CD III/3, p. 117). Barth acknowledges the stature of Schleiermacher as “approaching that of Zwingli and Calvin,” but he argues that their common problem was the failure to apply to the doctrine of providence “the proper centre of all Reformed knowledge, the doctrine of grace and justification” (CD III/3, p. 116). Whereas the Reformers certainly understood this center but did not know how to apply it to the doctrine of providence, Barth harshly contends that Schleiermacher never really understood the doctrine of grace and justification. Without a firm foundation even in Schleiermacher, the house

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was bound to fall. The doctrine of providence in modernity was “pushed more and more into the shadows, and this time seriously, in the eyes of all right‐thinking men” (CD III/3, p. 117). This is a provocative criticism of the Reformed doctrine of providence. Ironically Reformed theology, which affirms God’s sovereignty more strongly than any other theological tradition, has made it obsolete. Barth finds Schleiermacher most responsible for the decline of this doctrine, but he understands Schleiermacher as an inevitable fruit of the seed sown by Calvin himself. The Calvin scholar Randall Zachman puts it this way: “Barth claims that Calvin’s doctrine of providence, based on an abstract concept of divine omnipotence, led directly to Schleiermacher’s God as the Whence of the feeling of absolute dependence” (2004, p. 139). Barth’s discussion of providence, therefore, is a constant critique of Reformed theology in general and an implicit dialogue with Calvin and Schleiermacher in particular. Now whether his reading of Calvin and Schleiermacher is correct and how his own doctrine of providence compares with theirs remains an important question that needs to be examined (see Kim 2014).

The Problem of Christocentrism Now Barth’s critique of the historical discussions on providence may be better understood by analyzing it in terms of three interrelated problems (Kim 2014, pp. 5–17). First, Barth critiques that the Reformed doctrine of providence is not sufficiently centered on Jesus Christ. If the belief in God’s providence were to be a genuine faith instead of a mere opinion or postulate, it has to be simply “a hearing and receiving of the Word of God” (CD III/3, p. 15). As is evident throughout Barth’s theology, the Word of God that we must constantly hear and receive is primarily and ultimately Jesus Christ. The doctrine of providence, as with all other Christian doctrines, must be grounded in Jesus Christ and oriented by the faith in him. As we saw previously, Barth regards providence as the external basis of the history of the covenant that follows creation (CD III/3, p. 7). We must, therefore, again and again turn to Jesus Christ for the meaning of history in the Old and New Testaments, but our knowledge of and faith in divine providence is not limited to the biblical framework. The difficulty here, as Barth admits, is that God’s lordship in general history often remains hidden. Nevertheless, our faith in providence must always return to its internal basis for meaning and direction, and even in this farthest realm, the center is the one Word of God, Jesus Christ, in whom we come to know with certainty God’s care for the world. This is where the older Reformed theology failed, according to Barth, and even Calvin did not ask what Christ has to do with providence. In his characteristic way, however, Barth does not dismiss the Reformed tradition outright but points to glimpses of christocentric insight. For example, he refers to the preface of Calvin’s commentary on Genesis in which Calvin writes, “Christ is that image in which God presents to our view, not only his heart, but also his hands and his feet” (1844–1856, 1: p. 63). Barth interprets “his hands and his feet” as “God’s external works in the sphere of creation” revealed in Christ and points to Calvin’s warning that “if we do not keep strictly to Christ we can only be betrayed into the wildest hallucinations in respect of these external

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works of God” (CD III/3, p. 30). Barth regards this “the strongest testimony of theological tradition in this direction” (CD III/1, p. 31). However, this and other similar lines of thought did not go beyond occasional insights, and the Reformed tradition neglected to develop them fully. Barth does not doubt the good intention of the Reformers and their successors. They, too, were trying to be Christian in this doctrine, but they assumed it to be a general article of belief in common with basic monotheism and never seriously sought its theological foundation. Hence, Barth’s project is to build this doctrine on the rock of christological ground.

The Problem of Determinism The second form of Barth’s critique of the Reformed doctrine of providence is its inherent determinism. If the first critique points out the lack of a proper “ontic basis” in Christ, the second turns to the consequential uncertainty of the “noetic presupposition” (CD III/3, p. 73). Because the ontological ground of the doctrine is uncertain, our knowledge of God’s care for the world remains ambiguous at best, and faith in this God can never be necessary and compelling. Consequences of this methodological failure, Barth argues, are significant. The Reformed fathers instinctively understood the absolute supremacy and freedom of God in relation to creation. In abstraction from God’s work and revelation in Jesus Christ, however, this “God” could not be understood as anything other than “a purely formal concept, denoting a supreme being endowed with absolute, unconditioned and irresistible power” (CD III/3, p. 113). Reformed orthodoxy lacked the proper ground to demonstrate clearly and certainly that the “majesty of the operation of God” results from the fact that it is “the operation of His eternal love” (CD III/3, p. 107). The result, Barth laments, is the impossibility of genuinely and freely loving God. Not being able to know what kind of God stands behind awesome workings of the grand world, we are left with the unfortunate choice between resignation before an absolute power and submission to it. Barth asks incisively how this is different from the Stoic resignation “in face of an all‐powerful destiny” or from the submission to “the inscrutable will of Allah” (CD III/3, p. 113). Another noetic consequence is the inevitable infiltration of foreign concepts. In a ­historical discussion, Barth observes that Lutheran and Reformed theologians had their differences, but in steering clear of the dangers of the Roman Catholic synergism and Islamic fatalism, they both borrowed the concept of “cause” from Aristotle and Aquinas. This concept was already evident in Zwingli and Calvin, and even in Luther, in explaining God’s providence (CD III/3, pp. 94–98). Barth does not necessarily object to a borrowing of a concept from an external source. What matters is whether the terminology serves the Bible and carries its message faithfully. Barth argues that the Protestant theologians were formally correct in adopting the concept of cause since God indeed is the source of all causes. The problem, however, was that materially they filled no specifically Christian content in this causal relationship between God and the creature. Moreover, they provided no safeguards against possible misuse of the concept (CD III/3, pp. 99–100). Barth sees Schleiermacher as the endpoint of a serial wrong use of the concept of cause. In Schleiermacher’s doctrine of providence, God is reduced to the source of

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omnicausality that acts only in relation to the totality of the creation, not directly or immediately on the individual (CD III/3, pp. 170–173). Ironically, the absolutely free God of Schleiermacher is no longer free to love the individual creature. It is as if the causal system has swallowed up both God and the world. Barth thinks that Schleiermacher followed the path left open carelessly by Calvin and his successors.

The Problem of Evil Any teaching on divine providence must touch on the problem of evil at some point. Barth places this problem in the wider discussion of “nothingness,” the paradoxical being that does not exist because God has rejected it and yet poses a radical threat to the creature affirmed by God (CD III/3, pp. 289–368). Again, the third form of Barth’s critique is closely related to the first two. He argues that because the older doctrine of providence failed to provide a firm basis in Jesus Christ, it lacked the certainty that God protects the creature from attacks by that which is not. This is where it becomes apparent how radically Barth holds on to the belief that the knowledge of Christ is the key in every area of theology, including the problem of nothingness. By becoming flesh, the Word became a lost creature, and through the Word, God took upon Godself the challenge from nothingness. Therefore, our knowledge even of nothingness comes only from Christ, and “only from the standpoint of Jesus Christ, His birth, death, and resurrection, do we see it in reality and truth” and understand how serious this challenge is (CD III/3, p. 305). The problem with Reformed theology, Barth argues, was that it began not from this concrete knowledge of Christ but from abstraction. It treated God, creature, and nothingness like philosophical concepts that had to be resolved. Such an attitude would inevitably fall to the dilemma of theodicy, an attempt to balance out God’s goodness and almightiness in the face of rampant evil in the world. Barth observes that with their typically meticulous discussions Reformed orthodox theologians still could not satisfactorily define what nothingness is or declare how it is defeated. Barth thinks that they did not take the problem of evil seriously enough not because they lacked the experience of it but because they failed to establish firm ground for the good in Christ. Barth argues that this tendency reaches its climax in Schleiermacher for whom God is the source of omnicausality and the “author” even of sin, but he stands totally unaffected by it; hence, God is neither wrathful against sin nor merciful toward sinners. Barth asks, however, “How can anything have reality for us if we are convinced that it has none for God” (CD III/3, p. 329). Nothingness seems to merely become nothing.

Providence in Relation with Predestination and Creation If Barth’s historical critique of the Reformed doctrine of providence could be seen as clearing the outer field of the doctrine, his next task is to turn to the inner workings of the doctrine. Before formulating his own understanding of the dogmatic core, Barth starts from positioning this doctrine in a proper relationship with the two adjacent ­doctrines of predestination and creation.

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Traditionally, Reformed theology tended to understand predestination as a particular application of the general concept of providence. For example, François Wendel states that for Calvin “Predestination can in fact be regarded as in some respects a particular application of the more general notion of Providence” (1963, p. 178). God’s sovereignty is the presupposition out of which God elects some and not others, but Barth critiques that in this ordering Reformed theology makes the ground of God’s election an inscrutable, hidden will of God. Barth, therefore, radically reverses the order: “the election of grace being understood as this ratio, the root of the doctrine of providence” (CD III/3, p. 6). For him, predestination is a matter of God’s “eternal election of the Son of God to be the Head of His community and all creatures” (CD III/3, p. 4). As the internal decree of God, predestination “does not presuppose the act of creation and the existence of creatures, but is their presupposition” (CD III/3, pp. 4–5). Providence, on the other hand, is the “execution of this decree” as the external work of God (CD III/3, pp. 5). Therefore, Barth places the doctrine of predestination within the doctrine of God in the second volume of the Church Dogmatics, and the doctrine of providence within the doctrine of creation in the third volume. Only in this order, Barth argues, can we be certain of God’s love for us in election, and only then can we be assured also of God’s fatherly care for the world. Next Barth ponders the relationship between creation and providence. They are both external works of God that create and sustain the stage upon which the history of the covenant plays out, but Barth also distinguishes the two clearly, for two reasons. First, he wants to safeguard the freedom of God whose work of creation is perfect, and hence there is no need to create again and again. Providence, therefore, is a separate work that sustains the creation. It is not “continuata creatio [continual creation]” but a “continuatio creationis [continuation of the creation]” (CD III/3, p. 8). Second, Barth also wants to safeguard the creature’s freedom. Although creation has to do with the unilateral and unconditioned act of God, “providence has its basis not only in God’s unconditioned freedom and decision and the mystery of His election of grace, but also externally in the presupposed being of the creature and internally in its neediness in relation to the Creator” (CD III/3, p. 8). Providence, therefore, is the doctrine that provides room for a reciprocal relationship between Creator and creature. God has freely associated Godself with us, and we are called to freely participate in the providence of this faithful God with gratitude and praise. This is Barth’s ­“two‐sided inheritance from the Reformed school: the praiseworthiness of the God of divine providence and the doxology of the creature” (Green 2011, p. 40).

The Threefold Framework of the Doctrine of Providence With all his sharp critiques on the older discussions of providence, it is somewhat surprising that when Barth moves into the substance of the doctrine of providence, he takes up the traditional Reformed threefold framework. Indeed, he sounds surprised at himself: “I have found it possible to keep far more closely to the scheme of the older orthodox dogmatics (conservatio, concursus, gubernatio) [preserving, accompanying, ­ruling] than I anticipated” (CD III/3, p. xii; Heppe 1950, p. 256). Barth’s intention has never been to abandon the tradition; he rarely, if ever, discards anything outright. But

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he continues to write, “The radical correction which I have also undertaken will not be overlooked” (CD III/3, p. xii). He critiques the tradition, but if there is anything useful in it, he rehabilitates it for his own use. Barth’s positive construction of the doctrine is inseparable from his close and critical reading of the Reformed tradition. More important, Barth reasons that this framework accords well with the biblical formula: “For from him and through him and to him are all things” (Rom. 11:36 NRSV). He exegetes conservatio from “from him,” concursus from “through him,” and gubernatio from “to him” (CD III/3, pp. 59, 95, 157). Interestingly Barth’s thesis at the beginning of §49 contains everything he will be parsing out: “God fulfils His lordship over His creature by preserving, accompanying, and ruling the whole course of its earthly existence. He does this as His mercy is revealed and active in the creaturely sphere in Jesus Christ, and the lordship of His Son is thus manifested to it” (CD III/3, p. 58). Michael Plathow observes that the grammatical structure of this thesis in German mirrors the theological framework of Barth’s doctrine (KD III/3, p. 67; Plathow 1976, p. 102). In other words, how he says matches what he says. Plathow points out that there are two complex sentences here. The first consists of the main clause supported by a subordinate clause; the second consists of the main clause with subordinate and final clauses. Set up this way, the three classical concepts of providence (in the subordinate clause) serve and support the meaning of God’s fatherly lordship (in the main clause), and they must be limited and characterized by Jesus Christ (in the final clause). Already at this point we see that Barth uses the classical concepts only by subordinating them to the fatherly lordship of God and filling them with christological purpose. Furthermore, Plathow points out that the three modes of providence correspond to the three aspects of the history of the covenant – justification, sanctification, and vocation (CD IV/1, pp. 128, 523, 601; CD IV/2, p. 502) – and also to the christological aspects in the doctrine of reconciliation: Jesus Christ is very God, very human, and one (CD IV/1, pp. 128–154; Plathow 1976, p. 103). These are helpful analogies to remember.

The Divine Preserving Barth first asks what it means that God preserves the created world. He answers somewhat paradoxically that God preserves the creature eternally but “within the limits which correspond to its creaturely existence” (CD III/3, p. 61). God preserves the creature as creature and does not eradicate its contingency and limitedness. At the same time, by preserving it in space and time, God allows the creature to participate in the history of the covenant and become a covenant partner. Only in the finite space and time can we “participate in the history of Jesus Christ and His people, and therefore in eternal life” (CD III/3, p. 63). This may be a point of contention, however. G. C. Berkouwer argues that Barth’s “‘eternalizing of this present life’ dominated Barth’s thinking from the beginning” and critiques that it arises “neither from Christology nor from the Scriptures, but only from an anthropology” (1956, p. 340). Going further, another critic thinks that Barth’s understanding of eternal life in the present leads to the rejection of the idea of life after death (Kennedy 2011, pp. 210–211). On the other

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hand, Geoffrey Bromiley counters such critics in strong words: “This preservation … should not be confused with the resurrection, which belongs to reconciliation and redemption. Commentators can easily make fools of themselves by jumping to a hasty, illogical, and totally unfounded conclusion at this point” (1979, p. 144). We should not forget, however, how dialectically Barth’s mind works. Dialectical pairs such as hidden and revealed, not yet and already, nevertheless and therefore, and de jure and de facto are prevalent throughout his discussions of providence. Eternal preservation and finite preservation are in a dialectical way, and hence, the eternal life in the present that is still hidden may not necessarily negate the fully revealed eternal life of the resurrection. Barth then asks regarding the action of divine preserving. It is God’s free act out of his love for the Son who advocates our creaturely right to exit. But unlike his act in creation and redemption, which is immediate, God’s act in providence works through creaturely means. That is why we can talk about God’s act accompanying our acts in providence. Nevertheless, Barth emphasizes that even in the indirectness the preserving must be identified unequivocally as God’s act (CD III/3, pp. 65–66). Because it remains an act of God, the mode of divine preservation is beyond our comprehension, not due to the metaphysical unknowability of the being of God as older theology tended to think, but because God preserves the world out of his free goodness (CD III/3, p. 73). Barth is shifting the question of providence from how to who. We need not be weary of God’s caprice, however, for we have the concrete knowledge of the Father who has elected the creature in his Son and loves it for the sake of his Son. Jesus Christ is, therefore, the “ontic basis” and the “noetic presupposition” of God’s preserving of the world (CD III/3, p. 73). If God’s preserving is not necessarily against creaturely finitude such as death, what then is it against? It is ultimately against the far more threatening menace of nothingness (das Nichtige) to which God “pronounced His wise and omnipotent No” with the force of “His wrath and rejection and judgment” (CD III/3, p. 77). In the preface to this part‐volume, Barth explains that he does not want to mention God and the devil in the same breath and hence has separated the discussions of providence (§49) and evil (§50) (CD III/3, p. xii). But because God’s preserving ultimately means defense against the threat of nothingness, he makes a brief excursus here, but we find a disturbing tension in this preliminary discussion of nothingness. Barth returns to the Genesis account in which God creates light and divides it from darkness, and Barth calls the darkness the “shadow of His work,” which is no adversary to God but poses a “radical problem” to the creature (CD III/3, p. 77). Now Barth seems to conflate this shadow side of creation, such as darkness, sickness, and death, with the power of nothingness. In his later discussion in §50, however, Barth affirms the total goodness of God’s creation in both light and darkness and takes pains to distinguish the shadow side of creation from nothingness. A critic points out that Barth is still confused and develops chronologically from one doctrine of nothingness to another (Wüthrich 2006, pp. 134–135, 139–141). Considering that the two sections are included in the same part‐volume, however, it is difficult to find chronological development (Green 2011, p. 171). It might be said that for Barth “nothingness” is what happens to the “shadow side” of creation under the conditions of the fall. In this light a more persuasive way would be to turn to Plathow’s insight that the aspect of divine preserving corresponds to ­justification (Plathow 1976, p. 104). As in the dialectical reality of justification, the

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creature participates de jure in the reality of redemption already, but its de facto share in salvation is yet to be fully realized in God’s preserving work, the external basis of the covenant. In this de facto or provisional state, therefore, confusion persists between the darker side of creation and the truly evil nothingness. The total judgment and expulsion of nothingness are expected but yet to come.

The Divine Accompanying For the formal basis of the divine accompanying, Barth points to the necessary and analytic implication from the divine preserving: “its preservation as actuality necessarily includes its preservation as its activity” (CD III/3, p. 90). We see here the movement from the being (conservatio) to the act (concursus) and finally to the end (gubernatio) of providence, which corresponds to the movement from justification to sanctification and finally to vocation in the history of the covenant. As for the material basis, then, Barth again resorts to the trinitarian reality. As Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, God is love in and of himself. Out of this love, and therefore completely freely, God gives himself to the creature by accompanying it. This is the basis for creaturely autonomy (CD III/3, pp. 107–108). As we saw in Barth’s critique of the orthodox predecessors, he argues that because they did not find this trinitarian ground they ended up with the revolt leading to Schleiermacher’s “Spinozism, or more generally … a pantheistic‐naturalistic monism” (CD III/3, p. 117). Barth follows, but of course reworks, the three classical subcategories of concursus. First, “the activity of God precedes, or praecurrit, that of the creature” (CD III/3, p. 119). It is the preceding activity, not merely a preceding knowledge, of the Father of Jesus Christ to save us. Barth does not deny that creatures determine one another in a causal nexus, but this nexus is not closed but open to the accompanying and determining activity of God. Second, as the creature works in time, the eternal God works simultaneously, or concurrit, with the creature in time (CD III/3, p. 132). Barth refuses to think of the simultaneity of divine and creaturely activity in a philosophical relationship ­between higher and lower potency or of the first action and subsequent series of actions. Instead, he turns again to the trinitarian framework: “the operation of God is His moving of all creatures by the force and wisdom and goodness which are His Holy Spirit, the Spirit of His Word. The divine operation is, therefore, a fatherly operation” (emphasis in KD III/3, p. 161; CD III/3, p. 142). We see repeatedly how Barth is interested not so much in the mode of God’s action, which ultimately is “the mystery of grace,” as in the subject of this action (CD III/3, p. 135). In the external realm of providence, God’s act is not as clearly discernible as in the covenantal history. Still, Barth argues, God’s act is triune even here: The Father speaks to the creature with the Word and acts upon it through the Spirit. We can trust that this God does not jeopardize but sustain our freedom because he is the Father, “not the father of a father‐complex but the Father of Jesus Christ and therefore our beloved Father” (CD III/3, p. 146). Finally, the activity of God follows, or succurrit, that of the creature. Our actions are surrounded before and after not only by other creature actions but also decisively by the action of the accompanying God. The effects of our actions are in “good hands” because they belong to no one but our Father in Jesus Christ (CD III/3, p. 154).

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The Divine Ruling Barth’s discussion of succurrit seamlessly leads to the doctrine of divine ruling, which teaches that God sets the telos of the creature and guides toward it. Here he finds his footing in the biblical idea of the kingship of God, both in the Old Testament as the king of Israel and more radically in the New Testament as the savior‐king of the world. The movement that governs his discussion here is from a particular, Israelite perspective to a universal, world‐historical significance. Naturally the dialectic of here and not here, revealed and hidden aspects of the kingdom of God drives the movement: “The basileia [kingdom] is here, and yet it is not here; it is revealed, yet also hidden” (CD III/3, p. 156). Barth suggests that we apply this biblical insight to understanding God’s ruling of the world with two rules. First, consider world events outwardly from the particular events in the history of the covenant, which do not take place for themselves but as an internal basis and pattern for general events in the world. Then, look back from  world events to the particular events in the Bible. In this sense, there is no “secular history” because all events have their meaning in the sacred (CD III/3, pp. 183–184). Corresponding to the doctrine of vocation, God’s ruling as the king of Israel and of the world demands our practical response here and now: “For good or evil we have to answer individually to this Lord of the world who is our Lord” (CD III/3, p. 194). The call can be heard “at all times and in all places,” but because it remains hidden, not everyone hears and answers. Christians are called to participate de jure in God’s ruling by serving as signs and witnesses, but they must do so de facto as well, to intentionally and voluntarily take part in showing the signs and proclaiming the Word to the world (Green 2011, pp. 108–124). There is, of course, a tension between the reality of God’s ruling in the present and its future actuality. In the meantime, which is the time of ­providence, we face doubts and objections. We are nevertheless called to participate in God’s ruling of the world humbly and earnestly. Barth gives four concrete examples of the signs of the divine ruling in general ­history, and they move from the inner to the outer: the history of Holy Scripture, the history of the church, the history of Jews, and the limitation of human life (CD III/3, pp. 200– 238). Beyond these signs, however, there remains “the sign and testimony … par excellence, the sign and testimony which stands behind and above all others” (CD III/3, p. 236). Here Barth engages in a brief excursus on angels before the proper discussion in §51 in a manner akin to his preliminary discussion of nothingness. Perhaps no other modern theologian has written so seriously and extensively about the heavenly beings, but for Barth they are indispensable in the realm of providence. Green argues that in aligning with the Reformed tradition Barth supplants the problem of theodicy by turning to the praiseworthiness of God. In the realm of providence, however, forces of evil abound and our confusions persist, and we fail to praise God fully and unequivocally. But thanks to the angels, who never cease to praise and give thanks to God “even though we are not, or even before we are, thankful,” Barth can affirm the praiseworthiness of God in the present (Green 2011, pp. 193–209).

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The Christian Participation Finally, Barth presents three forms of Christian participation in the providence of God: faith, obedience, and prayer. Like the perichoretic relationship of the Trinity, each includes the other two, but each is also distinct from the others (CD III/3, p. 246). By this point we can easily sense Barth’s “joy of tripartite structure” in his discussion of providence and see the correspondence to the three forms of God’s providential act  –  preserving, accompanying, and ruling  –  as well as to the trio of justification, sanctification, and vocation (Plathow 1976). Faith, for Barth, is simply “the receiving of the Word of God as such” (CD III/3, 246), and it is the “source” of the Christian since one “becomes a Christian” in faith and “has knowledge of the divine providence” in faith (KD III/3, p. 288; CD III/3, p. 253, emphasis original). Obedience is “the doing of the Word of God,” and “in obeying one is a Christian” (KD III/3, p. 288; CD III/3, pp. 253–254, emphasis original). The Christian can and must really cooperate with the divine work, and Barth emphasizes that this is possible “only in a direct participation in Jesus Christ, only in discipleship, only in the life of obedience as a member of His community” (CD III/3, p. 257). Lastly, prayer goes to the heart of Christian existence: “To be a Christian and to pray are one and the same thing” (Barth 2002, p. 18). Barth argues that prayer includes such aspects as praise, thanksgiving, confession, and penitence, but “in the first instance, it is an asking, a seeking and a knocking directed towards God” (CD III/3, p. 268). In prayer the Christian genuinely participates in the lordship of God, and “he is the friend of God, called to the side of God … living and ruling and reigning with Him” (CD III/3, p. 286). This participation is a great mystery and power because when the Christian lives, obeys, and prays, “there moves the finger and hand and scepter of the God who rules the world. And what is more, there moves the heart of God” (CD III/3, p. 288).

References Barth, K. (2002). Prayer (trans. S.F. Terrien) (ed. D.E. Saliers). Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox. Berkouwer, G.C. (1956). The Triumph of Grace in the Theology of Karl Barth (trans. H.R. Boer), 2e. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Bromiley, G.W. (1979). An Introduction to the Theology of Karl Barth. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Calvin, J. (1844–1856). Calvin’s Commentaries, vol. 22. Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society. Green, C.C. (2011). Doxological Theology: Karl Barth on Divine Providence, Evil, and the Angels. London: T&T Clark.

Heppe, H. (1950). Reformed Dogmatics Set Out and Illustrated from the Sources (ed. E. Bizer) (trans. G.T. Thompson). London: Allen. Kennedy, D.M. (2011). Providence and Personalism: Karl Barth in Conversation with Austin Farrer, John Macmurray, and Vincent Brümmer. Oxford: Peter Lang. Kim, S. (2014). Deus providebit: Calvin, Schleiermacher, and Barth on the Providence of God. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Plathow, M. (1976). Das Problem des concursus divinus: Das Zusammenwirken von göttlichen Schöpferwirken und geschöpflichem Eigenwirken in K. Barths Kirchlicher Dogmatik. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht.

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Wendel, F. (1963). Calvin: The Origins and Development of His Religious Thought (trans. P. Mairet). New York: Harper & Row. Wüthrich, M.D. (2006). Gott und das Nichtige: Eine Untersuchung zur Rede von Nochtigen ausgehend von §50 der Kirchlichen Dogmatik Karl Barths. Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich.

Zachman, R.C. (2004). Response to “I See Something You Don’t See”. In: For the Sake of the World: Karl Barth and the Future of Ecclesial Theology (ed. G. Hunsinger), 136–142. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

CHAPTER 12

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heology for Barth is “fundamentally Christology.” The theologian’s craft must therefore be “christologically determined as a whole and in all its parts” (CD I/2, p. 123). This claim does not mean that all parts of the Church Dogmatics deal directly with Christology. Of those that do, Barth’s doctrine of the incarnation is found primarily in CD I/2, IV/1, and IV/2. Though covering a period of nearly 20 years, these volumes are remarkably consistent, deeply traditional, and boldly adventurous.

“The Incarnation of the Word” (CD I/2, §§13–15) Barth begins his christological orations in CD I/2 with a traditional and ever‐timely warning. Christology must not define Christ. That is, we must not impose our categories or presuppositions on Christ or place limits on God’s freedom to reveal himself (CD I/2, p. 17). Rather, Christ must define Christology. We must let the reality of Jesus Christ determine what we confess about him. And what we see in Jesus Christ is “God’s Freedom for Man,” God’s unconstrained capacity to reveal himself to humanity. For Barth, when the church confesses that Jesus Christ is “very God and very man,” it is making two necessary but merely penultimate claims (CD I/2, pp. 24–25; cf. IV/2, pp. 63–65). With the Johannine literature, as developed in the Alexandrian tradition, it claims that Jesus is fully God, but in such a way as to avoid any docetic denial of Christ’s humanity. And with the synoptic gospels, as developed in the Antiochene tradition, it claims that Jesus is fully human, but in such a way as to avoid any ebionite denial of Christ’s deity (Molnar 2000, pp. 156–165). Together, these two penultimate claims are but partial indications of the ultimate reality, Jesus Christ himself (Hunsinger 2000, pp. 135–137). “The content of the New Testament is solely the name Jesus Christ, which, of course, also and above all involves the truth of his God‐manhood” (CD I/2, p. 15). The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth and Dogmatics, Volume I, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Once Jesus Christ has been acknowledged as the objective reality of revelation (§13.1), Barth turns to the question of possibility (§13.2). How is it possible for God to reveal himself to us in Jesus Christ? In other words, how is the incarnation possible? From God’s side, the Son is able to become incarnate in time because he is eternally ­generated by the Father (CD I/2, pp. 33–35). From our side, this revelation is accessible to us because the Son takes a human form that we can see and know (CD I/2, pp. 34–36; cf. CD I/1, pp. 425–427). As revelation, the incarnation cannot be made possible by any emptying or kenosis of the Son’s divine nature. How could a Christ emptied of deity reveal deity (CD I/2, pp. 38–39, 159; IV/2, pp. 40–41)? But the incarnation does involve a veiling of deity in humanity, and specifically, as Barth will later explain, in fleshly, fallen humanity. One of the constant emphases in Barth’s account of the incarnation is that, for all the inconceivable transcendence of divine revelation, revelation happens in history. The incarnation, Barth insists, “is a real event accomplished in space and time as history within history” (CD I/2, p. 177). “Reconciliation is history. To know it, we must know it as such. To think of it, we must think of it as such. To speak of it, we must tell it as history” (CD IV/1, p. 157; KD IV/1, p. 171). There is nothing gnostic or docetic about it. Likewise, the doctrine of the virgin birth means that “the person Jesus Christ is the real son of a real mother, the son born of the body, flesh and blood of his mother” (CD I/2, p. 185). The historical reality of the incarnation, Barth will later insist, means that the Word did not become just generic human flesh. “It became Jewish flesh” (CD IV/1, p. 166; KD IV/1, p. 181; cf. CD I/2, pp. 175–176). It is precisely in this historical particularity that the universal character of revelation is grounded (McFarland 2014, p. 284). Following a recondite, elusive, dialectical account of the relation of history and revelation, reminiscent of the Römerbrief (CD I/2, pp. 45–70), Barth addresses biblical history. He attempts to salvage both the possibility of a theological reading of Old Testament history, which he says had been neglected “for the last 200 years” by biblical scholars (CD I/2, p. 79), as well as the idea of a unified canon of Scripture – the Old Testament time of expectation facing the New Testament time of recollection “like the winged altars of the Middle Ages” (CD I/2, p. 95). Barth turns to the heart of matters in §15, “The Mystery of Revelation,” which (along with §16) has been rightly described as “the first truly great piece of writing in the Church Dogmatics, attaining a level of sustained conceptual and rhetorical grandeur equal to anything else Barth wrote” (Webster 2004, p. 62). This section is most remarkable for its combination of deeply traditional character and two surprisingly unconventional claims. Barth believes himself to be advancing a Christology “that up to the present day … has been a dogma which Catholics and Protestants have on the whole believed and taught unanimously and as a matter of course” (CD I/2, p. 174): Christ is fully divine and fully human, two natures in one person. Barth structures his exposition around the allusively creedal phrase, “very God and very man” (§15.2; Jones 2008, pp. 33–34) and the line from the Apostles’ Creed, “conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary” (§15.3). Even the Council of Ephesus and the Second Council of Constantinople make their appearance (CD I/2, pp. 139, 163). Though Barth prefers to speak in plain “English,” all the technical terminology of Christology is in play, right down to affirmation

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of Mary as theotokos (Cyril of Alexandria 1995, pp. 52–55) and the anhypostasis of the Son’s human nature (John of Damascus 1957, 3.9) (CD I/2, pp. 138–139, 164; Lang 1998, p. 657). Barth’s Christology here is a “ringing affirmation” of the Chalcedonian tradition (Von Balthasar 1992, p. 115; Boersma 1990, pp. 263–264; Hunsinger 2000; McCormack 2008, p. 212; cf. CD I/2, pp. 649–650). Where Barth strikes out most markedly from the tradition is in his provocative claim that the Son assumes a fallen human nature (Van Kuiken 2017, pp. 21–31). Against “the very understandable reserve” of “all earlier theology” (CD I/2, p. 153), Barth affirms that the Word took flesh “marked by Adam’s fall,” becoming “exactly like us even in our opposition” to God (CD I/2, p. 151). Barth notes that God is said to have sent “his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh” (Rom 8:3) (CD I/2, pp. 152, 156; Cranfield 1975, pp. 379–382), and he argues that it was not in the crucifixion, but in the Son’s incarnation that God “made him to be sin” (2 Cor 5:21) and “a curse” (Gal 3:13). Barth even appears to apply to Christ the words of Hebrews 5:2–3: “he himself is subject to weakness; and because of this he must offer sacrifice for his own sins as well as for those of the people” (CD I/2, p. 152). Barth hastens to add that Jesus did not commit personal sin – indeed, that as God he could not do so (CD I/2, pp. 155–159). “He was not a sinful man. But inwardly and outwardly His situation was that of a sinful man” (CD I/2, p. 152). “He is holy” in “unholy flesh” (CD I/2, p. 156). The Son takes a nature like ours, “with the guilt [Schuld] lying upon it of which it has to repent” (CD I/2, p. 40; KD I/2, p. 45). And yet he did so “innocently [unschuldig]” (CD I/2, p. 152; KD I/2, p. 167). Barth will continue to affirm that Christ “bore an alien guilt … without himself becoming guilty” (CD IV/2, p. 92; KD IV/2, p. 101). Barth denies (obliquely) that Christ takes on original sin in the incarnation, and he describes the virgin birth as indicating “the conquest of original sin [Erbsünde] that took place in Jesus Christ” (CD I/2, pp. 189–190; KD I/2, pp. 206–207; cf. GD, p. 1.166; CD IV/1, pp. 499–501). Nevertheless, Barth’s simultaneous insistence on the willful character of sin (Webster 1998, p. 75; Jenson 2006, pp. 146–147; Nimmo 2016, pp. 293–294), and on Jesus’ perfectly “free will of obedience” (CD I/2, p. 189), makes it difficult to specify the character of Jesus’ fallenness, except that he bears its full consequences in himself in order to bear them away. Barth’s second unconventional claim concerns the virgin birth, beginning with the simple fact that he confesses it to be true. But if Barth’s account of the virgin birth thus stands in less direct contrast to the tradition, it is a frontal assault on the demythologizing consensus of many of his contemporaries. The “homely self‐assurance” of his childhood in the miracle of Christmas (Busch 1994, p. 8; CD IV/2, p. 112) has become supreme confidence, and one detects here in Barth an almost mischievous delight in contravening scholarly sophistication (Webster 2004, p. 61; cf. IV/2, pp. 56–57). The virgin birth for Barth indicates not primarily Christ’s full humanity (though it does indicate this). Nor does it indicate Christ’s freedom from original sin (though it seems to indicate this as well). Rather, the virgin birth for Barth indicates both the inescapably mysterious character of the incarnation and the purely passive role of humanity in the reception of revelation. “The dogma of the virgin birth is thus the confession of the boundless hiddenness of the [incarnation] and of the boundless amazement of awe and thankfulness called forth in us” by it (CD I/2, p. 177). It requires “spiritual understanding” (CD I/2, p. 177). Although the virgin birth is merely the sign of this “prime

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mystery” of all divine revelation, we could no more retain the reality of the incarnation without this sign than we could the resurrection without the sign of the empty tomb (CD I/2, pp. 172, 179). “The virgin birth at the opening and the empty tomb at the close of Jesus’ life bear witness that this life is a fact marked off from all the rest of human life” as mystery (CD I/2, p. 182; IV/1, p. 207). The virgin birth is also a stark indication of human passivity before revelation. In the event of the incarnation, humanity is “involved only in the form of the Virgin Mary, i.e., only in the form of non‐willing, non‐achieving, non‐creative, non‐sovereign man, only in the form of man who can merely receive,” even though this reception is also an act of freedom (CD I/2, pp. 191, 373). The virgin birth indicates the exclusion not of sex, but of “willing, achieving, creative, sovereign man” in reconciliation (CD I/2, p. 192; cf. CD IV/1, pp. 304, 355–357)1  –  particularly, Barth suggests in a tentative aside, in the absence of the sexual role of the male (CD I/2, pp. 192–194).

“The Way of the Son of God into the Far Country” (CD IV/1, §59.1) Some 15 years later, with six more part‐volumes of the Church Dogmatics under his belt, Barth returns to the incarnation. Much remains the same. Rehearsing major claims from §15, Barth affirms (CD IV/1, pp. 157–177) that Jesus is fully God and fully human, that he appeared in actual history as attested by the unified witness of Old and New Testaments, and that he took flesh “under the sign of the fall of Adam” (CD IV/1, p. 165) without in any way emptying himself of deity (CD IV/1, pp. 179–183). What is strikingly new in CD IV/1 is Barth’s unique take on something quite old. More clearly than before, Barth now sees the incarnate Son as revealing not just the perfections of God but also something particular and “profoundly astonishing” (CD IV/1, p. 183) about the Son in his eternal relation to the Father. What Christ renders to the Father is indeed a human obedience (Jones 2008, pp. 216–230). It is also more. “As we look at Jesus Christ we cannot avoid the astounding conclusion of a divine obedience” (CD IV/1, p. 202). Barth now discerns a stronger sense in which the Son’s humility in the incarnation (Phil 2:5–11) “is not alien to him, but proper.” “He is amongst us in humility, our God, God for us, as that which he is in himself, in the most inward depth of his Godhead … [and] as the One he was from all eternity and will be to all eternity” (CD IV/1, p. 193). The Son’s humble obedience to the Father is a reality not merely in time, but also in eternity. “He is as man, as the man who is obedient in humility, Jesus of Nazareth, what he is as God. … That is the true deity of Jesus Christ, obedient in humility, in its unity and equality, its homoousia, with the deity of the One who sent him and to whom he is obedient” (CD IV/1, p. 204; Jones 2008, pp. 205–208). Barth is not saying that humility is a divine perfection, equally descriptive of Father and Son and Spirit. Rather, humility describes the Son’s eternal relation to the Father. The Father “rules and commands in majesty,” the Son “obeys in humility,” and the Spirit “affirms the one and

1  “Willing” in this context seems to bear the sense of “effecting” or “causing.”

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equal Godhead” of both (CD IV/1, p. 202). If Barth were to rewrite his doctrine of the divine perfections (CD II/1), he would not add humility to the list. But he would ensure that “all the predicates of [the] Godhead” were “filled out and interpreted” more fully in the light of the Son’s humility (CD IV/1, p. 130). Barth had been insisting since the first volume of the Dogmatics that “as Christ is in revelation, so he is antecedently in himself ” (CD I/1, p. 428). Barth could even say of the Son’s eternal relation to the Father, “All the associations which might be meaningfully suggested by the image [of a son with his father] are legitimate,” including “the love he [Christ] owes to the Father” (CD I/1, p. 432). But there Barth stops. In the Son’s eternal love for the Father, Barth does not yet acknowledge an element of humble obedience. In CD I/2, Barth tends to speak of incarnation and crucifixion in terms of divine hiddenness, as successive veilings of God that are unveiled in the resurrection. “The function of the resurrection is to make the passion of Christ, in which the incarnation of the Word of God was consummated, clearly and unmistakably revelation” (CD I/2, p. 111). A notable passage in CD II/1 speaks of God’s self‐humiliation in incarnation and crucifixion as somehow a “reflection and image” of his eternal divine being (CD II/1, p. 663). Now in CD IV/1, incarnation and crucifixion, precisely in veiling God’s glory, also unveil the Son’s divine humility (CD IV/1, pp. 188, 554; Jones 2008, pp. 204–205). This bold step forward for Barth is actually a cautious step back toward the classic correlation of divine missions and processions. According to the missions‐processions schema in trinitarian theology, the Father’s sending of the Son to be incarnate (the Son’s mission) reveals the Father’s begetting of the Son in eternity (the Son’s procession). Augustine explains, “Just as being born means for the Son his being from the Father, so his being sent means his being known to be from him” (Augustine 2012, 4.20.29). The Son’s birth in time reveals his “birth” in eternity. The Son’s “birth” in eternity, consequently, is the basis for his birth in time. Thomas Aquinas speaks of the Son’s mission as “a temporal procession” (Aquinas 1948, 1.43.3). That is, the Son’s eternal procession is extended into time as mission. Barth, for his part, can speak of the Son’s obedience in time as “the miraculously consistent ultimate continuation” of the Son’s obedience to the Father in eternity (in wunderbar konsequenter letzter Fortsetzung, KD IV/1, p. 223). Although Barth generally refrains “from using the concepts which dominate … ecclesiastical dogma” (CD IV/1, p. 204), he also makes clear that in this matter he is taking up the traditional formulation of the eternal generation of the Son and extending it beyond the tradition  –  perhaps unadvisedly (White 2011, pp. 246–247; Molnar 2014a) – to include the Son’s humble obedience to the Father. “The One who is obedient in humility … is in this way the only begotten Son of the Father” (CD IV/1, p. 210; CD IV/2, pp. 42–44). It is important to note that, for Barth, the incarnation is not necessary. Though it is based on the Son’s eternal relation to the Father, the incarnation is the historical result of God’s freely chosen decree to enter into covenant with humanity. And though it is freely chosen, the incarnation is definitive of the character of the Son even before he becomes human in time. “In this free act of the election of grace the Son of the Father is no longer just the eternal Logos, but as such, as very God from all eternity he is also the very God and very man he will become in time. In the divine act of predestination there pre‐exists the Jesus Christ who as the Son of the eternal Father and the child of the

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Virgin Mary will become and be the Mediator of the covenant between God and man, the One who accomplishes the act of atonement” (CD IV/1, p. 66; IV/2, pp. 31–36; cf. Sumner 2014, pp. 120–126). The idea of an eternal Logos whose character is not determined by the incarnation, “the so‐called logos asarkos,” remains “a necessary and important concept” in securing the freedom of God’s decree (CD IV/1, p. 52; McCormack 2008, pp. 212, 219–220) and indicating the trinitarian basis for it (CD IV/2, p. 31). But it would be both “pointless” and “impermissible” to speculate about the character of this Logos as if the decree of election had never occurred (CD IV/1, pp. 52, 180–181; Jones 2008, pp. 87–96).

“The Homecoming of the Son of Man” (CD IV/2, §64.2) The Christology of CD IV/1 (“The Lord as Servant”) finds its counterpart in IV/2 (“The Servant as Lord”). IV/1 is a Christology “from above,” describing the downward humiliation of the Son of God. IV/2 is then a Christology “from below,” describing the upward exaltation of the Son of Man. Reconciliation for Barth is “wholly and utterly” both of these movements (CD IV/2, p. 6) in dynamic simultaneity. The traditional distinction between the person of Christ and the work of Christ (CD IV/1, pp. 126–128) is here ­dissolved into “the one inclusive event of this going out of the Son of God and coming in of the Son of Man” (CD IV/2, pp. 21, 46). IV/2 thus traces out the “homecoming” of prodigal humanity to where it was always meant to be: at home in the enjoyment of God and others (CD IV/2, p. 20). Barth’s account is once again a vigorous encounter between tradition and innovation. “I have always found myself content with the broad lines of Christian tradition,” he observes (CD IV/2, p. xi). It was some 30 years before that Barth had come to affirm the anhypostatic‐enhypostatic character of Christ’s human nature (GD, pp. 1.156–158; McCormack 1995, pp. 327–328, 358–367; Asprey 2010, pp. 167–175). Barth continues to affirm this ancient doctrine (CD IV/2, 47–50), even though it plays a fairly minor role in his thought (CD IV/1, p. 127; Jones 2008, pp. 51, 130–131). At the same time, Barth remains more jealous for the incomparable uniqueness of Jesus Christ (CD II/1, pp. 442–445) than for tradition, rejecting outright the relevance of a general anthropology for knowledge of the humanity of Christ and gleefully dispatching a long series of traditional analogies to the hypostatic union (CD IV/2, pp. 26–27, 52–59). More boldly still, Barth offers two daring counterproposals to the Lutheran doctrine of the genus maiestaticum and to the traditional account of Christ’s states of humiliation and exaltation. With the latter he claims to have “left even Reformed Christology far behind,” and he remarks, somewhat sourly, “We cannot expect to be praised for our ‘orthodoxy’ from any quarter” (CD IV/2, p. 106). Barth’s first counterproposal comes as the climax of his account of the exaltation of human nature in the incarnation (CD IV/2, pp. 84–104). According to what the tradition calls a “communication of grace,” the hypostatic union results in a “mutual participation of divine and human essence” (CD IV/2, p. 84). Barth insists that this mutual participation has implications not only for Christ as human, but first and foremost for Christ as God. “God does not first elect and determine man but himself. … God elects and

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determines himself to be the God of man” (CD IV/2, p. 84). This is the divine humiliation. “In unbroken faithfulness to himself ” and “open‐handed generosity” toward us, God causes “the whole fullness of deity” (Col 2:9) to address and confront human essence in Christ (CD IV/2, pp. 86–87). “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” (CD IV/2, p. 100). Christ’s human essence, on the other hand, is “determined wholly and utterly, from the very outset and in every part, by the electing grace of God” (CD IV/2, p. 88). This is the human exaltation. “Exaltation to what?” Barth asks. His answer begins without controversy, but with “true and thankful astonishment” (CD IV/2, 86): exaltation to true human freedom in gratitude and sinless obedience; to the good‐pleasure of the Father in the power of the Spirit; and to empowered and authorized service in the work of reconciliation (CD IV/2, pp. 91–100; McCormack 2008, p. 226). Barth then takes “a further step” (CD IV/2, p. 100), into the classic christological debate between Lutherans and the Reformed. According to the traditional Lutheran doctrine of the genus maiestaticum (Chemnitz 1971, pp. 241–312), in the hypostatic union all of the divine attributes are communicated to the human nature of Christ, so that it participates “directly in the majesty of God” and enjoys “in its creatureliness every perfection of the uncreated essence of God” (CD IV/2, p. 77; Jones 2008, pp. 267–269). For Lutheran theology, this accounts for, among other things, Christ’s human presence in the Lord’s Supper (Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration 8:24, in Kolb and Wengert 2000, p. 621). The Reformed object that “it is a strange deity which can suddenly become the predicate of human essence, and a strange humanity to which all the divine predicates can suddenly be ascribed as subject” (CD IV/2, p. 79). And Barth adds that the genus maiestaticum threatens to divinize not only Christ’s human nature, but human nature per se (CD IV/2, pp. 80–83). So it comes as quite a shock when, as the final element in his account of the exaltation of human nature, Barth says that in the incarnation “our human essence is given … the glory and dignity and majesty of the divine nature” (CD IV/2, p. 100)! What does Barth mean? Barth speaks here in terms not of an abstract transfer of properties but of a concrete confrontation in relationship. When the Son assumes human nature, “he does not deify it, but he exalts it into the consortium divinitatis, into an inward and indestructible fellowship with his Godhead” (CD IV/2, p. 100). This indestructible fellowship is a reality in Jesus Christ, in whom it also – in “an event which is both wonderful and simple, infinitely disturbing and infinitely comforting” – extends to us, to “the exaltation of human essence to fellowship with the ‘divine nature’ (2 Pet 1:4)” (CD IV/2, p. 103). With this claim Barth attempts to say more about Christ’s human exaltation than the Reformed, who feared to say as much as the Lutherans, and at the same time to acknowledge Lutheran insight into Christ’s human exaltation, while still remaining within the Reformed tradition (CD IV/2, pp. 66, 76–77; HG, p. 50; cf. CD I/2, pp. 163–171; Sumner 2014, pp. 95–99). Barth develops his second counterproposal out of a consideration of the so‐called “communication of activities” (or genus apotelesmaticum), according to which Christ’s divine and human natures, in all of their properties, are always involved in his reconciling work (CD IV/2, pp. 104–116). Barth takes this traditional affirmation and transforms it to the claim that Christ always exists both in his history of humiliation and in

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his history of exaltation. Instead of Christ’s divine and human natures, Barth speaks about Christ’s divine and human histories. “We have ‘actualised’ the doctrine of the incarnation, i.e., we have used the main traditional concepts … to describe one and the same ongoing process,” giving it “a sense and a position which it did not have in all earlier Christology” (CD IV/2, p. 105). What this means is that Christ’s humiliation and exaltation are not “two different and successive states” – although they did occur decisively in that sequence and in history (CD IV/2, p. 107). Rather, Christ’s humiliation and exaltation are now two simultaneous movements, “two opposed but strictly related moments … which operate together and mutually interpret one another” (CD IV/2, p. 106; Hunsinger 2000, pp. 141–142). Christ exists in this event of his history (his “being is in act”). Therefore to say that Christ exists in every age is to say that Christ’s history “takes place in every age,” the twofold history “of God humbling himself in his grace and at the same time … of man exalted in the reception of God’s grace” (CD IV/2, pp. 107, 110; CD I/2, pp. 49–50; Sumner 2014, pp. 149–152). So although “Barth preserves the theological values registered in the Chalcedonian formula” even in CD IV (McCormack 2008, p. 229; cf. Molnar 2014b, pp. 467–474), he does so by filling or possibly even overloading the traditional terms and categories with new content. Barth’s undoubtedly valid concern here is to ensure that Christ’s identity in ascended glory not overshadow his identity in earthly humiliation. Barth concedes that the church in practice has not let this happen (CD IV/2, p. 110), but he wants to provide what he regards as stronger dogmatic assurance that it will not do so in future. Barth may also have in mind what he censures as his own one‐sided emphasis on Christ’s divinity in the heady days of dialectical theology (HG, pp. 46–47).

Conclusion “The Father’s Son, by nature God, /A guest this world of ours he trod.” Luther’s early hymn on the incarnation, “All Praise to Thee, O Jesus Christ” (LW 53.240–241; WA 35.434–335), can be overheard at various points in the Christology of CD IV (IV/1, p. 194; IV/2, pp. 47–51, 71, 95–96). It expresses Barth’s sense of being “lost in wonder before this mystery” (DC, p. 101) and recalls Barth’s advice to eager theologians approaching the doctrine of the incarnation. “At all costs we must make it clear that an ultimate mystery is involved here. It can be contemplated, acknowledged, worshipped and confessed as such, but it cannot be solved or transformed into a non‐mystery” (CD I/2, pp. 124–125). Barth’s own account is true to the character of the incarnation as ultimate mystery. The incarnation is a mystery to confess and celebrate, not a problem to solve. This is perhaps most clear in Barth’s masterful integration of traditional affirmation and original construction, the orthodox and the modern, the ancient and the new. All resources must be marshaled to do justice to this theme. But though the scope of Christian consensus at this point is a staggering gift of divine generosity, to take this consensus as final and definitive would reduce the incarnation to a problem solved. Barth thus summons us to our own confession of the mystery of the incarnation in a Christology that draws deeply from creed and confession and focuses relentlessly on Jesus Christ ­himself, as guided by the biblical witness and in turn guiding prayer and proclamation.

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References Aquinas, T. (1948). Summa Theologica (trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province). Cincinnati: Benziger Brothers. Asprey, C. (2010). Eschatological Presence in Karl Barth’s Göttingen Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Augustine (2012). The Trinity, 2e (trans. E. Hill) (ed. J.E. Rotelle). Hyde Park: New City Press. Balthasar, H.U.v. (1992). The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation (trans. Edward T. Oakes). San Francisco: Ignatius. Boersma, H. (1990). Alexandrian or antiochian? A dilemma in Barth’s christology. Westminster Theological Journal 52: 263–280. Busch, E. (1994). Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts (trans. John Bowden). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Chemnitz, M. (1971). The Two Natures in Christ (trans. J.A.O. Preus). Saint Louis: Concordia. Cranfield, C.E.B. (1975). A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, vol. 1. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Cyril of Alexandria (1995). On the Unity of Christ (trans. J.A. McGuckin). Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Hunsinger, G. (2000). Karl Barth’s Christology: its basic Chalcedonian character. In: Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Jenson, M. (2006). The Gravity of Sin: Augustine, Luther and Barth on homo incurvatus in se. London: T&T Clark. John of Damascus (1957). On the Orthodox Faith. In: Writings (trans. F.H. Chase, Jr). Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Jones, P.D. (2008). The Humanity of Christ: Christology in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. London: T&T Clark. Kolb, R. and Wengert, T.J. (eds.) (2000). The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. Minneapolis: Fortress.

Lang, U.M. (1998). Anhypostatos‐ Enhypostatos: church fathers, Protestant orthodoxy and Karl Barth. Journal of Theological Studies 49 (2): 630–657. McCormack, B.L. (1995). Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909–1936. New York: Oxford University Press. McCormack, B.L. (2008). Karl Barth’s historicized Christology: just how “Chalcedonian” is it? In: Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker. McFarland, O. (2014). “The one Jesus Christ”: Romans 5:12–21 and the development of Karl Barth’s christology. Scottish Journal of Theology 67 (3): 265–284. Molnar, P.D. (2000). Some dogmatic implications of Barth’s understanding of ebionite and docetic Christology. International Journal of Systematic Theology 2 (2): 151–174. Molnar, P.D. (2014a). The obedience of the son in the theology of Karl Barth and of Thomas F. Torrance. Scottish Journal of Theology 67 (1): 50–69. Molnar, P.D. (2014b). The perils of embracing a “historicized christology”. Modern Theology 30 (4): 455–480. Nimmo, P.T. (2016). Karl Barth. In: T&T Clark Companion to the Doctrine of Sin (eds. K.L. Johnson and D. Lauber). London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark. Sumner, D.O. (2014). Karl Barth and the Incarnation: Christology and the Humanity of God. London: T&T Clark. Van Kuiken, E.J. (2017). Christ’s Humanity in Current and Ancient Controversy: Fallen or Not? London: T&T Clark. Webster, J. (1998). “The firmest grasp of the real”: Barth on original sin. In: Barth’s Moral Theology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Webster, J. (2004). Barth, 2e. London: Continuum. White, T.J. (2011). Classical Christology after Schleiermacher and Barth: a Thomist perspective. Pro Ecclesia 20 (3): 229–263.

CHAPTER 13

Barth on the Atonement Adam J. Johnson

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arl Barth’s doctrine of the atonement is as rich as one can find anywhere. This is partly because of the manner in which Barth understood and developed the atonement as the center of the systematic task. A satisfactory account of Christ’s saving work both requires and gives rise to the full arsenal of theological resources. We enter that sphere of Christian knowledge in which we have to do with the heart of the message received by and laid upon the Christian community and therefore with the heart of the Church’s dogmatics: that is to say, with the heart of its subject‐matter, origin and content. It has a circumference, the doctrine of creation and the doctrine of last things, the redemption and consummation. But the covenant fulfilled in the atonement is its centre. (CD IV/1, p. 3)

The atonement is nothing without the doctrine of God providing its fundamental structure and energy, for this is the saving work of God incarnate, the work of God‐ with‐us (CD IV/1, p. 4). But the doctrine of God is likewise shaped by the doctrine of the atonement, for the free and loving God did not choose to hold creation at arm’s‐length, but elected to be the saving God, the one who, in Jesus Christ, would bring his creation to completion. And, of course, this has radical implications for every other doctrine. The doctrine of creation has no independent status or dignity but hangs together with the whole of Christian doctrine as the external basis of the covenant fulfilled in Jesus. Anthropology and hamartiology likewise derive from the doctrine of the atonement as the accounts of the human nature of Jesus in whom all men and women have their nature and salvation, and the account of that which Jesus exposes and overcomes in his saving death and resurrection. Ecclesiology takes its bearing from Christ’s atoning work, as an account of the people freed by Christ that in him they might likewise elect God. In short, all of Christian theology is necessary to give a full and adequate account The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth and Dogmatics, Volume I, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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of the work of Christ, and vice versa: to give an adequate account of any part of Christian doctrine requires that we do so in light of the atonement. Furthermore, Barth’s account of the atonement is so rich because he is stubbornly biblical in his thinking, refusing (to the best of his ability) to allow theories or schemes to dictate his thinking (DO, p. 116). At the culmination of a hundred or more pages exploring the work of Christ as the work of the Judge judged in our place (CD IV/1, pp. 272–283), Barth turns the tables, sketching the work of Christ as that of the Priest sacrificed in our place; this move effectively demonstrates that although the judicial account may (arguably) be more thoroughly developed in Scripture, and more easily communicable to the culture he knew, other ways of exploring the doctrine of the atonement were readily available in Scripture that relied on the same subterranean structural commitments (our attention in this chapter will be on this subterranean structure, rather than the judicial superstructure he develops in much of CD IV/1). Such depth and complexity defies oversimplification, and it is a fool’s errand to seek to align Barth’s thought with a single “theory” of the atonement. Barth is simply too expansive, too true to the ever‐rich work of Christ to be confined in such a manner, and we do better to move beyond such inadequate patterns of thought, rejoicing rather in allowing Barth to guide us into a fuller understanding of the work of Christ (Johnson 2015). Elsewhere, I have sought to play out the interrelation between the doctrine of God and the atonement in Barth, with particular emphasis upon the way that the doctrine of the divine attributes is the fundamental feature in explaining both the unity and diversity of different “theories” or aspects of the work of Christ (Johnson 2012a). In the present essay, I take a different approach, exploring the conceptual engine driving the whole doctrine for Barth: the representative/substitutionary nature of Jesus Christ, upon which Barth’s doctrine of the atonement depends. In sum, I will unpack the thesis that Barth develops the work of Christ as the work of the God who elects to be the representative substitute [Stellvertreter] of his people, or put with an anthropological emphasis, that we humans are who we are in Christ, our representative substitute, and that our identity is therefore fundamentally shaped by the life, death, and resurrection of this one. This, I suggest, is the key to understanding the underlying logic of Barth’s doctrine of the atonement, in which God in Christ took our place, that we might have life in him.

The Background: Election, Creation, and Anthropology We begin in the doctrine of God, for what it means to be human is rooted in what it means for God to be God. And when it comes to God, we are firmly and necessarily dealing with the category of decision, God’s choice of grace, the “divine movement and condescension on the basis of which men belong to God and God to men” (CD II/2, p. 19). God is a God in movement, a God who is what he is precisely in his act, in his decision, and the content of this decision is to be the God of man, “a relationship outside of which God no longer wills to be and no longer is God” (CD II/2, p. 7). God is the God who lives out his life in the midst of his self‐determination; the content of this self‐determination, the gospel tells us, is that God willed to be who he is as our God, specifically to be our God in and through the incarnate Son, Jesus Christ.

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God is the living God, who is free to specify or delimit his life as he sees fit, and according to Barth, God does in fact specify his eternal life, ordaining that he should not be “entirely self‐sufficient” as He might be (CD II/2, p. 10). God complicates but does not surrender his self‐sufficiency. “God’s decision in Jesus Christ is a gracious decision. In making it, God stoops down from above. In it He does something which He has no need to do, which He is not constrained to do. He does something which He alone can constrain Himself, and has in fact constrained Himself, to do. In entering into this covenant, He freely makes Himself both benefactor and benefit” (CD II/2, p. 10). On the basis of his own free election of love and grace, the self‐determining God chooses not to be merely the self‐sufficient God, but to be who he is in relation to his people, a relation that is centered in the person and work of Jesus Christ. On the basis of God’s election, God is who he is in relation  –  in relation to his creation ad extra. The specific content of this relation is that “within His triune being, God is none other than the one who in His Son or Word elects Himself, and in and with Himself elects His ­people” (CD II/2, p. 76). God is the God who in himself, in his Son, wills to represent a ­people, to elect them “in Him.” And as Barth specifies, this does “not simply mean with Him, together with Him, in His company.” Rather, it means “in His person, in His will, in His own divine choice” (CD II/2, p. 117). Who is the God of the gospel, but the one who, on the basis of his free and gracious decision, elects and represents humankind in himself, in his person, in Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God? For this reason, creation and the creature: Is no more its own goal and purpose than it is its own ground and beginning. There is no inherent reason for the creature’s existence and nature, no independent teleology of the creature. … Its destiny lies entirely in the purpose of its Creator as the One Who speaks and cares for it. (CD III/1, p. 94)

And as God wills to be the one who represents humankind in himself, in his person, creation is nothing but the context, the stage, for that representation, or, more precisely, that which is represented by God. “There is no such thing as a created nature which has its purpose, being or continuance apart from grace, or which may be known in this purpose, being and continuance except through grace,” (CD II/2, p. 92) specifically the grace of the covenant fulfilled in the atonement of Jesus Christ. As part of creation, therefore, the reality of human creatures lies in Christ (CD III/2, p. 225). No amount of biological, psychological, sociological and other insights will plumb the depths of human nature, for the answer lies not in ourselves as an object of study, but in the God who created and holds us in existence. Our being “consists in ­participating in what God does” (CD III/2, p. 74), a claim of almost unfathomable range and significance for Barth (CD III/2, p. 145). We derive our human nature from Jesus (CD III/2, p. 50), the One Man (CD IV/1, p. 223). Jesus is not merely the pattern after which women and men are made, the first among many brothers and sisters; neither is Jesus the one who represents men and women in the sense that God relates first to Jesus and on that basis to other women and men. Rather, Jesus is “the very ground and sphere, the atmosphere of the being of every man” (CD IV/1, p. 53); instead of we exist “in him” (CD III/2, pp. 148, 317).

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But the meaning of such statements lies deeper than mere nature: Jesus is more than a “form” or platonic archetype of “man.” Barth is thinking along quite different lines, for “forms” and “archetypes” do not live and move, do not have histories. What it means to be human, what it means to derive our nature from Jesus, is to have God see and treat us “in and with His beloved Son” (CD III/2, p. 42), to have our own history included within the history of Jesus Christ (CD IV/1, pp. 157–158), such that God relates to all others in and through this one man, Jesus Christ: “God’s relation to man, sinful man, is to this man alone and all others in and through Him” (CD III/2, p. 43). And this language is no mere “as if ” or “as though,” a divine sleight of hand, or decision to see things in a graciously “rose‐colored” manner. Not at all. It is not that God chooses to see fundamentally independent and free creatures as though they were in some way related to Jesus Christ. Rather, what it is to be human is to have one’s history within the history of Jesus Christ, such that Jesus “is our true existence” (CD IV/1, p. 154; cf. p. 160). Because this is true, “because we are in Christ, every man in his time and place is changed” (CD III/2, p. 133) in the course of the history of Jesus, the one in whom we live and move and have our being. The danger with this line of thought, one that Barth is well aware of, is that humanity is simply swallowed or absorbed into Jesus, such that we are left with Jesus and nothing else: to be human simply is to be in Jesus, or part of Jesus in some way. But Barth consistently eschews such a totalizing, one‐sided account (despite concerns to the contrary: Sölle 1967, pp. 88–91). For what Barth is after, what he finds within the gospel, is the good news that “the being and act of God stands in relation to our own being and act – a common history which is shared” (CD IV/1, p. 7). Apart from such a sharing, from such a relation in which the elect creature is freed to elect God in turn as a legitimate covenant partner, the gospel fades from good news to a mere tautology, a mere restatement of a God who is God alone, without external partner, without friend. How, then, does Barth safeguard the freedom and legitimacy of God’s covenantal partner within his account of the creature receiving its being and history in the person and work of Jesus Christ? Briefly, the answer lies within the doctrine of the Trinity. God: willed the existence of a being which in all its non‐deity and therefore its differentiation can be a real partner; which is capable of action and responsibility in relation to Him; to which His own divine form of life is not alien; which in a creaturely repetition, as a copy and ­imitation, can be a bearer of this form of life. … In God’s own being and sphere there is a counterpart: a genuine but harmonious self‐encounter and self‐discovery. … Thus the tertium comparationis, the analogy between God and man, is simply the existence of the I and the Thou in confrontation. (CD III/1, pp. 184–185)

How can we both be free and “in Christ,” or have our own history that is nonetheless a history within the history of another, of Jesus Christ? Because we are fashioned after the pattern of the Trinity. More specifically, we are fashioned after the pattern of the Son who is God, but is so in and with and from the Father; whose history is not his own autonomous history, but a history from and within the eternal history of the Father from whom he receives his eternally begotten being. We are genuine creatures with real

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freedom, standing in relation to God while nonetheless living in him, receiving our being from him, and being represented by him, because such simultaneous otherness and coinherence corresponds precisely to the reality of the Triune life that we are meant to image forth as his creatures.

The Foundation of the Atonement: Stellvertretung Stellvertretung (1): Substitution We are now in a better place to understand some of Barth’s fundamental commitments when it comes to the doctrine of the atonement. On the one hand, Barth’s thought is saturated with substitutionary language, in which what happens to Christ is unique to him: by the mercy of God, we are spared that which he endures. On the other hand, his thought is equally or even more saturated with representational language, in which what happens to Christ therefore happens in us, because of the intrinsic relation ­between us  –  and both lines of thought are brought together in a single term: “Stellvertretung” (cf. Graham 2005, 2017). So which way will Barth have it? Does Jesus spare us from the fate we deserve by taking it to himself, or do we suffer our fate in Jesus? Though the editors of the CD note that Stellvertretung “enshrines the notions both of representation and substitution, and never the one without the other” (CD IV/1, p. vii), their case is overstated, as Barth distinguishes between substitution and representation both linguistically and conceptually, and the term contains an inner tension we do well to explore. We see this dynamic clearly in Barth’s account of the meaning of “for us:” “It has happened fully and exclusively in Him, excluding any need for completion. Whatever may happen in consequence of the fact that Jesus Christ is for us cannot be added to it. … His activity as our Representative and Substitute” (CD IV/1, p. 230; KD IV/1, p. 252: “sein stellvertretendes Handeln für uns”). But how can one be both representative and substitute? A substitute, it would seem, takes the place of another so that they need not inhabit or take that place. A substitute does something for us so that we need not do it ourselves, much as a substitute teacher might cover a class for the primary teacher who is ill. A representative, on the other hand, includes the people she represents: their fate hangs together, much as when a band of soldiers eagerly awaits the results of a parley. Does Jesus’ work include or exclude us? To put it succinctly, did he die for us (substitution: Rom. 5:8, 1 Pet. 3:18), or did we die in him (representation: Rom. 6:6, Gal. 2:20)? We will consider each in turn. Barth offers a strong defense of substitution: “In his place Jesus Christ has suffered the death of a malefactor. The sentence on him as a sinner has been carried out. It cannot be reversed. It does not need to be repeated. It has fallen instead on Jesus Christ” (CD IV/1, p. 93). In the place of man, “Jesus Christ rendered that obedience which is required of the covenant partner of God, and in that way found His good pleasure. He did it by taking to Himself the sins of all men, by suffering as His death the death to which they had fallen prey” (CD IV/1, p. 94). In a similar vein, Barth notes that Jesus fulfills this work “by treading the way of sinners to its bitter end in death, in destruction,

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in the limitless anguish of separation from God, by delivering up sinful man and sin in his own person to the non‐being which is properly theirs. … The decisive thing is not that He has suffered what we ought to have suffered so that we do not have to suffer it … [though] this is true of course” (CD IV/1, p. 253). This qualified affirmation takes place in the context of Barth’s nuanced affirmation of the concept of punishment within the atonement, but the point stands: Jesus suffered what we ought to have suffered, so that we do not have to suffer it. Everything, he says, depends on the “doctrine of substitution (Lehre von der Stellvertretung),” the fact that the Lord who became a servant, the Son of God who went into the far country, and came to us, was and did all this for us; that He fulfilled … the divine judgment laid upon Him. There is no avoiding this straight gate. … If the nail of this fourfold “for us” does not hold, everything else will be left hanging in the void as an anthropological or psychological or sociological myth, and sooner or later it will break and fall to the ground. (CD IV/1, p. 273; KD, p. 300)

Everything, for Barth, depends on the “doctrine of substitution” (CD IV/1, p. 273; DO, pp. 115–116; “Vertauschung” in place of “Stellvertretung,” Dogmatik Im Grundriss, [Barth 1947, p. 135]). At the heart of this substitutionary account is the idea that our sin is transferred to Jesus, or that he bears our sin for us – for without this transfer, this exchange, it would seem impossible to explain how that which was ours can become his, that we might be spared. “The rejection which all men must die, God in His love for men transfers from all eternity to Him in whom He loves and elects them, and whom He elects at their head and in their place. … He, the Elect, is appointed to check and defeat Satan on behalf of all those that are elected ‘in Him.’ … And this checking and defeating of Satan must consist in His allowing the righteousness of God to proceed against Himself instead of them” (CD II/2, p. 123). “Transfer” and “instead” are key here  –  something shifted, something changed places or was exchanged, that we might be spared. It is precisely at this point that the role of sin‐bearing becomes so important. Barth richly explores the Pauline view that “He has caused Him to be regarded and treated as a sinner. He was made a curse for us, as Paul unhesitatingly concluded from Deut. 21:23 (Gal. 3:13)” (CD IV/1, p. 165). But this is no mere fiction, for the emphasis does not fall on “regarded” but “was made.” Jesus makes his own “not only the guilt of man but also his rejection and condemnation, giving Himself to bear the divinely righteous consequences of human sin, not merely affirming the divine sentence on man, but allowing it to be fulfilled on himself ” (CD IV/1, p. 175). He takes upon Himself to be the bearer and Representative [Träger und Vertreter], to be responsible for this case, to expose Himself to the accusation and sentence which must inevitably come upon us in this case. … He takes from us our own evil case, taking our place and compromising Himself with it. And as He does that, it ceases to be our sin. It is no longer our affair to prosecute and repent this case. …He is the man who entered that evil way, with the result that we are forced from it; it can be ours no longer.

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But that means that it became His way: His the sin which we commit on it; His the accusation, the judgment and the curse which necessarily fall on us there. … He is the condemned amongst those who are pardoned because the sentence which destroys them is directed against him. (CD IV/1, pp. 236–237, KD, p. 259; cf. CD III/2, p. 48)

And once more, Barth affirms that this is no “exchange only in appearance,” a “masquerade” or “dressing up” – in Jesus Christ, God made our sin his own, taking the place of us sinners. “Our sin is no longer our own. It is His sin, the sin of Jesus Christ” (CD IV/1, p. 238). Jesus, in this sense, as Barth says following Luther, is the “one great sinner” (CD IV/1, p. 254; KD, p. 279: “als der des einen großen Sünders!”).

Stellvertretung (2): Representation Alongside this robust account of substitution, we find an equally vigorous (if not even stronger!) account of representation, highlighting the way in which we are included in the work of Christ, rather than excluded from it. Jesus is the “representative of all nations and stands amongst the nations as the representative of God,” as such “bearing the judgments of God” (CD IV/1, p. 35) in a way that affirms not so much his apartness as his “solidarity with the world” (CD IV/1, p. 187). And to be clear, this is an ontological (or objectivistic: Sölle 1967, p. 88) and not merely emotional, poetic or political solidarity: “In the One in whom they are elected, that is to say, in the death which the Son of God has died for them, they themselves have died as sinners” (CD II/2, p. 125). The work of God in Christ is not one that sets us aside as spectators, while Jesus deals with the problem for our benefit; rather, his work is one that includes ourselves, one in which we have a necessary and intrinsic stake and connection, for this is our work – the work of our representative in whom we live and move and have our being. This line of thought comes clearly to the fore in CD IV/1.3 “The Verdict of the Father.” “That Jesus has died for us does not mean, therefore, that we do not have to die, but that we have died in and with Him, that as the people we were we have been done away and destroyed, that we are no longer there and have no more future” (CD IV/1, p. 295). As bizarre as it may seem, “We died. This has to be understood quite concretely and literally. In His dying, the dying which awaits us in the near or distant future was already comprehended and completed, so that we can no longer die to ourselves (Rom. 14:2f.). … His death was the death of all” (CD IV/1, p. 295). Put another way, “In His death He dies the death of man. Order is created, then, not by any setting aside of sins, but by that of the sinner himself. … It is not by the giving of medicine, or by an operation, but by the killing of the patient that help is brought” (CD IV/1, p. 296). It is this, more than anything, that explains Barth’s distance and proximity to penal substitution (on the range of views, see Williams 2008, pp. 256–257). Barth is in the native soil of that doctrine (dwelling on divine justice and wrath, punishment, transferred sin. …; cf. McCormack 2004, pp. 363–365), but he simply cannot reconcile himself to thinking of sin or punishment (let alone God’s wrath!) as the fundamental problem,

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when the reality of the sinner includes and transcends such realities. The problem is not simply how to punish sin: it is how to destroy sin and the sinner (and in so doing punish her), while resurrecting her for relationship with God, for salvation. Barth’s answer is that this is in fact what we must do: we must die, in Christ, and rise in him – a solution that includes the central dynamics of penal substitution, while reaching far beyond in a synthesis of substitutionary and representational categories, in which the sinner truly and literally dies in Christ, thereby fulfilling the law of a God whose love is a love of law and order (DO, pp. 48–49; cf. McCormack 1993, pp. 25–34). Barth thus takes up the concerns of penal substitution within a far more comprehensive account in which substitution plays its role alongside representation, and justice is satisfied alongside God’s love (Smythe 2016, 2017), to note some of the key divergences (and developments). At root what we have here is an “anthropology which is embraced by Christology,” such that “in His work, His death on the cross, as the death of our Representative and substitute, it came to pass that, as the sinners and enemies we are, we were delivered up to death, and an end was made of us, and we came to an end with this whole world of sin and flesh and death” (CD IV/1, p. 348; note the distinction between representation and substitution in the German: “als dem Tod unseres Repräsentanten und Stellvertreters” KD, p. 385; cf. p. 387). Just as theology proper embraces Christology via the doctrine of election (God does not will to be God alone, but to be the God of the people he represents in Jesus), so Christology embraces anthropology via that same doctrine of election (what it means to be human is to be human in Jesus Christ, to have one’s identity rooted in and shaped by the history of this particular Israelite). God did not will to be alone, and neither did he will us to be alone, nor to have an independent and discrete identity, knowable and identifiable apart from any other relation. We, by the will of God, are creatures whose identity is encompassed by a greater reality, the reality of our Lord Jesus Christ. On this basis, we have died in him, and risen in him (Col. 2:12): I am the man of sin. … I myself am nailed to the cross and crucified (in the power of the sacrifice and obedience of Jesus Christ in my place). … I am therefore destroyed and replaced … as the one who has turned to nothingness I am done away in the death of Jesus Christ. (CD IV/1, p. 515)

It is this integration of substitution and representation seen in the concept of Stellvertretung that energizes Barth’s fourfold account of the atonement, in which Jesus is the “Judge Judged in Our Place” (CD IV/1, pp. 211–283). (i) Jesus is the Judge among us, justice incarnate, the just God with us. His is the role to bring justice and righteousness to his creation, and as such to do away with all injustice, all the unjust. But, and this is where Stellvertretung comes to play its vital role, (ii) Jesus is the Judge judged – the judge who takes our place as the judged, taking upon himself our sin, our guilt, our very selves. And as the one who takes our place, who both represents us and is our substitute, (iii) he is judged. It is in Jesus, the one great sinner, that our sin meets it proper end, that we are judged and done away with as the sinners we are. But this is

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not the end, for as the one who (iv) acted justly in our place, Jesus is the one in whom we are vindicated by the Father, raised from the dead and brought to a life of righteousness. Lest we be distracted by the overwhelming role of judicial categories and overemphasize the similarities with penal substitution, Barth takes a vital excursus in CD IV/1, pp. 273–283, in which he retains the fundamental structure of the fourfold work of Christ, energized by the doctrine of Stellvertretung, covering the same material from the standpoint of holiness and the sacrificial system: the Priest sacrificed for us (cf. Grebe 2014). This excursus cements two vital commitments for us. First, the substitutionary/representative framework is fundamental for Barth in a way that runs deeper than the many expositions or forms by means of which that framework is developed in Scripture, such as the judicial or sacrificial views we have briefly canvassed (cf. Jones 2007). Stellvertretung, we can now see more clearly than before, is truly that on which the whole doctrine of reconciliation depends (CD IV/1, 273). Second, the distinction ­between the formal framework (Stellvertretung) and material standpoints (judicial, cultic, military, and not least apocalyptic,1 etc.) opens up the door for a multiplicity of perspectives on Christ’s reconciling work to fund and equip the church’s proclamation (Johnson 2012a,b). Stellvertretung is thus the energizing center of Barth’s theology of the atonement.

Autonomy “in Him” How do we reconcile these seemingly competing claims? Did Christ take our burden, sparing us of its reality and consequences, that we might be free? Or did Christ take us and our burden, that we might die and rise in him? Was his a work that was for us, in our stead? Or was his work our work, our work done in and through him? Delving back into the ­doctrines of the Trinity, election, creation, and anthropology, we find a consistent line of thought interweaving the seemingly disparate concepts of substitution and representation. As we have seen, God chooses to be more than the self‐sufficient God: to be who he  is also through a certain vulnerability in relation to his people, a relation that is ­centered in the person and work of Jesus Christ. God determines to be who he is in relation to a people  —  to be the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to be the Father of Jesus. Creation, on the other hand, is the fitting and appropriate vessel for the election of God, his purpose to represent a people in himself. For us to be specifically human creatures is for us to derive our being and to live out our history as a genuine life and

1  Barth does not use the term “apocalyptic” in this context, but as Smythe has shown he operates with apocalyptic ideas in his doctrine of the atonement (Smythe 2016). It is finally apocalyptic that enables Barth to emphasize that sin and sinners are annihilated in the death of Christ, thereby decentering the traditional idea of juridical punishment.

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history before and with God, within and in God’s own being and history, the history of Jesus Christ. Without blurring the lines between Creator and creature, Barth ties these two as closely together as possible, with the being of the creature bound up in the ­transcending being and history of the Creator, of Jesus Christ. A particularly helpful way of exploring this logic lies in Barth’s account of autonomy.2 God “wills and fulfills and reveals Himself not only in Himself but in giving Himself, in willing and recognizing the distinct reality of the creature, granting, and conceding to it an individual and autonomous place side by side with Himself.” But note carefully – this is not an individuality or autonomy side by side with his own, simpliciter. These gifts of individuality and autonomy are not to be possessed outside Him, let alone against Him, but for Him, and within His kingdom. … The sovereignty which was to be confirmed and glorified was the sovereignty of His love, which did not will to exercise mechanical force, to move the immobile from without, … but rather to triumph in faithful servants and friends … in their obedience, in their own free decision for Him. The purpose and meaning of the eternal divine election of grace consists in the fact that the one who is elected from all eternity can and does elect God in return. (CD II/2, p. 178)

Two bedrock commitments clearly emerge here. First, autonomy and individuality are vital for Barth’s theology, apart from which there would be no creatures with whom God could meaningfully relate and to whom he could give himself in love and freedom. Second, this autonomy and individuality is properly understood only within, and not alongside or apart from, the life of God. This is a genuine creaturely autonomy within the life of the Creator. What then might “autonomy in” mean? One possibility lies further within Barth’s treatment of election, in which he distinguishes between the being and life of the creature: “Between the being of the elect and his life as such there lies the event and the decision of the reception of the promise. It is not for his being but for his life as elect that he needs to hear and believe the promise. Not every one who is elected lives as an elected man” (CD II/2, p. 321). Our very being, and not merely that of Creator or Savior, stands as an object of faith: a reality we comprehend only as we receive it in the light of revelation. Our being is not accessible to us as creatures, as a matter of scientific or psychological observation, for it lies hidden in Christ. Along with this being that is ours, hidden in Christ (Col. 3:3), there occurs the life we live and experience, the choices we make, the autonomy we experience as creatures. The divine election consists in the determination of our being in Christ, in order that we can and do elect God in return, in this present life. Election is God’s will and call that our life correspond to our being in Christ, that our autonomy and individuality flourish within God’s life and history.

2  It should be noted that Barth uses the idea of autonomy in more than one sense. In this context autonomy means that one’s decisions are truly one’s own. Elsewhere Barth pairs it with theonomy to bring out the idea that true freedom is possessed only as it is used and only as it is received by divine grace. (Cf. CD II/2, pp. 179, 184, etc.)

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At root, then, Barth posits an account of human nature that we cannot perceive, and to which we have access only in faith: that we are what we are in Jesus Christ, that his history transcends and encompasses our own, and that our freedom and autonomy emerge and become what they are only within this greater reality as God elects us that we might in turn and on that basis elect him. Inasmuch as our being is in Christ, it is proper to say that the work of Christ is a representational one, that includes and shapes our own as the reality and history in which we subsist. Inasmuch as we are autonomous and free creatures within this history, within this person, Christ’s work is a substitutional one – one that we do not live and experience as such, for our life, our experience, is one that does not at present directly access or perceive our being in Christ. What then is the life lived by the unrepentant (which in some sense includes us all)? A “lie, an absurd self‐deception, a shadow moving on the wall – the being of that man who has long since superseded and replaced and who can only imagine that he is man, while in reality he is absolutely nothing” (CD IV/1, p. 89). As counterintuitive as it may seem, our reality is hidden with Christ in God. “We cannot experience and perceive and comprehend ourselves in this our real to‐day” (CD IV/1, p. 548), for “we are in Him and comprehended in Him, but we are still not He Himself. Therefore it is all true and actual in this Other first and not in us” (CD IV/1, p. 549). Our freedom, our autonomy, or individuality – all these are real, and treasured by God, the one who seeks to be our God, to be our friend. But these realities are what they are only in a specific relation, only as they are contained within a history, within the life of Jesus, which grounds, shapes, and constrains them as the kind of reality they are.

Conclusion Barth’s thought transcends any “theory” of the atonement preceding him within the history of the church, both for the fact that interpreting the history of the doctrine through the lens of “theories” is an inherently problematic approach and the fact that Barth’s own thought is simply that rich and diverse. Key insights of most major theologians throughout the history of the church can be found in one form or another throughout his writings on the atonement, largely because the doctrine of God (including the doctrines of the Trinity, divine perfections and election) funding his soteriology is so exceptionally rich, and so consistently woven into his account of the work of Christ. But beneath all this is an account of Jesus Christ as our representative and substitute (Stellvertreter), which stands as the energizing core of a ­doctrine of the atonement as comprehensive as any to be found in the history of the doctrine.3

3  Thank you to Jeannine Michele Graham, Glen Johnson, Paul Nimmo, Kyle Strobel, and Hannah Williamson for their comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.

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References Barth, K. (1947). Dogmatik Im Grundriss. Zürich: Evangelischer Verlag. Graham, J. (2005). Representation and Substitution in the Atonement Theologies of Dorothee Sölle, John Macquarrie, and Karl Barth. New York: Peter Lang. Graham, J. (2017). Substitution and representation. In: T&T Clark Companion to Atonement (ed. A.J. Johnson), 763–768. London: Bloomsbury. Grebe, M. (2014). Election, Atonement, and the Holy Spirit. Eugene, OR: Pickwick. Johnson, A. (2012a). God’s Being in Reconciliation. New York: T&T Clark. Johnson, A. (2012b). The servant lord: a word of caution regarding the Munus Triplex in Karl Barth’s theology and the church today. Scottish Journal of Theology 65 (2): 159–173. Johnson, A. (2015). Atonement: A Guide for the Perplexed. New York: T&T Clark.

Jones, P. (2007). Karl Barth on Gethsemane. International Journal of Systematic Theology 9 (2): 148–171. McCormack, B. (1993). For us and our Salvation. Princeton: Princeton Theological Seminary. McCormack, B. (2004). The ontological presuppositions of Barth’s doctrine of the atonement. In: The Glory of the Atonement (eds. R. Nicole et al.), 346–366. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity. Smythe, S. (2016). Forensic Apocalyptic Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress. Smythe, S. (2017). Karl Barth. In: T&T Clark Companion to Atonement (ed. A.J. Johnson), 237–256. London: Bloomsbury. Sölle, D. (1967). Christ the Representative: An Essay in Theology after the “Death of God”. Philadelphia: Fortress. Williams, G. (2008). Karl Barth and the doctrine of the atonement. In: Engaging with Barth (eds. D. Gibson and D. Strange), 232–272. Nottingham: InterVarsity.

CHAPTER 14

Barth on Christ’s Resurrection John L. Drury

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hrist’s resurrection is the key to Barth’s Christology. The image of a key may be used in a number of senses, three of which are in play here: a key that starts an engine, a key that unlocks a door, and a keystone that holds together two sides of an arch. Christ’s resurrection can be seen as the key to Barth’s Christology in each of these three senses. Christ’s resurrection is the epistemic basis, soteriological transition, and teleological unity of Barth’s Christology. The doctrine of Christ’s resurrection performs these functions because the event of Christ’s resurrection is the event of revelation in its strictest sense. This threefold function of Christ’s resurrection comes to its fullest expression in the fourth volume of Barth’s Church Dogmatics (CD). Though not without anticipations ­earlier in his career, CD IV decisively develops this threefold function of Christ’s resurrection with architectonic clarity and integrity. Here Christ’s resurrection functions as the ignition key that gets Christology up and running, the key that opens the door ­between Christology proper and Christology in its wider anthropological impact, and the keystone that holds together the twofold dialectical development of Christology’s material content. This essay will treat each of these functions in turn. By locating it in its larger architectonic context, one acquires a fuller picture of Barth’s mature doctrine of Christ’s resurrection than by merely attending to what Barth happens to say about it in this or that section. The term architectonic signifies a literary structure determined by substantive commitments. An architectonic reading thus attends not only to what a doctrine says but also to what it does in relation to other doctrines, concepts, and commitments. Furthermore, such a reading helps to clarify the structure of Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation, which curiously remains a mystery to many of Barth’s readers. Finally, by bringing together resurrection and Christology, this essay seeks to supplement but not supplant the excellent work on both in recent Barth

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth and Dogmatics, Volume I, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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studies. With the exception of Klappert (1971) and Molnar (2007), most secondary ­literature treats these two topics separately.1 Understanding Barth’s mature doctrine of resurrection will not resolve all interpretive problems, but it may begin to dissolve them by introducing an alternative point of view.

Resurrection as Epistemic Basis Christ’s resurrection is the key that ignites Barth’s Christology. Christ’s resurrection gets Barth’s Christology up and running. In what sense do I intend this figure? Christ’s resurrection is the epistemic basis of Christology. Throughout Barth’s career Christ’s resurrection performs a revelatory function. In fact, Christ’s resurrection performs the revelatory function. Because Christ just is the self‐revelation of God, and because Christ’s resurrection is the self‐revelation of Christ, it follows that Christ’s resurrection is the central event of revelation. It is, as it were, the center of the center. God reveals the truth of himself in the life history of Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ reveals the truth of his life history in his resurrection from the dead. Therefore, any Christology worthy of the name rests on the reality of the resurrection. Theological reflection on the being and action of Jesus Christ is rendered possible on the basis of the actuality of Christ’s self‐ attestation in his resurrection. In short, Christ’s resurrection is the epistemic basis of Christology. This claim can be logically inferred from what Barth says about Christ’s resurrection. Its revelatory function entails as much. But we needn’t simply draw this inference from what Barth says about Christ’s resurrection and read it back into what he says about Christology. For Barth makes this move explicit in the christological subsections in CD IV. In each of these subsections, Barth clearly and consistently states that the risen Christ himself is the epistemic basis of all he has to say about Christ. Before turning to these texts, it would be wise to clarify the claim I am making. I am asserting that Christ’s resurrection is the epistemological basis of Barth’s Christology. I am not asserting that Christ’s resurrection is the ontological basis of Christology. The logos of the incarnate Christ rests ontologically on God’s eternal self‐determination to be God for us. As Bruce McCormack puts it, “Christology is the epistemological basis of election, and election is the ontological basis of Christology” (2011, p. 90). Jesus Christ, the God‐human, is the subject matter of Christology. This subject matter is real or actual on account of the eternal will of God in Jesus Christ. There is this God‐human as and because of God’s eternal love. Nevertheless, there is knowledge of this God‐human as and because he himself rose again from the dead. In his resurrection from the dead, Christ attests to the reality of his identity as the God‐human. Thus we may and must say that Christ’s resurrection is the epistemological basis of Christology, while at the same time affirming that Christ’s election is the ontological basis of Christology. To put it 1  Older studies on Barth’s doctrine of Christ’s resurrection tend to be overdetermined by midcentury debates concerning historicity. More recent, properly theological studies include Hunsinger 2004, Dawson 2007, Hitchcock 2013, and Drury 2014. The literature on Barth’s Christology is vast. Important recent studies include Hunsinger 2000, McCormack 2008, Jones 2008, and Sumner 2016.

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bluntly, Christ does not become the Son of God in his resurrection, but we would never know that he is the Son of God if it were not for his resurrection. These claims are anticipated throughout Barth’s career. As early as the Romans Commentary, Barth states that, “The resurrection is the revelation, the discovery of Jesus as the Christ, the appearance of God, and the knowledge of God in him” (RII, 6; ET: 30).2 Later, in the prolegomena to the Church Dogmatics, Barth argues that “the function of the resurrection is to render the passion of Christ, in which the incarnation of the Word of God was consummated, transparent and comprehensible as revelation,” because the “resurrection is the event of the revelation of the one who became incarnate, who was humiliated, who was crucified” (KD I/2, p. 122; CD I/1, p. 111). Later still, in the justly famous passage “Jesus, Lord of Time” (CD §47.1), Barth asserts that during the 40 days of Easter “the man Jesus was among them manifestly in the mode of God. They recognized during these days that he was hidden, but actually always — already when they had been with him before his death — was among them in the mode of God” (KD III/2, p. 538; CD III/2, p. 448). So the revelatory function of Christ’s resurrection is a constant theme throughout Barth’s theological development. Nevertheless, these claims come together with architectonic clarity and particular consistency in Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation (CD IV). In order to trace the function of Christ’s resurrection in Barth’s mature Christology, we must attend to its complex structure (see Figure 14.1). Barth divides this volume into five chapters. The first (chapter 13) briefly introduces the subject matter and problems of the doctrine of reconciliation. The last (chapter 17) deals with the ethics relative to it, as is his custom. The three middle chapters develop this doctrine under three aspects: Jesus Christ, Lord as Servant (chapter 14); Jesus Christ, Servant as Lord (chapter 15); and Jesus Christ, the truthful Witness (chapter 16). Each of these three chapters is further divided into five parallel sections. The first section of each chapter develops at great length the christological actuality of reconciliation under the relevant aspect. The next two sections concern the respecting hamartiology and soteriology. The last two sections then articulate the related communal and individual consequences. Thus one can read this material both linearly and laterally. The latter is especially helpful for keeping the parallel perspectives in mind (and failing to do so can easily lead to hasty accusations of one‐sidedness). The lengthy christological sections are further divided into three main subsections (§64 and §69 add preliminary subsections that frame the issues at hand but to some extent obscure the parallelism of the internal numbering system). These unfold according to a recurring pattern in Barth’s writing: subject, act, and goal. As Eberhard Busch observes, “In the dogmatics Barth … structures his train of thought, with a certain freedom and yet with a recognizable constancy, with a three‐step sequence, in both small and large contexts. This threefold step is obviously an implication of the way he understands the doctrine of the Trinity. As a rule he speaks first of the subject of the divine Word and work, then of the act, and finally of the goal” (2004, p. 44). Each of these sections begins with the subject of reconciliation: the person of Christ, his identity,

2  All quotations from Karl Barth are my own translations, and all emphasis is original.

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Chapter 14 (IV/1)

Chapter 15 (IV/2)

Chapter 16 (IV/3)

Chapter Title:

“Jesus Christ, the Lord as Servant”

“Jesus Christ, the Servant as Lord”

“Jesus Christ, the True Witness”

Idiom: (Dialogue Partner)

Pauline (Protestant)

Synoptic (Monastic)

Johannine (Modern)

Perspective:

God Humbled

Man Exalted

God-Man Revealed

Christology:

“The Obedience of the Son of God” (§59)

“The Exaltation of the Son of Man” (§64)

“The Glory of the Mediator” (§69)

Subject : Incarnate Person of Christ

Deity: “The Way of the Son of God into the Far Country” (§59.1)

Humanity: “The Homecoming of the Son of Man” (§64.2)

Unity: “The Light of Life” (§69.2)

Priest: “The Judge Judged in Our Place” (§59.2)

King: “The Royal Human” (§64.3)

Prophet: “Jesus Is Victor” (§69.3)

Raising: “The Verdict of the Father” (§59.3)

Arising: “The Direction of the Son” (§64.4)

Parousia: “The Promise of the Spirit” (§69.4)

Sin:

Pride & Fall (§60)

Sloth & Misery (§65)

Falsehood & Condemnation (§70)

Soteriology:

Justification (§61)

Sanctification (§66)

Vocation (§71)

Pneumatology:

Awakening

Quickening

Enlightening

Act: Reconciling Work of Christ Goal : Christ's Resurrection as Transition

Community:

Gathering (§62)

Up-building (§67)

Sending (§72)

Individual:

Faith (§63)

Love (§68)

Hope (§73)

Foundation: Baptism (§63)

Fulfillment: Lord's Prayer (§76–78)

Renewal: Lord's Supper

Chapter 17 (IV/4): Ethics

Figure 14.1  The Architectonic of Barth’s Doctrine of Reconciliation (CD IV). Source: Adapted from E. Jüngel (1986), pp. 48–49.

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the being of the reconciler – Christology in the narrower sense of the term. The middle subsections concern the act of reconciliation: the work of Christ, his life history, the event of reconciling – soteriology in the basal sense of the term. The concluding subsections then articulate the goal of reconciliation, i.e. the effect of Christ, his transition, the aim of being reconciled. Now at first glance, this threefold structure corresponds to the threefold christological narrative of incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. So it is fitting that the most sustained discussions of Christ’s resurrection appear in the concluding transitional subsections. But that is not the whole story. For Christ’s resurrection is in play from the beginning. One need not wait until the goal of reconciliation to hear of Easter, for Easter bells are already ringing in the treatment from the beginning. This is no accident, but a feature of the architectonic: as the epistemic basis of Christology, Christ’s resurrection must be the first note struck. One cannot do Christology in the narrower sense of ­specifying the subject of reconciliation without at least some reference to Christ’s self‐ revelation in his resurrection from the dead. A brief survey of each of these subsections bears this out. Near the beginning of “The Way of the Son of God into the Far Country” (§59.1), Barth refers to Christ’s resurrection as the epistemic basis of the Christology developed there. In contrast to its parallel subsections (§64.2 and §69.2), this point remains brief and undeveloped. But Barth is no less clear. He begins his argument with the church’s confession that Jesus is Lord. Then he immediately identifies Jesus Christ’s risen self‐attestation as the basis of this confession: “when they do so describe him, they appeal so to speak to himself: that he himself continuously attests himself as such. … He himself in the power of his resurrection. … When the New Testament attests him as such, it speaks of his resurrection from the dead” (KD IV/1, pp. 178–179; CD IV/1, pp. 162–163). Now Barth will go on to famously arrive at the ontological basis of Christology in God’s eternal self‐differentiating self‐determination. But this justly famous argument begins with the simple confession that Jesus is Lord, which the church declares because Jesus himself attests to it in his resurrection from the dead. In other words, Christ’s resurrection is the epistemic basis of Christology. This idea is developed at greater length in “The Homecoming of the Son of Man” (§64.2). In contrast to the other two subsections (§59.1 and §69.2), this thesis does not emerge at the beginning of this subsection. Thus Christ’s resurrection does not appear as the literary starting point of §64.2. Nevertheless, Barth clearly and distinctly asserts that Christ’s resurrection is the epistemic starting point of Christology. In fact, he dedicates the last 30 pages of this subsection to a discussion of this very point. The theme of §64.2 is the exaltation of humanity in Jesus Christ. Barth divides this subsection into three large portions indicated by Roman numerals. The first and shortest of these portions asserts that the “first and last basis” of the exaltation of humanity lies “in God’s election of grace” (KD IV/2, p. 32; CD IV/2, p. 31). This section is brief because Barth can and does refer his readers to his Christocentric doctrine of election as developed in CD §32. The second and longest of these portions explicates the “historical fulfillment” of the exaltation of humanity in “the event of the incarnation” (KD IV/2, p. 32; CD IV/2, p. 31). Here Barth appropriates and revises the older doctrine of the incarnation as the actualization of true humanity in Jesus Christ. The third and final of these

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portions identifies the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ as “the basis of revelation” of the human exaltation actualized in him (KD IV/2, p. 32; CD IV/2, p. 31). Here Barth clearly asserts and argues that Christ’s resurrection (and therewith his ascension) is the epistemic foundation of Christology. Although the incarnation takes place prior to the resurrection, we must speak of the incarnation and its basis in election retrospectively from the resurrection. So, although election is clearly Christology’s ontological basis, resurrection is its epistemic basis. In this specified sense, Christ’s resurrection is the key that ignites Barth’s Christology. The most emphatic and extensive articulation of this claim appears in §69.2, “The Light of Life.” We shall return to this material in its wider architectonic context in the third part of this essay. For now it will suffice to show that Barth begins this christological subsection with an emphatic appeal to Christ’s resurrection as the singular axiom of Christian theology. Barth begins this christological subsection with the deceptively simple claim: “He, Jesus Christ, lives” (KD IV/3, p. 41; CD IV/3, p. 39). After a “preliminary development” of this theme, he proceeds to add three “explanatory additions” (KD IV/3, p. 46; CD IV/3, p. 43). The first of these is that everything he has said about Christ’s livingness is drawn from the scriptural attestation to Christ’s resurrection. “He lives” is simply another way of saying “He is risen.” Barth then makes this striking claim: “If there is any Christian‐theological axiom, it is this: Jesus Christ is risen, he is risen indeed!” (KD IV/3, p. 47; CD IV/3, p. 44). Could there be a more emphatic statement of the epistemic basicality of Christ’s resurrection? This biblical and liturgical d ­ eclaration functions as the noetic key that ignites Barth’s Christology. And this noetic key turns with the power of an ontic key: the actual event of Jesus Christ arising from the dead to reveal himself. To Barth’s treatment of this event itself we now turn.

Resurrection as Soteriological Transition Christ’s resurrection is the key that unlocks Barth’s Christology. The risen Christ is the key that not only ignites Christology in its narrower sense but also opens up Christology to its wider sense. In his resurrection, Jesus Christ enacts the soteriological transition (Übergang) within Christology. Just as Christology in the narrower sense cannot commence without the foundation laid by Jesus Christ in risen self‐attestation, so Christology in the wider sense cannot continue without the transition enacted by Jesus Christ in his resurrection from the dead. The remaining topics of the doctrine of reconciliation – sin, salvation, ecclesiology, ethics  –  are made possible by the actuality of Christ’s own movement toward us in his resurrection. This function of Christ’s resurrection comes to expression in the transitional subsections that conclude each of the three foundational sections of Church Dogmatics Volume IV (see Figure 14.1). After treating the acting subject and accomplished act of reconciliation, Barth treats the problem of transition. How does the actualized fact of reconciliation become an acknowledged factor in our lives? This problem is especially pressing for a theologian like Barth, who articulates Christ’s saving work in radically actualized terms. According to Barth, the life history of Jesus Christ in his obedience unto death

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just is the reconciliation of God to the world and of the world to God. It is finished. It is perfected. It is completed. Its accomplishment as such awaits no application. Its potency awaits no actualization. Its singularity awaits no development. Now this is good news – very good news! For all sinful resistance to grace has been radically undercut. But it presents a problem, for this actuality of grace has been actualized in death. “It is finished” is not an abstract principle but the concrete word of the one who breathed his last. So this good news is enclosed within the darkness of death. How can this good news become good news for us? How can the veil of darkness be lifted? Who can save us from this body of death? Enter the risen Jesus Christ. He who actualized our reconciliation in his life unto death also attests our reconciliation in his life beyond death. He who was enclosed in the darkness of his death discloses himself in the light of his life. He who was shut up in his tomb with our sinfulness bursts forth in the garden with our righteousness. In his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ reveals himself as the one, true, living God and the one, true, living human, existing in reconciled communion. In his resurrection, Jesus Christ supplies his own transition from the space and time of his actualization to that of our acknowledgment. Hence, because of the Easter event, we may and must move on to speak of sin, salvation, the church, and the Christian life in the light of the reconciliation accomplished in Jesus Christ. This is the argument in a nutshell of the three transitional subsections of Church Dogmatics Volume IV (§59.3, §64.4, and §69.4). To get a clearer picture of what Barth is doing here, it may help to attend to a number of images he uses to articulate the transitional function of Christ’s resurrection. The first is the image of a door. The problem of transition is that our reconciliation comes to its completion in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. In his crucifixion, Jesus Christ was concealed behind the door of death, which cannot be opened from the outside (CD IV/2, p. 297). According to this image, Christ’s resurrection is the event whereby Jesus Christ unlocks the door from within and “flings the door wide open” (CD IV/2, p. 298). Another image is that of a circle: Jesus Christ in his reconciling life history is the center, while we humans as reconciled sinners are its circumference. As Barth puts it, “Jesus Christ is not without his own. He is who he is as he is among them, the saving and illuminating center of which they form the circumference saved and illuminated by him” (CD IV/3, p. 278). Barth continues, “He himself is not merely there in his own place, but … also here in our place. He is the one who is on‐the‐way from there to here. … He is and acts on his way out from his own particular realm in‐to our surrounding anthropological realm” (KD IV/3, p. 322; CD IV/3, p. 279). According to this image, Christ’s resurrection is the radius, the event by which Christ himself moves from the center to the periphery. A third image is that of two intersecting lines: “The Christology is like a vertical line meeting a horizontal. The doctrine of human sin is like the horizontal line as such. The doctrine of justification [and sanctification and vocation] is the intersection of the horizontal line by the vertical. The remaining doctrine, that of the church and of faith [and hope and love], is again the horizontal line: but now seen as crossed by the vertical” (KD IV/1, pp. 718–719; CD IV/1, p. 643). According to this image, Christ’s resurrection supplies the perspectival shift from the vertical to the horizontal line.

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In all three cases the image is intended to illustrate not only the literary structure of Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation but also and primarily the structure of the reconciliation event itself. In fact, as far as Barth is concerned, the validity of the former (the doctrine) rests solely in its correspondence to the latter (the event). As and because Jesus Christ in his resurrection unlocks the door, makes his way from the center to the periphery, and intersects the line of our lives, we are freed to theologize not only about Christ himself but also about ourselves in light of Christ. In other words, Christ’s resurrection is the soteriological transition within Barth’s Christology. Barth advances this architectonic transition by means of a substantive exposition of the deep grammar of the Easter event. As I have argued elsewhere, this deep grammar is trinitarian (Drury 2014). Barth’s doctrine of Christ’s resurrection is transitional in function precisely because it is trinitarian in form. Christ’s resurrection occurs in a threefold structure analogous to, and ultimately grounded in, the triune life of God. Taken broadly, Easter is not a moment but a movement. It is the movement of Christ’s self‐attestation, which is as such the movement of God’s self‐revelation. This movement consists of three distinct but united moments: Easter commences in the originating event of the raising (Auferweckung) of Jesus Christ from the dead by God the Father; Easter continues in the ongoing event of the arising (Auferstehen) of Jesus Christ in which he appears to his own; and Easter culminates in the orienting event of the presence (Parusie) of Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit dwelling in and on his apostolic witnesses. Jesus Christ is raised; Jesus Christ is risen; Jesus Christ is present: these three are one Easter event in its originating, ongoing, and orienting aspects. And this three‐in‐ one event just is the three‐in‐one movement of Christ’s self‐revelation. This three‐in‐one structure of the Easter event is unfolded in each of Barth’s transitional subsections. That is fitting, insofar as each subsection performs the same function precisely by attesting this one self‐same event. Nevertheless, this threefold structure is developed differently in each case in keeping with the perspective of its part‐volume (see Figure 14.1). The same three notes are always struck, but the accent is placed on a different note each time. In the first transitional subsection, the accent is placed on the originating moment of Easter: the raising of Jesus Christ as the gracious gift of God the Father for us. Thus §59.3 is fittingly titled “The Verdict of the Father.” In the second transitional subsection, the accent is placed on the ongoing moment of Easter: the arising of Jesus Christ as his own self‐attesting appearance to us. Thus §64.4 is fittingly titled “The Direction of the Son.” In the last transitional subsection, the accent is placed on the orienting moment of Easter: the presence of Jesus Christ as the pledge of his co‐ laboring with us in the Spirit. Thus §69.4 is fittingly titled “The Promise of the Spirit.” And so, we can see that the three‐in‐one structure of Easter comes into play not only as the inner logic of each transitional subsection but also as the defining principle that ­differentiates them within their common function. In other words, Barth’s mature ­doctrine of Christ’s resurrection, both in its parts and as a whole, is trinitarian in structure. However, this trinitarian structure does not exhaust the perspectival differences ­between these subsections. For each subsection is also developed in accordance with the aspect of reconciliation under investigation in the relevant chapter. And so, despite the repetition of the basic three‐in‐one revelational structure of Easter, each subsection is

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differentiated not only by way of accent but also by way of idiom. In the first transitional subsection, Easter adopts the Pauline forensic‐cultic idiom of the fourteenth chapter: the self‐humbling judgment of God enacted in Christ’s crucifixion is followed by the life‐giving sentence issued in the raising of Jesus Christ. Thus §59.3 is fittingly titled “The Verdict of the Father.” In the second transitional subsection, Easter adopts the synoptic moral‐political idiom of the fifteenth chapter: the royal homecoming of the human accomplished in Christ’s life of obedience unto death is followed by the revolutionary wisdom unleashed in Christ’s risen self‐attestation. Thus §64.4 is fittingly called “The Direction (Weisung) of the Son.” Finally, in the third transitional subsection, Easter adopts the Johannine missional‐teleological idiom of the sixteenth chapter: the true victory enacted in the prophetic existence of Jesus Christ is followed by the vocational authorization ratified in the parousia of the risen Christ. Thus §69.4 is fittingly titled “The Promise of the Spirit.” And so, we can see that the three‐in‐one revelational structure of Easter is filled out by the reconciliational substance of Barth’s Christology. In other words, Barth’s mature doctrine of Christ’s resurrection is soteriological in function, precisely by attesting to the Christ’s own act of transition to us. Now this transitional function developed in its trinitarian form is ultimately teleological in focus. Even in a Christological context, Barth’s doctrine of Christ’s resurrection is always already oriented toward an eschatological horizon. This is why Barth’s theology of Easter transcends the “historical” and “existential” approaches found in most modern theology (Hunsinger 2004). Although indicated in the transitional subsections, this teleological focus finds its most thoroughgoing articulation in the sixteenth chapter of CD, to which we now turn.

Resurrection as Teleological Culmination Christ’s resurrection is the keystone to Barth’s Christology. This event is the key that not only ignites and unlocks but also unites Barth’s Christology. Christ’s resurrection is not only its epistemic foundation and soteriological transition but also its teleological culmination. Jesus Christ in his risen self‐attestation is the keystone that combines the two columns of the inner dialectic of Barth’s mature Christology – the Lord as Servant and the Servant as Lord – and renders it a single arch. This keystone comes to expression in the “third form of the doctrine of reconciliation” as Barth develops it in the sixteenth chapter of the Church Dogmatics. This chapter begins with the striking claim that the “material development” of reconciliation doctrine is already completed by the twofold exposition of its “inner dialectic” in the fourteenth and fifteenth chapters (KD IV/3, pp. 2–3; CD IV/3, pp. 4–5). Reconciliation is actual in the humiliation of God and exaltation of the human enacted in Jesus Christ. Nothing can or should be added to what has already been said. What curious words with which to begin a 900‐plus page book! But these words aptly frame the third problem of the doctrine of reconciliation. For this third problem is not symmetrically parallel to the first and second. These explore the twofold inner dialectic of the one event of reconciliation: How and why did the Lord become servant and the servant become Lord? How: in virtue of God’s eternal

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self‐differentiating self‐determination in Jesus Christ. Why: to reconcile God and the human in the priestly and royal work of Jesus Christ. The third problem adds no element to this substantive dialectic. But it does ask after the shape of this twofold content: How and why does this one mediator shine and speak for himself ? What unites these two sides in service of one end? What is the fundamental character of this twofold history? What sort of event is this? Barth’s initial conceptual answer is this: Reconciliation is as such also revelation. What does all this have to do with Christ’s resurrection? Reconciliation is as such also revelation because and as Jesus Christ is risen. The Easter event just is the teleological dynamic of Christology. The obedience unto death that took place in Jesus Christ is as such the very revelation of God’s free love, because this completed history speaks and shines for itself in and through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. And so, Christ’s resurrection is not merely the epistemic basis of this third form of Christology but also its theme. Jesus Christ not only lived and died but also lives and thereby attests himself. The Easter event, as a new and distinct event following Christ’s obedience unto death, is the revelation of the reconciliation he already accomplished. This much we saw in our treatment of the transitional subsections. But in the sixteenth chapter of Church Dogmatics, we learn that the Easter event, as the final and definitive event of Christ’s life, accomplished the revelation of reconciliation with the same “objectivity” and “actuality” as reconciliation itself. The truthful testimony to the divine–human covenant is not a possibility extrinsic to its fulfillment; rather, it shares in its actuality as an intrinsic feature of its occurrence. Revelation is the very teleological dynamic of reconciliation. The aim and purpose of the reconciliation of God and the human in Jesus Christ is always already the conscious participation of the world in this actuality. So, although revelation is crucially distinct from reconciliation, revelation is nevertheless intrinsic to reconciliation. Restated in narrative terms, Christ’s resurrection is crucially distinct from the Christ’s life of obedience unto death, but Easter is nevertheless an event in Christ’s life. Therefore, while respecting the distinctness of Easter revelation, we may and must regard it as equally essential to Christology. Barth develops this point by way of his peculiar deployment of the prophetic office. One of the best‐kept secrets of the Church Dogmatics is its radical revision of Christ’s prophetic office. Barth affirms the basic insight of the patristic age that Jesus Christ as prophet is the definitive revelation of God (CD IV/3, p. 13). And he enthusiastically embraces Calvin’s formal decision to treat the prophetic office as on par with the priestly and royal (CD IV/3, p. 13). However, he is severely critical of the sequential, external, superlative, divided, and parochial manner in which his antecedents in the Christian tradition developed the material content of the doctrine (CD IV/3, pp. 14–18). According to Barth, the threefold office has been developed in a sequential manner, as though Christ serves first as prophet in his public teachings and deeds, next as priest in his sufferings and death, and then as king in his resurrection and ascension. This tends to relegate Christ’s prophetic office to the past. In connection with this, the revealing function of the prophetic office has been understood as extrinsic to the reconciling function of the priestly and royal offices. This tends to empty Christ’s prophetic work and word of its properly christological content. Furthermore, Christ’s prophetic office

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has been articulated in superlative terms, as though Christ is merely the greatest, h ­ ighest, and best in a series of prophets. This tends to obscure the singularity of Christ as God’s self‐revelation. Moreover, the exercise of Christ’s prophetic office has been divided ­between his speaking through himself and through others. This contradicts Christ’s ­freedom to speak through himself even as he speaks through others. Finally, the prophetic office of Christ has been framed far too parochially, as though Christ’s primary audience is the church. This truncates the universal scope of Christ’s word of grace, spoken to all humanity. Barth aims to repair the doctrine of Christ’s prophetic office by radically receiving its core idea while radically revising its overall structure. Barth performs this repair by ­correlating Christ’s prophetic office with Christ’s resurrection. According to Barth, the Easter event is the inclusively singular occurrence of Christ’s prophetic utterance. It is singular in that it is the one necessary and sufficient enactment of Christ’s self‐attestation. It is inclusively singular in that from itself it summons a myriad of witnesses to participate in this service. In his risenness, Christ himself reveals himself as the divine–human reconciler who has reconciled God and the human. By so correlating resurrection and revelation, Barth affirms the core idea of the doctrine of Christ’s prophetic office: that Christ in his reconciling work also enacts his reconciling word, that reconciliation is as such also revelation. But Barth also corrects its problematic development: for Christ in his resurrection exercises his prophetic office simultaneously, intrinsically, singularly, self‐sufficiently, and universally. Let us consider each of these five points. According to Barth, Christ exercises his three offices simultaneously. Christ is always already the one true living priest, king, and prophet. This does not rule out that each comes to the foreground at distinct moments. But even on that account Barth is peculiar, for he swaps two of the standard pairings so that the royal office comes to the fore in Christ’s teaching and deeds (CD §64.3) whereas the prophetic office comes to the fore in Christ’s resurrection and parousia (CD §69). This innovative move helps Barth to articulate consistently his earlier insight into the simultaneity of God’s humiliation of himself and exaltation of us in Christ’s life of obedience unto death (see CD §33.2). The priestly and royal offices articulate the two sides of this inner dialectic of reconciliation. The prophetic office in turn articulates the teleological dynamic of reconciliation: its character as revelation. But despite these distinctions, the three offices are fundamentally simultaneous. The one life history of Jesus Christ is the reconciliation of God and humanity, and as such also is the revelation of this reconciliation. This revelation is centered in but not restricted to Christ’s resurrection. According to Barth, the content of Christ’s prophetic word is himself in his reconciling work. Jesus does not merely leverage his divine authority to teach truths more or less remotely connected with his messianic identity and significance. No! Jesus Christ as the one, true living prophet reveals himself as the one, true living priest and king! The material content of revelation is reconciliation. Barth’s peculiar correlation of the prophetic office with Christ’s resurrection substantiates this claim. Exegetically, the Risen Christ is narrated in the gospels as the one who reveals himself as the reconciler of the world to God: He appears, he confirms his identity, he opens the Scriptures about himself, he explains the meaning and fittingness of his suffering, and he commissions his apostles to bear witness to himself. Jesus’ teaching during the 40 days is explicitly and

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exclusively christological in content. The risen Christ is a teacher not of general or even particular truths but of the singular truth of his work of grace perfectly actualized in his life of obedience unto death. The risen Christ speaks and shines even in the p ­ re‐ Easter narratives, though most patently so in the Gospel of John. Architectonically, placing the prophetic office after the other two offices serves to ensure that the content of Christ’s proclamation is his self‐attestation as the reconciler. This order is in principle reversible. As Barth likes to say, “methodus est arbitrario.” And, as we saw in the first part of this essay, Barth already anticipates this theme when he treats Christ’s resurrection as the epistemic basis of Christology. So, in some sense, the prophetic office is always already implicitly operative – which ought not surprise in the light of the simultaneity of Christ’s threefold office. Nevertheless, for strategic reasons, Barth chooses to locate the prophetic office after the other two as a bold corrective to the historic depriving of this office of its properly christological content. But this achievement is ultimately grounded in the correlation of the prophetic office with Christ’s resurrection. Barth’s corrective reordering is intended as a testimony to this truth. For just as resurrection follows upon life crucified, so revelation follows upon reconciliation accomplished. Jesus is also the Revealer, yes; but not as a role alongside and separable from his being the Reconciler. Jesus Christ is the Revealer of himself as the Reconciler. He is the revelation of reconciliation. And this intrinsic relation is nowhere more manifest than in the Easter event. And so, as the culmination of his being in act for us, Christ’s resurrection serves as the keystone of Barth’s Christology. The next three points can be treated more briefly. According to Barth, Christ’s exercise of the prophetic office is not merely superlative, but singular. As the one, true, living, i.e. resurrected witness, Jesus Christ is the one, true, living prophet. Just as he alone accomplished the reconciliation between God and the human in his own personal life of obedience unto death, so also he alone accomplishes the revelation of that reconciliation in his risen glory. Accordingly, Christ’s exercise of this prophetic office is not divided but unified. As the one, true, living, i.e. resurrected mediator between God and the human, Jesus Christ speaks and shines through himself. Even in the mediation of the prophets and apostles, what is mediated is none other than the risen Christ’s own self‐attestation. Christ attests himself through them. Finally, Christ’s exercise of the prophetic office is not merely parochial but universal in scope. As the one, true, living, i.e., resurrected redeemer, Jesus Christ calls and draws all humans to himself. Just as he lived and died for the whole world, so also he lives to appear and appeal to the whole world – though not all at once, but to each in his own allotted time. Jesus Christ, precisely in his risenness from the dead, is free to speak his word of grace, not only to the church, but also and primarily to the world. It is to this universally directed prophecy that the risen Christ commissions his church to serve in its own life of witness. It is manifest that each of these five points of revision to the doctrine of the prophetic office is embedded in and advanced by Barth’s correlation of prophetic office with Christ’s resurrection. The simultaneous, intrinsic, singular, unified, and universal character of Christ’s prophetic office is guaranteed by the fact that he is no longer dead, but risen, and so can and does serve as his own true, living witness. Thus, we may say that Christ’s resurrection is the keystone of Barth’s Christology. The twofold office of

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priestly humiliation and royal exaltation, together accomplished in his life of obedience unto death, comes together in the third office of prophetic glorification rooted in his resurrection from the dead. The doctrine of the prophetic office articulates the teleological dynamic of Christ’s reconciling history as and because Christ’s resurrection just is that teleological dynamic. The two columns of Barth’s Christology are united into a proper arch by the keystone of Christ’s resurrection. Barth’s Christology is Easter saturated from beginning to end. His Christology begins with Christ’s resurrection as its epistemic basis, turns on Christ’s resurrection as its soteriological transition, and culminates in Christ’s resurrection as its teleological dynamic. In all three of these senses, Christ’s resurrection provides the key to Barth’s Christology. It performs this function because it is the central event of revelation. In his resurrection from the dead, Christ reveals himself. Many interpretive questions remain; but the light in which all of them may and must be explored is the Light of Life: Jesus Christ, risen from the dead. References Busch, E. (2004). Great Passion: An Introduction to Karl Barth’s Theology. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Dawson, R. (2007). The Resurrection in Karl Barth. Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing. Drury, J. (2014). The Resurrected God: Karl Barth’s Trinitarian Theology of Christ’s Resurrection. Philadelphia: Fortress. Hitchcock, N. (2013). Karl Barth and the Resurrection of the Flesh: The Loss of the Body in Participatory Eschatology. Eugene, OR: Pickwick. Hunsinger, G. (2000). Karl Barth’s Christology: Its basic Chalcedonian character. In: Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth, 131–147. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Hunsinger, G. (2004). The daybreak of new creation: Christ’s resurrection in recent theology. Scottish Journal of Theology 57 (2): 163–181. Jones, P.D. (2008). The Humanity of Christ: Christology in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. London: T&T Clark.

Jüngel, E. (1986). Karl Barth, a Theological Legacy (trans. G.E. Paul). Philadelphia: Westminster. Klappert, B. (1971). Die Auferweckung des Gekreuzigten: Der Ansatz der Christologie Karl Barths im Zusammenhang der Christologie der Gegenwart. Neukirchen‐ Vlyun: Neukirchener Verlag. McCormack, B. (2008). Karl Barth’s historicized Christology: Just how “Chalcedonian” is it? In: Orthodox and Modern, 201–234. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. McCormack, B. (2011). Karl Barth’s version of an “Analogy of Being”: A dialectical no and yes to Roman Catholicism. In: Analogia Entis: Invention of the Antichrist or the Wisdom of God? (ed. T.J. White), 88–146. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Molnar, P. (2007). Incarnation and Resurrection: Toward a Contemporary Understanding. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Sumner, D.O. (2016). Karl Barth and the Incarnation: Christology and the Humility of God. London: Bloomsbury.

CHAPTER 15

Barth on Christ’s Ascension Andrew Burgess

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iven his commitment to the classic creedal statements, and to a scripturally grounded theology, one would expect Barth to affirm Jesus’s ascension and ascended state. Indeed the centrality of Jesus Christ as living and active should lead us to expect an affirmation of Jesus as currently ascended. This is certainly the case. Noting Barth’s willingness to revise received modes of interpretation, readers will also be unsurprised to learn that his reading of Christ’s ascension functions in a particular and in some ways unconventional fashion. Although the ascension event receives limited treatment, the reality of Jesus as risen and ascended bears substantial fruit. Barth’s insights here interpenetrate widely within his doctrinal work, playing a particularly significant role in theological interpretation of the current age and therefore of key matters involved in this age. Such fundamental matters as Jesus’s agency in revelation, ecclesiology, the being and life of the Christian, and of course eschatology are all heavily interconnected with Barth’s ascension theology.

Christ’s Ascension as Event As with other such events witnessed in Holy Scripture, Barth maintains what we might call the “it happened‐ness” of Christ’s ascension but refuses to measure it via historical‐ critical investigation. The empty tomb and the events of ascension are signs of the deeper reality of Jesus’ resurrection and destination in the immediate presence of the Father, and thus function within Christ’s self‐witness. So, although they are not available to historical investigation or proof, physical resurrection and physical departure are signs that “are so important that we can hardly say that they might equally well be omitted” (CD III/2, p. 453).

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth and Dogmatics, Volume I, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Christ is taken from the disciples’ sight by his envelopment in a cloud, and Barth sees in this cloud clear biblical imagery for the hidden presence of God within the creation and with God’s people. Heaven is understood as the realm of God’s presence within the creation – not a closed realm, for as God is at work in the world so heaven opens toward us. Jesus’ ascension into this space is therefore not merely a departure but rather a movement that produces a dynamic presence and unveiling, both in the current age and ultimately in the eschaton. As a sign therefore, Jesus’ ascension points to the fact that Jesus’ departure does not produce mere absence, as of one who is dead, or of one who has departed, abandoned the world, and left no forwarding address. The absence of Jesus does not simply leave a gap without also producing a new form of presence. Jesus’ ascension into the cloud indicates that his destination is the hiddenness of God in the creation – we should now view him in his humanity and divinity as present at “the right hand of the Father” and expect his parousia from there. “As this sign, the ascension is indispensable, and it would be injudicious as well as ungrateful on any grounds to ignore or reject this upward and forward‐looking sign” (CD III/2, p. 454).

The Dynamic of Presence and Absence What does the ascension do to Jesus, or bring about in his mission? The continued agency of Christ is at the heart of Barth’s theology and his agency is understood as that of the ascended Lord who takes redeemed humanity into the presence of God, comes forward in the parousia of the Spirit and whom we await in immediacy of the eschaton. It is easy to underestimate how much impact Jesus’ ascension has on Barth’s theology, as this locus underpins enormously important decisions and insights. The departure of Christ and his ongoing movement toward us create the key dynamic in what Barth calls the “time between” ascension and eschaton. As concealed from us, and physically removed into the hidden presence of God, Jesus is genuinely absent. He is not immediate to us, and this lack of immediacy is the foundation of the present time (or age). The current age of the world will cease when Jesus Christ returns in the immediacy of his glory, and all current history will find its resolution in him. To put it the other way: the present age continues while he is veiled. This is the time of Jesus’ absence, and therefore the time in which his mission continues in its peculiar current form – the age of grace in mission and of the response of faith. This very description of the present time already involves the other pole of the dynamic  –  Jesus is not merely absent but is present through the mediation of the Spirit. Jesus Christ remains active and potent in his ascended Lordship, through the power of the Spirit, revealing himself and ruling over his church. The world and the church remain utterly permeable to the ever “coming” presence of Christ in his heavenly session. Jesus’ presence is real and not to be minimized, but it is not immediate and that fundamentally shapes the “time between” ascension and eschaton. All this is tied strongly to Barth’s perception of the being of Christ, and his Chalcedonian understanding of the incarnation of the Son of God in the particular human Jesus of Nazareth.

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The Ascent of the Son of Man In Barth’s reading of the ascension, the most significant matter is the glorification of the Son of Man that is revealed in his resurrection and ascension and to which the ascension in particular points. However, as has been well identified by commentators, it is key to understand that Barth departs from a sequential reading of humiliation in the incarnation of the Son of God in the man Jesus. Based in a Chalcedonian reading of the union of the Son of God with the Son of Man, Barth assigns humiliation and exaltation to the divine and human natures that are united in Christ and reads them concurrently. Thus, the ascension is not an exaltation of Jesus Christ in his being as the Son of God. Existing in the immediate presence of the Father is proper to the Son of God, and he is always the Lord of heaven as well as earth. The ascension can add no exaltation of the One who is always and everywhere God in the highest. The same is not the case with regard to the humanity of Christ, the Son of Man. The ascension reveals the exaltation of the humanity of Christ – the extraordinary raising of humanity into the place occupied by the eternal Son. However, the ascension is not that exaltation, rather it is the revelation of what takes place in the entirety of the incarnation itself. The humanity that God the Son takes to himself is glorified above all else simply by being united to the being of the eternal Son – what greater glorification could there be than that? In fact, the humiliation of the Son of God is at its most intense when Jesus is crucified, and equally the glorification of the Son of Man is at its height at the same moment as the Son of Man is carried into union with the Father through the obedience achieved by the Son of God within fallen human flesh. In this way Barth maintains that the Son of God truly becomes fully incarnate without being reduced to human existence. In his own fashion Barth therefore maintains the Calvinist “extra” – that in Jesus Christ God becomes human but his divinity is not “contained” within or subsumed by that humanity.1 So, the dual moments of resurrection and ascension do not bring about an exaltation. Rather they reveal who it is that has been incarnate among humanity, has died to save, and is now risen and ascended, and further reveal what he has achieved for those humans who belong to him. In Christ God has elected a people who are united to him in death and resurrection and in his ascension. In this union Jesus’ people are made to share in his glorified humanity, and entirely derive their being from his life. Barth quotes Colossians 3:1–4 with some regularity, with a focus on the derivation of Christian life from the heavenly life of the Son. The key here is that “your life is hidden with Christ” (Col. 3:3), to be revealed when he is fully revealed. The character of Christian life, and of the church, in the “time between” is fully determined by the conditions Jesus’ ascension creates. Just as Jesus is hidden and his glory veiled by his absence, so the life and future of those elect in him is veiled, even from themselves.

1  Clearly this requires some careful work to avoid a false doctrine of incarnation. See CD I/2, Section “The Dynamic of Presence and Absence”, esp. pp. 168–171.

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So, the “time between” as the particular age bounded by ascension and eschaton plays out in Barth’s thought regarding Christian and church existence in the ways ­discussed in this chapter.

Jesus Ascended and the Reality of Witness in the “Time Between” Barth’s treatment of this key theme of revelation connects with his reordering the ­traditional “threefold office” of the ascended Christ – Priest and King are gathered up and united in the office of Prophet. Just as the humanity and divinity of Jesus Christ are neither to be confused nor treated in disjunction, so the two prior themes – humiliation and exaltation – are to be understood together through the lens of his own identity as “the True Witness.” It is here that we most fully understand the being of Christ, in the unity of his being as “Witness,” so that this reality is “at once the simplest and the highest. It is the source of the two first, and it comprehends them both” (CD IV/1, p. 135). Jesus Christ is the risen and ascended witness who reveals himself and in doing so reveals both the Father and Spirit and also the fallenness and salvation of the creatures for whom he died and now lives. Resurrection and ascension are understood as two moments in one event, including within them the 40 days of witness, and have the character of parousia. As such (i) resurrection and ascension belong to a threefold movement of parousia, functioning in unity with (ii) the coming of the ascended Lord in the “promise” of the Spirit and (iii) his return in the eschaton (see e.g. CD III/3.1, pp. 295ff). The three movements of Christ’s coming are all revelation, or witness, but it is of particular importance to recall that for Barth revelation is never merely about knowledge in the abstract. Revelation is of one piece with reconciliation, subjectively actualized in elect humans by the power of the Spirit making them new. In understanding Jesus’ ongoing work as focused in witness Barth by no means gives him little to do – Jesus ascended is actively saving and sanctifying those who belong to him. In fact, the economy of God is still focused in the lordly agency of the Son. The Son is on the march, in union with the Father by the Spirit, from ascension to eschaton and bringing with him those who are his.2 Jesus’ ascension as genuine event therefore marks a new moment in the history of the Savior, and in particular the establishment of his humanity at the right hand of the Father, from whence he comes in saving power. In this it is revealed that in the man Jesus of Nazareth we are confronted by God the eternal and almighty – something we could otherwise never begin to perceive or understand unless revealed in the parousia of resurrection and ascension. All this is mediated in the promise of the Spirit as himself the subjective possibility of revelation. This revelation itself is therefore a saving matter, as knowledge of the Son belongs to participation in him (see e.g. CD I/2, 239). However, Jesus’ ascension and entry into the hiddenness of God maintains a certain incognito. He comes forth according to his own action and intention as he makes himself present in the Holy Spirit. Knowledge of the Son of God who has 2  We may note here the complaint of some commentators that Barth focuses too much on Christ to the exclusion of the Spirit and church in particular. Some attention is given to this in subsequent sections.

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become the Son of Man, who has reconciled God and human in his own being and raised humanity into the presence of the Father, is still a matter of revelation. The lordship and agency of Jesus remain central to all that happens in the time of his ascended life. In particular, the mission of God in the “time between” ascension and eschaton continues to be entirely a matter of the mission of the Father in the Son through the Spirit.

The Presence and Absence of the True Witness In the Chalcedonian union in differentiation of human and divine that takes place in Jesus Christ, as discussed previously, Barth will not allow the descent‐ascent schema to alter this union. So, whereas part‐volumes 1 and 2 of volume IV of Church Dogmatics are given over to discussing the humiliation (descent) of the Son of God and the exaltation (ascent) of the Son of Man respectively, it is the third theme – their union in the person and work of Jesus Christ (treated in IV/3) – that has logical priority and provides the basis for treatment of the other two. The union of humiliation and exaltation in the person of Christ are gathered and find their meaning in the being of Jesus Christ as the True Witness. Jesus Christ, in his very being in action, reveals who and what he is and thus accomplishes his work of reconciliation. In his true divinity and true humanity he is the reconciliation of humanity with God and of God with humanity, the logos of all creation and himself the image of God. In him the possibility of human justification with and before God is realized and the subjective fulfillment of his work for us occurs as he himself actualizes himself in us. To quote at length: The reason, and only reason why [human beings] can receive revelation in the Holy Spirit is that God’s Word is brought to [their] hearing in the Holy Spirit. … Jesus Christ creates the fact that we believe in Jesus Christ. Up there with Him it is possible for it to be possible down here with me. (CD I/2, p. 247)

But again, as Jesus Christ is hidden in his ascended life so his self‐disclosure – the saving knowledge he gives  –  remains witness rather than self‐evident. In his hiddenness he remains beyond the grasp of fallen humanity and is accessible only upon his own terms as the coming Lord who reveals himself in the agency of the Spirit.

Scripture and the Agency of Jesus Ascended The enormously significant doctrine of Scripture therefore relies upon the way Jesus’ ascension shapes Barth’s Christology. If we ask “how is it that the ascended Lord makes himself present?” the answer is manifold, with an obvious and fundamental emphasis on the agency of the Spirit. The Spirit manifests Christ and enables the subjective realization of his presence. In the agency of the Spirit, Holy Scripture functions as the objective, concrete means that the ascended Lord adopts as his witness.

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As the church’s text, Holy Scripture is the secondary form of the Word through which Jesus Christ exercises his Lordship and disqualifies all ecclesial attempts to subsume his being into the being of the church, or into the faith and experience of the Christian. At the heart of this is the key distinction between the primacy and Lordship of Jesus Christ and the derivative actuality of his presence in and to the church. In the space for the being and life of fallen humanity – the age of mission and reconciliation awaiting the eschaton – Jesus Christ bears witness to himself and exercises his judgment on the world that is perishing. Jesus Christ is therefore the one human in whom the time of fallen humanity is overcome by the time of God and the future that Christ himself embodies. The current age is established by Jesus’s ascension as the penultimate age within which space is created for the continued existence of the old time of fallen humanity, even while that time has already been overcome by the redeemed time of Jesus the Lord (see CD III/2, pp. 461ff). This overlap of the time that is fallen and passing away and the time that is comes and is eternal is the space created for the completion of God’s electing work among fallen humanity – the age of the church and Christians in God’s mission.

The Being of the Church as Creature of the “Time Between” As the ascended Lord Jesus unites a people to himself, through the mediation of the Spirit, and in union with the Father. The nature of Jesus’ ascended life, and the manner in which he acts in the “time between” is enormously significant in Barth’s thinking on the being and life of the church. The dynamic of absence and presence – the withdrawal involved in the ascension and the coming in the Spirit it brings about – are determinative of the being of the church. Attention to these realities, as ever with the supreme focus on Jesus himself, provides the framework within which Barth builds his ecclesiology.

Presence and Absence and the Boundaries of the Present Age in the Being of the Church In calling the present, penultimate age, the “time between” Barth makes it very clear that the boundaries of this time are decisive in perceiving its nature. As the age in which Jesus is immediately absent it is bounded and formed by his departure and equally by the fact that he is expected in immediacy at the eschaton. This is thus the age of faith and not of sight, of mediated participation, of the coming kingdom and not the fullness of the renewed creation that is yet hidden with Christ in God. However, the mediated presence of Christ in the Spirit is his parousia and belongs to both the 40 days of resurrection appearances and to the final parousia, as genuine presence and power. The new time of Jesus continues to invade and overcome the old time that is already past but lingers. For the being of the church this dynamic is all important. The relationship between the church and the ascended Lord is the controlling factor, so that Barth describes his approach as “christologico‐ecclesiology,” with the being of the church understood in direct relation to Jesus’ agency so that in the church he is the “primary Subject”

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(CD IV/2, p. 680). On the one hand overly exalted ecclesiologies are rejected on the basis that the church exists in the “time between the times” and not yet in the age to come, whereas on the other hand, reductionist ecclesiologies are displaced by the recognition that Christ’s parousia in the Spirit is genuine. Most significantly the Spirit creates a body for Christ in this world, and this “earthly‐historical body” is genuinely Christ present in the world during this age. “The community is the earthly‐historical form of the existence of Jesus Christ Himself ” (CD IV/1, p. 661). However, this body is secondary, and its being is derivative, for Jesus Christ’s primary embodiment is his ascended body, hidden from our sight and coming. For Barth, a right description of the church will attend to “the twin horizons” of ascension and eschaton so that such description turns upon the boundaries placed upon the church and its time. Therefore, the dialectic of Jesus Christ’s presence and absence plays out with particular force in relation to the being of the church and the role of Holy Scripture within the self‐witness of Christ (as above). Holy Scripture stands as an objective reminder of the transcendence of the heavenly head over his earthly body. The fact that Jesus Christ does not simply ascend into the life of the church, that he lives now in his primary embodiment “at the right hand of the Father,” is held firm by the otherness of Holy Scripture as the event of the Word of God that the church does not and cannot simply possess but must listen to and hear as the Word from beyond, the Word of its Head in the otherness of his being and the strangeness of his presence. The otherness of Jesus Christ, his heavenly life, and his parousia in the Spirit shape the church positively and negatively. Positively, in belonging to its heavenly Head, and listening to his Word in Holy Scripture, the church too is made other and shares in his heavenly life. The true being and action of the church is predicated on the ascended and lordly being and action of the Son. The language of seeking, evident in Colossians 3, marks clearly this space of derived life, sharing in that which is not inherent in humans but which is real as it is given from “above.” Negatively, the church cannot exist in its own power or simply as a community of human faith or of particular culture, values, or language. The church exists in the gift of seeking, and that which it seeks is ever other and beyond. The being of the church is profoundly relativized by the very source of that being, even as the life given to it is certain and utterly dependable. Institutional life is not rejected, but the otherness of the head of the church resists all attempts to hypostasize the church’s life. So, the “Christian Church cannot reflect on its own being, or live by it, without seeing itself confronted by the [risen and ascended] Lord, who is present to it but as its real Lord with a real authority which transcends its own authority” (CD I/2, p. 576). Yet, again, this does not yield a lack of confidence in the church, because that confidence comes in looking to the risen and ascended Lord. In the time between the ascension and the second coming, the Church as the communion of those who have been summoned by the Word and who have believed the Word, is the sign of God’s revelation, the sign of the incarnation of the Son of God and the sign of the new humanity redeemed by the Son of God in His coming kingdom. (CD I/2, p. 692)

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The Presence of the Lord in the Church Proclamation By virtue of being united to its heavenly Head, the church as Christ’s body functions to serve in his mission and activity. So, if Jesus Christ is most fully understood in the theme of True Witness, so the church as his body will function to serve his work of witness. Here too, the hiddenness of Jesus Christ, and his otherness also exercise important controls. Church proclamation is genuinely a form of God’s self‐proclamation Jesus Christ, but exactly as it derives its life from him. Barth describes this in language of speaking derived from listening – the church proclaims Jesus Christ as the church listens to him, obeys, and as the Spirit takes up the church’s words to enable the speaking of the Word of God. Barth identifies two key errors regarding excessive confidence in the church’s authority, and both are challenged by attending to the relationship between Christ and the church as he is ascended. The first error occurs when the church is seen as possessing the Word of God, as some sort of deposit from which it then may dispense. Barth’s awareness of Jesus Christ as bodily ascended into heaven means that his primary embodiment, within the creation, cannot be in the church. Moreover, the fact that Jesus Christ is not simply absent is key – his heavenly life and being may well be affirmed, but the ever‐coming reality of his lordly presence, his parousia in the Spirit, causes Barth to emphasize the active presence of Christ ruling and governing by his Spirit through his Word. As earlier, this otherness is maintained especially by the authority of Christ as the living Word present and active in the word of Holy Scripture. Scripture is not merely the book of the church but is the word in which the Word of God in his otherness and ascended life speaks to the church. The second error of overconfidence in the church rests upon absorbing the ascension and Jesus Christ himself into the experience and faith of the believer. The events in the life of Jesus that bound the time between – ascension and eschaton – lose concrete specificity and become “dim historical memory” and “equally vague goal of a gradual process.” Barth’s judgment is that the faith in view here has lost reference to the Lord and therefore lost its genuine connection. Such disconnected “faith can be no more than a special mode of human capacity, will and activity, and therefore, in comparison with Christian faith, only a false faith” (CD I/2, p. 692). The church thus belongs entirely to the ascended One and is shaped entirely by its connection to him. The tension in which it lives and breathes is the tension of the “between” time in which it exists, called and equipped to live now toward the fulfillment that is yet to come. The church exists in the presence (real presence) and absence (particular absence) of the Lord, called outward into him as he is on the march toward his ultimate immediate presence in the eschaton.

The Time Between as the Time of the Church If we ask as to the purpose of God in creating the time between ascension and eschaton, Barth sees a significant answer in the church, or more accurately in the mission of God expressed in the mission of God’s people. The time between is that time created for the

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grace of God to bring about the salvation of those elect in Jesus Christ. It is “the time of the Church,” but not because the church is an end in itself. The time between is the time for the church to serve – to serve Christ in his mission and serve the world to which it is called. The church exists in the time between in this mission, as the community of those being sanctified. It exists in great strength and tremendous frailty – strong because of the absolute power and authority of Jesus Christ, weak as the genuine human community of sinners living in the fallen time that lingers but is already judged and done away with. In this remaining time, space is created for authentic human history and for the participation of the church in the mission of its Head. It is on this basis that the church is itself the meaning of the intervening time: The community is and has the answer … to the question of the good and gracious purpose of God in the puzzling distance between the first parousia of Jesus Christ and the second, the question of the time between. (CD IV/1, p. 733)

Life in the Ascended Lord It is plain that the life of Christians is entirely shaped by the ascension and awaited return of Jesus Christ. Barth’s doctrinal treatment of the life of the Christian is thoroughly controlled by christological insight, and the ascension of Jesus is a significant contributor to the complex material Barth utilizes. Given the existence of Christians in the time of Jesus’ ascended state the ascension and his awaited return bear especially powerfully on the description of Christian life that emerges. Clearly the material already covered in relation to the life of the church applies with equal force to the life of individual Christians – the two are not really separable – so that the Christians are described in similar terms, existing as seekers and hearers of the Word. They exist in being met by and seeking Jesus Christ as he comes in the Spirit. In terms then of ethics, Barth affirms the free self‐determination of humans, but that free action occurs as it is empowered and commanded by the activity of God. Jesus Christ, risen and ascended, is the eternal Lord in whom genuine human life and activity takes place, and it is in union with him that Christians exist inside the judging grace of God that recreates them. Christians are “denied any other being than that which consists in the specific act of seeking,” and they live in their activity as a seekers after God (CD I/2, p. 170). With the tensions of the time between the good and perfected future of Christians is already real and present in Jesus Christ, but just as he is ascended and awaited so the future held in him remains hidden and awaited. The Christian exists in an ambivalent relation to the fallen time, which remains but is passing away, as sinners who are justified and receiving new selves in seeking to love God. The being of the Christian as a child of God is incognito just as Jesus Christ remains incognito in his ascension, pending his unveiling and immediacy in the eschaton. In this regard Barth makes significant use of the language of visibility and invisibility to delineate the connections between the visible life of the Christian and the invisible reality of her being in Christ. So, it “is as the man

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I am visibly in myself that I am invisibly in Jesus Christ. And it is the fact that I am invisible in Jesus Christ that imposes upon me as the man that I am visibly in myself the duty to love” (CD I/2, p. 395).

Love for God and Love for the Neighbor A particular focus on ascension theology plays out in Barth’s exposition of the relationship between the commandment to love God and the commandment to love the neighbor. Barth claims that the interrelation (“connexion and difference”) between these commands is to be understood on the basis that Christians live in the between times: “In effect they live in two times and two worlds” (CD I/2, p. 408). So the command to love God is seen as belonging to the Christian’s existence in the redeemed time of Christ as he is present. This command is eternal and ultimate. The command to love the neighbor is equally genuine, but is different in that it belongs to the obedience of the Christian within the time of the fallen world that remains as long as Jesus Christ is ascended and “absent.” In fact, the fallen time that remains, and the life of Christians within it, produces the situation in which the command to love God requires specificity of the command to love the neighbor. This is in fact the concrete form of seeking God in which Christians live. Additionally, Barth observes that in the second commandment the neighbor becomes a gift from and witness to Jesus Christ. The high priestly intercession of Christ is made actual, and the life he gives is expressed, in the Christian’s obedience to him. The neighbor is the occasion for such obedience and therefore the gift through which Christ gifts the Christian the reality of the new self. Secondly however, Barth also sees in the “neighbor” and in the visibility of a frail humanity, a witness to Jesus Christ in whom God has taken on our frail humanity and become our neighbor par excellence. The key for our purposes here is that Barth’s exposition of the life of the Christian turns upon his description of the conditions of the present age as the time of Jesus ascended – the time of Jesus Christ’s presence and absence, the time of redeemed life invisibly present in the visible life of justified sinners. Even the obedience of Christians can never be untainted by sin and fallenness, for Jesus Christ is ascended and the fullness of redemption is hidden in him. However, the reality of Christ is greater, and the reality of his time is greater, overmatching and putting to death the fallen time that is held open in the time between, but which will not remain. All this is of great importance in the development of Barth’s ethics.

Criticisms of Barth’s Ascension Theology Barth has been critiqued in regard to his specific ascension thought, although few have written in regard to it. Moreover, areas of his thought that more frequently are subject to complaint are strongly related to his ascension thought, especially the important realm of pneumatology. In this section we will merely indicate these critiques and some of the names associated with them.

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The most significant engagement with Barth on the ascension is that of Douglas Farrow. Farrow expresses appreciation for Barth as a significant ascension theologian but is unhappy with the final picture. The engagement offered is detailed and complex – here we can only offer a few indicative comments. The heart of the complaint is that there is not enough emphasis on Jesus’s ascended humanity and high‐priesthood and that the ascended Lord is not seen with sufficient fullness. At base this complaint targets Barth’s reading of the union of humanity and divinity in Jesus Christ, especially his refusal of a sequential reading of humiliation and exaltation. Farrow sees Jesus’ history, the movement of his life and work, as underplayed so that his ascension does not bring enough change and his ascended life enough influence. This plays out in a notable criticism of Barth’s sacramental failings. Significant aspects of Farrow’s more recent critique were earlier offered by Thomas Torrance – well known as a significant follower of Barth who maintained his own line at certain points, in distinction from his teacher. Torrance criticizes Barth particularly in regard to the loss of attention to Jesus Christ’s risen humanity. The most significant difference this yields is that Torrance emphasizes the ascension itself as the moment of Jesus Christ in his high priestly office offering his perfect humanity to the Father. There is agreement between Barth and Torrance in most of this, but Torrance claims that Barth’s approach, and lack of emphasis on ascension as the event of high priestly self‐ offering, produces a danger of doceticism with the mediation of the Spirit swallowing the agency of the ascended human savior. This latter complaint may surprise, as it is more often complained that Barth lacks adequate pneumatology (for Torrance the two complaints are not necessarily contradictory). This is generally regarded as due to overemphasis on the prophetic work of the Son, and with regard to Jesus as ascended, too much weight given to the Spirit as mediator of Christ’s self‐witness and agency rather than providing a richer account developed more fully in terms of Christ’s entire threefold office. Of course, these complaints are all the matter of discussion, and more detailed arguments can be offered both for the complaints and in defense of Barth’s doctrine. This author is largely convinced by Barth’s arguments and believes that these criticisms are able to be answered.

Final Comments Karl Barth is a more significant theologian of the ascension and Jesus Christ ascended than is generally noticed. Given his tremendous christological emphases this should not be surprising. Attention to Jesus’s ascension and the conditions it creates underpins highly significant aspects of Barth’s theology, such as revelation and the accompanying doctrines of Scripture and church proclamation, ecclesiology, Christian ethics, and pneumatology for that matter. Understanding the way Jesus’s ascension is involved in the whole mix of Barth’s theology clearly bears dividends in understanding that theology as a whole, and in thinking through the nature of the time in which the church exists and the Christian is formed. Attention to the conditions of the current age, formed by Jesus’ ascension, is enormously important for an adequate reading of Scripture and for the vitality of Christian witness and hope.

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Further Reading Burgess, A. (2004). The Ascension in Karl Barth. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing. Farrow, D. (1999). Ascension and Ecclesia: On the Significance of the Doctrine of the

Ascension for Ecclesiology and Christian Cosmology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Torrance, T.F. (1976). Space, Time and Resurrection. Edinburgh: Handsel Press. (republished 1998, T&T Clark, Edinburgh).

CHAPTER 16

Barth on Theological Anthropology Jeffrey Skaff

Introduction In the preface to Church Dogmatics III/2, the part‐volume devoted to theological anthropology, Barth makes a surprising claim: “The reader will soon realize that at this  point the exposition deviates even more widely from dogmatic tradition than in the  doctrine of predestination in II, 2” (CD III/2, p. ix). In comparison with CD II/2, however, Barth’s theological anthropology has received remarkably little attention. This chapter aims to introduce Barth’s innovation in theological anthropology and trace its outworking in CD III/2. The central question of philosophical and theological anthropology is typically this: “What is a human being?” Barth, however, begins somewhere much more specific: “Who is the creature who participates in covenantal fellowship with God?” Considering the human as one who always exists within covenant history requires recognizing that there is “no creaturely essence in which man is not seen at strife with God and therefore sinful” (CD III/2, p. 28). Yet the sinful human is not therefore the proper object of theological anthropology. No sinner is not at the same time “the object of divine grace, the partner in the covenant which God has made with him” (CD III/2, p. 32). Both aspects of the human must always remain in view. Barth sets out to exposit “the invariable being of man as this persists through the antitheses of sin, reconciliation and redemption” (CD III/2, p. 40, my emphasis). So although he will answer the general question of human being, he does so only as it arises within the context of covenant history. Without the light of God’s Word, the pervasive effects of sin prevent one from identifying what belongs to the human’s “invariable being” and what belongs merely to the sinner. The two are too intertwined. Much less could one know the human being as covenant partner of God, her more fundamental determination. To know the human

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth and Dogmatics, Volume I, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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being as she truly is, theological anthropology must begin where every other doctrine does, with Jesus Christ. Jesus alone reveals “a continuum [in the creaturely nature of the human] unbroken by sin, an essence which even sin does not and cannot change” (CD III/2, p. 43). Grounding anthropology in Christology is undoubtedly what Barth had in mind when he characterized his exposition as deviating from tradition. His decision to do so will not surprise anyone familiar with Barth. Yet the procedure for deriving anthropology from Christology is anything but straightforward. As Barth says, “there can be no question of … a simple deduction of anthropology from Christology” (CD III/2, p. 47). Although Christ’s humanity shares a “constitution” with everyone else’s, its “status” differs in three ways: first, our humanity is derivative of his; second, his is uncorrupted by sin; third, human nature is hidden in us, but manifest in Christ (CD III/2, p. 53). In turning now to Barth’s material elaboration of anthropology, this chapter seeks to  uncover how Barth derives anthropology from Christology in practice, despite the differences between Christ’s humanity and ours.

Divine Determination The person Jesus Christ is inseparable from his saving mission. “He is not first man and then the Bearer of this office, so that it might be possible to conceive of him apart from this office” (CD III/2, p. 56). The saving work he performs reveals God and God acts as he himself acts (CD III/2, p. 62). This applies throughout Christ’s life, not only at the end. If theological understanding of the human must begin with Jesus Christ, and if what distinguishes Christ from every other creature is that in him one directly encounters God and God’s activity and purposes, then the most particular thing about the human is the most comprehensive and therefore the most true: Through Jesus Christ the human exists in God, from God, and for God (CD III/2, p. 71). Human being and existence is, thus, grounded in God’s election of grace, by which God willed “that the Yes He as the Creator has spoken to His creation should prevail; that all men and all creatures should be delivered from evil” (CD III/2, 143). This will of God has been fulfilled in Jesus Christ whose “existence is determined from the beginning, before the foundation of the world” (CD III/2, p. 144). In Christ’s election, all are summoned to hear and obey God in gratitude and responsibility (CD III/2, p. 166). Drawing an analogy to creatio ex nihilo, Barth insists that no human exists prior to or apart from this determination (CD III/2, pp. 152–157). There is no one who first exists and then may or may not be elected and therefore summoned by God. Rather, God’s determination is the presupposition of everything else that is true of human being and existence. Humans possess no neutral capacities by which they can just as easily reject or accept God’s Word (CD III/2, p. 131). Sin is truly an alien possibility because in choosing sin the human rejects what most fundamentally determines human being; namely, God’s grace. In beginning theological anthropology here, with the human’s relationship to God, Barth follows the famous opening pages of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, in which Calvin insists that knowledge of God and of the human are intertwined. Barth

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wishes, however, that Calvin had clarified the christological foundation for his ­judgments (CD III/2, p. 73). Yet this approach distinguishes Barth both from most ­traditional Protestant theology and from philosophical anthropologies. Importantly, however, Barth’s theological and christological starting point does not lead him to deny the material judgments of other approaches to understanding the human. In this ­paragraph of the Church Dogmatics, arguably more than in any other, Barth extensively interacts with specific philosophies, criticizing them, but also identifying the truths on which they shed light. Barth considers four philosophical approaches to the human person: naturalistic, idealistic, existential, and theistic. The naturalistic approach seeks to understand the human as one creature among all others in the cosmos using the tools of natural science. Because it cannot discover what distinguishes humans from other creatures, it cannot know the “real” human (CD III/2, pp. 89–90). Idealism, as represented especially by Fichte, understands the human relatively better because it recognizes the human as an ethical subject. Yet it “fails to tell us whether God even exists. It shows us man, and man alone” (CD III/2, p. 95). Existentialism comes closer to identifying the “real” human because it considers the human as one capable of transcending the natural and ethical and even oneself. Despite its intentions, Barth thinks existentialism collapses existence and transcendence and leaves one “again confronted by the picture of a self‐enclosed human reality” (CD III/2, p. 119). Theistic philosophy would “go beyond the conclusions of even existentialist philosophy to the point where man himself can come to realize that his limitation spells a relationship and that he exists in confrontation by a real other” (CD III/2, p. 123). But even this understanding will fall short because it is incapable of knowing God’s “temporal and historical dealings” with the human, which alone determine and establish the “real” human (CD III/2, pp. 124–125). Note the nature of Barth’s criticisms: each of these philosophies is incomplete. This is not the Barth of the second Romans commentary, who only smashes humanity’s idolatrous pretensions. Considering each of these philosophical portraits as incomplete rather than wholly worthless allows Barth to rank them based on their proximity to the “real” human as determined by God’s election and summons. Their incompleteness also leads Barth to identify partial truth in each of them. Natural science is right that humans exist in the cosmos alongside other creatures. As idealism claims, humans are active subjects and responsible agents in the history they experience. As with existentialism, Christian anthropology sees human life lived in openness to transcendence. Theistic philosophy rightfully specifies this transcendence by understanding God as the origin and goal of human existence (CD III/2, pp. 200–202). That said, Barth issues these charitable remarks with a warning. Each of these philosophical approaches only indicate “phenomena of the human.” If one first knows Christ, one can recognize these phenomena as genuine “symptoms” of the “real” human, as Barth tries to do. Apart from revelation, however, there is a temptation to systematize these phenomena that are incomplete in themselves. One might think that these phenomena point to “real” humanity. This could only lead one astray. When one begins with these general understandings of humanity, “real” humanity will remain elusive (CD III/2, pp. 74–75. See pp. 198–199.).

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The consequences of Barth’s christological grounding of anthropology appear most straightforwardly and most prominently in this paragraph. Jesus Christ establishes and reveals that humanity’s origin and end exist wholly in fellowship with the God of Jesus Christ. Any philosophical or theological anthropology that does not know this will be, at best, incomplete. By missing the most important fact of human being and existence, it will even lack the context to understand properly whatever other truth it might learn.

Being in Encounter Having specified the human’s “divine determination,” where she is from and where she is going, Barth turns to her “creaturely form”; that is, to her “life here below, in distinction from God,” her “cosmic and creaturely being.” These “two essential ways of viewing” the human have “an inner relationship” (CD III/2, p. 204). The human “exists originally and properly in an inner connexion and correspondence between his divine determination and his creaturely form, between his being as the covenant‐partner of God and his being as man. The fact that of all cosmic beings he belongs so particularly to God necessarily affects him particularly as the cosmic being he is” (CD III/2, p. 205). Sin makes knowledge of this correspondence impossible apart from God’s revelation. Yet, “if our creaturely form, humanity, has this similarity to our divine determination, the correspondence and similarity cannot possibly be taken away from it or destroyed. The power of sin is great, but not illimitable” (CD III/2, p. 206). As an aside: Barth does not contradict here his earlier rejection of the analogia entis and his Nein! to natural theology. As stated, one cannot know the correspondence between the human’s creaturely form and her divine determination apart from revelation. More important, although creaturely form corresponds to covenant fellowship with God, such fellowship actually occurs only through the “free grace of God,” because of God’s “good‐pleasure which we cannot control but always acknowledge that we do not deserve” (CD III/2, p. 320, see p. 224). God’s free grace was the issue most at stake in Barth’s debates with his Roman Catholic interlocutors and Emil Brunner, and he remains as committed to it as ever in his theological anthropology (Johnson 2010). To uncover the content of humanity’s creaturely form Barth again looks to Jesus Christ. One sees there a person referred to others “not merely partially, incidentally or subsequently, but originally, exclusively and totally” (CD III/2, p. 208). Jesus’ enacts his role as savior, a role that we have already seen is inseparable from his being, by ministering to others. Everything Scripture says about Jesus’ natural life – his birth, hunger and thirst, family relationships, temptations, prayer, suffering, and death  –  are presented only inasmuch as they are “caught up in His ministry to His fellows which is the concrete form of His service to God” (CD III/2, p. 209). Although no one else saves others from sin, Christ reveals what is most basic about the human’s inner form, that human being is “being in encounter” with other humans (CD III/2, p. 248). This corresponds to the human’s divine determination in that the ability to exist in partnership with others “leaves open the further possibility that we are created to be the partners of God” (CD III/2, p. 320). Barth’s beautifully elaborates what it means to exist as a “being in encounter” with others: Humans must (i) look each

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other in the eye and be seen by another, (ii) speak and listen to another, (iii) assist one another, and (iv) do all of this gladly (CD III/2, pp. 250–274). One can exist as a being in encounter, live in accord with one’s humanity, with “varying degrees of consistency and perfection” (CD III/2, p. 276). One can do a better and worse job of looking another in the eye, of speaking and listening, of receiving and offering assistance. This is one of the rare instances in which Barth acknowledges “degrees” of goodness in human activity. But what surprises more is that this ability to live more or less humanly does not result from “a gracious gift of the Holy Ghost … or an operation of the Word of God directly proclaimed to man and directly received and believed by him” (CD III/2, p. 276). The ability is purely natural, equivalent to the fact that a stone has “a definite nexus of chemical, physical and mathematical conditions and determinations” (CD III/2, p. 276). Remember that the object of Barth’s theological anthropology is that which persists through sin and reconciliation. If the “creaturely form” of the human being, that which makes a human a human, were simply identical to reconciliation two intolerable conclusions would follow. First, this lack of distinction between creation and covenant would threaten God’s free grace. In the person’s humanity as such there is “neither the reality nor even the possibility of divine grace” (CD III/2, p. 276). Second, the identity of creation and covenant would imply that in turning one’s back on God’s grace the sinner ceases to be human. Yet Barth insists that for all the damage sin does, the human “does not accomplish a new creation by sinning. He cannot achieve any essential alteration of the human nature which he has been given. He can only shame this nature and himself ” (CD III/2, p. 227). Why does Barth’s affirmation of a human nature that “can be present and known in varying degrees of perfection or imperfection even where there can be no question of a direct revelation and knowledge of Jesus Christ” (CD III/2, p. 276) not contradict his insistence that humanity cannot be abstracted from the history of the covenant? First, no one acts out of this formally abstract human nature without a further ordering to sin or grace. This severely relativizes the significance of one’s ability to live more or less humanly. For Barth, the final aspect of being in encounter, that one must encounter the other “gladly,” indicates that to which one’s activity is ordered. In the person’s actual history with God and others, which is the only history there is, sin has corrupted nature such that even when we successfully see and are seen, speak and listen, assist each other, and seem to do so gladly, “we pervert the ‘gladly’ into a ‘reluctantly’” (CD III/2, p. 281). Being in encounter gladly is impossible under sin. Now we can encounter another gladly only by God’s grace. Grace enables gladness to exist as Christian love, an exercise of gladness beyond both humanity’s natural and sinful capabilities (CD III/2, p. 281). Second, Barth’s affirmation that human nature persists through creation, sin, and reconciliation does not depart from his intense focus on the history of God’s fellowship with humanity because the capacity to live more or less humanly is not a neutral capacity, even prior to an encounter with the Word of God. God’s determination stands over creaturely form and gives it its shape. Although no one has a claim upon grace and the gulf between “humanity and Christian love … cannot be bridged (except by God alone),” paradoxically, God’s grace is the “fulfillment of the natural” (CD III/2, p. 281). God has created the human with a creaturely form that is only fully realized by a further

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act of grace. God’s determination for fellowship remains the most fundamental truth about the human, even as the actuality of that fellowship remains a possibility beyond her capacities. Christology all but disappears as Barth elaborates being in encounter. Christology showed that being in encounter is the basic form of humanity but plays no role in establishing its material content. This is unsurprising given that Barth has isolated the formal aspect of humanity persisting through creation, sin, and reconciliation. If one sought to learn what this formal human nature looked like by considering Christ’s interactions with others, one would have to find a way to strip away what belongs to love of God and neighbor in Christ’s activity to find an underlying form of relating to others distinguishable from Christian love. Such a procedure would be obviously fraught and probably impossible. Although it is understandable that Barth does not attempt it, the result is that there is no specific sense in which Christology informs Barth’s anthropology at this point.

Men and Women Barth next exposits “the co‐existence of man and woman as the original and proper form” of “fellow humanity” (CD III/2, p. 292). This is one of three places in CD III that  Barth discusses male–female existence and relations. These sections have been ­subjected to many and varied criticisms by interpreters, with almost all challenging his subordination of women to men, and others also questioning the pride of place given to male–female relationships. One need not leave behind Barth’s basic assumptions to pursue such criticisms. Instead one can question whether he himself consistently follows the path indicated by his christological starting point. In the christological subsections that begin each of the four material paragraphs of CD III/2, Barth especially emphasizes the gospels. Other parts of the New Testament appear, and to a lesser extent the Old Testament does too. But because Barth is seeking to develop a theological anthropology based on the humanity of Jesus Christ, the writings of the evangelists are appropriately given ­prominence. He follows a different procedure, however, when considering male–female relationships. He begins with Genesis 2:18–25. Then turning to the Song of Songs as well, he insists that behind the Old Testament portrayal of the relationship between men and women “there stands the controlling original of the relationship between God Yahweh‐Elohim and His people Israel” (CD III/2, p. 297). The New Testament confirms and fulfills this picture by presenting Christ’s relationship to the Christian community as the revealed mystery standing behind both Israel and creation. Over the course of several small‐print pages, Barth exegetes passages from the Pauline epistles at length and describes Ephesians 5:22–33 as “the locus classicus for the point at issue” (CD III/2, p. 312). No theologian committed to Scripture’s authority as Barth is could ignore any of these passages or fail to integrate them into a full treatment of male–female relationships. And choosing to treat Genesis 2, Ephesians 5, or something else first is somewhat arbitrary, even if one will have to make more principled decisions about where to place material priority. But Barth’s failure to engage at all in this subsection with the person

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of Jesus as witnessed to by the Evangelists is hard to defend. A case could be made that when considering what Christ reveals about relationships between human beings his earthly ministry should be prioritized, rather than his resurrected lordship over the Christian community. At the very least, Jesus’ earthly ministry should appear somewhere in the discussion. In Barth’s case, the omission is particularly conspicuous given how often he does refer to Jesus’s preresurrected life elsewhere in the part‐volume. Had he considered Jesus’ interactions with others as depicted in the gospels, Barth undoubtedly would have remained the man he was, caught up in the particular oversights and prejudices of his time and place, as everyone is. That said, if one were to take Jesus’ interactions with other people in the gospels as the lens through which to read passages such as Genesis 2 and Ephesians 5, it would be harder to consider male–female relationships as paradigmatic for human relationships generally. Jesus’s interactions frequently subvert established gender norms and expectations (John 4:1–42). At the very least, one does not find that male–female relationships have a privileged place in Jesus’ ministry. The paradigmatic relationship might instead be friendship (John 15:1– 17). Arguably, friendship rather than the male–female relationship more closely aligns with how Barth described “being in encounter” and so may be a more fitting way to consider “the original and proper form” of “fellow humanity” (CD III/2, p. 292). Given that Scripture speaks of God’s relationship to humanity in terms of friendship (James 2:23), one could still lift up the God–human relationship as that which establishes the most basic interpersonal relationship. Such a possibility remains speculative insofar as it hypothesizes what Barth might have done differently, but it might be suggestive for those coming after Barth who share his basic theological commitments while finding his writings on gender objectionable.

Soul and Body If Barth’s theological anthropology as a whole has yet to receive the attention that much of the rest of his corpus has, this is especially the case for his account of soul and body. Particularly lacking is any comprehensive attempt to place it within the context of modern theology, let alone the centuries of philosophical and theological thought that preceded it. One reason for this is that Barth himself intentionally diverts attention from the topic. Although “the problem of the constitution of [human] being,” and particularly the “doctrine of the human soul,” was central for his theological forebears, Barth believes it can be properly addressed only after establishing the wider theological context for it, as he has done in the preceding three Paragraphs of CD III/2 (CD III/2, p. 325). When one follows this quite different theological procedure, Barth believes a substantial material difference arises: the body is regarded much more highly than it was in the tradition. Barth returns again and again to the refrain that the soul and the body must always be considered together. Although the evangelists present Jesus as having an inner life and a body, they provide little specific knowledge of either, especially in independence from each other. Barth understands this to mean that “the New Testament points consciously and effectively to the one whole man Jesus. On both sides He is seen only in the fact of His wholeness” (CD III/2, p. 330).

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Christ also reveals that the constitution of the human person as body and soul requires reference to the continual presence and activity of the Holy Spirit. “The relationship of [Christ] to the Holy Spirit is so close and special that He owes no more and no less than His existence itself and as such to the Holy Spirit” (CD III/2, p. 333). In the case of all others too, then, “we describe the spirit as something that comes to man, something not essentially his own but to be received and actually received by him, something that totally limits his constitution and thus totally determines it” (CD III/2, p. 354). This follows from the judgment that the real human exists only in reference to God. God’s determination is reflected in the human’s constitution in that God is continually present with her, preserving her in being and establishing her constitution from within. The constitution of the human as soul and body further specifies the creaturely form of the human, her existence as a being in encounter with others. Barth insists that if humans exist in fellowship with others, they must be considered as subjects. He goes as far as to say that the human’s existence as a single subject is the “basic natural point of contact for the covenant of grace” [der grundlegende natürliche Anknüpfungspunkt des Gnadenbundes] (CD III/2, p. 371. KD III/2, p. 446). Whatever the Christian affirms then about the human body and soul must serve to establish that humans are subjects. Barth rejects both “monistic materialism” (a body without a soul) and “monistic spiritualism” (a soul without a body) because they both make it impossible to recognize one’s neighbor, oneself, or “any of the great or small figures among the actors of real human history” (CD III/2, p. 393). “The abstract dualism of the Greek and traditional Christian doctrines” is relatively better, but always leads to a one‐sidedness that makes humans again unrecognizable as they are actually encountered in the real world (CD III/2, pp. 392–394). Instead Barth seeks “the concrete and Christian dualism of soul and body” (CD III/2, p. 394). The human is “the soul of his body.” That the human is soul means she is “a subject which is ordained for action and from which actions are expected.” That she is a body means that her actions have a particular determination, that she can “display a specific attitude in the creation” around her, and thus “outwardly represent” herself as a person (CD III/2, p. 397). Rather than two “substances,” soul and body are two “moments” in the one human person (CD III/2, p. 399). The possibility of being a subject who is “the soul of his body” rests on two “presuppositions” in human nature: That the human perceives and acts (CD III/2, p. 399). Perception has two moments, awareness and thinking. The body has a special relationship to awareness. Whatever one perceives must first be encountered externally. Barth particularly associates the soul with thinking. What is perceived cannot remain external to the subject, but must become internal. Body and soul must necessarily work together for perception to occur, though there is a relative priority of the soul in that one has external awareness for the purpose of internal thinking. Likewise, human action has two moments, one particularly associated with the body and one with the soul. First, humans have bodily desires. By this, Barth means that particular things in the external world can elicit “a particular urge of liking or dislike” (CD III/2, p. 408). Being externally drawn to or repelled by something is ordered to the second moment in human action, willing. If a subject is to act, she must not only desire some thing but must pursue it through an act of the will. Willing occurs internally and so is particularly ascribed to the soul. Though it cannot occur without desire, it has a relative priority over it.

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In what sense is this account of body and soul and their faculties christologically derived? Although Christology reveals the ultimate purpose for which human subjectivity exists, certainly the knowledge that humans are subjects does not arise solely or even primarily from Christ. Neither is knowledge of what capacities make subjectivity possible. Barth himself suggests this when he defends the interconnection of body and soul by appealing to ordinary human speech: “It is a remarkable thing that, in our use of the decisively important personal pronouns, we do not even remotely imagine that our expressions refer to the existence and nature of two substances or merely to one or other of them. On the contrary, we say with equal emphasis and equal right: ‘I think’ and ‘I see,’ ‘I know’ and ‘I have toothache,’ ‘I hate’ and ‘I am operated on,’ ‘I have sinned’ and ‘I am old’” (CD III/2, p. 394). Even if Barth presents no christological derivation at this point, he does posit that one could never have certainty regarding the relationship between body and soul apart from revelation (CD III/2, pp. 420–424). Those trying to position Barth’s understanding of soul and body within the history of Christian theology, let alone within contemporary mind‐body philosophy, have their work cut out for them. Although Barth’s concerns are plain – the body is important, humans are subjects – the details of his proposals are elusive and few. His reluctance to provide details, however, is purposeful. One can “easily go astray” among “the propositions of all kinds of non‐theological studies” of this topic (CD III/2, p. 325). But Scripture takes up the question of the human constitution “with a certain carefree inexactness.” Theologians must be “circumspect if … we are to see and think at this point too from an adequately biblical and exegetical ground and thus reach an understanding, and a Christian understanding, in the matter” (CD III/2, p. 326). However one judges the manner in which revelation and Christology inform those details he does provide, or the adequacy of them as measured against other theological and philosophical accounts, rightly understanding Barth requires keeping in mind these boundaries he establishes at the beginning of his discussion. Even if one could develop a very similar account of the soul and body apart from revelation, Scripture would still necessarily provide limits on speculation and reveal the christological origin and goal of human constitution.

Time The human’s divine determination to be God’s covenant partner is external to her and to creation itself. Although it is her ground and calling as a created being, the possibility of its fulfillment remains with God alone. She never possesses it. Her creaturely form, however, her nature as a “being in encounter,” is most properly hers. Her body and soul provide the internal means for encounter with others and so finally with God. Time, the topic of the final paragraph of CD III/2, is also proper to creation. Although time is not alien to God, God creates time and lives beyond time. Time gives creation its form from within. It is external to the human, but still a part of creation. It establishes the boundaries internal to creation in which God acts and creatures respond to God (CD III/2, p. 438). Barth divides creaturely time into four aspects: given time, allotted time, beginning time, and ending time. His exposition of each seeks to show how time reflects God’s divine determination of the human by providing the context within which she may live in covenantal fellowship with God.

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“Given time” looks “at time as it were from the inside” (CD III/2, p. 553). How does one understand that as subjects within history we have a past, look toward a future, and exist in the present? Left on our own, the past seems to be something always elusive, a forgotten reality (CD III/2, pp. 512–513). Similarly, the future appears as “pure illusion.” “In relation to it, even our identity with ourselves is only a guess, and a doubtful one at that” (CD III/2, p. 513). No security can be found in the present either. “For what is our present but a step from darkness to darkness… and therefore a continual deprivation of what we were and had in favor of a continual grasping of what we will (perhaps) be and have?” (CD III/2, p. 514). One can have confidence in the reality of time only by looking to Jesus Christ. Scripture attests that following the resurrection and ascension, “Jesus is really but transcendentally present” (CD III/2, p. 467, my emphasis). Jesus just as fully has his being in the past, in his pre‐Easter life, in his anticipation among the prophets, and in the eternal counsel of God (CD III/2, pp. 475–477). Finally, Jesus is “a being in the future, a coming being” (CD III/2, p. 485, my emphasis). While fully existing within time, Jesus is Lord of time, embracing all of it simultaneously. We can trust then that God secures and safeguards our own being in time, delivering us from the tyranny of our doubts about the past, future, and present and freeing us to live in gratitude and obedience to God and others (CD III/2, pp. 529–544). This christological derivation may persuasively respond to existential doubts about temporal human existence. But comments made by Barth at the end of his treatment of given time create puzzles. He says that the “natural” human “as such is exposed to the perils of sin, disintegration and error” (CD III/2, p. 553) and that Christ enables time to have reality when before it was empty. This might suggest an alignment between the natural human and the sinful human that he had been at pains to deny earlier in CD III/2. Sin is alien to true humanity, so how can the “natural” human as such be exposed to “sin, disintegration, and error”? It may be that “natural” in this case refers not to “the invariable being” of the human, but to the human as she actually exists, that is, under sin. But as Barth considers “allotted time,” natural humanity  –  that which makes the human what she is – and sinful humanity are less ambiguously identified with each other. “Allotted time” refers to “time as it were from the outside, as the totality of that movement” (CD III/2, p. 554). Barth proposes that the time of human life is always limited, under sin and under grace. This follows, he thinks, from God’s determination for fellowship with human creatures. Without a limit on our time, the human “would have an infinite number of opportunities” (CD III/2, p. 561). “The actuality of his life before and behind would be a continual reaching for the perfection of the relationship to God and fellow‐man. He could only be perpetually in via” and so “condemned to perpetual wanting and asking and therefore dissatisfaction” (CD III/2, p. 562). Such a person could have no permanent rest in life with God and others. But a human with “an infinite number of opportunities” can only ever be the sinful human for Barth. Throughout his corpus, Barth insists that the freedom to choose ­between pursuing one course of action or another is false freedom. One exercises true freedom by living in gratitude and obedience to God’s gracious command. In this ­section, Barth seemingly begins by equating natural and sinful humanity and then

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derives what must be true about time from that understanding. If Barth had begun with Christ’s humanity, it is unclear whether he could not have still maintained that true humanity has “an infinite number of opportunities,” even with infinite time. Only the sinner possesses that lack of direction, not the true human. This question of whether Barth consistently follows through on his christological grounding of anthropology arises most sharply in his treatment of “ending time.” He famously and controversially argues that death does not result from sin but is a part of natural human life. In Barth’s view, Christ’s mortality prevents us from understanding mortality itself “as something intrinsically negative and evil” (CD III/2, p. 630). That is, because Christ could die and did die, we too must die. Yet in the very same paragraph, he says that Christ “had to be able to die” in order to be able “to stand under the judgment of God” and “suffer the death of a reprobate” (CD III/2, p. 630). His reasoning thus appears very circular: The sinful state of humanity determines that Christ must be able to die, yet Christ’s ability to die reveals that mortality is natural (Kaltwasser, Chapter 19 in this volume). Even if the christological grounding of Barth’s defense of natural mortality leaves much to be desired, as with the other places where Christology fades into the background, one should not too quickly dismiss Barth’s conclusions. In this particular instance, he defends his view with careful and penetrating reading of Scripture. Whatever one makes of his understanding of death, the conclusions he draws from his biblical e­ xegesis cannot be lightly dismissed.

Conclusion Barth’s famous christocentric method achieves original and stunning results when he applies it to, for instance, the doctrine of God’s being and attributes or the doctrine of election. But it is a strange fit for anthropology, even theological anthropology. On the one hand, Christ alone establishes and reveals humanity’s origin and end in God, what Barth called the human’s “divine determination.” In this sense, Barth’s theological anthropology is grounded in Christ and may indeed separate him from much of the rest of the Christian tradition. On the other hand, deriving any details of humanity’s “creaturely form” from Christology is difficult for two reasons. First, there is not the unbridgeable gulf between human persons in the same way there is between humans and God. Much of what Barth says about the human could just as well be learned from many other sources. One could not say the same about Barth’s doctrine of God: knowledge in that locus is much more “all or nothing.” One cannot imagine Barth ranking philosophical understandings of God based on how close they come to the Christian understanding, as he does with philosophical anthropologies. Second, a christological grounding of anthropology is difficult precisely because of the differences between Christ’s humanity and ours. Barth insists like few others that everything about who Christ is and what he does is inseparable from his unique and unrepeatable mission to save humanity from the perils of sin. As we have seen at various points – most especially in the treatments of “being in encounter” and death – it becomes very hard then to distinguish what Christ reveals

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about human nature as it “persists through the antitheses of sin, reconciliation and redemption” from what he reveals about humanity as reconciled to God. Barth has good reasons for wanting to make the distinction but understandable difficulty in pinpointing and then making use of it. Neither of these difficulties condemn the method or content of Barth’s theological anthropology. Instead I hope that shedding light on them will offer some small measure of assistance in reading, interpreting, and evaluating CD III/2.1

Reference Johnson, K. (2010). Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis. Edinburgh: Bloomsbury T&T Clark.

1  Thanks to Gerald McKenny and Derek Woodard-Lehman for assistance with this chapter.

CHAPTER 17

Barth on Sin Matt Jenson

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n a sermon delivered in Basel prison, Karl Barth tells the story of a man who ­unwittingly rode across a frozen Lake Constance one night. Arriving on the other side, someone told the man what he had done; and “he broke down, horrified.” This is what it’s like when we hear that we have been saved by grace, Barth explains. “When we hear this word we involuntarily look back, do we not, asking ourselves: Where have I been? Over an abyss, in mortal danger! What did I do? The most foolish thing I ever attempted! What h ­ appened? I was doomed and miraculously escaped and now I am safe!” (DC, p. 38) The gospel of Jesus Christ declares that God was in Christ reconciling us to himself, not counting our sins against us; and it is in the declaration of this reconciliation, as we hear the good news that the man of sin has been displaced in the death and resurrection of the Son of Man, that Barth discerns the knowledge of sin. It is in the retrospective light of the covenant fulfilled in Christ that we see just how dire the situation was into which we had fallen in our sin.

The Dogmatic Location and Knowledge of Sin Barth is well known for his innovative insertion of election into the doctrine of God. Less famous, but still significant, is his dogmatic location of the doctrine of sin. Typically, in both older and modern approaches, the doctrine of sin would be considered after creation and before atonement (CD IV/1, p. 139). This follows a straightforward salvation‐historical approach, along the lines of a creation‐fall‐redemption‐consummation sequence, and makes sense of the narrative of Scripture. In contrast to this, Barth argues that the problem can be known only by examining its solution. He inserts sin

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth and Dogmatics, Volume I, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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into the doctrine of reconciliation, insisting that it can be understood only in the light of God’s reconciliation of the world to himself in Christ. Barth recognizes his independence from the tradition at this point, but he finds it necessary for two related reasons. The first is that sin has no ontological place of its own. Sin “is neither a creature nor itself a creator”; and it “can only negate, deny, destroy, break down, dissolve” (CD IV/1, p. 140). Sin “has only ‘entered into’ the world…. It does not belong to the creation of God. It can be present and active within it only as an alien. It has no appointed place, no place which belongs to it. If it has its place, it is that of an usurpation against the creative will of God, the place of an interloper” (CD IV/1, p. 139). If God gives sin no ontological place of its own in his creation, Barth will not give it its own place in his dogmatics (see CD IV/1, pp. 139, 141). The second reason for Barth’s dogmatic relocation of the doctrine of the sin is that sin is the violation of the covenant that is the “internal basis of creation” (see CD III/1, pp. 228–339). At every point, Barth rejects the supposition that sin might be known independently of the covenant, for instance as the transgression of a universally accessible moral law. Reinhold Niebuhr once affirmed a Times Literary Supplement remark that original sin is the “only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith” (Niebuhr 1965, p. 24), and evangelistic efforts often presume a universal awareness of sin. In contrast, Barth argues that “sin cannot be recognised and understood and defined and judged as sin in accordance with any general idea of man…. If it takes place as a breach of the covenant, and not in any other way, it can be known only in the light of the covenant” (CD IV/1, pp. 140–141). Sin is a doctrine known only as it is revealed in Christ. This might seem to follow as a matter of course from a recognition of the noetic effects of sin. “Man is corrupt even in his self‐understanding, even in the knowledge of his corruption,” Barth points out, saying nothing that any good Reformed theologian would deny (CD IV/2, p. 379). As a result, although we might know that we are “limited, deficient and imperfect,” we cannot know what we are as sinners by ourselves (CD IV/1, p. 360). “Access to the knowledge that he is a sinner is lacking to man because he is a sinner” (CD IV/1, pp. 360–361, emphasis added). Where Barth moves beyond other accounts of sin is in the christological specificity of our knowledge of sin. The doctrine of sin “derives subsequently and retrospectively from a knowledge of the existence and work of Jesus Christ as the Mediator of the covenant of grace. Sin may be known in its nature, reality, implications and consequences [only] as it is opposed, vanquished and done away by Him” (CD IV/3, p. 369). Only in Jesus Christ do we learn “how it really is with us”; only in him do we learn “that man is the man of sin, and what sin is, and what it means for man” (CD IV/1, pp. 391, 389). To speak of the knowledge of sin in Jesus Christ is still too vague, though. It runs the risk of abstraction, one of the cardinal theological errors Barth seeks to avoid. His christological account of sin is meant to focus attention concretely and at length on Jesus Christ as the fulfillment from both sides of the covenant between God and humanity. Barth thus focuses on how sin functions as a rebellious countermovement to God’s reconciling movement in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the coming of his promised Spirit. “What God wills is revealed in what He has done in Jesus Christ,” Barth writes. “What He wills of man is that which corresponds in its human

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way to His own divine action in Jesus Christ. The sin of man is the human action which does not correspond to the divine action in Jesus Christ but contradicts it” (CD IV/1, p. 415). The best way to elucidate this contradiction is to first see the life of perfect correspondence which Jesus lives. In each part‐volume of the doctrine of reconciliation in Church Dogmatics IV, Barth offers an extended account of Christology before considering sinners and sin in light of Christ. He weaves together the two natures of Christ (as divine and human), his two states (of humiliation and exaltation), and his threefold office (as priest, king, and prophet) in a dynamic Christology and then considers sin in its “basic character as a counter‐stroke to and caricature of the threefold office and work of Jesus Christ” (CD IV/3, p. 373).

The Ontology of Sin Given the retrospective angle on sin, as something behind and not in front of us, a question arises: what, if any, are the ontological effects of sin? What can and does sin do to us, or what do we do to ourselves in and as we sin? The first thing Barth will say is that sin is an ontological impossibility. In taking our place, Christ “made our place and status as sinners quite impossible. For in so doing He has finally judged sin in our place and status…, i.e., He has done away with it as our human possibility” (CD IV/1, p. 75) Christ has put an end to sin; in fact, he has put an end to sinful humanity as such. Barth intends this with the utmost ontological seriousness: In Him a new human subject was introduced, the true man beside and outside whom God does not know any other, beside and outside whom there is no other, beside and outside whom the other being of man, that old being which still continues to break the covenant, can only be a lie, an absurd self‐deception, a shadow moving on the wall – the being of that man who has been long since superseded and replaced and who can only imagine that he is man, while in reality he is absolutely nothing. (CD IV/1, p. 89)

Humanity has been made new in Christ, and sin is no longer a possibility for it. If Barth can speak of “the other being of man,” this is a being that is, strictly speaking, no being at all. It has no existence of its own; likewise, its sin “has no basis” and “no possibility … except that of the absolutely impossible. How else can we describe that which is intrinsically absurd but by a formula which is logically absurd?” (CD IV/1, p. 410) Because we do continue to sin, Barth must continue to speak of sin; but the idea that we need not sin leads Barth to resist any attempt to accommodate sin permanently in his theological anthropology. When Barth speaks of sin as an “impossible possibility” (see CD IV/1, pp. 409–410; CD IV/2, p. 495; CD IV/3, p. 463), he grounds this in the loving freedom of God in which he sets humanity free for him. Barth consistently pairs freedom and love throughout the Dogmatics, such that love is always free and freedom is always loving. In contrast to many modern notions of freedom, for Barth freedom does not connote the absence of constraints but rather the capacity to love. God is so free than he can dwell

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among us and give his life for us. We are freed in turn to love him and love our neighbors. Divine and human freedom are not fundamentally arbitrary, as if freedom consisted in the ability to choose among options. “Freedom is not an empty and formal concept,” Barth writes. “The free man is the man who can be genuinely man in fellowship with God. He exercises and has this freedom, therefore, not in an indefinite but in a definite choice in which he demonstrates this capacity” (CD IV/2, p. 494). We are free when we “keep to the fact, and orientate ourselves by it, that the ­alteration of the human situation which has taken place in Him is our own” (CD IV/2, pp. 304–305). In Christ, we have been given a concrete direction by the Holy Spirit that “summons us to act as the men we are, in real freedom. Its character is positive” (CD IV/2, p. 362). Thus the one who is free is not the one who thinks for herself (pace Kant), but the one who “thinks and decides and acts at peace with God” as his covenant partner (CD IV/1, p. 449). And so it simply makes no sense to speak of our being “free” to sin (CD IV/1, p. 449). The free person is “non potest peccare” – not free to sin. “His freedom excludes this…. He ‘cannot’ sin in the capacity granted to him by God.” Barth concludes, then, that sin is a “sinister fact which is not illuminated by any posse” (CD IV/2, p. 495). It cannot be explained from human capacities and possibilities but only as their denial, violation, or corruption. Barth describes sloth as “[our] failure to make use of [our] freedom.” This “has no basis either in God or in man himself by which it can be explained. It can be described only as a freedom not to be free – which is nonsense” (CD IV/2, p. 495). It is nonsense, because this is a “freedom” that is anything but. It is not the freedom to love, and it does not entail the realization of human possibility, but its frustration. Sin is impossible, unnecessary, and impotent. And yet, sin happens. It is not a mirage. The sinner “does do something actual. It has only a negative character. It lacks both necessity and possibility. It has no basis. It cannot be deduced or explained or justified. It is simply a fact. But it is a fact…. But we cannot explain how and why we are proud. The absurd act that we commit is as such inexplicable. We can only try to describe it” (CD IV/1, p. 419). Sin cannot be explained, because this would honor it with a reasonableness that it does not have. But sin does not make sense. It is not coherent. It does not follow as a natural course from anything. There is no reason to sin. We each have motives in sin, and we often speak of the reason that we did this or that. But strictly speaking, given God’s condescension to us and our exaltation to fellowship with God in Christ, there is no need to sin. Sin is strictly counterproductive, parasitic. Furthermore, sin has no sense. Given reality as it is – and reality is as it has been revealed to be in Christ – sin does not compute. It is a bewildering, surprising irruption into the already accomplished fellowship between God and humanity. It cannot be incorporated into a view of the world that God reconciled to himself in Christ. And yet – “it is a fact.” One can gather something of Barth’s sense of the relative ontological weight of sin from his reconfiguration of Luther’s description of the sinner as simul iustus et peccator (at once righteous and sinful). Barth plots the simul along a history: The two things which are “at the same time” are our past and our future. Our sin has been, and our righteousness comes. God affirms our righteousness as He negates our sin. We are at the same time righteous and sinners only under this determination, with this preponderance,

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and with this decision. This simul iustus et peccator has nothing whatever to do with a Hercules always at the crossroads…. This contemporaneity never means in any sense that we belong to both spheres in the same way. (CD II/1, p. 627)

Our sin is out of date, fading into the rearview mirror, rejected by God; it is our past. Our righteousness comes to us now and exalts us in Christ to covenant partnership with God; it is our future. If we can still speak of ourselves as both righteous and sinful, these two cannot be accorded equally determinative status. “In [Christ] the equilibrium between them has been upset and ended. He is the way from the one to the other and the way is irreversible. He is the turning” or “transition” (Wende) (CD II/1, p. 628). Sin has been defeated, and it is ever more irrelevant. The challenge is to honor the reality of sin’s defeat and to recognize the real human being as it is exalted in Christ without underestimating the terrible facticity of sin.

Describing Sin Sin happens. Even if it is impossible, sin “is a reality,” albeit never “an autonomous reality” (CD IV/1, p. 144). Because it is a reality, Barth will describe sin at length. But because it is not autonomous, he will describe it in light of Christ. Sin is not a thing so much as a movement and so needs to be described in action as our rebellious countermovement to who God is for us in Christ. Many in the tradition have spoken of a single paradigm for sin (e.g. pride, idolatry, unbelief) or defined it as disobedience to divine command. Barth acknowledges that sin can rightly be characterized as unbelief and disobedience, but he suggests that these remain too abstract (CD IV/1, p. 414). We need, instead, to describe sin concretely as a failure to correspond to Christ. Barth considers sin from three angles, as pride, sloth, and falsehood. These don’t name discrete sins so much as sin “in its unity and totality” as seen from a particular christological standpoint (CD IV/1, p. 413). In each case, sin constitutes “rebellion against God, enmity with one’s neighbour and sin against oneself ” (CD IV/1, p. 398). Also, in each case, sin’s form is concealed; sin’s very nature is to hide itself.

Pride Barth first considers “the man of sin in the light of the obedience of the Son of God” (CD IV/1, pp. 358–413). “The true God – if the man Jesus is the true God – is obedient,” he writes (IV/1, p. 164). In a surprising remixing of classical christological categories, Barth speaks of the humility of God in Christ. When the Word became flesh, he “emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant,” and became “obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phil 2:7–8). In Christ, we learn that humility “is not alien to [God], but proper to Him” (CD IV/1, p. 193). Nor is this humble obedience a given. With the tradition, Barth affirms the sinlessness of Christ; but he characteristically gives it an actualistic accent. “His sinlessness was not therefore His condition. It was the act of His being in which He defeated temptation in His condition which is ours, in the

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flesh” (CD IV/1, pp. 258–259). Barth boldly claims that “He was not immune from sin,” even if he did not commit sin (CD IV/1, p. 216). We can find no refuge in the claim that Jesus did not really know the temptations to sin that plague us. His humble obedience is not a given so much as an achievement. In his humility, the Lord comes as a servant. In our sin, we seek to be lords ourselves. Pride is “the negation, the opposite of what God does for us in Jesus Christ in condescending to us, in humbling Himself, in becoming a servant to take to Himself and away from us our guilt and sickness” (CD IV/1, p. 142). Barth always considers “the man of sin” before “the sin of man.” He does this for two reasons: to expose our sinful tendencies even in considering sin and to offer an account of humanity’s being‐in‐ action. Barth writes that the human ego is “ready to confess its sins, but it is not inclined or ready to confess that it is itself the origin and base of those sins, the man of sin” (CD IV/1, p. 404). We look for any way to distance ourselves from the wrongs we have done, including sophisticated philosophical moves that separate person and work. Barth will have none of this: “A man is what he does,” he writes; and “there is no place for any distinction between himself as the neutral doer of sin, and sin as his evil deed” (CD IV/1, pp. 405, 406). I am the problem – I, who am a sinner. Barth considers pride from four standpoints. First, in our pride “we want to be God” (CD IV/1, p. 418). But, ironically, we do not want to be God in the way that God is God – in his humble condescension to us in Christ. The God we want to be like is “a self‐ sufficient, self‐affirming, self‐desiring supreme being, self‐centered and rotating about himself.” But “such a being is not God” (CD IV/1, p. 422). We want, too, to be lords, not servants, those who “can survey and penetrate and master and control,” not realizing that “the more he wants to compel and control, the more he is himself compelled and controlled” (CD IV/1, p. 433). We want to judge for ourselves, rather than submit to the just judgment of God. This frequently takes on a heroic cast, as we seek to “stand at God’s side in defense of the cosmos” (CD IV/1, p. 450). But “I am already choosing wrong when I think that I know and ought to decide what is right,” which involves me in “an analysis, i.e., a dissolving or unraveling, of the divine commandment,” rather than obedience (CD IV/1, pp. 451, 448). Finally, in our pride we think that we can and must help ourselves. Pride describes “what the sin of man is” – and “the man of sin is fallen man, fallen to the place where God who does not and cannot fall has humbled Himself for him in Jesus Christ” (CD IV/1, p. 478). Barth makes two observations at the outset of this discussion: We must continue to listen to the Word of God to understand the fallenness of humanity. And, because we listen to the Word of God in which we hear of the covenant fulfilled in Christ, “we cannot say that man is fallen completely away from God, in the sense that he is lost to Him or that he has perished” (CD IV/1, p. 480). After all, “it is the Word of God which decides what he is and what he is not” (CD IV/1, p. 482). “Man has not fallen lower than the depth to which God humbled Himself for him in Jesus Christ” (CD IV/1, pp. 480–481). Barth describes a threefold corruption of fallen humanity. First, as we hear the Word of forgiveness, we know ourselves to be God’s debtors who are unable to pay our debt (CD IV/1, p. 484). Second, we learn that our corruption is “both radical and total” (CD IV/1, p. 492). We are still created good, and we have not lost the divine likeness; Barth,

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with the Reformers, rejects Flacius’s suggestion that fallen humanity is in the imago diabolus (CD IV/1, p. 481). But the human being has become corrupted to the point that “the whole man in all his actions is a sinner, sinful flesh” (CD IV/1, p. 498). Barth rejects the notion of hereditary sin as “hopelessly naturalistic, deterministic and even fatalistic,” but even as he insists that sin is always personal, is always mine, he likewise insists that I am “necessarily and inevitably corrupt” (CD IV/1, p. 501). Barth makes his third point regarding corruption in light of Paul’s statement that God has “concluded them all in disobedience.” In the verdict of the Father, sinful humanity “is set side; he belongs to the past and he has no future” (CD IV/1, p. 502). But, God has concluded all in disobedience in order that he might have mercy on all (CD IV/1, p. 513).

Sloth Much of the tradition has characterized sin as pride, but seldom has the tradition emphasized its obverse – sloth. This second form of sin is strikingly relevant in the wake of a half‐century of critique of male dominance and female oppression. A number of feminist theologians have warned that condemning pride and praising humility can have the unintended effect of underwriting abuse. If women struggle with sloth or self‐ loss more than pride, then they hardly need to be exhorted to humble themselves still further (see Jenson 2006, pp. 98–129; McFadyen 2000, pp. 131–166). One of the virtues of Barth’s doctrine of sin is his threefold description of it, which suggests a more expansive and variegated account of sin and protects against the deleterious effects of a single, overly wooden paradigm. We should note, however, that Barth did not describe sin as sloth for pastoral reasons, no matter how pressing. Instead, he followed the movement of the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ, which is a movement of God to humanity, but also of humanity to God. “As in Him the Lord became a servant,” Barth writes, “so too in Him the servant has become a Lord…. In Him humanity is exalted humanity, just as Godhead is humiliated Godhead” (CD IV/1, p. 131). Under this second form of sin, Barth discusses the sinner illuminated by the servant who is exalted as Lord. At issue is the true humanity of Christ “as fulfilled in His death and revealed in His resurrection,” “His exaltation to be the royal man” who “lives and rules in full communion and conformity with God the Father” (CD IV/2, p. 381). Because Christ is exalted, and humanity is exalted in him, we are no longer free to let ourselves be exalted or to exalt ourselves (CD IV/2, p. 382). Instead, we are summoned to live with him in the direction given by his Spirit. Throughout Volume 4 of the Dogmatics, Barth returns to the parable of the prodigal son. Jesus went into the far country in solidarity with the lost son (CD IV/1), and (CD IV/2) he returned to the Father’s house, “bringing us with Him. But instead of being those who are exalted in and with Him, as we are in truth,” we live “as though He had not taken us up with Him, as though we were not already at home in and with Him, sharing His royal freedom” (CD IV/2, p. 483). We remain behind “instead of going up with Him,” being “too lazy to follow the movement of God which lifts us up” and letting ourselves “sink and fall … into our graceless being for ourselves” (CD IV/2, pp. 484, 458). Of course, as Barth tirelessly reminds us, we do not really remain behind; we really are in Christ. But as those who are exalted in Christ but would rather not be, we are – really – miserable.

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In its sloth, sinful humanity resists its exaltation in Christ and refuses the freedom for which God has set it free. As sloth, sin is “sluggishness, indolence, slowness or inertia.” God’s reconciling grace is “wholly and utterly sanctifying and awakening and establishing grace” (CD IV/2, p. 403) – to which we reply, in the words of Bartleby, the scrivener, “I would prefer not to” (Melville 2016). Thus, if sin has a “heroic” and “Promethean” form, it likewise has an “unheroic and trivial” form (CD IV/2, p. 403). Make no mistake, however: though sloth might appear to be “a mere failure to act, this does not mean that it is a milder or weaker or less potent type of sin than it is in its active form as pride” (CD IV/2, p. 405). “In its form as man’s tardiness and failure, sloth expresses much more clearly than pride the positive and aggressive ingratitude which repays good with evil” (CD IV/2, p. 405). In our sloth, we spurn the gifts of God incarnate, even those that cost him his life. If in our pride we do not trust God, in our sloth we do not love him. Instead, we turn away from God, rolling ourselves into a ball “like a hedgehog with prickly spikes” (CD IV/2, p. 405). We refuse to live “in the distinctive freedom of the man Jesus,” which is a freedom with and for others. We want “to be left alone by the God who has made this man a neighbour with His distinctive freedom” (CD IV/2, p. 407). Sloth involves a fourfold refusal. We seek to live without God and so are – Barth is fittingly blunt – stupid. We play the fool, attempting the impossible, thinking we can live a godless life. We seek, too, to live without our neighbors. In Christ’s exaltation, we receive “a summons to participate, as thankful recipients of His grace, in the humanity actualised in Him,” which is a humanity lived with and for others (CD IV/2, p. 433). But we would rather be left alone in our sinful inhumanity. Third, we refuse ourselves, preferring an undisciplined “life of dissipation” to the Spirit‐filled life of Jesus (CD IV/2, p. 452). Finally, we refuse a right relation to time, ignoring Christ’s triumph over death. We take inappropriate care and “make [our] future [our] own problem” (CD IV/2, p. 476). The corruption of slothful humanity is misery. Here, Barth begins (as he did in speaking of the fallenness of proud humanity) with the caveat that no sin can remove us from “the sphere of influence of divine grace.” The sinner “does not give God the slip.” In fact, this is what makes sin so miserable: “The very thing which limits his misery – the fact that in it he belongs to God – is also the very thing which makes it so sharp” (CD IV/2, p. 485). From Jesus’ having borne our misery, we learn, first, that “it is a mortal sickness,” one that would have killed us had it not killed Christ (CD IV/2, p. 486). Life according to the flesh is “pathological” (CD IV/2, p. 490). This entails that, apart from the new beginning that comes in Christ, our every act will be sloth and misery (CD IV/2, pp. 490–491). “The liberation of man as it has taken place in Jesus is his true liberation from this circle. That he (he himself) moves in this circle is his misery” (CD IV/2, p. 491). Finally, our misery can be seen in the bondage of the will (CD IV/2, p. 494). We have to learn this from Jesus, whose royal freedom flows from his fellowship with God and is enacted in faithfulness to God. In our sin, we fail to “make use of ” this freedom and so are bound.

Falsehood God has humbled himself in Christ, the Lord becoming a servant for our sakes. God has exalted humanity in Christ, the servant becoming Lord. We were justified and sanctified

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in Christ, long before we were born. But we do have to hear this good news, the gospel of our salvation! And we do, as the risen Christ speaks in the power of his Spirit, “freeing [humanity] from his prison by revealing to him that the door to freedom has long since been opened” (CD IV/3, p. 808). The accent in Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation falls on what is accomplished in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, none of which needs to be supplemented or extended or repeated in the life of the Christian. The aspect of Christ’s ongoing work of reconciliation is in his prophetic work. He is the true witness proclaiming God’s reconciliation of the world to himself in Christ. Jesus Christ is the truth we encounter “in the sphere of our time and history” (CD IV/3, p. 376). He is a real, historical figure who has been raised to the right hand of the Father, and “in virtue of the resurrection there is none who does not find himself in this encounter” by the power of the Spirit (CD IV/3, p. 371). When Jesus speaks, he witnesses to himself and “the saving grace of God which has appeared in Him” (CD IV/3, p. 371). He does not “encounter man in a splendor which wins him easily and impresses him naturally. Raised from the dead by the power of God, He encounters him in the despicable and forbidding form of the Slain and Crucified of Golgotha” (CD IV/3, p. 377). It is the crucified Christ who speaks, and he is a truth which we cannot stomach. Barth describes falsehood as “the specifically Christian form of sin” (CD IV/3, pp. 374, 434–435). It is the form of sin that arises in reaction to the truthful speech of the crucified and risen Christ. The time given to the church is our “opportunity under the promise of the Spirit to participate in reconciliation as an active subject, namely, as a recipient and bearer of the Word of reconciliation” (CD IV/3, pp. 392–393). It is an opportunity too often wasted, however, as we stop our ears to the Word and utter lies in its place. Thus, as Christ the truth encounters us, he “unmasks, discovers, accuses and judges the man of sin as such” (CD IV/3, p. 371). The sinner is a liar. More precisely, the sinner bears false witness. Barth speaks of falsehood less as saying things that are not the case than as seeking to avoid an encounter with Christ the truth. He is interested in falsehood as a spiritual rather than a moral phenomenon, as “the disguise or mask which the man of sin at once assumes when he is confronted by Jesus Christ the true Witness, and which is torn off again in the course of this encounter” (CD IV/3, p. 434). We hide. We are willing to do anything to avoid hearing what is true of us. And so falsehood is fundamentally “a movement of evasion” (CD IV/3, p. 434). Falsehood often speaks the language of truth – we are not so naïve as to deny truth outright. “On the contrary, [the man of sin] will confirm it emphatically. But he will confirm it only in the sense in which he can regard it as tolerable and useful” (CD IV/3, p. 436). Barth’s discussion of falsehood takes the form of an extended theological exegesis of Job and is a high point of his engagement with Scripture. Job’s friends, whose theology is relatively sound, nevertheless exemplify falsehood in their attempts to evade encounter with the living God. For all his anger and despair, Barth praises Job for his willingness to speak to God, not just for or about him. “The real truth of God and man is valid when God and man are engaged in eye‐to‐eye and mouth‐to‐ear encounter. It is valid as the truth of the event of their common history. It is valid hic et nunc” (CD IV/3, p. 458). If pride comes before a fall and sloth ends in misery, falsehood earns condemnation. As ever, Barth qualifies his discussion of the corruption resulting from sin by reminding us that sin has already been vanquished in Christ. But the stakes are raised in discussing the

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implications of falsehood, for “in refusing the Word of truth he refuses his pardon” (CD IV/3, p. 463). In lying we reject the truth Christ speaks about our justification and sanctification in him and “try to substitute for the election of man fulfilled by God a rejection which is not God’s will for him and which according to God’s Word is averted by His act” (CD IV/3, p. 464). We try to do this, but we may not do so. Barth is “careful to speak only of man’s attempt to change the truth into untruth” (CD IV/3, p. 474). He devotes a disproportionate amount of space in IV/3 to the true witness (see CD IV/3, p. 474), as if structurally to indicate that God’s Word about humanity, and the “Yes” it finds in the man Jesus, is far more determinative than any response we can utter, faithful or not. And yet, Barth refuses to foreclose on the awful possibility of damnation. “To be damned is to be committed to an eternity in which we are rejected by God and therefore lost. It is to have to be finally what we wish to be when we change truth into untruth and live in and by this untruth. This sword has not yet fallen” (CD IV/3, p. 473). But it might. Barth takes up the question of apokatastasis at the end of this section, wondering whether the logic of election and reconciliation in Christ entail universal salvation. “God does not owe eternal patience and therefore deliverance,” and so if it is the case that he delivers all that can only be ascribed to the glorious, surprising freedom of his love (CD IV/3, p. 477). And yet, Barth concludes, even if we cannot assume a universal salvation, we can – and indeed must – hope and pray that this it might be so.

Conclusion In light of Barth’s joyful witness to the overcoming of sin in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, one might wonder if he takes sin seriously enough. Certainly, he writes plenty about it – but he writes plenty about everything. He does not downplay the hideousness of sin in its many guises, though he recognizes that sin’s deception often hides it from view. Having lived through two world wars and the daily battles of domestic, academic, and church life, he could hardly have been unaware of the staying power of sin. Sin is real, powerful, even demonic. But it is also irrelevant, passé, defeated. Christ has taken our sin on himself, made an end to it – made an end to us – and given us new life. And so, Barth can conclude: “Whatever [the sinner] may be, whatever there is to be said of him, whatever he has to reproach himself with, God no longer takes him seriously as a sinner. He has died to sin; there on the Cross of Golgotha” (DO, p. 122).

References Jenson, M. (2006). The Gravity of Sin: Augustine, Luther and Barth on homo incurvatus in se. London: T&T Clark. McFadyen, A. (2000). Bound to Sin: Abuse, Holocaust and the Christian Doctrine of Sin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Melville, H. (2016). Bartleby, the scrivener. In: Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other Stories. New York: Penguin Classics. Niebuhr, R. (1965). Man’s Nature and His Communities: Essays on the Dynamics and the Enigmas of Man’s Personal and Social Existence. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

CHAPTER 18

Barth on Evil and Nothingness Wolf Krötke

The “Full Scope” of Nothingness In Barth’s understanding, opposition to God – the full scope of which becomes recognizable in faith in Jesus Christ – is not exhausted in human sin. For across the whole of Scripture, regardless of the fact that “human beings are fully responsible” for sin, “sin itself is always described as their succumbing to the alien power” of an “adversary” of God. This power overreaches all human commission and omission. It does not draw its energy solely from the repertoire of human behavior. Rather, sin is only one “concrete form” of the opposition to God and his works, and it is “accompanied” by other forms of its power (CD III/3, pp. 310f. rev.). These other forms are the “evils” that destroy the conditions for life and the creaturely being of women and men, death as the annihilator of life, as well as “demons” and the “Devil.” In this, Barth ventured into a really rather tricky field that today, just as in the past, is surrounded by many objections. He has attempted to describe the evil that can be experienced and discerned in concrete forms within the created world and yet can also be characterized and analyzed as a particular “reality” above and beyond these “forms” (CD III/3, pp. 349–368). Relatively late in the course of unfolding the Church Dogmatics Barth chose the concept of “nothingness” for this evil. He first deploys it in a definitive sense in the context of the doctrine of God’s providence (§50, “God and Nothingness,” CD III/3, pp. 289–368), after it had already been used in an enhanced sense in the interpretation of the Genesis creation narratives (CD III/1, pp. 101–117) and the doctrine of the preservation of creation (CD III/3, pp. 73–90). To ascribe a kind of independent “reality” and dynamics to nothingness above and beyond all human activity was tricky, even risky. It was so because in an era like ours that is shaped by the Enlightenment, this is considered a relic of a picture of the world

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth and Dogmatics, Volume I, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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that has passed away. People formed by this era’s way of understanding reality can ­comprehend the idea that “evil” consists in human acts and failures. But nothing can be made of the idea of a dark power that rules “chaotically,” demonically, or satanically over humanity or even the whole of creation. Such an idea is governed by an ancient “mythological” picture of the world that can explain natural catastrophes and other suffering that befalls human beings only by assuming the activities of “demons” and the “devil.” It is a marked tendency in both modern theology and philosophy precisely to avoid considering evil as an independent power set over against creation and humanity. As the extended excursus in the history of theology and philosophy that constitutes nearly half of §50 demonstrates, Karl Barth took this tendency with utmost seriousness (CD III/3, pp. 312–349). Yet in Barth’s judgment, reducing the understanding of evil to an aspect of the finitude of creation (Leibnitz) or to an expression of human religious self‐consciousness (Schleiermacher) or to the “nihilation of nothing” in human existence (Heidegger, Sartre) is tantamount to downplaying the power and scope of evil. Against this, Barth recognized in that “mythological” depiction of the world the approximation of a truth that may not be abandoned by theology if it is to take the biblical witness – and above all else the witness of Jesus Christ – seriously. According to Barth, the biblical witness sets before us God’s confrontation with the power of evil not only in such a way that this power is manifested in the acts of sinful people. More than this, in Jesus Christ God comes alongside his human creatures so as to enact his opposition to the suffering that sickness, experience of death, and many other evils visit upon them. What becomes evident in this opposition is that “God does not will that which troubles, torments and disturbs and destroys human beings”: indeed, as the power of nothingness from which women and men are delivered, it is “alien” and “repugnant” to him (CD IV/2, p. 225 rev.). So God undertakes to resist this power. Thus, in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ God not only suffered “for the forgiveness of sins.” At the same time, by this death he took away the power of death, i.e. “death as the condemnation and destruction of the creature” (CD III/3, p. 312). For Barth, God’s confrontation with evil in the life and death of Jesus Christ ensures that “nothingness in all its scope and dimensions” can be apprehended (CD III/3, p. 312). To delimit the idea of evil merely to human behavior encourages people to adopt the view that they can escape its power by themselves. In truth, they fall into the undertow of this power in just this way. We may not forget that Barth’s doctrine of nothingness is permeated with the experiences he had during the time of the Nazi regime in Germany: the mass murder and unspeakable crimes committed against the Jews and other peoples were not stopped by appeals to the humane self‐awareness of the murderers who were ideologically blinded. The concept of “nothingness” here gives expression to a power that human beings were “not able to surmount” and whose ­annihilating power they themselves served as henchmen of horrendous evil (CD III/3, p. 355 rev.). This is the way in which Thomas Mann, the German author and émigré to the United States, depicted the matter in his novel Doctor Faustus. Mann did not balk at depicting a German musician – to whom he gave the profile of Friedrich Nietzsche – and the whole of Nazi Germany as possessed by the “devil.” Karl Barth’s doctrine of nothingness is a

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theological parallel to this literary effort. Of course, Barth’s point is that only God is in a position to supply us as human beings with the lasting power with which to resist nothingness. This is why Barth understood himself to be confronted with the theological task of elucidating both how nothingness should be characterized “in all its scope and dimensions” and why it is able to rampage so powerfully in God’s creation. Barth was fully alert to the difficulty of this task. For it involves describing a reality that does not belong to the good creation but which is rather a “hostile and aggressive power” set against it (CD III/3, p. 311). But when theology describes this hostile power it has at its disposal only categories derived from the experience of created reality. These are not genuinely suited to capture the dark and inexplicable form in which evil exists. For “being” belongs only to God and to the creature. Hence, Barth characterized nothingness as an “ontological impossibility” (CD III/3, pp. 354f., CD IV/3, pp. 173 et passim), which is to say, as an “impossible possibility” (CD III/3, pp. 351 et passim). Being without any ontological ground in either God’s being or in the creation, it appears on the scene only as a fact. Barth attempted to describe this strange actuality by appeal to the “ontic peculiarity” of nothingness (CD III/3, p. 353). In doing so he had constantly to avert the danger of placing nothingness within a “system” of ontological accounting. Similarly, at the outset of his doctrine of nothingness, Barth drew attention to the “necessary brokenness of all theological thought and utterance” that becomes particularly patent in respect of the knowledge and characterization of nothingness (CD III/3, p. 293). Something that is in principle inexplicable  –  namely, that fact that an annihilating power should win room within God’s good creation – is described here “with the greatest intellectual probity and with rigorous logic and objectivity” (CD III/3, p. 295). In Barth’s view, the task of such description may not be abandoned despite the problems and difficulties that attend it. For it is a defining characteristic of evil to obscure its destructive power, if not to present itself as something good and true. For this reason, theological exposition in the light of the knowledge of Jesus Christ is required. Barth carried this out in an experientially rich way in the third part of his doctrine of sin (cf. CD IV/3, pp. 434–461). What he there discusses of “the falsehood” in which human evildoing is reinterpreted as the good also holds true for its manifestation within the ­created world generally. Inasmuch as it claims to belong to God’s creation, “nothingness is falsehood” (CD III/3, p. 527). It intermingles with the creation by “assuming [a] form and power” (CD III/3, p. 525) that humans entangled in sin are no longer capable of recognizing. It “rejoices when it notices that it is not noticed” (CD III/3, p. 526) just as is the case when we conceive of it as phenomenon belonging to the being of creation that has nothing to do with opposition to God. In no way did Barth want to isolate nothingness in the forms of evil, “chaos,” death, the “devil,” and “demons” from sin. Sin directs itself “directly against God” whereas the  other forms of nothingness “primarily and immediately attack the creature but indirectly and properly the Creator” (CD III/3, p. 311). Without knowledge of sin, these other forms of nothingness can scarcely be perceived as modes of opposition to God. Accordingly, Barth’s understanding of God’s confrontation with human sin is what determines the characterization of nothingness in all its forms at every point.

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Nothingness as “God’s Own Affair” Karl Barth’s unfolding of his understanding of nothingness in the doctrines of creation and reconciliation rests upon theological decisions made in the doctrine of election (CD II/2). Election is the eternal “beginning of all the ways and works of God” (CD II/2, p. 3). In the act of election in Jesus Christ, God elects all human beings to be partners in his covenant. He elects them as sinful people whose sin he overcomes and forgives in his gracious coming into the world in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Thus, Barth’s doctrine of eternal election conceives of that which God does in time in Jesus as an action that “God had already begun from the very beginning” (CD IV/1, p. 36). Why was this so? It was because Barth could not consider God’s reconciliation of sinful human beings in time to be a more or less accidental divine reaction, an “convenient evasion,” or a “mysterious wrestling with what is almost a rival God” that surprised God with evil (CD II/2, p. 90 rev.). In faith in the revealed God, God’s action time is founded in his eternity. But this means that when God takes sinful human beings into covenant with him, sin – and evil with it – is from the very beginning of the gracious election of humanity “properly God’s own affair” (CD III/3, p. 354). In his eternal election God has made this problem his own in that he has “ascribed to the human … election, salvation and life; and to Himself He has ascribed … reprobation, perdition and death” (CD II/2, p. 163 rev.). The consequences of this insight for the understanding of God as such are far‐ reaching: Barth can say that God “would rather be unblest with His creature than be the blessed God of an unblest creature” (CD III/3, p. 358). Indeed, it was an overriding concern of Barth’s theology as a whole to portray the God who shares in our creaturely suffering as the One who liberates us from the tentacles of sin as a “form” of nothingness. Nothingness Vanquished from the Beginning The sin and evil that have been “routed and extirpated” in Jesus Christ must be adjudged something that is already “past” in the eternal beginning of all the ways and works of God (CD III/3, p. 363). For Barth, whatever evil “is in Jesus Christ, it is also in the beginning with God” (CD II/2, p. 172 rev.). In Jesus Christ, evil is that over which God triumphs, that which is judged to pass away; thus it is always already so at the beginning of all God’s ways and works. One might object that such a view renders harmless the annihilating power of evil in creation and among God’s creatures. In fact, even the concept “nothingness” that Barth chose for evil sounds in German like something meaningless, something insignificant. In German idealism (Hegel, Schelling) this ­concept designates a necessary transitional state in the developmental process of ­absolute Spirit that has no ultimate significance. Barth comes close to these kind of ­idealist formulations when he describes nothingness as “a shadow which yields and flees” (CD II/2, pp. 170 et passim), as something with “no perpetuity” that is “empty and without substance” (CD III/3, pp. 360f.), or when he speaks of the “existence of that which does not exist” (CD III/3, p. 77). However, Barth repudiated the objection that

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evil is rendered harmless by such characterizations. In a long excursus in the midst of the doctrine of reconciliation that takes up this objection (cf. CD IV/3, pp. 173–180) he once again stated clearly that evil really must be considered negligible in relation to God, but that its power must be rated “as high as possible in relation to ourselves” (CD III/3, p. 295). This is precisely the absurd and inexplicable fact that women and men subject themselves (i.e. allow themselves to be subjected) to a power that only destroys and annihilates and does not open any path whatsoever into the future. In this context Barth emphatically reiterates that for him it is never a matter of “explaining” evil as nothingness and thereby rendering it harmless. He says, “it is of a piece with the nature of evil that if we could explain how it may have reality it would not be evil” (CD IV/3, p. 177). So theology’s task cannot be to locate nothingness explicitly within God’s activities or within God’s creation! Rather, any and all reasons for its usurpation of power within the creation must be denied both in thought (!) as in life. The only thing that is permitted here is resistance against nothingness in life and thereby also in theological thinking. This conclusion follows properly from Barth’s understanding of nothingness. Unfortunately, Barth did not allow himself to be guided by this insight consistently.

God’s “No” as the “Permission” of Nothingness In the course of deliberating about God’s eternal election, Barth did not want to evade the question as to why God should have allowed such power to nothingness within his creation, or indeed why it may have any place whatsoever within the scheme of things. In fact, according to Barth’s insight, nothingness is per definitionem that which has been negated, “that which God does not will” (CD III/3, p. 352). In order to make sense of why nothingness is able to secure power in creation despite not being willed by God, Barth availed himself of a problematic figure of thought. In a certain sense it draws upon the traditional teaching of God’s “permission” of evil. In this way of thinking, God does not will evil but he permits it in order to realize his plan of salvation in confrontation with it. Barth turns this idea around, suggesting that what God “does not will is potent and must have a real correspondence” (CD III/3, p. 352). God’s “No” to nothingness is also productive. It has the effect of literally “conceding to and creating for that shadow” within creation “an existence as something yielding and defeated” (CD II/2, p. 170). Why Barth seized upon this explanation of the existence of nothingness is clear: he wanted to foreclose upon any dualism that would understand God and evil as two independent powers. For nothingness is not an independent power. It is not withdrawn from God’s authoritative power to dispose over all things. And as that which God has negated, neither is it established in God’s positive willing in relation to elected humanity. Yet by the fact God does not will it, nothingness acquires “a kind of possibility and reality of existence” (CD II/2, p. 170). In subsequent discussions of Barth’s doctrine of nothingness, this figure of thought is thought to be problematic because it appears to afford nothingness a certain “dialectical” necessity. God needs this destructive counterforce – in the form of its negation – in order to overcome it. But when in the Church Dogmatics nothingness is understood to be a powerless

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opponent that simply miscarries from the very beginning, then Barth’s understanding of nothingness is subordinated to the principle of a monism of divine grace (so Berkouwer 1956; Härle 1975). In fact, we must ask whether Barth was wise to expound nothingness as a kind of shadowy power of God’s “No.” His understanding of the “beginning of all the ways and works of God” wants to be nothing but an interpretation of the historical event of the overcoming of the absurd, baseless appearance of sin and thereby of nothingness. Yet, no reason can be provided for something baseless and absurd. So that which “will never be in place” (CD IV/1, p. 410) can never really secure a reason for its existence in God’s not‐willing. There are only good reasons for God and his creation! Within the knowledge of God there is absolutely no reason whatsoever for nothingness. Nothingness does not come into being when God summons the world into existence: under God’s “No” it exists only in passing away. Hence – and here we move beyond Barth – the question as to why nothingness exists should be translated into the question as to how this dark power – a power that God did not avow and establish but only battled against – is able to oppose God among us.

The “Non‐Being” of the Good Creation and the Threat “Nothing” Poses to Creation Barth’s “ontic of nothingness” is burdened by a lack of conceptual clarity. This is ­associated with Barth’s use of the concepts “nothing” (Nichts) and “non‐being” (Nicht‐Seins) – from which the concept of “nothingness” (Nichtige(n)) is derived – in different senses. So, in his interpretation of the creation story of Genesis 1 Barth could draw the idea of creation threatened by “nothingness” into close connection with the fact that God created the world “out of nothing” (creation ex nihilo). This “nothing” is “always present – as it were on the frontier of the cosmos…. It continually calls this cosmos into question. It has mounted an offensive against it” (CD III/3, p. 76). But this contradicts Barth’s own interpretation of the creation ex nihilo in which he rightly asserts that there is no reason whatsoever apart from God for the cosmos and for humanity. They exist inasmuch as they are “ex aliquo” (CD III/2, p. 155), that is, inasmuch as they come from God who affirms and calls them into existence. As a result, the peculiar independence that “nothing” wins as the power of nothingness in the conception of creation ex nihilo is unjustifiable. A similar problem arises in relation to Barth’s understanding of the “shadow side” of the creation and its relation to nothingness (CD III/1, pp. 372–375; CD III/3, pp. 295–302). With the idea of the “shadow side” Barth conceived of the “negative aspect of creation and creaturely occurrence” (CD III/3, p. 295) that belongs to God’s good creation as such. Here, in the first place, we may think of the limitations in time and space that are established for the created world. These visit the pain of finitude upon creatures. Human beings are limited in time and must die. Human beings are limited in space and vulnerable to natural forces and conditions. In all this they confront a non‐being that is “not to be identified with nothingness” (CD III/3, p. 295). But – and here the concept of “nothing” bedazzles once again – the created world with its negative aspect is however “on the frontier of nothingness and oriented to it”

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(CD III/3, p. 296). Human beings live “at the edge of nothing” (CD III/3, p. 296; cf. CD III/1, p. 376), a “nothing” that Barth now conceives as the power of nothingness, despite the fact that non‐being belongs to the good creation. As with the peculiar independence that the “nihil” gains in the doctrine of the creatio ex nihilo, so also here the non‐being intrinsic to creaturely being is construed in such a way that, not only can it become an autonomous destructive power, but this power is always already present and slumbering within it. Barth was certainly correct to understand the confrontation of the created world with non‐being as a determinate gateway for nothingness. Humans internalize the inescapability of the confrontation between their finite existence and non‐being in such a way that they take it into their own hands as an annihilating power, violently attack their fellow human beings, and run rampant within God’s creation. The problem with Barth’s “ontic of nothingness” however, is that his interpretation of the creation ex nihilo and the “shadow side” of creation can be understood – against his own intention – as an explanation founded within God’s action as Creator for why that nothingness that “will never be in place” can win a foothold within God’s creation. Over against this, the God of Jesus Christ as Barth fundamentally characterized him is only to be understood as the One who refuses any and all such explanations. In lieu of any such explanation, God should be made manifest all the more to be the One who in  Jesus Christ deprives nothingness of every right to exist and who emboldens his ­creatures to do the same by word and deed in faith in him.

The “Forms” of Nothingness Sin and Death According to Barth’s expansive doctrine of sin set forth across the three volumes of his doctrine of reconciliation (CD IV/1–IV/3), it is clear that sin is the principal “form” in which nothingness wins room within God’s creation. Compared to this, Barth gives only relatively restricted attention to other “forms” of nothingness. The “evil” that nature inflicts upon us – for example through storms and earthquakes – is only marginally addressed in the Church Dogmatics. Neither does Barth link the chaos (tohu and bohu) – which according to his interpretation of Genesis 1:3 God rejected as nothingness – to cosmic catastrophes (CD III/1, pp. 104–110). He can even say that “in itself and as such, without the freely uttered and freely repeated Word of the grace of God, the cosmos has no real guarantee against precipitation into chaos” (CD III/1, p. 109). He described the effective eruption of chaos as “the primal and rudimentary state of evil, of sin, of the fall” (CD III/1, p. 108) such that it enters into creation through human conduct. It is the “sinner who has submitted and fallen a victim to chaos” who stands the center of Barth’s interest (CD III/3, p. 352). In keeping with this, Barth occupied himself most extensively with the “form” of nothingness that affects human beings in their very “nature.” This “form” is death. Barth characterized it from a twofold perspective. On one hand, death belongs to the creatureliness of finite human beings whose lives God has “limited” (CD III/2, pp. 587–590).

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By conceiving of human creatureliness in this way Barth broke with the theological ­tradition that understood death per se to be a consequence of sin (i.e. the “wages of sin” [Rom 6:23]). Because God has created human beings to be finite and thereby mortal, “natural death” belongs to humanity’s “good nature.” The same holds for Jesus as a human being: “He had to be able to die. His being in time had to have this finitude in order that He might take this end upon Himself ” for us (CD III/2, p. 630). But this “non‐being” into which Jesus passes  –  just as do all human beings in their “limited time”  –  is “not intrinsically negative or necessarily evil” (CD III/2, p. 595). For as has already become clear in Barth’s understanding of the creatio ex nihilo, this non‐being can “only mean a return to the same God” (CD III/2, p. 595), from whom we originated. “Human beings as such, therefore, have no beyond … for God is their beyond” (CD III/2, p. 632 rev.). Barth distinguished this “natural death” from the “death of judgment” that humans bring upon themselves through their sin and that Jesus vicariously suffered for us. This death means the “radical negation of life.” It is the “seal and the fulfilment” of the “negation” of the human. “Death means that our existence as human beings is really and finally a negation.” It is “an evil,” “an abnormal determination of our being” (CD III/2, p. 625). In this way, through human sin death becomes a “form” of nothingness. Death is not sealed off from the fact that human beings grant room to the power of nothingness in their lives. This is why, for example, Barth even dared to characterize illness “as the merited subjection of human beings to the power of nothingness in virtue of their sin” and as “a declaration of the devil and demons” (CD III/4, p. 366 rev.). If in his own time Barth would have caught a glimpse of the ecological catastrophe that so greatly concerns us today he certainly would have been able count the destruction of the atmosphere by human causes and the overexploitation of the resources of our earth among the consequences of humanity’s devotion to nothingness. Yet in our scientific and technological age, the idea that illnesses that are not the result of any known human cause and natural catastrophes that occur, for example, due to the shifting of tectonic plates should be traced back to human sin can be conveyed only with real difficulty. There are “shadow sides” to creation for which it is impossible to ascertain any grounds in either God’s activity as Creator or in the conduct of human beings. As Barth contends, because Jesus Christ gave priority to the “bright side” of creation we may draw encouragement from him to delimit the suffering such natural occurrences bring upon people, insofar as this is humanly possible.

The “Devil” and the “Demons” As for Barth’s understanding of the “devil and demons” as “forms” of nothingness, his statements vary. On the one hand, he claims that “the devil and demons exist.” On the other hand, he claims that in faith in Jesus Christ we nevertheless “cannot believe” in their quasi‐godlike invisible power (CD III/3, p. 521). For Barth, if we are to depict their reality and efficacy, only a “quick, sharp glance” that “demythologises” them as fraudulent, if actual opponents of God and humanity is fitting (CD III/3, p. 519). But in the Church Dogmatics this “quick, sharp glance” is extended across the piece, continuing right up and into Barth’s final lecture on the Christian life.

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In that lecture he described the “demons” to which human beings deliver themselves in political absolutism, in ideologies, in the service of the “mammon” of money and many of the trends of social life as “lordless powers” (CL, pp. 213–233). These “lordless powers” are as such “nothing but humanity’s own powers, i.e., powers conferred and proper to its created nature” (CL, p. 215 rev.). They acquire a “pseudo‐objective reality and efficacy” (CL, p. 215) when human beings bow to them and allow themselves to be controlled by them. This description of the “demons” is not to be gainsaid: that humans hand themselves to the rule of powers that destroy their lives and the creation is an experience confirmed a thousand times over. When they do so, they make use of their good creaturely possibilities in ways that turn them against both God and their fellow creatures. Barth’s understanding of these “forms” of nothingness moves in full alignment with the traditional understanding of evil as privatio boni (i.e. as the despoiling of the good possibilities of God’s creatures [cf. CD III/3, p. 318]). Nothingness is not in fact a genuine force in human life unless and until it leeches its destructive power from the creation. But when it does avail itself of creaturely possibilities, then it absurdly brings the creation to naught together with itself. We can thus say, in Barth’s own idiom, that nothingness burrows into the creation like a parasite that drains its host in order itself finally to ­perish together with it. We may well ask whether it was a good idea for Barth to characterize the power of nothingness with the biblical and premodern concepts of “the devil” and the impulses of “demons” as “spirits of complaint” or “poltergeists” (CD III/3, p. 529). For when we speak of “the devil” we inevitably think immediately of an independent person and when we speak of “demons” of personal and independent “spirits.” Yet Barth pursed an understanding of “the devil” and “demons” in which they were understood precisely not to possess this kind of independence and individuality. Moreover, he set aside the kind of Christian “demonology” that in its depiction of “the devil” and “demons” was engrossed by “a secret respect and admiration” (CD III/3, p. 522). By contrast, Barth’s “quick, sharp glance” at the “devil” and “demons” did not admit any elaboration of their specific characteristics as such. And it is questionable whether – in keeping with Barth’s own criteria – we may even rightly talk of the “forms” of nothingness. Nothingness takes “form” when it appropriates created possibilities in sin and in death. Barth could not and would not describe further the “form” of the devil and demons beyond this bare claim. The sole statement that can possibly be made of them is this: “they are,” but “they are only improperly” (CD III/3, p. 523 rev.). This means that they “are” genuinely formless and thus are not available as an object of our “considering, contemplating, or conceiving” because they are “not worthy of it” (CD IV/3, p. 261). Strictly speaking, Barth deploys these descriptions as ciphers for nothingness in its “dynamic … movement and activity” (CD III/3, p. 523). In order to prevent the “devil” from effectively being conceived of as a “person,” Barth sought in his own discourse to give preference to “neutral expressions like ‘the resisting element in humanity’ over personal expressions (though these are not debarred)” (CD IV/3, p. 261 rev.). Hence, all the forms of nothingness that embed themselves in the creation – in human sin and in the death to which sin gives rise – so as to wreck it are to be understood as “devilish” or

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“demonic.” Talk of “the devil” and of “demons” serves to give notice that human beings are prey to a power from which they cannot free themselves if God does not come to their aid.

Resistance Against Nothingness For Barth, the life to which God has elected humanity is the life of free covenant partners whom God has united to himself in Jesus Christ in eternity (cf. CD II/2, pp. 3ff.). In this covenant, women and men are made “free to live in contact, solidarity, and fellowship not only with God but also with the world reconciled to Him … as companions in the partnership of reconciliation” (CD IV/3, p. 248). And in this fellowship human beings also become capable of endeavoring to resist nothingness by exercising their own creaturely possibilities. The first act of this resistance on the part of Christians is the prayer in which they align themselves to Jesus’ prayer, “deliver us from evil” (cf. CD III/3, pp. 264f.). In the posthumously published ethics of the doctrine of reconciliation Barth depicted the “Christian life” as one in which people who pray live in this resistance against nothingness free from all hubris. Because they know God to be none other than the One who denies nothingness any and all right to exist, they prayerfully join in this divine resistance. Faced with the suffering that nothingness causes in the world, such prayer cannot merely be a “pitiable” affair (CD III/3, p. 267), even though there are times and places where nothingness will show its power, times and places in which all that remains is our lament before God in view of the deleterious display of the power of nothingness in creation. But because it is oriented to God’s powerful negation of nothingness, Christian prayer is not finally pitiable but is rather an “impassioned prayer” (CD II/1, p. 511 rev.) for salvation from the power of nothingness. Whoever prays in this way cannot remain inactive in life: they will do whatever is theirs to do in order to resist the outworking of the power of nothingness in sin and death. Thus, Karl Barth’s doctrine of nothingness has immediate ethical and political consequences. Trusting in God and knowing the nothingness of the destructive power that threatens God’s creation, Christians will never take this power to be a “final reality that cannot be altered” (CL, p. 212) for they are certain that nothingness “has no final power, significance, or dignity of its own” (CL, p. 127). And they know that are empowered by God actively to fight with their relative human capacities against the “destruction” of creaturely existence by nothingness. They will never resign themselves to the “corruption and evil of the world” to which nothingness gives rise. As we read on the final page of the Church Dogmatics: “shame on them if they let themselves be surpassed in courage for this!” (CL, p. 271). References Berkouwer, G.C. (1956). The Triumph of Grace in the Theology of Karl Barth (trans. H.R. Boer). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

Härle, W. (1975). Sein und Gnade, Die Ontologie in Karl Barths Kirchlicher Dogmatik. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter.

CHAPTER 19

Barth on Death Cambria Janae Kaltwasser

Introduction: Death as Created Limit and Curse? In §47 of Church Dogmatics III/2, Karl Barth sets out to paint a biblical portrait of human temporality. In doing so, he portrays death as a sign of God’s judgment, the ­outcome of human sinfulness. At the same time, Barth introduces an innovation to Christian anthropology by arguing for the goodness of our finite time as part of God’s original creation. How can these two assertions be reconciled? If Barth’s affirmation of the limits of human time does not annul or greatly qualify his negative assessment of death as it actually meets us, why is this so? New Testament scholar Oscar Cullmann is one critic who claimed that Barth had gone too far in his positive appraisal of human finitude. Cullmann could find no biblical or theological support for “Barth’s attempt…to place a positive valuation in dialectical fashion alongside the negative valuation of death” (1964, p. 56). It is worth lingering over Cullmann’s criticism for a moment, precisely because the theological outlooks of Cullmann and Barth share so much in common otherwise. Examining where the two diverge, we can better ascertain what is at stake for Barth in his affirmation of human death as a component of our good creation. Both scholars were committed to the lived history of Jesus Christ as the point of departure for our doctrine of the human being. Moreover, each opposed the fundamental dualism that, with the assistance of certain Stoic or Platonic notions of immortality, had crept into lay‐Christian understandings of eternal life. Both scholars affirmed the scope of God’s redemption as encompassing the whole human being and the whole creation. Barth and Cullmann disagreed, however, when it came to the nature of death’s power over the human creature. For Cullmann, the agonizing nature of Jesus’ end as glimpsed in the Garden of Gethsemane confirmed a general truth about death known to

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth and Dogmatics, Volume I, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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the writers of the New Testament: Death is intrinsically evil, opposed to God’s will for creation (1964, pp. 22–29). In the final sections of CD III/2, Barth draws a very different conclusion: Precisely in disclosing the judgment of God upon human sin, Christ’s death distinguishes the death of judgment from natural death. Whereas Cullmann maintained that death was inherently evil, being opposed to God’s will in creation, Barth argues that death becomes problematic for us by divine ordination. In what follows, I will argue that Barth presents an internally coherent account of death that is distinct from that of Cullmann, one that aims to do justice to the covenant of grace as a relationship of accountability to God: It belongs to our good determination as human creatures, Barth argues, and not merely to our sinful existence, that our time is finite, the boundaries of our lives comprising a unique confrontation with God. Death endangers the individual precisely because in it we meet the wrath of God’s love incurred by human sin. Underlying both sides of Barth’s argument, therefore, is a particular understanding of the historical nature of human being as one determined for covenantal accountability with God, our Counterpart.

Bounded by God: Death as a Horizon for Judgment and Grace “Allotted Time” In §47.3 “Allotted Time,” Barth develops an account of human temporality in general, before tracing this issue concretely, first in relation to the beginning of life (“Beginning Time”) and second in relation to its end (“Ending Time”). Though I am here concerned specifically with the latter, the arguments advanced in “Allotted Time” prove intrinsic to Barth’s assessment of human death. Underlying Barth’s argument in “Allotted Time,” is a particular account of our humanity: To be human is to be elected in Jesus Christ to covenant partnership with God and freed to correspond to that election in obedience. Accordingly, only an account of time that is adequate to the human creature’s determination for free covenant partnership is a suitable ground for theological anthropology. In this section Barth argues that the bracketed nature of human life clarifies and affirms our freedom for encounter with God. This is true in two related senses, according to Barth: (i) In a formal sense, in order to be distinct subjects of concrete histories whom God can encounter, our time cannot be endless; (ii) Because it is God who constitutes the boundary of our lives, our finite time means our greater contact with grace.

Our time cannot be endless The limited nature of human life, Barth maintains, does better justice to the situation disclosed by Scripture in which we are referred wholly to God for both the sustainment and the fulfillment of our lives than does a life in endless time. First, Barth refutes the idea that an unlimited life would better serve this covenant partnership, though he does not consider its illegitimacy to be self‐evident. In fact, Barth argues, it is our created determination for God and for others that rightly asks for the time to achieve these ordered relationships

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(CD III/2, pp. 555–556). He goes on to question whether the endless opportunity to realize these ends would really fulfill, however: “This would obviously be the case only if an infinite quantity of human life could guarantee… that in its relation to God and to others… it would be the life which it ought to be in correspondence to its determination” (CD III/2, p. 560). But this is precisely what an endless life could never guarantee. Length of time, being only the presupposition of this fulfillment, not its assurance, does not answer our basic need, “which consists in the perfection of the relationship to God and fellow man to which it aspires” (CD III/2, p. 561). Therefore, “Even if it were in unlimited time, this could only mean the possibility of a constant reaching out to this perfection. In relation to what he really asks for, because he really lacks it, man would still be no better off on the presupposition of the reality of this notion of infinite time than in the allotted span in which he has actually to live” (CD III/2, p. 561). Not only would an endless length of days fail to guarantee the fulfillment of our created nature, only a limited lifespan ensures our integrity as distinct subjects capable of relationship with God. Temporal limits, Barth argues, are essential to the unity of the human subject. In this assertion, Barth weds human nature very closely to one’s h ­ istory. To be endless would be to live without a concrete identity, to be constantly reinventing oneself, never settling the question as to what one’s life is all about.1 To have unending opportunities to redefine oneself would mean to be constantly unraveling: Man would not be this man, here and now, the concrete subject of this history, if his life did not have this outline and contour, if it did not have these limits and boundaries. A being in unending time would be centrifugal. It would not be that of a concrete subject to whom God can be an equally concrete Counterpart and Neighbour, with whom He can enjoy communication and intercourse. (CD III/2, p. 565)

Barth’s description of the human being in endless time suggests that apart from temporal limitation our agency would be trivial. By contrast, to inhabit a world on which limits are imposed, in which the choice for one thing means the negation of another, is to be a determinate subject. The limits inherent to our creaturely life endow its concrete particulars with significance.2

1  For this reason, neither does Barth consider God a being in endless time. Instead, God’s eternality means that “He is simultaneously and in fulness beginning, middle and end” (CD III/2, p. 565). 2  Barth’s affirmation of the limits of human time has formal similarities to Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of being-toward-death. For Heidegger, death affirms the “wholeness” of the human subject. Piotr Hoffman elucidates Heidegger’s logic: As long as a human individual is alive – as long as he continues to take a stand on what it means to be – his identity is not a settled matter, for it is open to constant revision and reinterpretation. At every stage of my life I can always take this rather than that option open to me – and, in so doing, not only do I determine what the course of my life will be from now on, but I also reshape and redefine the meaning of what my life was all about until now. This is so because the options that I take shed light on what was important to me all along, on the endurance of my commitments (or the lack thereof), and so on…and since death does extinguish – ultimately and irrevocably – man’s ability to choose his possibilities, death puts to rest the ongoing process of reshaping and redefining an individual’s identity. What his life was all about becomes now a settled matter. (2006, pp. 223–224)

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Moreover, for Barth, to be creatures within temporal limits is to be freed to live in correspondence to God. This fact becomes all the more clear when we shift our attention from the limits of our life to “the God who limits it”: “The question of our Whence? and Whither?, of the duration and perfection of our life, cannot lead into the void, like a broken bridge in a sea of mist, but always to Him” (CD III/2, p. 564). If, at the borders of our lives we have to do not with an empty abyss, but with God, then to live a concrete life in a limited span of time is to live in correspondence to our divine Counterpart. In view of this correspondence, for Barth, “The final longing for an unlimited life in an unallotted time necessarily falls away” (CD III/2, p. 565). Here is the formal ground for Barth’s affirmation of our limited time.

Finite time means greater contact with grace In addition to this formal ground, Barth builds his understanding of human time upon the affirmation of God’s gracious action toward us. We know the God who constitutes the boundaries of our lives to be the gracious God of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is God who forms the ground of our being and God alone who sustains, upholds, and protects our cause as human creatures. Barth maintains both that “our life would not be human … if it were not spent in carrying out this task,” but also, “we should be wrong if we were to conclude that we ourselves can and must achieve duration and perfection by a power immanent in our life as such” (CD III/2, p. 566). God would not be our true Counterpart, therefore, the sole One on whom we are to rely in both life and death, if we were to look to time as such and not to the God who allots our time, for the fulfillment of our lives. If it is indeed the God revealed in Jesus Christ who surrounds us, then at the boundaries of our lives God’s grace confronts us in an utterly unique way: “For at these points we are referred wholly and absolutely to the fact that he is our gracious God. For what are we, or were we, or shall we be, if He were not already and still there as our gracious God even when our own life and being is not yet or no longer?” (CD III/2, p. 568). To be deprived of life means, ultimately, to have no other recourse but God alone: “Thus the fact that our time is allotted, and allotted by God, simply means the proximity of His free grace in this clarity” (CD III/2, p. 569). Barth’s argument for the limits of human time runs so: It is proper to our created nature as concrete subjects in relationship to God and reliant upon God for the fulfillment of our determination as human beings that our time is limited and not endless. To be temporally finite is to be the subject of a concrete history for which we are accountable to God our Counterpart. It is to be bounded by God and thus able, finally and definitively, to cast ourselves upon God’s mercy.

“Ending Time” In his positive appraisal of human finitude found in “Ending Time,” Barth affirms the insight he first laid out in “Allotted Time”: Human temporality is necessary in order for God to be our Counterpart. Barth reasserts this claim in two different ways:

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(i) christologically: Since Jesus lived as a being toward death (this being the requirement of his voluntarily taking on our punishment), death must belong to our good creation; (ii) soteriologically: We must be able to die in order to cast ourselves definitively on God’s mercy. The christological argument Because Jesus suffered the death of judgment voluntarily, in his life we see the distinction between natural death and death as curse: “In His human person there is manifested a human existence whose finitude is not intrinsically identical with bondage to that other death. Therefore in His person, in which there is revealed with incomparable urgency the fact of this simple identity, we obviously have to do with a limitation and relativization of this fact” (CD III/2, p. 629). Barth’s argument appears to have a circular logic. He claims that Jesus had to live as a temporally limited human being in order voluntarily to take on our death of judgment. But how can we make a distinction between death as human necessity and death as judgment, given that in Jesus the two apparently coincided? In other words, why should we conclude that in virtue of his self‐determination Jesus took upon himself the death of judgment only, and not that human finitude in the broadest sense was the form of judgment he took on? There are at least two ways of interpreting Barth here, neither of which proves entirely conclusive. We might conclude from Barth’s analysis that, because Jesus’ life was a life of ongoing obedience, the death he suffered having been contingent upon his free will, all of his life prior to Calvary had not the same determination for judgment. Jesus’ obedience to the Father’s will could not have been a matter of mere “biological necessity” (CD III/2, p. 629). Yet, all of his life prior to that point was nonetheless marked by limitation, by human weakness, and by threat of death. In all of these manifestations of human finitude prior to his death, Jesus lived as a human, who, though sinless, was finite: “Since he was neither sinful nor guilty, the finitude of His life did not stand in advance and as such under this shadow [of judgment]” (CD III/2, p. 629). This interpretation has a concrete analogue with the finite lives of Christian believers, who claim by hope in the resurrection that, though they die, they have been spared the judgment of God. Thus, “The end of Jesus Christ has made our end simply the sign of God’s judgment” (CD III/2, p. 629). On a slightly different reading, one might interpret Barth to mean that in order for Jesus to have had the freedom to submit to the death of judgment, he must have been able to die already. Were Jesus immortal he would have been unable to die even by willing it: “His being in time had to have this finitude in order that He might take this end upon Himself ” (CD III/2, p. 630). Yet, both of these arguments assume what they set out to prove – that apart from his voluntary submission to death, Jesus was already finite. Whatever else may be said, Barth here affirms a particular continuity between our human experience and the new humanity disclosed in Jesus Christ: If in Christ we see the fulfillment of the human being’s determination for God in the context of a limited life history, then the limits intrinsic to this human life do not negate our humanity, our God‐given determination to live for God and others.

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The soteriological argument If Barth’s christological argument remains inconclusive, his soteriological argument brings us back to solid ground previously trod. Finitude is the prerequisite for the work of grace in our life because it allows human beings to be the subjects of concrete histories, for which they must make account and on behalf of which they might cast themselves definitively upon God’s mercy. This judgment of God that constitutes the horizon of human life is seen by Barth to be a supreme mercy. To live endlessly would mean never to be called to account for our lives: It is only as a boundary is set for us to which we can move, which we shall one day pass and beyond which we shall be no longer, that we are in a position to throw ourselves conclusively and definitively and exclusively on God and therefore concretely on Jesus Christ as our Deliverer from the wrathful judgment of the second death. What would become of us if in an endless life we had the constant opportunity to achieve a provisional ordering of our relationship with God and our fellows in the way we know so well, or rather to postpone the ordering of this relationship, accomplishing it at best only in that daily drowning of the old Adam which is always so doubtful a matter because he can unfortunately swim? (CD III/2, pp. 630–631)

The encounter with God in the form of this final judgment elevates the urgency of our agency in this life. Without it, “we should be able to sin infinitely and even quantitatively multiply our guilt on an infinite scale” (CD III/2, p. 631). Here, one might surmise that such judgment is occasioned by sin, and that, therefore, death is made necessary only to stem the tide of sin. That would be to mistake Barth’s argument for a more mundane point, however. In fact, Barth is arguing that God’s final judgment is not contingent upon human sin, but intrinsic to the meaning of covenant. The necessity of our standing before God and making an account of our lives is inherent to a life lived in encounter to God and would be so whether or not human beings had abused their freedom in this relation. The limits ordained to creaturely existence, argues Barth, rather than destroying the fellowship between God and human being, actually serve to highlight the intimacy of this encounter, while elevating the dignity of the human being’s creaturely, this‐sided, finite life.

“The Fire of God’s Wrathful Love”: Death as Curse Now at last we are in a position to address the question with which we began: how can a view of the goodness of human death exist side by side with the New Testament understanding of death as “the last enemy” (1 Cor 15:26)? Barth’s exposition of death as a sign of judgment does not contradict his later assertions concerning the goodness of human finitude but actually assumes and anticipates them. This is true because although Barth emphasizes the alien and inimical nature of death as it is transformed by human sinfulness, he subordinates that portrayal of death to God’s sovereignty over the limits of our existence: It is God who ordains death to be a sign of judgment in

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response to human sin. Barth develops this claim by arguing (i) it is sin that renders death problematic for us; (ii) it is God whom we fear in death; and (iii) because God is the gracious God, God remains our deliverer from the midst of death. In examining the meaning of death as a sign of judgment, we return to the beginning of “Ending Time” and to the problem of the “relation of our existence to our non‐existence.” Here Barth asks whether death is not “an intrinsic evil ... whether it may not be so in fact or for some factual reason” (CD III/2, p. 588). Barth finds the general character of death in the Bible to be that of an alien power which, though not outside of God’s domain, is abnormal and contradicts God’s positive will for humankind (CD III/2, p. 594). The reason for this de facto evil character of death is human sin. It is because of what we have made of our time that its end takes on a sinister character. In our investigation of the goodness of human finitude we saw that the bracketed nature of human life was the precondition for living as subjects of a concrete history. Here, Barth argues that the nature of death as it actually meets us has everything to do with the character of that history. The meaning of death is again set in relation to the covenant between God and human beings. In this case, it is our failure to respond to God’s grace on the basis of our creaturely freedom that makes death a threat to us. During our lifetime we have misused the freedom given us to live rightly with God and neighbor in keeping with the grace shown us by God. Instead, our lives have become one long history of guilt toward God and neighbor. Therefore, “it is in this irreparable state of transgression that we shall be translated from being to non‐being and brought face to face with our Creator” (CD III/2, p. 596). The presupposition of the sinister nature of our death due to sin is the fact that at the boundary of our life we have to do with God in a unique way. The presupposition is our very dignity as human creatures fit for encounter with God. Barth concludes that it is not death itself we fear, but God. This claim lies in stark contrast to that of Cullmann, for whom the dead are “no longer in the hands of God, but in the hands of God’s enemy” (1964, p. 23). Barth’s description of death’s evil character, rather than contradicting his assertion that it is God who surrounds and bounds the human life, reinforces it: In death we encounter the wrath of God in response to human sinfulness. Much of Barth’s support for this claim comes in the form of an extended investigation into biblical views on death. In the Old Testament, the connection between sin and guilt and death is only ever suggested, its general insight being that “death is a great woe which God suspends over [the human being]” (CD III/2, p. 599). The real insidiousness with which death confronts us is glimpsed only in the cross of Jesus Christ. The New Testament insight, according to Barth, is that “before and apart from what God has done for him in Jesus Christ man is dead even while he lives” (CD III/2, p. 601). Yet, it is not the apostles’ backgrounding views on sin or death that forge this connection, it is their viewing both from the center of the cross: “The reason for their unequivocal unanimity is that they could contemplate [death] only from the point where they saw man’s deliverance accomplished, and life, salvation and felicity offered in ineffable fullness” (CD III/2, p. 601). Death is not sinister primarily because of its opposition to God’s creation, for Barth (as in Cullmann). Rather, the real evil of death emerges from the

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relationship between human sin and the God whom we encounter at the boundary of our lives. Death’s authority is granted it by God, and thus “in its perhaps concealed but very real basis our fear of death is the well‐grounded fear that we must have of God” (CD III/2, p. 608). Barth concludes that death is the enemy to which we fall prey by our standing in the wrong before God almighty. Yet if death’s sinister nature is appointed by God, it is also circumscribed by God. Its authority is not unlimited. Therefore, “If death has such terrors for us, it is because in death we shall finally fall into the hands of the living God. But we shall fall into His hands and not the hands of another…. If God wills otherwise, the purpose of death for us will be frustrated” (CD III/2, p. 609). On the basis of God’s covenant with God’s people, already witnessed in the Old Testament, we may legitimately hope for death’s radical negation of our lives to be thwarted. “Indeed, it is just as the One who is so palpably against us that he is so much and more mightily for us. If the fire of His wrath scorches us, it is because it is the fire of His wrathful love and not His wrathful hate” (CD III/2, p. 609). In Barth’s account, the threat that death suspends over the human creature is itself overshadowed by the gracious God of the covenant. In the New Testament, the hope of God’s merciful presence with us in the midst of death becomes a strong positive assertion given by our very God through union with Jesus of Nazareth. In Jesus, our safety from death is not merely hoped for but already manifest: “It is in Him that He is our gracious God…. In Him God, the Lord of death, has already put death behind and beneath us” (CD III/2, pp. 613‐614). In Christ, the character of the judgment that will meet us when our lives and our identities are no longer ours to reshape or to add to is drastically transformed. This justification of the godless is the concrete content of the grace that meets us beyond the boundary of our life in time. Barth refutes the commonplace notion that the New Testament hope is really distinct from that of the Old Testament in that the former holds forth the continuation of human life after death. Instead, the New Testament makes concrete what the Old Testament held implicitly, that our only hope in death lies not in ourselves, our future, or in the prospect of attaining some altered form of existence, but in the God who is for us even in death (CD III/2, p. 623). In Barth’s eyes, Christians do not hope for anything other than God’s very self. In accepting the creaturely limits of human life we look away from the prospect of a future that we could possess and look solely to the grace of God in Jesus Christ to be our chief advocate. As we have seen, Barth’s affirmation of the goodness of human limits does not rule out his negative assessment of death as it actually appears to us in this life. In fact, both the negative and positive interpretations of the bracketed nature of human life are ­supported by the same assumption: at the boundary of our lives we have to do not with an empty abyss, but with God. It is God, against whom we have transgressed and in whom we have nonetheless found abounding favor, whose grace will extend to us in a unique way on the boundary of human life. It is, therefore, the dignity of the human creature, subject of a concrete history and covenant partner to God, that necessitates this affirmation of human finitude, creating both the horizon for judgment and the occasion for grace.

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Concluding Thoughts: Death and Eternal Life Some might consider Barth’s biblically informed affirmation of natural death in §47 warrant for deemphasizing eternal life as a theological theme or for demythologizing the concept such that “eternal life” is understood strictly as a potentiality of our lives here and now – perhaps a quality of faith and an openness toward the future.3 It would be a mistake, in my view, to see Barth’s theology of human time as cohering with this perspective. Barth’s affirmation of natural death does leave us with the burden of reassessing our notions of eternal life, however, a task that Barth himself only touches upon and does not adequately address.4 The fact that Barth consistently employs the concept “eternal life” to refer beyond our given experience to a coming kingdom and a future act of God ought caution us against correlating his use of the concept to a mode of present existence available today. His dialectical handling of natural death suggests that his response to such demythologizations of “eternal life” would have consisted in a dialectical “yes” and “no.”5 On the one hand, Barth’s emphasis on historical existence means that eternal life can be thought of neither as an escape from time, nor as an endless extension of time (CD III/2, p. 521). As we have seen, in Barth’s perspective, either move treats the individual’s choices and actions in this life with less than full seriousness. Our appeal to a future life as the reinstatement of our projects or programs, the resumption of our efforts at self‐invention, or even as their undoing would signal a circumvention of our giving an account of our lives before God. By contrast, Barth points to an eschatological hope not for a liberation from, but a liberation of this life: The human being’s “divinely given promise and hope and confidence in this confrontation with God is that even as this one who has been he will share the eternal life of God Himself. Its content is not, therefore, his liberation from his this‐sidedness, from his end and dying, but positively the glorification by the eternal God of his natural and lawful this‐sided, finite and mortal being” (CD III/2, pp. 632–633, italics added).

3  Rudolf Bultmann is usually taken to be a proponent of a strictly this-worldly interpretation of eternal life with his emphasis on the concept of new life in the New Testament as experienced here and now by the believer in the power of the Spirit. Regarding the Gospel of John, Bultmann writes, “The last judgment is no longer an imminent cosmic event, for it is already taking place in the coming of Jesus and in his summons to believe…The believer has life here and now, and has passed already from death into life…Outwardly everything remains as before, but inwardly his relation to the world has been radically changed” (1961, p. 20). 4  As it stands, the Church Dogmatics offers little in the way of a theology of last things or of the general resurrection. One can only wonder how Barth would have handled this subject had he gone on to produce the fifth volume of the Church Dogmatics, on redemption. 5  In contrast to CD III/2, where references to the hope of “eternal life” are rare (though not absent) (cf. CD III/2, pp. 318, 487, 502, 624, etc.), the dialectical pendulum swings more toward “eternal life” in later volumes, especially in CD IV/3, where the references are more frequent. Barth does not deny but affirms that the community of Jesus Christ will “share eternal life in fellowship with God” (CD IV/3, p. 724). It is a hope that extends to the whole creation. In Jesus Christ “God fulfils the covenant between Himself and human beings on both sides … delivering them, and in them all creation, from their exposure to the assault of nothingness, and rescuing them for participation in His eternal life” (CD IV/3, p. 412 rev.).

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The emphasis on our “this‐sidedness” coincides with the existentialist instinct of one like Bultmann to elevate rather than to minimize our life in time. Barth deemphasizes natural death as a theological problem and, consequently, rejects extended time as a theological antidote. Above all, Barth attests the Christian’s hope in God our Savior in the midst of life and death. For Barth, Christian hope does not regard the extension of our agency in time. On the other hand, in Barth’s hands, eternal life regards a genuinely future action of God’s and a redemption in which we are genuinely present. On Barth’s terms, distinguishing natural death from the death of judgment would seem to be misplaced if it does not orient us to a future consummation of God’s promises, a consummation in which we will take a real part. It is not “for this life only we have hoped in Christ” (1 Cor. 15:19). Barth’s eschatology does not fall prey to Brunner’s criticism of Bultmann, that his theology “amounts to a faith without hope” (1954, p. 214). According to Brunner, in Bultmann, “The future is represented only in the sense that man by faith is liberated to create his future, but not in the sense that he hopes for a promised future action of God, a final redemption in the future, a life beyond the grave and a fulfillment of history beyond death.” For Barth, salvation does not take place “over our heads,” touching us, if at all, only sporadically in experiences of especial faith or gratitude. It points forward to a genuine setting right of wrongs. Even as Barth speaks objectively of the believer’s death being behind him or her, Barth continues to employ the future tense to describe what God has yet to do.6 The question remains, what does this future‐orientation of Christian hope mean for the New Testament affirmation of the general resurrection and eternal life with God? Barth supplies the beginnings of an answer when he replies to the letter of a man dissatisfied by Barth’s statements on eschatology made during a radio broadcast of What Do You Think, Professor? In his return letter Barth attempts to clarify his views on eternal life in both negative and positive terms: Eternal life is not another and second life, beyond the present one. It is this life, but the reverse side which God sees although it is as yet hidden from us – this life in its relation to what He has done for the whole world, and therefore for us too, in Jesus Christ. We thus wait and hope, even in view of our death, for our manifestation with Him, with Jesus Christ who was raised again from the dead, in the glory of not only the judgment but also the grace of God. The new thing will be that the cover of tears, death, suffering, crying, and pain that now lies over our present life will be lifted, that the decree of God fulfilled in Jesus Christ will stand before our eyes, and that it will be the subject not only of our deepest shame but also of our joyful thanks and praise. I like to put it in the fine stanza of Gellert in 6  Nowhere perhaps is this usage more pervasive that in Barth’s final writings, on the ethics of reconciliation, published posthumously under the title The Christian Life. In §78, “The Struggle for Human Righteousness,” Barth takes pains to differentiate the end of human agency from the object of Christian hope in the future action that is God’s alone, that is, the inauguration of the kingdom of God.

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which he speaks of knowing in the light what is now obscure on earth, of calling­wonderful and glorious what took place inscrutably, of seeing with our spirit the context of our destiny with praise and thanksgiving. (1981, p. 9)

Here, Barth speaks of “eternal life” as a manifestation of God’s glory in this life, a revelation of God’s work in this life, and also somehow the removal of its suffering and sorrow.7 Barth’s description sounds rather like traditional Christian concepts of the return of Christ and the final judgment itself. Yet, Barth remains circumspect about saying too much. Barth leaves us to the question whether his circumspection about future human agency, though it elevates the historical nature of human life, does justice, at the end of the day, to the bodily resurrection, and to the unity of body and soul that mark human life. Barth’s response elevates the noetic aspect of the eschaton – what we will know – but it lacks specification with regard to our future embodiment – what we will be. If it is true that God’s redemption of this life “will be the subject” of both “my deepest shame” and “joyful thanks and praise,” in what sense will this shame and thanks be mine if I am no longer agent? Can I be present in any other way? Considering theological accounts of the life of the world to come inevitably entails bumping up against the limits of human thought and speech. Barth’s account, privileging the weightiness of our actions in this life, inevitably makes the character of the life to come somewhat ambiguous or at least underdeveloped.8 A needful lesson to be drawn from Barth’s treatment of ending time is that Christians ought be cautious about imposing the contours of human life as we know it upon the eschaton and the world to come. Above all, we ought to be on guard against the proclivity to replace our hope in God with hope in our future ability to rewrite or supplement our earthly histories, lest such “hope” become a pretext for shirking our responsibilities today, lest our very reaching out for the promised consummation of God’s gift of life ensures we miss its contents – time for communion with and accountability toward God and neighbor.

7  A similar description is given in CD IV/1 where eternal life is described as “this temporal life itself in the newness which is already ascribed to it in the judgment and sentence of God, in the righteous form which is already given to it by the divine pardon…” (p. 603). 8  A full-fledged critique of Barth’s eschatology with regard to the sketchiness of its account of the bodily resurrection is given in Hitchcock 2013. Nevertheless, it seems fair to say that for Barth eternal life would mean no less a glorification of our bodies than it did for the risen and exalted Jesus Christ. It is hard to see how he could regard the human being in the status glorificationis as anything less than “the unity of body and soul” as set forth in CD III/2.

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References Barth, K. (1981). To Werner Rüegg, Hombrechtikon, Zurich Canton, Basel, 6 July Bultmann. In: Letters 1961–1968 (eds. J. Fangmeier and H. Stoevesandt), (trans. G.W. Bromiley), 9–10. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Brunner, E. (1954). Eternal Hope (trans. H. Knight). Philadelphia: Westminster. Bultmann, R. (1961). New testament and mythology. In: Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate (ed. H.W. Bartsch), 1–44. New York: Harper.

Cullmann, O. (1964). Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead?: The Witness of the New Testament. New York: Macmillan. Hitchcock, N. (2013). Karl Barth and the Resurrection of the Flesh: The Loss of the Body in Participatory Eschatology. Eugene, OR: Pickwick. Hoffman, P. (2006). Death, time, history: division II of Being and Time. In: The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, 2e (ed. C.B. Guignon), 222–240. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 20

Barth on the Holy Spirit JinHyok Kim

Introduction: How to Read Karl Barth’s Pneumatology? Karl Barth’s theology is often characterized as christocentric, a term that can capture the centrality of the person of Jesus Christ in his thought, but may remain ambiguous and even misleading unless carefully qualified. Interestingly, Barth explained to his students in the mid‐1950s why pneumatology is important as follows: Today I would speak more of the Holy Spirit. Perhaps I was too cautious. You students should not make that mistake in your polemical writings! … A good theology can be based on any of the three articles of the Creed. You could base it on the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit … I personally think that a theology of the Spirit might be all right after ad 2000, but now we are still too close to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (Barth 1963, pp. 27–28)

Readers might assume from this quotation that Barth not only underlined the significance of pneumatology but also proposed it as a future for Christian theology. But these remarks have provoked skepticism because pneumatology has often been regarded as one of Barth’s most undeveloped doctrines. Due to his well‐known christocentrism, Barth has been severely critiqued for leaving little room for the Spirit. The absence of the final volume on pneumatology in his magisterial Church Dogmatics has even triggered speculation as to whether he really had something new to say about the Spirit (Gunton 1978, p. 163; Jenson 2010, p. 173). When reading recent books on trinitarianism or pneumatology, one may easily find that many scholars, if not most, utilize their critiques of Barth as platforms

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth and Dogmatics, Volume I, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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from which they offer more Spirit‐oriented visions: some charge that Barth reduced the Spirit’s main role to actualizing what has already happened in Christ, thereby subordinating pneumatology to Christology and marginalizing eschatology (Zizioulas 2006, p. 203; Moltmann 1974, p. 225). Others claim that Barth so emphasized the Spirit’s transcendentality that the significance of human freedom and faith is not properly recognized (Come 1959, p. 86; Macchia 2006, pp. 163–165). Others question whether Barth’s conception of the Father as the revealer, the Son as the revelation, the Spirit as the revealedness makes the Spirit superfluous, or a kind of impersonal principle, in the Godhead (Rogers 2006, p. 22). Still others suspect that Barth’s deficient pneumatology results in his corollary undeveloped doctrines of history, nature, and the church  –  the creaturely fields in which the Spirit meets and works through men and women (Moltmann 1977, p. 209; Pannenberg 1968, p. 171; Gunton 2007, p. 200). These wide‐ranging critiques leveled against Barth can be impressively epitomized by Robert Jenson’s claim that “[L]ong stretches of Barth’s thinking seem rather binitarian than trinitarian” (Jenson 1993, p. 296). The reality is that Barth’s pneumatology is one of the most extensive descriptions of the Holy Spirit in Christian history. In the CD, which has no separate volume on pneumatology, more than 2100 pages were written with “Spirit” in boldface theses (Rogers 2004, p. 173). The simple fact that Barth wrote so much about the Spirit, of course, cannot be a conclusive proof that he left a rich Spirit theology. To demonstrate the distinctiveness of the Spirit’s person and work in Barth, the deeper logic of his pneumatology needs to be carefully analyzed, and this chapter is an attempt to do it with special attention to his incomplete doctrine of redemption. Many critics rightly point to the fact that Barth did not write CD V, which would have been devoted to the Spirit’s redemption. They often ignore, however, that his overall vision on the Spirit would not be properly recognized if utilizing categories and perspectives extracted from Barth’s other doctrines or from other theologians. This is one of the main reasons they mostly see deficiencies, rather than promising ideas, in Barth’s extensive Spirit‐talk. This chapter proposes that Barth’s pneumatology should be studied primarily in light of its own logic, concepts, and motifs within the doctrine of redemption. One  may question how this task is possible considering the fact that CD V on ­redemption was never written. Barth himself noted one year before his death that, instead of waiting for a new volume of CD, his ideas of redemption “may be gathered indirectly, and sometimes directly, from the earlier volumes” (CD IV/4, p. vii). It is true that key pneumatological themes can be discovered, albeit partly, in his other doctrines – Trinity, revelation, election, creation, Christ, human beings, the church, baptism, etc.  –  and other chapters in this volume cover them in explicit or  implicit manners. Following Barth’s own suggestion, this chapter will make ­reasonable conjectures about his vision of the Spirit’s redemption mainly on the basis of his earlier writings. After reviewing the young Barth’s doctrine of redemption, I will analyze his reading of Paul’s pneumatology in Romans 8, which plays a vital role in shaping his tantalizing reflections on the Spirit and the subsequent Christian life.

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Being and Becoming God’s Children: A Key Pneumatological Theme Barth’s famous conception of the Spirit as the subjective side of God’s revelation, by whom Christ and his work are known to us, makes critics suspect that Barth reduced the Spirit’s work into the noetic function (CD I/2, p. 203). This epistemological vision is significant for Barth in the sense that men and women are totally dependent upon the Spirit’s grace in order to perceive God’s revelation in Christ. The Spirit’s work as seen in the perspective of revelation, however, cannot fully demonstrate what the Spirit’s redemption is; in this approach the Spirit’s primary role is simply serving Christ’s revelation. Although revelation and redemption are not separated, the Spirit’s saving work seen from the standpoint of redemption offers us a starkly different image: the eschatological Spirit perfects Christ’s saving work, and human beings are led by the Spirit to participate in the very future of God here and now. In this regard, the Spirit’s work is not merely the actualization of revelation in history, but the future and goal of Christ’s reconciliation.

The Being of the Holy Spirit in the Trinity Barth’s Spirit theology is too complex and extensive to be summarized from a single perspective. Nevertheless, it is crucial to keep in mind that his pneumatological ­ reasoning developed against the backdrop of what he saw as a problem of nineteenth‐ century pneumatology. In Barth’s eyes, his liberal teachers and predecessors marginalized the deity of the Spirit and failed to do justice to the biblical accounts of the Spirit’s concrete work: the Spirit was improperly understood by them in terms of the idealization of the human spirit, the infinite’s abstract presence in history, or the principle for actualizing the divine will in and through the state. By contrast, for Barth, the divinity of the Spirit is an unnegotiable starting point for any pneumatology, but he also had to secure room within it for human freedom, piety, and moral life. In his study on Calvin and Schleiermacher in the early 1920s, he learned that these great theologians described the God‐human relationship in similar but different ways (TC, pp. 77–78, TS, pp. 13–48). For them, Christian theology is not concerned with one single center but deals with the two, God and humanity, in their unity‐ in‐difference. Calvin’s theology of the Word could do justice to the twofold center by keeping the distance between them. However, Barth suspected Schleiermacher’s Spirit‐ oriented theology of positing the two too closely (PTNC, pp. 44–45). Barth attempted to rediscover a right relationship between the Word and the Spirit on the one hand, and its implications for the Christian life on the other. The layout of the early Barth’s pneumatology was presented in his first dogmatics cycle (1924–1925) as follows: God himself is not one spirit among others, something spiritually finite, as he obviously would be if there were intermingling or marriage or even identification between him and our spirits…. God’s relation to us is not accidental. It is necessarily contained and grounded in God’s being. All that the Father does and the Son does, the Spirit does with them…. We have stressed again and again that the outward works are not divided, and here again, in

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the third article, this principle is important. The turning to us is not something subsequent, something episodic. God himself, the Creator and Redeemer, stands or falls with what takes place as the divine Yes to us in the outpouring and reception of the Holy Spirit in time. (GD, pp. 127–128)

Here one may see Barth’s key ideas on the Spirit’s being and act. First, the Spirit can neither be identified with the human spirit in history, nor subsumed under the Father or the Son within the Trinity. Second, the Spirit’s act is linked to our capacity for experiencing God’s gracious “Yes.” Third, this work of the Spirit is not accidental or supplementary, but the reality rooted in the Trinity. Without giving up the priority of the Word in theology, in short, he endeavored to recognize the Word–Spirit relationship inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably in the wider context of trinitarianism.

Redemption as the Work of the Holy Spirit Ad Extra In light of the trinitarian formula opera trinitatis ad extra indivisa sunt, Barth treated the Trinity of God in their unity and warns against developing an independent doctrine of the Spirit. At the same time, he also underlined the distinctive work of the Spirit, i.e. redemption, which cannot be assimilated to Father’s creation or the Son’s reconciliation. The Creator Spiritus brings about a new form of God–human relationship by creating human freedom for God. Barth wrote, “the fact that there are Christians, men who have this freedom, is no lesser miracle than the birth of Jesus Christ of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, or than the creation of the world out of nothing” (DO, p. 139). In order to conceive of Barth’s pneumatology, it is essential to distinguish the term redemption (Erlösung) from reconciliation (Versöhnung).1 Unlike Barth’s usage, redemption has been mainly attributed to Christ’s salvific work in Christian history. Barth even acknowledged the limitation of the term redemption to describe the Spirit’s activity. He explained it as follows: “Our situation as reconciled men is like that of a man in prison who has received the good news that he is free. The door is open, but he has not yet gone out of prison. Perhaps the word ‘Vollendung’ (consummation) would have been better than ‘Erlösung’ (redemption). We now have freedom, but we are not in it!” (Barth 1963, p. 53). Unfortunately, Barth’s death prevented him from exploring this tantalizing vision in detail as a separate topic in CD. 1  Barth based this distinction on an exegetical observation. “In the New Testament,” he wrote, “redemption is from the standpoint of revelation or reconciliation the future consummating act of God which has still to come.” For “the eschatological use of α̕ πολύτρωσις [redemption],” he referred to Lk. 21:18, Rom. 8:23, Eph. 4:30, and Heb. 11:35 (CD I/1, p. 409). His choice of the term “redemption” to designate the work of the Holy Spirit seems to be innovative within the history of Christian theology. It had more commonly been used to refer to the work of Christ. Barth needed a way to distinguish Christ’s work from the distinctive work of the Holy Spirit without losing their underlying unity. He adopted “reconciliation” for the former, perhaps under the influence of his Ritschlian teachers (not to mention the apostle Paul), while “redemption” could then be used for the special office of the Spirit.

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Barth’s earlier work, nevertheless, offers us valid hints as to what his mature ­doctrine of redemption would look like. The main content of the doctrine of redemption, for Barth, is “the eschatological reality of man” (ETH, p. 461). It is to explore the God– human relation from the perspective of God’s perfection of creation and reconciliation. Despite his severe criticism of liberal theology’s near equation of the divine Spirit with human consciousness, Barth argues that redemption surprisingly discloses God’s “true continuity with the human spirit,” though this continuity remains indirect because it is not present to us by nature but only “eschatologically” (Barth 1938, p. 72; German original, 1929). This eschatological reality is still not yet our own, but we can taste it and wait in hope for its completion. In this respect, Barth called the Redeemer “the Spirit of Promise.” How should it be otherwise? In the fact that His Word has been spoken, spoken in the Incarnation and the Resurrection of His dear Son, God creates fellowship between Himself and us; such fellowship as exists between a father and his child. Revelation of God would not be revelation if it should not give us a share in God’s own nature [Anteil an Gottes eigenem Wesen], however that be understood. The words Creation and Reconciliation do not yet say this in themselves. In those words we are not yet the children of God. We are told that we are His creatures, but in those words we are not told that His grace is victorious over our sins. But God cannot be revealed as our Creator and Reconciliator, unless, at the same time, we are thereby named as being His children, whom he begets as His children and who is thus our Redeemer. (HSCL, p. 76 rev.)

This quote shows that the twofold content of redemption is our transition from creatures who are sinners into God’s children with a destiny to partake of God’s glory. Although the true meaning of creation and reconciliation is still veiled, the Spirit unveils in the penultimate our becoming God’s children and inheriting the divine glory. Thus, the Spirit’s redemption has a unique place, and a special importance, within the ad extra act of the Trinity. Barth argued, “Redemption is creation, but without the possibility of sin and death. Thus far, it is more than creation. Redemption is also more than reconciliation…. Redemption is reconciliation without qualification, without the ‘not yet’ which we must here and now combine with the ‘in Christ’, to indicate faith and sacrament” (Barth 1962, p. 348). In this respect, redemption is not merely the goal of humanity but also the telos of God’s creation and reconciliation. Barth further explores the Spirit’s redemption, focusing on the way in which this future reality structures our present existence and is experienced in everyday life. This is the future that is given to and present with us as the promise of the Spirit. This reality as God’s children is its presence not in the future but as the future, shedding light on the present as we live in the penultimate and move into God’s future. This motif invites us to look “beyond the present, also beyond the dialectical paradox of ‘always sinner and always righteous’, to the coming kingdom of His father” (Barth 1938, p. 81). Although the veil is still thick between the present reality and the promised future, the Spirit of the promise touches our reality, transforms us as God’s children, and draws the present into the very future of God. It discloses that the structure of our present being is in the process of becoming by God’s redemptive grace. This interaction between being and

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becoming within the broader framework of God’s salvific act, in my view, is the place where the eschatological possibility of newness within out daily existence arises, and it is the reason why our earthly existence can be filled with awe and joy.

The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life Barth’s eschatological doctrine of redemption results in the vision of the Christian life as acting‐with‐the Spirit. This life has been originally created by the Father and given to us in the Word who is “the divine womb, in which we are conceived, grow, brought forth in birth” (Barth 1938, p. 75, n.1). The Word fully discloses God’s desire for us, but it is not a fixed manual for or encyclopedia of the Christian life. In the Spirit, we are free to respond and live in accordance with the Word, thereby participating in the reality that is not our own. God’s constant coming to us in this redemptive manner is the basis for our openness to the future. In this respect, the Christian life as an action‐with‐the Spirit is not merely backward looking – pointing to what Christ has already accomplished. Rather at the same time it is also forward looking – anticipating the Spirit’s consummation. In a similar manner that anticipates Moltmann or Pannenberg, Barth could ask, “How can we seriously present what God wants of us without recalling what God finally wants with us? Is what he wants of us not really affected and co‐determined by this? … We are still forced to admit that something is left out, something future” (ETH, p. 462). Historical contingencies with which we live are provisional, ambiguous, and even in opposition to the divine promise. God’s future will make sense of them in the end, but God’s coming to us reveals here and now their deeper and newer meaning, albeit fragmentarily. Accordingly, we should not only continuously reflect on and revise their meaning during the course of history, but also look beyond “the inescapable dialectic of everything that belongs to the temporal order” (Barth 1938, p. 78). Barth’s proposal for this radical openness toward the future of God results in two distinctive features of the Christian life. First, the Christian life as human beings’ actual living in the Spirit is defined in terms of hope. Fulfilling the divine promise is God’s exclusive and inclusive act alike. Exclusive, because God’s future does not presuppose human cooperation to actualize it. Inclusive, in the sense that God’s coming to us always evokes our correlative and participatory conduct. Christians confront the present reality and live in secular societies with this unique hope for Maranatha and Emmanuel. In this light, the Christian life is characterized by our waiting for God’s redemption and ­hastening toward it in the Spirit. Second, although our existence is vulnerable and enigmatic, the Spirit endows us with a kind of release or tranquility so that we can live in the world without total seriousness, despair, or illusion. The Spirit’s redemption (Erlösung) involves a certain “loosening” or lightening up (Lösung), although the latter does not guarantee the former. God’s command encourages us to live and work on behalf of the good, but the Spirit makes this way of life possible not by compulsion but by loosening the grip of anxiety. Thanks to the Spirit‐given gift of our acquiring a nonanxious presence, we can be faithful and obedient to God’s command joyfully, voluntarily, and thankfully. Being freed from anxiety, or “growing up to be the child of God” (ETH, p. 503), is a critical concept

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for the Christian life that allows us to deal with varied happenings in life gladly, willingly, and with a measure of composure. The early Barth offers a suggestive and rich view of redemption in relation to the Spirit’s eschatological action. One may question whether he maintained these basic pneumatological ideas throughout his theological career. In fact, we can only speculate about this possibility. Nevertheless, as the mature Barth himself noted, his earlier work offers important clues about his vision of the Spirit’s redemption. It is not difficult to discover that the redemptive theme of our becoming God’s children keeps occurring. In Barth’s later work it seems to intensify with the help of his renewed analogical thinking. Through the perichoretic life of the Trinity and its ad extra overflowing, Jesus’ sonship is analogically extended into human “sonship.” This theme culminates in his lecture fragments on the ethics of reconciliation (CL), which arguably reflect the most mature stage of his thought. To sum up, this section was an attempt to look at the Spirit’s eschatological work by consulting Barth’s earlier work on redemption. To explore how he might have gone on to develop the tone and content of eschatology in CD V is beyond the scope of this essay. Instead, I will now turn to the deeper structure of redemption in his work with special attention to his biblical exegesis regarding pneumatology.

Veni Creator Spiritus: The Spirit’s Prayer and Human Prayer After his break with liberalism, Barth intended to offer a thoroughly eschatological theology (RII, 314). For Barth, God’s redemptive act in the Spirit may be better understood not as a self‐standing doctrine, but as an enduring leitmotif that determines the tenor of his theology. I will now attempt to survey the way in which Barth’s discovery of the Spirit’s “sigh” in Romans 8 plays a crucial role in his making sense of redemption. Throughout his career Barth regarded Romans 8 as lying at the heart of the biblical view of redemption. He turned to it as one of the key bases for his pneumatological reflections (Barth 1963, p. 53). His interest in this passage allowed him to grasp the complexity and richness of the doctrine of the Spirit, especially regarding his vision of the Spirit as our means of entry into the intradivine fellowship.

The Spirit’s Sigh as a Ground‐Breaking of Barth’s Pneumatological Thinking In his earlier writings Barth often emphasized the Pauline “sigh” in a way that differentiated him from nineteenth‐century Protestant spirituality. In 1922, as his reputation was growing, he was asked to explain his theology to a group of ministers. He first hesitated to do so, but he eventually introduced one word – the word sigh: “Utter the words, ‘Veni creator spiritus!’ [Come Creator, Holy Spirit],” he said. According to Rom. 8:26, that sigh for the time being is more hopeful than triumphant. But once it has been heard, “you have been introduced to ‘my theology’” (WGT, p. 128). Uttered in the form of prayer, this very sigh is grasped and upheld, according to Paul, by the Spirit’s own groaning and prayer. To pray in this way is to receive the Spirit of sonship. It is to be

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transformed from being spiritually inept into being God’s child. A link between sigh and invocation, prayer and participation, appears throughout Barth’s work. Its importance seems only to increase as his vision of redemption becomes sharper and more concrete. It is widely understood that Barth had an unfavorable view of human piety as such. Indeed, the early Barth was even somewhat reticent about prayer. However, he could not ignore that in Scripture God commands people to pray and wants to listen to their prayers. To resolve this tension, he placed prayer and piety within the context of the Spirit’s redemption: “In the Holy Ghost prayer is made…. It must be said that it can only be made intelligible from the point of view of eschatology…. The child of God can speak with God, his Father, and he does so speak” (Barth 1938, p. 84). In other words, although Barth rejected prayer as human piety, he rooted its “impossible possibility” in the Spirit’s eschatological adoption of the praying person as God’s own child. The Spirit’s redemptive act both results in human prayer and responds to it. For Barth what Scripture attests is that the Spirit is a “spirit of real prayer” (Barth and Thurneysen 1935, p. 137). The prayer Veni Creator Spiritus integrates all human prayers into the Spirit’s redemptive act for us. The power of invocation is demonstrated somewhat ironically by the praying person’s sigh, a humble expression of our inability to speak to God. This sigh, however, does not mark the futility or hopelessness of our prayer. Rather, the Spirit’s groaning and prayer in and through our sighs allows us to pray to God truly, and thus converse with him. This sigh colors the life of the praying person with an eschatological tone: “If there were no God and if the heavenly habitation were not awaiting us, there would be no cause for groaning. But God has begun to trouble us with an anxious restlessness. He is the cause of our groaning; and therefore we must groan” (Barth and Thurneysen 1978, p. 275). This conception of the “sigh” discloses a new structure of our existence and relation with God, miraculously established by God’s receiving of our impossibility as the Spirit’s own groaning. Barth laid the basic structure for his pneumatology, in its eschatological and prayerful dimension, as early as in his Romans II, which is filled with his polemic against piety. In light of the “infinite qualitative difference” (RII, p. 10), any kind of human piety seems to be almost totally excluded. In the end, however, the ontological divide between God and humanity functions as fruitful soil for establishing a promising pneumatology and a theology of prayer.

The Spirit’s Intercession as the Justification of Human Prayer Because of our human inability to pray as we ought (Rom. 8:26), Barth surveys prayer first within the context of the salvific act of the Trinity, especially the Spirit’s sanctifying role, and then extends his reflections to the human level. The triune God not only hears our prayers passively but also enables them actively. God through the Spirit becomes the “primary praying agency.” Despite our inability to pray rightly, the Trinity transforms us into a true but “secondary praying agency.” Here prayer, as human piety, is dialectically negated and yet restored on the basis of God’s own intercessory prayer for us in Christ and through the Spirit.

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Prayer becomes genuinely possible as we sigh in acknowledging our inability. As Barth acutely observed, the existential struggle of humanity in Romans 7 is an indispensable background for conceiving of the Spirit’s work in Romans 8 (CD I/1, p. 466).2 When reading Romans 7 and 8 together, what is essentially required of us is the audacity to cry out to the incomprehensible divine addressee. Barth writes, “I must still cry unto Him who confronts me only as unknown and undiscoverable, as the enemy who has vanquished me, and as the judge who has sentenced me to death – but nevertheless, crying to Him, Abba Father” (RII, pp. 297–298). When human beings fumble in their prayers, the Spirit intercedes with Abba Father for them, with sighs too deep for words (Rom 8:26). By becoming the praying agent within the Trinity, the Spirit endows humans with the possibility of prayer. With the Spirit’s gift they can pray to God truly as they are being drawn into the intradivine communion of the Trinity. With this line of thought Barth explained that prayer takes place not only in the God–human relationship but also in the intradivine relationship, that is, in the Spirit through the Son to the Father. It may appear that the God–human relationship precedes the latter logically and temporarily, but the possibility and legitimacy of the former come from the latter. Barth’s commentary on Romans 8:26–27 demonstrates this dynamic: The justification of our prayer is not that we have attained some higher eminence on the ladder of prayer; for all ladders of prayer are erected within the sphere of the “No‐God” of this world. The justification of our prayer and the reality of our communion with God are grounded upon the truth that Another, the Eternal, the Second Man from Heaven (I Cor. xv. 47), stands before God pre‐eminent in power and – in our place. (RII, p. 317)

At stake here is a dialectical motif of God’s rejection and restoration of prayer. The dynamic is clearly eschatological. When prayer is justified, it is elevated to “the reality of our communion with God” and even equated with it. Although Barth at this stage did not clearly distinguish the Spirit’s redemption from the Son’s reconciliation, the justification of prayer in RII constitutes a main theme in his vision of the Spirit’s redemptive act, according to which prayer is the context in which the Father–child relation of adoption is created and given to us by the Spirit. Barth’s seminal doctrine of participation is also anticipated here. The idea of participation will become increasingly important as the core of his doctrine of salvation continues to grow. Reading Barth from this perspective not only leads us to pay more attention to the continuity between his early and mature writings but also invites us to appreciate the originality of his thought. Paul’s pneumatology in Romans 8 animated Barth to bring a theology of prayer into the heart of the doctrine of redemption. This is a strongly theocentric vision of prayer, in which any discussion of human prayer and piety should be based on the gracious work of the Spirit. Although Barth did not talk very much about the human side of prayer in his earlier career, there is enough room for developing the theme of correspondence/analogy in it. Prayer, as talking with God, according to Barth, 2  For a recent scholarly defense of the traditional view, shared by Barth, that Romans 7 pertains to the Christian life, see Timmins (2017).

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can be understood only if we humans are more than God’s creatures and more than sinners saved by grace. Prayer is the actualization of our eschatological reality that is possible here and now…. [A]s one who prays… I stand in the overarching relation of a child of God as its Father. Perhaps all that needs to be said about our claiming by God from this third standpoint may best be understood if it is seen in the light of prayer. (ETH, pp. 472–473)

This eschatological justification of prayer serves as the basis for developing Barth’s idea of prayer at least in two directions. First, Barth’s trinitarian thinking fills this eschatological structure with the theme of prayer as a “human act.” The following two examples may help to clarify how he reflected upon this issue both christologically and pneumatologically. 1. In Barth’s eyes, the desperate sigh of praying persons is analogous to Jesus’ anxious cry to the Father in Gethsemane, pointing to their extreme experience of God’s absence (CD I/1, p. 458). The Spirit’s mediatory role, however, draws believers into fellowship with God and invites them to call upon “Abba” (Barth 2002, p. 25), the gracious Father whom Jesus introduced to his disciples in the Lord’s Prayer. 2. Barth’s later interpretation of Romans 8 elaborates further on the Spirit’s sanctifying act as follows: in the movement from earth to heaven, the Spirit purifies human prayer driven by anxiety, desire, and cupidity. In this upward movement, human prayer is taken into the fellowship of the Trinity (CD III/4, p. 100). An analogy between Jesus’ prayer and our prayer is thus grounded in the Spirit, through whom we are freed to pray, and continuously learn how to pray, according to God’s will. Second, in the light of prayer Barth could speak of the unity of God and humanity in a positive sense, conceiving of it as the foundation for the Christian life. Of course when considering the gift of salvation, he ruled out the idea of divine–human collaboration. However, when discussing ethical issues from a theological perspective, he took this notion seriously. As suggested by Jesus in Gethsemane, for example, unity with God’s will is possible for God’s children in their prayerful attentiveness and earnest requests. In this context, the term cooperation can be adopted to describe our participation in God’s present‐tense action, when the primacy is ascribed to God, and prayer constitutes its Sitz im Leben (Barth 2002, p. 30). Christian ethics, for Barth, is living in and acting with the Spirit, who shapes human beings as praying agents by calling them to live, in the time between the times, in accord with the Word of God.

Conclusion Barth showed from his early theological career that the Spirit’s redemption means our becoming God’s adopted children, and that the Spirit’s intercession constitutes the crux of a biblical view of redemption. Indeed his extensive, if fragmentary, talk about the Spirit was constructed from this perspective. This pneumatological proposal enriches and widens the meaning of salvation, pointing beyond justification by faith alone as conventionally understood to the way of our incorporation into God. In addition,

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Barth’s exegesis of Romans 8 crystallizes some critical pneumatological motifs – namely, the mediation between God and humanity in the form of the Spirit’s heavenly intercession, the Spirit’s shaping of human agency, human participation in fellowship with God, and prayer as the basis for Christian ethics. Reading Barth in this way challenges certain prevailing, but oversimplified critiques leveled against his pneumatology. Barth did not simply conceive of the Spirit as revelation’s subjective side but invites readers to regard the Spirit as the means of entry into the intradivine trinitarian fellowship; his invocation of the Spirit as the divine agent of prayer disqualifies the charges of depersonalizing the Spirit and of repressing human piety; the Spirit’s redemption is neither overshadowed by the Father’s creation, nor the Son’s reconciliation, but serves as their eschatological fulfillment. This reading of Barth may also lead to evaluating his pneumatology as a modern appropriation of the patristic theme that the relation between the Father and the Son is shared with believers by the Spirit. Approaching Barth’s other key doctrines from this pneumatological insight will certainly offer a better understanding of what his theology intended in general and what he wished to say about the Spirit’s being and act in particular. The more I read Barth’s pneumatology in the perspective of redemption, conclusively speaking, the more I like to say that Barth loved the Spirit too much to be binitarian.

References Barth, K. (1938). The Holy Ghost and the Christian Life (trans. R.B. Hoyle). London: Frederick Muller. Barth, K. (1962). Church and culture. In: Theology and Church: Shorter Writings, 1920–1928 (trans. L.P. Smith), 334–354. London: SCM. Barth, K. (1963). Karl Barth’s Table Talk (ed. J.D. Godsey). Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd. Barth, K. (2002). Prayer: Prayer: 50th Anniversary Edition (ed. D.E. Saliers), (trans. S.F. Terrien). Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. Barth, K. and Thurneysen, E. (1935). God’s Search for Man: Sermons (trans. G.W. Richards, K.J. Ernst, and E.G. Homrighausen). Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Barth, K. and Thurneysen, E. (1978). Come Holy Spirit: Sermons (trans. G.W. Richards, K.J. Ernst, and E.G. Homrighausen). London: Mowbrays. Come, A. (1959). Human Spirit and Holy Spirit. Philadelphia: Westminster Press. Gunton, C. (1978). Becoming and Being: The Doctrine of God in Charles Hartshorne and Karl Barth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gunton, C. (2007). The Barth Lectures (ed. P. Brazier). London: T&T Clark. Jenson, R. (1993). You wonder where the Spirit went. Pro Ecclesia 2: 296–304. Jenson, R. (2010). God After God: The God of the Past and the God of the Future as Seen in the Work of Karl Barth. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Macchia, F. (2006). The Spirit of God and the Spirit of life: an evangelical response to Karl Barth’s pneumatology. In: Karl Barth and Evangelical Theology: Convergences and Divergences (ed. S.W. Chung), 149–171. Milton Keynes: Paternoster Press. Moltmann, J. (1974). The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (trans. R.A. Wilson and J. Bowden). London: SCM. Moltmann, J. (1977). The Church in the Power of the Spirit: A Contribution to Messianic Ecclesiology. London: SCM. Pannenberg, W. (1968). Jesus‐God and Man (trans. L.L. Wilkins and D.A. Priebe). London: SCM.

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Rogers, E. Jr. (2004). The eclipse of the Spirit in Karl Barth. In: Conversing with Barth (eds. J.C. McDowell and M. Higton), 173–190. Aldershot: Routledge. Rogers, E. Jr. (2006). After the Spirit: A Constructive Pneumatology from Resources Outside the West. London: SCM.

Timmins, W.N. (2017). Romans 7 and Christian Identity: A Study of the ‘I’ in Its Literary Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zizioulas, J. (2006). Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church (ed. P. McPartlan). London/New York: T&T Clark.

CHAPTER 21

Barth on the Church Kimlyn J. Bender

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arl Barth’s doctrine of the church exhibits both historical development and, in its mature form, a consistent christological and trinitarian character. Barth defines the church as a gathered congregation in a specific place and time, evident in his growing preference for the term “community” (Gemeinde) rather than “church” (Kirche) in his late ecclesiology, while also acknowledging the church’s universal connotation as a corporate body that spans spatial and temporal boundaries. His ecclesiology presents a solidly evangelical vision for the church with corresponding catholic aspirations, incorporating the church within the economy of salvation without construing it as a steward of grace. The church is set forth as a community in which every member is called to minister as a witness to Jesus Christ in service to one another and to the world.

Barth’s Early Reflections on the Church Although Barth included passing references to the church in his early writings and sermons, his first intensive reflections on the church coincided with the theological upheaval caused by his break with his liberal theological inheritance (Busch 1994, chs. 3–4). As with his evaluations of this legacy, his thoughts on the church during this period were quite critical. In the first edition of the Römerbrief Barth asserted that the church had crucified Christ and that its way henceforth was a separate one from Christ’s own (GA 16, p. 361). In his Tambach lecture of 1919 he bemoaned “modern ecclesiasticism” as a “churchly temptation” that needed to be resisted, and in an address the following year even went so far as to say that the knowledge of God was more hindered than helped by the church (WGT, pp. 41, 76). Continuing his assault in that address, Barth asserted that the concern of Scripture was in fact “not the construction of the

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Church” but rather “its necessary and looming deconstruction,” and he drew attention to the fact that the picture of the heavenly Jerusalem in Revelation has no church within it (WGT, p. 86). Both the high point of this critical phase, and the beginning of the turning of the tide to a more positive assessment of the church, was marked by the appearance of the second edition of the Römerbrief in 1922. In this work, Barth’s sharp comments from the first edition were reiterated and indeed intensify (GA 47; RII). Barth railed against the cultural optimism and religiosity of his day and asserted that all human and historical achievements stood under the judgment of the “Wholly Other” God who opposed them, including both religion and the church itself. Barth’s criticisms of the church followed and complemented his condemnation of a cultural milieu and its theology that he judged to be an attempt to domesticate God through the identification of divine revelation with contemporary cultural and political aspirations and programs. Both the church and the world were thus prone to idolatry, and in turn the judgment of God fell equally on both. Even if the church might be judged as the apex of human achievement, it still stood on the human side of the great divide between God and the world and thus stood in opposition to the revelation of God. Barth concluded: “Here it is clear that the opposition between the Gospel and the church is fundamental and infinite all along the line. Here one standpoint stands against another. Here one is in the right and another in the wrong. The Gospel is the abolition [Aufhebung] of the church, as the church is the abolition [Aufhebung] of the Gospel” (GA 47, p. 455; RII, p. 333 – my translation). Although the second Romans commentary presented Barth’s most sharp and sustained criticisms of the church, it also marked the turning point from primarily critical to more positive assessment. It might indeed be understandable to conclude in light of the statements presented earlier that Barth’s Romans commentary offered a solely negative appraisal of the church, yet such a judgment would overlook the highly dialectical argument that was actually offered there. For although it is true that Barth charged that the church was prone to idolatry and rightly fell under divine judgment, he went on to contend that it is nevertheless the only place where the question of God is asked with real seriousness (leaving the synagogue out of account). The church for this reason should not be abandoned in a flight to an unachievable moral purity but should be embraced along with the divine judgment that falls upon it. As Barth contended: “We must not, because we are fully aware of the eternal opposition between the Gospel and the Church, hold ourselves aloof from the Church or break up its solidarity; but rather, participating in its responsibility and sharing the guilt of its inevitable failure, we should accept it and cling to it” (GA 47, p. 457; RII, p. 334). In spite of his strong criticisms, Barth never advocated abandoning the church (GA 47, pp. 459–460; cf. p. 503; RII, p. 336; cf. p. 371). He did not do so because, in a surprising turn, Barth stated that the acceptance of its judgment was the first step toward salvation. Barth spoke not only of the church’s tribulation (GA 47, ch. 9; RII, ch. 9) and its guilt (GA 47, ch. 10; RII, ch. 10) but also of its hope (GA 47, ch. 11; RII, ch. 11). The church was in fact the one place where such sin and guilt could be rightly named, heard, and accepted, and this condemnation itself was the precursor and sign of God’s mercy and salvation. Moreover, insofar as God himself chose to speak through this human proclamation of judgment and mercy, the great chasm between God and humanity could be

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graciously overcome from God’s side. The church was therefore the locus of both God’s judgment and justification, and God’s “No” served the larger purpose of God’s “Yes,” an important and ever‐recurring theme for the remainder of Barth’s theological development that would shape his thought on election, reconciliation, and the church itself. Although the strong criticisms of the church found in the Romans commentary would in time give way to more positive and constructive descriptions of the church, Barth never retracted his condemnations of cultural Christianity or ecclesiastical triumphalism, and he could revive them with the appearance of a growing nationalism and the churches’ accommodation to it (Barth 1961, pp. 27–32, 33–57). Barth’s consistent eschatology in the second Romans commentary served an important critical function in protecting against all direct identifications of God’s revelation with history and thereby opposed all ecclesial hubris and the cultural assimilation of the Gospel. It did not, however, provide for a substantive ecclesiology in any real sense. Barth in time came to see the Romans commentary as a needed form of theological and ecclesial criticism but also as ultimately deficient due to its lack of a robust Christology and its penchant for seeing the church “only as a negative counterpart to the Kingdom of God” (HG, p. 62; see pp. 37–65). Missing in Barth’s writings of this early period, as in the Romans commentary itself, was any affirmative description of the church as God’s new people within the world or any positive account of its worship, doctrine, or practices. The relation of the kingdom of God and the church was portrayed in purely oppositional terms with no account of their relation. The church at its best was described only as a timeless moment of divine disclosure, not a reality with historical duration. To borrow Barth’s parlance of the time referring to revelation, this divine event that is the church is at most a “tangent touching a circle.” The historicity and the visibility of the church, insofar as they were acknowledged, were simply equated with its sin and guilt. Such theological convictions made any truly substantive ecclesiology impossible (Bender 2005, ch. 2).

The Turn to a Constructive Ecclesiology A more constructive account of the church became possible, and coincided, with Barth’s increasing reflection upon Christian proclamation as the means used by God for his Self‐revelation. As Barth gained an appreciation for proclamation within the church as the site of God’s revelation and pronouncement, he began to describe the church in more favorable terms. This positive account was, as noted previously, already prefigured in the second edition of the Romans commentary, but it is developed in a more intentional and focused way in Barth’s 1922 lecture “The Need and Promise of Christian Proclamation” (WGT, pp. 101–129). In this work, Barth identified preaching as the site of God’s own revelatory word and presence to his people, and he situated preaching itself within the context of the worship of the church and at its center. There was now in this address an apparent shift from an emphasis upon the church as the locus of God’s judgment to one where it is portrayed as the locus of a divine revelation coming through the means of human proclamation (WGT, pp. 110, 121–122). Barth’s critical concerns did not disappear in this essay, but the dialectical relation of God’s “No” and

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“Yes” now more strongly prioritized the latter and took the former to serve its ultimate purpose. Barth therefore stated that persons gather in church precisely because they “passionately desire to have the Word spoken to them, the Word, which promises grace in judgment, life in death, the beyond in the here and now” (WGT, p. 111). It was only with his lectures on dogmatics during his initial professorate in Göttingen that Barth first produced what might justifiably be called a doctrine of the church. In the early lectures of this series, Barth provided his first systematic reflections upon the formal question of the church as the locus of revelation and of its speech as the medium of God’s own divine address, themes first examined in his 1922 lecture (GA 17, §§1–3; GD §§1–3). Barth’s doctrine of the church as a dedicated topic unto itself appeared later in the lecture cycle in a paragraph simply titled “Die Kirche” (GA 38, §34, pp. 349–377; see also Bender 2005, ch. 3). Although Barth’s chapter on the church in the GD is quite thin and undeveloped in light of his later ecclesiology in the CD, a number of significant themes and convictions appeared that would shape all of his future ecclesiological thought. These followed upon Barth’s discovery in the prior lectures of a richer Christology than he had before possessed, a discovery directly related to his interaction with earlier patristic and Reformation materials, and one that would greatly influence his ecclesiological thought. As in his later CD, Barth in the GD placed ecclesiology within the larger context of the doctrine of reconciliation. His careful distinction between revelation and history is on display, echoed in his insistence that the church does not take its rise from a potency or principle latent in history but from a particular act of God who calls it into existence, a call itself grounded in an eternal decision (prefiguring Barth’s understanding of the relation of election and ecclesiology that will be fully developed in CD II/2). The church therefore exists in history but is not of history, for its origin lies with the Spirit of God and is not due to an intrinsic capacity or power within history itself. In its visible existence, the church appears to be similar to other such communities of the world, but in reality it differs from them all in that it is founded and sustained by an invisible divine act. Therefore the church’s true existence is known only by faith, and this is the basis of its invisibility (GA 38, pp. 353–354). It is this invisible power of the Spirit that calls the church into visible existence. The church is therefore both visible and invisible, the “invisible‐becoming‐ visible” (GA 38, p. 364; see also pp. 359–366). And so just as the Word takes on the veil of human flesh in the incarnation, so the true church is the invisible that becomes visible amid the ambiguities of history (GA 38, pp. 361–364). The ecclesiological doctrine of the invisible‐becoming‐visible in the church is thus an analogy (neither more nor less) to the christological doctrine of the Word‐becoming‐flesh in the person of Christ, God’s work and power coming to visibility in human history through the power of the Spirit (GA 38, p. 366). Here Barth has grounded ecclesiology within Christology and trinitarian thought, and this move will remain a hallmark of his mature ecclesiology.

Church Dogmatics – Volume One – The Church and Proclamation Barth’s most developed ecclesiology occurred in the CD. In the first volume, Barth takes up the church in a discussion of prolegomena. The church is portrayed as the locus of

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revelation, authority, and freedom (CD I/1 and I/2). Although Barth’s emphasis here is upon such formal questions, it is not without important material implications as well (Currie 2015, ch. 3). In the first volume of the CD, the church is construed as the context in which proclamation (now defined as preaching and sacrament) occurs and where God speaks. Having heard God’s Word in Holy Scripture, which itself testifies to God’s revelation in Jesus Christ, the church in turn proclaims what it has heard, and this proclamation is itself the Word of God insofar as it is based on Scripture and is graciously and freely taken up by God for the purpose of his own Self‐revelation and address (CD I/2, §§3–4). In addition to being the site of proclamation, the church is also designated as the context where critical reflection upon its own speech is undertaken. Dogmatics is the intentional and formal reflection upon the church’s speech in proclamation and in its confession (CD I/1, 4). Dogmatics can therefore properly be conducted only as a function of the church itself, for the purpose of dogmatics is found in its service to the church’s task as witness (CD I/1, p. 17). As a discipline of the church, dogmatics tests the church’s own speech in light of its norm and standard – the revelation of God in Jesus Christ as attested in Holy Scripture (CD I/1, pp. 4, 11). Barth in this volume repeatedly refers to Jesus Christ in his capacity as Lord of the community and in his distinctive relation to it as “the being of the Church” (CD I/1, pp. 4, 12, 17, 31–32, 41–42; et al.). The authority of Christ is exercised in the church during the time of his ascended Lordship through Scripture. Scripture stands on the side of Christ, and therefore stands over the church and does not simply exist within it (CD I/2, §§19–21; see esp. pp. 574– 585; cf. also CD I/1, pp. 100–101). As Barth writes: “To say that Jesus Christ rules the Church is equivalent to saying that Holy Scripture rules the Church” (CD I/2, p. 693). Yet although Scripture stands over the church as an absolute authority, the church’s own confessions and doctrine do possess a real though circumscribed authority in that they serve as a pronouncement of what the church has heard in Scripture and as commentaries on Scripture even as they remain ever open to its correction (CD I/2, pp. 586– 587, 649). Barth spends much time carefully delineating the nature of this real, though relative, indirect, and formal authority of the church and its confessions and teachings (CD I/2, §20). In addition to this authority, the church also has a real freedom granted to it to interpret Scripture and to proclaim what it has heard (CD I/2, §21). The teaching church is therefore always first the hearing church, and Barth renounces any strong distinction between them, similar to his consistent rejections of sacerdotalism and strong clergy‐laity distinctions (CD I/2, p. 844). To serve and teach the Word, Barth asserts, is in the end the church’s greatest joy and privilege, for “it is the whole meaning of the Church’s existence” (CD I/2, pp. 852–853). In this capacity as the agent of proclamation, confession, and instruction, the church stands between Christ and the individual believer, and it is only within the context of the church that the believer hears the Word of God and exists as a member of the body of Christ (CD I/2, p. 703). In its ordered and asymmetrical relation to Christ, the church stands ever in a subordination of servanthood (CD I/1, pp. 100–101). As Barth insists: “The relation between Jesus Christ and His Church is, therefore, an irreversible relation” (CD I/2, p. 576). The church is related to Christ “as the human nature which He assumed is related to His divinity,” the “earthly body” of its “heavenly Head” (CD I/2,

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p. 576; see also ibid., p. 348). The relation between Christ and the church is therefore “the same relation as that of the Creator and the creature” (CD I/2, p. 576). This christological and ecclesiological conviction and its correspondent logic is consistently ­evident throughout the CD and Barth’s mature ecclesiology. So even while stressing the deep unity and analogical relation between the Christ and the church, Barth rejects any portrayal of the church as a prolongation, extension, or repetition of the incarnation itself or of Christ’s own distinctive work (see, for instance, CD IV/2, pp. 59–60). A failure to discern this proper and irreversible relation of Christ and the church, and therefore to misconstrue the “being of the Church,” is understood by Barth to lie at the root of heresy, of which neo‐Protestantism (Protestant liberalism) and Roman Catholicism are the most prominent examples. Barth accordingly engages these traditions critically and often throughout the first volume (CD I/1, pp. 31–35, 36–44, et al.). Heresy, which is at its heart this failure to rightly discern the “being of the church,” results in the church being left “alone with itself,” or in “splendid isolation,” phrases (and variations thereon) that occur repeatedly throughout the first volume (CD I/1, pp. 105, 259; also CD I/2, p. 688, et al.). Barth can, nevertheless, refer to the church as “true religion” (see CD I/2, §17.3).

Church Dogmatics – Volume Two (and Three) – The Church and Election In the second volume of the CD, Barth takes up a discussion of the church under the doctrine of election (itself taken up into the more inclusive doctrine of God), and here we see the beginning of a richer and more substantive ecclesiology than that of the earlier first volume. In light of the doctrine of election that Barth sets forth, the church is seen to be grounded in an eternal decision, its own existence and election standing between Christ and the individual believer (CD II/2, §34, “The Election of the ­ Community”). The church is included in the elect “community of God” (Gemeinde), a term chosen because it can include both Israel and the church, with Israel representing, typologically, the rejection of election, and the church representing the believing reception of it. Nevertheless, the themes of judgment and rejection serve the larger goal of mercy and inclusion, for together Israel and church comprise the one elect community, as “the bow of the one covenant arches over both” (CD II/2, p. 200; see pp. 199–201, 204, 224–227). In Barth’s construal, the church’s election is consequently a “mediate and mediating election” as it is set between Christ and the individual believer, and in another and more fundamental sense, between Christ and the world (CD II/2, pp. 196–197; also 205–206). Moreover, because the church is grounded in an eternal divine decision, it is not solely understood in terms of its appearance in redemptive history but must be viewed as the product of God’s eternal intention for covenant with humanity. Just as election determines that the Word shall take on flesh, so it also determines that the Spirit will bring about a visible people in history. While Barth in no way considers the church to be a second incarnation or extension of it, the church does exist in a real if qualified correspondence to God’s revelation in Christ and serves as a witness to him and to the salvation he accomplished. Barth goes so far as to say in the fourth volume of the CD

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that the church is Christ’s “earthly‐historical form of existence” (irdisch‐geschichtliche Existenzform) in the world (CD IV/1, pp. 643, 661, et al.; KD IV/1, pp. 718, 738, et al.). By placing the church within the doctrine of election, the church is now portrayed not as opposed to the gospel and the way of Christ, as stressed in his earlier critical period, but in accordance with the gospel and joined to Christ in an eternal decree. The church is no longer portrayed in fundamental opposition to the will of God (though its sinfulness remains) but as a result of and in correspondence to this will, existing as a divinely and eternally determined witness to God’s reconciliation of the world in Jesus Christ. As Barth writes: “It is in virtue of this self‐determination that God wills to be God solely in Jesus Christ. And it is as such that He is the Lord of Israel and the Church, and as such, and not otherwise, that He is the Creator, Reconciler and Redeemer of the universe and man. But it is with this primal decision of God that the doctrine of election deals” (CD II/2, p. 91). From this point forward, Barth’s ecclesiology will be irrevocably grounded in and determined by the doctrines of Christology, Trinity, and election. Nevertheless, Barth’s discussion of the church in this second volume itself remains quite formal. There are no extensive discussions of the church’s concrete worship and life, or of the church as a particular social entity with distinct practices enduring through history. Correspondingly, Barth states that the church has “no history in the strict sense but only…a status of continual self‐renewal” (CD II/2, p. 342). Such a statement seems to betray advances made already in the GD and perhaps should not be given undue weight. Nevertheless, insofar as such a view could appear even as late as this second volume of the CD, the historicity and visibility of the church could not be given more than a principled affirmation. Lacking historical duration in any meaningful sense, the church was not, and perhaps in truth could not be, described in rich and detailed concrete terms, and a developed material ecclesiology remained for the later volumes of the CD. Such rich descriptions are first in evidence in the third volume of the CD concerning the doctrine of creation in the ethical section entitled “The Active Life” (CD III/4, pp.  470–564). There, Barth examines the Christian community with particular attention to its form of life and the practices and dispositions that characterize its  ministry and service. Nevertheless, Barth develops a dedicated and material ­ecclesiology in the full sense only in the fourth volume of the CD, which addresses the doctrine of reconciliation.

Church Dogmatics – Volume Four – The Church as a Called and Gathered Community In the first of Barth’s dedicated ecclesiology sections, “The Holy Spirit and the Gathering of the Christian Community” (CD IV/1, §62), Barth attends particularly to questions regarding the church’s origin and identity. The richer Christology that appears as the volumes progress is in turn mirrored in a richer ecclesiology. No longer is the church treated solely as an eschatological event without historical duration. Now, Barth is able to speak of the church as a history enduring through time, though he does not abandon, but in fact prioritizes, the event character of the church. The church is portrayed as a

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work of the Spirit (the church as event) that gives rise to a people and its corresponding form of life in structures and practices that exist through time (the church as institution). Barth’s convictions regarding faith and history continue to hold, though now the viewpoint on the church is not only eschatological (as in the second Römerbrief) but is itself set within a more comprehensive and richer christological framework. Borrowing from the geometric language of the earlier commentary, but now greatly enriched and developed, Barth introduces the doctrine of the church and situates it within the more inclusive doctrine of reconciliation and among the themes of which that doctrine is concerned: The Christology is like a vertical line meeting a horizontal. The doctrine of the sin of man is the horizontal line as such. The doctrine of justification is the intersection of the horizontal line by the vertical. The remaining doctrine, that of the Church and of faith, is again the horizontal line, but this time seen as intersected by the vertical. The vertical line is the atoning work of God in Jesus Christ. The horizontal is the object of that work, man and humanity. (CD IV/1, p. 643)

Speaking now of the church not only as event but as a history, Barth sees this history as enclosed within the history of Christ himself (CD IV/1, p. 644; cf. p. 151). It is a visible history and one that, in its visibility, can be perceived as one history among others (CD IV/1, p. 652). Nevertheless, though the visibility of the church exists in its historical character, its true identity and nature can be known only to faith, for the source of its visible existence, and that which sustains it through time, is the miraculous event of the Spirit’s action. The church is in but not of history, existing in time but not the product of historical forces, being both divinely established and historically constituted (CD IV/1, p. 647). This is, at its heart, what it means to say that the church is both invisible and visible, both event and institution (as witnessed earlier in the GD). In each of these pairings, it is the former term that takes precedence and gives reality to the second in an irreversible and asymmetrical relation, the second only existing by means of the first. In short, the church comes to exist as a visible institution in history only because it is grounded in a prior event of the Spirit that calls the church into being and sustains its existence. With such careful ordering of the work of the Spirit and the historical existence and human activity of the church, Barth’s early eschatological convictions and concerns are retained even as they are now incorporated and developed within more inclusive christological, pneumatological, and trinitarian lines of thought (Bender 2005, ch. 6). The church is portrayed as the body of Christ called into existence by the Spirit existing in this time given to it between the first and second advents of Christ (CD IV/1, pp. 725– 739; cf. CD IV.3.2, pp. 752–755). As Barth would later write: “The Christian community, the true Church, arises and is only as the Holy Spirit works — the quickening power of the living Lord Jesus Christ” (CD IV/2, p. 617). To know the church in this way, as both invisible and visible, is to know it as a m ­ ystery of faith and not simply as a sociological reality open to historical investigation. To understand the church as a mystery is akin to knowing the mysteries of the incarnation and of creation (CD IV/1, p. 645; cf. pp. 653–654). In contrast, to see the church

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exclusively as either a spiritual (invisible) entity or as a historical (visible) one is akin to docetic and ebionitic heresies, respectively (CD IV/1, pp. 653–655; cf. CD IV/3.2, p. 726). Moreover, to appreciate the church as a mystery is to understand that its visible and extensive numerical growth cannot be equated with its invisible and intensive spiritual increase, nor can the Nicene marks of the church be attributed to the church in its simple visibility. They must, rather, be dialectically understood and christologically grounded, for the church, as invisible and visible, is at once both one and many, holy and profane, catholic and shattered, apostolic and in constant need of authentication and correction (CD IV/2, pp. 644–648; CD IV/1, pp. 668–725).

Church Dogmatics – Volume Four – The Church as an Ordered and Governed Community In the second ecclesiology section of volume four, “The Holy Spirit and the Upbuilding of the Christian Community” (CD IV/2, §67), Barth turns to questions regarding the form that the community called into existence by the Spirit takes as the body of Christ in the world. The church is “the living community of the living Lord Jesus Christ,” a phrase that also served as the title to Barth’s address to the Word Council of Churches Assembly in Amsterdam in 1948 (CD IV/2, p. 681; Barth 2003, pp. 75–104). Barth’s christological logic governs the relation of Christ and his church, and this focus upon the church as the body of Christ in and for the sake of the world, and his carefully ordered relation between Christ, church, and world, are perhaps Barth’s most singularly notable contributions to ecclesiology. Christ and the church are united in a relation of “indissoluble differentiation and irreversible order” (CD IV/3.2, p. 594). Christ remains ever Lord and Head, whereas the church as Christ’s body remains ever dependent upon him as his servant. Christ is present to the church even in his bodily absence through the power of the Spirit (CD IV/1, p. 353). Yet Christ is transcendent to the church, distinct from his earthly body even as he is united to it, never subsumed into the church (CD IV/3.1, pp. 349–350). In this, the singular and inimitable mystery of the incarnation is proper to the hypostatic union of Christ alone. There is therefore a tension that runs throughout Barth’s ecclesiology between the presence of Christ in the world through Word and Spirit and his particular absence during the time between ascension and final return, an enduring theme in Barth’s mature ecclesiology. The emphasis, however, is upon Christ’s presence through the Spirit rather than upon his absence (CD IV/2, p. 652; see also CD IV/3.1, p. 352; CD IV/3.2, p. 503). The strictly ordered and irreversible relation between Christ and the church is mirrored in their respective ministries. Because Christ’s work is unique, perfect, and finished, it is not necessary for the church to make him present or to complete his salvific work through sacramental mediation or representative vicars. Christ’s work and that of the church consequently do not stand on the same plane. Christ is the agent of salvation; the church is the witness to that salvation. It is neither a prolongation of his incarnate person nor a repetition of his work (CD IV/1, pp. 317–318; cf. CD IV/3.2, pp. 729). It lives, rather, in correspondence to Christ as a provisional representation of the salvation that Christ has accomplished for all (CD IV/1, pp. 661–662; cf. CD IV/1, pp. 149–153;

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CD IV/3.2, pp. 573–576). The church, and Christians within it, therefore live in union with Christ and “in proximity to Him and therefore in analogy to what He is” (CD IV/3.2, pp. 532–533; cf. p. 729). Barth’s understanding of Christ and the church is therefore marked by dialectical and analogical richness and a deeply christological (Chalcedonian) logic of unity and differentiation, asymmetry and irreversibility (Bender 2005, chs. 5 and 7). Indeed, Barth writes: “All ecclesiology is grounded, critically limited, but also positively ­determined by Christology” (CD IV/3.2, p. 786). This christological logic is everywhere evident and it is on display in a number of significant passages that draw out this ­intricately ordered dialectical relation of the totus Christus, Christ with his church (see esp. CD IV/2: pp. 59–60, 655–666; also CD IV/1, pp. 661–668; CD IV/3.1, pp. 207, 278–279; CD IV/3.2, pp. 752–755; cf. CD I/2, p. 576; and ibid., p. 348). As Barth states, the relationship between Christ and the Christian community is “indirectly identical to the relationship between Himself as the eternal Son of God and His being as man” (CD IV/2, p. 59; cf. CD IV/3.2, p. 786). It is the Spirit that unites this Lord with the church in a bond of unity analogous to the relations of God in the inner‐trinitarian life itself (CD IV/2, pp. 336–348). The form that this life takes in the world requires a particular structure and institutionalization, for “the christologic‐ecclesiological concept of the community is such that by its very nature it speaks of law and order” (CD IV/2, p. 680). This order and law governs and concerns every aspect of the church’s life and activity, though worship stands at its heart. Even though no church order can be absolutized, the fact that the church exists in space and time requires that it possess structure and shape. Whereas the specifics of such details belong to canon law and practical theology, their presuppositions and general criteria are grounded in Christology and outlined in dogmatic theology (CD IV/2, pp. 677–678, 698). Barth’s understanding of church law avoids both antinomianism and legalism, and the provisional nature of church law is demonstrated in its continual openness to correction by Scripture, as well as by its flexibility and local and temporal determination. All law, however, must be characterized by the qualities of service, worship, a dynamic yet definite form, and an exemplary character, whereby such ecclesial law fittingly provides a model for the world and for civil law (CD IV/2, pp. 689–726).

Church Dogmatics – Volume Four – The Church as a Sent and Witnessing Community In the third ecclesiology section of volume four, “The Holy Spirit and the Sending of the Christian Community” (CD IV/3.2, §72), Barth turns his focus to the ordained and commissioned witness of the Christian community. This is Barth’s longest sustained discussion of the church, and one dedicated to its being and task as “the people of God in world occurrence” (CD IV/3.2, p. 681, et al.). Its vocation is to bear witness to God’s reconciliation of the world in Jesus Christ (CD IV/3.2, pp. 681–683; Busch 1990). It is both set apart from yet sent into the world in order to serve God and the world’s need (CD IV/3.2, pp. 762–764). The church has, Barth asserts, no reality or existence apart

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from this ministry entrusted to it (CD IV/3.2, pp. 795–796, 830–831). As the Father has sent the Son, so the Son has sent the community into the world (CD IV/3.2, pp. 768–769). Barth’s reflections on the church are thus marked by an actualism and teleology in which the church exists in and for this activity of witness and service to the world. The identity of the church for this reason cannot be separated from but is constituted by its existence as mission, a central element of Barth’s ecclesiological thought and one he credited not to the magisterial Reformers but to Anabaptism and Pietism (CD IV/3.1, pp.  11–38). As in prior discussions of the church, Barth here emphasizes that the church’s mission is not a prolongation, supplementation, or augmentation of Christ’s unique work but is comprised of its own task of witness (CD IV/3.2, pp. 834–838). As the church fulfills its task of witness, it becomes a “likeness” (Gleichnis) or “subsequent and provisional representation” (nachträgliche und vorläufige Darstellung) of the kingdom of God in the present world (CD IV/3.2, p. 792; KD IV/3.2, p. 906). The church reflects but is not identical to the kingdom, for in Christ alone is the presence of the kingdom manifest in all its perfection (CD IV/3.2, p. 792). The irreversible order of the relation between the kingdom of God and the church thus follow familiar patterns. For the church to live in correspondence to Christ and the kingdom, it must take up a particular life with particular forms of ministry. Barth designates and discusses 12 such forms, divided into two equal groups of the church’s speech and its action (CD IV/3.2, pp. 865–901). Here Barth designates baptism and the Lord’s Supper as at the heart of the church’s practice. These serve as the proclamation of the gospel and the most eloquent means of the church’s witness to the world (IV/3.2, p. 901). Barth’s more complete discussion of baptism (in which he embraced believer’s baptism and repudiated infant baptism) was taken up in a later incomplete fragment of the CD (CD IV/4), whereas a dedicated discussion of the Lord’s Supper was never written. In the last section on ecclesiology in CD IV/3, the primary relation of Barth’s investigation shifts from that between Christ and the church to that between the church and the world. Whereas the former is always strictly ordered and irreversible, his understanding of the latter is more flexible and less rigidly structured. Although the life and law of the church take precedence over and are paradigmatic for the world, the church can also receive and learn from the world as well, resulting in the possibility for mutual and reciprocal influence. The church lives in “total freedom” but also in “total dependence” in relation to the environment of the world in which it finds itself (CD IV/3.2, p. 734). The church borrows from the language, thought, and social structures of the world to articulate its own message and give form to its life (CD IV/3.2, pp. 735–741). The distinction between the church and the world (like that between the Christian and the non‐Christian) is less sharply drawn by Barth than that between Christ and the church (and the Christian). Yet important distinctions remain, not only in terms of the church’s particular election and vocation but also in the foundational fact that the world cannot know its own identity or meaning apart from the Christian community (CD IV/3.2, p. 769; see also pp. 769–773, 801–812; cf. CD III/3, pp. 203–210). It is the Christian community that lives in the knowledge of Christ and in conformity to him. Nevertheless, the world, even in its ignorance, unbelief, and disobedience, still falls under the lordship of Christ, so that its history is inseparable from that of the church

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(CD IV/3.2, pp. 687–688). The church and the world therefore stand (in contradistinction from the relation of Christ and his church) on the same created plane despite their real differences (Bender 2005, ch. 8). The line that separates them is one of acknowledgment and correspondence to the lordship of Christ (CD IV/3.2, p. 715; cf. pp. 793–795). Barth does not, however, allow for absolute distinctions between the church and the world, and every rejection by the church of elements of the world ultimately serves its larger affirmation of the world’s reconciliation (CD IV/3.2, pp. 773, 797–798). The church exists in a dialectical relation to the world, one of both separation from the world and in solidarity with it, and Barth’s ecclesiology navigates between sectarian isolation and cultural accommodation, opposing both a “sacralization” and a “secularization” of the church, rejecting both a triumphal church (“the church in excess”) and a compromised church (“the church in defect”) (CD IV/2, pp. 667–671; CL, pp. 132– 142). Barth’s political thought regarding the church and the civil order follows similar christological and dialectical patterns of thought, with the state, like the world as a whole, in structured relations to Christ and the church. Barth situates his reflections on the state not under the aegis of the doctrine of creation but of reconciliation, and Barth’s political reflections are also deeply shaped by christological and ecclesiological concerns and questions (see CD IV/2, pp. 719–726; also CSC). Barth’s delineation of these christologically ordered relations is always for the sake of the church’s clarification of its true identity and vocation and a proper understanding of its relation to Christ and to the world. At the heart of Barth’s ecclesiology is a ­picture of the church as a divinely elected and commissioned witness to God’s reconciliation of the world in Christ, calling the world to faith and obedience in this gospel. The church’s vocation and mission therefore both follow from and in turn condition and  define its identity, so that the church’s being is defined in its act (Bender 2005, pp. 243–244). In short, the church is a missionary church because God is a missionary God (Flett 2010, ch. 6). The greatest service the church can therefore render the world is to be the church (CD IV/2, p. 721). Barth’s doctrine of the church has not been without its critics (see Bender 2014, chs. 1 and 3). Yet his doctrine is unquestionably rich and complex, and it remains from first to last evangelical and exemplary in character. References Barth, K. (1961). Der Götze Wackelt (ed. K. Kupisch). Berlin: Käthe Vogt Verlag. Barth, K. (2003). God Here and Now (trans. P.M. van Buren). London: Routledge. Bender, K. (2005). Karl Barth’s Christological Ecclesiology. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. Bender, K. (2014). Confessing Christ for Church and World: Studies in Modern Theology. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. Busch, E. (1990). Karl Barth’s understanding of the church as witness. Saint Luke’s Journal of Theology 33: 87–101.

Busch, E. (1994). Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts (trans. J. Bowden). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Reissued by Wipf and Stock, 2005. Currie, T. (2015). The Only Sacrament Left to Us: The Threefold Word of God in the Theology and Ecclesiology of Karl Barth. Eugene, OR: Pickwick. Flett, J. (2010). The Witness of God: The Trinity, Missio Dei, Karl Barth, and the Nature of Christian Community. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

CHAPTER 22

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hortly before his death Karl Barth said: “My whole theology, you see, is fundamentally a theology for pastors. It grew out of my own situation when I had to teach and preach and counsel a little” (FT, p. 23). In his homiletical thought and in hundreds of sermons, Barth showed the practical consequences of his conviction that the subject and agent of Christian theology is the one God who meets us and speaks to us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the God who elects to be God for us and elects us to be for God. Like John the Baptist in Grünewald’s Isenheim “Crucifixion”  –  Barth pointed, in all his ­sermons, to the relentlessly self‐revealing God who, in the power of the Holy Spirit, is the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ, here and now. The sermon is the Baptist’s long, bony finger that points away from the preacher toward the revelation of God on a cross.

The Young Preacher After seminary, Barth was called as an assistant at Calvin’s old pulpit in Geneva and, two years later, to the dreary Swiss village of Safenwil (population 1625) in 1911, arriving two years before electricity (Busch 1976, p. 60). The young pastor found preaching to be a misery. In Safenwil he trudged to church every Sunday, “with a sermon in my head, good or bad, … behind the dung‐cart” (in Busch 1976, p. 60). In his inaugural sermon on John 14:24 Barth confessed to the congregation the compulsion he was under: “I am not speaking to you of God because I am a pastor. I am a pastor because I must speak of God, if I am to remain true to myself ” (in Busch 1976, p. 61). Thus began a decade of Safenwil sermons. Every sermon written, “painstakingly and down to the last detail,” sometimes as if with “terrible birth‐pangs” (in Busch 1976, p. 61). One sermon was begun and ended five times before it was finally written.

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth and Dogmatics, Volume I, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Although he experienced preaching as an intellectually “limitless problem,” “impossible from the start” (in Busch 1976, pp. 89–90), Barth said later that his grand Church Dogmatics arose from the anvil of the pulpit in the Sunday‐after‐Sunday sermons hammered out of the biblical text. Barth characterized preaching as an impossible possibility. Human sinfulness (particularly our propensity toward idolatry) as well as the paradoxical, crucified, resurrected God, preclude any merely human being standing up and faithfully rendering God. Attempting to speak about God on our own, there is an inexorable tendency to substitute anthropology for theology, vainly attempting to “speak about God by speaking about man in a loud voice” (WGT, p. 196). Yet, by the grace of God, preaching is possible because God in Christ is relentlessly revealing, communicative, and determined not to leave God’s people ignorant of the truth about God. Barth admitted that he demanded great intellectual effort from his listeners. In Safenwil Barth began his lifelong practice of taking a biblical text, focusing almost exclusively on that text, often only a verse or two, with a minimum of illustrations or contemporary connections. The early sermons show the young preacher’s enthusiasm for the incipient existentialism he imbibed at the university – confrontation with the inevitability of death is a frequent theme as well as encouragement to probe our inner consciousness for evidence of divine presence. When his congregation resisted the forced diet of enthusiastic socialism mixed with morbid existentialism Barth snapped, “If I wanted to be liked, I would keep quiet” (in Busch 1976, p. 63). Then, World War I. Barth famously read a newspaper manifesto, signed by 93 German intellectuals, including “all my German teachers” praising the war and urging everyone to rally behind the Kaiser. Jolted, Barth felt that his “theological masters in Germany” must have misled him. The failure of modern theology to enable his professors to withstand the ideology of German nationalism and war led the young pastor to question all the “exegesis, ethics, dogmatics, and preaching that I had hitherto held to be essentially trustworthy” (in Busch 1976, p. 81). Barth dashed off a letter to his mentor Hermann criticizing him for advocating “‘experience’ as the constitutive principle of knowing and doing in the domain of religion” (in McCormack 1997, p. 113). Barth began to scrutinize his theology and the context of his calling, that confining, bourgeois “religious workshop in which one is forged as a pastor,” lamenting, “If only one could be something other than a pastor” (in Busch 1976, p. 86). The church, as he experienced it as a novice preacher, was suffocating with “religion” that merely bolstered the status quo. In urbane, liberal pulpits “a universal spoonful of tolerance” was mixed with bland idealism and “proclaimed the supreme good.” Part of the problem, Barth realized, was the way he had been taught to preach. Instead of being concerned with “life” and “experience,” Barth discovered that preaching’s main task was to be radically encountered and addressed by God. Raging against the war in his sermons, Barth discovered, through careful, attentive reading of Scripture, that the conflict between a loving God and the idolatrous modern world may be more radical even than the socialist critique, more serious than the war (WGT). Barth and a couple of preacher friends began, “More reflectively than ever

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before … reading and expounding the writings of the Old and New Testaments. And behold, they began to speak to us  —  very different than we had supposed we were obliged to hear them speak in … ‘modern theology’.” Preaching was the catalyst for Barth’s break with nineteenth‐century liberalism, “simply out of what we felt to be the ‘need and promise of Christian preaching’” (WGT, p. 100). After painstaking, verse‐by‐verse study of Paul’s Letter to the Romans, in August of 1919 the village pastor and brash young scholar burst upon the European theological scene with his commentary, The Epistle to the Romans. Though the seeds of Romans are clearly evident in the previous three years of Safenwil sermons, nothing like Romans had been seen in the German‐speaking theological world – an unabashed homiletical reading of Scripture, approaching Paul’s epistle as one would listen to a sermon. In the preface Barth brashly dismissed the concerns of historical critics, “I entirely fail to see why parallels drawn from the ancient world … should be of more value for an understanding of the Epistle than the situation in which we ourselves actually are” (RII, p. 11). Romans makes no effort to contextualize either Paul or the reader, refuses speculation about historical antecedents or reconstruction of prior theological development for what Paul had to say and attempts no explanation or argument in behalf of Paul’s assertions. After the resurrection, what matters is our present and future with God, not the history of the text but rather the present reality of God’s dealings with us through the text. Barth simply begins with what Paul said and works from there, verse by verse, humbly, continually surprised and delighted by Paul, eagerly, breathlessly proclaiming the world‐shattering event who is Jesus Christ. Romans is Barth’s first public demonstration of his discovery, through his preaching in Safenwil, that the biblical text is an event in which God chooses to speak with direct, contemporary, miraculous abundance. Dismissing Luther’s deus absconditus (RII, p. 42), Barth boldly asserts that God speaks, reveals, assaults and theology is, of necessity, a process of prayerful, submissive attentiveness and listening whereby God comes to us here, now, stripping us of our modern defenses against God, speaking to us whether or not we are prepared to hear what is spoken. In Jesus Christ, even though much is veiled, there is a decisive and irrefutable, constant and ever‐present event of unveiling.

Preaching Themes in Romans In Romans we first encounter a number of themes that have been invigorating for generations of preachers: 1. Barth’s condemnation of “religion” – defined in Romans as “a vigorous and extensive attempt to humanize the divine, … to make it a practical ‘something’, for the benefit of those who cannot live with the Living God, and yet cannot live without God” (RII, p. 332) – is a warning to preachers not to conceive of preaching as a substitute for encounter with the living God. 2. God is relentlessly self‐disclosing and near to us yet paradoxically, more distant and odd the closer God comes. The more we know of God in Christ the greater our realization of how corrupted, accommodated, and tame are our notions of God.

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3. Human words fail. “Is one single word of mine even the word that I am seeking, a word which I out of my great need and hope want to say? Can I speak in such a manner that one word does not negate another?” (RII, p. 343). Yet God’s word enables the preacher’s word faithfully to speak truthfully of God. 4. Faith is external address, God’s word to us that we cannot speak to ourselves. Faith is never an expression of our vaunted interiority. Theology probes the objective ­self‐ revelation of God; not our subjectivity. The message that the church is commissioned to deliver to the world need not bow to the philosophical rules of this age in order to be comprehended by modern people. Reception of the verbum externum (Luther) happens only as miracle, as a gracious condescension of the living God. The modern world, no less than the world of the First Century, must submit to the truth who is Jesus Christ and ask God for the grace to receive this God‐given, world‐shattering word. All the necessary work of reconciliation is an accomplished fact in the life and work of Jesus Christ; nothing in our redemption awaits our contribution. Therefore Christian preaching is witness that joyfully announces that the trouble between us and God has been solved by God. From all eternity, God has elected to be our God and has elected us to be for God (Willimon 2015). When asked what we know of God, Barth repeatedly referred to 2 Corinthians 5:19, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.” God has revealed himself, the Word became flesh. God has assumed human nature. Humanity has become God’s in Christ. In Christ God has made fallen humanity his own. Faced with the fall, God did not step angrily aside. Instead he has personally united himself with the race. Lost humanity has been called home. (Barth 1991, p. 51)

The sermon is not a ladder to climb upward to the divine; no connection between us and God exists except that made by God and, in Christ, God has. The sermon does not commend spiritual practices that foster deeper piety in the believer or give listeners a thoughtful way for considering and then making judgments about the validity of the gospel. Christians are simply those who have been addressed, have been given the grace to hear the good news, and are under commission to give others the news.

The Homiletical Theologian In 1921, Barth was invited to Göttingen where he began work as a dogmatic theologian. In a letter to his friend Thurneysen, Barth declared that his intent was to address “the situation of the preacher in the pulpit” (GD, p. xxi). In Göttingen Dogmatics, Barth’s ­lectures from this period, Barth says that theology begins, not with scholarly rumination on abstractions but with “the concrete situation of preachers mounting the pulpit steps”(GD, p. 85). Preaching is the Word of God proceeding “from revelation and scripture (as the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son), the Word of God is ongoing. It is present” (GD, p. 16). Preaching is the Protestant equivalent to “the sacrament on the altar” in the Roman Catholic Church (GD, p. 31). “The Church of Zwingli and Calvin, maintained this equation loudly and definitely…. The preaching of God’s Word is God’s Word” (GD, p. 32).

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Neither piety nor religious consciousness, neither faith nor apologetics are the ­rationale for theological reflection; only preaching is the starting point for dogmatics (GD, pp. 7–12). Dogmatics is “the science of the principles of Christian proclamation” (GD, p. 314). Although dogmatics often offers preaching a critical, corrective word, dogmatic theology is the servant of preaching, not its master; if God did not speak in Christian preaching there would be no point to dogmatics. Dogma and dogmatics must give way to preaching as the “moon does to the sun” (GD, p. 18). There is an “ambiguity” in any word about God spoken by a human preacher, therefore dogmatic reflection attempts to determine to what extent the preacher’s words are the Word of God (GD, p. 24). Yet even while admitting ambiguity, preachers may speak with confidence that they can indeed say something truthful about God because God has spoken and speaks to preachers. “God is completely inconceivable, concealed, and absent for those whom he does not address and who are not addressed by him. To receive revelation is to be addressed by God” (GD, p. 58). Christian preachers dare to talk about God. Even on the presupposition of the mediation of revelation by holy scripture this venture would always be impossible without the third presupposition that God acknowledges it and will himself speak as we speak, just as he spoke to the prophets and apostles and still speaks through them…. It is pure doctrine if the word of the preacher gives free play to God’s own Word. (GD, p. 265)

After his study of Anselm of Canterbury in 1930–1931, Barth asserted more pointedly that it was not a preacher’s job to convince readers of the reality of God or  the truth of the Christian faith through rational proofs or convincing arguments. Nor is the preacher to hound people into admission of their finitude and sin or to produce existential angst or despair. Proofs, arguments, inducement of human feelings, and apologetic defenses of God tend to reveal what we value more than God. If any one hears the gospel in a sermon it is a concrete instance of justification sola fide. Anselm was right: God’s gift of faith leads to true understanding of God. When he was appointed to a professorate in Bonn, Barth began his massive Church Dogmatics. In the prolegomena, Barth signals that he intends to do theology in a way that is counter to the dogmatics of his day. Eschewing philosophical defense of his method, refusing to display his core assumptions, Barth begins by thinking theologically. Theology arises in careful, humble listening, expecting to hear a word about God that may shake our philosophical presuppositions. Only God can speak of God and God has definitively, actively, decisively spoken: Jesus Christ (CD I/1, p. 116). Church Dogmatics opens with the longest exposition of the Trinity in many ­centuries, thus demonstrating Barth’s conviction that if God does not speak, here, now in the processions and revelation of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, then we have nothing to say about God. Jesus Christ is the active, personal, present, embodied Word who comes to us: The promise of the Word of God is not as such an empty pledge…. It is the transposing of a person into the wholly new state of one who has accepted and appropriated the promise, so

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that irrespective of his attitude to it he no longer lives without this promise but with it…. Whatever may be his attitude to God’s claim, the person who hears the Word now finds himself in the sphere of the divine claim; he is claimed by God. (CD I/1 p. 152)

Dogmatic theology renders service to the church and its messengers by rigorously testing the church’s speech to ensure that we are speaking of Christ and not of some easier to assimilate and more manageable idol of our own concoction. The “first axiom of theology?” “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” Church Dogmatics is a vast biblical commentary in which every theological assertion is rigorously tested by the specifics of the biblical text. Throughout the many volumes of the Dogmatics Barth demonstrates that even as an experienced interpreter, he is continually stunned, delighted by the fruitful otherness of the biblical text. For preachers, searching for something to say, Barth declares that, “The message which Scripture has to give us, even in its apparently most debatable and least assimilatable parts, is in all circumstances truer and more important than the best and the most necessary things that we ourselves have said or can say” (CD I/2, p. 152). Scripture is the source of sermons; “the preached Word of God we know only through the revelation attested in Scripture or the Scripture which attests revelation” (CD I/1, p. 121). Revelation occurs when humans know God as a living being, present, not just when they receive accurate information about God. The preacher, with gaze fixed intently upon the text, prays that God might interest others in what interests the preacher. Preaching is a primary way of God’s ongoing, active, dynamic interaction with the world. Preaching deals with the Bible, not as an archeological dig, but as an occurrence or a happening by which God elects to reveal. In preaching, the gospel happens contemporaneously in the world as God’s people are empowered by God’s spirit to hear God’s word and to witness to the living, resurrected Lord. Preaching can never be reduced to worldly causality. Like Scripture itself, preaching is not, on its own, an adequate vehicle for revelation. The third person of the Trinity miraculously enables preaching to be revelation: We can substitute for revelation, Scripture and proclamation the names of the divine Father, Son and Holy Spirit and vice versa, that in the one case as in the other we shall encounter the same basic determination and mutual relationships. (CD I/1, p. 121)

Barth not only spoke of revelation as an “event” but also called the church that is ­engendered by the word as an “event.” The church is homiletically constituted by God, in each generation, from those who have been addressed by God and who dare continuing conversation with the fecund, generative Word: As the church that is founded on the apostolic word, the church is never a given factor. It has to be repeatedly founded anew by an apostolic word. It can exist only in the event of the speaking and hearing of this apostolic word as God’s Word. Thus the church is an institution only as an invitation, as a waiting for the church. In the church we are always on the way to the event of the church. Thus the ministry as the stepping forth of individuals is an

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act which must repeatedly become a reality by the calling of God. Ordination is a canonical act, but its significance is as a pointer to God’s calling to the extent that in ordination the ordained come to hear the Word of God, which, however, they must constantly hear afresh. (CD IV/3, p. 76)

God comes to us as a personal address – not in abstract or general concepts. Knowledge of God is fellowship with God. Truth is personal (i.e. Jesus the Christ). Justification/ sanctification/vocation are all aspects of reconciliation; God’s personal address to us is also God’s commissioning of us. Jesus Christ is the objective fact of revelation; the Holy Spirit eventfully works that fact in us so that it is a subjective reality. In Barth “subjective” refers, not to our personal experience, but to the work of the Holy Spirit in us, God’s subjectivity offered to us, made an “object” to us so that we might commune with God. Preaching need not rummage about in the subjective recesses of human feelings. By God’s grace, our talk about God is no mere projection of our interiority but a realistic dealing with the truth of God that God, in Jesus Christ, has graciously made available to us. “Not every man can do this [speak the Word of God]. Not every man can speak God’s Word. For not every man has heard it,” says Barth (CD I/2, pp. 490–491). Everyone who hears can and must speak. Hearing and the preaching vocation are inextricably linked. Dogmatics remains an indispensable critic and ally in preaching. “It is a familiar and perhaps unavoidable beginner’s mistake of students and assistants, when preaching, to think that they can and should confidently take the content of their preaching from their treasured … textbooks of dogmatics. On the other hand, older preachers are usually far too confident in removing themselves from the jurisdiction of this critical authority” (CD 1/1, p. 79).

Barth the Homiletician With the rise of Nazis in the 1930s Barth became a leader in the Confessing Church, eventually authoring the Barmen Declaration, a bold confession that Christian preaching could never be submissive to the dictates of the state (CSC). Barmen’s defense of the freedom of preaching is christological: “Jesus Christ as attested to us in Holy Scripture is the one Word of God whom we musts hear and whom we must trust and obey in life and in death.” The most practical, effective Christian resistance to Hitler is preaching. Behind Barmen is Barth’s conviction that the nineteenth‐century theological error was to suppose that divine revelation is problematic, not sufficiently given in Christ, and therefore revelation must be derived from the depths of religious self‐consciousness or human moral striving where God was somehow waiting to be progressively, subjectively discovered. When examination of human religious experience becomes the subject matter of theology, Barth argued, two things occur. First, Jesus Christ ceases to be understood unequivocally as the Lord; and second, we ourselves vainly usurp the center which rightfully belongs to him. Rather than understanding ourselves from him, we come to understand Christ as a postulate of our experience – “as an ideal case or an idea

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of our possibility and our reality” (CD II/1, p. 150). In other words, we refuse to “give God glory,” (Rom. 1:21), devising some means of getting to God through our own vaunted selves. The German Christians were the result of such theological misunderstanding. Barth infuriated Bonn’s aging, sympathetic‐to‐the‐Nazis professor of preaching by unilaterally informing him that he would offer public lectures on preaching, lectures that were eventually transcribed and published as his homiletical tour de force, Homiletics. Homiletics ought not to be regarded as a full Barthian homiletic; the lectures were given under the gathering storm clouds of Nazism. There is no mention of Nazis or Hitler because Barth told preachers to speak “as if nothing had happened.” We preachers do not want, even in our opposition, to give honor or sovereignty to the state that should only be given to God. Here is an “emergency homiletic,” (Hancock 2013) preaching for a church that is fighting for its life. Preaching in a time of crisis must be strictly submissive to the biblical text, disregarding congregational approval or disapproval or the headlines of the day, and adhering only to close exposition of the text: Preachers must not be boring. To a large extent the pastor and boredom are synonymous concepts. Listeners often think that they have heard already what is being said in the pulpit…. The fault certainly does not lie with them alone. Against boredom the only defense is again being biblical. If a sermon is biblical, it will not be boring. Holy scripture is in fact so interesting and has so much that is new and exciting to tell us that listeners cannot even think about dropping off to sleep. (HOM, p. 80)

The very form and structure of the sermon make a theological claim as the preacher moves from direct encounter with the specifics of the text, as if beginning in midconversation, holding up the jewel of the text before the congregation, admiring every facet. The preacher is not to make the text relevant to the congregation but rather to allow God miraculously to make the congregation relevant to the biblical text. Though Barth makes a studied effort not to refer, in his homiletic lectures, to the current political situation in Germany, listeners easily surmise that the way to counteract paganism in the form of National Socialism is by close, obedient attentiveness to God rather than Caesar. God will speak a life‐giving, victorious word in the storm, if we dare to listen. In Homiletics Barth famously rails against sermon introductions, illustrations, endings, and beginnings. The great misunderstanding, especially in modern times, is to suppose that a personal encounter with God was somehow given in the structure of human nature itself so that the preacher need only uncover that point of contact within the listener and build a bridge to that innate point of contact. Barth charged that preaching that thinks it has uncovered some human yearning for the Word has deceived itself, offering the world a false god. Thanks be to God that the true God, the Word made flesh, “completes its work in the world in spite of the world” (WTW, p. 66). On 10 December 1933, Barth preached in the university chapel in Bonn, one year into Hitler’s Reich. Taking as his text Romans 15:5–13 Barth preached on the gentile Christian indebtedness to Israel. Christ has received us and has grafted us outsiders onto

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the promises of God to Israel. Some of the congregation walked out midsermon. Barth brashly sent a copy of the sermon to Herr Hitler. A little while later Barth was ejected from his Bonn professorship.

Barth the Preacher During the postwar decades of his life Barth regularly preached to the prisoners in the Basel jail. Those sermons, Deliverance to the Captives, are the best introduction to Barth as a preacher, not only because they are a less intimidating encounter with his theology than the Dogmatics, but also because they show Barth as the preaching pastor who simply, compassionately, applies the biblical text directly to the congregational context (Denecke 1989). In keeping with his theology, the prison sermons are devoid of apologetics, argument, explanation, or attempts to historically contextualize the text. Barth the preacher is the herald who asserts and announces the message in simple, straightforward, upbeat style, showing the mature Barth caring for an unusual congregation by preaching the gospel as good news for them. Each of these sermons is preceded by and ended with a prayer, not as a pious act but rather as a material necessity, as if to demonstrate that without listening to God’s address, there is no sermon. In a Christmas sermon Barth characterizes the Incarnation as a rescue: A drowning man cannot pull himself out of the water by his own hair. Neither can you do it. Someone else must rescue you. This is the good news of Christmas. He who stands by you and helps you is alive and present! It is he who was born that Christmas Day! Open your eyes, open your ears, open your heart! You may truly see, hear and experience that he is here, and stands by you as no one else can do! He stands by you, really by you, now and for evermore! (DC, p. 138)

In more than one sermon, Barth tells the prisoners that their captivity is not detrimental to their relationship with God. Their imprisonment is no more noteworthy than the sad captivity of the citizens of Basel who know not how bound they are even in their proud assertions of individual freedom and autonomy. In an August 1955 sermon, Barth preached on the gratuitous nature of God’s salvation in Christ: ‘By grace you have been saved!’ How strange to have this message addressed to us! Who are we, anyway? Let me tell you quite frankly: We are all together great sinners. Please understand me: I include myself. I stand ready to confess being the greatest sinner among you all; yet you may then not exclude yourself from the group! Sinners are people who in the judgment of God, and perhaps of their own consciences, missed and lost their way, who are not just a little, but totally guilty, hopelessly indebted and lost not only in time, but in eternity. We are such sinners. And we are prisoners. Believe me, there is a captivity much worse than the captivity in this house. There are walls much thicker and doors much heavier than those closed upon you. All of us, the

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people without and you within, are prisoners of our own obstinacy, of our many greed’s, of our various anxieties, of our mistrust and in the last analysis of our unbelief. We are all sufferers. Most of all we suffer from ourselves. We each make life difficult for ourselves and in so doing for our fellowmen. We suffer from life’s lack of meaning. We suffer in the shadow of death and of eternal judgment toward which we are moving. We spend our life in the midst of a whole world of sin and captivity and suffering. But now listen. Into the depth of our predicament the word is spoken from on high: By grace you have been saved! (DC, p. 37)

Barth’s Gifts to Preachers Contemporary preachers often presume to know more about our cultural context or the subjectivity of our listeners than we know of God. Barth thought the opposite: Because of Jesus Christ, we know more of God than we will ever know of the arcane subjectivities of listeners. By so robustly focusing upon the activity and presence of a living God, Barth can restore in us a sense of nerve, a revived conviction that what a congregation needs most is clear, direct, enthusiastic presentation of and address by the true and living God who comes to us through preaching. Barth charges that we preachers have been far too deferential to the modern world, too intimidated by current culture and its idols, and too subservient to the whims and passing preoccupations of our congregations. As Barth said in a number of contexts, at our Holy Spirit induced best, “Preachers dare.” Preachers can speak with confidence but not with smugness. In Dogmatics in Outline, Barth asserted that the gap between God’s intentions for humanity and the actual state of the church fosters a “continuous restlessness” for the church. Even though Christians may be like a “bird in a cage which is always hitting against the bars,” preaching continually stirs in us a sense that, “Something bigger is at stake than our bit of preaching and liturgy!” Knowing that the kingdom is not here yet but is coming, a preacher can dare “to take your place and be in your place as a true minister verbi divini” (DO, pp. 147–148). Barth reassures preachers that despite our cowardly preaching and our people’s poor listening, the Word of God shall be heard: People with their various (but by nature unanimously hostile) attitudes towards the Word of God come and go. Their political and spiritual systems (all of which to some extent have an anti‐Christian character) stand and fall. The Church itself (in which somewhere the crucifixion of Christ is always being repeated) is to‐day faithful and to‐morrow unfaithful, to‐day strong and to‐morrow weak. But although Scripture may be rejected by its enemies and disowned and betrayed by its friends, it does not cease…to present the message that God so loved the world that He gave his only‐begotten Son. If its voice is drowned to‐day, it becomes audible again to‐morrow. If it is misunderstood and distorted here, it again bears witness to its true meaning there. If it seems to lose its position, hearers and form in this locality or period, it acquires them afresh elsewhere…. The maintaining of the Word of God

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against the attacks to which it is exposed cannot be our concern… we do not need to worry about it…. For a power which can annul these testimonies is quite unthinkable. (CD I/2, pp. 680–681)

We preachers need not lose heart because we know that the Word of God makes a way for itself and “completes its work in the world in spite of the world” (WTW, p. 66). Barth’s great confidence in the self‐revelation of God tends to put Barth at odds with the rhetorical interests that characterize some of contemporary homiletics. Although Barth’s criticism of the reduction of preaching to rhetorical strategies is well taken, his criticism of rhetoric overlooks the poetic, rhetorical, literary forms within Scripture itself as well as Barth’s own skillful use of distinctive rhetorical devices in his own writing and preaching. The church exists to herald of the gospel. Although “Preaching must be done in the sphere of the church, i.e., in concrete connection with the existence and mission of the church” (Barth 1991, p. 56) – preaching is prior to and superior even to the church. Preaching is the peculiar speech of the church but it is not authorized or dependent upon the church and its preachers and may often be experienced as against the church, in order to be for the church. The words of the sermon are not congregationally derived; the Word comes from God to the church. Preachers must be willing to risk conflict, resistance, and rejection by the church in order to be faithful to the church’s peculiar vocation: joyful subservience to the Word. Preachers serve the Word rather than to be servile to the desires of the congregation. In a day when pastoral care for and caring about the needs of the congregation has virtually overwhelmed much of Christian ministry, Barth reminds us that the best and most loving service that we clergy can render to our people is utter subservience to the Word rather than acquiescence to the ill‐formed desires of our people. Karl Barth preached to criminals imprisoned in the Basel jail that the first Christian community was composed of Jesus and criminals on Golgotha: ‘They crucified him with the criminals.’ Which is more amazing, to find Jesus in such bad company, or to find the criminals in such good company? … Like Jesus, these two criminals had been arrested, … locked up and sentenced…. And now they hang on their crosses with him and find themselves in solidarity and fellowship with him. They are linked in a common bondage never again to be broken … a point of no return for them as for him. There remained only the shameful, pain stricken present and the future of their approaching death…. They crucified him with the criminals…. To live by this promise is to be a Christian community. The two criminals were the first certain Christian community. (DC, p. 38)

Barth’s greatest gift to preaching is his constant reiteration that preaching – in both substance and means – is a theological activity. God is more interesting than preachers or congregations. God is the chief agent of preaching, not the preacher’s personality or skillful communicative techniques. When preaching degenerates into moralistic advice, principles for better living, political commentary (whether of the right or of the left), pastoral care for the hurting, conventional wisdom, teaching of noble principles,

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apologetics, recruitment for political activism, or other practical (but essentially superficial) suggestions for humanity, Barth recalls us to again take up the joyful task of preaching as witness to the very voice of God. The church must not allow itself to become dull, nor its services dark and gloomy. It must be claimed by, and proclaim, the lordship of God in the kingdom of his dear Son rather than the lordship of the devil or capitalism or communism or human folly and wickedness in general… Who otherwise will believe it when it says that the holy day is made of joy for men and therefore the day of God? (CD III/4, p. 69)

In response to a letter congratulating him on his 75th birthday, Barth said that his greatest joy in the letters he received was “especially when pastors told me I gave them courage and joy in their preaching” (GA 6, pp. 1–2). References Barth, K. (1991). Homiletics (trans. G.W. Bromiley and D.E. Daniels). Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. Busch, E. (1976). Karl Barth: His Life from Letter and Autobiographical Texts (trans. J. Bowden). Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Denecke, A. (1989). Gottes Wort als Menschensworts: Karl Barths Predigtpraxis‐ Quelle seiner Theologie. Hannover: Lutherisches Verlagshaus.

Hancock, A.D. (2013). Karl Barth’s Emergency Homiletic, 1932–1933: A Summons to Prophetic Witness at the Dawn of the Third Reich. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmanns. McCormack, B.L. (1997). Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909–1936. New York: Oxford University Press. Willimon, W. (2015). How Odd of God: Chosen for the Curious Vocation of Preaching. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press.

Further Reading Barth, K. (1960). Community, State, and the Church, with an Introduction by Will Herbert (trans. G.R. Howe). Garden City, NJ: Anchor. Barth, K. (1986). Witness to the Word: A Commentary on John I (trans. G.W. Bromiley) (ed. W. Fürst). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

Willimon, W. (2006). Conversations with Barth on Preaching. Nashville: Abingdon Press. Willimon, W. (2009). The Early Preaching of Karl Barth: Fourteen Sermons with Commentary. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press.

CHAPTER 23

Barth on Baptism W. Travis McMaken

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arl Barth’s doctrine of baptism has been one of the most fraught aspects of his legacy. Barth himself saw it as an emblem and capstone of what he called “the theological and ecclesiastical isolation which has been my lot for almost fifty years” (CD IV/4, p. xii; KD IV/4, p. xii). Even among Barth specialists it is possible to trace a clear divide between those who embrace Barth’s mature doctrine of baptism in CD IV/4 as the fitting culmination of his work and those who prefer to hold it at arm’s length, treating it as a final misstep in Barth’s theological program. Some of those specialists dissatisfied with Barth on this subject have criticized his interpretation of relevant biblical texts, claiming that Barth’s position is out on an exegetical limb (esp. Dinkler 1971). Such claims have been advanced, however, apart from a thorough consideration of the work done by Barth’s son, Markus, on baptism in the New Testament (see M. Barth 1951). Karl acknowledged that Markus’s work influenced his thinking (CD IV/4, p. x; KD IV/4, pp. x–xi; see also Busch 1976, p. 369), and the secondary sources have neglected thus far to plumb their relationship on this issue. Even without this important consideration, however, it is possible to reach quite different conclusions about the ­adequacy, or at least the plausibility, of Barth’s exegesis (Slater 2013). More complete treatments of the reception of  Barth’s mature doctrine of baptism are available elsewhere (see McMaken 2013, pp. 38–55; McMaken 2015, pp. 90–97).

Overview My present concern is to provide an overview of Barth’s mature doctrine of baptism in CD IV/4 (for the development of Barth’s doctrine of baptism over the course of his career, see Migliore 1999). Barth treats baptism in two sections, dealing first with Spirit

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth and Dogmatics, Volume I, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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and then with water baptism, and the present chapter follows this ordering. Under the heading of Spirit baptism, I give sustained attention to baptism’s place at the beginning of the Christian life and to Spirit baptism as the divine change that actualizes the significance of Jesus’s saving history in the believer’s life. My discussion of water baptism explicates Barth’s understanding of water baptism’s basis, goal, and meaning. I also discuss Barth’s account of infant baptism, which he locates within his discussion of water baptism’s meaning. A third section provides a closer look at Barth’s understanding of the relationship between divine and human action as seen through the lens of baptism. Finally, I conclude with three further points of reflection on Barth and infant baptism.

Spirit Baptism Barth’s mature doctrine of baptism in CD IV/4 is sometimes referred to as his “baptism fragment,” in part because “fragment” language features in the titles of both the German and English language publications of this material. But as Eberhard Jüngel rightly notes, Barth’s treatment of baptism “is not in itself fragmentary in any way” (Jüngel 1982, p. 253). Not only does Barth’s treatment of baptism in CD IV/4 comprise a well‐integrated whole, it is also carefully situated within a larger plan for the unfinished volume. Some of this material was published posthumously (see CL). Baptism thus falls within a more comprehensive conceptualization of the Ethics of Reconciliation, which parallels the Ethics of Creation provided in CD III/4.

Baptism and the Christian Life When first lecturing through the material that would become CD IV/4 and CL during the 1959–1960 winter semester and the 1960 summer semester, Barth “planned to bring the whole ethics of reconciliation under the rubric of faithfulness which determines the Christian life” (CL, p. x). However, by the end of 1960 he had reconceived the material as grounded in the concept of invocation. Remnants of this shift are still visible in the published version of Barth’s baptism material. For instance, Barth discusses baptism’s character as prayer only at the very end of the work in connection with the concept of hope (CD IV/4, esp. pp. 209–213; KD IV/4, pp. 230–234), and the idea of faithfulness plays a key role in his hypothesis concerning the origin of Christian baptism: that the faith of the earliest Christians motivated them to undergo water baptism as an act of obedience that emulated Jesus’s own act “of acknowledgement and commitment” (CD IV/4, p. 68; KD IV/4, p. 75). More telling still, “faithfulness” retains a central place in the Leitsatz for §75. So although Barth ultimately redefines baptism as an act of hopeful prayer, it remains also and fundamentally an act of faithfulness. And it is ­precisely as such an act of faithfulness that baptism stands at the beginning or as “The Foundation of the Christian Life,” Barth’s title for §75. This faithfulness that stands at the beginning of the Christian life has a twofold form, which will be familiar to students of Barth from his doctrine of election. There he speaks

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of a “steadfastness on both sides” (CD II/2, p. 125; KD, II/2, p. 134) between God and humanity in Jesus Christ, who is both the electing God and the elected human being (Barth uses the Treue word family in both contexts). Baptism, then, comprises both God’s faithfulness – or, as Barth puts it, “the work of this faithful God” – as well as “the first step” in an individual’s “life of faithfulness to God” (§75 Leitsatz; CD IV/4, p. 2; KD IV/4, p. 1). This twofold focus is a move straight out of the playbook of John Calvin’s treatment of both baptism in particular and the sacraments in general, where baptism both reinforces the individual’s faith in God (i.e. baptism is God’s act of faithfulness) and publicly demonstrates the individual’s faith in God before the community (Calvin 1960, 4.14.1 and 4.15.1). But Barth takes it a step further than Calvin insofar as he applies this notion of twofold faithfulness schematically to the distinction between Spirit and water baptism.

Divine Change The systematic theological issue addressed by Barth’s doctrine of Spirit baptism is this: how is it that something Jesus Christ did long ago also encounters one in such a way as to comprise the fundamental determining characteristic of one’s existence here and now? For Barth, one’s salvation occurs objectively (de jure) in Jesus Christ’s own history, but at some point it becomes actual (de facto) in one’s life (see CD IV/2, p. 511; KD IV/2, pp. 578–579). Spirit baptism is one way of talking about that “at some point.” Barth describes Spirit baptism as the “divine change [Wendung]” that awakens and elicits in the individual the human faithfulness that corresponds to God’s faithfulness. Speaking of Spirit baptism is, for Barth, another way of describing what he calls the event of faith in CD IV/1, conversion in CD IV/2, and vocation in CD IV/3. This event is a convergence of histories, where Jesus Christ’s history does not erase the individual’s own history but displaces that history as the foundation of the individual’s future history. That is, in Spirit baptism Jesus’s history is actualized as the foundation of the individual’s Christian life. Or to put matters in biblical terms: “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal 2:19–20, NRSV). As Barth puts it, drawing on a different Pauline passage: “In the history of Jesus Christ, then, is the origin and beginning of the Christian life, the divine change in which the impossible thing that there is movement … from the depth and power of the faithfulness of God … to the corresponding faithfulness of man (Rom. 1:17), is not only possible but actual” (CD IV/4, p. 17; KD IV/4, p. 18). Describing this convergence of histories as “Baptism with the Holy Spirit” (§75.1 title) safeguards the primacy of God’s agency in this divine change, and Barth insists that it is not within human power to reverse this primacy. Only God can produce the divine change in which these histories converge. This does not mean, however, that God’s agential priority constitutes an exclusive christomonism. Barth rejects both a christomonism that rules out the presence and reality of human agency, and an anthropomonism that rules out the presence and reality of divine agency. He opposes to these misplaced emphases a “true Christocentricity” (CD IV/4, p. 19; KD IV/4, p. 21). For

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Barth, divine action grounds and calls forth human action, but it does not displace or destroy that action. Barth articulates his position by describing the event of Spirit baptism from two different perspectives: “Viewed from above … the history of Jesus Christ becomes once in time the origin and commencement of the reorientation and refashioning of the life of a specific man liberated therein. Seen from below … a specific man is liberated for the reorientation and refashioning of his life in the history of Jesus Christ as his origin and commencement” (CD IV/4, p. 23; KD IV/4, p. 25). This exposition runs against the longstanding criticism that Barth’s emphasis on God’s agential priority compromises the integrity of human beings, a criticism that goes back at least as far as Barth’s well‐known exchange with Emil Brunner in 1934. David Congdon has recently renewed this line of criticism from within the boundaries of dialectical theology. Congdon argues that “Barth succeeded in overcoming metaphysics with respect to God by letting the history of Jesus determine the meaning of all God‐ talk,” but “he did not succeed in overcoming metaphysics with respect to humankind, since he left an abstract concept of humanity stand in the place of the actual historicity of human persons.” As a corrective, Congdon suggests that “Barth’s Christocentric [doctrine of] election” must be replaced by “a Christo(pneumato)centric election” in which “the Holy Spirit is the subject of election, not alongside Christ but as the agent by which the elected Christ interrupts the human person” (Congdon 2016, p. 147; see Kerr 2009, pp. 63–92; McDonald 2007; McDonald 2010, pp. 59–84; McMaken 2013, pp. 165–173). Certain aspects of Barth’s complicated and intricate conceptual world do, in fact, lend themselves to Congdon’s criticisms. For instance, Barth’s claims that “in Jesus Christ it is not merely one man, but the humanum of all men, which is posited and exalted as such to unity with God” (CD IV/2, p. 49; KD IV/2, p. 52). However, Barth’s treatment of Spirit baptism mitigates against this criticism and shows that Barth’s theology has resources to at least begin addressing the issue that Congdon identifies. In Spirit baptism, Jesus’s history displaces the individual’s history as the foundation for the Christian life, but this does not mean that the individual’s history is replaced altogether. And this displacement is possible precisely because the actualization of Jesus’s history in the individual’s history is included within Jesus’s history. Jesus’s being as electing God and electing human being  –  that is to say, his saving history  –  includes the event of Spirit baptism. This “work of the Holy Spirit … is not a different work, a second work alongside, behind and after the work of the reconciling covenant action of the one God accomplished in the history of Jesus Christ and manifested in his resurrection. It is the one divine work in its movement, its concrete reference, to specific men, wherein for the first time it reaches its goal” (CD IV/4, p. 29; KD IV/4, p. 32). When one takes Spirit baptism into account, it is clear that Barth’s doctrine of election is well on the way to being christo(pneumato)centric.

Water Baptism Water baptism is also the foundation of the Christian life, although in a different key. Spirit baptism describes the faithfulness of God as that faithfulness reaches the

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individual, whereas water baptism decisively and paradigmatically marks the response of human faithfulness elicited by the fulfillment and actualization of God’s faithfulness. Barth organizes his discussion of this faithful human response by reflecting on water baptism’s basis, goal, and meaning. Before he does so, however, he articulates seven points that he believes “can be taken from the New Testament with relative exegetical certainty” (CD IV/4, p. 44; KD IV/4, p. 49) but that, in reality, constitute important ­preliminary decisions (Böttcher 1983, p. 21). On the whole, these points serve to underscore Barth’s ethical perspective on water baptism as a response of human faithfulness to God’s faithfulness in the event of Spirit baptism.

Basis Water baptism’s basis resides in Jesus’s baptism by John. Barth departs here from the method of traditional Protestant sacramentology, which bases the sacraments on explicit dominical command. Such a command appears to be available in Matthew 28:19. Barth spurns that passage, however, because it comprises a postresurrection appearance. Such appearances can confirm or recapitulate Jesus’s saving history, but they cannot add to that history. Consequently, water baptism requires a basis in Jesus’s life prior to his death. Barth finds this basis in Jesus’s own baptism, which he interprets as the paradigmatic instance of the baptismal relation between God and humanity: “Here baptism with the Holy Ghost, which may be regarded as the epitome of the divine change effected on a man, meets baptism with water, which represents here the first concrete step of the human decision which follows and corresponds to the divine change” (CD IV/4, p. 53; KD IV/4, p. 58). For Barth, Jesus’s baptism is the beginning of his “way,” the moment at which he submitted to the Father’s lordship in solidarity with sinful humanity and committed himself to the work of reconciliation accomplished in his saving history. Christians are those called to bear witness to Jesus and his “way,” and so – Barth reasons in the hypothesis mentioned previously – as the earliest members of the nascent church “entered on this way, the beginning of His way could not be of mere historical interest for them. It necessarily became exemplary and binding in respect of the form of the beginning of their new life” (CD IV/4, p. 68; KD IV/4, p. 74). Just as Jesus’s saving history begins with water baptism as the act of faithful human response to God, so the Christian’s life begins with an analogous action in imitation of, solidarity with, and obedience to Christ.

Goal What then is water baptism’s goal? Barth’s basic consideration here is to guard against finding water baptism’s goal in water baptism itself. Just as Jesus’s baptism looked beyond the human actors to the divine voice and descending dove, so water baptism’s goal is Spirit baptism. As such, water baptism is oriented toward its goal in a twofold way. First, it looks back to the Spirit baptism of the baptizand who now seeks to ratify that divine change through faithful and obedient response. Second, it also looks forward

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to the ever new actualization of that divine change in the Christian life. As Barth says elsewhere, Christians are those who “are awakened a first time and then again, … those who, it is to be hoped, continually waken up” (CD IV/2, p. 555; KD IV/2, pp. 627–628). Water baptism looks both behind to the first awakening and ahead to continual reawakening. In doing so, it is a confession of faith made not only by the baptizand but also by the Christian community that serves the baptizand in this act. And as a “confession of the obedience of their faith,” water baptism also stands as a renunciation “of any attempt to represent  —  or misrepresent  —  [water baptism] as divine speech or action,” as though it “accomplishes something which is more and better than a human answer … in the face of God’s grace and revelation” (CD IV/4, p. 73; KD IV/4, pp. 80–81). Barth takes the opportunity to reflect on what Pentecost means for the relation of Christian baptism to the baptism administered to Jesus by John. This examination ­contributes to Barth’s argument by reinforcing his distinction between the divine change in Spirit baptism and the faithful human response in water baptism (see CD IV/4, p. 88; KD IV/4, pp. 96–97).

Meaning Barth now turns to the meaning of water baptism, which will occupy him for the remainder of his exposition and accounts for slightly more than half of the total material. At one level, water baptism’s meaning is very simple: it is “an act of free obedience to the command of Jesus Christ” that is “given and received in hope in Him” (CD IV/4, p. 101; KD IV/4, pp. 110–111). But exactly this simplicity renders Barth’s discussion conceptually complex and systematically fraught. Precisely because water baptism is such an act of obedience and hope, “the question of [water] baptism’s meaning is the question of human action’s meaning” (Schlüter 1973, p. 86). What Barth has to say with reference to the meaning of this particular, concrete human action stands as a recapitulation and clarification of all that he has previously said about the meaning of human action as such. This is one of the reasons why Jüngel rightly claims that Barth’s mature doctrine of baptism is “not an appendix to the Church Dogmatics, but rather a test‐case” (Jüngel 1982, pp. 286–287). With his ethical perspective on water baptism remaining emphatically in the foreground, Barth’s primary concern is to avoid any conception of water baptism’s meaning that undermines its human character. Reaching for christological terms in making his point, Barth wants to avoid a baptismal docetism on the human side in much the same way that he elsewhere wants to avoid “ecclesiastical Docetism” (CD IV/1, p. 653; KD IV/1, p. 729). It is not that water baptism only appears to be human action; it really is human action! Docetism occurs whenever the proper distinction between Spirit and water baptism is lost, and Barth explains that this can happen in two ways. First, it occurs when the divine action of Spirit baptism assumes a preeminence that displaces water baptism as human action, rendering it insignificant and disinteresting. Second, it occurs when water baptism is absorbed into Spirit baptism such that the human action of water baptism has significance only as the carrier or medium of divine action. In

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each case, water baptism’s meaning is disconnected from its basis and goal so that “at the commencement of the Christian life, there is … no free human answer to the act and call of the free God” (CD IV/4, p. 102; KD IV/4, p. 112). A fine‐print section surveys Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed doctrines of baptism to demonstrate the theological consensus against which Barth sets himself, namely, that baptism’s meaning resides in divine rather than human action. Barth’s judgment is dramatic: “this consensus needs to be demythologised. We oppose it” (CD IV/4, p. 105; KD IV/4, pp. 115–116). Barth undertakes an extended exegetical survey in support of finding the meaning of water baptism in its ethical rather than sacramental character, that is, as a human action rather than as a divine action. He then devotes a few pages of fine print to discussing how his account of water baptism relates to Ulrich Zwingli’s. Barth criticizes Zwingli for basing his position so much on the abstract principle that material reality is fundamentally incompatible with spiritual reality (finitum non est capax infiniti). Nonetheless, Barth admits that Zwingli was fundamentally right both negatively (i.e. that water baptism is not sacramental) and positively (i.e. that water baptism is meaningful as a human action). Thus he accepts the label of “Neo‐Zwinglian,” albeit with caveats (CD IV/4, p. 130; KD IV/4, p. 142; see Demura 1989). Having now established to his satisfaction that water baptism’s meaning resides in human rather than divine action, Barth must further specify the character or material content of that human action. If we recall that water baptism constitutes the faithful human response to the divine change faithfully accomplished by God in Spirit baptism, then Barth’s account of water baptism’s character as a human action will not surprise us: “the meaning of baptism is one’s conversion, … which takes place in knowledge of the work and word of God” (KD IV/4, p. 151; CD IV/4, p. 138, rev.). He further specifies this conversion as a matter of obedience and as both renunciation and pledge. But his introduction of “knowledge” here is an important development. There is a variation on sacramental baptism in the theological tradition that rejects it as a mediating cause of salvation but nonetheless argues that it effectively mediates knowledge of salvation. It was this sort of “cognitive sacramentalism” (CD IV/4, p. 130; KD IV/4, p. 142) that Barth associated with Calvin, perhaps unfairly, and advocated earlier in his career (see BAP, pp. 27–31). Barth now rejects his earlier position, which brings a new level of systematic consistency to his work in keeping with his longstanding affirmation that revelation (noetic) and reconciliation (ontic) are two sides of the same coin: water baptism “is neither a causative nor a cognitive medium salutis. It is a genuine human answer to the divine work and word” (CD IV/4, p. 156; KD IV/4, p. 171; see CD I/1, p. 119 and IV/3, pp. 8–9; KD I/1, p. 122 and IV/3, p. 7).

Infant Baptism Previously we noted that Barth ends his exposition of water baptism’s meaning by discussing its character as an act of hopeful prayer. Before Barth reaches that material, however, he pauses to consider the practice of infant baptism. His judgment against infant baptism is a foregone conclusion. If water baptism’s meaning resides in its

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character as an act of free human faithfulness, it becomes systematically impossible to countenance a form of baptism in which the baptizand is unable to undertake such an act. With an infant baptizand, “there can be no question of any renunciation and pledge as the act of his own free decision” (CD IV/4, p. 165; KD IV/4, p. 182). For Barth, there are four criteria that a doctrine of baptism must meet if it is to be legitimate. First, it must fit with the principles of the broader doctrine of baptism in which it is located. Second, it must be supported calmly and without rancor. This criterion is somewhat ironic given Barth’s exclamation at the close of his discussion: “Enough of this grievous thing!” (KD IV/4, p. 213; CD IV/4, p. 194, rev.). The third criterion recapitulates the demand of the first criterion for basic consistency within one’s doctrine of baptism. Fourth, Barth requires that a doctrine of baptism prove what must be proven, namely, “that the community is commanded and permitted to discharge [through infant baptism] its mission to the world” (CD IV/4, p. 175; KD IV/4, p. 193). Barth faults the Protestant Reformers, especially, for abandoning consistency in their doctrines of baptism and advocating the practice of infant baptism for polemic and apologetic reasons. Calvin comes in for more sustained criticism in this regard, although his doctrine of baptism has its own important consistencies (Raitt 1980). What exactly does Barth’s fourth criterion require? How might it be possible to prove what must be proven? Barth’s turn to exegetical material at this juncture demonstrates that his demand is that some biblical basis be found for infant baptism. Of course, this is exactly what Barth is not willing to admit. Those who point to New Testament passages that speak of households being baptized in order to provide warrant for infant baptism rely on “a very thin thread” (KD IV/4, p. 198; CD IV/4, p. 180, rev.). Neither does appeal to circumcision satisfy this criteria because “the Christian life cannot be inherited as blood, gifts, characteristics and inclinations…. [It] can begin only on the basis of their own liberation by God, their own decision” (CD IV/4, p. 184; KD IV/4, p. 202). Barth is emphatic that the issue is not whether children are to be welcomed into the Christian community, or whether children are important to God: they are. Rather, the issue for Barth is whether the church is authorized to facilitate water baptism for those baptizands who are incapable of free and faithful human response. Barth’s elaboration of his ethical approach to water baptism is perhaps brutally consistent at this point.

The Relation Between Divine and Human Action We noted previously that Barth’s doctrine of baptism serves as a “test‐case” or case study in Barth’s understanding of the relationship between divine and human action. This comes to the fore when considering how Barth relates Spirit and water baptism. Thomas Torrance is highly critical of this aspect of Barth’s doctrine of baptism, accusing him of “a sacramental dualism between water‐baptism and Spirit‐baptism” that produces “an operational disjunction between God and the world” (Torrance 1996; see McMaken 2016). Barth intends no such thing, of course. He locates water and Spirit baptisms in the sort of ordered or asymmetrical relationship of unity‐in‐distinction that George Hunsinger refers to as the “Chalcedonian Pattern” (Hunsinger 1991, pp. 185–188).

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For Barth, both God’s act and the baptizand’s human act – Spirit baptism and water baptism – must be properly identified and demarcated as, respectively, the objective and subjective sides of a single event. These are two distinct moments (Momente; unhelpfully translated as “elements” in this passage of CD), and two distinct agencies. Nonetheless, we “must see them together as well as distinguish between them” because together they comprise “the totality of the event [Ereignis],” “the one event of the foundation of the Christian life” (KD IV/4, p. 45; CD IV/4, p. 41, rev.). It is important to note that Barth speaks here not with the ontological language of “nature” and “essence,” but with the historical language of moments, acts, and events. The unity that obtains between these two moments within this event as a whole, then, is not a static unity but a dynamic one in keeping with the actualistic character of Barth’s thought. It is a teleological unity, which shares a great deal with Barth’s account of the unity of cross and resurrection (see CD IV/1, p. 342; KD IV/1, p. 378). Precisely how to characterize and evaluate this teleological unity of moments and agents constitutive of a single event resides at the heart of scholarship on Barth’s doctrine of baptism. Jüngel introduced an influential interpretation, reinforced in English language scholarship by John Webster, that Barth’s account of the relationship between divine and human action in CD IV/4 constitutes a departure from earlier versions of his thought (Jüngel 1982, p. 277; see Webster 1995, p. 172). If we gloss matters according to Brian Gerrish’s categories, the claim is that Barth held to a version of “symbolic instrumentalism” early in CD but shifted at the end to a version of “symbolic parallelism” (Gerrish 2004, p. 128). We need not explore the detailed textual argument concerning why this interpretation is finally unsatisfactory (McMaken 2013, pp. 250–257; McMaken 2015, pp. 93–97 and 107–111). Neither symbolic instrumentalism nor symbolic parallelism are conceptually adequate for describing Barth’s mature account of the relation ­between divine and human action. Both ultimately bring divine and human action together within a larger framework, whether as parts of a whole (instrumentalism) or operating at the same level of explanation (parallelism). This consequently compromises the freedom proper to both divine and human agency. The language of “paradoxical identity” describes the necessary qualitative distinction between divine and human action while simultaneously affirming their radical coincidence in a manner more suited to the actualistic character of Barth’s thought (esp. McMaken 2013, pp. 240–250; McMaken 2015, pp. 98–107). However, the primary difficulty that arises here pertains to determining exactly what Barth means by his persistent characterization of water baptism as human action. Barth says that the meaning of water baptism resides in human action; he does not say that divine action is somehow entirely excluded from water baptism. Indeed, Barth admits that divine action is present in water baptism even while doggedly insisting that water baptism’s meaning resides in human action. “How could [water] baptism … be a true answer [to God’s action] if the action of God were not present and did not precede and follow it in his work and word” (CD IV/4, p. 106; KD IV/4, p. 116)? Paul Nimmo rightly notes that this formulation is deeply consistent with the doctrine of concursus Dei that Barth advanced in CD §49.2 (see esp. CD III/3, p. 105; KD III/3, p. 118). Nimmo explains: “the human causality in water baptism and the divine causality in water

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baptism do not work to the exclusion of each other, for all creaturely activity finds its locus within the context of the divine activity” (Nimmo 2007, p. 127). The same pattern holds, mutatis mutandis, with reference to Spirit baptism.

Conclusion: Infant Baptism Revisited Given that Barth’s treatment of infant baptism is perhaps the most contentious aspect of his doctrine of baptism, it may be fitting to conclude with a few further comments on that subject. In doing so, I want to make a contextual point, a critical point, and a constructive point. First, it is important to understand Barth’s rejection of infant baptism as part of his rejection of Christendom, where national and Christian identities are coextensive. He makes this concern explicit by faulting the Reformers for continuing the practice of infant baptism at least in part as a mechanism for maintaining “the continuity and existence of the Church” under Christendom (CD IV/4, p. 168; KD IV/4, p. 185). Barth lived through two world wars, in which ostensibly Christian nations did their best to kill each other in the most modern and efficient ways possible. He also saw the Nazi regime at close quarters, during which a population overwhelmingly baptized as infants in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit participated in or were complicit with the extermination of millions of Jews and others. The dangers of Christendom were at the forefront of Barth’s mind, and he was theologically unconvinced by its sacramental lynchpin. Second, Barth’s insistence on an explicit biblical warrant for the practice of infant baptism is inconsistent with his own account of baptism’s basis, which depends on an exegetical‐historical hypothesis. It also runs counter to his account of discipleship. Barth argues that Christian discipleship will follow certain trend lines, but he rejects the idea that it is a matter of slavish repetition. He also explicitly warns against attempting to reproduce the patterns or images of discipleship found in the New Testament and earliest Christian communities: “It is not for us simply to reproduce those pictures” (CD IV/2, p. 552; KD IV/2, p. 625). The demand for explicit biblical warrant also raises questions of consistency concerning Barth’s actualistic doctrine of Scripture, with its well‐ known distinction between the Word of God and the text of Scripture. Taking all this into account, third and finally, it is possible to reconstruct Barth’s approach to baptism on firmer ground in a way that preserves the practice of infant baptism (see McMaken 2013, pp. 209–274). Rather than finding baptism’s basis in an exegetical‐historical hypothesis about the earliest Christian communities, we can look with far more historical responsibility to a practice of baptism carried on by Jesus and his disciples (see Collins 1995). This practice provides a firm background for accepting Matthew 28:18–20 as the organizing center for New Testament reflections on baptism. Given this foundation, baptism is not the free and faithful response of the baptizand to God’s free and faithful act, as Barth argues, but the free and faithful response of the Christian community. Baptism is a mode of gospel proclamation that the church deploys in service to its missionary vocation (see McMaken 2009). Reconfiguring Barth’s doctrine of baptism in this way, the practice of infant baptism becomes a form of gospel

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proclamation that can uniquely emphasize the prevenient and gracious character of God’s covenant partnership with humanity. As Barth was prepared to admit, “there is something in this” (CD IV/4, p. 189; KD IV/4, p. 208).

References Barth, M. (1951). Die Taufe — ein Sakrament? Ein exegetischer Beitrag zum Gespräch über die kirchliche Taufe. Zollikon‐Zürich: Evangelischer Verlag. Böttcher, R. (1983). Erwählung und Verplichtung: eine Untersuchung zu Karl Barths Tauflehre im Kontext der kirchlichen Dogmatik. Inaugural Dissertation. Erlangen‐Nurnberg: Evangelisch‐ Theologischen Fakultät der Friedrich‐Alexander‐Universität. Busch, E. (1976). Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts (trans. J. Bowden). Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Calvin, J. (1960). Institutes of the Christian Religion, Library of Christian Classics. (trans. F.L. Battles), vol. 2 (ed. J.T. McNeill). Philadelphia: Westminster Press. Collins, A.Y. (1995). The origin of Christian baptism. In: Living Water, Sealing Spirit: Readings on Christian Initiation (ed. M.E. Johnson), 35–57. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press. Congdon, D. (2016). The God Who Saves: A Dogmatic Sketch. Eugene, OR: Cascade. Demura, A. (1989). Zwingli in the writings of Karl Barth — with special emphasis on the doctrine of the sacraments. In: Probing the Reformed Tradition: Historical Studies in Honor of Edward A. Dowey, Jr. (eds. E.A. McKee and B.G. Armstrong), 197–219. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. Dinkler, E. (1971). Die Taufaussagen des neuen Testaments: neu untersucht im Hinblick auf Karl Barths Tauflehre. In: Zu Karl Barths Lehre von der Taufe (ed. F. Viering), 60–153. Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn. Gerrish, B.A. (2004). Sign and reality: the Lord’s supper in the reformed confessions. In: The Old Protestantism and the New:

Essays on the Reformation Heritage, 118–130. London: T&T Clark International. Hunsinger, G. (1991). How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology. New York: Oxford University Press. Jüngel, E. (1982). Karl Barths Lehre von der Taufe: ein Hinweis auf ihre Probleme. In: Barth‐Studien, 246–290. Zürich: Benziger. Kerr, N.R. (2009). Christ, History and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission, Theopolitical Visions 4. Eugene, OR: Cascade. McDonald, S. (2007). Barth’s ‘other’ doctrine of election in the Church Dogmatics. International Journal of Systematic Theology 9 (2): 134–147. McDonald, S. (2010). Re‐Imaging Election: Divine Election as Representing God to Others and Others to God. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. McMaken, W.T. (2009). Authority, mission, and institution: a systematic consideration of Matthew 28.18–20 in Karl Barth’s doctrine of baptism. Ecclesiology 5: 345–361. McMaken, W.T. (2013). The Sign of the Gospel: Toward an Evangelical Doctrine of Infant Baptism after Karl Barth. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. McMaken, W.T. (2015). Definitive, defective or deft? reassessing Barth’s doctrine of baptism in Church Dogmatics IV/4. International Journal of Systematic Theology 17 (1): 89–114. McMaken, W.T. (2016). Actualism, dualism, and onto‐relations: interrogating Torrance’s criticism of Barth’s doctrine of baptism. Participatio 6: 1–31. Migliore, D.L. (1999). Reforming the theology and practice of baptism: the challenge of

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Karl Barth. In: Toward the Future of Reformed Theology: Tasks, Topics, Traditions (eds. D. Willis and M. Welker), 494–511. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Nimmo, P.T. (2007). Being in Action: The Theological Shape of Barth’s Ethical Vision. London: T&T Clark. Raitt, J. (1980). Three inter‐related principles in Calvin’s unique doctrine of infant baptism. Sixteenth Century Journal 11 (1): 51–61. Schlüter, R. (1973). Karl Barths Tauflehre: ein interkonfessionelles Gespräch. Paderborn: Verlag Bonifacius‐Druckerei.

Slater, J. P. (2013). ‘Karl Barth’s doctrine of baptism: An assessment of its plausibility as exegesis’. Doctoral Dissertation. University of St. Michael’s College. Torrance, T.F. (1996). The one baptism common to Christ and his church. In: Theology in Reconciliation: Essays Towards Evangelical and Catholic Unity in East and West, 82–105. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock. Webster, J. (1995). Barth’s Ethics of Reconciliation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 24

Barth on the Lord’s Supper Martha Moore‐Keish

Introduction As has been pointed out, when one considers Barth’s theology of the Lord’s Supper, there are at least two important factors to keep in mind: it changed significantly over his lifetime, and the Church Dogmatics was unfinished at his death (Nimmo 2011, p. 108). The latter fact is especially significant, since Barth intended to end his massive dogmatic theology with a treatment of the Lord’s Supper as the “conclusion and crown” of the Christian life, yet that final volume exists only in fragmentary form. What more might we have glimpsed of Barth’s eucharistic theology if he had been able to complete that volume? Despite the shifts and the unfinished nature of Barth’s writings on the Lord’s Supper, we can observe consistent convictions over time that guide his thinking on these matters. First, and from early on, Barth emphasizes God’s freedom. God lives, moves, and has being in triune freedom, not determined by anything in the created order, including human activity. This means that God acts first and freely in relation to any human action, and all human action is response. Barth frequently insists therefore that “sacraments” (including the Lord’s Supper) do not restrict divine freedom in any way. This emphasis on divine freedom leads Barth to maintain a clear distinction between the acts of God and human action, placing “sacraments” (along with all human religion) squarely on the side of human action. For instance, in the second edition of his commentary on Romans, written in 1922, Barth argues that sacraments are not themselves fellowship with God, but “only significant of fellowship with God” (RII, p. 74). Sacraments in no way mediate God’s fellowship with humanity, but only point to it. In  the final volume of the Church Dogmatics, over four decades later, he describes baptism and the Lord’s Supper not as “instruments, vehicles, channels, or means of

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth and Dogmatics, Volume I, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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God’s reconciling grace,” but as “actions of human obedience for which Jesus Christ makes his people free and responsible” (CD IV/4, p. 46). In both cases, Barth insists that though the Lord’s Supper may point to God’s grace, God is not bound to this human action in any way. Alongside this commitment to God’s freedom is Barth’s emphasis on God’s love. In Jesus Christ, God’s Word incarnate, by the power of the Spirit, God graciously takes up the “lost cause” of humanity and accomplishes our reconciliation. Beginning in the 1930s, Barth affirms that this reconciling work (in a secondary and dependent form relative to its definitive and constitutive enactment on the cross) is exactly what happens in baptism and the Lord’s Supper. He declares in the Barmen Declaration: “The Christian church is the community of brethren in which Jesus Christ presently works in the word and the sacraments through the Holy Spirit” (Presbyterian Church [USA] 1934, thesis 3). Similarly, 20 years later, he affirms, “in the eating and drinking of the Lord’s Supper it is not a question of the nourishment of one here and another there in company with neighbors, but of the eating of one bread and the drinking from one cup, of the common nourishment of them all, because it is He, Jesus Christ, who brings them to it, who invites them, who is the Lord and Host, who is, indeed, their food and drink” (CD IV/2, p. 703). Christ is the subject in both affirmations, working, inviting, drawing people to himself. God in Christ acts freely, without constraint, but also lovingly, intimately, truly feeding people at the Supper with his own life. Both sides of this dialectical relationship weave their way through Barth’s reflections on the Lord’s Supper. Depending on the misunderstanding he is addressing, one or the other takes precedence. Is he arguing against liberal conflation of the Holy Spirit with human spirit, or against what he sees as Roman Catholic overemphasis on the church’s power to dispense God’s grace? Then he insists that the Lord’s Supper is simply a sign that points beyond itself, a free and responsible act of human obedience that witnesses to God’s free grace. Is he arguing against any perception of the church as merely human institution, rather than the body of Christ, the “earthly‐historical form of his own existence,” quickened by the Holy Spirit? Then he insists that in the Lord’s Supper Christ lovingly meets us as host and as food. This dialectic of divine freedom and love informs Barth’s writing on the Lord’s Supper from early on. What then changes? One obvious shift is his use of the use of the term “sacrament.” Barth willingly uses this term in his early writing to name both baptism and the Lord’s Supper, but beginning in CD IV/1, he insists that Christ alone is the only true sacrament, whereas baptism and the Lord’s Supper are human acts of obedience (he sometimes refers to them as “so‐called sacraments”). Even as he rejects the term “sacrament” and “sacramental union,” however, he grows in his emphasis on the union with Christ that is possible in the Supper. The Supper is a free and obedient human action but also the real living enactment of our union with Christ and with one another. For that reason, Barth, like John Calvin, argued that it ought to be celebrated every week, or in Calvin’s case at least once a week. In what follows I offer an overview of Barth’s discussions of the Lord’s Supper, particularly in the Church Dogmatics, with some attention to how his interpretation of the Supper relates to his evolving view of sacraments in general. I will conclude by situating my own reading of Barth in relation to other recent discussions of Barth’s eucharistic theology.

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Development of Barth’s View of the Lord’s Supper In the early 1920s, the dialectical tension in Barth’s view of the sacraments is already evident. On the one hand, in the second edition of his commentary on Romans (1922), he criticizes the church, and therefore the sacraments, as having no “positive content”; they are but signs whose “independent significance diminishes and finally dies” (RII, p. 74, cf. 130). As noted earlier, sacraments are not themselves fellowship with God, but “only significant of fellowship with God.” In this context, he clearly objects to any suggestion that human religious action can control or domesticate divine freedom. Shortly after writing these words, during the academic year 1922–1923, Barth was working through the theology of the sixteenth century reformers in his lectures in Gottingen. When he came to the disputes regarding the Lord’s Supper, he found Luther’s position much more satisfying than that of Zwingli, presumably because of Luther’s rejection of transubstantiation coupled with his affirmation of Christ’s real work “in, with, and under” the elements of the Lord’s Supper. As Barth reported much later to some students, “Study of the earlier writings of Luther, where one can see it come into being, had convinced me that Luther’s doctrine of the eucharist was incomparably better than that of Zwingli. His only mistake was that he persisted with it” (Busch 2005, pp. 142–143). Notable here is Barth’s positive view of Luther’s eucharistic theology, which suggests that even as he denies the “independent significance” of the eucharist in the Romans commentary, he sees Luther as a resource for thinking about the true ­significance of the eucharist, in which Christ is actively present. Barth could not, however, agree completely with Luther’s view of the Lord’s Supper, because he thought Luther misunderstood the nature of Christ’s presence in the elements. Barth goes on: “It was a real piece of good fortune that Calvin came along afterwards and got the two carriages moving again after they had become stuck in the undialectical relationship; unfortunately, however, he was too late for all of them” (Busch 2005, pp. 142–143). In July 1923 Barth writes a study of the “Origin and Purpose in Luther’s Doctrine of the Eucharist” in which “he sought to follow Luther for quite a long way, in the end only to confront him with Calvin’s qualification, ‘Yes, but’” (Busch 2005, p. 143). Barth’s dialectical approach to theology developing in these years finds the most resonance with the eucharistic theology of Calvin, who was similarly trying to balance God’s freedom from human signs with a respect for God’s loving use of signs in order to unite with humanity. Barth’s appreciation for Calvin’s theology of the Supper endures for decades, appearing again in CD I/2 and IV/2 (see e.g. I/2, p. 229). In the Barmen Declaration, as noted earlier, Barth affirms again his conviction that by the power of the Spirit, Christ truly works in both word and sacraments: “The Christian church is the community of brethren in which Jesus Christ presently works in the word and the sacraments through the Holy Spirit. With her faith as well as her obedience, with her message as well as her ordinances, she has to witness in the midst of the world of sin as the church of forgiven sinners that she is his alone, that she lives and wishes to live only by his comfort and his counsel in expectation of his appearance” (Barmen, thesis 3). The church and the sacraments depend on Christ alone for their

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authentic existence; they have no “independent significance,” as Barth pointed out in Romans. At the same time, Christ does work “in the word and the sacraments through the Holy Spirit.” Shortly before the Barmen Declaration, Barth began to publish the Church Dogmatics, in which we see his view of the Lord’s Supper change over time, but ever guided by this basic dialectical commitment to God’s freedom and love. In volume I, “The Doctrine of the Word of God,” Barth opens with a discussion of proclamation, which is the Word of God directly addressed to people with the expectation that they will hear and respond in faith. Proclamation includes both preaching and sacraments, which he describes, much like Luther, as visible signs testifying to the divine promise. But Barth goes on, “The former must exist for the sake of the latter, and therefore the sacrament for the sake of preaching, not vice versa. Hence not the sacrament alone nor preaching alone, nor yet, to speak meticulously, preaching and sacrament in double track, but preaching with the sacrament, with the visible act that confirms human speech as God’s act, is the ­constitutive element, the perspicuous center of the Church’s life” (CD I/1, p. 70). “The sacrament” (Barth seems to mean particularly the Lord’s Supper here) is important and ought to accompany the preached word, but is dependent upon it. The Lord’s Supper, however, is not incidental to Barth’s understanding of proclamation, because it illustrates how proclamation must continually become proclamation, and the church must ever and again become the church. As Barth says, “The presupposition which makes proclamation proclamation and therewith makes the Church the Church is the Word of God.” That is, the Word, which is incarnate in Jesus Christ and which is attested in Scripture, empowers the church’s proclamation so that it too becomes living Word. Furthermore, “what applies to proclamation and the Church generally cannot be better illustrated than by the sacrament” (CD I/1, p. 88, cf. p. 94). The earthly elements of bread and wine continue to be simple, visible elements, not changed in nature (as in transubstantiation). Yet “inscribed” (insculpta) by the Word of God, they receive a new form (nota), no less real than the Roman or Lutheran interpretation. By the Word, the bread and wine become the Lord’s Supper. This shows what may also be  true of our simple words, making them into proclamation of the Word of God (cf. CD IV/3, p. 737). When he moves on to discuss the triune revelation of God (CD I/1–I/2), Barth describes the sacraments as signs that help to make God’s objective revelation in Christ subjectively real, by the outpouring of the Spirit. How does revelation come from Christ to humanity? By the giving of visible signs, so that through them we may see the incarnation of the Word. These signs are the objective side of the church “as the sphere in which God’s revelation is subjectively real” (CD I/2, p. 224). God gives signs in the Old Testament and then gives a small number of new signs in the New Testament. Proclamation of Christ by preaching, baptism, Lord’s Supper, “and the gathering of the people out of all nations by this proclamation”: this is “the new and simplified and concentrated sign‐world of the New Testament” (CD I/2, pp. 226–227). Barth agrees with Luther’s and Calvin’s view of the centrality of these signs to identify the true church: “The Church, the body of Christ, and therefore Christ Himself exists and exists only where there are signs of the New Testament, that is, preaching, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper” (CD I/2, p. 227).

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But what exactly do these signs do? In reflecting on John 1:14, “the Word became flesh,” Barth says that sacraments make clear the incarnate, fleshly character of the incarnation as objective gift. “In a way which preaching can never do, the sacrament underlines the words sarx and egeneto … and we have to think of these words as underlined if we are to understand and treat the divine sign‐giving as the objective side of the Church, that is to say, in its given‐ness … The sacrament’s insistence upon this quality in divine sign‐giving is its special feature compared with preaching and its special feature in the whole life of God’s people assembled to form the Church” (CD I/2, p. 230). It is the given‐ness, the objective sign‐character of the sacraments, that communicate the Word as grace. And the church lives only by that Word of grace, according to Barth. “For that reason and in that sense we have to say in all seriousness that sacraments are an indispensable ‘means of grace.’” (In this concept, we have only to stress the word “grace” to understand it correctly!) And no complaints about “Roman sacramentalism” will prevent us from declaring that on its objective side the Church is sacramental (CD I/2, p. 232). This distinctive character of the sacraments as actions (rather than just words) that testify to Jesus Christ leads Barth to criticize “Evangelical” (Protestant) churches for making sacraments the exception rather than the rule in weekly worship (CD I/2, pp. 762–763). In volume II, “The Doctrine of God,” Barth begins to describe God’s act of revelation itself as “sacrament,” and Jesus’ humanity as the “first sacrament,” the foundation of all other signs that attest to God’s Word (CD II/1, pp. 52–54). From Jesus, there is a “sacramental continuity” stretching back to the people of Israel and forward to the church. Because of the unique and unrepeatable union of humanity with God in the person of Jesus, human signs (including sacraments) can witness to God’s objectivity. Yet the “whole sacramental reality” that attests to God’s self‐revelation also conceals, veiling God’s glory in the creature. Therefore, although sacraments can act as revelatory, they also can lead to idolatry, if the creaturely reality itself is perceived as God. According to Barth, it is essential to recognize this dialectic in sacramental reality: the fulfillment of real knowledge of God is “by the grace of God and in faith, but only by the grace of God and only in faith,” and in it “veiling becomes unveiling in virtue of the lordship of God even in and above His work and sign” (CD II/1, p. 56). When Barth turns to discussion of divine omnipresence, he continues to wrestle with the distinctiveness of Jesus’ humanity in relation to sacramental signs, particularly the Lord’s Supper. In an extended footnote, he explores the sixteenth and seventeenth century Reformed‐Lutheran controversy about the ubiquity of Christ’s body in relation to the sacramental elements, finding value on both sides, but faulting both for overcorrection. As David Grumett notes, Barth praises the Lutherans for recognizing Christ’s omnipresent humanity in the world, made possible because of the union of Creator and creature in him. However, he criticizes their “inadequate recognition of the distinctiveness of Christ’s humanity, which is necessarily limited in space, in relation to his divinity.” The Reformed tradition, on the other hand, rightly points out that “God’s right hand is recognized to be the place above all places,” and that the fleshly corporality of Jesus is not ubiquitous. “However, Barth contends that Reformed theologians have nonetheless failed to give a coherent account of Christ’s mediatory role…. Barth argues that what is lacking in both the Lutheran and the Reformed accounts is the ‘human

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corporal omnipresence of Jesus Christ.’ There is, he insists, a ‘relative but real’ presence in the world, not only of God but of Jesus Christ, who is in the world just as much as he is in heaven” (Grumett 2016, p. 293; interpreting CD II/1 par. 31, pp. 487–490). This insight expands on Barth’s language of “sacramental continuity” elsewhere in CD II; because of the unique and unrepeatable union of Jesus’ humanity with God, not only are human signs given the possibility of witnessing to God, but Jesus’ very humanity continues to be present in the world. Though Barth does not say so at this point, this has profound implications for thinking about the Lord’s Supper as not only human sign but also a site of Christ’s real human presence. In his discussion of the doctrine of election, Barth strongly affirms that the Christian community is elect in Jesus Christ, and this community in turn witnesses that all individuals are also elect by God in Jesus Christ. The apostles serve as key illustrations in this discussion of election, both as individuals and as community. At one point, Barth points to the institution of the Lord’s Supper as the supreme moment when God’s act of electing (“I for you”) is revealed as the basis for the calling and commissioning of the apostles (“You for me”). Despite their betrayal, Jesus never abandons the disciples. Instead, “the institution of the Lord’s Supper speaks of the strongest possible affirmation and confirmation of the fellowship between Jesus and the apostles.” It shows God’s gracious act of choosing them in giving his body and blood, and it summons them to “do this.” As Barth says, “It reiterates in a way which the ‘I for you’ makes quite unmistakable the ‘you for me’ of their calling and mission in Galilee” (CD II/2, p. 440). Discussion of election, of course, includes consideration of rejection, and Barth famously identifies Jesus Christ as the only rejected one, who has borne and canceled the rejection of humanity by God. In his discussion of the rejected, Barth emphasizes that at the last supper, Jesus gives himself to his disciples at the cost of his death. His self‐offering of body and blood gives them his life and takes to him their death. The Lord’s Supper thus means that “he will give them his body to eat and his blood to drink. He will give them himself at the cost of his death” (CD II/2, p. 474). Later, in discussing the meaning of self‐examination at the table, Barth emphasizes that this is not merely about “undisciplined and disorderly administration of the sacrament,” but an invitation to be prepared for “this action of actions, for our public and solemn participation in the communion of the body and blood of Christ.” “To be prepared for our Judge is to be those who worthily partake in the communion of the body and blood of Christ, who expect their spiritual nourishment from this communion and find in it their life, who can say of Jesus Christ, ‘I am His, and he is mine’” (CD II/2, pp. 640f.). At moments like these, Barth portrays the Lord’s Supper as the consummate moment of holy exchange, the moment at which Christ offers his own body and blood in exchange for our own and thereby grants us life. This approach to the Supper undergirds his willingness at times to identify the bread and wine of the Supper straightforwardly as Jesus’ body and blood. He says, for instance, “In order that others may … appropriate what is active and revealed in him, he … does not offer up anything less than Himself, His body and his blood: This is my body. And this is my blood” (CD IV/2, p. 258). When his focus is on election, reconciliation, exchange  –  any of the major

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themes that centers on God overcoming the separation between God and humanity – Barth tends to focus on the Lord’s Supper as the consummate expression of God’s union with humanity in Christ. This tendency is visible again in volume III, when Barth addresses the doctrine of creation, focusing on the creator, the creature, and their relationship. In this context, the Lord’s Supper illumines the real covenant partnership between created humanity and Creator God, the same partnership that was established in election. As in the earlier discussion of election, so too here Barth highlights the miraculous exchange that occurs at the Supper, where the disciples receive life for death, forgiveness for guilt, joy for sorrow. For instance, Barth interprets the words of institution at the Lord’s Supper in this way: “The offering of My body and blood has for you the effect that as you eat this bread My life is given to you as yours, and that as you drink of this cup you may live with joy and not with sorrow, as innocent and not condemned … Do this (‘in remembrance of me’) as you eat this bread and drink this cup. Proclaim in this way the Lord’s death until he comes” (CD III/2, p. 214). Barth speaks in this volume of Christ’s “real presence” in the Lord’s Supper, but not in a way that restricts that presence to the sacrament alone, and certainly not in a way that repeats his sacrifice. As he says, “There is obviously no baptism or Lord’s Supper without his real presence as very God and very Man, both body and soul. But this presence cannot be regarded as restricted to what were later called the ‘sacraments.’” We see here Barth beginning to distance himself from the language of “sacrament” as naming only the actions of baptism and Supper, continuing the logic he suggested earlier when he named Christ as “first sacrament.” The bath and the meal of the Christian community remain central, but they point beyond themselves to Christ. “For these are only a symbolical expression of the fact that in its worship the community is gathered directly around Jesus Himself, and lives by and with Him, but that through faith He rules over the hearts and lives of all even apart from worship” (CD III/2, pp. 467–468). For this reason, Barth rejects any notion of the eucharist as “a re‐presentation and repetition” of Christ’s sacrifice – “as in the Romanist doctrine of the mass” – but rather as “a simple and full enjoyment of its benefits” in particular “the eternal life won for us in him” (CD III/2, p. 502).1 In volume IV of the Church Dogmatics, Barth develops his comprehensive doctrine of reconciliation, including discussion of the church under the Holy Spirit, who gathers, upbuilds, and sends the Christian community. The Lord’s Supper particularly belongs to the “upbuilding” of the church, and in this context Barth lifts up the eucharist as the “crowning act of worship,” the “direct proclamation of [Jesus’] death until He comes (1 Cor. 11:26). In this provisional form as the action of the community, it is His own action, the work of His real presence. Here and now He Himself is for them – His offered body and his shed blood – the communion of saints thanking and confessing Him in this action” (CD IV/2, p. 658). Here we see Barth’s most unified and positive view of the 1  George Hunsinger notes that this is an oddly polemical comment for Barth, but it does reflect his “considered judgment” about the problems with the Roman Catholic interpretation of the Mass as representation of Christ’s sacrifice. He mistakenly saw the Catholic view as involving a “new sacrifice.” Hunsinger 2014, pp. 37–38 fn. 17, quoting CD IV/2, p. 640.

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Supper, as simultaneously Christ’s own action of self‐offering and the community’s act of thanksgiving and confession. This unified action is possible because of the Spirit; as Barth reminds us, “we have to remember especially that in the Lord’s Supper it is distinctively a question of outward and inward, visible and invisible, physical and spiritual nourishment, at one and the same time. Where the human mind normally separates these two spheres, in the action of the Holy Spirit, and drastically in the action of the Lord’s Supper, they are comprehended and united” (CD IV/2, p. 708). Like Calvin before him, Barth sees the Holy Spirit as the mysterious unifying power that binds together at the Supper those things that our minds keep separate. By the power of the Spirit, the Lord’s Supper represents “the perfect fellowship between [Christ] and [Christians] which He has established” (CD IV/3, p. 542). Barth cites John and Paul in support of a strong notion of Christ’s unity with believers, dwelling in them. But he emphasizes that this is not an “extension of the incarnation” in relation to this union, and “in relation to the Lord’s Supper” (CD IV/3, p. 543). Nor is it appropriate to speak of any Christian, or a priest in the mass, as “another Christ” to other Christians. There is only one Christ, and all the rest are witnesses in union with him. Union with Christ, rightly understood, becomes an increasingly important theme for Barth in this volume, a theme that he notes approvingly in Calvin’s eucharistic theology. Echoing again his appreciation for Calvin’s view of the Lord’s Supper, he reflects, With incomprehensible mystery it is attested to us that we are to grow up to be one body with Christ, to become one with Him, so that what is ours is His and what is His, ours, He being the Son of Man with us and we sons of God with Him, He lowly weak and mortal with us and we exalted, strong and immortal with Him, He invested with our unrighteousness and we with His righteousness. (in CD IV/3.2, p. 551; see Calvin, Institutes IV, 17, 2)

Barth rightly says that this notion of the union with Christ might almost be called “[Calvin’s] conception of the essence of Christianity” (CD IV/3, p. 551). Later, speaking in his own words, Barth makes a similar claim: In the work of the Holy Spirit there takes place in the Lord’s Supper, in a way which typifies all that may happen in the life of this people, that which is indicated by the great touto estin [this is], namely, that unity with its heavenly Lord, and the imparting and receiving of His body and blood, are enacted in and with their human fellowship as realized in the common distribution and reception of bread and wine. None of this can be taken for granted. It is all most strange and improbable. Indeed, from the human and even the Christian angle it is impossible. Yet on God’s side it is not only possible but actual. (CD IV/3, pp. 761–762)

The Lord’s Supper embodies not only union with Christ but union of people with one another. Barth emphasizes that at the table, the Christian community gathers in “common eating and drinking in remembrance of the death of the Lord, in joy at His resurrection, and in the expectation of his coming again” (CD IV/2, p. 640). When they gather, Christ himself is present as Host and as nourishment. In a particularly lyrical passage, Barth says,

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The promise with which they are brought together is that He will give them food and drink, that in the life in which they too are surrounded by death he will provide, and will Himself be, their wayside sustenance. And so they go and come to the gathering of the community to seat themselves, and to eat and drink, as brothers and sisters at the table where He Himself presides as Lord and Host, and they are invited and welcome guests. (CD IV/2, pp. 702–703)

At this table, community is paramount: “In the eating and drinking of the Lord’s Supper it is not a question of the nourishment of one here and another there in company with neighbors, but of the eating of one bread and the drinking from one cup, of the common nourishment of them all, because it is He, Jesus Christ, who brings them to it, who invites them, who is the Lord and Host, who is, indeed, their food and drink.” Gathering at the table is not about individuals, and not about distinctions between people, but about nourishment of the corporate body (cf. CD IV/2, p. 708). Because of his emphasis on common eating and drinking, Barth grieves every instance of disunity in the church, in which groups cannot preach or pray or “keep the Lord’s Supper” together (CD IV/1, p. 676). In his last complete part‐volume of the Church Dogmatics, Barth again emphasizes the unified fellowship of the Christian community, without respect to race, culture, or class. In this context he refers to the common table of the Lord’s Supper, as well as baptism and the Lord’s Prayer, as corporate actions that attest to the reconciling work of God. “In baptism and the Lord’s Supper an invisible action of God—the fellowship of the Father and the Son in the Holy Ghost, the fellowship of God and man in Jesus Christ, the fellowship of Jesus Christ the head with his body and its members, and finally the fellowship of God with the world created by Him and reconciled to Him—is the prototype, the meaning and the power of the visible and significatory action of the community and therefore of the unification of human beings therein attested.” Importantly, Barth insists here that baptism and the Lord’s Supper are not “empty signs. On the contrary, they are full of meaning and power. They are thus the simplest, and yet in their very simplicity the most eloquent, elements in the witness which the community owes to the world, namely, the witness of peace on earth among the human beings in whom God is well pleased” (CD IV/3, pp. 900–901 rev.). Though he insists that the Supper is a meaningful action communicating humanity’s union with Christ, and not an empty sign, by this time in his writing Barth rejects the language of “sacrament” to refer to anything or anyone but Christ. In volume II he began this trajectory by calling Christ the “first sacrament”; now in volume IV he calls Christ the “only sacrament.” In discussing Christ’s death, for instance, he says, “The event itself, the event of the death of man, is that of the death of Jesus Christ on Golgotha … This is the one mysterium, the one sacrament, and the one existential fact before and beside and after which there is no room for any other of the same rank” (CD IV/1, p. 296). Baptism and Lord’s Supper are thus “so‐called sacraments,” because they do not establish the church. Barth insists that the church is established by the election of Christ from all eternity (as he earlier explained in II/2), and this has led him to reinterpret the language of “sacrament” as unique to Christ (CD IV/1, p. 667). For this reason, at this point in his writing he also rejects any notion of “sacramental union” apart from the incarnation itself, since Christ is the only sacrament (CD IV/2, pp. 54–55; cf. IV/4, p. 102).

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In his final fragmentary part‐volume IV/4, Barth becomes even bolder in his rejection of the sacramental character of baptism and the Lord’s Supper: “Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are not events, institutions, mediations, or revelations of salvation. They are not representations and actualizations, emanations, repetitions, or extensions, nor indeed guarantees and seals of the work and word of God; nor are they instruments, vehicles, channels or means of God’s reconciling grace. They are not what they have been called since the second century, namely mysteries or sacraments” (CD IV/4, p. 46). Instead, they answer to, attest, and proclaim the “one act and revelation of salvation that has taken place in the one Mediator between God and man.” They are free, responsible, and obedient actions corresponding to God’s grace and command. Thus they “are well done as holy, meaningful, fruitful, human actions, radiant in the shining of the one true light in which they make take place and which they have to indicate in their own place and manner as free and responsible human action” (CD IV/4, p. 46; cf. similar argument on pp. 130 and 287f.). Barth had hoped to end his Church Dogmatics with a treatment of the Lord’s Supper as the “conclusion and crown” of the Christian life (CD IV/4, p. ix; cf. IV/2, p. 658). This reveals both his high regard for the Supper and his concern that it be rightly understood as human action in response to God. He sought finally to portray the Lord’s Supper as the “free, responsible, and obedient” action of the community in response to “God’s grace and command.” As his biographer Eberhard Busch notes, he “wanted to understand the eucharist as the thanksgiving which responds to the presence of Jesus Christ in his self‐sacrifice and looks forward to the future” (2005, p. 444; quoting CD IV/4, p. ix; ET, pp. viiif.). This image of the Supper as “conclusion and crown” of Christian life fits with his occasional description of the Christian life as situated between baptism and the Lord’s Supper, suggesting the Supper as a destination toward which we are always moving. In IV/2, for instance, Barth describes the church’s basic pattern of “coming from baptism and going to the Lord’s Supper” (CD IV/2, pp. 706ff.). Much earlier, when he still used language of “sacrament” more broadly, he wrote, “The sphere of sacrament means the sphere in which man has to think of himself as on the way from the baptism already poured out upon him to the Lord’s Supper yet to be dispensed to him, the sphere in which he begins with faith in order to reach faith” (CD I/2, p. 232). This eschatological view of the Lord’s Supper as the end toward which Christian life is always moving seems to have been present in Barth’s thinking for a long time. It is perhaps fitting that it remained unfinished even at his death. From early in his professional life, Barth advocates regular celebration of the Lord’s Supper, as often as each Lord’s day. In 1956, reports indicate that most of Barth’s sermons were followed by the eucharist (Busch 2005, p. 415). In retirement too, Barth maintains “that congregational worship should take the form of an ellipse with two foci—the proclaimed word and the breaking of the bread” (FT, p. 46). At one point he complained, “why is the Lord’s Supper not celebrated every Sunday in every church (at the very least in the presence of the whole congregation)—even if this is at the expense of the length of our sermons and our excessive organ music? … Would this not make us a comprehensive ‘church of the Word’—the Word which did not become speech, but flesh?” (Busch 2005, p. 474).

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Recent Interpretations of Barth’s View of the Lord’s Supper The past few decades have seen an outpouring of scholarship on Karl Barth as well as on eucharistic theology. It is not surprising, therefore, that some scholars have devoted attention to the intersection of these fields, evaluating Barth’s writings on the Lord’s Supper with appreciation as well as critique. Paul Molnar was the first to write a book‐length systematic theology of Barth’s theology of the Lord’s Supper. Acknowledging that Barth himself never finished his final volume, Molnar seeks to develop Barth’s theology of the Lord’s Supper based on his doctrine of God. Beginning with Barth’s understanding of the “possibilities and limitations of human knowledge of God” (1996, p. ix). Molnar argues that though Barth’s view of the term “sacrament” did change, the reason for the change was dictated by basic theological presuppositions that remained constant through the Church Dogmatics. His eventual rejection of the term stems from his enduring “theological understanding of the relationship between divine and human being and action. He believed the term [sacrament] historically came to mean that divinity was either noetically or ontically in the human activity of the church” (Molnar 1996, p. 3). Molnar argues that “Barth’s primary theological concern always was to demonstrate God’s freedom from and freedom for his creatures. Unless God could be distinguished clearly from the visible church in its sacramental action, the Holy Spirit could be confused with and controlled by the church’s sacramental or moral actions” (1996, p. 3). The dialectic of freedom from/freedom for governs Molnar’s analysis of Barth’s theology, including his eucharistic theology, though Molnar emphasizes divine “freedom from.” God and creatures are “essentially distinct in communion,” which means that communion between creator and creatures can only be established by God alone – no analogies are possible except the analogy of faith (Molnar 1996, p. 7). Barth seeks to avoid monism, pantheism, or panentheism, insisting that God remains God, and humans remain humans in relationship to God as established by God. This same logic applies to ecclesiology and to his theology of the Lord’s Supper, because he insisted that the church remains distinct from God even though “it is in closest union with him by the power of his Word and Spirit” (Molnar 1996, p. 12). Molnar argues that Barth’s view of Christ as the only “sacrament” in CD IV/4 uses these presuppositions worked out in his doctrine of God, showing a systematic coherence in his thought over time. God always remains free, never bound to human action, even though God calls for human response. My own reading of Barth agrees with Molnar in his effort to situate Barth’s eucharistic theology in the context of the dialectics in his doctrine of God. More than Molnar, however, I see the prominent dialectic of divine freedom and love, which emphasizes not only distinction but also real communion between God and humanity at the Supper. In this reading I seek to hold together not only the emphasis on divine freedom in I/1 and IV/4, but also the insistence on reconciliation in II/1, II/2, and IV/2, with its clear emphasis on Christ’s action in and through the Supper by the power of the Spirit to draw us into union with Christ and with one another.

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In his work on the eucharist and ecumenism, George Hunsinger seeks a eucharistic theology in keeping with Barth’s basic Chalcedonian logic of unity in distinction, while noting problematic inconsistencies in Barth’s own discussions of the Supper. Hunsinger acknowledges that Barth rejects any Roman Catholic notion of the mass as re‐presentation (as noted in previous discussion of CD III/2), but he sees this as Barth  simply repeating Reformation polemic against his own better insights. In response, Hunsinger points out themes from Barth that could inform a fuller appreciation of Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper. First, Barth argues for the unity of Christ and his benefits: “Christ’s benefits could be enjoyed only by way of participatio Christi…. A separation of Christ’s work of sacrifice on the cross from its benefits, as though the sacrifice were merely past while the benefits alone were present, fails to correspond with Barth’s best insights” (Hunsinger 2008, p. 16). The person and work of Christ cannot be separated, according to Barth’s own argument. Therefore, such separation should not characterize our understanding of the Lord’s Supper, suggesting that Christ’s activity is completely in the past. Second, because Christ’s work and being are mutually implicating, Barth’s own logic requires some notion of re‐presentation. “Christ’s being in act requires a perfect work (opere perfectus) that is also a perpetual operation (operatione perpetuum). The perpetual operation adds nothing new in content to the perfect work … Yet it belongs to the perfect work’s perfection that it is not merely encapsulated in the past” (Hunsinger 2014, p. 38; cf. 2008, p. 16). Hunsinger cites the following from Barth to make his point: In God’s revelation, which is the content of His Word, we have in fact to do with His act. And first, this means generally—with an event, with a happening. But as such, this is an event which is in no sense to be transcended. It is not, therefore, an event which has merely happened and is now a past fact of history. God’s revelation is, of course, this as well. But it is also an event happening in the present, here and now. Again, it is not this in such a way that it exhausts itself in the momentary movement from the past to the present, that is, in our to‐day. But it is also an event that took place once for all, and an accomplished fact. And it is also future—the event which lies completely and wholly in front of us, which has not yet happened, but which simply comes upon us. Again, this happens without detriment to its historical completeness and its full contemporaneity. (CD II/1, p. 262)

Hunsinger comments that Barth himself “failed to exploit the full potential of his ­theology regarding the eucharist” but that his student T.F. Torrance did exercise this potential (2008, pp. 15, 39). Finally, Paul Nimmo argues that the basis of the Lord’s Supper for Barth is the dominical command to “Do this …,” but understood in its widest context, which includes the Passover meal, table fellowship with sinners, eschatological hope, and the original divine act of God’s election to be for humanity in Jesus Christ. “The dominical command to participate in the eucharist is thus not a new thing for the disciples, but an explication and proclamation of the whole history of Jesus Christ, determined in eternity” (2011, p. 118). The goal of the Supper is likewise comprehensive: “God’s act of reconciliation in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit, God’s act of judgment and grace, of salvation and revelation” (CD IV/4, p. 72). Its goal does not lie within itself, but is “before

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it, beyond the participants and their action and means of action” (CD IV/4, p. 71). The Lord’s Supper is therefore a human action which “has to acknowledge the work of God, to bear witness to it, to confess it, to respond to it, to honour, praise and magnify it” (CD IV/4, p. 72). It must be characterized above all by thanksgiving for God’s action. Nimmo emphasizes IV/4 in his final interpretation of Barth’s theology of the Lord’s Supper. He affirms, using language from that part‐volume, that for Barth the Supper is a free human action of meeting to break bread and drink wine together, in obedience, thanksgiving, and hope (2011, p. 120). “Hence though the action of breaking bread and drinking wine are, as human actions, ‘so unassuming, equivocal and irrelevant,’ nevertheless they become and are ‘eternally important and significant’ in relation to the divine act of nurturing and sustaining the community” (Nimmo 2011, p. 121; citing CD IV/4, p. 135). Nimmo helpfully attends to the expansiveness of Barth’s vision, noticing the connections between his theology of the Lord’s Supper, the doctrine of election, Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, and the work of the Spirit. In the end there remains tension in Barth’s interpretation of the Lord’s Supper, a tension that may be best understood in light of the dialectic of God’s freedom and love. On the one hand, God is free, unable to be constrained by any human action or institution. On the other hand, God in Christ graciously enters into human experience, even joining human action: “Unity with its heavenly Lord, and the imparting and receiving of His body and blood, are enacted in and with their human fellowship as realized in the common distribution and reception of bread and wine” (CD IV/3, pp. 761–762). It seems fitting that Barth’s view of the Lord’s Supper, which seeks to express this tension between divine freedom from human action and divine love in and through human action, remains open and unresolved at his death. References Busch, E. (2005). Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts (trans. John Bowden). First English edition SCM Press, 1976. Reprinted. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers. Grumett, D. (2016). Material Eucharist. New York: Oxford University Press. Hunsinger, G. (2008). The Eucharist and Ecumenism: Let Us Keep the Feast. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hunsinger, G. (2014). Karl Barth on the Lord’s supper: an ecumenical appraisal. In: What Does It Mean to “Do This”? Supper, Mass, Eucharist (eds. M. Root and J.J.

Buckley), 24–46. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books. Molnar, P.D. (1996). Karl Barth and the Theology of the Lord’s Supper: A Systematic Investigation. Pieterlen: Peter Lang. Nimmo, P. (2011). Bavinck, Barth, and the uniqueness of the Eucharist. Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 29 (1): 108–126. Presbyterian Church (USA) (1934 [2014]). The Theological Declaration of Barmen. In: Presbyterian Church (USA), Book of Confessions, 279–284. Louisville, KY: Office of the General Assembly.

CHAPTER 25

Barth on Justification Shannon Smythe

Introduction Justification has long been regarded as the key doctrine of the Reformation. In its most basic outline, the Reformation doctrine asserts that justification is by God’s grace alone, in Christ alone, and through faith alone. Recognizing the significance of such a teaching, Calvin called justification “the main hinge on which religion turns… For unless you first of all grasp what your relationship to God is, and the nature of his judgment concerning you, you have neither a foundation on which to establish your salvation nor one on which to build piety toward God” (2006, p. 726). Yet in many quarters of Protestant theology today, the doctrine suffers neglect if not outright rejection. Although objections to the doctrine are nothing new, Gerhard Forde has suggested that the doctrine has been under fire “[e]ver since Paul proposed justification as an interpretation of the cross and resurrection of Christ” (1982, vii) as well as attacked from “within” for over 150 years (2004, p. 114). A cursory reading of Barth’s dogmatics might lead one to conclude that this problematic doctrine is a rather minor element within his overall project, showing up in only one paragraph (§61 “The Justification of Man”) within the first part‐volume of his doctrine of reconciliation in the Church Dogmatics. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Despite the attempts by some to downplay the role of justification in Barth’s thinking, the reality is that Barth is a theologian of the Reformation through and through. Indeed, there is scarcely a topic in his theological oeuvre that does not relate, in some crucial way, to a soteriology centered on justification. Barth has so taken Calvin’s words to heart that, in both form and content, justification has a normative status in his work because “[t]here never was and there never can be any true Christian Church without the doctrine of justification” (CD IV/1, p. 523).

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth and Dogmatics, Volume I, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Of course, this does not mean that his theology of justification is static. Nor does it imply that the doctrine monopolizes his dogmatic project to the neglect of other dogmas “so that everything else becomes only a help for one favorite idea” (Migliore 1991, xl). Rather the doctrine of justification unfolds throughout his career as he takes it up again and again in different ways and for different ends. The centrality of the doctrine does not lead Barth simply to adopt the Reformational formulation of the doctrine wholesale. Neither “back to” (CD IV/1, p. 372) nor a move “beyond Protestantism” (Harink 2003, p. 65) sum up his approach. Instead, Barth always goes through the Reformation by building on, hoping to improve, and even radicalizing the doctrine of justification in light of its “formative norm” Jesus Christ (CD IV/1, p. 637). Hunsinger muses that the “acute sense that faithfulness to the gospel is a matter of life and death may well have been a disposition that Luther helped inspire in Barth” (2000, p. 281). After all, when Barth does critique the Reformation doctrine it is because “the programme of Reformation theology did not allow for any radical consideration of the meaning, importance and function of Christology in relation to all Christian knowledge” (CD IV/1, p. 366). Barth does not regard the doctrine of justification by itself to be the “articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae” [“the article by which the church stands or falls”]. For him justification is one (but only one) aspect of the larger doctrine of reconciliation. For Barth, reconciliation, as justification’s basis and culmination, is the doctrine on which everything depends. It is reconciliation that involves, more comprehensively, “the knowledge of … [Jesus Christ’s] being and activity for us and to us and with us” (CD IV/1, p. 527). Barth’s point is that justification must be subservient to the history of Jesus Christ for us. In other words, justification must stand with sanctification and vocation, the other two “aspects” of reconciliation, as the one reconciling work of the triune God. All three happen together simultaneously in God’s work of reconciliation in the history of Jesus Christ. Barth is not here diminishing the Reformation’s emphasis on the centrality of justification for the church; rather, he is radicalizing the understanding of justification in light of the being and activity of Jesus Christ for salvation and the correlative participation of the individual and community to witness to the perfect work of reconciliation accomplished by and in Jesus alone. At the end of the day, he was convinced that the doctrine be renewed from a center in the reconciling work of Jesus. For this reason, he circled back around to Paul’s polemical message of salvation in Christ alone. Bearing in mind the crucial role of justification in Barth’s theology, the task of this essay will be to show how and why the doctrine was so central for his thinking. We will do this, in Part I, through an investigation of the shape of the doctrine within Barth’s early theology in Romans II. We will see already in Barth’s understanding a strong emphasis on justification as an eschatological and forensic doctrine. For the Barth of Romans II justification is the consequence of a direct act of God on a person insofar as God creates faith in her in the eschatological moment of revelation. It is a forward‐ looking divine declaration that makes a person to be, in a moment’s time, what she is not yet in herself but will be in the end. In Part II, I will sketch the particular contours of the doctrine in the mature theology of Barth’s Church Dogmatics. The commitment to forensic justification remains, but it has undergone a change. Now, in light of the doctrines of election and reconciliation,

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the locus of eschatology resides in the perfect tense. As I have argued elsewhere, Barth has a “forensic apocalyptic understanding of justification” (Smythe 2016, p. 17). This understanding emerges most fully in his mature Christology of CD IV/1 through his engagement with Pauline apocalyptic eschatology. In essence, Barth’s mature Christology allows him to work out the ontological commitments of forensic thinking in which “being” is a function of decision and act (McCormack 2006, p. 193). In this way Barth affirms but extends Luther’s commitment that “Christ himself is our Reconciliation, Righteousness, Peace, Life, and Salvation” (1963, p. 151) through a covenantal ontology centered on the history of Jesus Christ. This allows him to radicalize a more traditional forensicism so that it speaks not only about the being of God as righteous in itself but also about “the essential role of human participation within the contingencies of history” (Congdon 2014, p. 477). Barth understands justification to take place, in the first instance, in the lived history of Jesus Christ, and only secondarily in us. The present tense aspect of justification in the life of a believer is now located within an eschatology centered on the perfect tense reality of 1 Corinthians 1:30, which sets forth Christ as our righteousness. The intended result is a closer adherence to the apocalyptic message of the gospel as articulated by Paul.

Part I: Justification in the Early Barth Romans II Having made his break from Protestant liberalism, Barth focused on emphasizing the infinite qualitative difference between God and humanity in order to guard against divine revelation being co‐opted in the event of its being given. The saving work of God is therefore the starting point for all theology. Revelation from God must always be received anew in faith. “Direct communication from God is no divine communication. If Christianity be not altogether thoroughgoing eschatology, there remains in it no relationship whatever with Christ” (RII, p. 314). With this focus, his arguments were “patterned after the Protestant doctrine of justification,” expressed “in terms of the dialectic of sin and judgment on the one hand and righteousness and grace on the other” (Johnson 2012, p. 8). “The righteousness of God is justitia forensis, justitia aliena; for the Judge pronounces His verdict according to the standard of his righteousness only” (RII, p. 93). Barth defines the righteousness of God as God’s affirmation of himself “by denying us as we are and the world as it is… He justifies us by justifying Himself ” (RII, pp. 40–41). “He declares His Righteousness … and that we, His enemies, are His beloved children” (RII, p. 101). Throughout the commentary, Jesus features as a distinct subject from God. Jesus is “the place of propitiation above which God dwells and from which He speaks” (RII, p. 105). Jesus Christ manifests God’s faithfulness. “The name Jesus defines an historical occurrence and marks the point where the unknown world cuts the known world” (RII, p. 29). Jesus is the place of God’s revelation. “In Jesus, God becomes veritably a secret. He is made known as the Unknown, speaking in eternal silence” (RII, p. 98). God’s revelation in Jesus takes place in hiddenness. It is not a product of history nor given to us

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directly. We cannot possess or control it. It is always out in front of us as a present giving. Such “radical differentiation between God and the world is a consequence of a soteriological claim rooted in the reformational conviction that salvation is by divine grace alone” (Congdon 2015, p. 281). Hence, the doctrine of justification gives shape to Barth’s epistemological argument even as Christ’s work is “subsumed largely into the category of revelation” (McCormack 2014a, p. 179). What Barth’s commentary makes clear is that justification is a thoroughly eschatological doctrine lacking any preconditions on our side. Bringing life out of death is work that is God’s alone, and it is work made known only to faith. Faith is our acceptance of the judgment of God on us. It is only by “faith [that] we are what we are not” (RII, p. 149). We are saved by the wholly otherness of God, who shows forth the power of divine righteousness in Jesus Christ, saving us by remaining true to Godself. Justification as the work of God’s faithfulness features more prominently than does the alien righteousness of Christ. God alone can save, and God does so by a grace that does not spare us from judgment. “Grace is grace where the possibility of religion in the full bloom of its power is earnestly accepted – and then offered up as a sacrifice” (RII, p. 186). “Life is not life, if it be not life from death. And God is not God, if he be not the End of men” (RII, p. 187). The truth of our newness, the meaning of the resurrection, is known only in our death. “The propitiation occurs at the place of propitiation—only by blood, whereby we are solemnly reminded that God gives life only through death” (RII, p. 157). The Spirit reveals the resurrection as the place where eternity confronts time, the turning point where the transition from the old to the new takes place (RII, p. 30). The new humanity that Jesus’s resurrection brings into existence is complete only in Christ. Justification is “in Christ” alone because Barth has so thoroughly actualized the Spirit’s work in our lives. In Romans II such newness is our future, not our present. Barth comes quite close to equating the Spirit with new humanity. “The Spirit is the ‘Yes’ from which proceeds the negative knowledge which [human beings] have of themselves. As negation, the Spirit is the frontier … of human life: as affirmation, the Spirit is the new, transfigured reality which lies beyond this frontier” (RII, p. 272). Thus, attaining freedom from the law is a “sheer impossibility” (RII, p. 257), and therefore even faith can never be “a foundation” on which we can place ourselves; it is rather “the place where we are established by God. There there is nothing but God … God only; and there the place is no place” (RII, p. 110). Barth writes of faith as “negation” in order to guard against the idea of it being something we contribute to our salvation. Faith is a void in which God reveals God’s own faithfulness. Romans II is an exercise in making Reformation soteriology “constitutive of theological method as such” (Congdon 2015, p. 571). Revelation, which takes place in history, is not a predicate of history. It remains at once always behind and before us in a present giving. The resurrection of Jesus is “the place” of God’s revelation. It is the point of intersection between the unknown world of God and our known world. Thus where revelation occurs, there reconciliation is its essential if often implicit correlate. The unintuitable God is revealed in Christ’s death. As the Christ, Jesus surrenders all human possibilities open to him in order to die. In so doing, Jesus is “the place” where God reveals God’s righteousness. What Barth is not yet able to say is that the lived obedience of the human Jesus, including his death in God‐abandonment, is an event that takes

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place in the very being of God, such that the faithfulness of God is simply the faithfulness of Christ. At this point in Barth’s development, humanity’s justification is not yet objectively realized in the atonement. “What is missing is a Christology which could make it clear how a human act, could, at the same time, [also] be a divine act. For a divine act alone can have universal significance and immediate efficacy” (McCormack 2014b, p. 148 n45). Only later will he be able to say that in Christ’s perfect accomplishment of reconciliation, revelation occurs. Barth later expressed reservations about the line he had taken in Romans II. “The sentences I then uttered were not hazardous (in the sense of precarious) on account of their content. They were hazardous because to be legitimate exposition of the Bible they needed others no less sharp and direct to compensate and therefore genuinely to substantiate their total claim” (CD II/1, p. 635). According to Barth’s retrospective reflection, the issue was that the “tension between the ‘then’ when we believed and the ‘now’ of ‘disturbing recollection’, a new awareness of Christ’s parousia, was only a continual tension, having no connection with the tension of two points in time and the time of Church history” (CD II/1, p. 635). Although he was right to speak of God’s distinction from the world, he could not yet show “how this distinction is maintained from within history itself as God enters into it” (Johnson 2012, p. 9). His doctrine of justification could not yet “do justice to the theology of John 1:14” (Johnson 2012, p. 9), nor could it frame the death of Jesus as the powerful action of God’s triumph over sin and death. Justification was not yet connected to its telos in the human participation in proclaiming the reconciliation accomplished in Christ. In sum, the notion of solus Christus in Romans II, though present in form, lacks the material depth that it will later acquire in the Church Dogmatics. Once Barth develops a doctrine of the incarnation as well as an account of the ontological constitution of Jesus, he will center God’s justification of humanity as something complete and perfect only in the atonement. This will provide him with a corresponding way to speak of justification within the Christian life as something we always live in transition. Although still stretching the relationship of our justification in Christ and our lived experience of justification to the breaking point, it affirms faith and obedience, as they conform to the humanity of Christ, as the real effect of the divine declaration of the justification of sinners. Barth’s desire to speak about divine revelation in a way that does not allow for human control or manipulation is the correct impulse that flows from forensic justification. However, the challenge is to do so in a way that does not speak ahistorically about God and the world. Barth later recognized that in the commentary he had not yet found a way to speak that made it clear that he “actually meant to speak of God and not of a general idea of limit and crisis” (CD II/1, p. 635).

Part II: Justification in Barth’s Mature Theology Church Dogmatics II/2 The doctrines of election and justification are both committed to a soteriology by God’s grace alone. If Barth’s early understanding of justification was centered on the hiddenness of God’s revelation in the cross and resurrection of Christ, his revolution to the doctrine

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of election – that Jesus Christ is both electing God and the elect human – helps norm his theology to a soteriology based on the reconciling work of Jesus Christ in his life, death, and resurrection. “Jesus Christ is Himself the divine election of grace” (CD II/2, p. 95). This starting point excludes from his soteriology all “natural‐anthropological presuppositions while … resisting a complete bifurcation between the divine object and the human subject” (Congdon 2015, p. 175). Election is the essential presupposition of what occurred in the reconciling history of Jesus Christ. What has occurred decisively in the atonement is the outworking of God’s being toward humanity and humanity’s appointed being toward God. With the pretemporal election of Jesus Christ and the fulfillment of his election in history, “a decision has been made concerning the being and nature of every man by the mere fact that with him and among all other men [Jesus Christ] too has been a man” (CD III/2, p. 133). “What we are ‘essentially’ is that which God has chosen us to be in entering into covenant with us: ‘He chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love’ (Eph 1:4)” (McCormack 2004, p. 114). God’s self‐determination to be God for us in and as Jesus reveals that the material content of election is the covenant of grace. In place of speculation about an abstract absolute decree of God, the covenant God makes with humanity is the beginning of all the works of God (CD II/2, pp. 101–102). “In Jesus Christ God in His free grace determines Himself for sinful man and sinful man for Himself. He therefore takes upon Himself the rejection of man with all its consequences, and elects man to participation in His own glory” (CD II/2, p. 94). Election is the event of God’s decision to be God for us, and the incarnation is the instantiation of this decision in time. Indeed, the lived history of Jesus Christ crowds out any notion of a secret, absolute decree of God (CD II/2, p. 76). Within the covenant of grace, both God’s being and humanity’s are constituted by way of anticipation of the history of Jesus Christ. “Being” is now inseperable from decision and action. Thus, Barth’s revolution to the Reformed doctrine gives him the foundation he needs to expound the ontological basis of forensic justification. As Jüngel points out, “Barth understands justification precisely from the viewpoint of election as God’s self‐ justification. For God’s choice ‘from all eternity … to take to Himself and to bear man’s rejection is a prior justification of God in respect of the risk’ to which he resolved to expose man by confronting him with nothingness and sin [CD II, p. 165]” (Jüngel 2001, p. 93 n.71) Election is a forensic decision God makes concerning both God and us that comes extra nos in the reconciling work of Jesus Christ. “The righteousness of God in His election means, then, that as a righteous Judge God perceives and estimates as such the lost case of the creature, and that in spite of its opposition He gives sentence in its favour, fashioning for it His own righteousness” (CD II/2, p. 34). The exegetical basis for the modification to forensic justification comes from Barth’s word study of a collection of divine and human paradidōmi clauses in the New Testament. “Barth’s reading of the divine handing‐over provides the biblical basis for his modified forensicism by setting forth the formal framework of covenant ontology in its divine and human aspects” (Smythe 2017, p. 194). He connects the divine “handing‐over” formula within the Pauline collection to the “original and authentic paradounai” (CD II/2, p. 491) in the prologue to John’s gospel. Thus, the condition for the possibility of God willing God’s own handing‐over to death is the triune decision for incarnation. The “decree of God’s

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eternal love, in which the Father sent the Son and the Son obeyed the Father” (CD II/2, p. 491) necessarily overflows in history in the divine positive paradidōmi in which God’s will is revealed through God’s willingness “to deliver Himself into the situation of impotence in face of the power by which man is overborne” (CD II/2, p. 491). In its traditional form, the heart of the Reformational doctrine of forensic justification consists in a verdict of acquittal, or innocence, by which God judges sinful humanity to be righteous on the basis of the nonimputation of the guilt of sin and the positive imputation of Christ’s righteousness to us. In Barth’s mature theology, forensic justification still consists in acquittal but its basis is now located in the covenant of grace that God upholds in the atonement. God turns freely toward humanity in the lived history of Jesus of Nazareth. At the same time, in Christ’s resurrection, humanity is created anew. The divine decision for the historical event of the divine handing‐over, enacted by God and Jesus, modifies and finally replaces the older Protestant conception of imputation. The divine verdict of acquittal is actualized not only in the original divine handing‐over of the Word become flesh but also in the historical instance of God handing Jesus over to the event of Golgotha and Jesus’s free handing‐over of himself to sin and death for us. “The positive divine παραδου̃ναι is included in the decree of God’s eternal love. Concretely, the sending by the Father and the obedience of the Son are simply this divine παραδου̃ναι. It is not for nothing, therefore, that Rom. 8:35, Gal. 2:20, and Eph. 5:25 relate it so emphatically to the divine άγαπα̃ν… Delivery, handing‐over, abandonment by God are themselves included in and necessarily result from the fact that God wills to make man participant in eternal life by giving Himself to be his Covenant‐partner” (CD II/2, p. 491). Therefore, in the event of Christ’s death on the cross, God is not only faithful and just in Godself, God also destroys both sin and the sinful human, restoring us as God’s covenant partners. This substantiates our acquittal in Christ as God keeps the promise given humanity in its election as God’s covenant people. Humanity’s election as God’s ­covenant partner has its teleological goal in vocation. Barth highlights the apostolic handing‐over of the tradition (paradosis) as the human correspondence to the divine handing‐over. “As the praise of God by creation is related to the praise which God Himself has prepared for His Son in the glory of His resurrection, so that which the apostles will and do is related by their παραδου̃ ναι to that which God Himself has decreed from all eternity, and accomplished in time, with His delivering up of Jesus Christ” (CD II/2, p. 498). The faithful obedience by which humanity, through their vocation as witnesses, corresponds to their election in Christ is the regenerative “effect of the divine declaration given in the justification of the ungodly” (McCormack 2004, p. 115).

Church Dogmatics IV/1 Within Barth’s new forensic framework, justification is not an arbitrary declaration. It is an event in Jesus Christ resulting from the divine decision for the covenant of grace. With election qualifying the concept of positive imputation, Barth has a way to speak concretely about how humanity’s justification comes from the alien righteousness of Christ. “The alien righteousness which has been effected not in and by us but in the

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sacrifice of Jesus Christ does become and is always ours, so that in him we are no longer unrighteous but righteous before God, we are the children of God… What He has done He has done in order that being done by Him it may be done by us; not only acceptable to God, but already accepted; our work which is pleasing to Him; our being as those who are dead to sin and can live to righteousness” (CD IV/1, p. 283). Thus, forensic justification, as Barth conceives it, always takes place as “an event between God and man,” a movement from unrighteousness to righteousness in which Jesus transitions, in the event of the cross, from the “man of sin,” who is condemned and destroyed, to his “new right” and “new life,” in the event of the resurrection (CD IV/1, p. 545). Now the divine righteousness of justification rests on the faithfulness of Jesus’s lived obedience and death in God‐abandonment. God’s righteousness is constituted in that God is the subject of the act of atonement “in such a way that His presence and action as the Reconciler of the world coincide and are indeed identical with the existence of the humiliated and lowly and obedient man Jesus of Nazareth” (CD IV/1, p. 199). The purchase of this new framework means that the verdict of acquittal that God pronounces on us in justification is not a legal fiction. In an essentially apocalyptic move, the ­sinner – sinful humanity, as such – has been utterly destroyed in the death of Christ, which is God’s action of judgment on sin. Grace would not be grace “if God did not oppose man’s opposition to Himself ” (CD IV/1, p. 490). Old, sinful humanity has been abolished in Christ’s death, and in his resurrection new humanity has been ushered in. “Insofar as humanity is originally in Christ by virtue of election and Jesus is the one true human before God, justification is made to be effective and transformative for us” (Smythe 2016, p. 147). “His history is as such our history” (CD IV/1, p. 548). “We are the participants in this great drama. That history is, in fact, our history” (CD IV/1, p. 547). Looking to the history of Christ, Barth speaks of our justification, in both its negative and positive aspects. The negative aspect is God’s judgment of sinful humanity, which cannot stand before God’s righteousness. God must overcome and destroy our wrong. This is the negative side of God’s grace, which cannot be reconciled with sin. Christ judges and destroys sin in his death because it is “an outrage and abomination to God” that has to perish” (CD IV/1, p. 539). “It is taken and burnt up and destroyed by the life of God like dry wood by the fire. This is the event of His righteousness” (CD IV/1, p. 539). Christ’s death releases humanity “from an imprisonment” that came as a result of being subjected to sin” (CD IV/1, p. 256). The positive aspect of justification happens in the gracious event of God’s raising Jesus from the dead, which is the “judicial sentence that the action and passion of Jesus Christ were … His good and holy will” (CD IV/1, p. 305) and the verdict of the acceptance of Jesus’ “obedience which judges the world … with the aim of saving it” (CD IV/1, p. 309). In the event of the resurrection, we are pronounced innocent in Jesus Christ and given a new life. “His innocence, the innocence in which He bore and bore away our sin, the innocence which was manifest in His resurrection, was and is our innocence” (CD IV/1, p. 556). With the verdict of acquittal in the resurrection of Jesus, God tells the truth about the true being of humanity. What we truly are is what God determined us to be, from all time, in Jesus. In Christ, our justification is a completed state of affairs. It has occurred extra nos in the history of Christ’s alien righteousness. Jesus Christ has lived our history of rejection and election in his death and resurrection. God’s unconditional acquittal of humanity

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is “the central event of all human history” (CD IV/1, p. 568). It is a “divisive sentence” (CD IV/1, p. 568) made in history, which contains the whole of our justification. It divides us between the human as the wrongdoer, who is the object of God’s rejection, and the human as the elect of God, who is created and called to be God’s covenant partner. Between the sinful human, which is our past, and the elect human, which is our future, is an “unbridgeable gulf ” (CD IV/1, p. 568). God’s sentence “locks up the one in order to free the other” (CD IV/1, p. 568). “Therefore, each present moment of our own history contains both this past and this future. Yet, because our justification is totally complete in Christ, in each moment of our present justification, our past rejection is behind us and our future election is before us in the same sequence as the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ” (Smythe 2016, p. 176). The experience of justification in the Christian life is always a transition in which we move forward, away from our past sinfulness, which requires death, to our right future, which is our new life. In us, justification is not static, but a true history that mirrors Jesus’s own history. To drive this home further, Barth’s retrieves Luther’s challenging notion simul iustus et peccator, but he speaks of it instead as “simul peccator et iustus” (CD IV/1, p. 596). “Our justification, as it has taken place in Him, has given to God’s history with us … a very definite direction. If we look at Him, we can look and go only in this direction, from here to there, but not in the reverse direction” (CD IV/1, p. 558). However, as long as we exist in time in our own personal history, we are “both altogether, not half and half, but both altogether, yet only in transition and already with the future promise of totus iustus coming to bear on us in the present. If we were not in this transition, then justification would no longer apply to us; for it is only the sinful person who can be pronounced free by God’s sentence” (Smythe 2016, p. 176). Justification is always a once for all and yet repeated event in the life of a Christian, consisting of a continual movement away from sin and toward new life – a movement that Barth calls a Wende (turning or transition). Justification in the Christian life is dialectical precisely as it is actualized in the particular, historical event in Christ, which is made present to us by the Word and in the Spirit. In us, justification is always a dynamic movement away from our bondage to sin and toward our new freedom and life in Christ by the Spirit. Barth maintains his commitment to the Reformation concept of justification by faith alone. He argues that sola fide is a rediscovery, during the Reformation, of a truly Pauline conception. Although he admittedly spends more time expounding the objective side of justification in Christ, he does not shy away from what he calls the “very important ‘subjective’ side” of faith (CD IV/1, p. 615). Barth grounds justification by faith in its object, Jesus Christ. “What is the sola fide but a faint yet necessary echo of the solus Christus?” (CD IV/1, p. 632). Justification by faith alone means faith in Jesus Christ; it means that the believer “knows and grasps [her] own righteousness as one which is alien to [her], as the righteousness of this other, who is justified … in [her] place, for [her]” (CD IV/1, p. 631). “Of the three factors—justification, faith, and Christ—the basic and controlling one is obviously the last” (CD IV/1, p. 639). With not only forensicism but also apocalyptic now providing the framework, he can speak of faith both in its negative form – “faith as a vacuum” (CD IV/1, 628), as the exclusion of works—and in its truly positive form as well, as “the human work which corresponds” to God’s work (CD IV/1, p. 615). “Everything depends on the fact that faith is not empty in so far as it

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does not look into the void … but has this concrete object. Everything depends on the fact that it is being in encounter with the living Jesus Christ …” (CD IV/1, p. 633). The truth of our justification in Christ – the reality that his history really is our history and that our true being is actually our being in Christ – means that correspondence here and now to who we are in Christ is imperative. For this reason, Barth says, faith is “negative only in appearance” (CD IV/1, p. 635). In its positive aspect – as “a human act and experience” – faith (imperfectly) “imitates Jesus Christ” so that as it believes in Him it also “corresponds to Him” (CD IV/1, p. 635). And it does so through “the humility of obedience” (CD IV/1, p. 631). “Faith itself, therefore, becomes a poverty, a repetition of this divine downward movement, … a human imitation of what God has done for [human beings] in this One” (CD IV/1, p. 635). Without this active correspondence through humility, “it is not justifying faith” (CD IV/1, p. 636). For all that Barth did to intensify the Reformation commitment to the forensic doctrine of justification by grounding it in the covenant of grace fulfilled in the history of Jesus Christ, he comes back around, at the close of §61.4 on “Justification by Faith Alone,” to extolling the strength of the Reformation teaching. When it comes to the true “substance” of the matter, Barth stands with the Reformers precisely because “they made plain that the living Jesus Christ – and His righteousness as man’s righteousness” is the scarlet thread running throughout the biblical text (CD IV/1, p. 642). Those who would take their stand with Barth, and thus with the Reformation, should take Barth’s words to heart. Further, they should remember that the truth of justification resides not in the doctrine itself “but in the spirit with which it is engaged, for the Spirit of God is always seeking and creating new forms” of attestation to the gospel of the living Christ (Wiman 2013, p. 111). References Calvin, J. (2006). Institutes of the Christian Religion (ed. J.T. O’Neill) (trans. F.L. Battles). Louisville: Westminster John Knox. Congdon, D.W. (2014). Apokatastasis and apostolicity: a response to Oliver Crisp on the question of Barth’s universalism. Scottish Journal of Theology 67: 464–480. Congdon, D.W. (2015). The Mission of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann’s Dialectical Theology. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Forde, G.O. (1982). Justification by Faith – A Matter of Death and Life. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Forde, G.O. (2004). A More Radical Gospel: Essays on Eschatology, Authority, Atonement, and Ecumenism (eds. M.C. Mattes and S.D. Paulson). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

Harink, D.K. (2003). Paul Among the Postliberals: Pauline Theology beyond Christendom and Modernity. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press. Hunsinger, G. (2000). Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Johnson, K.L. (2012). A reappraisal of Karl Barth’s theological development and his dialogue with Catholicism. International Journal of Systematic Theology 14: 1–25. Jüngel, E. (2001). God’s Being Is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology of Karl Barth. A Paraphrase (trans. J. Webster). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Luther, M. (1963). Lectures on Galatians 1535 Chapters 1–4. Luther’s Works Volume 26 (ed. J. Pelikan). Saint Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House.

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McCormack, B.L. (2004). What’s at stake in current debates over justification?: the crisis of Protestantism in the west. In: Justification: What’s at Stake in the Current Debates (eds. M. Husbands and D.J. Treier), 81–117. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. McCormack, B.L. (2006). Justitia aliena: Karl Barth in conversation with the evangelical doctrine of imputed righteousness. In: Justification in Perspective: Historical Developments and Contemporary Challenges (ed. B.L. McCormack), 167–196. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. McCormack, B.L. (2014a). Can we still speak of “justification by faith”?: an in‐house debate with apocalyptic readings of Paul. In: Galatians and Christian Theology: Justification, the Gospel, and Ethics in Paul’s Letter (eds. M.W. Elliott, S.J. Hafemann, N.T. Wright and J. Frederick), 158–184. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. McCormack, B.L. (2014b). Longing for a New World: on socialism, eschatology and

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apocalyptic in Barth’s early dialectical theology. In: Theologie im Umbruch der Moderne: Karl Barths frühe Dialektische Theologie (eds. G. Pfleiderer and H. Matern), 135–149. Zürich: Theologischer Verlag. Migliore, D.L. (1991). Karl Barth’s first lectures in Dogmatics: instruction in the Christian religion. In: The Göttingen Dogmatics: Instruction in the Christian Religion, vol. 1 (ed. H. Reiffen) (trans. G.W. Bromily), xv–lxii. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Smythe, S.N. (2016). Forensic Apocalyptic Theology: Karl Barth and the Doctrine of Justification. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Smythe, S.N. (2017). The sum of the gospel: Barth’s Intracanonical and Intertextual interpretation of paradidōmi. In: Reading the Gospels with Karl Barth (ed. D.L. Migliore), 187–203. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Wiman, C. (2013). My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

CHAPTER 26

Barth on Sanctification Jason Goroncy

Introduction Karl Barth is no abstract thinker. For him, Christian theology is always ethics, and ethics is always unambiguously and unapologetically theological, both in character and in fact. That Barth’s ethics derive unilaterally from his doctrine of God is a direct outworking of his conviction that God makes God’s self responsible for us. This commitment on Barth’s part represents, among other things, his deliberate response to the profound discontentment with the state of contemporary theology prior to the outbreak of World War I. That discontentment fueled Barth’s conviction that theology undertaken in ways that render the world peripheral to its concerns is theology concerned with something other than the Word of God. Consequently, Barth never divorces ethical concerns from those of Christian doctrine. This is no less the case with the doctrine of sanctification. Barth’s most sustained attention to the doctrine of sanctification appears in §66 of his Church Dogmatics1 where it serves his larger treatment of the doctrine of reconciliation, the concern of the four part‐volumes that make up CD IV. By CD IV/2, however, Barth has already prepared his readers for how the doctrine serves his wider theological concerns. In CD I/1 (§12), for example, Barth signals the relationship between holiness and the action of the Spirit in the setting apart, seizing, appropriating, and distinguishing of those who live before and with God (CD I/1, p. 450; KD I/1, p. 472). And in CD IV/1 (§58.2), Barth focuses on three objective modes of the one grace of Jesus Christ  –  justification, sanctification, and vocation  –  vis‐à‐vis their corresponding subjective forms in the life of the creature, in faith, love, and hope. But it was as early as CD II/2 that Barth had clearly laid out his cards on the matter: 1  For a close reading of this “paragraph,” see Hunsinger 2013.

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth and Dogmatics, Volume I, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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The sanctification of [the human person], the fact that [they are] claimed by God, the fulfilment of [their] predetermination in [their] self‐determination to obedience, the ­ ­judgment of God on [the human person] and [God’s] command to [them] in its actual concrete fulfilment – they all take place here in Jesus Christ. (CD II/2, p. 517; KD II/2, p. 573)

Church Dogmatics IV/2 demonstrates the continuity of Barth’s insistence on locating the doctrine of sanctification in the context of a broader discussion on God’s triune life, election, and mission. As Barth would put it in an interview in 1968: “Election means election to justification, to sanctification, to mission. All the particular things which I then try to develop in the doctrine of reconciliation are explications of the doctrine of election… And behind the doctrine of election stands the doctrine of the Trinity. That is the order [Reihenfolge]. The doctrine of the Trinity, election, and then sanctification, and so forth” (GA 28, p. 286). There is concern also to locate the doctrine in constructive conversation with longstanding‐though‐unsettled Reformed‐Lutheran distinctions about exactly how the doctrine bears witness to the Good News, and with an even longer conversation about western theology’s interpretation of St Augustine’s work. In some ways, these mark a continuation of work undertaken during his first four winter semesters at Bonn when, between 1930 and 1933, Barth led a seminar on “The Reformation Doctrine of Sanctification.” But Barth’s attention to the doctrine of sanctification predates even this time. His essays on “The Righteousness of God” (1916), on “The Christian in Society” (1919), on “The Problem of Ethics Today” (1922), and on “The Substance and Task of Reformed Doctrine” (1923) (each published in WGT, pp. 1–13, 31–69, 131–169, 199–237), his 1922 Göttingen lectures on Calvin (TJC), those on the theology of the Reformed confessions (TRC; GA 30), his treatments on Christian dogmatics (1924–1925) (GD; GA 17), and on the resurrection of the dead (1924, based on lectures delivered in 1923) (ROD), his lecture on Rechtfertigung und Heiligung [justification and sanctification] first delivered in Rudolstadt in April 1927 (Barth 1927), his lecture on “The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life” given at Elberfeld in 1929 (HSCL), and his 1938 Gifford Lectures on the Scots Confession (KGSG), together demonstrate that the doctrine of sanctification was of perennial interest to Barth. In addition to these, his lectures on ethics, first delivered in Münster in 1928–1929 and then again in Bonn in 1930–1931, although not offering much dogmatically that is absent from his earlier reflections on the subject, provide clarification on how the early Barth understood God’s sanctifying activity to occur – in “the concrete event of our own conduct” and “at a definite place and as a definite work of God’s creation” (ETH 63, p. 175). This earlier material also serves as a reminder to students of Barth that his doctrine of sanctification is contextually alive. His attention to the doctrine during the postwar period of reconstruction, which is the focus of this essay, is marked by a rather more sanguine note than that which he was sounding in the midst of World War I. To be sure, there are also ontological shifts at play, particularly after CD II/2, but these too do not emerge in a vacuum. CD II/2’s insistence upon the singularity of Jesus Christ, the God‐ human, as the Führer is more than simply a statement of explicit theological‐ontological import. It also is a way of resisting the sanctification of any political order in much the same way that Barth presses during the period of Romerbrief wherein the sharpness of the dialectic in his theology often encourages little hope for sanctification. (Indeed, in

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Barth’s Römerbrief period, there is a sense in which the ethical subject must simply come to the divine No again and again, the Yes only concealed eschatologically under that process of mortification). Christ is always the locus of sanctification; therefore, no profane political order can ever be in and for itself holy. As always, Barth’s concern is not to be original but rather to be guided by Holy Scripture (itself a gift of God’s sanctifying work) and its witness to the one interrupting Word of God, and to speak in ways respectful of and congruent with the church’s theological traditions. CD §66 represents no departure from this habit. Its fine print is marked by exhaustive and extensive references to Scripture, with particular attention given to those texts that have defined debates on the subject. Barth’s debt to Martin Luther and especially to John Calvin is also evident in this section, and he confesses to finding himself in “general agreement” with studies on the subject undertaken by the Calvin scholar Alfred Göhler (1934) and the Reformed systematician Gerrit Berkouwer (1949). What follows here is a summary of that section.

Locating Sanctification Barth begins by offering an account of the relationship between justification and sanctification. He understands sanctification to be the “second part” (CD IV/2, pp. 265, 499, 614, passim; KD IV/2, pp. 293, 565, 695, passim) of the doctrine of reconciliation, the first part being the doctrine of justification (see §61) and the “third part” (CD IV/2, p. 500; KD IV/2, p. 565) or “element” (CD IV/1, p. 527; KD IV/1, p. 587) being Christ’s prophetic mission to the world, the vocation of discipleship in which the justified and sanctified community participates in the life and history of Jesus Christ and which individual believers mark in various forms of hope, love, and faith. These three parts of the doctrine of reconciliation correspond, in Barth’s mind, to the threefold office of Christ, the munus triplex idea often associated with Calvin’s christology. Barth, employing a heuristic device, relates Christ the priest with justification, Christ the king with sanctification, and Christ the prophet with discipleship. Like justification, mission, and participation in the life of God, sanctification is “not the consequence of a metaphysically‐conceived ‘indwelling’ of the divine on the part of the human” (McCormack 2004, p. 349) but is rather “indissolubly bound up with” (CD IV/2, p. 499; KD IV/2, p. 565), and accomplished and revealed in, the concrete history of Jesus of Nazareth in whom God, in God’s mode of existence as the Son, freely undergoes humiliation (kenosis) and in whom humanity is exalted and given a “new form of existence” (CD IV/2, p. 513; KD IV/2, p. 565) or vocation as God’s covenant partner. This is one and the same event because it is the event that is God’s very [simple] life. The ontological ground for such action is the divine election of grace that is concretely the election of Jesus Christ in whom God elects and determines God’s self for humanity and humanity for God, a decision God bears “with all its consequences” (CD IV/2, p. 31; KD IV/2, p. 33). Human vocation, which is a concrete fruit of this election and which is treated at length by Barth in §71, is the call to discipleship – i.e. to being continually awakened to and by God’s vivifying and converting command, to life marked by the cross, to the miracle of offering thanks to God as a foretaste of universal thanksgiving, to

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the perennial advent of grace  –  and is exercised in the gift of Christian community (see §67 and §72). Moreover, Barth insists that any change that is experienced by the creature is only ever relative “for sanctification is not an ultimate [letztes]” but “only a penultimate [vorletztes] word. Like justification, it is not redemption or glorification” (CD IV/2, p. 530; KD IV/2, p. 600). Still, sanctification is an empty word if it finds no concrete and awakened form in the world, if it is not about “the new actuality” (CD IV/2, p. 531; KD IV/2, p. 601) in which the sinner is really gifted with the capacity to lift themselves up to live antithetically to their being as a sinner. Convinced of the veracity of Johannes Quenstedt’s passing judgment that justification and sanctification “take place tempore simul,” indivisibly at one and the same time, Barth, with some debt to the critical idealism of the so‐called Marburg Neo‐Kantians such as Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp, departs from older Protestant efforts to understand the act of salvation according to a series of temporal sequences, the so‐called ordo salutis, judging such efforts to be an example of “psychologistic pragmatics in soteriology [corresponding] to the historicist pragmatics of Christology.” “There is,” he insists, “no such order in the temporal sense. The simul of the one redemptive act of God in Jesus Christ cannot be split up into a temporal sequence, and in this way psychologised” (CD IV/2, pp. 502, 507; KD IV/2, pp. 568, 574).2 Here Barth seeks to avoid any conflation of the event of sanctification with its psychological experience in the individual believer. His insistence, in Romans I, that “theology does not depend on ‘experiences and sensations’ [‘Erlebnisse, Erfahrungen und Empfindungen’] … but on ‘objective knowledge’” (Lohmann 1995, pp. 237–238; cf. GA 16, p. 320) – an argument made even more unambiguously in Romans II  –  places Barth in self‐conscious opposition to theological liberalism (see RII, pp. 295, 296). Barth also argues that in “the temporal sense,” the relationship between justification and sanctification cannot properly be described by thinking about a “superiority and subordination, a Prius [before] and Posterius [after]” (CD IV/2, p. 507; KD IV/2, p. 574). Although in his treatment of reconciliation Barth attends to justification first (because structurally the execution of justification takes place first), he insists, from as early as CD I/2, that formally speaking sanctification is “the main or at any rate the formally prior reality in faith” (CD I/2, p. 313; KD I/2, p. 342) and therefore in terms of the divine intention, sanctification is teleologically “superior” and prior to justification (CD IV/2, p. 508; KD IV/2, p. 575).

2  This was not a new concern for Barth but echoed that made during his time at Safenwil. See Barth and Thurneysen 1964, p. 40. For a helpful treatment of both the continuity and discontinuity between Barth’s early and mature antipsychologism in his doctrine of sanctification, see Anderson 2002. Some of Barth’s readers may wonder how exactly Barth’s leaning on some of the Neo-Kantians really helps to evade psychologism when the neo-Kantians amplified Kant’s idealism by eliminating the Ding an sich. To the extent that this is predicated upon an atemporal subjectivity (the subject is the condition for temporality) how this move is distinguished from the Cartesian psychologism Barth rejects in his discussion on Dort (see e.g., CD II/2, p. 137; KD II/2, p. 147) becomes important to understand. See Kirkland 2016.

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Barth’s main stress throughout this section, however, is to underscore that ­justification and sanctification “take place simultaneously and together” in Jesus Christ (CD IV/2, p. 507; KD IV/2, p. 574; cf. CD I/2, p. 308; KD I/2, p. 336). Sanctification is a “moment” in the one unitary twofold movement of divine condescension and human exaltation in the God‐human. Just as Jesus’ exaltation is no mere addendum to his humiliation, so too “sanctification is not a mere appendix of justification” (CD IV/2, p. 35; KD IV/2, p. 37). “When … we speak of justification and sanctification,” therefore, “we have to do with two different aspects,” or “two genuinely different moments,” of “the one event of salvation” (CD IV/2, p. 503; KD IV/2, p. 569). Humanity’s justification in the promise “I will be your God” finds its corresponding movement in the word of sanctification, “Ye shall be my people” (CD IV/2, pp. 499, 562; KD IV/2, pp. 565, 635). These two “moments,” Barth avers, take place in the hypostatic union, a union without analogy. Although the “moments” “belong inseparably together” (CD IV/2, p. 505; KD IV/2, p. 571), they are not the same thing, however; one cannot be explained by the other, and the result of their confusion is a distorted soteriology that either allows justification and sanctification to be conflated (Barth suggests that, following Augustine, many Roman Catholics and neo‐Protestants have fallen foul here) or that confuses faith in Jesus with the obedience in which the Christian disciple has to die to the world and to themselves (Barth charges Rudolf Bultmann with mistakenly taking this path [CD IV/2, p. 504; KD IV/2, p. 570]). Had Protestant theologians resisted this path, it may, Barth suggests have led to a collapse of the historicist pragmatic, and even perhaps to the dualism between an objective achievement of salvation there and then and a subjective appropriation of it here and now, in favour of a recognition of the simultaneity of the one act of salvation whose Subject is the one God by the one Christ through the one Spirit. (CD IV/2, pp. 502–503; KD IV/2, p. 569)

Barth insists that to ignore the mutuality between justification and sanctification inevitably leads to a misunderstanding of both and to corresponding errors in practice – to a doctrine of divine isolation, cheap grace, and “indolent quietism” on the one hand, or  to an “illusory activism” on the other (see CD IV/2, p. 504–505; KD IV/2, pp. 570–572).

Sanctification, Community, and Incarnation God’s work of reconciliation does not happen behind the back of the very world that is its concern. So God’s election of Israel to be “a priestly kingdom and a holy nation” (Ex 19:6) who, in both their faithfulness and their recalcitrance, bear witness to God’s mode of being in the world “in what they are and do and suffer” (CD IV/2, p. 511; KD IV/2, p. 578). Israel’s “special existence,” Israel’s being “marked off from the race, from others,” represents a witness to the divine love for the world (CD IV/2, p. 511; KD IV/2, p. 578), and a prefiguring of the world’s sanctified telos.

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The Christian community too, as a creature of the Holy Spirit and a communion of saints,3 has also been claimed by God in election for service in the world (see CD IV/3/2, pp. 762–795; KD IV/3/2, pp. 872–910) to witness to God’s sanctity, action for which God truly affects, radically alters, and redetermines a people by “giving them direction” toward “a particular and new situation.” As with Israel, the church too is a sign that God elects a people in whose worldly “mode of existence” God finds a real correspondence and imitation [reale Entsprechung und Nachbildung], albeit an imperfect one, with God’s own self (CD IV/2, p. 501; KD IV/2, p. 567). The community’s looking to Christ precipitates a history in which its existence corresponds to its true essence and the split between its being sinful and its being saints is overcome. This is one way that Barth’s actualistic understanding of God’s own history in Jesus Christ finds expression – God “creates saints” (CD IV/2, p. 523; KD IV/2, p. 591) by calling into fellowship those whose existence is now bound up with God’s own (CD IV/2, p. 527; KD IV/2, p. 596). This redetermining is not without significant resistance however, for the subjects are not willing creatures but rather those who are “slothful, stupid, inhuman, dissipated and careworn” (CD IV/2, p. 524; KD IV/2, p. 592). To such, the word of God’s reign comes as “an irresistible and invincible disturbance,” as a breaking of sleep, and as the beginning of a wakening up to the contradiction of their existence so that they are “no longer happy in the cause that they have espoused” (CD IV/2, pp. 524, 527; KD IV/2, pp. 593, 596). God seeks a faithful covenant partner in the election of Israel, and in the sanctifying activities of the Christian community, a reflection in the world of the divine holiness itself. But this longing, Barth insists, is met fully only in Jesus Christ: It is with a view to [Jesus Christ] that the people Israel exists as the people of God, and from Him that the community of the last time derives as the community of God. The sanctification of [humanity] which has taken place in this One is their sanctification. But originally and properly it is the sanctification of Him and not of them. Their sanctification is originally and properly His and not theirs. For it was in the existence of this One, in Jesus Christ, that it really came about, and is and will be, that God … became [human], that the Son of God became also the Son of Man, in order to accomplish in His own person the conversion of [humanity] to Himself, [humanity’s] exaltation from the depth of His transgression and consequent misery,

3  Barth is quick to observe that the Second Testament, in contrast to the Hebrew Bible’s description of Israel, only very occasionally speaks of the church as “holy.” The first is the citation, in 1 Peter 2.9, of Exodus 19.6; the other is in Ephesians 5.24–27. Concerning the latter, Barth repeats that the community’s holiness is not regarded by the author as “an inherent quality” but is rather the “intended result” of Christ’s sanctifying action, and “the character which He will give it” (CD IV/2, p. 512; KD IV/2, p. 580). On this basis, Barth concludes that “we can speak only of considerable reserve in describing the Church as holy” (CD IV/2, p. 512; KD IV/2, p. 580; cf. CD IV/1, pp. 685–701; KD IV/1, pp. 765–783). He notes too the “astonishing frequency” by which the Second Testament designates believers as “the saints” but only ever in reference to their corporate existence: “Sanctity belongs to them, but only in their common life, not as individuals” (CD IV/2, pp. 512, 513; KD IV/2, p. 580). The ecclesial and pneumatological character of God’s sanctifying work could have been made more explicit in §66, a fact that Barth himself acknowledged to his seminar students, and in his “Concluding Unscientific Postscript on Schleiermacher” (TS, p. 278).

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[humanity’s] liberation from [its] unholy being for service in the covenant, and therefore [its] sanctification. (CD IV/2, p. 514; KD IV/2, p. 582)

Plain here is Barth’s conviction that sanctification is principally and most directly concerned with Jesus Christ, and only secondarily and indirectly with those made holy through God’s decision to enter into, and to take responsibility for, humanity’s being‐ in‐contradiction. There is no justification or sanctification (and so no reconciliation) other than that which is given, mediated, located, and received in Jesus Christ, the One elected by God and who elects as God. Jesus Christ is the divine decision for all of humanity  –  the decision to make of humanity God’s covenant partner: “In [Christ] we are elect from eternity, in Him we are called, in Him we are justified and sanctified, … in Him everything that has to be done for us, to us, and by us, has already been done … For by Christ we will never be anything else than just what we are in Christ” (CD I/2, p. 240; KD I/2, p. 262). The form of existence as God’s covenant partner is not achieved by imitation but rather by incorporation and participation in the sanctification secured as an “accomplished fact” for all people in “the true humanity of Jesus Christ” (CD IV/1, p. 654; KD IV/1, p. 731). Following Calvin, Barth argues that both Israel and the Christian community are sanctified insofar as they participate, in different ways, in the sanctity of the one who sanctifies himself for their sake. The holiness of the faithful is therefore always, as it were, borrowed, or shared, holiness: “They do not belong to themselves, but to Him. They are saints, not propria [with their own holiness], but aliena sanctitate; sanctitate Jesu Christi [with the holiness of another, with the holiness of Jesus Christ]. They are holy in the truth and power of His holiness” (CD IV/2, p. 518; KD IV/2, p. 586). This conviction, as Barth sees it, makes it possible for theological ethics to be properly theological. Such a claim, Barth believes, eliminates too “the pride of religious self‐seeking and self‐sufficiency” and sets sanctification “in the larger sphere of the creation of God,” giving it “a solidarity even with secular things with which it is contrasted” (CD IV/2, p. 519; KD IV/2, p. 587; cf. CD IV/2, p. 517; KD IV/2, p. 585). Saints, therefore, are those who recognize and confess that they have been placed under this new determination, and who recognize and confess that “the sanctification which comes de facto on the saints in virtue of their participation in the sanctity of Jesus Christ acquires its weight” from what has already come on every other human being “de iure in Jesus Christ” (CD IV/2, p. 521; KD IV/2, p. 589; cf. CD IV/2, pp. 271, 511; KD IV/2, pp. 300, 578–579; passim).

Sanctification and Vocation According to Barth, Jesus is “the image to which we have to conform ourselves” and “the command which tells us first and foremost that we are to live as the beloved of God” (CD II/2, p. 737; KD II/2, p. 823; cf. CD IV/2, p. 506; KD IV/2, p. 573). His election is the summons of God’s sanctification upon all humanity – “Follow me” – a summons that the elect hear first and who, in the questionableness and frailty of life, “become its image

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and repetition and attestation and acknowledgment” (CD II/2, p. 512; KD II/2, p. 568). Those who hear that summons are, in the particularity and concreteness of their existence, pulled toward “a re‐interpretation of themselves in accordance with the truth” of God’s decision to be “the Holy one among [human beings]” (CD IV/2, pp. 521, 522; KD IV/2, p. 590). This command, which is the call to discipleship [Nachfolge], is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer4 calls “simple obedience” [einfältigen Gehorsam] (CD IV/2, p. 540; KD IV/2, p. 612), and is characterized by “an inward liberation from everything in which we might otherwise put our trust; the loosening of all other ties to the point of being able to sever them at any moment” (CD IV/2, p. 541; KD IV/2, p. 612). To hear the gospel, in other words, is to have one’s entire existence radically altered and re‐determined. It is to be given the gift of “direction” [Weisung]. This “direction” is “the sowing and the developing seed of new life,” constituting itself as “the ruling and determinative factor in the whole being of those to whom it is given” (CD IV, pp. 522– 523; KD IV/2, pp. 591, 592). The vocation to discipleship, to fellowship (CD IV/3/2, pp.  520–554; KD IV/3/2, pp. 598–636), to witness (CD IV/3/2, pp. 575–576; KD IV/3/2, pp. 660–661), and to “diakonal and ethical directionality” (Migliore 2002, p. 288), is also a summons issued afresh each day, always involving “the decision of a new day; the seizing of a new opportunity which was not present yesterday but is now given in and with the call of Jesus” (CD IV/2, p. 538; KD IV/2, p. 609). Reading §66 in light of §61 (on the justification of the creature) and of §71 (on human vocation), it becomes clearer why Barth rejects the habit of attending to the doctrine of sanctification principally in terms of individual conversion, or under the umbrella of ethics more generally, or in light of the sacramental activities of the Christian community, as if these were ends in themselves. Instead, justification and sanctification find their end in the election of the human creature and community for vocation, for being a sign in the world of Christ’s priestly, royal, and prophetic work, and for participation in Christ’s own ministry of reconciliation. Following Bonhoeffer, therefore, Barth accentuates that obedience toward vocation binds those who hear the call to “the One who calls” (CD IV/2, p. 536; KD IV/2, p. 606) and not to a set of principles, programs, laws, or doctrines, and not even to the command itself (cf. CD IV/2, p. 541; KD IV/2, p. 612). The faith in which sanctification is a reality is, in other words, not “a trust in abstracto or in general” (CD IV/2, p. 537; KD IV/2, p. 607) but rather a lived correspondence to God’s own ecstatic life open and self‐giving toward the other (see CD IV/3/1, p. 352; KD IV/3/1, p. 407). Clearly, Barth is uninterested to extend efforts being made to “execute the Kantian programme” after the manner of Albrecht Ritschl and Wilhelm Herrmann (PTNC, p. 292). He excludes and resists the possibility of making rational generalizations into dependable ethical constants. Ethics, for Barth, would in fact be an impossible activity were it not for the possibility of being

4  On the subject of discipleship, Barth confesses that one “cannot hope to say anything better on the subject” than what Bonhoeffer has given us in his book Nachfolge (1937) (ET: The Cost of Discipleship), which Barth judges to be “easily the best that has been written on this subject” (CD IV/2, p. 533; KD IV/2, p. 604). Barth does not, however, refer to the mündige Welt, “the world come of age,” as did the late Bonhoeffer (and also Friedrich Gogarten), but retained the metaphor of childhood. For Barth, our obedience is not that of adults but of children, i.e., children of God.

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unequivocally responsible to the command of the living God. Such responsibility is charged with the risk that characterizes faith itself. That the divine command which summons forth “response‐ability” from us is itself the means by which God sanctifies underscores Barth’s conviction that the vocation laid upon the human creature shows itself concretely in “that we understand better and better that we are absolutely dependent on grace” (CRE, p. 202).

Sanctification and Conversion There is no question for Barth that this vocation takes concrete forms (discipleship, conversion, good works, and the cross), each of which are “included” and “conditioned” by the fact that the sanctification of all humanity has already taken place de jure in Christ, who is sanctification’s “original,” “proper,” and “direct” form. To seek sanctification in forms otherwise or elsewhere, therefore, is to “look into the void” (CD IV/2, p. 515; KD IV/2, p. 582). Here, the objective and the subjective forms of God’s work in the hypostatic union correspond to the precedence of the divine grace and prefigure the fitting responsibility of the creature. Clearly, for Barth, sanctification is not an act that takes place “over our heads,” as it were. Still, a number of theologians, including Emil Brunner, Rudolf Bultmann, H.R. Mackintosh, and Stanley Hauerwas, have registered criticism against what they judge to be Barth’s neglect or downplaying of human responsibilities in the work of sanctification. Common too is the criticism that Barth does not make explicit the particular shape the sanctified life takes. What Barth’s theology does do, however, and more importantly, is to consistently bring under the judgment of the Word the ideological foundations upon which certain actions or inactions depend. Insofar as it does this, it participates in the sanctification of the church’s speech and thought. Moreover, Barth is explicit that those called to discipleship are not called to be mere “objects and spectators” of God’s activity, thereby “ignoring the freedom of the creature for any activity of its own” (CD IV/3/1, pp. 332–333; KD IV/3/1, p. 384). Rather, God has determined that the sanctification of God’s covenant partners takes place both “in time and on earth” (CD IV/2, pp. 553, 554; KD IV/2, p. 626), that the creature might be with God an “independently active and free subject,” sharing in God’s “work in our independence” as those “summoned to freedom, as those who are justified and sanctified in [God]” (CD IV/3/1, p. 332; KD IV/3/1, p. 383). This summoning to fellowship and to freedom is what Barth names “the awakening to conversion” [Die Erweckung zur Umkehr] (CD IV/2, p. 553; KD IV/2, p. 626). The conversion Barth has in mind equates to a participation in the conversion and history of reconciliation of Jesus Christ himself: “It is in His conversion that we are engaged” (CD IV/2, p. 583; KD IV/2, p. 559). Two things immediately strike the reader here. The first is the placement of this section after the discussion on discipleship  –  discipleship ­precedes conversion. Among other things, such a move is an expression of Barth’s critique against rationalistic and pietistic understandings of conversion (See CD IV/2, p. 567; KD IV/2, p. 641; cf. PTNC, pp. 165–166, 452–453), both of which place the focus and end of the activity in individual human experience rather than in the gift of

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participation in the sanctity and history of Jesus himself. The second concerns Barth’s rejection of p ­ sychologism mentioned earlier. It is clear now that although subjective experiences cannot provide adequate ground for theological reflection on the Christian life, this rejection cannot be interpreted to mean the wholesale denial of the psychological experience of conversion itself. The question raised by Barth is about how such experience should inform that reflection. Although Schleiermacher is not mentioned in §66, his ghost is present in Barth’s concerns about the place that Christian self‐consciousness plays in theological work. Barth had already raised this concern directly in his 1923–1924 lectures on Schleiermacher, delivered at Göttingen, charging the theological “genius” with departing from both the Second Testament and the Reformed project on this matter and, as he would articulate it in CD 66.4, leaving “the sphere of the vita christiana as it is actually lived for a psychological myth which has no real substance” (CD IV/2, p. 572; KD IV/2, p. 647; cf. TS, pp. xv, 196–197). Also, in Die protestantische Theologie im 19. Jahrhundert, a book that is very much about Schleiermacher even when the subject under investigation is Kant, Novalis, Strauss, or Ritschl, and again in CD I/2, Barth credits Hermann Friedrich Kohlbrügge for reminding Protestantism that its true origin and essence lies not in the “fluctuation” of subjective experiences but in our sharing in “the great acts of God in [God’s] revelation” (CD I/2, p. 708; KD I/2, p. 794; cf. PTNC, §27). Christians, Barth avers, are those who have been “roused” by this revelation. Indeed, they are those who must be continually woken up, jolted from sleep, and interrupted, over the course of their entire life. Otherwise, as both Calvin and Luther argued, sanctification could not be “an affair of the whole [person]” (CD IV/2, p. 566; KD IV/2, p.  641). Faith, therefore, looks to be “constantly” and “continually reawakened” [sie immer aufs neue erweckt werden] (CD IV/2, p. 555; KD IV/2, pp. 627–628), that those so aroused might “look up, and rise, thus making the counter‐movement to the downward drag of their sinfully slothful being” (CD IV/2, p. 554; KD IV/2, p. 627). It is to such beings that the Word comes, calls, turns, empowers, and awakens, that those who hear him may traverse the way from foolishness to wisdom, from cruelty to compassion, from apprehension to fortitude, from insouciance to works of love, from an obsession with the self to a turning on an “axis” (CD IV/2, p. 560; KD IV/2, p. 634). As Barth would write elsewhere: You are no hirelings, no paid workers, you receive and have the gift of grace. This receiving and having is your life and as such is the order under which you live, the imperative which you have to obey, because apart from this order you do not even exist. Because this is true, the Gospel is from this point of view too inevitably and as such your sanctification. (RSC, p. 73)

Although there can be no question that the “initial shock” that awakens is nothing short of a “divine mystery and miracle” (CD IV/2, p. 553; KD IV/2, p. 626) – and so there is “no question of co‐ordination between two comparable elements” (CD IV/2, p.  557; KD IV/2, p. 630)  –  “real sanctification,” Barth insists, “involves the total and most intensive conscription and co‐operation” of the creature’s entire being, apart from which “it would not be [their] awakening” (CD IV/2, p. 556; KD IV/2,

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p. 629; cf. CD IV/2, p. 557; KD IV/2, p. 630). The dynamics of this reality cannot be attested to without recourse to paradox, but what is plain is that while the event of awakening has two acting subjects, it has only one Saving Agent whose work is the creation of a “new person” [ein neuer Mensch] (CD IV/2, p. 563; KD IV/2, p. 637), one brought to life by the truth that God is for them and that they are for God. The  new person is the one who is no longer “selfishly wrapped up in [their] own ­concerns” (CD IV/2, p. 565; KD IV/2, p. 639) but has been liberated from “egocentric Christianity” and is now pressing forward “steadily to continually new things” (CD IV/2, p. 567; KD IV/2, p. 641). They are those who have crossed the threshold of their private existence and have moved out into the open, have accepted  “a public responsibility” (CD IV/2, p. 565; KD IV/2, p. 640). They are, therefore, those who have been brought to a contradiction, to being “­seriously at odds,” with themselves (CD IV/2, p. 570; KD IV/2, p. 645), as a result of continuous interrogation by the divine address. This is the event of conversion. They are those whose entire existence is being brought into question, their commitments, ­priorities, and identity, unceasingly placed at risk. They are those unremittingly “confronted with two mutually exclusive determinations” (CD IV/2, p. 571; KD IV/2, p. 646). The life lived in this event, this act, this history, is one described by Luther as at one and the same time wholly righteous and sinful: “Daily we sin, daily we are continually justified” (Luther 1960, p. 191). Or in Barth’s words: “all are sinners (even and especially the saints)” (CD IV/2, p. 586; KD IV/2, p. 663). In Barth’s hands, however, Luther’s doctrine of simul iustus et peccator is not only about the quarrel in which a person finds themselves engaged in the painful work of conversion, mortification, and vivification, but is also – and indeed is principally – about Christ being the only true ground of the believer’s trust and moment‐by‐moment confidence in a life in which “the old and the new [humanity] are simultaneously present in the relationship of a terminus a quo [a starting point] and a terminus ad quem” [an ending point] (CD IV/2, p. 573; KD IV/2, p. 647). The dynamic principle of the movement of the awakening to conversion is the gospel itself, which frees persons for God and therefore for conflict with themselves. This is the truth “which kills and makes alive” (CD IV/2, p. 579; KD IV/2, p. 655), which comes as both and at the same time “a radical termination and a radical recommencement” (CD IV/2, p. 580; KD IV/2, p. 656). Barth’s instance that this twin movement takes place in the hypostatic union itself – that is, in that life alone in which human persons are “not condemned to vacillate between a heaven‐soaring spiritual optimism and a mortally despairing spiritual pessimism, … and therefore between legalism under the banner of  the one and libertinism under that of the other” (CD IV/2, p. 583; KD IV/2, p.  659)  –  marks, in varying degrees, a detour from both Calvin and Kohlbrügge on grounds not only that both had in different ways conceded improper ground to subjective experience (and that Kohlbrügge, at least, had collapsed the epistemologically‐important distinction between subjective and objective forms of knowing), but that both privileged mortification over vivification and so failed to allow the origin of the confrontation [Auseinandersetzung] to “speak for itself with sufficient force and clarity” (CD IV/2, p. 577; KD IV/2, p. 653).

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Sanctification and “The Praise of Works” Those sanctified in Christ, called to discipleship, and awakened to and engaged in conversion under Christ’s rule, will “inevitably” manifest in their works elements of the praise of God. As Barth articulates it elsewhere: “The goal of election is holiness of life” (GD, p. 472; cf. RSC, p. 65). For the God whose work embraces all creation, and who directs all creation to a specific end in the covenant, elects also to take into God’s own service the good works of those called to discipleship and awakened by the Holy Spirit, “quite irrespective of what they might be apart from this relationship in the eyes of [others] and above all in the eyes of God, and quite irrespective of the fact that even as good works they are full of transgression” (CD IV/2, p. 593; KD IV/2, p. 670). “Otherwise,” Barth avers, “the whole event of reconciliation … would be quite futile” (CD IV/2, p. 585; KD IV/2, p. 662). The power of the resurrection makes it possible, in the freedom given graciously to the sinner, to bear “fruit unto sanctification” in a world “under the dominion of death” (RII, pp. 227, 228); but there is neither promise nor confidence that such works are empirically discernible, and still less that they are empirically categorizable. Thus Barth resists, for example, “any easy coordination of the ‘invisible’ fact of sanctification and specific ethical‐political projects (such as religious socialism). There must be no presumption about what counts as ‘sanctified’ behaviour; such presumptions are nothing more than a basis for ‘religious’ attempts to anticipate and possess God’s reality and action” (Jones 2010, p. 104). Moreover, such work is marked by a “radical claimlessness” – the sense that God is in no way put under any obligation as a result of such action – as well as by “calm,” “resolution,” “vigor,” “free humor,” and a “particular attitude” of not pursuing action according to one’s “own inclination or desire or plan or caprice but according to the direction given to [one] and received by [one]” (CD IV/2, pp. 594, 596; KD IV/2, pp. 672, 674). Election means freedom for this kind of responsibility (see CD IV/2, p. 532; KD IV/2, p. 602).

Sanctification and the Bearing of the Cross For those bound to the freedom of participating in the life‐movement of Christ, to responding positively to the calls to discipleship, and who have been awakened to conversion and to the pursuit of works that praise God – that is, to all that is the event called sanctification  –  there is also the inescapable reality of the tolerantia crucis, the bearing of the cross. This is “the most concrete form of the fellowship between Christ and the Christian” (CD IV/2, p. 599; KD IV/2, p. 677). “In recognition of the righteousness and wisdom of the divine providence,” the Christian, Barth says, accepts their cross “grata placidaque anima, [with a grateful and peaceful soul], not with … natural bitterness, but in thankful and cheerful praise of God” (CD IV/2, p. 604; KD IV/2, p. 683). Following Calvin, Alfred de Quervain, and Bonhoeffer, Barth offers two reasons why the cross is an “indispensable element in any Christian doctrine of sanctification” (CD IV/2, p. 598; KD IV/2, p. 676). First, because it identifies and bears witness to sanctification’s limits [Grenze der Heiligung] as the raising up of the slothful [trägen] human

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being in the power of Christ’s resurrection – the sui generis event that reaches beyond itself to the coming again of Jesus Christ and its accompanying judgment that will end the contradiction [Widerspruches] between what the sanctified still are and what they are already. Second, because it is with reference to the cross that a human being’s sanctification is seen to be their “movement to that goal [i.e., the end of contradiction], and therefore set in the light of the great Christian hope” (CD IV/2, p. 598; KD IV/2, pp. 676–677). The vocation given to Christ’s Body in baptism includes the call to death, apart from which the divine work  –  work undertaken sub specie historiae  –  is transfigured into a kind of “ecclesiastical Docetism” (CD IV/1, p. 653; KD IV/1, p. 729). This bearing is not a reenactment of Christ’s own cross carrying or crucifixion however, which he carried and suffered alone, but is rather a “correspondence to it” (CD IV/2, p. 600; KD IV/2, p. 679). So Barth: [T]he suffering which comes on Christians, the cross to which they are nailed, the death which they have to die, is always their suffering, their cross, their death, just as the salvation which accompanies it is their salvation, won for them and brought to them in the suffering and cross and death of Christ on their behalf (ἀντὶ πολλῶν) [for many]. Their cross corresponds to the death of Christ. It does this with supreme realism. But it does not do more. It is not a repetition, or re‐presentation, of the cross of Christ. (CD IV/2, p. 601; KD IV/2, p. 679)

Barth’s is a call to disciples to recognize that their suffering in no way at all augments Christ’s own, but which is no less for that a “witness” or “sign” to that of Christ’s. It is also a witness to the provisional nature of Christian existence (CD IV/2, pp. 605, 606; KD IV/2, pp. 684–685), to faith’s claim that human being exists only – and this is quite enough! – in the echo of Christ’s sentence, in the shadow of Christ’s judgment, and in the after‐pains of Christ’s rejection (CD IV/2, p. 604; KD IV/2, p. 683), which is the promise of God’s sanctification for all the world. Barth readily acknowledges that in the Second Testament, this cross bearing primarily takes the form of persecution (see CD IV/2, pp. 609–610; KD IV/2, p. 689), is characterized by “doubts and despairs,” and is “a foretaste of joy even in the intermediate time of waiting” (CD IV/2, p. 613; KD IV/2, p. 693), a waiting that cannot be evaded lest the sanctification of believers is mocked. So understood, sanctification means suffering in hope. Barth concludes his lengthy discussion on sanctification by offering two further observations: First, that those familiar with the cross neither desire it nor seek to bear it: “Self‐sought suffering has nothing whatever to do with participation in the passion of Jesus Christ, and therefore with [a person’s] sanctification” (CD IV/2, p. 613; KD IV/2, p. 693). And second, that the bearing of the cross is “not an end in itself, … is not an ultimate but only a penultimate word” and is only ever “provisional, indicating the provisional nature of the Christian existence and all sanctification … It is not our cross which is eternal, but, when we have borne it, the future life revealed by the crucifixion of Jesus” (CD IV/2, p. 613; KD IV/2, p. 694). Those who read Barth with charity will discover that the judicious assessment offered by his close friend Eduard Thurneysen that “Barth is no abstract thinker” and that his

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“theological thinking was from the beginning directed to the life of [human persons]” (Barth and Thurneysen 1964, p. 14) – to their confrontation, overcoming, and transformation by the liberating Word – is borne out no less in his thinking on sanctification than it is in his attention to any other central doctrine of the Christian faith. References Anderson, C.B. (2002). The problem of psychologism in Karl Barth’s doctrine of sanctification. Zeitschrift für Dialektische Theologie 18: 339–352. Barth, K. (1927). Rechtfertigung und Heiligung. Zwischen den Zeiten 5: 281–309. Barth, K. and Thurneysen, E. (1964). Revolutionary Theology in the Making: Barth‐Thurneysen Correspondence, 1914– 1925 (trans. J.D. Smart). Richmond, VA: Westminster John Knox Press. Berkouwer, G.C. (1949). Geloof En Heiliging. Kampen: J.H. Kok. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Nachfolge. München: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1937. Göhler, A. (1934). Calvins Lehre von der Heiligung. Munich: Chr. Kaiser. Hunsinger, G. (2013). Sanctification. In: The Westminster Handbook to Karl Barth (ed. R. Burnett), 193–198. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox. Jones, P.D. (2010). The rhetoric of war in Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans: a theological analysis. Zeitschrift für neuere Theologiegeschichte 17: 90–111.

Kirkland, S.A. (2016). Into the Far Country: Karl Barth and the Modern Subject. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Lohmann, J.F. (1995). Karl Barth und der Neukantianismus. Die Rezeption des Neukantianismus im “Römerbrief” und ihre Bedeutung für die weitere Ausarbeitung der Theologie Karl Barths. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Luther, M. (1960). Luther’s Works, Vol. 34: Career of the Reformer 4 (trans. L.W. Spitz) (eds. L.W. Spitz and H.T. Lehmann). Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press. McCormack, B.L. (2004). Participation in God, yes, deification, no: two modern Protestant responses to an ancient question. In: Denkwürdiges Geheimnis. Beiträge zur Gotteslehre. Festschrift für Eberhard Jüngel zum 70. Geburtstag (eds. I.U. Dalferth, J. Fischer and H.‐P. Großhans), 347–374. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Migliore, D.L. (2002). Participatio Christi: the central theme of Barth’s doctrine of sanctification. Zeitschrift für Dialektische Theologie 18: 286–307.

CHAPTER 27

Barth on Vocation Paul T. Nimmo

Introduction Barth’s doctrine of vocation represents some of the least well‐trodden terrain in the whole of Church Dogmatics and has received little thematic attention in the literature (among notable exceptions, see Hunsinger 1991, pp. 152–184; Kuzmič 2005; Flett 2010, pp. 256–262; Jamir 2016, pp. 76–112; Leigh 2017, pp. 198–207). Yet the richness and complexity of Barth’s understanding of vocation, as well as the architectonic significance that he accords the doctrine, suggest that such lack of attention is radically undeserved. To that end, this chapter seeks to explore in some depth the material content and theological import of the doctrine of vocation in Church Dogmatics. It begins with a  consideration of the place or context of Christian vocation as given in Barth’s doctrine of creation. It then considers the location, structure, and content of the event of Christian vocation as presented in Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation. It proceeds to identify and analyze some of the most significant features of this understanding of vocation within the context of Barth’s theology as a whole.

Creation and the Place of Vocation The first major exposition of the theme of “vocation” in Church Dogmatics is found not in the doctrine of reconciliation, but in the doctrine of creation, in the part‐volume devoted to the ethics of creation (KD III/4, pp. 683–744; CD III/4, pp. 595–647). The theme is already important here because, in Barth’s understanding, when God calls human beings into active recognition of and response to covenant partnership, this does not happen in the context of a world otherwise alien to God or with reference to a

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person otherwise remote from God. Instead, the revealing and reconciling address of God is always issued to creatures of God who are inhabitants of the creation of God. The central thesis of Barth’s treatment of the place of creaturely vocation is thus that God is the Creator and Lord of the human being even before God calls the human being in an event of vocation. This means that when the call of God encounters each person in his or her own particular and concrete circumstances, precisely these circumstances are already under the rule of God’s providence. This is not, of course, to posit any direct material continuity between the circumstances and the command, as if one could anticipate the latter on the basis of the former: the command of God is always, for Barth, “a new thing [ein Neues]” (KD III/4, p. 684; CD III/4, p. 595). Instead, it is to recognize with Barth that “God’s choosing, commanding, and ordering is never arbitrary” – that there is rather a “positive relationship” between what God as Creator and Lord has caused the creature “to be and become” and what God now wills in encounter with the creature (KD III/4, pp. 683, 684; CD III/4, pp. 595, 596). In both cases, there is a restriction involved: in the event of vocation, the command of God reaches the individual as a particular demand to pursue one concrete course of action; in respect of each person’s place of vocation, there exist not only “the temporal limitation of their lives” but also “a whole array of particularities and thus also … a whole range of limitations and restrictions which cannot belong to anyone else” (KD III/4, p. 685, CD III/4, p. 597). Crucially for Barth, however, this creaturely limitation and restriction are no slight or offence against human beings. By contrast, it signals the providential uniqueness of each human creature that serves as the specific backdrop for their freedom and obedience in response to the divine command. Barth gives to this “complete particularity, limitation, and restriction” of the creature the title “vocation” (Beruf) and contrasts it with “the imperatival revelation and declaration of the particular … will of God in [God’s] Word and command spoken to the human being” (Berufung) that will be treated in the doctrine of reconciliation (KD III/4, p. 686; CD III/4, pp. 597–598). Although the terms for these two concepts in German are different, the English translation of CD rather confusingly refers to both as “vocation.” Creaturely vocation (Beruf) thus serves Barth as a holistic concept: it is not identical with any one profession or function, but refers to what Barth terms  –  drawing on a phrase of Bonhoeffer – the “place of responsibility,” which Barth further describes as “the terminus a quo of all knowledge and fulfilment of the command, the situation of the human being called into freedom by the command” (KD III/4, p. 687; CD III/4, p. 598). Drawing on Barth’s own language, one might say that this creaturely vocation  –  the place inhabited by the creature  –  is thus the “outer basis” of the divine vocation  – the command issued by God. And no less than the latter event of vocation (Berufung),the former place of vocation (Beruf) is also “wholly from God … in so far as God as Creator has constituted human beings in this way, and … as Lord has preserved, accompanied, guided and ruled them in this way up to this moment” (KD III/4, p. 687; CD III/4, p. 598). But the reciprocal statement is even more important: the divine event of vocation is in turn the “inner basis” of the creaturely vocation ordered by providence. There is no humanly navigable path from the place of vocation to the event of vocation. As with the relation between creation and covenant in general, here too, it is the salvation event that gives meaning, depth, and purpose to the creaturely context.

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This is, thus far, a largely metaethical description of creaturely vocation, and the impossibility of offering a full material description is obvious given, in Barth’s words, that “it is a matter of the totality of the particularity in which the human being is this one and no other before God” (KD III/4, p. 689; CD III/4, p. 600). Yet Barth proceeds to essay an elucidation in some detail of what he describes as “some of the innumerable lines within which the vocation [Berufung] of the human being becomes a reality,” the “general criteria which are to be noted in any event” (KD III/4, p. 689; CD III/4, p. 600). The first category Barth explores is that of age, the ultimate limitation and restriction of human life. Barth observes that every human being is “somewhere on the strange – and at each of its many stations particularly strange – way from the cradle to the grave,” and that each step on this way represents a moment of both “becoming” and “perishing” (KD III/4, p. 697, CD III/4, p. 607). The common feature of every stage and age of life, for Barth, is the need to take oneself seriously as one who “should be open, willing, and ready for the doing of the command” (KD III/4, p. 699, CD III/4, p. 609). Barth proceeds to treat in turn, and with some sensitivity, the particular challenges of youth, maturity, and old age. Barth proceeds in the second and third categories to consider the external and internal limitations of creaturely vocation. The former refers to the “particular historical situation,” by which Barth means their personal, societal, cultural, educational, and social contexts. The latter refers to the “personal aptitude” of the individual, by which Barth means their talents and dispositions (KD III/4, pp. 710, 716; CD III/4, pp. 618, 623). Although Barth recognizes the great differences that exist between human beings in respect of both these dimensions of creaturely vocation, he cautions that neither dimension is determinative of the event of vocation; they can only ever be its presupposition–its place and point of departure. (KD III/4, pp. 714, 718; CD III/4, pp. 621, 625). The final category Barth considers is the particular “sphere of activity” of every individual, “the area of [their] normal, everyday, regular activity … in which [they] are in their own place and in their own way an active member of human society” (KD III/4, p. 724; CD III/4, p. 630). In contrast to the other categories, here the human creature has already exercised and continues to exercise a certain degree of choice and decision, albeit this creaturely freedom never takes place “outwith the sphere of the lordship of God the Creator” (KD III/4, p. 726; CD III/4, p. 632). This means, however, that just here, in this category, “vocation [Berufung] and vocation [Beruf ]  stand … in the closest relationship to one another from the very beginning and continuously thereafter” (KD III/4, p. 729; CD III/4, p. 634). This short subsection of Church Dogmatics thus sets forth a vision of creaturely ­vocation which, for all it sits securely within the consistently christocentric framework of Barth’s doctrine of creation, addresses attentively the genuinely creaturely dimensions of human existence. The four criteria that Barth explores are all seen as part of the providential ordering of creation, describing the creaturely space within which the divine command is encountered. Together they serve to depict the indispensable external ­context of the call of God, and betray Barth’s deep and searching inquiry into the creaturely dimensions of the human life that is summoned to obedience.

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Reconciliation and the Event of Vocation The second major exposition of the theme of “vocation” in Church Dogmatics is found in the third part‐volume of the doctrine of reconciliation (KD IV/3, pp. 553–779; CD IV/3, pp. 481–680). At this point in his doctrine of reconciliation – as at parallel points in part‐volumes IV/1 and IV/2 – Barth moves from considering the objective event of reconciliation with God that is effected and proclaimed in Jesus Christ to the way in which this reconciliation becomes a reality in the life of the sinful world and of its human beings. In the first two part‐volumes of volume IV, Barth has exposited this way under two familiar forms –  justification and sanctification. But here in part‐volume IV/3, Barth elucidates a third form under which the outworking of reconciliation is to be understood – vocation (Berufung). Right from the outset, in his survey of the doctrine of reconciliation as a whole, Barth indicates explicit awareness that he is here adopting a new course in theology. He observes that he will be going beyond the vision of the sixteenth‐century Reformers and notes his desire to bring to light the life of Christian discipleship in its teleological orientation and to seek a rapprochement between the instincts of continental European Protestantism and those of Anglo‐Saxon Protestantism that are more influenced by currents of humanism and enthusiasm (KD IV/1, p. 161; CD IV/1, p. 146). And though it forms the indispensable presupposition of the entire paragraph on this third form of vocation (Berufung), the idea of creaturely vocation (Beruf) here falls almost entirely out of sight. As he turns explicitly to the theme of vocation (Berufung), Barth moves to address “what it means positively that the human being as the person of sin stands in th[e] light [of Jesus Christ]” and thus “the event in which the human being is transferred into and established in actual communion with Jesus Christ, namely in the service of his prophecy … in the service of God and of their fellow human beings” (KD IV/3, p. 554; CD IV/3, p. 482 rev.). The vocation of human beings – along with their justification and sanctification – has its basis in the eternal divine act of election: in this act, “in Jesus Christ as the eternal beginning of all the ways and works of God … all human beings are elected to justification, sanctification, and thus also to their vocation” (KD IV/3, p. 556; CD IV/3, p. 484). This means that objectively, every person is already justified, sanctified, and called in Jesus Christ; subjectively, however, this calling must become real and actual in their own lives, in time and history. Barth begins with the event of vocation itself, in which the acting Subject is “the living Jesus Christ acting directly and immediately in the power of his Word and in this way through the Holy Spirit” (KD IV/3, p. 576; CD IV/3, p. 502). Regardless of how the call of Jesus Christ is mediated, the one called is thus always called directly by the Word and in the power of the Spirit. And Barth posits that for the human being who is thus addressed, their vocation is “a single, a total event” (KD IV/3, p. 580; CD IV/3, p. 505). Thus the process of being called by God cannot be conceived as a series of successive and incremental events after the fashion of an ordo salutis (order of salvation), whether that succession be perceived chronologically or simply logically. For Barth, the danger looms large at this point of offering a psychological or biographical description of vocation as a spiritual process in a way that is absent from the New Testament and that refocuses

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our attention away from God and toward human experience. This is not to say, of course, that Scripture does not itself seek to describe the divine work upon human beings, and Barth himself foregrounds the biblical concepts of illumination and awakening at this juncture in his attempt to portray the holistic claiming of the whole person in the event of vocation. But Barth insists that each such concept, rather than being used to identify one discrete step in an ascending process, “must be introduced and employed to denote the one, complete divine work  –  temporal and historical but as such also real and spiritual – as it is seen from one particular perspective” (KD IV/3, p. 584; CD IV/3, p. 508). And this one divine work of vocation refers not only to the first calling of the person to reconciliation but also to their ongoing call to discipleship, for “no one whom [Jesus Christ] has called is not in need of and completely dependent upon being called, illuminated, and awakened by him again” (KD IV/3, p. 596; CD IV/3, p. 518). Barth next turns to the goal of vocation, proposing this to be that the human being “become a Christian person, a homo christianus” (KD IV/3,p. 599; CD IV/3, p. 521). Barth immediately guards his use of the term “Christian” from misunderstanding, denying that the words should be identified with the “Christian” background of one’s cultural inheritance or with one’s own religious appropriation of “Christian” ideas. By contrast, he deploys the term to describe those who “belong to Jesus Christ in a special way” such that “their existence in the midst of all other human beings is determined by their faith in him” (KD IV/3, pp. 604–605; CD IV/3, p. 526). Certainly, Barth acknowledges that those who are called and become Christians remain in every way part of the fabric of the human race. However, he also insists that they are a “new creation,” set apart by grace from other human beings to become –“as those who are called to [Jesus Christ]… as brothers and sisters received and adopted by him” – “children of God” (KD IV/3, p. 612; CD IV/3, p. 533). In this vocational setting apart in time and space to live in communion with Jesus Christ, their eternal election in Jesus Christ is realized. The call to live as a child of God in this communion, however, is not the end of the story, for it requires from the very first an active creaturely response: Barth notes simply that the Christian “is called into discipleship of Jesus Christ” (KD IV/3, p. 615; CD IV/3, p. 535), to follow freely and obediently upon the way set out by Jesus Christ. This is the new truth of the life of the one called to become Christian: they are no longer their own but their whole life belongs to Jesus Christ by the power of the Spirit. This vision of the Christian person is developed further by Barth by means of a consideration of the biblical image of “union with Christ.” On the one hand, Barth asserts that the communion of Jesus Christ and the Christian does not obviate the distinction and dissimilarity between the two agents, and he carefully repudiates unhelpful concepts of a “mystical union” between them. On the other hand, Barth affirms that the communion between Jesus Christ and the Christian takes place and consists in “a total giving [Hingabe] on both sides, for all their differences” such that there results “a whole, a one, a unity that is differentiated and eventful but real and solid” (KD IV/3, p. 621; CD IV/3, p. 540). This union, for Barth, is the ultimate meaning and goal of vocation and lies at the heart of what it means to be Christian. On the one side, as Jesus Christ calls Christians, he unites himself with them, giving himself to them and making them his own; on the other side, as Christians respond to this call in faith, obedience, and confession, as they recognize their true being in Jesus Christ and act on this basis,

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they unite themselves with him. There is thus a clear direction to the union, and no sense in which its order or content can be reversed. The result is that both Jesus Christ and the Christian exist for Barth “eccentrically” in the sense that Jesus Christ exists in and with the existence of Christians and Christians are received into the life and history of Jesus Christ (KD IV/3, pp. 629–630; CD IV/3, p. 548). Turning to practical matters, Barth posits that the essence of the vocation of Christians is that “God makes them his witnesses,” such that “with all their being, action, inaction, and disposition, and then also in word and speech, they have to make a particular declaration in the midst of other human beings” (KD IV/3, p. 660; CD IV/3, p. 575). Barth arrives at this view having considered – and then rejected – a series of alternative conceptions of the principal purpose of the vocation of Christians: that they are called to separate themselves from the world, that they are called to follow a certain ethical imperative (even a scriptural one), or even that they are called to enjoy the benefits of Christ. Although there may be insight to be gained from each of these different answers, and although the last‐named answer has proven particularly influential, they are all for Barth insufficiently scriptural. He explains that “the one called in the biblical sense is actually a witness of the Word in a double sense – as one who has seen and heard the works … of God, and as a witness called to testify, who has to … proclaim to others what he has seen as God’s work and heard as God’s word” (KD IV/3, p. 679; CD IV/3, pp. 592–593). What these other answers thus fail to perceive fully is that the focus of Christian vocation as attested in Scripture is principally directed not at cultic separation, ethical perfection, or personal benefit; rather the core purpose of Christian discipleship is to witness to Jesus Christ in the world. The basis for conceiving the purpose of vocation in this way is that, for Barth, the call to union with Christ means the call to union with Christ in his work: “Christ is engaged in a work – and, in perfect communion with him, so also is the human being called by him” (KD IV/3, p. 685; CD IV/3, p. 597). Hence just as the work of Christ, in fulfilment of the will of God, has as its object “the world created and loved by God [and] the human being reconstituted by [God] in the position of covenant partner and thus also reaffirmed in his creatureliness” (KD IV/3, p. 686; CD IV/3, p. 598), so too the work of the Christian must be directed beyond the self toward the world and its people. And when the Christian seeks first the kingdom of God in their action, in union with Christ, this means their “real and concrete participation [Anteilnahme] in the great context of the history of God with the world, in salvation history” (KD IV/3, p. 687; CD IV/3, p. 599). Of course, in making this claim, there is no question for Barth of the content or order of the union between Jesus Christ and the Christian being reversed; nevertheless, in the service of Jesus Christ, the Christian truly cooperates in the work of Jesus Christ. The particular work that is in view for Christians relates to the prophetic office of Jesus Christ and thus not to the accomplishment of salvation but to its proclamation. It is for this latter task that Jesus Christ –  not out of necessity, but out of mercy –  calls Christians “to make visible, show forth, and testify to that which has been said to them and heard by them as the Word of reconciliation directed not only to them, but to the whole world, to all people” (KD IV/3, p. 698; CD IV/3, p. 609). This, then, is the final goal of their vocation – free and obedient response to the call to witness to God.

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However, pursuing this Christian witness in the world will, according to Barth, ­necessarily involve the Christian in suffering: “No one can be a Christian, without encountering affliction” (KD IV/3, p. 708; CD IV/3, p. 618). The principal basis of this affliction is neither external, from the world in its opposition to the Gospel, nor internal, from the Christian desire to witness to the gospel without domesticating its message, presenting it inappropriately, or usurping its power. By contrast, the ultimate basis of this affliction lies in the union of the Christian with Christ, the same Christ who “was and is the one who is primarily and truly afflicted – not only by the world, but first by God” (KD IV/3, p. 727; CD IV/3, p. 635). Being called to union with and witness of Christ, then, Christians live under the shadow of the cross. However, even under this shadow, the Christian experiences the presence of God at their side. And as their own suffering takes place after the likeness of the great suffering of Jesus Christ, so too it takes place in the light of his Easter resurrection. Barth thus writes that their witness points and moves beyond the present difficulties, anticipating “the breaking through of the light of the fulfilled covenant of grace into the darkness which still now surrounds it” (KD IV/3, p. 736; CD IV/3, p. 643). That future already now determines their existence, even as it yet remains hidden with Christ in God. Barth attends finally to the consequences of the event of vocation for the individual Christian, traditionally called “the benefits of Christ” and here considered under the rubric “liberation.” For someone to be called by Jesus Christ means, for Barth, not only “enlightenment in respect of knowledge of the Word of God” but also “a distinction and change of the being of the called person” (KD IV/3, p. 745; CD IV/3, p. 650). The consequent participation in union with Christ brings with it participation in the work of Jesus Christ, as the Christian is called and empowered to free and obedient witness, and in the course of this service, Barth writes, the Christian “can and will experience th[e] particular grace of their liberation” (KD IV/3, p. 750; CD IV/3, p. 654). Barth identifies a number of discrete dimensions of this liberation of the Christian: the Christian is liberated from isolation to communion, from unlimited possibility to the one necessity, from bondage before things to freedom for humanity, from desire and demand to the willingness to receive, from indecision to action, from the dialectic of good and evil to that of forgiveness and gratitude, and – finally – from anxiety to prayer. And Barth insists that, for all that the personal liberation and benefit of the Christian is neither the primary goal of their vocation nor the primary content of their witness, without the experience of this personal liberation and benefit there can be no Christian witness. At the same time, the liberation of the Christian is conceived by Barth as being an incomplete work, at least in this life. He thus writes that “the reflection and expression of the great history of the living Lord Jesus Chris in the little history of the Christian will only ever be provisional” (KD IV/3, p. 773; CD IV/3, p. 674). The position of the Christian is thus that of a pilgrim, moving from a dark past to a bright future. Their existence is not the end of the ways of God but rather a pointer toward that end. Ultimately, then, for Barth, the question of Christian identity is not principally determined by one’s experience of liberation or other people’s adjudication of their behavior, but by the appropriation of the call to witness. Thus he writes that the question of Christian identity can only be the question: “Do I believe in such a way that nothing

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remains for me but also to speak?” (KD IV/3, p. 778; CD IV/3, p. 679). It is the call to Christian witness that for Barth answers the question of Christian identity. This lengthy treatment of the event of vocation in Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation forms a creative and insightful addition to previous treatments of union with Christ, which rested content with expositions of the doctrines of justification and sanctification. Here, the existence of the Christian in union with Christ is – by the grace of God – unavoidably set in motion, drawn into the revealing and reconciling work of God in the world as servant and participant. In this calling out of the self and into the world to herald the reconciliation achieved in Jesus Christ, the Christian recognizes and enacts the true purpose of their vocation: to join in the prophetic witness of Jesus Christ in the world and only in this way to enjoy the benefits of the liberation that is the work of Jesus Christ upon the individual.

Analysis The doctrine of vocation as presented by Barth across the inextricably linked dimensions of creaturely place (Beruf) and revelatory event (Berufung) occupies an important place in Church Dogmatics. The two dimensions serve respectively as the presupposition and as one dimension of the way in which the work of God in Jesus Christ reaches and transforms human lives in time and space. There are a number of significant aspects of this doctrine that bear further reflection. First, it should be noted that the event of vocation in which the individual is called to the service of Jesus Christ – as well as the place of vocation which serves as its creational context – is given in the work of Barth a secure objective basis in the work of God, and this in three different regards. Eternally, the event of vocation (together with justification and sanctification) has its basis in the divine act of electing to be gracious to humanity in Jesus Christ that Barth calls “the eternal beginning of all God’s ways and works” (KD IV/3, p. 556; CD IV/3, p. 484). Temporally, the event of vocation (again in common with justification and sanctification) has its basis in the once‐for‐all work of reconciliation effected through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, that is, “in the history of Jesus Christ occurring in time” (KD IV/3, p. 556; CD IV/3, p. 486). And most immediately, the event of vocation in the present itself has its basis in the fact that “the living Lord Jesus Christ is the Subject who acts in this event in the power of his Word and thus in his Holy Spirit” (KD IV/3, p. 596; CD IV/3, p. 519). The objective grounding of the event of vocation in the work of God, and the fact that Jesus Christ is the acting subject of the event of vocation, highlights for Barth that the event of vocation has a miraculous quality. Indeed, Barth draws repeated attention to this aspect of vocation, arguing that “the miracle of vocation [Berufung] … is great – in its own way and in its own place, no less so than its precursor, the Christmas miracle of the birth of Jesus Christ from the Virgin Mary” (KD IV/3, p. 599; CD IV/3, p. 521). The two miracles of incarnation and vocation are certainly distinct, but they are not at all separate; they are both for Barth part of the one divine work of reconciliation in and through Jesus Christ, the former being its historical terminus a quo (starting point) and the latter being its historical terminus ad quem (end point). The appropriate human

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response to considering the event of vocation can therefore, for Barth, only be ongoing astonishment (KD IV/3, p. 599; CD IV/3, p. 521). Second, Barth’s doctrine of vocation is notable for the way in which it shifts the focus of vocation away from individual Christians as object of attention towards their participation in the work of God in the world. The purpose of Christian vocation is thus not primarily the changed status, spiritual advancement, or charismatic endowment of the Christian: Barth rejects decisively the view that “what their vocation promises, means, and makes available to the human being personally – the beneficia Christi [benefits of Christ] – is indeed the decisively, dominatingly interesting, particular, and central matter in the goal of their vocation” (KD IV/3, p. 647; CD IV/3, p. 563). By contrast, he asserts, those called by Jesus Christ into union with him are called “to attach themselves to him with their own action, to follow in his footsteps, to become with him a proclaimer of the reconciliation of the world accomplished in him, a herald of his person and his work” (KD IV/3, p. 695; CD IV/3, p. 606). This call to witness is not for Barth limited to Christians in special situations, such as those belonging to a particular religious order or those ordained by a given Christian denomination. The call to witness is rather the new thing for all Christians, regardless of their historical or personal context. Hence in relation to the calling of God, Barth writes, whatever the creaturely vocation (Beruf) of the human being may be, it “can never be understood as a prison, in which [they] are cut off today from new possibilities that are yet perhaps incredible and seemingly impossible” (KD III/4, p. 696; CD III/4, p. 606). The event of vocation is thus not restricted by creaturely circumstances, but only by the will of God. At the same time, as Barth makes clear, the situation within which people are called and the nature of the witness to which they are called will be unique and specific to each individual case. What will be true for every Christian is that the event of vocation will be characterized by an outward prophetic impulse, by a calling of the Christian out of the world to go into the world for the sake of the world. Indeed, this decentering vector of activity serves for Barth as a more fundamentally determinative indicator of Christian existence than internal feeling or external holiness. In respect of the various dynamic aspects of personal liberation that pertain to the reconciled life of the Christian, Barth writes that “[i]t is in and with their vocation that it is decided that their existence becomes the site of those transitions” (KD IV/3, p. 779; CD IV/3, p. 679). In ethical terms, Barth’s understanding of the Word of God as both Gospel and Law is clearly in evidence here: the desired human response to the grace of reconciliation with God that corresponds to that divine grace is the human witness to reconciliation with God, a witness that at one and the same time serves both God and the world. The ecclesiological implications of this vocational decentring are also significant. As Barth follows this trajectory of thought into his understanding of the church in part‐volume IV/3, the category of the “sending” (Sendung) of the church becomes the dominant rubric for understanding the work of the church. Barth writes that the service of the Christian community “is materially determined as a service of witness” and that “no more is demanded and expected of it than this particular witness” (KD IV/3, pp. 956–957; CD IV/3, pp. 834–835). As an immediate consequence, the task of mission – far from being an optional consideration or peripheral activity – is considered by Barth to be one of the essential dimensions of what it is to be the people of God,

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without which the church is not the church at all, and all Christians as members of the church are called to play their part in that work of witness. Third, it is important to Barth that the event of vocation is just that – an event. To exist as a Christian is not a status attributed to an individual in the aftermath of their act or decision, nor is it a possession of the individual over which they dispose as they see fit. By contrast, Barth avers, it is something that is given to human beings in the grace of their calling: “Christian existence as such is grounded as such in vocation, and only thus” (KD IV/3, p. 609; CD IV/3, p. 530). To exist as a Christian thus consists in life in a dynamic history of relationship with God in which one is always proceeding from the call of God that has already been received. At the same time, it is always also a proceeding towards the call of God that will be received again, for Barth is insistent that –  as the biblical example of Peter shows – “our calling to be Christians … must become an event over and over again” (KD IV/3, p. 568; CD IV/3, p. 494). There is thus a need for constant renewal in the Christian life, for constant events of vocation to take place. On the pilgrimage that is the Christian life, then, the existence of the Christian is never a perfected work: their liberation must rather always be described as “an event that is beginning but not yet completed” (KD IV/3, p. 772; CD IV/3, p. 673).To its final, eschatological completion, the witness of the Christian in this life – by divine grace – can only point.

Conclusion Barth’s doctrine of vocation – across both its installments – sets forth a comprehensive and insightful account of the way in which God calls human beings to serve the witness of Jesus Christ. Barth is attentive both to the creaturely location of vocation and to its miraculous unfolding, and his approach offers an unconventional and yet illuminating trajectory of inquiry, moving from the work of God itself through the individual as called and empowered to engage in the work of God to the personal existence of the individual. Yet this relativization of the place of the beneficia Christi in the doctrine of vocation in favor of an emphasis upon the task of witness is not finally to the detriment or denigration of the individual Christian. Rather, within this construal of Christian vocation, Barth holds out the glorious, if undeserved, prospect of the Christian participating by the grace of God in the heralding of the great work of reconciliation and thus cooperating in the history of salvation. References Flett, J.G. (2010). The Witness of God. The Trinity, Missio Dei, Karl Barth, and the Nature of Christian Community. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Hunsinger, G. (1991). How to Read Karl Barth. The Shape of his Theology. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jamir, I. (2016). Vocation in Christ. Naga Christian Theology in Conversation with Karl Barth. Eugene, OR: Pickwick.

Kuzmič , R. (2005). Beruf and Berufung in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics: toward a subversive Klesiology. International Journal of Systematic Theology 7: 262–278. Leigh, R. (2017). Freedom and Flourishing. Being, Act, and Knowledge in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. Eugene, OR: Cascade.

CHAPTER 28

Barth on the Church in Mission Hanna Reichel

Introduction: Variations on “Mission” If you are looking for reflections on how to convert people to Christianity, on how to save souls, or on how to effect church growth, Karl Barth is not the most helpful resource. He maintains that you should actually not do these things that could be called a (i) historical material sense of “mission” (as in “foreign missions”). According to Barth, these activities are God’s responsibility. God has already done everything necessary to save every soul in Jesus Christ; his Holy Spirit is the one who inspires faith; and God’s faithfulness sees that there was, is, and will be a community of believers in all times. Therefore, it is no surprise that “mission” is not a major topic in Barth’s theology. Within his extensive oeuvre, only 5 out of the roughly 9000 pages of the CD and a handful of other publications explicitly engage the topic. If, however, by “mission” one were to understand in a (ii) formal sense the purpose or objective of a given entity (as in “mission statement”), then of course the church “has” a mission. According to Barth, the church is not an end in itself; it exists due to its specific function: to bear witness and proclaim the gospel. Then there is the (iii) literal sense of “mission” (as in Latin for “sending”). In this sense, the whole of Barth’s ecclesiology and ethics are “missional.” Christian existence is constituted from outside itself, in Christ, and it is directed outside itself, as a witness to the Christ‐event in and to the world. A sent community, the church is constituted and exists as being‐in‐mission. “The Church in mission” is a pleonasm, a tautology as in “a burning fire.” This literal “being‐sent” gains a (iv) properly theological sense: It defines not only Barth’s ecclesiology, but is derived from and encompasses his doctrine of the Trinity and divine election. This mission is bigger than the church. Christ’s “own earthly‐historical

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth and Dogmatics, Volume I, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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form of existence,” the church is enveloped in Christ’s mission within the trinitarian economy. Christ’s reconciliatory sending conditions the church’s mission: It is called to become a witness to Christ in his being for others, participating in Christ’s kingly, priestly, and prophetic offices. Distinguishing these different aspects of the theme elucidates why there is so little specific reference to mission(s) in Barth’s theology, and why he nevertheless has been called “[t]he decisive Protestant missiologist in this generation” (Aagard 1965, p. 238). Everything depends on what one understands by “mission.” Barth closely links all four aspects here proposed, but this is a highly specific feature of his theology and not a matter of course.

“Movement of Serious Import”: Colonial Imagination, Enthusiasm, and Skepticism in Barth’s Early Writings At the beginning of the twentieth century, “mission” implied: spreading the gospel to foreign lands and converting people to Christianity. Mission was Christendom’s vision of global expansion: bring Christ to all the peoples – bring all the peoples into the church. Stimulated by technological progress, global travel, and mass media, the vision of “the evangelization of the world in this generation” (Mott 1900) incited the great World Missionary Conference 1910 in Edinburgh, the beginning of the ecumenical movement and of Protestant collaboration in their missionary enterprises. The time was ripe with missionary enthusiasm, relying on optimism about Western civilization and unbroken colonial aspirations. Although Barth was not an enthusiast, scattered references to “missions” in his early writings reveal a high esteem for the task, if also a certain skepticism in the face of missionary activity in practice. A child of his time, the young Barth identifies “mission” with Ausbreitung des Christentums, which translates somewhere between “spread of Christianity” and “expansion of Christendom” (GA 22, p. 60). (All English translations in this essay, except for those from CD, are my own). Barth shares the conviction of liberal theology that “we have something good, the best, in our Christianity, and since the heathen are human beings like us, we must give it to them” (GA 22, p. 60). He writes several student papers on missionary themes, reports about talks on missionary activities in local newspapers, and treats “Evangelische Missionskunde” with his confirmands (cf. GA 21, GA 22). In his first publication, “Moderne Theologie und Reichsgottesarbeit,” Barth wrestles with the question why “so conspicuously few students of modern theology, after the completion of study, apply themselves to working in foreign missions” whereas their pietistic and conservative contemporaries burst with evangelistic zeal (GA 21, p. 341). This puzzle seems to have been the first major challenge to Barth’s positive appraisal of liberal theology: He finds that its religious individualism and historical relativism do not prepare students for what Barth considers the purpose of theological education: “practical religious work” like the one carried out in foreign missions as a “witness of the faith within you” (GA 21, p. 342). The young Barth considers mission an “international movement of such serious import” but also expresses reservations, suspecting “American humbug” in evangelizing

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activities (GA 22, p. 271). In 1911, he attends talks by YMCA leader and missiologist John Mott, who only recently had inspired the World Missionary Conference. Barth criticizes the “huge, jaunty business of religion,” its tone of agitation, its accommodationism, and its “moralistic watering down of Christian truth” (GA 22, p. 271). Barth is, however, impressed by Mott as a personality (GA 22, p. 275), finding him “refreshing and vitalizing”: “Would that we had more such ‘Americans’!” (GA 22, p. 276). Among all forms of “Christian activism,” Barth expresses his highest esteem for mission and religious socialism. But precisely because these human aspirations come closest to the kingdom of God, he considers them all the more dangerous and in need of critique (see, e.g. GA 16, p. 42; GA 19, p. 54; GA 2, p. 410). In Barth’s early writings, however, mission overall receives only passing mention (for a more extensive appraisal, see Congdon 2014). This changes once Barth develops a more sophisticated doctrine of the church and when “mission” becomes a useful concept in his own contextual struggles.

Missio Dei! Barth’s Dialectical Missiology in the “Twilight” of the “Heathen Church” and Fascism’s Political Religions World War I not only marked Barth’s disillusionment with liberal theology, it also marked a disillusionment for enthusiastic visions of global mission, especially in Europe (see Günter 2002). Optimism about progress, enlightenment, and rationality as well as belief in the humanitarian values of the “Christian West” had been thoroughly shaken by the war and its atrocities. Criticism against the collusion of missions with cultural hegemony and imperialism grew louder. The task of mission could no more be correlated unambiguously with the expansion of Western culture and technology. Furthermore, the “West” itself became acutely aware of processes of secularization and estrangement from its Christian heritage. And in Germany, the young democracy proved fragile under economic pressures and the rise of fascist forces with little esteem for or outright hostility toward the Christian faith. In the ensuing confrontations, Barth soon declared: “The Christian‐bourgeois age has expired, the [Constantinian] concordat, and this also means: Christianity as we know it, has come to an end” (GA 52, p. 33). In the face of global and national challenges, the task of mission had to be redefined. It is under the rise of fascism that Barth rediscovers the topic of mission and gains appreciation in the ecumenical movement for fleshing out its theological foundations. In the two lectures where Barth speaks about “mission,” it is clear that he is not only concerned with evangelizing activity abroad but also with carving out a theological stance amidst the growing political turmoil in the Weimar Republic. In his 1931 “Fragen an das ‘Christentum’,” Barth protests against views of the contemporary situation as a process of secularization. On the contrary, the rising forces of communism, fascism, and “Americanism” have to be regarded as religions: Rather than providing mere “worldviews,” the power they claim over the individual human being is quasi‐divine. Barth therefore speaks for a Christian opposition to these new “religions” and demands “mission” as the only appropriate reaction. “Mission” here stands for the uncompromising answer with the gospel of the one true God against the idols, sharply

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distinguished both from compromising “parlamentarianism” and self‐advocating “propaganda” (GA 49, pp. 151–153). “Mission” does not denote evangelism or attempts at conversion, but a confessing stance, an all‐out witness to revelation instead of any negotiation with “fascism’s Godhead of race, Volk, nation” (GA 49, p. 151). The targets of the missionary “attack” are not, however, the “heathen” believers – Barth expresses solidarity between Christians and even fascists in their common human distress (GA 49, p. 154) – but the false gods they worship. Just days before the 1932 Reichskanzler election that pitted Hindenburg against Hitler, Barth talks about “Theology and Mission in Our Times” at the Brandenburg Conference of Missions. There, he defines “mission” as the church’s confession to God’s revelation insofar as it addresses a domain “outside” of the church. However, Barth assiduously points out that there is no qualitative difference between proclamation abroad and the proclamation at home: This outside is, sure enough, also an inside.… The church itself is and remains a church of heathens, a church of sinners and a church of publicans. Therefore, all action of the church is mission, even where it is not explicitly named as such. What we call mission is only a prolongation of what the church attempts to do in its extension of the message of Jesus Christ towards her own members who are always once more in the position of the “Not yet”. (GA 49, p. 166)

Barth refuses to denigrate “heathens” as objects of mission and, thwarting any imperialist triumphalism, develops the concept of a “heathen church” (GA 49, pp. 166, 175) in perpetual need of conversion. It is his own fellow Christians in his own supposedly Christian context that beg for these witness of the gospel as much as any foreign people. Barth thus expands the area of mission to the point that “all action of the church is mission.” Any more specific proclamation toward a domain “outside” of the church always rests on “the solidarity of the heathens inside with the heathens outside, the solidarity of the world, the creation, the people in the church with all the world, all creation, all the peoples” (GA 49, p. 167). Barth goes further in his criticism when he points out that the church is not even the subject of mission: Shouldn’t one fact make even the most faithful missionary and the most convinced friend of missions take pause, namely, that the term “mission” in early Christianity belongs to the doctrine of the Trinity, denoting God’s own mission, the sending of the Son and the Holy Spirit into the world? Is it even clear that we have any right to use it in any other way? (GA 49, p. 187, see also already GA 17, pp. 146–147)

Barth’s etymological call for caution implies a critique of all human missions. Mission is first and foremost an activity of God and not of the church. Read in context, this is not only directed at evangelizing activities abroad, but at a church that Barth finds on the brink of making compromising arrangements with fascism. This self‐critical thrust becomes more obvious when he compares “mission” and “theology”. Although they are distinct as different ministries, fundamentally share the predicament of all human attempts at bearing witness, being precarious and “ever vulnerable” to hubris

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(GA 49, p. 189). As such a human undertaking, “mission could, as we all know, just as well be an instrument of religious or cultural propaganda or even of economic or political wishes for power,” whereas theology could always be just “a highly dangerous variety of self‐authorizing speculation and intellectual self‐affirmation and self‐overestimation.” In fact, Barth judges none of the historical forms of either to be free from such “twilight” (GA 49, p. 171). Barth redefines “mission” because the Trinitarian missio Dei. Nevertheless, the church does participate in God’s mission as its very nature is derived from the being of Christ as sent by the Father. It exists as “the earthly body of her heavenly Lord” (GA 49, p. 172). The true motif for mission, according to Barth, is “identical with the actual will and command of a person, the divine person who is the Lord of the church” (GA 49, p. 187). His critique turns into an empowerment and an expansion of the missionary task. The church is sent to encounter those outside itself “as an ambassador in God’s place” (GA 49, p. 176). As the whole understanding of church is derived from the divine missio, missionary activity must arise as a “function of natural necessity of the church, as an indispensable articulation of a living Christianity” (GA 49, p. 185). Therefore, missions cannot be relegated to particular societies at the outer limits. The whole church must “recognize herself and confirm what she is at heart: a missionary community! Not a club or association for missions determined by their own decision to engage in missionary action, but a group of people called to missionary action” (GA 49, p. 193, original italics).

Missio Ecclesiae: The Sent Community in Barth’s Mature Theology The Great Com‐Mission, the Universality of Christ, and Missionary Empowerment to Witness Although Barth himself did not explicitly build on the trinitarian missio Dei motif in his later work, the 1932 lecture laid the tracks on which his theology of mission continued: the robustly theo‐logical foundation, a critical attitude toward human activity, an ­ecclesiological expansion of the theme of mission. The end of World War II aggravated the crisis of missiology after World War I, heralding the political end of the colonial age and the beginning of postcolonial reflection. The further decline of western Christianity, the growth of the “younger Churches” in the majority world and the political rise of openly atheistic systems, such as the Soviet Republic and Maoist China, served to spark an “orgy of self‐criticism” within missiology (Günter 2002, p. 528). In the last weeks of World War II, Barth spoke at the Basel Mission about the “Great Commission” (Mt 26:16–20). Barth now locates the theological foundation of mission in the particular historical event of the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Their universal significance as “both the recapitulation of the history of Israel and its culmination in the earthly life of Jesus, and the anticipation of the kingdom of Christ in his church and the whole world” makes mission both possible and necessary (Barth 1945, p. 7). The universality of Christ demands the universality of his church: “Any

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limitation to the reign of Jesus is impossible. How could the one who holds all power ever want to just found a pious little Jewish-Christian club?” (Barth 1945, pp. 15–16). Barth’s universalism arises not out of abstract metaphysics but out of a historical particularity. Against any (anti‐Semitic) national appropriation of the gospel, Barth defines the universal community of Christ as the incorporation of all peoples into the eschatological Israel. This implies that the objective of mission is participation. “Becoming Christian means: becoming a Christ for others by participation in his kingly, his priestly and his prophetic office” (Barth 1945, p. 20). Mission serves to enable others for this participation. With reference to John 20:21, Barth spells out a transitive structure of mission: As the father sends Christ, thus Christ passes on his offices to his disciples; thus his disciples pass on these offices to others who in turn participate in the same mission. The empowering objective of mission is to turn the objects of mission into subjects of mission (Barth 1945, p. 14).

Missional Foundations of Ecclesiology … Although the specific reasoning has varied, Barth is consistent in maintaining that the church is by definition in mission. Whether conceived within the word‐of‐God paradigm or within divine election, Barth’s ecclesiology is persistently grounded in its function as bearing witness. Consequently, it has been interpreted as a theology of mission (e.g. Guder 2013; Thomas 2013; Congdon 2014). In Chapter 21 of the present volume, Kimlyn Bender asserts: “the identity of the church … cannot be separated from but is constituted by its existence as mission, a central element of Barth’s ecclesiological thought… In short, the church is a missionary church because God is a ­missionary God.” Barth’s mature ecclesiology is founded on and governed by a christological missiology. The CD situates ecclesiology within Christology, which itself is incorporated into the doctrine of reconciliation. Already in terms of systematic architecture, the church is thus part of Christ’s mission to the world. Barth develops this theme in three parts: the gathering, upbuilding, and sending of the church. Each of these complementary aspects provides a comprehensive conception of the church from the perspective of one of Christ’s offices. However, all three are oriented toward the prophetic office of the church, which is to be “the provisional representation” (vorläufige Darstellung) of Christ in the world. This office is envisioned in CD IV/1 and IV/2 and developed in CD IV/3: The Holy Spirit is the enlightening power of the living Lord Jesus Christ in which He c­ onfesses the community called by Him as His body, i.e., as His own earthly‐historical form of existence, by entrusting to it the ministry of His prophetic Word and therefore the provisional representation of the calling of all humanity and indeed of all creatures as it has taken place in Him. He does this by sending it among the peoples as His own people, ordained for its part to confess Him before all men, to call them to Him and thus to make known to the whole world that the covenant between God and man concluded in Him is the first and final meaning of its history, and that His future manifestation is already here and now its great, effective and living hope. (CD IV/3, p. 681; cf. CD IV/1, p. 643; CD IV/2, p. 614)

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It is participating in Christ’s offices that constitutes the mission, the sending of the church. As Christ reconciles the whole of creation and calls all creatures, thus the church  –  as his provisional representation  –  is sent to all the world. The kingly and priestly offices are to a higher degree Christ’s work alone. The church only bears witness to their fulfillment. But this bearing witness is exactly the essence of the third, prophetic office. In fact, the church participates in all three offices of Christ by participating truly in his prophetic office. Mission’s aim is not primarily to transform others, e.g. by converting them, but to be true to oneself as Christian. Being Christian means bearing witness to the word of God, and bearing witness is what makes a human being Christian. This implies, first, that the difference between Christian and non‐Christian, between church and nonchurch is a certain kind of knowledge and a certain kind of subsequent action: the recognition and acknowledgment (Erkenntnis und Anerkenntnis) that in Jesus Christ, all creation is reconciled, as well as the active confession (Bekenntnis) of this reality. Second, this ­witness is always already directed toward a domain “outside” of the church. Church is by definition missional, that is, sent into the world to proclaim and to provisionally represent Christ in its being and actions. Just as “Christian” and “witness” are synonyms, “church” and “mission” are synonyms for Barth. The church is always in mission. Church is what happens when people are integrated into God’s mission of reconciliation in Christ.

… and Ecclesiological Foundations for Missions Not only Barth’s understanding of faith but also his conception of the church is thus utterly actualistic. While allowing for a relaxed stance with regard to traditions, institutions, and symbols, this understanding is highly demanding, as it constantly has to be actualized. Concrete confessing and proclaiming is essential for the church in order to be. “It has to be understood that the church is no church at all where she does not evangelize [missionierende Kirche ist]” (GA 25, p. 203). The whole church is under a “missionary obligation [Missionspflicht]” (CD IV/3, p. 875; see also GA 49, p. 193). Missionary activity is ecclesiologically founded and ecclesiologically necessary. Nevertheless, mission is not the only activity of the church. Barth specifies mission as one within a dozen “ministries of the community” in which the “witness of the community” materializes. The first half – praise of God, proclamation of the gospel, religious instruction, evangelization, mission, and theology – is defined as mostly the church acting by its speech, the second half  –  prayer, cure of souls, exemplary Christian life and action, diaconate, prophetic action, and fellowship – as the church mostly speaking through its actions (CD IV/3, pp. 830–901; a similar, if shorter list can already be found GA 2, p. 459). In CD IV/3, Barth spells out the specific ministry of mission along the lines developed in 1945. He reiterates that the possibility of mission rests on the universalist presupposition “that everything which was needed for the salvation of all … has already taken place, that Jesus Christ died and rose again for these heathen too” (CD IV/3, p. 874). He reinforces that “the whole community is as such a missionary community [Missionsgemeinde], mission cannot be an isolated activity endorsed only by specific

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societies or groups within the church” (CD IV/3, p. 875). And he reaffirms that the goal of mission can never be to convert people, which is God’s work alone, but rather to empower and equip people to in turn become witnesses themselves (CD IV/3, p. 876). “Being‐sent” describes the church’s whole existence (from the perspective of her prophetic office) and all of her activity, as part of her witness. Her whole existence has a missional dimension. But not all of her activity is missionary in a technical sense. Barth differentiates: Every Christian is a witness, “explains Barth,” even before any particular action. Evangelism is the specific ministry of “renovation, the reformation of the Church, … coming back to the gospel” (GA 25, p. 116), whereas mission is specifically the “inviting existence” of the Church, “looking for, and going to, those who … do not yet know the reality of the Kingdom of Christ” (GA 25, p. 117).

The Church in Mission in a (Post)Colonial World Barth’s advocacy for a missional understanding of the church should not be mistaken for any collusion with worldly powers. He is both aware and critical of mission’s being possibly co-opted by colonial forces and cultural imperialism. Unlike many a contemporary, Barth stresses that the objective of mission can never be “to strengthen confessional positions, nor to extend European or American culture and civilisation, nor to propagate one of the modes of thought and life familiar and dear to the older Christian world … and certainly not the desire to support colonial or general political interests and aspirations” (CD IV/3, p. 875). Although Barth may not be a “postcolonial” theologian in a technical sense (to Congdon’s unnecessary disappointment, 2014, pp. 395–396), both the general tenets of his theology and his specific treatment of missions provide ample grounds for alliance with postcolonial and de‐colonial criticism. Barth’s theology can easily be read as a deconstructive movement that dialectically challenges all human self‐empowerment and in a never‐ending activity of theological self‐criticism which “again and again starts at the beginning” (1962, pp. 181–182). His realistic anthropology is highly aware of structural sin and human complicity in it. Both the early emphasis on the “totally other God” and the later one on the “kingship of Christ” unmask all human claims to power as political‐theological idols and as sinful hubris. Throughout his life, Barth passionately struggled against political appropriations of the gospel (most prominently in the Kirchenkampf) and against its confusion with “modern” or “European” culture (most prominently against liberal theology). Against contemporary optimism, even the young Barth was highly skeptical of propagating “European values”: “What is that? Technology? Trains, automobiles, canons. Well, but with all that we ourselves have not become any better, let alone the heathens” (GA 22, p. 62). Barth makes it clear that, in terms of culture, India or China is by no way inferior to Europe and points out that Europeans are responsible for a great deal of destruction abroad, taking freedom and lands from indigenous peoples and exploiting them (GA 22, p. 60). Barth clarifies that missionary work has to be a service and in ­subordination to the community, not a form of mastery or ruling. Its task is bearing ­witness to the gospel, not expanding Christendom or promoting the growth of the

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church. Barth is also critical of unending European stewardship in other nations, calling for their empowerment rather than their representation: “The purpose of ­missions is to make themselves superfluous by the establishment of new missions carried on by the former heathen” (CD IV/3, p. 876). Unlike many of his contemporaries, Barth is theologically opposed to a Eurocentric view of the gospel that could legitimize mixing mission with (neo)colonial aspirations. The “good” that Barth sees in missions is neither religion nor culture but a gospel that is foreign to any culture. There can be no theological ground for claiming European superiority. Just as the field of mission is not merely outside the church but always also inside, the divide between gospel and culture that the church has to cross is not something merely external. In practice the church is neither a countersociety nor a counterculture, but is always thoroughly enmeshed with culture (GA 24). An early critic of domesticating the gospel in modern, Western terms, Barth urges that the service of the missionary is “never towards any specific historical form of the gospel – neither the European nor the Asian nor the African, but towards the essential and superior Gestalt whose concretion is revelation as witnessed by ­scripture and only by scripture” (GA 49, p. 206). This Gestalt is Jesus Christ. Barth points out that neither the languages of Africa and Asia nor, for that matter, those of Hebrew, Greek, and German have been created to serve the word of God. Nevertheless, they must be enlisted “in order to find or rather to conquer and usurp words” for the purpose of proclaiming the gospel (GA 49, p. 177). The gospel does not belong to any specific language or culture and none is more apt than any other to convey it. However, there is no culture‐free gospel and no other option than to venture into culture “with all possible freedom” (GA 49, p. 205). Although the gospel is always encountered only as embodied in human culture and language, it nevertheless has also to be distinguished from it. Without any misgivings, Barth acknowledges his contextuality and his limited relevancy to other contexts, in responding to a request for counsel from South East Asia: Say what you have to say for God’s sake as Christians, say it responsibly and concretely, truly with your own words and thoughts, concepts and actions! … You indeed do not have to become “European,” “Occidental” people, let alone “Barthians,” in order to be good Christians and theologians. You can happily be South East Asian Christians. Be South East Asian Christians! Be this neither loftily nor self‐consciously in view of the religions around you and the ideologies and realities reigning in your countries! Be this in all openness for the burning problems in your area and in the freedom given and granted to us for your very particular and special peoples, the freedom that is according to 2 Cor 3:17 where ‘the Spirit of the Lord’ is. (GA 15, p. 555)

Expecting from Barth a full‐blown postcolonial theology of mission would be ­misguided but only because it would fail to engage Barth’s theology at his strongest. Its critical edge is sharpest at short range, and missionary work overseas was too far away for his contextual engagement. Nevertheless, the tenets of Barth’s theology provide powerful resources for a postcolonial missiology, as reception clearly ­indicates (e.g. Bosch 1991).

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Mission, Religions, and Universalism Barth’s relativization of the Christian religion vis‐a‐vis other religions parallels his relativization of European culture. Barth is a post‐Christendom thinker by theological principle rather than by sociological necessity. He embraces a post‐Constantinian era, assured that when the world takes off its Christian mask, it only gives the church back its “freedom to live its sending, which is its own responsibility and its own ministry, in the world and for the world” (GA 52, p. 834). One of the reasons Barth pays so little attention to “foreign missions” may be the fact that his theology is through and through a criticism of religion – not of religions. It is important to note the difference. Barth’s rigorous attacks against religion are sometimes mistaken for a highhanded Christian superiority. However, most of these are directed at what would more commonly be called “ideologies” (cf. GA 49). Furthermore, Barth’s criticism of religion is at a heart self‐criticism of the Christian religion. Where Barth talks about the relation of gospel and culture in the context of mission, his concern is not the conversion of any “heathen,” but of the “heathen Church.” When once challenged to address the non‐Christian majority of humanity, Barth could only react with: “But what about the Christian 1/3? Uncountable nominal Christians and outright heathendom exist in our midst… Why then mission? Why cross the seven seas? That’s right! Each one must start closer to home with ‘spreading Christianity’, especially with oneself!” (GA 22, p. 60) Except for Christ, there is no true Christian. Therefore, the work of mission begins at home, and its first and most pressing task is always found at close range (CL, p. 195). Potential conflicts between missionary work and other religions are merely variations of the tension between the gospel and culture within the church. The church should not presume to possess any more of an Anknüpfungspunkt to revelation than any other human being or community: ­“Missionary proclamation [Missionspredigt]” is “the prototype of all church proclamation” (GA 49, p. 176). Whether the message is repeated all over again or heard for the first time, it can never build on any natural or cultural capital. Faith is always “creatio ex nihilo. What it proclaims is not healing to the sick, but resurrection to the dead” (GA 49, pp. 175–176). In CD IV/3 Barth elaborates on the “specifically Christian form of sin” (GA 49, p. 374), namely, that those who believe themselves to be Christians, and to already p ­ ossess the truth, can thereby only turn faith into falsehood. Barth’s version of Reformation’s simul iustus et peccator destroys any claim to Christian superiority. Contrary to claims of enlightenment thinkers and cultural Protestants, the Christian religion is no better than any other religion. The Christian is just as heathen as anyone else. On the other hand, the “heathen” are just as much “inside” salvation if in that reconciliation is already an objective reality in Christ. Thus Barth asks, “Is it even possible to address people as heathen, or do we not have to also address the Indian as the one for whom Christ has already done everything?” (GA 52, p. 392). The only theologically relevant difference is that between God and humanity – not between Christians and Hindus or Asians and Europeans. Mission is a universal exigency, not a European or Christian project. The only difference, ­consist in subjective Christian knowledge about the objective reality of reconciliation in Christ, and this should only serve to ease Christians’ sense of their self‐importance and free them to participate in God’s mission by their witness.

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Mission thus has to treat other religions and cultures “with a severe respect” and “with a complete absence of the crass arrogance of the white man” (CD IV/3, p. 875). The “equally sincere lack of respect” on the other hand, for all religions (including Christianity) arises not out of any cultural or religious superiority, but is due to the utter opposition of the gospel to any kind of self-sufficient culture or religion (CD IV/3, p. 875). If there is an exceptional case in the world of religions for Barth, it is not Christianity but Judaism. Over against anti‐Semitic sentiments and well‐meant attempts at conversion, Barth maintains, “Mission is not the witness which [the church] owes to Israel” (CD IV/3, p. 877). There is no question that Israel is God’s chosen people and worships the true God. Christ has already come to them, “kata sarka He is first their Christ” (CD IV/3, p. 877). Israel is the tree onto which the church is engrafted. The ­synagogue is therefore not an object of mission nor a case for a Christian theology of religions, but for ecumenical relations. Jews are not dependent on Christians on the way to divine reconciliation, but quite the contrary. The “divine mission … to call all the ­peoples to Zion” is originally theirs (GA 16, p. 59). If Jews have rejected Christ “and still hasten towards a future that is now empty,” the church’s appropriate reaction cannot be contempt but only contrition that “it has not done for the Jews the only real thing which it can do, attesting the manifested King of Israel and Saviour of the world, the imminent kingdom, in the form of the convincing witness of its own existence” (CD IV/3, p. 878). The only way forward for the church is not evangelize, but to “make the synagogue jealous” (CD IV/3, p. 878).1 Barth’s concept of mission is highly demanding in the witness it requires, yet it is utterly relaxed with regard to its outcomes (CD IV/3, p. 845). Objectively, nothing depends on the success of missionary endeavors. Because Barth never tires of stressing that everything decisive has already happened in Jesus Christ, he has often been “accused” of universalism (cf., e.g. Manecke 1972). To clarify matters, Barth retorted, “I do not believe in universal reconciliation [Allversöhnung], but in Jesus Christ, the universal Reconciler [Allversöhner]” (GA 25, p. 189). In any case, it is not the church’s witness or its “success” in converting people that has the ultimate word in the matter.

Barth and Beyond: Summary and Outlook In the semantics of “mission,” many aspects of Barth’s theology converge. “The reason for the existence of the Church is simply and totally her commission [Auftrag]” (GA 25, p. 99). The church has a mission [Auftrag], and this mission is to be a witness [Zeuge/ Zeugnis]. Thus directed in a mission [Sendung] to a domain outside herself, the sent community is a “missionary community [Missionsgemeinde] through and through” (GA 25, p. 151). Her witness is to reflect and participate in God’s universal mission of ­reconciliation in the world by sharing in its own way in Jesus Christ’s priestly, kingly, and prophetic offices [missio Dei]. In order to fulfill this mission, the church – among

1  For a post-Barthian critique of “making Israel jealous” in favor of contrition, confession of sin, repentance, solidarity, and if possible even reparations by the church toward the synagogue, see Hunsinger 2015, p. 94.

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other things  –  engages in evangelism and missionary work [Missionieren]. Ecclesiologically founded, these activities form a distinct ministry but are not qualitatively different from other forms of proclamation, teaching, and diaconal service. This short summary may serve to indicate why Barth’s ecclesiology has been called missional through and through, while he pays the specific ministry of mission comparatively little attention. If all fires burn and the church is by nature in mission, a specific “topos” “on mission” becomes superfluous. Barth had no experience in missionary work nor extended insight into its challenges and exigencies, and he did not intend to formulate a full‐fledged theology of missions. Others may be better equipped to do so. However, his theology provides resources for a theology of missions as well as for the comprehensive reformulation of theology as missional theology. Translations that render Barth’s talk of Auftrag, Sendung, or Zeugnis univocally as “mission” have facilitated the mining of his theology for this purpose. Barth rigorously criticized all human activity, especially with regard to “religion,” and denied all possibility of natural theology, an assumed starting point for missions. Early on, leading missiologists therefore regarded his theology as a “strong obstruction to mission” (GA 49, p. 161). Others welcomed the theological reorientation by dialectical theology (Hartenstein 1928). A student of Barth’s, Karl Hartenstein coined the phrase of ‘missio Dei’ (1934), which went on to become the World Council of Churches’s (WCC’s) leading paradigm of missiology in the 1960s (see Bosch 1991). Although the historical connection between Barth’s use of the phrase in 1932 and the missio Dei concept in the aftermath of the International Missionary Council at Willingen 1952 remains dubious (see Flett 2010), the missio Dei paradigm indeed manifests important insights from Barth’s theology. It defines “mission” primarily as a characteristic of the Triune God in his involvement with the world and only subsequently as an action of a church sent into the world to participate in God’s mission; and it maintains that the church is by definition missional. However, a variety of approaches employ the watchword of missio Dei differently, building on diverse insights from Barth’s theology (see Rosin 1972; Richebächer 2003; Flett 2010; see also, assessments of the reception of Barth in Manecke 1972; Wrogemann 1997; Bentley 2010; Flett 2010; Reichel 2017). The main line of reception points out that because God’s mission is the multifaceted reconciliation of the world, a church participating in his mission will always be a “church for others and church for the world” (WCC 1967). In solidarity with those who suffer, it strives for the humanization of the world and for “justice, peace and the integrity of creation.” Other prominent approaches maintain that the gospel as God’s revelation and self‐communication to the world works according to a “plausibility structure” different from that of any given culture. Subsequently, the church’s mission will constitute a counterculture to the societies it inhabits. Building on the missio Dei understanding as further developed by Lesslie Newbigin, the “missional church” movement has in the past two decades developed a vision for a post‐Christendom theology in North America as a newly emerging mission field (see Guder 1998; Guder 2015; Newbigin 1984). As the church’s “outside” domain grows larger, interest in Barth’s theology of mission has recently increased in different parts of the world. New insights can be expected in the years to come.

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References Aagard, J. (1965). Some main trends in modern Protestant missiology. Studia Theologica 19: 238–259. Barth, K. (1945). Auslegung von Mt 28,16–20. Basel: Missionsbuchhandlung. Barth, K. (1962). Einführung in die evangelische Theologie. Zürich: TVZ. Bentley, W. (2010). The Notion of Mission in Karl Barth’s Ecclesiology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bosch, D. (1991). Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission. New York: Orbis. Congdon, D. (2014). Dialectical theology as theology of mission: investigating the origins of Karl Barth’s break with liberalism. International Journal of Systematic Theology 16 (4): 390–413. Flett, J. (2010). The Witness of God: The Trinity, Missio Dei, Karl Barth, and the Nature of Christian Community. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Guder, D. (ed.) (1998). Missional Church: The People of God Sent on a Mission. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Guder, D. (2013). Mission. In: The Westminster Handbook to Karl Barth (ed. R. Burnett), 150–151. Louisville: John Knox. Guder, D. (2015). Called to Witness: Doing Missional Theology. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Günter, W. (2002). The history and significance of world mission conferences in the 20th century. International Review of Mission 92: 521–537. Hartenstein, K. (1928). Was hat die Theologie Karl Barths der Mission zu sagen? Munich: Kaiser. Hartenstein, K. (1934). Wozu nötigt die Finanzlage der Mission? Evangelisches Missionsmagazin 79: 217–229. Hunsinger, G. (2015). After Barth: a Christian appreciation of Jews and Judaism. In: Conversational Theology, 93–108. London: Bloomsbury/T&T Clark. Manecke, D. (1972). Mission als Zeugendienst: Karl Barths theologische Begründung der

Mission im Gegenüber zu den Entwürfen von Walter Holsten, Walter Freytag und Joh. Christiaan Hoekendijk. Wuppertal: Brockhaus. Mott, J. (1900). The Evangelization of the World in this Generation. New York: Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions. Newbigin, L. (1984). The Other Side of 1984: Questions for the Churches. British Council of Churches. Reichel, H. (2017). The sending of the church and civil society: a test case for a comprehensive missional paradigm. In: Church and Civil Society: German and South African Perspectives (eds. M. Welker, N. Koopman and J.M. Vorster), 221–250. Stellenbosch: African Sun Media. Richebächer, W. (2003). Missio Dei: the basis of mission theology or a wrong path? International Review of Mission 92: 588–605. Rosin, H. (1972). Missio Dei: An Examination of the Origin, Contents and Function of the Term in Protestant Missiological Discussion. Leiden: Interuniversity Institute for Missiological and Ecumenical Research. Thomas, G. (2013). Missionstheologische Grundentscheidungen in der KD Karl Barths. Zeitschrift für Dialektische Theologie 29: 11–34. World Council of Churches (1967). The Church for Others, and the Church for the World: A Quest for Structures for Missionary Congregations. Final Report of the Western European Working Group and North American Working Group of the Department on Studies in Evangelism. Geneva: WCC. Wrogemann, H. (1997). Mission und Religion in der systematischen Theologie der Gegenwart: Das Missionsverständnis deutschsprachiger protestantischer Dogmatiker im 20. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

CHAPTER 29

Barth on Participation in Christ Adam Neder

Introduction For all its breadth and complexity, Karl Barth’s understanding of the Christian message revolves around the simple claim that God’s gracious action toward the world is concentrated “in Christ,” who is both the savior of the world and its salvation, the giver of grace and grace itself. Not since the apostle Paul has one phrase so dominated a theologian’s work. According to Barth, revelation, election, creation, reconciliation, and redemption all take place “in Christ,” and their meaning and significance are likewise revealed in him. In fact, the very being of humanity itself is objectively included in the being of Jesus Christ and is subjectively (i.e. by individual people) realized in him. In these acts of inclusion and realization, the creature is incorporated into a depth of fellowship that is nothing less than participation in the being of God. Statements such as these are at the heart of Barth’s theology. Yet they cry out for explanation. How can Jesus Christ be both the giver of grace and grace itself? The giver of grace surely, but grace itself? Or what does it mean to say that the being of humanity is objectively included in the being of Jesus Christ? How, precisely, should this statement be understood? And what does it mean to say that human being is subjectively realized in Christ? How can the being of humanity be both objectively included in Christ and subjectively realized in him? Surely “in Christ” means something different when referring to objective inclusion than when referring to subjective realization, but what exactly is the difference? And how do we understand participation in Christ as participation in the being of God? Does Barth not go out of his way to reject deification repeatedly in every volume of the Church Dogmatics? If so, then how can fellowship with God be a form of participation in God? Barth certainly never let go of his commitment to the ineradicable distinction between the Creator and his creatures, but how does that commitment

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth and Dogmatics, Volume I, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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square with his assertion that salvation means participation in God’s being? The deeper one delves into Barth’s theology, the more such questions abound. This essay will trace some important features of Barth’s doctrine of participation in Christ as it unfolds within the Church Dogmatics. Far from being a minor aspect of his thought, this theme belongs to the fundamental core of Barth’s theology and is present, in one way or another, in virtually every part of the Church Dogmatics. Without a clear grasp of this central doctrine, Barth’s soteriology, indeed his theology as a whole, cannot be understood.

Revelation Barth’s conception of participation in Christ as he articulates it in CD I/1 is grounded in his understanding of revelation. According to Barth, revelation is more than the giving and receiving of information. It is rational, to be sure, because it is divine reason communicating with human reason. But because revelation is Dei loquentis persona [God speaking in person], it occurs as an event in which God establishes an orderly fellowship between himself and human beings. “God’s Word means that God speaks,” and because it is God who speaks, to hear his Word is not simply to become aware of him, but to obediently acknowledge him as Lord (CD I/1, p. 136). According to Barth, this event of divine speaking and human hearing is a union – a “mutual indwelling (Beieinanderseins) of the Word and man” (CD I/1, p. 241; KD I/1, p. 254) – and the connection with participation in Christ is clear: “As God’s Word is spoken to man, it is in him and he is in the Word” (CD I/1, p. 241). Throughout CD I/1 Barth stresses the distinction between God and believers within this union, and he finds it necessary to criticize what he regards to be numerous mistaken claims and assumptions concerning the nature of this relationship. But his goal is essentially constructive rather than destructive. Barth’s critical comments regarding historicism, psychologism, the analogia entis, etc. all support his positive claim that the event of revelation is an event of divine–human communion. “The point of God’s speech,” he argues, “is not to occasion specific thoughts or a specific attitude, but through the clarity which God gives us, and which induces both these in us, to bind us to himself” (CD I/1, p. 175). When one considers the knowledge of God, “the decisive point materially is that it is a determination of the whole self‐determining man” (CD I/1, p. 204). In other words, knowledge of God is thoroughly existential: “We know” the Word of God, Barth writes, “when we can only affirm it because we ourselves are its actualization in our entire existence” (CD 1/1, p. 224). According to Barth, the “co‐existence” (Zusammensein) of the Word with those who know the Word occurs as two actions – the divine determination of lordship and the human response of free faith and obedience – are united in a single event (CD I/1, p. 200; KD I/1, p. 208). Within this union, God, and human beings are not separated or divided from one another, and thus there is a real union, a mutual indwelling. Yet neither are they confused with one another or somehow changed into one another. God always remains the Lord of the occurrence of this fellowship, and therefore his action to establish and maintain it always precedes and makes possible the human action of

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­ articipating in it. To be God is to be the one who is always gracious; to be properly p human is to be the corresponding active recipient of God’s grace. This ordering of giving and receiving, preceding and following, lordship and grateful obedience, constitutes the basic difference between the parties within their fellowship. In faith, human beings are united to the Word, elevated outside of their own range of possibilities and potential, and liberated to live in communion with God – to live in the freedom of “conformity to God” (CD I/1, p. 238). Although Barth stressed that an accurate depiction of this union requires a clear demarcation between the Lord and his creatures, he was convinced that such a union really exists, and his doctrine of revelation was an attempt to describe it in a manner faithful to the identities of its participants.

Election and Anthropology The most basic and far‐reaching dogmatic point that Barth makes in CD II/2 is that election is an aspect of the doctrine of God. Election “is part of the doctrine of God because originally God’s election of man is a predestination not merely of man but of  himself ” (CD II/2, p. 3). Election is an eternal decision, a “primal decision” (Urentscheidung) by which God determines his being as Lord of the covenant of grace (CD II/2, p. 9; KD II/2, p. 8). God is free. Nothing ad intra or ad extra compelled him to create or redeem the world. But his free and gracious determination to enter into covenant relationship with a reality ad extra means that “God is God in this way and not in any other” (CD II/2, p. 6). This decision establishes a relation “which is irrevocable, so that once God has willed to enter into it, and has in fact entered into it, he could not be God without it. It is a relation in which God is self‐determined, so that the determination belongs no less to him than all that he is in and for himself ” (CD II/2, p. 6). Election is a decision made by Jesus Christ as well as one that first of all concerns him. It is good news for everyone, to be sure, but only because everyone is elect in him. And that raises a very obvious question: What does it mean to be elect “in him?” In a somewhat general sense, Barth’s position is unmistakable. Because Jesus Christ is the origin of all things, nothing exists apart from him. He is not accidentally related to all creaturely things but is their most fundamental presupposition. Jesus Christ “encloses” the existence and history of humanity within himself (CD II/2, p. 458). In this sense, everything is “in Jesus Christ.” This leads Barth to the startling conclusion that human nature as such does not exist apart from its being in Jesus Christ, apart from its being within the covenant of grace. This claim is analogous to Barth’s previous assertion that God is God exclusively within the covenant. Although Barth does not make this connection explicit, a similar thought is operative in both cases. Just as election means that “God is God in this way and not in any other” (CD II/2, p. 6), so too does it mean that there is no such thing as human being apart from its being “in Jesus Christ.” “There is no such thing as a created nature which has its purpose, being and continuance except through grace” (CD II/2, p. 92). Let’s examine this claim more closely. Barth’s theological anthropology, implicit in his doctrine of election, is rooted in a single, simple, and very wide‐ranging presupposition – that Jesus Christ alone establishes

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and reveals the truth of human nature: “The ontological determination (ontologische Bestimmung) of humanity is grounded in the fact that one man among all others is the man Jesus” (CD III/2, p. 132; KD III/2, p. 158). Or, as he puts it a few pages later, it is “ontologically decisive (ontologisch entscheidend) that one man among all others is the man Jesus” (CD III/2, 135; KD III/2, 162). To know what human nature is, one must look to the place where it has been enacted and definitively established – in Jesus Christ. Human nature has no “independent signification” apart from him (CD II/2, p. 8). He is “the one Archimedian point given us beyond humanity, and therefore the one possibility of discovering the ontological determination of man” (CD II/2, p. 132). In the election of Jesus Christ and its fulfillment in time, “a decision has been made concerning the being and nature (Sein und Wesen) of every man by the mere fact that” Jesus Christ himself is a human being (CD III/2, p. 133; KD III/2, p. 159).1 This thought is so simple as to be elusive. The irreducible fact of human nature is that Jesus Christ is a human being (not some other supposedly defining human characteristic such as rationality, responsibility, existence in relationship, or anything else). Jesus Christ’s fulfillment of the covenant of grace establishes the context within which human beings exist, and that context is determined fundamentally by the relationship of lordship and obedience that Jesus Christ embodies. Thus election, covenant, Christology, anthropology, history, participation, and ontology are all inextricably linked. The essence of human life is to be drawn into the covenant, to exist within the sphere of this relationship. Jesus Christ is himself the relationship of the transcendent Lord and the perfectly obedient servant. The occurrence of this relationship constitutes his history. Therefore, human life is life “in him”  –  life in the history of this relationship. For Barth, to say that the Son of God assumed a human nature is not to say that the Son of God assumed a substance that could otherwise be described apart from this act of assumption. Instead, it means that the Son of God lives as a human being, indeed the human being he was always elected to be. Barth is not simply affirming the anhypostatic and enhypostatic character of Jesus Christ’s human nature. Traditionally, that theologoumenon was a defense against adoptionism. Barth’s point, however, is that there is no humanity at all apart from the act of this union. Indeed, the hypostatic union is itself the history of the dynamic relationship between God and humanity in one person, a relationship that defines humanity itself. Jesus Christ is in his one person the history of the movement from the Creator to the creature and back again, the history of sovereign lordship and free obedience as it happens. As Barth will say later in CD IV/2, “the Subject Jesus Christ is this history” (CD IV/2, p. 107). His identity – the person of the union – is always the uninterrupted dynamic movement of divine lordship and human obedience. Moreover, if the union of divine and human natures in Jesus Christ occurs as the actions of this history occur – as the actions of the divine Lord draw forth the freely faithful and obedient actions of the man Jesus  –  the union of believers with Jesus

1  In Barth’s discourse Sein (being) seems to refer to something concrete, whereas Wesen (essence) pertains to something generic.

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Christ can be expected to occur in analogy to this dynamic movement. As the summons of the Lord is met with the free obedience of his servants, history occurs and human being is actualized. To be sure, Jesus Christ’s history is “primal history” (CD III/2, p. 157), and the history of those whom he represents “is clearly history in a secondary, derivative and indirect sense of the term” (CD III/2, p. 161). But the hypostatic union is “historical,” and so too is human fellowship with God. Barth describes this history, the event of human fellowship with God, in a variety of ways: the transcending of human beings by God and their corresponding transcendence of their human limitations; the procession of divine action and the return of fitting human action; the divine election of humanity and the human election of God, etc. All of these ways of speaking point to the same event: the union of God and humanity that occurs as God’s command is met with human obedience. Thus, Barth concludes that “the formula that man is ‘in the Word of God’ does not denote a mere state, but the being of man as history” (CD III/2, p. 164). It is essential to notice that participation in Christ takes two forms: an objective (de jure) form and a subjective (de facto) form. Failure to recognize the double structure of Barth’s understanding of participation in Christ is the source of numerous interpretive errors. According to Barth, objective participation in Christ is the more basic of the two forms. It is the ground of the subjective form, which is its consequence and goal, its telos. Moreover, and this is crucial to recognize, the nature of objective participation in Christ guarantees that participation in Christ will also include a subjective form. Given the significance of this feature of Barth’s teaching, it is necessary to examine these claims closely. Jesus Christ is the object of election. Humanity benefits from his election by virtue of its being in him. And to be “in Christ” in the objective sense means that humanity has Jesus Christ as its representative (Vertreter) and head. His life, death, and resurrection, his fulfillment of the covenant between God and humanity, are accomplished on behalf of humanity. The reconciliation of the world to God in Christ is an objective fact, a perfect reality that requires no supplementation to become real (see, for example, Col 1:15– 23; 2 Cor 5:14–21; Rom 5:6–11). Neither its reality nor its truth is contingent upon its reception. By being who he is for humanity, Jesus Christ establishes, in an objective sense, the being and identity of humanity. He establishes, constitutes, and defines human being. Parenthetically, Jesus Christ does not represent the whole of humanity – his existence is not of decisive significance for the rest of humanity – because he assumes human “nature” as such and does something in or to it. On this view, objective participation in Christ would mean that human beings share the same essence or substance that the Son of God assumed into his person and healed or cleansed. Such an idea is foreign to Barth’s way of thinking. According to Barth, human nature – the humanum of every human creature – is something that Jesus Christ creates through his life of faith and obedience in fulfillment of the covenant of grace determined from all eternity. What human nature or essence is is decided by God in election and is actualized by Jesus Christ in the series of decisions and actions that correspond to that eternal decision and which constitute the history of the covenant. Human nature is as Jesus Christ does it, not as he does something to “it.”

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And yet this objectivity is of a very specific sort. De jure participation in Christ does not exclude or replace the action of individual human beings. Rather, it establishes a trajectory for humanity, defining humanity by giving it a telos. In this way, the objective reality of the being of humanity in Christ includes within itself, establishes, and guarantees genuine human subjectivity. In human faith and obedience, the objective aspect of election – the objective presence of the being of humanity in Jesus Christ – is realized in the action of individual human beings “as the fulfillment (Vollzug) of that prior divine decision” (CD II/2, p. 19; KD II/2, p. 19). Election and obedience are related to one another as ground and consequence. Jesus Christ’s fulfillment of the covenant of grace is a work of faithful obedience. As such it establishes true humanity as a life of faithful obedience. The telos of election is Jesus Christ’s life history, and the telos of objective participation in Christ is subjective participation in Christ. In both cases, the telos is realized in obedience. In faith and obedience human beings become (in themselves) who they objectively are (in Christ). Their subjective existence corresponds (and bears witness) to their objective being in him. Over against certain critics, Barth maintains that there is a difference – a real and important difference – between the accomplishment of salvation in Jesus Christ and the realization of this fact within the lives of those whom he represents. In other words, there is a difference between de jure and de facto participation in Christ. Regarding the latter, Barth even goes as far as to say that “for all people everything depends upon it coming to pass” (CD IV/1, p. 15, trans. rev; KD IV/1, p. 14). However, given the clarity and strength of his claims about objective participation in Christ, many readers find it difficult to imagine how Barth can affirm subjective participation in Christ. Or if they recognize that he does affirm it, and that he has a great deal to say about it, they struggle to take such statements seriously. The solution to this problem lies in the perception that objective participation in Christ is a teleological reality. Salvation is not first of all a question posed to humanity. It is a truth proclaimed to humanity. But this truth itself poses a question that demands an answer from humanity. Or, to put it another way, Jesus Christ is the answer to the question of human salvation and as such poses the further question to humanity: Will you become who you really are? As Barth writes, “To be or not to be is the question now” (CD IV/1, p. 293). Thus, although our salvation is an accomplished reality in Jesus Christ, not merely a possibility, this does not exclude but includes the fact that this reality awaits its confirmation and fulfillment in the lives of individuals by the power of the Holy Spirit. For Barth, the objective aspect of salvation is not fulfilled until it reaches its subjective actualization by grace through faith.

Reconciliation Although the christocentric orientation of Barth’s theology is in place from the beginning of the Church Dogmatics, Barth’s most explicit treatment of the person and work of Christ occurs in the fourth volume – the doctrine of reconciliation – which is an elaborate description of the thesis that “Jesus Christ is the atonement” (CD IV/1, p. 34). Rather than dividing the person and work of Christ into discrete chapters, Barth set out to integrate the two into a unified whole, offering a description of Christ’s “active person

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or his personal work” (CD IV/1, p. 128). He reshapes and interweaves the states of humiliation and exaltation, the threefold office, and the hypostatic union into a single fabric. Moreover, because the Holy Spirit is “the power in which Jesus Christ attests himself,” this volume includes Barth’s most extensive pneumatology (CD IV/2, p. 648). Finally, because the atonement is the history of Jesus Christ in whom the whole of humanity participates, Barth also offers lengthy sections on sin, the church, faith, hope, love, justification, sanctification, vocation, as well as a partially completed ethics of reconciliation. The scope and ambition of this volume are astonishing, and Barth’s doctrine of participation in Christ runs like a red thread through the entire volume, bearing much of the weight of the argument as a whole. Thus, a great deal of important material related to our theme will have to be left unexamined. In the rest of this section, I will focus on two especially significant questions – whether Barth’s doctrine of the hypostatic union leaves room for the possibility of participation in God and the question of the relationship between participation in Christ and justification. Jesus Christ is both God and human. All the older orthodox Christologies affirmed this, and Barth is clear that any subsequent theology that wishes to be Christian must likewise affirm it. But according to Barth, the common flaw in these Christologies is their description of the hypostatic union in static rather than active‐historical terms. Jesus Christ is both God and human, Barth asserts, but he is so dynamically and ­historically as an event, not statically as the joining of two independently existing substances. For what is the meaning, in this answer, of the little world “and”? This “and” tells us who He is. But is there any standpoint from which we can see and expound it as the description of an immobile and rigid contiguity and fusion of two elements? Certainly, the word speaks of a union (Vereinigung). But it is a union in which there can be neither mixture nor change, division nor separation. The being of Jesus Christ consists in this union. “Union”? To say this is already to suggest an act, or movement… On what ground, quo iure, is the distinction made between unitio and unio, which necessarily results in unio acquiring the sense of unitas and denoting a static and non‐actual twofold being, with inevitable consequences for the interpretation of communio and comunicatio? Can we say “Jesus Christ,” and therefore “God and man,” “Creator and creature,” without making it clear that we are speaking of the One who exists in this way only in the act of God, and therefore the occurrence of this history? Can we see what he became in this act, “God and man,” but ignore—or leave behind as a mere presupposition—the act in which he became it, and therefore his becoming? Can we say Verbum caro but conceal, or give no emphasis to, the factum est? (CD IV/2, p. 109; KD IV/2, pp. 120–121)

This way of thinking about the hypostatic union is not the outworking of a commitment to a preconceived actualistic ontology but rather an attempt to offer a fitting description of the living Lord Jesus Christ himself, as attested by Holy Scripture. Barth asks, “Does not everything depend on our doing justice to the living Jesus Christ? But, at root, what is the life of Jesus Christ but the act in which God becomes very God and very man, positing himself in this being? What is it but the work of this union (Vereinigung)” (CD IV/2, p. 109, trans. rev; KD IV/2, p. 121)? Because Jesus Christ is

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himself the event of this history, historical thinking – in the Barthian sense – is the only fitting mode of description. “There can be only a historical thinking, for which each factor has its own distinctive character. The divine and the human work together. But even in their common working they are not interchangeable. The divine is still above and the human below. Their relationship is one of genuine action” (CD IV/2, pp. 115–116). Jesus Christ is “the common actualization of divine and human essence” (CD IV/2, p. 113). The being of Jesus Christ as divine and human is in the specifically coordinated event of this union. Thus, Barth concludes that Jesus Christ “is in this operatio, this event. This is the new form which we have given to Christology in our present understanding and development of it” (CD IV/2, p. 107). But why should this be such an important point? Why draw attention to it? And what does it have to do with the theme of participation in Christ? Simply put, the Christology is the key to the whole volume, and covenant‐historical thinking is the key to the Christology. Moreover, and of special importance to this essay, the category within which Barth explores the history of Jesus Christ – his one person and work – is the “mutual participation” of the human essence in the divine and the divine essence in the human. The event of this mutual participation is the event of his person – unio hypostatica – and the accomplishment of the exaltation of humanity. The participation of humanity in Jesus Christ occurs objectively within this history of mutual participation and subjectively in a way that corresponds to this history. The actualism of Barth’s Christology makes itself felt in a thoroughly actualistic construal of the believer’s participation in Christ. As he does throughout the Church Dogmatics, Barth reminds us that this divine– human communion is characterized by an irreducible distinction that will never be overcome, since Jesus Christ will always be who he is. The hypostatic union itself is an event of lordship and obedience, the perfect coordination of two distinct sets of actions, divine, and human, which are never confused with each other. This two‐sided participation (Dieses beiderseitige Teilnehmen und Teilhaben), and therefore the union of the two natures in him, arises and consists, therefore, from him. Hence it is “from above to below,” and only then (as we have seen, in a way which is characteristically different) “from below to above.” It is two‐sided, but in this sequence, and in the differentiated two‐sidedness which this and the difference of the two natures involves … [I]t is not itself a unity (Einheit), but a union (Vereinigung) in that two‐sided participation, the communio naturarum. In the one Subject Jesus Christ divine and human essence is united, but it is not one and the same. (CD IV/2, p. 63; KD IV/2, pp. 67–68) The 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, and the determination of His human essence from his divine… This means that the word mutual (beiderseitig) cannot be understood in the sense of interchangeable (wechselseitig). The relationship between the two is not reversible (umkehrbar). That which takes place between them is not cyclic. Each has its own role… What we have here is a real history. It takes place both from above to below and also from below to above. But it takes place from above to below first, and only then from below to above. In it is the self‐humiliated Son of God who is also exalted man. He himself is always the subject of this history. It is not merely because

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they are d ­ ifferent by definition, but because they have a different relationship to this subject, that the divine and human essence bear a different character in their mutual participation. (CD IV/2, pp. 70–71; KD IV/2, p. 76)

Because the exaltation of humanity is a gift of grace, it must take this differentiated form. The presence of this distinction, however, does not mean that the mutual participation is merely partial on each side. Rather, each participates totally in the other: There is no element of human essence which is unaffected by, or excluded from, its existence in and with the Son of God, and therefore from union with it, and participation in, this divine essence. Similarly, there is no element of his divine essence which the Son of God, existing in human essence, withdraws from union with it and participation in it. (CD IV/2, p. 64)

In the one person Jesus Christ, the Son of God takes to himself everything that belongs to human beings as covenant‐breakers. In so doing, and simultaneously, he becomes the man who receives his being in response to this act of grace, the man whose “being in this exaltation can consist only in an action of the most profound human thankfulness” (CD IV/2, p. 63). Thus, the self‐offering and humiliation of the Son of God is total as this man, and the grateful response of obedience of the Son of Man is correspondingly total. “The mystery of the incarnation consists in the fact that Jesus Christ is in a real simultaneity of genuinely divine and human essence, and that it is on this presupposition that the mutual participation is also genuine” (CD IV/2, p. 64). Yet if this is so, an important question immediately arises. If God’s being is in‐act, how can God share his being without ceasing to be the God he is or creating another God alongside himself ? If the act in which God exists is always sovereign and gracious, how can he share his being with another? Moreover, if Barth’s actualistic premises entail the conclusion that the divine being cannot be shared, then the whole presentation founders, because its basic thesis is that such sharing actually takes place. In other words, Barth’s own premises seem to rule out the point he is most concerned to make. According to Barth the divine being cannot be shared in the way that this line of questioning assumes. That is, if Barth tells us that God’s being is in his sovereign act, and he also tells us that God shares his being with humanity, then we would expect him to mean that God shares his being with humanity in a way that is suitable for creatures who are not, and never will become, God. And that is precisely what he argues. According to Barth, God shares his being with humanity by including humanity in the history of the covenant. “God with us” means “that we ourselves are in the sphere of God” (CD IV/1, p. 6). The divine being and life and act takes place with ours, and it is only as the divine takes place that ours takes place. To put it in the simplest way, what unites God and us [human beings] is that he does not will to be God without us, that he creates us rather to share with us and therefore with our being and life and act his own incomparable being and life and act, that he does not allow his history to be his and ours, but causes them to take place as a common history (gemeinsame Geschichte). (CD IV/1, p. 6; KD IV/1, p. 6)

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As this common history takes place, God shares himself with us. In fact, it is possible for God to share himself with us precisely because he does so covenantally – in the context of a relationship in which he is and always remains the sovereign Lord. To correctly interpret Barth’s language of participation in the divine being, one must understand it within the specific ontological framework that he sets forth here. This is especially important to bear in mind in light of passages such as the following: Salvation is fulfillment, the supreme, sufficient, definitive and indestructible fulfillment of being. Salvation is the perfect being (vollkommenes Sein) which is not proper to created being as such but is still future. Created being as such needs salvation, but does not have it: it can only look forward to it. To that extent salvation is its eschaton. Salvation, fulfillment, perfect being means—and this is what created being does not have in itself—being which has a part in the being of God (ein Sein in der Teilnahme am Sein Gottes), from which and to which it is: not a divinized (nicht ein vergöttlichtes) being but a being which is hidden in God, and in that sense (distinct from God and secondary) eternal being. Since salvation is not proper to created being as such, it can only come to it, and since it consists in participation in the being of God it can come only from God. The coming of this salvation is the grace of God—using the word in its narrower and most proper sense. (CD IV/1, p. 8; KD IV/1, p. 7)

Ignoring Barth’s teaching in the first three volumes of the Church Dogmatics, one might mistakenly interpret this passage (and others like it) to mean that salvation as human participation in the being of God means something other than the union of divine and human action (and therefore being) in which God’s prior action calls forth the human action that faithfully and obediently corresponds to it. On the other hand, if one does not ignore the three previous volumes and the material in CD IV/1 that precedes this quote, but rather interprets this passage in light of them, then it seems nearly impossible to make this mistake. Barth certainly uses the traditional language of participation in the divine being, but he infuses that language with new meaning – his actualistic understanding of divine–human communion. He offers an alternative account in which human participation in God occurs not on the level of a cleansing or transformation of human nature (substantially understood) by either the divine “essence” or “energies,” but rather as an event of covenant fellowship in which God and human beings exist together  –  a fellowship in which human beings do not become gods but rather the human beings they were created to be. Thus, participation in the divine being is “not a divinized being but a being which is hidden in God, and in that sense (distinct from God and secondary) eternal being” (CD IV/1, p. 8). Let’s turn now to the second question – the relationship of participation in Christ to justification. Since Albert Schweitzer’s work on Paul, there has been a growing tendency to pit participation against justification, as if the two are somehow at odds with one another or represent competing alternatives. Barth did not view them as such. As we saw in the previous section, reconciliation is a perfect work. In Jesus Christ, God has made peace between himself and sinful humanity by overcoming sinful humanity and creating a new humanity in its place. According to Barth, reconciliation occurs as the event of the justification, sanctification, and calling of humanity in Jesus Christ. These three together constitute the being of humanity in

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him. They are not loci developed ­independently or alongside Christology but rather derive wholly from Christology. Even more precisely, they are events in Jesus Christ: “What is said about Jesus Christ Himself, the Christological propositions as such, are constitutive, essential, necessary and central in the Christian doctrine of reconciliation” (CD IV/1, p. 125). Thus, justification, sanctification, and calling are inseparable from Jesus Christ himself. Given what reconciliation is, it could not be otherwise. Moreover, because faith, love, and hope are the obedient responses that correspond to the three aspects of the objective being in him, the new humanity is actualized as those responses occur. Christian existence is existence in union with Christ, and faith, love, and hope are the modes of this union – the forms of existence that correspond to the justification, sanctification, and calling accomplished in him. As Barth writes, “Christians exist in Him. In practice this is the only thing that we can call their peculiar being” (CD IV/1, p. 92). On this construal of the matter, the question of which is more basic – participation in Christ, on the one hand, or justification, on the other – does not arise. And it does not arise because the objective being of humanity in Jesus Christ just is the verdict, direction, and promise given in each of the three aspects of reconciliation. In the relationship of Jesus Christ to humanity, he is more basic than they, because he is their Savior and Representative, and they are saved and represented. Thus, the objective inclusion of humanity in Jesus Christ is more basic than the obedient responses to Jesus Christ because the latter are the realization of the telos established in the former, and for that reason justification, sanctification, and calling are more basic than faith, love, and hope that receive and affirm them. But that is just another way of saying that objective participation in Christ is more basic than subjective participation in Christ. If one wanted to press the question, it could be made more precise by asking, “Which is more basic objective participation in Christ, on the one hand, or justification on the other?” The question immediately answers itself, however, because the objective being of humanity in Jesus Christ is justification, sanctification, and vocation. Those are the three aspects of the new being of humanity created in him. The new being is a being under the verdict, direction, and promise of God. When looked at in this way, Barth’s famous statement that the confession of Jesus Christ (rather than the doctrine of justification) is the articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae is not as iconoclastic as it first appears (CD IV/1, p. 527). His point is simply that justification is only one of the three aspects of the new humanity that Jesus Christ is.

Barth and Theosis An important upshot of this discussion is the recognition that Barth’s teaching concerning participation in Christ is a constructive contribution to the church’s tradition of reflection on the meaning of human participation in the being of God and not merely a rejection of that tradition. To be sure, Barth offers a Reformed way of thinking through these issues, and as such he is keen to uphold the distinction between the Creator and his creatures. But he writes for the whole church, not merely a part of it, and he does so as a contributor to a discussion that has been

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t­aking place within the church through the centuries. Barth learns from this discussion, criticizes it, and attempts to redirect it, but he never dismisses it. He broadly acknowledges the concerns of the proponents of theosis in its various forms even if he differs significantly in how he thinks those concerns should best be met. Barth’s aim is not to demolish this tradition of thought, but to reconstruct it. His understanding of participation in Christ is a sympathetic and innovative attempt to contribute to the conversation by offering a covenantal‐historical construal of what it means for human beings to participate in God. If Barth is a critic of all existing models of deification, he is so as an insider to the discussion, as someone who agrees with the validity and importance of the questions, and who intends to think the issue through from its dynamic center in Jesus Christ. Barth shares many of the basic convictions upheld by those who affirm theosis, and he addresses many of the same dogmatic issues addressed by that teaching. The distinctive genius of Barth’s position, and his fundamental contribution to the church’s thinking on the matter, is the way that he attempts to think through every aspect of the meaning of participation in God from its dynamic center in the living history of Jesus Christ himself as attested by Holy Scripture. God gives himself to humanity by making himself the covenant Lord of humanity. By grounding the nature of human sharing in the divine life within the history of the covenant of grace, Barth highlights and insists upon the fact that God always remains the Lord of this fellowship. God shares his life with human beings in a way that is appropriate for them as creatures who are not, and never will become, the Lord of the covenant. Because Jesus Christ has secured this fellowship by fulfilling the covenant of grace, because he is himself the grace of the living God, union with God can never be abstracted or disconnected from him. He can never be left behind. He is neither the starting point for nor the entrance into some supposedly higher or deeper form of union with God. Nor does the character of this fellowship evolve into some other form of relationship than that between Lord and servants. For Barth, union with God means union with Christ. By elaborating the idea of participation in the being of God within the context of the covenant, Barth is attempting to guarantee that the meaning and content assigned to this fellowship will be determined by the meaning and content of Scripture, not secretly nourished by and grounded in some other source. So far, the church has hardly begun to perceive Barth’s achievement on this front. It has yet to be fully attentive to the unique way that his Christology enables him to clearly and powerfully articulate a dogmatically integrated vision of human participation in God, which affirms the dynamic reality and intimacy of that union, and at the same time preserves the ineradicable distinction that remains between the Lord and his servants even within it. The more one reflects on this material, the more one realizes how deeply traditional and yet daringly innovative, deceptively simple and yet surprisingly counterintuitive Barth’s view of participation in Christ is.2

2  This essay draws extensively on my book. Participation in Christ: An Entry into Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics Columbia Series in Reformed Theology. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2009).

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Further Reading Hunsinger, G. (2000). The mediator of communion: Karl Barth’s doctrine of the holy spirit. In: Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth, 148–185. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. McCormack, B. (2008). Participation in god, yes; deification, no: two modern Protestant responses to an ancient question. In: Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the

Theology of Karl Barth, 201–260. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. Migliore, D. (2002). Participatio Christi: the central theme in Barth’s doctrine of sanctification. Zeitschrift für dialektische Theologie 18: 286–307. Neder, A. (2009). Participation in Christ: An Entry into Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, Columbia Series in Reformed Theology. Louisville: Westminster John Knox.

CHAPTER 30

Barth on the Christian Life Marco Hofheinz

Introduction Under the heading “The Christian Life,” which Barth borrowed from Calvin and his tract “De vita hominis Christiani” (Calvin 1960, III.vi), the last lectures of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, written between 1959 and 1961, have been published (Webster 1995, pp. 9f.). They consist of two parts: Barth’s in 1967 published so‐called “baptism fragment” and the posthumous material, which provides the torso of Barth’s interpretation of the Lord’s Prayer (for a fascinating overview see Webster 1995, pp. 174–213; also Klappert 2000, pp. 116–136). Both parts, the self‐contained fragment “The baptism as foundation of the Christian Life” (CD §75) and the unfinished exposition of the opening invocation and the first two petition of the Lord’s Prayer (CD §§76–78), were intended to be part of the ethics of the doctrine of reconciliation (CD IV/4). Unfortunately, the originally planned section on the eucharist as the renewing of the Christian Life in the thanksgiving was never written. The following essay on “The Christian Life” does not ignore the other parts of the magistral and voluminous CD and Barth’s breathtaking complete oeuvre but limits itself and thus puts a special focus on both available parts of the fragment. In other words, it considers the fact that Barth’s exposition of the Christian life is part of his Trinitarian ethics (Biggar 2000, pp. 212–227): As created by God, being and becoming in Christ and empowered by the Spirit the Christian life has an undeniable trinitarian shape. Yet, in Barth’s ethics of reconciliation (CD IV/4) the Christian life gets a christological emphasis. In the following, we take up the “golden rule” of an adequate Barth interpretation not to see him as the ultimate thinking machine but rather to understand him through the vivid, sometimes even vibrant motifs of his theological reflection on the Christian life (The German word is “nachdenken,” that is to say “think‐after” God’s self‐revelation). Following the course of §§75–78 of the CD we present six of these motifs. The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth and Dogmatics, Volume I, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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The Christian Life “in Christ”: Real, Hidden, and Yet to Come The Christian Life means the life of Christian people, i.e. Christians, as it is characterized by Jesus Christ’s relation to them that made them be and become Christians (CL, p. 49). The Christian life is revealed and made present in Jesus Christ. Significantly, the phrase “in Christ” functions as the key to Barth’s theological apprehension of the Christian life: “The Christian does not exist in a vacuum; … He exists in Christ. He always exists only because and as Christ exists for him” (CL, p. 144). The Christian life means the life of a person whose true identity is in Christ, not just some inner part of their consciousness, i.e. an isolated inwardness. Barth pays enormous attention to the reformatory aspects of the totus. The neuralgic point for Barth’s understanding of the Christian life can be identified as the inclusion in Christ’s being, his humanity, his history, and his transition from shameful death to glorious resurrection. It includes our transformation as part of the old creation into the new (2 Cor 5:17). Barth’s emphasis on transformation refers to the fact that the Christian life cannot adequately be described as a static, ontological being but has to be understood as a becoming that results from God’s acting. Barth refers to Luther’s famous quote: “vita christiana non stet in esse, sed in fieri” (the Christian life does not consist in standing still but in a process of becoming) (Luther 1939, p. 102, line 16), when he explicitly says: “Thus Christians, in Luther’s words, have never become but are always becoming. Even their standing‐there can never be any question of a sitting or lying in some static Christianity‐can never take place except between two steps in their journey or pilgrimage, not to speak of their riding between death and the devil” (CL, p. 78). The truth of that “being” in Christ is in other words yet to come, but nevertheless already real though hidden in him (Col 3:3, the central verse for Barth’s interpretation: “You have died, yet your life is hid with Christ in God”): “Jesus Christ is not the inclusive human being without also being the eschatological human being… We are also confronted by his being as the promise that our transformation as he has accomplished it from old creation to new will not always remain hidden but will one day be manifest fully in the light of his resurrection and in the glory of his eternal life. We are confronted by his being here and now as the new being of our common future” (Hunsinger 1991, pp. 124f.; cf. Hofheinz 2014, pp. 164–236). What does this emphasis on the reality, the hiddenness, and the promised future of salvation in Christ mean for the actions of Christians? For Barth, their being “in Christ” is precisely what enables, allows, orients, and demands their new life as Christians. “Their only choice. ‘he writes’, can be to live this new life, which here and now is already theirs, by seeking it where it is, namely, in Christ [Col. 3:1ff.]” (CL, p. 146).

The Foundation of the Christian Life: Baptism as First Step The gift of salvation in Christ elicits a response from the whole person. For Barth, as the beginning of the Christian life, baptism is what shapes this response. In the boldface lead sentence of CD IV/4 (fragment), he defines them as follows: “The first step of this life of faithfulness to God, the Christian life, is a man’s baptism with water, which by his

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own decision is requested of the community, and which is administered by the community, as the binding confession of his obedience, conversion and hope, made in prayer for God’s grace, wherein he honors the freedom of this grace” (CD IV/4, p. 3). In short, baptism takes place within the Christian community as does the Christian life along with it. The church (CL, pp. 188–194) and the world (CL, pp. 194–204) then supply the formative contexts in which Christians live out their calling – as children and citizens of both realms. However, the opening reference to “baptism with water” forms the second part of the sentence in boldface. It begins with a reference to “baptism with the Holy Spirit,” something that Barth regards as logically prior. He writes: “A man’s turning to faithfulness to God, and consequently to calling upon Him, is the work of this faithful God which, perfectly accomplished in the history of Jesus Christ, in virtue of the awakening, quickening and illuminating power of this history, becomes a new beginning of life as his baptism with the Holy Spirit” (CD IV/4, p. 3). In baptism with the Holy Spirit, God freely offers His presence. In baptism with water, the Christian affirms this offer with a free response. The order between the two is irreversible. The precedence of “baptism with the Holy Spirit” is meant to block any sort of works righteousness or semipelagianism. For it sets apart the beginning of the Christian life as God’s own work and gift. It pertains to the objective moment that establishes the Christian life while the “baptism with water” pertains to the subjective. Barth’s doctrine of baptism with its two aspects forms the threshold where a key transition takes place. It is the transition from God’s saving action in the Spirit to the action of the Christian in response, an action of witness in union with Christ. The Chalcedonian Pattern is the technical device by which divine sovereignty and human responsibility are held together. Formally speaking, they constitute an asymmetrical unity‐in‐distinction. For Barth, in such contexts, divine and human action occur together “without separation or division,” “without confusion or change,” and with the priority belonging irreversibly to grace (Hunsinger 1991, pp. 185–224, esp. 223f.). The two elements in the foundation of the Christian life, the objective and the subjective, are to be correlated as well as distinguished. Only as (1) the divine change makes possible and demands human decision as conversion from unfaithfulness to faithfulness to God, and only as (2) this human decision has its origin wholly and utterly in the divine change, does there come about the foundation of the Christian life and the existence of a human being who is faithful to God. Only as the two are seen together in differentiated unity can one understand them. The act of God in this event is thus to be construed strictly as such, and the act of the human being in the same event is also to be construed strictly as such. Each of the elements both individually and also in correlation, and therefore the totality of the event, will be misunderstood if it is either separated from the other, or else if instead of being kept distinct, it is mixed together or confused with the other. (CD IV/4, p. 41 rev., italics added)

Barth sets forth a theory of double agency. Divine and human action are thought to occur together in a differentiated way. In the process, they are neither divided or separated, nor are they confused or changed. Barth thus avoids affirming not only an

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independent human autonomy but also a divine determinism or monism. In effect the Chalcedonian Pattern supplies the grammar of the infinite qualitative difference in action. It sets forth the operation of Creatorly and creaturely acting subjects in their unity and distinction. Both separation and confusion are avoided. At the same time, the reduction of the divine action to the human is also avoided, as is the conflation of human action with the divine. The life of the Christian bears witness to the sovereignty of grace. It is essentially a life of mimesis or imitation (Geyer 2003, p. 236). It is the active response to grace that establishes the Christian life as a life of gratitude. To say this is to say that in the one event of the foundation of the Christian life we have the wholly different action of two inalienably distinct subjects. On the one side is the action of God in His address to man, and on the other, made possible and demanded thereby, the action of man in his turning towards God. On the one side is the Word and command of God expressed in His gift, on the other man’s obedience of faith required of him and to be ­rendered by him as a recipient of the divine gift. Without this unity of the two in their distinction there could be no Christian ethics. To see their distinction‐in‐unity is especially important at this point where we are concerned with the beginning of the relation between the God who commands in His grace and the responsible action of the man who is grateful to this God. It is particularly important at this point where our concern is the foundation of the Christian life, and where a decision has thus to be made on whose precise correctness all further ethical reflection will depend. (CD IV/4, p. 41 rev., italics added)

The Invocation of God as the Basic Form of the Christian Ethos For Barth, the mystery of double agency finds its fulfillment in prayer. In prayer the mystery of human action relative to the divine is experienced in all its brokenness “most clearly and sharply” (Jüngel 1989, p. 162). For there would be no need to pray if human beings could act on their own in a divine way. The act of praying sets all human actions into their proper spiritual context. It presupposes the critically realistic horizon that throws all human neediness and poverty into relief over against the abundance of God’s grace. In the act of prayer the individual and the community respond with open hands to the Pauline question: “What do you have that you did not receive” (1 Cor 4:7)? Barth grounds prayer as “invocation” in a christological way by referring to Jesus’ own practice. Jesus, he says, “founded calling on God the Father – and made it binding on his people – by doing it first himself, and in so doing giving a prior example of what he demanded of them, or rather, demanding it of them by himself doing it. He took them up into the movement of his own prayer. His making of this movement was an integral part of his history as the Mediator between God and man. Hence, life in relationship to him, in his discipleship, in obedience to him as the Lord, will always consist in union with this work of his, [namely, calling upon God], in fulfilling this movement of his after him and with him” (CL, p. 64). Praying, as exemplified by Jesus, is for Barth the paradigmatic act of the Christian life. It represents the heart of the Christian ethos. In the prayer of invocation, a plea for

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instruction and direction occurs in the midst of disorientation. “While not every act of the Christian is invocation, this is the representative activity that gives ‘meaning, direction, and purpose’ to everything he or she does” (Mangina 2001, p. 173). The prayer of invocation is something that precedes all other action so that a way might be opened for living the Christian life. Invocation, in Barth’s view, also precedes all ethical theorizing. His ethics dismisses a limine [at the outset] looking for some general or universal principle that might serve as the foundation for ethics. It knows of no superior system of axioms from which actions could be deduced, whether theoretically or practically. Most especially, human acting begins with a prayer of invocation to the gracious God: “Our Father” (CL, p. 43). This prayer builds on the command: “Call upon me” (Ps 50:15). It is the “Grundakt” (foundational act) of faith engaged in obedience (CL, p. 44). The Christian life is one long act of invocatio Dei. “In the sphere of the covenant,” writes Barth, “this is the normal action corresponding to the fulfilment of the covenant in Jesus Christ” (CL, p. 43). It is the persistent habit or ethos through which all good action is carried out. In calling on God, Christians already enact the good: “For in that we ask and invoke God ‘directly from below’, we pray to him as he God who is distinct from us, asking him to accomplish a work distinct from our own work. We are thereby already doing that which corresponds to the divine act for which we make our plea” (Jüngel 1989, p. 161). In relation to ethics, prayer is not without “material” significance. A clear direction for action emerges according to the content of prayer. Prayer and action correspond, for Barth, in a way reminiscent of the famous formula associated with Prosper of Aquitaine: lex orandi  –  lex credendi/lex orandi  –  lex videndi/agendi (the law of prayer is the law of faith/the rule of prayer is the rule of life/action) (CL, pp. 50, 168). The ethical importance of this formula becomes evident in Barth lead sentence for “The Struggle for Human Righteousness” in The Christian Life: I. Lex orandi. “Christians pray to God that he will cause his righteousness to appear and dwell on a new earth under a new heaven.” II. Lex videndi/agendi. “Meanwhile they act in accordance with their prayer as people who are responsible for the rule of human righteousness, that is, for the preservation and renewal, the deepening and extending, of the divinely ordained human safeguards of human rights, human freedom, and human peace on earth” (CL, p. 205). Prayer cannot be true prayer without a readiness to act upon that which is being requested, insofar as one is able to do so. Prayer and work belong together (ora et labora) for Barth, but not in the sense of a vague correlation. He stresses that the ora et labora relation is irreversible. Only as a consequence of prayer can work be understood and carried out in a genuinely theological way. As he comments on the formula “ora et labora:” Ora! – because by ourselves we can neither obtain faith nor love nor understanding nor correct discernment. They become possible for us only as we request them from free grace and so from God, who gives them.

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Labora! – because these things are not served to us on a platter, but are constantly to be gained afresh though sheer work. (GA 28, p. 441; Hunsinger 2015, p. 14)

Christian ethics “does now allow us to talk about praying in a way that does not lead us into work, and no work can be undertaken that is not already grounded in praying” (Barth 1946, p. 14; my translation). In short, there can be no prayer without work, and no work without prayer, but the priority and precedence belong to prayer. Ora et labora! Barth once said to his students: “Prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world” (quoted from Lochman 1993, pp. 18f.). This dictum needs to be taken seriously in both its aspects. The second aspect contradicts the idea that prayer is a substitute for responsible action. Barth does not see prayer as some kind of self‐ edification or evasive maneuver. “Prayer is not a sterile retreat to an enclave beyond secular involvements. It is the first step toward renewing and preserving the church and hence, directly and indirectly, the world” (Hunsinger 2000, p. 88). Barth’s reflection on prayer as “the basic form of the Christian life” presupposes that prayer has dialogical, ecclesial, and public dimensions.

The Christian Life as a Life of Passion: Zeal for the Honor of God Barth’s understanding of the Christian life has been subjected two common misperceptions. First, it has been suggested that Barth is a hidebound opponent of human experience, and in a modern Marcionite fashion that he emphasizes divine transcendence at the expense of divine immanence. Second, it has been claimed that Barth is a monophysite redivivus or christomonist whose Christology absorbs the human and quashes even the relative autonomy of God’s covenant partner (Mangina 2001, pp. 2f.). Both mistakes fail to see that Barth actually deals with human subjectivity and human experience, not least in The Christian Life. To be sure, he indeed rejects an “expressivist” view of theological language (Lindbeck 1984, pp. 31f.: “An experiential‐expressive model”) as associated with Schleiermacher (2016, §15: “Christian doctrines are accounts of the Christian religious affections set forth in speech”). Although moving beyond expressivism, Barth describes the Christian life as a life of passion. “Christians are people with a definite passion” (CL, p. 111). For example, he pays attention to human affections that correspond to God’s action. He describes human agency in Christ to as a life of passion, showing how the divine‐human encounter shapes Christians at the heart of their lives. Barth has, in other words, an interest in showing how human subjectivity emerges in relation to grace, in other words, in how it is fashioned by God. With his motif of zeal for God’s honor, Barth by no means avoids thinking about e­ motions. He shows that his theological thinking has an interest in felt human experience. Nevertheless, for Barth, true human subjectivity emerges from the grace of God’s ­­self‐revelation in Christ. For Barth the Christian life is a life of passion, because among other things Christians suffer from God’s hiddenness in the world. They suffer “because [God] is so well known and yet also so unknown – unknown to the world, unknown to the church, and, above all, unknown to themselves” (CL, p. 111 rev.). Phenomena like theoretical atheism,

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r­ eligiosity, making God into our own image, and ignorance of the needs of our fellow human beings all amount to “forms of the ignorance of God … in the world” (CL, p. 127). For its part, the church tends to develop two kinds of pathology, which Barth calls “self‐ sacralization” and “self‐secularization.” He describes the former as the “church in excess” (CL, p. 136), and the latter as the “church in defect” (CL, p. 137). Over against these disorders Christians “pray that God will bring his self‐declaration to its goal with the manifestation of his light which destroys all darkness” (CL, p. 111 rev.). The Christian life is life in accord with this petition. It complies with it and corresponds to it. Just as prayer is no mere lip service, so Christians “have a zeal for the ­primacy of the validity of God’s Word in the world, in the church, and above all in their own hearts and lives” (CL, p. 111 rev.). The passion of the Christian life thereby has a particular theme: “Zeal for the Honor of God” (CL, p. 112). This “zeal” is in Barth’s eyes shaped and oriented by the first petition of the Lord’s Prayer: “Hallowed be your name” (Mt 6:9). God himself is the subject who glorifies his name, so that the first petition constitutes a “pure petition” (CL, pp. 156, 245): “Father, glorify your name” (John 12:28). Barth interprets this petition with not only the Johannine but also the prophetic tradition in mind: As we read in Ezekiel, “I will sanctify my great name, which has been ­profaned among the nations, and which you have profaned among them; and the nations shall know that I am the Lord, says the Lord God, when through you I display my holiness before their eyes” (Ez 36:23; cf. 39:25; CL, pp. 185, 257). God’s sanctification of his name came to fulfillment in Jesus’ history: “In his history, as God’s work, there took place the total and final sanctifying of his name” (CL, p. 162).

Affections of the Christian Life Barth describes the Christian life in terms of its affections, which he believes need to be viewed holistically. A range of emotions occur in the human correspondence to God’s acting. Affections like desire (CL, pp. 111ff.), anxiety (CL, pp. 139, 151), delight (CL, pp. 111ff., 127f.), or yearning (CL, pp. 151f.) are all mentioned, but for Barth two affections in particular stand out as exemplary: gratitude and joy. As it serves the triumph of grace, the Christian life is a life of gratitude and a life of joy.

Gratitude In a relatively neglected essay Barth’s student Helmut Gollwitzer has shown that Barth  uses “a central word for the basic determination of human existence” (“Grundbestimmung menschlichen Daseins”), namely, “gratitude” (Gollwitzer 1988, p. 387; Trowitzsch 2007, p. 440). “Good” may be defined, Barth explained, as “that activity in which human beings are grateful for God’s grace” (Barth 1946, p. 9).1 Thanksgiving is found at the very heart of prayer. “I believe,” wrote Barth, “that what

1  “Gut ist dasjenige Tun des Menschen, in welchem der Mensch für Gottes Gnade dankbar ist.”

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is really missing for us is that we aren’t sufficiently thankful for what God gives us… And I believe that the great sin is ingratitude” (GA 28, p. 244; Hunsinger 2015, p. 14). “What differentiates … the Christian understanding of right conduct as expected by God if not that, from the very first and in all circumstances, it can be nothing but the work of free gratitude for the grace extended to us” (CL, p. 36 rev.; cf. pp. 30, 291)? Inspired by a section of the Heidelberg Catechism (1563) called “Of Gratitude” (CL, pp. 39, 279), Barth singles out this spiritual quality as the indispensable human response: “The Word of God’s free grace, effective and revealed in Jesus Christ, ‘he writes’, is his command to each person and all people in which he calls for the response of their obedience in thought, word, and deed by as informed by their free gratitude” (CL, p. 291 rev.). Gratitude pertains to God’s grace as enacted in the history of Jesus Christ and revealed there (CL, pp. 30, 124). God’s mercy in Christ serves as a signpost that gives direction to human behavior. “Human existence means existing in the mode of reception,” writes Gollwitzer. “Relative to other being, it means extending to others the blessing freely given to us. Gratitude is the human stance that corresponds to this situation and relation. Thanksgiving means putting this stance into action. Gratitude brings human beings into subjective agreement of with their objective truth” (Gollwitzer 1988, p. 392).2

Joy As already mentioned, the Christian life for Barth is a life of passion. Among other things, it is marked by a “desire which seeks fulfilment – the fulfilment in which it can transform itself and become delight and joy instead of pain” (CL, p. 111 rev.). Joy is an essential attribute of the Christian life but not because existence as we know it is filled with sweetness and light. Joy pertains to “the joy of the Lord” (CL, pp. 152; cf. 124), which “is your strength” (Neh 8:10). It is objective before it is subjective, something extra nos before it is in nobis. “We really live in the joy of the Lord, which we know to be our strength (Neh. 8:10, etc.),” explains Barth, “and we speak about the great joy of Advent and Christmas and Easter and Pentecost, and yet when we have to suffer our reverses and endure our depressions and put up with our more or less justified feelings of irritation, we have the curious freedom to react if possible with even greater pessimism, distress, and ill‐temper than do other people who have not heard Paul’s great ‘Rejoice’ (Phil. 4:4) as we have” (CL, p. 152 rev.). Joy in Christ, for Barth, has a cruciform character informed by “the shadow of the judgment of God,” as it falls across the face of creation (Mangina 2001, p. 150). He points to something greater, despite the ambiguities of experience: “The Gospel is not a mixed message of joy and terror, salvation and damnation” (CD II/2, p. 13 rev.). Because 2  “Zusammengefaßt besagen diese vier Punkte: Menschliche Existenz ist Existieren in der Situation des Empfangens und in der Beziehung zu anderem Sein, von dem uns frei geschenkte Wohltat zukommt. Dankbarkeit ist die dieser Situation und dieser Beziehung entsprechende Einstellung des Menschen, und Dank ist die Betätigung dieser seiner Einstellung. Dankbarkeit ist die subjektive Übereinstimmung des Menschen mit seiner objektiven Wahrheit.”

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of the Gospel’s lucidity and the function of the theologian as its witness, he can comment with wry humor: “The theologian who has no joy in his work is not a theologian at all. Sulky faces, morose thoughts and boring ways of speaking are intolerable in this discipline” (CD II/1, p. 656 rev.). Not unlike Schleiermacher, Barth tried to resolve life’s tensions into a “cheerful serenity” (heitere Gelassenheit). In the last of his “rules of life for elderly people in relation to younger ones,” the aging Barth wrote to his friend, Zuckmayer: “Under no ­circumstances should you drop them. You should rather accompany them with cheerful serenity by giving them the green light. Trusting in God you should trust them to do the best. You should maintain love toward them, whatever happens, and pray for them” (Zuckmayer and Barth 1977, p. 57).3

The Orderly Revolution: The Christian Life as Struggle for  Human Righteousness The Christian Life as a Revolt Against Disorder Barth also set forth his view of the Christian life by referring to another petition of the Lord’s Prayer: “The decisive action of their revolt against disorder, which, correctly understood, includes within itself all others, is their calling upon God in the second petition of the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Thy kingdom come.’” (CL, p. 212). Barth returns to his maxim of letting prayer shape the Christian life. He thereby indicates how his ethical approach rests fundamentally on prayer. This maxim also applies to Barth’s portrayal of the “struggle for human righteousness”: “Christians pray to God that he will cause his righteousness to appear and dwell on a new earth under a new heaven. Meanwhile they act in accordance with their prayer as people who are responsible for the rule of human righteousness, that is, for the preservation and renewal, the deepening and extending, of the divinely ordained human safeguards of human rights, human freedom, and human peace on earth” (lead sentence, §78, CL, p. 205). No matter how limited the Christian life may appear to be, no matter how fragmented and imprisoned within a disordered system, Christians still have the freedom to pray “Thy kingdom come.” Rightly understood, as Barth urges, this prayer involves Christians in taking steps, however modest they may be, toward a world whose reality corresponds to its truth of being reconciled in and through Christ. The Fall has resulted not only in disorder in our relation to God but also in our human life together. The disorder is not only horizontal but also vertical. Nevertheless, God’s command calls us not to accept this disordered situation but to rise up against it in ­protest (CL, p. 206). Christians are called to change those things that can be changed, but not to accept those things that cannot be changed, rather to oppose them with

3  “Du sollst sie unter keinen Umständen fallen lassen, sollst sie vielmehr, indem du sie freigibst, in heiterer Gelassenheit begleiten, im Vertrauen auf Gott auch ihnen das Beste zutrauen, sie unter allen Umständen lieb behalten und für sie beten.”

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r­ evolutionary patience in witness to Christ. According to Barth, Christians need to be part of the uprising against the disorder that not only blocks human rights, freedom, and peace on earth, but that also prevents the church from becoming a community of justice and peace as a foretaste of God’s kingdom. As we read in the sixth thesis of the Barmen Declaration (1934): “It [the church] calls to mind the kingdom of God, God’s commandment and righteousness, and thereby the responsibility both of rulers and of the ruled. It trusts and obeys the power of the Word by which God upholds all things.”

The Christian Life as a Fight Against the Lordless Powers Those who have learned to pray “Thy kingdom come” may receive the gift of clarity about certain larger forces that determine our lives. There are dependencies not readily comprehended and slavish addictions that remain unperceived. There are death‐dealing powers that unconsciously rule our lives. Thus, a certain discernment belongs to the Christian life, a clarification of those forces that control us by gaining authority over us, whether as fascinating or threatening powers. Barth speaks of “lordless powers,” ­disclosing the ongoing timeliness of certain biblical traditions. He is thinking of the “principalities and powers” as mentioned in Eph 1:20–21; 3:10; 6:12 or Col 1:16–17; 2:10; 2:15. Barth explains that by “lordlessness” he doesn’t mean that those powers are completely apart from the lordship of Christ, but that they act as though they were. The “powers” represent originally good gifts from God to humankind that have gone astray because humankind has gone astray from God. The powers that were intended to serve humankind have gotten loose and become humanity’s masters. These powers are emanations of the human creature who has fallen prey to the “illusion of the person who thinks and claims that he has come of age and is now sovereign and autonomous” (CL, p. 214). The fallen human creature is estranged from God and therefore from others. “His capacities when he uses them, as Goethe describes so vividly and with such frightening profundity in his poem The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, become spirits with a life and activity of their own, lordless indwelling forces” (CL, p. 214). These lordless powers “rob people of the freedom which they have misused and thus forfeited in advance. They oppress people. They move them according to the laws of their own dynamics and mechanics. They make them subjects, parrots, puppets, or even robots” (CL, p. 233). Barth’s discussion of lordless powers critiques their dominance through capitalism and political ideologies (Prather 2013; Hailer 2004, pp. 98–139). Here Barth is thinking of political absolutism in its most destructive forms (Rev 13:1–8; CL, pp. 219–222), of the perversion of financial arrangements into the imperial power of international capital over subjugated peoples (CL, pp. 222–224), and the misuse of mental skills and intellectual abilities for loathsome ideologies and inhumane worldviews (CL, pp. 224– 227), not to mention murky bodily‐chthonic (underworld) irrationalities of sex, power, and violence, which Augustine called libido dominandi (CL, pp. 227–232). He is thinking of what would later be called the culture of death. Barth’s treatment of the powers implores Christians to a theologically grounded resistance against any inhumane ­sociopolitical and economic structures that claim dominance in all their irrational

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r­ ationality. In effect he urges Christians to speak out against what Camus once called “the blood‐stained face that history has taken on today.”

The Christian Life as Prayer for the Coming Kingdom that Makes Justice Happen The kingdom of God lies beyond every human possibility; therefore Christians have to pray for it. The kingdom is not something that they can bring about, but something that comes upon them; not something they can build, but something that is given and received; not something they can seize by force, but something to be entered when it comes. In short, the kingdom of God depends not on our coming to God, but on God’s coming to us. Barth cites key passages throughout the Bible which illustrate the kingdom of God as a new creation (e.g. Is 65:17–25; Rev 21:1–22:5). The kingdom of God is “not inside the margin of the horizon of all the perceptions and conceptions of us people… It is real only as God himself comes as King and Lord, establishes ­righteousness in our relationship to him and to one another, and thus creates peace on earth” (CL, p. 237, italics added). Barth cautions against confusing human with divine justice, while he insists at the same time on striving for human justice. This striving for a greater margin of human justice Fiat iustitia! (“Let there be justice!”), as involved in prayer for the coming of the kingdom, is at once both ethical and eschatological. Following Christoph Blumhardt (1842–1919), one of the founders of the religious‐socialist movement, Barth describes the Christian life in the light of God’s coming kingdom as “a hastening that waits” (Collins Winn 2008, pp. 273–279). Christians hasten toward that which they await, and wait for that to which they hasten. Barth gave this figure a special dialectical turn (Biggar 1993, pp. 77f.; Reuter 1996, pp. 63f.; Hofheinz 2014, p. 609). It signifies ­neither a passive and quietist “Sit back, relax, and put your mind at ease,” nor does it plead for a titanic‐Promethean “We can get it done.” It rather means the special eschatological expectation characteristic for the Christian life that interlocks present and future: Christians “wait and hasten toward the dawn of God’s day, the appearing of his righteousness, the parousia of Jesus Christ (2 Pet. 3:12). ‘Aiming at God’s kingdom, established on its coming and not on the status quo’, they do not just look toward it but run toward it as fast as their feet will carry them” (CL, p. 263) A hastening that waits characterizes the Christian life as the life of the cooperator Dei in mundo (“cooperator with God in the world”).

Conclusion In explaining the Christian life Barth sets forth key features of what it means to be human as a child of God (CL, p. 204). These features arise through the gifts of grace that are given freely to humankind in Christ. They establish, so to speak, the “textuality” of the Christian life, for they demonstrate the way in which this life may become a witness to God’s grace as a “readable text” to others (2 Cor 3:3). These features can be summarized as follows:

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The Christian life bears witness in word and deed to God’s reconciliation of the world to himself. It is a life that is realized first of all in worship and prayer. Without worship and prayer it would simply be impossible. Prayer is the essential action that shapes the Christian life: lex orandi – lex agendi. God is worshipped and praised for his own sake (CL, p. 106) as well as for the sake of a better world. Created, reconciled, and redeemed by God, this life is enabled • • • •

To take part in the uprising against the disorder of the world; To oppose the lordless powers; To join in the coming kingdom of God; To work for the human justice, freedom, and peace that reflects the justice, freedom, and peace of God’s coming kingdom.

Precisely as life that corresponds to the “pure petition” for God’s kingdom, the Christian life consists in service, thanks and praise to God, and not least in the struggle for “human rights, human freedom, and human peace on earth” (CL, p. 205). References Barth, K. (1946). Christliche Ethik. Ein Vortrag. Munich: Chr. Kaiser. Biggar, N. (1993). The Hastening that Waits: Karl Barth’s Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Biggar, N. (2000). Barth’s trinitarian ethic. In: The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth (ed. J. Webster), 212–227. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Calvin, J. (1960). Institutes of the Christian Religion, vol. 2 (ed. J.T. McNeill), (trans. F.L. Battles). Philadelphia: Westminster. Collins Winn, C.T. (2008). “Jesus is Victor!” The Significance of the Blumhardts for the Theology of Karl Barth. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications. Geyer, H.G. (2003). Wahre Kirche? Betrachtungen über die Möglichkeit der Wahrheit einer christlichen Kirche. In: Andenken. Theologische Aufsätze (eds. H.T. Goebel, D. Korsch, H. Ruddies and J. Seim), 227–256. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Gollwitzer, H. (1988). Der Glaube als Dank. Christliche Existenz als Leben in der Dankbarkeit bei Karl Barth. In: Auch das Denken darf dienen. Aufsätze zur Theologie und Geistesgeschichte Vol. 1 (= Ausgewählte Werke Vol. 8) (ed. F.‐W. Marquardt), 387–408. Munich: Chr. Kaiser.

Hailer, M. (2004). Die Unbegreiflichkeit des Reiches Gottes. Studien zur Theologie Karl Barths. Neukirchen‐Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag. Hofheinz, M. (2014). “Er ist unser Friede.” Karl Barths christologische Grundlegung der Friedensethik im Gespräch mit John Howard Yoder. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Hunsinger, G. (2000). Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth. Grand Rapids, MI/Cambridge: Eerdmans. Hunsinger, G. (1991). How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of his Theology. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Hunsinger, G. (2015). Conversational Theology: Essays on Ecumenical, Postliberal and Political Themes, with Special Reference to Karl Barth. New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark. Jüngel, E. (1989). Invocation of God as the ethical ground of Christian action. Introductory remarks on the posthumous fragments of Karl Barth’s ethics of the doctrine of reconciliation. In: Theological Essays, 154–172. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Klappert, B. (2000). Christliche Ethik der Antwort und der Verantwortung. Karl Barths Ethik des christlichen Lebens als

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Ethik des Bundes und der Tora. In: Unter dem Fußboden ein Tropfen Wahrheit. Festschrift für Johann M. Schmidt (eds. H.‐J. Barkenings and U.F.W. Bauer), 116–136. Düsseldorf: Presseverband der EKiR. Lindbeck, G.A. (1984). The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age. Philadelphia: Westminster Press. Lochman, J.M. (1993). The Lord’s prayer in our time: praying and drumming. In: The Lord’s Prayer. Perspectives for Reclaiming Christian Prayer (ed. D.L. Migliore), 5–19. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Luther, M. (1939). Römervorlesung vol 57. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 73. Weimar: Herman Böhlaus Nachfolger. Mangina, J.L. (2001). Karl Barth on the Christian Life: The Practical Knowledge of God. New York: Peter Lang.

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Prather, S.T. (2013). Christ, Power and Mammon: Karl Barth and John Howard Yoder in Dialogue. New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark. Reuter, H.R. (1996). Rechtsethik in theologischer Perspektive: Studien zur Grundlegung und Konkretion. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus. Schleiermacher, F. (2016). Christian Faith: A New Translation and Critical Edition, vol. 2 (eds. C.L. Kelsey and T.N. Tice) (trans. T.N. Tice, C.L. Kelsey, and E. Lawler). Louisville: Westminster. Trowitzsch, M. (2007). Karl Barth heute. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Webster, J. (1995). Barth’s Ethics of Reconciliation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zuckmayer, C. and Barth, K. (1977). Späte Freundschaft in Briefen. Zürich: TVZ.

CHAPTER 31

Barth on the Ethics of Creation Jonathan Lett

Introduction “There is no dogmatics,” wrote Karl Barth, “which is not also and necessarily ethics” (CD II/2, p. 12). It is therefore no surprise that Barth incorporated a discussion of ethics at the conclusion to each volume of the Church Dogmatics. His ethics are intelligible only in light of his dogmatics, just as his dogmatics cannot be understood apart from the corresponding moral action. His ethics present the moral life primarily as a matter of two things: participating in Jesus Christ and bearing witness to him. Barth’s ethics of creation fit into this pattern. “Now at the end and climax of the great Locus de creatione what was implicit must also be made explicit” (CD III/4, p. 32). In this essay I will d ­ iscuss his ethics as grounded in the dogmatic decisions of his doctrine. Barth’s ethics of creation were placed in the context of divine election. Election was not just one doctrine among others. It was the preeminent doctrine that shaped every aspect of Barth’s thought. It could be summarized as God’s eternal decision to become incarnate in Jesus Christ in order to share himself with humanity. The doctrine of election enabled Barth to accomplish two things. First, it enabled him to uphold the unity of the immanent Trinity and the economic Trinity while maintaining their abiding distinction. Second, and where our concern lies, election determined the content of all God’s external works: creation, reconciliation, and redemption. Because election as centered on Christ was God’s first act and decisive act ad extra, the incarnation established both the basis and the goal of all God’s activity in the world. By virtue of election, God had acted to create, reconcile, and redeem the world so that human beings could be given a share in God’s triune life through Jesus Christ. Election was God’s first act, not creation, an approach that distinguished Barth from the older infralapsarian theologies. Although creation took place before the incarnation

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in point of time, election in Christ was logically and eternally prior to creation. Creation presupposed God’s pretemporal decision of election. As Barth stated, “the work of God (the work of all works!) is not creation, but that which precedes creation both eternally and in effect temporally, the incarnate Word of God, Christ” (CD II/2, p. 80). God’s act of election in Christ determined the being and nature of all things. It ordained them to exist for God in a life of eternal fellowship with him. The whole creation was ordered to the purpose of God’s pretemporal decision. Election in Christ had material consequences for the nature, order, and intelligibility of all things. As the “ontic basis” of creation (CD III/1, p. 28), Jesus Christ was the elected One of God who grounded and ordered the fundamental structure of all reality. Barth wrote: “The whole cosmos exists in no other way than by the Word of God, which is already the secret of its creation, existence and nature. Human beings may deny this Word, but by no denial can they remove or abrogate it” (CD III/1, p. 111 rev.). Creation was included, objectively and vicariously, in the history of the person of Jesus Christ. It was in and through him that God created, reconciled, and redeemed the world. Creation not only subsisted in Christ but was also ordered by him to fulfill God’s purpose of covenant partnership with humanity. Creation could not be properly known apart from its origin and destiny in Christ. This line of thought was applied to the ontology of the creature. Theological anthropology meant that the human creature belonged to God by virtue of its election in Christ. There was therefore no created reality and no human nature apart from Christ, who was the creature’s abiding basis and goal. What human creatures were arose from who they were in him as those elected and created for fellowship with God. Human nature was so structured as to facilitate God’s purpose of covenantal partnership. The fourfold structure of human nature, as determined by Christ, can be summarized as follows. The human creature is a being (i) elected and called to be in fellowship with God, (ii) called also to be in fellowship with other human beings, (iii) constituted as soul and body, and (iv) allotted a fixed span of life for the sake of covenant partnership. In his ethics of creation Barth treated these four dimensions as the framework through which fellowship – with God and fellow humans – became possible. Fellowship became possible, in particular, through obedience to the command of God, and this command meant being and becoming the human creature God had elected it to be.

Ethics as a Task of the Doctrine of Creation Theological ethics attempted to make explicit the ways in which all things were ordered to God’s good ends. Dogmatic foundations served to protect ethics “against arbitrary assertions, arguments or conclusions.” They enabled ethics “to follow a secure path to fruitful judgments” (CD III/4, p. 3). Therefore, good actions had to correspond to the purposes of divine election. They had to serve the goal of covenant fellowship. Good actions would thus correspond to the inner telos of human nature. Human nature was created not only to reflect these purposes but also to fulfill them. It was created within definite limits that enabled persons to achieve the goods appointed by God, namely, the goods of fellowship both vertically and horizontally.

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Good moral actions and human flourishing went hand in hand. This idea was ­evident in Barth’s summary of the divine command as “Become what you are” (CD III/4, p.  388). Two important aspects of divine election supported this maxim. First, the imperative rested on the indicative. The divine command directed human beings to act in accord with what was already true about them in Christ. They were directed to act in accord with their election as persons ordered to fellowship with the triune God through their participation in Christ. Second, the indicative made fulfillment of the divine command possible. The whole creation subsisted in Christ and was ordered for Christ. By virtue of their election, human beings already participated in the good, because they had already been elected and sanctified in Christ. As they acted in accord with their election, they became the covenant partners that they already were in Christ. Because Jesus had already lived the good life for their sakes and in their place, they were given the condition for the possibility of living a good life themselves (McKenny 2010). Human beings flourished when they obeyed the command of God to be and become what they already were in Christ. They flourished when who they were as persons corresponded to what they were by nature as those elected and created in Christ. The “vertical” and “horizontal” dimensions of good moral action had to be held together. What Barth called “special ethics” concerned moral subjects as they acted with regard to particular questions “under the command of God.” It equipped them to act in accord with God’s “claim, decision and judgment” (CD III/4, p. 5). The fourfold structure of human nature set the terms within which good actions regarding special questions took place. At the same time, good actions also had to be considered from the standpoint “general ethics.” General ethics involved an “upward look” at God’s sovereign, electing grace, and from there a consequent look at how that grace actually claimed the moral subject in present circumstances. God’s primal grace was an ongoing gift. From an ethical point of view, it took the form of a particular command requiring a particular response from the acting subject (CD III/4, pp. 4–5). The living and unique event of the divine command within particular moral circumstances had to be balanced by the “permanence, continuity and constancy” of the individual acting subject (CD III/4, p. 19). The fourfold structure of human being (as oriented to fellowship with God, fellowship with others, the unity of body and soul, and temporal finitude) had to be honored without according it a moral status that was independent of the command. The real moral subject under the divine command was not some neutral reality. It was the person who participated in Christ through the divine election of grace and who therefore lived under the covenant of grace. It was the person whose reality was truly but vicariously included in Jesus Christ’s life ‐history, in his life, death, and resurrection. Special ethics pertained to this person as elected in Christ (CD III/4, pp. 25–26). Its field of inquiry was the divine–human encounter as it occurred, under the aspect of special questions, within the economy of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (CD III/4, p. 27). This living encounter was governed by the history of the covenant of grace, which, as scripturally attested, provided a “formed reference” [geformten Hinweis] for ethical reflection. What the history of the covenant provided, in other words, was not a set of hard‐and‐fast rules but a sort of direction or rule of thumb. “Concrete human action … proceeds under a divine order which persists in all the differentiations of individual cases” (CD III/4, 17).

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The ethics of creation instilled an orientation for good moral action by attending to the patterns of the Creator–creature relationship as enacted in history and made evident through Scripture. At the same time reconciliation and redemption had to be taken into account as well, because in Christ it was impossible to isolate the elected human creature from the reconciled sinner and redeemed heir. Again, the history of the divine– human encounter in Christ also presupposed the fourfold structure of human nature. Together, therefore, the covenant of grace, the history of the encounter, and the structure of human nature formed the conditions for the creature to respond in obedience to the divine command. Neither the history nor the structure was to be confused with the divine command, however. Without this distinction Barth’s ethics would lose their intelligibility. Barth rejected casuistry – the application of a fixed moral law to particular cases – for this reason. He thought that casuistry distorted the command of God in two ways. It tended to homogenize particular circumstances under the divine command, and it tended to regard the divine command as a universal law to be applied by the moral agent. Either way, the moral agent usurped the place of God. The moral agent was not commissioned to “translate” a general law into a particular context but to receive God’s concrete command within it. It was an act of reception that took place through waiting upon God, which meant through prayer and communal discernment as informed by Scripture. Although the fourfold nature of humanity contextualized moral reflection, it could not be identical with the divine command, which always arrived as a divine gift in the form of a particular summons for particular persons to respond to God in particular situations. Barth also differentiated his ethics of creation from any ethics predicated on the so‐ called “orders of creation” and “natural law.” He certainly regarded the fourfold structure of human nature as something real. Nevertheless, unlike natural law and orders‐of‐creation ethics, he held that the human creature had no grounding or telos outside of Christ. Although those other approaches purported to offer an ethic based on creation, they were flawed from the outset because they did not attend to the actually existing Creator–creature relationship as determined by election. For Barth the triune God related to the creature through the election of grace in Christ, who (again) was the basis, grounding, and destiny of all creation. Any immanent law that could be known apart from election could not account for the actual essence of humanity. Barth rejected the ideas of “orders of creation” and “natural law” because they failed to recognize the impact of election on the ontology of creation. Barth’s point was not that there is no such thing as an immanent order, but that any account of natural law or orders of creation not informed by creation’s determination for covenantal purposes inevitably misconstrued the nature of creation.

Freedom before God Because human creatures were created in Christ and summoned for covenant partnership with God, freedom was essentially a matter of obedience, or of grace ordered to obedience. To be human meant “to be caught up in responsibility before God” (CD III/4,

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p. 47). God’s claim upon his creatures extended to every aspect of their lives (CD III/4, p. 49). They were responsible to God, because they had been created for him and belonged to him. Creatures would flourish as they entrusted themselves to their Creator. In particular, they would flourish by exercising their freedom to keep the Sabbath, to pray, and to confess God through faith by acknowledging, praising, and thanking him. Although these practices might be catalogued under the Christian life, Barth discussed them in his ethics of creation. He saw them as the sine qua non of creaturely existence. They were precisely what enabled creatures to participate in covenant partnership with God. Worship, confession of faith, and prayer enabled them to be free for God their Creator, and so to flourish in right relationship with him. Apart from such practices, creaturely flourishing was not possible. Flourishing, however, did not ensue in any simple way by engaging in them. In his ethics of creation Barth turned to aspects of the Ten Commandments for examination. In his disquisition on “Freedom Before God” (CD III/4, pp. 47–115), he began with the commandment to remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy (Ex. 20:8). “The Sabbath commandment explains all the other commandments, or all the other forms of the one commandment” (CD III/4, p. 53). God’s one commandment was internally rich and complex. Although it could take many concrete forms, it always presupposed election in Christ and the covenant of grace. It was therefore always determined by God’s “plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him [Christ], things in heaven and things on earth” (Eph. 1:10). The particular commandment to rest on the Sabbath explained all the other commandments, because it pointed toward Christ as the ultimate harmony of all things. This harmony was the ground and the goal of creaturely existence. It was a gift as well as a task, and was the telos of God’s commandment in every form. It was at once a reminder and a foretaste of that which was promised to all. It was a real anticipation of what was already there in Christ for the taking. As they remembered the Sabbath day and kept it holy, creatures as moral agents anticipated and fulfilled the purpose of their lives by resting in God. The commandment to keep the Sabbath called creatures as moral agents to put faith in their divine election and to become what they were before God. It required them to renounce their “work, striving, powers, and capacities,” so that despite their fall into sin they could dare to be a new creatures, new human beings (CD III/4, p. 58). Two conditions had to be met if they were to fulfill the command to keep the Sabbath. First, they had to impose a limit on their work, on their activities for personal and professional achievement, even on their undertakings for the good of others (CD III/4, p. 50). On that basis the second condition could be met as well. Imposing limits on their work created a space for them to hear the Word of God (CD III/4, p. 60), to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest it. “There must be from time to time an interruption, a rest, a deliberate non‐continuation, a temporal pause, to reflect on God and his work and to participate consciously in the salvation provided by him and to be awaited from him” (CD III/4, p. 50). Pausing from their work served a deeper purpose. It interrupted their misguided efforts to secure their own future, to ground and justify themselves. As they obeyed this commandment, moral agents received the refreshment promised and contained within it (CD III/4, p. 60). “Where the ‘work day’ is only a work day,” wrote Barth, “only a day of bondage, care and planning, only a day of grim seriousness,

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of self‐help and self‐justification, what sort of a Sunday preceded it, and how can even the work day be one that is good and well‐ordered?” (CD III/4, pp. 71–72 rev.). Barth saw the command to rest as an act of divine grace and liberation. No one could live truly as a creature without being summoned by Christ to rest. Confession and prayer also belonged to the fulfillment of this commandment. Creatures were summoned to praise God, to thank him and to confess his holy name. They were summoned to acknowledge that they owed all that they had and were to God’s creative Word. Acknowledging the grace of their creation, they received a share in the covenant from above. They openly or secretly attested its glorious history, which had begun with the eternal election of God’s Son for their sakes and the sake of the world. Here Barth emphasized that being a human covenant partner involved the “mouth, tongue and lips” and thus the partner’s “talking and speaking” (CD III/4, p. 75). In prayer, creatures turned to God to receive what was needed for confessing his goodness in the world by word and by deed (CD III/4, p. 87). Prayer and confession were like breathing; they were the two movements  – inhalation and exhalation – that sustained life. The commandments to confess and to pray led creatures as moral subjects into well‐being. They were led to attest to what God had already done, was doing, and would do in Christ to bring the world to its completion. They were led to confess and pray for the grace that had already been given in him to fulfill the whole creation and would continue to be given again.

Freedom in Fellowship For Barth, covenant partnership with God involved not only the vertical dimension of our relations with God (worship, confession, and prayer) but also the horizontal dimension of our relations with each other (co‐humanity). Barth taught that human beings were created in the “image of God” in terms of an analogia relationis [analogy of relationships]. He took seriously that the God of the covenant was not a solitary monad, but the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to all eternity. He also defined created human nature as essentially relational (CD III/4, p. 117). His ethics made it clear that nothing preceded either God or humanity as they were constituted in relational terms. The relationality of human nature reflected the relationality of God. Co‐humanity was the imago Dei reflecting of the inner life of the Trinity. Humanity was “by nature and essence a being in fellow‐humanity” (CD III/4, p. 116). Human beings existed in three primary relational spheres: (i) male and female, (ii) parents and children, and (iii) near and distant neighbors. These three were not equally weighted. Only the encounter between man and woman rested upon “a structural and functional difference.” The male–female relation was foundational. “The human never exists as such, but always as the human male or the human female” (CD III/4, p. 116 rev.). Barth’s ethics of “freedom in fellowship” sought to describe the ­conditions under which true fellowship could occur between male and female in their created unity and distinction. Barth has been criticized not only for a supposed binary gender‐essentialism, but also for his practical subordination of women to men. It is worth noting, however, the

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extent to which he underscored the historically and socially contingent nature of all expressions of gender while maintaining the conviction that a distinctive (relational) nature undergirds humanity as male and female. God’s command, he believed, “radically demythologized” any false gender essentializations that would inhibit human beings from freely sharing their distinct gifts qua male and female. It liberated them to flourish according to their human nature as persons‐in‐relation (CD III/4, p. 121 rev.). Barth refused “to define or describe the differentiation” that constituted male and female, because the expression of “femaleness” or “maleness” always had to be negotiated within a particular cultural milieu. Barth reached for the category of mystery to avoid reifying contingent social norms or mores into essential differences (CD III/4, pp. 150–151). Although he did not posit essential differences between male and female, Barth did suggest three constitutive elements of their relationship. First, a genuine otherness or alterity characterized the sexes (abiding difference) (pp. 149–163). Second, this otherness was rooted in interdependence rather than independence (inseparable unity) (pp. 163–168). And finally, this interdependence was ordered to unity and equality through a pattern of the male leading and the female following (asymmetrical ordering) (pp. 168–170). The underlying logic here was that of the Chalcedonian Pattern to which Barth so often reverted in relating two different terms: a pattern of unity, distinction, and asymmetry. Although an extensive discussion would be beyond the scope of this essay, it may be suggested that what got Barth into difficulty at this point was not so much the pattern itself as the one‐sided way he applied it. Mutuality between male and female, which is what he clearly intended, could surely mean that sometimes the one would lead and the other would follow, but it is hard to see why the male should always be the one leading but never following. Why not the other way around?1 When Barth later turned to the question of offices within the church, he argued for “a definite order” but also for “a very flexible hierarchy.” “There are no superior and inferior functions and tasks,” he wrote, “nor could there be a rigid hierarchy” (CD IV/2, p. 631). Barth might have done well to incorporate a greater measure of flexibility into his understanding of how male– female relations were ordered in practice. Here was a point, it seems, where he was not  sufficiently dialectical. He needed a pattern of unity, distinction, and double asymmetry. In any case, the bulk of Barth’s comments were aimed at sweeping away cultural conventions that might obscure the command of God that called male and female equally to freedom in obedience. On the one hand, the nature of the created order should not be conflated with what might appear to be the givenness of the natural world. On the other hand, the event of the divine command was necessary for male and female to navigate their contingent cultural and social situations faithfully in order to be (and become) the full persons God created them to be. Two other spheres existed that Barth considered to be definitive, even if they did not constitute the essence of being human. First, the relation of parents and children had

1  The only example Barth gave of the male taking the lead was in birth control (CD III/4, p. 276).

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its universal and permanent character. It presupposed that every human life began within the context of male and female intimacy (CD III/4, p. 240). Parental oversight and responsibility did not belong merely to biological generation, however, but to the “historical order.” Parents were the particular elders who had been providentially allotted a degree of wisdom and experience. They were summoned to lead their children “in the way of life” (CD III/4, p. 243). Consequently, children were to submit to their parents as “apprentices” who needed to be schooled for faithful living. Although Barth considered the parent–child relation to be “fixed” and “given,” parental authority was a divine appointment. Parents were summoned to act faithfully and responsibly as representatives of God, who alone was Father. They were summoned to attest that only God was Creator of the child, “the controller of its destiny,” and “its savior from sin, guilt and death.” They were summoned to remember that Jesus Christ was the brother of all children (CD III/4, p. 246). Parental authority was relativized by the divine command. It made obedience to God in the rearing of children a “spiritual act and attitude” rather than merely a matter of following nature or society (a “natural instinct” or a “sociological rule”) (CD III/4, pp. 249–251). It was the command itself, not the subordinate relation of children to parents, that had to be obeyed. There were times when parental authority would need to be subordinated to the “superior wisdom” of children (CD III/4, p. 264). There were also times when obedience to Jesus would mean that some (like the prophets) had to become “strangers to their kinsmen for the sake of the future eschaton” (CD III/4, p. 264). Under the heading of “Near and Distant Neighbors,” Barth turned to a third and final sphere of human relations. He discussed the question of wider responsibilities, whether it involved one’s immediate neighbors within a particular race or people or else more distant neighbors of another race or people. Barth’s aim here was largely critical in the sense that he sought to abolish any normative ethic of “nationality” or “race” as supposedly grounded in creation. He went to great lengths to show that races, peoples, and nations were fluid and reversible phenomena. For him, this third sphere dealt only with transitory epiphenomena and the contingencies of God’s providence. He wrote, “To ascribe to them [races, nations, etc.] a divinely willed and guaranteed persistence is quite arbitrary and even laughable for those who are prepared to hear the divine command. Since the confrontation of near and distant neighbors is reversible, fluid and removable, this means that it is not original or final. It is not a natural and necessary confrontation” (CD III/4, p. 302). Ethical reflection had to consider this sphere not as a “constant determination of humanity” or “divinely created being” but as coming under the rule of providence (CD III/4, p. 304). Unlike the other two spheres, no command requiring specific obedience existed in these cases. The relation of near and distant neighbors was an open question. The human creature was “disposed to be in company with some and not at first with others.” Preferences existed in “language, locality and history.” This disposition toward some and not others was always contingent and open ended, because the “disposition itself does not contain any imperative. We cannot learn from it what is right and what is wrong” (CD III/4, p. 304). It was merely the context into which the divine command called human beings to respond in obedience to Jesus Christ, who as Creator could in no way be a “national” or “racial” God (CD III/4, p. 305).

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Barth did not take up the question of imperialism in this context. He did not ask about how the divine command might bear upon the structural violence imposed by the center on the periphery. He did not ask about the exploitation of “distant neighbors” or about international relations of economic dependency and dominance. Later in the ethics of creation, however, we find him commenting: “It can hardly be denied that on the whole, at least in the West, the modern industrial process does in fact rest on the principle of the exploitation of some by others, or … on the aiming and obtaining of a profit which accrues to the economically stronger, i.e. to the owners of the means of production, in virtue of the fact that they can turn to their own advantage the contract of labour with the economically weaker who are dependent on them” (CD III/4, p. 542). Questions about international human rights and their abuses might also have been addressed in this context, but were not.

Freedom for Life Barth now turned to the moral significance of human life. He depicted it as a gift on loan from God, a gift for which human creatures were accountable. They were given human life for the sake of fellowship – fellowship with God and with their fellow human beings (CD III/4, p. 334). The good life was one in which moral agents participated in God’s kingdom through loving service to the world. It was good to the extent that it ­corresponded with God’s own actions in love and freedom. The basic divine command, in this sphere, was to respect and protect the life loaned and given by God. Respect for life and its protection was determined by life’s true goal: covenant partnership with God and the neighbor. The divine command could not be heard apart from respect for life. This respect ­consisted in wonder, action, and awareness: in wonder at the mysterious integrity of another life, in practical action grounded in the solidarity of shared lives, and in awareness that our lives were borrowed from elsewhere rather than owned absolutely. Barth described moral character as “the distinctive moulding and determining of the course and form of life” from the center of God’s gracious address to human creatures (CD III/4, p. 389). The form of life to which God summoned creatures was the one already given in Christ. “Grow into your character, accept the outline of your particular form of life… For it is in this form that already in the eyes of the eternal God, and therefore in reality, you are what you are. You are thus committed to this form” (CD III/4, p. 388). The formation of moral character was aimed at freedom in obedience to God and service to neighbor. It required practices that served to shape and direct the moral will. Barth asked: “And in willing to be [human] how can we put it [genuine humanity] into operation unless we also will and seek and desire it? We gain it as we practice it. We should therefore will to practice it. This is what is demanded of us as human creatures in this respect” (CD III/4, p. 357). Human beings become what they are by practicing health, joy, and gratitude. They do so by utilizing their God‐given capacities for strength in order to respond to the grace of God’s ongoing summons. Moral character prepared the moral agent to hear the divine command that required respecting and protecting the human life that God had loaned. Barth considered the

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sixth commandment “Thou shalt not kill” to be the biblical form of this command (CD III/4, p. 344). The call to respect life, and not take it, was the positive and definitive aspect. Nevertheless, the literal words of the command did not mean the absolute preservation of life. “We cannot deny the possibility that God as the Lord of life may further its protection even in the strange form of its … termination” (CD III/4, p. 398). The termination of life did not mean the suspension of respect for life but rather its fulfillment in the exceptional case of God willing the taking of life. Note what was exceptional: the possible command to kill was not an exception to the preservation of life. Rather, the divine command was so dependent on the ultimate divine purposes of respect and protection that in extraordinary cases God might will the termination of life. Honoring God’s command might sometimes mean paradoxical interventions, which were never to be undertaken lightly.

Freedom in Limitation Barth’s final section on the ethics of creation consisted in an affirmation of creaturely limits. They were seen as the condition for the possibility of fellowship with God. Human finitude was ordained as a good from God. It included an allotted life span that ran from birth to death. Temporal finitude was not contrary to human nature, nor was it an obstacle to human flourishing. It was rather “the unique opportunity” that established the context for our flourishing as human creatures. In it we would find ourselves “exposed, understood and addressed in [our] innermost nature and being … on the basis of the divine will and disposing” (CD III/4, p. 567 rev.). We were called to fulfill our unique opportunity as we were summoned by God and given the freedom to obey the divine command. It was from within a fixed span of life that our fourfold relation to God had to be “apprehended, grasped and used” as the unique opportunity to become what we already were in Christ (CD III/4, p. 567). The particularity of our lives within the providence of God gave each of us our unique opportunity. Our actions had to “be measured and tested by the question of whether they were a seizing or neglecting of the unique opportunity allotted to us within the limitations of our time” (CD III/4, p. 584 rev.). Vocation presupposed, as Barth understood it, that our lives were more than our work and that our work was more than our jobs. Vocation thus pertained not just to our jobs or our work but to the entire gift of our lives. It meant that each of us was called to become who we were in Christ. It meant we were called as creatures to respond faithfully throughout our lifetimes to God’s gracious command. It meant participating by free obedience in the gift of Christ’s history on our behalf, and it meant doing so within the contingent limits of our lives. We were commanded to live according to our natures within the theater of the covenant’s unfolding. Theological ethics had to hold fast to the reality that God’s command encountered us within the contingencies of our finitude. Providence meant, accordingly, that the limits of our situation were not “mere stage‐ scenery” in which we were placed by accident, but that they were “holy and binding, obliging us to accept even what we might think to be their narrowness and other inconveniences, and to be humbly thankful for their advantages as compared with the ­situations of others” (CD III/4, p. 620 rev.). God’s call encountered us within the limits of our everyday situations.

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Vocation was the unique opportunity given within our creaturely limits. These limits were both external and internal: external by virtue of political, cultural, and ecclesiastical circumstances, or possibilities of education and personal development, while also internal by virtue of individual strengths, weaknesses, desires, and capacities. Such limits had to be appraised according to our stage in life and our social‐cultural role in society (CD III/4, pp. 607–632). In any case, within these limitations we were called to obey God’s command as members of the covenantal community. Each of us was called not only to contribute to the needs of the larger human community but also to attest God’s good ends as accomplished in Christ. Each of us was called to participate in Christ through God’s providential rule within our limitations and over them. In the mystery of providence, we were a people of mixed content: good and evil, truth and falsehood baked into one cake (CD III/4, p. 621). It would thus be wrong for us to absolutize the contingent order, because the “calling and command of God must be understood as a summons to break down all [inhumane] historico‐sociological systems, myths and dogmas” (CD III/4, p. 619). Nevertheless the given limits (external and internal) of our lives did not preclude but allowed genuine freedom for fellowship (both vertical and horizontal) to occur on the account of God’s providential grace (CD III/4, p. 623). It was our peculiar honor as creatures that we were not only created but also commanded to receive this grace (CD III/4, p. 651). In conformity with the pattern of Christ, our obedience took place under a double aspect. It involved both humiliation and exaltation, both resisting what had to be resisted and yielding, like Christ in Gethsemane, to what for the time being could not be changed. It involved our “unavoidable human submission, integration, reduction and humiliation within our limitations” while also “finally and decisively being a matter of our elevation, establishment, encouragement, and even exaltation” (CD III/4, p. 648 rev.). Any honor, dignity, and glory we might receive was predicated on our union with Christ, humiliated and risen. Through him we would receive a share in the honor intrinsic to the Son of God insofar as our creaturely histories partook of his history (CD III/4, p. 654). Our honor as mere creatures was “the reflection of God’s own glory falling upon us” (CD III/4, p. 685 rev.). Although such honor could not be self‐evident in the sufferings of the preset time, it was unshakably real for it was grounded and vouchsafed in the incarnate Son. It was an honor that could only be glimpsed by faith from afar, reminding us that the ethics of creation were themselves an act of confession that, like the Creed, could not separate belief in the Creator from belief in Jesus Christ: “We believe in God the almighty Father, creator of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only son, our Lord” (CD III/4, p. 685).2

Conclusion Barth’s ethics of creation defined actions that were morally good in the light of our telos as creatures in Christ. By virtue of our election in him, we were determined for ­covenantal partnership with God. Our created natures already bore the imprint of the 2  Barth concludes his doctrine of creation by affirming the indivisibility of the first and second articles of the Apostles’ Creed, quoted in Latin: “Credo in Deum, Patrem, omnipotentem, creatorem coeli et terrae et in Jesum Christum, Filium eius unicum, Dominum nostrum” (CD III/4, p. 685).

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eschaton. Creaturely rest was already ours and yet to come. Fellowship with God in reality and hope elicited genuine friendship in the human community both now and in the life to come. Christ’s moral and spiritual character already belonged to us as a gift to be actualized. Our everyday particulars offered the unique opportunity of our sharing in the glorification of the Son, crucified and risen. Creation served as the meaningful theater – but not the replacement – for discerning God’s command. It was not a neutral reality but was eschatologically determined by our election as creatures in Christ. It exhibited constant structures, patterns, and limits that were ontologically real, while yet being responsive, fluid, and irreducibly particular in their instantiations. This was one reason why the created order could not function as the divine command. The other reason was that our moral responsibility as creatures could not be known apart from Jesus Christ. Moral responsibility required that we obey God’s command as already enacted by Christ for our sakes and in our place. Free obedience meant participating in the gift of his life history and bearing witness to it by word and deed. Our election could not be confirmed, nor could we be obedient to God, without participating in Christ as his followers and witnesses. Our human obedience was possible despite our sins, because he had already lived as God’s faithful covenant partner in our place and removed our sins by his death. God graciously called us to be the persons he had made us to be in the life history of his Son. Our created nature was objectively and realistically ordered to him. God commanded us to receive the nature that had already been actualized for us in Christ’s life history. The divine command was thus none other than the confirmation of our true human nature in Christ. Reference McKenny, G. (2010). The Analogy of Grace: Karl Barth’s Moral Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Further Reading Nimmo, P.T. (2007). Being in Action: The Theological Shape of Barth’s Ethical Vision. London: T&T Clark. Webster, J.B. (1995). Barth’s Ethics of Reconciliation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Webster, J.B. (1998). Barth’s Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth’s Thought. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Werpehowski, W. (2014). Karl Barth and Christian Ethics: Living in Truth. New York: Routledge/Ashgate.

CHAPTER 32

Barth on Love Gerald McKenny

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od’s love for human beings and their love for God and one another is a central theme in Karl Barth’s theology as it is in nearly every Christian theology. What distinguishes Barth’s account of love are its identification of God’s love with God’s gracious self‐giving and its emphasis on our love for God and one another as participation in God’s love in the form of a creaturely analogy that corresponds to God’s gracious self‐giving love in a distinctively human way. The following exposition fills out this general picture by considering (i) how God’s love and ours are related, (ii) what love for God and neighbor are and how they are related, and (iii) the controversial identification of Christian love with agape in contrast to eros.

God’s Love and Our Love According to Barth, our love of God and neighbor is grounded in God’s love for us (CD I/2, p. 372). The Christian “loves … as one who is called and compelled by God to do so by the fact that He has disclosed Himself and is known as the One who first loves, and first loves him. …It is for this reason, in response to the Word in which God loves him and tells him that He loves him, … that the Christian may and must and will also love” (CD IV/2, p. 752). Here Barth follows I John 4:19: “We love because he first loved us.” But what is the force of this “because”? For Barth, in loving us, God is toward us (ad extra) what God is in Godself (ad intra), “in the self‐giving of the Father to the Son and the Son to the Father which is accomplished in the fact that He is … also the Holy Spirit.” It follows that when God loves us, “He does not place us merely in an external and casual fellowship with Himself, but in an internal and essential fellowship in which our existence … may become and be analogous” to God’s own existence as intra‐trinitarian

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth and Dogmatics, Volume I, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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love (CD IV/2, p. 757). This claim has three implications. First, it is in this sense that we love because God first loved us. “Called and impelled on the basis of His action to us, our Christian love arises and takes place as the human act which answers and corresponds to His act” (CD IV/2, p. 760). Second, our love corresponds to God’s love by doing in a distinctively human way what God does in a divine way (CD I/2, p. 395f.). “He is called … to do as a man, and therefore in the form of a reflection or analogy, that which God does originally and properly” (CD IV/2, p. 752). Barth strongly emphasizes the creaturely nature and limitation of our love. As a human act “it cannot repeat or represent” God’s act. However, it can “correspond to it as a likeness and a copy” (CD IV/2, p. 753). Third, as it does so, our love participates in God’s love. “God gives us to participate in the love in which as Father He loves the Son and as Son the Father, making our action a reflection of His eternal love, and ourselves as those who may and will love” (CD IV/2, p. 778f.; see also p. 756). In this participation by analogy we enjoy fellowship with God. As we will see, it is in the form of self‐giving love, or agape, that our love resembles and thereby participates in God’s love.

Love for God and Love for the Neighbor The scriptural love commandment is twofold, and every Christian account of love must determine both what love for God and neighbor are and how they are related. With his conviction that our love participates in God’s self‐giving love in its human correspondence to it, Barth grounds love of neighbor in love of God and characterizes both as self‐giving love.

Love for God We have seen that for Barth our love for God is our answer or response to God’s love for us (CD I/2, p. 380). God’s love for us is God’s grace to us in Jesus Christ, and our love in response is our gratitude to God for God’s grace to us (CD IV/2, pp. 753, 790). CD I/2 reduces our love for God to acceptance of God’s grace toward us. In Jesus Christ, God has taken up our cause, making it God’s own cause. We love God by accepting that God has taken it up (CD I/2, p. 383). Our love for God is “the one diligere, the one choice, in which man chooses God as his Lord in the sense in which God has already chosen Himself and decided on his own lordship — that is, … as the One who has done literally everything for man, so that there is nothing left for man himself to do. …Love to God consists decisively in recognizing that we have nothing of our own to offer Him” (CD I/2, p. 383f.). The identification of love for God with acceptance of God’s grace to us exemplifies the notion that human beings cannot benefit God but are obligated to honor God as God. To love God is for Barth to honor God as God. If God in God’s very being and lordship is the One who makes the cause of the human being God’s own cause, then one would dishonor God by presuming that one could do something or offer something in return, and one honors God by simply accepting what God is and does for human beings.

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CD IV/2 qualifies this restriction of human love for God to mere acceptance of God’s grace. Barth now insists that the one who loves God has a kind of regard for God in all that one is and does. “The Christian’s love for God … consists in the fact … that he is a man who is interested in God. … [T]he One above … is — how shall we put it? — i­ mportant to him; … He has significance as the axiom of all axioms” (CD IV/2, p. 793f.). To love God means that in everything that one is occupied with, one is above all occupied with God. Barth acknowledges that banal‐sounding terms like “interest” and “importance” may seem inadequate to express love for God. But his willingness to risk banality betrays his determination to avoid at all costs the language of desire, which for him would ­suggest that our love for God is an expression of eros‐love. Rather, our love for God is agape‐love, and that means for Barth that it is self‐giving love. To love God is to give oneself to God; it is not to seek and find in God the fulfillment of desire. To give oneself to God is to devote oneself to God in a commitment that issues forth in obedience. “To love God is to give oneself to Him, to put oneself at His disposal. And when man does this, his freedom for love becomes and is his freedom for obedience” (CD IV/2, p. 798f.). The notion that in loving God we give ourselves to God, putting ourselves at God’s disposal and thus readying ourselves for obedience to God, does justice to the connection ­between love of God and obedience to God’s commandments that is a major theme of both Deuteronomy and the Gospel and first Epistle of John. But the desire for God and the sheer delight in God that are expressed in, for example, Psalms 37:4 (“Take delight in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart”) and 42:1f. (“As a deer longs for the flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God”), are also scriptural themes, even if less central ones, and it is unclear that Barth’s view of love for God can do justice to them. The austerity that characterized love for God in CD I/2 continues to haunt it in CD IV/2 despite the evidence of a more robust form of love for God.

Love for the Neighbor Barth consistently holds that love for the neighbor is dependent on but not reducible to love for God. That one cannot love God without also loving the neighbor of course is a well‐established scriptural point. According to 1 John 4:21, “those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also,” and Barth concurs: “It is in relation to [the neighbor] that our love to God is manifested” (CD I/2, p. 415). But Barth does more than affirm the necessary connection between love for God and love for the neighbor that is established in Scripture. He makes the stronger claim that the latter is in some way included in the former, so that “love to the neighbor is … commanded for the sake of love to God and in and with the commandment to love God” (I/2, p. 410, italics added). In other words, our love for God in response to God’s love for us includes the love of the neighbor. For Barth, “the human love which responds to God’s love, even as love for God, has also another object side by side with and apart from God, and different from Him” (CD IV/2, p. 802, italics added). Barth accordingly rejects all grounds for love for the neighbor, including humanitarian grounds, which do not derive from and express our love for God.

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If our love for the neighbor is in some way included in and expressive of our love for God, it is unsurprising that in CD I/2 love of the neighbor is connected with acceptance of God’s grace, which, as we have seen, is how Barth characterizes our love for God in that volume. The identity and role of the neighbor are determined by the parable of the Good Samaritan, who is “the bearer and representative of the divine compassion” (CD I/2, p. 416); that is, of God’s grace to us. “My neighbor is my fellow‐man acting toward me as a benefactor” (CD I/2, p. 420); that is, as one who “proclaims and shows forth Jesus Christ within this world” (CD I/2, p. 421). But as the Good Samaritan helped the victim of the robbery out of his largesse, it is in his or her abundance that the neighbor in this sense bears and represents the divine compassion. Where does this leave the neighbor who encounters me as destitute? Here, too, Barth insists, the destitute neighbor is my benefactor who “has something to impart, to give, to present” (CD I/2, p. 428). It is in her likeness to the destitution of Jesus Christ’s own humanity that she is the bearer and representative of the divine compassion (CD I/2, p. 428f.). For Barth, however, the destitution of the neighbor is ultimately not her material suffering itself but the futility of living her life for herself; that is, her sinfulness. This is what Jesus Christ takes into his humanity, and the benefit one receives from the destitute neighbor is therefore not an occasion to admire the tragic greatness that may be manifested in destitution or to bestow one’s own surplus to alleviate it (both of which distance oneself from it) but rather an occasion to recognize oneself in it as also a sinner. “[A]s the man he is, and therefore as a sinful, afflicted fellow‐man, he is what they themselves are” and is thus a mirror in which they see themselves (CD I/2, p. 433). “The neighbor shows me that I myself am a sinner. …How can he help but show me, as the reflection of myself, what Christ has taken upon Himself for my sake?” (CD I/2, p. 431) In what she shows me of myself, namely, my own destitution as one who is also caught up in the futility of living my life of and for myself, “my neighbor acquires for me a sacramental significance” (CD I/2, p. 436). In her destitution the neighbor shows me that I live only by grace. Barth’s insistence that the destitute neighbor is one’s benefactor dismantles the superiority that comes with pity, whereas his claim that what the destitute neighbor imparts is the recognition that one is oneself in the same position suggests a kind of solidarity with the destitute. However, the problem is that on Barth’s own terms none of this counts as love for the neighbor. Barth insists in CD I/2 that love must be directed to a genuine other (CD I/2, p. 388). But to recognize oneself in another is not to encounter the other as other and therefore is not to love that other. At its worst, it reduces the other to an occasion for one’s own self‐knowledge. The destitute and afflicted neighbor may reveal one’s own plight and thus bear and represent the divine compassion, but to recognize oneself in the neighbor is not to love the neighbor. It is only in a second move, in which one reciprocates the witness of the neighbor to oneself by becoming a witness in return, that we can recognize genuine love for the neighbor. “If he has reminded me that I live by forgiveness, how can I not be summoned to assume the same of him? … It is this faith in respect of him that I now have to live out” (CD I/2, p. 440). How do I live it out? According to Barth, I enact my reciprocal witness to my neighbor by being a ­witness to him; that is, by declaring Jesus Christ to him (word), giving material assistance to him in his destitution as a sign of the promise of God’s assistance (deed), and ­conveying this word and deed in my own person (attitude) (CD I/2, pp. 441–448). In

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this way I myself become a neighbor to my neighbor and thereby fulfill the concluding order of the parable of the Good Samaritan: “Go and do likewise.” In Barth’s account in CD IV/2, love for the neighbor is again associated with mutual witness to God’s grace. But this theme is now governed by the concept of the covenant in which Christians exist before God and with one another. The centrality of the covenant is already apparent in Barth’s portrayal of love for God, in which “the relation of the covenant, the covenant of grace, becomes two‐sided instead of one‐sided” as “[t]he word and work of human gratitude encounter and respond and correspond to the Word and work of God’s grace” (CD IV/2, p. 790). But for Barth, the covenant relationship involves not only the vertical dimension in which God’s people are loved by God and correspondingly love God in return; it also involves a horizontal dimension in which “these men are together reached by the divine act and together engaged in the corresponding act,” so that “there is a definite connexion of these men among themselves posited in and with their twofold passive and active relationship to God. This connexion is their mutual love; the love of each for his neighbor” (CD IV/2, p. 809f.). As such, the people of God in covenant relationship with God and one another are witnesses to one another of God’s love for them and their love for God. “The neighbor is a witness to me, and I am a witness to him.… And we can fulfill this function only as we love one another” (CD IV/2, p. 812). For Barth, the covenant on its human side is constituted by this mutual witness in the form of love. It is “the law of the common life of the people of God” that each is in this way a witness to the other (CD IV/2, p. 814). But in what way are God’s people witnesses to one another, and in what sense must their witness take the form of love for one another? In the mutual witness Barth has in mind, “the one guarantees to the other the turning of God’s love to His people and the turning of His people to God, giving him a visible reflection and therefore reminder of the twofold movement of and in which this people and within it all its members live, and thus helping to maintain him in this twofold movement” (CD IV/2, p. 817). This claim that in one’s self‐giving love to the other one is a guarantor (Bürge) to the other of the love of God for God’s people and of God’s people for God is the crux of Barth’s mature concept of love for the neighbor (KD IV/2, p. 930). In loving the other, one guarantees this love to the other or stands surety for it with respect to the other (beim Anderen dafür einstehen) (KD IV/2, p. 929). Barth is careful to distinguish standing surety for God’s love for the other and the other’s love for God, which God’s people do in their witness to one another, on the one hand, from taking the place of God in relation to the other or the other in relation to God, which Jesus Christ alone does, on the other hand. Nevertheless, there is a striking resemblance of the former to the latter, and this resemblance is essential to the function of the former: “It resembles God’s love and love for God in the fact that it is self‐giving; the self‐giving which reflects and therefore guarantees to the other the love of God and the freedom to love Him” (CD IV/2, p. 819f.). It is regrettable, and a serious defect in his account, that Barth says almost nothing about what this love for the neighbor actually does. The ostensible reason for his reticence is that “[n]o words or works or attitudes are able in themselves and as such to render this service” of standing surety to the other for God’s love for us and our love for God (CD IV/2, p. 817). But if it is true that every word, work, and attitude is subject to this limitation, it does not follow that no word, work, or attitude is any more suited to

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this service than is any other. Barth’s account, then, is to be faulted for its failure to specify what love for the neighbor does. However, it may be commended for its clarity in portraying this love as an embodied or enacted guarantee of God’s love for us and our love for God. Here again, neighbor‐love is endowed with a kind of sacramental significance, as a sign of that twofold love, though now Barth, having grown cautious in his use of sacramental language, refrains from using that term. But despite the absence of the term, Barth portrays love for the neighbor as a concretely enacted sign of God’s love for us and ours for God that both reminds us of that twofold love of God and helps to maintain us in it. And this quasi‐sacramental function explains Barth’s controversial restriction of love for the neighbor to fellow Christians. Barth insists that the object of love for the neighbor is not universal humanity or any human being whatsoever but the fellow member of the covenant (and it is significant that love serves the “upbuilding” of the church in CD IV/2, not its “sending,” which CD IV/3 treats). This restriction may seem to compromise agape as a general moral principle. But if (i) the self‐giving involved in love for the neighbor is not a general moral principle but rather an activity that maintains God’s people in their twofold love of God, if (ii) the witness it involves constitutes the life of the people of God with one another (“the law of the common life of the people of God”), and if (iii) the people of God in their love for one another play an active role in the history of salvation that ultimately takes place for all human beings – if all of this holds, then Barth’s claim that love of neighbor is properly exercised in the Christian community, with a stance toward others that instantiates a readiness to extend it to them as well, seems defensible (see CD IV/2, pp. 806–809, 814, 817). Far from unacceptably compromising a general moral principle, Christians in their exercise of ­self‐ giving love for one another, with their readiness to extend it to all, enact the role God has assigned them in the divine work of love that is ultimately for all human beings.

Agape and Eros For Barth, our love, like God’s, is self‐giving love. In it, one puts oneself at the disposal of the other whom one loves, loves this other for her own sake and not for anything she might contribute to one’s interests, and loves this other without conditioning one’s love on her love in return. Barth sharply contrasts this form of love, namely, agape (which he identifies with Christian love), with eros (which for him is a paradigmatically pagan form of love, though it is ubiquitous and is expressed even by Christians, who are never perfectly consistent in their exercise of agape). The incompatibility of these two loves is clear enough. In Christian love, or agape, one turns away from oneself and gives oneself to the other, even to the point of placing oneself under the other’s control, all for the sake of the other. In eros, the self asserts itself and takes possession and control of the other, all for the sake of the self (CD IV/2, p. 733f.; see also CD III/2, pp. 279f., 282). Like Anders Nygren, whose controversial analysis he largely adopts (while rejecting some of its details and implications), Barth insists on the mutual incompatibility of these two forms of love and rejects what he sees as their synthesis in caritas (CD IV/2, p. 737). The threefold tendency, set in motion by Nygren, to oppose these two forms of love, to identify agape with Christian love, and to exclude eros from the latter, has been vigorously

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criticized in recent decades. It stands accused of (i) exaggerating the difference between the two loves to the point of distorting them and excluding forms of love that fall ­between them; (ii) failing to give eros its due as an expression of human love; and ­promoting a conception of agape that (iii) annihilates the self or (iv) encourages acquiescence in exploitative or oppressive relationships. Barth’s treatment of agape and eros is susceptible to all four of these accusations, but in each case he makes moves that mitigate, without eliminating, the force of the accusation. By considering his treatment in light of these accusations, we can both understand it better and evaluate its viability.

An Exaggerated Difference? Like Nygren, Barth starkly contrasts agape and eros and rejects all attempts at a ­synthesis, yet he also criticizes what he sees as Manichaean tendencies in Nygren’s analysis (CD IV/2, p. 740f.). In opposition to those tendencies, Barth stresses that both forms of love are determinations of human nature. They are not capabilities inherent in human nature itself but rather come to expression in the covenant‐history in which human beings exist as creatures of their nature (CD III/2, pp. 280–285; CD IV/2, pp. 741–746). One of these loves (agape) corresponds to human nature in its determination for covenant fellowship with God and other human beings, whereas the other (eros) contradicts human nature in this determination (CD III/2, pp. 280, 281f.; CD IV/2, p. 743). Inasmuch as both loves are expressions of human nature, neither of them destroys nature. What Barth identifies as the basic form of human nature – namely, the being of the human being with the fellow human – is found in both agape and eros. A Manichaean separation of agape and eros is therefore ruled out. However, agape and eros are not equally legitimate expressions of this basic form of human nature. In eros, one’s being with the fellow human is in order to assert oneself and take possession and control of the other in one’s quest to achieve and maintain one’s self. As such, eros contradicts human nature in its determination for covenant fellowship even as it expresses the being with the other that constitutes human nature in its basic form. By contrast, in its self‐giving to God and the fellow human, agape corresponds to human nature in its ­covenant determination. Thus, eros sinfully contradicts human nature while agape ­corresponds to it, yet both express the being with the other that characterizes human nature as such. The treatments of agape and eros in CD III/2 and CD IV/2 are conceptually the same but differ in emphasis. In CD III/2 Barth stresses that even in its contradiction to our humanity in its basic form, eros is nevertheless an expression of it; whereas in CD IV/2 he stresses that notwithstanding its expression of our humanity, eros contradicts it. This difference in emphasis is best explained by the distinctive contexts of each treatment. The subject matter of CD III/2 is theological anthropology, and Barth wants to show how even sinful expressions of human nature in its basic form do not destroy human nature but express it. The fact that eros expresses our nature even in its contradiction to it clinches Barth’s case: Even this paradigmatically sinful form of love does not destroy our nature but expresses it. Indeed, ancient Greek eros expresses it in “a noteworthy and unforgettable form for every time and place” so that even the apostle Paul is compelled

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to invoke it, albeit indirectly, in order to portray aspects of Christian love that the biblical tradition as Paul inherited it was ill equipped to portray (CD III/2, p. 283f.). In CD IV/2, however, Barth wants to present love in its distinctively Christian form as the act of self‐ giving that confirms and corresponds to what Christians are as those who have received God’s grace in the act of faith. What is significant about eros in this context is its ­contrast to the self‐giving that characterizes Christian love, and it is this contrast that Barth stresses. If Barth avoids the Manichaean tendencies in Nygren’s analysis, he retains the polarization of agape and eros that leaves no space for forms of love that fall between them. Excluded is not only caritas as an alleged synthesis of agape and eros, but also friendship, the various forms of which simply disappear in the stark contrasts between turning away from oneself and asserting oneself, giving oneself to the other and possessing the other, and acting for the sake of the other and for one’s own sake. Barth does refer obliquely to “other relationships” between human beings “that involve a very inward and profound and significant and meaningful intercourse and exchange. These, too,” he acknowledges, “may be a means of love” (CD IV/2, p. 816). Presumably, Barth has in mind friendship in its many forms. But it is notable that he does not name these relationships or elaborate them. They may be means of agape, but there is nothing about their nature or characteristics that orients them or disposes them to agape and therefore no ground for an explicit theological affirmation of them. The inability to affirm forms of love that fall between agape and eros is a major defect in Barth’s account.

Giving Eros Its Due? Barth explicitly criticizes unnamed opponents of eros who trivialize it or underestimate its importance by reducing it to sexual love (CD IV/2, p. 737). Of course, Barth recognizes sexual love as an instantiation of eros, but he refuses to reduce eros to sexual love, insisting that the cultural and religious instantiations of eros are just as characteristic of it as its sexual instantiations. Indeed, the religious seems to have been prior to the sexual in the history of reflection on eros. “In its origin,” Barth asserts, “eros was a doctrine of redemption and salvation” in which the self “lose[s] himself on the one hand in order to find himself on the other” (CD IV/2, p. 738). But however one orders or values the various instantiations of eros, what is essential to all of them is the self‐assertion in which the self realizes itself by possessing what is other and making it its own, whether that other takes the form of things, other persons, or God. By virtue of this defining characteristic, eros “will always be a grasping, taking, possessive love” and will culminate in the perversely godlike figure of the solitary, self‐subsisting, sovereign self – or rather the illusion of such – that for Barth is the paradigmatic figure of sin (CD IV/2, p. 734f.; CD III/2, p. 280; CD I/2, p. 192). Yet Barth is also determined to do justice to eros as an undeniably profound force in human life. The purportedly less impressive form of sexual love “point[s] to the mighty and really cosmic power of human creaturely eros,” which Barth credits as a creative force (CD I/2, p. 192). And far from finding in the sexual form of eros the grounds of its devaluation, for Barth it is in this form that eros is sanctified as it is taken up, in marriage,

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into a relationship determined by agape (CD III/4, p. 219f.). With respect to the creative force of eros, Barth freely acknowledges that it “can claim some of the greatest figures in the history of the human spirit, whom it would be a highly questionable enterprise to reject and repudiate in a curt and dogmatic Christianity.” And finally, it must be said in favor of eros that “in its best and finest as well as its most basic phenomena [the world] is for the most part built upon this other rather than Christian love, and that we live by the works and fruits and achievements of this love” (CD IV/2, p. 735). Clearly, Barth refuses to join in the denigration of eros and, more positively, feels compelled to recognize its profundity as a vital force in human history. Nevertheless, he is unwilling, apart from the special case of sexual love in the context of marriage, to reserve for eros any legitimate place in the life of the Christian, and in the end he does not assign it any role in his own portrayal of Christian love in CD IV/2 in spite of his hearty approval in CD III/2 of the role it plays in the portrayal of Christian love in the Pauline epistles. Having contrasted eros so sharply with agape and endowed it with the paradigmatic characteristics of sin, Barth can credit it as a cultural force but must largely exclude it from the Christian life.

An Annihilation of the Self? Barth explicitly contrasts the self‐giving of agape with the self‐maintaining of eros. “The one who loves gives himself instead of trying to keep and maintain himself ” (CD IV/2, p. 787). In eros, too, one turns to the other (that is, to God or to the fellow human) – like agape, it is a way of being with the other – but only to achieve and maintain oneself. Is it, then, the point of agape, in contrast to eros, to lose oneself? In opposition to this notion, Barth insists that God does not begrudge one the self that one seeks through eros. “Will God refuse him this? Can the God who has created him as he is refuse it? Most certainly not” (CD IV/2, p. 749). It is true that as self‐giving love, agape precludes “desiring and seeking the freedom and glory of the self. But why and how far,” Barth asks, “is this really the case?” It is not, as one might worry, because agape is incompatible with any freedom and glory of the self. Rather, it is “because he has already found himself in great freedom and glory.” Most fundamentally, and as we have seen, the giver of agape‐love is the prior recipient of God’s love. “He himself is the one who is loved by God.” As one who is loved by God and whose agape‐love for God and the fellow human is one’s response to God’s love, one receives from God what one sought by way of eros, namely oneself. “[L]oving as a Christian, he is already at the place which he was vainly trying to reach in the Icarus‐flight and self‐assertion of eros‐love” (CD IV/2, p. 750). Barth’s distinction between eros and agape is not a distinction between being a self and not being one but between two ways of being a self in relation to God and, in consequence, to other humans: one way that presumes to secure the self by asserting it and another way that receives the self from God as one gives it. The point, of course, is not that agape‐love for God and the fellow human is a formula for attaining what one vainly sought by eros‐love, so that agape is a more successful strategy for achieving and maintaining oneself. “I cannot try to love as a Christian in order to attain the goal and end which escapes me as one who loves erotically. An ut finale [in order that] necessarily

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means a relapse into eros‐love. The only valid ut is the ut consecutivum [it follows that]” (CD IV/2, p. 750). The point, then, is that one becomes oneself and is oneself in the self‐giving of agape. In support of this point, Barth cites Mark 8:35 (“For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it”) and Matthew 6:33 (“But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well”). We may now understand Barth’s claim that agape involves the self‐impartation of the one who loves. “The one who loves … imparts himself,” Barth declares, but to impart oneself is not to destroy oneself. “This does not mean, as the matter is often represented, that there is an extinction or annihilation of the one who loves in favor of the one whom he loves.” This “unhealthy view” is not love of the self for the other at all but rather the withdrawal of the self in death. Love is relational and therefore requires one’s ongoing presence with the other. “It is a matter of giving ourselves to the loved one, and therefore, as we continue to be ourselves, of renouncing the false idea that we belong to ourselves and being ourselves together with the loved one, in relationship with him” (CD IV/2, p. 787). As we have seen, Christian love takes place in a covenant that involves mutuality or reciprocity of love among those who are witnesses to one another. Although one’s own self‐giving is not conditioned on the self‐giving of others (in which case it would not bear witness to the love of God that is the purpose of love for the neighbor), it is intelligible only in a covenant that is itself partly constituted by mutual love. In short, in one’s agape‐love one is oneself for the other; one does not lose oneself in the other. “He does not include the loved one in his own being (which would be eros), but his own being in that of the loved one, so that it is his own on behalf of the loved one.” Thus does the love of the Christian resemble God’s love. “This is what God does when He loves us, and therefore gives Himself to us and for us. He does not cease to be the One He is …” Yet, “He imparts Himself to us, entering into relationship and fellowship with us” (CD IV/2, p. 788). Just as God gives God’s self without losing it when God loves us, so do we when we love God and our neighbor. It is now clear why Barth defines agape as self‐giving rather than self‐sacrifice and stresses living for the other rather than dying for the other, even as he makes clear that self‐giving involves self‐sacrifice (CD IV/2, p. 787).

Acquiescence in Unjust Relationships? Barth claims that agape‐love involves putting oneself at the disposal of the one whom one loves. Because he never qualifies this claim or even tells us what it involves, and because he refuses to endorse any form of self‐love, he appears to leave the one who loves vulnerable to exploitation or oppression by the one who is loved. It seems that in agape‐love, one simply puts oneself at the other’s disposal with no concern for oneself. Nowhere is Barth’s failure to specify what love for the neighbor does more unfortunate than it is here, where we legitimately seek assurance that putting oneself at another’s disposal does not authorize mistreatment by that other. Because Barth says so little here, we must look elsewhere for any such assurance. Earlier in CD IV/2, he cautions against supposing that one is called by God to repeat or continue Christ’s suffering in

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one’s own act and against transforming or glorifying one’s suffering (CD IV/2, pp. 600, 602). He thus undercuts common justifications of acquiescence in unjust relationships as “bearing one’s cross.” But here he is speaking primarily of suffering in the form of illness and mortality, and he counsels that these negations of one’s life must at some point be affirmed. There is thus no unambiguous ground here for a notion that agape excludes acquiescence in unjust relationships, nor is any such ground to be found ­elsewhere. This is clearly a serious defect in Barth’s account.

Conclusion The virtues of Barth’s account of love include its conceptions of our love as participation in God’s love in the form of creaturely correspondence to it, of mutual neighbor‐ love as a kind of sacramental witness to the love of God, and of neighbor‐love as included in yet not reducible to love for God. Its vices include its reticence regarding what self‐giving love does and the problematic implications of its polarized contrast between agape and eros. The virtues and vices both follow from the determination of Barth’s account of love by his account of grace. Our self‐giving is a creaturely analogy to God’s self‐giving. The viability of Barth’s account today may depend on the extent to which other aspects of love may be incorporated into this self‐giving without compromising it.

CHAPTER 33

Barth on Prayer Andrew Purves

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arl Barth’s teachings on prayer are spread across his corpus. The sections on prayer in the Church Dogmatics are set within the context of (i) the special ethics of the doctrine of creation (CD III/4) and (ii) the special ethics of the doctrine of reconciliation (CL). Our exploration of Barth’s understanding of prayer will follow these two sources and ­conclude with (iii) a brief discussion of prayer in his book Prayer (1985).

The Command of God and the Special Ethics of the  Doctrine of Creation Barth’s focus is the human person who acts under the command of God. This is human activity that Barth has in view, shaping sanctification. The ethics of human action is concrete, particular or special ethics (CD III/4, p. 6). The focus is on the command of God for the intention, decision, and conduct of a human person, at this moment and in this situation (CD III/4, p. 11). The standard of human action, for good or evil, will be decided not by ethics as such, but by God the Commander (CD III/4, p. 18), from the Word of God. Who is the commanding God as God is known in Jesus Christ (CD III/4, p. 24)? Barth answers in terms of the three loci of dogmatics: God is creator, reconciler, and redeemer, holding us human beings fast on all sides in this threefold activity. Whenever God encounters us with God’s command, it is always by God who is this God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the sovereign Lord of creation, who in God’s Son gives himself for it, and who as Spirit leads it into truth and perfection. Who is the human person who acts as known by the Word of God in Jesus Christ (CD III/4, p. 25)? Correspondingly, the human is the creature of God, the sinner to whom

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth and Dogmatics, Volume I, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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God is gracious, and the one led by the Spirit who lives in hope of final redemption. It is this human person who is confronted by the command of God. Thus the special theological ethics treats of God as creator and the human person as God’s creation. Here Barth refers to “spheres” in which God commands and the human person is obedient or disobedient, rather than to “laws” that God commands and the human person does right or wrong (CD III/4, pp. 29–30). Barth operates within the framework of encounter and relationship, appropriate to the nature of the gospel.

God the Creator as Commander Immediately Barth runs into a problem. God is one and indivisible in God’s work of creation, reconciliation, and redemption. Further, the first and third articles of the creed can be understood only from the second, and the latter only on the basis of the first and the third. The command of God the Creator cannot mean there are separate commands related to each article. In the ethical event God commands and the human person acts in all three spheres at once (CD III/4, p. 33). Nevertheless, God’s action in each of these three spheres is a particular one. That is, we consider the whole command of God in one particular form, in this case, as God the Creator. Correspondingly, the human person acts or abstains where God the Creator encounters him or her. God known as the human person’s creator follows, however, from the fact that God is really known as the God who acts with grace in Jesus Christ. Confessing the second article, Jesus is Lord, the church sees the truth of the first article concerning the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth (CD III/4, p. 39). The grace of God is the noetic basis of creation; it is also the ontic basis of creation, for the ground of creation is the gracious election of humankind in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the meaning and purpose of creation. What we know of ourselves outside of the mirror of God’s grace in Jesus Christ never reaches above the phenomenon of the human (CD III/4, p. 43). To be human is to know that one stands before God the Creator. The human person is a being in history, created, elected, and summoned by God in Jesus Christ.

Freedom Before God The human person under the command of God the Creator has three responsibilities. 1. To Keep the Holy Day Keeping the Sabbath as a day apart from human achievement allows attention to be on who God is and what God does for humankind (CD III/4, p. 53). We cannot be satisfied only with our human “Yes.” The Sabbath commandment demands faith in God and the renunciation of ourselves (CD III/4, p. 60). This is the basis for the service of the congregation and rest from work. The human person is placed before the fact that the holy day belongs to God (CD III/4, p. 67). And because God is the God of grace, it is a day of freedom, joy and feasting, and a day of life together. As the first day of the week it sets the coming days of the week in its light (ET, p. 151).

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2. To Make Confession By confession Barth intends the invitation and obligation to bear witness to God. The human person knows God, and God calls from this person to confirm, to declare and impart this knowledge (CD III/4, p. 73). The person of faith, by way of one’s mouth, comes out into the open as a partisan of God. There must be speech; silence is impossible (CD III/4, p. 76). In particular, it is speech to God’s honor when the faith of the Christian community is confronted or questioned, either from within or without by unbelief, superstition or heresy. Confession has the character of protest against false faith that contradicts the glory of God. The first criterion of faithful confession consists in whether and to what extent it is faithful to what Scripture sets before us as its all‐controlling theme: Jesus Christ, the covenant fulfilled in him, reconciliation accomplished in him, his Lordship as an exclusive Lordship, and his unity with God (CD III/4, p. 84). The second criterion of faithful confession is that it implies action, exposing the subject as a member of the Christian community. Confession is a free action (CD III/4, p. 85) made by a person who has freedom before God. Confession is spoken by a human person who stands on God’s side; it can, therefore, be spoken forth without fear or anxiety. 3. To Pray Barth’s treatment of prayer as the command of God the Creator has a generalized tone. His treatment of prayer under the rubric of God the reconciler, where he discusses the first two petitions of the Lord’s Prayer at length, is more specific and developed. Similar to keeping the holy day and confession, prayer is commanded by God (CD III/4, p. 87). Alongside all other commanded activities, we must not fail to turn to God directly. Of central importance, and the highest honor that God claims from the human person, is to seek, ask, and accept from God, not just this or that, but everything that is needed. As free before God, a human person is free to will and present him‐ or herself wholly to God as an application directed to God. Prayer is the inner side of confession; they belong together. And without prayer there will be no theological work (ET, p. 149). The person who prays knows to whom he or she prays. Prayer renews confession, and they are related in their common knowledge of God. Barth expands this in a note, commenting on “the praise of God” (CD III/4, p. 88). Although prayer is not confession, there is no legitimate prayer that does not lead to confession. Prayer is directed toward God that takes place in “thy closet” and as such is a private matter, whereas confession is directed outward to others. Prayer is concrete action in particular moments. And like confession, prayer has the form of speech. Prayer will not try to be eloquent or even theologically correct but has the character of a sighing and stammering (CD III/4, p. 89). More than anything else, prayer is a matter of responsibility before God. The human person who prays encounters God as someone who has something to say to God because he or she is invited and summoned to do so. God who has already spoken expects us in return to speak with God (CD III/4, p. 90). In spite of human incompetence, we can leave it to God to hear and understand us in and through our miserable words.

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Barth’s Five Criteria for Prayer 1. The first, and the basis for prayer, is the human person’s freedom before God (CD III/4, p. 91). The basis for prayer can consist neither in privation or desire, nor in the asking. It is not need that teaches us to pray, or awareness of blessings, even of the goodness of God. The demand for divine help and gifts will not necessarily drive us to serious petition. When asking God for what we need, its cause lies outside of us in the human person’s freedom before God, that is, the God‐given permission to pray, which because given by God, becomes a command and a necessity (CD III/4, p. 92). God is the gracious God who lets us come before God. In prayer we stand before the inner reality of the covenant between God and human persons, which is the meaning and basis of creation. In a note Barth points out that we have the command and promise that we may and shall pray in the name of Jesus Christ (CD III/4, p. 94). Jesus Christ, properly speaking, is the one who prays. We belong to him, and are thereby empowered, invited, and summoned to pray, as the church at whose head he has placed himself. It is a single fact that both Jesus Christ with his prayer and the Holy Spirit with “unutterable groanings” is at once our mediator and intercessor. It is Jesus Christ as the Spirit of Jesus Christ who brings our prayers before God and as such makes them possible as prayers, and, following his lead, call upon God our Father. Prayer has its origin as we belong to Jesus Christ. Prayer is decisively petition or request (CD III/4, p. 97), and is distinguished from all human attempts to make ourselves worthy of God. In prayer we come to God with empty hands. This is what God wills from us when God bids us to pray. We present ourselves to God as people who have to receive everything from God (ET, p. 155). In this context Barth has a critical note on devotion as the cultivation of soul or spirit. Prayer, he insists, begins where this kind of exercise leaves off. Understanding prayer as request means that all masks and camouflages fall away as the real person stands before God (CD III/4, p. 98). Prayer is not a function or a service in which a person “gives” him‐ or herself to God. Rather, a person stands before God in his or her need in relation to God. A question arises whether prayer must include thanksgiving, penitence, and worship (CD III/4, p. 99). Thanksgiving, Barth argues, is the root of prayer, and is to be understood as gratitude to God who gives us the invitation, permission, and freedom to come before God as supplicants with our needs. The same is true for repentance. Our requests of God fall within our utter need to repent. To worship God we do what God wants of human persons, and like thanksgiving and repentance, must issue in petition. We honor, prize, and praise God when we come to God applying to God for everything. Thus ­centrally prayer is petition, and only as such is it also thanksgiving, repentance, and worship. Barth briefly, and pastorally, discusses petitionary prayer that falls short, and stands in need of repentance on account of human egoism, anxiety, cupidity and so on (CD III/4, p. 100). We must keep in mind the intervention of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit that makes our petitions a movement in a cycle that goes out from God

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and returns to God. Even our unholy prayer will not fail to be sanctified. What we do badly is made good by God’s grace (III/4, p. 101). 2. When “I” pray, I do so as one of “we.” Thus: “Our Father, which art in heaven.” “We” are the men and women who are with Jesus (CD III/4, p. 102). “We” are made brothers and sisters under our common Head. As such, we represent the Lord to the world and the world before the Lord. And “we” who believe, among many who do not, stand provisionally in their place. “We” offer our prayer for those who do not yet know the Lord, but whose Lord he is. Belonging to the Christian community, differentiates prayer from private religious action. Christian prayer is characterized by the two groupings of the six petitions of the Lord’s Prayer. We are summoned to take up the cause of God and participate in it in our asking (CD III/4, p. 103). We call God our Father, asking that God’s cause might also be our cause, for God wills not to be God without us. God commands us to ask that God’s name be hallowed, that God’s kingdom may come, and that God’s will be done. Outside of this participation in the work of Jesus Christ we would not belong to the “we” of this prayer. We are summoned, further, to ask God to participate in our human cause. We cannot be human persons for God without God honoring our cause by making it God’s own, which God has done so in Jesus Christ (CD III/4, p. 105). To participate in God’s cause we need God to stand firmly for our cause. 3. True prayer is sure of a hearing (CD III/4, p. 106). God receives and adopts our requests into God’s plan, and therefore into God’s speech and action. This assurance has the character of hope. One cannot pray uncertainly, and “Amen” means this shall be true and certain. We may doubt the value of our prayer but not God’s hearing of it (CD III/4, 107). The person who prays thus, in hope and in confidence of God’s hearing, belongs to the “we,” to the body whose head is Jesus Christ. In union with Christ the human person is bound up with God, and God is bound up with the human person. In this case, we are bound up with Jesus’ praying as the petition for God’s cause and our human cause. In Christ we are raised to the side of God, asking our petitions in Christ’s name. How can we be refused? Barth calls into question a view of divine immutability that rules out the possibility that God cannot be conditioned by prayer (CD III/4, p. 109). God is immutable as the living God who espouses the cause of God’s people. God’s glory is  that God can give a place in God’s will for the requests of God’s people. Barth’s  reasoning here has to do with God in Christ for us, who hears and answers requests. 4. This is mostly a summary point: prayer rests on command, it is petition, it is prayer of all God’s people, and it is prayer sure of a hearing (CD III/4, p. 110). Barth also gives some basic teaching: Prayer as petition has the character of both intercession and discipline. As such, we must learn to pray. Further, prayer should probably be short than long. There is an obligation to times and hours of prayer. Prayer takes place in obedience, but as such can only flow from freedom. We turn now to Barth’s lengthy treatment of the first two petitions of the Lord’s Prayer.

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The Command of God and the Special Ethics of the Doctrine of Reconciliation As discussed previously, at issue is the relation of human action to God’s command (CL, p. 4). The focus is explicitly on the command as grace, that is, as Jesus Christ. In him grace is God’s superior answer to human sin (CL, p. 26). In him the covenant between God and the human person has an irrevocable basis (CL, p. 29). God’s glory and human salvation are bound together, and the point of human obedience to the command of God is free gratitude (CL, p. 30). The command of God is the command of Jesus Christ, the one mediator between God and humankind, which encounters us in the form of grace and commands our obedience as free persons in Christ before God (CL, p. 35). Grounded and oriented in Jesus Christ the human life is a Christian life (CL, p. 37). Barth runs through possible answers to the question of what constitutes a Christian life: freedom, repentance, faith, thanksgiving, faithfulness. He seeks to name the obedience the gracious God commands that is distinctive to human persons as the partner of God and for which he or she is empowered (CL, p. 42). This action must have significance for all human acts, for which God alone is the helper, source, and giver, so that it is ventured in confidence. Barth’s discovery is this: “We are speaking of the humble and resolute, the frightening and joyful invocation of the gracious God in gratitude, praise, and above all petition” (CL, p. 43). The human person is empowered for this and obligated to it by God’s grace. The command, “Call upon me” (Ps 50:15) is the basic meaning of every divine command, and invocation is the basic meaning of human obedience (CL, p. 44). To explore this, Barth engages in a study of the special themes suggested by the Lord’s Prayer. Barth placed his discussion on the Lord’s Prayer between his discussions on the foundation of the Christian life with baptism, and the renewal of the Christian life with the Lord’s Supper. The latter was never written. We move immediately to the discussion on the Lord’s Prayer. The task of Christian ethics is to portray Christian life under the command of God (CL, p. 49). Given baptism, what is the Christian life in view of that foundation? Barth has in view life in relation to the obligation and commitment to Jesus Christ. This life is one of the invocation of God. The law of prayer is the law of faith. The Lord’s Prayer is a breviary of the whole gospel, and is a prayer of invocation that we are directed to pray as those who belong to Jesus Christ (CL, p. 50). §76 The Children and Their Father Seven times Barth begins aspects of his discussion with “Father!” It is a stand‐alone vocative. The word is direct address. We do not speak about the Father, but toward the Father (CL, p. 51; ET, p. 153). To pray “Father” is the primal act of Christian obedience. God is really Father, a speaking and hearing subject who acts personally. God is not neutrally or abstractly Father. As Father, God is “Thou.” For Christians, the vocative signifies “dear” Father (CL, p. 58). “Father” gives precision, fullness, and interpretation to the word “God” that is otherwise ambivalent (CL, p. 53). Christians, says Barth, “move

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through this misty territory (denoted by the word ‘God’) invoking the Father with ­crying, sighing, singing, and rejoicing, praising the Father, thanking the Father, and above all praying to the Father, their life being lived in this vocative” (CL, p. 54). “Father” qualifies the word “God” as the one whom Jesus proclaimed as “your” Father, and as “Our Father” (CL, p. 55). Christians confess as God the God who is Father. But God is Father in a different sense from all other fathers. God is Father in heaven, who has absolute superiority over all things. God as Father is the Creator, both distinguished from all things yet present to all things, both transcendent and immanent (CL, p. 57). Who is this Father as the one true God in God’s distinctive nature (CL, p. 61)? God as Father is known as such because Jesus Christ is the executor and revealer of him, who guarantees Christians that God is their Father, enabling, inviting, and summoning them to call upon God as their Father (CL, p. 63). Jesus Christ founded calling upon God the Father, and made it binding on his people, by doing it himself. Says Barth, “He took them up into the movement of his own prayer” (CL, p. 64). Christians do as he does and join him in calling upon God the Father in obedience to his command. Although the imperative of Jesus Christ is the basis for the vocative “Father!,” it carries also the force of an indicative (CL, p. 65). The command of Jesus Christ is the command of the covenant between God and humankind fulfilled in him. God and this one man, Jesus Christ, belong together as Father and Son. Our freedom to call upon God as Father is grounded in the way in which Jesus Christ called upon God, and we in return do so also in the power of the grace given and effective in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, in calling upon God as Father, gives us what he demands, freeing us for it (CL, p. 66). Not to know Jesus Christ is not to know the Father, because God is the Father of Jesus Christ. God is our Father just as Jesus Christ is our Lord. Barth now turns to the opposite and corresponding problem, the children of the Father (CL, p. 69). We become and are God’s children by God’s grace, which is God’s possibility not ours (CL, p. 73). By grace, coming to faith in Jesus Christ, people become the children of God, recognizing that his life and ministry, death and resurrection, all took place for them. For humankind, in their place and on their behalf, God’s grace is Christ’s grace given for them, the fulfillment from the human side of the covenant between God and humankind. As they look and cling to him, they become and are children of God (CL, p. 75). There is no one who in Jesus Christ is not justified before God, sanctified for God, called to the being and work of God’s children, and endowed as God’s child. Here Barth is at pains to emphasize that we are children of God in Christ. In Christ, belonging to Christ, Christians are commanded, as God’s children, to call upon God as their Father. Barth makes three points concerning this human mode of existence. First, a necessary reminder: they are people of the gift of God’s grace (CL, p. 77). Gratitude for this must never end. And it is given afresh daily. Christians walk in this faith, have no abiding city, yet press on to the goal. This is all a miracle, that they can do this and have freedom for it. Second, those who are free to call upon God as their Father do so as those who are inept, inexperienced, unskilled, and immature as children (CL, p. 79). The invocation of “Our Father” is always the work of beginners. Says Barth, “Spiritual life … begins at the very point where spiritual skill ends” (CL, p. 79). Third, Barth insists that we are children of God in the plural (CL, p. 82). It is as a people that Christians are freed to call upon God as Father.

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Invocation is the movement in which the children bring themselves to the notice of their Father (CL, p. 85). It is to rise up to take the way to the Father to whom they owe thanks. Thanksgiving is not just acknowledgement of received gifts from God; it is also an honoring of God. Invocation as pure petition is to seek grace and to cry for it, and for this God’s children are liberated, invited and summoned. Given the free will and work of God’s grace, human persons are commanded to ­­participate in God’s being and life which is freely given (CL, p. 88). Barth now invokes the gift of the Holy Spirit by whom God joins himself to certain people and them to God (CL, p. 90). In the Holy Spirit God awakens, impels, and enables people to receive God, to establish a common life between God and them. As these people they call upon God as their Father. Barth develops his discussion with three elucidations. First, the Christian life is a spiritual one (CL, p. 92). It is a life of calling upon God the Father in prayer for the Holy Spirit. In the Holy Spirit Christians find themselves confronted by God, confessing Jesus Christ is Lord, and calling upon God as their Father. Christians cling to God, and to God only in Jesus Christ, as they are freed to do by the Holy Spirit. Second, the Christian life is a personal but never a private matter (CL, p. 95). The invocation of God is a social matter. Further, Christians may always be “a little flock,” and as such they are different from the world, though not taken out of the world. Their awakening is not for the satisfaction of their special interests but they are this minority for the ministry in which they are placed when they are called God’s children: to bear witness to the covenant, the ­reconciliation, the peace that God has set up between himself and the world in Jesus Christ (CL, p. 97). Christian life has this public character for which they are freed for the ­service of their Father. The vocative “Our Father” bursts through the limits of personal life in God, for Christians who pray this prayer are the people of God’s witness to all other people (CL, p. 100). Those who pray this prayer cannot do so without including those who do not live in their communion, those for whom Jesus Christ is still a stranger. All people have been taken up into Christ’s invocation of God as his Father. As those who belong to Christ, Christians pray “Our Father” as provisional representatives and vicars of the rest, as witnesses to those from whom God’s work is yet concealed. Third, God will not be without God’s people. As they invoke God as their Father, God hears and answers their invocation. God has authentic dealings with those who call upon their Father, invoking the name of Jesus Christ (CL, p. 108).

§77 Zeal for the Honor of God “Hallowed be thy name” is the first decisive petition, asking for something only God can do (CL, p. 112). This petition expresses passion for the honor of God and for God’s name to be manifest. This petition is prayed because God is both known and unknown in the world, in the church, and in the lives of Christians. There is knowledge and ignorance of God in the world (CL, p. 116). From the side of God, God is incontestably known in the world, for God is the world’s creator, and God hallows God’s name in its midst. The world lives by the fact that God is open to the world. Yet such knowledge of God is also hidden.

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Only in Jesus Christ is God’s name known in the world, and in him God’s name is hallowed by both God and humankind. Even so, God’s name continues to be desecrated. Atheism denies the existence of God. Religion, a work of the world, amounts to the domestication of God. But worst of all is the world’s attempt to exalt its own cause as God’s, subjecting God’s cause to our own (CL, p. 130). Thus we pray, “hallowed be thy name.” There is knowledge and ignorance of God in the church. Indeed, God is known in the church (CL, p. p. 132). In it God’s “yes” is heard, and the human “yes” to God is spoken in response, both through Jesus Christ. But God’s name is also desecrated in the church (CL, 135). In one form, the church puffs itself up, serving its own needs. In another form, the church is in defect, when it does not take the gospel or itself seriously. Thus we pray, “hallowed be thy name.” There is knowledge and ignorance of God within ourselves. A person becomes a Christian when God hallows God’s name through the Word of Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit (CL, 143). But within ourselves as Christians there is also ambivalence and division, and the absurdity of ignorance of God. There is within us what Barth calls “the stupid and blasphemous ‘and’” of being both righteous and a sinner (CL, p. 149). Thus we pray, “hallowed be thy name.” We pray God to make an end of the twilight in which the world, the church, and we Christians exist in relation to God (CL, p. 153). Let the light of the knowledge of God shine in all three spheres. Making this prayer at the behest of Jesus the church disturbs the false peace between knowledge and ignorance of God. But this is not a prayer for the empowerment of the church; it is a prayer for God to do what only God can do. We ask that God will hallow God’s name, thrusting God’s name into the world to be known and confessed. Of course, God has spread forth God’s name in Jesus Christ, and we pray that this sanctifying of God’s name will also mark the future when the veil of ignorance of God is lifted altogether. The indicative of God hallowing God’s name implies an imperative, for the law of prayer is the law of action (CL, p. 168). To pray this prayer demands zeal for God’s honor. We cannot be satisfied with the status quo of knowledge and ignorance of God. To this end, Christians have to give precedence to the Word of God, Jesus Christ, in what they choose to do. This Word has priority over everything else that must be heard. Life ­oriented to the Word of God creates an unrest both within oneself, in the church and as a person in the world insofar as we live within the sphere of the “and.” The Christian is called upon to be a witness of the Word to the world. Christians themselves become “a readable text” (CL, p. 202).

§78 The Struggle for Human Righteousness The prayer for the kingdom of God to come means praying for God’s order and against human disorder. Zeal for God’s honor and order is accompanied by the struggle for human righteousness (CL, p. 206). Barth uses the language of warfare to describe the revolt Christians must wage against the disorder that poisons human relations caused by a broken relationship with God. Human rebellion against God unleashes human

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abilities which exalt themselves as lordless powers. Thus we pray “Thy kingdom come” as a petition against them that only God can set aside. The powers of disorder are not ontologically godless forces (CL, p. 215). God is their creator. And in Jesus Christ they have been basically de‐demonized and will be fully so one day. As we pray this petition we ask God to unmask, overcome, and destroy them. Barth briefly discusses the lordless powers that have broken away from God and hold sway over human persons (CL, pp. 219f.): political absolutism, where power breaks loose from law; Mammon, when material possessions become idols; ideologies, as intellectual constructs of fallen persons; chthonic forces, the powers of the earth  – technology, fashion, sport, pleasure – which when released from their slumber bind the human person who has broken away from God. Thus we pray, “Thy kingdom come,” for God’s kingdom over and against human disorder. In the midst of disorder Christians pray “Thy kingdom come,” looking for the act of God that resists injustice and evil (CL, p. 234). The prayer is for the coming of God himself. What this means is a mystery insofar as it has already come but is still to be expected, and as such it is God’s independent action. Even so, this prayer cannot be omitted; it is unavoidable that God should be invoked with this prayer. By this prayer we plead for God’s intervention, putting an end to all unrighteousness. And it is prayed with c­ ertainty of being heard. The kingdom of God means the history of Jesus Christ (CL, p. 248). God’s kingdom is the kingdom of the Son. In Christ, God acted and spoke and rules. Speaking about the kingdom means telling his story. The past act of Jesus Christ had the power to compel Christians to pray this forward‐looking prayer: “Thy kingdom come.” and to turn and move toward that coming future. “(H)e comes who came, Jesus the Lord, and … it comes that came, the kingdom of God” (CL, p. 255). To pray this petition is also to be placed under an obligation to act congruently with it (CL, p. 262). Christians who pray thus are called to live with a view to the kingdom’s coming. We are claimed for action in the struggle for human righteousness. “Thy kingdom come.” We close this discussion from The Christian Life with a citation from elsewhere: “the whole of the Christian life is a form of this petition” (CD IV/4, p. 72).

Prayer In his little book, Prayer, Barth discusses prayer from the teaching of the Reformation. The Reformation was itself an act of continuous prayer (PRA, p. 23), and the Reformers were of one mind regarding its importance. Prayer comes from the heart and is not reducible to the mumbling of lips. Prayer is word, thought, and life. It means going toward God, asking for what we lack, for what we need in order to be faithful, and for renewal of our faith (PRA, p. 31). It is to speak to God who has already spoken to us. Prayer is a grace, an offer of God (PRA, p. 33). God answers and acts as prayer exerts an influence upon God. What matters is not the force of our piety, but that God listens to our prayers. Of course, God knows us, sees us, and judges us through the person of Jesus Christ. In him, humankind is in the presence of God. In this way, all our prayers are summed up in him. Thus we pray assuming we have already been heard in Christ.

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Regarding the Lord’s Prayer, we will not repeat what has been noted already. We note just these observations. Jesus Christ is the donor and warrant of the Fatherhood of God and of our filiality (PRA, p. 45). It is Christ who prays, and we join in his prayer (PRA, p. 51). “Thy will be done.” May God’s plan be executed. What in heaven is perfectly ­fulfilled, may that continue to be unfolded upon earth. Eight times in the last three petitions are the words “our,” “we,” or “us,” referring to the fellowship that is in Jesus Christ (PRA, p. 65). Barth comments on the boldness. This prayer importunes God to be involved in human affairs. Daily bread: the strict necessities for life and the temporal sign of God’s grace (PRA, p. 70). Debts: we owe God everything (PRA, p. 74). Forgiving: a criterion necessary for understanding God’s pardon (PRA, p. 76). Pardoned: we are able to forgive. Temptation and evil: save us from the nothingness that is opposed to God (PRA, p. 82). So be it. Reference Barth, K. (1985). Prayer, (trans. S. Terrien). Philadelphia: Westminster Press.

CHAPTER 34

Barth on Religion Michael Weinrich

Diverse Perspectives Karl Barth’s relationship to the word “religion” – and to the broad spectrum it represents – is not easy to pin down, because in his hands it was something wide ranging and complex. It oscillated in different directions so that a clear and sustainable definition never emerged. For him religion extended all the way “from the spiritual exercises of Benedictine monks to the ideological compass of a socialistic ‘workers assembly hall’” (GA 47, p. 550). Along with fascism and communism, Americanism could also be ­portrayed as a religion, even as the most threatening of them all, because it was not ­recognizable as such at first glance (Barth 1931, p. 94). Barth was convinced that every form of social life involved some kind of religion, including certain varieties of atheism. Given the range of the definitions that he used (cf. Weinrich 2012, pp. 17–24), there are good reasons for leaving the horizon open. At no time did Barth explain his use of the word “religion” with reference to philosophical, sociological, or psychological criticism. He made no significant use of the secular study of religion as known in his own day through writers like Ernst Troeltsch or Rudolf Otto, who tried to promote religion as a modern alternative to traditional doctrinal theology. Instead, from the very beginning of his published writings, he adopted an explicitly theological standpoint in which religion was the object of sharp criticism. Nevertheless, he never tried to delete religion from the theological agenda. We can no more escape from religion and morality, he argued, than we can escape from ourselves (GA 16, p. 260). Any attempt to rid the world of religion would be misguided. It would mean “erecting the worst of all idols, namely that of a so‐called ‘truth,’ from the throne of which I would consider myself capable of seeing through all gods and of unmasking them as

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth and Dogmatics, Volume I, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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idols. The world which I could clear of all gods would truly be neither the kingdom of the living God nor even a preparation for it, but would probably be the worst of all forms of devilry, by which I could oppose that kingdom” (“Nein! Antwort an Emil Brunner,” GA 52, p. 515). From a theological standpoint, it was the light of God that would expose religion in its temptations, its shortcomings, and even its hubris. It was God’s self‐revelation that demystified religion, even if it sometimes appeared to be humanity’s “one great concern” (CD I/2, p. 300). Barth was always alert to the tension between whether religion was somehow a sign of God’s kingdom or just another human invention. His approach to religion – especially after 1914 – was not for the sake of making human life more human, as might be the case with secular studies of religion, but for the sake of honoring God as God, and only from there enhancing the humaneness of human life. In this general perspective we may distinguish three vantage points – as set forth in the following sections – from which Barth considered religion even though they were sometimes mixed together.

“Religion and Life” During his student years Barth was eager to sit under famous liberal theologians like Adolf von Harnack in Berlin and Wilhelm Herrmann in Marburg in order to make his way over against his father Fritz Barth. It was especially Herrmann who inspired him with a new understanding of religion. Religion was not something cultivated as a private experience that would provide access to the really real. It was rather an experience in which one encountered the deepest mystery of life; it imparted a certain ­consciousness of God’s will, and it did so in particular through an encounter with Christ. When the early Barth interpreted religion as an individual experience, he already criticized the manner in which church and society manipulated it for their own purposes. At the same time he was opposed to the relativism of the History of Religion School, because it would banish God from history (“Der christliche Glaube und die Geschichte, 1910” GA 22). Religion was rejected as a kind of ideology (Weltanschauung) or a common moral program, because at its best it really stood for a deeper sense of life that would shape the whole person through an encounter with God’s will. Although Barth distanced himself from his early ideas (cf. Barth 1981, p. 154; GA 1, p. 306), he held on to his view that religion obtained its relevance only from God or else had no relevance at all. The bankruptcy of religion became obvious for him, when the German churches – except for a few members – did nothing in 1914 to prevent the outbreak of World War I. On the contrary, the armed forces were invested with a halo for doing God’s will and their weapons were blessed. Barth became disillusioned about the effectiveness of religion, lamenting its disconnection from real life. The church, religion, morality, and other idealistic forces dealt with truth only at the level of abstract ideas and never reached concrete reality (GA 16, p. 234). Religion had become little more than pious window‐dressing in support of prevailing vested interests. In this horizon it could not be taken seriously by anybody.

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In 1917 Barth gave a paper titled “Religion und Leben” (“Religion and Life”), in which he tried to explain his changed attitude toward religion (GA 48, p. 409). Instead of promoting real life, religion was so overtaken by human ideas that the voice of God was silenced. Where concrete powers were at work, religion was marginal. It was like a sparrow hopping around in the jaws of a crocodile (GA 48, p. 448). He came to think that Wilhelm Hermann had failed by concentrating on inner experiences; he was caught in a framework that was merely psychological instead of emphasizing the reality of God’s kingdom in the New Testament sense (cf. “Die dogmatische Prinzipienlehre bei Wilhelm Hermann,” GA 19, pp. 591f). It was apparent that for Barth the quest for true life was still in view even as religion had lost all ­connection to it.

“I Hate the Word” In a letter from Karl Barth to the American author and playwright Herbert Kubly (1915–1966) dated 16 July 1963 we find the short but fraught remark: “Religion” (“I hate the word!”) (GA 6, p. 161; Letters 1961–1968, 111). Obviously the later Barth still had feelings about the phenomenon of religion. His objection was that Kubly seemed to approach the Bible and the Christian tradition as something like a smorgasbord: “The Bible and the Christian tradition become a kind of Bern dish … from which everyone can serve themselves according to their individual tastes” (ibid.). It was risky to speak about religion, Barth averred, because it meant so many different things, and there were no binding standards. People feel free to make up their own minds. But they will not arrive at a binding consensus, because almost everyone feels committed to different premises. Religion reveals the ambiguity of human existence not its certainty, even if superficially, it is seen as the source of veritable truths. What Barth meant when he said that he hated the word “religion” was not entirely clear, but it seems that he felt stymied about how to communicate when no agreement could be reached. He suspected arbitrariness whenever religion was regarded as some sort of independent order or as providing a significant foothold for human existence. Religion did not pave the way to God, who called us not to religion but to real life in faith and obedience. Religion was the all‐too‐human signature of a life conducted in reference to some vague sense of transcendence beyond one’s run‐of‐the‐mill experiences. Experiential religion, however, never existed in a vacuum. It occurred only in connection with a specific confession or commitment. Theologically, religion had to be put into perspective, namely, one informed by the particularity of God’s election to Christian life. The correct line of reasoning did not flow from the universal to the particular (from religious self‐consciousness to the religious symbol), but rather from the particular to the universal (from the history of the covenant to eschatological hope). Barth became weary of trying to explain time and again that experiential religion was not something self‐contained but that it depended on assumptions about ultimate reality that needed to be made explicit. When approached by vague talk about religion, as in that letter from Kubly, he could become impatient.

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“True Religion” Things become more complicated. Beyond his irritation, Barth could also speak about “true religion,” never without hesitation, and yet with a positive emphasis. He was not thinking about the traditional distinction between vera religio (true religion) and falsa religio (false religion) that was used in the sixteenth century to distinguish the proper teaching of the church from heresy. Religio (being bound) stood for lex (normativity) and referred to the correct understanding of dogma in the church. Zwingli and Calvin used religio in this sense (Zwingli, Commentarius de vera et falsa religio, 1525; Calvin, Institutio christianae religionis, 1536–1559). When Barth spoke about “true religion,” however, he was using it as a generic term in the modern transconfessional sense. It was a usage that had emerged in the time of the early Enlightenment to counteract the confessional wars that had broken out especially in the seventeenth century (Weinrich 2012, pp. 25ff). (In other words, his use of the term “true religion” had little to do with world religions.) His focus on religion was characterized by the assumption that religion – including any kind of faith – was present in all human attitudes aimed at understanding one’s own life or human life in ­general. In this context the decisive question for Barth was not whether to accept religion or not, because everyone had to believe in something. It was rather a question about the truth of what was believed. For Barth religion was mostly just an empty form in search of content – an almost endless variable. In ordinary life it always involved some content as its particular credo. And it was this content that had to be interrogated about its truth. No religion was driven by the intention of just functioning emotively as a religion. It lived by its credo, and this credo’s truth was something cognitive, not merely something emotive and practical. From this standpoint, for Barth, the question of religion became secondary to the question of truth. No one could float above a truth that really deserved to be called truth. That was precisely the quandary of religion. Truth could not be merely a matter of personal preference. The question about truth was an attempt to put religion into perspective. Even in a modern non‐confessional sense, religion involved a credo, whether overtly or covertly, which had cognitive elements as well as emotive and practical elements. Barth was interested in the cognitive elements of religion within the nonconfessional symbolic form. The form did not determine the content, he contended, but the content determined the form. In religion there could be no form without the content. The technical device by which Barth had related gospel and Law (Barth 1935) was essentially the Chalcedonian Pattern of an asymmetrical unity‐in‐distinction. This was also the device by which he saw truth as related to its religious symbolic form. Truth and symbol were related “without separation or division,” “without confusion or change,” and with the priority and precedence belonging to truth. With these ideas in the background, Barth dared to speak theologically about the possibility and reality of “true religion.” The event of Jesus Christ suggested a possibility in which content and form, truth and religion, might enter into correspondence without being directly identical. Because as a Christian theologian he identified “truth” with the Word of God, by which he meant the gospel of Jesus Christ, Barth would attempt to

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work out the possibility of “true religion” on that basis. The result was a provocative thesis that has been widely misunderstood. We will return to it later.

Religion as Question From roughly World War I to his engagement with Anselm (ca. 1916–1930), Barth engaged in a harsh critique of religion. Religion was depicted as an autonomous attempt at human self‐realization over against God and his loving care for human life. At the same time religion was also defended as a valuable tool for calling contemporary human existence into question. In their self‐seeking and godlessness, considered by Barth to be obvious, along with all the terrible consequences that went with them, the catastrophes of recent history had served to provoke a deep longing for something better. Religion gave expression to these longings in spite of its tragic efforts at autonomous self‐realization. Religion therefore had a double aspect. On the one hand, it was the self‐defeating project of a narcissistic humanity turned in upon itself, while on the other hand, it gave symbolic expression to real hopes. In an way reminiscent of Marx, religion for Barth was the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the spirit of a spiritless situation. It was an expression of real distress, and a protest against it. Indeed, as with Marx, the religious world was but a reflex of the real world; but for Barth, as over against Marx, the real world was not finally the world of economic and materialistic forces. It was the world of God’s coming, transcendent kingdom. From this standpoint, Barth would call religion into question and ask about the truth concealed within it.

The Concern of the Existentially Godless Human Being In the first edition of his commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (1919), Barth depicted modern nonconfessional religion as a tragic and anthropocentric mistake, one that had confused the historical church, or human moral capacities, with God and his loving kindness toward the world. The biblical God was robbed of his sovereignty and replaced by human piety. In this context Barth spoke about the existentially godless religious human being (GA 47, p. 325). Modern culture, he worried, was mainly based on human self‐seeking. It rested on prevailing notions of historical progress, which were illusory. Religion had become a site of self‐exaltation, whether individual or social. In the 1920s Barth developed a rudimentary “Dialectic of Enlightenment” somewhat like that proposed in the 1940s by the Frankfurt social theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Barth saw religion as embodying a tendency toward self‐destruction, a ­tendency that had enveloped the world in violence, barbarism, isolation, and a false sense of unity, and yet also as embodying a tendency toward transcendent hope. Barth’s critique was not directed against the Enlightenment or against reason as such, as known in many antiliberal interventions in the crisis after World War I. It was rather an attempt to enlighten the Enlightenment about its illusions and shortcomings. It was an attempt to sober up the reasonableness of reason over against its unreasonable uses

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and ideological pretentions. For Barth it was especially about a lost humility and modesty over against the reality of God as God. Barth was rejecting the paradigm shift of modernity that would place the human being at the center of the universe, almost as if it had not long since been clear that the earth was not the center of the universe. For Barth, as for Horkheimer and Adorno, it was not accidental that the Enlightenment emerged together with absolutism (PTNC, pp. 22ff). Positing religion as the pivotal starting point for theological reflection could also be taken as a token of the same absolutism.

The Question of the Human’s Existence Already in the first edition of his Romans commentary (GA 16, p. 83), but even more so in the second edition, Barth portrayed religion as the existentially godless human being’s “titanic possibility” (“titanische Möglichkeit”) (GA 47, p. 342). Nevertheless, for him that was not the whole story. By emphasizing the “tragic paradox” of religion (“tragische Paradoxie”) (GA 47, p. 346), he also interpreted it as a huge question mark that cast doubt on the whole cultural system (“Fragezeichen des ganzen humanen Kultursystems”) (GA 47, p. 336). Religion’s value was discerned in its continual annulment of itself (“Biblische Fragen, Einsichten und Ausblicke”) (GA 48, 678). At its best it posed a powerful question, indirectly, about what truly determined human life. As he would later write in CD I/2, Barth was already pointing to the possibility of an “Aufhebung der Religion” (GA 47, p. 153). This term was regrettably translated in CD I/2 as the “abolition of religion” (CD I/2, p. 280). The English word “abolition,” however, did not capture what the term “Aufhebung” was really about. The term Aufhebung has no good English translation. It signifies a dialectical process of critical negation and affirmation. One and the same entity is subjected to affirmation, negation, and the negation of the negation. Hegel, who had started out as a theology student, took the particular christological history of incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection and turned it into a general and recurring pattern that he proposed could be seen as running throughout world history. Something was always being posited, negated, and then subjected to a negation of the negation. Barth took over this pattern from Hegel and applied it to the phenomenon of religion. Barth was not advocating the eradication of religion. He was proposing a higher “synthesis” in the sense of Hegelian dialectics, where thesis and antithesis had been negated and reconstituted onto a higher plane that was not immediately approachable empirically. When Barth spoke about the “Aufhebung der Religion,” he was suggesting a kind of self‐enlightenment for religion by revealing the hidden question behind all the teeming religious forms that in the end did not lead to any satisfactory achievements. Religion was recognized as an ambiguous phenomenon. On the one hand, it reinforced religiously godless people in their problematic longing for self‐assurance, whereas, on the other hand, it called everything into question that they were pursuing for their own self‐realization. It is this ambiguity that stood in the background when Barth described religion as “a forlorn outpost that must nonetheless be maintained” (GA 47, p. 459). “The limits of religion,” he wrote, “and the unavoidable problematic into which it plunges people, is

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identical with the limits of human possibilities in general” (GA 47, p. 319). The very existence of religion already pointed to the predicament and the limits of human life. We are again reminded of Marx, whose idea of religion as the “opium of the people” also posited the ambiguity of religion. It offered people a superficial happiness while revealing by its very necessity the actual depth of their misery. In the same vein, Barth could speak about religion as dynamite that did not explode as long as it was kept wet by the limited happiness religion provided (GA 47, pp. 350, 369). Because religion contained a hidden revolutionary element within itself, Barth saw reason to affirm it: “To awaken religion, to keep it awake and endeavor above all to reform it, or better, even continually to revolutionize it, is as noble a task today as any worthy of the greatest labor” (GA 47, pp. 349f). At this point Barth was interpreting religion against the grain. Nevertheless, with his dialectical outlook, he could still envision religion as a “point of contact” for genuine theological engagement (“Anknüpfungspunkt”). Religion was the disease not the cure (GA 47, p. 354), not the solution but the symptom of an unredeemed world (GA 47, p. 354). It papered over social conflicts (GA 47, p. 365) and the split within individual psyches (GA 47, p. 369). It was an expression of the neediness humans felt about themselves (GA 47, p. 370). It posed the riddle of life with acuteness (GA 47, p. 391). It was already clear to Barth that clarification could be expected only from God’s revelation. Yet he still believed that the need for clarification was something that could be generally accepted by all. Because the salient point about religion was its critical self‐ annulment as a solution to human misery, its survival deserved to be safeguarded within the horizon of ordinary life. This dialectic – a dialectic of need and false consciousness as paradoxically reflexive of the reality of God’s kingdom – might be taken as a provocative but promising suggestion for a new approach to the philosophy of r­ eligion, one that has yet to be taken up.

Religion in the Perspective of the Church Dogmatics When Barth took up the question of religion in the Church Dogmatics, his theological approach became more distinctive and decisive (Weinrich 2016). The issue of religion was discussed in the “prolegomena” (i.e. the “preliminary introduction,” or more precisely “things to be said first”). In the nineteenth century that was the place where more or less any dogmatics used to discuss religion as the common ground of Christian faith. The important difference was that Barth used his prolegomena as “the first part of ­dogmatics rather than that which is prior to it” (CD I/1, p. 42). For Barth, prolegomena were not about neutral presuppositions but rather about substantive theological commitments that had to be unpacked from the very first. Prolegomena were not just a general foreword but an exposition of theological essentials (like the doctrine of the Trinity). These were what had to be established if theological work were to unfold responsibly. Prolegomena were concerned with what made theology theological. Religion was not the prior basis of theology but a special topic within it. Barth thus began with the actual substance of theology. He did not offer an account of what today

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we might call a presumed social or religious “imaginary,” that is, of a prior set of symbols, values, and conventions, common to a particular religious consciousness, through which a whole religious world was socially imagined. It is not unimportant that Barth’s account of religion occurred in the substantive part of his dogmatics. In contrast to his earlier dialectics, Barth toned down the sharpness of his rhetoric, while his new more theological approach left philosophical and anthropological foundations behind. In the title of the relevant section, Barth returned to his earlier terminology about the “Aufhebung der Religion,” but it was no longer based on a semiautonomous understanding of religion. According to Barth, all genuine theological matters now had their root in the Word of God as made known by revelation. Given the self‐revelation of the triune God, religion had to be considered theologically in the light of God’s loving concern for all of human life, including its religious dimension. Revelation as Barth understood it meant that “God is not alone” and that humankind “must not be overlooked or eliminated.” As an aspect of human existence, therefore, “religion” could not be overlooked, “whether by that we mean the Christian religion in particular or human religion in general, to which the Christian religion belongs” (CD I/2, pp. 295f.). Religion was not something autonomous in relation to revelation, because in “his revelation God is present in the world of human religion” (CD I/2, p. 297). From this standpoint, the paradoxical complexity of religion came into view. Religion was defined as the human effort to bypass revelation in order to achieve or sustain an independent relationship with God. It therefore had to be negated as the enterprise of humans who were religiously godless. Like the godless, no matter how “spiritual” or pious they may be, religion was in no position to justify itself. Like them, however, religion could receive justification and sanctification – and thus its affirmation – from God alone. Religion’s paradoxical complexity will need to be considered more fully.

Religion as Unbelief We start with the well‐known sentence: “Religion is unbelief.” “Religion is a concern,” explained Barth, “indeed we must say that it is the one great concern, of godless man” (CD I/2, pp. 299f. rev.). Was this statement simply a provocation? (van der Kooi 2010, p. 447). For Barth, theological judgments had to be based on what is said to us in the Word of God. In what sense did he understand the Word of God as God’s revelation? That was the topic of his whole prolegomena (CD I/1 and I/2). The threefold form of God’s Word – preached, written, and revealed – led Barth to adopt a trinitarian hermeneutic of revelation, according to which God was the Revealer, the Revelation, and the Revealedness (CD I/1, p. 295; cf. Weinrich 2013a). “Revealedness” referred in particular to the Holy Spirit as the one who actualized revelation on its subjective side. The question of religion (CD I/2, §17) was taken up in the middle of Barth’s doctrine of the Spirit (CD I/2, §16–18). He set forth the Spirit as revelation’s “subjective reality and possibility” (in that order). The actual reception of revelation served as the practical basis for freedom – “The Freedom of Man for God” (§16). It made freedom for God possible as the true destiny of human life. Revelation did not presuppose a preexisting religious self‐consciousness. It presupposed a humanity

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enslaved to sin, which revelation graciously transplanted into a new realm of freedom. Therefore, revelation was not only about knowledge but also about life  –  life in faith through the knowledge of faith. “True religion” was the practical response of faith to trinitarian revelation. It was the human answer to the divine address that came from the Father through the Son in the Spirit. Human beings not only received their true humanity through the work of the Spirit, but also put it into action. It was a matter of living in love for the triune God and for one another. Humans were called to a life of love and freedom in service to the Holy Trinity. As they served and worshipped this God, they practiced “true religion.” What might be true in principle (de jure), however, was very different in fact (de facto). And so we proceed to examine CD §17, whose title is so poorly rendered in the standard translation as “The Revelation of God as the Abolition of Religion” (italics added). This section, as already indicated, functions as kind of interlude in the flow of Barth’s trinitarian account of revelation (Di Noia 2000, p. 246). According to Barth, instead of living out their God‐given freedom in the form of “true religion,” sinful human beings – especially modern human beings – had invented their own nonconfessional religion, one severed from the history of the covenant, so that religion was something that stood at their disposal. Religion was no longer the revelation that encountered fallen humanity and transformed it for the sake of true life with God. Religion had been hollowed out into a generic concept. Revelation supposedly had to defer to it if it wanted to be relevant to modern life. With the rise of a new “rational orthodoxy at the beginning of the eighteenth century,” which Barth considered a “catastrophe” (CD I/2, p. 288, italics added), religion was portrayed as a general dimension of human self‐consciousness. Consequently, the “Christian element … has now actually become a predicate of the neutral and universal human element” (CD I/2, p. 289). Religion, so defined, became normative and took over the place that belonged to revelation. In this reversal Barth detected the basis for a new church‐destroying heresy (CD I/2, p. 291). Generic religion had borne its evil fruit in the German‐Christian movement under Hitler. The church was left defenseless, because theology had lost its proper object (CD I/2, p. 294). Where religion was defined as something generic, God would dwindle to a matter of arbitrary choice, and religion could be shaped according to unfortunate purposes. Matters were turned completely upside down, and faith was transformed into unbelief.1 Religion had been coopted by a form of human absolutism (CD I/2, p. 293). This de facto reversal of biblical revelation into generic religion was the theme of CD §17. Barth’s criticism of religion was not developed against the horizon of world religions, although some of it might apply in that regard. He was contending specifically against Christianity as a religion in the modern generic sense. Christian theological reasoning, he argued, did not properly proceed from the universal (or the generic) to the particular but the other way round. The Christian religion could not be truly understood if it were not considered in light of trinitarian revelation and the incarnation of the eternal Word of God. As previously mentioned, Barth saw the relation between God and humankind

1  Green prefers using the terms “faithlessness” or “unfaith” (Green 1995, p. 480).

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as governed by a pattern of asymmetrical unity‐in‐distinction. This pattern ensured that God would always be the initiating Subject while humans were the responding subjects. As long as the God‐relationship was seen as the result of human decision, however, the God in question was not really God but an idol, and the faith in question had to be seen as unbelief.2 Any proposal that interpreted Christianity as a variety of nonconfessional religion, and so as a human possibility, remained strictly linked to unbelief. Religion in the modern sense will never be more than a reflection of human nature. It will reflect who sinful human beings think they are and how they think they should proceed to satisfy their needs (CD I/2, p. 316). Religion, as a human project, becomes entirely human. In the end humans are worshiping themselves via a little detour (GA 14, p. 415). Religion degenerates, for example, into a typical middle‐class ideology (“typische Mittestandstandsideologie”) (PTNT, p. 77) in service to the prevailing bourgeois way of life (“Bürgerlichkeit”) (PTNT, p. 90).3 Christianity was now represented as a better foundation for philosophy and morality, as a better satisfaction of ultimate needs, as a better actualisation of the supreme ideals of modern man, than any of its various competitors. …It was inevitable that Christianity should surrender its truth to the continual fluctuations of modern man, that it should be tossed about from one unclean hand to another, that its truth should be regarded as now the absolutely authoritarian, now the individually romantic, now the liberal, now the national or even racial truth of man, but not as the actual truth of God, not as the truth that judges and blesses, and not as the truth that it continually claimed to be according to the original and strangely enough unsilenced documents of Christianity. (CD I/2, p. 336 rev., italics added)

Against this horizon Barth offered a metaphor drawn from economics. Religion had become a kind of investment. It was not as an end in itself, but an instrumental value, the means to some supposedly higher end. It was not the reception of God’s grace but was instrumentalized as the trust that human beings had in their own capacities. The modern religious man, he wrote, “is like a rich man, who in the need to grow richer (which cannot, of course, be an absolute need) puts part of his fortune into an undertaking that promises a profit” (CD I/2, p. 315). Religion could then be rejected by the same calculus. “We do not lose anything by the withdrawal. We simply withdraw our capital from an undertaking which no longer appears to be profitable” (CD I/2, p. 317).

2  “Freedom of choice” was not something neutral. It had to be understood in light of the mystery of the election of grace. “It might, of course, be objected: Is not the confession of the name of Jesus Christ a free human decision and therefore a choice of this name? Of course it is: that is the unequivocal teaching of Matt 16:13f., John 6:67f. …In fact there is no doubt that an election does take place: but it is an election upon which, just because it is our own election, we can only look back as upon something which has taken place already. In the act of electing [or choosing] we are not confronted by two or three possibilities, between which we can choose. We choose the only possibility which is given to us: ‘Lord, whither should we go?’ Those who confess and therefore choose the name of Jesus Christ choose the only possibility which is given to them, the possibility which is given to them by Jesus Christ” (CD I/2, pp. 351–352). 3  For this theme see Schellong 1984.

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Contrary to what is sometimes supposed, the later Barth did not curtail the severity of his religion‐critique (pace Dahling‐Sander and Plasger 1997, p. 32ff.). Religion remained an idolatrous attempt to make God over in our own image. He called religion the “attempted ‘nostrification’ of God,” that is, the attempt to refashion God according “to our own goals and aims and aspirations” (CL, p. 130 rev.). Nor was Barth’s critique limited to the situation of the German church struggle (pace van der Kooi 2010, p. 452). Nevertheless, because Barth’s critique was about God’s judgment, religion was not merely negated. It was also subject to a negation of the negation. Even as the past was cut off, a hopeful future had already opened up (Krötke 1981, p. 30).

The Justified Religion Just as sinful humanity was incapable of justifying itself before a holy God, so also religion as a projection of sinful self‐consciousness lacked the capacity to justify itself. Nevertheless, the justification of religion was not impossible, “but only in virtue of a reckoning and adopting and separating which are foreign to its own nature and being, which are quite inconceivable from its own standpoint, and which come to it quite apart from any qualifications or merits” (CD I/2, pp. 325f. rev.). The rehabilitation of religion was developed in terms of the doctrine of justification. Theologically, if something was justified by God, it was not because it was already spiritually healthy but only because it was endowed with righteousness by God’s grace alone (iustita aliena). Therefore the justification of religion was not to be seen as something exclusive to the Christian religion: “It is not that some human beings are vindicated as opposed to others, or one part of humanity as opposed to other parts of the same humanity. It is that God himself is vindicated as opposed to and on behalf of all humans and all humanity” (CD I/2, p. 356 rev., italics added). Although all religion stood under the sign of dissolution by divine judgment, it also stood under the promise of justification by divine grace. “Religion can just as well be exalted in revelation, even though the judgment still stands. It can be upheld by it and concealed in it. It can be justified by it, and … sanctified” (CD I/2, p. 326). This twofold dialectic of judgment and grace was exactly what the German word Aufhebung implied for Barth. In contrast to the oversimplified translation “abolition,” Aufhebung contained the dialectical implication of dissolution and elevation, negation and the negation of the negation, at the same time.4 It was God’s Aufhebung of sinful religion that led Barth to take the risk of talking about “true religion,” talk that has been often misunderstood. For him it was a matter of revelation and of faith that, in spite of everything, the sinful enterprise of religion stood under the promise that God might justify our social, religious, and indeed fallen “imaginaries,” just as he justifies fallen human beings. This promise did not mean suspending the necessary critique of religion. Nevertheless, because of Christ, the severity 4  See Di Noia 2000 with reference to Green 1995, p. 245. Green suggests “sublation” as a better translation. But this option comes close to translating the obscure by the obscure. As previously suggested, it would probably be better to leave the term Aufhebung untranslated but then discursively explained.

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of the critique did not have to end in desperation. There was still the promise that God would look with grace upon our religious endeavors, that he would negate, purify, and reconstitute them onto a new and higher plane, raising them as it were from the dead. Borrowing a line of thought from Calvin, we might say that it was God’s grace of sanctification that would elevate our imperfect and unsuitable practices as a father might graciously receive the insufficient efforts of his children. More precisely, Aufhebung in Barth’s sense meant “that man’s [sinful] self‐determination is co‐ordinated into the order of the divine predetermination” (CD I/2, p. 313), where it would be purified and made whole in spite of itself. For Barth, the possibility of true religion, whether Christian or any other, remained strictly eschatological. It did not become a visible phenomenon in the times between the times. Barth emphasized: “No religion is true” (p. 325). His agenda was opposed to any suggestion about the so‐called superiority of Christianity (cf. Troeltsch 1971). The truth was never something inherent in religion, whose possibility and reality as such could be granted only from the outside (extra nos). Religion’s elevation could only be accomplished by God himself. Grounded in Christ, it was a hope that any particular religious practice or “imaginary” might be elevated and purged by grace into the required truth. Therefore, we “can speak of ‘true’ religion only in the sense in which we speak of a ‘justified sinner’” (CD I/2, p. 325). Religion’s truth, insofar as it was true, was not transparent, although we were called to live by the hope of God’s sanctification. The scandal of the term “true religion” was identical with the scandal of faith, or with the scandals of revelation and the gospel. The term was primarily about a promise, and the only fulfillment to be glimpsed was its fulfillment in Christ. Again, to be clear, Barth did not identify “true religion” with Christianity. For Barth, the church was a witness to Christ in spite of its sinfulness – simul iustus et peccator (justified and sinful at the same time) – because there was more grace in God than sin in us. Although the church did not possess “true religion” any more than it could possess Christ, Christ was the Lord who indeed possessed the church – a church whose calling (vocatio) it was to attest him by word and deed (CD IV/3), and which he equipped for that task. Barth explicitly placed his view of religion in the hermeneutical perspective of the assumptio carnis (the assumption of flesh by the eternal Son), underlining the relevance of the Incarnation as a divine event that entered into, changed, and sanctified all things (CD I/2, p. 323; cf. Dahling‐Sander and Plasger 1997, pp. 14, 19, 24, 31f, 44; Di Noia 2000, p. 248). What from one perspective would be a human initiative determined by sin was from another perspective the impossible possibility (but the true reality) of a free human being in the power of the Holy Spirit (Krötke 1981, p. 23). The whole range of relevant factors became visible when Barth considered, at some length, religion’s Aufhebung as an act of God’s creation, election, justification, and sanctification (CD I/2, pp. 346–361). The eschatological truth of religion depended on these divine acts and revealed that for Barth any analogy that referred only to justification was too narrow. The Aufhebung of religion remained an important concept for Barth. It was directed against any triumphalist mentality in the church. The church of justified sinners did not exist on some elevated plateau from which it could stoop down and lift up sinners from the mire. It was more like one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread (in

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the words of D.T. Niles; Weinrich 2019). The Aufhebung of religion kept the crisis alive, the crisis in which the church always existed. At the same time it kept hope alive. It encouraged the church to transcend any religious complacency. It directed the church to pose ever anew “the question of canon and dogma, the question of creed, cultus, and church order, the question of correct theology and piety and ethics. …But the sanctification, to which [Christians] are subject in this exercise and repetition, is quite beyond their own striving and its successes and failures. No less than their justification, it is the work of him for whose sake they are called Christians and Christianity” (CD I/2, pp. 360f.). Perhaps the term “true religion” was finally too ambiguous for Barth, because he avoided it in his later writings, but without essentially changing his position.

The Religious Quandary of the Church By prescribing modesty to the church, Barth sidestepped the unfortunate typology of exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism (cf. Dahling‐Sander and Plasger 1997; Krötke 2007; Di Noia 2000; Ensminger 2014; Weinrich 2013b, 2014).5 The Christian religion could claim no privileged status over other religions. On the contrary, in “the world of religions, the Christian religion is in a position of greater danger and defenselessness and impotence than any other religion. It has its justification either in the name Jesus Christ, or not at all” (CD I/2, p. 356). At the same time, other religions were not necessarily cut off from the truth. The social imaginary of “true religion” was bound solely to the grace of God, and this grace could not be restricted exclusively to the Christian religion. The divine exclusiveness of “true religion” in Christ implied a particular inclusiveness and even plurality, because religious truth was not at human disposal, not even Christian disposal. There were incognito forms of the truth, and the Spirit would blow where it wills (John 8:3). “We have to reckon with the hidden ways of God in which he may put into effect [by the Holy Spirit] the power of the atonement made in Jesus Christ (John 10:16) even extra ­ecclesiam [outside the church], i.e. other than through its ministry in the world” (CD IV/1, p. 688, italics added). Certainly, in Christian understanding truth was defined by the name and history of Jesus Christ and to that which was included in him. Barth wrote: “Only one thing is really decisive for the distinction of truth and error. …That one thing is the name of Jesus Christ” (CD I/2, p. 343). It followed “that the truth of the Christian religion is in fact enclosed in the one name of Jesus Christ, and nothing else” (CD I/2, p. 343).

5  Barth would be in accord with Lesslie Newbigin: “It has become customary to classify views on the relation of Christianity to the world religions as either pluralist, exclusivist, or inclusivist.… [My] position is exclusivist in the sense that it affirms the unique truth of the revelation in Jesus Christ, but it is not exclusivist in the sense of denying the possibility of the salvation of the non-Christian. It is inclusivist in the sense that it refuses to limit the saving grace of God to the members of the Christian church, but it rejects the inclusivism which regards the non-Christian religions as vehicles of salvation. It is pluralist in the sense of acknowledging the gracious work of God in the lives of all human beings, but it rejects a pluralism which denies the uniqueness and decisiveness of what God has done in Jesus Christ” (Newbigin 1989, pp. 182–183, italics added).

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This name was at “the very heart of the divine reality of revelation”; and therefore, it was this name that “alone constitutes the truth of our religion” (CD I/2, p. 343). The advantage and the blessing of the Christian religion as over against every other religion was that it was given to know and to attest this holy name. All religions, and not least the Christian religion, stood under the sign of Aufhebung, the sign of divine judgment and grace. But the greatest promise and peril belonged to those who were given to know the name of Christ. Of those to whom much was given, much would be expected (Luke 12:48). “And just because they are the house of God, it is expressly with them that judgment begins on the fleshly, sinful, worldly [and thus religious] human being (1 Pet. 4:17)” (CD IV/1, p. 372 rev.). References Barth, K. (1931 [1957]). Fragen an das Christentum. In: Theologische Fragen und Antworten. Gesammelte Vorträge Vol. 3, 93–99. Zollikon: Evangelischer Verlag. Barth, K. (1935). Evangelium und Gesetz. In: Theologische Existenz heute 32, 1–30. Munich: Chr. Kaiser. Barth, K. (1981). Autobiographical sketches. I. Münster, 1927. In: Letters 1922–1966 (eds. K. Barth and R. Bultmann), 151–157. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Dahling‐Sander, C. and Plasger, G. (1997). Hören und Bezeugen. Karl Barths Religionskritik als Hilfestellung im Gespräch mit den Religionen. Waltrop: Spenner. Di Noia, J.A. (2000). Religion and the Religions. In: The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth (ed. J. Webster), 243–257. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ensminger, S. (2014). Karl Barth’s Theology as a Resource for a Christian Theology of Religions. London/New York: Bloomsbury. Green, G. (1995). Challenging the religious studies canon: Karl Barth’s theory of religion. Journal of Religion 75: 473–486. Kooi, C.v.d. (2010). Religion als Unglaube. In: Karl Barth im Europäischen Zeitgeschehen (1935–1950) (eds. M. Beintker et al.), 447–456. Zürich: TVZ. Krötke, W. (1981). Der Mensch und die Religion nach Karl Barth, Theologische Studien 125. Zürich: TVZ. Krötke, W. (2007). Impulse für eine Theologie der Religionen im Denken Karl Barths.

Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 104: 320–335. Newbigin, L. (1989). The Gospel in a Pluralistic Society. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Schellong, D. (1984). Bügertum und christliche Religion. In: Theologische Existenz heute 187, 2e. Munich: Chr. Kaiser. Troeltsch, E. (1971). The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religions. Louisville, KY: John Knox Press. Weinrich, M. (2012). Religion und Religionskritik, 2e. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Weinrich, M. (2013a). Theologischer Ansatz und Perspective der Kirchlichen Dogmatik Karl Barths. In: Die bescheidene Kompromisslosigkeit der Theologie Karl Barths, 36–63. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Weinrich, M. (2013b). Von der Humanität der Religion. In: Die bescheidene Kompromisslosigkeit der Theologie Karl Barths, 296–315. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Weinrich, M. (2014). Theologische Religionskritik als Brücke zu einer Theologie der Religionen. In: Theologische Religionskritik (eds. M. Hofheinz et al.), 16–33. Neukirchen‐Vluyn: Neukirchener. Weinrich, M. (2016). Karl Barths Weg von der Krisis zur Kritik. Zeitschrift für Dialektische Theologie 32: 71–94. Weinrich, M. (2019). Karl Barth. Leben – Werk – Wirkung. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to  Karl Barth

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Wiley Blackwell Companions to Religion The Wiley Blackwell Companions to Religion series presents a collection of the most recent scholarship and knowledge about world religions. Each volume draws together newly commissioned essays by distinguished authors in the field and is presented in a style that is accessible to undergraduate students, as well as scholars and the interested general reader. These volumes approach the subject in a creative and forward‐thinking style, providing a forum in which leading scholars in the field can make their views and research available to a wider audience. Recently Published The Blackwell Companion to Religious Ethics Edited by William Schweiker The Blackwell Companion to Christian Spirituality Edited by Arthur Holder The Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion Edited by Robert A. Segal The Blackwell Companion to the Qur’ān Edited by Andrew Rippin The Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Islamic Thought Edited by Ibrahim M. Abu‐Rabi’ The Blackwell Companion to the Bible and Culture Edited by John F. A. Sawyer The Blackwell Companion to Catholicism Edited by James J. Buckley, Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt, and Trent Pomplun The Blackwell Companion to Eastern Christianity Edited by Ken Parry The Blackwell Companion to the Theologians Edited by Ian S. Markham The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature Edited by Rebecca Lemon, Emma Mason, John Roberts, and Christopher Rowland The Blackwell Companion to the New Testament Edited by David E. Aune The Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth Century Theology Edited by David Fergusson The Blackwell Companion to Religion in America Edited by Philip Goff The Blackwell Companion to Jesus Edited by Delbert Burkett The Blackwell Companion to Paul Edited by Stephen Westerholm The Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence Edited by Andrew R. Murphy The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, Second Edition Edited by Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology Edited by Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore Wiley Blackwell Companion to Wisdom Literature Edited by Samuel L. Adams and Matthew Goff The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Materiality Edited by Vasudha Narayanan The Wiley Blackwell Concise Companion to the Hadith Edited by Daniel W. Brown The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Christian Martyrdom Edited by Paul Middleton The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth (2 volumes) Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson

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The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth Barth in Dialogue Volume II Edited by

George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson

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This edition first published 2020 © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions. The right of George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson to be identified as the authors of this editorial material has been asserted in accordance with law. Registered Offices John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK Editorial Office The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, customer services, and more information about Wiley products visit us at www.wiley.com. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print‐on‐demand. Some content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this work, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives, written sales materials or promotional statements for this work. The fact that an organization, website, or product is referred to in this work as a citation and/or potential source of further information does not mean that the publisher and authors endorse the information or services the organization, website, or product may provide or recommendations it may make. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a specialist where appropriate. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data applied for 9781119156567 (hardback)  Cover Design: Wiley Cover Image: Grunewald Isenheim by Mathias Grünewald is licensed under CC BY-SA Set in 10/12.5pt Photina by SPi Global, Pondicherry, India 

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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To Eberhard Busch

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Contents

Preface xi

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List of Contributors

xiii

Primary Text Abbreviations

xvii

Part III  Barth and Major Figures

419

35 Barth and Augustine Han‐luen Kantzer Komline

421

36 Barth and Anselm Paul Dafydd Jones

435

37 Barth and Aquinas Nicholas M. Healy

449

38 Barth and Luther George Hunsinger

461

39 Barth and Calvin Randall Zachman

473

40 Barth and Post‐Reformation Theology Rinse H. Reeling Brouwer

483

41 Barth and Edwards Kyle C. Strobel

495

42 Barth and Kant John Hare

507

43 Barth and Hegel Nicholas Adams

519

44 Barth and Schleiermacher Ryan Glomsrud

535

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contents

45 Barth and Kierkegaard David J. Gouwens

551

46 Barth and Bonhoeffer John W. de Gruchy

565

47 Barth and Bultmann Joseph L. Mangina

577

48 Barth and Tillich George Hunsinger

591

49 Barth and Rahner James J. Buckley

607

50 Barth and Balthasar D. Stephen Long

619

51 Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr Stanley Hauerwas

633

52 Barth and Hans W. Frei Ben Fulford

645

53 Barth and T. F. Torrance David A. S. Fergusson

657

54 Barth and Jüngel R. David Nelson

669

55 Barth and Charlotte von Kirschbaum Eberhard Busch

681

56 Barth and Tolkien George Hunsinger

693

Part IV  Barth and Major Themes

701

57 Barth and Modern Liberal Theology Gary Dorrien

703

58 Barth and Biblical Studies Mark S. Gignilliat

715

59 Barth and Theological Exegesis Richard Burnett

727

60 Barth on Actualistic Ontology Shao Kai Tseng

739

61 Barth and Philosophy Kevin Diller

753

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contents

ix

62 Barth and the Natural Sciences Andrew Torrance

767

63 Barth and Interdisciplinary Method Deborah van Deusen Hunsinger

781

64 Barth and Practical Theology Richard R. Osmer

797

65 Barth and Liberation Theologies Nathan D. Hieb

809

66 Barth and Near and Distant Neighbors Derek Alan Woodard‐Lehman

821

67 Barth and Ecumenism Michael Welker

833

68 Barth and Roman Catholicism Amy Marga

845

69 Barth and Eastern Orthodoxy John P. Burgess

857

70 Barth and the Religions Sven Ensminger

869

71 Barth and the Jews Mark Lindsay

881

72 Barth and Islam Glenn Chestnutt

893

73 Barth and Sexual Difference Faye Bodley‐Dangelo

905

74 Barth and Socialism Andreas Pangritz

919

75 Barth and War Matthew Puffer

937

76 Barth and the Weimar Republic Rudy Koshar

951

77 Barth and the Nazi Revolution Arne Rasmusson

965

Index 979

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Preface George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson

R

eaders of Karl Barth often find his work at once familiar and strange. The familiarity stems from the largely traditional subject matter of his theology. The questions, debates, and doctrines that Barth considers have been the currency of Christian theologians for centuries. He talks about recognizable topics like the triune God, Jesus Christ, the church, and the Christian life. He cites the Bible regularly, nearly 15 000 times in the Church Dogmatics alone, and he interacts with the work of well‐known figures within the Christian tradition. All these things make Barth’s theology appear accessible to new readers, as if they have found a theologian who speaks a language nearly everyone can understand. But one does not have to read very far in Barth’s work before things become strange. Barth uses everyday language in new and surprising ways. He often places fairly simple claims in dialectical tension with one another to produce an unexpected and complex result. Major figures within the tradition might be cited approvingly on one page only to have central aspects of their work rejected and reconfigured a few pages later. Barth frequently produces innovative readings of Scripture that stretch the imagination. No one who reads Barth comes away without being challenged, provoked, and changed. We edited this Companion with these readers of Barth in mind. Our goal was to help them better understand those parts of Barth’s theology that seem strange so they can see the familiar aspects of his theology with new eyes. We sought to create a comprehensive resource that covers nearly every topic of interest related to Barth’s life and work. The diverse set of scholars who participated are experts in their subject matter, and they brought great care to their work. Each chapter was composed with the aim of providing both clarity and depth to the topic. New readers of Barth should find that the chapters serve as a helpful introduction to the most important questions, themes, and ideas in Barth’s work. Experienced readers should discover fresh insights and interpretations that will raise new questions and enrich their scholarship. This Companion is divided into two volumes and four parts. Volume 1 explores “Barth and Dogmatics.” Part I introduces “The Life of Karl Barth” through two timelines of Barth’s life and a chapter‐length survey of his historical and theological significance.

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xii

preface

Part II examines “Barth on Doctrinal Theology.” The 33 chapters in this section explore Barth’s thought on key topics and questions in dogmatic theology as reflected both in Barth’s early work and his Church Dogmatics. Volume 2 turns attention to “Barth in Dialogue.” The 22 chapters in Part III place Barth into conversation with major figures in the history of Christian thought in order to capture a true, critical dialogue between them. Part IV explores “Barth on Major Themes.” Over the course of 21 chapters, Barth’s relationship to a variety of movements, traditions, religions, and events are explored with the goal of placing his thought in its theological, ecumenical, and historical context. Projects of this size are the product of a community. We are grateful to editors and production team at Wiley‐Blackwell both for inviting us to take on this project and for supporting our work along the way. Special recognition should be given to Rebecca Harkin, Joseph Catherine, Benjamin Elijah, Jake Opie, Richard Samson, and Sandra Kerka. They were gracious and professional at every turn. We also want to express our deep appreciation to each of our authors for their contribution to this project. Several of them put other tasks on hold, or worked on short time frames, in order to meet the deadlines associated with this project. Special recognition should be given to Ty Kieser, who worked as an editorial assistant on this project while completing his doctoral studies at Wheaton College. Ty’s encyclopedic knowledge of this project proved to be invaluable time and again. His enthusiasm, work ethic, and joyful spirit kept this project from becoming overwhelming despite its size. In addition to bringing every chapter into conformity with the bibliographical requirements, he also raised good questions and contributed insights that made the work stronger. It was a privilege to work with such a fine theologian. One of the best days we experienced over the course of this project was the day Eberhard Busch accepted our invitation to participate in it. The importance of Professor Busch’s contributions to Barth studies over the past 50 years can hardly be overstated. His keen mind, gracious spirit, and willingness to share his knowledge – not to mention his close personal acquaintance with Barth – have strengthened and enriched Barth’s legacy. In honor of his lifetime of work, we dedicate this Companion to him.

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List of Contributors

Nicholas Adams is a Religion Professor of Philosophical Theology at The University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Faye Bodley‐Dangelo is Managing Editor of Harvard Theological Review and Harvard Divinity Bulletin. James J. Buckley is Professor Emeritus of Theology at Loyola University Maryland. John P. Burgess is James Henry Snowden Professor of Systematic Theology at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. Richard Burnett is Executive Director and Managing Editor of Theology Matters. Eberhard Busch is Professor Emeritus of Systematic Theology at Georg‐August‐ Universität in Göttingen, Germany. Glenn Chestnutt is Lead Minister at The Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul. John W. de Gruchy is Emeritus Professor of Christian Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Kevin Diller is Associate Professor of Philosophy & Religion at Taylor University. Gary Dorrien is Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. Sven Ensminger is an Adjunct Teaching Fellow at the University of St. Andrews, UK. David A. S. Fergusson is Professor of Divinity and Director of Research at the University of Edinburgh.

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list of contributors

Ben Fulford is Deputy Head of Department and Senior Lecturer in Systematic Theology at the University of Chester. Mark S. Gignilliat is Professor of Divinity at Samford University’s Beeson Divinity School. Ryan Glomsrud is Associate Professor of Historical Theology at Westminster Seminary, California. David J. Gouwens is Emeritus Professor of Theology at Brite Divinity School. John Hare is Noah Porter Professor of Divinity and Professor of Philosophy and of Religious Studies at Yale University. Stanley Hauerwas is Gilbert T. Rowe Professor Emeritus of Divinity and Law at Duke Divinity School. Nicholas M. Healy is Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at St. John’s University. Nathan D. Hieb received a Ph.D. in Systematic Theology from Princeton Theological Seminary. Deborah van Deusen Hunsinger is Charlotte W. Newcombe Professor of Pastoral Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. George Hunsinger is Hazel Thompson McCord Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. Paul Dafydd Jones is Associate Professor; Co‐Director, The Project on Religion and its Publics at The University of Virginia. Han‐luen Kantzer Komline is Assistant Professor of Church History and Theology at Western Theological Seminary. Rudy Koshar is Emeritus Professor in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin‐Madison. Mark Lindsay is Joan F.W. Munro Professor of Historical Theology at Trinity College. D. Stephen Long is the Cary M. Maguire University Professor of Ethics at Southern Methodist University. Joseph L. Mangina is Professor of Systematic Theology at Wycliffe College. Amy Marga is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at Luther Seminary. R. David Nelson received his PhD from Aberdeen University and is an editor at Baker Academic.

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list of contributors

xv

Richard R. Osmer is Ralph B. and Helen S. Ashenfelter Professor of Mission and Evangelism at Princeton Theological Seminary. Andreas Pangritz is Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Bonn. Matthew Puffer is Assistant Professor of Humanities and Ethics at Valparaiso University. Arne Rasmusson is Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Rinse H. Reeling Brouwer is the Miskotte/Breukelman Chair for Theological Herm­­ eneutics at the Protestant Theological University in Groningen, Amsterdam. Kyle C. Strobel is Associate Professor of Spiritual Theology in the Talbot School of Theology at Biola University. Andrew Torrance is Lecturer in Theology at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. Shao Kai Tseng is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at China Evangelical Seminary in Taipei, Taiwan. Michael Welker is Senior Professor of Theology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Derek Alan Woodard‐Lehman is Lecturer in Theology and Public Issues at the University of Otago, New Zealand. Randall Zachman is Professor Emeritus of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.

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Primary Text Abbreviations

ALA ATS BAP CD CL CRE CSC DC DO EE EP ESS ET ETH FI FOC FT FQI GA GD HCT HG HIC HOM HSCL KBA KD KGSG PRA PTNC

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Ad Limina Apostolorum Against the Stream The Teaching of the Church Regarding Baptism Church Dogmatics The Christian Life Credo Community, State, and Church Deliverance to the Captives Dogmatics in Outline Epistle to the Ephesians Epistle to the Philippians Eine Schweizer Stimme Evangelical Theology Ethics “Fate and Idea in Theology” The Faith of the Church Final Testimonies Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum Karl Barth Gesamtausgabe Göttingen Dogmatics The Heidelberg Catechism for Today “The Humanity of God” How I Changed My Mind Homiletics The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life Karl Barth Archiv Kirchliche Dogmatik The Knowledge of God and the Service of God Prayer Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century

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xviii RI RII ROD RSC TC TET TJC TRC TS WGT WTW

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primary text abbreviations

The Epistle to the Romans, first edition The Epistle to the Romans, second edition The Resurrection of the Dead A Shorter Commentary on Romans Theology and Church Theological Existence Today!: A Plea for Theological Freedom Theology of John Calvin Theology of Reformed Confessions Theology of Schleiermacher The Word of God and Theology Witness to the Word: A Commentary on John 1

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Part III

Barth and Major Figures

CHAPTER 35

Barth and Augustine Han‐luen Kantzer Komline

Introduction Barth locates Augustine on the very highest tier of Christian theologians. In terms of universal recognition, technical prowess, and achievement in his craft, he ranks with Origen, Calvin, and Schleiermacher (GA 1, p. 246). With respect to creativity, he belongs with Anselm and Thomas Aquinas (CD IV/3.1, p. 32). His de facto authority in the church puts him in the company of Athanasius and, in some circles, Luther (GA 14, p. 479). In all of these respects, Augustine’s name is, for Barth, among “the greatest names of Christian Theology” (GA 1, p. 246). At the same time, Barth expresses doubts about Augustine’s reliability. He “fears” that in some ways “the Father Augustine was simply Catholic” (GA 25, p. 70). He states offhand that Augustine is “in some cases simply not a very trustworthy Christian” (GA 28, p. 314). And, while acknowledging the authority Augustine does enjoy in Protestant theology, he questions whether this authority is legitimate (GA 17, p. 290). In each of these cases, Barth qualifies his concerns but voices them nonetheless. The ambivalence of Barth’s explicit assessments of Augustine matches his interpretation of Augustine’s place in the history of theology. In Augustine, Barth believed, the influences of Plato and Paul converged (TJC, p. 52), giving shape to his creative synthesis in almost equal measure. Augustine carried an invisible Lutheran ember in the torch of his Pauline thinking, yet proved “already Catholic” in a way that should have concerned the Reformers more than it did (GA 17, p. 290). Barth’s identification of this duality helps explain his radically divergent assessments of Augustine’s legacy in medieval theology and beyond. Out of admiration for the Pauline Augustine, Barth avers, “Wherever Augustine made an impact, no matter how faintly, there still glowed under the ashes some recollection of the vertical line [i.e. ‘of the knowledge of God in Christ’]”

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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(TJC, p. 51[49]). Suspicious that Augustine the theologian always remains Augustine the Platonist, Barth characterizes Augustinianism as “the classical representation of the Catholic view, which, in Protestantism even, either avowedly or secretly holds the field” (HSCL, p. 60). Barth does not follow the Ritschlian school in reading the Reformers against the fathers (Meijering 1993, p. 17), but neither is he wholeheartedly convinced that Augustine merited his place as the only real extrabiblical authority they accepted (TJC, p. 20). Augustine, then, fits into the broader pattern of Barth’s interaction with the fathers whereby he seeks to use them to overcome the problems of modern theology even while uncovering in them the “roots” of the very natural theology he seeks their help in opposing (Meijering 1993, p. 12).

Statistics Augustine is cited more frequently by name in Barth’s German corpus than any other extrabiblical figure before the Reformation, including Athanasius, Aquinas, and even Anselm, on whom Barth composed a whole book. This breadth of citations corresponds to depth of interaction. Augustine is the only church father with whom Barth engages in extended dialogue, which is usually reserved for his interactions with medieval and Protestant scholastics and the Reformers (Meijering 1993, p. 13). Whereas Luther and Calvin are cited about twice as often by name as is Augustine in the Church Dogmatics, Barth cites Augustine by name more often in the work than he does the post‐Reformation figures significant for his thought, including Kant, Hegel, and even, by a narrow margin, Schleiermacher. Barth refers to Augustine by name over 350 times in the Kirchliche Dogmatik and over 250 times in his Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Taking into view the whole of Barth’s corpus, Augustine’s name appears over 650 times. Augustine is a constant dialogue partner in the Church Dogmatics. Though he appears less frequently as the work progresses, he is cited at least once in every volume. Augustine’s name surfaces the most by far in the doctrine of the Word of God, second most frequently in the doctrine of God, third most frequently in the ­doctrine of creation, and fourth most frequently in the doctrine of reconciliation, as illustrated in these descending statistics: 164 citations in KD I, 91 citations in KD II, 80 citations in KD III, 27 citations in KD IV. Though this pattern has been characterized as peculiar (Stickelberger 1997; Wisse 2013), Barth’s pattern of interaction with the fathers more generally helps to explain it. About half of Barth’s total citations of the church fathers are found in the discussions of Trinity and christology in I/1 and I/2 (Meijering 1993, p. 13). The six paragraphs in which Augustine appears the most give a sense of the areas where leading themes in the thought of Barth and Augustine overlap and collide. Augustine is cited most often in II/1 §31 on “The Perfections of the Divine Freedom” (25 times). Then follow 1/1 §12 on God the Holy Spirit (21 times), III/1 §41 on Creation and Covenant (19 times), II/2 §33 on the election of Jesus Christ (16 times), III/1 §40 on Faith in God the Creator (15 times) and KD I/2 §20 Authority in the Church (15 times). A survey of where Augustine does and does not appear beyond these paragraphs is a mixed bag in terms of predictability. As one might expect, for example, Augustine

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appears with some frequency in §18 section 2, where Barth treats the love of God. Yet he appears only once in Barth’s paragraph on the perfections of the divine loving (II/1 §30) and not at all in the section on confession in III/4 §53. Heavier areas of interaction with Augustine do not present themselves as idiosyncratic, but Barth sometimes fails to engage Augustine when one would expect him to. The omissions in his use of Augustine are, on the whole, more surprising than are his decisions to include Augustine at v ­ arious points. A similar dynamic holds with regard to the works of Augustine Barth chooses to cite in the Church Dogmatics: what receives coverage surprises less than what does not. Barth is conventional in terms of the Augustinian texts he cites most frequently. He returns again and again to Augustine’s three classic works Confessions (over 45 times), City of God (over 40 times), and On the Trinity (over 25 times). Barth cites On Christian Doctrine with some frequency (nearly 15 times) and a number of texts about half as many times as he does that work including a few of Augustine’s writings from his exchange with the monks of Hadrumetum and Provence late in the Pelagian controversy (Rebuke and Grace, The Gift of Perseverance, The Predestination of the Saints); The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Augustine’s mature magnum opus on Genesis; On the Instruction of Beginners; Enchiridion; and Tractates on the Gospel of John. He also cites about 10 different Augustinian sermons over the course of the Church Dogmatics. Cumulatively he cites Augustine’s anti‐Pelagian works (including works from earlier phases in the controversy) upwards of 25 times. One might expect slightly more or less interaction here or there, but the greatest surprise is Barth’s minimal engagement with Augustine’s sprawling Expositions of the Psalms. Given their highly christological approach, their tremendous popularity over the centuries, and their status as one of Augustine’s longest and most significant works, it is remarkable that Barth does not integrate them into his own constructive work more frequently. Overall, however, Barth majors on Augustine’s most famous works but also devotes considerable attention to lesser known titles in Augustine’s corpus, one of which, Tractates on the Gospel of John, is clearly a personal favorite. Barth also engages Augustine beyond the Church Dogmatics. His most extensive interaction with an Augustinian text appears in a little work on John chapter one, delivered in lecture form at Münster in 1925–1926, reworked for delivery at Bonn in 1933, and translated into English as Witness to the Word. Here Barth engages Augustine in an amicable conversation that stretches across the whole lecture as he begins with, and repeatedly returns to, Augustine’s Tractates on the Gospel of John. This work is to Augustine as Faith Seeking Understanding is to Anselm. Barth exposits Augustine at length as a way of exploring not only the meaning of John, but also theological method, in this case, “the basic elements in general biblical hermeneutics” (WTW, p. 11). Augustine also features prominently in The Theology of John Calvin, The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life, and Snapshots from the History of the Christian Religion. All of these works are from 1929 or earlier. In individual works such as Witness to the Word and The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life, as in many discussions in the fine print of the Church Dogmatics, Augustine, the first name Barth invokes, sets the terms of the discussion to follow. These individual cases represent a repeated pattern of Barth’s career as a whole: Augustine is where Barth chooses to “commence our own study,” even when he then proceeds to step back with critique as he unfolds his argument (WTW, p. 1).

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Barth’s Debts to Augustine Barth famously remarked that he would rather talk to Mozart than to Augustine. “If I ever get to heaven,” he said, “I would first of all seek out Mozart and only then inquire after Augustine, St. Thomas, Luther, Calvin, and Schleiermacher” (Barth 1986, p. 16). Barth may have hoped to give Mozart the first word in heaven, but he actually did give the first word to Augustine in his loftiest earthly work, the Church Dogmatics. Before citing any other thinker, or even the Bible, Barth quotes Augustine’s definition of theology as an “account of, or discourse about, divinity” (Augustine, de civ. Dei. 8.1, cited in CD I/1, p. 3). From page one, Augustine does more than aid Barth in his theological task; Augustine defines that task. Augustine’s words set the terms in which problems, and solutions, come down to him; determine the historical resources at his disposal as he develops his own contributions; and lend momentum and conviction to his thinking on many of the most central topics of his theology. Though Barth tends to be portrayed as a critic, rather than an admirer, of Augustine, his relationship to his North African predecessor is both more nuanced and more positively significant for Barth’s thinking than typically acknowledged. Augustine is a major dialogue partner in terms of the quantity of interaction he receives, the positive character of Barth’s assessment of many aspects of his thinking, and the centrality and significance of the topics on which Barth attends to his voice. Barth draws on Augustine to support his views on theological anthropology, grace, and the doctrine of God, in which Augustine plays roles of ascending importance. Augustine is most present in the doctrine of God, though not in a way that corresponds strictly to the volume of the Church Dogmatics of this title, where Barth treats some of the topics most important to his theology: Trinity, including – but not limited to – the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, and election.

An Augustinian Doctrine of the Trinity With respect to the doctrine of the Trinity, Barth follows Augustine on a number of basic decisions that became normative for trinitarian theology: the doctrine of relations, according to which the three in God are three by virtue of their distinctive relations to each other (CD I/1, p. 365); the doctrine of appropriations (CD I/1, p. 373); and the principle opera ad extra sunt indivisa (CD I/1, p. 375). Barth, along with much of the rest of the western theological tradition, accepts the basic tenets of Augustine’s trinitarian teachings as axiomatic. Finding firm footing on Augustine’s shoulders, Barth can then be free to look for new doctrinal footholds. Before proposing a revision to the traditional language of “persons,” for example, he remarks that he finds it “something of a relief that a man of Augustine’s standing openly declared” that the term “person” is more of a practical and conventional placeholder than a theological necessity (CD I/1 p. 355). Barth looks to Augustine to help him articulate the basic presuppositions of trinitarian theology and for permission to build on them in new ways.

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An Augustinian Pneumatology This pattern in Barth’s use of Augustine in his thinking on the Trinity as a whole also applies to his reception of Augustine’s teaching on the Holy Spirit. Barth cites Augustine extensively in developing the idea that the Holy Spirit is the communion of the Father and the Son, tracing it to Augustine’s De Trinitate, and endorsing as well Augustine’s ideas that the Holy Spirit is the bond of peace, the love, the charity, and “the mutual [gift] between the Father and the Son” (CD I/1, p. 470). Barth also vehemently defends the filioque, engaging Augustine in both the first and last small print sections on the topic (CD I/1, pp. 478 and 487). In all of these respects, Barth’s understanding of the distinctive Seinsweise of the Spirit is Augustinian to the core. Barth closes his treatment of the Trinity by echoing the ending of De Trinitate. He observes, “One can hardly conclude an exposition of God’s triunity in any better way than Augustine did at the end of his work on the subject. …There he declares again in simple terms that he believes in God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit because God has revealed Himself thus in Scripture” (CD I/1, p. 489). As Barth completes the foundational first volume of the Church Dogmatics, Augustine is the first and last authority he invokes. Barth not only finds in Augustine material inspiration for the content of his thinking but also encouragement and a posture to imitate. Like Barth, Augustine was a theological risk‐taker. He flung himself, in the end, on God’s mercy in prayer. Barth concludes by praying with him: “Oh Lord, One God and Triune God, whatever I have said in these two books that is of you, may yours approve. But if I have said anything of my own, may both you and yours pardon it” (de trin. 15.51, cited in CD I/1, p. 489 rev.). Augustine’s doctrine of the Trinity sets the basic axioms governing Barth’s version, but in a generic kind of way because Barth’s acceptance of these axioms does not make him unusual. This acceptance rather attests to the unusually universal influence of Augustine on the western Christian tradition. Barth’s doctrine of election, like his doctrine of the Holy Spirit, draws on Augustine in a way that is more distinctive, in part because in these cases the original ideas in Augustine themselves received less attention or, in the case of the Holy Spirit, at least less acceptance, in the history of theology. Barth’s use of Augustine in his doctrine of election is important, not only because of the significance of Barth’s thinking in this area for the history of Christian thought but also because it brings to light an aspect of Augustine’s thinking that has suffered a strange neglect. This neglect helps to explain why his influence on Barth’s doctrine of election has been both overlooked and, in the remaining cases, downplayed. Barth himself, however, is keenly aware of his debt to Augustine in this area and makes no bones about acknowledging it.

An Augustinian Doctrine of Election Even before arriving at his treatment of election, Barth cites two key passages where Augustine proposes a counterintuitive idea. The incarnation is more than a means by which Jesus Christ conveys grace to others; in the incarnation Jesus Christ himself

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receives grace. This means that the incarnation is a “prototype of justifying grace,” to use Barth’s words (CD I/2, pp. 150–151; Barth quotes at length from enchir. 36 as well as from c. serm. Arian.). Jesus Christ shows us what grace means as recipient as well as giver. In this sense, he is the “most illustrious light of predestination and grace” (praed. 15.30). This insight in Augustine, one of three characteristic metaphors in Augustine’s Christology (Daley 1987), is at the root of Barth’s doctrine of election and to this extent it merits the designation “Augustinian.” Barth’s Augustinian doctrine of election, developed in II/2 §32–35, can be summarized in six theses: (i) election is the sum of the gospel; (ii) Jesus Christ is the basis of the doctrine of election; (iii) Jesus Christ is the subject, as well as the object, of election; (iv) Jesus Christ as the object of election illustrates the gratuity of grace; (v) election is not primarily a matter of the election of individual beings; and (vi) the elect person is distinguished not by her separation from nonbelieving individuals but by standing in solidarity with them as she bears witness to God’s grace. Augustine is the key figure in relation to whom Barth defines his position on five out of six of these theses, and four of these are reached as Barth builds positively on Augustine. Barth thus traces the majority of his most significant argumentative moves on election to Augustine, which is one indication of the fact that Barth owes more to Augustine for his doctrine of election than he does to any other thinker. With respect to the first thesis, although Barth sees Augustine’s teaching of a double pedagogy or “double divine decision” in On the Predestination of the Saints as problematic, he notes that overall Augustine resists this kind of parallelism in his thinking and never applies it to the notion of predestination. Barth applauds Augustine for preserving the positive character of predestination. For Augustine, Barth insists, predestination is always election; it never includes reprobation. The introduction of double predestination by Isidore of Seville and Gottschalk in the seventh and ninth centuries, Barth insists, was a formal departure from Augustine. Due to their innovation, predestination was subsequently seen as including both election and reprobation, whereas previously each had been understood to constitute a separate genus. As he defends the second thesis, Barth explicitly pronounces himself in Augustine’s debt: “to Augustine we owe a Christological explanation of predestination” (CD II/2, p. 60). In this area, Barth finds the Reformed tradition in need of correction. Augustine is the only figure or movement in the entire small print section devoted to this issue to remain unscathed by major critiques. In developing the third thesis, Athanasius, rather than Augustine, is Barth’s main hero. However, Barth also claims that Augustine supports him here in that Augustine speaks about predestination as fixed “in the eternal word,” which Barth argues he understands as in verbo eius incarnando. Although this interpretation seems a stretch as developed in this context, Barth elsewhere treats a text from Confessions that seems more amenable to this kind of reading. In arguing for the fourth thesis, Barth claims to enjoy the support of “the great exponents of the traditional doctrine of predestination,” Thomas and Calvin, as well as Augustine (CD II/2, p. 118). Still, Augustine is the first among equals in this section. Barth quotes at length his discussion of Christ as the “most illustrious light of predestination and grace” in On the Predestination of the Saints.

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The one major area in which Barth is, on balance, critical of Augustine is in his treatment of the fifth thesis. Barth sees Augustine as bearing some responsibility for the individualistic focus into which the doctrine of election fell. After Augustine, especially with Calvin, teaching in this area deteriorated even further. Yet Barth observes that Augustine at least defines predestination in an “objective sense” (i.e. not in terms of whether it is appropriated subjectively by various human beings but in terms of its accomplishment in Christ) as the gratiae praeparatio (praed 10.19) and that Augustine can relate it to the two kingdoms rather than to two individuals (as in de civ. Dei. 15.1). Calvin is the main influence with respect to Barth’s sixth and final thesis, but Augustine also makes a positive appearance in that he characterizes faith as the realization of election. Barth is quick to point out that because this faith cannot be the basis of distinguishing the elect from the reprobate, one cannot believe against nonbelievers but only for them. The Augustinian basis of Barth’s doctrine of election is difficult to deny when one reads Barth’s development of these six theses in the fine print dialogue with traditional sources, especially given the fact that Barth himself calls attention to his debts to Augustine in no uncertain terms. Yet contemporary interpreters have tended to obscure these debts in two ways. Some have pitted Barth’s doctrine of election against Augustine as if it were merely the antidote to, rather than also the extension of, Augustine’s ­version. Philip Cary, for example, has argued that Augustine’s doctrine of election, encapsulating all that is unhelpful about his theology and its influence on the West, is the problem, which Karl Barth fixes with his doctrine of election in Jesus Christ (Cary 2008a,b, p. 101). Meanwhile, others have tended to ignore Augustine’s role in Barth’s doctrine of election altogether, presenting Barth’s perspective as essentially Calvinist. One book concludes with the observation, “Despite the four centuries that divide Barth from Calvin, there is a basic unity between them and that is to be found in the following citation from the Institutes: ‘Christ is the mirror wherein we must, and without self‐ deception may, contemplate our own election’” (Davies 1992, p. 155). Both of these strategies for locating Barth’s doctrine of election in the Christian tradition lose sight of Augustine’s positive contributions to it. Neither viewing Barth’s doctrine of election as a corrective to Augustine nor viewing it as an area of commonality with Calvin is all wrong, but both interpretations fail to get to the bottom of things. Barth presents his doctrine of election as carrying forward a basic insight that was first – and more consistently, even, than in John Calvin – articulated by Augustine: Christ is the key to the doctrine of election. To the degree that Calvin, also, embraces a christological understanding of election, Calvin’s own repeated insistence that his doctrine of predestination went no further than Augustine’s should be born in mind (see, for example, Inst. 3.22.8). With respect to the christological focus of his own doctrine of election, though not with respect to its double orientation, Calvin was right in claiming Augustine’s support; Barth’s doctrine of election seems similar to Calvin’s because Calvin is himself Augustinian. At the same time, it was Barth’s view that Calvin’s doctrine was deficient in terms of faithfulness to Augustine’s key Christological insight. This is why Barth connects his departure from the “framework of theological tradition” in II/2 with the difficult work of restraining his natural tendency to follow “Calvin’s doctrine of predestination” (CD II/2, p. x). Barth’s own explicit

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i­ nterpretation was that his doctrine of election led him away from Calvin at some c­ rucial points even as it led him deeper into a central insight from Augustine that Calvin also acknowledged. An examination of Barth’s engagement of the sources in the tradition in the actual text and argument of the volume shows that Barth’s “reconstruction” did not – even in his own mind – involve a wholesale rejection of the tradition. Far from it! In fact, Barth was engaged in a careful renovation of the tradition. Working within it, he brought to light what he saw to be the inconsistencies there and proposed changes by which the Augustinian‐Reformed tradition might achieve greater internal coherence. In the end, then, Barth’s careful attention to Scripture on these matters led him not away from the giants of the tradition but into deeper conversation with them. Most of all, it led him to Augustine’s teaching on Christ as most illustrious Light of predestination. Standing on Augustine’s shoulders, Barth thought he came to see this Light as even more illustrious than Calvin or even Augustine had consistently imagined.

Augustinian Resonances in Barth’s Theological Anthropology Although Barth’s doctrines of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, and election may be regarded as thoroughly Augustinian, his theological anthropology, too, shows some resonances with Augustine’s thought. Barth expresses appreciation, for example, for Augustine’s recognition of the basic human need for God, the rough contours of his account of creaturely participation in God, and his view of sin. These resonances stand out like so many flags flying from a fortress. They help the reader to see where Barth’s theological sympathies are, but the edifice of his thought could easily stand without them. With Augustine, Barth rejects the notion that God is a luxury. Instead, God is a basic human need without which human beings cannot be satisfied. Citing Augustine’s famous quote about the restless human heart from the opening of Confessions, Barth adds that all human desires stem from the human desire and need for God (CD III/2, p. 412). This line from Augustine represents, he writes, “a correct interpretation of the biblical concept of man.” Despite his grievances with Augustine’s theological anthropology, and with Confessions, which he once described as “fearful” (HSCL, p. 22) but frequently cites in a favorable way, Barth endorses this baseline Augustinian confession of human desire for God, which forms a bedrock assumption of Augustinian anthropology. Barth also accepts the broad lineaments of Augustine’s account of creation’s participation in God. Barth concurs with Augustine that God providentially directs and empowers creatures while preserving their integrity and, when relevant, their agency. Quoting from Augustine’s Literal Commentary on Genesis, he approves Augustine’s avoidance of either the notion that human persons are “in Him” as “partakers of His essence” or by possessing being “in ourselves” (CD III/3, p. 75). Though Barth finds more to be desired in this account, he appreciates the premise that God sustains human beings while remaining ontologically other. This shared assumption in the doctrine of creation has implications for affirming the compatibility of divine and human agency.

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With respect to sin, Barth locates himself firmly in the “Augustinian‐Reformed” camp, which tends toward a more maximal view of sin’s repercussions over against the “Roman Catholic‐Neo‐Protestant” camp (CD IV/1, p. 492). Like Augustine, Barth resists the idea that there is some pristine kernel of human nature or the human person that remains insulated from sin’s effects. There exists no independent basis for obedience without the aid of grace (CD IV/1, p. 499). Absent grace, the whole person is a sinner and incapable of good. That Barth would align himself with Augustine in this way is not surprising from a theological standpoint. But his way of drawing a line in the sand illustrates the ambivalence of his attitude toward Augustine as much as it does his material theological commitments. For Barth, Augustine is alternately the epitome and the opponent of Roman Catholic theology, and not simply, as B.B. Warfield would have had it, Catholic and Protestant in his doctrines of the church and grace, respectively (Warfield 1905, p. 126). The difficulty Barth has pinning down Augustine for long on either the Catholic or the Reformed side signals both the complexity of Augustine’s legacy and the nuance of Barth’s reception of him.

Barth’s Augustinian Doctrine of Grace In addition to borrowing heavily from Augustine on themes within the doctrine of God to the point of justifying a description of Barth’s doctrines of Trinity, Holy Spirit and election as Augustinian, Barth repeatedly cites Augustine in support of his doctrine of grace. Barth looks to Augustine for backing as he argues for the priority of grace and for its necessity to do theology, to know God, and for creation to come into existence. Though parallels in their thinking on grace are almost ubiquitous in the writings of these two thinkers, both of whom worked tirelessly to push the boundaries of grace out to biblical proportions, Barth makes a point of tracing certain ideas directly to Augustine. At the outset of the Church Dogmatics, Barth calls on Augustine to support the idea that prayer is “the attitude without which there can be no dogmatic work” (CD I/1, p. 23). The necessity of prayer, in turn, implies the need for grace. This connection was one Augustine made in the Pelagian controversy, drawing on Cyprian of Carthage’s short treatise On the Lord’s Prayer. Now Barth makes this point drawing on Augustine: people pray because they need God’s help. The need for prayer to do theology, then, demonstrates the theologian’s absolute reliance on grace. Barth echoes Augustine: “Who of human beings is able to give this understanding to another human being? What angel can give it to an angel? What angel to a human being? From You it must be asked, from You it must be sought, it is at Your door that one must knock: thus it will be received, thus it will be found, thus the door will be opened” (conf. 13.38.53, cited in CD I/1, p. 23). At the start of the Church Dogmatics and at the start of Augustine’s episcopate with the writing of Confessions, readers see two great theologians confessing their smallness along with their great need for God’s help to complete the theological work ahead. Barth does not leave Augustine behind in the remainder of the Church Dogmatics. In II/1, he again quotes Confessions at length to emphasize the necessity of grace for human knowledge of God more broadly speaking (II/1, p. 197). This “terrible” Augustinian work turns out to be terribly congenial for giving eloquent expression to

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the human need for God. Barth also returns to the doctor of grace in his doctrine of creation, underlining the importance and decisiveness of Augustine’s emphasis on creation as a gift of grace (CD III/1, p. 39). Augustine’s teaching in this regard, Barth notes, shaped the tradition for the better. The priority of grace according to Augustine is a theme Barth highlights appreciatively in Witness to the Word when discussing the calling of Nathanael. Augustine extrapolates from Nathanael’s case to form a more general principle about the chronology of Christian healing: “In his mercy he has seen you before you knew him, when you lay under sin. Have we first visited Christ, and not he us? Have we, the sick, come to the physician, and not the physician to the sick?” (Io. eu. tr. 7.21, cited in WTW, p. 149). After quoting this material, Barth writes, “We would do well to insist on this fact that Jesus comes first, on his primacy in principle in establishing the relationship with the disciples” (WTW, p. 149). He then makes the further move of tying this primacy to election. Jesus sees and chooses Nathanael before Nathanael can do anything to deserve this attention. In teaching the priority of grace, not least of all in election, Barth takes his cue from Augustine’s prior comments.

Barth’s Criticisms of Augustine Though Barth draws positively on Augustine’s thought in his development of the doctrines of the Trinity, Holy Spirit, election, and grace, he repeatedly expresses concerns about three issues in Augustine’s thinking: the locus of revelation, the continuity between nature and grace, and the inherent character of the righteousness God grants to human beings. As Barth moves through the Church Dogmatics, he returns to these issues from different angles at different times, but like so many critical spokes, the problems he perceives all return to the same central hub: an overestimation of the human person. According to Barth, Augustine overestimates who the human person is by nature, he overestimates who the human person is by grace, and he overestimates who the human person is as a locus of revelation. Despite the resonances he highlights between his theological anthropology and that of Augustine, Barth’s attitude toward Augustine’s theological anthropology is predominantly negative and all of his major critiques of Augustine ultimately return to this area of concern. This assessment squares with more generalized complaints about Augustine’s theology that Barth registers periodically. Sometimes Barth does directly accuse ­ Augustine of being excessively controlled by anthropological concerns (CD I/2, p. 783; III/2, p. 21; IV/2, p. 233). But because for Barth being too philosophical means being too anthropological (CD III/2, p. 21), naming Barth’s issues with Augustine as c­ entering on theological anthropology also lends appropriate specification to his characterization of Augustine as too philosophical (CD II/2, p. 529) or too metaphysical (CD III/1, pp. 65, 71, 75). Likewise, when Barth famously refers to Augustine’s doctrine of grace as an insidious “sweet poison” unwittingly imbibed by the Reformers (HSCL, p. 22), his specific concern is how grace affects the human person. He does not dispute Augustine’s teaching on the reach of grace, that it cannot be overestimated but encompasses every good and perfect gift from God. In fact, Barth finds Augustine’s doctrine of grace “truly

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consistent” as a “soteriological principle” (CD II/1, p. 127). What concerns him is how Augustine applies this doctrine of grace to other elements of his Christian thinking, particularly in the realm of theological anthropology. God’s grace saves us. The question is how this reality affects the human person. The crux of Barth’s concerns about Augustine is theological anthropology, not philosophical debates, theoretical commitments to philosophy, or even, at bottom, Augustine’s doctrine of grace. In Barth’s view, Augustine overestimates the capacity of human beings to represent sites of revelation. This concern surfaces in at least two ways. First, it surfaces in Barth’s contention that Augustine relies on the Platonic doctrine of recollection to explain the mechanics of revelation. Barth believes that, largely under the influence of Plato’s teaching that “new” ideas are remembered rather than genuinely discovered, Augustine seeks revelation as an ancient forgotten truth within one’s self, rather than recognizing it exclusively as something radically new coming from the outside (CD I/1, pp. 99–101; HSCL, p. 5). Self‐reflection ends up crowding out, and compromising, scriptural reflection. This Barthian critique, though difficult to sustain in an absolute form in terms of Augustine’s explicit commitments, has taken on a life of its own, animating a controversial multivolume interpretation of Augustine’s development and legacy in the Christian tradition (Cary 2000, 2008a,b). Barth’s concern about Augustine’s allowances for human beings to serve as a locus of revelation also manifests itself in criticisms of Augustine’s idea that analogies for the Trinity exist in the natural world, first and foremost in the psychology of the human person. For Barth, this notion is a “Trojan horse” (CD I/1, p. 336). In its belly is a second source and foundation for the doctrine of the Trinity outside of God’s self‐revelation, attested in Holy Scripture. Here, too, as in the case of Augustine’s alleged dependence on the Platonic doctrine of recollection, Barth’s concern is that each human person, rather than exclusively the person of Jesus Christ, becomes an independent source of revelation. Human beings, as well as Trojan horses, harbor dangers within. In addition to overestimating the human capacity to serve as a pathway to genuine knowledge of God, Augustine, according to Barth, overestimates the capabilities with which human beings have been naturally endowed. This, in turn, lures Augustine into endorsing an “easy transition between grace and nature” that puts him in league with the Roman Catholics, the analogia entis, and Przywara. In Barth’s view this same basic problem crops up in everything from Augustine’s notion that time is “definitively and unequivocally … a self‐determination of man’s existence as a creature” instead of being understood in relation to God (CD I/2, pp. 45–48), to his indication that having faith is inherent in human nature as a theoretical possibility, though one requiring grace for actualization (CD I/1, p. 245). For Barth, Augustine’s famous account of the vision at Ostia epitomizes, though it does not exhaust, his overly optimistic anthropology and its encroachment of the human sphere upon the divine. This episode is an instance of Augustine trying “to find the uncreated Spirit in continuity with man’s created spirit” (HSCL, p. 3) via “an ascent of his own efforts” (HSCL, p. 4). On both accounts, Barth is persuaded, Augustine overestimates natural human capacities. Finally, Barth portrays Augustine as overestimating who the human person is by grace insofar as Augustine believes that, by God’s grace, love inheres in the human person in this life. This was the problem with Augustine’s doctrine of justification.

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Though he wakened the church from the slumbers of Pelagianism (CD IV/1, p. 524), recognizing that both justification and sanctification were entirely a gift, Augustine failed to demarcate with sufficient clarity the boundary between the two (CD IV/2, p. 504). Keeping them inseparably coupled, Augustine argued that justifying faith could not exist without being worked out through love. He believed, in other words, that moral progress by God’s grace was not only possible but inevitable given the gift of fellowship with God. Barth preferred a doctrine of justification that could be invisible: “We are compelled to believe this is God’s action, without our seeing it” (HSCL, p. 24). Other ­disagreements flow from this watershed, such as Barth’s rejection of Augustine’s evangelistic understanding of love, which Barth glosses as “moving the neighbor … to love God” (KD I/2, p. 439) and Barth’s dismissal of the view, which he associates with Augustine, that an independent church tradition confers and encompasses the authority of Scripture (I/2, p. 549). If the grace of sanctification does not take root and continue to grow in a human person, such lofty ideals for what human beings can attain with God’s help are impossible to reach. Barth’s critiques of Augustine are nearly as diverse in validity as they are uniform in theological focus. Almost all of Barth’s concerns boil down to issues concerning theological anthropology, but his portraits at times signal genuine differences of opinion and at times prove difficult to recognize for those who know other takes on Augustine’s thought, not least of all the collection of snapshots one encounters in his own words. With respect to the issue of the effect grace has on the human person, for example, Barth certainly is correct that there is a major difference of opinion. But in terms of theological epistemology and the natural endowments of the human person, Augustine is not quite so ambitious for human nature as Barth would suggest; in these latter two areas Barth and Augustine may be closer than Barth dared to think. Even were all of Barth’s critiques to be sustained, however, his positive interactions outweigh the negative. Barth agrees with Augustine on who God is – on the doctrines of the Trinity, Holy Spirit, and election – with some of his points about who human beings are and with his conviction of the irreversibly gracious character of the relationship between the two. The flow of their thought moves in the same direction, with grace, down from above. Moreover, more than has been previously seen, Barth regards himself as indebted to Augustine for one of the most creative aspects of his thinking and one of his most significant contributions to the history of dogma, where all three of these areas (doctrine of God, theological anthropology, and the doctrine of grace) overlap: his christological doctrine of election.

Comparing Barth and Augustine Even in areas where Barth does not directly engage Augustine, there is significant overlap in their thinking. For both, grace, Christ, and humility are more than the leading subjects. These are the primary colors of thought. Because they are already applied on the level of the palette, not a shade of the resultant theology would be the same without them. In addition to content, these two theologians share some common charisms for their task. Both are masters of rhetoric. This is true of Barth primarily on the level of tying

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together sentences; he layers these on top of one another like a snowball bound downhill, creating a sense of irrepressible intensity and momentum. Augustine’s art is ­perhaps most obvious on the level of linking words, each of which opens the door to an interlocking world of meaning. In a passage especially admired by Barth, the imagery of a “mountain” is, by turns, John the evangelist, the scriptures, and finally, the reader herself (Io. eu. tr. 1). Augustine uses multiple applications of this single term to move his listeners from gospel, to psalm, to hermeneutics, to humility. Both are dynamic thinkers who experienced drastic changes of mind over time. And for both, as it happens, Paul, and – more specifically – the letter to the Romans, was a catalyst that transformed first their own perspectives and then, through them, the basic theological assumptions of countless others. Stemming in part from this biographical parallel, both are biblical thinkers who read the Christian scriptures out of a center in Romans. Looking beyond the epistles, and unsurprisingly given the weight they place on Christology, the gospel of John was of vital importance for both thinkers. Finally, both Barth and Augustine were theologians of prayer. Augustine’s theology often takes the overt form of a prayer, as in Confessions and De Trinitate, which are among those of his works that Barth cites most frequently. Barth, for his part, once stated that “the basic form of theology is, as appropriate given her subject matter, prayer and preaching” (Die Menschlichkeit Gottes, 20, cited in Schaede 2009, p. 93). Performatively or by explicit principle, prayer is basic to how both do theology. Equally important, however, is the parallel in terms of what their theology does to its readers. Both tend to inspire spontaneous praise. They cause prayer, as well as practicing and commending it.

Conclusion In Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, Barth, now a thinker of the past, offers a word of advice on receiving past thinkers: As regards theology, also, we cannot be in the Church without taking as much responsibility for the theology of the past as for the theology of our present. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Luther, Schleiermacher and all the rest are not dead, but living. They still speak and demand a hearing as living voices, as surely as we know that they and we belong together in the Church. (PTNC, p. 3)

Barth’s voice continues to be a living voice today because he constructed his theology in conversation with the living voices of his past and, above all, along with Augustine, in the effort to hear the living voice of God in Jesus Christ. Toward the end of the Church Dogmatics, Barth beckons his readers further down the path of their calling, and his, to listen to the living voices of the past. Listening to these other voices is necessary, but not sufficient, he writes: But [a Christian person] must not imagine that he can be a Christian and therefore a ­witness on the authority of Paul or John, of Luther or Augustine, of pious elders or friends. If he hears them, if he goes to their school and remains in it, then he will be led by them to a personal part

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in the act and revelation of God. And it is in vain that he will shelter under the wings of their authority if he will not let them conduct him to their source and thus be instructed by them in his own responsibility in relation to this source. (KD IV/3.2, pp. 657–658)

The vindication of Barth’s theology on both accounts, both with respect to faithfully hearing Augustine’s living voice and with respect to boldly speaking in his own, is of an Augustinian kind. Despite all of Barth’s intentions to avoid this kind of evangelistic ­presumption, moved by Christ, he moves his readers to love God. References Barth, K. (1986). Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, (trans. C. K. Pott). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Cary, P. (2000). Augustine’s Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cary, P. (2008a). Inner Grace: Augustine in the Traditions of Plato and Paul. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cary, P. (2008b). Outward Signs: The Powerlessness of External Things in Augustine’s Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Daley, B.E. (1987). A humble mediator: The distinctive elements in Saint Augustine’s Christology. Word and Spirit 9: 100–117. Davies, H. (1992). The Vigilant God: Providence in the Thought of Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, and Barth. New York: P. Lang. Meijering, E.P. (1993). Von den Kirchenvätern zu Karl Barth: das altkirchliche Dogma in

der ‘Kirchlichen Dogmatik’. Amsterdam: Verlag J.C. Gieben. Schaede, S. (2009). Das reformierte ‘A‐B‐C’ der Allmacht?: Augustinus – Calvin – Barth. Zeitschrift für Dialektische Theologie 25: 72–94. Stickelberger, H. (1997). Karl Barth und Augustin: eine Sternenfreundschaft. In: Studia Patristica, vol. 33 (ed. E.A. Livingstone), 250–254. Leuven: Peeters Publishing. Warfield, B.B. (1905). Augustine and his “confessions.”. Princeton Theological Review 3: 81–126. Wisse, M. (2013). The first modern person? Twentieth‐century theological reception of Augustine. In: The Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of Augustine, vol. 1 (eds. K. Pollmann and W. Otten), 106–116. New York: Oxford University Press.

Further Reading Ables, T.E. (2014). Incarnational Realism: Trinity and the Spirit in Augustine and Barth. London: Bloomsbury. Barth, K. (1993). The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life. (trans. R. Birch Hoyle). Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. Harasta, E. (2006). Gemeinsam in Christus: die ‘Einheit’ von Nächstenliebe und Gottesliebe nach Augustin und Karl Barth. Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 48: 445–459. Hwang, J.‐B. (1998). The trinitarian logics of St. Augustine and Karl Barth: With special reference to their respective pneumatologies

and filioque‐positions. PhD dissertation. Union Theological Seminary. Jenson, M. (2006). Gravity of Sin: Augustine, Luther and Barth on homo incurvatus in se. New York: T&T Clark. Jenson, M. (2013). Karl Barth. In: The Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of Augustine, vol. 2 (eds. K. Pollmann and W. Otten), 623–626. New York: Oxford University Press. Sonderegger, K. (2014). Divine justice and justification. Zeitschrift für Dialektische Theologie. Supplement Series 6: 164–176.

CHAPTER 36

Barth and Anselm Paul Dafydd Jones

Introduction In the preface to the first edition of Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum (1931), Barth notes the profound impression made on him by Heinrich Scholz, a philosopher who visited Barth’s seminar on Anselm in the summer of 1930. Scholz prompted Barth to rethink his attitude to the Proslogion, a medieval work that modern philosophers often excoriate for advancing an “ontological proof ” of God’s existence (Kant 1998, pp. 563– 569; see, more generally, Murdoch 1992, pp. 391–430). Barth came to view this text and, in particular, its notorious “proof,” not as an instance of philosophical reflection, but as “a model piece of good, penetrating, and neat theology, which at every step I have found instructive and edifying” (FQI, 9 [my emphasis]). By the end of the 1930s (see HIC) and in prefatory remarks to the second edition of Fides Quaerens Intellectum (1958), Barth would declare a connection between his interpretative stance and his dogmatic work. An “interest in Anselm,” he claimed, “was never a side‐issue … in this book … I am working with a vital key, if not the key, to an understanding of that whole process of thought that has impressed me more and more in my Church Dogmatics as the only one proper to theology” (FQI, p. 11). A fair judgment? Hans Urs von Balthasar thought so. A central argument in The Theology of Karl Barth (1951) is that Barth’s early theology was caught in the grip of a series of dialectical oppositions (God vs. world, grace vs. sin, divine subject vs. human object, etc.), and risked devolving into “theopanism … a monism of the Word of God, which … threatens time and again to swallow up the reality of the world.” Barth’s encounter with Anselm therefore came at the right time. It led Barth to forge an analogical sensibility, wherein the “natural order has its own proper, though relative, autonomy within the order of grace” and the human subject can reckon meaningfully with God’s creative and saving action (von Balthasar 1992, pp. 94 and 120).

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Bruce McCormack, by contrast, argues that Fides Quaerens Intellectum has only incidental importance for Barth’s intellectual development. The analogia fidei that underwrites the Church Dogmatics does not reflect Anselm’s salutary influence, for some form of analogy was ingredient to the revelatory dialectic of veiling and unveiling that Barth embraced in the 1910s, and that received a decisive Christological “spin” when Barth engaged Reformed scholasticism in the 1920s (McCormack 1995). If one wants to track material shifts in Barth’s thinking in the 1930s, one must focus not on Anselm but on Pierre Maury, whose work set Barth on the path toward to the innovative treatment of election in Church Dogmatics II/2 (McCormack 1995, pp. 455–463; also McCormack 2008, pp. 183–277). Discussions about the significance of Barth’s Anselmbuch continue, and profitably so. An important recent monograph, for instance, deftly expands John Webster’s account of Barth’s “moral ontology” (Webster 1995, p. 1): it proposes that a study of Paul’s epistles in the 1910s and 1920s enabled Barth to reckon anew with God’s justifying reorientation of thought, and a study of Anselm enabled Barth to understand theological reflection in terms of the sanctification of reason (Westerholm 2015). This essay, however, shies away from judgments about Barth’s theological development. It attempts instead to identify material continuities and differences between Anselm and Barth, with a particular interest in the authors’ views of the theological task and their accounts of Christ’s person and work. Although the interpretative rewards that follow from such a comparison are not inconsiderable – useful light is cast, I hope, on prayer, reason, sin, the knowability of God, divine aseity, atonement, among other matters  –  treating Barth and Anselm as conversation partners serves, more broadly, to set in relief a fundamental challenge facing Christian theology today. Put very baldly: In a late modern setting of widespread (and maybe intensifying) pluralism, which augurs the “fragilization” of every religious, philosophical, and political standpoint, can Christian theologians share Barth’s and Anselm’s boundless confidence in God’s communicative actions, and in God’s justification and sanctification of the intellect?

On the Theological Task A string of sentences from the first chapter of the Proslogion supplies a useful starting point for reflection: Lord, I am bent double; I can only look down. Raise me up so that I can turn my gaze upwards. …Teach me how to seek you, and show yourself to me when I seek. For I cannot seek you unless you teach me how, and I cannot find you unless you show yourself to me. Let me seek you in desiring you; let me desire you in seeking you. …I am not trying to scale your heights, Lord; my understanding is in no way equal to that. But I do long to understand your truth in some way, your truth which my heart believes and loves. For I do not seek to understand in order to believe (intelligere ut credam); I believe in order to understand (credo ut intelligam). For I also believe that “Unless I believe, I shall not understand” (Prosl. 1; Anselm 2007, p. 81).

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Given these words, so reminiscent of Augustine’s Confessions, it would be a drastic mistake to read the Proslogion as an attempt to “establish the necessity of a highest being from mere concepts” (Kant 1996, p. 349). That judgment implies a mode of inquiry that proceeds without regard to distinctively Christian commitments and depends on something like the “rules of autonomous human reason” (FQI, p. 54). Anselm’s modus operandi is clearly otherwise. His reflections are consistently framed in terms of prayer, with a pursuit of Christian “understanding” relying on the condescension and guidance of the Domine (Lord) become Magister (teacher). This condescension and guidance has such importance, in fact, that what Paul Griffiths (2016) has recently identified as the historical “archive” that shapes the lexicon and grammar of Christian theology seems conspicuous in its absence. Although scriptural allusions pervade Anselm’s prose, explicit reference to patristic authorities is infrequent – a stark contrast with contemporaneous writing (and one that troubled Lanfranc, Anselm’s mentor, when he first reviewed the Monologion [Southern 1990, pp. 120–123]). The “cognitive skills necessary for knowing about the LORD, for arriving at the kind of intimacy with the LORD that theologians seek” (Griffiths 2016, p. 45) need not, it seems, be mediated through an engagement with the Christian tradition. In place of citations, allusions, and glosses – the entire complex of elite learning which, via Peter Lombard’s Sentences, so fascinated those who later studied at medieval universities  –  Anselm makes unadorned appeals for “firmness of faith,” for God’s “cleansing” of the “heart,” and for the provision of a “humble obedience” that coincides with the sanctification of the intellect (De Inc. Verbi 1; Anselm 2007, pp. 215–216). What does it mean for belief to seek understanding? It means that Christian faith attempts to become intelligible to itself, and in such a way that the inherent reasonableness and truthfulness of faith are made manifest – one result being that the prior commitments of believers are rearticulated and reaffirmed on the plane of thought. Reasonableness and truthfulness do not, then, involve the formulation of self‐evident contentions that accord with historic Christian beliefs and that might be employed for apologetic purposes in a putatively “neutral” context (i.e. one that presumes to prescind from particular religious commitments). Reasonableness is governed by the ratio veritatis that is God himself, the triune Lord who creates, sustains, and redeems the world. Truthfulness is defined by the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ: One who is “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6), the Son who ensures that the “truth that is in the being of things is an effect of the supreme truth” (De Ver. 1 and 10; Anselm 2007, pp. 119, 134). And because both reasonableness and truthfulness are grounded in “a reality to which the mind has already given real assent,” the act of understanding means, very simply, that that reality is “grasp[ed] in progressively fuller and more ­adequate ways” by the believer herself, through a focused exercise of the intellect (Pfau 2013, p. 140). To be sure, as faith gains understanding, it may be that Christian convictions are shown to be prima facie coherent and credible. It may even be that “unbelievers,” ­otherwise minded to dismiss Christian beliefs as nonsensical or unseemly, might find the force of their objections blunted (and Anselm likely did encounter unbelievers, if only indirectly, in the relatively homogenous religious world of early medieval Europe [Southern 1990, pp. 198–202]). But whereas unbelievers “seek reason because they do

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not believe … we seek it because we believe,” and hope to “understand that you exist as we believe you exist” (CDH I.3 and Prosl. 2; Anselm 2007, pp. 247 and 81 [emphases added]). The Christian thinker does not, in other words, view “unbelievers” as her principal responsibility or audience. She is interested in her coreligionists. She aspires to show how certain intellectual processes can be conformed to – or, more precisely, derived from – the basic structures of Christian faith, and in such ways that those intellectual processes become aligned with God’s ways and works. And, again, if this occurs, something grander than “cognitive intimacy” (Griffiths 2016, p. 2 and passim) with the Lord acclaimed by the Christian tradition becomes possible. Understanding, correlated with faith, means deepened union with God. It foretells the beatific vision for which believers yearn; it anticipates the fullness of the joy which is to come (Prosl. 26 and CDH commendation; Anselm 2007, pp. 97 and 237. See also Sweeney 2012). A faith that seeks understanding … but of whom, more specifically? Although it is not inapt to read Anselm as promulgating a “perfect‐being theology” (Leftow 2004), the divine perfections he identifies are no bundle of abstractions which aggregate to a generic Supreme Being. In the Proslogion, for instance, the famous contention that God is “something than which nothing greater can be thought [aliquid quo nihil ­cogitari posit],” and that God “cannot even be thought not to exist” (Prosl. 2 and 3; Anselm 2007, pp. 81–82) are only opening moves in a far‐reaching and distinctively Christian account of God. The compact “proofs” of God’s existence (chapters 2–4) are followed by a lengthier exposition of divine attributes (chapters 6–22), which then segues into remarks about God’s triunity and the delights that await the redeemed (chapters 23–26). And within the exposition of God’s attributes, two intriguing twists. First, having disclosed that Exodus 3:14 serves as a warrant for the supposition that God maintains the cluster of perfections intrinsic to God’s being, since “you are what you are, not through anything else, but through yourself ” (Prosl. 12, see also Mon. 16; Anselm 2007, p. 88, see also 23) – a claim that allows Anselm to contain his perplexity about the relationship between divine mercy and divine justice – chapter 17 offers an unembarrassed affirmation of God’s “harmony,” “fragrance,” “savor,” and “softness.” If such “physical” attributes are treated hesitantly by later theologians, Anselm takes them in stride. They are just as definitive for God’s being as more familiar metaphysical perfections (omnipotence, omniscience, eternality, etc.); they distinguish God as the Subject that God intends to be and is. Second, one finds here an often‐overlooked apophatic subtext. Chapter  14 insists that Christian understanding soon bumps up against a “darkness” that is the effect of God’s dazzling splendor and the soul’s “narrowness”; chapter  15 avers that God is “something greater than can be thought”; and chapter  16, glossing 1 Timothy 6:16, declares “the unapproachable light in which you dwell” is such that “understanding does not grasp it, and the eye of my soul cannot bear to look into it for long” (Anselm 2007, pp. 89–90 [emphasis added]). Right in the middle of the Proslogion, then, Anselm’s acclamation of God’s perfections is crossed with an assertion of divine excess and, consequently, the inevitability of human incomprehension, that recalls Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo‐Dionysius, and countless others. Whoever God in God’s perfections actually is will, it seems, always baffle human comprehension  –  and so much that all

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“progress” in understanding involves an exponential intensification of confidence and hesitation (a claim Barth does not adequately grasp; see FQI, pp. 31–32). Combine the two points, and a further comes into view. For Anselm, God’s existence is qualitatively different from the existence of the creatures God brings into being. It is not only that God’s existence cannot be limited to an intra‐mental “concept,” given that this existence is itself a property of divine “greatness.” One must also recognize that God, by necessity, lives as the ground of all other realities, the “supreme good, through which every good thing exists” and in whom “I move and … have my being” (Prosl. 5 and 16 [alluding to Acts 17:28]; Anselm 2007, pp. 83, 90). Gaunilo of Marmoutiers was thus quite wrong to claim that the Proslogion elides the difference between “something than which nothing greater can be thought” as it is thought and as it exists in fact (Pro Insp. 5–6; Anselm 2007, pp. 101–102). That misses the Proslogion’s distinctively Christian frame entirely. Within the context of faith, God exists in a way that the hypothetical Lost Island does not, for God has proven God’s reality so definitively that Christians cannot sensically deny it. One can and must delight, in freedom and in ­obedience, in affirming the “necessity” of God’s being. (As Iris Murdoch puts it, perhaps a bit anachronistically: “The idea of necessity … joins with the certainty of ardent faith” [Murdoch 1992, p. 404]). A fascination with God’s self‐revelation, a determination to integrate exegetical and dogmatic reflection, a characteristically Reformed willingness to part ways with established church teaching, and, last but not least, a concern to engage ethical and political matters: All this might appear to make the identification of continuities ­between Barth and Anselm an unlikely enterprise. Yet the three points sketched ­previously – Anselm’s interest in the relationship between theology and prayer, in the grace‐led empowerment of reason, and in divine alterity  –  find striking parallel in Barth’s ­theology. Addressing them in reverse order proves instructive. With respect to God’s alterity, Barth’s reputation obviously precedes him. His early writing is replete with assertions of divine otherness and constantly seeks to disrupt our tendency to render God in all‐too‐human terms – thus the repeated references to God as “wholly Other,” stark juxtapositions of time and eternity, and fraught statements about the “contradictions” that beset those who attempt to think Christianly. Yet even as this rhetoric seems far removed from the “sweet reasonableness” (Evans 1989, p. x) of Anselm’s prose, Barth was right to say that, for him and Anselm, “God shatters every syllogism” (FQI, p. 29). Granted the claim that God is “uniquely whatever he is, having nothing in common with his creatures,” and the claim that God’s “substance is not included in any common classification of substances, since every other nature is excluded from having an essence in common with him” (Monol. 26 and 27; Anselm 2007, pp. 36, 37) were not ventured in the register of Krisis, they attest to a conviction that Barth held dear. For Barth, an acclamation of the “inalienable subjectivity of God” (GA 4, p. 254) is the conditio sine qua non for an authentic attempt to pay tribute, in thought, to the mystery with which we have to do. God cannot be numbered as an item within a genus or set; God’s reality “demands thought beyond any class, any universal, any likeness” (Sonderegger 2015, p. 25). Faithful acts of understanding, further, must wrestle with the fact that God bears God’s own unique reality, with God’s Godness (or “necessity”) depending on nothing other than God’s own power and vitality. Indeed, it

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is only because God Subjectivity’s is God’s own business, so to speak, that God can be both distant from and proximate to human beings. It is only because God is not limited by God’s alterity, only because God is free with regard to the modes of God’s self‐presence, that God can be for and with Godself and for and with us, in Christ and his Spirit. So  much so, in fact, that the Krisis of thought that arises when Christians track the movement of God in the economy of salvation must eventually look beyond the claim that God is “something than which nothing greater can be thought” – or, at the least, understand that God’s “greatness” must be viewed in light of God’s willingness to enter into the condition of sin that estranges us from God (about which, more soon). Anselm’s perspective on the sanctification of reason resonates throughout Church Dogmatics II/1, the only installment of Barth’s magnum opus that makes explicit mention of the Anselmbuch (CD II/1, p. 4). To be sure, this part‐volume exhibits the marks of a modern western philosophical context. The dialectic of veiling and unveiling in revelation (which deftly fuses Kantian suppositions about the limits of human knowledge with the Lutheran idiom of divine concealment) is prominent; and Barth’s actualistic theological epistemology is parsed with the help of a number of existentialist motifs, gathered under the canopy of human obedience to the Word of God (see, e.g. CD II/1, p. 26). Yet significant parallels still obtain. As with Anselm’s work, the knowledge of God ingredient to Christian faith is taken as a given, as a noetic presupposition that delimits the territory in which reflection occurs. The theological task is to move in an intellectually self‐conscious fashion along the “circular course” that passes from “faith to faith and … from knowledge to knowledge” (CD II/1, p. 43). Understanding follows: as our intellectual processes are aligned with the ontic content of faith, so  –  by grace! – our reasoning and knowing is conformed to the reason of God’s own being‐in‐act and the knowledge that God has of God’s own being‐in‐act. As with Anselm, too, Barth’s principal objective is not apologetic. His concern is simply that the content of faith be rearticulated and reaffirmed on the plane of thought and that this rearticulation and reaffirmation occur in ways that benefit believers. Indeed, it is not improper to say that when the theological epistemology of Church Dogmatics II/1 does depart from the ­perspective of Fides Quaerens Intellectum, this is largely a function of Barth’s distinctive preoccupations requiring a modification of the prior viewpoint – thus the provocative use of “encroachment” to describe God’s self‐revelation and God’s bestowal of knowledge (recall that the Nazis had done plenty of idolatrous encroaching by 1940, when II/1 was published); or the specification of the hypostatic union as the condition by which human knowledge of God is possible, with inclusion in Christ’s body being the means by which we are included in the triune God’s self‐knowing (see esp. CD II/1, pp. 149–157); or the recasting of divine hiddenness, such that the limits of Christian knowledge of God are subordinated to an insistence on the completeness of God’s self‐revelation. To describe Church Dogmatics II/1 as simply “Anselmian” would, admittedly, be an interpretative mistake. It would obscure the distinctiveness of Barth’s theological vision, draw attention away from other important influences (Calvin, Kant, etc.), and risk underrating how much of Barth’s theological method was established prior to the Dogmatics. Yet the continuity between Anselm’s texts, the careful interpretative labor of Fides Quaerens Intellectum, and key contentions in II/1 – which arguably towers over its

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predecessors, in terms of nuance and sophistication – still bears note. One can demur with respect to the degree to which Anselm influenced Barth, while still acknowledging substantial overlap between Anselm’s writing, Barth’s interpretative endeavors, and Barth’s dogmatic efforts. Finally, and granted that it is a commonplace to affiliate theological reflection and prayer – few have not turned to Romans 8:26–27 when tasked with making sense of belief! – Barth, like Anselm, gives this affiliation pronounced attention. And to such a degree that it is only a bit hyperbolic to claim that “no other theologian of the twentieth century took prayer more seriously or developed a more extensive theology of prayer than did Barth” (Migliore 2002, p. 95). Swathes of the Dogmatics support the claim, as does the memorable fourteenth chapter of Evangelical Theology, which identifies prayer as the “first and basic act of theological work,” and argues – in a Benedictine vein that Anselm could surely approve – that the laborare undertaken by the theologian “is essentially an orare … Work … that has the manner and meaning of prayer in all its dimensions, relationships, and movements” (ET, p. 160). For both authors, theological inquiry will not ­succeed without God’s favor and presence; and God’s favor and presence, while given freely, must always be sought out, asked for, and waited on if the pursuit of understanding is to bear fruit. Which is not to say, again, that the moniker “Anselmian” is helpfully applied at this juncture. The monastic context of Anselm’s work is obviously absent from Barth, and although the earlier thinker is alert to the possibility that Christian reasoning might veer off course, his scholarly texts lack anything comparable to Barth’s critique of religious idolatry.1 The Augustinian‐Platonic sensibility of Anselm also separates him from Barth. The later author often frames prayer in ethical terms (thus CD III/4 and the Christian Life) – less a matter of ascent, more a matter of asking God how best to participate in the covenant of grace. Finally, the ecclesial contexts of the authors are worlds apart. Granted the Augustinian meditatio that launches the Proslogion, Anselm’s concern for obedience to the church hierarchy is persistent, being particularly accentuated in some devotional writings. Barth’s prayers, by contrast, evoke the highly actualized ecclesiology of the Dogmatics, with the church presented as a mobile event, convoked as and when a community realizes it is “free to address itself to God in communion with Jesus Christ” (PRA, 44). Still, a general continuity remains. For each author, “at the beginning of the knowledge, of the seeking and finding of God, stands an instruction of human beings through God himself ” – an instruction for which one “can only pray” (GA II.14, p. 132)

Cur Deus Homo? If the first half of this essay emphasized similarities between Barth and Anselm, the second half attends more to contrasts. Whereas both authors exhibit an interest in the dyothelite tradition – a stream of thought that supposes Christ’s being “consubstantial

1  I say “scholarly” advisedly: Anselm’s prayers and meditations are singularly preoccupied with Christian failure and clearly aim to provoke some kind of Krisis in readers.

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with the Father as regards his divinity and consubstantial with us as regards his humanity” (per the “Definition of Chalcedon,” 451 ce) has as an entailment Christ’s possessing and exercising a divine will and a human will – I suggest that the authors’ accounts of Christ’s atoning death exhibit quite different profiles. The divergence, in nuce: Barth describes the cross as an act of divine‐human self‐substitution, with Christ bearing God’s rejection of sin in freedom and obedience, whereas Anselm describes the cross in terms of a divine‐human gift that releases humankind from its obligation to repay the debt of sin and vouchsafes the disbursement of God’s saving mercy. A useful baseline for thinking about Barth’s perspective on atonement is his treatment of Romans 3:21–26, and particularly his remarks on the difficult verse 25: In Jesus … atonement happens only through ‘the faithfulness of God in his blood’ … in the hell of his complete solidarity with all sin, all weakness, all misery of the flesh, in the secret which appears for us utterly negative, in the darkening and extinguishing of all lights (hero, prophet, wonderworker) which distinguish human life. (RII, p. 105 rev.; cp. RII, p. 97)

In Christ, God plunges into a condition of estrangement, into the nastiness of “sin‐­ controlled flesh” (RII, pp. 275 and passim). The divine “incognito” is thoroughgoing, as the “humilitas carnis (humility of the flesh) covers the divina majestas (divine majesty) … all along the line” (EP, p. 63). The “fate” God undergoes, too, is unbearably real. On the cross, the light of the world seems to be snuffed out, lost in the nighttime of human wickedness. Yet this act of nearly unthinkable love and solidarity is the ground of our salvation. Precisely because God defines Christ in his life, death, and resurrection, the hold that sinfulness has upon us is broken, and the “impossible possibility of our salvation” (RII, p. 105 rev.) is disclosed. That God can do this, for Barth, bears witness to a freedom that exceeds expectation. It announces a Lord whose power reaches into and abides within, but is never overcome by, the horrors of sin. That God does do this, moreover, makes impossible the claim that Barth’s theology is but one more hypostatization of the religious self‐consciousness. The incarnation and passion of the Son reveal the otherwise‐inconceivable fact that God loves humankind and that God spans the absolute “distance” separating holiness and wrongdoing to remake humankind as God’s covenant partner. The “righteousness of God,” which seems so intolerable and impossible to us, then, is for Barth a decisive act of “forgiveness, a basic alteration of the relationship between God and humankind.” It is a “statement as to why the impiety and insubordination that have brought the world to this condition are made insignificant, and do not stand in the way of God’s naming us his people, so that we may be his people” (RII, p. 93 rev.). If Barth’s early dialectical writing sometimes struggled to move beyond an amazed affirmation of the mighty “Nevertheless!” of God in Christ, his later work attends carefully to Christ’s human being and acting (Jones 2008). Barth’s actualistic account of Christians’ intellectual participation in the covenant of grace, which pervades Fides Quaerens Intellectum and finds striking articulation in Church Dogmatics II/1, is in fact grounded in a dogmatic account of Jesus’ human acknowledgement of and obedience to the one he calls Father. His “correspondence” to God, in word and deed, is the analogate to which human thought can become an analogue. Complementing its fuller

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account of Jesus’ human being and acting, the later stages of the Dogmatics also provide an imaginative elaboration of the juridical motifs deployed in Romans in order to accentuate the centrality of God's action. Christ is the “judge judged in our place” (CD IV/1, §59). He is the one in whom God delivers righteousness, for he takes the place of those under judgment and bears the rejection that sinners deserve. And he does so with such thoroughness, such comprehensiveness, that all who are elected in him are pardoned and summoned to approach God as a loving parent. Luther’s notion of the “blessed exchange” is thus nested within the legal framework often favored by Reformed thinkers, then glossed in terms of the determination of humankind as a “new creation” – one that has the right and responsibility to make use of its freedom within the covenant of grace, since “everything old has passed away” and “everything has become new” (2 Cor 5,17). And, at a crucial point in §59, one finds a striking reference to Anselm. Switching the referent from the “orderliness” of the cosmos to the identity of the God of our salvation, Barth insists that “the radical nature of the divine love … could ‘satisfy’ itself only in the outworking of its wrath against the man of sin, only by killing him, extinguishing him, removing him” (CD IV/1, p. 254, emphases in original). For Barth, one might say, the logic of salvation revolves around the jealousy of God’s love – around the fact that God does not rest until God gets God’s way. Cur Deus Homo proceeds rather differently, not least because of Anselm’s (in)famous decision to reason remoto Christo, without direct appeal to person and work of Jesus Christ. Although the first paragraph of the Dogmatics expresses hesitation about this mode of inquiry (so CD I/1, p. 16), I/2 offers something of a retraction, as Barth censures those who charge Anselm with “rationalism” (CD I/2, pp. 8–10). This retraction and censure are quite apt. Anselm’s decision to “leave Christ out of the picture, so to speak” (CDH Preface; Anselm 2007, p. 238) does not betray an interest in “deducing” Christian belief from self‐evident premises; it announces a canny dogmatic wager, predicated on the conviction that the ratio of faith involves a coherent cluster of interlocking claims. The hunch is that the Christian thinker can hold the central piece of the soteriological “puzzle” to one side and focus attention on the “problem” that comes into view when one analyzes adjacent structures of belief and understanding: God’s love for humankind, humanity’s refusal to obey God’s direction and its correlative guilt, divine justice and mercy, and the like (see Deme 2003, pp. 19–22). For when this occurs, it becomes clearer how the soteriological puzzle fits with the “answer” that is already known. Only one who is divine and human can compensate for the dishonor that God appears to suffer as a result of sin and can thereby bring God and humankind into right relationship. Only one who is divine and human can do what is needful to effect reconciliation: “To make such satisfaction it was necessary that the sinner, or someone for him, should give to God of his own something that he does not owe him, and something more valuable than all that is not God” (Anselm 1973, p. 232). (Note, again, that Anselm imagines “satisfaction” to be something that we need to do; Barth, by contrast, treats satisfaction as something God does). Anselm’s argument, outlined more fully: God, for all eternity, marks humanity as God’s most “precious work” and puts Godself under an obligation to bring about a state of affairs wherein human beings receive and rejoice in God’s blessings (CDH I.4 and II.5; Anselm 2007, pp. 249 and 292–293). Yet each and every human being acts in

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opposition to God. Each and every human being disobeys God, challenging and frustrating God’s purposes. The result is the estrangement of God and humankind, and a disordered and ugly universe – a state of affairs that Anselm describes vividly in “A Meditation on Human Redemption”: “O, God, what is this that I perceive, the land of ‘misery and darkness’? Horror! horror! What is this that I gaze upon, where they live without order, in eternal horror?” (Anselm 1973, p. 227). Worse, human beings now have neither the inclination nor capacity to remedy the situation. We do not know how to honor God as we ought, and we cannot offer the “compensation” needed to make things right. Meanwhile, God appears to be caught on the horns of another dilemma. While God stands under the self‐imposed obligation to deliver blessings to a select number of God’s children, God has also obliged Godself to maintain orderly and just relations with creatures – which means that the disobedience of sin ought to be met with punishment (a divine action that would, at least, lend a bit more order to the cosmos and redound to God’s honor [so CDH I.12–14; Anselm 2007, pp. 262–266]). Yet a solution is possible: an incarnate Son who assumes an individual human nature and affords a representative human being the inclination and capacity required to compensate and “satisfy” God, thus averting punishment, so that God’s saving project can be put back on track. “Satisfaction,” that is, in a distinct sense. Granted that parts of Cur Deus Homo give the impression of quantitative thinking about the “debt” of sin, what secures our salvation is the decision of the God‐man to gift his life to the Father, freely and spontaneously (see esp. CDH I.9–10. II.11, and II.18; Anselm 2007, pp. 255–261, 301–304, and 319–322). It is only because Christ does what he is not obliged to do, making a supererogatory offering of his life‐unto‐death, that justice and punishment do not define God’s relationship with sinners. For when Christ offers himself to the Father, the Father responds to this offering with a “return” gift: salvation for those whom the Son incorporates into his body (CDH II.19; Anselm 2007, pp. 322–324). If Romans 3:25 serves as a possible guide for reading Barth, then, a different scriptural verse epitomizes Anselm’s perspective: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13; see also the “Prayer Before Receiving the Body and Blood of Christ” in Anselm 1973, p. 100). For Anselm, satisfaction is something that Jesus, a human being assumed into union with God as Son, can and does do when he offers himself, unto death, as a gift to God on our behalf. “More precious,” Anselm insists, “is the life of that man than all that is not God, and it is more than all the debt that sinners owe in order to make satisfaction for their sins” (Anselm 1973, p. 233). By contrast, Barth treats satisfaction (which he describes as a “problematical concept” [CD IV/1, p. 255 rev.]) as something that God insists upon and realizes, given the intensity of God’s love for us. It is something that Jesus, the divine Son who assumes to himself an individual human nature, can and does do when he bears the rejection ­sinners are owed, in death, becoming and being the judge judged in their place. To be sure, the difference in perspective must not be overworked. Both authors fall within the tradition of dyothelite thinking, and both show a particular concern for Christ’s humanity. Barth advances an actualistic Christology in a Reformed key, wherein the two natures that comprise Christ’s person are distinct but seamlessly united through Christ’s being‐in‐act: a divine Son whose self‐humiliation is such that he realizes this eternal self‐determination by living out a history, in obedience to the Father, that runs

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from cradle to cross to resurrection; and a “man of Israel, an Israelite” (CD IV/1, p. 167) who does exactly the same and sanctifies and determines human beings as God’s ­faithful covenant partners. Anselm, while assuming that “the Son assumed human being not into a unity of nature but into a unity of person” (Ep. de Incarn. 8; Anselm 2007, p. 227), claims that Christ humanly endorses the wish of the Father that the elect be saved, and does so in such a way that God’s “obligation” to deliver sinners becomes sole purpose of his life. Yet this shared commitment to dyothelitism only makes more notable the different “spins” that are put on the “actuality of the atonement” (Gunton 1988). On the one side, there is the cross as an act of spontaneous and uncoerced gift‐giving (and a gift‐ giving that is therefore, in some sense, unnecessary: see De Conc. I.3; Anselm 2007, pp. 364–365), offered by the incarnate Son to the Father – an aneconomic centerpiece to the apparently feudal framework of Cur Deus Homo. With this gift, we are disburdened of the “huge leaden weight” of sin that impedes our approach to God (Anselm 1973, p. 235). Christ’s satisfying action frees us to become “heirs of the reward” that God qua Father gives to Christ qua Son, which – because Christ is God, and needs no “reward” to supplement his being – Christ passes on to us (CDH II.19; Anselm 2007, p. 323). On the other side, there is the cross as an act of divine self‐substitution (which, because it is animated by grace, is also unnecessary, though without it the human race would be lost, even as God’s love for us is such that God is “compelled” to act on our behalf). This self‐substitution anchors the covenant of grace and reveals that God’s justice, in the final analysis, means nothing other than the consummation of God’s saving purposes. Given the cross, the “leaden weight” of sin is not just set behind us; it is rendered passé, an impossible (but not, unfortunately, ineffectual) throwback to our old lives. And we do not now, in Christ, live only as “heirs of the reward.” We live as children of God, as ­sisters and brothers in Christ, as God “calls for new and wonderful liberations” to be realized in the church and the world (CL, p. 99).

Conclusion Obviously more could be said. It would be rewarding, for instance, to consider the ­trinitarian dimensions of both authors’ work. That would draw us into the later parts of the Monologion, as well as De Incarnatione Verbi (Anselm’s response to Roscelin’s crude tritheism) and De Processione Spiritus Sanctus (Anselm’s disputation with “Greek” rejections of the filioque) – texts that would repay comparison with key sections of Church Dogmatics I/1, II/1, II/2, and IV/1–4. The authors’ views on human freedom could be profitably set in critical conversation, too, with Church Dogmatics III/2, De libertate arbitrii, and De concordia serving as principal points of reference. It may even be that issues of sex, gender, and sexuality, vexed as they are in both Anselm and Barth studies (see, inter alia, Boswell 1980; Southern 1990, pp. 148–160; Sweeney 2012, pp. 38–73; Tietz 2017; and Bodley‐Dangelo forthcoming) would benefit from comparative inquiry. In conclusion, however, I want to return to my opening comments about the contemporary significance of treating Anselm and Barth as conversation partners. The burden of the preceding pages has of course been to signal that this conversation,

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viewed in strictly dogmatic terms, is possible and fruitful. “Possible” in the sense that Anselm and Barth share enough common ground to make a conversation viable; “fruitful” in the sense that when the authors’ perspectives diverge, as is the case with respect to the atonement, the divergence is of such a kind that readers can weigh the merits of two distinct doctrinal pathways. A possible next step is to reckon with what I initially described as Barth’s and Anselm’s confidence in God’s communicative action and, correlatively, in God’s empowerment of human reason. Is such confidence warranted? Can it be credibly affirmed in a context of radical pluralism, a “secular age” that makes fragile all subject positions, whether they be religious, philosophical, and/or political in nature (Taylor 2007)? Precious few Christian theologians, of course, would respond to the question with a straightforward “no.” Most suppose that God acts with discernible communicative intent; most suppose that human reason has some part to play in rendering faith intelligible. Yet it is fair to say that a number of recent theological initiatives shift attention away from God’s communicative action and the capacitation of human reason – and, perforce, away from the register of reflection that this essay has presumed in setting Barth and Anselm in conversation. The “cultural‐linguistic” approach to doctrine pioneered by George Lindbeck in the mid‐1980s; the interest in Christian formation and “virtues” as a means to stabilize and maintain Christian identity in a pluralistic ­context;  the “ethnographic turn” toward finely grained descriptions of Christian life‐­in‐community; and, again, the recent proposal by Paul Griffiths, which supposes that Christian theology involves apprenticing oneself to a tradition of reflection and gaining facility in its distinctive grammar and syntax: What connects these otherwise divergent perspectives, to varying degrees, is a diminished interest in God’s action and God’s superintendence of human reasoning. It is not the case, of course, that either divine action or human reason are suddenly being scorned. Obviously not. Within academic circles, the ongoing renaissance in Barth studies, the continuing vitality of process theology, and the vigor of liberationist thinking provide ample evidence that whatever a “secular age” is, it is neither godless nor irrational. Still, the very fact that swathes of the academy do not seem to share Barth and Anselm’s confidence in God’s action and the sanctification of reason deserves attention and helps focus the question of what these authors mean for Christian theology in the present and future. Put baldly, are we entering a time in which talk of revelation and reason must move to the sidelines and be eclipsed by different idioms and modes of theological reflection? Or, rather, is this a time in which Barth’s affirmation of God’s activity and Anselm’s trust in the power of grace‐directed inquiry ought to serve as an object lesson, as an indication of habits of mind that should be championed and restored? Or, presuming that this either/or, artificial as it, is liable to mislead: How might the confidence of a Barth and an Anselm be harnessed in such a way that recent theological developments can be framed in terms of the “quite specific astonishment” that “stands at the beginning of every theological perception, inquiry, and thought,” and the consequent obligation of each Christian “to become active in gratitude” by pursuing the task of faith seeking understanding (ET 64 and 73)?

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Abbreviations Monol. = Monologion (1–73) Prosl. = Proslogion (75–98) Pro Insp. = “Gaunilio’s Reply on Behalf of the Fool” (99–103) De Ver. = “On Truth” (117–144) De Inc. Verbi = On the Incarnation of the Word (213–236) CDH = Cur Deus Homo (237–326) De Conc. = On the Harmony of God’s Foreknowledge, Predestination, and Grace with Free Choice (361–394)

References Anselm (2007). Basic Writings, (ed. and trans. Thomas Williams). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company. Anselm (1973). The Prayers and Meditations of Saint Anselm with the Proslogion, (trans. Benedicta Ward). London: Penguin. von Balthasar, H.U. (1992). The theology of Karl Barth, (trans. T. Edward Oakes). San Francisco: Ignatius Press. Bodley‐Dangelo, F. (forthcoming). Sexual Difference, Gender, and Agency in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. London: T&T Clark. Boswell, J. (1980). Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Deme, D. (2003). The Christology of Anselm of Canterbury. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. Evans, G.R. (1989). Anselm. London: Continuum. Griffiths, P.J. (2016). The Practice of Catholic Theology: A Modest Proposal. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Gunton, C.E. (1988). The Actuality of the Atonement: A Study in Metaphor, Rationality, and the Christian Tradition. London: T&T Clark. Jones, P.D. (2008). The Humanity of Christ: Christology in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. London: T&T Clark.

Kant, I. (1996). Lectures on the Philosophical Doctrine of Religion, in Religion and Rational Theology, (trans. A. W. Wood and G. Di Giovanni). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, I. (1998). Critique of Pure Reason, (trans. P. Guyer and A. Wood). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leftow, B. (2004). Anselm’s perfect‐being theology. In: The Cambridge Companion to Anselm (eds. B. Davies and B. Leftow), 132–156. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCormack, B.L. (1995). Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909–1936. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McCormack, B.L. (2008). Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. Migliore, D.L. (2002). Freedom to pray: Karl Barth’s theology of prayer. In: Prayer: 50th Anniversary Edition, by Barth, K. (ed. D.E. Saliers) trans. S. F. Terrien, 95–113. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Murdoch, I. (1992). Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. New York: Allen Lane/The Penguin Press. Pfau, T. (2013). Minding the Modern: Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and

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Responsible Knowledge. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Sonderegger, K. (2015). Systematic Theology. Volume 1, the Doctrine of God. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Southern, R.W. (1990). Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sweeney, E.C. (2012). Anselm of Canterbury and the Desire for the Word. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press.

Taylor, C. (2007). A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Tietz, C. (2017). Karl Barth and Charlotte von Kirschbaum. Theology Today 74 (2): 86–111. Webster, J. (1995). Barth’s Ethics of Reconciliation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Westerholm, M. (2015). The Ordering of the Christian Mind: Karl Barth and Theological Rationality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 37

Barth and Aquinas Nicholas M. Healy

Introduction At least three obstacles stand in the way of a substantive comparative engagement with the theologies of Karl Barth and Thomas Aquinas. One obstacle is the more than six hundred years that divide them. Thomas (1225–1274) was a Dominican master who was canonized in 1323 on account of his exceptional holiness. As a thirteenth‐century theologian, he was unable to think of his work as “Roman Catholic” and distinct from “Protestant” or “Reformed”; nor could he foresee modernity, science, secularism, or the holocaust. The primary challenge for Christianity during his lifetime was not unbelief but wrong belief and its threat to salvation, so the order to which Thomas belonged sought to combat heresy by excellent preaching. For these and many other reasons, Thomas’s theological project was significantly different from Barth’s, so each theologian is likely to be misunderstood to the extent he is read in terms of the other’s project. A second obstacle is that one must decide which Barth and which Thomas should be brought into dialogue. With regard to Barth, we will simply avoid the issue in this short essay and rely on the extensive treatment elsewhere in this volume. But “which Thomas?” is an inescapable question, for there are widely differing interpretations of his work (Kerr 2002). In what follows we can consider only two of these. One is the neo‐Thomist tradition (itself by no means uniform) that was dominant among Barth’s Catholic contemporaries until about 1950. The other is the Thomas revealed by historical‐­theological scholarship that began to appear after about 1940 (Bauerschmidt 2013, pp. 1–81; Jordan 2017, pp. 1–16), and that Barth gives no indication of knowing. Treatments of the historical Thomas are by no means uniform, but they do address the first impediment by reading Thomas far more in terms of his own project than anyone else’s, including Barth’s (for examples, see McCosker and Turner 2016).

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Knowledge of the historical Thomas also has the benefit of bringing the two theologians closer than Barth himself seemed to have thought possible and enables a better account of the significant differences that remain.

Barth’s Thomas Arguably, a third obstacle is Barth’s own reading of Thomas, in large part because it reflects the two obstacles just noted. Yet if one reads through the references to Thomas in the CD it soon becomes evident that, in spite of his misgivings and an occasional sharply critical remark, Barth had great respect for the medieval Dominican. Not only, he writes, is there “a lot that the Evangelical theologian can learn in Thomas as a well‐ chosen compendium of all preceding tradition,” “on a careful reading” there are also “lines of thought which, if they do not point us to the Reformation, certainly do not point us to Jesuist Rome” (CD I/2, p. 614). Accordingly, when Barth takes up a new topic in the CD he will often discuss Thomas’s treatment of it as he works out his own position. It is from such scattered and usually relatively brief discussions that we can build up an idea of Barth’s somewhat conflicted view of Thomas’s theology. Barth tends to refer to Thomas rather less than positively when tackling natural theology, which he understands to be one of the main issues between himself and Thomas.1 The issue surfaces in many forms: theological method, ethics and natural law, nature and grace, Scripture versus metaphysics, and so on. For Barth, Christian theology must be “evangelical” – that is, theology must be based upon and determined by the gospel.2 Theology must be evangelical because it “belongs by right to the Word of God, and the Word of God alone.” Any theology other than evangelical in this sense is necessarily distorted because it will rely upon “an arbitrarily chosen basic view” (CD I/2, p. 866), and therefore upon “another knowability of God” than that which is bestowed upon us in “the free grace of His revelation” (CD II/1, p. 126). This fundamental error takes two main forms. The more egregious (CD II/2, p. 529) is that of modern neo‐Protestant theology, represented paradigmatically by Friedrich Schleiermacher and, in hermeneutics, by Rudolf Bultmann. Although such approaches claim to be in continuity with the Reformation, they are guided not by the Word of God but by an “arbitrarily chosen basic view” formulated as a modern philosophy of the religious subject (CD I/2, p. 866). Barth understood contemporary Roman Catholic theology to be a second form of this error. Beginning about 1860, some Catholic theologians had begun to develop a “basic view” for theology drawn from Aristotelian philosophy rather than from Scripture or church doctrine (McCool 1977; Jordan 2006, pp. 33–88). Barth regularly cites two contemporary examples: the Katholische Dogmatik of Franz Diekamp (1884–1943), a colleague during Barth’s time at Münster, and the Lehrbuch der Dogmatik of Bernhard 1  Throughout this essay, “natural theology” refers to what Barth means by the phrase, which was unknown to Thomas. Thomas refers to “natural reason,” which is different, as we will see, and here it will always be used in his sense. 2  Here “evangelical” refers only to scripture-based theology; it is not used here, as it is sometimes by contemporaries, to refer to a particular way of being Christian.

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Bartmann (1860–1938). The subtitle of Diekamp’s Dogmatik is “nach den Grundsätzen des heiligen Thomas” (“according to the principles of St. Thomas”). These and other neo‐ Thomists were enthusiastically encouraged by Pope Leo XIII (in Aeterni Patris, 1879) and Pius X (in Doctoris Angelici, 1914). Barth saw an anticipation of this Thomistic approach at work in the Council of Trent (1545–1563) and in the definitions of the First Vatican Council (aka the “Vaticanum,” 1869–1870). Barth sometimes indicates he is aware that contemporary Thomism differed significantly from Thomas’s own theology, and he distinguishes between the latter and “Roman Catholicism in the form which it gave itself in the sixteenth century in the battle against the Reformation” (CD I/1, p. 34). Elsewhere, though, he qualifies the ­distinction by treating the loss of a properly evangelical basis in contemporary Catholic theology as a consequence of developments within the medieval church that were at least enabled by Thomas’s theology. Thus he makes a connection between “the new external order of the relationship between Church and Empire initiated by Constantine,” and medieval theology, which “was able, after the rediscovery of Aristotle, to acquire over [Roman Catholic] theology the power which is finally revealed in the formulae of the Vaticanum (which canonises the supreme achievement of Thomas Aquinas)” (CD II/1, p. 127). So although his primary critical target was neo‐Protestant theology, Barth tells his readers that “we must beware of … so wearying of Descartes that we throw ourselves into the arms of, e.g., Aristotle or Thomas” (CD I/1, p. 195). For Barth, then, Thomas’s own theology, though often both right and profound, remained always fundamentally questionable. As he put it in 1945, Thomas’s work displays the “retention of a certain natural theology” (CD III/1, p. 4) and thus runs the danger of permitting a second, independent source of knowledge of God to replace the gospel as the “basic view.” There is evidence of a significant development in Barth’s thinking concerning natural theology by CD IV/1 (1953), and in 1959 he was able to say there are “true words which are not spoken in the Bible or the Church, but have to be regarded as true in relation to the one Word of God,” and thus should be heard by the Church as “parables of the kingdom” (CD IV/3.1, p. 114). Accordingly, some scholars have argued persuasively that in CD IV Barth draws significantly closer to Thomas on the issue of the use of nonscriptural knowledge in theology (Rogers 1995, 2005; Johnson 2013). However, Barth himself does not make this rapprochement with Thomas explicit. References to Thomas are comparatively few in CD IV and remain mostly critical (e.g. CD IV/3.1, p. 15). But more directly to the point, Barth clearly distinguishes between “secular ­parables” and the knowledge produced on the basis of what he calls “the sorry hypothesis of a so‐called ‘natural theology’ (i.e., a knowledge of God given in and with the natural force of reason or to be attained in its exercise),” and thus “apart from Bible and the Church” (CD IV/3.1, p. 117).3 In 1968, the last year of his life, Barth made his final comment on Thomas’s theology in the course of a letter written to Pope Paul VI about the latter’s encyclical,

3  For an account of the idea of secular parables in Barth, see “Secular Parables of the Truth” in Hunsinger 1991, pp. 234–280.

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Humanae Vitae, promulgated earlier that year. Barth tells the Pope that “during the long course of my engagement with theology it has become impossible for me to agree with Thomas Aquinas” on the “issue” of “natural law as a kind of second source of revelation” (Barth 1981, p. 314). He complains that Paul’s encyclical betrays a disappointing inconsistency in relation to the far more evangelical basic view of the Second Vatican Council document, Dei Verbum. One might speculate that Barth’s criticism was prompted less by Thomas and more by the Pope’s heavy reliance upon natural law in his encyclical of that year. But that is only speculation. Perhaps we might conclude, then, that (i) although Barth came to accept a nonevangelical source of knowledge that can be appropriated by the church, provided the proper conditions are met, (ii) he remained firmly against the natural theology he continued to believe Thomas engaged in. It would seem likely, then, that (iii) Barth’s concerns about Thomas remained distinct from his acceptance of “secular parables” in CD IV. If that is so, it would indicate (iv) that what Barth says explicitly about Thomas is his final position and is not to be confused with whatever developments he thought were occurring in contemporary Roman Catholic theology, such as the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar and the documents of Vatican II. So here we will take a rather different approach and explore the possibility that Barth’s long‐standing doubts about Thomas were influenced to a significant degree by a combination of the three obstacles noted here. If these are cleared away, some of the key issues between them can be seen rather differently. We begin by noting some of the more significant differences between their respective theological projects.

Barth: A Modern Theologian When nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century theologians – whether admirers or critics – appropriated Thomas’s theology to address their contemporary theological issues, they tended to read Thomas rather as if he were a modern systematic theologian. According to Barth, neo‐Protestants, neo‐Thomists, Thomas, and Barth himself all p ­ roduced what Barth called “regular” dogmatics, which he defines as any systematic theology that attempts to be “as complete as possible,” is designed for instruction in a theological school, and seeks to “impress on the student how one question breaks up into many questions and how in every respect and from every possible standpoint all these many questions are in fact open and inter‐related” (CD I/1, pp. 275–276). Thomas’s Summa Theologiae (ST) meets all these criteria, but does so in ways significantly different from modern theology. One difference is that the theological and philosophical systems of modernity seek to resolve a distinctly modern epistemological question: how can we acquire knowledge that is true, and how can we know it is true? They address this question by attempting to locate the right “basic view” – we adopt henceforth Barth’s useful phrase  –  which also guarantees the truth of the system insofar as it is shown to determine its form and substance. Thus the basic view in terms of which the theologian represents Christianity must be set out explicitly from the outset, and the order of presentation must follow the order by which doctrine is deduced from that basic view if it is to benefit from that epistemological foundation. In this

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regard, modern theology was – and some contemporary theologies still are – similar to modern philosophical systems such as those of Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and so on. Faced with major challenges to Scripture’s historicity and meaningfulness, modern theologians often replaced Scripture with some other basic view. Barth, of course, did not, and so he had not only to show systematically the gospel’s cogency and fruitfulness, he also needed to display the failure of alternative basic views when judged by Scripture. He did the latter with the scholarly care and generosity often evident in PTNC and in much of his treatment of Thomas. But like his contemporaries, he approached ­premodern theologies with a set of modern concerns that made it difficult for him to perceive quite how different Thomas’s project was.

Thomas: A Dominican Master of Sacra Doctrina Barth’s project in the CD was to display the truthfulness and livability of a thoroughly evangelical Christianity before a high‐modern culture. By contrast, Thomas’s project is “a theological project oriented to Dominican ends,” a “form of discipleship” that sought “to relate faith and reason for the sake of following Christ” (Bauerschmidt 2013, p. x). In the Prologue of the ST, Thomas remarks that he writes for “the instruction of beginners” (incipientes), so he will avoid “useless questions” and follow “the order of the subject matter … briefly and clearly.” But because the ST is clearly far too difficult for any but exceptionally gifted beginners, and because Thomas had been given a leadership role in the pedagogical decisions of his order’s houses of study, many have concluded that the ST was most likely written as a guide for Dominican “masters,” those who taught the order’s novices. On this account, then, the ST sets out what Thomas believed the members of his order needed to be taught for them successfully to perform their primary roles within the order: to preach, hear confessions, and live holy lives (Jordan 2017, pp. 1–16; Turner 2013, pp. 17–40; Davies 2014, pp. 7–17). The first question of the ST considers the “nature and extent of sacra doctrina,” the “holy teaching” or “sacred knowledge” revealed by God in Scripture for our salvation. Sacra doctrina is necessary for our salvation because whatever natural “reason could discover [about God] would only be known by a few, and that after a long time, and with the admixture of many errors” (ST I.1.1). Sacra doctrina is virtually identical to Scripture, for “the authority of the canonical Scriptures” is the sole “incontrovertible proof ” of any doctrinal proposal (ST I.1.8). But it is not completely identical because sacra doctrina provides the first principles for a scientia Dei, a “science” or, as we might say now, an “intellectually rigorous inquiry,” into sacra doctrina. Furthermore, because sacra doctrina “derives its principles not from any human knowledge, but from the divine knowledge,” it is necessarily “the highest wisdom,” higher than any other science, and therefore it must be that by which “all our knowledge is set in order” (ST I.1.2 and 6 ad1; Davies 2014, pp. 18–28). Those who pursue this kind of scientific inquiry do so not in order “to prove faith … but to make clear other things that are put forward in this doctrina” (ST I.1.8 ad2). Along the lines of Anselm’s fides quaerens intellectum, they seek to help others think through their faith and acquire Christian wisdom for themselves. Thomas believed that the “more sacra doctrina approaches scientia, the more firmly and fruitfully it

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implants itself in the student’s mind” and helps preaching be more effective and fruitful (Bauerschmidt 2013, p. 54). Scientia Dei is therefore not all that dissimilar to what Barth argued is the only true form of “scientific dogmatics,” namely the inquiry “into the agreement of Church proclamation with the revelation which is attested in Holy Scripture” (CD I/1, p. 283). For both theologians, the basic view cannot be anything other than the Word of God in Scripture. And so we may conclude that Thomas and Barth concur in rejecting the validity of any theological inquiry that is not evangelical. This conclusion is further supported by a rule Thomas defines for this kind of scientia: “we ought not to say about God anything which is not found in holy scripture either explicitly or implicitly” (ST I.36.2 ad1). However, Barth and Thomas differ significantly over what may be implicit. A good example is their respective treatment of angels. Both accept the existence of angels because they are explicitly mentioned in Scripture. But when Thomas discusses them he seeks to show: how they are different from other creatures, how such bodiless rational entities are not impossible, and how awareness of this contributes to a deeper understanding of creation’s perfection (ST I.50.1). His arguments use concepts drawn from Aristotle, but rework them – in a way that Aristotle would find incomprehensible – in order to bring out the fullness of the scriptural text’s teaching. Barth rejects Thomas’s arguments because, he believes, they go beyond what is implicit in Scripture. He points out that “there is no reference in any part of the Bible … to the creation of angels,” and he considers Thomas’s account of angels to be irrelevant for understanding “the divine activity in relation to the world and especially to humanity” (CD III/2, p. 13). Barth insists the “Scripture‐principle must obtain in all its exclusiveness. Angelology cannot be confused with a philosophy of angels, nor what the Bible says about angels interpreted in terms of such a philosophy” (CD III/3, p. 412). Their divergence here reflects in part a broader disagreement as to what the theologian should use Scripture for. Thomas works on the belief that “an intrinsic part of theology is to work through our understanding of revelation in relation to other things we know or think we know about the world, and in Thomas’s time this meant, in large part in relation to philosophy” (Kilby 2016, p. 72). So sacra doctrina can and should move “from articles of faith to other truths” (ST I.1.8 ad1). For Barth, Scripture is centered upon Jesus Christ, by comparison to whom, of course, angels are only peripheral. Thomas would agree on the comparison, but might note that angels were a vital part of thirteenth‐century religious life and are often portrayed in Scripture when key events occur (not least the Annunciation). So those who are training to be Dominican preachers need to understand angels properly so as to talk about them without any superstitious confusion.

God’s Existence and Perfections In the ST’s second question, a discussion of “the proposition ‘God exists’” (ST I.2 Prol.), Thomas offers the well‐known “five ways” to prove the truth of the proposition. These are exercises in natural reason in that they rely solely upon what everyone knows about

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the world around us (ST I.2.2; see Davies 2014, pp. 29–50). The second proof can be taken as representative for our purposes here. Thomas’s premise is that we all know that something cannot be the cause of itself; everything is because of something else. But there has to be something that is the cause of the whole chain of causes and that therefore cannot be part of the chain of causes, “and this everyone understands to be God” (ST I.2.3). Whether or not the proof works – and Thomas clearly thought it did – we might ask why Thomas offers it; after all, that “God exists” is surely taught us with sufficient authority by Scripture. But in one way it is not taught, for the proposition “God exists” is not in fact an explicit article of faith (ST I.2.2 ad1). It is not in Scripture, and when Christians say the Creed, they describe the God they believe in, but they do not say that God exists, we just assume it. Accordingly, there is room for scientia Dei to offer arguments to show that “God exists” and thereby render explicit what is implicit in Scripture. A second reason for the proofs is to make the point that we cannot prove “the existence of God.” Thomas knows we cannot do that – not for Kantian or positivist reasons, of course, but because it is logically impossible. In order to prove the existence of something one must have some minimal idea of what it is that exists, its essence. But it is a fundamental axiom for Thomas that God’s essence is unknowable and therefore indefinable. The proposition, “God exists,” may well be true, but it says absolutely nothing about the “God” that exists. Thus the proofs do not, and indeed cannot, serve to establish a positive basis upon which to build a systematics. Instead, they initiate a kind of knowledge‐through‐negation, an apophatic approach that Thomas follows in the subsequent questions on God as One (ST I. 3–26). In question 3, he begins to delineate what we can say about God, given that (i) God necessarily exists if anything else is to exist, and therefore (ii) God is necessarily and absolutely different from anything created (Davies 2014, pp. 33–50; Levering 2004, pp. 23–46). Here Thomas follows a rule for talking about God he finds implicit in Scripture: “because we cannot know what God is, but rather what God is not, we have no means for considering how God is, but rather how God is not” (ST I.3. Prol.; Turner 2013, pp. 100–144). Accordingly, the subsequent questions describe how God is unlike anything else by showing how certain words – simple, perfect, good, infinite, and the like – can be used to indicate that God exists as radically Other. It is only with question 27 that Thomas turns to the doctrine of the Trinity (ST I 27–43). He thereby moves in a contrary direction to Barth, who discusses God’s attributes in CD II/1 only after a lengthy treatment of Jesus Christ and the Trinity in CD I. Barth’s doctrine of God is thus often thought to be more scriptural and more concrete, and Barth himself suspects Thomas engages in metaphysical natural theology in ST I.2–26. We noted previously, however, that Thomas (unlike Barth) could safely assume his readers shared the evangelical basic view and could therefore organize his material differently to serve a different purpose than Barth’s. In ST I.2–26 Thomas seeks to overcome any theological naiveté his readers and their pupils may have, in order that when they reach the doctrine of the Trinity they will be better able to understand, and give an account of, the saving knowledge of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As Gilles Emery has argued with regard to Thomas’s procedure in the treatises on God as One and God as Triune, Thomas is displaying the necessity of a “redoublement” of theological

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l­anguage: a “double perspective of the common nature and the Trinitarian relations is imperative in order to take account fully of Trinitarian faith” (Emery 2003, p. 172; see also pp. 175–208). A second reason for Thomas’s order of presentation here is that it follows the movement of Scripture, from the Hebrew scriptures to the New Testament, and thereby avoids at least some forms of supersessionism. The “proofs” and the apophaticism are authorized for Thomas by the Shema’s proclamation of God’s Oneness against any and all idolatry (Deut. 6.4–9; ST I.11.3sc). And the possibility of forming true affirmative propositions about God is authorized by HaShem, the “Name of God” revealed as “He Who Is” in Exodus. 3.14, which Thomas contends is “the most proper name of God” (ST I.13.11; see the valuable discussion in Soulen 2011, especially pp. 73–86, 93–104; and Sonderegger 2015). To make these two points is not to suggest that Barth’s order of ­presentation is inadequate, given his particular project, but that, given his project, Thomas’s order is also reasonable, evangelical. If so, it may well be an appropriate complement to Barth’s. If Thomas’s theology is indeed evangelical, his discussion of analogy in theological language about God in ST I.12–13 should be read as a version of what Barth called the analogia fidei. Although Barth was clearly uneasy with Thomas’s discussion of analogy, he seems at times willing to acknowledge this. He notes that it was Thomas who ­correctly “established” that “God is not in any genus” (CD II/1, pp. 237–238). It may be, too, that his uneasiness was induced not so much by Thomas himself but by neo‐ Thomism’s philosophy of being and the analogia entis. His famous statement about the analogia entis as “the invention of Antichrist” (CD I/1, p. xiii) refers to “Roman Catholicism” and the Vaticanum, but not to Thomas. On the same page he also writes that he is not particularly concerned that he might thought to be “going the way of scholasticism” and becoming a “crypto‐Catholic.” It is also quite possible that he also had in mind the false start he had made with his earlier Göttingen Dogmatics. And he later said the statement “was nothing more than a literary flourish” (Schwöbel 2016, p. 334). So perhaps the analogia entis issue was a bit of a red herring, after all, at least with regard to Thomas.

Nature and Grace Underlying many of their differences – and Barth’s ongoing unease with Thomas – are differing emphases (perhaps no more than that in later Barth) in their concepts of “nature” and in the relation between nature and grace (Wawrykow 2013, pp. 193–211; Hunsinger 2000, pp. 183–185). Barth tends to separate nature and grace rather more than Thomas does in order to stress the absolute freedom of God, the necessity of grace, and the sinfulness and sheer inadequacy of our nature. In this he reflects various developments subsequent to the thirteenth century. Among these are the doctrine of election in the Reformed tradition, the moral failure of liberal Protestantism, and changes in the concept of nature, especially the advent of a “pure nature” unknown to Thomas but used in some Thomisms, and “nature” as a cultural basic view. But perhaps the dominant background reason is that with his doctrine of election in Jesus Christ, Barth can

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find in Scripture grounds for greater optimism than Thomas about the possibility of salvation and therefore tends rather more to stress that God works for us and apart from us, rather than with us. Thomas’s theology of nature reflects a critical reaction to Peter Lombard (1096– 1160), who taught that love (caritas) is nothing but the Holy Spirit. That might seem to rule out any notion that it is we who love, and if so would be difficult to reconcile with Scripture, for example the command that we are to love God and one’s neighbor (Mark 12:30–31). For Thomas, God brings us into relation to God not only as our Creator, but always also as our Redeemer and Sanctifier. Grace is the Holy Spirit enabling us to do what we by nature alone could never do, yet in such a way that it is truly we who love, albeit only by grace. Thomas formulates a rule for the relation: “grace does not destroy nature but perfects it” (ST I.1.8 ad2). Barth agrees with this “maxim,” as he calls it, though he adds, darkly, that it has been “so often put to dangerous use and in the first instance was no doubt dangerously meant” (CD II/1, p. 411).4 Thomas argues that after the Fall our nature is not so corrupted by sin that we cannot build cities and plant vineyards by our natural powers alone (ST II/1.109.2). Such activities, however, are unrelated to our salvation. For that, we need to know the truth and do good, for which grace is always necessary. Although Thomas believes that human nature’s corruption bears more heavily upon our “desire for good than in regard to the knowledge of truth” (ST II.109.2 ad3), he insists that grace is always necessary, even to know what is true: “every truth by whomsoever spoken is from the Holy Spirit as bestowing the natural light” (ST II/1.109.1 ad1). If the exercise of natural reason results in true knowledge, it does so always and necessarily by grace: not only by grace, but by grace alone perfecting a natural operation. As a result, he can say that natural reason is able (again, only by grace) to “minister to faith” (ST I.1.8 ad2). Thus we may conclude that those who do not have sanctifying grace (as Thomas would think pagan philosophers do not) may yet be able, by grace, to know truth by their natural light. If we find their knowledge is consonant with Scripture, we can accept it as true, and it may help us think more deeply about sacra doctrina. Here, perhaps, we may be at least in the neighborhood of Barth’s secular parables. Barth’s dark comment noted previously may have been in part prompted by Roman Catholic talk of “merit,” which he rejects (Wawrykow 2013, pp. 193–211). Because the concept would seem to be pervasive in some parts of Scripture (not least in the Psalms), Thomas has to make sense of it. He argues that the Holy Spirit sanctifies us so that it is we who do what is good, but we do it only by grace. And because it is also only by grace that what we do is pleasing to God, it is only by grace that we can be said to “merit” salvation. This is a necessarily odd notion of merit, for what is meritorious is never something we could possibly do by ourselves, nor without grace could we even have the will to want to do what is good. God gains nothing at all by our good will and good works, nor could God be in our debt in any way. Merit is therefore pure gift (ST II/1.114.2 ad3, citing Rom 9:35).5

4  For some of the complexities of Barth’s possible “agreement” on this issue, see Hunsinger 2000. 5  For a brief account of “merit” in Barth, see Hunsinger 1991, pp. 192–194.

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Ethics Barth believed that within “the classical dogmatics of Reformation theology it would be difficult to point to any passage in which faith or the object of faith is treated without regard to the conduct of the believer” (CD I/2, p. 783). By contrast, he thought Thomas’s ethics has “its foundation as unambiguously in Aristotle as it has its illustration in the vita religiosa of the religious and the monk.” Faith and ethics are detached from one another, with the ethics having “an independent basis” in a natural law ethic, though he acknowledges it is not presented independently within Thomas’s “dogmatics, but in a subordinate position within it” (CD I/2, p. 783). Thomas’s ethics are arguably deeply trinitarian, though in a way that is far too complex to display here beyond a few simple gestures. The most important point is made by Fergus Kerr: “The best way of describing the moral considerations in the ST is not as virtue ethics, let alone as divine command ethics, but as an ethics of divine beatitude” (Kerr 2002, p. 133). Accordingly, the Good News of our salvation must control our understanding of Law and virtue. The natural law is basic in that it reflects the kind of thing we are, our created nature, but it cannot be developed into an “independent” ethical system, and not only because “all acts of virtue must be modified with a view to their due circumstances” (ST II/2.31.2; see also ST I/273.7). The revealed Law of the Old Testament is far more significant for Thomas, which he explores in considerable detail. But everything depends upon the New Law, which is Caritas Itself, the Love that is the Holy Spirit working within us: “the perfection of the Christian life consists radically in caritas” (ST II/2.184.1). It is from this perspective that Thomas describes the life of Christian virtue, which is modeled upon the life of the apostles, the vita apostolica. Through acquired habits of mind and body we may overcome some of our faults and find it easier to love God and our neighbor. We will remain sinful, to be sure, but perhaps may have some anticipation of the happiness to come as we attempt to follow Jesus now. There cannot be any “progress” in the sense of something we become that we can keep, as it were, because “we stand in continual need” of the work of the Holy Spirit (ST I/2.68.2 ad2), without whom any virtues we might acquire will be lost. Only in heaven, for which we are created, redeemed, and sanctified, will we be finally at rest.6

Conclusion In this essay I have tried to show something of how historical scholarship helps us see more readily the evangelical basis of Thomas’s theology, which in turn makes possible a richer and more extensive dialogue with Barth. The dialogue is barely begun here, to be sure, and it would be significantly enriched if Thomas’s biblical commentaries could have been brought to bear. There are many other issues between them we have not even mentioned, not least their doctrine of God and Christology, as well as their respective views of the Christian life, prayer, and the Eucharist and Real Presence. 6  For Barth’s critique of caritas, which following Aulen, he regarded as a synthesis of agape and eros, and his preference for mere agape, see CD IV/2, pp. 737-741.

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The approach here has been to try to understand each theologian’s respective ­projects in relation to their evangelical basic view. Such an approach would not be possible for every modern or contemporary theology. Fewer theologians are attempting the kind of regular dogmatics Barth and Thomas produced. Many restrict themselves to particular issues or doctrines, making it difficult to see their understanding of the whole. Some of the more well‐known systematic theologies, modern, and contemporary, do not have Scripture as their basic view, or do not make that view sufficiently explicit. Thomas and Barth may disagree about many things, but their disagreements, like their agreements, are mostly about what they have learned by engaging with Scripture in their time and place. Because both theologians are subtle and profound, and pursued different projects, it may not be always necessary for us, their later readers, to choose between them when they disagree. Or at the least, it may not be a matter of choosing between what is correct and what is wrong, though we will have preferences, of course. This is not to say that Scripture supports just any old doctrine, but rather that it can sometimes be impossible or unnecessary, or even beneficial, not to try to make a judgment between what look like opposing views, and instead hold them together, and acknowledge they are supported within different theological systems. Barth made the theological decisions he did from something like scriptural necessity, just as Thomas made his. Theirs were sometimes different decisions. Similarly, Thomas’s theology ­differed substantially from that of his good friend and sometime colleague at the University of Paris, the Franciscan friar, St. Bonaventure. Neither Thomas nor Bonaventure would have thought their differences church‐dividing, not least because each knew the other’s theology was thoroughly evangelical. They both served the Word of God. Scripture sometimes permits more than one way to follow our Lord truly. Perhaps this is why some of those who appreciate Barth also find it useful, even necessary, to read Thomas, and vice versa.

References Barth, K. (1981). Letters: 1961–1968 (eds. J. Fangmeier and H. Stoevesandt). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Bauerschmidt, F.C. (2013). Thomas Aquinas: Faith, Reason, and Following Christ. New York: Oxford University Press. Davies, B. (2014). Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica: A Guide and Commentary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Emery, G.,.O.P. (2003). Trinity in Aquinas. Ypsilanti, MI: Sapienta Press. Hunsinger, G. (1991). How to Read Karl Barth. New York: Oxford University Press. Hunsinger, G. (2000). The mediator of communion. In: The Cambridge Companion

to Karl Barth (ed. J. Webster), 177–194. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, K.L. (2013). Natural revelation in creation and covenant. In: Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: An Unofficial Catholic‐ Protestant Dialogue (eds. B.L. McCormack and T.J. White), 129–156. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Jordan, M.D. (2006). Rewritten Theology: Aquinas after his Readers. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Jordan, M.D. (2017). Teaching Bodies: Moral Formation in the Summa of Thomas Aquinas. New York: Fordham University Press. Kerr, F.O.P. (2002). After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

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Kilby, K. (2016). Philosophy. In: The Cambridge Companion to the Summa Theologiae (eds. P. McCosker and D. Turner), 62–73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levering, M. (2004). Scripture and Metaphysics. Malden, MA: Blackwell. McCool, G.A. (1977). Catholic Theology in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Seabury Press. McCosker, P. and Turner, D. (eds.) (2016). The Cambridge Companion to The Summa Theologiae. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rogers, E.R. Jr. (1995). Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: Sacred Doctrine and the Natural Knowledge of God. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press. Rogers, E.R. Jr. (2005). Faith and reason follow glory. In: The Theology of Thomas Aquinas (eds. R. van Nieuwenhove and J.

Wawrykow), 442–459. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press. Schwöbel, C. (2016). Reformed traditions. In: The Cambridge Companion to the Summa Theologiae (eds. P. McCosker and D. Turner), 319–342. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sonderegger, K. (2015). Systematic Theology, vol. 1. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Soulen, R.K. (2011). The Divine Name(s) and the Holy Trinity, vol. 1. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Turner, D. (2013). Thomas Aquinas: A Portrait. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Wawrykow, J.P. (2013). Aquinas and Barth on grace. In: Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: An Unofficial Catholic‐Protestant Dialogue (eds. B.L. McCormack and T.J. White), 193–211. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

CHAPTER 38

Barth and Luther George Hunsinger

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o theologian receives a longer entry in the index volume to Barth’s Church Dogmatics than Martin Luther. Although John Calvin runs a close second, the entry for Luther exceeds that for Schleiermacher and Aquinas combined and is far longer than for any other major figure, including Athanasius, Augustine, or Anselm. Of course an observation like this reveals little except that Barth’s engagement with Luther was extensive. It tells us nothing about whether the various references are favorable or c­ ritical, or whether they are passing or significant. Nor does it disclose any notable allusions to Luther or, more importantly, any lines of his influence that may remain tacit or implicit. Yet it does suggest that Luther was a towering figure in Barth’s mind. In this essay five areas of convergence between Barth and Luther will be explored: christocentrism, theology of the cross, the primacy of the Word, simul iustus et peccator, and finally grace and freedom. Although I think it is likely that Luther exercised a strong influence on Barth in all these matters, I will concentrate mainly on points of convergence and divergence rather than possible influences.

Christocentrism “Christocentrism” was the most basic point of all in Barth’s theology. Insofar as Barth may have owed it to Luther, he went on to radicalize it. In this respect he would perhaps remain truer to the spirit than the letter of the Reformer’s thought. It should not be forgotten, however, that modern liberal theology  –  the theology of Schleiermacher, Herrmann, and Barth’s youth – was already basically christocentric. A thoroughgoing christocentrism was one of the most notable features distinguishing modern theology from Protestant theology in the seventeenth century.

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Barth was no cultured despiser of the seventeenth‐century theologians. It might be said that his theological achievements arose largely through his genius in forging a creative synthesis between the nineteenth and the seventeenth centuries, between the christocentrism of the one and the scholastic rigor of the other, between the newer personalism and the older biblicism, between the thoroughly modern and the solidly traditional, in a word, between Schleiermacher and Polanus. Yet the christocentrism that Barth absorbed was not finally Schleiermacher’s but Luther’s. Schleiermacher’s christocentrism can be distinguished from Luther’s primarily by its subjective tendency. For Schleiermacher, the saving significance of the Redeemer was essentially a matter of his “God‐consciousness.” This was a modern, somewhat secularized way of saying that the important thing about Jesus, the thing that made him ­savingly significant, was the power of the Holy Spirit. As with all Spirit‐oriented christologies down through the ages, whose prototype was perhaps Theodore of Mopsuestia, the salient point was not so much that the Holy Spirit pointed us to Jesus as that Jesus imparted the Holy Spirit. In such christologies, regardless of any specialized terminology, although Jesus was formally central, the operative center in the work of salvation was finally the Holy Spirit. Luther’s christocentrism was different. It was not merely formal but substantive. Jesus Christ was not the source of a salvation other than himself. In his person he was uniquely and irreplaceably our salvation. His saving significance was not found in his spirituality, but in the concrete events of his incarnation, death, and resurrection for our sakes. His person was inseparable from his saving predicates, because he was finally identical with them. As Luther urged repeatedly, he alone was our righteousness and our life. No one else would ever be God incarnate, nor would anyone else ever die for the sins of the world. Only Jesus Christ was such a person, only he could do such a work, and he in fact had done it. He did not impart righteousness and life except by giving ­himself, as he did when he was received by faith alone. Persons were not saved by reduplicating his spirituality, which Luther would have regarded as a new form of the law, but by the miraculous exchange (admirable commercium) whereby Christ had died in our place as sinners so that we might be clothed in his righteousness by grace and live through his body and blood in eternal life in fellowship with God. Our salvation was anchored not in a repeatable, but in a finished and unrepeatable event, not in an event that took place in nobis but in one that had taken place extra nos. Because we received a share in this finished work by grace through faith, having been baptized into Christ’s death (Rom. 6:3), the substance of our salvation, and not merely the source, was Christ himself and Christ alone. What Luther had discovered, according to Heiko Oberman, was not that grace was prevenient, for that would have been nothing new. Nor was the novelty located in the idea that the sinner was justified by grace through an existential process of sanctification. That idea was as common in the middle ages as it was finally alien to the Lutheran Reformation. Rather, what Luther attacked, states Oberman, was “the whole medieval tradition as it was later confirmed at the Council of Trent” (Oberman 1992, p. 119). All known scholastic doctrines of justification, whether nominalist, Scotist, or Thomistic, finally saw justification as a goal to be obtained at the end of a purifying process that took place in nobis. By contrast, Luther saw justification as “the stable basis and not the

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uncertain goal of the life of sanctification” (Oberman 1992, p. 124). Justification by faith alone meant that our righteousness in God’s sight (coram Deo) was already our real spiritual possession. Although it had yet to become a predicate in nobis, we now possessed it, whole and entire, extra nos in Christ by faith. “Christian righteousness,” wrote Luther, “is … that righteousness by which Christ lives in us, not the righteousness that is in our person” (LW 26:166)1. Not some spirituality being formed within us, but “Christ himself is our Reconciliation, Righteousness, Peace, Life, and Salvation” (LW 26:151). The centrality of Christ in this sense was also distinctive of Barth. That Christ alone was our salvation, that he was not an incomplete but a perfect Savior, that he was our righteousness on account of his obedience, that he was not the source of our righteousness without also being its reality and ground, that the righteousness received from him by faith did not come by portions and pieces but was already ours whole and entire, that it was participatory before it was intrinsic – these were as much themes in Barth as in Luther, and they can probably be traced back to Luther. In any case, the christocentrism for which Barth was so famous would scarcely have been thinkable without Luther’s Reformation breakthrough.

Theology of the Cross Another powerful theme that Barth may have absorbed from Luther involved the ­theology of the cross. Here is a juncture where it seems that a choice had to be made between Luther and Calvin. Although Barth adopted a dialectical strategy that would attempt to do justice to the interests of both Reformers, and although the contrast here between Luther and Calvin can be overstated, the suffering of God was not a theme that Calvin was eager to embrace. Luther and Calvin both saw Jesus Christ as one person in two natures whose true deity and true humanity were joined by a relationship of unity‐ in‐distinction. However, where Luther would focus on the unity, Calvin would press the distinction. Nowhere were these differences more evident than at the point of the cross. Remembering the abiding distinction of Christ’s deity from his humanity, Calvin insisted on the impassability of the divine nature. Remembering the real unity of Christ’s person, Luther affirmed the suffering of God. Although Barth respected Calvin’s distinction, he moved closer to Luther. For Barth the theology of the cross disclosed the suffering love of God. Certainly if Barth had followed Calvin, he would not obviously have been led in that direction. “We know that in Christ,” Calvin stated, “the two natures were united into one person in such a way that each retained its own properties.” To him this suggested that sometimes it was necessary “in fulfillment of the office of Mediator” that the “human nature should act alone in its own terms” according to its peculiar character (Calvin 1972, p. 99). It is not surprising that Calvin could remark: “Certainly when he

1  The abbreviation LW in this essay refers to Luther’s Works: The American Edition, published by Concordia and Fortress Press between 1955 and 1986, which contains 55 volumes in its original edition.

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says that the Lord of glory was crucified (1 Cor 2:8), Paul does not mean that he suffered anything in his divinity, but that Christ, who suffered in the flesh as an abject and despised man, was also, as God, the Lord of glory” (Calvin 1960, IV.17.30). Far from discerning the suffering of divine love, Calvin was inclined to safeguard the divine impassability: “God has no blood, nor does he suffer, nor can he be touched with hands” (Calvin 1960, II.14.2). Although these statements were technically correct, they suggested an orientation to the cross in which God seemed more detached than involved. Luther was prepared to run different risks. As early as the Heidelberg Disputation (1518), we find him asserting: “Now it is not sufficient for anyone, and it does him no good to recognize God in his glory and majesty, unless he recognizes him in the humility and shame of the cross” (LW 31:52–53). “He who does not know Christ does not know God hidden in suffering….God can be found only in suffering and the cross” (LW 31:53). Although not continuously prominent, 10 years later in the midst of eucharistic controversies, the same theme would reappear. Confronted by the objection that the deity cannot suffer and die, Luther retorted: “That is true, but because the divinity and humanity are one person in Christ, the Scriptures ascribe to the divinity, because of this personal union, all that happens to the humanity” (LW 37:210 rev.). Luther’s inclination ran opposite to Calvin’s: “Therefore it is correct to say: the Son of God suffers. Although, so to speak, the one part (namely the divinity) does not suffer, nevertheless the person, who is God, suffers in the other part (namely, in the humanity)” (LW 37:210). Or more boldly: “What Christ does and suffers, essentially God does and ­suffers” (WA 20:265). Faith affirms, said Luther, what reason cannot possibly grasp, namely, “that a man who dies is God” (LW 28:269). God was never more fully God, said Barth in echo of Luther, than in the powerlessness and humiliation of the cross. Far from contradicting the divine omnipotence, the cross revealed it. Nothing demonstrated more than the cross how great was the omnipotence of God’s love – “so great that God can be weak and indeed powerless, as a human being can be weak and powerless” (CD IV/1, p. 129 rev.). “This is how he is God,” continued Barth, “this is his freedom, this is his distinctness from and superiority to all other reality…. This One, the One who loves in this way, is the true God” (CD IV/1, p. 129 rev.). The glory of God was revealed in the face of Jesus Christ as he hung in agony on the cross (2 Cor 4:6). “False gods,” by contrast, “are all reflections of a false and all too human self‐exaltation. They are all lords who cannot and will not be servants, who are therefore no true lords, whose being is not truly a divine being” (CD IV/1, p. 130). Divine impassability, urged Barth, should not prevent us from seeing the cross as “the passion of God himself ” (CD IV/1, p. 245). As Barth agreed with Luther, the “mystery of this passion” – the passion of the impassable God – could not be expressed without paradox. Thus Barth could write that “in this humiliation God is supremely God, … in this death he is supremely alive, in the passion of this man as his eternal Son God has maintained and revealed his deity” (CD IV/1, pp. 246–247 rev.). Of course, unlike Luther, Barth recoiled from any suggestion that the cross implied a rift within God’s being, an idea he regarded as blasphemous (CD IV/1, p. 185). The cross, he stressed, was the deepest manifestation of God s being, not its contradiction. Moreover, the cross bore its saving significance not in the placating of divine wrath, but in the divine judgment that in mercy had assumed the whole burden of the world’s sin and removed it

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through suffering love. With that proviso, however, Barth concurred with Luther (more than Calvin) on the unavoidability of paradox. Like Cyril of Alexandria, who once suggested that in Christ God “suffered impassably” and “died immortally,” Barth and Luther agreed that there were cases when the transcendent necessities of faith outweighed any possible offenses to reason. Otherwise, God would appear in a false light as “a remote and aloof spectator or a non‐participating supervisor of this event,” rather than as what he really was – the merciful God who suffered with us and for us on the cross in order that our deepest distress might be removed (CD IV/3, pp. 414–415 rev).

Primacy of the Word of God As the point about paradox would suggest, a third theme where Barth echoed Luther involved the primacy of the Word of God. As for Luther so also for Barth, the Word of God took precedence not only over “experience” but also over “reason.” No theology of the cross, the two theologians agreed, could avoid the scandal and the promise of hiddenness. The content of the Word of God was hidden from both experience and reason taken in themselves. Although each could be enlisted in the service of God’s Word, neither could provide it with a foundation. The Word was too much of a novum, too high, too full of hope to be normed and judged by the uncertainties of the human heart or the frail powers of the mind. The Word authenticated itself from faith to faith, and in no other way. Although Barth would expand the scope of this theme into areas not admitted or anticipated by Luther, and although it would of course have been mediated to him also by Calvin and Reformed theology in general, it would seem that the ultimate source may again have been Luther. “Christ cannot be set forth,” argued Luther, “any other way than through the Word, and cannot be grasped any other way than through faith” (LW 26:356). Nothing but the Word could make us certain in our faith. “It is impossible ever to decide what God wills and what is pleasing to him except in his Word. This Word makes us certain that God cast away all his wrath and hatred toward us when he gave his only Son for our sins” (LW 26:388). Therefore our gaze had to be averted from everything but the promise of the gospel. “Now it is time to turn your eyes away from the Law, from works, and from your own feelings and conscience, to lay hold of the gospel, and to depend solely on the promise of God” (LW 26:389). “God has portrayed himself definitely and clearly enough,” Luther stated, “in his Word” (LW 24:23). If we did not wish to go astray, we had therefore to begin with God where he wished to be found. We could not rely on what we might perceive or feel. “We must close our eyes to what we perceive and feel, and cling to the Word of Christ with our heart” (LW 24:31). We ought not look to the sin that still clung to us so closely, for that would only lead us to despair. “We must not judge according to the feeling of our heart; we must judge according to the Word of God, which teaches that the Holy Spirit is granted to the afflicted, the terrified and the despairing in such a way that he encourages and comforts them” (LW 26:383). “You are not to be conscious of having righteousness,” exhorted Luther. “You are to believe it” (LW 27:26). Neither reason nor our hearts could tell us this, especially in the midst of Anfechtung or despair.

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The Word was sufficient for us, “but if we lose sight of the Word, we have no aid or counsel left” (LW 27:78–79). Reason, contended Luther, was no more reliable than our hearts in matters of faith. It did not understand that we cannot live to God without dying to the law (LW 26:156). It would always view the content of the gospel as “simply impossible and absurd” (LW 26:227). It was therefore “the greatest and most invincible enemy of God” (LW 26:229). Reason “neither comprehends nor is able to believe” the doctrines of faith, but instead takes offense at them (LW 33:158). Although it was “blind, deaf, stupid, impious, and sacrilegious,” reason presumed nonetheless to judge “all the words and works of God” (LW 33:173). But these stood beyond ordinary comprehension (LW 33:175). The gospel was filled with “mysteries and unsearchable judgments” (LW 33:188). Neither reason nor any other human capacity could know or understand them without the gift of the Holy Spirit, which was faith (LW 13:75). The upshot was that apart from the Word of God ultimate reality remained hidden. We might not feel that we are righteous, yet the Word proclaimed and promised that it was so. Nor did we comprehend how the mysteries of the gospel could be true, yet the Word confirmed them to faith by the Holy Spirit. “Faith in Christ,” as one commentator summarized Luther, “is thus a form of the theology of the cross (theologia crucis): we are to believe that we are righteous, innocent, and blessed even though we feel as though we are sinful, guilty, and damned” (Zachman 1993, p. 56). Likewise, we were to affirm such evangelical truths as that God was one and undivided in three persons, that the impassable God suffered on the cross, and that God’s righteousness came only to lost sinners, even though our reason might complain that these were impossible and absurd. “I believe” wrote Luther in The Small Catechism, “that by my own reason or strength I cannot believe in Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to him. But the Holy Spirit has called me through the Gospel, enlightened me with his gifts, and sanctified and preserved me in true faith.” Perhaps one way to appreciate the impact on Barth of the primacy Luther assigned to God’s Word would be to say that it led Barth, almost alone among modern theologians, to grant precedence to the Reformation over modernity itself. Barth took Luther seriously that apart from God’s Word ultimate reality could not be known, that it could be apprehended by faith alone. Barth did not reject modernity, but he accepted it only on Luther’s terms. He refused to allow secular epistemologies to establish the conditions for the validity of the gospel. Instead he took up “an exposed position minimally supported by the prevailing culture and maximally in agreement with mainstream Christianity” (Ford 1979, p. 198, italics added). The defining skepticism of modernity  –  of Kant, Feuerbach, Strauss, Marx, Nietzsche, Darwin, Freud, and all the rest – could be transcended and left behind, Barth believed, even as modernity’s contributions could be ­welcomed and preserved, on the basis of something like Luther’s theological critique of reason and experience.

Simul Iustus et Peccator Few theologians have aligned themselves with Luther more fully than did Barth in adopting the great doctrine of simul iustus et peccator. This is another place where it

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could be argued that Barth sided with Luther against Calvin, or at least against Calvin’s ambiguities. It might also be said that at this point Barth sided with Luther against much of the later Lutheran tradition as well. In any case Barth championed the distinctive, dialectical eschatology by which Luther described the Christian life. Salvation as Luther understood it was not essentially a process but a person, not an existential goal but an accomplished fact, not something to be actualized but something to be received, in short, not a work but a gift. In a move whose significance can hardly be overestimated, Luther broke at this point with every form of soteriological gradualism, that is, with every viewpoint that saw salvation primarily as a matter of gradual acquisition. Righteousness, he argued, was not essentially something that we acquired by degrees, but something that came to us as an indivisible whole, just because Christ and his righteousness were perfect in the finished work he had accomplished on our behalf. Justification, as Luther understood it, was an eschatological event that centered on the person of Christ. As such it was an event that had three tenses. In one sense it had already occurred, in another sense it had not yet occurred, and in yet a third sense it occurred continuously in the life of faith here and now. Justification, from the first perspective, had already occurred extra nos. For “Christ has achieved it on the cross” (LW 40:213), stated Luther, and “he has made us righteous by his death” (LW 34:163–164). Here justification was spoken of in the perfect tense as a fact accomplished apart from us by Christ (cf. LW 26:183 and LW 40:215). From a second perspective, however, ­justification in all its fullness had yet to take place. For “we are not yet perfectly righteous. Our being justified perfectly still remains to be seen, and this is what we hope for. Thus our righteousness does not yet exist in fact, but it still exists in hope” (LW 27:21). Here justification was spoken of as the object of future hope. Finally, from yet a third, more existential perspective, justification occurred not in the past or the future but here and now. For when God’s Word was once heard and believed, Christ became present to us, and justified and saved us (LW 26:240). It was in this sense that justification occurred by faith. “For while the act [Christ’s saving death] has taken place,” noted Luther, “as long as I have not appropriated it, it is as if it had not taken place for me” (LW 40:215). Christ “has won [forgiveness] once for all on the cross. But the distribution takes place continuously” (LW 40:214). Having once received forgiveness by faith, we continued to receive it again and again each day. “Forgiveness of sins,” wrote Luther, “is not a matter of a passing work or action, but of perpetual duration. For the forgiveness of sins begins in baptism and remains with us all the way to death, until we arise from the dead, and leads us to life eternal. So we live continually under the remission of sins” (LW 34:164). Here justification was spoken of as an ongoing existential occurrence. As an eschatological event, justification was at once completed on the cross, yet to be fulfilled at the Last Day, and received continuously by faith here and now. The point in Luther that would become especially important for Barth involved the idea of perfection. The intrinsic perfection of what Christ had already accomplished (opere perfectus) meant that it could not be acquired by degrees but became instead a gift of perpetual divine operation (operatione perpetuus) in our lives (CD I/1, p. 427). Before taking up this theme in Barth, let us examine it more closely in Luther.

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In Christ, wrote Luther, “we find a righteousness that is complete and perfect” (LW 27:86). Therefore, we could speak of ourselves in the present tense as those who “are made perfect” through Christ (LW 27:32). “In him is everything,” wrote Luther; “in him we have everything and he supplies everything in us” (LW 26:232). Because in him we found a “perfect and complete” righteousness (LW 27:86), we also found in him “our whole righteousness before God” (LW 51:287). “Though I am a sinner in myself, I am not a sinner in Christ, who has been made righteousness for us (1 Cor 1:30). I am righteous and justified through Christ, the Righteous and the Justifier, who is called the Justifier because he belongs to sinners and was sent for sinners” (LW 12:311). “Faith justifies because it takes hold of and possesses this treasure, the present Christ” (LW 26:130). It was the Christus praesens, “the Christ who is grasped by faith and who lives in the heart,” who was “the true Christian righteousness on account of which God counts us righteous and grants eternal life” (LW 26:130). Although Luther did not define justification as a merely incremental process (sometimes his rhetoric could be complex here) by which we became righteous gradually, he did think of it in some sense as an ongoing event. It was an event that had occurred in our lives once and for all through faith, and then on that basis continued to occur throughout our lives on a daily basis again and again. Our being wholly righteous in Christ was thus the continuing ground of our lifelong existence in faith. “The grace of God,” wrote Luther, “is never present in such a way that it is inactive, but it is a living, active, and operative Spirit” (LW 31:13). Grace was God’s ongoing action upon us – “the continuous and perpetual operation or action through which we are grasped and moved by the Spirit of God” (LW 12:377–378). Grace was not a “momentary operation,” but “the continuation of a work that has been begun” (LW 12:377). More specifically, grace was a divine work of “perpetual duration” throughout our life on earth, whereby “we live continually under the remission of sins” (LW 34:164). Therefore, although we were and remained sinners in and of ourselves, not just partially but completely, and although nothing less availed before God than p ­ erfect righteousness (LW 27:86; 34:127), grace was effective within us. Despite the sin that clung to us so closely, wrote Luther, “yet grace is sufficient to enable us to be counted entirely and completely righteous in God’s sight because his grace does not come in p ­ ortions and pieces, separately, like so many gifts; rather it takes us up completely into its embrace for the sake of Christ our mediator and intercessor, and in order that the gifts may take root in us” (LW 35:370 rev.). Barth’s break with soteriological gradualism, in which he seemed more indebted to Luther than to anyone else, might be introduced by recalling a theological argument he had once gotten into with his brothers, Peter and Heinrich, early in 1928. Peter apparently defended the traditional Protestant view of salvation as it had developed after Luther. Although the details would take us too far afield, this view was variously represented not only in Reformed but also in Lutheran theologies. A distinction between what happened in nobis once for all and what then went on to happen gradually was the hallmark of this traditional view. What happened once for all may conveniently be designated as “justification,” and what then happened gradually after that

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as “sanctification.” Under the category of sanctification (or its equivalent), the idea of soteriological gradualism, a process of salvation happening in us by degrees, had been restored to prominence in traditional Protestantism. Over against the traditional view of his brother Peter, Karl took the more radical ­position that there was no such thing as progress in sanctification (Barth 1981, 410n.). He was unimpressed by the counterargument that to deny such progress would have a crippling effect on ethics. It would be a sad day, he retorted, when Protestantism could find no better motivation for Christian ethics than self‐improvement in the Christian life. Barth took his stand staunchly with Luther that all our actions, not only the worst but also the best, existed before God as filthy rags. They all stood in need of justification by faith alone. In and of ourselves we remained sinners throughout our whole lives, not just partially but completely. Although relative distinctions of better and worse, of more and less, were indeed indispensable in practicing the Christian life, Barth stated, they arose only as God was gracious to us as sinners, as those who would never get beyond being sinners in this life. Progress in sanctification, he argued against his brother, was something like “different levels on the surface of the earth when seen from the standpoint of the sun” (Barth 1981, p. 414). Viewed from 93 million miles away, which suggested what sanctification would really mean, any differences in attainment were negligible. By the time he wrote about progress in the Christian life nearly 30 years later in CD IV/2, Barth’s view of sanctification had changed only slightly. Sanctification still meant that grace had set sinners apart for free obedience to God without their ceasing to be sinners. The only real conversion to God was what had occurred perfectly for our sakes in the life‐history of Jesus Christ. He himself in his finished work was the one true alteration – and therefore the sanctification – of the human condition. The saving significance of his work was not located in its initiating a gradual process of improvement in our lives. The freedom granted to faith was not a freedom to return to the law. Because our relationship to the work of Christ was mediated through faith alone, the freedom that grace bestowed was always the freedom of pure reception, of bearing witness, and of active participation in that which had taken place extra nos. It was the freedom to live a life of gratitude, despite our remaining sinners, by grace alone. Barth defined the Christian life by Luther’s doctrine of simul iustus et peccator. Before God (coram Deo) believers were totally righteous in Christ while yet remaining totally sinners in themselves (totus/totus). For Luther this doctrine had meant that grace came to faith in three basic modes: once for all, again and again, and more and more – in that order of significance. Calvin followed Luther mainly by highlighting the once‐for‐all and more‐and‐more aspects of grace in the life of faith. The again‐and‐again aspect, however, receded largely from view, because Calvin did not retain the sharpness of Luther’s simul iustus et peccator. Instead, though not without ambiguities, he tended to revert back to an Augustinian gradualism that depicted sanctification (or “regeneration”) as an existential process. Finally, by retrieving the sharpness of Luther’s d ­ octrine, Barth reinstated the again‐and‐again motif that had been so decisive in Luther’s understanding of the Christian life. Nothing was more characteristic of Barth’s

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s­ oteriology than the thesis that grace was new to us as sinners each morning, that it was a continuous and perpetual operation in the life of faith, and that it did not arrive by portions and pieces but came to us again and again in the perfection of Christ and his finished work.

Grace and Freedom Last but not least, one final theme may be noted where Barth echoed Luther – namely, the relationship of grace to freedom. Barth followed Luther by teaching that grace was unconditioned by anything other than itself, and that fallen human beings in themselves had no capacity for grace. The Luther of The Bondage of the Will and similar ­writings had made a profound impression on Barth s mind. Although the Reformed tradition would stand with Luther against synergism more staunchly than would the ensuing Lutheranism, Barth’s debt to Luther at this point should not be overlooked. What separated Barth here from the main tendencies of the Reformed tradition while aligning him with Luther was the inner connection he discerned between unconditioned grace, human incapacity, and the doctrine of simul iustus et peccator. In other words, the grace that was unconditioned by anything other than itself was the very grace by which our ongoing human incapacity as sinners was overcome – not “more and more,” but “again and again” – by the gift of faith. What Barth owed especially to Luther, were thus the constitutive elements in what is known as Barth’s distinctive “actualism” (Hunsinger 2015, pp. 299–301). The death of Christ, stated Luther, showed that our wills were impotent by nature (LW 33:142). Without grace no one could will what is good (LW 33:112). In the absence of grace “free choice cannot will anything good, but necessarily serves sin” (LW 33:147). This bondage of the will meant that “salvation is beyond our powers and devices, and depends on the work of God alone…. It is not we, but only God, who works salvation in us” (LW 33:64). “All the good in us is to be ascribed to God,” for “the mercy of God alone does everything” with respect to our salvation, and “our will does nothing, but rather is passive; otherwise, all is not ascribed to God” (LW 33:35). To say that the will was passive meant “the will is not a cause, but a means through which grace is accepted” (LW 34:196). Just as God created us “without our help,” so that we contributed nothing to our being created, so God also regenerated us by faith “without our help,” so that we contributed nothing to our being recreated (LW 33:243). We became children of God “by a power divinely bestowed upon us, not by a power of free choice inherent in us” (LW 33:157). Although there was no such thing as a “neutral” free will (LW 33:237), nevertheless “[God] does not work in us without us,” but actually granted to us by grace again and again the freedom we would not otherwise enjoy (LW 33:243). Human beings who were by nature at war with grace were thus transformed into its friends (LW 33:250). Divine grace and human freedom, as Barth understood them, could be conceptualized only by means of an unresolved antithesis. They could not be systematized or captured by a unified thought. Any attempt at resolving the antithesis would result either in a false determinism (the risk run by Luther and Calvin) or else in a false libertarianism

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(the risk run by Augustine and Aquinas). Barth’s alternative to thinking in terms of a system at this point was to think in terms of the Chalcedonian Pattern. Grace and freedom existed in the life of faith “without separation or division,” “without confusion or change,” and according to an “asymmetrical” ordering principle. “Without separation or division” meant that no human freedom occurred without grace, and no divine grace occurred at the expense of freedom. Grace granted the freedom for God that human beings were incapable of by nature, not only before but also continually after awakening to faith. Grace and freedom also existed “without confusion or change.” Divine grace always remained completely unconditioned, even as human freedom always remained completely dependent on grace (again: totus/totus). Finally, grace and freedom were related according to an asymmetrical ordering ­principle. Human freedom was a completely subordinate and dependent moment within the event of grace. Barth wrote: There can be no question of coordination between two comparable elements, but only of the absolute primacy of the divine over the creaturely. The creaturely is made serviceable to the divine and does actually serve it. It is used by God as his organ or instrument. Its ­creatureliness is not impaired, but is given by God a special function or character. Being qualified and claimed for God for cooperation, it cooperates in such a way that the whole is still an action which is specifically divine. (CD IV/2, p. 557)

Use of the Chalcedonian Pattern to elucidate the dialectical relationship of grace to freedom, so characteristic of Barth, was anticipated by Luther in his treatise Against Latomus, where the same pattern of thought is already discernible in nuce (LW 32:257). Although other theological sources will also have been important to Barth at this point, most notably Calvin, here too his debt to Luther cannot be overlooked.

Conclusion It remains true that Barth had real disagreements with Luther. He emphasized the universal Lordship of Christ in a way that relativized Luther’s dichotomy between the two realms. Moreover, in a way that was foreign to Luther, he integrated the hidden God with the revealed God, making them two different aspects of the one God taken as a whole. Again, in contrast to Luther, he elevated reconciliation to preeminence so that justification became a subordinate concept which described reconciliation as a whole  –  as also did sanctification, justification’s simultaneous counterpart. Other examples could also be cited. Yet such powerful themes as substantive christocentrism, the theology of the cross, the primacy of God’s Word, the doctrine of simul iustus et peccator, and the use of the Chalcedonian Pattern in relating divine grace to human freedom were no small legacy for one great theologian to have bequeathed to another.2

2  A longer version of this essay may be found in Hunsinger (2000, pp. 279–304).

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References Barth, K. (1981). Ethics. New York: Seabury. Calvin, J. (1960). Institutes of the Christian Religion. In: Library of Christian Classics (trans. F.L. Battles), vol. 2 (ed. J.T. McNeil). Philadelphia: Westminster. Calvin, J. (1972). A harmony of the Gospels: Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Calvin’s Commentaries (trans. A.W. Morrison), vol. III (eds. D.W. Torrance and T.F. Torrance). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Ford, D. (1979). Karl Barth: Studies of His Theological Methods (ed. S. Sykes). Oxford: Clarendon.

Hunsinger, G. (2000). Disruptive Grace. Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, MI. Hunsinger, G. (2015). Evangelical, Catholic, and Reformed. Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, MI. Oberman, H. (1992). “Iustitia Christi” and “Iustitia Dei”: Luther and the scholastic doctrines of justification. In: The Dawn of the Reformation, 104–125. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Zachman, R. (1993). The Assurance of Faith: Conscience in the Theology of Martin Luther and John Calvin. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress.

CHAPTER 39

Barth and Calvin Randall Zachman

Introduction Karl Barth views the Reformation as a decisive moment in the restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ to the church. As an evangelical theologian, he takes his orientation both from the prophets and apostles in Scripture and from Reformation theologians, including John Calvin, in order to restore the gospel to the church in his own day. “The qualifying attribute ‘evangelical’ recalls both the New Testament and at the same time the Reformation of the sixteenth century” (ET, p. 5). Barth was a lifelong student of the Reformers, beginning with Luther, under the tutelage of his Lutheran teachers in Germany, and then proceeding to Calvin and the Reformed tradition, beginning with his professorship in Göttingen in the 1920s, where he taught classes on Calvin, the Heidelberg Catechism, and Schleiermacher. In what follows, we shall trace Barth’s engagement with Calvin and his theology, beginning first with his lectures on Calvin in Göttingen, and then turning to his engagement with Calvin’s theology in his Church Dogmatics. As we shall see, the distinctive path that Barth claims that evangelical theology follows is oriented by the insight that all possibility lies in the eternal nature of God, and in the Word and work of God, and not in nature in general or human nature in particular. This insight is threatened both by the Roman Catholic claim that grace does not destroy but perfects nature and by the Protestant modernist claim that the grace of Christ enhances and strengthens the consciousness of God already present in every human being. Both claims seek to relate humans to God, rather than relating God to humans, and thus subject theology to a new “Babylonian captivity” by surrendering evangelical theology to dependence on an interpretation of human existence that is not derived from the grace of God in Christ (ET, p. 8). We cannot seek to understand God, ourselves, or the world apart from the

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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gospel of Jesus Christ, even if we think we are deriving this understanding from Scripture. Barth claims that this position is in continuity with the central insights of the Reformation, but he becomes increasingly aware that the seeds of Roman Catholic and Protestant modernist tendencies can be found in the theology of Calvin himself. Barth will therefore seek to detect and correct places in the theology of Calvin where he seeks to relate human beings to God apart from Christ, rather than relating God to human beings in Christ. We will begin by examining Barth’s exploration of the person and work of John Calvin in his lectures on Calvin in Göttingen. We will then turn to the task of evangelical theology as Barth understood it, in comparison to Calvin’s understanding of ­theology. We will then consider Barth’s criticism of Calvin regarding the way he locates the free election of God apart from the self‐revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Next, we will examine the way Barth attempts to correct Calvin on the relation of the knowledge of God the Creator to the knowledge of God the Redeemer, and the relation of the knowledge of ourselves to the knowledge of God, especially the knowledge of ourselves as sinners. We will conclude with Barth’s agreement with Calvin’s view of the sacraments, followed by his fundamental criticism of infant baptism in Calvin, based on his reading of Zwingli.

What John Calvin Wanted: The Next Life Is the Power of This Life Barth’s first sustained engagement with Calvin came in the series of lectures at Göttingen in 1922, published as The Theology of John Calvin. Barth seeks to approach Calvin with humility and humor, reading him in light of what Calvin wanted to say and daring to think Calvin’s thoughts as his own, even when he disagrees with Calvin (TJC, p. 6). He sees Calvin as standing on the other side of the great disruption of the medieval “theology of glory” that took place in Luther’s “theology of the cross.” Barth sees the cross as the vertical that cuts through the horizontal road to the vision of God, revealing the disaster of our own striving toward God, and disclosing the grace of God for sinners (TJC, p. 46). Calvin came to see that this vertical disruption of time by eternity does not represent a conflict between the two but rather a deeper unity. This deeper unity explains why Calvin always held distinct realities in inseparable union with each other, such as creation and redemption or the Law and the Gospel, even though Barth claims that he failed to press to the find the source of that unity in the one Word of God, Jesus Christ (TJC, p. 82). The cross reveals the power of the next world, on the other side of death, but the power of the next world is and should be the power of this world (TJC, p. 73). Put another way, the real life is the future, eschatological life: but that life is the power of this life (TJC, p. 293). Calvin sought to apply this insight to every moment of life, not only in his personal life but also in the city of Geneva. This brought him into sustained conflict with Geneva, for what Calvin wanted, and pursued with the zeal of an Elijah, is not what Geneva wanted (TJC, p. 354). This zeal also explains the impatience of Calvin, as well as his almost demonic need always to be seen to be right (TJC, p. 371).

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John Calvin and Karl Barth on the Subject Matter of Theology When Barth engages Calvin in his Church Dogmatics, he does so on the basis of his insight that Calvin intuited the deeper unity of distinct realities but did not discover the true source of that unity in the one Word of God, Jesus Christ. This one Word of God confronts the church in its proclamation, making the Word of God the criterion of evangelical theology, and the testing of proclamation the subject matter of theology (CD I/1, p. 77). The need to test church proclamation by the criterion of the Word of God is directly derived from Luther and Calvin, and Barth makes it clear that this task must always accompany the proclamation of the church, and cannot be assumed to have been completed in the Reformation of the sixteenth century. Barth is here much closer to Luther than to Calvin, as is evident from the abundance of citations from Luther’s Postils and the lack of citations from Calvin. For Calvin, theology has to do with true and sound wisdom, and wisdom consists of the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves. Calvin insists that there is a mutual reciprocity between these two kinds of knowledge that Barth will rather severely criticize. Barth will agree with Calvin that the knowledge of God leads to knowledge of ourselves but will categorically reject Calvin’s claim that sound wisdom includes the way the knowledge of ourselves leads to the knowledge of God. According to Barth’s reading of the reformers, the Word of God alone is the condition of the possibility of faith, which means that the Word of God is also the act of God. Even though proclamation is drawn both from the prophets and apostles in Scripture, and from the testimony of the Reformers in the sixteenth century, the Word of God is entirely the act of God and hence can be freely proclaimed only by God (CD I/1, p. 148). Because the Word of God is the act of God, it cannot be put under human control. Rather, the Word of God brings human beings under its control. “God’s speech is His action in relation to those to whom He speaks. But His action is divine. It is the action of the Lord. It is thus His ruling action” (CD I/1, p. 149). If the Word is God’s free and gracious action, then it follows that anything we can control and master is not God’s Word, not even Scripture. Again, Barth departs from Calvin here and sides with Luther, as Calvin would claim that the work of God in the universe is the original self‐manifestation of God. The Word of God is needed to clarify the work of God, but the Word is not itself the work of God for Calvin.

Departing from Calvin: Grounding the Word of  God in the Being of God Barth seeks to ground the freedom of the Word of God in the eternal being of God. Because there is no will of God hidden behind the one Word of God, it is possible to move by analogy from the Word of God in relation to us to the Word of God in relation to God. The truth of the Word of God proclaimed to us is grounded in the fact that the Word of God is true in itself, even were it never to be proclaimed to us. “It would be no less God’s eternal Word if it were not spoken to us, and what constitutes the mercy of its revelation,

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of its being spoken to us, is that it is spoken to us in virtue of the freedom in which God could be ‘God in Himself ’ and yet He does not will to be so and in fact is not so, but actually wills to be and actually is ‘God for us’” (CD I/1, pp. 171–172). The relationship that God freely establishes with us in the Word is grounded not in us, or in the world, but in the eternal nature of God. God is eternally in himself everything that he is in relationship to us. The fact that we are in relationship to God rests entirely on God’s free decision to be in relationship to us, and not in our decision to be in relationship with God. “Because God is antecedently love in Himself, love is and holds good as the reality of God in the work of reconciliation and in the work of creation. But He is this love antecedently in Himself as He posits Himself as the Father of the Son” (CD I/1, p. 484). Barth’s desire to ground the free love of God revealed to us in the Word in the eternal nature of the triune God is not a move that Calvin would make. Calvin insists that we have knowledge of God only as God reveals himself in his works, as clarified by his Word, and because much remains in God that has not been revealed, we should cling to the revelation of God to us and not seek to know about God in Godself, for this is an abyss from which we would never return (Inst. I.ii.2). Because Barth insists that the revealed God is the hidden God, he can move from God in relation to us to God in relation to himself, for only in this way does he think he can ground the truth of the Word of God proclaimed to us (CD I/1, p. 479). When Barth fully develops his understanding of the eternal being of God, it is not surprising that he no longer engages in a dialogue with Calvin, because Calvin would not ground the truth of the Word of God spoken to us in the eternal relation of God to himself (CD II/1). This move already reveals the fact that although Barth will try to align himself as much as possible with Calvin over against both Roman Catholic and modernist Protestant theology, he is also going to become increasingly critical of the theology of Calvin, both when Calvin distinguishes the Word  of the Law from the Word of the Gospel, and when he distinguishes God in ­himself from God in relation to us.

Criticizing John Calvin: Jesus Christ and the Eternal Election of God Barth’s most profound engagement with Calvin takes place around the issue of the eternal election of God. In his earlier lectures on Calvin, Barth commends the way Calvin roots the possibility of human faith solely in God. “Calvin is a thousand times right when he begins his description of faith with God and God alone” (TC, p. 276). This means that Barth will engage in a sympathetic and also sharply critical dialogue with Calvin over eternal election, as it is central to the way the free and loving God relates to creation. According to Barth, God freely establishes a relationship with us through the Word that God proclaims, and this relationship reveals the depth of God’s love for us. Because God’s relationship to us is entirely grounded in God’s relationship to himself, we know that God is from all eternity the One who loves in freedom. “God is who He is in the act of revelation. God seeks and creates fellowship between Himself and us, and therefore He loves us. But He is this loving God without us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in the freedom of the Lord, who has life from Himself ” (CD II/1, p. 257). Because God is the eternal relation of free love in himself, the decision to love human beings

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freely cannot have been necessary for God, because God does not need us to be the One who loves in freedom. “Under the concept of predestination, or the election of grace, we say that in freedom (its affirmation and not its loss) God tied Himself to the universe” (CD II/2, p. 155). Thus, even though Calvin would never argue from God in relation to us to God’s eternal nature in itself as Barth does, Barth winds up affirming Calvin’s claim that we know the free mercy of God only when we come to God’s eternal predestination, for the mercy of God is free only if God freely decides to show mercy to us (Inst. III.xxi.1). Moreover, as the one Word of God is both “Yes” and “No” according to the dialectic of the theologia crucis, Barth also agrees with Calvin that predestination contains both a Yes and a No, or election to grace and reprobation to wrath and annihilation (CD II/2, pp. 162–163). However, even as the Yes and No are found in the one Word of God, so also God’s election and reprobation are found in the one Jesus Christ, who Barth insists is simultaneously the electing God and the elected human. Barth accuses Calvin of separating the God revealed in Christ from the God who elects and reprobates individuals before creation. “The electing God of Calvin is a Deus nudus absconditus. It is not the Deus revelatus who is as such the Deus absconditus, the eternal God. All the dubious features of Calvin’s doctrine result from the basic failing that in the last analysis he separates God and Jesus Christ, thinking that what was in the beginning with God must be sought elsewhere than in Jesus Christ” (CD II/2, p. 111). Because of the way Calvin separates the electing God from Jesus Christ, Barth explicitly and categorically departs from Calvin’s doctrine of election, and from the confessions that follow him such as the Synod of Dort, and seeks to establish continuity with Athanasius, who insisted that the electing God is the one who is revealed in Jesus Christ (CD II/2, p. 110). When Barth describes the content of divine predestination in Christ, however, he returns to the way Calvin understands the work of Christ as a happy or joyous exchange, in which Christ takes upon himself our sin and all its consequences, and freely bestows on us his blessing with all its consequences (Inst. IV.xvii.1). “The election of grace is the eternal beginning of all the ways and works of God in Jesus Christ. In Jesus Christ God in His free grace determines Himself for sinful man and sinful man for Himself. He therefore takes upon Himself the rejection of man with all its consequences, and elects man to participation in His own glory” (CD II/2, p. 94). For Calvin, this wonderful exchange benefits only those who have true faith in it when it is proclaimed to them in the gospel, and only the elect receive the gift of the Holy Spirit that makes such faith possible. For Barth, the wonderful exchange is the content of God’s electing will, revealing to us what God has chosen for himself – the rejection of sinners with all its consequences – and what God has chosen for us – participation in the glory of God in eternal life. Calvin ascribes the taking on of sin, guilt, and death to the human nature of Christ, and the free bestowal of righteousness, forgiveness, and life to the divine nature of Christ. Barth reverses and transposes this order and claims that God elects to take sin and all its consequences from us and upon Godself, in order to give human beings eternal life with God (CD II/2, p. 124). Barth deploys his criticism of divine impassibility in his previous discussion of the perfections of God in order to show how the being of God as love makes it possible for God to empty himself to take on our sin, death, and

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­ erdition without losing Godself in the process. “If we would know what it was that God p elected for Himself when He elected fellowship with man, then we can only answer that He elected our rejection. He made it His own. He bore it and suffered it with all its most bitter consequences” (CD II/2, p. 164). If what God elected for himself is fulfilled when the Son of God takes our sin, death, and condemnation upon himself on the cross, what God elected for humanity is fulfilled when the Son of Man is raised from the dead and ascends to the eternal glory of God. In Barth’s understanding of the joyous exchange in Christ, God takes upon Godself human sin with all its consequences and bestows upon humanity participation in God’s glory in eternal life (CD II/2, p. 173). Barth will modify this position later on in his doctrine of reconciliation and claim that humanity was exalted to full participation in the glory of God when Jesus died on the cross (CD IV/2). The exaltation of humanity to eternal life takes place at precisely the same moment that the Son of God takes on our sin and death in order to annihilate it. Both the descent of God and the exaltation of humanity are revealed in the resurrection, but objectively they are completed once for all on the cross. In his doctrine of election, however, Barth follows Calvin and associates the work of the exaltation of humanity in Christ with his resurrection and ascension. “The suffering borne on the cross at Golgotha by the son of man in unity with the Son of God, who is as such a sacrifice for the sins of the world, is a stage on the road, an unavoidable point of transition, to the glory of the resurrection, ascension, and session” (CD II/2, p. 173). Despite his radical criticism of the way Calvin separates the electing God from Jesus Christ, Barth still thinks that Calvin made a major move in the right direction when he insisted that we gain the knowledge of our own election only when we look neither at God nor ourselves, but at Jesus Christ alone. For Barth, this is true because Christ reveals the electing will of God from all eternity, whereas for Calvin the goal of election is true faith in Christ, which distinguishes the elect from the reprobate. This is precisely the problem with Calvin’s position, according to Barth. It starts well by urging us to look at Christ alone as the image in which we may contemplate our own election, but it ends with ourselves, and our need to distinguish ourselves from the reprobate, which can come only when we find testimony to election in ourselves, especially in our own ­sanctification. Barth accuses Calvin of having a christological starting point and an anthropological conclusion, which led to the development of the syllogismus practicus in an attempt to solve this pastoral problem: I know I am elect when I find evidence of my own sanctification in myself (CD II/2, p. 338). This violates Barth’s basic axiom that we constantly have to be told something by God that we can never tell ourselves. If I can testify to myself about my own election, by the testimony of a good conscience in myself, I violate this axiom. “The need for a total revision of the dogma [of predestination] is plainly shown by the history of this subsidiary problem” (CD II/2, p. 339). Like Calvin, Barth claims that we have testimony to the election of grace in the proclamation of the gospel in the church, whereas we have testimony to divine rejection and reprobation in the synagogue of the Jews after the crucifixion of Jesus and the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus and the Roman army. Calvin insists that this means that the Jews as a people have been rejected by God (although there is a remnant of the elect among them), due to their crucifixion of Jesus and rejection of the gospel preached by the apostles. Barth, on the contrary, claims that this testimony to divine rejection is

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­ recisely the purpose of their election by God, so that by their existence, they bear p essential witness to the one work of God in Jesus Christ. Just as divine rejection and election are revealed only in the one Jesus Christ, so the church and the synagogue are one community that bears witness to the election of God in Jesus Christ (CD II/2, p. 195). Barth will repeat many of the earlier Christian descriptions of the Jews as a permanently exiled people with no future, but rather than concluding from this that they have lost their election, as Calvin does, Barth insists that it was precisely for this reason that they were elected by God (CD II/2, p. 263). If Israel as a people were to have been truly rejected by God, as Calvin insists that they are, then Barth would claim that no Gentiles could have been elected by God. The election of the Gentiles is founded upon and participates in God’s prior election of Israel, as Paul points out in Romans 11. “The Church can understand its own origin and its own goal only as it understands its unity with Israel. Precisely in its Gentile Christian members it must perceive that it would be forsaken by God if God had really forsaken Israel” (CD II/2, p. 284). Israel is the indispensable witness to the sin and rejection that God elected for Godself in Christ, even as the church is the indispensable witness to the life and glory that God elected for humanity in Christ. Barth insists that Israel remains the elect people of God even in their rejection of Christ, so that they are not without hope of salvation (Rom. 11:26) (CD II/2, pp. 267, 300). This represents a major departure from Calvin, at least as radical as his criticism of Calvin on divine election and reprobation.

Deepening Calvin’s Insights: Knowledge of God the  Creator and Jesus Christ If Jesus Christ is the one Word of God, then we cannot distinguish, in the way Calvin does, between the knowledge of God the Creator and the knowledge of God the Redeemer, even if both are revealed by the Word of God in Scripture (Inst. I.i–vi). Barth exhibits quite a bit of ambivalence in his engagement with Calvin on this issue. On the one hand, he acknowledges that Calvin holds the door open to the real possibility that God reveals Godself in the universe in a way that is distinct from the self‐revelation of God in Christ. Because this claim leads, Barth believes, in a direct line from Thomas Aquinas to Friedrich Schleiermacher, it is not enough simply to take our theological bearings by building on the explicit statements of Calvin on the knowledge of God the Creator, but we must rather make them more pointed than he did on this issue (NT, p. 101). On the other hand, in his rebuttal of Emil Brunner on natural theology, Barth refuses to see in Calvin any claim that creation itself is the self‐revelation of God, even if this self‐ revelation is clarified by a Word of God in Scripture distinct from Jesus Christ. He insists that for Calvin the knowledge of God the Creator is included in the self‐revelation of God in Jesus Christ, but he rejects the claim that the universe as such is the self‐revelation of God distinct from the self‐revelation of God in Christ (NT, p. 109). Indeed, he claims that “Reformation ideas” make such a move impossible (CD I/1, p. 130). By the time Barth comes to the formulation of his own dogmatic exposition of creation, he seems to know that he is in fact departing from Calvin’s formulation of the issue in very significant ways. Calvin does in fact identify and highlight a Word of God

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in Scripture that points us to the self‐revelation of God in the universe in a way that is quite distinct from the Word of God in Scripture that sets forth the self‐revelation of God in Christ, making both the universe and Christ distinct images of the invisible God. Calvin describes the witness of Scripture to creation as “spectacles” through which we might contemplate the self‐revelation of God in the works of God in the universe. This in turn allows us to appreciate the insights into the works of God that were attained by the learned investigations of the pagans in Egypt, Babylon, and Greece that make up the foundation of natural science. This is what Calvin means when he describes the universe as the “theater of God’s glory.” Barth will reject Calvin’s claim that the Word of God in Scripture gives us knowledge of God the Creator distinct from the knowledge of God in Christ, but he will take as his point of departure a claim made by Calvin in his commentary on Genesis, in which Calvin claims that Christ is the image of God in which we may contemplate both the heart of God in redemption and the hands and feet of God in creation. Barth acknowledges that Calvin did not draw the conclusion that we know the Creator only in the self‐revelation of God in Christ, but he thinks that Calvin points him in this direction. “The step which we ourselves have attempted along the lines he so impressively indicated is only a logical conclusion which is as it were set on our lips by the statements of the fathers, although they did not draw it for themselves” (CD III/1, p. 31). Barth will also describe creation as the theater of God’s glory, but he means by this that creation is the setting of the covenant fulfilled in Christ, which is the self‐revelation of God. Creation is the stage on which this self‐revelation takes place, but it is not itself the self‐revelation to God, as it most definitely is for Calvin (CD III/1, p. 102).

Reconsidering Calvin: The Knowledge of Ourselves in Jesus Christ Because it is axiomatic for Barth that we always have to be told something that we can never tell ourselves, Barth will become increasingly critical of the way Calvin develops the knowledge of ourselves, either on the basis of our status as creatures of God, or in light of a Word of God in the Law that is seen as being distinct from Jesus Christ. Calvin claims that the knowledge of ourselves should lead directly to the knowledge of God, because we can trace the gifts we experience in ourselves back to their source in God, the fountain of every good thing (Inst. I.i.1). Barth categorically denies that we can move from the knowledge of ourselves to the knowledge of God, thereby departing quite decisively from Calvin’s theological method. “Thus to understand God from man is either an impossibility or something one can only do in the form of Christology and not of anthropology (not even a Christology translated into anthropology)” (CD I/1, p. 131). We can arrive at the knowledge of ourselves from the knowledge of God, but we cannot reverse this order and come to know God by knowing ourselves, even by means of the conscience formed in us by the self‐revelation of God (CD II/1, p. 546). Barth highlights our inability to know ourselves apart from the self‐revelation of God in Christ in his discussion of sin, and by so doing reveals how far he has moved away from the theology of John Calvin by this point in his career. Barth notes that the previous theological tradition prefaced its discussion of the person and work of Christ with the

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knowledge of human sinfulness, most likely derived from a source other than the one Word of God, Jesus Christ. Barth acknowledges that Calvin wished to derive the knowledge of sin from our relationship with God, but he described this as the general relationship God has with all people through the Law, as their Lord and Creator, and not by means of the Word and work of God in Jesus Christ alone. This violates Barth’s axiom that Jesus Christ is the one Word of God, who alone reveals God to us, and therefore who alone reveals our sin to us. “A division of God into a god in Christ and a god outside Christ is quite impossible. We cannot start from such a division even in our question concerning the basis of the knowledge of human sin” (CD IV/1, p. 363). Once this division is made, the danger immediately arises that the “god” whom we confront in this relationship apart from Christ will really be the “god” we ourselves create by telling ­ourselves who and what God is (CD IV/1, pp. 364–365). Calvin avoids this danger because he bases the foundation of this independent knowledge on the testimony of Scripture (CD IV/1, p. 365). However, by creating a Word of God called the Law independent of the one Word of God Jesus Christ, Calvin began the collapse of the Word of God into Scripture that was accelerated in the orthodox period, which Barth is convinced leads directly to the replacement of the one Word of God with reason or human consciousness, as happened in the Enlightenment and in Protestant modernist theology (CD IV/1, p. 368). When Calvin sought to derive the knowledge of sin from a Word of God in Scripture divorced from Jesus Christ, he necessarily had to combine this Word with a capacity of the human sinner, especially the conscience, which has a prior knowledge God via its knowledge of good and evil that the Word of God can activate. Once this combination is allowed to stand – the Word of God in Scripture and the conscience of the sinner – an inevitable dynamic is set in motion that will lead from the “and” to the “only,” leading to the point that theology will seek to derive the entirety of human sin from the self‐ communing of human reason or consciousness (CD IV/1, p. 387).

Reconsidering Calvin: Ulrich Zwingli and Baptism Barth extends his reconsideration of Calvin when he comes to his discussion of baptism. Earlier in his theological career, he affirms with Calvin the position of the Augsburg Confession that the preaching of the gospel and the administration of the sacraments make faith possible. “It can and should aim to be the proclamation as preaching and sacrament because the Church has a commission to make such proclamation” (CD I/1, p. 56). The humanity of Christ as the primary sacrament or self‐revelation of God makes possible the adoption of other sacramental signs in proclamation, such as baptism and the eucharist. “Not of and by itself, but of and by God’s appointment and grace, the creature can be the temple, instrument and sign of God himself ” (CD II/1, p. 54). However, by the end of his career, Barth insists that there is only one sacrament, Jesus Christ, who is the self‐revelation of God’s free love and grace by means of the Holy Spirit (CD IV/4, p. 128). Baptism by the Spirit is part of the sacramental action of God in Christ, but Barth no longer sees baptism by water as a sacrament. It is instead the first and paradigmatic response of the free human believer to the free love of God in Jesus

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Christ, “as the binding confession of his obedience, conversion, and hope, made in prayer for God’s grace, wherein he honours the freedom of this grace” (CD IV/4, p. 2). When baptism by water is made into a sacrament, there is no room for the free response of the believer to the free grace of God, and hence no human action freely given in correspondence to the love of God in Christ (CD IV/4, p. 102). Barth acknowledges that by making this move he shifts his allegiance from Calvin to Zwingli, but he differs from Zwingli with regard to the latter’s appeal to circumcision to justify the practice of infant baptism. “The people of the new covenant, however, is not a nation. It is a people freely and newly called and assembled out of Israel and all nations. It is not made up of succeeding generations. It is not recruited through procreation and birth” (CD IV/4, p. 178). Barth actually draws closer to Menno Simons than to Zwingli, but he does not draw the conclusion that infant baptism is invalid, as Menno and others did. Infant baptism is still legitimate water baptism, even though it must be completed by confirmation in order to fulfill its function as the free human response corresponding to the free grace of God in Christ (CD IV/4, p. 189).

Conclusion: Jesus Christ as the One Word and Work of God As we have seen, throughout his theological career Barth engages with Calvin on the grounds he first set forth in his book on the theology of John Calvin. He endorses Calvin’s sense of the unity of distinct realities but criticizes Calvin for failing to see the ground of this unity in Jesus Christ alone as the one Word of God. Barth initially seems to read Calvin in light of Luther when he insists that the subject matter of theology is the proclamation of the Word of God. However, Barth’s conviction that Jesus Christ is the one Word of God leads him to become increasingly critical of Calvin for the way he distinguishes God in Godself from Jesus Christ, first with regard to the eternal election of God, then with regard to the knowledge of God the Creator and the knowledge of ourselves as sinners, and finally with regard to the relationship between Jesus Christ as the one sacrament of God and the other alleged sacraments of the church. By adding other forms of revelation, including the sacraments, to the one Word of God in Jesus Christ, Calvin sets out on a path that leads directly to Schleiermacher, and hence needs to be corrected by means of Jesus Christ as the one Word and work of God. Reference Calvin, J. (1960). Institutes of the Christian Religion (trans. F.L. Battles), vol. 2 (ed.

J.T. McNeill). Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press.

CHAPTER 40

Barth and Post‐Reformation Theology Rinse H. Reeling Brouwer

A Helpful Discovery In the fall of 1921 Barth commenced his duties as honorary professor of Reformed theology in Göttingen. However, given that confessional awareness was very low in the Swiss churches, it should hardly surprise us that his knowledge of the Reformed tradition was also rather inadequate. Many years later he would reflect on this period and write: “I actually only became acquainted and grappled with the substantial mysteries of Reformed theology especially over the course of the rather arduous bouts of nightly labour in Göttingen” (GA 16, p. 9). During his first Göttingen semesters, Barth offered courses on the theology of several major historical documents of the Reformed tradition, such as the Heidelberg Catechism, Calvin, Zwingli, and the Reformed confessions. After this, however, Barth became bolder and planned a series of lectures on “dogmatics.” As he prepared his first course, Barth had difficulties deciding upon the best approach for this project. Then, however, he made a helpful discovery. Later on, at the end of his time in Germany, at Bonn in February 1935, he would write in retrospect: I shall never forget the spring vacation of 1924. I sat in my study in Göttingen, faced with the task of giving lectures on dogmatics for the first time. No one can ever have been more plagued as I then with the problem, could I do it? and how? My Biblical and historical studies to date had more and more expelled me from the goodly society of contemporary, and, as I began to realise ever more clearly, of almost the whole of the more recent theology; and I saw myself, as it were, alone in the open without a teacher…. Then it was that, along with the parallel Lutheran work of H. Schmid, Heppe’s volume … fell into my hands; out of date, dusty, unattractive, almost like a table of logarithms, dreary to read, stiff and  eccentric on almost every place I opened; in form and content pretty adequately

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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corresponding to that what I, like so many others, had described to myself decades ago, as the “old orthodoxy.” Well, I had the grace not to be so slack. I read, I studied, I reflected; and found that I was rewarded with the discovery that here at last I was in the atmosphere in which the road by way of the Reformers to Holy Scripture was a more sensible and natural one to tread, than the atmosphere, now only too familiar to me, of the theological literature determined by Schleiermacher and Ritschl. I found a dogmatics which had both form and substance, oriented upon the central indications of the Biblical evidences for revelation, which it also managed to follow out in detail with astonishing richness  —  a dogmatics which by adopting and sticking to main lines of the Reformation attempted alike a worthy continuation of the doctrinal constructions of the older Church, and yet was also out to cherish and preserve continuity with the ecclesiastical science of the Middle Ages. I found myself visibly in the circle of the Church, and, moreover … in the region of Church science, respectable of its kind. (GA 52, pp. 746ff.; Heppe 1950, pp. v–vi)

Heppe’s Reformed Dogmatics (first edition 1861) offered a systematic collection of sources for Reformed theology between c. 1560 and c. 1710. Because Heppe himself did not have any constructive intentions with his textbook, Barth preferred it above the works of Alexander Schweizer as at the same time “more modest” and “more solid and instructive” (Heppe 1950, p. vii). As to Heppe’s weaknesses Barth indicates, that “according to modern claims it is anything but a source book” – indeed, all the quotations in Heppe’s work are lumped together without distinguishing schools, periods, kinds of spirituality, or other contextual aspects of the quoted text. Furthermore, “according to him, wonderful to relate, not Calvin but the later Melanchthon must have been the father of Reformed theology.” And “for him the incursion of the covenant‐­ theology of Cocceius and his pupils, proclaimed alongside of Cartesianism, into the line of the older expositors of Reformed doctrine seems not to involve any deeper problem” – actually, the Medulla theologiae Christianae by the Swiss federal theologian J.H. Heidegger of 1696 seems to be the most important example of an arrangement of the several loci for Heppe (Reeling Brouwer 2015, pp. 207–209.). And lastly, Barth recommends: “to acquire a knowledge of [Post‐Reformation] orthodoxy we need not to stop at either Schmid or Heppe, but must seek out and traverse the more arduous road to the sources, in which once more everything often enough acquires an appearance quite different from that which the excerpts offered by Heppe might lead us to suppose” (Heppe 1950, p. vii).

Barth in Conversation: An Overview As a matter of fact, between his Göttingen lectures and the writing of the 1935 preface, Barth himself had been traversing this “more arduous road” ad fontes. In his lecture of 2 December 1924, he quotes the Synopsis Theologiae by Francis Burman (1678), and that appears to be the first evidence of the private book collection that Barth assembled in those years and that he increasingly used in his work. From 1951 onward we find 37 copies of original editions of the main systematic works of the Post‐Reformation period in his library, which still can be found in the Karl Barth Archiv (see the list in Reeling Brouwer 2015, pp. 7–13).

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Unfortunately, Barth, in spite of his love for history, never availed himself of the opportunity to lecture on “the history of Protestant theology in the seventeenth century,” as he did for the history of newer Protestant theology from 1700 onwards (PTNC). Instead the old Protestant theologians function as conversation partners in Barth’s systematic argument. Nevertheless, the step he took from simply explaining textbooks like Heppe and Schmid to the actual consultation of the original sources also implies that Barth did not debate in general with a theological account of “the” Reformed or Lutheran doctrine, but with very specific, individual voices from these distinctive confessional traditions. At times – and then always to his own great satisfaction – Barth hints in the text that he knows the individual and contextual peculiarities of the figure in question, of that figure’s main systematic work and of his theology. Nine titles in Barth’s personal collection are by Lutheran theologians, and 28 – to which we can add 10 others taken from the Index of Names to the Church Dogmatics – by Reformed theologians. This proportion is in line with the actual development at the ­centers of theological inquiry in the post‐Reformation era, where Reformed theologians in that period definitely formed the majority. When we consider the development of old Reformed theology, we can observe that most of the shortcomings of Heppe’s selection of sources are reflected in Barth’s compilation of his personal collection. The accent lies on theologians from Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Germany, whereas France (especially the Academy of Saumur), England, and Scotland are neglected. We see the consequences, for example, in Barth’s reference to the doctrine of the church in Heppe (GA 38, pp. 349–377; Göttingen ­lectures 28–31 July 1925). All the Reformed theologians quoted by Heppe favor an ­aristocratic form of government. Some of these  –  mostly continental  –  theologians explicitly distance themselves from the current they call “Brownist” or “Independent,” which is now known as “Congregationalist.” Van Mastricht, who perhaps found h ­ imself under pressure from certain quarters of Reformed Pietism, declares in his Theoretico‐ practica theologia (1698) that the Presbyterian order is in accordance with the New Testament and is grounded in the ius divinum, and that therefore the potestas gubernandi cannot be, as in the opinion of these English groups, a matter of the whole congregation. After World War II Barth will plead for these English Congregationalists, among whose descendants he observes an interesting contribution to theological and ecumenical renewal. But for this plea he could not find any support in the textbook of Heppe (Reeling Brouwer 2015, p. 169). Among the most quoted sources by Barth we meet early reformed theologians like Bucanus in Lausanne (main work 1605), Polanus (1609), and Wolleb (1626) from Basel, Walaeus (1640) and his colleagues from the Leiden Faculty after the Synod of Dordrecht (1625). Barth also quotes from the covenant theologians – Cocceius (1669) from Leiden and Francis Turrettin (1679–1685) from Geneva, among others – and from the more pietist current, Voetius (1648) and the already mentioned Maastricht from Utrecht. Since his 1932–1933 lectures on the theology of the beginning of the eighteenth century, and in connection with the German Church Struggle (especially his debate with Emil Brunner), Barth showed a special interest in the theologians of the so‐called “Reasonable Orthodoxy”: they did not attack the doctrine of their church, but at the same time they were driven by a completely new spirit (CD I/2, p. 4).

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In their program one can observe that the Enlightenment was not the enemy of the Protestant world, but from the beginning also a fruit of its inner renewal. In 1936 Barth holds his inaugural address in Basel on Samuel Werenfels (1718), as a representative of this current and of the genius loci of this city: Werenfels does not combat the reformation doctrine of justification, yet at the same time is clearly abandoning it (Barth 1936). When looking at what shaped Barth’s conversation with Post‐Reformation theology as a whole as well as with its currents, we can distinguish several stages. In the Summer Semester of 1924 in Göttingen he only uses certain specific loci from Heppe’s textbook: Locus 6 on the Holy Trinity, Locus 17 on the Mediator of the Covenant of Grace (or the Person of Christ), and Locus 2 on Scripture. In both following semesters (but much less so in the additional semester on eschatology, in the winter of 1925– 1926 in Münster), he really developed a kind of “Sentence Commentary” on Heppe and on the parallel work Die Dogmatik der evangelisch‐lutherischen Kirche by H. Schmid, 1843 (McCormack 1997, p. 334). In the middle ages a baccalaureus sententiarum had to show all the possibilities and implications of the existing text (often by Peter Lombard), as well as its problems. He could be critical when necessary, but even if he proposed to correct the propositions of his textbook, he had to do so from within that textbook’s system. He was not writing a summa, for he was not yet moving freely, in the “open air,” so to speak, of his own project. Thus Barth initially behaved as a baccalaureus, until he dared to fly freely, writing his own summa, which would become the Church Dogmatics. In the first volume of this Church Dogmatics the concentration of quotations from old Protestant theologians is the highest. A general look at the statistics teaches us that out of the total of c. 750 quotations found in the Church Dogmatics, 275 quotations (or more than a third of the total) can be found in these prolegomena. Definitions, propositions, and clarifications are adopted from a great variety of witnesses, in the same way Barth had found patristic quotations in the Roman Catholic textbooks of his time. But beginning with the excursus on the concept of “religion” in theology (CD I/2, pp. 284–291) and on the doctrine of the inspiration of Holy Scripture (CD I/2, p. 522– 526) a new approach becomes visible. Starting with these discussions, Barth seeks to evaluate the treatment of a certain topic in Post‐Reformation theology in terms of its contribution as well as its dangers, often focusing on several well‐chosen conversation partners. This will be the dominant procedure in the doctrines of (i) God (CD II/1, chapter VI), (ii) Election (CD II/2, chapter VII), (iii) Providence (CD III/3), and (iv) Reconciliation (CD IV/1 §§57, pp. 59–60 and CD IV/2 §§64–65). In the last volumes of the Church Dogmatics, Barth seems to be flying at such heights, increasingly freed from the necessity of any conversation with tradition, that the amount of quotations of the orthodox ancestors strongly decreases. In the fragment on baptism, he takes only a short, critical look at the arguments of Schmid and Heppe on the issue (CD IV/4, pp. 103–107). After this global overview it makes sense to first take a look at the early Göttingen Dogmatics and then to briefly discuss several examples of Barth’s conversation with Post‐Reformation theology in the Church Dogmatics on the four topics just mentioned.

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The Göttingen Dogmatics as a Commentary on Heppe In the Winter Semester of 1924–1925 Barth commented on Heppe’s Loci 1.4–5.7– 10.12 under the title “The Doctrine of God” and on the Loci 9.11.13–15 as “The Doctrine of Man.” For the Summer Semester of 1925 he had planned to deal with the Loci 16–19 as “The Doctrine of Reconciliation” and the Loci 20–27 as “The Doctrine of Salvation” (GD, 323). This division corresponded with the Lutheran one, as he could find it in Schmid (who speaks of “The Principles of Salvation” and “The Means of Salvation,” respectively). However, when the semester started, Barth actually commented on the Loci 16–27 together under the title “The Doctrine of Reconciliation.” The reason for this was his decision to revert to a former division found in the Tambach lecture “The Christian in Society” (1919), which joined the doctrine of the threefold royal office of Christ in the kingdom of nature, the kingdom of grace, and the kingdom of glory (GA 48, p. 578). Barth connects these three perspectives to the main loci creation, redemption, consummation (1919) or creation, reconciliation, redemption (from 1925 onwards). In the second cycle of his Dogmatics lectures, Münster 1926– 1928, Barth also accommodated his “Doctrine of God and of Man” to this threefold scheme, subsuming it under the perspective of creation. Barth acknowledges taking over the doctrine of predestination as part of the doctrine of God as well as the doctrine of the Covenant as part of the doctrine of Man, as a specific inheritance from the Reformed tradition. The God of whom we speak here is a deciding God, and humanity is destined to participate in a covenant with this God, and in this way we will remember the actual character of revelation (GA 20, pp. 383f.): along such lines the newly discovered Reformed tradition was integrated into the theological actualism that characterized his own The Epistle to the Romans (second edition). Now Reformed doctrine, as documented in Heppe, distinguishes a twofold covenant. Since Ursin, one speaks of a prelapsarian “covenant of nature” and afterwards of a “covenant of grace.” From the beginning Barth stresses: “there is re vera only one covenant, as there is only one God” (GA 20, p. 398), and he tries to resist the tendency to historicize this single covenant. At the same time, however, Barth is ready at this stage to make sense of a certain twofoldness, when one dares to look back from reconciliation to creation. Thus we read such a rather “unbarthian” sentence during this period as “in the theology of revelation natural theology is also included and brought to light, and in the reality of divine grace also the truth of Creation” (GA 24, p. 22; quotation from 1926). And therefore the concept of a “covenant of nature” should not be excluded. Only the category of a Covenant of Works, as found in Heppe’s locus 13, that is, a relationship between God and Adam as two contractual partners in which man promises to fulfill the law and God promises life eternal in return, must be rejected as a Pelagian concept. Nevertheless, Barth is following orthodox Reformed doctrine, when he sketches sin as a violation of the original covenant and a transgression of the Law, and again it sounds very “unbarthian” when we read sentences like: “in anthropology, as the doctrine of man apart from Christ and apart from the redemption accomplished by him, we have to abide by the revelation that declares man guilty,” or: “only when one has spoken genuinely and emphatically about sin, one is able to speak genuinely and emphatically

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about grace” (GA 20, pp. 417, 440f.). We have to admit, however, that already in the Münster cycle of Dogmatics, Barth corrects himself. There he will unfold the doctrine of sin not in contrast to the covenant of nature, but in contrast to the covenant of grace (until, as is well known, in his doctrine of reconciliation of the 1950s the speaking of sin will arise from the knowledge of Jesus Christ). At the end of his third draft of the prolegomena in 1937–1938, Barth offers a sketch of the remaining volumes of his Church Dogmatics in accordance with the main loci chosen by that time: God (no longer, as formerly in Münster, part of the perspective of creation), creation, reconciliation, and redemption (CD I/2, pp. 870–883). When one compares this overview with the content of Heppe’s textbook, it becomes clear that at that time Heppe was still functioning as the main conversation partner regarding the question of the order of dogmatics (Reeling Brouwer 2015, pp. 226–230). However, when we compare Barth’s plan at that time with the actual framework of volumes II, III, and IV of the Church Dogmatics as they actually unfolded between 1939 and 1967, we see how Barth even in the structure of his argument continually becomes more independent and free from Heppe, his teacher, and the tradition Heppe represents.

Post‐Reformation Theology in the Church Dogmatics – Four Examples God: Barth and Polanus and the Discourse on the Divine Perfections Amandus Polanus, “my illustrious predecessor” (CD III/2, p. 381) as professor in Basel, followed the didactical method of Petrus Ramus in his Syntagma theologiae Christianae (1609–1610). This logical system limited itself to defining and dividing. General definitions were followed by ever‐expanding ramifications. The presupposition of this organizing principle was that both parts of a division always presuppose a fundamental unity. Along these lines, in theology Polanus distinguishes, for example, between logical arguments and the message of Scripture, divine Essence and divine works, and in the framework of divine Essence, divine attributes and the Persons of the Godhead. Barth does not explicitly discuss this method, but time and again he takes issue with its outcomes as symptoms of an alleged fundamental dualism in its content. Barth has 131 references to Polanus in the CD, and 47 of these occur in CD II/1. The highest density of references occurs where the question of human speaking of the names and perfections of God (CD II/1, pp. 327–335) are dealt with. There Barth reproaches the scholastic tradition that in a so‐called “seminominalistic” way it stresses the simple and undivided divine essence, as if the divine reality were a totally undifferentiated identity, presupposing an abstract and pale conception of oneness. Even though a scholar like Polanus tries to speak as realistically as possible about the multiplicities of perfections in the biblical speaking of God in his 11 axiomata on the essential divine properties (Syntagma II.7), in the end, in Barth’s eyes, Polanus cannot succeed in his endeavor precisely because of this abstract presupposition. Against this tradition, Barth himself wants to develop the doctrine of the divine essence from the doctrine of the Trinity representing Christian knowledge based on the revelation of the biblical God, divine theology from the divine economy (the divine “works”), the one and single divine

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essence from the multiplicity of divine perfections, and then also logical argument in theology from the starting‐point of the biblical witness. In this criticism, Barth – according to my observation – neglects the historical distance with respect to the different frame of thought between Polanus and himself (also Te Velde 2010, p. 373). For Polanus there can be no contradiction between any scriptural and logical argument, between any theological and metaphysical speaking of God, between an “inadequate” speaking in terms of multiplicity and an “adequate” referring to the divine essence, because both parts of these dichotomies speak of the same truth, and this truth is always one. Only “archetypal theology,” that is, the essential and uncreated knowledge that God has of Himself, is able to understand both dimensions at the same time. “Ektypal theology” in heaven is also able to know the ­multiplicity in one simple act, but “our theology,” the theology of homines viatorum, of pilgrims on earth, has to reconcile itself to the limits of its discursive mind. At the end of the period of Post‐Reformation theology, this distinction of archetypal and ektypal theology falls into oblivion. At the same time, the presupposition of the unity of metaphysics and theology disappears, and a new type of natural theology becomes the basis, foundation, and rule of revealed theology (Jean‐Alphonse Turrettini; Joh. Fr. Buddeus around 1700; Breukelman 2010, pp. 234–240). After this happened, it became nearly impossible to fall back on the presuppositions of Polanus, and therefore we can understand why Barth – at least in his theological methodology – tries to go a rather different, more strictly focused on biblical revelation, way of Christian speaking about God.

Election: Barth and Turrettin on the Object of Predestination At the end of §33.1, “Jesus Christ, electing and elected” Barth offers a long excursus on the seemingly esoteric debates in Reformed theology between supralapsarians and infralapsarians (CD II/2, pp. 127–145). In this context he refers circumstantially to the authoritative François Turrettin as a spokesman for the infralapsarian approach (CD II/2, pp. 129–132; reference to his Institutio theologiae elencticae Locus IV quaestio 9). For he clearly defines the question at stake: “whether the object of predestination was man creatable, or capable of falling; or whether as created and fallen” (Turrettin 1992, I:341). Turrettin argues for the second option. For “when man not yet created and fallen were indeed the object of predestination, then creation and fall would be instruments of predestination. But they are not. Man might well have been created and have fallen without the question of election or reprobation ever arising. Creation and fall belong to the natural order of providence. Salvation and damnation form the specific content of the supernatural order of predestination, that is” – as Aquinas had already taught – “part of providence. Creation and fall must be regarded as necessary from the standpoint of predestination not as a medium, but as a condition for it” (Turrettin 1992, IV.9.12–13). Barth comments (CD II/2, p. 136): it is clear that the infralapsarians wanted to avoid the impression of a deterministic‐monistic divine plan from eternity, as the strict Calvinists defended. But by limiting the election to man after the fall, they obscured the question “with whom we have to do in the God who created man and the universe, and who permitted the fall of man.” “It was inevitable, then, that the

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infralapsarian construction could help towards the later cleavage between natural and revealed theology” (that would become manifest in the days of Turrettin’s son Jean‐ Alphonse). However, as Barth also remarks (CD II/2, p. 133), François Turrettin was not unambiguous in this respect, because in his Institutes the Locus “The decrees of God in General and Predestination in Particular” follows on the Locus on God, and not, as it would have more consistently – and as it can be found, for instance, in the equally infralapsarian Leiden Synopsis from 1625 – after the doctrines of sin and law. After detailed weighing, Barth declares himself in favor of the supralapsarian position. For “no despite can be done to the sovereignty of … the God of the Bible, the God who is Judge and yet also merciful, the God who is Judge just because he is merciful” (CD II/2, p. 142). But this has to be a purified supralapsarianism. For the  –  rightly posed  –  question of the “object of predestination” deserves a deeper and more fundamental answer than that of the supralapsarians of the seventeenth century, as Barth exposes in the main text (CD II/2, p. 116ff.). The crucial statement is that Jesus Christ, “in virtue of his divinity, was appointed Lord and Head of all others, the organ and instrument of the whole election of God and the revelation and reflection of the election of those who were elected with him.” Certainly the Reformed tradition had taught Jesus Christ as elected – as it had also taught him as electing, a proposition for which there are more witnesses than Barth presumed (Muller 2008, p. 159). But the tradition omitted to actually think through these assertions. Both the supralapsarian and the infralapsarian saw the decree of predestination as a decretum absolutum, an utterance of an isolated divine will with regard to isolated individuals. “We have to expunge completely this idolatrous concept,” Barth writes, “and in place of these we have to introduce the knowledge of the elect man Jesus Christ as the true object of divine predestination” (CD II/2, p. 143). Accordingly, the very thing Turrettin rejected may be true, namely that creation must be seen as an “instrument of predestination.” Thus through this, as we said, seemingly rather esoteric debate, Barth in fact made a fundamental decision with regard to the structure of the following volumes of the Church Dogmatics.

Providence: Barth and Rivet on Divine Government and the Common Good In his preface to Church Dogmatics III/3, Barth writes: “In the doctrine of providence I have found it possible to keep far more closely to the scheme of the older orthodox dogmatics than I anticipated.” At the same time, “the radical correction which I have also undertaken will not be overlooked” (CD III/3, p. xii). Both, the “keeping” and the “correction” can be illustrated here from a conversation with the Leiden Synopsis, although it should be noted that the scheme on providence presented by its eleventh disputation does not fully follow the structure – conservation, concurrence, governance – Barth found in other spokesmen for orthodoxy, a difference of which Barth h ­ imself appears not to have been aware. The Leiden Synopsis contains a series of disputations, held by four professors at the Leiden University after the decisions that were made at the Synod of Dordrecht regarding the Arminian controversies, and published to document the process of

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“purifying” theology. The eleventh disputation, with André Rivet as president, discusses the providence of God (Poliander et al. 2014, pp. 260–283). In an excursus to his treatment of God’s government (CD III/3, pp. 170–175), Barth quotes from this disputation Thesis 18: it does not belong to Providence “to direct each and every thing to a particular goal suitable for it,” but absolute (“in itself ”) to a goal “that agrees with the operation as a whole.” Just as when we burn wood in the house, we do not do something that corresponds to the particular purpose of the existence of wood, but rather something that corresponds to the purpose of the house in general. Divine world‐government must be compared to the providence with which a father rules his house and the king his country. The bonum commune is more important to it than the bonum singulare, so that he must pay more heed to the well‐being of the community than to that of the individual. And Thesis 19: When we consider the objects of the divine gubernatio there is a difference between those things over which “he exercises his providence for the sake of themselves,” and “other things in which he shows providence for the sake of something else.” In the universe as a whole there are some things that belong “essentially” to its perfection and therefore must not be destroyed, and others that can and necessarily do perish and therefore last only as long as they have to in the interests of the first group (Poliander et al. 2014, pp. 274–275; CD III/3, p. 172f.). Barth comments: This is a type of argument which is very enlightening and most dangerous in its amiable brutality … between the free governing will of God sub‐ordinating and co‐ordinating all things and individual creatures and their existence there is interposed quite independently an all‐embracing third factor, the house or state, the totum opus, the universum, the communitas, in the interests of which and in relation to which the individual is reduced to mere means…. It may easily be seen that a divine world‐government of this type will inevitably result in the unequivocal abasement of the individual creature or at any rate the majority of individual creatures…. At the end [we find ourselves in 1948–1950, in the midst of the highest tensions of the Cold War] of the thread which begins here there lies in the ethical sphere the political or economic totalitarianism which has caused us so much anxiety to‐ day both in its Western and also in its Eastern forms…. [In conclusion] it is impossible to equate the much too primitive ordering of the world and society with the divine world‐governance [as] the kingdom of righteousness. (CD III/3, pp. 172–173)

Rivet’s remarks on providence can be analyzed within the broader perspective of a development in the history of western thinking. Already with Aquinas the doctrine of providence had the function of integrating reflection on immanent physical and historical processes to be studied scientifically as part of the divine dispensation. In the seventeenth century thinkers like Malebranche attempted to interpret the providentia specialis in such a way that the new science of physics could be incorporated into it. In this context, the Stoic notion of the acceptance of “collateral damage” in favor of a higher law was revived. Barth’s question for Rivet and his colleagues would actually be whether they did not do too much to promote this neo‐Stoic, potentially totalitarian tendency of the age, instead of countering it. On the other side, he displays a certain appreciation for the Lutheran theologians specifically on this point, because their rather Epicurean inclinations were better able to safeguard the freedom of the individual creature. As far as

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the Reformed tradition was concerned, in Barth’s eyes indeed a “radical correction” (as announced in the preface) had to be considered.

Reconciliation: Barth and Cocceius on the Abrogation of the Covenant of Works and the Counsel of Peace The covenant of grace is the execution of the eternal divine decision of election in time. It is, Barth says in CD III/1 (§41.3), the causa interna of creation – a category we can find in Heppe (1950 [2007], p. 195), but in this form we quite likely do not encounter it in scholastic reflection. And in a next step, it is also the decisive “presupposition of Reconciliation” (CD IV/1, §57.2) – decisive in such a measure, that Barth (according to Eberhard Busch) was thinking of calling the entire fourth part of the Church Dogmatics a “doctrine of the covenant.” At the end of the subparagraph on the covenant, Barth offers an excursus on the historical phenomenon of federal theology (CD IV/1, pp. 54–66), largely based on the information in the classical study of Gottlob Schrenk on the subject, that he had already read in Göttingen during the Christmas holidays of 1922–1923. In his eyes, this current succeeded in correcting the older orthodoxy (by means of making dynamic the former static Loci‐method in a baroque way), but at the same time it was precisely this operation that created room for dangerous theological developments in later neo‐Protestantism. Johannes Cocceius himself, however, was for Barth in a certain sense an exception in his own generation: “the main strength of the thinking of Cocceius is at the very point where formally the main objection is made against him” (CD IV/1, p. 61): “certainly, he took over from his predecessors that idea of a covenant of nature or works which was alien to the Reformers. But … he had such a strong sense of the uniqueness of the divine covenant as a covenant of grace that, although he could begin his narration with the covenant of works, he could understand everything that followed only in antithesis to it, as its increasing abrogation.” With this concept of abrogation, the reformation doctrine of justification by grace and not by works is actually affirmed. Cocceius sketches five stages of this abrogation, and the greatest deviation in this sketch is the second one, which in a “scene in heaven” consists of “the institution of the covenant of grace. God adopts man into a new agreement by which he wills to give man a Mediator and therefore in this just person new fellowship and peace with himself and the promised eternal life, not now as a reward which had been earned but as a free gift.” This is understood as “an eternal and free contract (pactum) made between the Father and the Son, the latter adopting the function of a Mediator and pledge in the place of men.” Already in Göttingen 1925 Barth had the impression that this eternal pact or “counsel of peace” (Zech. 6:13) had to be identified with the eternal decree of predestination (GA. 38, p. 17), and therefore in his doctrine of Election he would take up Cocceius as an ally in his own christocentric renewal of the older Reformed doctrine (CD II/2, pp. 114–115). In the light of the newer Cocceius research, especially that of the late Willem van Asselt, these claims are questionable. Van Asselt, like Schrenk before him, reads the ­category of “abrogation” not as implying a process of degradation but rather as a transformation of the covenant of works, either in a more historicizing “salvation‐historical”

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or in a more psychologizing “order of salvation” way (van Asselt 2001, p. 277). And as far as the counsel of peace is concerned, he argues that for Cocceius predestination precedes the pactum. For in this treaty the Father gives the elect who were known beforehand, to the Son (van Asselt 2001, pp. 215–222). Cocceius also agreed with the general conviction in Reformed theology that the decree of predestination (in his terms: “the decree of grace and wrath”) is a work of the Father that refers to the personal election or reprobation of separate individuals. After that, in the eternal inner‐trinitarian ­covenant, the Father and the Son agree that the Son will allow himself to be sent to give his life for the elect who were given to him by his Father and who will, by the Holy Spirit, receive the power of the deity and the love and friendship of the Son as the fruit of their election. In conclusion we can say that although Barth developed his own christological correction of Reformed doctrine in an undoubtedly intense conversation with Post‐ Reformation theologians like Cocceius, he stood more alone in his proposals for the renewal of this doctrine than he had hoped. Nevertheless, his way of conversing with these predecessors remains exemplary and inspiring for us as a generation of his successors. References van Asselt, W.J. (2001). The Federal Theology of Johannes Coccejus, 1603–1669. Leiden: Brill. Barth, K. (1936). Samuel Werenfels (1657–1740) und die Theologie seiner Zeit. Evangelische Theologie 3: 180–203. Breukelman, F.H. (2010). The Structure of Sacred Doctrine in Calvin’s Theology. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Heppe, H. (1950 [2007]). Reformed Dogmatics. Set out and Illustrated from the Sources. Foreword by Karl Barth. Revised and ed. by Ernst Bizer, (trans. G.T. Thomson). London: Allen & Unwin; Reprint (without the Foreword by Karl Barth) 2007. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock. McCormack, B. (1997). Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909–1936. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.

Muller, R.A. (2008). Christ and the Decree. Christology and Predestination in Reformed Theology from Calvin to Perkins. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. Poliander, J., Rivetus, A., Walaeus, A., and Thysius, A. (2014). Synopsis Purioris Theologiae. Synopsis of a Purer Theology. Latin Text and English Translation, vol. I (ed. D. te Velde), Disputations 1–23. Leiden: Brill. Reeling Brouwer, R.H. (2015). Karl Barth and Post‐Reformation Orthodoxy. Farnham: Ashgate. Turrettin, F. (1992). Institutes of Elenctic Theology, (trans. G.M. Giger) (ed. J.T. Dennison Jr.). Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing. te Velde, D. (2010). Paths Beyond Tracing Out. The Connection of Method and Content in the Doctrine of God, Examined in Reformed Orthodoxy, Karl Barth and the Utrecht School. Delft: Eburon.

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omparing the work of a figure as profound and intricate as Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), the New England divine, with the work of Karl Barth opens the interpreter to various sorts of temptations. It is tempting to reduce one figure into the other, or to use one figure as the plumb line along which to evaluate the other. It is tempting, likewise, to either ignore differences or to exacerbate them  –  rejecting historical differentiation or overemphasizing it. Keeping these temptations in mind, the goal for this essay is to highlight a shared impulse by Edwards and Barth. In particular, this essay focuses on the impulse to ground God’s life pro nobis back into the eternal life of God, such that the God who is for us in Christ Jesus is a true revelation of God in se. From there, the divine attributes will serve as an example of how this impulse forms their unique theological reflections. By articulating a shared impulse, it is not necessary that the overall formal structure (or material content) of the impulse is identical. Therefore, this essay will focus positively on the shared impulse in Barth and Edwards and not the ways that they differ. Furthermore, because of space, these will be sketches and not highly nuanced accounts. It is important not to overread these positive claims, as much as to recognize two great minds in the tradition seeking faithfulness to the revelation of God.

God and Creation Early in his discussion of God’s revelation, Barth declares, “God reveals Himself. He reveals Himself through Himself. He reveals Himself” (CD I/1, p. 296). “God, the Revealer,” Barth adds, “is identical with His act in revelation and also identical with its effect” (CD I/1, p. 296). The desire to support the claim that God’s self‐revelation is a true revelation of himself leads Barth to avoid bifurcation between God ad intra and God

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ad extra; the God who is a se is the God who has revealed himself in Christ Jesus. “If we are dealing with His revelation,” Barth quips, “we are dealing with God Himself and not, as Modalists in all ages have thought, with an entity distinct from Him” (CD I/1, p. 311). In light of this, Barth continues, “In a dogmatics of the Christian Church we cannot speak correctly of God’s nature and attributes unless it is presupposed that our reference is to God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” (CD I/1, p. 312). This focus on God, God in his revelation, and God’s attributes understood through God in his revelation, is the precise impulse we will see in Edwards. To develop this theme, however, it is important to begin with the God of love and freedom.

God of Love and Freedom For both Edwards and Barth, to talk about God is to talk about God in his revelation. In this section, our focus is the important discussion of the “Being of God as the One Who Loves in Freedom” from §28 of the Church Dogmatics. In the leitsatz (or summary paragraph), Barth provides a helpful overview, “God is who He is in the act of His revelation. God seeks and creates fellowship between Himself and us, and therefore He loves us. But He is this loving God without us as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, in the freedom of the Lord, who has His life from Himself ” (CD II/1, p. 257). God is who he is without us, and yet, Barth wants to emphasize, God is who he is in his works: “God is who He is in His works. He is the same even in Himself, even before and after and over His works, and without them. They are bound to Him, but He is not bound to them…But He is who He is without them. He is not, therefore, who He is only in His works” (CD II/1, p. 260). It is in God’s works that he is revealed as the One he is (CD II/1, p. 260). Barth, in his criticism of Protestant orthodoxy, nevertheless lauds Polanus on his definition of the essence of God as “Essentia Dei est ipsa Deitas, qua Deus a se et per se absolute est et existit” (“The essence of God is his deity, by which God is and exists absolutely from himself and through himself ”) (CD II/1, p. 261; quoting Polanus, Synt. Theol. chr., 1609, col. 865), a definition Edwards basically follows. But the focus of Barth’s criticism concerns the way that Protestant orthodoxy abstracted the Trinity, and therefore the act of revelation, away from a discussion of God’s self‐revelation in history. The essence of God “is something which we shall encounter either at the place where God deals with us as Lord and Savior, or not at all” (CD II/1, p. 261). Barth wants to hold together the being and act of God without abstracting from the reality of God’s triune life as Father, Son, and Spirit. Barth clarifies helpfully, noting, “We are in fact interpreting the being of God when we describe it as God’s reality, as ‘God’s being in act,’ namely, in the act of His revelation, in which the being of God declares His reality: not only His reality for us – certainly that – but at the same time His own, inner, proper reality, behind which and above which there is no other” (CD II/1, p. 262). Discussion of God’s being is always, necessarily, discussion of God’s act. Barth declares, “We are dealing with the being of God: but with regard to the being of God, the word ‘event’ or ‘act’ is final, and cannot be surpassed or compromised” (CD II/1, p. 263). In his discussion, Barth affirms the instincts of the tradition. “Thus it was quite right when the older theology described the essence of God as vita (life), and again as actuositas

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(effectual activity), or more simply as actus (act)” (CD II/1, p. 263). God is pure act, Barth affirms, and as such supersedes all that we know as activity or event, and his differentiation from all other activity also includes a kind of immanence to it. “But the particularity of His working and therefore His being as God is not exhausted by this dialectical transcendence which, however strictly it may be understood, must always be understood with equal strictness as immanence. On the contrary, without prejudice to and yet without dependence upon His relationship to what is event, act and life outside Him, God is in Himself free event, free act and free life” (CD II/1, p. 264). This life and event, Barth declares, is “the particularity of the being of a person” (CD II/1, p. 267). Barth articulates God’s being as “being in person,” (CD II/1, p. 268) not, with Edwards and much of the tradition, through a psychological analogy, but in affirmation that the essence of God is what is revealed in God’s act as Father, Son, and Spirit (a focus Edwards shares through his idiosyncratic use of the psychological analogy).1 God is a se and complete in himself, and therefore does not create for the purpose of finding fulfillment for unfulfilled desire. Rather, “God is He who, without having to do so, seeks and creates fellowship between Himself and us. He does not have to do it, because in Himself without us, and therefore without this, He has that which He seeks and creates between Himself and us” (CD II/1, p. 272). What God is in se is the fullness he offers the creature, a fullness that “implies so to speak an overflow of His essence that He turns to us” (CD II/1, p. 273). The language of overflow highlights that God is not creating an intermediary between himself and humankind, or that who he is ad extra is somehow other than who he is ad intra. Barth’s overview is helpful: Therefore what He seeks and creates between Himself and us is in fact nothing else but what He wills and completes and therefore is in Himself. It therefore follows that as He receives us through His Son into His fellowship with Himself, this is the one necessity, salvation, and blessing for us, than which there is no greater blessing — no greater, because God has nothing higher than this to give, namely Himself; because in giving us Himself, He has given us every blessing. We recognize and appreciate this blessing when we describe God’s being more specifically in the statement that He is the One who loves. That He is God — the Godhead of God — consists in the fact that He loves, and it is the expression of His loving that He seeks and creates fellowship with us. (CD II/1, p. 275)

God is blessed within himself, and he opens that blessing to his creatures in the Son; this is a blessedness that is always the blessedness of love (CD II/1, p. 283). The love that God’s creatures come to know in the Son is the love of a God who has given himself to them. This is an eternal love, and is “being taken up into the fellowship of His eternal love” (CD II/1, p. 280). God is love in freedom, which is to be “determined and moved by oneself,” and “unlimited, unrestricted and unconditioned from without” (CD II/1, p. 301). Barth links this freedom of God to the sovereignty, majesty, holiness, and glory of God, aligning it with the aseitas Dei (self‐sufficiency of God) (CD II/1, p. 302). The freedom of God means that “nothing can accrue to Him from Himself which He had not or was not already; because, therefore, His being in its self‐realization or the actuality of His 1  Barth, of course, would have been allergic to any use of the psychological analogy. See CD II/1, pp. 337–338.

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being answers to no external pressure but is only the affirmation of His own plenitude and a self‐realization in freedom” (CD II/1, p. 306). It is this God, the God of absolute freedom, who gives himself to his creatures. In his freedom God is present to his creatures by giving himself and uniting the creature to himself, not as a creature does, but in a way that does not restrict God’s transcendence and immanence. “God is free to be wholly inward to the creature and at the same time as Himself wholly outward: totus intra et totus extra” (CD II/1, p. 315).

The Overflowing Fullness of God In the thought of Jonathan Edwards, we discover a remarkably similar impulse to the one sketched previously (see Strobel 2012). Edwards would fully affirm Barth’s prodding, “Now that we are asking: What is God? what is His divinity, His distinctive essence as God? we can only ask again: Who is God?” (CD II/1,p. 300). Talk of God is talk of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God is not an “it” but a subject who is the pure actuality of love. It is this God who is eternally for the elect in the person of the Son, and it is this God, who, in his freedom, is the God of love.2 In the freedom of his love, God is fullness that overflows to the creature. In Edwards’s thought we find a God whose being is being in person, and who, as such, is a “knowing, willing, acting I” (to use Barth’s language [CD II/1, p. 284]). Edwards preferences God’s blessedness and personhood to articulate an account of God’s life as the pure actuality of love. It is this life that will overflow to the creature, and as such, it is the life of God that will determine the content of the Christian’s existence. As I have argued elsewhere, Edwards’s doctrine of God is best categorized as “religious affection in pure act” (Crisp and Strobel 2018).3 God is the truly religious One, in that God’s life is the infinite actuality of love and delight in the knowledge of the Father and Son in the Holy Spirit. There is a sense, with Barth, that Edwards can say that God is God without the creature in the fullness of his blessedness, and yet, like Barth, Edwards presses hard on this, claiming, that “in some sense it can be truly said that God has the more delight and pleasure for the holiness and happiness of his creatures: because God would be less happy, if he was less good, or if he had not the perfection of nature which consists in a propensity of nature to diffuse his own fullness” (WJE 8:447).4 The preference for “person” language to talk about the being of God is similar to both thinkers, but so is Barth’s worry about overemphasizing person language concerning

2  I am borrowing Barth’s emphasis on freedom here, but it is fitting. As the procession of God’s love, and in Edwards’s understanding, God’s will, God’s life is the pure movement of love in freedom that is the full and concrete expression of that freedom as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. 3  In contrast to Edwards Barth has little or no conception that God’s trinitarian being might include such things as affection, delight, and pleasure within itself. Where Edwards privileges divine affections, Barth restricts himself almost entirely to divine actions. But cf. CD II/1, pp. 370–371, where Barth allows that God indeed has a heart and can be moved to mercy but only as he is self-moved. 4  WJE refers to The Works of Jonathan Edwards volumes from Yale University Press. Cited sources listed in the references as Edwards 1959, 1989, 1999, 2000, 2001a, 2001b, and 2002.

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the divine hypostases.5 Edwards develops this differently, arguing that the hypostases of the divine essence are features of the one person of God that are three “persons” only insofar as they interpenetrate each other (i.e. as they exist in perichoretic union). In this sense, Barth’s knowing, willing, and acting I is the one indivisible God whose knowing and willing, as perichoretically united in pure act, is known as the three “persons” through the life and ministry of the Son and Spirit in the economy as sent by the Father from above. The economic activity of God is undivided, in this sense, because the activity and personhood of God is undivided in se. In narrating the processions of the divine essence, Edwards explains the procession of the Spirit by claiming, “there proceeds a most pure act, and an infinitely holy and sweet energy arises between the Father and Son: for their love and joy is mutual, in mutually loving and delighting in each other,” going on to claim that this “is the eternal and most perfect and essential act of the divine nature, wherein the Godhead acts to an infinite degree and in the most perfect manner possible. The Deity becomes all act; the divine essence itself flows out and is as it were breathed forth in love and joy” (WJE 21:121). God is a se, and is free in the fullness of his life. It is not in spite of this fullness but because of it that God can overflow to the creature. Like Barth, Edwards affirms that God is God without the creature but also names the reality that the God known in revelation is eternally inclined to the creature in his own fullness. Edwards affirms the traditional Reformed line that God creates for his own glory, affirming that who God is ad extra is an extension of who he is ad intra, and that God’s ad extra movement is grounded in eternity and in God’s self‐regard. In this sense, Edwards states, This propensity in God to diffuse himself may be considered as a propensity to have himself diffused, or to his own glory existing in its emanation. A respect to himself, or an infinite propensity to, and delight in his own glory, is that which causes him to incline to its being abundantly diffused, and to delight in the emanation of it…. God looks on the communication of himself, and the emanation of the infinite glory and good that are in himself to belong to the fullness and completeness of himself, as though he were not in his most complete and glorious state without it. (WJE 8:439 — my emphasis)

Like Barth’s use of “overflow,” Edwards turns to God’s diffusing himself and emanating himself in creation as a way to link God’s life ad intra with his ad extra mission for us. It is with respect to himself that God diffuses his glory to the creature, and this diffusion is nothing other than God’s self in Christ Jesus and the Spirit. Furthermore, in God’s eternal act of election in the Son, God stands in a relation to the creature (the church specifically) as though he were incomplete without her. “In election, believers were from all eternity given to Jesus Christ” (WJE 17:282). Likewise, “we must suppose that Christ, in some respect, is first in this affair, and some way or other the ground of our being chosen, and God’s election of him some way or other including and inferring the election of particular saints” (WJE 18:178). This is not Barth’s view of election of 5  CD I/1, pp. 351–368 for Barth’s explanation of personal language and his use of the terms Father, Son, and Spirit.

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course, but the grounding of the creature’s election in Christ’s election is at least a shared part of the overall Reformed impulse being highlighted. In grounding God’s “pronobeity” (God’s being for us) in Christ Jesus in eternity, Edwards locates all of creation and its ends in God’s redeeming and reconciling activity by mooring it to who he is within himself, such that the God revealed in Christ Jesus is the only God there is. Edwards highlights this impulse in two key texts. First, focusing on the connection of God’s life ad intra with his ad extra overflow, Edwards states, “This twofold way of the Deity’s flowing forth ad extra answers to the twofold way of the Deity’s proceeding ad intra, in the proceeding and generation of the Son and the proceeding and breathing forth of the Holy Spirit; and indeed is only a kind of second proceeding of the same persons” (WJE 20:466, my emphasis). Second, grounding the act of creation in God’s life, Edwards claims that it was God’s last end, that there might be a glorious and abundant emanation of his infinite fullness of good ad extra, or without himself, and the disposition to communicate himself or diffuse his own fullness, which we must conceive of as being originally in God as a perfection of his nature, was what moved him to create the world. (WJE 8:433–434)

God has a disposition to communicate himself, which Edwards glosses as God willing to diffuse his own fullness. This, he claims, is originally in God as a perfection of his nature. It is this perfection that moves God to create the world. Although the language is cumbersome, Edwards is arguing that the act of God’s life, his pure actuality of knowing and willing in love, is the grounding of his ad extra overflow in creation and ultimately redemption. The God revealed in creation is a “second proceeding” of the Son and Spirit in their mission to redeem, and redemption is offering the life of God to the creature as a participation in God’s life of knowing and loving (i.e. religious affection). The goal of religious affection for the creature is nothing else than a finite participation in the pure actuality of God’s affectionate self‐knowing – the Father gazing upon the Son and the Son gazing upon the Father in the love of the Spirit. The theological mooring for this knowledge is the beatific vision, which is the goal of all creaturely existence. In Edwards’s words, The saints shall enjoy God as partaking with Christ of his enjoyment of God, for they are united to him and are glorified and made happy in the enjoyment of God as his members…. They being in Christ shall partake of the love of God the Father to Christ, and as the Son knows the Father so they shall partake with him in his sight of God, as being as it were parts of him as he is in the bosom of the Father. (Edwards 1735, Rom. 2:10, [L. 44v.] my emphasis)

As Barth claimed, what God creates between himself and creatures he is already in himself. The goal of the elect creature is fellowship with God; sharing in God’s love in the Son by the Spirit. In his fullness, God is for his creature as the creator who isn’t bound by a contrastive notion of transcendence and immanence. Edwards argues that “God’s acting for himself, or making himself his last end, and his acting for their sake, are not to be set in opposition; or to be considered as the opposite parts of a disjunction: they are

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rather to be considered as coinciding one with the other, and implied one in the other” (WJE 8:440–441). In being for himself in the freedom and fullness of his love, God is for his own in Christ Jesus.

God’s Self‐Revelation and the Divine Attributes It proves helpful, briefly, to address how Edwards constructs his notion of God’s self‐­ revelation and, in particular, the divine attributes in light of Barth’s own development. Barth’s emphasis on God being known in his revelation as God himself, and not something distinct from him, is an instinct he shares with Edwards, and Edwards shares Barth’s desire to reconstitute the divine attributes (but does so in a very different way). It is helpful to briefly sketch Barth’s inclination before turning to Edwards’s own ­idiosyncratic development of the divine attributes. Early in Barth’s discussion of the divine perfections he states, “Since God is Father, Son and Holy Ghost, i.e. loves in freedom, every perfection exists essentially in Him” (CD II/1, p. 323). God’s perfect life of abundance is a life of oneness and multiplicity; the “One is He who loves in freedom,” and the “many are His perfections — the perfections of His life” (CD II/1, p. 323, my emphasis). In terms of the perfections, Barth claims, “each of these is perfect in itself and in combination with all the others. For whether it is a form of love in which God is free, or a form of freedom in which God loves, it is nothing else but God Himself, His one, simple, distinctive being” (CD II/1, p. 322). To know God entails knowing his perfections, but to know his perfections, Barth argues, one must know them within the knowledge of God, in the knowledge of his loving in freedom (CD II/1, p. 322). At the heart of Barth’s proposal is his claim that the perfections exist in God essentially, such that he will say, “He not only has it [i.e., what is ­‘perfect’] as others might have it. He has it as His own exclusively. And not only so, but He is it, so that it has its essential being in Him” (CD II/1, p. 323). We pause here because Barth is setting up the divine attributes such that it is impossible to talk about God generically – outside of his revelation – as if God were simply the sum total of creaturely attributes expanded to their highest possibility. Barth refuses a doctrine of God where God’s perfections could be excised and analyzed away from God’s triune life.6 The “special task” of the doctrine of the divine attributes, Barth proposes, is to recognize that God “exists in these perfections, and these perfections again exist in Him and only in Him as the One who, both in His revelation and in eternity, is the same” (CD II/1, p. 324). Starting with the Lord, and, more specifically, the Lord of glory, Barth seeks an account of the perfections that makes certain that “God is actually and unreservedly as we encounter Him in His revelation” (CD II/1, p. 325). This means that the multiplicity

6  Barth names Stoicism and Neo-Platonism as foreign impulses to generalize a doctrine of God that functions apart from the Trinity. This makes simplicity an “all-controlling principle,” and turns the discussion of God’s attributes into an analysis of “pure being” (CD II/1, p. 329).

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perceived in God’s revelation is not in the revelation alone but is true of God in se7 (CD II/1, p. 332). But Barth is also worried about any account of the divine perfections focused so fully on “a collection of mighty potencies” that in the midst of this cacophony of attributes the Lord becomes lost. In the face of this deluge the creature is so overwhelmed by the multivalent nature of revelation that no harmony could be found. The Lord to whom the perfections belong is lost behind them (CD II/1, p. 325). But this is not the biblical picture according to Barth. Rather, “according to Scripture, all the glory of God is concentrated, gathered up and unified in God Himself as the Lord of glory.” The perfections are never to overtake focus on God, but should lead to contemplation of God himself. In part, therefore, Barth’s exposition is to give a positive account of the divine perfections as naming something of God essentially, as those perfections “of His own being as He who loves in freedom” (CD II/1, p. 332). Throughout Barth’s discussion of the divine perfections he is seeking to correct the tradition. More important, for our purposes, Barth is working closely with the Reformed High Orthodox and is seeking to follow their general inclination while rejecting several key features of their account that he believes leads them away from the God of Scripture.8 Edwards, of course, is doing the same thing. Barth’s dialectic, in part, is a response to the High Orthodox bifurcation between the incommunicable attributes and the communicable attributes. Barth is troubled by the notion that theologians should begin with God’s being in general, only afterwards turning to his triune nature. In discussing this faulty ordering, Barth notes, “the order undoubtedly implies that it is a question first of what the being of God is properly in itself, and only then of what it is improperly in its relationship ad extra” (CD II/1, p. 349). Dialectic is the form that theology must take, for Barth, to avoid speaking of God as disparate parts, bifurcating God, or having an incoherent account of God who is one way in revelation and another in himself. This brief sketch reveals Barth’s driving inclination, and it reveals two key features that Edwards anticipates. First, anticipating Barth’s desire to only talk about the divine attributes through God’s self‐revelation, Edwards reconstructs his discussion such that the only way to talk about the “attributes” of God is to talk about the Son and the Spirit.9 Second, for Edwards the single attribute of God, what is named by God’s simplicity, is the divine glory, or, more precisely, the pure actuality of God’s religious affection. In Edwards, we do not find the distinction between the incommunicable attributes and the communicable attributes of God doing significant dogmatic work, because God is addressed only in relation to personhood and revelation, and what is true of God in se is communicable to the creature through Christ as the very purpose of salvation (see Strobel 2016, pp. 370–398). It may be true that God is omnipresent, but Edwards finds

7  Barth quotes Augustine positively who spoke of God’s multiplex simplicitas (multiple simplicity) (CD II/1, p. 329). 8  I follow Reeling Brouwer in his focus on Barth’s thorough use of the High Orthodox. See his Karl Barth and Post-Reformation Orthodoxy (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2015). 9  In his explanation of Barth’s “actualism,” Justin Stratis names its negative feature as a rejection of “a supposedly free-standing divine ‘essence’ which may be consulted independently as a canon by which to interpret God’s acts.” Justin Stratis, “Speculating about Divinity? God’s Immanent Life and Actualistic Ontology” International Journal of Systematic Theology 12:1 (2010), 21. The rejection of the divine essence serving as a “canon” to interpret God’s acts is, likewise, a helpful way to consider Edwards’s impulse.

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that relatively uninteresting (and extrinsic, and therefore not a constitutive feature of God’s life in se). What is profound is that God is the fullness of love binding together God’s life in the Father and Son by the Holy Spirit. In his development of his doctrine of the Trinity, Edwards sketches a doctrine of the divine attributes by making the distinction between real and relative attributes in God, claiming, “There are but these three distinct real things in God; whatsoever else can be mentioned in God are nothing but mere modes or relations of existence. There are his attributes of infinity, eternity and immutability: they are mere modes of existence”10 (WJE 21:131). Whatever is “real” in God names a divine person, and whatever is relative is an extrinsic attribute of God. In other words, proper talk about God is talking about the divine persons and not generic talk of God as “being.” Rather than reading the full breadth of revealed attributes back up into God’s life, with Barth, Edwards focuses the attributes on the personal nature of God as a description of who God is and how that life refracts in a creaturely modality.11 In other words, the goal of Edwards’s discussion is to moor the divine attributes to personhood, such that an articulation of the divine attributes is always only an articulation of who God is. This preferences God’s life of love in himself, and attends fully to his knowing and willing as Father, Son, and Spirit. Furthermore, all attributes predicated of God’s personhood are grounded in the processions and are therefore simply aspects of God’s knowing or willing. For instance, Edwards claims, “There are the attributes of goodness, mercy and grace, but these are but the overflowings of God’s infinite love” (WJE 21:131). This differs from Barth who denies that grace is God’s love in relation to creatures, because he wants to say that the form of “grace exists in God Himself and is actual as God is in point of fact hidden from us and incomprehensible to us” (CD II/1, p. 357). Edwards would affirm this incomprehensibility, of course, but what is hidden and incomprehensible isn’t that God is somehow gracious in se (Edwards would have understood this as a category fallacy),12 but that he is the fullness of love, and in that fullness of love he is for us in Christ Jesus. Rather than turning to pure dialectic to ground God’s revelation as a true revelation of God in himself, Edwards turns to beauty as refracted in a creaturely mode through the presence of the divine persons of Son and Spirit. The focus is on the immediate reality of God’s self in Son and Spirit and therefore of the truth of God in history (bearing in mind that God’s “real” attributes are both communicable and communicated in the economy). But the nature of God’s life in se must refract in creaturely forms because in his descent into the flesh the divine attributes take on new modes of existence (even as 10  Edwards does run the discussion of the attributes in a slightly different direction, when he makes the distinction between the moral and natural attributes of God. See WJE 2 : 256. Space does not allow engagement with this issue, other than to say that “moral” and “natural” are a way to articulate the divine attributes and revelation, such that knowing God requires the Spirit’s work of illumination. 11  One particularly odd turn in Edwards’s account is when he posits four “unexercised attributes” in God that are extrinsic, but “fitting,” for God to exercise in creation. The attributes Edwards names are power, wisdom, righteousness, and goodness. See WJE 8:428–429. Barth would be critical of this, as well as Edwards’s intrinsic/extrinsic distinction, and is so concerning related issues in the High Orthodox. See CD II/1, p. 349. 12  On this point Hunsinger and Molnar would agree with Edwards. See Hunsinger 2015, p. 118 the reference to Molnar there cited.

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they are grounded in God’s life in eternity as a mode of his love). Edwards’s exposition of this takes on the texture of a dialectic, a dialectic ultimately resolved in the person of the Son through the Spirit’s work to unite the created and uncreated, using the typology of Christ as the lion and the lamb to address the “diverse excellencies” in Christ. Because each nature has “diverse” excellencies, their union in Christ by the Spirit creates a scenario where opposing virtues and attributes must be dialectically united through that union (e.g. that Christ is of infinite highness and infinite condescension). Edwards claims, In the person of Christ do meet together, infinite glory, and the lowest humility. Infinite glory, and the virtue of humility, meet in no other person but Christ. They meet in no created person; for no created person has infinite glory: and they meet in no other divine person but Christ. For though the divine nature be infinitely abhorrent to pride, yet humility is not properly predicable of God the Father, and the Holy Ghost, that exist only in the divine nature; because it is a proper excellency only of a created nature…. But in Jesus Christ, who is both God and man, these two diverse excellencies, are sweetly united. (WJE 19:568)

Edwards claims that the “human excellencies” of Christ are “communications and reflections of the divine,” (WJE 19:590) such that Christ wasn’t revealing something untrue of God, but that the divine was “accommodated to our apprehensions” (Edwards 2004, p. 233). Unlike Barth, Edwards does not read up into the life of God attributes like humility or grace but recognizes these as appropriate refractions of the life of God through a creaturely modality that reveals the truth about who God is. The person of Christ brings the full reality of the life of God with him in the economy, such that he is the locus of all creaturely knowledge of God in the Spirit. Christ is the center of Edwards’s doctrine of revelation, because in Christ humankind comes to see God face to face.

Conclusion In both Edwards and Barth there is an impulse to reject bifurcation (although I do not use the qualifier “any” here) between God in se and God pro nobis. Although both affirm divine aseity, there is also a predisposition to press hard on God’s inclination to overflow. Barth notes that God “had no need of a creation. He might well have been satisfied with the inner glory of His threefold being, His freedom, and His love,” and that God “is not satisfied, but that His inner glory overflows and becomes outward” (CD II/2, p. 121). Both Edwards and Barth note this overflow, and ground it in the divine glory, and both seem to incline God toward creation and away from this satisfaction in himself, even grounding God’s “pronobeity” in this very satisfaction. Building upon this impulse, and the desire to affirm that God himself is revealed in revelation, both Barth and Edwards radicalize the divine attribute discussion. Whereas Barth turns to the dialectic of love and freedom to ground his discussion, Edwards focuses on personhood and then turns to God’s descent to us in the incarnation to ground the refraction of the divine nature in a human modality, resolving this dialectic in the person of the Son by the work of the Spirit (developed through Edwards’s Spirit‐Christology).

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Both Edwards and Barth are driven by the inclination that God “seeks and creates fellowship with us” by receiving “us through His Son into His fellowship with Himself ” (CD II/1, p. 275). To know and love God one must participate in God’s self‐knowing and be loved from within his love (John 17:26). At the heart of this impulse is the idea that it really is God that confronts the Christian in revelation and salvation, and the grace of God is God’s self‐giving love overflowing to catch the creature up into himself. For both thinkers, glory becomes the sphere in which the economy is understood, where God’s life, overflow, and creaturely participation are grounded. In Barth’s words, which Edwards would heartily affirm, “God’s glory is God Himself in the truth and capacity and act in which He makes Himself known as God” (CD II/1, p. 641). For both, there is something like a threefold movement of glory, where glory names the truth of God in himself, God in his ad extra overflow, and the creature being caught up in that overflow (Kim 2014, pp. 202–207). Edwards claims, In the creature’s knowing, esteeming, loving, rejoicing in, and praising God, the glory of God is both exhibited and acknowledged; his fullness is received and returned. Here is both an emanation and remanation. The refulgence shines upon and into the creature, and is reflected back to the luminary. The beams of glory come from God, and are something of God, and are refunded back again to their original. So that the whole is of God, and in God, and to God; and God is the beginning, middle and end in this affair. (WJE 8:531)

The locus of this glory is Christ, known in the incarnation and illuminated by the Spirit, which Barth rightly emphasizes when he states, “But the beginning, center and goal of these works of the divine glory is God’s Son Jesus Christ” (CD II/1, p. 667). Edwards would affirm this emphasis, and does when he names Christ as the “end of all God’s works ad extra” (WJE 18:178). Edwards would, furthermore, agree with the movement of glory in Barth’s thought when he makes comments like, “God stands in need of nothing else. He has full satisfaction in Himself…Yet He satisfies Himself by showing and manifesting and communicating Himself as the One who He is” (CD II/1, p. 667). God’s glory is God’s life in se, God’s life overflowing, and, as Barth notes, “God’s glory is also the answer awakened and evoked by God Himself of the worship offered Him by His creation to the extent that in its utter creatureliness this is the echo of God’s voice” (CD II/1, pp. 667–668). In this light, it is worth quoting Edwards again: “God looks on the communication of himself, and the emanation of the infinite glory and good that are in himself to belong to the fullness and completeness of himself, as though he were not in his most complete and glorious state without it” (WJE 8:439–440, my emphasis). By looking upon himself as incomplete without the creature, God includes creaturely response within his self‐glorification, such that being for himself and being for us are united in Christ. Although there are many formal and material differences between Edwards’s and Barth’s theology, this impulse is an important point of overlap. It seems that this is a distinctively Reformed impulse, with Barth and Edwards offering two trajectories for how it can be articulated. Although there is a harmony in their theologizing, we could claim (at risk of oversimplification) that Barth’s christocentric distinctive and Edwards’s unique trinitarian focus set each thinker on slightly different trajectories. But at the heart of their projects is a shared focus on who God is for us in Christ to the glory of God.

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References Crisp, O. and Strobel, K. (2018). Jonathan Edwards: An Introduction to His Thought. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Edwards, J. (1959). The Religious Affections, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 2 (ed. P. Miller). New Haven: Yale University Press. Edwards, J. (1989). Ethical Writings, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 8 (ed. P. Ramsey). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Edwards, J. (1999). Sermons and Discourses 1730–1733, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 17 (ed. M.R. Valeri). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Edwards, J. (2000). The ‘Miscellanies’: Entry Nos. 501–832, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 18 (ed. A. Chamberlain). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Edwards, J. (2001a). Sermons and Discourses 1734–1738, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 19 (ed. M.X. Lesser). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Edwards, J. (2001b). Writings on the Trinity, Grace, and Faith, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 21 (ed. S.H. Lee). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Edwards, J. (2002). The ‘Miscellanies’: Entry Nos. 833–1152, The Works of Jonathan

Edwards, vol. 20 (ed. A.P. Pauw). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Edwards, J. (2004). Jesus Christ is the shining forth of the Father’s glory. In: The Glory and Honor of God: Volume 2 of the Previously Unpublished Sermons of Jonathan Edwards (ed. M.D. McMullen), 208–244. Nashville: Broadman & Holman. Edwards, J., Transcription 373, Romans 2:10 Sermon, December 1735, 1735. Jonathan Edwards Center. Yale University, New Haven, CT. Hunsinger, G. (2015). Reading Barth with Charity: A Hermeneutical Proposal. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. Kim, J. (2014). The Spirit of God and the Christian Life: Reconstructing Karl Barth’s Pneumatology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Reeling Brouwer, R. (2015). Karl Barth and Post‐Reformation Orthodoxy. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Stratis, J. (2010). Speculating about divinity? God’s immanent life and actualistic ontology. International Journal of Systematic Theology 12: 21. Strobel, K. (2012). Jonathan Edwards’s Theology: A Reinterpretation. London: T&T Clark. Strobel, K. (2016). Jonathan Edwards’s reformed doctrine of theosis. Harvard Theological Review 109: 370–398.

CHAPTER 42

Barth and Kant John Hare

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his chapter is about the relation of Barth to Kant. It will focus mostly on Kant’s moral theology, because this is the focus of most of Barth’s explicit commentary. But Kant’s epistemology and metaphysics are also important for understanding Barth, and I will start from there. My overall thesis is that Barth, while being a subtle reader of Kant, has misunderstood him at certain key points. There is a historical irony here in relation to the reception of Barth, especially in the United States. There was a tendency among American evangelicals to accuse Barth of being too close to Kant. As Cornelius Van Til puts it, “There must of necessity be a death‐struggle whenever Christianity and Criticism meet. And they meet at every front since the days when the Copernicus of philosophy took his regular walks in Königsberg. It is Criticism, too, which in the persons of Barth and Brunner meets and attacks the historic Christian faith under cover of an orthodox‐sounding theology” (Van Til 1946, p. 27). The irony is that if Barth and Van Til had understood Kant better, they would have seen that they were both closer to Kant and closer to each other than they had thought.

Barth’s Ambivalence Barth starts as a Kantian. Thus he says, “My first attempt to theologize was with Kant. I was a real Kantian! But I couldn’t see a way from Kant to theology. I didn’t like his theory of religion. Schleiermacher, whom I found on my own, became the way out – or in!” (Duke and Streetman 1988, p. 45). It is significant that Barth here describes his dissatisfaction with Kant in terms of Kant’s theory of religion, not his theory of knowledge. This is consistent with what he says in his most sustained account of his relation to Kant, which comes in Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century (PTNC, pp. 252–298). We will come back to this work in detail in section 5, but for now we can The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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notice just that Barth here says “Yes” to Kant’s acknowledgement of the limits of human knowledge, at the same time as he says “No” to Kant’s account of God’s relation to us, and in particular to what Barth sees as Kant’s denial of the necessity of divine revelation. Here is the “Yes”: “In Kant’s philosophy, as in the music of Mozart, there is something of the calm and majesty of death which seems suddenly to loom up from afar to oppose the eighteenth‐century spirit. That is why, in Kant, thrown completely back upon its humility, it shines forth once again in its full splendour. That is why it here commands our respect” (PTNC, p. 255). Barth retains throughout his career a basically Kantian conception of the limits of human knowledge, or in his own term here, a Kantian “humility.” This lies, for example, behind his rejection of natural theology. The “No” is to what Barth sees as Kant’s inability to speak of revelation: “Anyone who speaks of revelation is bursting the religion of reason asunder, for he is bursting asunder ‘mere’ reason, he is speaking of something which cannot be an object of empirical knowledge. The critical philosophy of religion cannot therefore speak of revelation” (PTNC, p. 270). Along with this denial of revelation, Barth thinks, goes Kant’s failure to make any use of the idea in the prologue to John’s Gospel that the Word became flesh (PTNC, p. 274). An illuminating way to see Barth’s conception of his relation to Kant is to see that he reverses Kant’s account of the two circles in the preface to the second edition of Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (Kant 1996a, pp. 64–65).1 George Hunsinger suggested this picture of the relation in conversation after a paper I delivered to a conference at Princeton Seminary on Karl Barth and American Evangelicalism (Hare 2011, pp. 73–90). Kant proposes that revelation be considered as two circles with the same center, one inside the other. The inner circle is the revelation to reason, supposedly the same to all people at all times. The outer circle is historical revelation, to particular people at a particular time. Kant’s project is then to see if doctrines from the outer circle can be understood within the boundaries of mere reason, that is to say within the territory of the inner circle, by using the moral concepts. The outside circle is the province of biblical theology and the inside circle is the province of philosophical theology. Kant claims (and this is important in my subsequent interpretation) that he is going to leave biblical theology untouched (“without wishing to modify its public doctrines”), but that his own project is philosophical theology (Kant 1996a, 6:9). Barth then sees himself as the biblical theologian in terms of this same picture, but he puts biblical theology in the inside circle. He leaves room for philosophical theology, as long as it respects the proper limits, but his own project is to see if any of its doctrines can be understood within the confines of the revelation given us in Scripture and by the Word made flesh.

Barth’s “Yes” to Kant Because it is revelation that is the central issue here, we can expect that Barth will engage with Kant in volume I/2 of the Church Dogmatics, “The Revelation of God.” We can see here both the “Yes” and the “No.” First, the Yes. I will give three examples, and 1  I will refer to Kant by using the volume and page numbers of the Berlin Academy edition, as this is standard scholarly practice, referring to the English translation in the bibliography.

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at each point we will see Barth agreeing with Kant even though he does not think Kant has the whole truth. At the beginning of the volume Barth identifies what he calls a fallacy, the thought that “we can put ourselves, so to speak, midway between God and man, with a twofold illusion and assumption, the claim to know what God can and must do, to know what is necessary and appropriate to us men so that revelation between Him and us can become an event” (CD I/2, p. 3). This illusion is what Kant calls “dialectical illusion,” or “subreption.” It is not my purpose here to give anything like a full account of Kant’s epistemology. I will assume the standard account, namely that Kant distinguishes between things in themselves (noumena) and things as they appear to us (phenomena) and confines the objects of knowledge to the latter. He leaves room, however, for justified true belief (Glaube) about how things are in themselves. Indeed, he says in the preface to the second edition of the first Critique that we have to “deny knowledge in order to make room for faith” (Kant 1998, p. 117). Our knowledge of things as they appear to us is constrained by the limits of our own understanding, which is formed through the fundamental concepts common to all human beings that Kant calls “categories” (e.g. unity, reality, subsistence, causality, possibility). Dialectical illusion is a constant temptation for us. It occurs when we try to apply to things in themselves categories that have sense only when applied to objects within space and time, that is, as they appear to us in experience. Kant has the same kind of distrust of reliance upon religious experience that Barth repeatedly demonstrates. Barth is against any attempt to argue the divinity of Jesus from “an uncontrollable inner experience” (CD I/2, p. 20) or “a supreme ecstasy of union with his Lord” (CD I/2, p. 118). Kant is harsh in the same way about the “supposed favorite of heaven” who “reaches heights of enthusiasm, to the point of imagining that he feels the special effect of faith with in him (or even has the impertinence of trusting in a supposed hidden familiarity with God)” (Kant 1996a, 6:201). For both thinkers the fundamental problem is the illusion that we can build a bridge from our experience to how God is in Godself. For Barth, however, there is a conceptually prior point; Jesus is already the bridge that we are unable to build. Barth is appealing to Kant’s picture of human knowledge when he says that the divine act of revelation is “inconceivable” (CD I/2, pp. 201, 233, 237). “We cannot imagine that we even know ourselves, man, so well, that we can make clear from our side which way from God to man is a traversable one! And we cannot presume to think of understanding the way which God has actually trodden in the light of conditions which we ourselves have discovered and set up” (CD I/2, p. 205). There is a common source for Barth and Kant here in Luther’s conception of the limits of human knowledge. Barth quotes Luther, in describing the unity of the church, saying that “what the one or one sort of thing is, we shall never see or grasp, we have to believe” (CD I/2, p. 218). But again there is for Barth a conceptually prior point; Jesus has already established the ­revelation that we cannot grasp. One place that manifests the continuity between Barth and Kant is Barth’s treatment of time, and we can take this as an example to cover other cases. For Barth there are three times: “our” time, the time God created, and a third time, which is God’s time for us (CD I/2, p. 47). Between the first and second of these comes the Fall, so that “our” time is lost time. Barth appeals to Kant’s first antinomy in the first Critique as showing that we do not understand the first or second time. The unanswerability of the ­questions

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that “our” time generates (for example, the question whether time has a beginning) shows, he says, “that we can only believe in the creation of time by God, as we believe in the creation itself, but cannot know it” (CD I/2, p. 49). The third time is different from the first two, and “arises and has its place because God reveals Himself, because He is free for us, because He is with us and amongst us, because in short, without ceasing to be what He is, He also becomes what we are…. The time God has for us, as distinguished from our time that comes into being and passes away, is to be regarded as eternal time” (CD I/2, p. 50). In Kant there is in the same way the time that is a “form of sensibility” along with space and that conditions our understanding of how things appear to us in experience. The antinomy, or apparent contradiction, generated by this time is only soluble negatively. That is to say, like all of the antinomies in the first Critique, the introduction of the distinction between noumena and phenomena shows that there is not actually a contradiction; but it does not give us positive understanding or what Kant calls a “constitutive” as opposed to a merely “regulative principle,” that is, a principle for how things are as opposed to a principle for how we should think of things (Kant 1998, A508 = B536). The important thing for present purposes, however, is that Kant also has noumenal change. There is, for example, what he calls “the revolution of the will” by which the will goes from subjection to the evil maxim to subjection to the good maxim. This is a free and therefore noumenal conversion. The same is true about the changes in the next life that take us toward holiness. Noumenal change is not something that, by Kant’s doctrine, we can understand. It has to take place in something analogous to, but not identical with, the time we experience. But in Barth there is again a conceptually prior point; Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection are already the reconciliation with God that makes possible our conversion.

Barth’s “No” to Kant There is also in this volume (CD I/2) a sustained “No.” At the beginning Barth records, autobiographically, that he started off with a Kantian view of Christ but came to see the profound error of this. He calls Kant’s view of Christ “docetic.” He says that this view “can upon occasion abandon Jesus, the historical existence of Jesus of Nazareth, and yet retain Christ, i.e. its Christ. It can regard this very paradox as a peculiar triumph of a strong faith. (About 1910 – the time of A. Drews’ Christ myth – when a theological stripling, I was of that opinion myself.) Even if it does not push matters so far, it will see in the man Jesus a ‘vehicle’ or ‘symbol,’ and if it speaks of His divinity will mean the divinity of the idea incorporated and realized in Him, and so will have difficulty in conceding that the divinity is incorporated and realized only in Him and perfectly in Him” (CD I/2, p. 17). Barth sees Kant here as starting from an idea of moral goodness given us by reason, and then judging that Christ is Jesus because Jesus fits this idea. Sometimes Barth hyphenates the view he is disputing here as “docetic‐moralism.” The doctrine of God in Kant, he says, is “intolerable, for in it the idea of God is put alongside other supreme ideas like freedom and immortality, and with them is subordinated to the crowning idea of reason” (CD II/1, p. 311). The fundamental error he sees is a reversal of the proper order of revelation and religion, the error of thinking “that religion has

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not to be understood in the light of revelation, but revelation in the light of religion” (CD I/2, p. 291). This catastrophe for theology starts by submitting Christian dogma, as well as the Bible, to the notions of natural religion, and then “Kantian rationalism” reduces the natural religion to ethics, “ultimately rejecting revelation, except as the actualizing of the powers of moral reason” (CD I/2, p. 290). If this is the view of religion, says Barth, then “religion is unbelief ” (CD I/2, p. 299), and it is bound to fail because it is tied inescapably to a historically contingent view of what our reason delivers to us. Barth makes this point by referring to Kant’s famous conclusion to the second Critique, which Kant himself did not regard as historically contingent at all. “The religion of man is always conditioned absolutely by the way in which the starry heaven above and the moral law within have spoken to the individual. It is, therefore, conditioned by nature and climate, by blood and soil, by the economic, cultural, political, in short, the historical circumstances in which he lives” (CD II/1, p. 316).

Kant’s Own Position I said at the beginning of this article that Barth has misunderstood Kant at certain key points. We can start from Kant’s own position and then relate it in the following section to Barth’s account of this position. I am not claiming to represent in this section a consensus of Kant scholars, because there is no such consensus. I have given a fuller account of my view in Hare 2007, chapter  3. A good place to start is the quotation already given from the first Critique, that it is necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith. Making room for faith is here described as the point of the extraordinary labor that follows, as Kant lays out in detail the limits of human knowledge. To understand what Kant is doing here, we need the distinction he makes between the theoretical and the practical employment of reason. This is not a distinction between two faculties of reason, but between two employments of the same faculty. Reason in its theoretical or speculative employment is stuck within the limits already mentioned in section two, namely that its thoughts only have sense (as opposed to being “empty”) if they are given content from objects of sense experience within space and time. But reason in its practical employment can start from a different starting point, what Kant calls “the fact of reason” that we are under the moral law (which we should recognize, he consistently says, as God’s command, e.g. Kant 1996a, 6:154). We have experience of this only to the extent that we have the feeling he calls “respect,” which responds to the moral law when it confronts us. We can ask, however, what has to be the case if this fact of reason is to obtain. Morality gives us, as its object, what Kant calls “the highest good,” which is the union of happiness and virtue. If we were only rational beings, we would not need any incentive other than the law itself (Kant 1996a, 6:3). But we are not only rational beings; we are also creatures of sense and of need. As such a combination, we need a union of virtue and happiness not just for ourselves as individuals but for all human beings. This means that if our pursuit of virtue is to be rationally stable, we have to believe that this highest good is really (and not merely logically) possible. But we do not see how human beings could ground this possibility. So, as Kant says in the first preface to Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, “morality thus

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inevitably leads to religion,” to the postulation of a supersensible author of nature who can bring about the rewarding of virtue with happiness that Kant thinks we do not observe empirically (Kant 1996a, 6:6). This argument appears at the end of all three Critiques as well as at the beginning of Religion. One difficulty with believing in the real possibility of the highest good is the one just mentioned, that we do not see that humans have the requisite capacities to bring it about. Another difficulty is internal to each human being, that we seem to be born under what Kant calls “the evil maxim” that subordinates duty to happiness (so that we will do our duty only to the extent we can see that it will make us happy). This propensity is innate but not (unlike the predisposition to good) essential to us as human beings. But because it is radical, corrupting the ground of all maxims, “as natural propensity, it is also not to be extirpated through human forces, for this could only happen through good maxims — something that cannot take place if the subjective supreme ground of all maxims is presupposed to be corrupted” (Kant 1996a, 6:37). It is therefore necessary to postulate divine, extra‐human, assistance to accomplish what Kant calls “the revolution of the will” by which the wrongful order of incentives is reversed, and we come to will what we think will make us happy only to the extent we see it as consistent with our duty. This divine assistance is what he calls “a work of grace.” In the picture of the two circles of revelation already mentioned, the doctrine of the works of grace lies in the outer circle, but in the area immediately adjacent to the inner circle, in what Kant calls “parerga” (Kant 1996a, 6:52–53). What, then, is the relation between these arguments and the limits of reason in its theoretical employment? Kant sheds more light on this in the second Critique, in the section called “On the Primacy of Pure Practical Reason in its Connection with Speculative Reason.” “Primacy” is defined by saying that if speculative reason had primacy, this would mean that practical reason “may not assume and think as given anything further than what speculative reason of itself could offer it from its insight” (Kant 1996b, 5:120). This would not include the existence of God, because speculative reason has no insight into this (because God, if God exists, is supersensible). But Kant’s own position is that although speculative reason can veto some belief if it contradicts its own insight, it does not have veto over beliefs that go beyond its insight. If some belief is necessary for practical reason, necessary as a presupposition of the fact of reason that we are under the moral law, then speculative reason “which knows nothing about all that which practical reason offers for its acceptance, must accept these propositions and, although they are transcendent for it, try to unite then, as a foreign possession handed over to it, with its own concepts.” Thus, “In the union of pure speculative reason with pure ­practical reason in one cognition, the latter has primacy…. One cannot require pure practical reason to be subordinate to speculative reason and so reverse the order, since all interest is ultimately practical” (Kant 1996b, 5:121). In a later section, Kant asks “How is it possible to think of an extension of pure reason for practical purposes without thereby also extending its cognition as speculative?” (Kant 1996b, 5:134). He argues that belief in the existence of God (and in the existence of an eternal life) is an extension of theoretical reason, because it is belief that something exists rather than (as with practical reason) belief that something should be done. But theoretical reason is “forced to grant that there are such objects, though it cannot determine them more closely….

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For this increment, then, pure theoretical reason, for which all those ideas are transcendent and without objects, has to thank its practical capacity only. In this they become immanent and constitutive inasmuch as they are grounds of the possibility of making real the necessary object of pure practical reason (the highest good), whereas apart from this they are transcendent and merely regulative principles of speculative reason” (Kant 1996b, 5:135). What is the relation Kant sees between these practically necessary beliefs and Scripture? Here it seems to me that he is not entirely consistent. There is a change in his view from Religion to Conflict of the Faculties, and even within Religion there are contrary texts. His view in Religion is that Scripture is a “vehicle.” As a “pure rationalist” he holds that this vehicle may be necessary, even always necessary in this life, but it is not necessarily necessary (Kant 1996a, 6:155. See also 6:135). There is a double modality here that requires explanation. Much depends on what conditions other than our present ones Kant is contemplating as possible. If he is thinking just about the next life, in which we see Christ face to face and no longer need a book, that is one thing. But if he means a future state of this world, an ethical commonwealth in which humans no longer need historical faith, that is something quite different and, for a theologian like Barth, much more problematic.

Barth’s Misunderstanding of Kant To what extent does Barth recapitulate this account of Kant? Here we will focus on his most sustained treatment, namely his chapter on Kant in Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century. Again we have a “Yes” and a “No.” In some ways Barth is a subtle reader of Kant, and he recognizes the importance of Kant’s doctrine of radical evil and the resulting necessity of belief in God, in a way that anticipates some of the developments in Kant scholarship in the last 40 years. But there are at least seven ways in which he departs from the picture of Kant given in the preceding section of this article, and we will look at them in one paragraph each. First, Barth holds that God is a regulative idea for Kant, and therefore “to speak of existence or non‐existence is per se not to speak of God” (PTNC, p. 261). This was also the view of Van Til, who holds that Kant’s limitation of our knowledge to phenomena reduces God to a limiting concept, a regulative as opposed to a constitutive principle (Van Til 1946, p. 21). To show the pervasiveness of this view of Kant among American evangelicals, we could also cite Carl Henry, who talks of “[Kant’s] denial of the cognitive status of religious beliefs” (Henry 1979, p. 463). But this view of Kant fails to acknowledge that he holds that reason also has a practical employment, that this employment has primacy in the sense described previously, and that in this employment the idea of God is a constitutive principle. Contra Barth, to talk of “existence” can be, for Kant, to talk of God. Second, Barth says that for Kant historical faith is “dead in itself ”; it is not a living, not a salutary, faith (PTNC, p. 270). Here too Van Til and Henry agree (Van Til 1946, p. 81; Henry 1979, p. 342). But in this passage to which Barth refers (Kant 1996a, 6:111) Kant is quoting from James 2:17 “faith itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead,”

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and he is criticizing historical faith without corresponding moral action. He is not saying that historical faith if lived together with the moral disposition is dead or inert. On the contrary, it is because of the power of the vehicle that he says that Christianity is supposed to be destined to be the world religion (das Christenthum allgemeine Weltreligion zu sein zwar bestimmt, Kant 1996c, 8:339). Contra Barth, the historical faith can be, for Kant, living. The third point is similar. Barth takes it that Kant is saying, “Historical knowledge, which bears no inner relationship valid for all to the betterment of mankind,” may be believed or not as we like (PTNC, p. 271). But Kant’s passage here is about “historical cognition that has no intrinsic relation, valid for everyone, to [moral improvement]” (Kant 1996a, 6:44). Kant’s point is that in some cases, and in fact in the one he is ­discussing in this passage, there is an intrinsic connection between Scripture and its moral meaning that is valid for everyone. Fourth, Barth says: “The critical philosophy of religion cannot therefore speak of revelation” (PTNC, p. 270). I quoted a similar passage from Dogmatics earlier. Here again he repeats Van Til and Henry. But the two concentric circles in Religion are both described by Kant as revelation,  –  historical revelation and the revelation to reason. Moreover “pure rationalism,” which Barth is right to attribute to Kant, explicitly allows special revelation (Kant 1996a, 6:155). About the works of grace, Kant says that we can make room for them, even though we cannot make use of them in theoretical reason (because there is no sense‐cognition of them) or practical reason (because they are things God does, not things we do) (Kant 1996a, 6:53). Barth would no doubt object that Kant uses the term revelation but does not have room for what Barth means by the term. But on the picture given above, Kant is sincere in wanting to leave biblical theology untouched. He does not intend to reduce the first circle to the second. He does not intend to deny that God speaks to us or commands us, though the two thinkers sometimes disagree about how what is spoken and commanded is to be interpreted. Fifth, Barth treats Conflict of the Faculties as teaching the same doctrine as Religion, and many of the passages he likes the least are from the former. But there are in fact important differences between these two texts. Conflict is already moving in the direction of the unpublished Opus Postumum, and it is important to allow room for development here (whether toward or away from the view one prefers oneself). Sixth, Barth has Kant saying that no historical example of the good disposition is necessary (PTNC, p. 274). But Kant’s passage actually says that although no example is necessary for us to take the idea of a human being morally pleasing to God as a model, the hope that we can be pleasing to God requires that we represent the prototype of such moral perfection as in fact taking on humanity, even though we cannot deduce the good disposition just from outward behavior and teaching (Kant 1996a, 6:61–63). Kant explicitly says here that he is not denying that such an example could be a supernaturally begotten human being, but he insists that if such a being is indeed to be an example for us, there must be the same natural inclinations and temptations as we have. Kant’s relation to history here (even though Barth will still find it “docetic”) is more complex than Barth allows. Seventh, Barth (yet again like Van Til) quotes Kant’s saying that “the human being must make or have made himself into whatever he is or should become in a moral sense,

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good or evil” (Kant 1996a, 6:44, referred to in PTNC, p. 284). Barth takes it that this removes the need for God’s grace. But any good interpretation of this passage in Kant has to acknowledge that he goes on, three sentences later, to say “granted that some supernatural cooperation is also needed to his becoming good or better.” The solution to the apparent contradiction here is to see that Kant means that we are to be called morally better only to the extent that we are responsible for the improvement, but this does not mean that we are solely responsible for our improvement, which indeed requires a work of grace. (This is Kant’s usual, but idiosyncratic, use of “moral.” See Kant 1996a, p. 21). Barth does not like the idea of “supernatural cooperation,” but he should acknowledge that it does not by itself preclude divine grace. Having made these seven points, however, we should add that Barth, having described the “closed and rounded quality” of Kant’s philosophy of religion, then wants to say that Kant himself “disturbs” this philosophy with his views on radical evil and on the church’s need for an authoritative Scripture. The result is a “clash” (PTNC, p. 290). Barth does this same maneuver with other figures, such as Novalis. It is indeed a typical deconstructive strategy found in many heirs of Hegel, for example in Derrida’s reading of Plato. The picture is odd, however, because Kant’s account in Religion starts with radical evil; this is not a subsequent addition to a structure already proposed as complete without it. The previous section of this article suggested an account in which Kant is consistently maintaining both that radical evil is innate and imputable and that we are nonetheless under the moral law. He is maintaining both that morality gives us the goal of the highest human good, the union of virtue and happiness, and that we are unable to see how by our own devices we could achieve this. What makes these claims a consistent whole is Kant’s moral theology.

A Kantian Retrieval What would it be like if we tried to modify Kant’s view, as described previously, in the light of those of Barth’s criticisms that stick (as opposed to those that are simply misunderstandings)? This section of the paper is necessarily briefer than would be ideal. We should concede at least four of Barth’s criticisms. The first is that Kant’s account of human reason is in fact contingent, though he does not see this himself. It is moreover indefensible in certain key respects, and depends on views about gender and race that we now see to be inconsistent with his own imperative to see humanity in every human being as an end in itself. The second criticism we should accept is that Kant is unacceptably moralistic. This does not mean that his moral standards are too narrow (though this is undoubtedly true in some cases), but that he gives morality itself too large a place in his account of our relation to God. For example, Kant’s conception of the next life is one in which we gradually approximate (though we never reach) moral holiness (Kant 1996b, 5:123). We discussed in section three Barth’s rejection of moralism, even though he also wants to say that Law is the form of the gospel (CD II/2, p. 513). We should also agree with Barth that God’s commands are paradigmatically not universal but particular: “This concrete aspect of the divine command derives, of

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course, from the fact that it is not a general truth, rule or precept but always has a historical character and is always a particular challenge to a specific individual” (CD III/4, p. 59). Barth acknowledges that the divine command is also universal: “At this point, again, we have something to learn from Kant — from his definition of the ethical as that which is adapted to be ‘the principle for a universal law’” (CD II/2, pp. 655–656). Barth and Kant are agreed that moral obligation is established independently of what we desire (CD II/2, p. 650). But Barth is right to stress, as Kant does not, that “the Word of God is spoken by the divine I to the human Thou, claims the supremely particular hearing and obedience of this specific man, and thus reveals the individuality of his being and life” (CD III/4, p. 329. I have tried to explain how all of this is consistent in Hare 2015, pp. 143–157). Finally, we should agree with Barth that Kant is too sanguine about human progress. I referred earlier to passages in Religion and elsewhere where Kant seems to envision that we are moving (though there is sometimes retrograde movement) toward an ­ethical commonwealth on this earth (Kant 1996a, 6:136; I have discussed some of these texts in Hare 1996, pp. 71–74). Barth’s experience of the twentieth century did not encourage him to believe in overall human progress of this sort (McKenny 2010, pp. 39–41). Having made all these concessions, however, there is still much for a theologian to retrieve from Kant. I am borrowing the term “retrieve” from Charles Taylor: “The intention of this work was one of retrieval, an attempt to uncover buried goods through rearticulation — and thereby to make these sources again empower, to bring the air back into the half‐collapsed lungs of the spirit” (Taylor 1989, p. 520). Chief among Kant’s merits for the moral theologian is his sustained account of the equal dignity of all human beings, and his defense of the claim that this morality becomes rationally “unstable” if it is detached from belief in God (Kant 1900, 28:1151). The theologian can ask the twenty‐first century thinker who wants to retain Kant’s account of human worth but reject the theology, “What do you have as a replacement for God, to do the work in your moral life that Kant thought God does, namely securing the real possibility of both the highest human good (the union of virtue and happiness) and the revolution of the will (by which the order of incentives we are born with is reversed)?” Without a replacement, morality of the demanding type Kant taught will become rationally unstable in the way Kant described. This is an agenda upon which there is some hope that Christians, evangelical and nonevangelical alike, might combine. References Duke, J.O. and Streetman, R.F. (1988). Barth and Schleiermacher: Beyond the Impasse? Minneapolis: Fortress. Hare, J. (1996). The Moral Gap. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hare, J. (2007). God and Morality: A Philosophical History. Oxford: Blackwell.

Hare, J. (2011). Karl Barth, American evangelicals, and Kant. In: Karl Barth and American Evangelicalism (eds. B.L. McCormack and C.B. Anderson), 73–90. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Hare, J. (2015). God’s Command. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Henry, C.F.H. (1979). God, Revelation and Authority, Vol. III: God Who Speaks and Shows. Waco, TX: Word Books. Kant, I. (1900). Kants Werke: Akademie Textausgabe. Berlin: Georg Reimer. Kant, I. (1996a). Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (trans. G. di Giovanni). In: Religion and Rational Theology, (trans. and ed. A.W. Wood and G. di Giovanni). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, I. (1996b). Critique of Practical Reason (trans. and ed. M. Gregor). In: Practical Philosophy (trans. and ed. M. Gregor). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Kant, I. (1996c). The End of All Things (trans. A.W. Wood). In: Religion and Rational Theology (trans. and ed. A.W. Wood and G. di Giovanni). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, I. (1998). Critique of Pure Reason (trans. and ed. P. Guyer and A.W. Wood). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McKenny, G. (2010). The Analogy of Grace: Karl Barth’s Moral Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Van Til, C. (1946). The New Modernism. London: James Clarke.

CHAPTER 43

Barth and Hegel Nicholas Adams

Introduction Karl Barth was both appreciative and critical of Hegel.1 He was appreciative of Hegel’s bold insistence that knowledge of God is at the heart of philosophy, and of Hegel’s challenge to the theology of his time that it was too timid. He was critical of Hegel’s philosophy for bringing human and divine subjectivity too close together, for reconciling the dualism between thinking and being on the side of thinking, and for producing an account of the absolute concept that dissolves all contradictions. In this essay I break new ground by arguing that Barth’s theological instincts obstruct his appreciation for some of Hegel’s key philosophical insights  –  insights to which Barth himself draws attention. Without defending Hegel’s theological project, I also demonstrate that Hegel and Barth were in key respects asking different questions and indeed questions of quite different kinds. If one poses Barth’s questions and gives Hegel’s answers, one has indeed a monstrous theology; but equally to pose Hegel’s questions and give Barth’s answers yields an impoverished philosophy. This essay also offers an opportunity to consider the deeper question of the relation of philosophy to theology: I approach Barth’s interpretation of Hegel as a case study in this relation. An enquiry of this kind, namely “Barth and x,” presents some preliminary puzzles. Is our concern with the influence of Hegel on Barth? Is such influence explicit (borne out in Barth’s engagements with Hegel) or concealed (and discernible at those points where Barth echoes Hegel’s claims, perhaps without acknowledgement, but where those claims are known to the reader)? Are the connections somewhat less obvious, as when Barth poses a question that Hegel also poses, regardless of whether the answers are 1  I am grateful to Gerhard Sauter and Matthew Bruce for advice on how to interpret Barth’s working ­practices, especially as reviewed by Michael Welker (see the third section). The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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identical (and even where the answers are incompatible)? Or are they much less obvious, as when Barth poses a question of broad interest, but poses it in a way that perhaps resembles Hegel’s way of posing it? In what follows I am concerned to do justice to what Barth says about Hegel and, at those points where those claims seem indefensible, to try to guess – charitably – at why Barth might have made them. I also propose to think historically, bearing in mind that Barth’s reception of Hegel was part of a wider reception in German thought, and that this reception shifted over time. Barth’s most substantial engagements with Hegel come from the late 1920s, for example, well before the postwar period when theological writing on Hegel became more widespread in Germany. Our reception of Hegel in the twenty‐first century is aided by meticulously edited critical editions in both German and English, and these are accompanied by an unmanageably vast secondary bibliography of commentary and analysis. None of this was available to Barth: it would be unfair to assess Barth’s claims against these standards. The period from the 1930s onwards was nonetheless marked by a renewed interest in Hegel’s work in Germany. The Leipzig Sämmtliche Werke had begun to be published in 1911, under Georg Lasson, whose significantly new edition of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (LPR) had recently appeared (1925–1929).2 The Stuttgart Sämmtliche Werke had begun to be published in 1927, under Hermann Glockner (whose editions of the Phenomenology of Spirit and the first part of the Lectures on Esthetics were published in 1927, with the LPR, Science of Logic, Philosophy of Right, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, and the rest of the Aesthetics published in the ­following year). These replaced the Berlin Vollständige Ausgabe published 1832–1845 (there were two early editions of the LPR, one edited by Marheineke in 1832, the second by Bruno Bauer in 1840, known as W1 and W2 respectively; the Stuttgart edition  –  the Jubiläumsausgabe  –  of the LPR is a version of W2). Alexandre Kojève’s ­lectures on Hegel were being delivered in Paris from 1933, just a few years after Barth’s lectures in Münster on Protestant theology. At the time Barth was writing, then, Hegel was beginning to be newly accessible, at least in principle, and was becoming newly relevant in France as well as Germany. There is uncertainty as to the availability of these older and newer editions to Barth, during his professorships in Münster (1925–1930) and Bonn (1930–1935), the period when he produced and delivered his lecture on Hegel.3 My review of the university library catalogues of the universities of Münster and Bonn show rather patchy holdings for the Berlin Vollständige Ausgabe. We can infer that Barth probably did not have ready access (the kind busy professors need) to the full range of Hegel’s work while in Münster. Bonn appears to hold at least one volume of the Berlin series; it certainly has the Lasson

2  LPR refers to Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion in its various versions. PTNC refers to “Hegel” in Barth’s Die protestantische Theologie im 19. Jahrhundert: Ihre Vorgeschichte und ihre Geschichte (Zürich: Evangelischer Verlag, 1952) and in Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Its Background and History (London: SCM, 1972). Page numbers are to the German followed by the English translation. The translation has occasionally been amended without comment. 3  We know from Barth’s correspondence, and meticulous review of Barth’s manuscripts by Michael Welker and others, that Barth’s lecture on Hegel was complete by 1929 and with only very minor subsequent revisions: Welker 1983.

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edition of the LPR (this is the edition Barth cites) as well as Lasson’s Einführung in Hegels Religionphilosophie of 1930. For whatever reason, Barth cites very few of Hegel’s works.4 Barth’s account of Hegel needs to be interpreted in this context. He himself would doubtless express severe impatience with this approach, however, if all that is proposed is to catalogue Barth’s claims and to situate them (however charitably) in their context in the 1920s in the period before Barth was forced out of his professorship in Bonn. This is precisely the kind of disconnected thinking, mere peering in through the window at the displays of the past, which immobilizes theology and obstructs a living engagement with those who have bequeathed us the questions we ask, the categories in which we deal, and to whom we turn in the face of the real doubts that stimulate our enquiries. I thus ask about who Hegel is for us today, in relation to who Barth is for us today, and in relation to the anxieties about Hegel and Barth that characterize our own time. We might begin by noting that there are very few, and no substantial, references to Hegel in Barth’s Church Dogmatics. This suggests that when Barth began his magnum opus (1932), Hegel was not a central figure in Barth’s theological vision and probably should not be a central figure in our interpretation of Barth’s theology. This is not a surprising finding, perhaps, and for three reasons. First, Barth did not consider Hegel a theologian, in the same sense as, say, Schleiermacher. Second, the growth of interest in Hegel in German‐speaking theology only gained significant momentum in the 1960s, and there was 30 years prior to that no developed conversation in which Barth might have intervened. Third, Barth himself says in his postwar correspondence that after 1932 “Hegel dropped out of my sight” (GA 6, p. 228). One can ask whether Barth’s thinking in CD is “Hegelian” but such a question is dogged by vagueness. Does Barth make claims that he attributes (rightly or wrongly) to Hegel? Does Barth makes claims that others have attributed (rightly or wrongly) to Hegel? Have others attributed (rightly or wrongly) some of Barth’s claims to Hegel? If they are mistaken, are they mistaken about Barth or about Hegel (or both)? And so forth. Barth arguably repeats claims that are made by Hegel, for example the criticism of theological appeals to Kant, either in attempts to validate the truth of Christian claims through “reason,” or mistaken insistence on the radical unknowability of God; or the criticism of appeals to Scripture independently of what Hegel calls the “witness of the spirit” (for example, by trying to establish the truth of Scripture independently on grounds established by historical scholarship); or the insistence by Hegel that we do not first come to know God through speculative thinking but through God appearing in Jesus (LPR 3, pp. 312–313). The opening of CD IV/1, p. 14, “The way of the Son of God into the far country,” lays heavy stress on representation (a key term in Hegel’s discussion of what he calls the “second element”: LPR 3, pp. 290–291) and gives to God a certain “historical” action. Barth lays heavy emphasis in his trinitarian theology on

4  See Welker “Barth und Hegel” for a thorough review of Barth’s reading practices. Welker draws attention to Barth’s marginal notes in his copy of Hegel’s LPR: these are concentrated around the first 80 pages or so of volume 1 and around 150 pages of volume 3. This places severe limits on the material in view. Barth put brackets around certain passages. Charlotte von Kirschbaum, who had just started working for Barth, wrote them out on file cards. Barth wrote his essay from these cards. Welker 1983, p. 311. There are very few markings in Barth’s copy of the Phenomenology.

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the “subjectivity” of God. These characterizations of Barth’s theology are for the most part not in dispute. They have led some interpreters to claim heavy reliance by Barth on Hegel.5 It is however an open question how deep this relation to Hegel is, given his limited familiarity with Hegel’s texts. Arguably, the further one gets into the details of each thinker, the further apart they seem. If Hegel is unsurprisingly a minor player in Church Dogmatics it is somewhat more striking to notice that he is absent from Barth’s study of Anselm, Fides Quaerens Intellectum (1931). Anselm plays a significant role in Hegel’s criticism of Kant, in the LPR, where he argues that Kant’s arguments against the ontological argument fail to take seriously certain features of Anselm’s handling of the relation of thinking and being. Kant was not debating Anselm (Kant’s version of the ontological proof more resembles Descartes’s), however: Hegel’s introduction of Anselm into the argument is a novel intrusion and not just the continuation of a discussion. It is hard to miss for anyone interested in Anselm, but Barth misses it. Perhaps Barth had not read Hegel’s LPR when he was writing the Anselm book; perhaps he had read it and thought Hegel’s arguments were not relevant. I cannot explain the absence (in either the first or the later revised second edition) and merely note it. Barth’s most and only substantial engagement with Hegel is in his essay “Hegel” in Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, which dates from lectures delivered in the early 1930s in Bonn (reusing the text completed in Münster in the late 1920s) and later published in 1947. It relies almost exclusively on a somewhat hasty reading of the relatively recently published Lasson edition of the LPR.6 Barth was not an expert reader of Hegel. We shall see that some of his bolder interpretative claims are problematic. Why, then, be charitable? There are several reasons. Although the tone that Barth adopts in the essay is recognizable as a specimen of German professorial magisterialism (made worse in translation, owing to the familiar problem that German often sounds constipated in English), he is acutely conscious of, and draws attention to, the less than ideal conditions under which his lectures were originally produced. Barth had to work quickly, digesting complex materials at speed for presentation to students in a lecture course. Its focus was Protestant theology, not German philosophy, and his engagements with figures like Rousseau, Lessing, Kant, and Hegel (and others) were background (Vorgeschichte) for understanding the focal theological figures: the philosophers are not the main object of study. Barth apologizes for the rushed nature of the original researches and writing in the 1920 and 1930s, and for his failure to remedy this at the later time of publication in 1947. It would in any case have been a vast undertaking to engage in the kind of research that would have repaired the shortcomings of 5  A classic example is Pannenberg 1980. One can criticize this for its interpretation of Hegel or its interpretation of Barth or both, for example, Wagner 1982. See also Roberts 1979, who acknowledges the sparseness of Barth’s references to Hegel but nonetheless insists on the “pervasiveness” of Barth’s response to Hegel (p. 94). This is somewhat contradicted by the very next essay in that volume: Rowan Williams “Barth on the Triune God,” in which Hegel (rightly in my view) does not much feature. 6  This is not the edition typically used by German-speaking theologians later on, where from 1960 onwards theologians tend to use the Glockner edition (and especially the inexpensive paperback Suhrkamp edition from 1969) and from 1984 the Jaeschke edition. Barth’s use of the Lasson edition means he interprets what is, textually, something of a dead end.

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the original. Barth had no deeper formation in philosophy than systematic theologians today: it would be vindictive to hold him to a higher standard. Why publish such a rushed job at all? There is no great mystery. Barth had produced an overview of several major figures and their relation to theology, and a work of this kind was and continues to be invaluable to students of that discipline. Barth’s essays were first translated into English (From Rousseau to Ritschl) in 1959; they have been periodically reprinted (a new edition was issued by Eerdmans in 2002, with an introductory essay by Colin Gunton [PTNC]); and they continue to be consulted by students today. The need for such a volume clearly was and remains acute. Such a single authored work covering such a span of periods and figures would be scarcely conceivable today: its nearest contemporary analogues are The Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth Century Theology (Fergusson 2010) an undertaking started by Colin Gunton with the aim of refreshing Barth’s vision, and interrupted by Gunton’s death, which although written by multiple authors, encompasses fewer figures (nothing on Rousseau or Lessing, for example), and The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth Century Christian Thought (Rasmussen et al. 2017), which is organized by theme not by name. Neither of these has German thought as its main focus. Generosity is called for, then, because Barth was (and knew himself) incompetent to write scholarly essays on figures like Hegel, and his stated aim in publishing them (an act exposing himself to heavy criticism) was to encourage his students to read earlier figures with respect. In what follows a plain‐sense summary of Barth’s essay will be offered, with clarifications but without critique. Some reparative reasoning will then be attempted, not to rescue Hegel from Barth, and not to defend Hegel’s wider project, but to separate Barth’s theological concerns from his sometimes muddled claims about Hegel’s philosophy.

A Plain‐Sense Reading of Barth on Hegel Who was Hegel for Barth? Barth begins his essay with a puzzle. Why was Hegel’s thought so quickly abandoned after his death, given the considerable power of its vision (PTNC, pp. 343–344, 384–385)? Barth distinguishes two questions. First, why was Hegel abandoned in the mid‐ 1800s? Second, why is the current (in the late 1920s) “Hegel renaissance” such an underwhelming affair? “This is astonishing” (PTNC, pp. 344, 385). Barth advances five Hegelian theses, posed originally as rhetorical questions. 1. 2. 3. 4.

Hegel rejoices equally in reason and history, free of “all the ties of tradition”; He exploited Kant’s discovery of the transcendent nature of the human capacity to reason; He realized the goal of attempting to oppose Kant’s real or supposed one‐sidedness; He was a great systematiser of the Romantic immediacy of “creative individuality” and the dialectic of the way this individual’s life moves; 5. He came as the fulfiller of every promise that he inherited (PTNC, pp. 344, 385). Barth notes the extraordinary popularity of Hegel’s philosophy in Berlin during the 1820s and proposes that Hegel embodied the spirit of that age and that the rejection that followed Hegel’s death was that later age’s refusal or denial of itself.

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The rejection of Hegel, for Barth, was thus not only a reaction to a particular person and his work but part of a widespread determination in the mid‐1800s to recover from the Enlightenment those goods that Romanticism and German Idealism had failed to deliver. Alas! This determination lacked the ambition, conviction, and infectious energy of the earlier period. Compared with the great first half of the century, the latter half is a “meaner” and “smaller” intellectual world, marked by a boom in “the exact natural and historical sciences” (PTNC, pp. 345, 387). Barth means that a desire for precision was accompanied by a profound loss of nerve, of verve even, together with a growing dissatisfaction with itself: “and this resignation began to lay itself like a paralysing spell upon all intellectual life” (PTNC, pp. 345, 387). There is thus, for Barth, a noticeable contrast between the pomp of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany (i.e. from 1888 onwards, after Wilhelm became emperor) and the resignation of its intellectual life: “the century had become tired and somehow sad for all its enforced jollity” (PTNC, pp. 346, 387). Barth draws an image from Hegel’s LPR (but without attribution) to describe this later nineteenth century. “Looking back became its typical attitude of mind, a somewhat aimless and unrelated looking back to various periods of the remote past, a historical stocktaking” (PTNC, pp. 346, 387). Why “unrelated?” It had lost what Gadamer later names Wirkungsgeschichte, a living relation, a motivating connection to the past that one inherits but also thinks with. In Barth’s account, the later nineteenth century left Hegel behind and listlessly lost itself in the details of a past in which it had no stake, an engagement without life, all the while faking a sense of academic self‐importance and self‐satisfaction. One might well wonder if Barth is also commenting indirectly on his own time. It is in this context, namely a strong contrast between the earlier and later nineteenth century, that Barth poses his now‐famous question: why did Hegel not become for Protestant thought what Aquinas became for Catholic? (PTNC, pp. 343, 349, 384, 390).7 How, then, does Barth read Hegel? Like many who have read only one or two works by Hegel, Barth bravely offers “the key to this labyrinth” (PTNC, pp. 349, 391). This is provided, as is the way with such keys, through use of terms alien to Hegel, namely by describing his thought as a “philosophy of self‐confidence.” Hegel’s confidence relates to the equivalence between his thinking and that which is thought by him, i.e., the complete presence in his thinking of that which is thought by him and the complete presence of that which is thought by him in his thinking. (PTNC, pp. 349, 391)

No sooner is the reader in a position to brandish this key than Barth offers “the secret of his secret”: The identity which exists between our thinking and what is thought, in so far as it is achieved in the act of thinking is, with Hegel, called spirit [Geist]. So Hegel’s brand of self‐ confidence is also confidence in spirit which for its own part is one with God and the same with God. (PTNC, pp. 350–351, 391) 7  One surely first needs to ask why Aquinas should have taken on the significance he did at that particular period in Catholic thought in the nineteenth century and not, say, at the time of the French Revolution. Hegel’s lack of stature in Protestantism is a mystery comparable to Aquinas’ towering stature in Catholicism.

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Barth suggests (although without supporting evidence) that Hegel is regarded by many as overcoming “the dualism of transcendental and historico‐empirical thought,” that is, “the eternal truth of reason and the accidental truth of history;” but we must acknowledge that Hegel “actually achieved it within his concept of reason…. Hegel believed in the possibility, legitimacy and sovereignty of pure thought” (PTNC, pp. 351, 392–393). Barth cites as proof of Hegel’s commitment to pure thought his dictum that “what is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational” (PTNC, pp. 351, 393). For Barth, Hegel’s attempt to specify a complex logical relation between thinking and being fails, because it amounts to a reduction of being to pure thinking. Barth builds his case against Hegel gradually, repeating the same theological concern, namely that things said about humanity are too closely associated with God: Hegel’s brand of self‐confidence is also confidence in mind which for its own part is one with God and the same with God. (PTNC, pp. 350–351, 391) The Kantian distinction between the knowledge of ideas and empirical knowledge on the one hand, and between theoretical and practical knowledge on the other, also fall away…. All knowledge comprehending and surpassing these distinctions, is knowledge of God. (PTNC, pp. 351, 393) Because to Hegel the rational was historical and the historical rational, he completely and finally disposed of the God who had somehow stood in opposition to reason, who was in some way an offence and a foolishness to reason. (PTNC, pp. 353, 395) It is titanism to the highest degree and at the same time to the highest degree of humility. The  self‐confidence it proclaims … is at once and as such confidence in God. (PTNC, pp. 353, 395)

For Hegel, as Barth interprets him, philosophy embraces everything including theology. Hegel is the voice of modern man who understands everything and who has considered all objections and has answered them in advance, for whom confidence in God is confidence in himself, and for whom to listen to Hegel’s God is to “hear the loveliest and deepest echo of his own voice” (PTNC, pp. 355, 397). Barth circles around this problem several times, but each time returns to two core issues: Hegel’s philosophy identifies human self‐knowledge with knowledge of God; it embraces everything, including all contradictions and all contrasts, and including God, within its scope. In the final dozen pages of his essay, Barth enumerates several respects in which Hegel redescribed the relationship between Enlightenment impulses and religious belief.8 Hegel’s philosophy of religion makes a threefold unwelcome demand (Zumutung) against the culture of his time and a second threefold demand against theology. Against the culture of his time, Hegel insists that its quite proper concern with truth requires (i) ­taking seriously knowledge of God as the highest knowledge (PTNC, pp. 369, 412); (ii)  treating knowledge as the outcome of a dynamic, historical process (PTNC, pp. 370, 413); (iii) acknowledging that any unity to truth is a unity of contradictions 8  It is worth noting that Hegel’s actual discussion of this, in a late section of the Phenomenology titled “The Enlightenment Struggle Against Superstition,” appears unknown to Barth.

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(PTNC, pp. 371–372, 413–414). Against theology, Hegel insists (i) that it face up to its responsibility to make truth claims, and not hide timidly behind claims about the unknowability of God (PTNC, pp. 372, 415); (ii) that such truth is a matter of real history (PTNC, pp. 372–373; 415–416); and (iii) that its truth claims are resistant to various reductions (to science, to materialism, etc.), and indeed makes contradictory claims to theirs; it should refuse attempts to subsume its discourse into those of other disciplines (PTNC, pp. 373, 416). Barth clearly means to praise these demands, and he commends Hegel’s serious and sincere wish to think theologically, but he tempers his enthusiasm immediately with three final warnings: (i) the resistance of theology to reduction includes a resistance to philosophy, including Hegel’s. This includes a resistance to accounts, like Hegel’s, which fail to do justice to sin and which fail to articulate the need for revelation precisely because of human sin (PTNC, pp. 375, 418); (ii) revelation properly confronts humanity as something external, not as the outworking of an already ­possessed inner logic or already available self‐knowledge (PTNC, pp. 375–376, 418– 419); and (iii) the identification of God with the dialectical method limits God (PTNC, pp. 376–377, 420).

A Reparative Reading of Barth on Hegel We can say immediately that if Hegel’s philosophy is the philosophy Barth says it is, then Barth’s objections are to the point. Or, rather, if Hegel’s philosophy is answering Barth’s questions, it must be resisted and strongly. We shall see that although Barth does in one case offer an errant interpretation of Hegel, the more serious matter (the last of the three final points about the identification of God with dialectical method) is a case of Hegel and Barth asking not just different questions but different kinds of question. Correcting Barth’s errors may thus shed some light on the distinction b ­ etween theology and philosophy. For reasons of space, but also to give priority to the most important issues, I propose to consider two errant claims: Hegel reduces everything to pure thought; Hegel’s claims to knowledge are excessively all embracing. Michael Welker offers a sympathetic and persuasive account of Barth’s approach to Hegel. He suggests that Barth’s method in general (although not exclusively) from 1919 onwards is to take a handful of underdetermined but pregnant phrases and then work out his thinking in relation to them. This is what we find Barth doing in relation to Hegel: a handful of phrases (gleaned from the index cards) which stimulate a series of reflections. Welker also sees some similarities between Hegel and Barth in the shape of their thinking: developing a deep discussion out of a tiny germ, a focus on contradictions, coming at things from multiple perspectives, etc.9 This may be so, but Barth simply did not read enough Hegel for one to be confident that he learned this from Hegel. (What Welker says of Barth and Hegel one could just as well say of Beethoven. It would be

9  Welker 1983, p. 316ff.

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whimsical to write an article “Barth and Beethoven” on this basis.) I propose to take a different and more philosophically focused approach: to suggest the different kinds of interest – the philosophical and the theological – that are at work here in relation to topics like truth, judgment and the relation of thinking and being. We rehearsed Barth’s claim that Hegel was alleged to overcome the dualism between the conditions for knowledge (one of which includes empirical knowledge) and two species of empirical knowledge, which is also the dualism between deductive (a priori) and inductive (a posteriori) reasoning, but in fact resolves this dualism within reason (PTNC, pp. 351, 393). This is muddled. We can begin to unmuddle it in three steps. 1. For Lessing (on whom Barth had in his volume written an essay), in “On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power,” eternal truths (plural) of reason denote conclusions established by deductive a priori reasoning (what he calls “demonstration”). Its products are necessarily true. Accidental truths of history, by contrast, denote things judged inductively, from evidence, such as reports of miracles in the Bible. Even if the products of such reasoning are true, this truth is a contingent affair. These are different species of judgment, and there is no bridge from one to the other. 2. By transcendental thought (not a Kantian term) Barth presumably means “pure thought,” that is, one of Kant’s conditions for knowing. (For Kant, transcendental idealism names the combination of pure concepts and sense impressions.) Pure thought, for Kant, is thought independent of experience. 3. For Hume, in his discussion “On Miracles,” the two sources of knowledge are (i) firsthand experience and (ii) secondhand testimony. These lie as distinct forms on a nonhyphenated continuum of credenda that are more and less probable. Charity compels an interpretation that attributes a view to Barth that would make sense. Perhaps he means something like this (my words, not Barth’s): Hegel, like Kant, inherits dualisms from precritical philosophy. These are dualisms between the world of thinking (bequeathed from rationalism) and the world of experience (bequeathed from empiricism). These are expressed in one reading of Lessing’s ugly broad ditch whose two banks are two kinds of judgment: a priori (truths of reason) and a posteriori (truths of history). Hegel is credited with having overcome this dualism but in fact his resolution is one sided, namely in his concept of reason, which in the end excludes experience: it is pure thought. This has the virtue of making sense and the vice of being untrue. Even the charitable interpreter must acknowledge that if this is his meaning then Barth has misunderstood Hegel. Barth appears to conflate issues in metaphysics, especially concerning the relation of thinking to being, with issues in political philosophy, especially concerning the question of how rational the state is (Hegel’s claim that “the real is the rational”). This can be seen from the quotations he selects, and his failure to distinguish between the texts from which such quotations are drawn. But whichever we consider, whether metaphysics or political philosophy, the student of Hegel will discover the latter’s explicit and carefully argued repudiation of any reduction of being to pure thought. We can briefly take these separately.

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There is a philosopher who might appear (at least to Hegel) to reduce being to thinking: Descartes. Descartes’ cogito is discussed with exemplary clarity in Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy.10 This is the famous cogito ergo sum; in it thinking and being are thus inseparably bound together…. Kant objected that being is not contained in thinking, and he is quite correct. (Hegel 2009, p. 110)

This is sufficient to call Barth’s claim into question, but it is worth noting what Hegel goes on to say: [Thinking and being] are, however, inseparable, that is, they constitute an identity. What is inseparable [from another] is nonetheless distinct [from it], although the identity is not endangered by this difference; the two are a unity. (LHP, p. 110)

Hegel thus makes three significant claims: 1. Being is distinct from thinking (as Kant rightly claims). 2. The two terms are however inseparable; they are an identity (as Descartes rightly asserts). 3. They are a unity. Barth adds to these, without support, an inferred fourth claim that he ascribes to Hegel. Being is therefore reduced to pure thinking. This fourth claim must be rejected, on the grounds that Hegel explicitly affirms that Kant is right to object (in the Transcendental Dialectic in the Critique of Pure Reason) that being is not contained in thinking. The relation of thinking to being is not one of reducing or containing, but of what Hegel calls a unity. The problem with Descartes, for Hegel, is not Descartes’ claim that thinking and being are a unity, but the lack of ­supporting reasoning: Descartes offered no proof of this thesis of the unity of thinking and being. Thinking and being are different determinations, so the proof of their identity must be expressly ­furnished, and this Descartes fails to do. (LHP, p. 112)

Everything clearly turns on the handling of terms like unity or identity, and the role of difference (clearly asserted by Hegel). There might well be a case to argue that Hegel’s “identity” turns out to be a reduction, but that case would need to be made. Barth does not make it: he asserts it.11

10  Barth was lecturing before the publication of Hoffmeister’s critical edition in the 1940s, so if he had wanted to consult Hegel’s lectures, he would have had to read either the first edition (1833–1836) or second edition (1840–1844) both edited by Michelet. Although these are not as good as the latest German critical edition by Pierre Garniron and Walter Jaeschke (Hegel 1986), they are adequate to discover Hegel’s view of Descartes. 11  There are monographs with detailed textual exegesis whose purpose is to prove the contrary (Adams 2013; Williams 2017).

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If we turn to the preface to Elements of the Philosophy of Right (the source of Hegel’s claim about the relation of the rational to the real), we might note that this construction comes in the context of a discussion of Plato’s Republic. Hegel argues that even Plato, who appears to locate the rational in an empty world beyond, in fact articulates the deepest impulses of the actual habits of Greek everyday life, namely the community’s ethics (Hegel 1991, p. 20). Hegel’s point is that social and political arrangements are rationally ordered and that our articulations of what is rationally ordered are possible because of this: our shapes of thinking are historical products of our habits of everyday action. We cannot separate our capacity to discern order from the ordered relations that give rise to that very thinking. Hegel is open to two kinds of objection. It might be objected that our capacity for rationality does not have its source in contingent social arrangements (this would, pace the anachronism, be the criticism of Kant, who locates this capacity at least partly in pure thought). It might alternatively be conceded that our capacity for rationality does have its source in social life, but one might insist that lived social life is damaged and disordered (the criticism of Adorno in Negative Dialectics of 1966). Whichever objection one advances, neither amounts to a reduction of thinking and experiencing to pure thought. Quite the reverse, in fact. If there were a reduction, the example of Plato (and the motivation for Adorno’s critique) shows that it would go the other way: thinking for Hegel (as explained in Philosophy of Right) is a product of everyday life, that is, of being. Barth is wrong to claim that Hegel reduces the dualism of thinking and being to pure thought. Barth’s most serious objection, and the one that obstructs a proper understanding of Hegel, is that Hegel claims too much knowledge. This criticism appears in an acute form when Barth considers (and seems to mock) Hegel’s account of absolute knowing and the absolute idea (PTNC, pp. 356, 398). Hegel’s most sustained account of absolute knowing is at the end of the Phenomenology of Spirit and his account of the absolute idea is at the end of Science of Logic. To understand them requires study – to the end of Hegel’s longest and most challenging published works. Barth names neither of them and as discussed earlier it is reasonable to suppose he did not read them. To compound the felony of mocking what one has not read, we might also note that “absolute” has a technical meaning in German idealism and that although Barth is able to define it, as “free from limitation” (PTNC, pp. 356, 398), he seems not fully to understand its function. Nonetheless, one should show proper respect for Barth’s sound theological instinct to mistrust all‐embracing claims on the grounds that they will embrace God. God is indeed not to be embraced. The question is whether Hegel makes all‐embracing claims and, if he does, whether they embrace God in the way Barth supposes. Barth’s charge is that Hegel has altogether too much to say about infinite judgments and about absolute this and absolute that. He is suspicious because something absolute (e.g. reason, mind, truth) “cannot be called into question by any contrast, since they unite all contrasts within themselves” (PTNC, pp. 356, 398). This is a recognizably Barthian concern: the essence of his theology is to call things into question, and any philosophical method that robs theologians of that capacity must be suspect.

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Does Hegel claim that if something is absolute it unites all contrasts within itself? Yes, that is a fair enough characterization of the account in Science of Logic. Does this mean that contrasts are abolished and no longer available for the kinds of critique that Barth intends to pursue? Not at all. This is a question about what it means to say of something that it is “absolute” or “infinite” in Hegel’s philosophy. Barth does (if unconsciously) grasp this function: Anyone who has studied the textbooks of the history of philosophy and then begins to read Hegel, finds himself continually nonplussed and bewildered by the – so unlike the textbooks – overlappings (Überkreuzungen) in the usage of the individual terms the master allowed ­himself, for all the consistency of what he wanted to say and did in fact say. (PTNC, pp. 357, 399)

The problem is that Barth thinks this overlapping is an intellectual failing in Hegel: it is evidence of “the notorious obscurity of Hegel’s writing,” which causes “considerable suffering in the reader” (PTNC, pp. 357, 399) But it is not a failing in Hegel or in any other philosopher who displays such reasoning. It is a basic feature of certain kinds of logic.12 The logic Hegel identifies concerns the way concepts, under certain circumstances, embrace contrasts, contradictions and so forth. Suppose I claim, “it is a hot day.” This can be contrasted with another: “but yesterday it was a cold day.” Hot and cold are contrasted. I can be more precise: “today it is 90° in the shade.” But suppose I say, “all cold and hot days can be measured on a temperature scale.” The contrast between cold and hot begins to change. If I say, “there is a scale of heat that embraces everything, cold and hot alike,” the concept of heat is, in Hegel’s terms, absolute: it embraces all contrasts within it. It makes no sense to say, “Oh no! Absolute heat abolishes all contrasts and renders them no longer available.” The fact that the concept of heat has an absolute form (“heat embraces everything cold and hot”) does not abolish its relative form (“today is hotter than yesterday”). Rather, the concept of heat has a different logical form in each case. There is no reason to be suspicious if one understands that this is a question of logic, not an ontological claim about some monstrously devouring heat. One can also point out, as Barth implies, that in such cases the concept “cold” overlaps the concept “hot,” that is, when the concept of heat is used in its absolute form. But such overlap is quite proper to certain concepts in philosophy. The good, true, and beautiful all overlap. Duty, happiness, calculation of consequences, virtues: all overlap. Hot overlaps cold (in the scale of heat); good overlaps evil (in the scale of goodness) and so on. This is not peculiar to Hegel (although Hegel is one of the first philosophers to notice this and write a logical study of it), but to philosophy more broadly.13 12  The charge of obscurity, and the contrast with the textbooks, is also hard to sustain: It so happens that Hegel gave lectures on the history of philosophy and, contrary to what Barth says about Hegel’s style, they are perfectly readable. The problems, from Barth’s point of view, occur in Hegel’s technical discussions. 13  This is the central argument of Collingwood’s Essay on Philosophical Method (1933): almost exactly contemporary with Barth’s lecture.

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Echoing claims made by Descartes in Meditations, Hegel distinguishes two senses of “infinite,” one that extends a finite series indefinitely (the “bad infinite”) and another which embraces contrasts and contradictions (the concept in its “absolute” form). We can infer from Barth’s suspicion that he is not familiar with distinctions of this kind and, a fortiori, unable to understand Hegel’s technical discussions of such distinctions, which unfold in the earlier sections of the LPR. Thus, when Hegel speaks (in the Phenomenology) of “spirit” as embracing individual and community or of “concept” as embracing subject and object, these are logical claims about the function of certain concepts (or the function of concepts under certain conditions), not ontological claims about monstrous entities such as spirit or concept. Barth indicts Hegel of titanism. It would be fairer (if less exciting) to observe that Hegel is interested in logic. Barth considers Hegel’s definition of speculative thinking as it appears in an early section of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: “dissolving something real and setting it in opposition to itself in such a way that the differences as determined by one’s thinking are set in opposition and the object is conceived as a unity of both.” Barth is appalled: There is no limitation or exaggeration, no folly or wickedness in the whole range of real human thinking … which would not be in principle included in the rational quality of the  concept which conceives (in sich begreifender Begriff) all reality within itself. (PTNC, pp. 359–360, 402)

This is serious case of Barth mistaking Hegel’s logical questions for his theological ones. Barth leaps to a conclusion about the overreach of Hegel’s concept. It would have been better, in the face of confusion, to pause before judging and to ask the philosopher for an example. Barth could have asked a theologian: Augustine. Actually, then, in these two contraries we call evil and good, the rule of the logicians fails to apply…. Nevertheless, while no one maintains that good and evil are not contraries, they can not only coexist, but the evil cannot exist at all without the good, or in a thing that is not a good. (Augustine 1955, 4.14)

This claim is a nice specimen of speculative thinking in Hegel’s sense. The object (the good) is conceived as a unity of both (good and evil). What were previously differences set in opposition (good and evil) are now “within” the good. But if one were to charge Augustine with the criticism that “no folly or wickedness is not included in the rational quality of the concept of the good,” Augustine would reply, “well of course: that’s my point. All that is good and evil is conceived within the concept of the good.” Hegel is no more guilty of titanism than is Augustine. The problem is that Hegel uses such verbs as “dissolving” and others like it, of similar grades of goriness. A certain curiosity as to how they function is required, rather than panic‐struck horror that the world is under attack from monstrous Hegelian acid. This all leads to Barth’s big finish. He mocks Hegel for conjuring “[A] key to open every lock, a lever to set every wheel working at once, an observation tower from which not only all the lands of the earth, but the third and seventh heavens, too, can be surveyed at a glance” (PTNC, pp. 363, 406).

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This is absurd. A logic that distinguishes a relative concept (hot or cold) from an absolute concept (heat as such) is not any kind of perspective on the empirical world. It is a way of making sense of certain conceptual functions. Hegel and Barth ask different kinds of questions: Hegel asks logical questions about the function of concepts when they embrace contrasts and contradictions; Barth asks questions about theological claims’ resistance to all‐embracing overviews. Hegel’s answers would be disastrous responses to Barth’s questions. But they are not. The interpretative problem arises because not just because Barth misinterprets Hegel, but because he is unfamiliar with the kinds of logical question that ­concern Hegel.

Barth on Hegel for Us Barth’s theological concerns can be disentangled from his misunderstandings of Hegel. This is worthwhile because some of Barth’s concerns surely remain ours, or ought to. Barth insists that there are three focal concepts used of God in theology that must not be dissolved (in any sense). God’s sovereignty must not be dissolved in such a way that God becomes imprisoned in human language. God’s freedom must not be dissolved in such a way that God’s actions become understood as necessary. God’s grace must not be dissolved in such a way that it is lost in a humanly specified logic. These are vital concerns, and Hegel is vulnerable to criticism here. In the LPR Hegel repeatedly draws attention to certain logical forms, and particularly to infinite functions (of the kind seen earlier in the concept of the scale of heat), and connects them with God’s infinity. The absoluteness of certain functions is associated with God’s absoluteness. To know God is, for Hegel, to know in ways governed by these logical forms. Such claims should not automatically command assent. We can repair Barth’s account by suggesting that he should be suspicious not of Hegel’s logic per se but of this practice of association. The shape of Hegel’s account is something like this (not his words): Concepts function relatively and absolutely. They function finitely and infinitely. We have to do, in such cases, with what is absolute and what is infinite. And this everyone calls God. Aquinas, in the so‐called “five ways,” rehearses technical discussions in Aristotle’s metaphysics (e.g. in relation to causation) and then appeals to common consent: what in metaphysics is called a first cause, everyone calls God. Hegel can be interpreted as doing something similar by rehearsing technical discussions in logic and then appealing to common consent: what in logic is a matter of knowing in an absolute way, everyone calls knowing God. Hegel’s identification of “all truth” (a logical matter indicating the embracing function of a concept) with God is arguably Johannine, and thus defensible at least in principle for a Christian thinker, but it is questionable nonetheless. It is not self‐evident that “all truth” in Hegel’s sense means the same as “all truth” in the prologue to John’s gospel. It is likewise not self‐evident that when Christians talk of “knowing God” we are speaking in ways in which concepts function absolutely. Perhaps we are; perhaps not. These are things about which one can argue, once one grasps the kind of logic which Hegel constructs. That is an argument of considerable sophistication, made possible in

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no small measure by the study of Hegel’s philosophy. Nonetheless Hegel’s proposals are hardly self‐evident. We can summarize. In one respect, Barth is wrong: Hegel did not reduce thinking and being to “pure thought.” Recent critical editions and commentaries quickly can correct that mistake. In another respect, the question of right and wrong does not arise: Hegel and Barth ask different questions. Hegel asks about the logical structure of the concept, given its absolute function: its capacity to operate as a scale in which all contrasts and oppositions are contained. Barth asks about God’s sovereignty and God’s freedom, and about the capacity of revelation to resist absorption into human conceptual schemes. Hegel offers defensible answers to his philosophical questions, and Barth offers defensible answers to his theological questions. They offer indefensible (and even absurd) answers to each other’s questions. It is therefore vital to distinguish them. It turns out one cannot do a little Hegeling. Either one goes all in or one utters absurdities. Yet this is surely not the end of the matter. Barth’s essay on Hegel might unsettle twenty‐first century theologians in two ways. The first concerns the place of philosophical study. The second concerns the charge that both Hegel (in the LPR) and Barth (in “Hegel”) bring against their theological contemporaries: that small‐minded obsession with details amounts to paralyzing intellectual stocktaking. On the place of philosophy, we can say that Barth struggled to make sense of Hegel’s logical proposals because he lacked a suitable intellectual formation and suitable expert commentaries of the kind that are readily available today. Disciplinary discreteness was already a problem in the 1920s, but it is even more serious today. What kind of philosophical formation is appropriate in the study of theology, if we are not simply to throw up our hands and say that systematic theologians should not write about Hegel? This is an urgent problem. Faculties of theology and of philosophy have moved gradually further away from each other ever since their institutional separation in the new university of Berlin in 1811; but it is a problem even within theology, where the disciplines of philosophical theology and systematic theology are also increasingly distant, with distinct journals, conferences and disciplinary tracks in graduate programs. To read Barth on Hegel is to be confronted with a challenge to our theological curricula. On the question of stocktaking, the dangers of specialization take on a particular complexion in theology. Theologians who try to recover the past as a living tradition are often dismissed for playing fast and loose with history (consider Radical Orthodoxy, for example, whose most vociferous critics are historians). This criticism is hardly baseless. On the other hand, those who painstakingly gather historical evidence and curate it in specialist monographs are often hesitant to connect the alien past with the concerns of the present. Historians who do advance theses with a sharp contemporary bite often accuse each other of polemicism (consider the rival projects of Eamon Duffy [e.g. 2001] and Diarmaid MacCulloch [e.g. 2001] in relation to the English Reformation): these debates tend to produce hardened positions along confessional lines. One would surely hesitate to prescribe a course of “mere stocktaking” as the cure. To read Barth on Hegel is, for the expert on Hegel, to experience an almost irresistible urge to dismiss the Swiss theologian for unsupported and insupportable claims about his German forebear. But Barth was trying to introduce a living history to his students, with all the reputational risks that carries. His reader is surely required to practice the virtues of patience and charity, and perhaps to take a few risks of his or her own, too.

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To read Barth on Hegel, then, is to encounter some living history. It is to hold up a mirror to our own times and our own problems. It is an unsettling affair. Surely Barth and Hegel would have it no other way. References Adams, N. (2013). The Eclipse of Grace: Divine and Human Action in Hegel. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell Publishing. Augustine (1955). Enchiridion. In: Augustine: Confessions and Enchiridion Vol. 8 of The Library of Christian Classics (trans and ed. A.C. Outler). Philadelphia: Westminster Press. Barth, K. (1952). Die protestantische Theologie im 19. Jahrhundert: Ihre Vorgeschichte und ihre Geschichte. Zürich: Evangelischer Verlag. Barth, K. (1959). From Rousseau to Ritschl, trans B. Cozens. London: SCM Press. Collingwood, R.G. (1933). An Essay on Philosophical Method. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Duffy, E. (2001). The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Fergusson, D. (ed.) (2010). Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth‐Century Theology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Hegel, G.W.F. (1925). Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion: Teil 1 Der Begriff der Religion nach den vorhandenen Manuskripten (ed. G. Lasson). Leipzig: Meiner. Hegel, G.W.F. (1929). Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion Teil 3,1. – Die absolute Religion (ed. G. Lasson). Leipzig: Meiner. Hegel, G.W.F. (1986). Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion (ed. W. Jaeschke). Hamburg: Meiner. Hegel, G.W.F. (1991). Cambridge texts in the history of political thought. In: Elements of the Philosophy of Right (ed. A.W. Wood), (trans H.B. Nisbet). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Further Reading Hegel, G.W.F. (1977). Phenomenology of Spirit (trans. A.V. Miller). Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Hegel, G.W.F. (2009). Medieval and Modern Philosophy, Vol. 3 of Lectures on the History of Philosophy 1825–26, rev. ed. (ed. R.F. Brown), (trans. R.F. Brown and J.M. Stewart). Oxford: Oxford University Press. MacCulloch, D. (2001). The Later Reformation in England, 1547–1603, British History in Perspective, 2e. New York: Palgrave. Pannenberg, W. (1980). Die Subjektivität Gottes und die Trinitätslehre. Ein Beitrag zur Beziehung zwischen Karl Barth und der Philosophie Hegels. In: Grundfragen systematischer Theologie II, 96ff. Göttingen: Wandenhoeck. Rasmussen, J.D.S., Wolfe, J., and Zachhuber, J. (eds.) (2017). The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth Century Christian Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Roberts, R.H. (1979). Barth’s doctrine of time its nature and implications. In: Karl Barth: Studies of his Theological Method (eds. S. Sykes and R.H. Roberts), 88–146. Oxford: Clarendon. Wagner, F. (1982). Religiöser Inhalt und logische Form. Zum Verhältnis von Religionsphilosophie und Wissenschaft der Logik am Beispiel der Trinitätslehre. In: Die Flucht in den Begriff: Materialien zu Hegels Religionsphilosophie (eds. F. Wagner and F.W. de Graf). Stuttgart: Klett‐Cotta. Welker, M. (1983). Barth und Hegel. Zur Erkenntnis eines methodischen Verfahrens bei Barth. Evangelische Theologie 43: 307–328. Williams, R.R. (2017). Hegel on the Proofs and the Personhood of God, Oxford: OUP: Studies in Hegel’s Logic and Philosophy of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 44

Barth and Schleiermacher Ryan Glomsrud

Introduction Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) casts a long shadow over modern theology. Just as it has been said that all philosophy is a mere footnote to Plato, it has been claimed that all modern theology is a footnote to Schleiermacher. We all stand inescapably in the shadow of this father of neo‐Protestantism, wrestling with his legacy, fighting against him, living out of his inheritance, consciously, or without full awareness. Karl Barth, a  similarly towering figure in the history of theology, acknowledged this to be Schleiermacher’s legacy. “All the official tendencies of the Christian present emanate from him like rays: church life, experiential piety, historicism, psychologism, and ­ethicism” (TS, p. xv). For Barth, this was both an historical fact as well as a problem. Although there were many areas where Barth could and did appreciate Schleiermacher, on the fundamental question of the primary object of theology, he regarded this giant as seriously misguided.

Historiography Many of Barth’s contemporaries, as well as later generations, have remained convinced that Barth and Schleiermacher represent two contrasting theological trajectories beginning from one of two irreconcilable starting points, either God and the Bible for Barth or man and his piety for Schleiermacher (e.g. Grenz and Olson 1992; Dorrien 2000; Galli 2017). A number of Schleiermacher’s twentieth‐century followers, although disagreeing with certain of Barth’s interpretive points, nonetheless believed

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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the same, only preferring their man and his methods to Barth’s as the best and perhaps only plausible approach to religion in the modern age (Gerrish 1993; Mariña 2005). Frequently, the debate over these men and their legacies has revolved around the question of which of the two theologians was the truest heir of John Calvin (Gerrish 1978, 1982; DeVries 1996; Torrance 1986). For example, some have worked to recover an “evangelical Schleiermacher for the Reformed tradition,” a move that has necessitated vigorous rejection of Barth’s interpretation of the Berlin theologian (DeVries 1996, ix). In another vein, almost 20 years after Barth’s death scholars proposed a new approach exploring the “similarities and differences of Schleiermacher’s and Barth’s theological concerns” for the sake of overcoming the impasse in late twentieth‐century theology.1 From the 1990s then, the goal has been to read these theologians together and in relation, if not always in agreement. In fact, numerous studies have been published since that highlight areas of continuity, even dependence, conscious or not, of Barth on the theological inheritance of Schleiermacher (Gockel 2006; McCormack 1995, 1999). If there is a theme in present‐day scholarship, continuity between these two influential theologians would seem to be it.

Barth’s Dialectical Engagement with Schleiermacher Barth’s theological relationship with Schleiermacher evolved over the course of his life (Lütz 1988; Osthövener 1996). There were a number of dynamic factors involved, including shifting contexts in which Barth read, spoke, and wrote about Schleiermacher, in public and private, to say nothing of Barth’s own theological maturation from an upstart young pastor‐professor to one of the most important and influential theologians in Europe. For this handbook, it will be helpful to trace the relationship diachronically, identifying the diverse array of sources available to students interested in exploring the topic, including articles first published in the journal Zwischen den Zeiten, then later released in book form at a pivotal point in Barth’s career. There are manuscripts from Barth’s own hand that were published posthumously, as well as bootlegged student transcripts of lectures that were only grudgingly approved by Barth after they had achieved wide circulation. Reference will also be made to Barth’s remarkably candid letter correspondence with friends that reveal what he may in fact have believed about Schleiermacher at the deepest level. Finally, some attention will be given to Barth’s theological library in terms of his acquisition of key primary and secondary sources related to Schleiermacher. The goal will be to provide a quick‐start historical guide for the curious reader. Before turning to chronological survey, however, I want to offer a summary of Barth’s perspective on Schleiermacher as well as a very modest suggestion for scholarship.

1  See Duke and Streetman 1988. The project was a cooperative effort of the Barth Society of North America and the Schleiermacher Consultation of the American Academy of Religion.

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In  order to accomplish the first task, I would like to borrow from Barth’s well‐known thesis in his classic 1922 lecture, “The Word of God and the Task of Man,” namely that as theologians “we ought to speak of God,” but because we are human, “we cannot speak of God” (Barth 1978, p. 186). Redirecting this dialectical logic, we have an analogy for Barth’s approach to Schleiermacher. To paraphrase Barth: As theologians of the Word, we ought to overcome Schleiermacher. We are modern, however, and so cannot. Accordingly, we are both obligated to transcend, and yet unable to do so entirely. “This is our perplexity,” Barth believed, which necessitates a dialectical Yes and No. Consideration of this dialectic may help students learn from complicated and often quite polemical secondary literature. For the purpose of this essay, I will emphasize Barth’s critical rejection of Schleiermacher on what for him was the crucial issue of the primary object of theology. This was at the heart of Barth’s No, which rarely wavered over the course of his life. Even in 1957, a few years before his retirement, Barth explained, “my position has not changed” despite the “softer tone” (Tice 1988, p. 49). This reminder of Barth’s dialectical approach is offered for the sake of an historiographical rebalancing. Whatever harmonies have been and may yet be discovered, students of theology should not forget that Barth regarded Schleiermacher’s theology as a ­suspicious enterprise. This is the “ought to overcome” in the dialectic that has been deemphasized in recent scholarship. But as Barth himself put it in 1922, “To leave nothing unsaid,” and “with all due respect to the genius shown” in his work, we should “not consider Schleiermacher a good teacher in the realm of theology” (Barth 1978, p. 195).

Before the Wars: The Nineteenth‐Century Inheritance, 1907–1915 Barth’s earliest reception of Schleiermacher occurred as a student and then in the pastorate. As is well known, Barth was raised in Swiss pietism. His father, Fritz, was a “positive” theologian and seminary professor who wanted for his son a reliably conservative education of the sort associated with the biblical scholar from Tübingen, Adolf Schlatter (1852–1938), among others. Initially, Schleiermacher represented a figure out of bounds, even if his influence would have been impossible to avoid as Barth followed the typical path of a Swiss student with semesters at Bern, Berlin, Tübingen, and Marburg. Even though many presuppose a certain antagonism between Schleiermacher and “positive” theology, pietism, and biblicism, it should be noted that Barth later ­dismissed this notion on historical as well as theological grounds (see Busch 2004). Barth participated in his very first seminar on Schleiermacher in Bern in 1907. By his own admission he got little out of it because he was distracted by extracurricular activities in his fraternity (Tice 1988, p. 48). Gradually, however, autobiographical reflections report that he “began to diverge noticeably from his father’s ‘positive’ line” (Busch 1976, p. 40). In fact, Barth explained, “Alongside Kant, Schleiermacher took a clearer place in my thought than before” (Busch 1976, p. 40). This was the basic inheritance available to generations of students, theologians, and pastors. Barth’s experience was commonplace: “My first attempt to theologize was with Kant. I was a real Kantian! But I couldn’t see a way from Kant to theology. I didn’t like his theory of religion. Schleiermacher, whom I found on my own, became the way

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out – or in!” (Tice 1988, p. 45). Specifically, Schleiermacher “offered a more complete statement of what humanity is, which had a kind of religious a priori in it. I took Schleiermacher to myself, and he became my man” (Tice 1988, p. 45). And so, Barth outgrew his family’s pietism in some ways, much like Schleiermacher himself had sought to transcend his own Moravian roots. Fritz Barth did encourage his son to study with Schlatter in Tübingen, but Barth wanted to be in Marburg with a leading representative of the Schleiermacherian tradition, Wilhelm Herrmann (1846–1922). If his library is any indication, Barth’s serious, lifelong engagement with Schleiermacher cannot be questioned. He began acquiring relevant texts as a student. In Berlin, he had purchased Rudolf Otto’s brand new 1906 edition of Schleiermacher’s Über die Religion, or Speeches to Religion’s Cultured Despisers. In Marburg, he also acquired a new edition of Schleiermacher’s famous letter correspondence with Dr. Friedrich Lücke (Schleiermacher 1908), along with two other volumes from the critical Philosophische Bibliothek series, including the just‐released 1908 edition of the Weihnachtsfeier (or Christmas Eve dialogue) and the 1902 volume of Schleiermacher’s Monologen. Barth first read the Glaubenslehre (The Christian Faith) in 1908, the same year he heard Hermann lecture on dogmatics in Marburg (Tice 1988, p. 48). Herrmann represented a strand of the liberal school of Albrecht Ritschl. Different from that of Ernst Troeltsch, another Ritschlian, Herrmann developed a theology of religious experience that, according to scholars, “owed a great deal to the early Schleiermacher of the Speeches” (McCormack 1995, pp. 50, 52 n. 38). In fact, Barth recalled a moment when Herrmann informed students that the Speeches were “the most important piece of writing to have appeared before the public since the closing of the canon of the New Testament” (Busch 1976, p. 44). And so, Barth’s reception of Schleiermacher during these early student years, as well as immediately following his graduation when he worked as an editorial assistant to Martin Rade for the journal Die christliche Welt, was largely that of the Herrmannian variety that has been dubbed “a kind of existentialized Schleiermacherianism” (McCormack 1995, p. 52). There were other interpretations of Schleiermacher than Herrmann’s, as well as critics, and Barth acquired relevant secondary literature of these kinds as well.2 Even so, by the end of his time in Marburg, Barth praised Schleiermacher as one “who has taught us, or should teach us, on the soil of modern thought to acquire the genuine heritage of the Reformation, in order to possess it” (Gockel 2006, p. 5; quoting GA 22, p. 202).

2  Martin Rade’s edited volume, Die Leitsätze der ersten und zweiten Auflage von Schleiermachers Glaubenslehre (Tübingen and Leipzig, 1904) was in Barth’s library, and the editor and mentor also gave Barth a collection of Ernst Troeltsch’s essays on Schleiermacher in Troeltsch 1910. Furthermore, Barth seems not to have returned Rade’s personal copy of a book by Samuel Eck, Über die Herkunft des Individualitätsgedankens bei Schleiermacher (Giessen, 1908). Other notable works on Schleiermacher in Barth’s library – and which he cited – included Albrecht Ritschl, Schleiermachers Reden über die Religion und ihre Nachwirkungen auf die evangelische Kirche Deutschlands (Bonn, 1874), acquired by Barth in 1908; Ferdinand Kattenbusch’s Von Schleiermacher zu Ritschl (Giessen, 1903), acquired in 1909.

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Declarations of War, 1915–1921 The influence of Schleiermacher and Herrmann remained during Barth’s first two pastorates in Geneva (1909–1911) and Safenwil (1912–1921). In a sermon from 1913, for example, Barth “called Schleiermacher ‘one of the deepest Christian thinkers of all times, full of devotion to and understanding of Jesus’” (GA 8, p. 26; Gockel 2006, p. 3). Later, he acknowledged that there were very few of his generation who refused to bow the knee to “Baal” (TS, p. xv). After the outbreak of the war, however, and just before he began reading Paul’s letter to the Romans, Barth and his friend and colleague in the ministry, Eduard Thurneysen (1888–1974), began to question their indebtedness to nineteenth‐century theology. Barth recalled, “It was Thurneysen who once whispered the key phrase to me, half aloud, when we were alone together: what we needed for preaching, instruction, and pastoral care was a ‘wholly other’ theological foundation. It seemed impossible to proceed any further on the basis of Schleiermacher” (TS, p. 264). Barth famously recalled this new basis years later in 1957. By 1916 a number of us of the younger theological generation had hesitantly set out to introduce a theology better than that of the nineteenth century and of the turn of the century – better in the sense that in it, God, in his unique position over against man, and especially religious man, might be clearly given the honour we found him to have in the Bible (Barth 1971, p. 97).

But it has also been suggested, by Barth himself in fact, that ethical issues played a role in his turn from Schleiermacher’s nineteenth‐century inheritance. Barth expressed dismay when his former professors such as Herrmann supported the Kaiser’s war policy (see Rupp 1977, p. 11; Nicolai 1919, pp. 7–10; HG, p. 14). Disillusioned with their political commitments, as the simplistic version of the story goes, Barth turned away from Protestant liberalism to embark on his own journey of theological discovery. Just as Barth had outgrown his pietism during student years, he outgrew his liberalism in the early years of the war. The story is much more complicated than that, of course, in terms of his relationship to both conservative and liberal theology during the war years. In fact, one should be cautioned against emphasizing the war crisis in evaluating Barth’s theological commitments and relationships, especially to Schleiermacher and Herrmann. It is sometimes forgotten, for example, that conservatives such as Adolf Schlatter also lent their support to the same public proclamation on Germany’s behalf, seemingly without drawing Barth’s ire.3 Regardless of the impact of the war and German nationalism on Barth’s relationship to Schleiermacher, it should also be noted that Barth later indicated that it was not Schleiermacher himself against whom he was reacting, but the circle surrounding the 3  In fact, at the time of Barth’s disillusionment with Herrmann, he overcame his earlier disinterest in Schlatter and not only engaged but also appreciated the biblical scholar for his work on Romans, despite Schlatter’s having signed the “Appeal to the World of Culture” document.

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journal Die christliche Welt, with which he was involved. As Barth stated the matter, “It was their Schleiermacher I was opposing. At that time I was not conscious of fighting Schleiermacher himself ” (Tice 1988, p. 46).4

“A Mobile War”: Professor at Göttingen, Münster, and Bonn Göttingen, 1921–1925 Barth’s star began to rise as he declared this new theology of the “Godness of God” on the circuit of conferences variously organized by religious socialist groups, student movements, and the circle around Die christliche Welt. In January 1921, even without a doctoral degree, he was offered a teaching position at the University of Göttingen. From May 1921, letter correspondence with Thurneysen already indicated that he “planned to declare war on this church father and religious virtuoso” (See “Editor’s Preface,” in TS, p. ix). Barth balanced his thirst for polemics, however, with his need for continuing education and so offered a series of historical lectures, including a semester on the ­theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher during the winter of 1923–1924. He prepared in earnest, even suggesting later that this was his “first real study” of Schleiermacher (Tice 1988, p. 50). His library grew exponentially as a result and came to include the essential Schleiermacher texts. In 1923, for example, he acquired the just‐released second edition of Wilhelm Dilthey’s classic biography (Dilthey 1922). He also secured Schleiermacher’s Brief Outline of Theology, which he duly read, underlined, annotated, and then used extensively in the lectures (Schleiermacher 1910, 2011). Barth had been classmates with the editor, Heinrich Scholz, under Harnack in Berlin, and came to regard him as a capable interpreter of Schleiermacher (See TS, 262; Tice 1988, p. 48.). But the university lectures themselves were never intended nor revised by Barth for publication, only appearing posthumously in Barth 1978 (TS). For that reason, detailed analysis will be omitted here. I pause merely to comment on Barth’s method, course goals, and the general impressions he had of Schleiermacher at the time. In this first full‐scale engagement with Schleiermacher as a teacher, Barth employed a text‐based approach offering rigorous summaries and analysis of Schleiermacher’s sermons, the Brief Outline of Theology (or Encyclopedia in the English translation), hermeneutical writings, the Christian Faith, and finally, the Speeches (focusing on the first, 1799, edition). His expositions were placed under two headings, Schleiermacher as Preacher and Scholar. Looking back, Barth felt that he had made a notable scholarly contribution to have spent the time he did on the sermons. Incidentally, some of the themes he discovered in this material contributed to his interpretive disagreements with Emil Brunner.

4  In fact, Barth suggested that he had hoped at the time that the young Schleiermacher would certainly have agreed with him in his commentary on Romans (Tice 1988, p. 47).

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The dialectical perspective was at work from the beginning, as evidenced in his opening announcement to students. The aim of my lectures is not to make you hard on the universally venerated Schleiermacher but to see and know and learn to understand him with you, not to induce the arrogant view that you can become a match for him but to handle him modestly, not to condemn him but to comprehend him as he was and obviously had to be (TS, p. xvi).

Aside from the challenge of covering all the material, Barth was certain that he had “the man in his gunsights” (Barth 1964, p. 158). And yet, he worked to be even handed and appreciative in this academic context. He described the “temperature” of the classroom as rising and falling, “inclined at one time to an hour of peaceful communication but at still another to a malicious interest in the defects at the center” of Schleiermacher’s theology (Barth 1964, p. 159). Barth did not “conceal the fact” from students that he viewed “with mistrust Schleiermacher and all that theology essentially became under his influence” (TS, p. xv). But he was even more critical in his letter correspondence, such as in late December 1923 when he wrote to Thurneysen, “on the whole I see what is going on” here in Schleiermacher, “things are unfortunately even worse than I had expected, at least so far as the research up to this point has indicated” (Barth 1964, p. 158). His outlook had not improved by New Year when he confided that Schleiermacher’s theology was “just one gigantic swindle” and that “the way taken by this undoubtedly very wise and honest religious man is a blind alley” (Barth 1964, p. 168). He acknowledged Schleiermacher’s genius, both in public and private, but then explained in letters that after lifting one’s hat to the “competence” of the man, one would still like to “take him by the throat!” (Barth 1964, p. 158). This same tension between what Barth affirmed of Schleiermacher in public and would write about him in letters continued. In early 1925, for example, Barth’s labors bore fruit in an article for Zwischen den Zeiten on Schleiermacher’s Christmas Eve dialogue (Barth 1925, 1962). The essay itself, Barth’s first publication dealing exclusively with Schleiermacher, was an even‐handed summary (TS, p. 267). His criticisms were remarkably restrained, especially when one considers that he had confessed in a letter his view that the dialogue was “sheer nonsense beyond compare” (Barth 1964, p. 159). The conclusion at semester’s end was that the church needed “a theological revolution, a basic No to the whole of Schleiermacher’s doctrine of religion and Christianity” (TS, pp. 259–260). And yet, Barth reminded his students that although it may be “easy to say No in word,” it is not always so easy to say no in “deed,” nor indeed to offer a “positive counterachievement” (TS, p. 260). The challenge of how to move forward with a genuinely postliberal theology should not be underestimated. In the face of the question of how to begin again, Barth penciled into his lecture manuscript a closing line: “There is no occasion for triumphant superiority at this tomb, but there is occasion for fear and trembling at the seriousness of the moment and in face of our own inadequacy” (TS, p. 260). One can imagine that after the vehemence of Barth’s No, the timidity of his Yes had much to do with his own uncertainty about how to proceed in theology. Frequently, the pages of Zwischen den Zeiten became the venue for such debate over both the legacy of the nineteenth century as well as constructive possibilities for the future.

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Just prior to Barth’s 1923–1924 lectures, for example, Emil Brunner (1889–1966), at the time a friend and fellow minister, circulated in manuscript form a scathing attack on Schleiermacher. Published in Tübingen as Mysticism and the Word in 1924, Brunner argued that Schleiermacher had, according to one scholar, “surrendered the Bible and the Reformation to a sub‐Christian mystical philosophy” (Gerrish 1978, p. 1). Barth read the manuscript in 1923 and even referred to it cautiously in his opening lecture on Schleiermacher that winter. He distinguished his own educational goals from Brunner’s insistence on direct polemic, explaining, “My aim in these lectures, although I agree, so far as I can see, with Brunner’s criticism, is to know and to make known, and thus, if you will, to provide material for an understanding of Brunner’s book” (TS, p. xvii). Years later, Barth and Brunner would of course square off on other issues, but in the mid to late 1920s Brunner became a key contributor to the upstart journal, Zwischen den Zeiten, which provided a venue for Barth’s 1924 review, “Brunner’s Schleiermacher Book,” where he quibbled with his erstwhile colleague on a number of points (GA 19, pp. 401–425). Over time, Barth disapproved of Brunner’s totalizing rejection of Schleiermacher from both an earthly as well as a heavenly perspective. Barth thought this a step too far and his own eschatology would not allow it. Whatever temporal rejection or No must be issued, Barth insisted on a final divine Yes to humanity in Jesus Christ. As such, an earthly No could be only provisional, and Barth fully expected to see Schleiermacher in heaven (Tice 1988, p. 50).

Münster, 1925–1930 Barth arrived in Münster in the fall of 1925, a city he dubbed a “nest of priests and rebaptizers” (Busch 1976, p. 164). According to John Webster, during these years from 1925 to 1930 Barth “consolidated the theological positions forged in the early part of the decade” (Webster 2000, p. 4). His first order of business was to complete the lecture cycle he had begun in Göttingen on dogmatics. In the winter of 1926 he experienced a difficult period of personal depression and hoped to remain “very, very quiet” about “the Pope, Calvin, and Schleiermacher” (Busch 1976, p. 167). In the summer semester of 1926, however, he reengaged Schleiermacher and his legacy in a series of lectures under the title “History of Protestant Thought since Schleiermacher.” As biographer Eberhard Busch has noted, this very choice of topics “proved that Barth was obviously concerned to give an explicit account of himself in terms of the epoch from which he sought to make a critical departure in his theology” (Webster 2000, p. 169). Looking to Barth’s letter correspondence once again reveals the Yes and No dynamic, as well as a distinction between privately shared perspectives and the general stance he took publicly in academic settings. In a letter to Wolfgang Trillhaas, for example, Barth disclosed, “For myself … I still think Schleiermacher is just terrible, but I will try to tell the students about it as little as possible and make visible … the most positive interpretation” (Gockel 2006, p. 7). This is indeed what he accomplished. The lectures conveyed “not only the suspicious nature of the whole enterprise [of nineteenth‐century theology], but also the good points of each particular individual or at least,” he added, “the forgiveness of sins which is promised to one and all” (Busch 1976, p. 169). He gave these lectures again in 1929–1930 at the very end of his time in Münster.

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The following summer semester of 1927, he held a seminar on Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre, or Christian Faith, with similar (and dialectical) intentions to “communicate the mystery of wickedness in these really thought‐worthy runes.” During 1927 he also published some of the material from the historical lectures as two separate essays, “Ludwig Feuerbach” and “Schleiermacher,” in Zwischen den Zeiten. On holiday after the semester, Barth then delivered a conference lecture for the Reformed Alliance in Elberfeld. Given the relatively conservative audience, Barth was expected to “kill off wicked old Schleiermacher,” which he did quickly. But the emphasis of this lecture was on a “loving demonstration that revivalist theology and the biblicists” of the nineteenth century were, despite all appearances, “fundamentally in heart and soul one with Schleiermacher and his adherents” with respect to their understanding of the Word of God (TC, p. 205; Busch 1976, pp. 178–179). The lecture, “The Word in Theology from Schleiermacher to Ritschl,” revised material from the historical lectures was subsequently published in Zwischen den Zeiten in 1928. All three of these essays from the journal, on Feuerbach, Schleiermacher, and the Word in theology, then appeared finally in Barth’s 1928 book, Die Theologie und die Kirche (Theology and the Church [TC pp. 159–199, 200–216, 217–237]). Readers may find in the essays from Theology and the Church not only the product of Barth’s efforts thus far to read and understand Schleiermacher but also material that he intended for a broader public audience.5 By this time, his procedures and essential criticisms of Schleiermacher were well established. When Barth dealt with ­ Schleiermacher specifically, didactic exposition usually took precedence; when he referred to Schleiermacher’s legacy and the theology of the nineteenth century more generally, his trenchant criticisms of this founder came to the fore. The context is worth noting as well. From 1927, the contributors to Zwischen den Zeiten such as Barth, Bultmann, and Gogarten were intensely debating theological anthropology, and Barth both defended himself from their constructive criticisms and warned these allies that their philosophical preoccupation amounted to a return to Schleiermacher and the “fleshpots of Egypt” (Barth and Bultmannn 1981, p. 49). Methodologically, the historical lectures on which the 1928 chapters were based replaced the text‐based structure from Göttingen with a more thematic approach. As such, Barth identified five themes in his “Schleiermacher” chapter: (i) “The Word and Religion”; (ii) “The Principle of the Centre”; (iii) “Religion as Life”; (iv) “The Historical Element in Religion”; and (v) “The Mystical and Cultural.” For this study, I will limit our focus to the first section. On Barth’s reading, theology for Schleiermacher does not deal with “the truth of a revelation which lies basically outside of the religious affection” (TC, p. 162). Presupposing this, Barth explained §30 of The Christian Faith where Schleiermacher classified theological statements according to three kinds: (i) descriptions of human states; (ii) conceptions of divine attributes and modes of action; (iii) utterances regarding the constitution of the world (TC, p. 163). Barth here referred to Schleiermacher’s

5  Although the 1923–1924 lectures from Göttingen and the 1932–1933 Bonn lectures may provide insight into Barth’s process as a researcher and teacher, the only author-sanctioned engagement with Schleiermacher was the 1926 material twice revised for publication in Zwischen den Zeiten and then Theology and Church.

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correspondence with Dr. Lücke where he claimed that one might reasonably consider a theology restricted entirely to the first kind of statements that would not “deal with anything other than the human state of mind” (thus Schleiermacher’s rather astonishing statement in the Speeches that whether one has a religion with or without God really depends “on the direction of the imagination”) (TC, pp. 164, 165; Schleiermacher 1906, p. 129). Even theological preaching and teaching about human states, however, still remain mere “external” words, and to be overattached to these derivations from the original inner experience is to cling to the “dead letter” (TC, p. 162).6 According to Barth, Schleiermacher’s “pulpit polemic was never more vigorous than when he was bringing this charge” (TC, p. 162). In fact, Barth noted Schleiermacher’s belief that the biblical authors themselves were “as far away as possible from any trust in the letter” (TC, p. 162). Barth’s critique of Schleiermacher on the object of theology and on the nature of theological discourse then could be stated as an either/or question: Do we already know ourselves and God salvifically from a truth that lies within us? Or do we need to be encountered by God and a truth about salvation from outside of us? “Theology must give its decision here,” Barth insisted (TC, p. 201). And his consistent judgment on the nineteenth century was that, “on the whole,” Schleiermacher and those under his influence ascribed “to man, more or less confidently, power over God – or it is better to say, over a god. Power over a “god within man” (TC, p. 202; cf. pp. 217–237). Historically, Schleiermacher’s enthusiasm (or god‐within‐ism) as well as his polemic of spirit over against the “dead letter” would seem to share much in common with the Radical Reformation of the sixteenth century, or what Hans‐Jürgen Goertz labels “Augustinian spiritualism,” a point that is insufficiently recognized in scholarship seeking to promote Schleiermacher’s Reformed identity (Goertz 1996, p. 51). Barth himself seemed to have anticipated this discussion when he described both “Awakening” theology and Schleiermacher on the problem of the Word of God, arguing that their enthusiasm (Barth described it as divine inspiration within, or literally “divine frenzy,” mania), was decidedly “not a renewal of the Reformation” (TC, pp. 205, 206). As such, it may be that Schleiermacher’s connection to Calvin (or Barth’s, for that matter) can be secured only by transforming the Genevan Reformer’s theology of revelation and Scripture into something it was not, namely a radical ­theology of the spirit. Barth’s own approach by 1927 was quite different. Harkening back to the Reformation and Reformed orthodoxy, faith, for Barth, was a point of mediation (citing I.A. Dorner), a subjective principle of knowing, not the foundation or basis of truth, as in Schleiermacher (TC, p. 215). The Word of God, for Barth, was the objective principle of knowing, grounded upon God himself, of course, who is the principium essendi or “essential foundation” of theology.

6  According to Barth’s interpretation of Schleiermacher, “the ‘placid silence’ of the ‘holy virgins’” will one day replace all “speaking on religion”; in the meantime, poetical words and music lie “closest to reality” (TC, p. 161).

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Bonn, 1930–1935 By the time of his arrival in Bonn, Barth enjoyed the “personal self‐assurance,” as Webster describes it, of being the “leading Protestant thinker in Germany” (Webster 2000, p. 5). He was engaged with ethics, Anselm, and the New Testament during these years, until the third semester (Summer 1931) when he returned to Schleiermacher with a reading seminar on the Introduction to the Glaubenslehre (Tice 1988, p. 49). Then, from winter 1932–1933 through summer 1933, just as Adolf Hitler was coming to power in Germany, Barth lectured on the “Theology of the Nineteenth Century” over the course of two semesters. It is worth noting that Barth never intended this material for publication and only grudgingly wrote a foreword in 1946 well after a complicated history of partial editions and translations forced him to acknowledge the text in some way.7 Although there was remarkable continuity of content, the organization of the material with respect to Schleiermacher was quite different, and the dialectic of Yes and No, or love and hate, as Barth described it, began to tip toward affirmation whenever and wherever Barth was able. “Anyone who has never loved here,” he encouraged students, “and is not in a position to love again and again, may not hate here either” (PTNC, p. 413). He exhorted students to “show a little more love toward those who have gone before us,” Schleiermacher especially (PTNC, p. xii). After a long introduction discussing Schleiermacher’s legacy and reputation as a nineteenth‐century “church father,” Barth organized the presentation in five parts. The first section presented Schleiermacher as a Christian theologian, where Barth acknowledged that we “can and must” take the Christian character of Schleiermacher’s theology “upon trust” (PTNC, p. 419). The eschatological perspective that led Barth to distinguish himself from Brunner’s nondialectical No was enhanced with four considerations or arguments on Schleiermacher’s behalf. In relation to his own development, Barth wondered if what Schleiermacher “wanted to say about the relation of God and man could possibly be said also [and more helpfully] in the form of Christology” (PTNC, p. 417). This aside, Barth warned that “Jesus of Nazareth fits desperately badly into this theology of the historical ‘composite life’ of humanity, a ‘composite life’ which is really after all fundamentally self‐sufficient” (PTNC, p. 418). The second section introduced Schleiermacher as a modern theologian who desired above all a “cultural theology,” an “exaltation of life” (PTNC, pp. 419–425; cf. TC, pp. 176–182). Thirdly, Schleiermacher was described as an apologist of the “eternal ­covenant between the living faith and scientific research” (PTNC, p. 426). In the fourth section, Barth presented Schleiermacher as a Pietist who always described himself, ­correctly in Barth’s estimation, as a “Moravian of a higher order” concerned with “peace” and church unity (PTNC, pp. 437f.). Acknowledging this “brethren” background (along with Enlightenment and Romantic influences), Barth paid tribute 7  Die protestantische Theologie im 19. Jahrhundert (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 1952); Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century (English translation), trans. Brian Cozens and John Bowden (London: SCM Press, 2001). In his later foreword, Barth noted the text’s outdatedness, along with various “omissions,” “gaps,” and “accents” that he would have placed differently (p. xi).

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to Schleiermacher’s efforts to organize the ecumenical merger of Reformed and Lutheran confessions in the Prussian Union (PTNC, pp. 437–438). Further, Barth rehearsed material from his earlier lectures on the fact that the Word of God had for Schleiermacher “only a position of secondary importance” in relation to piety, which was primary (PTNC, p. 440). And finally, in the fifth section Barth explored the two motifs of experience and history. With this conclusion, Barth returned to familiar terrain. He explained, “The great formal principle of Schleiermacher’s theology is at the same time its material principle. Christian pious self‐awareness contemplates and describes itself: that is in principle the be‐all and end‐all of his theology” (PTNC, p. 443). After further explanation of this “pious self‐awareness,” Barth charged that, “in the very places where the theology of the Reformation had said ‘the Gospel’ or ‘the Word of God’ or ‘Christ’ Schleiermacher, 300 years after the Reformation, now says, religion or piety” (PTNC, p. 444). He added – with special emphasis in his manuscript – a significant criticism. “The Word is not so assured here in its independence in respect to faith as should be the case if this theology of faith were a true theology of the Holy Spirit” (PTNC, 457). In sum, “In a proper theology of the Holy Spirit there could be no question of dissolving the Word,” although here, in Schleiermacher, there is precisely “a question of such a dissolution” (PTNC, p. 457). And yet, comments suggestive of his own developing perspective reveal Barth’s acknowledgement that a proper theology must speak of “God and man.” Where the Reformers clearly established the relationship between these two, Barth explained that the church father of the nineteenth century “reversed the order” (PTNC, p. 445). On this point, and as evidence of his now fully dialectical affirmation of Schleiermacher, Barth refrained from criticism. “We must not condemn him out of hand for this,” he continued (PTNC, p. 445). “A genuine, proper theology could be built up from such a starting‐point”(PTNC, p. 445). This was not Barth’s starting point, however, and never would be. In fact, wherever he identified further differences between Schleiermacher and the Reformation, he clearly sided with the latter.

Peacetime Reflections: Basel, 1957–1968 In the last decade of his life, Barth had several opportunities to reflect on his lifelong engagement with Schleiermacher (e.g. Barth 1971). In 1960, for example, an American student, Terrence N. Tice, had opportunity to talk with Barth about his doctoral work on Schleiermacher. One conversation, taken down “practically verbatim” according to Tice, provides fascinating autobiographical reflections from Barth as well as the interviewers own summary of Barth’s interpretation of Schleiermacher (1988). In his ­epilogue to the published version of the interview, Tice declares it his belief that Barth’s critique of Schleiermacher was “seriously mistaken at every juncture” (Tice 1988, p. 55). But pressing further, he suggests that if Barth’s misreadings were corrected, that Barth in fact would turn out to be Schleiermacher’s “truest heir” in modern theology (Tice 1988, p. 55). This last suggestion, when Tice offered it in 1960, elicited a laugh from Barth (Tice 1988, p. 55).

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Whether Barth was wrong about Schleiermacher depends on many things, including how one interprets a series of questions that Barth posed in his final autobiographical engagement with Schleiermacher in 1968. This last essay, “Concluding Unscientific Postscript on Schleiermacher,” was written as an afterward to a collection of excerpts from Schleiermacher’s chief writings (TS, pp. 261–279). While rehearsing the story of his lifelong engagement with the father of neo‐Protestantism, Barth reiterated many familiar points of criticism, including the charge that Schleiermacher turned theology into anthropology and made the “pious person into the criterion and the content of his theology” (TS, p. 271). He then paused, “Until better instructed, I can see no way from Schleiermacher” to the biblical authors who “narrate the story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ” (TS, pp. 271–272). “For the present I can see nothing here but a choice. And for me there can be no question as to how that choice is to be made” (TS, p. 272). But the aging Barth continued with modesty, confirming that even though he was certain of his own course and his own point of view, he was perhaps “not so certain” that his “Yes necessarily implies a ‘No’ to Schleiermacher’s point of view” (TS, p. 275). Barth’s final engagement with Schleiermacher in the postscript concluded with five questions, which are paraphrased here not as queries but as a series of doubts – however humbly raised – that Barth had about Schleiermacher’s ultimately “suspicious enterprise.” 1. Barth suspected that Schleiermacher was a philosopher first and a theologian second; further, Schleiermacher’s philosophy was essential, whereas his religion was adoptive and could have taken any form, though for historical‐cultural reasons happened to be Christian (TS, p. 275). 2. Barth suspected that for Schleiermacher there was an overriding consciousness of the essential unity of all being, that is, pantheism, and no indispensable Other in a meaningful sense. 3. Barth suspected that for Schleiermacher “God” is first a “general reality whose nature and meaning have already been derived and established in advance,” and only secondarily rendered concrete and particular (TS, p. 276). 4. Barth suspected that the spirit which moves persons was not the Holy Spirit but merely “an effective spiritual power” that “basically remains diffuse” (TS, p. 276). 5. Finally, Barth acknowledged that his suspicions about Schleiermacher may have been stated too one‐sidedly and from his own theological perspective, such that it would be difficult for Schleiermacher to provide satisfactory answers to his questions (TS, p. 277). Barth insisted that he would “like to have misunderstood” Schleiermacher on these points and that he was willing to learn more, having “not finished with Schleiermacher yet” (TS, p. 277). Perhaps, he even suggested, these questions were posed too one‐sidedly, too much from his own perspective (TS, p. 277). “The only certain consolation” that remained was Barth’s rejoicing that he would see Schleiermacher in the kingdom of heaven where they could discuss these questions extensively (TS, p. 277).

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Conclusion: The Humanity of God in Karl Barth We have seen that as a student and young pastor Barth had embraced Schleiermacher’s theology. He then grew wary, disillusioned with the followers of Schleiermacher in his own day, before finally declaring a mobile war on the father of neo‐Protestantism. By his own later estimation in 1956, his critique of Schleiermacher and the nineteenth century in the 1920s had been “certainly right!” (HG, p. 41). “The Ship” had been “threatening to run aground; the moment was at hand to turn the rudder an angle of exactly 180 degrees” (HG, p. 41). And again, “there could never be a question of denying or reversing that change” (HG, p. 41). What then lay behind the Yes as well as the softer tone of the later years? A number of possibilities can be listed in conclusion. (i) Barth’s approach to Schleiermacher in the classroom was explicitly didactic and expository; over time, he increasingly enjoyed playing the historian as much as the polemicist. (ii) He possessed a genuine willingness to learn where he may have misinterpreted Schleiermacher in later years. (iii) Barth’s convictions about God’s divine election led him to regard the theologians of the nineteenth century as fellow servants in the church, even if serving on occasion as bad examples. And finally, (iv) Barth recognized that Schleiermacher was at least desirous of something important in the realm of theology, namely an extensive theological anthropology, even if he was unable to articulate it properly. On this last point, Barth maintained his earlier No to Schleiermacher as “presupposition” for a subsequent affirmation of a theology of God and man. He explained it this way in his essay “The Humanity of God” in 1956. A genuine revision in no way involves a subsequent retreat, but rather a new beginning and attack in which what previously has been said is said more than ever, but now even better. … As such it must remain, and still cannot be bypassed; rather it constitutes the presupposition of that which must be further considered (HG, pp. 41–42).

Barth’s first presupposition was and remained the deity of God, “the fact that God is God,” while then adding a true word about “God’s humanity.” Properly defined, God’s humanity is simply theology “from the Christological perspective,” a theology “grounded in and unfolded from Christology” (HG, p. 46). This is “God’s relation to and turning toward man. It signifies the God who speaks with man in promise and command. It represents God’s existence, intercession, and activity for man, the intercourse God holds with him, and the free grace in which He wills to be and is nothing other than the God of man” (HG, p. 37). For further exploration of this theme, one must look to the Church Dogmatics, which is undoubtedly a counterachievement to the Glaubenslehre. References Barth, K. (1924). Brunners Schleiermacherbuch, 1924. Zwischen den Zeiten 2: 49–64.

Barth, K. (1925). Schleiermachers “Weihnachtsfeier”. Zwischen den Zeiten 3 (1): 38–61.

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Barth, K. (1962). Schleiermacher’s celebration of Christmas. In: Theology and Church: Shorter Writings, 1920–1928 (trans. L.P. Smith), 136–158. New York: Harper & Row. Barth, K. (1964, 1964). Revolutionary Theology in the Making: Barth‐Thurneysen Correspondence, 1914–1925 (trans. J.D. Smart). Richmond: John Knox Press. Barth, K. (1971). A thank‐you and a bow – Kierkegaard’s reveille. In: Fragments Grave and Gay (trans. E. Mosbacher) (ed. M. Rumscheidt), 99–101. London: Collins. Barth, K. (1978). The Word of God and the Word of Man. Gloucester: Peter Smith. Barth, K. and Bultmannn, R. (1981). Karl Barth/Rudolf Bultmann Letters, 1922– 1966 (ed. B. Jaspert) (trans. G.W. Bromiley). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Brunner, E. (1924). Die Mystik und das Wort. Der Gegensatz zwischen moderner Religionsauffassung und christlichen Glauben dargestellt an der Theologie Schleiermachers. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). Busch, E. (1976). Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts (trans. J. Bowdeen). Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Busch, E. (2004). Karl Barth and the Pietists (trans. D.W. Bloesch). Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. DeVries, D. (1996). Jesus Christ in the Preaching of Calvin and Schleiermacher. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. Dilthey, W. (1922). Leben Schleiermachers, 2e. Berlin: de Gruyter. Dorrien, G. (2000). The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. Duke, J.O. and Streetman, R.F. (eds.) (1988). Barth and Schleiermacher: Beyond the Impasse? Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Eck, S. (1908). Über die Herkunft des Individualitätsgedankens bei Schleiermacher. Giessen: Kindt. Galli, M. (2017). Karl Barth: An Introductory Biography for Evangelicals. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Gerrish, B.A. (1978). Tradition and the Modern World: Reformed Theology in the Nineteenth

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Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gerrish, B.A. (1982). The Old Protestantism and the New: Essays on the Reformation Heritage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gerrish, B.A. (1993). Continuing the Reformation: Essays on Modern Religious Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gockel, M. (2006). Barth and Schleiermacher on the Doctrine of Election: A Systematic‐ Theological Comparison. New York: Oxford University Press. Goertz, H.‐J. (1996). The Anabaptists. Abingdon: Routledge. Grenz, S.J. and Olson, R.E. (1992). 20th Century Theology: God and the World in a Transitional Age. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. Kattenbusch, F. (1903). Von Schleiermacher zu Ritschl. Giessen: Ricker. Lütz, D. (1988). Homo viator: Karl Barths Ringen mit Schleiermacher. Zurich: Theologischer Verlag. Mariña, J.e. (2005). The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCormack, B.L. (1995). Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genius and Development, 1909–1936. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McCormack, B.L. (1999). The sum of the gospel: the doctrine of election in the theologies of Alexander Schweizer and Karl Barth. In: Toward the Future of Reformed Theology: Tasks, Topics, Traditions (eds. D. Willis and M. Welker), 41–62. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Nicolai, G.F. (1919). Die Biologie des Krieges, erster Band. Zürich: Art. Institut Orell Füssli. Osthövener, C.–.D. (1996). Die Lehre von Gottes Eigenschaften bei Friedrich Schleiermacher und Karl Barth. Berlin: de Gruyter. Rade, M. (ed.) (1904). Die Leitsätze der ersten und zweiten Auflage von Schleiermachers Glaubenslehre. Tübingen and Leipzig: J.C.B. Mohr (P. Siebeck).

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Ritschl, A. (1874). Schleiermachers Reden über die Religion und ihre Nachwirkungen auf die evangelische Kirche Deutschlands. Bonn: Marcus. Rupp, G. (1977). Culture‐Protestantism: German Liberal Theology at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Missoula, MO: Scholars Press. Schleiermacher, F. (1902). Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Monologen. Leipzig: Meiner. Schleiermacher, F. (1906). Über die Religion. Reden an die Gebildeten under ihren Verächtern (ed. R. Otto). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Schleiermacher, F. (1908). Schleiermachers Sendschreiben über seine Glaubenslehre an Lücke (ed. H. Mulert). Giessen: Töpelmann. Schleiermacher, F. (1910). Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums (ed. H. Scholz). Leipzig: Deichert.

Schleiermacher, F. (2011). Brief Outline of Theology as a Field of Study, 3e (ed. T.N. Tice). Louisville: Westminster John Knox. Tice, T.N. (1988). Interviews with Karl Barth and reflections on his interpretations of Schleiermacher. In: Barth and Schleiermacher: Beyond the Impasse? (eds. J.O. Duke and R.F. Streetman), 43–62. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Torrance, T.F. (1986). Karl Barth and the Latin heresy. Scottish Journal of Theology 39: 289–308. Troeltsch, E. (1910). Schleiermacher, der Philosoph des Glaubens. Berlin: Buchverlag der “Hilfe”. Webster, J. (ed.) (2000). Introducing Barth. In: The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 45

Barth and Kierkegaard David J. Gouwens

D

ue to the early Karl Barth’s extensive use of Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), ­followed by his later largely critical response, Barth’s relation to Kierkegaard is complex. In his revolt against nineteenth‐century liberal theology, the early Barth ­mirrored Kierkegaard’s own attack upon “Christendom,” declaring in the preface to the 1922 second edition of The Epistle to the Romans that “if I have a system, it is limited to a recognition of what Kierkegaard called the ‘infinite qualitative distinction’ between time and eternity” (RII, p. 10). Yet Barth later moves decisively away from Kierkegaard, so that near the end of his life he can say of Kierkegaard: “I consider him to be a teacher whose school every theologian must enter once. Woe to him who misses it – provided only he does not remain in or return to it” (Barth 1971a, pp. 100–101). To appreciate this complex relationship, we must examine the context of Barth’s favorable early reception of Kierkegaard as well as his more critical response to Kierkegaard as Barth’s thought developed through the 1920s and 1930s, particularly as Barth interacts with his contemporaries’ very different uses of Kierkegaard. We will explore finally whether the mature Barth perhaps overlooked some hidden parallels ­between them.

The Early Barth’s Reception of Kierkegaard Barth’s reception of Kierkegaard is helpfully seen as part of a much broader period in the German and Austrian reception of Kierkegaard that Heiko Schulz calls “The Productive Years, 1900–1945” (Schulz 2009, pp. 334–338), a “Kierkegaard renaissance” that began before World War I and had an impact on philosophy, literature, and theology, stimulating a wide range of intellectual responses, including existentialism,

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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the ontological philosophy of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), the Protestant “theology of crisis,” and Catholic Neo‐Thomism (Malik 1997, p. 393). The early Barth is indeed a significant contributor to this Kierkegaard renaissance. As we will see, Barth’s later reception of Kierkegaard after World War I is closely related as well to two significant Kierkegaard scholars in Germany, Eduard Geismar (1871–1939) and Barth’s colleague at Göttingen Emanuel Hirsch (1888–1972) as well as the so‐called “dialectical” theology or theology of crisis, such as Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976), Emil Brunner (1889–1966), Friedrich Gogarten (1887–1967), and Paul Tillich (1886– 1965) (Schulz 2009, pp. 321, 334). We will see how these various actors in the “Kierkegaard renaissance” in which Barth too played a role interacted with one another. As early as 1909 Barth first read the late Kierkegaard’s attack on the established Danish church but apparently was unimpressed by it (Kierkegaard 1896; Kierkegaard 1998; Schulz 2015, p. 210). Only while working on the second edition of The Epistle to the Romans does Barth return to Kierkegaard, as vividly revealed in his 1920–1921 correspondence with Eduard Thurneysen (GA 3, pp. 400, 414–415, 415n1, 420, 460, 519; von Kloeden 1982, pp. 94ff.). Barth also read extensively in Hermann Gottsched’s 1905 selections from Kierkegaard’s journals, titled Buch des Richters (Kierkegaard 1905; Schulz 2015, pp. 210, 218n7; Malik 1997, pp. 365–366). Finally, Barth tells Thurneysen of his reading Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments, in Gottsched and Christopf Schrempf ’s 1910 translation (GA 3, p. 461; Kierkegaard 1985; Kierkegaard 1910; von Kloeden 1982, pp. 95, 101n9). Particularly important to Barth, as we will see, was Kierkegaard’s later Practice in Christianity, written under the Christian pseudonym Anti‐Climacus, in the 1912 translation by Gottsched and Schrempf (Kierkegaard 1991; Kierkegaard 1912), and perhaps he knew at this time the veronymous Works of Love in the 1890 translation Leben und Walten der Liebe (Kierkegaard 1995; Kierkegaard 1890; Schulz 2015, p. 210; Barrett 2012, p. 11). Thus it is primarily the later Kierkegaard whom Barth employs so extensively throughout the second edition of Romans and in the addresses collected in The Word of God and Theology.

The Epistle to the Romans It is striking how deeply Barth’s 1922 Romans commentary is infused with Kierkegaard’s “diastatic” language and themes, including the “infinite qualitative distinction,” the intersection of time and eternity, the “Moment,” “Paradox,” “incognito,” contradiction, the impossible possibility, God as “Wholly Other,” and indirect communication. Barth’s rhetorical passion, so at odds with scholarly pedantic commentaries on the Bible, matches Kierkegaard’s own engaged writing. In the early Barth’s rhetorical strategy, his use of the later Kierkegaard is allusive and impressionistic and Barth often groups Kierkegaard with other figures, such as Franz Overbeck, who may have stimulated Barth’s interest in Kierkegaard as well as in Dostoevsky (RII, pp. 3, 4, 38–39, 252; GA 3, p. 524; Barth and Thurneysen 1964, p. 74). Barth finds in Kierkegaard a kindred spirit, inspiring his own attack upon religion as a human and sinful activity and upon the failure of nineteenth‐century liberal theology and exegesis to face cultural crisis.

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Most significantly Barth follows Kierkegaard’s own articulation of the offense and ­paradox of Christ’s incarnation as both judgment and redemption. In the preface to the 1922 Romans commentary, written in September 1921, Barth states directly his attraction to Kierkegaard: “If I have a system, it is limited to a recognition of what Kierkegaard called the ‘infinite qualitative distinction’ between time and eternity, and to my regarding this as possessing negative as well as positive significance: ‘God is in heaven, and thou art on earth’” (RII, p. 10). Contrary to a common assumption, Barth is likely citing here, as elsewhere in his commentary (RII, pp. 98–99, 279, 438–439; Schulz 2015, p. 218n9), not Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Kierkegaard 1992), but Practice in Christianity (Schulz 2009, p. 336; Schulz 2015, p. 210). Indeed, Barth could have become aware of many of the other Kierkegaardian concepts, such as “paradox,” “divine incognito,” “the moment,” “offense,” and “indirect communication” from Practice in Christianity alone (Barrett 2012, p. 9). A central interpretive question concerning Barth’s use of the “infinite qualitative distinction” and its associated “diastatic” language is whether Barth means to assert a metaphysical dualism, or is the “distinction” between God and humanity primarily about sin? In the preface Barth notes his brother Heinrich Barth’s writings that gave him “a closer acquaintance with Plato and Kant,” which has led many to see Barth embracing a metaphysical dualism of God and the world, also a common reading of Kierkegaard himself. However, the main thrust of Barth’s and Kierkegaard’s use of the “infinite qualitative distinction” is theological rather than metaphysical. Barth’s “dualism” (RII, p. 268) affirms the Otherness of God over against not only creaturely finitude but also sin. His references to “the infinite qualitative distinction” between God and man are certainly epistemological, based on finitude, as both Kant and Kierkegaard would agree (Turchin 2012, p. 330, citing McCormack 2008, p. 12). But for Barth, like Kierkegaard and unlike Kant, the cause of human inability to know God is fundamentally not epistemological but relational; “the infinite qualitative distinction” points to sin, specifically human defiance toward God (Turchin 2012, p. 330, citing RII, pp. 167, 330–331). For Kierkegaard too the “difference” between God and humans is defined primarily as sin. As Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus puts the question in Philosophical Fragments: “What, then, is the difference? Indeed what else but sin, since the difference, the absolute difference, must have been caused by the individual himself ” (Kierkegaard 1985, p. 47). Nevertheless, for Barth perhaps the choice between sin and finitude with respect to the infinite qualitative distinction ought not to be pressed too hard. In the mature Barth, at least, the ontological divide between time and eternity does not ­compete with the spiritual abyss between God’s holiness and human sin. Lee C. Barrett agrees that Kierkegaard and Barth use the “infinite qualitative distinction” and related concepts as a rhetorical trope conveying how God’s self‐revelation destabilizes human existence, rather than to suggest a metaphysical dualism (Barrett 2012, p. 30). Nonetheless, a close reading of Barth’s two lengthy citations from Kierkegaard’s Practice in Christianity in The Epistle to the Romans reveals too how Kierkegaard and Barth differ in their rhetorical use of these concepts (Barrett 2012, pp. 26–31; RII, pp. 98–99 and Kierkegaard 1991, p. 140; RII, p. 279 and Kierkegaard 1991, p. 135). Kierkegaard focuses on the believer’s existence, how the love of God is

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reduplicated in the believer’s life, whereas Barth focuses on revelation as divine act, as a judgment of grace and then a promise of reconciliation. Even in the second edition of his commentary on Romans, Barth’s theological emphasis differs from Kierkegaard’s.

The Word of God and Theology The 1916–1923 addresses published as The Word of God and Theology (1924) reveal another important aspect of the early Barth’s attraction to Kierkegaard; Barth places him firmly within the biblical and Reformation prophetic tradition over against theological modernism, including Schleiermacher. In “The Problem of Ethics Today” (1922), Barth explicitly links Kierkegaard to the Reformers, citing again Practice in Christianity on the impossibility of “direct communication.” Speaking of the Word of God as a two‐edged sword, with reference to Romans, Luther, and Calvin, Barth then lauds “the master of this Pauline‐Reformation dialectic, Kierkegaard!” (WGT, pp. 164–165). Similarly, in Barth’s Elgersburg address of 3 October 1922, “The Word of God as the Task of Theology,” Barth announces his pedigree: a “line of ancestors … [that] runs through Kierkegaard to Luther and Calvin, to Paul and Jeremiah” (WGT, pp. 182, 182n45). Barth immediately then affirms how this pedigree rejects the tradition of Schleiermacher and modern theological liberalism, for “What is illustrated with the names of Kierkegaard, Luther, Calvin, Paul, and Jeremiah … shows complete ‘un‐Schleiermachian’ clarity … that the service of humans must be the service of God, that is, worship, and not vice versa” (WGT, pp. 183, 183n48, citing Kierkegaard 1896).

Barth’s Emerging Critique of Kierkegaard in the Context of His Contemporaries Even in The Epistle to the Romans Barth criticizes Kierkegaard on a point that will become his increasing concern, how Kierkegaard can reflect “the poison of a too intense pietism” (RII, p. 276). After the Romans commentary and The Word of God and Theology, Barth’s citations of Kierkegaard diminish at the same time that his doubts about Kierkegaard increase. In his 1924–1925 Göttingen dogmatics lectures, Barth mentions Kierkegaard approvingly for saying that “the subjective is the objective,” which likely indicates knowledge of Concluding Unscientific Postscript (GD, p. 137; Barrett 2012, p. 12). Barth appreciates too Kierkegaard’s stress on “existentiality” over against Hegel (GD, p. 77), and makes positive references to Kierkegaard’s concepts of indirect communication and the divine incognito (GD, pp. 137, 144, 178, 332–333). Nonetheless, although Barth continues to approve of Kierkegaard in opposition to Schleiermacher, his praise is qualified. Already in his Winter Semester 1923–1924 Göttingen Schleiermacher lectures, he says that “this dogmatics knows nothing of any sickness unto death or of any unfathomable mercy” (TS, p. 221). But Barth soon qualifies

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the compliment when he adds that “Schleiermacher’s theology … is even further afield from the task of Christian theology than Kierkegaard’s” (TS, p. 230). Barth’s increasing antipathy to Kierkegaard is perhaps best appreciated in the context of his contemporaries’ uses of Kierkegaard. In response to these other theologians, Barth clarifies and develops his own theology in ways that leave Kierkegaard behind. As Eberhard Harbsmeier argues, following Per Lønning, Danish and German reception of Kierkegaard during Barth’s lifetime followed two paths (Harbsmeier 2008; Lønning 1952, 1955, 1978, p. 165). For the first path, Kierkegaard’s central concern was to nurture faith as inwardness. For the second path, Kierkegaard is the critical thinker of paradox, contradiction, and the absurd, over against speculative philosophy. In the first approach, Kierkegaard’s central theme is inwardness, attending especially to Kierkegaard’s earlier and middle works, read in the tradition of Schleiermacher as offering an account of the continuity between generic human religious inwardness and Christian faith (Harbsmeier 2008, p. 324n17). In the second approach, Kierkegaard is the champion of paradox, emphasizing how revelation is a breach and reversal of naturally human religious capacities. This first approach that sees Kierkegaard as the poet of inwardness and continuity included the two most eminent Kierkegaard scholars in Germany, both known to Barth. The first was the Dane Eduard Geismar, who published two books in German on Kierkegaard, as well as a 1924 German translation of Kierkegaard’s Purity of Heart (GA  4, pp. 294, 295n12; Geismar 1925; Geismar 1927–1929; Kierkegaard 1924b; Kierkegaard 1993). Barth developed a strong antipathy to Geismar, complaining to Thurneysen already in 1924 of the “middle pietistic Kierkegaard” in Geismar’s lecture on Purity of Heart, an antipathy Thurneysen shared (Harbsmeier 2008, 327n17; GA 4, pp. 294, 295n12, 355). The other Kierkegaard interpreter associated with Geismar in Barth’s mind was Emanuel Hirsch, Barth’s colleague at Göttingen during Barth’s tenure there from 1921–1925, described as “one of Germany’s most competent twentieth‐century experts on Kierkegaard” (Malik 1997, p. 313), who dedicated his important two‐volume study of Kierkegaard to Geismar (Hirsch 1930–1933). Pietism predominates in Hirsch as well; as Matthias Wilke states, Hirsch “sees a direct connection between Kierkegaard and the Pietism of the Herrnhuter, German Romanticism, Schleiermacher, and German idealism” (Wilke 2012, p. 173). Barth and Hirsch had a tense relationship. In Barth’s eyes, Hirsch embodied some of the worst dangers of Pietism, not least because Hirsch combined Pietism with Christian nationalistic politics. To Barth, so inspired by the late Kierkegaard, and so critically poised against Pietism and political conservatism, the gulf between them could hardly be wider. Barth’s growing antipathy to Kierkegaard extended beyond Geismar and Hirsch to the “dialectical” theologians with whom the early Barth had been aligned, including Rudolf Bultmann, Emil Brunner, Friedrich Gogarten, and Paul Tillich. Unlike Hirsch, all were drawn to the revolutionary possibilities in Kierkegaard’s thought over against theological liberalism, but they all used Kierkegaard to make theological anthropology central, whether in Bultmann’s Heideggerian‐inspired analyses of inauthenticity and faith, Brunner’s eristics focused on despair as a natural theology of a “point of contact” prior to grace, Gogarten’s focus upon theological anthropology, or Tillich’s “kairos‐philosophy.”

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All of this appeared to Barth, as he put it in a 1930 letter to Bultmann, as simply a return to “the fleshpots of Egypt” (Barth and Bultmann 1981, p. 49). Such existentialism imperialistically requires a philosophical framework to set the terms for theological discourse. As Barth will later argue against Bultmann’s program of ­demythologization, this method often reduces theological statements to anthropological statements, and, against Brunner’s eristics, posits the need for despair that is prior to, and thus constrains, the freedom of God’s grace. Given these diverse yet related uses of Kierkegaard, ranging from Geismar and Hirsch’s stress on inwardness to Bultmann’s and Brunner’s prioritizing of existentialist method and anthropology, Barth sees ­himself more and more polemically poised against Kierkegaard as well. But the second strand of Kierkegaard criticism is also relevant to Barth, if only indirectly, and that is to be found in Barth’s student Hermann Diem (1900–1975), for whom Kierkegaard is the thinker of paradox (Harbsmeier 2008, p. 325; Diem 1929). Diem argued against the portrayal of Kierkegaard as an existentialist, whether by Heidegger, Bultmann, Brunner, or Karl Jaspers. As Diem puts it later, all of these thinkers see Kierkegaard providing an existential philosophical portrayal of human existence in terms of care, guilt, anxiety, and despair that claims to provide the necessary basis for theological thinking (Diem 1959, pp. 215, 4; cf. Diem 1962). For Diem, this ignores the central drive of Kierkegaard’s reflection: to depict paradox (both the Socratic paradox and the Absolute Paradox of revelation), which is a rejection of the entire tradition of Schleiermacher and existentialism. Kierkegaard’s writings stressing the paradox of revelation (such as Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript) are central for Diem. In language strongly influenced by Barth, Diem states that theology must proceed “with the presupposition of revelation,” including regard for ecclesiastical authority and church tradition (Diem 1929, p. 347; Schulz 2009, p. 374). This means, however, that Kierkegaard’s “dialectic” is not itself theology, but rather “an impressive manifestation of … a ‘christliche Philosophie’ in the proper sense” (Schulz 2009, p. 374). This means, however, that Diem’s reading of Kierkegaard actually undercuts Kierkegaard’s usefulness for theology, for Diem makes a sharp distinction between Kierkegaard’s literature and “doctrine.” “Kierkegaard has no Christian doctrine which could be represented as a system, but only a dialectical method of Christian communication which wants to urge its recipient to exist as a Christian” (Diem 1929, p. vii; translation from Law 2013, p. 4n12). Barth himself was always on good terms with Diem (Barth 1981, pp. 146, 154), but it is clear why Diem’s approach to Kierkegaard would be of little interest to Barth’s own dogmatic thinking as it develops in Church Dogmatics. First, Diem speaks of Kierkegaard’s “Absolute Paradox” as not only “absurd” but “self‐contradictory,” implying Kierkegaard may be seen as an irrationalist and fideist (Diem 1959, pp. 49–50, 60, 64–65, 66, 70). Second, although Diem rethinks the relation of philosophy and theology to give primacy to revelation rather than to the religiosity of personal experience, as in the first strand, Diem also sees Kierkegaard’s significance lying in his philosophical project of a dialectic of existential communication. As Per Lønning succinctly puts it, for Diem, “the chief weight is not placed upon the content of the conceptual definitions of theology, but upon their existential function” (Lønning 1978, p. 165).

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On both counts, Barth’s interests lie elsewhere. Barth will tend to see Kierkegaard as the progenitor of theological existentialism, and will find little of constructive dogmatic use from Diem’s reading of Kierkegaard on paradox or a dialectic of existential communication. Henceforth Barth’s direct references to Kierkegaard will become even more infrequent.

Church Dogmatics By the time Barth writes Church Dogmatics, he sees Kierkegaard “as a transitional figure on the trajectory from Pietism to existentialism” (Barrett 2012, pp. 12–13). Most of the explicit references to Kierkegaard in Church Dogmatics are made in passing, or in relation to other figures or movements. A few passages in Church Dogmatics referring to Kierkegaard deserve special attention. In CD III/2 of 1948, Barth offers interesting observations on Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) (CD III/2, pp. 113–120). Seeing Jaspers’ interest, as a representative of “modern ­existentialist philosophy,” in “the historical element in human existence” in his three‐ volume Philosophie (Jaspers 1932) and other writings, Barth commends Jaspers for advancing “the dimension to which Sören Kierkegaard formerly pressed in impotent isolation.” Although Barth grants that Jaspers’ “doctrine of frontier situations especially seems to approximate … to a genuinely Christian understanding and estimate of man” (CD III/2, p. 113), he still judges that this experience of movement toward ­transcendence fails to be “an open door” to a true sense of transcendence required in Christian anthropology (CD III/2, p. 120). Kierkegaard appears more explicitly in the course of Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation in CD IV. Barth warns against the danger of focusing solely on “the personal appropriation of salvation by the individual Christian,” suggesting that Luther and Pietism contributed to “the same cul de sac on the detour via Kierkegaard” (CD IV/1, pp. 149–150). As part of his running debate in CD IV with Bultmann (CD IV/1, pp. ix–x), Barth criticizes the demythologizing of cross and resurrection, by saying “We must not mythologise the Gospel of the way of the true God (not even in the name of Kierkegaard or Luther himself)” (CD IV/1, p. 345). On the Holy Spirit’s work in gathering the Christian community, Barth says that “There is no legitimate private Christianity. The question … we have to address not only to all forms of mysticism and pietism but also to Kierkegaard is plain to see” (CD IV/1, p. 689). Similarly, in treating faith, Barth criticizes the tendency in modern doctrines of faith to focus first of all on the fides quae creditur as the possibility of the individual’s faith. Barth complains of “the broad way which leads from the older Pietism to the present‐day theological existentialism inspired by Kierkegaard” (CD IV/1, p. 741). In CD IV/2 of 1955, on the Holy Spirit and Christian love, Barth engages most extensively and critically with Kierkegaard, seeing Works of Love in light of Anders Nygren’s opposition of agape and eros. Barth complains that Kierkegaard’s “life and rule of love” (the title in the German translation Barth uses) (Kierkegaard 1995; Kierkegaard 1924a; Barrett 2012, p. 13) is marred by “the detective skill with which non‐Christian love is tracked down to its last hiding‐place, examined, shown to be worthless and haled before

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the judge!” (CD IV/2, p. 747). So too Barth criticizes the “unlovely, inquisitorial and ­terribly judicial character which is so distinctive of Kierkegaard in general” (CD IV/2, p. 782) and says that we cannot “be silent, as Kierkegaard is, about the creative, generous, liberating love of God, and speak instead only of the naked commandment: ‘Thou shalt,’ as the basis of Christian love” (CD IV/2, p. 782).

Barth’s Final Reflections on Kierkegaard In 1963, the 150th anniversary of Kierkegaard’s birth, Barth offered two brief reflections on him. On 19 April 1963, Barth was awarded the prestigious Sonning Prize in Copenhagen, using his address to deliver “A Thank You and a Bow: Kierkegaard’s Reveille” (Barth 1971a). Barth thanks Kierkegaard for his critique of “all the speculation that blurred the infinite qualitative difference between God and man” and even says that he has been faithful to that reveille to this day (Barth 1971a, p. 98). Barth, however, puts several critical questions to Kierkegaard: is it permissible, as Kierkegaard thought, to stress the “negations about the subject of theology and thereby to cause the poor wretches who became Christian … to taste again and again the bitterness of the training required” “if the aim was to proclaim and to interpret the Gospel of God and thus the Gospel of his free grace?” (Barth 1971a, p. 99). With Kierkegaard’s focus on the individual, where “are the people of God, the congregation, the Church” and “her political and social charge,” and what of Kierkegaard’s agreement “with St. Augustine and Scholasticism against Luther and Calvin that there must be a love of self that takes precedence over love of others?” (Barth 1971a, p. 99). Why did we “not immediately become suspicious of Kierkegaard’s pronounced holy individualism?” (Barth 1971a, p. 99). Barth then turns to his central concern: that in Kierkegaard “a new anthropocentric system” “opposed to that at which we aimed” announced itself in Kierkegaard: “the existential philosophy of Heidegger, Jaspers, and Sartre” (Barth 1971a, p. 99). In conclusion, Barth sees Kierkegaard “bound more closely to the nineteenth century than we were willing to believe at that time” (Barth 1971a, p. 100). Hence, Barth remains thankful for the reveille of Kierkegaard’s attack but finally sees him as “a teacher whose school every theologian must enter once. Woe to him who misses it – provided only he does not remain in or return to it” (Barth 1971a, pp. 100–101). In 1963 Barth presented once more in a brief essay his reflections on Kierkegaard, “Kierkegaard and the Theologians” (Barth 1971b), where he elaborates on the need to pass through the school of Kierkegaard. Such theologians cannot “ignore or suppress the ‘no’ uttered in the Gospel to the world and the Church” … “But – and this led them beyond Kierkegaard  –  they could not just hear it and bear witness to it as the ‘no’ enfolded in God’s ‘yes’; they could bear witness to it as the fire of his love, which aims, not only at this or that individual, but at the entire godless world and seeks to be ­proclaimed as such by the Church” (Barth 1971b, pp. 103–104). Hence, they cannot interchange theology with an existential philosophy, or fit theology within its structures. “Instead they were permitted to learn to walk. But for that they had to attend schools other than Kierkegaard’s” (Barth 1971b, p. 104).

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Critical Reflections Given the complexity of Barth’s relation to Kierkegaard, it is not surprising that there are various ways of construing Barth’s reception of Kierkegaard. Lee C. Barrett offers an insightful analysis of various types of interpretations of Barth’s use of Kierkegaard (Barrett 2012, pp. 19–34). Many scholars take Barth’s later self‐assessment of his initial attraction to Kierkegaard, followed by his moving away from Kierkegaard, to be essentially accurate. Others argue that Barth was always ambivalent toward Kierkegaard, with the negative becoming more pronounced. Still others maintain that Barth failed to appreciate certain features of Kierkegaard’s thought, so that Barth may actually be more in agreement than Barth himself thought. Each approach is worth further attention, but because the third approach in particular suggests avenues for further reflection, we will limit ourselves to it. This third group of interpreters in Barrett’s typology argues that there are more significant similarities between Kierkegaard and Barth than Barth himself recognized. This position maintains also that the two major approaches for interpreting Kierkegaard that Barth encountered, either as an existentialist or as a thinker of paradox, each obscured important features of Kierkegaard’s thought. In contrast to readings of Kierkegaard as an existentialist, this approach sees Kierkegaard affirming the otherness of God and the centrality of God’s revelation in Christ as a breach with immanent religion. But this third approach also denies that Kierkegaard’s paradox entails ­ ­irrationalism. Representatives of this third approach deny that Kierkegaard sacrifices grace to an emphasis on works and defend him against Barth’s charge that he has no room for sociality. Although not denying that significant differences remain, this ­viewpoint opens room for constructive engagement with Barth’s theology. We may now briefly survey just a few examples of this approach using some of Barrett’s examples and others (Barrett 2012, pp. 23–26). In 1967 Alastair McKinnon responded to Barth’s 1963 Sonning Prize address by arguing that the later Barth actually responded to a “phantom Kierkegaard,” one ­originated in misleading German translations by Christoph Schrempf and others, who presented Kierkegaard as “a thorough‐going fideist or irrationalist,” a position accepted by Brunner and, with minor qualification, by Diem (McKinnon 1967, p. 35). McKinnon argues, however, that Brunner, Diem, and Barth misunderstood Kierkegaard, for Kierkegaard denied that Christianity is based on logical contradiction; rather, Kierkegaard uses the “absurd” to describe how Christian faith appears to someone who is not yet a believer, whereas “the real Kierkegaard conceived both Christianity and the life of belief as in principle logically coherent” (McKinnon 1967, p. 34). As Barrett puts it, Kierkegaard himself “could have applauded Barth’s turn to Anselm and the theme of faith seeking understanding” (Barrett 2012, p. 23; McKinnon 1967, pp. 37–41). Barth, however, was not aware of this real Kierkegaard. Murray Rae’s studies of Kierkegaard continue this defense by questioning as well the existentialist readings of Kierkegaard by Bultmann and Brunner. First, Rae argues that Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments actually undermines Romantic Christologies like Schleiermacher’s (Rae 1997, pp. 42–46; 2010, pp. 168–170) and idealist and mythological Christologies like Feuerbach’s (Rae 1997, pp. 41–42). It is rather Barth’s

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t­ heology that corresponds to the religion of transcendence and revelation Kierkegaard describes in Philosophical Fragments (Rae 1997, 61n). Following Robert C. Roberts, Rae sees Bultmann’s demythologized Christ as an example of the immanent “Socratic faith” rather than revelation (Rae 1997, p. 61; Roberts 1986, pp. 34–37). Moreover, Bultmann’s diminishing of “the concrete historical reality of the incarnation” also departs from Kierkegaard (Rae 2010, p. 177). As for Brunner’s eristics that employs Kierkegaard’s despair as the natural “point of contact” prior to receiving grace, it is actually Brunner who, in his dispute with Barth on natural theology, departs from Kierkegaard when he “sought to give some credence to the truth human beings could discover for themselves (albeit through attention to general revelation) and which would establish a ‘point of contact’ for the advent of the special revelation given in Christ” (Rae 2010, p. 177). Rae argues that Kierkegaard would reject what Alan J. Torrance has called the western ordo salutis, in which sinners are required to understand and repent of sin before God graciously comes to their aid. For Kierkegaard it is only after hearing the word of forgiveness that sinners are able to learn what sin is and then repent (2010, p. 100, citing A. Torrance 1996, pp. 59–70). Hence, like Barth, Kierkegaard too sees God’s “No” to sin always enclosed within God’s “Yes” of forgiveness and reconciliation (Rae 2010, p. 104). Barrett discusses the present author’s attempt to account for some continuities ­between Barth and Kierkegaard, of which Barth was unaware, while acknowledging ongoing discontinuities (Gouwens 1996; Barrett 2012, pp. 25–26). Like Rae, Gouwens argues that Barth was wrong to see Kierkegaard’s concern with subjectivity as providing a logically prior analysis of human experience that aligned him with Schleiermacher. Rather, Kierkegaard and Barth can both be seen as grammarians attentive to the d ­ istinctive logic of Christian revelation. He affirms too that in contrast to existentialist tendencies, Kierkegaard does not reduce theology to anthropology and has a strong sense of the objective saving work of Christ. However, Kierkegaard and Barth continue to represent a more subtle difference, because Kierkegaard does see salvation including a human response to God’s grace, and hence salvation is not effective until this event of transformation occurs. This does contrast to Barth’s objectivism, which has no systematic interest in prescribing how persons come to faith (Gouwens 1996, pp. 149, 70).1 Other interpreters similarly argue that Barth misinterpreted Kierkegaard on grace and the works of love (Barrett 2012, pp. 23–24). Murray Rae considers Barth in CD IV/2 to be mistaken in seeing Kierkegaard imposing works of love as a harsh burden to imitate Christ that fails to recognize the objectivity of God’s grace in reconciliation (Rae 2002). For Kierkegaard the stringency of the command to love is what motivates one to fly to grace, and so the works of love are actually moved by gratitude for grace and are exercised joyfully. Other recent interpreters concur that grace rather than works is central in Kierkegaard (Polk 1997, pp. 46–47; Martens 1999, pp. 57–78). Similarly, Sylvia Walsh and the present author argue that Kierkegaard does not oppose eros and

1  Perhaps Barth might have looked on Kierkegaard as a representative of what he called “irregular” as opposed to “regular” dogmatics (CD I/1, pp. 275–287).

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agape in the way Barth charges; rather, Kierkegaard understands agape as transforming other loves, as the object of eros is loved as the neighbor (Barrett 2012, p. 25; Walsh 1988; Gouwens 1996, pp. 181–191). Finally, Philip Ziegler also considers three of Barth’s criticisms of Kierkegaard: subjectivism, legalism, and individualism (Ziegler 2007). First, Ziegler argues that Barth’s complaint that Kierkegaard reduces Christianity to subjectivity and ignores the objectivity of revelation is countered by Kierkegaard’s important reflections in The Book on Adler (Kierkegaard 1994) on how Christian faith is necessarily based upon revelation of an objective reality beyond the individual. Second, Ziegler addresses the charge of joyless legalism, arguing that Kierkegaard clearly affirms the priority of grace (Ziegler 2007, p. 444) but grants that Barth’s criticism has a point: in stressing that penitence should be cultivated before that prior grace is appropriated, for Kierkegaard the “No” of God experientially comes before God’s “Yes”; for Barth the “Yes” of God precedes the “No” (Ziegler 2007, p. 446). Third, Barth’s criticism of Kierkegaard’s individualism fails to account for how central sociality is to Works of Love. Here too, Ziegler nonetheless concedes that Kierkegaard says little about the church’s role in the daily nurturing of faith (Ziegler 2007, pp. 450–451).

Conclusion This third option in recent scholarship on Kierkegaard allows a more nuanced understanding of both thinkers in criticizing stereotypes of Kierkegaard as an irrationalist or an existentialist. On this view, Kierkegaard has a deep sense of the doctrinal component of Christian faith and also affirms God’s grace as the ground and basis of human faith. This does not of course remove all differences between them (Barrett 2012, pp. 32–33). In particular, their attitudes toward the Pietist tradition are strikingly different. Kierkegaard is favorably disposed toward Pietism, especially in its concern for the interrelations between belief and the human heart. Kierkegaard certainly did not reduce Christian faith to emotions or derive them from a general analysis of human existence, but he was primarily concerned with elucidating the logical context for Christian beliefs in the appropriate emotions, passions, and feelings involved in Christian faith. Andrew B. Torrance articulates the remaining contrast between Kierkegaard and Barth more precisely. With Barth, Kierkegaard holds that “the Christian faith is not primarily grounded in the human imagination or understanding but in God’s personal and dynamic engagement with the world in and through Jesus Christ” (Torrance 2016, p. 190). Where they differ is in their willingness to affirm the reciprocity of a person’s ­relationship with God. Citing Lee C. Barrett’s recent work on Augustine and Kierkegaard, Torrance says that “Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the qualitative difference (between God and persons) does not preclude desire for God” (Barrett 2013, p. 87) and therefore ­“passionate human existence has a critical role to play in the human relationship with God” (Torrance 2016, p. 191). Torrance notes that Barth would question even this nuanced account of faith, since as Barth stresses, “Faith in particular is not an act of reciprocity, but the act of renouncing all reciprocity, the act of acknowledging the one Mediator, beside whom there is no other” (CD I/2, p. 146).

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So too, Kierkegaard and Barth differ on the relation of law and gospel. Although Kierkegaard does see grace as prior to faith and rejects the western ordo salutis that requires sinners to repent before God comes to their aid (Rae 2010, p. 100; Torrance 2016, p. 113), Kierkegaard nonetheless still holds to a Lutheran law‐gospel understanding, in which the subjective experience of gratitude for forgiveness requires a prior experience of guilt. Barth’s radically different gospel‐law model denies that such sin‐ consciousness must precede faith (Barrett 2012, p. 32). Perhaps finally the continuing difference between Kierkegaard and Barth lies in how they conceive Christ, salvation, and discipleship. Kierkegaard’s soteriological focus leads not to subjectivism but expresses a passion to explore how persons struggle to be true disciples, responding in faith, hope, and love to God’s own self‐giving love and grace in Christ. Barth’s christocentrism is certainly not an objectivism that rejects subjective appropriation but also expresses a “great passion” (CL, pp. 111–115) to celebrate above all God’s “Yes” to all humanity in the completed victory of Jesus Christ, a story that frames and determines all other stories, as persons in their discipleship simply “follow at a distance.” Barth famously wrote to Rudolf Bultmann in 1952 telling him of the generous hypothesis he always presented to his students concerning Schleiermacher, which Barth now extended to Bultmann as well, “that what you are after is to be regarded as an attempt at a theology of the ‘third article’ and therefore of the Holy Spirit” (Barth and Bultmann 1981, p. 108). One might be forgiven for wondering whether, more than Barth himself knew, he might have extended that same generous hypothesis even more to Søren Kierkegaard. References Barrett, L.C. (2012). Karl Barth: the dialectic of attraction and repulsion. In: Kierkegaard’s Influence on Theology, Tome I: German Protestant Theology. Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 10 (ed. J. Stewart), 1–41. Farnham, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Barrett, L.C. (2013). Eros and Self‐Emptying: The Intersections of Augustine and Kierkegaard. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Barth, K. (1971a). A thank you and a bow: Kierkegaard’s reveille. In: Fragments Grave and Gay (trans. E. Mosbacher) (ed. M. Rumscheidt), 95–101. London: Collins. Trans. of Barth, K. (1963). Dank und Reverenz. Evangelische Theologie 23, no. 7 (July): 337–342. Barth, K. (1971b). Kierkegaard and the theologians. In: Fragments Grave and Gay

(trans. E. Mosbacher) (ed. M. Rumscheidt), 102–104. London: Collins. Trans. of Barth, K. (1963). Kierkegaard und die Theologen. Kirchenblatt für die reformierte Schweiz 119, no. 10: 150–151. First published as Barth, K. (1963). Il y a des théologiens qui. Réforme No. 947 (November 5): 12–13. Barth, K. (1981). Letters 1961–1968 (trans. and ed. G.W. Bromiley) (eds. J. Fangmeier and H. Stoevesandt). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Barth, K. and Bultmann, R. (1981). Letters 1922–1966 (trans. and ed. G.W. Bromiley) (ed. B. Jaspert). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Barth, K. and Thurneysen, E. (1964). Revolutionary Theology in the Making: Barth‐Thurneysen Correspondence,

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1914–1925 (trans. J.D. Smart). Richmond, VA: John Knox Press. Diem, H. (1929). Philosophie und Christentum bei Sören Kierkegaard. Munich: Kaiser. Diem, H. (1959). Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Existence (trans. H. Knight). Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd. Trans. of Diem, H. (1950). Die Existenzdialektik von Sören Kierkegaard. Zollikon‐Zürich: Evangelischer Verlag. Diem, H. (1962). Kierkegaard’s bequest to theology. In: A Kierkegaard Critique (eds. H.A. Johnson and N. Thulstrup), 244–265. New York: Harper & Brothers. Trans. of Diem, H. (1956). Kierkegaards Hinterlassenschaft an die Theologie. In: Antwort. Karl Barth zum siebzigsten Geburtstag am 10. May 1956, ed. Ernst Wolf et al. Zürich: Evangelischer Verlag. Geismar, E. (1925). Søren Kierkegaard. Gütersloh: Bertelsmann. Geismar, E. (1927–1929). Søren Kierkegaard. Seine Lebensentwicklung und seine Wirksamkeit als Schriftsteller (trans. E. Krüger and L. Geismar). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Gouwens, D.J. (1996). Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harbsmeier, E. (2008). Karl Barth und Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard im Streit der dialektischen Theologie. In: Karl Barths Theologie als europäisches Ereignis (eds. M. Leiner and M. Trowitzsch), 317–330. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Hirsch, E. (1930–1933). Kierkegaard Studien. Gütersloh: Bertelsmann. Jaspers, K. (1932). Philosophie, vols. 1–3. Berlin: Springer. English trans. Jaspers, K. (1969–71). Philosophy (trans. E. B. Ashton). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kierkegaard, S. (1890). Leben und Walten der Liebe (trans. and ed. A. Dorner). Leipzig: F. Richter. Kierkegaard, S. (1896). Sören Kierkegaards Angriff auf die Christenheit I: Die Akten (eds.

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A. Dorner and C. Schrempf). Stuttgart: Fromman. Kierkegaard, S. (1905). Buch des Richters. Seine Tagebücher 1833–1855 im Auszug (trans. H. Gottsched). Jena: Diederichs. Kierkegaard, S. (1910). Philosophische Brocken/Abschliessende unwissenschaftliche Nachschrift (trans. H. Gottsched and C. Schrempf). Gesammelte Werke, vols. 6–7. Jena: Diederichs. Kierkegaard, S. (1912). Einübung in Christentum (trans. H. Gottsched and C. Schrempf). Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9. Jena: Diederichs. Kierkegaard, S. (1924a). Leben und Walten der Liebe, Erbauliche Reden, 2e (trans. and ed. A. Dorner and C. Schrempf), vol. 3. Jena: Diederichs. Kierkegaard, S. (1924b). Die Reinheit des Herzens (trans. L. Geismar), foreword E. Geismar. Munich: Kaiser. Kierkegaard, S. (1985). Philosophical Fragments and Johannes Climacus (ed. and trans. H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kierkegaard, S. (1991). Practice in Christianity (ed. and trans. H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kierkegaard, S. (1992). Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 2 vols. (ed. and trans. H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kierkegaard, S. (1993). An occasional discourse: purity of heart is to will one thing. In: Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits (ed. and trans. H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong), 3–154. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kierkegaard, S. (1994). The Book on Adler (ed. and trans. H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kierkegaard, S. (1995). Works of Love (ed. and trans. H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kierkegaard, S. (1998). ‘The Moment’ and Late Writings (ed. and trans. H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong). Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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von Kloeden, W. (1982). Das Kierkegaard‐Bild Karl Barths in seinen Briefen der “Zwanziger Jahre”: Streiflichter aus der Karl Barth‐Gesamtausgabe. Kierkegaardiana 12: 93–102. Law, D.R. (2013). Kierkegaard’s Kenotic Christology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lønning, P. (1952). ‘Paradox’ og ‘Inderlighed’ hos noen av Søren Kierkegaards kritikere. Tidsskrift for Teologi og Kirke 23 (1): 16–25. Lønning, P. (1955). Kierkegaard’s “Paradox”. Orbis Litterarum 10: 156–165. Lønning, P. (1978). Kierkegaard as a Christian thinker. In: Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, vol. 1 (eds. N. Thulstrup and M.M. Thulstrup), 163–179. Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel. Malik, H.C. (1997). Receiving Søren Kierkegaard: The Early Impact and Transmission of His Thought. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Martens, P. (1999). “You Shall Love”: Kant, Kierkegaard, and the interpretation of Matthew 22:39. In: Works of Love, International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 16 (ed. R.L. Perkins), 57–78. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press. McCormack, B.L. (2008). Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic Publishing. McKinnon, A. (1967). Barth’s relation to Kierkegaard: some further light. Canadian Journal of Theology 13 (January): 31–41. Polk, T.H. (1997). The Biblical Kierkegaard: Reading by the Rule of Faith. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press. Rae, M. (1997). Kierkegaard’s Vision of the Incarnation: By Faith Transformed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rae, M. (2002). Kierkegaard, Barth, and Bonhoeffer: conceptions of the relations between grace and works. In: For Self‐ Examination and Judge for Yourself! International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 21 (ed. R.L. Perkins), 143–167. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press.

Rae, M. (2010). Kierkegaard and Theology. London; New York: T&T Clark. Roberts, R.C. (1986). Faith, Reason, and History: Rethinking Kierkegaard’s ‘Philosophical Fragments.’ Macon, GA: Mercer University Press. Schulz, H. (2009). Germany and Austria: a modest head start: the German reception of Kierkegaard. In: Kierkegaard’s International Reception, Tome I: Northern and Western Europe. Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 8 (ed. J. Stewart), 307–419. Farnham, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Schulz, H. (2015). From Barth to Tillich: Kierkegaard and the dialectical theologians. In: A Companion to Kierkegaard (ed. J. Stewart), 209–222. Chichester, UK/ Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Torrance, A.J. (1996). Persons in Communion: Trinitarian Description and Human Participation. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Torrance, A.B. (2016). The Freedom to Become a Christian: a Kierkegaardian Account of Human Transformation in Relationship with God. In: London. New York: T&T Clark. Turchin, S.A. (2012). Kierkegaard’s echo in the early theology of Karl Barth. Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2012: 323–336. Walsh, S. (1988). Forming the heart: the role of love in Kierkegaard. In: The Grammar of the Heart: Thinking with Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein (ed. R.H. Bell), 234–256. San Francisco: Harper and Row. Wilke, M. (2012). Emanuel Hirsch: a German dialogue with ‘Saint Søren.’ In: Kierkegaard’s Influence on Theology, Tome I: German Protestant Theology. Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resource, vol. 10 (ed. J. Stewart), 155–184. Farnham, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Ziegler, P. (2007). Barth’s criticisms of Kierkegaard – a striking out at phantoms. International Journal of Systematic Theology 9 (4): 434–451.

CHAPTER 46

Barth and Bonhoeffer John W. de Gruchy

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hen I embarked on my dissertation on Bonhoeffer’s ecclesiology my supervisor, a student of Barth’s, insisted, that Bonhoeffer could only be understood in terms established by Barth. This was soon reinforced by my reading of Eberhard Bethge’s biography of Bonhoeffer (Bethge 2000), along with John Godsey’s early monograph on Bonhoeffer’s theology written under the supervision of Barth (Godsey 1960). Barth, despite being a Reformed theologian, clearly had an extraordinary influence on Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran, even though, as both Bethge and Godsey frequently stress, Bonhoeffer always maintained a critical distance. Even so, they were invariably on the same side in terms of the theological debates and church controversies of the day, and members of the same provincial Evangelical Church of the Union (Old Prussian Union), which included both Lutheran and Reformed congregations.

Extraordinary Influence Yet Critical Distance Bonhoeffer spent his first year as a theological student in Tübingen (1923–1924). There he read Barth’s essays published in The Word of God and Theology (DBWE 9:148) which, as we shall see, had a lasting influence on the development of his theology. After Tübingen Bonhoeffer studied at the Humboldt University in Berlin (1924–1927) and, like other young theologians of the time, read Barth’s commentary on Romans, many of his journal essays, and a transcript of his Göttingen lectures, “Instruction in Christian Religion.” This, despite the fact that the theological faculty in Berlin was dominated by Lutheran confessionalists and liberal Protestant theologians who were either indifferent or antagonistic toward Barth’s theology.

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Bonhoeffer’s theological education began a decade after the 400th anniversary of Luther’s Reformation had been enthusiastically celebrated in Germany. Among his distinguished teachers was Karl Holl, a leading theologian in the Luther renaissance of the time. Yet for Bonhoeffer, it was not Holl but Barth who recovered the real Luther and enabled him to embrace his theology. Like Luther and Barth, Bonhoeffer became a theologian of the Word of God, not a philosopher of religion; a theologian of the cross and grace, not moral rectitude; and a christocentric church theologian concerned with the proclamation of the gospel, rather than an advocate of cultural formation or Bildung. The fact that Barth was a Reformed theologian gave Bonhoeffer a greater appreciation of Calvin than most Lutheran theologians had, but it also became the backstory of Bonhoeffer’s most significant theological disagreement with Barth. This can be traced back to the heated early debates between confessional Lutherans and Calvinists about the so‐called extra‐Calvinisticum (CD I/2, pp. 159–171; IV/1, pp. 180–181). The debate, in which Calvin was often misrepresented as a Zwinglian but was actually more Catholic than generally acknowledged, had to do with the extent to which the finite (the historical Jesus or the bread on the altar) is capable of containing the infinite (finitum capax infiniti) (Willis 1966). This question runs like a thread through Bonhoeffer’s interaction with Barth. Even so, we should not make more of such confessional differences between them than is warranted (Pangritz 2000, pp. 7–11), or at least, we need to recast the debate by contrasting the “act‐theology” characteristic of the “early” Barth with the “person‐theology” of Bonhoeffer and Luther (Green 1999, pp. 28–45; DeJonge 2012, pp. 11–13). Either way we do need to understand the nature of the problem. In retrieving the theology of the Reformation, Barth and his fellow dialectical theologians gave preeminence to God’s transcendence beyond and freedom from the world and, in doing so, rejected the notion that there was some religious “a priori” or capacity that enabled humanity to grasp hold of God. Only the Word of God as witnessed to in the Bible could create faith. For such reasons, Barth’s theology was fiercely rejected as “unscientific” by Adolf von Harnack, the theologian Bonhoeffer most admired in Berlin for his historical and exegetical scholarship (Rumscheidt 1972). Bonhoeffer found himself in a theological impasse. How could he relate Barth’s understanding of revelation, with its categorical rejection of anthropocentric neo‐Protestantism and Kantian ­idealism, to the modern world and the historical context in which the church was called to witness? This became the research question that led both to Bonhoeffer’s doctoral dissertation, Sanctorum Communio (1927), and his Habilitationsschrift Act and Being (1930). On reading Sanctorum Communio it soon becomes apparent that Barth’s shadow looms large. Even so, it also becomes clear that Bonhoeffer had begun to develop an approach to the problem that became uniquely his own, namely his christological understanding of “person” and “human sociality.” We can already begin to discern here the question that would become central to his theology, though rephrased and asked with increasing intensity, “who is Christ actually for us today?” (DBWE 8:362, 394–396) Or, where does God’s revelation become historically concrete in the world? Not in a new religion, answers Bonhoeffer in unison with Barth, but neither simply as an event, as Barth insisted in Der Romerbrief. Christ exists concretely in the world as a community of persons, a “new humanity,” namely the church (DBWE 1:153). Barth,

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whose ecclesiology would later mirror that of Bonhoeffer’s, would then also applaud Bonhoeffer for what he achieved in Sanctorum Communio, confessing that he could not have said it as well or as forcefully (CD IV/2, p. 641). But at the time Bonhoeffer wrote his dissertation, it was Barth’s understanding of the church as “event” that was Bonhoeffer’s primary target. Following on from Sanctorum Communio, in Act and Being Bonhoeffer seeks to show how God’s revelation provides its own epistemology by taking seriously the ontological categories in history (DBWE 2:9–11). It is a complex philosophical study that represents “Bonhoeffer’s most precise expression of his dissatisfaction with his contemporary theological options, especially those presented by Karl Barth and Karl Holl” (DeJonge 2012, p. 15). A theology of revelation cannot ignore the challenge of philosophical idealism, but it cannot be determined by it. Affirming with Barth that revelation is contingent on God’s freedom, Bonhoeffer rejects with Barth the idea that it can be subsumed within an institution or is dependent on human conscience, or a “religious a priori.” But against Barth, Bonhoeffer insists that God’s freedom is not freedom from humanity or the world, but freedom for them in the person of Jesus the Christ existing “as a community of persons,” in the world, (DBWE 2:111–112) just as he had concluded in Sanctorum Communio. This anticipates what Barth would later write in his essay on “The Humanity of God” in which he indicated an important turning point in his theology that led him to emphasize God’s freedom for rather than from humanity in Christ (HG, p. 50). But Bonhoeffer, we must constantly remember, never had the opportunity to read any of the volumes of Barth’s Church Dogmatics beyond II/2, which he would be able to read only in galley form in prison (DBWE 8:232). This would then have provided him with a fresh perspective on the cornerstone of Barth’s theology, namely God’s gracious election of humanity in Christ.

Bonhoeffer the Outraged “Barthian” Bonhoeffer went to study for a year at Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1930. There he encountered such “outrageous ignorance” about Barth’s theology among his fellow students and even some faculty (DBWE 15:243) that he set aside his disagreements with Barth. In a seminar paper on “The theology of crisis and its attitude towards philosophy and science” he asked his hearers to forget everything they ever thought they knew about Barth, or philosophical approaches to the question of God, and boldly declared that with Barth: “we stand at an entirely different and new point of departure of the whole problem. We stand in the tradition of Paul, Luther, Kierkegaard, in the tradition of genuine Christian thinking” (DBWE 10:463). Few of his American fellow students could grasp what he was saying, and some thought him arrogant, but Bonhoeffer stuck to his guns. He would later attribute this gap between them to the fact that Protestantism in America had never really experienced the Reformation, though eight years later, after a brief return visit in 1939, he observed a growing appreciation for the concerns raised by Barth (DBWE 10:462–476). The two first met when Bonhoeffer visited Barth in Bonn for three weeks in July 1931. While Bonhoeffer was there he wrote to his Swiss friend Erwin Sutz, a former

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s­ tudent of Barth’s and a fellow student with Bonhoeffer at Union, and told him how much he now regretted not having heard Barth in person sooner. He described an ­evening he spent in a discussion group with Barth as unlike anything that he had previously known. “Barth,” he declared, “stands beyond his books…. There is an openness, a willingness to listen to a critical comment.” As a result, Bonhoeffer said, he now understood “why it is unbelievably difficult to grasp Barth through the literature.” He also told Sutz that he was even more impressed by Barth’s discussion than by his writing and lectures, saying he had “never seen anything like it nor thought it possible” (DBWE 11:37). In a subsequent letter to Sutz, written on Christmas Day that same year, Bonhoeffer mentioned that he had just read Barth’s recently published book on St. Anselm, Fides Quarens Intellectuam, which was “a great joy.” Barth, he wrote, “shows the innumerable scholarly cripples for once that he knows far more precisely how one interprets and yet remains sovereign.” But, Bonhoeffer adds, with “regard to content, nothing has become less unquestionable” (DBWE 11:77). This expresses well Bonhoeffer’s appreciation of and indebtedness to Barth yet critical distance from him. During the Winter Semester of 1931–1932 Bonhoeffer was an assistant professor of theology at the Kaiser Wilhelm University in Berlin. His lectures, as well as his sermons from that period, amply show the extent to which he remained indebted to Barth. Barth, he said, in a lecture on the history of Protestant theology in the twentieth century, represented a “turning point” because “he does not confuse religion with God,” nor does he speak about God, but listening to the Word he proclaims the Word from God (DBWE 11:226–227). It was partly for this reason that Bonhoeffer saw his future less and less in terms of the academy and more in terms of the pulpit, even though permanent appointments as a pastor continued to elude him. But he did present several series of lectures in which he adopted Barth’s “theological interpretation” of the Bible and distanced himself from a purely historical‐critical approach to the text. This is particularly evident in his lectures on Genesis 1–3, later published as Creation and Fall (DBWE 3:6–7). But in his lectures on Christology (1933) we are reminded that Bonhoeffer remained a Lutheran at heart, even if deeply influenced by Barth. Without reference to Barth. he compares the Lutheran and Reformed understandings of the unity of two natures of Christ, the self‐emptying of God (kenosis) in Christ, and the humiliation of Christ on the cross (DBWE 12:343–350). Of course, Bonhoeffer had not read what Barth later wrote on these matters when Barth insisted that the early Calvinists and Lutherans were closer to each other than was subsequently the case (CD IV/2, pp. 73ff). But his Christology clearly anticipates what Barth did write in CD I/2 (pp. 122–126), published in 1939, which finds resonance in Bonhoeffer’s Christmas meditation that year (DBWE 15:530 n.1). But by then much had happened that sheds light on the remarkable relationship that developed between Bonhoeffer and Barth during those years, 1933–1939.

Speaking Frankly, Yet Warmly in Mutual Respect On 30 January 1933 Hitler became Reich Chancellor. Two days earlier, Bonhoeffer attacked the “Fuhrer Principle” on German radio, nailing his colors to the mast, and in June his essay on “The Church and the Jewish Question” was published in which he

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declared that a status confessionis would arise for the church if baptized Jews were excluded from membership (DBWE 12:366). Then, on the very day that Bonhoeffer concluded his lectures on Christology (22 July 1933), Hitler announced that he supported the Deutsche Christen in their attempt to control the Protestant Church and implement the Church Civil Service Law designed to exclude pastors with Jewish ancestry from exercising their ministry. The die was cast. Bonhoeffer hurriedly drafted a memorandum that described the attempt to apply the Aryan law in the church had, in fact, created a status confessionis (DBWE 12:371–373). The following month he began participating in drafting the Bethel Confession in response to the crisis. He also wrote to Barth for advice, reminding him that he had ­previously said that “wherever a church introduces the Aryan paragraph it ceases to be a Christian church” (DBWE 12:164). But Bonhoeffer now asked “what is the most appropriate way today to express what the confessio says?”(DBWE 12:165). That was not clear to him or his colleagues. Two days later, from his holiday home in Bergli, Switzerland, Barth replied that he agreed that a status confessionis had come into effect but counseled against pastors resigning from the church in protest and advised them to remain and fight the battle from within (DBWE 12:168). Meanwhile there was disagreement among those drafting the Bethel Confession, which resulted in the watering down of its response to the “Jewish Question,” making it impossible for Bonhoeffer to support the final version (DBWE 12:362, n1). The scene was being set for the first Confessing Synod of the Old Prussian Union to be held in Barmen in May 1934, when Barth would play the dominant role in drafting the Barmen Declaration despite some Lutheran reservations. But Bonhoeffer was absent, unable to lend his support to Barth. Already by the time he wrote to Barth in September, and without confiding in him, Bonhoeffer had accepted a call to the pastorate of two German‐speaking Lutheran congregations in London, where he began his ministry the following month. But soon after arriving in London he wrote to Barth saying: “I knew that I would simply have had to do what you told, and I wanted to be free, so I suppose I simply withdrew. Today I know that that was wrong and I must beg your pardon. I made my decision ‘freely,’ but without really being free in relation to you” (DBWE 13:22). Barth replied on 20 November in a letter that gives Bonhoeffer no quarter but also reflects Barth’s great respect for Bonhoeffer’s gifts and abilities. Bonhoeffer’s reasons were simply not good enough. Why, Barth asks, are you not here where your “fine theological skills” are so desperately needed? Your “church’s house is on fire,” and you “know well enough how to say what you know, to be able to help, and in fact you ought to return to your post by the next ship … you belong in Berlin not in London” (DBWE 13:41). Bonhoeffer did not return to Germany on the next ship. He stayed in London until April 1935 and when he did return, it was to become the director of the Confessing Seminary in Finkenwalde later that same month. The story of his ministry in London and his significant ecumenical involvement on behalf of the Confessing Church struggle back home need not detain us here, but the latter certainly proved invaluable in serving the cause in Germany and in shaping the emerging ecumenical movement with lasting effect. But Barth was not part of that story, and by the time Bonhoeffer returned home he had been deported by Hitler and was back in Switzerland, teaching at the University of Basel.

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The next glimpse into their relationship can be seen in a letter from Finkenwalde to Barth, his “esteemed professor,” on 19 September 1936 (DBWE 13:252–255) and in Barth’s reply to his “Dear Colleague” the following month (DBWE 13:265–269). Acknowledging that Barth’s straight talking was the reason that he returned to Germany as soon as he did, he tells Barth that he did not do so earlier because he wanted to examine biblical questions on his own, and in doing so “repeatedly discovered that in several points” he was “probably moving away from” what Barth thought. These questions had to do with the Sermon on the Mount and the Pauline doctrine of justification and sanctification. Bonhoeffer is referring, in fact, to his ongoing work on his book Discipleship in which explores these issues, but in a way, Bonhoeffer suspected, that would not altogether please Barth. But he is at pains to say that he is not bypassing “genuinely serious, rigorous theological, exegetical and dogmatic work” in the interests of a more meditative, pietistic approach (DBWE 13:254). Bonhoeffer also requests Barth to discuss the issues that were dividing the Lutherans and the Reformed in their respective approach to the current church‐political situation. There was no one else, Bonhoeffer says, who was capable of doing so (DBWE 13:255). Barth’s response was warm but frank. He is concerned about a rumor he had heard that Bonhoeffer wanted to visit Gandhi in India, and he squashes the idea that Bonhoeffer had not been invited to contribute to his 50th birthday Festschrift because he was not regarded as part of Barth’s inner circle. Bonhoeffer is closer to him, he says, if he does not worry about such matters. He then expresses his concerns about Discipleship, as well as the community at Finkenwalde that, he said smelled “of monastic eros and pathos.” But, he added, this was not so much a criticism of what Bonhoeffer was doing but part of his responsibility to “confront” Bonhoeffer “with questions.” On Reformed and Lutheran disagreement, he expressed the hope that both sides would take their confessions seriously and commend everything to God (DBWE 13:265–269). In September 1937 the Gestapo shut down the seminary forcing it underground. Bonhoeffer himself was also banned from speaking or lecturing in Berlin. In March 1938 Germany annexed Austria, the army was mobilized, and war became inevitable. The next month the governing Prussian Church Council in Berlin ordered all pastors to take the oath of loyalty of Hitler. This was hotly debated at the next and sixth Synod of the Confessing Church to which Barth sent an “open letter” in opposition to taking the oath. Bonhoeffer himself was also strongly opposed to doing this, so was thoroughly disillusioned when the Confessing Church ultimately gave permission (DBWE 12:566). The next month, faced with being conscripted into the military, Bonhoeffer was granted permission to visit the United States, and in June he left for New York. But no sooner had he arrived than he recognized he had made a mistake. Maybe Barth’s words in 1933 when he went to London were still ringing in his ears; his place was to be back in Germany engaged in the struggle. By 30 July he had returned home and become involved in the “illegal” seminary and the collective pastorate in Sigurdshof that had emerged after Finkenwalde was closed. But that, too, was closed by the Gestapo in March 1940. By this time Germany was at war and Bonhoeffer faced conscription, but ironically he was also being drawn into the inner circles of the Resistance centered in military intelligence (Abwehr) at the request of his brother‐in‐law Hans von Dohnanyi. In due course he was formally employed by the Abwehr on the pretext that his ecumenical

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contacts beyond Germany would help gather helpful intelligence for the war effort. But he actually became involved in the work of the Resistance, which included making contact with its supporters outside Germany. This also made possible further contact with Barth in Basel whom he was able to visit on three occasions. Bonhoeffer had another task as unofficial pastor to the members of the Resistance as they struggled with questions of conscience in working for the downfall of Germany and the assassination of Hitler. This related well to his own agenda, namely to write a book on ethics that he had long regarded as his most important theological project. Unfortunately he never finished it, but he did complete several extensive drafts that were posthumously edited and published by his close friend Eberhard Bethge (DBWE 6). And it is in writing his Ethics that his theological conversation with Barth continues until his imprisonment, when his reflections take a decisive turn with Barth, but beyond Barth.

With Barth, But Beyond Barth If in Discipleship Bonhoeffer writes about the cost of following and obeying Jesus as the Christ within the context of the Nazi state, in what became his Ethics Bonhoeffer reflects on the historical crisis facing western society, the experience of the past 10 years of life in, and oppositions to the Third Reich, especially the ethical issues raised (from civil disobedience and participating in the plot against Hitler to euthanasia and suicide), the ethical formation of Christians in order to respond faithfully, and the role of the church in the peaceful reconstruction of society in the future. Bonhoeffer’s point of departure is the need to discern the will of God understood christologically, which then leads to an ethics shaped by the incarnate, crucified, and risen Christ taking form within the Christian community (DBWE 6:96–97; 102 n.113). The influence of Barth is often apparent, even if their language is somewhat different. Christian ethics is not about how we can be good, but how we know the will of God and obey (DBWE 6:47). Barth develops his ethics to this question in a Reformed way on the basis God’s covenant of grace with humanity in Jesus Christ and the concomitant claim that this makes (CD II/2, §56–57). Bonhoeffer’s point of departure is God and the world reconciled in Christ, which anticipates and parallels the way Barth’s theology develops in his later writings. But for both, “there are not two realities, but only one reality, and that is God’s reality revealed in Christ in the reality of the world” (DBWE 6:58). Christian ethics is about discerning what this means in life and action. Bonhoeffer had already imbibed Barth’s approach to ethics when, as a student in Tübingen he read Barth’s The Word of God and Theology, especially his essay on “The Problem of Ethics Today” (WGT, Horton trans., pp. 136–182), but he also now shows some familiarity with Barth’s discussion on “the commandment of God” in CD II/2. In that same essay in WGT Bonhoeffer read Barth’s critique of the Lutheran doctrine of the “orders of creation” used by Lutheran theologians to give the state a freedom under God to pursue its own objectives without church interference (WGT, pp. 171ff. cf. DBWE 6:52–56). This had become a major problem during the Church Struggle, but now in response Bonhoeffer develops his own position, influenced by reading Emil Brunner’s The Divine Imperative (published in German in 1932), and speaks about the “divine

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­ andates” and “orders of preservation” (DBWE 6:18–22; 388–408). Brunner was, of m course, Barth’s chief sparring partner in the Swiss Reformed Church. Yet another essay from The Word of God and Theology had an influence on Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, namely Barth’s lecture on “The Christian’s Place in Society,” especially Barth’s comment on the relationship between the ultimate or eschaton, and the penultimate, that is, what we do now in the world (WGT, p. 324). As Bonhoeffer’s chapter on the “Ultimate and the Penultimate” is arguably one of the most significant in his Ethics, this reinforces our awareness of Bonhoeffer’s indebtedness to Barth over the years. But there is, as we have now come to expect, a significant development as Bonhoeffer takes a step beyond Barth. Whereas in Barth’s early writings there is absolutely no connection between the ultimate and the penultimate, for Bonhoeffer the person “who does something penultimate for the sake of the ultimate, this penultimate thing is related to the ultimate. The entry of grace is the ultimate.” But to “bring bread to the hungry is opening the way for the coming of grace,” even though it is not justification in itself (DBWE 6:163). When we turn to Barth’s extensive essay on “Justification and Justice” published in 1938, which Bonhoeffer read while writing his Ethics, we find Barth now saying virtually the same, as both point to the failure of Reformation theology to make the connection. Justice is not justification, for the first concerns us here and now, but they are inseparably related. For that very reason the church, in proclaiming the gospel of grace has a responsibility to call on the state to do justice (CSC, pp. 101–148; DBWE 6:181 n.38). Perhaps the most significant non‐Barthian element in Bonhoeffer’s Ethics is when, again influenced in part by Brunner’s The Divine Imperative he wrote on the “Natural Life.” But a stronger influence was Bonhoeffer’s engagement with Thomist moral philosophy, such as in the work of Josef Pieper – which he encountered especially during his time spent at the Benedictine abbey in Ettal while writing his Ethics. If we keep in mind that Barth’s early opposition to the Lutheran doctrine of finitum capax infiniti and the related of the analogia entis that Bonhoeffer affirmed, and was also at the heart of Barth’s opposition to Catholic theology (see von Balthasar 1971), we can discern here another instance of Bonhoeffer’s ongoing disagreement with Barth, which is already strong evident in Act and Being. While Bonhoeffer was writing his Ethics he was able to visit Barth in Basel on three occasions during 1941 (4, 6, and 7 March; 30 August; 19 September 1941). Although Barth was initially suspicious of Bonhoeffer’s connection with the Abwehr any doubts on that matter were soon dispelled and they resumed their close friendship. For our purposes the first visit, spread over three days, is the most significant. This provided ample time for the two theologians to engage in intense theological discussion about question to do with Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, as can be seen from his letter to Barth’s secretary, Charlotte von Kirschbaum, soon after the visit (DBWE 16:174). Barth also gave Bonhoeffer a copy of CD II/1, which Bonhoeffer read shortly after. All of which, as Bonhoeffer told Barth in a letter of thanks, helped him to make great progress in his work (DBWE 16:190). On the other two visits there was hardly much time for much discussion between them, and in any case other people were present to discuss political and church matters. The third visit was the last time that they were to meet face to face.

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Bonhoeffer did not complete his work on his Ethics, not only because of his hectic schedule but also because of his arrest by the Gestapo on 5 April 1943 and his imprisonment in Tegel Prison in Berlin. In fact the manuscript on which he was working at the time was confiscated by the Gestapo, though eventually it came into the possession of Bethge. But it remained Bonhoeffer’s hope to complete it as can be seen from the last letter he wrote to Bethge from prison (DBWE 8:518). In that same letter Bonhoeffer also indicates that his Ethics project anticipates what he was currently writing, namely his “short book” on the future of Christianity in a “world come of age,” which he had been discussing with Bethge for several weeks in his letters smuggled from prison (DBWE 8:499–504). There are a number of references to Barth in Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison. These range from an appreciative comment on receiving a cigar from “Karl” (DBWE 8:77), to comments on Barth’s hilaritas or optimism about his work, a bold “willingness to defy the world and popular opinion” for the sake of the world. This, Bonhoeffer said, was a sign of Barth’s greatness (DBWE 8:319). But it is when he gets into his stride in writing about Christianity in a “world come of age” that he more ­seriously engages Barth’s theology once more, beginning with Barth’s attack on “religion.” “Christianity” has always been a form (perhaps the true form) of “religion.” Yet if it becomes obvious one day that this “a priori” doesn’t exist, … what does that then mean for “Christianity”? … Barth, who is the only one to have begun thinking along these lines, nevertheless did not pursue these thoughts all the way, did not think them through, but ended up with a positivism of revelation, which in the end essentially remained a restoration. (DBWE 8:363)

To put it mildly, Barth would not take kindly to Bonhoeffer’s reproach concerning ­“positivism of revelation” when he later read Bonhoeffer’s prison letters. In a letter to Bethge, written in May 1967, he makes several cryptic remarks about Bonhoeffer’s “new theology,” expressing his perplexity about such phrases as “non‐religious interpretation,” “world come of age,” “arcane discipline,” and especially his disquiet about being accused by Bonhoeffer of the “positivism of revelation.” Mentioning that he had tried to understand what Bonhoeffer meant since he first read this criticism, he confessed that “to this day I do not know what Bonhoeffer himself meant and planned with it all.” He went on to say, “very softly” that he doubted whether systematic theology, including his Ethics, was Bonhoeffer’s “real strength,” and that his theological legacy should not be judged on the basis of his prison writings. In fact, he wondered whether Bonhoeffer himself really knew what he meant by those key phrases, and expressed the view that Bonhoeffer was still on an “intellectual pilgrimage” that might have yet yielded “astonishing evolutions in a whole different direction”(Barth 1981, p. 252). So what lay at the heart of Barth’s complaint about being guilty of “positivism of revelation?” The point Bonhoeffer was making was that while Barth had rightly “abolished” religion on the basis of revelation, he then went on to establish Christianity as “true religion,” the religion of God’s grace (see Green 1999, p. 258). Bonhoeffer found this inadequate in addressing those who are “religionless.” For them the ­questions that

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needed to be answered were “what does a church, a congregation, a sermon, a ­liturgy, a Christian life, mean in a religionless world? How do we talk about God  –  without ­religion, i.e., without the temporally conditioned presuppositions of metaphysics, the inner life, and so on?” (DBWE 8:364). In other words, Bonhoeffer’s rejection of Barth’s “positivism of revelation” was indicative of the direction in which he was taking Barth’s critique of religion further, going with Barth but critically beyond him (DBWE 8:364 n.17). It all has to do with Bonhoeffer’s hermeneutical attempt to provide a “non‐religious interpretation” of Christian faith in a language that would address “secular” people, rather than proclaim a “positivist” doctrine of revelation in, what Barth elsewhere referred to as “the ­language of Canaan,” that is the language of the Bible and tradition that we either had to accept or reject. But what do the concepts “of repentance, faith, justification, rebirth, and sanctification” mean in a “‘worldly’ way?” (DBWE 8:373). Did this mean that Bonhoeffer rejects the Biblical language of faith and church ­tradition? Not at all. This is the whole point of what he called the “arcane discipline” that was vital if the church was to engage the world on the basis of a “non‐religious” interpretation of the Bible. Just as Bonhoeffer said in prison that he could now see the dangers of what he had written in Discipleship, namely its failure to address a “world come of age,” that is, it was still operating at the level of religion rather than “this worldliness,” he still stood by what he had written there (DBWE 8:486; cf. DBWE 4:307–308). In his letter to Bethge, Barth, with some reservations, does endorse what he thinks Bonhoeffer was attempting to do at Finkenwalde and by speaking of the “arcane discipline,” namely the renewal of worship. But he is clearly not exactly on the same page as Bonhoeffer. Indebted to Barth, Bonhoeffer had in fact gone beyond him in envisaging the future of Christianity and the church. But by this time, Barth was at the end of his life, and Bonhoeffer was, in any case, no longer around to take the discussion further. Yet, there can be no doubt that Barth himself had, subsequent to Bonhoeffer’s death, benefited from reading what Bonhoeffer had written in the course of his life. Let me ­conclude, then, with reference to Barth’s appreciation of Bonhoeffer’s legacy.

A Postscript: “I Knew Bonhoeffer Well” The first indications of this appreciation are references to Creation and Fall (CD III/1, pp. 193ff); the second are to Ethics, which Barth labels “brilliant” (CD III/4, pp. 4 et al.); the third are references to Bonhoeffer’s distinction between “cheap” and “costly grace” in Discipleship (CD IV/1, p. 70), the relationship between justification and sanctification (CD IV/2, p. 505), and the call to discipleship (CD IV/2, pp. 533f; 540ff et al.); the fourth is Barth’s glowing tribute to Sanctorum Communio (CD IV/2, p. 641); and the fifth are some enigmatic references to Bonhoeffer’s “prison theology” in his Lecture Fragments (CD 1 V/4, p. 200), and to Dein Reich Komme (CD IV/4, pp. 239, 243). There are also references to Bonhoeffer in some of Barth’s occasional papers and ­several letters. One was the letter to Eberhard Bethge to thank him for his biography of Bonhoeffer, which, Barth said, he had avidly read and which had given him reason for further reflection on three matters. The first of these was the way in which Bonhoeffer

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connected the Christian faith and political action; the second was Bonhoeffer’s concern for the renewal of personal and public worship, a concern Barth shared; and the third was Bonhoeffer’s “prison theology,” which I have already discussed (Barth 1981, pp. 251–252). And then, in a letter written to Carl Zuckmayer, Barth remarks: “I knew Bonhoeffer well. What he would have thought and planned and achieved had he lived, no one can say.” But again, as in his letter to Bethge, he hoped that he would be remembered for more than just his Letters and Papers from Prison (Barth 1981, p. 294). But just as Bonhoeffer’s prison theology cannot be properly understood without some knowledge of his earlier writings, not least Sanctorum Communio and Act and Being, most Bonhoeffer scholars would also say that what we find in his prison writings, cryptic as his comments are, points to the direction in which he was going both in continuity with Barth and his earlier writings, but also in a bold step beyond them. References von Balthasar, H.U. (1971). The Theology of Karl Barth. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Barth, K. (1981). Letters:1961–1968 (eds. J. Fangmeier and H. Stoevesandt), (trans. and ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Bethge, E. (2000). Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Bonhoeffer, D. (1996). Act and Being: Transcendental Philosophy and Ontology in Systematic Theology, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English Edition, vol. 2 (ed. W.W. Floyd Jr.). Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Bonhoeffer, D. (1997). Creation and Fall: A Theological Exposition of Genesis 1–3, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English Edition, vol. 3 (ed. J.W. de Gruchy). Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Bonhoeffer, D. (1998). Sanctorum Communio: A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English Edition, vol. 1 (ed. C.J. Green). Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Bonhoeffer, D. (2002). The Young Bonhoeffer: 1918–1927, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English Edition, vol. 9 (eds. C.J. Green, P.D. Matheny and M. Johnson). Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Bonhoeffer, D. (2005). Ethics, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English Edition, vol. 6

(ed. C.J. Green). Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Bonhoeffer, D. (2007). London: 1933–1935, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English Edition, vol. 13 (ed. K. Clements). Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Bonhoeffer, D. (2008). Barcelona, Berlin, America 1928–1931, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English Edition, vol. 10 (ed. C.J. Green). Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Bonhoeffer, D. (2009). Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Berlin, 1932–1933, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English Edition, vol. 12 (ed. L.L. Rasmussen). Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Bonhoeffer, D. (2010). Letters and Papers from Prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English Edition, vol. 8 (ed. J.W. de Gruchy). Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Bonhoeffer, D. (2011). Theological Education Underground, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English Edition, vol. 15 (ed. V.J. Barnett). Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Bonhoeffer, D. (2012). Ecumenical, Academic and Pastoral Work: 1931–1932, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English Edition, vol. 11 (eds. M.B. Lukens, V.J. Barnett and M.S. Brocker). Minneapolis: Fortress Press. DeJonge, M.P. (2012). Bonhoeffer’s Theological Formation: Berlin, Barth, and Protestant Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Godsey, J. (1960). Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. London: SCM. Green, C. (1999). Bonhoeffer: A Theology of Sociality, rev. ed. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Pangritz, A. (2000). Polyphonie des Lebens: Zu Dietrich Bonhoeffers “Theologie der Musik.”. Berlin: Orient & Oxkident.

Rumscheidt, M. (1972). Revelation and Theology: An Analysis of the Barth‐Harnack Correspondence of 1923. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Willis, E.D. (1966). Calvin’s Catholic Christology: The Function of the So‐Called Extra Calvinisticum in Calvin’s Theology. Leiden: Brill.

CHAPTER 47

Barth and Bultmann Joseph L. Mangina

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xtending over the course of almost 50 years, the complex, often fraught relationship between Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann helped define an era in modern Protestant thought. The student wishing to know more of this relationship would do well to begin with their correspondence, which paints a vivid picture of German academic theology in the early to mid‐twentieth century. The letters move from the weightiest of issues, such as the best strategy for offering resistance to Adolf Hitler, to the most mundane details of everyday life: books published, vacation plans, academic politics. There is even a note from a sartorially challenged Bultmann, requesting Barth’s advice on the attire appropriate for receiving an honorary degree in Scotland (Barth et al. 1981, pp. 80–81). The letters also provide a helpful running commentary on the theological arguments between the two thinkers, including the famous debate over demythologizing in the 1940s and 1950s.

Bultmann: The Path to Dialectical Theology Barth and Bultmann will be forever identified with the movement known as dialectical theology, a school that flourished briefly in the 1920s before breaking up in a flurry of disagreement. Bultmann’s own path to becoming a dialectical theologian ran through the historical study of the New Testament. He was a pioneer in the discipline of form criticism, which investigated how oral traditions about Jesus were taken up and used in the early church. For the form critic, the gospels tell us more about the primitive community than they do about the historical Jesus. For Christian faith, the religiously decisive thing is not Jesus himself, a messianic figure who properly speaking belongs to the history of Judaism. (The modern commonplace that Jesus was a Jew, not a Christian,

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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owes much to Bultmann’s writing.) Rather, the Christ who concerns Christian theology is the crucified and risen Lord of the church’s “proclamation,” also known as the kerygma. As he would later put it: “He who formerly had been the bearer of the message was drawn into it and became its essential content. The proclaimer became the ­proclaimed” (Bultmann 1955, p. 33).1 Bultmann arrived early on at the conviction that the New Testament is charged with eschatological expectation and hope. The discontinuity between the two eons was utterly fundamental to him; but he insisted that this rupture must not be understood in the crudely apocalyptic terms favored by the New Testament writers. Rather, he translated it instinctively into a modern idiom concerning the self, using conceptual resources drawn from the world of Kantian ethics and the personalist theology of his teacher Wilhelm Herrmann (with whom Barth also studied). In this universe of discourse, that which is uniquely human is the realm of personal action or freedom. It must be strictly distinguished from all that merely “is” – the empirical and factual world as described by science but also the self ’s own reality in so far as it is determined by materiality, social forces, or even the self ’s own past. “Existence” for Bultmann is the potential to become who we are. Everything else belongs to “world” (Roberts 1976, p. 24). The gospels speak of a new heaven and a new earth, but the real evangelical novum is the new human being, liberated for authentic existence. Bultmann would eventually discover in the work of Martin Heidegger a powerful set of philosophical resources for articulating this vision.

Spirit and Letter: Barth and Bultmann on Interpretation But before Bultmann encountered Heidegger, he discovered an unsuspected ally in a young Swiss pastor named Karl Barth. Bultmann had read the first edition of Barth’s Epistle to the Romans (1919) and was unimpressed. The work seemed to him alarmingly ahistorical and unscientific. But at the urging of his students Bultmann accorded a careful reading to the second edition (1922), which seemed to him a different thing altogether. In a glowing review of the work for The Christian World, Germany’s leading journal of liberal theology, Bultmann argued that whatever might be Barth’s deficiencies as a scientific exegete, he had correctly understood Paul. What did Barth get right? Precisely Paul’s restless eschatology, his refusal to resolve the antinomies that separate the world from God, time from eternity. The new world of God presses in upon us and grasps us, yet never in such a way that we can grasp it as a form of religious security. Here was eschatology indeed. “In continually new expressions Barth describes the great paradox of faith, the identification of the perceptible with the imperceptible ‘I,’ of the unredeemed man with the justified” (Robinson and Moltmann 1968, p. 109). For a scholar of Bultmann’s stature – by 1922, he was already one of the leading lights of German New Testament scholarship  –  to offer such an ecstatic review of a work by an exegetical amateur was a remarkable acknowledgment on his part. The approbation comes not without a few criticisms. The most important of them concern

1  Throughout this article, italicized words in quotations represent the quoted author’s own emphasis.

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Barth’s conception of the interpretive task. On the one hand, Bultmann praises Barth for moving beyond mere explication of the text to boldly identifying its subject matter (die Sache). Although this inevitably involves a measure of identification with the author, it is only the first step. The truly serious interpreter is one who is also willing to correct the author in light of the subject matter. Authors are not always true to their own best insights. Thus, although in Paul’s letter to the Romans the theme is the pneuma Christou or Spirit of Christ, not everything in Romans breathes this spirit. Paul’s gospel is mixed up with a variety of first‐century Jewish and Hellenistic beliefs that are extraneous to it. Barth, however, does not distinguish these things, treating the entire text on one level – as if it were divine revelation. Bultmann sees this hermeneutical conservatism as being at odds with Barth’s overall eschatological vision. In his preface to the third edition of the commentary, Barth expresses his appreciation for Bultmann’s positive review. At the same time, he picks up the gauntlet his ­colleague had flung down on the question of exegesis. Regarding “other spirits,” Barth insists he simply does not have the ability to identify those places where Paul is speaking the gospel and where he is not. Viewed from a certain angle, Paul’s letter to the church at Rome is nothing but its cultural and historical conditioning: [I]n no case can it be a question of playing off the Spirit of Christ, the “subject matter,” in such a way against the “other spirits,” that in the name of the former certain passages are praised, but certain others, where Paul is not speaking “from the subject matter” are belittled. Rather it is a question of seeing and making clear how the “Spirit of Christ” is the crisis in which the whole finds itself. Everything is litera, the voice of “other” spirits …. (Robinson and Moltmann 1968, p. 127)

Although admitting that there is much in Paul we find difficult, Barth is willing to extend hermeneutical patience to the text even when its language and categories seem most alien to us. The reader must not presume to teach the apostle his business. “The pneuma Christou is not a position on which one can take a stand, and then from there play the schoolmaster to Paul” – or anyone else (Robinson and Moltmann 1968, p. 129; trans. rev.). In his review Bultmann had complained that Barth’s tendency to accept the text on its own terms places him uncomfortably close to the old Protestant doctrine of inspiration. Barth cheerfully pleads guilty to this charge. “I cannot understand how there could be any other way to the spirit of (any) writing than the hypothetical expectation that its spirit would speak to our spirit precisely through the letters. The unavoidable critique of the letter by the spirit is not at all abandoned by this way of reading” (Robinson and Moltmann 1968, pp. 128–129; trans. rev.). Of course, the letter must be discerned in light of the Spirit; we see here the broadly Reformed character of Barth’s theology of Scripture. At the same time, there is no apprehension of the Spirit that takes place apart from the actual letters, words, sentences, and discourse that make up the fabric of Holy Writ. Barth’s appreciation for the Bible’s coherence and his instinct for reading according to the plain sense marks his kinship with the biblical realism of J. C. and Christoph Blumhardt, whose writings were important catalysts in his theological revolution.

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In Barth’s mature theology of the Word of God, he would speak of revelation as the divine event in which Scripture “becomes” the Word for us. If the humanity of the text makes it an appropriate subject of historical inquiry, its role as an appointed witness to Jesus Christ invites our deference and obedience. There is a strong note of actualism in Barth’s formal theology of the Word. It is, after all, a doctrine of revelation. And yet the actualism is balanced by an overall hermeneutic of trust or assent, grounded in the expectation that there exists a relationship of appropriateness between the human text and its divine subject matter. Barth’s effective ontology of Scripture is the doctrine of the Trinity, describing the event wherein the Father speaks his Word Jesus Christ, in company with the witness‐bearing Holy Spirit. Chief among the Spirit’s gifts to the church is Holy Scripture. Barth’s turn to dogmatics in the early 1920s left Bultmann cold, as it did many other of his allies in the dialectical movement. Whereas Barth increasingly wished to read Scripture in company with Augustine, Aquinas, and the Reformers, Bultmann set out on a quest to clarify the conditions that make interpretation possible. Developing ideas from nineteenth‐century hermeneutics, he came to believe that truthful exegesis happens only as we bring to the text the right questions or “pre‐understanding” – a kind of useful prejudice, fostering a vigorous encounter between the author and reader. As mentioned earlier, Bultmann believed he had found the proper pre‐understanding for reading the New Testament in Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein, the distinctively human way of being‐in‐the‐world. If the question of authentic existence is the human question, Bultmann came to think, we should not be surprised if it also forms the central issue that comes to expression in the New Testament. To put it in Heideggerian jargon, if the human being is ontically existentiell (a historic being, one that comes‐to‐be) then ­theology cannot help but employ existential categories (the ontology that deals with precisely this feature of reality). Given this framework, it was inevitable that Bultmann’s reading of the Bible would be focused less on the content of its witness and more on the existential possibilities it opens up for us. The very idea of hermeneutics tends to place the emphasis on what lies “in front of ” the text – above all, the subjectivity of the reader.

Theology, Philosophy, and Politics Bultmann’s Heideggerian turn placed him on a collision course with Barth, who was working hard throughout this period to establish the independence of theology from all philosophical foundations. As God’s gift of himself in Jesus Christ is utterly sovereign and free, so theology must claim the freedom to orient itself toward this gift rather than becoming captive to a particular worldview. Here we see one of the perennial themes in the decades‐long quarrel between the two thinkers. Bultmann constantly pressed Barth to “clarify his concepts,” arguing that only a philosophically self‐aware theology can be truly self‐critical. It must have maddened Bultmann as a historian that Barth would not state his method! Yet Barth was unyielding. He confessed to being philosophically eclectic, raiding the systems of different thinkers for particular theological uses. As he  would write to Bultmann years later: “I am not an enemy of philosophy as such, but  I  have hopeless reservations about the claim to absoluteness of any philosophy,

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e­ pistemology, or methodology. Occasionally I may cheerfully make use of existential categories, – not without going back again sometimes to father Plato and others” (Barth et al. 1981, p. 106). This eclecticism has a whiff of the postmodern about it, but Barth’s reasons for it were not dictated by a spirit of postmodern playfulness or bricolage. Rather, he was convinced that the particular reality of God as attested by Scripture demands it. God’s unique being, otherness, and grace are such that the theologian must resist conceptual closure of the kind philosophy demands. It is for this reason that a high tolerance for mystery is an essential feature of Barth’s theological imagination (Hunsinger 1991, p. 34). There are things the theologian must say that stretch the bounds of human ­language – not because one should revel in paradox for its own sake (Barth did not), but because the overflowing fullness of God requires such flexibility. These rather abstruse methodological issues took on a new urgency in the political situation of the time. Barth now became convinced that any systematic correlation ­between theology and philosophy or cultural analysis was a disaster waiting to happen, leaving the church vulnerable to ideological subversion. To put it concretely, if revelation is a matter of Jesus Christ “and” some other source of insight, why should not the “and” mean Adolf Hitler? Barth’s fears were not groundless. Antiliberals such as Friedrich Gogarten and Emmanuel Hirsch read the renewal of Germany under Hitler as a revelatory sign of the times. Given Bultmann’s close association with Heidegger, whose sympathies for the new (Nazi) regime were only too apparent, Barth could only assume that he would soon join Gogarten and Hirsch in declaring his allegiance to the German Christians (Forstman 1992, p. 203). The fact that this did not happen was a source of continual pleasure and amazement to Barth. Surely someone of Bultmann’s views should have gone over to the German‐ Christian side. (He could not resist making this point in personal conversation with Bultmann, occasioning no little hurt and soul searching on the latter’s part. Barth could at times be remarkably tactless [see Barth et  al. 1981, p. 75]). Nevertheless, Bultmann and other members of the Marburg faculty would soon prove to be among his staunchest allies in the Confessing Church. The collaboration effectively ended with Barth’s expulsion from Germany in 1935. After the war, the fact that Bultmann had done the right thing in the Church Struggle meant a great deal to Barth, convincing him of the probity of Bultmann’s intentions even in the midst of fierce theological disagreement.

Demythologizing In 1941 Bultmann published his commentary on the Fourth Gospel. It is a majestic volume, employing critical historical analysis in the service of theological interpretation. In many ways this book is his enduring legacy to Christian thought. That same year – and almost as a methodological accompaniment to the commentary – Bultmann delivered his famous address on demythologizing to a theological conference of pastors of the Confessing Church. It is a breathtakingly bold programmatic essay, setting forth an agenda for evangelical theology that he claims “will tax the time and strength of a

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whole generation” (Bartsch and Bultmann 1961, p. 15). In it he argues that the world‐­ picture (Weltbild) of the New Testament authors is fundamentally mythic in character. The cosmos is hierarchically structured with heaven at the top, earth in the middle, and hell below our feet. It is also an enchanted realm, in which supernatural forces control human destiny. Miracles are a regular occurrence.2 The gospel story itself is mythic, with Christ descending from heaven to defeat the demons and make atonement for sin. His coming return in glory will usher in a final cosmic catastrophe. The problem, says Bultmann, is that no one today believes any of this. “It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles” (Bartsch and Bultmann 1961, p. 5). When Bultmann says “myth” he is not proposing a historical or literary category that would compete with, say, a folklorist’s understanding of myth. He is using the term theologically. Critically speaking, myth refers to the mistake of naively picturing God as a possible element in our world, so that we can describe his doings as we do those of earthly beings. As Jenson puts it, “the ruling maxim of Bultmann’s famous program of ‘demythologizing’ is that no stories can properly be told about eternity; in his definition, a ‘myth’ is any sequential narrative pretending to be about deity, and ‘demythologizing’ means identifying the impact of such a narrative in such fashion as to obviate its claim as narrative” (Jenson 1997, p. 169). Narrative qua narrative, description qua description, is discounted where matters of eternity – of God – are concerned. However, that is only the critical side of Bultmann’s project. The constructive side begins with the insight that myths really do have an “impact” on us, that they move and transform us in certain ways, and that this impact is their real meaning. We will not understand Bultmann rightly if we fail to see that demythologizing is intended as a hermeneutics of retrieval. In the context of the New Testament, the goal is to discern and clarify that which its mythical forms of expression are trying to say to us. As Bultmann said many times and in many ways, the goal of demythologizing is not to eliminate myth but to interpret it. The first and most important question to ask about demythologizing, then, is not so much “what is myth” but “what is the gospel as Bultmann understands it?” This brings us to the constructive side of Bultmann’s program, namely his consistent existentialist reading of the New Testament. Demythologizing is really just a ground‐clearing exercise for this constructive act of theological interpretation. It was this constructive aspect that so exercised Karl Barth, far more than issues concerning myth, miracle, and metaphor, although these were indeed important questions at a secondary level. Quite simply, Bultmann understands the gospel as God’s gift – which is at the same time a summons  –  of radical openness to the future. This future does not have a “content,” either personal immortality or the new Jerusalem or even the social gospel’s kingdom of God on earth. All these would fall under the category of mythic thinking. Rather, “the future” here names abandoning the prison walls of worldly existence (walls 2  “Myth” in the New Testament, for Bultmann, was largely constituted by miracle stories, as it was also for D.F. Strauss. “Demythologizing” meant that they had to be rejected as historical occurrences, while being subjected to a form of “existential” interpretation. By contrast, Barth regarded Jesus’s incarnation, atoning sacrifice, and bodily resurrection as miracles that had actually occurred in time and space and that were ­constitutive of the gospel.

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that human beings largely constructed for themselves, with the help of their social world and its fallen structures and assumptions) and entering into a new life of freedom. Such freedom arises when a person trusts the One who makes the offer. This trust is the stance of the self known as “faith.” And what faith responds to is none other than the kerygma, the good news of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The announcement that Jesus, the Crucified, is risen from the dead – not a general idea or principle, but a contingent and surprising historical (geschichtlich) event – is what jolts me out of my complacency and draws me into a new life of freedom and hope. Indeed, the gospel poses eschatological possibility precisely because of its contingent character, because it ­interrupts our history in a way we could never have anticipated. (On this point see the illuminating discussion in Jenson 1997, pp. 167–169). One cannot but admire the brilliance of this conception, whatever one makes of it theologically. It is in many ways the perfection of the nineteenth‐century liberal Protestant project that sought to bring together two things: 1. A general analysis of the human situation, by which the theologian shows that Christianity responds to a meaningful and indeed urgent set of questions, often by identifying some key anthropological structure or experience. In Bultmann’s case, this is the Heideggerian analysis of Dasein. 2. The particular historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth, as being somehow the clue or resolution to the universal situation described in (1). Quite obviously and explicitly, Bultmann’s version of the gospel does not require belief in “supernatural” realities as traditionally understood. One can have the existentialist gospel without a divine “being,” whether mythic pictures of a white‐bearded Sky‐father or the metaphysical refinements of an Aquinas, God as esse ipse (being itself). This does not mean Bultmann does not believe in God, but that God must be understood strictly in terms of the faith‐relationship in which the believer finds herself. Schleiermacher defined God as the “whence” of the feeling of absolute dependence. In like fashion, Bultmann effectively defines God as the source of eschatological possibility and new life. It is not too much to say that God for Bultmann happens, just as the human being may be said to “happen.” Actualistic ontology has replaced the language of divine aseity and perfections that reigned from the Church Fathers to the Enlightenment. Before turning back to Barth, it is important to notice another aspect in which Bultmann’s theology reflects the nineteenth‐century heritage. As Katherine Sonderegger has argued, modern Protestant thought has been haunted by the “problem of coinherence” or “the problem of the given,” closely related to the question of natural theology (Sonderegger 2015, pp. 115–121). The problem of coinherence arises in a modern context after Descartes and Kant, where the spontaneous activity of the human knower seems to pose a threat to God’s freedom and thus to his graciousness. A major underlying assumption here is that to know objects is to control them, and of course God can never be controlled. God must never be a “given” – sheerly available or passive to human knowledge and experience. This is why this nineteenth‐century Protestant tradition is highly suspicious of natural theology, a slippery term to be sure, and one that becomes the source of much finger‐pointing. Thus Barth accuses both Schleiermacher and Bultmann of engaging in “natural theology.” Yet in a broader

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sense, the thrust of this antimetaphysical tradition is away from God’s simple availability and toward God’s revelation in human history, and especially in the person of Jesus Christ. It would not be too much to say that dialectical theology is that mode of Christian reflection specifically designed to avoid committing the error of natural theology. Now clearly both Barth and Bultmann are dialectical theologians. Clearly they share an allergy to divine “givenness,” a fault they associate with Schleiermacher and the liberals (who themselves, however, were also wrestling with the same set of issues). Clearly they both see God’s relation to human beings as a matter of revelation and history. Nevertheless there is a big difference  –  namely, that Bultmann is a far more consistently dialectical thinker than Barth is (so rightly Congdon 2015). If Barth was lax about c­ larifying his concepts, this was not the case with Bultmann, who was extraordinarily consistent in articulating his first principles and carrying them through in practice. His answer to the problem of givenness or natural theology is both elegant and powerful. Thus, there is no more central Bultmannian rule than the one that states God may never be “objectified.” God comes to us in his revelation, but not in such a way as to enter the ordinary subject–object relations that define our engagement with the world (Roberts 1976, pp. 46ff.). Genuinely theological thinking aims to overcome the subject– object dichotomy, so as to maintain a strict separation between God and the world. Finally, we need to extend this pattern of reflection into the soteriological realm. Whatever salvation may mean, it cannot mean a supernatural reality that transpires above our heads. It is never less than an event in my existence: By giving up Jesus to be crucified, God has set up the cross for us. To believe in the cross of Christ does not mean to concern ourselves with a mythical process wrought outside of us and our world, with an objective event turned by God to our advantage, but rather to make the cross of Christ our own, to undergo crucifixion with him…. In other words, the cross is not just an event of the past which can be contemplated, but is the eschatological event in and beyond time, in so far as it (understood in its significance, that is, for faith) is an ever‐ present reality. (Bartsch and Bultmann 1961, p. 36, italics added)

The historical crucifixion is an event that occurred in the first century ce. But the meaning of the cross is its present tense. It occurs as I myself am crucified with Christ. This experience cannot be objectively described but only as it is undergone. There are clear echoes here of Luther’s early theologia crucis, focused on identification with Christ’s sufferings, even if Bultmann’s version is rather more sober than the mystical spirituality of the young Reformer. Once again, the cross is defined by its impact on us rather by its descriptive content – in other words, not as the fact of its being a sacrifice for sin or of the Crucified’s identity as a divine‐human person as set forth by Chalcedon. In this sense Bultmann was very much the modern, postmetaphysical Protestant. In response to the World Council of Churches’ Toronto statement of 1950, in which the churches affirmed their adherence to Jesus as “God and Savior,” Bultmann demurred. “How far,” he asks, “is a christological pronouncement about him also a pronouncement about me? Does he help me because he is God’s Son, or is he the Son of God because he helps

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me?” (Bultmann 1955, p. 280). From Bultmann’s perspective, to raise this question is already to answer it. He is the Son of God because he helps me.3 It is tempting to say that Bultmann’s theology is subjectively oriented whereas Barth is concerned with objectivities, but this way of putting it will not quite do. Despite his rejection of objectifying language, Bultmann clearly believes that the cross‐event names a reality prior to faith’s reception of it. “Something happened” in Jesus’ death – call it the action of God – and this event may not itself be demythologized. The right wing of the Bultmann school affirmed that the kerygma necessarily involves a reference to the historical crucifixion, while the left wing denied this. Bultmann himself belonged to the right wing of his own school, even if he refused to join its new quest for the historical Jesus in the 1950s. His stubborn insistence on the historical specificity of the Christ‐ event marks a conservative residue in what is otherwise a very radical vision. The issue, then, is not so much objectivity versus subjectivity. It is rather the kind of objectivity that pertains to God and the things of God. For Bultmann it is of the essence of the matter that the divine is not be objectified. To so represent it or narrate it would be to give it over for possible idolatrous use. Eternity cannot be translated without loss into time. That was a central theme of Barth’s Romans, but it was maintained with rigorous consistency by Bultmann. For the mature Barth, by contrast, the use of objectifying language was simply not as much of a worry, indeed the incarnation and its textual display in Scripture are the very means God uses to unite us with himself. Although Barth’s entire theology may be thought of as an extended meditation on the cross, his attention was focused – and increasingly so as time went on – on the person of the Crucified rather than on the “event” as such, even though for him the person and the event could never be separated. In a letter to Bultmann from 1952, a late dispatch in the debate over demythologizing, Barth writes: “I have become increasingly a Zinzendorfian to the extent that in the NT only the one central figure as such has begun to occupy me – or each and everything else in the light and under the sign of this central figure. As I see it, one can and should read all theology in some sense backwards from it.” (Barth et al. 1981, p. 107). One can read this as a methodological remark, and indeed in this same context Barth mentions his intention to subordinate anthropology, ethics, and theological method to Christology. More important, though, I take it as a comment on the character of Barth’s theological imagination. His was a God‐intoxicated imagination, and just so an imagination intoxicated with the person of Jesus Christ, the Son of God who ventured into the far country and the Judge who was judged in our place (CD IV/1, §59). The being of this person was in his act, in his history, as the Judge judged in our place.

Barth and Bultmann as Figural Readers of Scripture Barth’s repeated use of the term “figure” (Figur) in the previously cited passage is highly suggestive. In the Christian exegetical tradition, figural or typological reading names the practice of showing how particular persons and events in Scripture refer to other 3  Bultmann departed from Nicaea and Chalcedon as Barth did not.

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persons and events, not only elsewhere in Scripture but in our common world. Indeed, figural exegesis can be seen as the practice of tracing the analogies and correspondences that constitute the Bible as a unified testimony to Jesus Christ, in the process inviting readers to discover their own lives as figured in its pages. One potent example will have to suffice. In a long exegetical excursus in Church Dogmatics II/2, Barth discovers the reality of divine election mysteriously set forth in a series of Old Testament types. Among these types are the ritual of the two birds, slaughtered in connection with the cleansing of lepers (Lev. 14); the prescriptions concerning the sacrificed goat and the scapegoat led out into the wilderness for Aaron’s cleansing (Lev. 16); and the narratives concerning Saul’s and David’s struggle for the kingship (1 Samuel). In each of these pairings, we can glimpse some aspect of the mysterious coinherence between the elect and the reject. In these stories we see that election is never an individual’s secure possession, and in light of the divine mercy and patience rejection is never simply the end of the story; oddly, it is precisely the rejected who are the more obvious recipients of the divine mercy. Only in faith can these shadowy Old Testament figures be perceived as ultimately pointing to Jesus Christ, the Elect Beloved of God, who in his body bore the rejection deserved by each one of us. Barth’s account of these matters is rightly called “dialectical.” Election is a function of the living encounter between divine and human freedom, hence cannot be pinned down in a static, systematic structure. But what is dialectic summoned to protect? Precisely the reality and actuality of election in the person of Jesus Christ. Christ himself is the freedom of God for human beings. He is, in his own person, the “blessed exchange” between the divine and the human that constitutes our salvation. The birds, the goats, the agonizing relation between David and Saul – these biblical figures show forth the grace of God embodied in the “one central figure” of Jesus Christ. Finally, we note that there is rarely a distinct moment of application in Barth’s theology, insofar as the description itself just is the application. To rightly know who Jesus is in his narrated ­history (Geschichte) is to know that he is “for me” and “for us.” Now Bultmann also engages in figural exegesis of a sort; but in his case, the applicative moment looms much larger. In the terms used by premodern exegetes, his figuralism is concentrated primarily on Scripture’s tropological or moral sense, spelling out how we should act – the Bible’s consequences for our lives. In Bultmann’s version, the Christ‐event (the antitype) gives rise to faith (the type). Bultmann’s students Gerhard Ebeling and Ernst Fuchs offered an interesting variation on this theme. Deciding that theology could not after all dispense with the historical Jesus, they stressed that Christian faith is grounded in the faith of Jesus himself, the stance of faithful obedience that led him to the cross. The kerygma is the speech‐event that announces the possibility of such faith. Barth had no quarrel with tropological moves of this sort – as long as they are backed up by a sufficiently strong Christology (and, ultimately, doctrine of God). This he found lacking in Bultmann. Rather, Bultmann’s radical christological minimalism seemed to open the door to a collapse of the gospel into the human subject. This would represent a reversal of the traditional figural relation, in which our faith attains “antitypical” ­significance. For Bultmann, what happens in us is the real locus of salvation.

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The neuralgic issue was always the gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection appearances. For Bultmann, the appearance stories are a prime example of texts that invite demythologization. On the surface they tell of a man who walked around on earth after his death, a tale that is not only incredible but religiously useless. How can this putative miracle in the past possibly “help me?” So long as the myth is left uninterpreted, it remains at best a puzzle and at worst an offense. But when read as a powerful expression of Christian faith in the living Christ – then the texts come alive, then they truly become gospel for us. For Barth, this simply would not do. To secure the affirmation “Jesus lives,” a point on which he and Bultmann were agreed, he found it necessary to insist that the risen Lord have his own life, logically and ontically prior to that of his church: “the life he lives, he lives to God” (Rom. 6:10). And this, in turn, means that the appearance stories need to be read in something like a naively literal fashion, without resorting to the Ockham’s razor of existential interpretation. Barth, to be sure, notes the oddity of the post‐Easter accounts. He readily acknowledges their legendary character with respect to genre and mode of narration. They describe occurrences that by their very nature are likely to prove exceedingly elusive to the secular historian (CD III/2, pp. 445–447). But this does not make them any less historical. Somehow Jesus, Son of God and son of Mary, spent time – “fulfilled time,” but still earthly, human time – with his disciples after his resurrection, teaching and instructing them in “the things concerning himself ” (Luke 24:7). Before being proclaimed, he was the Proclaimer. This is what is involved in confessing him as the “Lord of Time,” the one in whose time the times of all our lives unfold (CD III/2, §47.1). Jesus lives, and we live in him. The Lukan account of the 40 days, then, helps bring into focus not just Barth’s and Bultmann’s divergent ways of reading Scripture, but their differing apprehensions of the reality‐status of Christian claims. Bultmann, with his tropological emphasis, sees divine and human being strictly in light of the kerygmatic encounter between word and faith. God is, as God saves us. We do not need to know more than that. In this sense Bultmann effectively does away with the hidden God that so haunted Luther, by identifying God strictly with the Christus praesens made known in word and sacrament (so Kay 1994). If the strength of this vision is its strict Lutheran correlation between the gospel and actual proclamation, its weakness is the erosion of the historic Christian conviction that God is “interesting” not only as God saves us, but as God lives eternally and perfectly in himself. Barth, by contrast, is closer to the mainstream catholic tradition in his desire to trace the lively being of God as “the One who loves in freedom,” in a way that is relatively independent of God’s meaning for us. As John Webster has noted, the simple declarative sentence “God is” summarizes what Barth takes Christian ­dogmatics to be all about (CD II/1, p. 257; Webster 2000, p. 83).

Conclusion An intellectual historian would not be wrong in classifying Barth and Bultmann as “modern Protestant christocentric theologians of revelation.” This was the atmosphere they breathed, and to some extent the idiom they shared. Yet they inhabited this

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i­ nheritance very differently. Bultmann pressed Reformation thought in the direction of one possible future: boldly iconoclastic, metaphysically revisionist, stripping the altars of Scripture in favor of a pure subject matter (“the gospel”) that floats free of the text and its merely human representations. It is hard to see how this theological program finally avoids the dissolution of myth altogether, despite Bultmann’s protestations to the contrary. There is something of a paradox here, for although he eloquently insists on the fleshly and historical character of the Word, his governing assumptions make it ­difficult to identify this Word unambiguously with the actual human being Jesus of Nazareth, Messiah. In one sense his disagreement with Barth was over the nature of the incarnation, and ultimately over the nature of God: God’s being, God’s relation to the world, God’s knowability. Throughout their relationship God was always the underlying issue at stake. In another sense, however, theirs was a disagreement about how to regard Scripture – a point already evident in their early hermeneutical debates. The issue, one might argue, is not directly concerning the authority of Scripture, for both were convinced of that authority. They invoked it in common in 1933 against the German Christians. The issue is more the way we understand Scripture as shaping the Christian imagination. For Bultmann, the Bible serves as a kind of catalyst, facilitating an encounter between the nonobjectifiable Creator and human persons in history. For Barth, the Bible is a world one enters, even a quasi‐icon displaying the being‐in‐act of “the One who loves in freedom and who freely loves.” Even though Barth is rightly considered a theologian for preachers, his esthetic is perhaps as much visual as it is auditory (as witness the importance of Matthias Grünewald’s painting of the Crucifixion in his work). This is why Barth’s formal, methodological differences from Bultmann may in the end be less important than questions of basic imagination or sensibility. For Barth, the creaturely reality of Scripture is caught up by God’s reality in such a way that we can trustingly enter it, without worrying overmuch about method. For our lives and our world are figures in its – or rather God’s – own life. References Barth, K., Bultmann, R., Jaspert, B., and Bromiley, G.W. (1981). Karl Barth‐Rudolf Bultmann Letters, 1922–1966. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Bartsch, H.W. and Bultmann, R. (1961). Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate. New York: Harper & Bros. Bultmann, R. (1955). Essays, Philosophical and Theological. London: SCM Press. Congdon, D.W. (2015). The Mission of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann’s Dialectical Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Forstman, J. (1992). Christian Faith in Dark Times: Theological Conflicts in the Shadow of

Hitler. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press. Hunsinger, G. (1991). How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology. New York: Oxford University Press. Jenson, R.W. (1997). Systematic Theology I: The Triune God. New York: Oxford University Press. Kay, J.F. (1994). Christus Praesens: A Reconsideration of Rudolf Bultmann’s Christology. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Roberts, R.C. (1976). Rudolf Bultmann’s Theology: A Critical Interpretation. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

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Robinson, J.M. and Moltmann, J. (1968). The Beginnings of Dialectic Theology. Richmond: John Knox Press.

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Sonderegger, K. (2015). Systematic Theology: The Doctrine of God. Minneapolis: Fortress. Webster, J. (2000). Barth. London: Continuum.

Further Reading Barth, K. (1962). ‘Rudolf Bultmann: an attempt to understand him,’ in Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate, vol. 2, ed. Hans‐Werner Bartsch. London: SPCK. Bultmann, R. (1965). Theology of the New Testament. New York: Scribner. Bultmann, R. (1971). The Gospel of John: A Commentary. Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press.

Bultmann, R., & Funk, R. W. (1969). Faith and Understanding. New York: Harper and Row. Fergusson, D. (1992). Bultmann. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press. Hammann, K. (2013). Rudolf Bultmann: A Biography. Salem, OR: Polebridge Press. Schmithals, W. (1968). An Introduction to the Theology of Rudolf Bultmann. London: SCM Press.

CHAPTER 48

Barth and Tillich George Hunsinger

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arl Barth and Paul Tillich stood for two contrary ways of doing Christian theology. Differences in theological method were reflected in their differences about theological doctrine. Tillich’s theology was philosophically “speculative” and “anthropocentric,” whereas Barth’s was strongly “dogmatic” and “christocentric.” By his own account Tillich’s method was “apologetic” and “correlationist,” whereas Barth’s method, about which he said rather little directly, was more nearly “exegetical” and “hermeneutical,” marked by a continual, often innovative, wrestling with Holy Scripture. Although the two were not without points of convergence, the “anthropocentric”/“christocentric” divergence between them was decisive. What they finally represented was the divided mind of modern theology. The nature and function of theological language separated Barth and Tillich rather sharply. Their divergent views about theological language, however, presupposed their equally divergent views about God. Their doctrines of God will therefore be taken up first before the issue of theological language is approached. After these topics are considered, our attention will turn to the theme of Christ and salvation in its objective and subjective (or “existential”) aspects. An overview of the main positions taken by the two theologians will be the result.

The Doctrine of God Tillich’s doctrine of God may be described as speculative. It owed much to the idealist tradition in philosophy, especially as found in Schelling and Hegel. In Tillich a received doctrine of the Trinity was recast in speculative and idealist terms. The basic proposition underlying Tillich’s speculative trinitarian doctrine was the famous statement:

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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“God is being‐itself, not a being.”1 For Tillich this was the only “nonsymbolic” statement about God that could be made. The category of “existence” could not be applied to God, because that would make God into merely one being among others. Therefore, God’s “existence” could be neither affirmed nor denied without committing a category mistake. Apart from the one exception, the infinite transcendence of God made descriptive or denotative statements about God to be impossible. Besides the one nonsymbolic statement, all other statements were “symbolic” and derived from what was thought to be “implicit” in religious self‐ consciousness. God as “the Unconditioned” (a “nonsymbolic” idea that seems to be a variation on “being‐itself ”) was given or coinherent in all religious self‐consciousness. Religious self‐consciousness, for its part, was apparently conceived as an anthropological universal. The “trinitarian,” or perhaps better “triadic,” structure of “being itself ” was postulated from what was thought to be “implicit” in universal religious self‐ consciousness. This basic move was fraught with far‐reaching implications. Despite the emphasis on infinite transcendence, Tillich’s theology lacked, according to one interpreter, a “clear distinction between God’s being and created being” (Leiner 2009, p. 12). The basis for the derivation (religious self‐consciousness) and the idea derived from it (God as being itself) perhaps had, as Feuerbach might have appreciated, too much in common. Being itself, for Tillich, had a triadic structure. The three elements by which being was structured were, most simply, abyss, logos, and reunification. The abyss element meant that nonbeing and negativity were found within the divine life. The logos element stood over against nonbeing and was the image that gave it form. The reunification element, in turn, was the dynamic process by which the abyss element was conquered by the logos‐element (ST 1, pp. 249–252). For Tillich the living God was “the eternal process by which separation is posited and is overcome by reunion” (ST 1, p. 242). The Father was associated with the abyss, the Son with the logos, and the Spirit with the process of reunification. This speculative triad bore little resemblance to Nicene orthodoxy. The three speculative elements were not coequal hypostases of a single ousia, there was no monarchy of the Father, there was no eternal generation of the Son, there was no eternal procession of the Spirit from the Father, and there was no perichoresis. Most especially, where Nicaea presupposed indivisibility in the divine ousia, Tillich posited a division in God that needed to be (and was) eternally overcome.2 The structure of created being reflected the structure of being itself. More precisely, created being was like a broken image of divine being. The same elements constituting

1  Tillich (1951), p. 237. Hereafter cited as ST 1 in the text. 2  God has the “element of nonbeing … within himself ” (ST 1, p. 252). The abyss-element, the first principle, is “chaos, burning fire” (ST 1, p. 251). It is “darkness” (ST 1, p. 279). “Without the second principle God is demonic” (ST 1, p. 251). “Nonbeing makes God a living God. Without the No he has to overcome in himself and his creature, the divine Yes to himself would be lifeless.” God’s life includes nonbeing within itself, but always as something “eternally conquered;” in that sense, “being-itself transcends nonbeing absolutely” (ST 1, p. 270). Being-itself is said to include, conquer, and transcend nonbeing. On these terms, it is not clear how the “transcendence” of nonbeing in the divine life, even if decisive, could be strictly “absolute.” Tillich (1952), p. 174.

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the divine being – abyss, logos, unifying process – were present in created being as well, in some sense, yet with a basic difference. The difference was that the harmony found in the divine being was absent under the conditions of existence. Whereas divine being included non‐being (the abyss element) as something eternally overcome in the divine life, created being was continually threatened by nonbeing. The human situation was one of estrangement, finitude, and anxiety. It was accompanied by the constant threat of meaninglessness. For created being, the eternal harmony of the divine being was at best a destiny, not a constitutive element. Created being somehow “participated” in divine being but only in the form of brokenness. At least three aspects of Tillich’s account stood in strong contrast to Barth. For Barth, (i) no separation or division was posited within the divine being, (ii) no element of ­nonbeing was constitutive of the divine being, and (iii) no ontological participation of created being in the divine being could relativize the sovereignty of divine freedom. Before moving on, this latter point especially needs to be considered. For Tillich creation was “not only God’s freedom but also his destiny” (ST 1, p. 252). Creation was therefore somehow “identical with his life” (ST 1, p. 252). It would be “meaningless to ask whether creation [was] a necessary or a contingent act of God” (ST 1, p. 252). Creation was thought to be neither necessary nor contingent. It was grounded in the divine being but not in a sovereign act of divine freedom. Nor was it merely an emanation of the divine being in the sense of being a necessary platform for divine self‐ actualization. There are perplexities in this account that cannot be unpacked here.3 It is not surprising, however, that one of Tillich’s sympathetic interpreters should conclude that “in Tillich’s view, the world loses [its] radical contingency … because its existence does not seem to depend on an act of God’s freedom” (Powell 2001, pp. 173–193, 189). A fundamental point of divergence between Barth and Tillich centered on their differing accounts of divine freedom. No point was more fundamental for Barth than the assertion that God revealed himself as the Lord. He famously analyzed God’s Lordship in trinitarian terms: God revealed himself as the Lord (the Father), God revealed himself as the Lord extra nos (the Son), and God revealed himself as the Lord who sets us free in nobis (the Holy Spirit) (CD I/1, p. 296). The sovereignty of divine freedom was unconditional. For Barth God was “absolutely superior” to the human creature, and he claimed the creature “with the same absoluteness” (CD I/1, p. 384). The one true God existed in not only “a sphere beyond human history” but at the same time at “the very center of this history” (CD I/1, p. 384). God was at once “absolutely distinct” from the creature while yet also being “absolutely related” to it (CD I/1, p. 389). Furthermore, to say that God’s essence was his Lordship meant that his essence was personal as well as sovereign and free. “Our existence is sustained by him and by him alone above the abyss of non‐ existence” (CD I/1, p. 389). Thus, where Tillich discussed the reality of God primarily in “ontological” terms, based on philosophical “speculation,” Barth set forth God more strongly in “volitional” terms, based on God’s “self‐revelation.” 3  For example Tillich could write that “[God] is everything he is ‘through himself ’” (ST 1, p. 254), and yet also that “through himself [God] creates the world, and through the world himself ” (ST 2, p. 145). Somehow God was thus thought be everything he is “through himself ” and yet also to create himself “through the world.”

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For Barth, the identity of the triune God was not fundamentally different in his works than in his essence. In his works as in his essence, he “is and remains God unus et individuus [one and indivisible]” (CD I/1, p. 395). The essence of God was always “a single and undivided essence,” and the trinitas [triunity] itself was “an individua trinitas [undivided trinity]” (CD I/1, p. 394). God was in himself “indivisible, indissoluble, and inflexible” (CD II/1, p. 458) even as his essence was a living essence that included three divine “persons” and multiple divine “perfections” within itself – all “in their individuality and diversity” (CD II/1, p. 327). Both Tillich and Barth recognized that such combinations of ideas were incomprehensible to the human mind, but unlike Tillich, Barth did not necessarily reject them for that reason. He followed Augustine: Si comprehendis, non est Deus. “If comprehensible, it is not God” (CD II/1, p. 185). Thus, where Tillich presupposed one standard of “intelligibility,” Barth operated with another. Moreover, where Tillich presupposed a division or separation in the divine being that needed to be (and was) overcome, Barth posited an ineffable divine being that was at once trinitarian and indivisible. Finally, for Barth there was no element of nonbeing in God himself. God was “the absolutely sovereign Lord of all that exists and is distinct from himself ” (CD III/1, p. 49). He was thus always the sovereign Lord of nonbeing, controlling it and transcending it absolutely. In no way did nonbeing belong to God’s essence (CD II/1, p. 165). Its existence was inscrutable. God abhorred it, even while strangely permitting it and also taking action to abolish it. It arose, in absurdity, on the fringes of creation (so to speak) only as that which God did not will.4 It could never be more than an inexplicable contingency, completely without purpose and completely without future. It was “real but absolutely negative” (CD III/3, p. 302). In its antithesis to God, it offered “only menace, corruption and death” (CD III/3, p. 302). Far from including nonbeing in his eternal essence, God was a God of holy love who condemned, excluded and destroyed it (CD II/1, p. 359). His eternal being was a “perfect being,” consisting wholly of loving in freedom, with no shadow of darkness in itself (CD II/1, pp. 322–324). Thus, where Tillich posited nonbeing as an element in the divine being, if only as something to be eternally overcome, Barth excluded nonbeing from the divine being as an evil power to be opposed, condemned and destroyed.

The Nature and Function of Theological Language Here are some general statements that Tillich makes about “religious symbols” (drawn from Tillich 1959, pp. 3–9, 53–68). 1. Religious symbols open up deeper levels of reality (TC, pp. 56, 57). 2. Religious symbols express the ineffable, the depth of being (TC, pp. 28, 45). 4  For Barth, God is not the “cause” of “nonbeing” (das Nichtige). He regards the existence of das Nichtige as inexplicable. Though it exists (“at God’s left hand”), it is the “impossible possibility” (CD III/3, p. 351), and therefore inscrutable. Barth intends his account to be descriptive, not explanatory. The origin of das Nichtige is obscure but its outcome is certain. It can be described only in “broken” discourse (CD III/3, p. 294).

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3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

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Religious symbols participate in that which they express (TC, p. 4).5 Religious symbols are irreplaceable (TC, pp. 57–58). Religious symbols can die (TC, pp. 58, 65–66). Religious symbols change under the power they express (TC, p. 47). Religious symbols are ambiguous (TC, pp. 60, 66). Religious symbols communicate healing power (TC, p. 50). Religious symbols answer our existential questions (TC, p. 49). Religious symbols are relational, symbolizing our relationship to God (TC, p. 61). Religious symbols need to be interpreted (TC, pp. 48–49, 61–63).

Although Tillich used the term “correlation” in several different ways (see Kelsey 1967, pp. 13–14), one that is not always picked out would be his general correlation between “symbols” and “concepts,” or perhaps more precisely between “religious symbols” and “philosophical concepts.” For Tillich, to put it simply, philosophical concepts without religious symbols are empty whereas religious symbols without philosophical concepts are blind. Religious symbols were essentially emotive and expressive. What they expressed were “revelatory experiences,” which in turn they also served to elicit. Although religious symbols were not devoid of cognitive content, that content remained “latent” or well below the surface. The cardinal error in understanding religious symbols occurred when they were taken “literally,” which meant using them as though their “manifest” content carried cognitive and referential significance. Personal words like “God,” “Father,” “acting,” and “loving,” for example, (the manifest content) could not be taken “literally,” because the divine being could be regarded as “personal” only by a fundamental confusion of thought. What was misunderstood was not only the divine being in itself, which was absolutely beyond the subject/object distinction, but also the nature and function of religious language. Religious symbols arose from “revelatory experiences,” and these experiences were essentially emotive. Religious language gave symbolic expression to intense religious experiences and feelings, objectifying them, so to speak, in symbolic language. If revelatory experiences were a kind of “kinetic energy,” the religious symbols “externalized” them linguistically into a form of “potential energy.” The progression went, in effect, from emotive experiences (kinetic energy) to their symbolic expressions (potential energy) and on again to emotive experiences (kinetic energy). An “original” revelation would be captured and “expressed” in religious symbols so that the originating experiences could be “mediated” to others for whom similar experiences were then reduplicated at second hand. These powerful emotive experiences were thought to be experiences of “healing” or “liberation” or “transformation.” They were experiences of spiritual well‐being that arose from encounters with a transcendent “numinous” reality that was thought to underlie every dimension of human life. The “Ground of Being” (being itself) was divine,

5  It is not clear what it means to say that religious symbols “participate” in the reality that they symbolize. Kelsey regards this as “the most perplexing element in Tillich’s theory” (Kelsey 1967, p. 46).

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spiritual and holy – apparently not entirely unlike the “Ground of Souls” (Seelengrund) as known from the mystical tradition. Human existence was threatened by ambiguity, anxiety and meaninglessness, because it was tragically “estranged” from the Ground of its Being. Revelatory experiences, as conveyed by religious symbols, meant overcoming existential estrangement so that the religious self would be spiritually reconnected in a healing way with its transcendent ontological Ground. When Tillich stated that religious symbols answered our existential questions, he did not mean that the symbols answered our questions in a cognitive way. He meant that the “answers” were as “experiential” (or emotive) as the questions. The only way to get at the cognitive aspect of the symbols was to “interpret” them, which for Tillich meant understanding them in terms of the ontological scheme he had posited. Thus, for example, as we have seen, the trinitarian symbols of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were correlated with the ontological concepts of abyss, logos, and reunification. In much the same way, the personal religious symbol “God” was equated with the ontological concept of “being itself.” Emotive religious symbols were thus “correlated” with the cognitive concepts that interpreted them. The ontological concepts made explicit the cognitive element implicit in the symbols. The symbols were descriptively blind without the concepts, while the concepts were experientially empty without the symbols. “Correlation” brought the experiential and the descriptive together. Beyond the two examples given (Ground of Being; the speculative triad), however, no cognitive “correlation” between symbol and concept was possible. The ontological “content” latent in religious symbols other than “God” could not be specified beyond saying that it was the “power of being” that functioned to overcome “estrangement” in a healing way. The manifest content of the symbol might be personal but the latent content obviously was not. This discrepancy between the manifest and the latent led to certain perplexities. What exactly was the ontological “referent” of religious symbols, especially those that were personal? Apart from the speculative minimum, “being itself ” (as the one and only referent) was beyond all cognition. Four consequences of this proposal may be mentioned, if only briefly, in conclusion. • First, the interpretive scheme was logically independent of any set of religious ­symbols. The ontological concepts stood on their own. They were universally valid whereas any particular set of symbols was relative and contingent. Although some religious symbols might be superior to others, and although at least some such ­symbols would be necessary, no one set could claim exclusive validity. • Second the validity of religious symbols depended on their expressive power, not on their descriptive adequacy. To say that a religious symbol could “die” meant that in certain cultural or historical circumstances, it no longer functioned to convey transformative religious experiences. Religious symbols were defined as the means to an experiential end. Their “validity” could be assessed only by instrumentalist criteria pertaining to how well they might function. The religious symbol was an instrumental value. • Third, impersonal terms for “God” were thought to be more descriptively adequate than personal terms. At the descriptive level, Tillichian discourse was studded with phrases like “the unconditioned,” “the transcendent,” “the divine,” and “the holy.”

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Anything more directly personal was dismissed as naive “literalism” if intended to make truth‐claims about God. • Finally, the cognitive relation of religious symbol to divine reality was one of equivocation. Even some of Tillich’s sympathetic interpreters have seen this as a serious concern. It may be very well to say that I have “experienced” ultimate reality as if “God is love.” But this is a remark about my experience. What grounds do I have for supposing that my “experience” truly refers to the character of God? Why isn’t it finally a pious illusion about an Ultimate Reality that is essentially non‐acting, non‐ personal, and non‐loving?6 Ontology seems at odds here with Christian theology. Whereas Tillich’s view of religious language was “expressivist,” Barth’s view may be described as “realist.” (Hunsinger 2000b, pp. 210–225 esp. 225). Whereas Tillich’s view was deliberately “emotive,” Barth’s conception was “cognitive” and “descriptive.” Finally, where Tillich’s view was “symbolical,” Barth’s approach was “analogical” and “referential” (as opposed to being either “equivocal” or “univocal”). Barth did not hesitate to speak in terms of “miracle” and “mystery” at certain points where Tillich would have found him to be dubiously “literalistic” or “supranaturalistic.” Their disagreements about the status of divine freedom were arguably in the background of their ­differences about theological language. Two contrasting statements about “divine freedom” will set the stage for a look at how Barth understood theological language. • Tillich: “God’s presence and power should not be sought in supranatural interference in the ordinary course of events, but in the power of the New Being to ­overcome the self‐destructive consequences of existential estrangement in and through the created structures of reality.” (ST 2, p. 161) • Barth: “God is free to be and operate in the created world either as unconditioned or as conditioned. God is free to perform his work either within the framework of what we call the laws of nature or outside it in the shape of miracle.” (CD II/l, p. 314) Though several elements are in contrast here, one stands out in particular. Where Tillich would confine God’s power to working “in and through the created structures of reality,” Barth posited no such restriction. For him God was free to work “either within the framework of what we call the laws of nature or outside it in the shape of miracle.”7 For Barth, God was absolutely free, whether in his transcendence or his immanence.

6  According to Adams, Tillich “has inadequately dealt with the question of the character of God.” “Even if we grant that God is not an object and that ‘personal’ is a symbol, still we are left in doubt as to whether God has a character somehow suggested by the symbol [e.g. that ‘God is love’] or is merely said to have it in order that our loneliness, anxiety, and despair may be overcome.” (Adams 1965, pp. 270, 269). This is the problem of equivocation as built into Tillich’s theory of the religious symbol. 7  Note that whereas Tillich saw “supranaturalism” as a matter of divine “interference” in history or even of “destroying” the natural structure of events (ST 1, p. 115), Barth regarded God’s sovereign freedom as allowing God to operate not only within the framework of those laws but also beyond it. Barth did not think in terms of “interference” or “violation.”

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He was therefore free to use human language to refer truly to himself in a cognitive way without losing himself in the process. The results could be surprising. According to Barth, even the most naively “anthropomorphic” metaphors could be used in Scripture to refer to God truly. They were not non‐informative “symbols” for expressing “religious experience.” They were fraught with cognitive significance. Properly understood, they were capable of conveying the truth about God within the limits of human finitude. We must keep well in mind that Holy Scripture not only speaks of God’s wrath, mercy, etc., but also — to the even greater confusion of all spiritualizers — very obviously and emphatically of his face, his eyes, his mouth, his ears, even his nose, his back, his arm, his hand, his right hand, his finger, his feet. Can it really be maintained that all that is meant “not theologically, but economically: according to our weak power of comprehension”? (CD II/1, p. 266, rev.; quoting Polanus)

Barth was well aware that God’s eyes were not human eyes, nor were his hands human hands. But he denied that impersonal concepts were any the less “anthropomorphic” than personal or even bodily ones. Even the latter could refer truly to God in their own way. “Not only some but all human standpoints and concepts,” he argued, “are ‘anthropomorphisms’” (CD II/1, p. 265). All human language about God, whether personal or impersonal, was necessarily “anthropomorphic,” if not in one way then in another. Impersonal terms were not necessarily preferable to personal ones; indeed for the most part the reverse was true. The reason was found in God’s self‐revelation. If we know God only in a human way, even in this limit we know him on the basis of his revelation as the One he is. He is the One who loves, surpassing all our concepts and ideas of love, but still the One who truly loves, and therefore One in a personal sense. As One, as person, he surpasses all our concepts and ideas of person, but still he reveals what one, a person, really and truly is. We are therefore allowed and commanded within the limits of what is human to speak the truth when we speak of him as the One, as personal; the truth, beyond which there is no greater, because in the mystery of his ways which we cannot unravel, God is none other than the One as whom he has made Himself manifest and comprehensible to us in his revelation. (CD II/1, p. 286 rev.)

In Christian theology the classical pattern for analogical discourse had been laid down at least as early as Irenaeus. “God is light,” Irenaeus wrote, “and yet God is unlike any light that we know” (Irenaeus 1978, II.13.4; cf. Hunsinger 2015, pp. 56–60). In his technical discussion of analogy, Barth in effect followed Irenaeus, only with a more explicit emphasis on the miracle of grace and a more technical discussion of the options. All human language, Barth argued, was essentially incapable of referring to God – except by grace alone. Barth distinguished four main types of analogy for making truth‐claims about God: improper proportion, proper proportion, intrinsic attribution, and extrinsic attribution (CD II/1, pp. 224–243). He rejected all but the final option. Despite their incommensurability with God, human words, concepts and images could still refer to God truly by

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the miracle of grace. An “incomprehensible similarity” [unbegreiflichen Ähnlichkeit] was posited by “God’s true revelation.” The analogy of human words, concepts and images with God was real despite its being beyond comprehension (CD II/1, p. 227). God ­graciously overcame the ontological distinction between the divine and the human by participating in human life and human language – in particular and miraculous ways (CD II/1, p. 227). Therefore, Barth could write: “Our views, concepts and words, grounded on God’s revelation, can be legitimately applied to God, and genuinely describe him even in this sphere of ours and within its limits. For all their unsuitability, they can still be correct and true” (CD II/1, p. 227). God was not some sort of inscrutable “being itself ” whose truth was eternally concealed from us. He was not an “enigma” whose reality could never be known. He was “unknowable” only if he chose not to reveal himself. It is dangerous and ultimately fatal to faith in God if God is not the Lord of glory, if it is not guaranteed to us that in spite of the analogical nature of the language in which it all has to be expressed, God is actually and unreservedly as we encounter him in his revelation: the Almighty, the Holy, the Just, the Merciful, the Omnipresent, the Eternal, not less but ­infinitely more so than it is in our power to grasp, and not for us only, but in actuality therefore in himself. (CD II/1, p. 325)

Revelation was the miracle of grace by which the faithful were given a share in the truth of God’s own self‐knowledge. “God is who he is,” wrote Barth, “the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Creator, Reconciler and Redeemer, supreme, the one true Lord” (CD II/1, p. 51). This was exactly who God knew himself to be to all eternity, and this was exactly who God revealed himself to be to humankind. “Although we are human beings and not God, we receive a share in the truth of his knowledge of himself ” (CD II/1, p. 51). In revealing himself, God gave us “permission to love and know him” as he truly is, to know and love him as he truly knows and loves himself. Despite being “completely unknowable to us,” God made himself “completely knowable to us,” that he might bring us into fellowship with himself (CD II/1, p. 343). Revelation thus disclosed the truth of God in both his love and his freedom: “his love in that God as he is in himself wills also to be God for us; his freedom in that he will and can be for us no other than as he is in himself ” (CD II/1, p. 346). God revealed himself in Christ as the sovereign Lord who was free to give himself to us in this way, that we might know him as he truly is – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – for the sake of love and freedom. Again, we may consider four consequences of this proposal. • First, Barth allowed for no interpretive scheme that was independent of God’s self‐ revelation in Christ. His position was, in effect, one of “reason within the limits of revelation alone.” Revelation alone (as attested for us in Holy Scripture) provided the normative framework within which true words derived from elsewhere might be critically assessed and (perhaps) appropriated (see Hunsinger 1991, pp. 234–280). • Second, the validity of any human concepts, images and words about God was not a function of “religious experience” or of a supposedly universal “religious consciousness.” The validity of such images and words about God was ultimately grounded in God, not in human experience. Barth did not move from the universal (“religious

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consciousness”) to the particular (“expressivist symbols”) but rather the reverse: from the particular (“revelatory events extra nos”) to the universal (“ecumenically true beliefs imparted to faith”). The particulars of revelation (mainly Christ and Israel) carried universal validity and significance in themselves. They were not ­(dispensable) instantiations of some logically independent scheme. • Third, impersonal terms were not more descriptively adequate for God than personal ones. Quite the reverse. God really was the One who loves in freedom. God was this reality first in his own triune life and then on that basis also for us. “The definition of a person — that is, a knowing, willing, acting I — can have the meaning only of a confession of the person of God declared in his revelation, of the One who loves and who as such (loving in his own way) is the person” (CD II/1, p. 284). The personal, triune God was not essentially different for us than he was eternally in himself. He was not an impersonal absolute (CD II/1, p. 295). • Finally, the cognitive relation of true beliefs to divine reality was not equivocal, nor was it univocal. It was analogical. It was a matter of similarity, even if that similarity was “incomprehensible” (CD II/1, p. 227). There was no way from human language to God, but there was a way from God to human language. The truth of theological language was grounded in the “free activity of God” (CD I/1, p. 9) as revealed by grace to faith. The incapacity of human language for God, whether personal or impersonal, was overcome by the free miracle of grace.

Christ and Salvation Tillich may be described as having a “middle” view of Christ and salvation. A “low” view, as the term is used here, would be one where Jesus had saving significance ­primarily as a teacher and an example, whereas a “high” view would be one where Jesus was God‐incarnate whose saving significance centered in his substitutionary death. Tillich espoused neither of these options. For him what gave Jesus saving significance was his “spirituality,” something Tillich called the “New Being.” Jesus was uniquely the bearer and the mediator of the New Being, a transforming spiritual power. Whereas a “low” view may be said to focus on “morality,” and “high” view on “vicarious obedience,” a “middle” view such as Tillich’s focused on “religion” as the experience of “healing” power. The difference between Tillich and Barth on “Christ and salvation” was essentially the difference between a “middle” Christology and a “high” one (Hunsinger 2015, pp. 126–145). For Tillich, Jesus was not God‐incarnate; he was a spiritually empowered human being.8 A high view of Christ’s “person” as God‐incarnate would require something like a Nicene doctrine of the Trinity and a robust idea of God’s sovereign freedom. Because, as we have seen, neither of these convictions was characteristic of Tillich, his view of Christ’s person had to be developed accordingly.

8  Tillich in effect had a middle view of Christ’s person and also a middle view of his saving work. He did not regard Jesus as the incarnation of the eternal Son.

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Tillich understood his Christology as being closer to Antioch than to Alexandria. “I am more in sympathy with the Antiochene rather than the Alexandrian Christology,” he wrote, “although I have often been accused of Docetism, which is certainly nearer to Cyril than Theodore” (quoted by Weigel 1950, p. 202). Tillich was critical of both Nicaea and Chalcedon, because he believed that they could not do justice to the humanity of Christ. Almost the only thing to be said in their favor was that they did not completely lose the “Jesus‐character” (or human nature) of “Jesus the Christ” (ST 2, pp. 144–145). Tillich preferred to think about Jesus in terms of his “Jesus‐character” and his “Christ‐character” (ST 2, pp. 142, 145) as opposed to what Chalcedonian Christology would affirm as his “complete humanity” and his “complete deity.”9 Because personal language about the divine being was expressivist, symbolical, and equivocal, Tillich could only regard the very idea of “God‐incarnate” as “nonsensical,” “transmutational,” “superstitious,” “cryptomonophysitic,” and “absurd” – if meant realistically and cognitively (ST 2, pp. 91, 94–95, 109, 112, 133, 138, 146, 149, etc.). Jesus was the “bearer” of the New Being (ST 2, p. 121), but he was not identical with it. The New Being was not a person but a power. It could be represented by Jesus and mediated by him, but it was not something that could possibly speak or act. As such it was neither loving nor free, though its function was to empower love and freedom in human beings. To suppose that this “divine” power was really somehow personal could only mean lapsing into literalism and superstition. The union of the New Being with Jesus was not regarded as indivisible. Their separability gave Tillich’s Christology a somewhat “Nestorian” cast. Jesus and the New Being were detachable in at least three ways. • First, the New Being could be mediated through many different religious and cultural symbols, not just Christian ones (ST 2, pp. 101, 121, 166–168). Although there might be other mediations of the New Being, they would not surpass its actualization in Christ, who remained the definitive criterion (ST 2, pp. 135, 162, 168, 175). • Second, because Jesus was not God‐incarnate, he himself could not be confessed as Lord, nor could he be worshipped. To say that “Jesus is Lord” was not to make a true statement about Jesus, but only about “the New Being.” “Jesus is Lord” was “symbolic” of the New Being, affirming that “nothing can happen in history which would make the work of the New Being impossible” (ST 2, p. 162). Nor could Jesus himself be the object of prayer and worship. “We cannot pray to anyone except to God. If Jesus is someone besides God” – as he was for Tillich – “we cannot and should not pray to Him …. But he who sees Him sees the Father” (Tillich

9  The phrase in the Chalcedonian Definition ran: “complete in deity and complete in humanity” (teleion ton auton en theoēti kai teleion ton auton en anthrōpoēti). As in Nicaea, the essence of Christ’s deity was affirmed to be the same as that of the Father (homoousion). Tillich would have none of this. “The term ‘divine nature’ … cannot be applied to the Christ in any meaningful way” (ST 2, p. 148).

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1955, pp. 99–100).10 Prayer should be addressed not to Jesus but to “the Father” as disclosed through him.11 • Finally, Jesus as the Christ was the supreme symbol for the New Being, because he negated himself as a particular person in favor of his office as the bearer of the New Being. He continuously sacrificed himself as Jesus to himself as the Christ (ST 2, p. 123). Persons were thereby “liberated from the authority of everything finite in him” (ST 1, p. 134) and so from the threat of idolatry (ST 1, pp. 128, 133, 136). As the bearer and source of the New Being, Jesus was said to be unique, but not exclusively unique (ST 2, p. 110). He was in effect the first among equals. As children of God, others might at last become equal to him in their being determined by the New Being’s transformative power (ST 2, p. 110). The revelation of the New Being in Jesus possessed “finality,” because it could never be surpassed. It was “final,” because it had “the power of negating itself without losing itself ” (ST 1, p. 133). It had appeared “under the conditions of existence without being conquered by them” (ST 2, p. 94). In the adverse circumstances of existence, it had been “actualized in a personal life” (ST 2, p. 124). Jesus had been plunged into existential estrangement with everything that meant  –  anxiety, despair, nonbeing  –  while nonetheless maintaining his “unbroken unity with God” (ST 2, p. 129). He “remained transparent to the divine mystery until his death, which was the final manifestation of his transparency” (ST 1, p. 134). The negativities of “anxiety, ambiguity and tragedy” were not removed – certainly not on the cross – but they were “taken into unbroken unity with God” (ST 2, p. 134). He had transcended them, even while suffering them, by the power of that unbroken unity (ST 2, p. 135). Despite the ordeal of the cross, his “serenity and majesty” were unshaken (ST 2, p. 138). That was his saving significance. Salvation, according to this scheme, took place by repetition. The same saving power that was in Jesus could also be repeated in others. Jesus had mediated this power to his disciples, and after his crucifixion they had given symbolic expression to it through “the picture of Jesus as the Christ.” Through this picture the New Being had “power to transform those who are transformed by it” (ST 2, p. 114). The picture did not guarantee the name of Jesus (nor did it need to) (ST 2, p. 114), but it did guarantee that existence had been conquered in a personal life, because otherwise how could healing power be encountered through the picture? The power that conquered estrangement in one

10  Tillich felt that it would be “idolatrous” to pray to Jesus himself, who by nature was merely a human being. Prayer could be directed only to God as known through Jesus. One difference between Tillich and the ancient Antiochenes was that the latter affirmed the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed whereas Tillich did not. What Tillich shared with them was a strong emphasis that the human Jesus had to be regarded as separated, in important respects, from something divine and higher than himself, whether it be called “the New Being” or “God the Son.” Tillich, however, could not say with Nestorius: “I separate the natures; I unite the worship” (see Bethune-Baker 1908, pp. 168). 11  Theognis of Nicaea, a supporter of Arius, insisted that only the Father was to be worshipped whereas the Son was only venerated. A similar position seems to have belonged to Paul of Samosata. A related (though not identical) view seems to have been upheld by Tillich. The Assyrian Church of the East (regarded as “Nestorian”) has rejected this position.

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personal life could also conquer it in others.12 To experience the New Being in Jesus as the Christ meant “to experience the power in him which has conquered existential estrangement in himself and in everyone who participates in him” (ST 2, p. 125). “Resurrection” meant that the healing power of the New Being continued to be mediated to succeeding generations through the symbolic picture of Jesus as the Christ (ST 2, p. 153).13 Barth differed from Tillich on at least three major points: the person of Christ, the work of Christ, and the meaning of salvation for the Christian life. In other words, the differences could hardly be more basic. At their heart they were differences about Nicaea, Chalcedon, and divine freedom. Barth proposed a Chalcedonian view of Christ’s person.14 He did not regard Chalcedon as a frozen paradox (CD I/2, p. 654), but as a set of guidelines for understanding the New Testament witness to Christ (CD IV/1, p. 127). Although Chalcedon’s truth‐claims were substantive, their logical force was largely “grammatical,” providing a set of rules that needed to be met for describing Jesus Christ in his divine‐human identity (CD IV/1, p. 146). The Chalcedonian Definition – according to which Jesus was at once completely God and completely human – attested an irreducible miracle and indissoluble mystery. “The mystery does not rest upon the miracle. The miracle rests upon the mystery. The miracle bears witness to the mystery, and the mystery is attested by the miracle” (CD I/2, p. 202).15 The Incarnation was an event grounded solely in the sovereign freedom of God. “In his freedom, mercy and omnipotence, God became human, and as such acts upon humankind” (CD I/2, p. 191 rev.). Like any “grammar,” Chalcedon could not stand alone. In particular it needed to be interpreted “actualistically.” It was the second‐order description of a history. The Incarnation was thus not an abstraction. It was the history of a once‐for‐all yet continual divine action (CD IV/1, p. 133; IV/2, p. 105; IV/3, p. 40). Within this actualistic framework, the Incarnation was either understood along Chalcedonian lines or not at all. Jesus was therefore exclusively unique. No one else would ever be God‐incarnate, no one else would ever die for the sins of the world, and no one else would ever be the self‐ revelation of God. These were all ways of affirming that no one else would ever be the full love of God in person on earth. Therefore, when Barth came to the early Christian confession that “Jesus is Lord,” he understood it as an assertion about Jesus, not merely about his ostensible saving effects. Jesus himself was to be confessed as Lord “in the same factual, self‐evident and indisputable way as Yahweh was of old as Israel’s God”

12  Clayton, a sympathetic interpreter of Tillich’s, expressed uncertainty about whether Jesus was really necessary for salvation in Tillich’s Christology (Clayton 1972, pp. 147–163). 13 For an account of how Barth and Tillich differed about Christ’s resurrection see Hunsinger 2015, pp. 169–188. 14  For an account of the ingenious way that Barth worked out this affirmation, using idioms drawn dialectically from both Alexandria and Antioch, see Hunsinger 2000a, pp. 131–147. 15 Barth regarded the Incarnation as an absolute miracle for which the words “supernatural” or “supranatural” were not really adequate (CD I/2, p. 176; IV/2, p. 215).

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(CD I/1, p. 405 rev.). As in the Nicene Creed (381 version), Jesus was properly the object of worship (CD I/2, p. 32; II/2, p. 424; IV/1, p. 188; IV/2, p. 102).16 Based on this high view of Christ’s person, Barth proposed, at great length, a substitutionary view of Christ’s work (e.g. IV/1, pp. 157–357). Christ’s saving obedience was a vicarious obedience, and his saving death was a vicarious death. He was obedient even to the point of death on a cross – not only for our sakes but also and above all in our place. Positively, his vicarious obedience meant that for our sakes and in our place, he was the true covenant partner that God had always sought, but never found (obedientia activa) (CD IV/1, p. 75, etc.). Negatively, it meant that for our sakes and in our place, he bore the harsh consequences of our sins that we might be spared (obedientia passiva) (CD IV/1, p. 165, etc.).17 Even more, it meant, most decisively, that in his suffering and death he “made an end of us as sinners in his own person and therefore of sin itself by going to death as the One who took our place as sinners” (CD IV/1, p. 253 rev.).18 Only someone who was God‐incarnate could fulfill this saving office. If he were not truly a human being, Jesus Christ could not have made our sins and their dreadful consequences his own (CD IV/1, p. 222). If he were not at the same time truly God, he could not in himself have removed our sins once for all and abolished death (CD IV/1, p. 254). Only as God‐incarnate, crucified and risen from the dead, could he reconcile the world with God and bring us into union with himself for the sake of eternal life in communion with God (CD IV/1, p. 603; IV/3, p. 724). His vicarious obedience, in its several aspects, was the supreme act of divine mercy, because mercy triumphed in him over judgment (CD II/1, pp. 393–406). Salvation as it took place in the present‐tense was not a matter of repetition. As accomplished in Christ apart from us (extra nos), Christ’s work of salvation could not possibly be repeated, nor did it need to be repeated (in nobis) (CD I/2, p. 12; IV/3, p. 635). But it did need to be acknowledged, received, and partaken of by grace through faith (CD I/2, p. 166; II/2, p. 244; IV/3, p. 595, etc.). The work of Christ was a finished and perfect work (CD IV/1, p. 283). It came to faith as a free gift (CD II/1, p. 22). Therefore the saving significance of Jesus Christ was not so much the Holy Spirit (or his “spirituality”). Rather, it was more nearly the reverse: the saving significance of the Holy Spirit was Christ himself, to whom the Spirit bore witness (CD IV/1, pp. 150, 153, etc.) and whose one saving work of reconciliation the Spirit actualized and revealed in the present in ever new (if secondary) ways (CD I/2, pp. 209, 265; IV/2, p. 334).

16  Tillich defined idolatry as treating something finite as if it were infinite. Barth defined it as regarding something as God that was not God. Tillich’s approach ruled out the Incarnation by definition. 17  I use the terms obedientia activa and obedientia passiva for the sake of convenience. Barth avoided them, no doubt because he would (rightly) have discerned a receptive element in the first term and an active element in the second. 18  For Barth the ideas of “substitution” and “objective participation” (as I go on to call it) were therefore inseparable. Not only Christ’s vicarious death but also his vicarious obedience involved this kind of objective participation or inclusion in Christ by grace. For Barth therefore ‘substitution’ and “representation” were not mutually exclusive. Christ died for us in our stead so that we did not have to suffer the dreadful consequences of our sin, while at the same time we were included in him, objectively and vicariously, in his death and resurrection.

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For Barth, the objectivity of Christ’s saving work was not, as Tillich liked to say, “a stone thrown down from heaven” (cf. ST I, p. 7). What Barth had that Tillich lacked was a concept of “objective participation” (Neder 2009, pp. 17–23). Salvation took place objectively by grace before it took place subjectively by faith. All persons were thought to be included in Christ by grace before they came to know him through faith, and to live by him through love and obedience. The objective participation of all human beings in Christ began with pretemporal election (CD II/2, p. 43) and was fulfilled in Christ’s death for them on the cross (CD IV/1, p. 148; IV/2, p. 516; IV/3, p. 42, etc.). It was not only attested to them but also mediated to them, by the Holy Spirit, primarily through the proclamation of the Word of God (CD I/2, p. 240). The faithful were therefore called to live a life of wonder and gratitude: “wonder at the God who in advance has answered all our questions, removed all our anxiety, and taken away the object of all our self‐despair, by himself, i.e. by his intervention for us, in which account is already taken of our insufficiency, and by which he has created a perfect sufficiency for us” (CD II/2, p. 32). In contrast to Barth, Tillich lacked this strong, objective sense of the “already,” and of the “perfect sufficiency” of the Lord Jesus Christ.19 References Adams, J.L. (1965). Paul Tillich’s Philosophy of Culture, Science, and Religion. New York: Harper & Row. Bethune‐Baker, J.F. (1908). Nestorius and His Teaching: A Fresh Examination of the Evidence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clayton, J.P. (1972). Is Jesus necessary for christology?: an antinomy in Tillich’s theological method. In: Christ, Faith and History: Cambridge Studies in Christology (eds. S.W. Sykes and J.P. Clayton), 147– 163. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hunsinger, G. (1991). Secular parables of the truth. In: How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology, 234–280. New York: Oxford University Press. Hunsinger, G. (2000a). Karl Barth’s christology: its basic chalcedonian character. In: Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth, 131–147. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

Hunsinger, G. (2000b). Beyond literalism and expressivism. In: Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth, 210–225. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Hunsinger, G. (2015). Evangelical, Catholic, and Reformed. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Irenaeus (1978). Against heresies. In: Ante‐Nicene Fathers, vol. 1. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Kelsey, D.H. (1967). The Fabric of Paul Tillich’s Theology. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Leiner, M. (2009). Tillich on God. In: The Cambridge Companion to Paul Tillich, 37–55. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Neder, A. (2009). Participation in Christ: An Entry into Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox. Powell, S. (2001). Schelling and Tillich on God’s relation to the world. In: Religion and Its Relevance in Post‐Modernism (eds. J.C. Verheyden, J.S. Park and G.D. Beebe). Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.

19  An earlier version of this essay appeared in 2018 in Theology Today 75(2): 123–138.

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Tillich, P. (1951). Systematic Theology, vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tillich, P. (1952). Courage to Be. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Tillich, P. (1955). The New Being. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Tillich, P. (1959). Theology of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Weigel, G.S.J. (1950). Contemporaneous protestantism and Paul Tillich. Theological Studies 11: 179–202.

CHAPTER 49

Barth and Rahner James J. Buckley

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arl Barth and Karl Rahner shared a common confession of the triune God, free ­creator of all things (comprehensively, catholicly) visible and invisible, Jesus Christ incarnate in our shared flesh, the Holy Spirit making a catholic church and raising the dead. And they probably wrote as much as any other twentieth‐century theologians about this shared conviction, generating an enormous secondary literature that has received them, individually and occasionally together, in diverse and competing ways.1 I do not aspire to the important and daunting scholarly chore of doing justice to all this primary and secondary literature in multiple languages. Instead, I am going to offer a brief analysis of why the conversation and debate between these two giants of twentieth‐century theology have never gotten far off the ground, before proposing that we consider their conversation and debate on one issue – the diverse and competing ways theology can and should be catholic (comprehensive). I hope this tactic stimulates conversation and debate among readers over Barth and Rahner. But, like all such readings, it cannot be ruled out that it will tell readers more about this author than about Barth and Rahner. In any case, I will largely focus on English readers of and writers on Barth and Rahner, knowing that the situation may well be very different in other nation‐states.

1 For those beginning their study of Barth or Rahner, I recommend the English-language websites for ­primary sources (Center for Barth Studies at Princeton Theological Seminary, http://barth.ptsem.edu/; Karl Rahner Society, https://www.karlrahnersociety.com/), and the Cambridge Companions for secondary sources (Webster 2000; Oakes and Moss 2004; Marmion and Hines 2005). I will use Rahner’s Theological Investigations (Schriften zur Theologie) rather than the more current Sämtliche Werke because English translations of the former are thus far more readily available.

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Some Historical Contexts A reading of Barth’s and Rahner’s as well as our own historical contexts can help explain this strategy. The Swiss Reformed Barth (1886–1968) and Roman Catholic Rahner (1904–1984) were members of distinct but overlapping theological generations. Barth was theologically most active from the brief eclipse of Protestant liberalism during and after World War I, through the battles with pre‐World War II German Christians and post‐World War II cold warriors, until just after the reforms Catholics initiated in Vatican II. Rahner was theologically active from the decade before World War II, through the battles between Catholic Modernism and the nouvelle theologie and the Catholic Magisterium, to Vatican II’s charters for a church in today’s world – and even beyond, into the postconciliar calls for reform of Vatican II’s reforms, some extending those reforms further in ever‐deeper ressourcement and others (like Rahner) extending the aggiornamento to more radical reforms needed to be a genuine world church. In terms of social circumstances, we might say Barth and Rahner were most different at Barth’s beginning and Rahner’s end, most overlapping in the middle. I will focus on this middle period, leaving room for others to extend the analysis earlier and later. But even in this middle period their interactions were mostly indirect. Barth was certainly on Rahner’s radar from early on, as he was on the radars of other German Catholic theologians before Vatican II (Marga 2010; Dahlke 2012), especially during the fruitful Barth‐Catholic polemic with Erich Przywara in the 1920s and 1930s (Przywara 2014) and the fruitful irenic conversation with Hans Urs von Balthasar and Hans Küng in the 1940s and 1950s (Balthasar 1992; Küng 1957, 1964). Rahner’s 1958 essay giving careful and veritably magisterial approval to Hans Küng’s argument for consistency between Barth and Catholic doctrines of justification – even as Rahner teased Barth about the magisterial tone of Barth’s own preface approving Küng’s book  –  was a climactic moment in the Catholic reception of Barth (Rahner 1966b). But a few years later we have two letters from Barth to Rahner, one expresses a previous interest in and great sympathy with Rahner’s theology, tells a story of when Barth was tempted to receive communion at a Catholic Eucharist, and even casts a placet iuxta modum for anonymous Christianity. The other letter vehemently castigates Rahner for a radio address, reminding him that Ernst Troeltsch also used “religious sociology” and that many neo‐Protestants were pious and churchly people (Barth 1981, pp. 278–282, 287–288). Barth had astute appreciative and critical questions for Vatican II (Barth 1968). But Catholic interest in Barth after Vatican II waned for over three decades. There has recently been an increase in Catholic interest in Barth (e.g. Hütter 2000; Molnar 2004; Marga 2010; Dahlke 2012; McCormack and White 2013), precisely when it might be argued that interest in Rahner has waned in English speaking lands. What, then, can be made of this ambivalence? The most challenging argument on the grammar or logic of the theologies of Barth and Rahner remains, I think, Bruce Marshall’s case that, although Barth and Rahner and Thomas Aquinas share the conviction that the particular individual Jesus Christ is of universal significance, Barth develops this conviction more coherently than Rahner  –  but it is Thomas’ logic of

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reduplication, christologically applied, that best articulates the grammar of their shared conviction (Marshall 1987). Marshall is a rare attempt to relate the Barth‐ Rahner argument to a larger tradition – a tradition prior to the modern‐postmodern context as well as prior to the sixteenth‐century reformations. But the reception of Marshall’s argument has itself been ambivalent. On the one hand, Marshall’s Barth‐Rahner argument has broken down into a pair of confessional arguments  –  an intra‐Reformed argument between Barth and Schleiermacher (Webster 2000; Marina 2005) and an intra‐Catholic argument between Balthasar and Rahner (Oakes and Moss 2004; Marmion and Hines 2005). It is hard for me to tell if this is a retreat behind confessional lines – and/or a recognition that Reformed and Catholics are nowadays in similar theological circumstances, faced with comparable disagreements and choices. However, it should also be noted that the Barth‐Schleiermacher argument seems to have a more irenical foothold and the Balthasar‐Rahner argument a more polemical one. That is, Barth was constantly reminding others and himself (and Rahner) that he would never think of Schleiermacher as excluded from the communion of saints (e.g. Barth 1982, p. 288). The earlier Barth who was critical of Schleiermacher’s relationalist doctrine of revelation became the later Barth who could reread Schleiermacher as proposing an inadequate doctrine of the Holy Spirit, challenging Barth to do better than Barth had done on that same topic. And Bruce McCormack has more recently suggested that Barth “might justly be located within the Schleiermachian tradition of ‘mediating theology,’” without denying significant differences between the two (2008, p. 37). It cannot be said that the argument between Balthasar and Rahner had reached this stage of irenic clarity, combining dogmatic disagreement with ongoing communion. For his part, Rahner once said that he was “resolutely opposed to the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, and he to mine even more so.” Nonetheless, “[f]or the time being, I believe he has not accused me to Rome of being a heretic. I have not done it either.” Rahner went on to say that “[t]he rationale for such situations has not yet been clearly thought through” (Rahner 1986, p. 291). In any case, and on another hand, beyond these intraconfessional debates, Marshall also presciently foreshadowed the way that modern‐postmodern discussions of Barth and Thomas (McCormack and White 2013) have extended and enriched earlier twentieth‐century polemical and irenical arguments between the two mentioned previously – but where Rahner rarely appears. Where to go? Recognizing the strong connections among Barth‐Rahner arguments and intra‐Reformed debates between Barth and Schleiermacher as well as intra‐Catholic arguments between Balthasar and Rahner prevents us from simply identifying Barth with Reformed theology or Rahner with Catholic theology. And there is little doubt that relating the arguments between Barth and Rahner to common traditions such as Thomas Aquinas and his predecessors, along with their not‐so‐common successors such as Duns Scotus for Catholics and Calvin for the Reformed is also crucial. But here I take another tack. I suggest that we think about the theological relationship between Barth and Rahner with the help of questions about the catholicity or comprehensiveness of their theologies: how catholic should theology be? How should it be catholic? And why?

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How Catholic Should Theology Be? A key problem that interpreters of Barth and Rahner face is that there are now many different and sometimes competing interpretation of what their theologies are about – their aims and how they carry out those aims. For example, Bruce McCormack provides one learned way to map the divides in contemporary readings of Barth. He distinguishes his own “critically realistic dialectical” reading from “post liberal” readings (Hans Frei, George Lindbeck) and “postmodern” readings (Walter Lowe, Graham Ward), along with those who do not neatly fit into any of these categories (George Hunsinger, John Webster) (McCormack 2008, pp. 109–165). McCormack also characterizes his own reading of Barth as one who “in the end was seeking to understand what it means to be orthodox under the conditions of modernity” (McCormack 2008, pp. 17, 232), in contrast to more neo‐Orthodox or even Catholics readings of Barth more at home in the tradition, seeking to be modern under the conditions of orthodoxy (McCormack 2008, pp. 230, 295). On this view, “[t]he central problem of Barth’s theology was one he shared with all modern theologians, namely how to understand the nature of, and the grounds for, human knowledge (in the strict sense of Erkenntnis) of God”  –  or “the problem of revelation” (McCormack 2008, pp. 125, 163). On another hand, among “postliberals” like Hans Frei and Catholics (or perhaps a small subgroup thereof) like myself, there is a resistance to taking “the problem of revelation” as the central theological problem, even while agreeing that competing solutions to “the problem” continue to characterize most of Christian theology (Orthodox and Catholic, Lutheran and Reformed) since the eighteenth century (Buckley 2010, 2015). Needless to say, comparison with Rahner will vary depending on which of these competing and complementary readings of Barth are taken as normative. In this situation, for purposes of comparison with Rahner, I suggest we begin with what we might call Rahner’s rule for interpreting Barth. Rahner’s previously mentioned essay on Küng’s theology of justification proposes that Küng does not contradict Catholic doctrine  –  and points out that Barth accepts Küng’s interpretation of Barth’s own ­theology. But Rahner also considers counterarguments to this “amazing” agreement. “One can certainly ask whether we (and Barth himself) are not bound to understand his doctrine of justification otherwise than Küng and Barth himself do, if they think it out with reference to certain other positions of Barth, his doctrine of predestination, for ­instance, and develop it consistently on such lines. However, one could just as well put the question the other way around and correct Barth’s other positions in light of his doctrine of justification; in a theology [like Barth’s] which stems from copious use of Scripture texts and tries to take all their assertions seriously, there is – happily – no systematic principle which claims to be so primary and unique that everything else is reduced to a dependent function of it” (Rahner 1966b, pp. 193–194, my italics). Barth would agree that he has an antipathy to systematic principles. As Barth himself sometimes persistently and contentiously put it, “Methodus est arbitraria” (CD I/2, p. 860; CD IV/3, p. 5). Rahner’s rule raises important questions (e.g. what makes any copious use of Scripture a “whole,” if not a “systematic principle?”). But I take Rahner’s “happily” (zu unserem Glück, happily for us [Rahner 1964, p. 242]) to be partly approving, partly critical of Barth’s theology. On one hand, there may or may not be a “systematic principle,” but it will not be so

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“­primary and unique” that everything else, comprehensively, will become a “dependent function” of it. The “copious uses of Scripture” fortunately gives Catholics like Rahner room to agree with Barth and Küng (and argue with those who disagree) on a theology of justification – but it unfortunately does not rule out counterarguments if justification is related to these other topics (like predestination). Posed in terms of a question in yet other words, how comprehensive or catholic can Barth’s theology be if it focused on “copious uses of Scripture,” sans a “systematic principle?” Will it be exclusively occasion specific, confident that copious use of Scripture will be Spirit‐corrected and self‐ correcting for any time and place? Could this be a reason for at least some of the diverse and competing readings of Barth’s theology that McCormack sketches? Before considering how Barth might respond, consider how diverse readings of Rahner create problems of their own for him. Karen Kilby (2004) has helpfully distinguished foundationalist, her own nonfoundationalist, and semifoundationalist readings of Rahner. “Foundationalist” readings of Rahner (e.g. Emerich Coreth, Gerald McCool, Langdon Gilkey, Gordan Kaufmann) claim or suppose that Rahner’s theology depends on his philosophy. Such readers emphasize how Rahner’s early metaphysics of knowledge and philosophy of religion “found” or ground his theology. Nonfoundationalists (like Joseph DiNoia, Nicholas Healy, and Kilby herself) deny this. Kilby also offers astute analysis and critique of some of Rahner’s philosophical claims (e.g. the Vorgriff auf esse) – while also noting that Rahner’s theology does occasionally make use of philosophy internal to his theology (Kilby 2004, p. 69). On a third hand, semifoundationalists move between foundationalism and nonfoundationalism, supposing or claiming that Rahner’s theology norms his philosophy (something like nonfoundationalists), which philosophy is “independently demonstrated” and which theology is “logically dependent” on that philosophy (something like foundationalists) (Kilby 2004, pp. 75–76). Kilby is not unsympathetic to such semifoundationalist readings; in fact, her nonfoundationalist reading finds a tension between (on the one hand) Rahner’s philosophical theology’s “transcendental” interest in the subject along with the object of knowledge and action and (on the other hand) Rahner’s insistence that theology currently operates amidst a world of radical pluralism (gnoseological concupiscence) – although Kilby also argues that her nonfoundationalist reading can reconcile this tension (Kilby 2004, pp. 85–99). Needless to say, the comparison with Barth will go differently, depending on which of these readings of Rahner prevails (in relation to which of McCormack’s diverse and competing readings of Barth). The nonfoundationalist reading certainly opens more doors to conversation with Barth, and Kilby’s later reading of Rahner on particular theological topics opens other doors for comparison with Barth (Kilby 2007). Insofar as labels can serve theologically appropriate irenical or polemical ends, I would prefer to put Rahner on a spectrum of “mediating theologies”  –  a label used of Catholic and Protestant theologians in the sixteenth century, although more commonly nowadays used of some Protestant theologians since the nineteenth century (Buckley 2007). This reading requires taking Rahner’s Foundations of the Christian Faith. An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity (1976, 1978) as the central clue for focusing the more “systematic” elements of his theology. Rahner is clear that this Introduction is not a summary of his theology, although it is “more comprehensive and more systematic” than his other writings (Rahner 1978, p. xv).

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I will return to these other writings later. But, for now, one way to summarize this complex book is to claim that here Rahner intends to show that God is the holy mystery who imparts self in Word and Spirit as the gracious fulfillment of human and cosmic self‐transcendence. That is, Rahner begins with an analysis of the human subject’s self‐ transcendence, radically threatened by guilt (chapters 1–3). This beginning can easily fool readers into thinking that this provides a sort of foundation for his theology – a foundation whose floors only emerge clearly (it might be thought) in chapters six through nine on Jesus, the church, Christian life, and eschatology. But the introduction and middle chapters (chapters 4–5) make it clear that God’s self‐impartation in Word and Spirit graciously fulfill the movement of human self‐transcendence. By the logic of the matter (in contrast perhaps to the pedagogy needed in de‐Christianized Europe), Rahner’s Introduction could as well have begun with Jesus and the church, Christian life and eschatology and concluded with his argument to and from self‐transcendence. In Rahner’s technical terms used in the transitional chapters 4 and 5, it is just as true to say that the transcendental is a “moment within” the categorial as that it is “a condition for” its possibility, just as true to say that the presuppositions of the gospel are “created by” the gospel as that they are “assumed by” the gospel, just as true to say that “history” mediates “transcendence” as that transcendence “mediates” history (Rahner 1978, pp. 20, 24, 140). It is this dual sense of “mediation” that, I think, makes sense of calling Rahner one kind of “mediating” theologian, although semi‐ or bifoundationalism might also be accurate. In either case, God’s triune self‐impartation is the gracious fulfillment of human and cosmic self‐transcendence – where Rahner’s theology takes on the burden of showing both that the triune self‐impartation is “gracious” and that the self‐transcendence is “fulfilled.” What, then, does this methodological difference  –  Barth insisting on having no systematic principle and Rahner on a complex mediating movement – amount to? One way to capture this difference is, using distinctions William A. Christian Sr. developed for studying the truth‐claims and action guides of diverse and opposed religious communities (Christian 1987, chapter 8 and pp. 225–227), by asking how “comprehensive” (catholic) a Christian theology should be. How should it be thus catholic (comprehensive), and why? On a first hand, neither Barth nor Rahner aspire to unlimited catholicity or comprehensiveness  –  what William Christian calls “topic‐comprehensiveness,” a veritable God‐like comprehensiveness, aspiring to say and do everything about everything. There are two problems with aspiring to topic comprehensiveness. First, topic‐comprehensive theologies threaten to confuse our theologies with God’s theology. Second, topic‐­ comprehensive theologies would threaten to absorb the many other ways of existing in and studying the world besides the theological – from physics and chemistry, through psychology and sociology, to math, and philosophy. Admittedly, there is a temptation to aspire to topic comprehensiveness built into the Christian profession I initially proposed Barth and Rahner share – their common confession of the triune God, free creator of all things (comprehensively, catholicly) visible and invisible, Jesus Christ incarnate in our shared flesh, the Holy Spirit making a catholic church and raising the dead. But Barth and Rahner have many ways of resisting the temptation to confuse God’s catholicity and ours  –  not least Barth’s theology of God’s hiddenness and Rahner’s theology of

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God’s abiding mystery of the triune God. But they agree that we are catholic precisely as finite sinners on the way to eternal life precisely as finite creatures. On a second hand, Barth and Rahner would also agree with the truism that theology should be relevant to specific occasions of human activity – “occasion‐specific,” we might say (with William Christian, Sr.). This is clear in Barth’s Church Dogmatics, where Barth is constantly “beginning again” with each topic he takes up – so much so that, as we saw previously, Rahner can worry (rightly or wrongly) about the consistency of Barth’s doctrine of predestination and his doctrine of justification in a way that does not undercut Rahner’s agreement with the latter. But the occasion‐specific character of Rahner’s theology is also clear in Rahner’s Theological Investigations (Schriften zur Theologie), where ad hoc essays on historical and philosophical issues as well as dogmatic and spiritual topics find a home. Indeed, Rahner (as we saw) not only understandably insists that the Introduction is not a summary of his theology. He also insists that his “methodology” treats “individual schemes in an unsystematic manner and as dictated by the needs of the moment” (Rahner 1974, p. 69). Of course, Rahner’s occasion specificity may be behind the ambivalence we saw in Barth’s two letters to Rahner (just as Barth’s occasion‐specificity ‘happily” raised questions for Rahner). Occasion specificity seems a necessary but not sufficient characteristic of the catholicity or comprehensiveness theology seeks. Nonetheless, their agreement on theology’s occasion specificity along with their agreement on denying topic comprehensiveness leaves room for ­comparing Barth and Rahner on a variety of their occasional writings. Thus, both Barth and Rahner eschew unlimited catholicity for theology (topic comprehensiveness) and embrace occasion specificity. But how many such “occasions” can or must theology embrace? Can or must theology be (again, in William Christian’s terms) “occasion‐comprehensive” if “a pattern of life is comprehensive if for any occasion in the course of human life, some elements of the pattern are relevant to that occasion” (Christian 1987, p. 188, my italics)? Can or must theology embrace such occasion‐comprehensive catholicity?

How Can Theology Be Catholic I would like to focus this issue of “occasion comprehensiveness” by returning to the issues Bruce Marshall raises for Barth and Rahner. Recall that Marshall rightly pointed out that Barth and Rahner each confess that the particular figure Jesus Christ is of universal and unrestricted significance. Marshall also argues that Rahner’s exercises in transcendental Christology are inconsistent with this common ground with Barth – and that Barth’s metaphysical (Marshall argues) construals of the common ground “obscures rather than clarifies the meaning or sense the belief is supposed to have.” That meaning is better articulated in Aquinas’ exercises in semantic ascent (Marshall 1991, p. 145). Here I set aside Marshall’s specific claims about Rahner, Barth, and Thomas to note that Marshall also says that Rahner’s “theology of the symbol” (Rahner 1966b), generously interpreted, is consistent with the claim about Christological particularity common to Barth and Thomas, although that piece of his theology is inconsistent with Rahner’s transcendental Christology. Thus, “at least on

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this point, different parts of Rahner’s Christology seem themselves to be in conflict” (Marshall 1991, pp. 147–149). Could Rahner’s theological ontology of the symbol, then, lead us to more productive comparisons with Barth? There is no doubt that this theology of the symbol is “occasion‐ comprehensive.” But the reason this is an important question is that some interpret Rahner’s theology of the symbol as more central to Rahner’s theology than I have so far. For example, Steven Fields reads Rahner’s theology of the “realsymbol” as central to Rahner’s theology, while also criticizing Rahner’s theology of “nature and grace” as bifurcating the two (Fields 2016, pp. 72, 117ff). Part of the power of this reading of Rahner is that poetic words are one example of realsymbol. As Rahner puts it, “really great Christianity and really great poetry have an inner kinship” (Rahner 1966d, p.  365). Embedding Rahner’s Vermittlungstheologie in this vision of poetry holds the promise of recognizing how theology is rooted in aesthetic sensibilities (e.g. Fritz 2014) rather than in the technicalities of (non‐ or semi‐) foundationalism and “mediating theology.” But if this rethinking of Rahner’s theology centered on his ontology of the symbol is to be helpful in comparison to Barth, we must also deepen what it might mean to characterize Barth’s theology as “stemming from copious use of Scripture texts” (as Rahner did in 1958). Doing this will create an important aesthetic contrast between Barth and Rahner. Consider Hans Frei’s interpretation of the prolixity of the Church Dogmatics. Frei’s climactic and often‐quoted reason for the length of Barth’s magnum opus was that “Barth had as it were to recreate a universe of discourse, and he had to put the reader in the middle of that world, instructing him in the use of that language by showing him how  —  extensively, not only by stating the rules or principles of the discourse.” Barth’s strategy for doing this eventually focused on the “temporal,” and “its primary first‐order depiction was narrative.” “Dialectic” and especially “analogy” were two of the technical devices Barth used to state “the mutual fitness, through God’s grace, of God and humanity, in the words, their sharing a common world.” But “stating” can usually be done more compendiously than “showing.” Note that, on Frei’s Barth’s view, there is no antipathy between stating and showing. Instead, there is “a clear and strong sense of the coinherence of theological analysis [stating] with its more imaginative counterpart [showing]” (Frei 1992, pp. 159–162, my italics). If Frei is correct, what Rahner called Barth’s “copious uses of Scripture texts” has an aesthetic shape that contrasts with Rahner’s realsymbolic poetry – a contrast between a “poetic” and “narrative” shape of our “common [catholic] world.” I need to be clear about the nature of this contrast. This is not a contrast between Barth and Rahner on the role of metaphysics or ontology in theology, although there are surely such contrasts between the two. However, writing about the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation over 50 years ago, Rahner noted that, although Catholic theology cannot exclude a priori “the possibility of contact with profane knowledge” (e.g. a metaphysics of substance), it is also “a priori improbable (nicht wahrscheinlich) — more we may not say — that a dogma can only be formulated and understood in dependence on a well‐defined (ganz bestimmten) philosophical system” (Rahner 1964, pp. 360–361; 1966a; 1966c, pp. 289–290). In Kilby’s more expansive terms addressed previously, although Rahner’s philosophy is not the foundation of his theology, Rahner’s theology can make occasion‐specific use (not occasion‐comprehensive use, “more we cannot

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say”) of philosophy in his theology, including his, and the church’s dogmatics. These claims are very similar to those that Barth makes when he considers what he calls “secular parables” [Gleichnis profaner Worte] (CD IV/3, pp. 1, 115; KD IV/3, p. 1118). Barth reads New Testament parables as “the prototype of the order in which there can be other true words alongside the one Word of God” (CD IV/3, pp. 1, 113). Today’s secular parables are normed by considering their relationship to Scripture, the church’s dogmas and confessions, the fruits they bear in the world where they originate, by what they signify for the community itself. And they are relevant “in a specific time and situation,” occasion specific and not occasion comprehensive (CD IV/3, pp. 1, 133). Neither Barth nor Rahner, then, rule out such occasion‐specific uses of “secular” knowledge in theology. But both also resist making any occasion‐comprehensive ­theology dogmatically essential. But the contrast I am trying to draw instead is between a theology that aims to create a universe of temporal discourse that is or claims to be a “common [catholic] world” and a theology more analogous to a “poetic word” that transcends our common [catholic] world, something like the way poetry transcends ordinary language. The advantage of this way of contrasting Barth and Rahner is that it does not make their differences seem only a matter of the academic technicalities involved in mediating theologies or the theological hermeneutics informing copious uses of Scripture. Instead their differences are their focus on different construals of our common world, “narrative” and “poetic.”

Conclusion This, of course, does not settle this argument between the two – either the technical academic argument over copiously scriptural and mediating theologies, or the more mundane argument over whether narrative or poetry (or somehow both) more fundamentally shape our common world. But it may help us understand why the dialogue and debate between the two has never quite gotten off the ground. Their arguments over their shared common confession with which I began is embedded in the technical academic and more mundane arguments that I have tried to follow here. Where might things go from here? I began by noting that Barth and Rahner shared a common confession of the triune God, free creator of all things (comprehensively, catholicly) visible and invisible, Jesus Christ incarnate in our comprehensively shared flesh, the Holy Spirit making a catholic church and raising the dead for eternal life. If so, what would be needed at this point is analysis of how Barth and Rahner deal with each of these three topics – keeping in mind, I suggest, David Kelsey’s argument that they constitute a kind of dogmatic “triple helix” (along with Kelsey’s sidebar suggestion that Barth and Rahner are each, in different ways, tempted to reduce the triple helix to a double‐helix of “nature and grace”) (Kelsey 2009, p. 467). And there is no doubt that comparing the catholicity of Barth and Rahner on the immanent and economic Trinity as well as God’s creative activity on the interactions of the particular lives of God’s ­creatures from beginning to end, christologically focused, would be fruitful. But that must be a project for another time.

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References Balthasar, H.U.v. (1992). The Theology of Karl Barth. Exposition and Interpretation, trans. Edward T. Oakes, S.J. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. Barth, K. (1968). Ad Limina Apostolorum. An Appraisal of Vatican II, trans. Keith R. Crim. Richmond: John Knox Press. Barth, K. (1981). Letters 1961–1968 (eds. J. Fangmeier and H. Stoevesandt); trans. and ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Barth, K. (1982). Concluding Unscientific Postscript on Schleiermacher. In: The Theology of Schleiermacher, 261–279. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Buckley, J. (2007). Roger Haight’s Mediating Christology. Modern Theology 23: 107–112. Buckley, J. (2010). Peace and War among the Orthodox and Modern. Karl Barth Society Newsletter 40 (Spring): 16–19. Buckley, J. (2015). Hans Frei and the Deflation of Revelation. Pro Ecclesia A Journal for Catholic and Evangelical Theology XXIV: 6–23. Christian, W.A. Sr. (1987). Doctrines of Religious Communities. A Philosophical Study. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Dahlke, B. (2012). Karl Barth, Catholic Renewal and Vatican II. London and New York: T&T Clark International. Fields, S.M. (2016). Analogies of Transcendence. An Essay on Nature, Grace, and Modernity. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Frei, H.W. (1992). Appendix C, Eberhard Busch’s Biography of Karl Barth. In: Types of Christian Theology (eds. G. Hunsinger and W.C. Placher), 147–163. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Fritz, P.J. (2014). Karl Rahner’s Theological Aesthetics. Washington, DC: Catholic University of American Press. Hütter, R. (2000). Karl Barth’s “Dialectical Catholicity”: Sic et non. Modern Theology 16: 137–157. Kelsey, D.H. (2009). Eccentric Existence. A Theological Anthropology. 2 volumes. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press.

Kilby, K. (2004). Theology and Philosophy. London and New York: Routledge. Kilby, K. (2007). Karl Rahner. A Brief Introduction. New York: Crossroad. Küng, H. (1957). Rechtfertigung. Die Lehre Karl Barth und eine Katholische Besinnung. Paderborn and Einsiedeln: Johann Adam Mohler‐Institute and Johannes Verlag. Küng, H. (1964). Justification. The Doctrine of Karl Barth and a Catholic Reflection, with a letter by Karl Barth. Trans. Thomas Collines, Edmund E. Tolk, and David Granskou. London, New York, and Toronto: Thomas Nelson & Sons. Marga, A. (2010). Karl Barth’s Dialogue with Catholicism in Göttingen and Münster. Its Significance for His Doctrine of God. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Marina, J. (2005). Cambridge Companion to Schleiermacher. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Marmion, D. and Hines, M.E. (2005). The Cambridge Companion to Karl Rahner. Cambridge University Press. Marshall, B.L. (1987). Conflict in Christology. The Identity of a Saviour in Rahner and Barth. Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell. Marshall, B.L. (1991). Christologic: A Reply to Some Questions About Christology in Conflict. Philosophy and Theology 6: 145–158. McCormack, B.L. (2008). Orthodox and Modern. Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. McCormack, B.L. and White, O.P., T.J. (eds.) (2013). Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth. An Unofficial Catholic‐Protestant Dialogue. Grand Rapids, MI/Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans. Molnar, P.D. (2004). Love of God and Love of Neighbor in the Theology of Karl Rahner and Karl Barth. Modern Theology 20: 567–599. Oakes, E.T.,.S.J. and Moss, D. (2004). Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Przywara, E. (2014). Analogia Entis. Metaphysics: Original Structure and

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Universal Rhythm, trans. John R. Betz and David Bentley Hart. Grand Rapids, MI/ Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans. Rahner, K. (1964). Schriften zur Theologie, Band IV (Neuere Schriften). Einsiedeln, Zürich, Köln: Benziger Verlag. Rahner, K. (1966a), Theological Investigations, vol. Volume IV (More Recent Writings). Baltimore and London: Helicon Press and Darton, Longman, & Todd. Rahner, K. (1966b). The Theology of the Symbol in Rahner, Theological Investigations, vol. Volume IV (More Recent Writings), 221–252. Baltimore: Helicon Press. Rahner, K. (1966c). The Presence of Christ in the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, Theological Investigations, vol. Volume IV (More Recent Writings), 287–311. Baltimore: Helicon Press. Rahner, K. (1966d). Poetry and the Christian, Theological Investigations, vol. Volume IV

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(More Recent Writings), 357–367. Baltimore: Helicon Press. Rahner, K. (1974). Reflections on Methodology in Theology, Theological Investigations, vol. Volume XI (Confrontations 1), trans. David Bourke, 68–114. London and New York: Darton, Longman & Todd; Seabury Press. Rahner, K. (1976). Grundkurs des Glaubens. Einführung in dem Begriff des Christentums. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder. Rahner, K. (1978). Foundations of Christian Faith. An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, trans. William V. Dych. New York: Seabury Press. Rahner, K. (1986). Karl Rahner in Dialogue. Conversations and Interviews. 1965–1982 (eds. P. Imhof and H. Biallowons), trans. [and abridged] Harvey D. Egan. New York: Crossroad. Webster, J. (2000). Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 50

Barth and Balthasar D. Stephen Long

Introduction Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar first met face to face on 29 April 1940, but Balthasar was already well acquainted with Barth’s work. Balthasar asked for the meeting and Barth agreed. Von Balthasar arrived in Basel in 1939 from Munich where he had worked with Erich Przywara on Stimmen der Zeit from 1937 to 1939. A decade previous in 1929 while teaching at the University of Münster Barth invited Przywara to his seminar on Thomas Aquinas. It was most likely through this engagement with Przywara that Barth became familiar with the analogia entis (Johnson 2010, p. 98). Only a few years later in 1932 Barth will publish the statement that has drawn so much attention: the “analogia entis is the invention of the antichrist” and the primary reason one could not become Roman Catholic (CD I/1, p. xiii). Although that statement is well known, less attention has been given to the sentence that precedes it. In that sentence, I suggest, is a key to Balthasar’s attraction to Barth. Barth wrote, “I can see no third alternative between that exploitation of the analogia entis which is legitimate only on the basis of Roman Catholicism, between the greatness and misery of a so‐called natural knowledge of God in the sense of the Vaticanum [Vatican I], and a Protestant theology which draws from its own sources, which stands on its own feet, and which is finally liberated from this secular misery” (CD I/1, p. xiii). In this brief, cryptic statement, Barth identifies a theological issue that will occupy Roman Catholic theologians like Hans Urs von Balthasar and Henri de Lubac for several decades. Is there a relationship between certain interpretations of Vatican I’s teaching on the natural knowledge of God and the emergence of the secular? Balthasar was well aware of Barth’s accusation before they met. He had already published two pieces on his theology, first in the third volume of his Apokalypse der

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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deutschen Seele, which is subtitled “The Apotheosis of Death” (Die Vergöttlichung des Todes)1 and second a short essay that same year that bore the same title as the public lectures on Barth he gave in Basel in 1948, “Karl Barth and Catholicism” (Karl Barth und der Katholizismus).2 In the Apokalypse volume, Balthasar argued that Barth misidentified the error in Catholicism. It was neither the analogia entis nor the potentia oboedientialis; both of which are “essential” to Catholicism, but the doctrine of “natura pura,” which is nonessential and resulted from the overreach of the Counter‐ Reformation. Balthasar writes, “We have then made no ‘concessions’ to Barth, but rather only demonstrated the analogia‐entis problematic as not identical and not indissolubly connected to a natura‐pura problematic, which first obtained broad theological validity since the counter‐Reformation”(Balthasar 1998, p. 380). It is telling that Balthasar publicly admitted that he made “no concession” to Barth; such a concession would have alarmed some in the Catholic theological world as is evident from his later work on Barth, which met significant Catholic resistance. Balthasar’s 1939 published piece on Barth is something of a commentary on Barth’s cryptic 1932 statement. There is an error in Catholicism, and it was an error that led to a secular misery, but it was not the analogia entis; it was the doctrine of pure nature. Within two years of having published Apokalypse and arriving in Basel, Balthasar presented Barth with a monograph on his work Analogie: Ein Gespräch mit Karl Barth. Although he completed it in 1941, it would not be published until a decade later because neo‐Thomist Roman Catholic censors refused to give it ecclesiastical approval. They found it contradicted the teaching of Vatican I on the natural knowledge of God. Ecclesiastical approval was finally granted in 1951 shortly after Pius XII promulgated Humani Generis. Balthasar’s 1941 book on Barth was finally published under the title Karl Barth: Darstellung und Deutung Seiner Theologie (Karl Barth: Presentation and Interpretation of His Theology). It was an unpropitious time for a Roman Catholic theologian to appreciate Karl Barth, although writing on Barth might have been one way to write on the same issues but avoid the difficulties Balthasar’s friend Henri de Lubac encountered after the publication of Humani Generis. De Lubac was silenced and prohibited from publishing for a time, not by Pius XII, but by his own Jesuit order, who thought his work potentially contradicted Pius’s encyclical by making grace something that God owed human nature, thus potentially denying a basic teaching of Thomas Aquinas on pure nature. In 1947 de Lubac responded to the accusations to the General of the Jesuits by stating, “I have to confess that I can find nowhere in my work that I relativize Saint Thomas, ignore truth, disrespect dogma, invent ‘new principles’ or call into existence a heterodox ‘théologie nouvelle’” (Mettepenningen 2010, p. 107). Similar charges were brought against Balthasar causing him to delay publishing his Barth book, but Balthasar did not see how his interpretation of Barth contradicted Vatican I’s teaching on the natural knowledge of God or Humani Generis. In 1952, Balthasar presented Pius XII with a copy of his Barth book in a private meeting (Long 2014, pp. 20–36; Lochbrunner 2009, pp. 410–447). 1  Apokalypse der deutschen Seele: Studien zu einer Lehre letzten Haltungen Band III: Die Vergöttlichung des Todes (Erst Ausgabe Verlag Anton Pustet, Leipzig, 1939 and Johannes Verlag, Einsiedeln, Freiburg, 1998). 2  “Karl Barth und der Katholizismus,” Theologie der Zeit, Jahr 1939, folge 2.

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Two important themes are present in the early exchanges between Barth and Balthasar that inform their relationship and influence their theology. The first is an ecumenical opening to each other’s work and tradition for which Balthasar paid more of a price than did Barth. Ecumenical lectures bracketed their three decade relationship from Balthasar’s attendance at Barth’s seminar on Trent in 1941 to their joint lectures on ecumenism in 1968 shortly before Barth’s death. The second is modern theology’s tendency to devolve into a “secular misery.” The first is explicit in their work, the second less so, but nonetheless present and worthy of more attention in order to understand their mutual engagement.

Ecclesial Division: A Puzzling Cleft Barth invited Balthasar to attend his council of Trent seminar that began April 1941. The protocols from the seminar suggest Balthasar was not a quiet observer but an active participant. Barth’s last public lecture was on church unity to the Swiss ecumenical dialogue commission on Ash Wednesday 1968 in tandem with Balthasar (published as Barth and Balthasar 1968). The absurdity of ecclesial division drew Barth and Balthasar into a 37‐year conversation. During the 1941 seminar on Trent Barth and Balthasar often conversed, in the presence of Barth’s students, about the real source of the “rätselhafte Riss” (puzzling cleft) that divided Protestants and Catholics for 500 years. This term, “rätselhafte Riss,” is found in the first volume of Barth’s Church Dogmatics in a statement about the difference between Catholicism and Protestantism. Barth writes, But we can also sum up our objection to the Roman Catholic doctrine in the direction given to the preacher by the greatest Catholic theologian, Augustine: Oret, ut Dominus sermonem bonum det in os eius [Let us pray that the Lord will put a good word in his mouth] (De doctr. chr., IV, 15). What does it mean if this oret [let us pray] is taken not merely as an ascetic and homiletic suggestion but more seriously in its material content, much more strictly than it need be even according to Augustine’s own view? Must we really pray for the sermo bonus [good word]? Can we only pray for it? Is Christ’s action, real proclamation, the Word of God preached, tied to the ecclesiastical office and consequently to a human act, or conversely, as one might conclude from this oret, are the office and act tied to the action of Christ, to the actualising of proclamation by God, to the Word of God preached? From the standpoint of our theses this question is the puzzling cleft [rätselhafte Riss] which has cut right across the church during the last 400 years (CD I/1, p. 99).

Here is a succinct statement of Barth’s concern about Catholicism and his alternative to it. The good word that we pray for is not a function of ecclesiastical office but of the action of Christ. Christ’s word to the faithful is not dependent upon the church, but the  church is dependent upon Christ “actualizing” his word. The church cannot ­guarantee this word through office, it can only pray for it in hope and expectation that Christ gives it to the preacher. This passage must have impressed Balthasar for he began his book on Barth’s theology by referring to it. He stated:

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“The mysterious split [rätselhafte Riss] that has divided the Church for four hundred years” – what does it mean to us? If we are aware of the true nature of the Church, we must feel this split not only as a daily wound but even more as a constantly burning shame. The essence, and not merely the name, of the Church is agape: unity in love. So every lapse from this unity calls the very substance of the Church into question (Balthasar 1992, p. 4).

Balthasar followed this quote with several pages of long quotations from Barth that provided no way forward in ecumenical conversation. Barth rejected “multiplicity” as a “foundation for churches,” any theology that affirmed “de facto schism,” and an unwillingness to look “eyeball to eyeball” at the reasons for the divisions and merely tolerate each other. It is only those who can say “yes” and “no” to the other who can possibly affirm “the very unity of the Church.” Balthasar concluded, “Why this paradox? Because unity cannot be found in some neutral no man’s land between the confessions; it can only be found within the respective ecclesial spaces of each denomination” (Balthasar 1992, pp. 4–7). Balthasar goes as far as to say that Catholics should be no more “led astray” by Barth when he calls them heretics and refuses to call their church a “sister church” than Protestants should be when Catholics “repeat the anathema of Trent” against them (Balthasar 1992, p. 8). Neither Barth’s nor Balthasar’s words appeared to hold forth promise for an “ecumenical dialogue,” but surprisingly this is exactly what occurred. After attending Barth’s Council of Trent seminar in 1941, Balthasar presented his book on Barth’s theology to him and later to the public through 10 controversial lectures in Basel beginning in November 1948.3 Both leading Protestant and Catholic intellectuals objected to Balthasar’s “preoccupation” with Barth. Catholics feared that Barth’s dialectical theology disjoined God and creation so thoroughly that the two are no longer related, Protestants that giving voice to a Jesuit in Switzerland would erode Protestant liberty. Balthasar and Barth knew that these were caricatures of each other because they had come to know each other (see Long 2014, pp. 23–31).4 In his book on Barth, Balthasar makes three important points about “Barth’s standpoint” in theology. First, it is “midway between liberal Protestantism and Catholicism.” Second, it is from this midway point that he “expounds revelation” and “critically judges and delimits the real thrust of liberal Protestantism as well as Catholicism.” Third, it is “radically christocentric.” In a telling statement, Balthasar states that Barth “interprets all secular and worldly relations and realities in terms of God’s self‐interpreting Word, Jesus Christ” (Balthasar 1992, p. 30). It is a telling statement because, as we shall see, this is how Balthasar also interprets Przywara and what he attempts in his own theological trilogy, but Balthasar also has criticisms to lodge against Barth. Barth has rejected the “content” of liberal Protestantism while maintaining its “formal principle” 3  There is one extant typed copy of Analogie: Ein Gespräch mit Karl Barth in the Hans Urs von Balthasar archives in Basel. 4  It is difficult to imagine a situation today in which several newspaper editorials would garner public attention the way these lectures did in Switzerland in 1948. For an account of these events see Long 2014, pp. 23–31.

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which is “radical Christocentrism,” and rejected the formal principle of Catholicism, the analogia entis, while affirming much of its theological content (Balthasar 1992, p. 36; see also Oakes 2012, pp. 24–26). Barth identified the formal principle of Catholicism as the “analogia entis,” but Balthasar claims he is only identifying what Przywara did before him. He writes, “This happened in the course of Przywara’s ambitious plan of drawing in modern intellectual life, and ultimately every conceivable outlook, and incorporating these into the structure of the Catholic world view” (Balthasar 1992, p. 36). Notice how similarly Balthasar interprets Barth and Przywara. Barth attempts to interpret “all secular and worldly relations and realities in terms of God’s self‐interpreting Word, Jesus Christ,” and Przywara attempts “drawing in modern intellectual life, and ultimately every conceivable outlook” within Catholicism. Although their formal principles were opposed, their attempt to render the secular, and everything else, intelligible through Christianity was similar. Balthasar argued that the analogia entis made this possible for Catholics, but the doctrine of pure nature did not, because it allowed too many important secular and worldly matters to be defined in terms of nature qua nature. In a controversial passage in The Theology of Karl Barth he stated: Now common sense claims to know what nature is. But the more exactly it tries to grasp it, the more difficult – nay impossible – it becomes to isolate it neatly from the other dimension: supernatural grace. But it is equally difficult to espy the negative effects on the realm of nature of the loss of grace … questions about marriage, community, the State, our relation to a God who might not have revealed himself in his personal, interior life, the necessity for prayer in a natural state (which many people deny for good reasons), the eschatological fate of the soul, resurrection of the body, Last Judgment, eternal bliss: all such questions addressed to pure nature are simply unanswerable (Balthasar 1992, p. 283).

This statement has been the source of controversy for more than half a century. It caused the Jesuit Gutwenger to give a very negative review of Balthasar’s book in 1953 stating that his “zeal to understand our Protestant brothers let himself be led away.” He also associated Balthasar’s statement with the theology of de Lubac (Gutwenger 1953, p. 97). In 2010 Steven A. Long, who has defended the doctrine of pure nature, identifies this same passage as evidence for Balthasar’s inadequate Catholic theology (Long 2010, p. 68). The problem with Catholicism that Balthasar thought Barth had misidentified is present in this important quote. Is “nature” known in itself apart from grace? If so, how does this not render the divine economy irrelevant for understanding everyday life? Although Balthasar could find Barth’s attempt to interpret secular realities in terms of Jesus Christ to be too “monistic,” too defined by liberal Protestantism’s form with its christocentrism, the attempt to render them intelligible by the divine economy was an important correction to some aspects of post‐Tridentine Catholic theology, which he thought lost the dramatic character of theology in favor of a putative self‐interpreting nature. Przywara’s analogia entis provided a form to do this well, and thus to interpret modern intellectual life through the divine economy. A reasonable judgment, I suggest, is to see Balthasar’s trilogy as an attempt to do what Barth did but within a broader, less

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essentialized, understanding of Christianity.5 What he thought Barth lacked was the fullness of Catholic ecclesial life. Rather than counter Barth’s standpoint with a general “Catholic standpoint,” Balthasar narrows the focus to “two thematic motifs” running through the Church Dogmatics and engages them.6 The first is the “thematic cycle centering on creation, Incarnation, and redemption” with its “christocentric stamp,” and the second is the “thematic cluster of Church, sacrament and Christian life.” Barth, suggests Balthasar, treats the first “more creatively, originally and at ease” than the second. Although Balthasar finds the first thematic cycle “creative” and “unique,” the latter thematic cluster is less inspiring. His doctrine of the church is “rather pallid,” and the account of the sacraments “derivative.” In the third part of this cluster, however, the ethics is different. Here Barth is at his best. Balthasar writes, “only in his ethics does the old color, so evident in his treatment of creation, providence, and redemption seem to return to his cheeks” (Balthasar 1992, p. 44). Balthasar’s Catholic response to Barth’s standpoint first locates Barth’s complaint against Catholicism. It can do theology without being “scientific” in Barth’s sense, meaning that it is not always “appropriate to its object” (Balthasar 1992, p. 50). Balthasar had previously affirmed Barth’s theology as worthy of dialogue because of Barth’s “theological objectivism.” Balthasar stated: “He is passionately enthusiastic about the subject matter of theology, but he is impartial in the way he approaches so volatile a subject. Impartiality means being plunged into the object, the very definition of objectivity. And Barth’s object is God, as he has revealed himself in Jesus Christ, to which revelation Scripture bears witness” (Balthasar 1992, 25). Barth’s objectivism lived directly from its object, God. Barth critiqued Catholicism for its “theological indirectness,” another reason he opposed the analogia entis. The problem Barth identified in Catholicism, suggested Balthasar, was singular and consistent: “one drama keeps playing itself out: the ‘naturalization of grace’” (Balthasar 1992, p. 52). Knowing that Balthasar found Barth’s objectivism compelling would he concur that Catholicism tended to naturalize grace? By that Barth meant that for Catholicism grace was less an act of God given to creatures and more a human act of institution, another version of his question, “are the office and act tied to the action of Christ, to the

5  In his 1961 foreword to the second edition of The Theology of Karl Barth, Balthasar stated that he was “in my own way, a ‘Barthian’” when he wrote Prayer in 1955. Then he adds, “And I am just as Barthian in the work of theological aesthetics I have recently begun … The third dogmatic volume of the Aesthetics (volumes 6 and 7 in the English version), where I plan above all to discuss the issue of justification, will illuminate Barth’s contribution (and that of the Reformation) from a new and until now little noticed side.” Balthasar 1992, p. 401. 6  Readers should keep in mind that when Balthasar wrote his first version of The Theology of Karl Barth, he only had access through Church Dogmatics II/1. According to Barth, he was attached to that volume. During the 1941 seminar, Barth teased the class telling them to be careful around Balthasar because “the enemy listens in.” He also stated, “[Balthasar] hears many critiques but still offers no actual, impressive resistance. Perhaps he read too much in my Dogmatics (he carries II/1 around in his briefcase like a little kitten)” Lochbrunner (2009), p. 279. By the time he published the work, he had access through Church Dogmatics, III/3. In 1961 Balthasar wrote a foreword to the second edition of his book incorporating brief comments on III/4 and IV/1.

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actualising of proclamation by God, to the Word of God preached?” (CD I/1, p. 99). Balthasar responded to the variations of Barth’s singular, consistent accusation and stated, “Only a fool would deny that each one of the accusations could be on target” (Balthasar 1992, p. 52). In fact, Balthasar recognized this naturalization of grace as a danger and states, “We can go farther and say: forced by the one‐sidedness of heresy, the church of the Counter‐Reformation after Trent had to put the accent on works and institution. But this was done, not as a counterconcept to free grace; rather works and institution were understood as its highest form, the most daring deed, the most breathtaking venture of grace itself ” (Balthasar 1992, p. 53). In other words, Balthasar pushed Barth to see the emphasis on institution in Catholicism not as grace’s naturalization, but as its highest form. This theme leads to the heart of Balthasar’s trilogy, and it is related to his Mariology. Just as Mary’s yes gives birth to God, so other creatures are given the opportunity to participate in Christ’s mission. Truth (theologic) emerges as the interplay between receiving the glory of God (aesthetics) and performing that glory in our own lives (theodrama). It is a receptive activity that both views Jesus’ “personal mission” as “unique” and at the same time “capable of ‘imitation’ by those who are called, in him, to participate in his drama” (Balthasar 1991, p. 162). Jesus hands himself over in obedience beginning with the incarnation and Mary’s yes, concluding with his death and burial (Balthasar 1991, pp. 184–187). In turn, Mary and others receive him and in this passive‐activity make him possible. Barth never conceded Balthasar’s main point that ecclesiology, Mariology, saints, etc. were theological sites in which human action was the highest form of grace, but he may have influenced a not so subtle shift in Barth’s work. In the 1958 Church Dogmatics IV/2 Barth admits a change has occurred in his work in which, “There is not only a way of God to man. Because there is a way of God downward to man, there is also a way of man upward to God” (CD IV/2, p. 118). He poses this question, “Is it really the case that He has caused His Word to become flesh not merely in order that He may be an act for us in His own person, but in order that we may also be an act for Him?” (CD IV/2, pp. 797– 798). This statement and question are remarkable for Barth; they should put an end to the accusation that he could only conceive of a one‐way communication from God to creatures without a corresponding path from creatures to God. Whether this shift occurs because of Balthasar’s direct influence could not be ascertained with certainty, but that Barth’s work in the late 1950s moves in a direction that Balthasar was challenging him to move in the late 1940s and early 1950s is unmistakable.

Shifts at Vatican II and Barth’s Final Public Lecture A few years after Barth published these statements, Vatican II began and the ecumenical landscape was changed forever. Barth had been invited to attend sessions of the council, but sickness prevented him from doing so. He studied the documents carefully and at 80 years of age wrote Ad Limina Apostolorum. The following statement from that document reflects the ongoing discussion he and Balthasar had over the previous 30 years. Barth stated:

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Now, on the other hand, where in the documents of Vatican II is there a natural theology or an anathema against those who reject it? All the concern over the relationship of faith to reason, of nature to the supernatural, etc., which occupied the fathers of Vatican I exclusively does not seem to exist any longer for the fathers of Vatican II (ALA, p. 53).

What Balthasar had identified as the problem Barth should be concerned with, a doctrine of pure nature, no longer surfaced in the documents of Vatican II. Did this not reflect a move away from the “counters” lodged between Catholics and Protestants from Trent to Vatican II? Inasmuch as the “puzzling cleft” that divided them was a preoccupation with “nature” that could only admit of an indirect theology, Barth found it no longer present in Vatican II. Both Balthasar and Barth had their worries about Vatican II. “Updating” theology to the modern spirit could be another way to relinquish the divine economy to secular trends, but emphasizing the role of nature in theology against Protestants was no longer one of their worries. Three years after the conclusion to Vatican II Barth and Balthasar were asked to give lectures on ecumenism before the Swiss ecumenical commission. Barth’s lecture was titled, “Kirche in Erneuerung” (Church in Renewal) and Balthasar’s was “Einigung in Christus” (Unification in Christ).7 Both in his lecture “Kirche in Erneuerung” and Ad Limina Apostolorum, Barth expressed his affirmation of Lumen Gentium and his concern about Gaudium et Spes. He affirms the former because it presents the church as a pilgrim people capable of reform. In fact, Barth views Vatican II as embodying the Reformation’s ecclesiology of semper reformanda better than the Reformation itself had been able to do. He redefines “aggiornamento” as “the adaptation [Anpassung] of the church’s life to the life of another,” above all the “triune God in his action in the world and in the church” (Barth and Balthasar 1968, p. 15). Barth fears, however, that Gaudium et Spes overlooks the adaptation first to the triune God by going straight to the world. He finds troubling the language of opening a window in the Vatican as a metaphor for the council. Rather than only opening a window, it may be “removing the roof,” especially because Gaudium et Spes takes on too much of the modern spirit such as the “dignity of the individual” (Barth and Balthasar 1968, p. 15). The church’s structure should be that of a “free, living people,” free for service, for God and humanity, but it must be careful not to be seduced into a Babylonian “captivity of power, of mammon, of brutal force, and of course much more dignified but also more effective, captivity to the Spirit of the age, to the modern” (Barth and Balthasar 1968, p. 16). Here Barth feared Vatican II could lead Catholicism into a ­version of “Neoprotestantism.” Balthasar was also concerned that Vatican II could lead Catholics to domesticate their faith in order to accommodate the modern spirit. As with Barth, this domestication

7  The two lectures were originally published as Einheit und Erneuerung der Kirche: Zwei Vorträge Karl Barth und Hans Urs von Balthasar (Freiburg, Schweiz: Paulusverlag, 1968). Balthasar published his essay the following year in Entfaltung: auf Wegen christlicher Einigung, (Munich: Kösel Verlg Gmbh and Co., 1969). The English translation is Convergences: To the Source of Christian Mystery (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1983.) Balthasar’s lecture was given the chapter heading, “The Multitude of Biblical Theologies and the Spirit of Unity in the Church,” pp. 75–110.

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would occur by Catholicism beginning to resemble Neoprotestantism, but Balthasar means something specific with that phrase. It is a formal principle that seeks to identify the “essence” of Christianity and then relate everything to that singular essence. He stated this explicitly in his lecture, A word about the Evangelical‐Catholic controversy in general is appropriate here. The present ecumenical dialogue, although it is frequently understood as a cooperative search for Christian truth in focus on the mutual Lord, is understood also as a radical reduction to the allegedly “essential,” along with the elimination of all dispensable additions which disturb the understanding. It is clear that the Catholic partner will draw the shorter straw under these conditions, for the Reformation already lightened the ship of all its alleged “ballast” four hundred fifty years ago, and today, in the face of the events within the Catholic Church, it speaks, not without satisfaction, of a “need to catch up” [Nachholbedarf] (Balthasar 1983, p. 108).

What concerned Balthasar in 1968 is what had concerned him in 1951. Protestantism had a formal principle that sought the “essence” to Christianity whether that be Harnack’s “Fatherhood of God, brotherhood of man and the infinite value of the human soul” or else Barth’s “Christomonism.” Once the essence was identified, other crucial elements became superfluous, wrongly assuming they could be pared away without loss. For Balthasar, Christian faith was more “symphonic” than this; it needed a fullness of lay and clerical styles, a Petrine vocation to office and a Marian vocation to holiness. It needed “archetypal experiences” present in Jesus, the Old Testament, Mary, and the Apostles. It needed saints who could be imitated and lay and religious orders. The Bible alone cannot produce unity because it is in itself a “kaleidoscope,” a multitude of images and figures from both Testaments, some that are dead ends like the ­monarchy; others that can be troubling but are necessary like apocalyptic texts. These figures converge on Jesus Christ, but then branch out again, generating more figures. Balthasar concludes by identifying promising Protestant developments, especially evangelical and Anglican movements, such as Taize and the Anglican Klosterbewegung (monastery movement).

The Secular Misery Balthasar did not oppose the reforms of Vatican II, but he feared that some of them could exacerbate the secular misery Barth warned against in 1932. In 1966, on Barth’s 80th birthday, Balthasar published a tribute to him. He returned to Barth’s controversial 1932 statement about the analogia entis and the need to be free from a secular misery and suggested Barth may have been correct. “In terms of the Council, he will feel confirmed in his grim analysis of Catholicism in the first volumes of his great Dogmatics, which in proximity, even in a secret identity, of the Catholic and Schleiermacher liberal principles again and again he unsparingly underlined” (Lochbrunner 2009, p. 352). Two years later after Barth’s death, Balthasar published an obituary in which he argues once again that postconciliar developments may prove Barth’s 1932 concerns justified. A misuse of the analogia entis, Balthasar stated,

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leads in fact easily to a Kulturseligkeit [blessing of culture] or “turning to the world,” which whether it now appears in the name of the order of creation (evolution) or of the Gospel and Christology (as “transcendental anthropology”), can lead even further to the degeneration, which stands before us everywhere today (Lochbrunner 2009, p. 371).

His primary concern is similar to Barth’s concern about Gaudium et Spes. A transcendental anthropology leads to a naturalization of grace contributing to a “secular misery.” Balthasar did not use this term, but Barth did and now Balthasar returns to the passage in which it is found. What exactly is this secular misery? Barth never gave an extended analysis of the “secular” but made random statements about it throughout the Dogmatics. One of the earliest best captures his concern and is consistent with his brief statement against the analogia entis from the 1932 preface. While still discussing the necessity of prolegomena to dogmatics in the second section of CD I/1, Barth restates his critiques of Catholicism. The analogia entis and the Catholic understanding of nature lead to the “secular ‘There is’” [Es gibt]. He writes: Their presupposition is that the being of the Church, Jesus Christ, is no longer the free Lord of its existence, but that He is incorporated into the existence of the Church, and is thus ultimately restricted and conditioned by certain concrete forms of the human understanding of His revelation and of the faith which grasps it. Again, there can be no mistaking the common Christian character of this faith to the extent that the concept of the acting God, of that which is radically beyond all human possibilities, is taken seriously as the source of dogmatic knowledge, at least in intention. But again our fellowship with this faith is broken by the way in which grace here becomes nature, the action of God immediately disappears and is taken up into the action of the recipient of grace, that which is beyond all human possibilities changes at once into that which is enclosed within the reality of the Church, and the personal act of divine address becomes a constantly available relationship … It affirms an analogia entis, the presence of a divine likeness of the creature even in the fallen world, and consequently the possibility of applying the secular ‘There is’ to God and the things of God as the presupposition, again ontological, of that change or transformation, of that depriving of revelation and faith of their character as decision by evasion and neutralisation (CD I/1, pp. 40–41).

By affirming something in nature as the condition that makes possible God’s communication, the natural overwhelms grace, placing unnecessary limits on God’s communication to creatures. Barth sees this occurring in Roman Catholic ecclesiology. Balthasar never consented to that accusation, but he did see it occurring post Vatican II inasmuch as it gave place to emphases on orders of creation and “transcendental anthropology.” Barth and Balthasar came together over their mutual concern about the naturalization of grace and its contribution to the secular. Rodney Howsare notes that overcoming this naturalization of grace is what originally attracted Balthasar to Barth and led him to see strong similarities between him and de Lubac. Both challenged a “radical rift” between nature and supernature that occurs post Aquinas and then, suggests Howsare, gets read back into him. Thomas, he states, “would have been quite perplexed by the later Scholastic notions of ‘pure reason’ and ‘pure nature’.” Balthasar saw similarities

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between Barth and de Lubac in challenging this rift and the concept of pure nature it generated. Howsare writes, “Balthasar perceives a common goal to the work of Barth and de Lubac: namely, an attempt to overcome the disastrous effects of modern secularism by overcoming the split which had developed since Thomas Aquinas between nature and grace” (Howsare 2005, pp. 77–78). What brings Barth, de Lubac, and Balthasar together is first a common critique of the naturalization of grace and second the claim that it leads unintentionally to modern secularism. The diagnosis is shared among them, but not the remedy. Howsare sides with Balthasar against Barth as to how to address pure nature and its inevitable slide into the secular. Barth’s remedy collapses nature into grace and “simply leaves no room for creation to exist outside of God” (Howsare 2005, p. 86). Balthasar’s makes no such move, allowing creaturely agency its proper role in the divine economy. Howsare makes an important point, but I wonder what it would mean to argue for creation to “exist outside of God?” If God is infinite and eternal, then in some sense there is no “outside” to God. Although God and creation are distinct, it is not because creation is located in a space where God is not. I take Balthasar’s concern to be not so much the location of creation “outside” God; after all he argued that all of creation was contained in the differentiated “space” of the Second Person of the Trinity. Both Barth and Balthasar refused to give creation its own independence or autonomy “outside” of the Triune God, for as Hosware also notes, such a space would require a pure nature or pure reason that would make creation intelligible in itself apart from the divine economy. Balthasar’s concern is that the early Barth had an insufficient role for human action, only God acts. He challenged the misery of the secular without giving adequate attention to human action within the one realm of creation, fall, and redemption. There is a properly secular time, but it is not one located in a fiction called “pure nature.” Balthasar saw a shift occurring in Barth that remedied his inadequate early remedy. The early Barth viewed Catholic ecclesiology as contributing to our secular misery. It did this not only by absorbing Christ as head of the church into the church as his body, but also by “mechanically” transferring Christ’s affirmation of Peter as the rock on which the church is built to historic, apostolic succession. Here too Barth saw a secular “There is” – “as if, being spiritual, it could be tied to the secular circumstance of a list of bishops of this kind.” Barth rejects such a secular enterprise, citing Melanchthon: “It is to this that we can only say No. Est enim ecclesia coetus non alligatus ad ordinariam successionem, sed ad verbum Dei. Ibi renascitur ecclesia, ubi Deus restituit doctrinam et dat Spiritum sanctum [For the church assembly is not bound to the succession of ordination, but to the word of God. The church is reborn where God restores doctrine and gives the Holy Spirit]” (CD I/1, p. 103). But Barth’s position toward Roman Catholic ecclesiology and the secular “There is” shifted slightly as he worked through the Church Dogmatics and found Roman Catholics among his most important conversation partners. In a nuanced defense of monasticism, Barth shifts his analysis of the secular from the analogia entis and the naturalization of grace to a political contest between the state and the church. The very term “secularism,” he suggests, arose from “enlightened governments in the 18th and 19th centuries” who were seeking protection from the politically powerful monastic institutions. The fact that

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they sought such protection was a sign of the “power and vitality of the Church” (CD IV/2, p. 12). The secular became a space defined by governments to curb the power of monastic communities. This shift does not reverse his earlier concerns, but it shows how the misery of the secular seeks a “natural” space free from ecclesial “vitality.”8 As noted in the previous section, Barth gradually gives more space for human action in the one realm of grace (creation and reconciliation) that characterizes creaturely existence. Barth never rejects the secular outright. In the first volume of the Church Dogmatics, he also argued that the secular is not neutral and yet God speaks by means of it. The secular is the reality in which God is incarnated and in which God speaks. It is the “untearably thick veil” that contradicts God, but yet God miraculously and indirectly speaks by means of it (CD I/1, pp. 166–168). Given what Barth said about the secular, readers should not be surprised that toward the end of the Church Dogmatics (IV/3, §69), Barth returns to the “prolegomena to the Church Dogmatics, to the doctrine of the threefold form of the Word of God as revealed, written and proclaimed” and sets forth “secular parables.” He reminds his readers that the “truth” of the church’s word “receives its shape in the school of the prophets [Old Testament] and apostles [New Testament].” The church speaks the “truth to the extent that it perceives and receives the prophecy of Christ attested by Scripture and thus gives itself to present Christ by its own word” (CD IV/3, p. 114). Barth has not wavered from his critique of Catholicism and his primary concern that it naturalizes grace through absorbing Christ in its institutions. Christ depends on them for his word; they do not depend on him. But he raises the question of “secular parables.” These are parables not spoken by the church. They will be in “material agreement” with the word the church speaks, and they will be “alien witnesses to the truth.” Nothing, not even the secular, can escape its origins.

Conclusion Balthasar’s preoccupation with Barth and Barth’s ongoing conversations with Balthasar had a salutary effect on their work; their relationship demonstrates the importance of friendship for theology and the need to speak outside one’s immediate circle of influence. Too often theology and theologians become preoccupied with one thinker or movement. We produce centers, journals, societies, and attend conferences dedicated to a singular thinker or movement and find ourselves speaking with scholars of similar interest arguing about the thinker or movement more so than what the thinker or movement argued about. No single theologian or movement can or should

8  His analysis here fits well with earlier statements from CD I/1 that opposed a neutral, secular sphere. He wrote, “It is not a question of natural theology but very much indeed of supernatural theology. But such a theology, bearing in mind the power of God’s Word, will have to claim the world, history, and society as the world, history, and society in the midst of which Christ was born and died and rose again. Not in the light of nature but in the light of grace, there is no self-enclosed and protected secular sphere, but only one which is called in question by God’s Word, by the Gospel, by God’s claim, judgment and blessing, and which is only provisionally and restrictedly abandoned to its own legalism and its own gods. What the Word says stands whatever the world’s attitude to it and whether it redound to it for salvation or perdition” (CD I/1, p. 155).

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ever suffice – not Augustine, Thomas, Luther, Calvin, Barth, or Balthasar, not neoscholasticism, nouvelle théologie, neoorthodoxy, radical orthodoxy, liberation, postcolonial  –  in order to do theology well. The conversations between Barth and Balthasar should matter to us because they ventured beyond dividing walls of hostility without assuming they could enter into some neutral, safe space. By speaking unapologetically from their traditions, they sought the truth of God without abandoning those traditions. In so doing they breathed new life into old, stale conversations. References Balthasar, H.U.v. (1983). Convergences: To the Source of Christian Mystery (trans. E.A. Nelson). San Francisco: Ignatius Press. Balthasar, H.U. (1991). Theodrama Vol. III: Dramatis Personae: Persons in Christ (trans. G. Harrison). San Francisco: Ignatius Press. Balthasar, H.U.v. (1992). Theology of Karl Barth (trans. E.T. Oakes), 3e. San Francisco: Ignatius Books. Balthasar, H.U. (1998). Apokalypse der deutschen Seele: Studien zu einer Lehre letzten Haltungen Band III: Die Vergöttlichung des Todes. Einsiedeln and Freiburg: Johannes Verlag. (First edition published by Anton Pustet, Leipzig, 1939). Barth, K. and Balthasar, H.U.v. (1968). Einheit und Erneuerung der Kirche: Zwei Vorträge Karl Barth und Hans Urs von Balthasar. Freiburg: Paulusverlag. Gutwenger, E. (1953). Nature und übernature. Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie 75: 82–97.

Howsare, R. (2005). Hans Urs von Balthasar and Protestantism: The Ecumenical Implications of his Theological Style. London: T&T Clark International. Johnson, K. (2010). Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis. New York: T&T Clark. Lochbrunner, M. (2009). Hans Urs von Balthasar und seine Theologenkollegen: Sechs Beziehungsheschichten. Würzburg: Echter. Long, S.A. (2010). Natura Pura: On the Recovery of Nature in the Doctrine of Grace. New York: Fordham University Press. Long, D.S. (2014). Saving Karl Barth. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Mettepenningen, J. (2010). Nouvelle Théologie New Theology: Inheritor of Modernism, Precursor of Vatican II. London: T&T Clark International. Oakes, K. (2012). Karl Barth on Theology and Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 51

Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr Stanley Hauerwas

The Inevitable Conflict Karl Barth (1886–1968) and Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) were each larger than life individuals. Their writing alone is amazing in quantity and quality, but they were also engaged in political and societal life. One suspects that their presence would take up all the air in the room. They did not occupy the same rooms often, but in the room called Christianity – and that smaller room called Christian theology – they could make it difficult for the other to get sufficient air. They were men of enormous intellect and energy who, one would like to think, recognized something of themselves in the other. It would seem they were destined to come into conflict. A date and place can be established when that conflict became public. It was in 1948 at the World Council of Churches meeting in Amsterdam. Prior to Amsterdam Reinhold Niebuhr had occasionally written about Barth. The Barth he wrote about seems to have been Barth of the Romans. In these early articles he had high regard for Barth though he worried about Barth’s “absolutism” (Niebuhr 1959, p. 144). Barth clearly haunted Niebuhr but I think it fair to say that Barth did not return the favor. He certainly had some acquaintance with Niebuhr but Barth would have thought Niebuhr’s theology “thin.” In 1947 Niebuhr had come to Europe and invited himself to visit Barth in Bonn. Barth reports that Niebuhr’s anticipated visit filled him with trepidation because, as Barth wonderfully puts it, he worried whether “we would sniff at each other cautiously like two bull mastiffs, or rush barking at each other, or lie stretched out peacefully in the sun side by side” (Busch 1975, p. 342). Barth does not say which description best describes their meeting but he reports that they had a good conversation. They may have had a good conversation in Bonn but the difference between them exploded in Amsterdam. It will be the burden of the first section of this chapter to

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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­ rovide the background necessary to understand what happened at Amsterdam. I think p that important because their differences continue to matter. Their disagreements are of historical interest but because they continue to represent alternatives, particularly in theological ethics, which continue to shape the field it is important to understand their differences. I do not want, however, to keep anyone in suspense – I think Barth usually had the best of the arguments between them. Niebuhr first wrote about Barth in 1928 in an article titled “Barth – Apostle of the Absolute,” which was published in The Christian Century. Niebuhr began his article observing that for some time Barth was seen as an important theologian but it was difficult to say why Barth is significant because his books had not been translated causing his work to appear fragmentary. Niebuhr expressed hope that might be changing because Douglas Horton had just translated Word of God and Theology. In this early article Niebuhr gave a largely positive account of Barth. He noted, for example, that some considered Barth to be a fundamentalist because of the bombastic character of his Romans Commentary. Niebuhr defended Barth from that charge by pointing out Barth accepts the results of biblical criticism. As their differences over the years became more pronounced Niebuhr became more sympathetic with those who called Barth a fundamentalist. I suspect Niebuhr never thought Barth was a fundamentalist, but he certainly did think Barth’s theology was, in his word, obscurantist. Early in Niebuhr’s career he thought Barth and he shared a similar critique of Protestant liberal theology. Niebuhr characterized Barth as a theologian that was rightly reacting against the subjectivism and relativism of liberal theology. He assumed, however, that Barth’s criticism of liberal theology did not commit Barth to the view that Christian theologians over the centuries had not developed a better understanding of God. Yet Niebuhr expressed worries about Barth’s stress on revelation that he feared could lead to a regrettable absolutism. But Niebuhr thought Barth’s Christology to be a promising way to express our alienation from God. Niebuhr commends Barth for “reintroducing the note of tragedy in religion” because it is an antidote to the superficial optimism of most current theology (Niebuhr 1959, p. 144). Yet he worries that Barth’s reassertion of the absolute in Christ pays too high a price for whatever advantage is gained. Niebuhr explains that for Barth it is not really the Christ‐life that is the absolute but it is the “Christ‐idea.” Niebuhr, and he cannot be thinking of Barth’s work other than the Romans, argues that Barth’s theology is not at all interested in the peculiar circumstances of Christ’s life. Niebuhr even suggests that Barth is not even interested in the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount. What interests Barth, according to Niebuhr, is a “Christ idea” that may have little relation to the historical Jesus. But that leads Niebuhr to wonder, “How do we know that this Christ‐idea is absolute and not subjective: we do not know” (Niebuhr 1959, p. 144). Because we do not or cannot know Niebuhr fears Barth is offering a dogmatically stated position that is without proof. Niebuhr comments on this dogmatic strategy suggesting that for Barth to so understand the role of the absolute is equivalent to the experience of justification by faith. Barth’s account of justification, Niebuhr thinks, is promising because it suggests a dogma like justification may be true because it meets human needs. Yet Niebuhr argues that such an “abstruse” theology, a theology designed to escape relativism, in the end

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can do no more than result in a sorry victory. It is a sorry victory because, Niebuhr asks: how are we to know that the human need this kind of religion is designed to satisfy does not in the end satisfy a far too morbid conscience? Niebuhr speculates that the kind of morbidity that hangs over Barth’s theology may reflect the sense of tragedy World War I created in Europe and particularly in Germany but that does not make it any the more attractive. Niebuhr thinks Barth has had to pay a far too high a price to make his position coherent. In order to defeat relativism, Barth’s theology threatened to be quietistic. It is so because Niebuhr suspects that Barth is more concerned with the inner life than with project of advancing the progressive values of society. That Niebuhr could make such an argument indicates the mistaken view of many at the time that Niebuhr’s stress on sin allied him with Barth’s criticism of modern liberal views of social progress. Niebuhr, however, was quite clear that Barth did not give the appropriate reason for why Christians have an ongoing responsibility to work for a more nearly just society. Niebuhr acknowledges that Barth rightly thinks that history is the story of brutality, but Barthian pessimism can tempt some to “despair of history and take flight into the absolute which can neither be established upon historical grounds nor justified by any rational process, but can only be assumed and dogmatically asserted because it seems morally necessary” (Niebuhr 1959, p. 147). Niebuhr will sharpen these early arguments against Barth through a series of short but powerfully written articles. Quite understandably, given the confrontation at Amsterdam many assumed Niebuhr’s critique of Barth was primarily against Barth’s ethics. But Niebuhr was perhaps even more worried that Barth’s theology would fail to meet the intellectual standards of the modern university. For Niebuhr the intellectual and the ethical aspects of the faith were closely interrelated and he feared Barth met neither standard. Niebuhr continued to develop his criticism of Barth in articles in The Christian Century. In 1931 Niebuhr wrote an article titled “Barthianism and the Kingdom” in which he continued to develop his criticism of Barth’s “absolutism.” He observes that the Barthians are very critical of present society but they fail to develop the grounds necessary to sustain their criticism. Niebuhr observes that Barth and his followers lack an adequate social ethic but given Barth’s early socialism that fact can go unnoticed. Niebuhr thought, however, that Barth and those influenced by him were giving up on efforts to improve society. Barth and his followers worry more about the pride and conceit that social actions may produce with the result that the salvation brought by Christ is betrayed (Niebuhr 1959, p. 148). According to Niebuhr, it is crucial to see that the moral sensitivity and corresponding lack of social vigor and disdain for the historical that characterizes the work of Barth and his disciples have the same source. That source is a stress on religious perfectionism. Niebuhr worries that when Barth’s depiction of God, God’s will, and the kingdom of God are described in such idealistic and transcendent terms nothing in history can match them. As a result the distinction between good and evil is obscured making impossible judgments about how amidst the ambiguities of history relative goods can be achieved. Niebuhr’s criticism of Barth increasingly takes on an extremely negative tone.

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In a later article, “Barthianism and Political Reaction,” which appeared in The Christian Century in 1934, Niebuhr developed this attack by suggesting that Barthians lack a passion for social justice. One of the reasons for that absence is Barthians’ increasing recognition that no society exists without some degree of coercion. Yet their failure to support the underprivileged because such support entails coercion results in giving the privileged a free ride. Niebuhr confesses as one who bears wounds from doing battle with a complacent liberalism that the appropriation of Barth’s thought by reactionaries tempts him to return to the liberal camp. For the first time, however, Niebuhr makes an important qualification. He disavows any attempt to associate Barth’s theology with the support of Hitler. He rightly identifies Barth as one of Hitler’s most determined foes and he expresses admiration for Barth’s stance. Later, however, Niebuhr says he is astonished about Barth’s letter to “a theological professor in Prague” in which Barth suggests that Czech soldiers have a Christian duty to kill Germans. Such a letter Niebuhr thinks exposes the contradictions in Barth’s position, that is, Barth confuses relative political judgments with the unconditional demands of the gospel (Niebuhr 1959, p. 164). Niebuhr returns to these issues in 1939 in an article in Radical Religion titled, “Karl Barth on Politics.” Niebuhr provides an account of Barth’s justification for his letter in which he seems to approve of Barth’s characterization of Nazi politics as not just a political program but equivalent to a counter religion to Christianity that promises a false salvation. Even though the Nazis describe their program as Christian it is, Niebuhr argues, a religion diametrically opposed to Christianity. Niebuhr applauds Barth’s claim that National Socialism must be opposed but Niebuhr suggests that opposition means Barth should acknowledge he has changed his position. Niebuhr argues that Barth’s opposition to the Nazis means he is now ready to identify certain social strategies as required by the gospel. Niebuhr thinks Barth now holds a position not too different from his own. His only criticism is Barth does not admit that he has changed his position (Niebuhr 1959, pp. 166–167). We have no evidence that Barth read or responded to any of Niebuhr’s early criticisms of his work. The war and the German Church Struggle were all consuming for Barth. One suspects that Barth, the primary author of the Barmen Declaration, would have found Niebuhr’s suggestion that he had changed his understanding of the relation of Christianity and politics to be a profound misreading. After all it was Barth who had written in the Barmen Declaration that: As Jesus Christ is God’s assurance of the forgiveness of all our sins, so in the same way and with the same seriousness he is also God’s mighty claim upon our whole life. Through him befalls us a joyful deliverance from the godless fetters of this world for a free, grateful service to his creatures. We reject the false doctrine, as though there were areas of our life in which we would not need justification and sanctification through him (Cochrane 1962, p. 240).

The Barmen Declaration reflected Barth’s refusal to understand the relation of the church and the civil community in terms of the two kingdom duality shaped by the

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Reformation. That was and is an extraordinary development. It is not clear, however, that Niebuhr understood the significance of what Barth was doing. In particular Niebuhr did not seem to appreciate that Barth had called into question the Lutheran dualism between the order of creation and redemption. Niebuhr was right to think that Barth’s position was shaped by his eschatology, but he failed to understand that for Barth creation is an eschatological concept. As I suggested previously these matters came to a head at the founding assembly of the World Council of Churches meeting in Amsterdam in August, 1948. There the difference between Barth and Niebuhr became dramatically clear. It is to that dramatic event I now turn.

Amsterdam Eberhard Busch reports that Barth first said “no” when asked to give the speech that was to open the first assembly of the World Council of Churches (WCC). The assignment meant that Barth would need to read the four preparatory volumes that had been written for this event. However he was urged to reconsider by theologians, particularly theologians in Eastern Europe, he had influenced. Barth agreed to give the opening address only to discover that the materials prepared for the assembly were written from a perspective that had been the subject of Barth’s withering critique. The assembly was gathered under the banner, “The Disorder of the World and God’s Design.” It was a slogan that Barth could not help but challenge. For Barth the order was backward. It is a profound mistake, Barth argued, for the WCC to begin speaking about the world’s disorders in order to offer social and political ideals that they think might solve the world’s problems. Rather, Christian speech about the world must begin with God’s kingdom “which has already come, is already victorious, and set up in all its majesty.” Accordingly the church must begin “with our Lord Jesus Christ, who has already robbed sin and death, the devil and hell of their power” (Barth 1948, p. 1330). Barth was not about to give those who had worked hard to develop materials for the WCC a free pass. He observed that the body of Christ only lives from and through the One who is wholly present to us, but he confesses he is frightened by the fact that in all the materials prepared for the Assembly Jesus Christ has little or no work to do. It is as if God’s providence, his already founded kingdom, the accomplished reconciliation of the world, the presence of the Holy Spirit, and the triune God – his person, purpose, and glory – lay somewhere outside the circle envisaged under the theme of “Man’s Disorder and God’s Design” (Barth 1948, pp. 1330–1331). Barth, no doubt with a sense of irony, suggested that “‘God’s design’ does not mean something like a Christian Marshall plan.” Barth develops his criticism of the papers prepared for the meeting by observing that many of the documents written for the meeting worry that we may be entering a post‐ Christian era. Barth challenges that very way of understanding the task before the church, pointing out the phrase “post‐Christian” was first used by the National Socialists. But equally problematic is the assumption that some form of quantitative thinking, all calculation of observable consequences, all attempts to achieve a Christian world order, should determine the character of the witness to the sovereignty of God.

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The Christian task is first and foremost to point to God’s kingdom. Christians have no Christian systems of economic or political principles to offer but what they offer is a hope that is grounded in God’s work in Christ (Barth 1948, p. 1332). Barth concludes his address before the assembly by maintaining that in the face of the political and social disorder of the world the task of Christians is to be witnesses and disciples of Jesus. To be such a witness means Christians will have no problem having something to do. Christians have meaningful work to do because God has done the work that makes what Christians can do meaningful. Accordingly the work Christians are called to do is freed from the desperate attempt to live lives that assume it is up to us to make up for what we fear God has not done. Barth thought that was exactly the presumption that had shaped the materials that set the agenda for the first meeting of the WCC. Gary Dorrien reports that Barth was surprised that Niebuhr took strong exception to Barth’s criticism of the slogan that was to shape the meeting, as well as Barth’s dissatisfaction with the prepared reports. That Barth was surprised, Dorrien suggests, may have been because Barth and Niebuhr in the United States were often linked under the unhappy designation of being “neo‐orthodox” theologians. Barth hated that description but Dorrien suggests he may have had the impression that he and Niebuhr shared the same critique of the liberal reformism that shaped the WCC preparatory materials. Yet Dorrien rightly observes that for all Niebuhr’s criticism of the liberal presumptions that too often were moralistic, even supporting pacifism, he remained a product of the Protestant social gospel. Accordingly Niebuhr was appalled not only by what he considered Barth’s indifference to political challenges but was equally concerned by Barth’s assertion that Christians have no business accommodating the gospel to modern scientific thought (Dorrien 2000, p. 135). Niebuhr’s response to Barth’s Amsterdam speech was titled “We Are Men and Not God” and like Barth’s speech Niebuhr’s response was published in The Christian Century. Niebuhr began by duly acknowledging that Barth had been a powerful witness in the German Church Struggle against Hitler. But Niebuhr suggested that it may be the case that a theology constructed in the face of a great crisis in history may fail to make the discriminating judgments necessary for a responsible social ethic (Niebuhr 1959, p.  172). Niebuhr argued Barth’s insistence that Christians qua Christian have no economic or political principles to offer the world means that Christians can dispense with the principles of justice that “represent the cumulative experience of the race” (Niebuhr 1959, p. 171). With his usual rhetorical brilliance Niebuhr suggests Barth represents the German flight from responsibility by trying to extend the virtue of yesterday to cover current problems. As a result Niebuhr argues that Barth’s address encourages the German tendency to think of the church as an ark that provides a perpetual home on Mount Ararat, that is, a place above the worldly battles. Niebuhr acknowledges that “continental” theology is the scholarly pinnacle of the Christian faith, which makes him feel that he is an inadequate critic. Yet he argues that Barth’s theology requires correction because “it has obscured the foothills where human life must be lived” (Niebuhr 1959, pp. 174–175). Continental theology rightly reminded us that God is supreme and not men, but Niebuhr suggested the wheel has come full circle, tempting

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Christians to offer a crown without the cross, a triumph without a battle, a faith without perplexity. Barth responded to Niebuhr by focusing on Niebuhr’s contrast of continental and Anglo‐Saxon theology. He challenged Niebuhr’s characterization by observing that he knows some English‐speaking theologians that belong to the “continental type.” Yet Barth does not deny that there is a difference in the two theological traditions and that difference is the Bible. Accordingly Barth confesses all he was trying to do in Amsterdam was to say as the Bible says that God’s plan of salvation has already come in Jesus Christ. Accordingly it is from that viewpoint that we have a faithful understanding of the world’s disorder (Barth 1949, pp. 201–204). Barth was sure that Niebuhr had not understood him. So Barth even developed a list of such misunderstandings. For example, Barth said that the action of the church in the world ought not consist in the proclamation of theoretical principles, which earns him the mistaken criticism that he is willing to fight the Devil only when he has shown both horns. Barth argued that Christians should not fill the role of Atlas, for which he is mistakenly charged with being a cultural obscurantist who would have the crown without the cross. Some have even criticized Barth for his emphasis on the “otherness” of God, leading some to accuse him of being a dogmatic Lutheran who seeks to be free from all responsibilities. Barth, in particular, calls attention to the characterization that he is trying to secure a home by remaining in Noah’s ark on Mount Ararat. Barth concludes in exasperation pointing out that he is accused of all these failings even though for 10 years he has been rebuked in Germany for bringing the gospel and the law, faith and politics, the church and democracy, into too close connection with one another (Barth 1949, p. 203). Niebuhr might well be forgiven for not understanding what Barth was suggesting about how the Christian witness to the state should be developed. Will Herberg’s collection of Barth’s extremely important essays on church and state had not been published. Those essays, “Gospel and Law,” “Church and State,” and “The Christian Community and the Civil Community” in fact constitute Barth’s political theology. In particular, as I noted concerning Barmen, Barth’s christological reading of the power and status of the state was not understood by Niebuhr or put more charitably Niebuhr does not seem to appreciate the significance of Barth’s christological understanding of the state (Barth 1960, p. 118). Nor did Niebuhr seem to have any knowledge or appreciation of Barth’s development in “The Christian Community and the Civil Community” of the analogies that could inform Christian political judgments (Barth 1960, pp. 149–189). To be sure if Niebuhr had known of those aspects of Barth’s thinking about politics he might have been even more dismissive of Barth’s position. I suspect he would have found many of Barth’s analogies arbitrary, but even more troubling Niebuhr would have had difficulty accepting Barth’s christological account of the state. As I noted previously Niebuhr had some understanding of Barth’s eschatological perspective, but Niebuhr did not see the difference that made and it did not become central to Niebuhr’s concern with what he took to be Barth’s shortcomings. In an odd way, in his understanding of the state Niebuhr was closer to some forms of the Lutheran two kingdoms view than Barth.

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George Hunsinger helps clarify what may have been the most determinative difference between Barth and Niebuhr on these matters when he observes that Barth, unlike Niebuhr, characteristically did not think in terms of the “real” and the “ideal” as alternatives. Yet that alternative was at the heart of Niebuhr’s charge against Barth of absolutism. Niebuhr thought Barth’s christological politics was an ideal that could not be realized. Because the ideal could not be realized Niebuhr assumed Barth must abandon the messy world of the political. That way of understanding Barth reflected Niebuhr’s position about love as the absolute ideal that cannot be realized in the messy world of politics (Hunsinger 1991, p. 38). Hunsinger points out, however, that Barth did not think in terms of real and ideal, but rather in terms of the real and the unreal. Niebuhr’s concept of the real in contrast to Barth was grounded in his anthropology, which meant sin made love unattainable. In contrast, Barth’s “reality” was theocentric, which means Barth thought it is God who sets the terms for what is real. As a result, Hunsinger argues, that Barth maintains God’s love in Christ establishes what is real so that sin becomes unreal, making possible alternatives that otherwise would not exist (Hunsinger 1991, p. 39). Amsterdam had been the most intense face to face interaction we know concerning the relation between Niebuhr and Barth. Niebuhr left Amsterdam with the view that Barth’s influence had to be countered. He acknowledged that Barth’s theology was shaped by “profound” interpretations of the Biblical faith, but he worried that achievement might beguile some to accept Barth’s attempt to preserve what Niebuhr described as the purity of the faith (Niebuhr 1959, p. 182). Niebuhr even claimed that no Christian could argue with Barth’s stress on the redemptive power of Jesus life, death, and resurrection, but the question that arose at Amsterdam was whether the conclusions Barth draws from that article of faith rob Christians of an appropriate sense of social and political responsibility (Niebuhr 1959, p. 169). If Niebuhr was right in his summation of the events in Amsterdam one can only conclude that there had been a massive failure in communication. We should not be surprised that such a failure happened because Barth forces a reconfiguration of how Christians think and act in a manner that Niebuhr was bound to think problematic (Brown 1992, p. 145). Yet Amsterdam was not the end of Barth’s and  Niebuhr’s battles. The WCC meeting in Amsterdam had taken place against the backdrop of a changing world order. It is to be expected, therefore, that Barth and Niebuhr would find themselves in very different places with the rise of communism.

Fellow Traveler? The changed world against which the WCC assembly had in the background can be put in a very exact way – the cold war had begun. Because Barth bore the title of being the great enemy of totalitarianism many expected him to take a stance against the communist regimes of Russia and Eastern Europe. However, his stance toward the communist takeovers after the war was quite different than his opposition to the Nazis. Barth was clear that he was not about to become a cold warrior. At least he was not, as many did, in the name

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of democracy going to side with the United States against the Soviet Union. As a result of his stance of refusing to take sides he was often accused of being anti‐American. Barth’s refusal to join the anticommunist movement became a serious point of contention as the Soviets tightened their grip on Eastern Europe and in 1956 with the uprising in Hungary. Emil Brunner wrote a forceful letter that asked Barth given developments in Eastern Europe why he had not, as he had in the German case, taken a stance against the communist regimes. Brunner pointedly directed Barth’s attention to Niebuhr who had, like Barth, first refused to be an absolute opponent of communism, but subsequently Niebuhr like Brunner had assumed a position of complete opposition. Brunner wondered if Barth simply did not think totalitarianism to be that much of a problem because Barth had not based his criticism of Nazi Germany on the grounds Germany had become a totalitarian state. In a similar manner Brunner suggests that Barth had failed to see the threat communism presented because for unknown reasons Barth seemed to regard the countries of Eastern Europe in more friendly terms. Barth replied to Brunner’s criticism in Against the Stream (Barth 1954, pp. 106–113). Barth came straight to the point by responding to Brunner’s question of how Barth could have roused Christians to oppose the Nazis but not the communists. Barth answered by observing that the church at certain times is called upon to vindicate the faith in terms of certain historical developments, but the church must not concern itself with various “isms” that come and go throughout history. What must focus the church’s attention are the actual historical realities as they are seen in the light of the Word of God. The church never acts “on principle,” but rather judgments must be made one case at a time. That is why the church rejects all attempts to develop a political system. Barth argues that from 1933 until the end of the war a reality confronted the church unlike that presented by communism. That difference was that Hitler had the power and tried in many ways quite successfully to overwhelm the souls of the German people. Opposition to him was then a matter of life and death because the godlessness the Nazis represented was unqualifiedly evil. The Nazis were, therefore, more dangerous than the communists because they presented themselves in the guise of a falsified Christianity. The communists never pretended to be a form of Christianity. That difference between the Nazis and the communists, Barth explained, is why his opposition to the Nazis is different than judgments about the communists (Barth 1954, pp. 113–118). I have called attention to this exchange between Brunner and Barth because it is the background of Niebuhr’s last extended response against Barth. In 1957 Niebuhr wrote an article in The Christian Century titled, “Why Is Barth Silent on Hungary?” (Niebuhr 1959, pp. 183–190). Niebuhr begins the article praising Barth’s stance against Hitler, but it is in some ways hollow praise. It is so because Niebuhr says it is now obvious that Barth’s resistance to the Nazis was dictated by his personal experience with tyranny by the Nazis rather than required by his theology. Niebuhr makes that judgment even though he indicates he has read Barth’s Against the Stream, which means he must have read the exchange between Barth and Brunner as well as papers Barth gave on his ­lecture tour of Hungary. If he had read Barth I am sure he would have continued to ­disagree with Barth, but the disagreement would have been more productive. Instead of calling attention to Barth’s understanding of the difference Hitler represented, Niebuhr concentrates on Barth’s response to the question of whether a Christian

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can cooperate with a communist government. Barth answered that there will never be a time in which the state will exist in its pure form as an ordinance of God nor will there be a time when the state that is a diabolical perversion of God’s intention will exist. Barth, therefore, suggests that there may be some avenues open to Christians even in communist states. Niebuhr, however, concludes from Barth’s answer that Barth does not seem to think that a diabolical government has or will exist. Niebuhr wonders how a man as wise and robust as Barth could have come to such a false conclusion (Barth 1954, pp. 185–186). But it is not clear, given Barth’s reply to Brunner about the difference between the Nazis and the communists that he in fact thought what Niebuhr attributes to him. Niebuhr uses this characterization of Barth, and, in particular, Barth’s judgment about Hungary to expose what he takes to be the limits of Barth’s theological method. According to Niebuhr, Barth simply lacks the resources for wise judgments for two ­primary reasons; (i) he is too consistently eschatological to justify the necessity of ­calculating how to achieve politically the lesser good and (ii) his approach to political and social problems is far too pragmatic. Interestingly enough in support of these criticisms Niebuhr calls attention to Barth’s suggestion that the totalitarian character of the Nazis was of a different order than the communist brand. Niebuhr bluntly describes Barth’s judgments about such matters as capricious. Niebuhr ends his attack on Barth by suggesting that one could forgive Barth many things because he is a creative and imaginative theologian. We might even be ready to forgive arbitrary judgments about politics, although one could wish Barth studied the realities of political order more. But what Niebuhr stands for that cannot be forgotten or forgiven is Barth’s failure to confess that he was wrong about Hungary. Niebuhr observes even John Paul Sartre has disavowed what the Russians did in Hungary and he sees no reason that Barth should not do the same. As far as I know Barth did not respond to Niebuhr’s “Why Is Barth Silent on Hungary?” article. One has no way of knowing what Barth may have thought of Niebuhr, but I cannot help but suspect he became less and less interested in Niebuhr’s criticisms because he could not help but recognize that Niebuhr represented the ­methodological characteristics of Protestant liberal theology that Barth had claimed to have left behind. What is clear, however, is the fundamental issues between Barth and Brunner were christological.

The Difference Matters In an incisive article entitled, “The Lordship of Christ and the Gathering of the Church: Hauerwas’s Debt to the 1948 Barth‐Niebuhr Exchange,” Brandon Morgan put the matter just right. He suggests that theologically Barth and Niebuhr inhabited different worlds. For Barth the care of the church and the care of the world were not a necessary burden for Christians to bear. Barth was about advancing the freedom of the church to be gathered according to Christ’s reconciling work which established his lordship over it in history. This makes possible the witness of the church, amidst the world’s disorder, to the true order established in Christ’s cross and resurrection (Morgan 2015, pp. 1–15).

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Morgan observes from Niebuhr’s perspective this cannot help but appear theologically irresponsible. It is so because it seems to forgo the task of securing relative justice by utilizing the use of power and even violence. That task means the church has no choice other than to act politically but such action must often mean that at best the church can achieve a lesser evil. That means for Niebuhr the best that can be done would be that Christ stands on the edge of Hitler not at its center. Though Niebuhr might well have reservations about those who now identify as social ethicists rather than Christian theologians and ethicists, in many ways he is the originator of that division. You do not need a church if you understand your task is to advocate in the name of justice for this or that cause. You can even follow Niebuhr and claim to be working out of a theological account of the human condition. For Barth the justice Christians must pursue cannot be abstracted from the practice of the faith grounded in Christ’s cross. This is a position that can only make Christian social and political engagements more difficult. I suspect Barth would have it no other way. References Barth, K. (1948). No Christian Marshall plan. The Christian Century 65: 1330–1333. Barth, K. (1949). Continental vs. Anglo‐Saxon theology. The Christian Century 66: 201–204. Barth, K. (1954). Against the Stream: Shorter Post‐War Writings, 1946–52. London: SCM Press. Barth, K. (1960). Community, State, and Church, with an introduction by Will Herberg. New York: Doubleday. Brown, C. (1992). Niebuhr and His Age. Philadelphia: Trinity Press. Busch, E. (1975). Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts (trans. J. Bowden). Philadelphia: Fortress Press.

Cochrane, A.C. (1962). The Church’s Confession Under Hitler. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Dorrien, G. (2000). The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology. Louisville: Westminster John Knox. Hunsinger, G. (1991). How To Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology. New York: Oxford University Press. Morgan, B. (2015). The lordship of Christ and the gathering of the church: Hauerwas’s debts to the 1948 Barth‐Niebuhr exchange. Conrad Grebel Review 33: 1. Niebuhr, R. (1959). Essays in Applied Christianity (ed. D.B. Robinson). New York: Meridian Press.

CHAPTER 52

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ans W. Frei (1922–1988) was one of Karl Barth’s foremost Anglophone ­interpreters in the latter half of the twentieth century. He wrote about Karl Barth’s theology throughout his academic career, and in all the stages of the development of his central project on Christology and modern theology. Indeed, Frei’s reading of Barth became integral to that massive, unfinished project and his deep sympathy with Barth’s thought set him apart from many of his peers and sustained wider interest in the study of Barth (McCormack 2008, p. 124). That project had a constructive agenda, and Frei read Barth in order to map an approach to Christian theology beyond Barth’s great theological statement. He thus offers us the lineaments for one way of doing theology “after Barth.” In this chapter, I will summarize the little studied development of Frei’s reading of Barth in order to contextualize his own Christology as an attempt to learn from Barth yet think beyond him on the locus central to all his theology.1 Although we can trace significant lines of continuity between Frei’s Identity of Jesus Christ and Karl Barth as Frei understood him, we can also see it as a bold, risky essay in pursuit of an even more focused attention to the concreteness of God’s presence in Jesus Christ given us in the text of Scripture.

1  Although most scholars commenting on Frei discuss his relationship with Barth, few give sustained and detailed attention to Frei’s readings of Barth, and these confine themselves to one or two instances and give most attention to his doctoral dissertation. See Higton (2004), pp. 39–64, 155–176; Sonderegger (2013); Knight (2013), pp. 125–137.

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Barth’s Break with Liberalism The story Frei tells consistently about Karl Barth is about his nonconformity to the mainstream of modern theology. It is a story Frei tells first and in most detail in his enormous unpublished doctoral dissertation, submitted in 1956. As an account of Barth’s development, Frei’s work is often bracketed with Hans Urs von Balthasar’s as a reading of Barth’s development that has been superseded by more recent studies, ­culminating in that of Bruce McCormack (1995): one that traces a turn from dialectic to analogy in Barth’s book on Anselm in 1931. Yet although Frei does describe the Anselm book as a “revolution” in Barth’s thought (1956, p. 193), his account of Barth’s gradual development from the first edition of his Römerbrief to the early ­volumes of the Church Dogmatics is more nuanced and subtle. It is also an important background to understanding Frei’s appreciation of the later Barth and Frei’s own constructive intentions. Frei focused on development of Barth’s doctrine of revelation in his break with liberalism, and primarily upon the first two stages of the break, represented by the first two editions of his commentary on Paul’s epistle to the Romans. Although Balthasar shared Frei’s aim of analyzing and evaluating Barth’s quest to express his basic intention in a succession of thought‐forms, Balthasar’s analysis is prefatory to his exposition of Barth’s mature theology and its pro‐Catholic tendencies. Frei seeks Barth’s consistency of intention with a far more sophisticated analytic procedure and in much more detail. The main burden of Frei’s analysis is to show that Barth had a consistent intention across his two‐stage break with liberalism, one that also persisted through the subsequent development of his doctrine of revelation, all the way to the early volumes of the Church Dogmatics. Frei looks for consistency or discontinuity in Barth’s intention by attending to successive shifts in his conceptual idiom and content. Where Barth tries to say the same thing but finds the need to say it in a different conceptual register, Frei proposes, the contrast between the continuity of content and the shift of thought‐form reveals an underlying consistency of Barth’s basic intention. Frei finds that continuity of content and shift of conceptuality across the first two editions of the Römerbrief seen against the background of the liberalism of the German academic theological tradition, but it also extends to Barth’s subsequent treatments of revelation, especially in the change between his christliche and kirchliche doctrines of the Word in 1927 and 1932. On Frei’s account, Barth sought from his earliest publications to find something ­normative in Christian faith that might be applied to the “changing, concrete issues of history and life, in the midst of which men live” (1956, p. 108). To address this problem adequately, Barth had to break with liberal theology’s basic outlook, which Frei calls “relationism.” At the heart of relational theology was the positing of the original and inextricable togetherness of divine presence and human consciousness of God or of God‐consciousness and self‐consciousness. These are given directly to us in Christian faith or religious experience in the historical form of the togetherness of Christ’s presence with the church’s consciousness of sin and grace (Frei 1956, pp. 251–253). From this it follows that God is known indirectly. Relationism could not provide the objective normativity Barth sought, because the togetherness of Christ’s presence and religious experience made Christ an instant or product of that experience and not

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something that could stand over against it (Frei 1956, pp. 72–73, 79, 84–85). Here is the root of Barth’s persistent intention, on Frei’s account. Frei’s main focus is on the shift in conceptuality from the first to the second edition of Barth’s Römerbrief and specifically on his attempt in the second edition to express through idealist dialectic the eschatological understanding of christocentric revelation that he had sought to express in the first edition. Frei attributes the shift to Barth’s diagnosis that in the first edition his thought‐form had remained essentially relationist. Rather than point to God’s unique, concrete initiative he had in fact pointed to Christ’s immanent presence in the cultural change of his time, where the new emerges organically from and in continuity with the old, and restores a lost immediacy between humanity and God (Frei 1956, pp. 137–145, 149). And so Barth changed his conceptual idiom. A dialectic of objects or realities allowed Barth to conceive of the existential problem common to modern humans and the Biblical world, the relation of finite life to the ­infinite, the ground of being. A heightened actualism emphasized that this relation is not given to us in intuition, experience, or history; it is enacted in God’s objective self‐ revelation in Jesus Christ (Frei 1956, pp. 98–99), his Word, which appropriates and actualizes human faith (1956, pp. 116–117, 519–520). Frei found continuity here in the positive, eschatological content of Barth’s doctrine of revelation in both editions. But that content Barth now expressed using a dialectic of judgments, where each affirmation of an object, or of a relation between objects, is balanced by a negation of the same, so that thought moves to and from an identity point or center coinciding with concrete actuality (Frei 1956, p. 464). This dialectic of judgments enabled Barth to express “the continuing, unbridgeable distance” between thought’s content and the concrete actuality of God’s self‐revelation in Christ (Frei 1956, p. 464) and at the same  time to gesture toward it and its “total independence and self‐origination” (Frei 1956, p. 132; his emphasis). In this way Barth’s change of thought‐form in contrast with the organic continuity of his content pointed Frei to the consistency of Barth’s underlying intention. Frei thus offers a much more methodical treatment of that intention than Balthasar, whose focus is mainly on how Barth’s thought comes to be more in harmony with a Catholic outlook, and who emphasizes Barth’s consistent christocentrism and his increasingly adequate self‐emancipation from the dominance of philosophical concepts over theological content. For Frei, Barth turned to dialectic in order to praise God by showing, “to the limit of the mind’s capacity, and perhaps even beyond it, the freedom or sovereign Lordship of God in his grace” (Frei 1956, p. 555). For such was Barth’s concern: to express God’s sovereignty in his self‐revelation in Christ “over the very means and the mode of reception of revelation” (Frei 1956, p. iv), while upholding the human freedom, spontaneity, and subjectivity expounded in German idealism and valued by relationism (1956, p. 447). Frei finds this same consistency of intention confirmed in the third key stage in Barth’s development, from 1922 through to 1931. Frei detects there two gradual shifts. First, there was a shift in content toward a modification of Barth’s actualism to say that God, while remaining subject‐in‐act, freely gives himself as object to us in Christ. Second, there was a shift in emphasis, from dialectic to analogy. Barth slowly shifted in

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these directions in order better to express the positive character of his intention, to shake off the remnants of relationism in his dialectical period, and finally to escape from the terms of his debate with Schleiermacher in the 1920s. Like Balthasar, Frei finds this shift underway but incomplete in Barth’s 1927 Doctrine of the Word and saw a decisive transition toward its completion in the book on Anselm. For what Frei identifies as articulated in Barth’s book on Anselm, and as developed in the first volume of the Church Dogmatics, was an account of faith that upheld God’s transcendence and sovereignty over the reception of revelation but that also affirmed true creaturely cognition of God. By giving Christology epistemological and methodological priority, Barth could retain his actualistic insistence that the self‐revealing God remains subject‐in‐act, while modifying it so as to assert that in grace, in Jesus Christ, this God, who is subject and nothing else, “gives himself as object to us” (Frei 1956, p. 197). Barth could thus overcome the barrier of epistemological dualism that he found in Kant and Schleiermacher: that God is not given to consciousness or intuition and so it is not an object. Without abandoning the dialectical contrast between God and creatures, and the inherent inadequacy of creaturely God‐talk to its object, Barth could also affirm that by God’s gracious gift of his Word and the enabling of his Spirit, grounded in his triune being, God effects a certain similarity amidst dissimilarity between God’s Word and the obedient act of faithful human intellectual activity. These changes in turn involved the deemphasis “though perhaps not complete rejection” of the dialectical method in favor of analogy (Frei 1956, 198), to which Barth had been moving in the 1920s (and which Frei finds foreshadowed even in the second edition of the Römerbrief; Frei 1956, p. 520). Barth’s bringing of his radical christocentricity to culmination in his doctrine of election in Church Dogmatics II/2, and his addition in III/2 of the analogia relationis in his anthropology to fill out the God‐given anthropological conditions of the reception of revelation, complete Frei’s story of Barth’s development (as they do Balthasar’s). Frei’s account, then, finds not only a consistency of Barth’s basic intention, but also some continuity in his thought‐form across significant shifts in emphasis, as Jason Springs has argued (2010, pp. 96–97). What is most significant for my purposes here is to note, first, Frei’s considerable sympathy with this intention and Barth’s increasingly adequate expression of it and, second, the dangers he detected in Barth’s expression of it. For Frei found throughout Barth’s development a persistent danger of undermining human subjectivity in the reception of revelation. Analogy, Frei asserts with Austin Farrer, excludes a systematic viewpoint that transcends the analogical relation and grasps it in a single concept. Barth was therefore right to protest against one form of systematizing found in relationism, but his own approach courted the risk of systematizing in the opposite direction: of making the doctrine of God the sole ground for understanding the knowledge of revelation, and so sublating any anthropology or account of human understanding in revelation. Even when Barth enunciates a positive anthropology, via his analogia relationis in Church Dogmatics III/2, Christology remains the basis for understanding anthropology so that, noetically at least, “‘Jesus Christ alone’ is human nature” (Frei 1956, p. 570). In this sense, Frei asserts, Barth still struggled to do justice to the reality of other human beings, their faith and their election alongside Jesus Christ.

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Frei connected this problem of Barth’s systematicity to that of his persistent christocentricity. By grounding all doctrine in revelation and the doctrine of God, and making Jesus Christ the content of that doctrine, Barth risked making everything else appear abstract beside him. Frei suggests that this sort of Christocentric systematicity also makes it harder for Barth to set “a genuine appreciation of creaturely conditions” over against and alongside the incarnation and redemption (Frei 1956, pp. 575–576), as evidenced in Barth’s tendency to deprecate historical knowledge of Jesus of Nazareth over against the systematic priority of revelation. Frei describes this problem as “a sort of epistemological monophysitism” (1956, p. 576): a tendency to assert such dominance of divine revelation over its creaturely reception, by the systematic grounding of the latter in the former, that the human character of that reception is undermined.2 Barth’s great contribution to modern theology, Frei concludes, was his radical realism, the force with which he insisted upon the objectivity of God’s self‐revelation in Christ (1956, p. 577). Perhaps, Frei wondered, that objectivity might have been made more consistent with Barth’s intention of asserting divine sovereignty and human freedom had he “permitted his anthropology to be governed less univocally by his doctrine of revelation” (1956, p. 577). Frei’s appreciation of Barth’s theological realism and his worries about his persistent systematic christocentrism illumines Frei’s appreciation of later volumes in the Church Dogmatics.

Barth, Narrative, and Figure The next step in Hans Frei’s own theological development also involved a development in his view of Karl Barth’s mature theology. In a number of papers and pieces written in the 1960s and 1970s, Frei complemented both his influential critique of modern theology and biblical hermeneutics in The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (1974a) and his own constructive position articulated in The Identity of Jesus Christ (1975) and antecedent pieces with several fresh appraisals of Barth over against the mainstream of modern theology. Here Frei seems to find the later Barth escaping the problematic systematicity and excessive christocentricity that he had articulated in the doctoral dissertation. First, in an essay from 1968, Frei celebrates Barth for dissenting from the near‐­ unanimous apologetic agenda and anthropocentric procedure of (German and Anglophone) modern theologians. Rather than seeking the conditions of possibility of the incarnation and its meaningfulness in a dubious general anthropology, Barth derived the possibility of and need for the incarnation from its actuality and grounded the possibility of the incarnation in the reality of God’s triune life of love and freedom revealed in Christ (Frei 1993, pp. 170–174; cf. CD IV/2, p. 39). Second, Frei notes that, after the prolegomena to the Church Dogmatics, Barth brought the doctrine of reconciliation to the fore, while that of revelation receded, and 2  Hunsinger, Frei’s student, would later go on to suggest that for Barth the divine–human relation in the giving and receiving of revelation was conceived as an irreducibly mysterious event governed by the Chalcedonian Pattern so that the integrity of both God and the human being was upheld (Hunsinger 1991, pp. 185–188, 201–218, 272–273; see also Sonderegger (2013), p. 258.).

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brought Christ’s person and work into close unity (1993, p. 184). That unity was bonded by a concept of “personhood as self‐enacted agency or performative project rather than the epistemic notion of revelation as existentially imparted and appropriated knowledge” (Frei 1993, p. 184). In this sense alone one can say Barth became a narrative theologian: Jesus was what he did and underwent, and not simply his understanding of self‐­ understanding. He was an agent in a narrative plot, in his particular narratable plot, that is, the restoration of the broken covenant which is also the realization of the aim of divine creation. (Frei 1993, p. 184)3

It is not difficult to recognize in this description the way Barth treats Jesus in, for example, his doctrine of reconciliation in §59, where the atonement is treated as Jesus Christ’s own history (CD IV/1, 157), and where at the heart of Barth’s analysis of that history he finds he can do no better than to turn to the details and sequence of the narrative itself (CD IV/1, pp. 223–228).4 Thus for Barth, as Frei adds, it is truer to say that the “story” or “history” (Geschichte) is the meaning of the doctrines, rather than the other way around, and that the unity of Christ’s person and work is their unity in the narrative, rather than a conceptual unity. Third, Frei saw a concomitant shift in the later volumes of the Church Dogmatics from a cognitivist to an “increasingly and self‐consciously temporal” vision of the world of Christian discourse (1974b, p. 33; Frei 1992, p. 159), increasingly evident in volumes II/2, III/1, and IV. Barth saw the subject matter of the church’s confession as primarily narrative in form, deriving from biblical narratives, which he increasingly retold and incorporated in his theology. Even Barth’s concepts “flowed, as figurations of motion in time” (Frei 1992, p. 160). Frei finds an index of this shift in Barth’s deployment of the second‐order devices that had been so central to the development of his doctrine of revelation – analogy, and dialectic subordinate to it – to describe “the teleological, temporal flow of the divine‐human relation” (Frei 1992, p. 160). Barth’s realism now proposed a historical world. Consistent with Barth’s turn to emphasize analogy over dialectic, the biblical narratives rendered for him “the one real world in which we all live” (Frei 1974b, p. 37). Indeed, they demanded we see ourselves in that world. One cannot rightly understand the world depicted there and think of it as not real. Frei also held that Barth’s shift to a more historical outlook went together with what he termed a literary‐historical approach to exegesis (including a recovery of figural interpretation), and a sort of postcritical second naïveté in respect of history‐like biblical narrative, with an ad hoc relationship to historical criticism (Frei 1974b, pp. 32–33).5 In this way, the later Barth exhibited in these volumes of the Church Dogmatics (and especially in CD III and IV) a much bolder, more mimetic, theological imagination than in the Römerbrief. Borrowing Erich Auerbach’s category of the figura (that “which is itself and yet points beyond itself to something else that it prefigures”), Frei c­ ompares 3  Frei thus paved the way for David F. Ford’s study of Barth’s treatment of narrative in Ford (1981). 4  The same point could be made in respect of Barth’s treatment of sanctification in CD IV/2, §64. 5  On Frei and Barth’s recovery of figural biblical interpretation see Higton 2004, pp. 155–167.

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Barth’s theological vision with Auerbach’s description of Dante’s Commedia (1993, pp. 168–169). Auerbach claimed that for Dante, the literal or historical meaning of a figure represents its deeper meaning in the eternal plan of salvation, which in turn, when understood, confirms and fulfills that figure, intensifying its reality. For Barth, Frei claims, the Bible was at once Virgil, the guide who took him to the threshold of paradise, and Beatrice, the written figura of Jesus Christ, the incarnate reconciliation of God and humans, and the fulfillment of all natural and historical being without prejudice to its proper reality. Barth’s thought “circles restlessly and celebratively” about the wonder of Christ, who served there as the figura for every doctrinal locus in which Barth described the relation of God to creatures, wherein every form of the divine‐human relation was at once itself and also a figure to be fulfilled in Christ’s first and second advents. (We can perhaps see what Frei means by examining, for example, Barth’s treatment of the election of the individual in CD II/2, §35 to which Frei himself pointed elsewhere (1974a, p. viii), or of creation as the external basis of the covenant and the covenant as the internal basis of creation in III/1, or of providence and creatures in IIII/3 §49). Here was a profoundly comic vision of the world, and Barth’s basic theological affirmation.6 Frei saw him as seeking in this way to reintroduce readers to the themes and contours of Christian discourse by recreating it, like a poet, placing the reader in its midst and instructing him in its use by showing it to him extensively, as well as by stating its rules and principles (1993, p. 159). It is an illuminating and enlivening way to think of the function of the Church Dogmatics. In these accounts, Frei does not feel the need to reiterate the concerns of his dissertation. It is not hard to see why. For here in effect is a different kind of systematicity from that which Frei critiqued in his dissertation; one in whose figural connectivity there was apparently more room for describing the concrete, temporal reality of other humans alongside Christ – and Christ’s own humanity – than Frei had found in Barth’s doctrine of revelation. For it also allowed Barth room for a secular sensibility, which appreciated and affirmed “the vast variety of this indefinitely expansive human experience in this vast natural context” (Frei 1993, p. 172) for itself and for its potentiality as a figura of God’s fulfilling work. It did so without finding any inherent basis for that figural potential by which it might be recognized apart from Christ. Such a christocentric outlook also grounded work on behalf of one’s neighbors “in the very contexts of secular life in which we are all set” (Frei 1993, p. 176).

Theology and Philosophy In the final stage of Frei’s development, which would be cut short by his death in 1988, he began to rework his arguments about Christology and modern theology in terms of the fate and future of what he called “the literal sense,” a set of minimal norms embedded in Christian reading practices that work to give priority to the narrative rendering of Jesus of Nazareth in the New Testament. It is a rendering in which the community 6  An observation which Frei ascribed to David Kelsey: Frei 1974b, p. 29.

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encountered him irreducibly as someone who does not stand for anything other than himself. Jesus was not a “symbol” but a unique person and a saving agent in himself. Frei took that to be the “literal sense” about Jesus, and he argued that it was variously upheld by both Schleiermacher and Barth. What sort of relationship between theology as the critical self‐description of the Christian community and external academic disciplines such as philosophy would best foster the literal sense in a post‐Christendom context? Barth features here (in close ­juxtaposition to Friedrich Schleiermacher) as the exponent of the type of modern ­theology most hospitable to the literal sense and to the unsubstitutable Christ it ­rendered. It involves a literal sense that prioritizes the self‐description and self‐criticism of the Christian community’s language and practice about God in the ad hoc appropriation of philosophical norms and concepts. It involves a rendering of Jesus normed by Scripture as read according to the literal sense in a quasi‐literary theological fashion. Barth’s theology, Frei asserted, became both more practical and more ecclesial with his shift away from the epistemic preoccupation of the prolegomena of the Church Dogmatics (Frei 1993, p. 185). Barth came to treat the uses of theological concepts in effect as ecclesial skills. The practical function of theology was a critical one. Theology for Barth was a function of the church, arising from the church’s accountability to God for its discourse about God (Frei 1992, p. 39), conducted obediently before God and in light of the norm of God’s presence to the church, which is Jesus Christ (here Frei is alluding to the prolegomena and to CD I/1, §3 in particular). Christianity had sufficient (but not sole) shaping force over the community’s language use such that its language as embodied in its institutions, practices, and doctrines is “a distinctive and irreducible fact” (Frei 1993, p. 100). Theology was the community’s constant testing of the use of that language in a given era against “some ordering of the paradigmatic instances of the language (such as the sacred text), but also the cumulative tradition and the most supple and sensitive minds and consciences in the community past and present” (Frei 1993, p. 100). This irreducibly distinctive language of Christianity was not to be interpreted without residue into other forms of thought and language (Frei 1992, p. 38). The task of Christian critical self‐description (“dogmatics”) had to take priority over “apologetics” as well as over theology’s status as an academic discipline. This priority ruled out two senses in which theology might be grounded philosophically: neither materially on a philosophical system purporting to describe reality truly nor formally by adherence to a set of formal, universal rules or criteria for what counts as coherent and true (Frei 1992, pp. 38–39). Rather, the formal rules of dogmatic reasoning are those that govern (implicitly or explicitly) the church’s own language‐use and so are internal to the discipline and displayed in their use. Of course, dogmatics needs formal structure, criteria, distinctions, logical laws and categories, but they are tools, their use is ad hoc, subordinate to dogmatic rules of reasoning, and dependent on the specific context, and they would need to be broken at times (Frei here is thinking of CD I/1, pp. 7–10). In application they are fragmentary and incomplete in this life because of the limits of our knowledge relative to the absolute uniqueness of its object. Barth could therefore appropriate from a variety of conceptual schemes, for many may be fit for such unsystematic use. Frei thought Barth was aware

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that this position might look problematical but preferred to cut his losses there rather than subordinate Christian theology to philosophy. It is a choice of priorities reflected in Frei’s own dogmatic contribution.

A Christology “After Barth” Frei’s lengthy engagement with and critical appreciation of Barth’s thought invites comparison between them. Although much of Frei’s historical theology is theologically motivated and constructive in intention, his overtly constructive output was very slender. The Identity of Jesus Christ is his chief dogmatic contribution, though best read in the context of his other writings. There Frei drew attention to contrasts and similarities between elements of his analysis there and those of Barth in Church Dogmatics IV/1 (Frei 1975, pp. 128, 137). I will therefore focus on these texts, with the caveat that we cannot expect Frei in so short a compass to specify as closely or extensively the depths and ramifications of his account as Barth does. Although comparisons can be made on several of the topics Frei treats in his analysis of Christ’s presence at the end of the book – his doctrine of Scripture, his handling of the question of faith and history, his ecclesiology, his account of providence or his sketch of Christian discipleship – I will focus here on Christology, which is the theological heart of the book.7 There are several respects in which Frei’s procedure clearly resembles what he found to praise in Barth. Identity is a clearly nonapologetic endeavor, pitched explicitly over against what Frei took to be the apologetic, anthropocentric character predominant in modern western Protestant theology, including his own contemporaries in North America and Germany (Frei 1975, pp. xii–xiii; Frei 1993, pp. 27–30). Frei’s move to understand faith in Christ’s presence in terms of its own internal logic normed in Scripture, rather than by way of what he termed “the logic of coming to belief ” (1975, pp. xii–xiii); his focus on Jesus Christ’s story as his starting point; his treatment of Jesus as an agent in a narrative plot in which he enacts divine–human reconciliation in his person; his quasi‐literary approach to the text as narrative; his preference for the ad hoc, nonsystematic use of low‐level hermeneutical concepts to describe his use and interpretation of Scripture (Frei 1993, pp. 31–67) and interpret the gospels’ narrative portraits of Jesus Christ: all these are features of Barth reminiscent in Frei’s account and do indeed bear resemblance to those aspects of Barth’s thought. There are others. Both treat Christology as the basis and clue to understanding his presence and activity now (Frei 1975, pp. 6–7; CD IV/1, p. 211). Both emphasize Jesus’ obedience unto death as his characteristic intention (Frei 1975, pp. 105–115; CD IV/1, pp. 159–166). Both think of this action in terms of substitutionary atonement (Frei 1975, pp. 102–105, 110–111; CD IV/1, pp. 222–223, 228–238). Both affirm the literal, bodily resurrection 7  For a similar exercise in comparison of Barth and Frei’s hermeneutics, see David Demson (1997) who argues that in contrast to Barth, Frei is inattentive to the relationship between Jesus and the disciples, their place in his identity and their participation in his identity and mission, which leaves his account of Christ’s presence lacking specificity because lacking a clear relation to his identity, which leaves his doctrine of Scripture and the church’s hermeneutical relationship lacking specificity also.

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of Jesus from the dead by God’s sole action (Frei 1975, pp. 102–105, 112–113; CD IV/1, pp. 351–353). There are, however, important differences of procedure here. The subject of the story Barth tells in IV/1 is the preexistent, eternal Son of God, God’s second mode of being, whom Barth (along with most theologians in the Christian tradition) takes to be the ascriptive subject of all the stories told about Jesus in the New Testament, and whose story is one of condescension in incarnation (the same is true of IV/2, where the subject is the Son in his humanity as Son of Man). Barth thus ascribes Christ’s enactment of reconciliation to God’s initiative and action in a manner that echoes patristic accounts of the incarnation. God without ceasing to be Godself graciously enters the human situation, the far country of human opposition to God, taking full responsibility for humanity by assuming human limitations and corruptions and so by exercising a strange and merciful judgment in which he receives our condemnation. In Barth’s telling, this story of the incarnation, grounded in and informed by his doctrine of election, supplies the narrative frame for the events in which Christ enacts reconciliation. Hence in Jesus’ person, without prejudice to his full humanity, we recognize the coming of “One who is qualitatively different from all other men,” their Lord, lawgiver and Judge, the divine agent of their salvation, who is the subject of Jesus’ human actions (CD IV/1, p. 160). This frame allows Barth to read the story of Jesus’ obedience as the demonstration of divine freedom and an expression of the mode of existence of the second person of the Trinity. It enables him to make sense of Christ’s competence and power to stand in our place (CD IV/1, pp. 222–223, 235–236). In Identity, Frei eschews that procedure. Frei does not elevate those titles into descriptions primarily of a preexistent hypostasis and only secondarily, and in virtue of the incarnation, of Jesus, as Barth appears to do (with much of the Christian theological tradition). Nor does he think here of Christ’s humanity in terms of an attribute of a preexistent divine identity (“the Son of God”). One can therefore legitimately ask, with George Hunsinger, whether Frei has a sufficiently high Christology for the universal scope that he (like Barth) ascribes to Jesus’ individual identity (Hunsinger 2015, pp. 138–189; Frei 1975, p. 74). Frei does not think of Christ as an essentially human character elevated to exalted communion with God, however. His analysis of Christ’s identity should not be mistaken for an Arian or Adoptionist version of Barth’s that differs by failing to begin with an unambiguously divine subject for Christ’s human life. Frei’s procedure differs from Barth’s more fundamentally than that. Frei gives priority to the narrated subject of the synoptics – Jesus of Nazareth – without framing that story with an account of incarnation and the communication of idioms (as Barth does when he prioritizes the synoptic stories in IV/2, §64). The way he attends to the gospels’ rendering of Jesus’ identity privileges their more “history‐like” passages, where characteristic enacted intentions and circumstances are closely intertwined, and where Jesus is depicted most concretely and individually in a manner most resistive to determination by readerly perspectives. It also highlights the cumulative disclosure of continuous identity through narrative sequence. (Frei sees more sequential cohesion in  the synoptic narratives than Barth did in CD IV/2, p. 165.) This attention to the cumulative rendering of an identity with increasing singularity in history‐like sequences differs markedly from Barth’s analysis of the stages of the gospel story in §59.2

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(CD IV/1, pp. 224–228). There the sequence is the advent of the Lord and Judge as a stranger set in antithesis to the world of men to which he belongs, his transition to the position of the judged, and his recognition and acknowledgement by God in the resurrection. The transition that Barth sees from Judge to judged finds an echo in Frei’s analysis of the transition in Christ from power to powerlessness (1975, pp. 112–115). Nevertheless, on the whole Barth’s story, to a significant extent, presumes the identity of its central character from the start, rather than disclosing it through its sequence. In Frei’s analysis, Jesus’ story in the synoptics discloses a single complex pattern in which there are two kinds of unity‐in‐distinction between God and Jesus. On the one hand, their enacted intentions overlap without confusion, even as God’s agency supplants that of Jesus (Frei 1975, pp. 118–121): they aim lovingly at the salvation of humanity – one in command; the other in obedience. This unity involves no real identity between them as persons but requires a clear differentiation in relation. On the other hand, the culmination of the manifestation of Jesus’ continuous selfhood in the resurrection is also the direct manifestation of God’s self that demands the ascription of divine predicates (unquenchable livingness) to Jesus. The two patterns are united in the narrated figure of Jesus, who shapes the meaning of his predicates in the gospel, and upon whom the Johannine and Pauline literature offer commentary, not necessarily interpretive keys. These patterns, finally, push in the direction of some kind of trinitarian account of God, which Frei did not go on to fill out, but which presumably would not place nearly so much weight on the language of Father and Son that Barth (and the premodern Christian tradition) did. Frei’s procedure differs significantly from Barth’s, but their basic meanings are not radically divergent. Like Barth, Frei also uncovers in Jesus’ story the gracious initiative of God at work and embodied directly in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, to whom titles of majesty rightly belong. Hence his reference to Jesus’ abiding power in his powerlessness in the passion narrative (Frei 1975, pp. 108, 112–113), which in an earlier version of the argument he describes as his saving work of omnipotence (Frei 1993, p. 49). Frei’s analysis implies, in the light of the resurrection, that the identification of Jesus with human beings in their need is the gracious, free condescension of God to them. Both see Jesus as climatically summing up the history of Israel, though Frei does not repeat Barth’s typing of Jews as essentially disobedient (Frei 1975, p. 137; CD IV/1, pp. 166–176). Both understand the atonement in terms of an exchange of conditions, though Frei’s account is fairly vague and Barth’s highly developed with a judicial theme. Both saw the resurrection in unity with the passion as God’s action of vindicating Jesus and disclosing his divinity, his sharing God’s eternal life by which he can own and share his presence with us (Frei 1975, pp. 33, 61–62, 103, 120–121, 136–137, 172; CD IV/1, pp. 300–313). Nevertheless, the difference of procedure means that any similarity in intention is qualified by significant dissimilarities, manifest in differences of enactment. To take one example: Barth’s procedure allows him to ascribe Christ’s human existence directly to the presence and action of God in the manner of a subject and his actions (CD IV/1, p. 199) and to develop a sophisticated trinitarian account of the “inner moment” of Christ’s obedience, “the history of the inner life of his Godhead” so grounding the shape of the Son’s incarnate obedience in the form of God’s inner being and making our ­reconciliation to God a participation in that triune life (CD IV/1, p. 215).

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Frei’s eschewal of ascribing Christ’s personal acts and suffering to Another who is incarnate in him represents a strong commitment to the irreducible, singular concreteness of Jesus Christ’s person as given in the synoptic story. This austerity keeps Frei’s thought anchored to that concrete figure, and bars the way to any hint of subordination of that figure to a prior, more basic meaning or systematic perspective. By the same token, however, Frei struggles to express clearly and conceptually the God‐grounded gratuity of divine–human reconciliation and the objectivity of divine self‐disclosure therein. Barth’s vision of reality, Frei once wrote, was “so enormous and so fitting” as to be unrepeatable (1974b, p. 30). One either sought to do something similar or parted ways in respectful disagreement. Frei opted to do something similar, yet his actual Christology, though experimental, was bolder and riskier, making continuity with Barth the basis for a sympathetic departure from his procedures. References Demson, D.E. (1997). Hans Frei and Karl Barth: Different Ways of Reading Scripture. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Ford, D.F.F. (1981). Barth and God’s Story: Biblical Narrative and Theological Method of Karl Barth in the ‘Church Dogmatics’. Frankfurt am Maine, Berne: Verlag Peter Lang. Frei, H.W. (1956). The Doctrine of Revelation in the Thought of Karl Barth, 1909–1922: The Nature of Barth’s Break with Liberalism. New Haven, CT: Yale University. Frei, H.W. (1974a). The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Frei, H.W. (1974b). Scripture as Realistic Narrative: Karl Barth as Critic of Historical Criticism. In: Hans W. Frei Unpublished Pieces. Transcripts from the Yale Divinity School archive (ed. M. Higton). http://divinity‐adhoc. library.yale.edu/HansFreiTranscripts/ Freitranscripts/Frei02‐Narrative.pdf (accessed 22 April 2019). Frei, H.W. (1975). The Identity of Jesus Christ: The Hermeneutical Bases of Dogmatic Theology. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Frei, H.W. (ed.) (1992). Types of Christian Theology. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Frei, H.W. (1993). Theology and Narrative: Selected Essays. New York: Oxford University Press.

Higton, M. (2004). The fulfilment of history in Barth, Frei, Auerbach and Dante. In: Conversing with Barth (eds. M. Higton and J.C. McDowell), 120–141. Aldershot & Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Hunsinger, G. (1991). How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology. New York: Oxford University Press. Hunsinger, G. (2015). Frei’s Early Christology: the book of detours. In: Conversational Theology: Essays on Ecumenical, Postliberal, and Political Theology (ed. G. Hunsinger), 129–144. London: Bloomsbury. Knight, J.A. (2013). Liberalism versus Postliberalism: The Great Divide in Twentieth‐ Century Theology. New York: Oxford University Press. McCormack, B.L. (1995). Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology. Its Genesis and Development 1909–1936. New York: Oxford University Press. McCormack, B.L. (2008). Orthodox and Modern. Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. Sonderegger, K. (2013). Epistemological monophysitism in Karl Barth and Hans Frei. Pro Ecclesia 22 (3): 255–262. Springs, J.A. (2010). Toward a Generous Orthodoxy. Prospects for Hans Frei’s Postliberal Theology. New York: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 53

Barth and T. F. Torrance David A. S. Fergusson

Thomas F. Torrance (1913–2007) was arguably Karl Barth’s most distinguished exponent in the English‐speaking world through much of the twentieth century. Having studied with him in Basel in 1937, he supervised (with Geoffrey Bromiley) the translation of the Church Dogmatics and wrote extensively on Barth’s theology in a succession of essays and monographs. A regular correspondent with Barth, he maintained close links with him until his death. And as editor of the Scottish Journal of Theology (with J. K. S. Reid) from its inception in 1948, he ensured that the study of Barth’s theology maintained a strong profile in church and academy. This essay will explore the ways in which Torrance consistently maintained his high regard for Barth, ranking him amongst the greatest theologians in the history of the church, while yet registering various criticisms and points of departure.

Early Scottish Reception of Barth Torrance was not the first Scottish theologian to discover Barth. An earlier generation, including his teacher H. R. Mackintosh, had already interacted extensively with his theology during the 1920s and 1930s (McPake 1996). John McConnachie, parish minister at St John’s, Dundee, produced two substantial studies of his work (McConnachie 1931, 1933). Recognizing that Barth’s theology was a work in progress, McConnachie nevertheless registered considerable enthusiasm for his project, regarding it as a means of theological escape from the cultural captivity of the church. In corresponding with McConnachie, Barth seemed reluctant to be summarized in this way to the extent that he discouraged the attempt altogether. His work, he insisted, was not to be repeated formulaically; instead, the theologians of the UK should develop their own critical lines of

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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enquiry (Morgan 2010, p. 36). Yet McConnachie proved to be a harbinger of later twentieth‐century enthusiasm for Barth in Scotland. Of the four English‐language contributors to Barth’s 1936 Festschrift, three were from the Church of Scotland (Wolf 1936; McPake 1996, p. 102). In his posthumously published Croall Lectures, H. R. Mackintosh devoted a chapter to Barth’s theology. This recognized the emergence of a leading figure in European theology. Despite the earlier influence of Herrmann and kenotic Christology, much of Barth’s work resonated with Mackintosh. His early appreciation and criticism of Barth’s emerging theology are surprisingly prescient in light of Torrance’s later work. He comments on Barth’s temperamental tendency to overstate positions subsequently qualified, the “excessive actualism” of his formulations, and an underdeveloped doctrine of the church. Yet, above all, he passionately commended Barth’s resistance to “modernistic humanism” with his return to the radical message of God’s righteousness. “At the moment (Barth) stands in the midst of his theological work, which cannot but take years to complete. Nothing more enriching for the whole church could be thought of than that the time for completion should be given him” (Mackintosh 1937, p. 319). Barth and Mackintosh had one brief but memorable encounter at Waverley Station in Edinburgh while Barth was returning from St Andrews (Busch 1976, p. 205). Upon his arrival as a student at New College, Edinburgh in 1934, Tom Torrance became a devoted pupil of H. R. Mackintosh. His recommendation of Karl Barth ensured that Torrance would later study in Basel for two semesters in 1937–1938. At this time, Barth was lecturing on the doctrine of God – the material was later incorporated into KD II/1 and II/2, which Torrance came to regard as “the high point” of Barth’s dogmatics (Torrance 1990, p. 124). His doctoral dissertation under Barth’s supervision was on the subject of grace in the apostolic fathers (Torrance 1948). The path to the completion of this work was stalled by Torrance’s academic work in the USA and the outbreak of war. But the thesis was finally submitted and approved in 1946. His Rigorosum coincided with his engagement to Margaret Spear  –  Barth jested with Torrance that a completed doctorate might be a condition of the marriage (McGrath 1999, pp. 42–46). Though Mackintosh had been the catalyst in introducing him to Barth’s work, Torrance continued to acknowledge his debt of gratitude to Mackintosh in other ways (Torrance 2000, pp. vii–ix). In particular, Mackintosh’s commitment to the centrality of union with Christ and his high Reformed doctrine of the sacraments remained central to Torrance’s own theology in ways that set him apart from Barth. Torrance always remained on good terms with Barth, continuing to correspond with him and to visit him periodically in Basel until near the time of his death. He was also friendly with Christoph Barth, who was godfather to his elder son. This recognized affinity with Barth is also evident from a letter received from Oscar Cullmann in 1961 inviting Torrance to become a candidate for the chair in Basel from which Barth had retired. Deciding not to apply, Torrance spent the remainder of his career in Edinburgh (McGrath 1999, pp. 101–102). The correspondence with Barth (often via Charlotte von Kirschbaum) reveals a steady pattern of interaction, much of this initiated by Torrance as the younger man. This material is now readily accessible in the Torrance archive at Princeton Theological

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Seminary. The following may provide a flavor. A reference is requested from Barth for Torrance’s application for the chair in Glasgow in 1947 – Barth responds quickly and affirmatively. (In the event, Ian Henderson, another pupil of Barth, was appointed). In 1950, Torrance takes up a post in Edinburgh writing to Barth that although he is sorry to leave his parish ministry, he believes that he is “cut out” for the work of theology. Torrance publishes his book on Calvin’s Doctrine of Man (1949), which attempts to gain a clearer perspective on the famous debate with Brunner. He writes to Barth that Brunner no longer has a leg to stand on. Other theologians, including John Baillie, are criticized for failing to penetrate more fully the work of the KD. In 1950, Torrance reports that a team of 15 translators has been assembled for the CD. Torrance visits Barth in 1955. The following year, as Barth reaches 70, the University of Edinburgh confers a doctorate of divinity on him, while Torrance contributes to the Festschrift in his honor edited by T. H. L. Parker (Torrance 1956). During Barth’s visit to Edinburgh, there takes place a strained conversation between Torrance and Markus Barth in the Braid Hills Hotel on the subject of baptism (Torrance 1990, p. 135)1 – this appears to have been repeated in another difficult encounter in Princeton in 1959. By 1960, Torrance is apprising Barth of his voluminous work for the Church of Scotland’s Special Commission on baptism. Here the correspondence becomes more combative with Torrance forcibly pressing his sacramental position upon a skeptical Barth. During this time, Barth declines a meeting owing to his health problems. Following Barth’s death, Torrance wrote the Times obituary in which he refers to his former teacher as “a Reformed theologian whose stature rivaled that of the giants of the Reformation epoch” but whose “influence radiated far beyond the frontiers of Protestantism” (Torrance 1975, p. 52).

Translating the Kirchliche Dogmatik The story of the English translation of the KD is not well known. Conceived by Torrance and his friend Geoffrey Bromiley, who was at that time an Episcopalian minister in Edinburgh, the project represented a significant investment and risk for Thomas Clark, the publisher. But, persuaded of its potential, the firm undertook to publish what turned out to be 13 part‐volumes. CD I/2 appeared in 1956, and the project was completed with the publication of the index volume in 1977 (Torrance 1990, pp. 127–129). A formidable undertaking, this required the involvement of a large team of translators. A similar approach had been adopted by H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart in their translation of Schleiermacher’s Glaubenlehre (McGrath 1999, p. 127). Oversight and quality control were provided by Torrance and Bromiley, and somehow momentum was maintained over a period of years. Despite a gap of almost two decades between G. T. Thomson’s early rendition of CD I/1 and the publication of CD I/2, the English translation eventually caught up with the original. Several features of the translation are worth mention.

1  Although he later records this as 1966 (Torrance 1990, p. 135), I believe that this must be a misprint. The correspondence reveals that the exchange took place in 1956.

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A team was assembled, including several of Torrance’s students. Many of these made extensive commitments of time and energy to the project, including T. H. L. Parker, James Haire, and R.H. Fuller. As the part‐volumes appeared, their collective efforts gained momentum. A large portion was undertaken by Harold Knight who also translated Brunner, Diem, and Niesel. Rudolf Ehrlich, who worked on CD III/3 was a German exile of Jewish descent who had come to Edinburgh in the 1930s as a schoolboy. Later serving as a parish minister, his bilingual skills were impressively deployed in this translational context. Much of the later material was accomplished by Geoffrey Bromiley, who had moved from Edinburgh to Fuller Theological Seminary in 1958 and who acquired ­considerable expertise in theological German. Given the diversity of translators, the time constraints under which they worked, and the volume of material, the outcome of the whole was surprisingly good and a serviceable translation was produced. Torrance ­credited Bromiley with much of this achievement (Torrance 1990, p. 127). Inevitably, numerous mistakes crept into the work. Some of these were minor grammatical and typographical errors or infelicitous expressions; others involved missed words or inaccurate renditions. By the late 1990s, Frank McCombie, an Anglican scholar based in Durham, had painstakingly amassed lists of the mistakes, including many inaccuracies in the index volume. In III/4 alone, he detected around 950 errors, though many of these were stylistic rather than substantial. His intriguing correspondence with Torrance has been preserved. The eventual outcome was that a revised edition of the CD, in hard and now electronic version, was eventually produced in 2009. This incorporated many of McCombie’s revisions as well as those of Bromiley and others. Translations (by Ian McFarland and Simon Gathercole) into English were made of the Latin and Greek citations that had previously been reproduced untranslated. Today the CD continues to sell successfully for T&T Clark, following its migration from Edinburgh to London. The translation of the KD arguably contributed much to the resurgence of British theology in the mid‐twentieth century. Many within the team subsequently took up teaching posts in different parts of the world. The appearance of the CD also coincided with the establishment of the Scottish Journal of Theology (1948) and the UK Society for the Study of Theology (1952). Both institutions did much for the promotion of systematic theology, as did T&T Clark in providing a publishing base for their output. In all this, Torrance exercised a leading role.

Interpretation of Barth’s Early Theology Although Torrance produced a steady succession of articles on Karl Barth through the 1950s, his first major contribution to Barth studies was his 1962 monograph, Karl Barth: An Introduction to His Early Theology, 1910–1931. Beginning with Mackintosh’s initial estimate of Barth’s significance, Torrance proceeds to rank him alongside Augustine, Aquinas, and the Reformers. His reading of Barth is shaped by at least three claims – his break from the anthropocentrism of liberal Protestantism, his transition from dialectical to dogmatic thinking, and his pursuit of a properly scientific theology determined by the subject matter of divine self‐revelation in Jesus Christ. Each of these deserves further comment.

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1. Torrance views Barth’s initial break with liberal Protestantism as radical and decisive, even if its full implications took him some time to understand. As a preacher in Safenwil, Barth became dissatisfied with the prevailing liberalism in which theology was too readily co‐opted by public opinion, cultural fashion, and philosophical Weltanschauungen. Resources that assisted him to present the message of the Bible included the writings of Blumhardt, Kutter, and Ragaz. Even Overbeck’s radical criticism of Christianity was employed to attack the regnant theology of cultural Protestantism. Further influenced by Kierkegaard, Barth’s rebellion developed through the successive editions of the Romans commentaries with the shift to a stronger christological focus. According to Torrance, this enabled Christian theology to confront human beings in a more counter‐cultural mode. A strong binary is thus generated between a scientific theology faithfully grounded in the act of God in Christ and all forms of religious and cultural self‐projection. The following passage typifies Torrance’s description of this contrast. By seeking the meaning of faith in self‐comprehension, the Christian message was transposed into an expression of the creative spirituality of man; then God, the real, masterful, living God, who confronts us objectively in Jesus Christ, who actively intervenes in history, coming to us to save and forgive, disappeared behind the clouds of subjectivity and what took his place was a mythical projection out of the depth of religious consciousness (Torrance 1962, p. 60).

Repeated disjunctions of divine/human, revelation/projection, and theology/ anthropology dominate Torrance’s reading of Barth. This may be one reason why he remained less sympathetic to those nineteenth‐century projects, especially Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre, that Barth was more inclined to revisit and reassess throughout his career. 2. Torrance detects a “really decisive transition” in Barth’s work around 1930 (Torrance 1962, p. 133). This coincides with his Anselm book and the shift from Die Christliche Dogmatik (1927) to Die Kirchliche Dogmatik (1932). With the disappearance of existentialist categories as a vehicle for expressing the content of the faith, there is a corresponding rehabilitation of dogmatic theology; this became the correct way to reflect the objectivity of divine revelation as it comes to us in faith through the work of the Holy Spirit. Though Barth is criticized by others for a return to Protestant scholasticism, Torrance insists that this is the proper path of obedience and scientific faithfulness to the inner content of the Word of God (Torrance 1962, p. 105). Increasingly shaped by the subject matter of Christian theology, Barth’s theology evinced a more reflexive theological method in which philosophy exercised a subordinate though necessary role. Stressing this methodological shift, Torrance perceives a crucial development in Barth. As the shape of his mature theology emerges, he moves from a dialectical approach (stressing the opposition of God and the human being) to an analogical approach (determined by christological and trinitarian forms in a constructive dogmatics). This movement, however, is not generated by abstract epistemological considerations, but by the material content of faith (Torrance 1962, p. 197).

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More recent work on the development of Barth’s theology (McCormack 1995) has suggested a greater degree of unfolding as opposed to the more sudden transitions detected by Torrance. But Torrance’s disjunctive reading is accentuated less by the historical details and more by his own growing preoccupation with theological method. His study of Barth coincided with his own significant work on theological science which was first presented as a series of lectures in 1959. Here Barth’s integration of content and form is seen alongside developments in quantum mechanics as signaling a new scientific spirit (Torrance 1969, pp. 6–9). 3. Torrance’s preoccupation with a correct theological method is threaded throughout his study of Barth’s intellectual development. Terms such as “scientific” and “objectivity” are regularly employed to characterize his breakthrough and subsequent reordering of theological thought. (These are also evident in Torrance’s prefaces to several volumes of the translated CD around this time.) Torrance states that Barth by 1929 was wrestling with problems about the given object of theology (its nature and reality) and our thought about the object (its mode and truth). He notes that this required an avoidance of both a naïve realism and a pure idealism. Yet despite this strategy of mediation between these two extremes, Torrance is decisively committed to Barth’s theological realism as foundational to his enterprise. This critical realism enables Barth, on Torrance’s estimation, both to recapture the ancient doctrines of the Catholic faith and to fuse those with the biblically oriented accounts of the acts of God that dominated the work of the Reformers. “[T]he immense significance of Barth’s theology is that in it we have a Herculean undertaking to expound within the more dynamic and critic‐idealist style of modernity a fundamentally realist theology” (Torrance 1962, p. 176). At this juncture, Torrance’s interpretation of Barth takes a more creative and critical turn. Instead of redescribing the role of philosophy in relation to theology, he recommends comparison with a more “exact science, such as physics” (Torrance 1962, p. 179). Here the method is prescribed by the nature of the concrete object. In the case of theology this is Jesus Christ the Lord. Hence Barth’s achievement in turning to the KD was to penetrate more deeply to describe the “concrete objectivity” of the Word of God (Torrance 1962, p. 184). The obedience of faith involves the reshaping of our thought; this is determined by God in such a way that our theology itself can never fully comprehend or correspond to the “utter objectivity” of God (Torrance 1962, p. 185). As we respond in worship and humility, we confess the inadequacy of our thought forms. Such critical realism characterizes much of Torrance’s epistemological work during this period and it is a constant refrain in his subsequent writings. The alliance with the epistemology of the natural sciences, especially physics, is a preoccupation of Torrance rather than Barth whose theology perhaps inclines more toward the sociopolitical demands placed upon the church. Torrance, although not insensitive to the ethical dimensions of theology, tends to pursue a dialogue with the natural sciences, albeit within a Barthian paradigm. Although much of Torrance’s appropriation of Barth is directed against liberal Protestant trends, his work also pitted him against various evangelical forces on the other side. This is less evident in his later work, but it informs many of his darts against positions found in more conservative forms of Protestantism.

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Barth’s critical realism involves the claim that our human words can never be wholly adequate to the one Word of God who is Christ. For this reason, the inerrancy of Scripture must be contested, not simply because of its intrinsic implausibility but because of its tendency to displace Christ as the proper divine object who can never be fully comprehended by our patterns of speech. In an earlier context, Torrance had launched a coruscating attacking on Cornelius van Til, accusing him of an intellectual variant of justification by works (Torrance 1947, p. 148; Morgan 2010, p. 246) in his misreading of Barth. Van Til, he further claimed, had perpetuated the docetic heresy with his doctrine of Scripture. It seems that this criticism also aroused the consternation of Carl Henry who, having studied with Torrance in Edinburgh, later recorded his conviction that “the Barthian erosion of Scriptural authority” would prove ruinous for the Church of Scotland (Morgan 2010, p. 223). This critique of a hyper‐biblicism is also evident in Torrance’s claim that theology cannot rest content with the language of Scripture alone. The true knowledge of God requires us to enter upon the inner rationality of the given object “to penetrate to the solid truth upon which biblical statements rest” (Torrance 1962, p. 188). The theologian therefore does not simply repeat Scripture but seeks to understand, albeit imperfectly, the reality to which it bears witness. According to Torrance, Barth learned this lesson from his reading of Anselm, thus enabling him more clearly to embark upon the CD. He concludes with an appeal for the church to recognize this way as both strictly theological and strictly scientific, while adding the important rider that this will require not a simple uniformity but a process of developing ­different understandings to complement what Barth has already achieved.

The Torrance‐Blanshard Exchange In much of the English‐speaking world, Barth’s theology continued to be dismissed for its “irrationalism” and “fideism.” This stock charge was repeated in the writings of philosophers and theologians who were baffled by the criticism of natural theology, human reason, and religion. Perhaps the best defense of Barth was Torrance’s public response to the American philosopher, Brand Blanshard. In his 1952 Gifford Lectures delivered in St. Andrews, Blanshard had declared that Barth (and Brunner) had made genuine religious faith “irrational” by an excessive stress on divine otherness and human fallibility. His lectures were summarized in the Scotsman. Reacting to the caricature of Barth, Torrance directed Blanshard to his work on Anselm with the stress on the rational objectivity that characterizes faith as it apprehends its proper object. On this reckoning, Barth is held by Torrance to be an opponent of all forms of irrationalism – here he appears to be thinking of Bultmann’s demythologising project – which are a “menace to the gospel” (Torrance and Torrance 2009, p. 8). Blanshard continued the correspondence in the daily newspaper by insisting that Torrance was using “reason” in a very paradoxical and obscure sense. Appealing to Barth’s condemnation of all forms of natural theology, he judged his irrationalism more extreme even than that of Brunner (Torrance and Torrance 2009, p. 10). Torrance coun-

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terattacked in another letter several days later. Here he describes Barth as an exponent of a critical realist view (alongside his brother Heinrich), over against the idealism of much continental thought. To this extent, his account of rationality is similar to that of several philosophers, including John Macmurray with his insistence on a functional view of reason that behave(s) in accordance with the nature of the object (Torrance and Torrance 2009, p. 13). For good measure, Torrance adds that scientists in other fields display a growing interest in Barth’s work on account of its “ruthless, scientific criticism of the activity of reason” (Torrance and Torrance 2009, p. 14). The real issue, he concludes, is not between Blanshard and Barth but between Blanshard and the Christian gospel. Despite elements of hyperbole, this still reads as an effective rejoinder to a standard philosophical charge. The correspondence rumbled on with further exchanges in which Torrance suggested that Blanshard was in the grip of idealist presuppositions in making the object conform to the presuppositions of the knower, a charge that was vehemently denied. With Blanshard’s third letter, the editor of the newspaper declared the correspondence closed. This robust defense of theological reason in the national press revealed again Torrance’s commitment to a “scientific,” “functional,” and “objective” reading of Barth’s work, together with his characteristic refusal ever to apologize for being a theologian in the university. One colleague remarked whimsically that already “a pillar of the Kirk,” Torrance had now become two columns in the Scotsman.

Criticisms of Barth The laudatory remarks that populate Torrance’s many writings on Barth might suggest an uncritical adulation. Certainly, he ranked Barth alongside the greatest theologians of the church, believing that his work was the most important to appear for several centuries. But such comments did not prevent Torrance from registering points of criticism and departure. These were later summarized under three headings by Alasdair Heron, one of Torrance’s most distinguished pupils: the legacy of Scottish Reformed theology, Torrance’s greater ecumenical and historical breadth, and his commitment to a ­dialogue with the natural sciences (Heron 2000, pp. 298–299). Some points of doctrinal departure are already apparent in the short essay in The Expository Times (Torrance 1954–1955), which unfortunately was not fully reproduced in the subsequent collection of his occasional Barth writings (Torrance 1990). Here Torrance briefly expresses the view that Barth’s theology lacked a fully robust account of the work of the Spirit – this may reflect an unease about a latent subordinationism in Barth’s doctrine of the Trinity (Molnar 2017, pp. 213–219)  –  and an accompanying clarification of the doctrine of a living union with Christ (Torrance 1954–1955, p. 209). In his subsequent writings, Torrance seems inclined to locate this flaw in Barth’s failure to offer a sufficiently robust account of the priestly ministry of the ascended Christ through the Spirit. Instead of a munus triplex, Barth had tended toward a munus duplex in which the priestly office of the heavenly Christ had been left underdeveloped. For Torrance, this is of ecclesial and sacramental significance. In his own writings on the ascension, the heavenly priesthood of Jesus is connected to a stronger sacramentology and ecclesiology than anything espoused by Barth (Torrance 1976).

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Torrance’s theology of the ascension is one of the richest treatments of the subject in modern theology. Although it shares much with Barth, it is developed in ways that take his theology decisively beyond and away from some convictions of his Basel teacher (Fergusson 2012). Here more than anywhere else, we are faced with significant adjustments to Barth’s theology in the area of church, sacraments, and ministry. Particular stress is given to the liturgical and sacramental significance of the ascension, a view foreshadowed in William Milligan’s late nineteenth‐century study of the priestly ministry of the exalted Christ. Torrance was a longstanding member of the Scottish Church Society, founded in the late Victorian period by leading figures such as Milligan, John McLeod, and James Cooper. The goals of the society included a more Catholic reading of the Reformed tradition that sought liturgical renewal, frequent celebration of the Lord’s Supper, and a Calvinist (as opposed to a Zwinglian) account of the real presence of Christ in the eucharistic elements. It is this configuration of influences in Torrance that results in differences from Karl Barth. George Hunsinger has suggested that Torrance’s breakthrough in sacramental theology results in a creative synthesis of elements from Calvin and Barth. Like Barth, he maintains the clear priority of the work of Christ in the perfect tense as the ground of our salvation. But, like Calvin, he is able to connect that once for all work with its sacramental impartation in the life of the church. Hence, he is able to avoid Barth’s unnecessary disjunction of “witness” and “mediation” when describing the significance of baptism and the Lord’s Supper (Hunsinger 2001, p. 166). With Scripture and proclamation, the sacraments can also be seen in their distinctive ways as derivative forms of the Word of God. In this context, Torrance makes extensive reference to the priestly ministry of the ascended Christ in the Letter to the Hebrews. This is central to an understanding of the doxological and sacramental life of the church that is continuous with the work of Christ, yet in a relationship that is marked both by distinction and dependence. Here Torrance treads a careful path between those views that disjoin the work of Christ from the life of the church (attributed to sectarian traditions on the evangelical wing of the church) and other approaches that tend to conflate this by failing to distinguish with sufficient clarity between the work of Christ and that of the church. Roman Catholicism is here his main target with notions of the church as the extension of the incarnation or as part of the totus Christus. The life of Jesus and the life of the church are neither to be confused nor separated. The characteristic error of Protestantism is to divorce these, as if the work of Christ now being finished we must do something in return and apart for this. Against this notion, which has a strong hold over Protestant worship, Torrance views the act of worship as one in which Christ remains present and active through the Holy Spirit. His departure from Barth is also evident on the contested practice of infant baptism to which Torrance remained strongly committed, particularly in his leading of a commission on this subject in the Church of Scotland (1954–1962). Barth’s failure properly to connect spirit baptism and water baptism is viewed as a curious inconsistency in his theology (Torrance 1990, p. 134) – a lapse into the kind of dualism that he otherwise did so much to combat. To remedy this, Torrance sought to connect the once for all baptism of Christ for us with the sacramental act of the church extended to believers and their children. In sending Barth a copy of the commission’s initial findings,

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he hoped to solicit his critical sympathy, perhaps even to persuade him of the need to modify his view. But in a reply of 8 April 1960, Barth remained unmoved. Torrance’s report merely confirmed his former anxieties about baptism as a means of grace that enabled the church to mediate the work of Christ. A new direction had to be followed – there could be no pouring of new wine into old wineskins. By comparison with New Testament teaching, the traditions of the church had overdetermined the ecclesial rite and the ministers of the church appointed to administer it. For his part, Torrance was undeterred in his work; in an increasingly ecumenical context, he continued to argue for a view of the church and its two sacraments as reformed and catholic. The linkage of water baptism and spirit baptism is viewed according to a Chalcedonian pattern – similar comments are offered mutatis mutandis on the Lord’s Supper and the authority of Holy Scripture. Divine and human actions are neither to be separated (a Protestant tendency) nor confused (a Catholic tendency) but properly connected. The work of God in Jesus Christ, as it was seen during His life on earth, is continued through the sacraments, and so the pattern seen in His earthly life may in a large way also be found in the sacraments. Yet the work of God in Christ is not confined to His work through the sacraments, and we must not make claims for the sacraments that can be made for Christ alone (Church of Scotland 1958, p. 64).

In one further respect, Torrance’s theology explicitly moved beyond Barth. This is already apparent in his remarks about scientific rationality and the appeal to Einsteinian physics. Barth’s work, he believed, had lacked proper coordination with our creaturely forms of knowledge in other domains. Yet there were important possibilities for ­theology here. The partnership with science could generate a chastened epistemology (critical realistic) together with responses to questions generated by the natural sciences which could only be answered by a robust theology. In his 1970 essay on natural ­theology in Barth, Torrance first outlines his fundamental agreement (Torrance 1990, pp. 136–159). There can be no freestanding, independent knowledge of God that controls or sits apart from the act in which God is revealed. This is excluded not primarily on grounds of skepticism, but as the expression of a positive theology that is determined by its object, that is, revelation. A natural theology, by contrast, is tantamount to an act of self‐justification. And yet the work of God in the incarnation requires to be correlated with the work of God in creation  –  an analogy with non‐Euclidean geometry and physics is offered here. Our creaturely rationality “must be brought to light and be fulfilled within the context of grace” (Torrance 1990, p. 156; McGrath 1999, pp. 183–194). This work of coordination or integration does not take place a priori but only as ­determined by the one Word of God through whom all things were created. This is further developed in works such as The Ground and Grammar of Theology where Torrance’s claim that modern physics has caught up with developments that took place 40 years earlier in Karl Barth’s integration of the being and acts of God. For example, the search for a unified wave‐particle theory in modern physics belongs to the same scientific spirit that characterized earlier theological work (Torrance 1980, p. 12). This is not a capitulation of theology to current intellectual fashions; on the contrary, it

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r­ epresents the development of a robust methodology, obedient to the nature of the subject matter in question. To this extent, theological science can lead the way. In seeking out these connections, particularly with the natural sciences, Torrance appears to be moving beyond Barth, perhaps into a realm of over‐systematization or apologetic advocacy that would have made Barth instinctively uneasy (Molnar 2017, pp. 219–225). Yet, on Torrance’s own estimation, this is a development that sits within the framework of Barth’s theology, albeit one that corrects some perceived tendencies. Critics have sometimes been puzzled by remarks of Torrance that suggest a commitment to the design argument, for example, his comments about the mystery of cosmic contingency and intelligibility or his high praise for the thought of Einstein as a gateway to theological reflection. Yet these tendencies should be regarded not as aberrations but as ways in which he consistently developed Barth’s work, even as he recognized that this took him beyond anything Barth himself explicitly avowed. [S]cience must assume conceptions and principles that are themselves not logically derivable, explainable, or provable, but without which it could not function. Contingence and order are assumptions of that kind, yet we do not derive them from natural science but from a fundamental outlook upon the nature of the universe that is the correlative of a distinctive doctrine of God as the Creator of the universe (Torrance 1981, p. 27).

Conclusion Even as he pursued his own path in constructive theology, Torrance remained loyal to the spirit, if not the letter, of Karl Barth’s theology. His greatest work may be The Trinitarian Faith where the influence of his former teacher is most remote (Torrance 1993). Without any reference to modern theology, this reflection on Nicene theology displays Torrance’s immersion in the theology of the Greek Fathers and his engagement with Orthodoxy. Yet Barth’s work remained an important formative influence, a point of constant return, and a stimulus that Torrance consistently and cheerfully acknowledged for the better part of 70 years. This survey confirms Heron’s subtle judgment that Torrance can be ranked as “the most redoubtable and most massively learned of all Barth’s disciples in (his) generation” (Heron 2000, p. 297).2 References Busch, E. (1976). Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts. London: SCM Press. Church of Scotland Special Commission on Baptism (1958). The Biblical Doctrine of Baptism. Edinburgh: St. Andrew Press.

Fergusson, D. (2012). The Ascension of Christ: its significance in the ­theology of T. F. Torrance. Participatio 3: 92–107. Heron, A. (2000). Karl Barth: a personal engagement. In: The Cambridge Companion

2  I am grateful to Iain Torrance for his comments on an earlier draft of this essay and for furnishing me with additional biographical information.

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to Karl Barth (ed. J. Webster), 296–306. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hunsinger, G. (2001). The dimension of depth: Thomas F. Torrance on the ­sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s supper. Scottish Journal of Theology 54 (2): 155–176. Mackintosh, H.R. (1937). Types of Modern Theology. London: Nisbet. McConnachie, J. (1931). The Significance of Karl Barth. London: Hodder and Stoughton. McConnachie, J. (1933). The Barthian Theology and the Man of Today. London: Hodder and Stoughton. McCormack, B.L. (1995). Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McGrath, A.E. (1999). T. F. Torrance: An Intellectual Biography. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. McPake, J. (1996). John McConnachie as the original advocate of the theology of Karl Barth in Scotland: the primacy of ­revelation. Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 14: 101–114. Molnar, P.N. (2017). The importance of the doctrine of justification in the theology of Thomas F. Torrance and Karl Barth. Scottish Journal of Theology 70: 198–226. Morgan, D.D. (2010). Barth Reception Britain. London: T&T Clark. Torrance, T.F. (1947). ‘Review of C. van Til). The new modernism: an appraisal of the theology of Barth and Brunner. Evangelical Quarterly 19: 144–149. Torrance, T.F. (1948). The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd.

Torrance, T.F. (1954–1955). Karl Barth. The Expository Times 66: 205–209. Torrance, T.F. (1956). The place of Christology in biblical and dogmatic theology. In: Essays in Christology for Karl Barth (ed. T.H.L. Parker), 13–37. London: Lutterworth. Torrance, T.F. (1962). Karl Barth: An Introduction to his Early Theology, 1910–1931. London: SCM Press. Torrance, T.F. (1969). Theological Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Torrance, T.F. (1975). Karl Barth. In: Obituaries from the Times 1961–70 (ed. F.C. Roberts), 52–53. Reading: Newspaper Archives. Torrance, T.F. (1976). Space, Time and Resurrection. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Torrance, T.F. (1980). The Ground and Grammar of Theology. Belfast: Christian Journals. Torrance, T.F. (1981). Divine and Contingent Order. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Torrance, T.F. (1990). Karl Barth, Biblical and Evangelical Theologian. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Torrance, T.F. (1993). The Trinitarian Faith. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Torrance, T.F. (2000). Foreword to H. R. Mackintosh. In: The Person of Jesus Christ, vii–ix. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Torrance, I.R. and Torrance, M. (eds.) (2009). A skirmish on the early reception of Karl Barth in Scotland: the exchange between Thomas F. Torrance and Brand Blanshard. Theology in Scotland 16: 5–22. Wolf, E. (ed.) (1936). Theologische Aufsätze: Karl Barth zum 50. Geburtstag. Munich: Kaiser.

CHAPTER 54

Barth and Jüngel R. David Nelson

Introduction Eberhard Jüngel was one of seven speakers to eulogize Barth during a public memorial service at Basel Cathedral on 13 December 1968. Alongside well‐established luminaries such as Max Geiger, Helmut Gollwitzer, Josef Hromádka, and Willem A. Visser ’t Hooft, Jüngel, who had turned 34 just eight days prior to the service, was chosen to represent “the youngest generation of scholars” (Busch 1994, p. 499). In the eulogy, Jüngel manages to distill Barth’s theological witness in a handful of perceptive paragraphs. “His entire life revolved around a single word,” Jüngel says of Barth: “the Yes that God says to himself – the Yes that (because he says it to himself) he says also to the human race.” For Barth, theological existence enchanted by and in service to God’s Yes follows a distinct pathway. “The fundamental movement of his theological thought,” Jüngel writes, “was always to return to the beginning. In his theology, to go forward always meant to begin once again with the beginning, which only as the beginning can also be the goal, only as the Alpha can also be the Omega” (Jüngel 1986, p. 18). Barth’s theology therefore mirrors the pattern epitomized in Anselm’s formulation fides quarens intellectum – faith seeking understanding. Liberated by the word of God and empowered by the Holy Spirit, faith pursues knowledge. “Barth’s theology is intelligent,” Jüngel thus observes. “For him, the Holy Spirit is the dearest friend of a healthy human intelligence” (Jüngel 1986, p. 20). The theologian must not shirk rigorous thought but rather seek it d ­ iligently as the demand of the intelligence ensuing from faith. It is a testimony to the enduring significance of Barth for Jüngel that these themes highlighted by the young theologian at Barth’s memorial service recur across his own oeuvre. With Barth, Jüngel is astonished by the Yes of God – the affirmative word of love that constitutes God’s self‐relatedness and also God’s relationship to creatures (Jüngel

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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2014a, pp. 117–123). This Yes, which reveals the triune God as the mystery of the world, is the one word to which theology always must attend. Moreover, to attend to this word – that is, to hear it – is, for Jüngel, to begin ever anew, and to follow after God’s self‐revelation wherever it leads. As Jüngel puts it early on in his career, paraphrasing Barth, the word of God “goes before all theological questioning in such a way that in its movement it paves the way for questioning, leading the questioning for the first time onto the path of thinking” (Jüngel 2014a, p. 9). This marks Jüngel’s theology as thought that, like Barth’s, pursues the trajectory of faith seeking understanding. “Faith gives itself to be thought,” Jüngel writes in a midcareer reflection on his “own” theology. “One cannot believe God without thinking about him. Faith is passionately concerned to understand itself and thereby understand God. Faith is essentially fides quarens intellectum” (Jüngel 1985, p. 9). This chapter will address the relationship between Barth and Jüngel from two vantage points – the personal and the intellectual. Accordingly, the task before us is twofold: first, we consider how Barth regarded Jüngel from their first meeting during the winter semester of 1957–1958 up to Barth’s final year a decade later; second, we explore the extent to which Jüngel drew upon and departed from Barth in his own theological work. I show that Jüngel rose above the ranks of those students of Gerhard Ebeling, professor of systematic theology at the University of Zurich, who journeyed from Zurich to Basel in the late 1950s and 1960s to visit Barth’s seminar. Although initially Barth eyed Jüngel as yet another “Bultmannian interloper” from the Ebeling camp (DeHart 1999, p. 5), in short time he came to esteem Jüngel as a leading light among the emerging generation of Protestant theologians. I demonstrate, further, that, for his part, Jüngel never left Barth behind as a conversation partner, but rather continued throughout his career to engage Barth’s theology. Indeed, several of Jüngel’s most significant contributions to Christian dogmatics “after Barth” pivot on the exegesis, paraphrase, and extension of – and sometimes departure from – passages from Barth’s writings.

Barth, the Hermeneutical Turn in Postwar Theology, and Jüngel’s “Illegal” Semester Abroad, 1957–1958 Barth and Jüngel met for the first time in Basel during the winter of 1957–1958. Jüngel, then just turning 24 and in the midst of an “illegal” semester studying abroad in Zurich, Freiburg im Breisgau, and Basel, made a lasting impression on Barth. That semester, Barth had selected for his seminar the Dogmatics of Erlangen Lutheran theologian Werner Elert. Barth and his students hardly were impressed by the “sombre historical fatalism” and “equally pig‐headed confessionalism” they discovered in the Elert text. The seminar was marked by spirited discussion, and Jüngel, one of a handful of regular visitors to Basel from Ebeling’s inner circle, was an active and eager participant (Busch 1994, p. 429). By the end of the term, the relationship between Barth and Jüngel was well established, and the two would stay in touch until Barth’s death in 1968. All things considered, it is remarkable that Barth and Jüngel so quickly were able to form a lasting bond. At the time, Jüngel was nearing the end of his first round of study at the Kirchliche Hochschule in Berlin and had come under the wing of New Testament

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theologian Ernst Fuchs, who would later go on to supervise Jüngel’s doctoral dissertation. At the advice of Fuchs, Jüngel had arranged to spend the bulk of his time abroad in 1957–1958 in Zurich with Fuchs’s longtime collaborator Ebeling. The University of Zurich served, as it were, as a home base during the term, with Jüngel traveling to Basel each week for Barth’s seminar and to Freiburg once a month to visit with philosopher Martin Heidegger. Jüngel’s associations with Fuchs, Ebeling, and Heidegger alerted Barth to the common link among them  –  Rudolf Bultmann, Barth’s relationship to whom had been uneasy since the late 1920s. And so, in spite of the fact that Jüngel’s contact with Basel had been encouraged and mediated by Barth’s friend (and Jüngel’s teacher) Heinrich Vogel, Barth was initially quite wary of the young student who showed up each week for the discussion of Elert. A few additional comments on Fuchs and Ebeling are in order here, for the so‐called “New Hermeneutic,” shorthand for the hermeneutical theology spearheaded by the two in the 1950s and fashionable in German‐speaking theological circles for over a decade thereafter, lies in the background of Barth’s first meeting with Jüngel. At the heart of the New Hermeneutic was a problem that had besieged Protestant theology from the middle of the nineteenth century up to World War I, namely, the connection between the man Jesus of Nazareth and the Christ of Christian faith. During the long nineteenth century, Wissenschaft in the German universities was determined by the organizing principle of “historical consciousness.” In the theological guilds, this commitment took the form of scholarly preoccupation with the historical origins of the Christian religion. But direct interest in the historical Jesus and in the beginnings of Christianity waned with the flowering of dialectical theology in the period following the war. Barth, Bultmann, Emil Brunner, and others of the era did not invest much confidence in the tools of critical historical research for discovering the “true” Jesus. However, a generation later, and in the wake of a famous paper from 1953 by Ernst Käsemann, a cadre of Bultmann’s followers and former pupils  –  Fuchs and Ebeling among them – renewed the quest for the historical Jesus. With Bultmann and Barth, the scholars of this “second quest” held that Christianity cannot be proven or disproven through the means of historical inquiry. Against Bultmann and Barth, though, they argued that faith indeed should be directly interested in its historical origins. After all, Christians always have believed that Jesus of Nazareth was a real man who, upon his resurrection from the dead, was declared the Lord Christ by the incipient church. Faith, that is, assumes continuity between the Christ it confesses and the man Jesus. To ignore the Jesus of history is to neglect this continuity and risks unmooring Christianity from its origins. Within the burgeoning movement, Fuchs and Ebeling in particular were convinced that the problem which had triggered the two quests for the historical Jesus – the relationship between Jesus of Nazareth and the Christ of faith – could be resolved by way of a new program for hermeneutics. Heidegger’s late‐career musings on the ontological entailments of language were in the air at the time, and Fuchs and Ebeling wrote with great confidence that the new turn in philosophy offered a skeleton key for opening theological impasses. Regarding modernity’s evergreen problem of the historical Jesus, they proposed that Jesus of Nazareth and the Christ of faith were linked by language. In his public ministry, the man Jesus preached interruptive “speech‐events” – the parables,

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the “Son of Man” statements from the gospels, the “I am” claims found in Johannine literature, and so on; Christian proclamation – that is, preaching about the resurrected, ascended, and ruling Christ – is, likewise, an interruptive speech‐event, presenting the lordship of Christ to the hearer of the sermon. Fuchs and Ebeling were colleagues in Tübingen in the mid‐1950s, and from that point forward they produced a number of works, both in tandem and separately, but always with one voice, elaborating and defending the New Hermeneutic. Barth’s personal writings reveal that he was highly allergic to these “little schoolmasters in Tübingen” (Barth and Bultmann 1981, p. 106). He detected in the hermeneutical theology of Fuchs and Ebeling the mere reiteration of Bultmann’s program of demythologization. Barth was especially concerned that, like Bultmann, the theologians of the New Hermeneutic jeopardize the authenticity of the gospel by bowing to the demands of a philosophy propped up as the entryway to theology. In a well‐known letter written to Bultmann in 1931, Barth appeared astonished that Bultmann had unwittingly allowed fashionable existentialist philosophy to determine his theological judgments. “I believe,” Barth writes in the letter, “that with your relating of anthropology and theology you are so little free of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that you so little perceive and reject the old and shameless dictatorship of modern philosophy under the new banner of that of Heidegger, that with you I simply feel myself finally replaced under the same bondage of Egypt that, as I see it, we are supposed to have left with the rejection of Schleiermacher and the new allegiance to the theology of the reformers” (Barth and Bultmann 1981, p. 58). Three decades later, and while speaking to a group of students from Zurich, Barth complains that he finds also in Ebeling “a prior knowledge concerning the reality of humanity” which eclipses the freedom of the gospel (Barth 1962, p. 273). In Barth’s mind, one significant consequence of this displacement is that authentic evangelical “encounter” [Begegung] loses its object. Rather, “in Ebeling everything is pressed anthropologically into the concept of faith” (Barth 1962, p. 274). In the end, then, Barth concludes: “I can only see in Ebeling a repristination of the circles of questions from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ebeling is a ‘hyper‐Schleimercher.’ He skips over the efforts I have made” (Barth 1962, p. 274). Beyond this severe critique, on a number of occasions Barth groans that he finds Fuchs frustratingly opaque, commenting about his theology in one spot that “in view of its kaleidoscopic and glossolalistic character, I have so far been able to achieve only a rather obscure and troubled acquaintance” (Barth 1981, p. 78). Barth’s intense dislike of the “irksome stuff turned out by the Ebelings, Fuchses, etc.” (Barth 1981, p. 62) set the stage for a memorable first meeting with Jüngel, who, although not quite a protégé of either Fuchs or Ebeling, was drifting into the orbit of the New Hermeneutic as his theological studies unfolded in the late 1950s. Fuchs had left Tübingen for East Berlin in 1955 to chair the faculty of theology at Humboldt University. He remained there until 1961, leaving just before construction of the wall commenced that August to return to Marburg, where three decades earlier he had completed his doctoral dissertation under Bultmann. Jüngel, hailing from Magdeburg in the German Democratic Republic (Deutsche Demokratische Republik, DDR), matriculated at the Kirchliche Hochschule in Berlin in 1955. Before the wall went up, seminarians would begin their studies at the Sprachenkonvikt  –  the “Language House”  –  in East Berlin,

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where they received instruction in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, and then complete their coursework at the main seminary campus in the borough of Zehlendorf in West Berlin. Jüngel took advantage of this fading privilege during his time at the seminary, completing most of his classes at the Zehlendorf campus. It was there that he became a favorite student of Fuchs and Vogel, both of whom came across from Humboldt in the east to teach young ordinands. When Jüngel endeavored to study abroad in 1957–1958 with Ebeling, Heidegger, and Barth, he made his arrangements through the West Berlin campus, rather than through the Sprachenkonvikt in the east. Such a scenario technically violated the rules governing student travel for a citizen of the DDR in the late 1950s. Jüngel, however, resolved to take the risk, and even contrived a clever plan to get around border control. He bought a ticket to Wittenberg, but alighted at Berlin‐Tempelhof and from there flew to Zurich. “When the conductor checked my ticket,” Jüngel recounts, “I lied and said, ‘Yes, I will continue on to Wittenberg.’ But instead I got off at the airport.” Of course, Jüngel had to address one additional detail for the ruse to work: “I had to explain my absence in Berlin … So I let the rumor spread that I had had a nervous breakdown and was on my way to the Harz to recover in a sanatorium. The bad thing was that some people said, ‘Well, we saw it coming!’” (Jüngel 2009, p. 21). By all accounts, Jüngel made the most of his semester in Switzerland, learning much from Ebeling and Barth and leaving his mark on their respective seminars, and developing collegial relationships that would remain significant for him throughout his academic career, which began in 1961 on the east side of the newly built wall at the Sprachenkonvikt, which, by that point in time, was institutionally cut off from the Kirchliche Hochschule in the west. As I already have indicated, though, his relationship with Barth started off awkwardly, due mainly to Barth’s wariness regarding Jüngel’s associations. “At first Barth regarded me as a kind of spy from the Bultmann school and for weeks viewed me with undisguised skepticism,” Jüngel recalls. “But when in an unforgettable session of his small seminar I not only dared passionately to refute his criticism of Bultmann with the audacity of youth but at the same time interpreted a section from Barth’s anthropology to his satisfaction, I was invited to another dispute in the late evening over a bottle of wine” (Jüngel 1997, p. 10). Barth was both amused and impressed by the young Jüngel’s brash performance in the seminar. In a formal letter of reference Barth wrote on Jüngel’s behalf for student records at the Kirchliche Hochschule, he reports that Jüngel “took a lively interest in the discussion and also led a presentation.” “I got to know him at close quarters,” Barth comments, going on in the letter to reflect upon Jüngel’s intellectual abilities and vocational aspirations. “In my opinion, he is without a doubt one of a small number of students whose academic advancement is well warranted.” “He has distinguished himself by a quick comprehension and an independent style of research,” Barth writes, “and is developing a challenging dissertation topic.” For Barth, it is clear that Jüngel has “a gift for teaching,” and “can also be expected to serve as a pastor as he fulfils his vocation in the future.” At all points, the letter is enthusiastic and supportive. “My overall impression of Jüngel is that he is highly qualified,” Barth concludes, “and I am convinced that he should be admitted to the Studienstiftung [the German national scholarship program]” (Barth 1958).

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As Jüngel recounts, Barth even made overtures to him about remaining in Switzerland to become his student. “Barth wanted me to stay in Basel,” Jüngel reports in an interview from 2005. “He gave me a set of the Church Dogmatics, inscribing it, ‘To Eberhard Jüngel, on his way to God’s beloved Eastern Zone’. And then he asked if I did not want to stay in Switzerland after all.” But Jüngel was constrained by financial and political circumstances. “I said to Barth, ‘I cannot stay,’” Jüngel recalls, “and explained to him that I had no money. But Barth replied, ‘I will rent you an apartment and pay the entire cost.’ While that was extraordinarily generous of him, when I explained that I was in Switzerland illegally and could get away with only one semester abroad, Barth understood immediately. So I went back to Berlin” (Jüngel 2009, p. 25).

The Problem of Analogy, God’s Being Is in Becoming, and Jüngel’s Stint in Zurich, 1966–1969 Barth and Jüngel kept in touch over the course of the next decade – Barth’s last, and Jüngel’s first as a professional theologian. Barth watched with interest as Jüngel moved up the ranks at the Sprachenkonvikt before departing in 1966 to take a full professorship in Zurich, where he also directed the Institut für Hermeneutik that Ebeling had founded in 1962, and which Barth had once described as “comical” in a letter to Paul Tillich in 1963 (Barth 1981, p. 142). Much of Jüngel’s work from this period resides well within the domain of the New Hermeneutic (indeed, his doctoral dissertation, published in 1962 as Paulus und Jesus, might actually count as the quintessential statement of the short‐lived movement). Further, Jüngel remained close to Fuchs, Ebeling, and even Bultmann throughout the 1960s. And yet, in spite of Barth’s unabated distaste for the New Hermeneutic, his comments about Jüngel in personal writings from his last decade are unequivocally warm and collegial, and letters written between the two men reflect their abiding friendship. The relationship continued to thrive not least on the strength of Jüngel’s emerging talent as an interpreter of Barth. In two key texts from the first few years of his career – an essay on Barth’s approach to the problem of analogy from 1962, “Die Möglichkeit theologischer Anthropologie auf dem Grunde der Analogie. Eine Unterschung zum Analogieverständnis Karl Barths” (Jüngel 1982, pp.  210–232); and the celebrated “paraphrase” of Barth’s doctrine of God from 1965, God’s Being Is in Becoming – Jüngel proved to be a creative and agile exegete of Barth’s writings. Barth seemed delighted with both pieces, referring to them as ­evidence that Jüngel ranked among the best theologians of the coming generation. Though I hardly can do justice to these pieces in this narrow space, some brief introductory comments on both texts are useful for framing the relationship between Barth and Jüngel during the 1960s. In “Die Möglichkeit,” Jüngel draws together several prominent themes from the Church Dogmatics in order to track Barth’s rejection of the analogia entis in favor of an analogia fidei. Over against especially Hans Urs von Balthasar’s interpretation of the development of Barth’s theology, Jüngel argues that, for Barth, the analogia entis and the analogia fidei are mutually exclusive, entailing “as unrelenting a  contradiction as the opposition between δικαιοσύνη ἐκ νόμου [righteousness from the law] and δικαιοσύνη ἐκ πίστεως [righteousness from faith]” (Jüngel 1982, p. 211).

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For Jüngel, the key to understanding Barth on this point is to recognize that, in Barth’s view, the “the being of the man Jesus is the ontological and epistemological ground of analogy” (Jüngel 1982, p. 212), for in Jesus Christ God reveals what it means to be human and also what it means to be God. Faith in Jesus Christ involves the acknowledgment that in him alone divinity and humanity correspond, and this acknowledgment sets the conditions for authentic Christian thought and speech about God. In clarifying Barth’s position on this nest of issues, “Die Möglichkeit” articulates Jüngel’s own contribution to the doctrine of analogy, a theme that first drew his interest when preparing his Habilitationsschrift on the origins of analogy in the metaphysical tradition, and which would remain a matter of his attention throughout the 1960s and 1970s, culminating with the study God as the Mystery of the World. He would later revisit Barth’s approach to analogy in the context of an essay on Barth’s theological development, arguing, once more against von Balthasar, that Barth’s turn from dialectic to analogy owed much to a dispute from the mid‐1920s with Erik Peterson, his erstwhile colleague from Göttingen (Jüngel 1982, pp. 127–179). For his part, Barth deemed “Die Möglichkeit” worthy of lofty praise. “I have just reread with close attention your essay on analogy,” he wrote to Jüngel in November of 1962, “and must not delay letting you know how pleased I am with this fine work. You undoubtedly express better than I could have done myself what I have thought and think on this subject.” For Barth, Jüngel’s analysis effectively had put the matter to rest: “The discussion has now passed a turning point and it certainly cannot go back again” (Barth 1981, p. 71). God’s Being Is in Becoming, first published in 1965, takes the form of a fine‐grained analysis of key passages from the Church Dogmatics. The work is somewhat difficult to classify. Jüngel dubs the book a “paraphrase” of Barth, but what he is up to here is something much more ambitious, namely, a dogmatic examination of the intersecting themes of trinitarian theology, the doctrine of election, the relationship between history and eschatology, and the problem of human language for God. Although Jüngel does indeed proceed by way of direct engagements with Barth’s mature trinitarian theology, throughout the text we discover him judiciously using the Church Dogmatics to break open other trajectories of thought. At the heart of God’s Being Is in Becoming is Jüngel’s thesis that, according to Barth, God’s eternal decision of election – that is, God’s decision to be “God for us” – is, correspondingly, God’s decision to be God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. To put it another way, and returning to an idiom we encountered at the outset of this chapter, for Jüngel’s Barth the Yes God says to humanity in Jesus Christ is the same Yes that constitutes God’s inner triune life. Jüngel shows how this way of coordinating trinity and election opens up new possibilities for understanding God’s relationship to time and language. In doing to, Jüngel is able to identify some surprising affinities between Barth and the theologians of the New Hermeneutic. Barth himself regarded the book as “excellent,” and in particular praised Jüngel’s parsing of the debate over the doctrine of God between Helmut Gollwitzer and Herbert Braun, which Jüngel discusses at the beginning of the text in order to get his argument off the ground (Godsey 1966, p. 82). As a result of his enthusiastic reception of “Die Möglichkeit” and God’s Being Is in Becoming, Barth came to regard Jüngel as “one among today’s younger theologians who has studied me thoroughly and has the willingness and ability to do independently and

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fruitfully the further work which is needed today,” as he puts the matter in an invitation to Jüngel to attend a celebration of his 80th birthday in May 1966 (Barth 1981, p. 203). Later that same year, when Jüngel moved from East Berlin to Zurich, Barth sent to him a congratulatory note and invited him to visit so that the two could “meditate, sigh, and laugh a little about modern theology” (Barth 1981, p. 228). Busch reports that Jüngel, “whose progress Barth followed hopefully,” did indeed call upon Barth on a number of occasions during the latter’s twilight. Busch goes on to suggest that, during this season, Jüngel even “helped to establish a new understanding between Barth and Fuchs, though they still had their problems with each other” (Busch 1994, p. 491). There is an additional revealing and amusing final footnote to the relationship between Barth and Jüngel from 4 December 1968, just days prior to Barth’s death. Barth drafted a letter to Kaiser‐Verlag in Munich, which recently had published a collection of Jüngel’s sermons. “Please send me at once 8 copies of the Predigten by Eberhard Jüngel,” Barth requests. “They are excellent, better than much (or all) the Kaiserverlag has published! – and I will see to their distribution at Christmas.” He concludes with a tip: “in a second edition (Jüngel) should leave out the whole of his homiletical epilogue. Being so schoolmasterish … it is stylistically disruptive. And the volume could be a little cheaper without it” (Barth 1981, p. 339).

Jüngel After Barth For the most part we have concentrated on the personal relationship between Barth and Jüngel as it unfolded during the final decade of Barth’s life. Here we briefly explore Jüngel’s engagement with Barth’s thought during the course of his own theological career. The title of this section, “Jüngel after Barth,” is meant to be taken in two distinct but interrelated senses. First and most straightforwardly, we are concerned with the theological and intellectual relationship between Barth and Jüngel after the former’s death. In what respect does the story of their friendship in theology continue once Barth is available to Jüngel only as the memory of a late mentor? Second, we must examine the extent to which Jüngel should be regarded as a “theologian after Barth;” that is, as one among a number of theologians from the last quarter of the twentieth century who worked, as it were, beneath Barth’s long and imposing shadow. Space prohibits me from attending to all of Jüngel’s numerous engagements with Barth from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, the most significant of which are anthologized in the book Barth‐Studien, published in German in 1982 and in English (in part‐ translation) in 1986. But much can be gathered by considering the topics at stake in Jüngel’s later work with and after Barth – most conspicuously analogy (still), the nature and tasks of Christian theology, the doctrine of the trinity, Christology, justification, the sacraments, ethics, and political theology. Jüngel draws regularly and heavily from Barth in his own work on these and other issues. However, he never merely reiterates Barth. Rather, Jüngel’s interpretive engagements with Barth bear witness to the fact that, for Jüngel, Barth remained a source of inspiration and lively dialogue. Instead of working through Jüngel’s writings on Barth one by one, I focus here on  three themes in Jüngel’s theology concerning which his ongoing dialogue with

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Barth is pivotal – the doctrine of God, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, and sacramental theology. First, reading the corpus of Jüngel’s works in order, one notices a gradual burgeoning of interest and reflection in the area of the doctrine of God from the time of Paulus und Jesus (1962) to that of God as the Mystery of the World (1976; Jüngel 2014b). His early critical interactions with Barth that yielded the monograph God’s Being Is in Becoming compelled Jüngel to adjust and extend the insights he uncovered in his dissertation regarding the theology of the first article. The decade following his paraphrase of the Church Dogmatics and leading up to God as the Mystery of the World is perhaps best viewed as a period of further adjustments and amendments to the same nexus of claims. This remarkable trajectory of research and reflection led to a host of publications and culminated in the 1976 opus. Again, conspicuous throughout this stream of texts is an organic development of thought in areas such as trinitarian theology, the rise and decline of metaphysical reflection on the being, existence, and attributes of God, the problem of God’s relation to the world, and the language of theology. How does Barth factor into this critical period of development within Jüngel’s oeuvre? Demonstrably, Jüngel’s particular interpretation of Barth plays a determinative role across this bevy of texts. He never diverges fundamentally from what he identifies as Barth’s insights into the coordination of trinity and election, divine essence and existence, theology and economy, and so on. Rather, he builds upon his early research into the Church Dogmatics to propel the discussion into new directions. To be sure, Barth hardly is Jüngel’s only interlocutor during this period: Fuchs, Ebeling, and Bultmann remain close at hand, as do a host of new conversation partners such as Luther, Bonhoeffer, Schleiermacher, Nietzsche, and Hegel. But Barth continues to hold a place of prominence. And, again, the texts reveal that Jüngel remains committed to the nest of positions at the heart of God’s Being Is in Becoming. Now, whether Jüngel in fact got Barth right in the early paraphrase and in subsequent texts is another matter entirely. As we observed earlier, Barth certainly was impressed with Jüngel’s interpretation of the Church Dogmatics, and remarks to this effect made by Barth suggest that he considered the book to faithfully represent his own thought. George Hunsinger, however, proposes that Jüngel departs from Barth at a key juncture by surrendering “the Trinity’s eternal antecedence as something pure, self‐subsisting, and absolute. Pure antecedence was replaced by the idea of dialectical identity. For Jüngel, one could not think of God as God without referring at the same time to the human Jesus” (Hunsinger 2015, p. 26). Interestingly, Barth himself earmarks a similar dilemma in the theology of Ebeling and Fuchs and counters their position with the claim that the pro nobis of God “has its power in an esse dei in se! In order to arrive at the soteriological pro nobis, I will first refer to its grounding in the doctrine of God” (Barth 1962, p. 276). I forgo taking a side here in the ongoing debate over this issue. I will suggest, however, that the loss of, as Hunsinger puts it, “eternal antecedence” is perhaps one consequence of Jüngel’s abiding commitment to the New Hermeneutic, which, in this instance, may have led Jüngel beyond Barth and to a position concerning which Barth himself remained cautious. Second, although Jüngel never composed a substantial text on the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, dogmatic reflection on the person and work of the Spirit assuredly is present in his theological writings, even if such reflection as a rule remains tacit rather than

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explicit. In his essay “Eberhard Jüngel’s Theology of the Third Article,” David W. Congdon draws upon three sets of theses Jüngel composed on the Spirit, all of which originated as outlines for seminars on pneumatology. Congdon notices a remarkable overlap between the structure of Jüngel’s approach to the person and work of the Spirit as his analysis unfolds over the three collections of theses and Barth’s pattern for addressing the person and work of Christ in Church Dogmatics IV/1–IV/3, at least as Jüngel outlines it. I have reservations concerning Congdon’s claim that Jüngel was “already in 1983” intently “developing not merely a doctrine of the Holy Spirit but an entire theology of the third article” (Congdon 2014, p. 16), given that Jüngel’s writings from the period fail to substantiate the thesis. But I do agree that Jüngel’s outline for the lectures on the Spirit owe much to his engagement with Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation. Jüngel “follows Barth in differentiating between two works of the Spirit at the levels of individual and community,” Congdon writes. “Like Barth, he defines the primary work of the Spirit according to the Pauline triad of faith (i.e. truth), love and hope (1 Cor 13:13). This translates into a corresponding ecclesiology‐eschatology, that is to say, the Spirit’s communal work” (Congdon 2014, p. 19). If Congdon is correct in detecting these similarities in architecture, more work remains to be done to draw out in detail the way in which Jüngel’s theology of the third article compares and contrasts with Barth’s. Finally, a number of Anglophone studies assert or assume that Jüngel was strongly influenced by Barth’s late turn toward credobaptism; that is, that Barth’s argument in Church Dogmatics IV/4 is paradigmatic of Jüngel’s own approach to the doctrine of baptism and, more generally, to sacramental theology. In the late 1960s, and soon after he contributed a short dogmatic sketch of the sacraments to a book he c­ oauthored with Karl Rahner, Jüngel wrote a handful of analytical essays on Barth’s fragment on baptism. Careful scrutiny of these pieces reveals that Jüngel found much to admire in IV/4, especially the sharp distinction Barth draws between divine and human action and also Barth’s location of baptismal theology as an extension of the doctrine of reconciliation. However, we discover, both in these texts and elsewhere in his writings on the sacraments, several differences between Jüngel’s approach and that taken by Barth in the fragment. For instance, Jüngel nowhere capitalizes on Barth’s insistence that the baptisms with water and with the Spirit are fundamentally dissimilar. Moreover, in all of his other writings on sacramental theology, Jüngel, in good Lutheran fashion, lays stress on the agency of God and on the passivity of the human recipient in the events of water baptism and the Lord’s Supper – an emphasis far removed from Barth’s thesis in IV/4 that water baptism “is not itself … a mystery or sacrament” (CD IV/4, p. 102), but is, rather, exclusively a human action. In fact, as Jüngel’s theology of baptism and the Lord’s Supper developed over time, he became increasingly comfortable with using “sacrament” for these liturgical practices, ­eventually embracing the term outright. As the trajectory of Jüngel’s texts on sacramental theology moves forward, citations from Barth’s writings all but disappear. All of this suggests, I think, that, in regard to the sacraments, the extent of Jüngel’s indebtedness to Barth is much more complex than typically acknowledged. The ­similarities between their approaches must be understood in light of even greater ­dissimilarities (Nelson 2014).

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Conclusion The lively relationship between Barth and Jüngel is significant for research into the thought of both theologians. For students of Barth’s theology, his friendship with the young Jüngel sheds light upon his perspective on the passing theological scene during the critical period of 1960s. In particular, Barth’s appreciative comments on Jüngel as an interpreter of the Church Dogmatics give us insight into how Barth understood his legacy as he surveyed the field of an emerging generation of theologians. For scholars of Jüngel’s work, his friendship with Barth during the latter’s twilight is perhaps the key relationship at the inception of his own theological existence. In this brief essay I have sketched the personal contact between the two while Barth was still living and have introduced a few areas of theological similarity and difference. We have observed how Barth revised his early suspicion of Jüngel as a “spy from the Bultmann school,” going on to recognize Jüngel as a leading light among Barth’s immediate theological heirs. And I have shown that the personal and intellectual impressions Barth left upon Jüngel continued to impact him long after Barth’s death. To be sure, students of modern Protestant thought have much to gain from considering this fascinating theological friendship. References Barth, K. (1958). Reference Letter for Eberhard Jüngel, 5 July 1958. [Document] Karl Barth‐Archiv, Basel. Barth, K. (1962). Conversation with Zurich Doctoral Students, trans. David A. Gilland. In: Barth in Conversation, vol. 1, 1959– 1962 (ed. E. Busch), 273–277. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. Barth, K. (1981). Letters, 1961–1968 (eds. J. Fangmeier and H. Stoevesandt), trans. and ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Barth, K. and Bultmann, R. (1981). Karl Barth/Rudolf Bultmann: Letters, 1922– 1966 (ed. B. Jaspert), trans. and ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Busch, E. (1994). Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Congdon, D.W. (2014). The Spirit of Freedom: Eberhard Jüngel’s Theology of the Third Article. In: Indicative of Grace – Imperative of Freedom: Essays in Honour of Eberhard

Jüngel in His 80th Year (ed. R.D. Nelson), 13–27. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark. DeHart, P.J. (1999). Beyond the Necessary God: Trinitarian Faith and Philosophy in the Thought of Eberhard Jüngel. Atlanta: Scholar’s Press. Godsey, J.D. (1966). Epilogue. In: How I Changed My Mind (ed. K. Barth), 82–83. Richmond, VA: John Knox Press. Hunsinger, G. (2015). The Trinity after Barth: Moltmann, Pannenberg, Jüngel, and Torrance. In: Evangelical, Catholic, and Reformed: Doctrinal Essays on Barth and Related Themes, 21–31. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Jüngel, E. (1962). Paulus und Jesus. Eeine Untersuchung zur Präzisierung der Frage nach dem Ursprung der Christologie. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Jüngel, E. (1982). Barth‐Studien. Zürich‐Köln: Benziger Verlag; Güttersloh: Güttersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn. Jüngel, E. (1985). “My Theology” – A Short Summary. In: Theological Essays II, trans.

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Arnold Neufeldt‐Fast, ed. J.B. Webster, 1–19. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Jüngel, E. (1986). Karl Barth: A Theological Legacy, trans. Garrett E. Paul. Philadelphia: Westminster Press. Jüngel, E. (1997). Eberhard Jüngel. In: How I Have Changed: Reflections on Thirty Years of Theology (ed. J. Moltmann), 3–12. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International. Jüngel, E. (2009). Die Leidenschaft, Gott zu denken. Ein Gespräch über Denk‐ und Lebenserfahrungen. Zürich: TVZ. Jüngel, E. (2014a). God’s Being Is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology

of Karl Barth, trans. John Webster. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark. Jüngel, E. (2014b). 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. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark. Nelson, R.D. (2014). Eberhard Jüngel on Baptism and the Lord’s Supper: towards a Hermeneutic for reading the texts. In: Indicative of Grace — Imperative of Freedom: Essays in Honour of Eberhard Jüngel in His 80th Year (ed. R.D. Nelson). London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark.

CHAPTER 55

Barth and Charlotte von Kirschbaum Eberhard Busch

Introduction Charlotte von Kirschbaum was more than Karl Barth’s brilliant secretary. In that role, of course, her work was indispensable. But something greater was at stake. Not without risk to herself, she lived out what Barth said about human work in general: “Work in the proper sense is possible only when people work together.” “Work that is not cooperation is little more than busy idleness” (KD III/4, p. 616; IV/2, p. 474). Von Kirschbaum’s life was a commentary on these words. With Barth she believed that by divine grace we are all called to be God’s co‐workers. At the same time we also coexist with one another as men and women, as fellow human beings, so that we cannot live and work authentically unless we do so together, dependent on one another, and grateful not to have to labor in isolation. Barth knew her from the middle of the 1920s and esteemed her highly. When in 1929 Charlotte moved into Barth’s home, a complicated mènage a trois arose among her, him, and his wife Nelly, from which all suffered. They tried to live out their complex relations on a high level of spiritual discipline. Of course, in this difficult triad the role of each was distinct. For Charlotte it was a special burden that she was disapproved of not only by the surrounding Basel society but also by Karl’s mother and his siblings. In 1940 her friend Gerty Pestalozzi wrote about this suffering to Barth’s brother Heinrich: “She is the one who always finds kind words [about Barth’s family, which rejected her]. She knows how to dispel the tensions that emerge with a sense of humor and just the right touch. She doesn’t capitalize on estrangements, but tries again and again to smooth the way for Karl to his mother, in which she herself is the obstacle…. That she is not accepted remains an unspoken grief for her, endured without bitterness…. Her influence inclines to the good, to understanding, to openness, to full sincerity. These

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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qualities, connected with a measure of wisdom, make fellowship with her possible and fruitful … I do not see a self‐absorbed egoisme à deux, but a mutual regard in which each seeks the good of the other, and of all concerned” (Pestalozzi‐Eidenbenz 1993).

Her Active Involvements One of her closest friends, Dr. Lili Simon, assured me that it would be unjust to regard von Kirschbaum’s life as “working in the shadows” (see Koebler 1989). Charlotte would have insisted that, on the contrary, her life was based on a resolve to live and to work openly in the light. Although she had to accept many hardships, she never regretted her decision to work with Barth. She felt that the power of his work promised new vitality for theology, for the church, and for public life, and she wished to share in it as closely as possible. She wanted to be involved in the same concern as he was. Therefore, she wanted to collaborate with him in a way that suited her abilities, so that although she could not do what he did, she could still do something necessary and helpful. This was her conscious choice. This consideration is important for assessing whether or not von Kirschbaum was exploited by Barth, as is sometimes alleged. Exploitation exists only where a person is coerced to work against her will, so that she cannot genuinely affirm her own life. That was not the case with Charlotte von Kirschbaum. Her cooperation with Barth was distinctive in four areas.

The German Church‐Struggle, 1933–1934 in Bonn Barth was under enormous pressure. Besides his dogmatic lectures, he had to teach New Testament in place of Karl Ludwig Schmidt, who had been dismissed by the Nazis, and also to teach practical theology, in order to counteract the influence of a Nazi colleague. At the same time he was involved in heated debates about how the church should meet the new political situation and in the struggle to build a Confessing Church. A special responsibility fell upon von Kirschbaum’s shoulders. In 1933, proceeding with characteristic wisdom and vigor, she played a key role alongside Barth in carving out a clear evangelical alternative to the enormous confusion of the times. She contacted many people and cultivated relationships with them, she took part in discussions for nights on end, and she circulated documents and information. The position for which she stood and fought was clear from the start. Horrified by the susceptibility of so many Christians and theologians, she had backbone. The brown‐shirt German Christians who dominated theology and church had to be rejected unconditionally, she felt, because they had sold out to Volk and race. Her main concern, however, was that the would‐be opposition, the Young Reformation Movement, was incapable of serious resistance. “This opposition,” she wrote, “knows little better, when it comes to theology, than the German Christians. At bottom they are committed to the same policies. No more than the German Christians are they open to the true freedom of the gospel.” Contending, supposedly, for the gospel’s purity, the Young Reformation fails to see that what they called “their ‘grateful Yes’ to the Third Reich has nothing to do with the purity of the

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gospel.” (KBA, letter to Hugo Putsch, 26 November 1933; and to Erica Küppers, 16 May 1933). How can one can take a stand in Christian freedom toward the Nazi regime, von Kirschbaum asked, if, heedless of the gospel, the regime has already been endorsed in advance? Truly grieved, like Barth she rejected such misguided opposition for the sake of true resistance. She wrote about the “almost total loneliness” that she endured with Barth at this time. Courage was ever needed, because their theological convictions did not allow them to affirm the Third Reich. The regime increasingly went after its critics. In November 1933 she spoke of an “existence in Germany that is threatened and oppressive” (KBA, letter to Erica Küppers, 16 June 1933). One day the district attorney’s office confiscated a document that she had written. It contained statements Barth had made in Berlin on Reformation Day in October 1933 about the injustices of the Nazi regime and its violence against the Jews. It stated that when Jews are persecuted and placed in prison camps, a church bound to God’s Word cannot be silent. The contents of this document eventually led to Barth’s expulsion from Germany and to her emigration with him to Switzerland. In 1933 she commented on a novel her friend Erica Kueppers had given her. She found it “consoling and helpful to read about a woman who goes her own way like a force of nature” (KBA, letter to Erica Küppers, 27 December 1933). Charlotte herself was such a force, and she agreed with Barth’s denunciation of the Nazis, while the so‐called “Confessing Church” remained silent.

Quite a Different Scene: Life at the “Bergli” The “Bergli,” the summer residence of Rudolf and Gerty Pestalozzi, was situated near Zurich, on a lovely hillside, surrounded by woods, with a grand view of the lake and the Alps. Although Rudolf was a wealthy manufacturer, he was also, along with his wife, an active member of the Swiss Religious Socialist Movement, and in this movement they became close friends with Barth. For many years Barth spent his semester vacations there. Together with Karl, von Kirschbaum cherished the way of life at this hospitable retreat. There was no contact with the nearby residence of the Wille family, which was visited by Adolf Hitler and later by the von Weizsäcker family in the 1920s. The Willes were a clan from the Swiss military and financial aristocracy that sympathized with the Third Reich. Life at the Bergli was very different. To this secluded spot Barth brought his theological writing projects as well as his questions about the Church Struggle and about how to respond to Hitler’s machinations. There he toiled at his tasks in cooperation with von Kirschbaum. They attracted many friends like Thurneysen, Gogarten, Brunner, Visser ’t Hooft, Gollwitzer, Bonhoeffer, Pierre Maury, Ernst Wolf, and not least the philosopher Heinrich Scholz, who wanted to marry von Kirschbaum (thus giving her an exit), though she did not hesitate to reaffirm her vulnerable life with Barth. Once after a swim in Lake Zurich, the journal called Zwischen den Zeiten (Between the Times) was founded. For many years the Bergli retreat served as a center of free debate about a wide range of issues – theological, ecumenical, political, cultural. The atmosphere there was, by the standards of the times, remarkably free in spirit. It should not be overlooked that Barth, the author of the Dogmatics, and Charlotte, the

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author of The Real Woman, were both active and creative participants. Barth once wrote about Gerty, who influenced that atmosphere more than anyone else: “She is miles ahead of us with a grace from paradise lost, or perhaps already regained” (Pestalozzi‐ Eidenbenz 1993, p. 279). Gerty combined a loving heart with an openness for undiscovered horizons, concern for those in need, contentment with the moment, and an ardent desire for the universe. In 1926 she wrote to von Kirschbaum: “I’d give anything to embrace you and let you feel once more, and again and again, my tender love, my warmth and my nearness” (Pestalozzi‐Eidenbenz 1993, p. 279). In this atmosphere of work and relaxation, the guests were companions in a common life. They went hiking, swimming, riding. They liked to sunbathe and to sleep out under the stars. They were interested in geography, architecture, sociology, music, graphology, a health‐conscious diet, and even astrology. They entertained themselves by composing poems or riddles or by performing dramatic scenes. They also read out loud together from various works of literature old and new. One favorite was a novel by Mervin Brian, The Heart Is Awake: Letters of a Love – letters that portrayed a sensitive, passionate love between two, who though they belonged together, could not come together, and yet tried “to band together the Me and the You across thousands of miles.” At the end the woman says: “I believe that I can create something which betokens our love. I believe there is a mission in this desperate world that has called us to this fate” (Brian 1934, p. 398). At the Bergli many strong and interesting women turned up, who became close friends of von Kirschbaum and Barth. There were Emmy Lentrodt (a nurse in Munich), Gertrud Staewen (a social worker from Berlin), Lili Simon (expelled from Germany by the Aryan law), Hertha List (a Jewish woman and a single parent), Dora Scheuner (a philologist from Berne), Margit Fesca (a sculptor), and Emmi Bloch (a social worker from Zurich). A photo exists showing some of these women with flowers wreathed in their hair. In the midst of these gatherings, von Kirschbaum could thrive with her creativity. In 1942, filled with joy at this community of friends, but also with foreboding that all could soon change, she wrote to Gerty: “Let us be happy about what is given for now.” In reply, Gerty addressed her as, “You good star,” and wrote that on her “strange, good, blessed, brave, fulfilled, and difficult path,” she broadcast “a constant radiance of love and confidence.”1

Contact with Germans After 1935 After 1935 von Kirschbaum was increasingly exposed to danger. Living in Switzerland with only a German passport, her stay had to be continually approved. Obtaining this approval was not easy, because by publicly accusing the Swiss authorities of aligning with Germany under Hitler, Barth had made himself notorious. Even worse, in 1941, as part of the effort to reduce him to silence, she was pressed by the German authorities to abandon her work with him and return to Germany immediately. At that time, however, as a German she experienced tensions with Barth as a Swiss. In the fall of 1938 he had

1  Gerty Pestalozzi, op. cit., 318.369.366f.

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publicly called for the churches to endorse international military action against the antisemitic, therefore godless and inhuman, German state. Von Kirschbaum did not disagree with him, but she feared that his outspoken statements could easily be misunderstood as anti‐German warmongering and that this stance could make life worse for the hidden, but upright supporters of the Confessing Church in Germany. It was perhaps because of von Kirschbaum that Barth came to regard his opposition to Hitler’s Germany, necessary as it was, as a fight also in favor of the Germans. Nevertheless, in 1942 it was she who wrote a critical word to Bonhoeffer against the mentality of the German conspiracy in which he was engaged. Immersed as it was in nationalism, she said, their nation could not be rescued “by further ‘nationalistic’ enterprises” (cf. Busch 1996, p. 349). After her move to Basel she was connected to her country of origin by a nexus of intense relationships. In 1935 Barth was appointed by the Basel canton to serve as Commissioner of Refugees and to work on behalf of those civil servants, scholars, lawyers, and politicians who were expelled by the Aryan law. This duty was to a large extent taken over by von Kirschbaum. She helped these people, some of whom wanted to remain in Switzerland whereas others wanted emigration. Then in 1938 the Swiss “Evangelical Relief Organization for the Confessing Church in Germany” was formed. As the director of its welfare activities, she was responsible for the Confessing Church refugees. After the expulsion of the Jews from Austria and then also from Germany, she and Barth worked together with the Swiss Jewish refugee organization to deal with the increasing number of Jewish and Christian‐Jewish immigrants. They assisted many of those so‐called “non‐Aryans” and remained in touch with them after their emigration. One such refugee was a lawyer, Kurt Müller, who, having undertaken to defend Jews and social democrats, was thrown in jail. Having been converted by the Barmen Declaration and being unable to function as a lawyer, he began to study theology. Because he suffered from illness until 1942, he was allowed to remain in Basel for his studies. During this time he became friends with Barth and von Kirschbaum. Then he deliberately returned to Germany, where he organized a clandestine operation in Stuttgart to hide Jews, so that eventually hundreds of them survived. It is certain that he maintained secret contact with the Barth household about these activities. It is also certain that he had relations with a circle in Munich to which long‐established friends of von Kirschbaum belonged. A member of this circle was the publisher Eugen Claassen, who because of his Swiss passport could travel to Basel in order to get crucial information or instructions. With the support of Müller, and using formulations suggested by Barth, perhaps the strongest contemporary Christian protest against the holocaust in Germany was written by this circle. Pastor Helmut Hesse of Wuppertal, who read out this text publicly, was killed in Dachau. It was, it seems, von Kirschbaum who maintained a close involvement in these conspiratorial activities.

Cooperation with the “Committee for a Free Germany” In 1944–1945 emigrants in Switzerland began organizing for Germany’s spiritual and political renewal after the war. Among them were distinguished personalities, including

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communists and social democrats, expelled from their country for political or racial reasons. Von Kirschbaum counted herself among the emigrants. Barth wrote that she became “a public personality. She holds diplomatic talks with heads of state and other authorities. As a representative of the Confessing Church, she makes speeches up and down the country, side by side with leftists. She plays an important and respected part in the coordinating committee of that movement, even serving as a member of the directorate. Only now do I see this side of her talents, which went untapped for so long” (KBA, letter to Kurt Mueller, 3 August 1945). She took the Barmen Declaration as the theological basis for her activism. For her it meant abandoning the “two‐kingdoms” doctrine that still dominated the church’s opposition to the German Christians. In other words, it meant abandoning the idea that outside the church Christians have to follow a different Lord than they do within it. Even the Confessing Church, she said, has not yet understood the full implications of Barmen. In supporting resistance to the Nazi regime, the international churches have affirmed, however, that confessing Jesus Christ as our only Lord must be realized also outside the church – in the struggle for justice and freedom. Justified in this way, Christian political involvement works for concrete goals, making common cause with whoever is engaged in the same struggle. Therefore she was not afraid to cooperate with communists. She could support limited alliances with them in working for justice and freedom – better with them, she wrote, than with the German postwar church, which she regarded as reactionary to the core. In 1945 she agreed with Barth in the task: “To help [the Germans] today means making this people once again responsible for their own lives, to free them slowly from the terrible dependence and foolishness into which their leaders, the blind leading the blind, have led them” (Koebler 1989, p. 89).

Being Together Having embarked on such an extraordinary path as a woman in her time, von Kirschbaum also emerged as a theological teacher. She made a remarkable contribution to the understanding of women in evangelical theology. Her work was proficient in ancient and modern biblical interpretation, in ecclesial dogmatics, and in contemporary discussions of feminism. While she was preparing lectures she had been invited to offer, Barth wrote her a poem: “Woman, once sent to undeserving man in paradise, has now, and all to the good, turned finally to herself….” (KBA, 17 August 1949). Her first lectures were preceded by two events. In the late summer of 1948, at the World Council of Churches Assembly in Amsterdam, Barth was assigned, probably through the efforts of Henrietta Visser ’t Hooft, to the committee on women. There he caused a stir by insisting that Ephesians 5:22–33 be considered alongside Galatians 3:28. In the fall of 1948 he then gave lectures in Bièvres near Paris on “The Reality of the New Human Being.” He suggested the idea that our being in the image of God is essentially our being‐ in‐relationship as “man and woman.” These events stimulated interest in what von Kirschbaum would say on the same hot topic. Alluding to Barth’s lectures, she presented her own ideas in the spring of 1949 in

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Bièvres, under the title, The Real Woman (Découverte de la femme, 1951). Then she gave another lecture in Basel on January 1951, “The Role of Women in the Proclamation of the Word.” At that time a referendum was about to be held on women’s ordination in the Swiss churches. This was prior to the series of political referenda in Switzerland on women’s suffrage, which did not begin until years later. Equality for women in the church – their ordination and their right to vote in ecclesiastical affairs – actually paved the way in Switzerland for women’s full right to vote, not granted for federal elections until 1971. To appreciate von Kirschbaum’s ideas, we need to consider three points. First, on this subject her ideas are not essentially different from Barth’s. We have to assume that they worked them out in conversation together, so that in the process Barth learned from her as she did also from him. From Amsterdam he wrote to her that he had fought in that commission on women “with my/your wisdom.” In her lectures she quoted from his Dogmatics, and when discussing man and woman in volume KD III/4 (pp. 127–269; esp. pp. 192–196), he in turn referred to what had been written by her. Once, in a public forum, when a male theologian spoke against women’s equality, Barth directly contradicted him: No, because in this matter he fully agreed with von Kirschbaum. Second, they agreed that theology’s responsibility was to develop a “doctrine of woman” that was truly evangelical. The question had to be thought out according to the Barmen Declaration. It had to be a response to Jesus Christ, the one Word of God, as attested for us in Holy Scripture. Theology’s tough‐minded claim was not to offer a special religious doctrine but a view of “the real woman.” Once in Amsterdam a theologian told Barth that because biblical statements about the subordination of women were all conditioned by the times, they had no authority for us. Our task was to speak about this matter with the mind of Jesus. To which Barth replied: “I don’t like your ‘mind of Jesus!’” (GA 15, p. 396). The mind of Jesus could not be found by a balloon ride into the heavens of humanistic theology. The true mind of Jesus is mediated through the word of the apostles and prophets, from which it is inseparable. Von Kirschbaum shared this basic conviction. A new orientation to the contemporary question of woman could only be found through fresh attention to Scripture. Finally, they concurred in the results of their inquiry. If we let the apostles and prophets finish speaking, then according to von Kirschbaum, what we will hear is the message of freedom. It is not a freedom that we have to win, but in which we are allowed to live as liberated human beings, because that is what we are. Her last sentence in Bièvres says: “Where men and women bear mutual witness to [this freedom] in the reality of their existence, they stand in the genuine complementarity that no longer admits of either inauthentic domination or inauthentic subjection” (Kirschbaum 1996, p. 171). Barth for his part summarizes his view like this: In Christ “male supremacy meets its limits – as does also that form of female irresponsibility whereby women exist only passively and put up with it. In subordination to the Lord, and doing the work he assigns us, men and women can only be first and last together, those who both give and receive, with no priority or subordination of gender in relation to the other.” Today it isn’t easy to see how von Kirschbaum and Barth could hold these last two points together: the method and the conclusion. In other words, it isn’t easy to see how they could hold biblical statements about woman’s subordination together with their

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own statements about mutuality and liberation, so that the woman doesn’t have to submit to the desires of the man and his claim to superiority. We seem to have an idea of hierarchy, on the one hand, and, on the other, an idea of true equality, grounded in equal grace for both. Shouldn’t we be satisfied with the conclusion, while quietly leaving the method behind? Or if, on their view, we can’t really have the one without the other, won’t we have to give up the conclusion, because by this method women will always be subordinated and enchained? Weren’t they wrong to suppose that this method can free women from their subjugation? Won’t the so‐called real woman be free only by consenting “voluntarily to her inferiority?” As Simone de Beauvoir observed, that conclusion would only mean perfecting man’s rule over woman. Von Kirschbaum explicitly agreed with de Beauvoir (Kirschbaum 1996, p. 167). Our difficulty may rest on our having become accustomed to other methods. In discussing the relation of man and woman, what Barth and von Kirschbaum were trying to do was to take seriously the basic decision of the Barmen Declaration. That decision meant the Word of God was not to be understood according to creaturely existence, but creaturely existence was to be understood according to the Word of God as attested in Scripture. Otherwise the Word of God would never be heard. Knee‐jerk biblicism was just as much out of the question as preconceived ideas from other sources. Simply to sanction what we already knew or believed was not a valid reason for consulting Scripture. It is significant that von Kirschbaum approached “the women’s question” primarily from an exegetical standpoint. Needless to say, she didn’t listen to Scripture in a vacuum. She did so in a particular situation, where Christians were either using the Bible to attack woman’s liberation or else were disregarding it altogether (or adopting only a small portion adjusted to their interests). In this context she turned to the Bible for a proper orientation to the whole controversy. She didn’t fail to engage the hard passages again and anew – that is, in light of “the one Word of God” – that seemed to undermine support for women’s free and emancipated existence. Her method thus departed from a merely biblicist approach. Certainly, by her method von Kirschbaum also received an orientation to her own situation. But this should not be confused with merely using Scripture to confirm preconceived ideas, a policy she rejected. Admittedly, her exegetical discussions demand the reader’s patience, as they unfold in a rather complex, circuitous way, as if cracking one of the highbrow riddles at the Bergli. As we consider her argument, three theses deserve our consideration. 1. To be human means to be man and woman – that is von Kirschbaum’s central thesis. No essential defining characteristic exists in humankind except that between man and woman. “There is no human form of being that is beyond or above man and woman. Humanity exists only in the dissimilar duality of man and woman” (von Kirschbaum 1996, p. 170). Humanity in general is a mere abstraction. Man and woman, in concrete distinction and relation, constitute “the real human being” (von Kirschbaum 1996, p. 55). Not apart from their difference, but only in it, are they completely equal. Their concrete difference determines them for encounter, for togetherness, for relationship, and thus for a sociable existence. It may be that “the unmarried man or woman lives more intensively in the encounter than do some married men and women” (von

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Kirschbaum 1996, p. 68). For von Kirschbaum this being‐in‐encounter as man and woman is what it means to be created in God’s image. “Since human encounter is constitutive of its very being, by the same token humanity is ready for encounter with the divine, that is, for divine grace. The relationship between the sexes derives its centrality from this [readiness]” (von Kirschbaum 1996, p. 57). Sexuality falls under God’s commandment, because human beings do not coexist apart from the interconnection of body and soul. Moreover, because the covenant of grace culminates in the self‐giving of God’s Son on the cross, and because this event is God’s mercy toward sinners, the relationship of man and woman in conformity to the covenant, that is, in self‐giving and mercy toward one another, emerges as a living parable of grace. Because it is good to be such a parable, this relationship can be affirmed as God’s good creation. From this vantage point, moreover, the goodness of celibacy, so painful in the Old Testament, can also be affirmed, for it points to “that relationship for which all ‘relationships’ between husbands and wives are but a preparation” (von Kirschbaum 1996, p. 93). From this standpoint, von Kirschbaum criticizes Gertrud Le Fort’s book The Eternal Woman. Focusing on the figure of Mary, Le Fort elevates woman into an ideal myth. Woman becomes the eternal feminine, transcending the concrete reality of man and woman in their difference and togetherness. By the same token von Kirschbaum also criticizes Simone de Beauvoir’s work Le deuxième sexe. De Beauvoir’s woman, who creates herself in the struggle for emancipation, finally mimics the self‐sufficiency of male privilege. In this way the concrete difference between man and woman does not belong essentially to humanity. Neither author, says von Kirschbaum, acknowledges the real human being – who “is not solitary,” but is “by nature a fellow human being” (von Kirschbaum 1996, p. 158). Nor does either appreciate God’s mercy in his Son, who, by becoming human in Jesus, makes us into fellow human beings. “The secret of our existence is disclosed in the light of encounter with him. If we have him as our fellow human being, then the very nature of [our] being a fellow human becomes intelligible to us as involving another [Jesus] who belongs to our own existence…. Only as taken together are man and woman the human being for whom Jesus lives, and hence the real human being.” Our concrete humanity is real, because it is already is created and given in Christ as a being‐in‐relationship with one another. Therefore, it means neither postulating an eternal ideal, nor creating ourselves by self‐emancipation. It is always twofold in its concreteness, because “there is no humanum above man and woman. And precisely the fact that there is not, constitutes grace” (von Kirschbaum 1996, p. 158). When this grace is acknowledged, man and woman will live together with gratitude “in genuine solidarity and hence in genuine partnership.” Moreover, where grace is acknowledged, neither partner triumphs ultimately over the other, neither woman over man, nor man over woman. 2. Nevertheless, how are we to understand the biblical passages about man and woman? Do they not teach the kind of hierarchy that excludes equality and mutuality? Von Kirschbaum thought that when used to legitimate inequality, the biblical passages were abused. The way to overcome such abuse was through better interpretation. Properly understood, she argued, the biblical passages support her central thesis. They show that humanity is constituted by two equals who are at once together and yet also really

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different. The relation of man and woman is truly a dissimilar duality, not a hierarchically ordered binary. The two who are so different are at the same time also truly equal. Neither their humanity nor their equality exists beyond their difference. Her interpretation walks a narrow line. Oppressive hierarchy is to be avoided as much as abstract individualism. The biblical statements fix no gender‐specific roles. They do not base gender relations on the inheritance of natural qualities, on socioeconomic disparities, or on biological traits of reproduction. To think otherwise would mean to do natural theology. The clue to the biblical statements is the covenant of grace, as attested by Scripture and fulfilled in Christ, who laid down his life for our salvation. The creation stories depict this covenant in its preparation. Their point is not that the woman was created from the man, but that they were both created by God (Gen 2:18ff.). Their being created in mutual encounter is an assault upon the isolated, selfish, and therefore inhuman human being (the peculiar danger, perhaps, of the male). The human being without a companion cannot save himself from isolation. By creating the woman, God provides a “helper” who opposes that form of existence in which man exists only for himself as endangered and dangerous. The woman serves as man’s helper by “limiting any notion of self‐sufficiency” (von Kirschbaum 1996, p. 58). This limit is the condition for acknowledging the otherness of the other. It prevents the isolated “I” from treating the other as its possession. Von Kirschbaum says: “Through encounter with the woman the male becomes man” (von Kirschbaum 1996, p. 59). Only by affirming the woman does the man become fully human. “And so man and woman face each other in an ultimate freedom and in an ultimate bond: in an ultimate freedom, because each of them has emerged from the hand of God; and in an ultimate bond, because it is both together who constitute the humanity in whom God is well pleased” (von Kirschbaum 1996, p. 59). How sin reverses and distorts this relationship is shown by Gen. 3. The man now lords it over the woman, and the woman becomes his possession. In this story of misery and disorder, however, the Old Testament intimates that the reversal will be reversed. The woman becomes a “helper” in another sense: as a mother she is a “bearer of hope” (von Kirschbaum 1996, p. 61). This is the hope of the coming son who will overcome misery and disorder. According to von Kirschbaum, it is at last fulfilled when that Son comes in whose procreation “man’s lordship is disregarded.” In that fulfillment, however, the mother’s biological role and spiritual consent are not disregarded. “Rather, woman is accorded preeminence in a manner that surpasses every other form of preeminence” (von Kirschbaum 1996, p. 133). But this reversal is only by Christ’s grace – by Christ, who for the sake of God, humiliated himself to those beneath him in order to love them and set them free. It is in this light that von Kirschbaum reads Eph. 5. This Christ is the head of his community. The community of the church is his body in subordination to him – that is, in the life that is determined by him and by his redeeming and liberating love. According to Paul, the woman symbolizes the whole community of men and women. The woman does nothing alien in her subordination to Christ, and really only to Christ, because in this way Christ the Lord is with her as his body. If Paul also calls man the head of the woman, that does not mean the man becomes a Christ or her savior. The only parallel in this headship metaphor is that in love the man has to acknowledge the woman as

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beloved by Christ. And this love means soberly, “to allow the other person’s existence to become a condition of one’s own existence” (von Kirschbaum 1996, p. 69). Therefore, only by affirming the woman does the man emerge “in all the fullness of his nature as a man” (von Kirschbaum 1996, p. 69). Moreover, “only when the woman truly is the vis‐à‐vis of the man and in that way truly remedies his loneliness,” and only by opposing his existing for himself alone, “does she regain her original place of honour as a ‘helper’” (von Kirschbaum 1996, p. 75). 3. How men and women are related in the church carries, according to von Kirschbaum, a significance that is more general and exemplary. Ordaining women to the ministry is not enough, she felt, if it means no more than gaining a place in the pulpit. Women’s full participation has to mean a fundamental change in the whole system of church governance. Women have to aim at the church’s renewal – at “its edification.” Moreover, women can only take seriously “as our partners in dialogue, [those men] who think and speak on the basis of this same perspective” (von Kirschbaum 1996, p. 56). Here she stresses especially three points. First, in a certain sense, man is to woman as Israel is to the church. From the cross Jesus joins together Mary and John: “He said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother’” (John 19:26–27). The two stand, von Kirschbaum suggests, for Israel and the church. She comments: “The legitimate path for [Christ’s] church [is] drawn from among Israel … [and] leads to the apostles …. There is no other future for Mary [other] than this. Conversely, though, since [Mary] is the church drawn from among Israel, she is the mother of the apostle, his origin, that which belongs to him. Thus the Lord has brought them together, and thus shall they remain together” (von Kirschbaum 1996, p. 134). As with Israel and the church, so with man and woman, each now belongs to the other in concrete unity and distinction. Second, the renewed church will downgrade hierarchical structures in favor of mature activity by the whole community. The office of “apostle,” von Kirschbaum observes, was limited to the original witnesses of the New Testament. Women no less than men may hold fast to the apostolic witness “irrespective of which vocation they follow” (von Kirschbaum 1996, p. 117). Although women may indeed be called to the ministry of Word and sacrament, they must remain alert to the dangers of office. “The contrast between officeholder and congregation, which has also become an ever more pronounced feature of the Protestant church, is alien to the New Testament, as is any distinction between clergy and laity in the church. ‘You have all received the Spirit’” (von Kirschbaum 1996, p. 181). The relation of office and community is again one of unity in distinction. Finally, von Kirschbaum ventured a favorable construction on the apostolic word about “woman’s silence in the community.” This silence does not mean a total ban on woman’s speaking in the congregation, for women certainly had a say in early Christianity. Nor does it support “the inertia and thoughtlessness of a custom that prevents women in particular from issuing a lively summons to a fresh restructuring of our church services today” (von Kirschbaum 1996, p. 114). On the contrary, what is meant is “silence in the Holy Spirit.” This silence is a necessary, active function for the upbuilding of the community. It “points to the limitation of all human speech, and designates the sphere of ‘the one thing necessary’ that Jesus attributes to Mary.” It is silence

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born of respect for the risen Christ, who rules the Church. With it women may remind overbearing men of that humility that befits the whole church. “They restrain it from any form of misguided fanaticism” (von Kirschbaum 1996, p. 112). Von Kirschbaum hoped that this way women might help renew the church by actively participating in all its functions. Such a hope is the legacy of this exceptional woman. In reading the chapter on man and woman in Barth’s Church Dogmatics, we can see how much he learned from her insights. He found her teaching helpful for his own teaching. Certainly, her teaching is an example of the woman existing as “co‐ worker” and “helper.”

Summary “Work that is not cooperation is little more than busy idleness,” so said Karl Barth. His intensive cooperation with Charlotte von Kirschbaum was a happy illustration of this truth. She supported him in the dark days of 1933, when the Christian churches had forgotten their vocation, and later after his banishment from Germany by the Nazis. And he supported her, when she herself began to publish her own lectures about the “Question of Women.” Both lived in agreement with one another. References Brian, M. (1934). Das Herz is wach: Briefe einer Liebe. Tübingen: R. Wunderlich. Busch, E. (1996). Unter dem Bogen des einen Bundes. Karl Barth und die Juden 1933– 1945. Neukirchen‐Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag. Kirschbaum, C.v. (1996). The Question of Woman: The Collected Writings of Charlotte

von Kirschbaum (ed. E. Jackson). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Koebler, R. (1989). Schattenarbeit: Charlotte von Kirschbaum – Die Theologin an der Seite Karl Barths. Bonn: Pahl‐Rugenstein. Pestalozzi‐Eidenbenz, G. (1993). Ein Leben. 1893–1978. Tagebücher und Briefe. Aarau: Verlag Röthlisberger.

CHAPTER 56

Barth and Tolkien George Hunsinger

Introduction J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973) has been acclaimed, however improbably, as “author of the century.” Three reasons have been suggested for this accolade: the democratic, the generic, and the qualitative. The democratic reason rests on sales figures and opinion polls, both of which have been astonishing. Generically, the argument is that fantasy, and especially heroic fantasy, was unexpectedly catapulted into a respectable literary form by Tolkien’s trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, first published in the 1950s. The author generated a new appreciation for this ancient genre, one that shows no signs of abating any time soon. Finally, the literary quality of Tolkien’s work, though not without its detractors, has moved many readers, including W. H. Auden, in a strong and estimable way. As Thomas Shippey observes, Tolkien reconciled “what appear to be incompatibles: heathen and Christian, escapism and reality, immediate victory and lasting defeat, lasting defeat, and ultimate victory.” At the same time a “deep sadness” pervades his work, cheerful hobbits, imposing wizards, and elysian elves notwithstanding. We shall return to the theme of sadness (Shippey 2000, pp. xvii–xxiv; quotation from xxxii). The Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886–1968) was almost Tolkien’s exact contemporary. Like Tolkien, he broke with existing conventions and had to swim against the stream throughout his career. My teacher Hans Frei used to say that if Barth had not been a theologian, he would have been recognized as one of the great minds of the twentieth century. In any case he is widely recognized as perhaps the century’s greatest theologian. In robust evangelical conviction, penetrating scriptural insight, range of historical knowledge, sharp theological polemic, and moving rhetorical power, not to mention mere quality and quantity of output, Barth stands in a class by himself. I myself once ventured to liken his imposing work, the Church Dogmatics (1932–1967) – a nearly

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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10 000 page argument published between the covers of 14 separate books  –  to the cathedral at Chartres. Like the cathedral Barth’s dogmatics consists, as it were, of flying buttresses, intricate, labyrinthine passageways, an almost endless array of well‐carved sculptures, and rose windows dancing with fire. Along with complex traces of gravitas and humilitas, Barth’s dogmatics is suffused, as Bonhoeffer remarked, with an exuberant note of hilaritas. If Tolkien’s pervasive sadness is perhaps reminiscent of Bach’s Art of the Fugue, Barth’s irrepressible good cheer seems closer to Mozart’s Magic Flute. As far as I know, little or no effort has been made to bring Tolkien and Barth into some kind of conceptual relation. A comparison is possible, however, because Tolkien, a devout Catholic who attended mass every morning, built subterranean Christian themes into the deep structure of his Lord of the Rings. In what follows I will first offer a sketch of how Barth understood the meaning of agape. I will then turn to the problem of evil, drawing some parallels between Barth’s difficult conception of nothingness and Tolkien’s frightening depiction of militant, self‐seeking wickedness. Finally I will reflect on the eschatology of agape. I will correlate Barth’s conception of how love abides in the face of evil (1 Cor. 13:8, 13) with Tolkien’s intimation of what he once called “the long defeat.”

The Meaning of Agape Let me begin on a polemical note. Contrary to what one encounters in much ethical, philosophical, and psychological literature, agape is not well defined as benevolence or even as compassion. Although benevolence and compassion can be important aspects of agape, it would be a mistake to suppose that they are simply interchangeable terms for same thing. Neither benevolence nor compassion captures the heart of what the New Testament means by agape, because neither is sufficiently self‐involving. Benevolence and compassion can exist in a detached and impersonal way. Agape in the New Testament sense, however, always means self‐giving for the sake of fellowship or koinonia. For example, I might feel good will and compassion for the hungry, I might provide them with food and even establish a soup kitchen, but unless I gave of myself for the sake of entering into fellowship with them, I would not yet have acted with agape. I would still be keeping them at arm’s length. I would be treating them more nearly as objects than as subjects (or potential subjects) of love. It should be noted that self‐giving for the sake of koinonia does not, in itself, exhaust the meaning of agape. My point, however, is that without self‐giving and self‐involvement, agape does not exist. Agape in the New Testament involves more than just benevolence and compassion. The New Testament meaning of agape cannot be captured without referring to the triune God and the cross of Christ. I suspect that is why so many ethical, philosophical, and psychological definitions of agape go astray. They proceed as if the Holy Trinity and Christ’s cross do not exist, or at least as if for purposes of definition they can be ignored. Yet the Trinity and the cross are essential not peripheral to determining what agape means in Christian ethics. Neither as revealed in the Trinity nor as poured out on Calvary can agape be understood merely as benevolence and compassion. As enacted in the triune life of God and

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then poured out for our sakes on Calvary, agape is essentially love in the form of self‐ giving. In the New Testament agape is either understood from this theological center or not at all. If there is any place for benevolence and compassion, as there sometimes is, it arises only secondarily from there. Without establishing self‐giving for the sake of koinonia as that which is central and essential, definitions of agape as benevolence and compassion result in a form of misplaced concreteness that easily becomes misleading (Outka 1972, pp. 208–209; cf. pp. 66–67). “In agape‐love one gives oneself to another with no expectation of a return, in a pure venture, even at the risk of ingratitude, even at the risk of the other person’s refusal to make a response of love” (CD IV/2, p. 745 rev.). Karl Barth summarizes his understanding of agape in four points, each of which is centered on the triune God. First, he says, “God’s loving is concerned with a seeking and creation of fellowship [or koinonia and shalom] for its own sake.” By loving us in Jesus Christ, even to the point of dying on the cross, God takes us up into the fellowship or communion that he is and enjoys eternally in himself as the Holy Trinity. “Loving us,” Barth writes, “God does not give us something, but himself; and giving us himself, giving us his only Son, he gives us everything. The love of God has only to be his love to be everything for us” (CD II/1, p. 276). Second, “God’s loving us is concerned with a seeking and creation of fellowship without reference to an existing aptitude or worthiness on the part of the object of his love.” God’s pure and unmotivated agape arises simply and spontaneously from himself. It is not conditioned by any prior reciprocity of love. Any such reciprocity is itself the creation of God’s love. God does not love us because we are lovable; on the contrary, we are lovable because God loves us. God loved us while we were yet sinners, enemies, and helpless. His self‐giving agape equips lost sinners in spite of themselves for fellowship or koinonia with himself and therefore also with one another. This is the mystery and miracle of self‐giving agape as “the almighty love of God” (CD II/1, p. 278 rev.). Third, “God’s loving is an end in itself.” All other purposes that are willed and achieved by God are internal to his action of agape; they are contained in it and explained by it. God does not will even his own glory for its own sake, but only for the sake of his agape. God’s eternal glory is intrinsic to his triune life as a communion of love. It is therefore also intrinsic to his free gift of agape for us in Jesus Christ. God loves because he loves. His agape is itself the supreme end that includes all other divine ends in itself (CD II/1, pp. 279–280). Finally, God’s loving is necessary in one sense though contingent in another. As the being, the essence and the nature of God, God’s agape is necessary. It is necessary in the sense that it belongs to the divine essence by definition. It rests on nothing other than itself, nor is it conditioned by anything other than itself. God’s agape is therefore eternal as God himself is eternal. His agape needs no object outside his inner trinitarian life. It is wholly self‐sufficient in and for itself. The Father loves the Son, and the Son loves the Father, in the communion of the Holy Spirit, to all eternity. Nevertheless, by a free act of grace God does restrict his agape to his inner life. In Jesus Christ he allows it to overflow for the sake of the world. The act is free because God owes us nothing. He “does not owe us either our being, or in our being his love.” Nevertheless, God gives us our being and his love. His agape gives us our being as creatures and, at great cost to himself, our new being as redeemed creatures despite our sin (CD II/1, pp. 280–281).

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Barth so defines agape that, unlike mere benevolence or compassion, or any other substitute for pure self‐giving, it applies at every level. It applies not only to God’s inner trinitarian life and to God’s agape toward us, but with appropriate modifications also to our love for God in return, and on that basis to our love for one another (Outka 1972, p. 246).

The Mystery of Evil in Barth and Tolkien Some interesting convergences exist between Barth and Tolkien in their depictions of evil. No more can be offered here than a sketch. But I want to lift up some parallels between Barth’s difficult idea of “nothingness” and an important character in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings known as the “Witch‐king of Angmar” or “Lord of the Nazgûl.” Although the term “nothingness” is the standard translation, it does not capture what Barth meant by das Nichtige. For one thing the term “nothingness” is too static and abstruse, whereas what Barth had in mind was something dynamic and sinister. Das Nichtige denotes an active cosmic power, a power of destruction, a power of chaos, negation, and ruin. “In this sense,” Barth writes, “das Nichtige is really privation, the attempt to defraud God of his honor and right, and at the same time to rob the creature of its salvation and right” (CD III/3, p. 353). The active power of das Nichtige, for Barth, is at once outwardly repulsive (CD III/3, p. 303) and “intrinsically evil” (CD III/3, p. 354). It is also “altogether inexplicable” (CD III/3, p. 354). It cannot be explained but only described. Its origin is obscure, but its outcome is certain. For Barth, it is not das Nichtige that delegitimizes God by calling into question his power and love, but rather God who in his power and love delegitimizes das Nichtige and defeats it. Over against God, das Nichtige can be defined only as something conflicted and absurd. It is, to use Barth’s term, “the impossible possibility” (CD III/3, p. 351). For all its dreadfulness, it is at once actual and yet empty at the same time. The Lord God did not create it, and yet somehow permits it, only to delimit and defeat it at unspeakable cost to himself. Das Nichtige stands for the pure evilness of evil. It has no right to exist and serves no greater good. For Barth, evil is not rightly conceived as the means to some higher end, otherwise it would not be wholly evil. Evil represents only “what God does not will and therefore negates and rejects” (CD III/3, p. 353). It is somehow that which God passed over and rejected when he uttered his absolute Yes in the pretemporal election of Jesus Christ. God’s primordial act of negation, the No which accompanied his Yes, does not in any sense “cause” das Nichtige to exist, a point on which Barth is often misunderstood. Rather, this primordial divine rejection only locates das Nichtige theologically and ontologically, so to speak, by way of “broken” description (CD III/3, p. 294). For Barth, the mystery of evil is unfathomable. It imposes limits on clear and coherent discourse. Das Nichtige’s ultimate defeat and abolition, for Barth, “are primarily and properly God’s own affair” (CD III/3, p. 354). Although the creature may be given a secondary role in bringing about its demise, it is finally only God who achieves the victory. “His free grace alone is victorious,” writes Barth, “even where it is given to his creature to be victorious in this conflict” (CD III/3, p. 355). Only God can save us from this sinister cosmic power.

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The fearfulness of das Nichtige and yet also its emptiness are revealed in the cross of Christ. The cross shows us how seriously God takes the menace of evil, even as, by a kind of divine jiu‐jitsu, he subverts it to serve his own purposes. “The creature as such,” states Barth, “would be no match for nothingness and certainly unable to overcome it” (CD III/3, p. 356). Only God can bring good out of evil, and that God does so does not make evil good. God’s power is perfected in weakness as he reigns triumphantly from the cross. The answer to the problem of evil is therefore not an argument but a name – the name above every name, the name of Jesus, crucified yet highly exalted, to which every knee is destined to bow. Tolkien’s Witch‐king of Angmar is chief of the nine Ringwraiths. These terrorizing Wraiths are, in the saga, Sauron’s “most terrible servants; darkness went with them, and they cried with the voices of death” (Tolkien 2001, p. 346). Their long‐standing use of the Nine Rings to amass power and wealth had served to undo their very beings. As Ringwraiths, they were enslaved to Sauron and diminished in substance, having become tormented bearers of torment, and undead purveyors of death. Riding on ­hideous winged creatures, they draped their empty forms with ominous black cloaks. Here is Tolkien’s account of the Witch‐king as he confronted Gandalf at the city gate during the siege of Gondor: In rode the Lord of the Nazgûl. A great black shape against the fires beyond he loomed up, grown to a vast menace of despair. In rode the Lord of the Nazgûl, under the archway that no enemy ever yet had passed, and all fled before his face. All save one. There waiting, silent, and still in the space before the Gate, sat Gandalf upon Shadowfax: Shadowfax who alone among the free horses of the earth endured the terror, unmoving, steadfast as a graven image in Rath Dínen. “You cannot enter here,” said Gandalf, and the huge shadow halted. “Go back to the abyss prepared for you! Go back! Fall into the nothingness that awaits you and your Master. Go!” The Black Rider flung back his hood, and behold! he had a kingly crown; and yet upon no head visible was it set. The red fires shone between it and the mantled shoulders vast and dark. From a mouth unseen there came a deadly laughter. “Old fool!” .he said. “Old fool! This is my hour. Do you not know Death when you see it? Die now and curse in vain!” And with that he lifted high his sword and flames ran down the blade (Tolkien 1955, pp. 102–103).

Of particular interest here is the way in which Tolkien’s Black Rider captures something of Barth’s notion of das Nichtige. Like Barth’s concept, the Lord of the Nazgûl is an active, terrifying force of ruin, who is at once outwardly repulsive and intrinsically evil. Like Barth’s concept, he is inherently conflicted and absurd. Above all, he is actual and yet empty at the same time. When he flings back his hood, he bears a kingly crown that rests on no visible skull, with eyes glowing like red coals, while his deadly laughter shrieks forth from no visible mouth. Tolkien’s dead but undead Black Rider is as good a symbol as any, I submit, for Barth’s impossible possibility.

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The Black Rider’s demise comes at the hand of Éowyn, a young woman who had disguised herself as a man in order to take part in the Battle of Pelennor. She is drawn unexpectedly into hand‐to‐hand combat with the fearsome Lord of the Nazgûl. Tolkien writes: With her last strength she drove her sword between crown and mantle, as the great shoulders bowed before her. The sword broke sparkling into many shards. The crown rolled away with a clang. Éowyn fell forward upon her fallen foe. But lo! the mantle and hauberk were empty. Shapeless they lay now on the ground, torn and tumbled; and a cry went up into the shuddering air, and faded to a shrill wailing, passing with the wind, a voice bodiless and thin that died, and was swallowed up, and was never heard again in that age of this world (Tolkien 1955, p. 117).

Again, we are given an image for the paradox of evil as something powerful and yet hollow at the same time. Éowyn must expend her last remaining strength as she thrusts her sword into the darkness between the Black Rider’s mantle and crown. Her sword shatters into sparkling pieces as she delivers the fatal blow. And yet when she throws herself down upon her vanquished foe, nothing is left. The Black Rider’s mantle and hauberk are empty, lying shapeless and ruined on the ground. The sudden demise of the Black Rider is an example of what Tolkien meant by “eucatastrophe.” It points to a narrative in which an imminent catastrophe is reversed into unexpected blessing through the secret operation of divine providence or something like divine providence. Tolkien regarded Christ’s resurrection as the central and definitive eucatastrophe. He drew analogies from it to similar reversals in romantic literature and fairy tales. For such surprises, he wrote, “I coined the word ‘eucatastrophe:’ the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears.” “The Resurrection,” he continued, “was the greatest ‘eucatastrophe’ possible in the greatest Fairy Story – and produces that essential emotion: Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love. Of course I do not mean that the Gospels tell what is only a fairy‐story; but I do mean very strongly that they do tell a fairy‐ story: the greatest. Man the story‐teller would have to be redeemed in a manner consonant with his nature: by a moving story” (Tolkien 1981, pp. 100–101). What Barth and Tolkien seem to share is an idea known as the privative view of evil. According to this view, which goes back at least to Augustine, evil is to goodness as blindness is to the eye. It has no substance of its own but can only sap and destroy the integrity of that which exists. It does not belong to God’s good creation but can only prey upon its substance like a leech. Evil in this cosmic sense is no more and no less than the devitalizing power of nothingness. It works by way of ruin to deform and pervert the good. Neither Barth nor Tolkien is lacking in a sense that evil can sometimes be subtle, alluring, and ambiguous as well. A fuller discussion than is possible here would need to take this point into account. Even when evil is outwardly alluring, however, it is still always conflicted, repulsive, and empty at the core. When the Black Rider is defeated at the hands of Éowyn, he is said to cry out with a thin, shrill wail. “A cry went up into the shuddering air,” writes Tolkien, “and [his voice] … passing with the wind … was never heard again in that age of this world” (Tolkien 1955,

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p. 117). Note the tacit implication that the Lord of the Nazgûl, like Satan after tempting Jesus, has not been vanquished forever, but has only “departed until an opportune time” (Luke 4:13). Much earlier in the story a similar intimation is registered. “And is that the end of the Black Riders?” asked Frodo. “No,” said Gandalf. “Their horses must have perished, and without them they are c­ rippled. But the Ringwraiths themselves cannot be so easily destroyed” (Tolkien 1954, p. 236)

The Eschatology of Agape As a young man Tolkien had been summoned from Oxford to fight in World War I. He took part in the dreadful Battle of the Somme, experiencing its mass slaughter and rotting corpses at first hand. Only trench fever rescued him from the front lines, sending him back to a hospital in England. At around this time he received news that two of his closest friends were killed in the war. “By 1918,” he remarked, “all but one of my close friends were dead” (Tolkien 1954, p. 7). Tolkien knew other sorrows as well, not least the death of his father when he was only a boy of three, followed by the death of his mother when he was 12. There is a sadness in much of what Tolkien wrote, the burden of which is that one has to fight against evil regardless of the knowledge that it cannot be permanently suppressed. “Always after a defeat and a respite,” says Gandalf, “the Shadow takes another shape and grows again” (Tolkien 1954, p. 60). This remark expresses Tolkien’s sense that we are faced with the fragility of goodness and the resilience of evil. His noblest characters are those who fight on knowing they will not finally prevail. Galadriel tells Frodo she has dwelt with Celeborn, wisest of the elves, “since the days of dawn, … and together through ages … we have fought the long defeat” (Tolkien 1954, p. 372). This melancholy reflection echoes Elrond, who states earlier in the story: “I have seen … many defeats, and many fruitless victories” (Tolkien 1954, p. 256). An underlying theme of The Lord of the Rings is “that no victory is complete, that evil rises again, that even victory brings loss” (Hammond and Scull 2005, p. 319). Tolkien attributed this vision to his Christian faith. “Actually,” he wrote in a letter, “I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’.” He went on to add: “though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory” (Tolkien 1981, Letter to Amy Ronald, 15 December 1956, p. 195). Tolkien conceived of Middle‐Earth as occurring after the Fall of Adam but before the coming of Redemption in Moses and Christ. Any glimpses of final victory were  overshadowed in his stories by his sense of the long defeat. Nevertheless, because of Moses and Christ the forces of evil cannot prevail and the long defeat is not the last word. Tolkien’s vision of the long defeat bears on the eschatology of agape. Among other things, it offers a corrective to any ill‐considered talk in Christian circles (whether

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academic or ecclesial) about “human flourishing” or “thriving.” It reminds us that there can be no theology of glory (theologia gloria) divorced from a theology of the cross (theologia crucis). Not even Paul’s famous hymn to agape in 1 Cor. 13 is without a note of sober realism. It avoids Tolkien’s melancholic tone without sidestepping his profundity in knowing that we walk by faith and not by sight. For Paul agape cannot be divorced from long‐suffering (I Cor. 13:4). It has considered all the facts, taking iniquity into account, and still rejoices in the truth (1 Cor. 13:6). However melancholic it may sometimes be, agape nevertheless displays the cardinal biblical virtue of hypomone  –  a word that has no good single translation. In the English Bible it appears variously as patience, endurance, waiting, persevering. It would apply to Joseph in the pit, Moses in the wilderness, Stephen being stoned to death, Paul in chains, and even Jesus on the cross. Hypomone is a matter of clinging to God and his promises in the midst of every trial and adversity, of waiting for God through every dark night of the soul with patience, groaning, and eager longing (1 Cor. 13:7). “On this wide and complicated front,” writes Barth, “there is no certain victory apart from that to which Paul points” – namely, the victory of Christ the Royal Man, who has absorbed all evil into himself for our sakes in order to destroy it and rise in glory from the dead. When Christians persist in love in spite of every evil, they participate in the victory of the Royal Man, their living Head. With their hypomone and unflagging agape, “they withstand the whole world of hostile forces and defeat” (CD IV/2, p. 835). We may suggest in conclusion that in spite of the long defeat, faith, hope, and love abide; and they do so because of the risen Christ who has undone sin and vanquished death. Faith, hope, and agape, these three abide, but the greatest of these is agape. As Barth states, the other two abide “only as and because agape abides.” Agape is indeed “the greatest of these” (1 Cor. 13:13), because “it is the future eternal light [of Christ] shining in the present” (CD IV/2, p. 840). Agape – self‐giving to God and to one’s neighbor – is therefore “the eternal activity of the Christian” (CD IV/2, p. 840). It is final and supreme in itself, because the risen Lord in whom it participates is final and supreme, the Alpha and the Omega, in himself. Like Tolkien, Barth suggests in conclusion that the risen Christ is the reason why “it is agape alone that counts, and agape alone that conquers.” Agape is the way when there is no way, the victory hidden in love’s every defeat (CD IV/2, 840). References Hammond, W.G. and Scull, C. (2005). The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Outka, G. (1972). Agape: An Ethical Analysis. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Shippey, T. (2000). Author of the Century. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Tolkien, J.R.R. (1954). The Fellowship of the Ring I, 2e. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Tolkien, J.R.R. (1955). The Return of the King. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Tolkien, J.R.R. (1981). The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (ed. H. Carpenter). London: George Allen & Unwin. Tolkien, J.R.R. (2001). The Silmarillion (ed. C. Tolkien). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Part IV

Barth and Major Themes

CHAPTER 57

Barth and Modern Liberal Theology Gary Dorrien

Introduction Karl Barth’s relationship to liberal theology was momentous and ironic. For two centuries the pressure of modern science, biblical criticism, and Enlightenment philosophy made the liberal strategy in theology seem imperative. Barth changed the field of theology by overthrowing this presumption, repudiating the liberals who taught him at Berlin and Marburg, Adolf von Harnack and Wilhelm Herrmann. For many years he condemned liberal theology with accusatory flair until he wrote off the subject as no longer important, but Barth retained crucial ideas from Herrmann and G.W.F. Hegel, and he never stopped interrogating the quintessential liberal theologian, Friedrich Schleiermacher, whom he greatly admired. The cornerstone of liberalism is the assertion of the supreme value of the individual, an idea rooted in Christian theology, the Magna Carta Libertatum of 1215, and Renaissance humanism. As a political philosophy, liberalism originated in the seventeenth century as the claim that individuals have natural rights to freedom. The state has a sacred duty to protect liberty, or tolerance is natural to a rational state existing to protect the natural rights of citizens, or both. The state must prevent the tyranny of the mob and religion must be separated from politics. As an economic theory, modern liberalism originated in the eighteenth century as a defense of free trade and self‐regulating markets. As a cultural tradition it arose in the eighteenth century as a humanistic ethic and a rationalist critique of tradition and authority‐based belief. The universal goal of human beings is to realize their freedom, and state power is justified only to the extent that it enables and protects individual liberty. These principles defined liberalism wherever capitalism spread, yielding liberal theologies that affirmed modern humanism, biblical criticism, and Enlightenment philosophy.

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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England had schools of mildly liberalizing theology and aggressive rationalist criticism stretching back, respectively, to the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, but no liberal theology movement until the end of the nineteenth century. Germany had the first fully liberal tradition of theology, dating back to the mid‐eighteenth century, where it helped that every German prince had to have his own university. The USA produced liberal theologies from the mid‐eighteenth century onward but only a trickle of them until the late nineteenth century. By the time that England and the USA developed significant movements of liberal theology, liberalism itself had morphed into liberal democracy under pressure from democratic movements, variously contesting older traditions of liberal individualism and elitism. Thus, liberal theologies varied in how they absorbed the social idealism and progressive politics of late nineteenth‐century liberalism. Religion, from the beginning, was distinctly troublesome for liberal ideology. Some theological liberals harkened back to John Milton and the radical Puritans of the English revolution, prizing faith and religious liberty and contending for the sacred duty of the state to protect liberty. Others took for granted that Thomas Hobbes and Immanuel Kant defined the liberal idea, in which liberalism was secular and rational, religion was problematic (except, for Kantians, as a guardian of morality), and the rational state was naturally tolerant. Liberals sought to disenfranchise state religion, or refashion it, as in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s National Church semiecumenism. Often they sought to establish a new positive ideology, sometimes on an implicitly religious (liberal Protestant) basis. Usually they cited John Locke for support, wherever they stood on the spectrum of liberal ideologies. Always they protected the liberties of society’s most productive class, the bourgeoisie. The founders of modern liberalism had an ambiguous relationship to their own rhetoric of freedom, for liberalism arose as an ideological justification of capitalism and as tolerant relief from the religious wars of the seventeenth century. In both cases, the champions of liberal ideology exalted human dignity while denigrating or denying the humanity of vast numbers of human beings. Theories of racial, sexual, and cultural inferiority disqualified most human beings from their rights, while liberals designed a supposedly natural political economy based on self‐interested market exchanges that served the interests of the bourgeois class. The liberal state tolerated plural religious traditions and posed as a neutral guarantor of the rights of individuals and communities to pursue diverse interests, which did not stop liberals from denying rights of citizenship and humanity to human beings who were not literate, white, male, and owners of property like themselves. Modern liberal theology arose as an aspect of this story. Every tradition of liberal theology emphasized the individual’s right to intellectual freedom as a bedrock principle, yielding key commonalities between European and North American liberals. Liberals embraced the historical critical approach to the Bible, allowed science to explain the world, looked beyond the church for answers to their questions, and refused to establish or compel religious beliefs on the basis of external authority. Other factors defined liberal theology only in given contexts. In the USA, the movements for liberal theology and social gospel progressivism were deeply intertwined and eventually synonymous. In Britain, liberal theology did not conflate with the social gospel except in exceptional cases; British

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Christian socialism was mostly Anglo‐Catholic. In Germany, liberal theology and a nationalistic social gospel folded together. The German case was fateful for liberal theology, because the dominant version of it was Ritschlian theology  –  a species of Culture Protestantism emphasizing historical criticism, social religion, conservative politics, Germany’s cultural greatness, and Germany’s esteemed monarchy and military. Barth’s rebellion against his Ritschlian teachers in 1914 was a protest against the patriotic gore they espoused in blessing the German war effort. Then he revised his estimate of the problem, eventually claiming in 1921 that the entire modern tradition of theology from Schleiermacher onward was fatally corrupted by liberalism. Barth’s rendering of the liberal tradition and his blistering attack upon it were enormously influential in twentieth‐century theology. Both targeted something real – the modern overthrow of scriptural and church authority. His version of what happened, however, was misleading concerning German liberalism and him. Schleiermacher did not call himself a liberal, nor did his followers, nor did Hegelian theologians, nor did the mediating schools of theology that variously blended Schleiermacher, Hegel, and Pietism. For most of the nineteenth century, Kantians owned the liberal designation in German theology, and even Ritschlians usually did not call themselves liberals, although Harnack was a telling exception. Barth’s onslaught against liberalism made it hard to remember that “liberal” had long meant something quite specific in German theology. He also exaggerated key parts of his personal story to make it a better story. Barth keenly recognized, however, that liberal theology grew into a powerful and diverse tradition by outgrowing its origins as an ideology of freethinking, antichurch criticism. This was the legacy of Schleiermacher, who turned liberalism into a church theology. Schleiermacher claimed to have no theology of his own; he merely explicated the church’s experience of redemption in Christ. Barth perceived that Schleiermacher’s brand of liberal theology had the greatest staying power because it expounded its own truth, independent of philosophy and apologetics, like Barth (Dorrien 2012, pp. 3–11).

The Barthian Revolt The story of Barth overthrowing his liberal teachers is the founding narrative of twentieth‐century theology, although Barth overdramatized it. He began his theological studies in 1904 at the University of Bern, where his father Fritz Barth taught biblical theology and embarrassed Barth by opposing biblical criticism. Barth studied under Harnack in 1906 for a semester at Berlin, where he hung on Harnack’s every word, and under Adolf Schlatter in 1907 at Tübingen, where he sneered at Schlatter’s conservatism, resentfully indulging his father. In 1908 Barth moved to Marburg and enthralled at Herrmann’s christocentric blend of Kant, Schleiermacher, and Albrecht Ritschl – three kinds of liberalism synthesized by Herrmann’s assurance that the living Christ can be known personally. Kant consigned religion to the moral concerns of practical reason, identifying good religion wholly with moral faith  –  the struggle to conform one’s will to the good. Schleiermacher taught that religious feeling (Gefühl) is a deeper aspect of human

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e­xperience than any kind of reason or even sensation, and religion expresses this pre‐­ ­ reflective awareness of reality, a richer wellspring than mere Kantian moral ­grasping. Ritschl embraced Kant’s division of knowledge, Kant’s emphasis on moral faith, and Schleiermacher’s emphasis on religious experience, but contended that Kant and Schleiermacher misconstrued Christianity by evading its sociohistorical character. Christianity is irreducibly social and historical, a Jesus movement with a distinct social ethical character defined by the teaching of Jesus. Theology, to be truly modern and Christian, had to embrace historical consciousness. Herrmann began his career in the late 1870s as a follower of Ritschl who accentuated Ritschl’s Kantian repudiation of metaphysical theology. Ritschl taught that Christian truth is historical by virtue of its relation to Jesus, who inspired the kingdom‐ oriented community of value that is the body of Christ. Christian faith is grounded in historical facts that are open to historical criticism and confirmed by it. In 1886 Herrmann revised this argument in his book The Communion of the Christian with God, contending that the history‐making figure of Jesus is not the crucial point. What matters is the inner life of Jesus that is knowable only to faith. Christianity is historical because it bears the spiritual reality and power that makes history, not because it is founded on historical facts confirmed by historical criticism. Faith is fundamentally different from all other forms of knowledge. The reality known to faith is knowable only to faith, not to any other kind of cognition. Certainly, moral conflict is a necessary precondition for salvation, because we learn through it that we are lost souls. But we are saved by faith, not by moral knowledge or achievement. Faith is a distinct kind of knowing through which we experience communion with God through a saving encounter with Jesus. It is comprehensible only to those who participate in its effects, not by onlookers. This version of Ritschlian theology claimed to improve upon Ritschl by pressing the implications of Lutheran “faith alone” doctrine, but Ritschl disliked Herrmann’s mystical/Pietist bent and his downplaying of historical evidence. He told Herrmann he could not find himself in the book, despite reading it several times. Then the emerging History of Religions School caused Herrmann to heighten his existential fideism. Ernst Troeltsch and other former Ritschlians in the History of Religions School blasted the Ritschlians for privileging Christian questions, conceiving theology as an insider enterprise requiring faith, fashioning a liberal Jesus of their own making, and failing other academic tests of true historicism. A genuinely historicist theology had to dispense with favoring any religion or the Jesus it wanted. Troeltsch said Herrmann embarrassed German theology by opting for fideism. Herrmann replied that no one has ever been saved by information. Knowledge of God is the expression of religious experience wholly without proofs, historical foundations, or apologetic crutches, apart from the bare historical “fact” of Jesus. Theology needed to throw away its crutches. Barth later recalled that he caught the ring of prophetic utterance in Herrmann’s voice. It mattered greatly to Barth that Herrmann’s warm‐hearted piety seemed to retain the essential gospel faith. Herrmann was not ashamed of the gospel and not impressed with outside criticisms of its truth. He persuaded Barth that Christian truth requires no basis outside itself. Barth carried this idea into his early ministry, preaching like Herrmann for two years in Geneva. Then he preached for 11 years to a small congregation in Safenwil, Switzerland, where his parishioners worked in knitting and dye

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mills, only women went to church, and Barth puzzled that they did not find liberal ­theology as inspiring as he had when he heard it from Herrmann and Harnack. Barth’s German teachers loathed social democracy as an agent of class war, atheism, and nonpatriotism. Harnack founded the Evangelical Social Congress in 1890 to oppose a burgeoning social democratic movement, warning that German Protestantism had no greater enemy. Barth’s first breakthrough against his teachers occurred shortly after he arrived in Safenwil in July 1911. Wages were low, working conditions were dangerous and grueling, and workers had no trade union to help them. Social democracy had a stronger clerical following in Switzerland than in Germany, and by October, Barth was associated with it. Zurich pastor Hermann Kutter and University of Zurich theologian Leonhard Ragaz led the two wings of religious socialism in Switzerland. Kutter combined orthodox Marxism with classic Reformed theology, confining his activism to the church. Ragaz was an ethical socialist, feminist, and antiwar activist, theologically liberal, ambivalent about the church, and opposed to Marxian dogmatism. Both figures admired German Lutheran pastor Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt, who broke the taboo in 1899 against joining the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and thereby lost his clerical career in the state church. Kutter and Ragaz wagered that Switzerland should be more hospitable to Christian social democracy, which turned out to be true. From the beginning the differences between Kutter and Ragaz yielded different kinds of religious socialism. Barth’s closest friend and fellow minister in the Aargau, Eduard Thurneysen, knew Kutter and Blumhardt personally, and Ragaz less so. He told Barth that religious socialists were different from the Christian liberals he knew in Berlin and Marburg. The religious socialists were religiously serious in a way that was new to Barth. They spoke and behaved as though it mattered immeasurably whether one believed in God. Kutter impressed Barth by saying it emphatically. Barth’s exposure to Swiss religious socialism shook loose some of his acquired culture religion. He told his congregation that without a commitment to a kingdom‐bringing social justice, their religion was a pack of lies. Every week for a year before Europe descended into war, Barth implored from the pulpit that Christians had to be antiwar. He tried to believe that at least some of his teachers agreed. Then the Kaiser called Germany to war in an address written by Harnack, 93 German intellectuals issued a ringing manifesto of support for the war, and Barth read it with revulsion, finding the names, as he told the story, of nearly all his German theological teachers. He said that reading it was almost worse for him than contemplating Germany’s invasion of Belgium. The failure of his teachers even to raise the question of national idolatry repulsed him. Everything he had learned from Germany’s esteemed liberal theologians had shattered for him. Bourgeois theology was obviously bankrupt, and he had to find an alternative to it. Actually it was not that simple or abrupt. Only two of Barth’s teachers signed the manifesto, it was not published in August as he claimed, but in October, after which he recoiled at learning that his teachers were adapting Herrmann’s theology of experience to what Barth called “an allegedly religious war experience” (Barth and Rade 1981, p. 113). Moreover, Barth’s career did not consist of a series of dramatic conversions. It took him seven years to break from liberal theology, his development of an analogical method was an elongated affair too, and he never stopped being a dialectical theologian. He also remained a socialist for the rest of his life, although not a religious socialist.

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Kutter’s influence over Barth, when it mattered, was immense and ironic. Kutter kept quiet about the war, quietly cheered for a German victory, opposed church involvement in social democratic politics, and lauded social democracy as the hammer by which God would smash capitalism. Ragaz blasted German militarism, condemned the war unequivocally, and called the churches to Christianize social democracy. Ideologically, Kutter agreed with the Marxist mainstream of the SPD led by Karl Kautsky, whereas Ragaz aligned with the ethical revisionist wing of the SPD led by Eduard Bernstein. Barth was torn between them. Politically he favored the Ragaz idealists over Kutter’s blend of church separatism and Marxism, because it made little sense to advocate socialism while refusing to work with Socialists, and Barth admired Ragaz’s antimilitarism. But Barth held back from joining the Swiss Social Democratic party; even Ragaz held back until October 1913. Was it really possible for clerics to link arms with Socialists? Then Europe erupted in war, and Barth trembled at reading Die Christliche Welt (The Christian World), the German paper edited by his former Marburg teacher Martin Rade. Barth told Rade his respect for Germany’s character was being destroyed. The Christian part of German theology had broken into pieces under the pressure of a war psychosis. Barth joined the Social Democrats in January 1915, clinging to the antimilitarism of Ragaz’s wing of the party, while Kutter apologized to Germans for the Swiss Socialists who blamed Germany for the war. All of that militated against Kutter, but Thurneysen cautioned Barth that Kutter’s emphasis on waiting for God contained a deeper spiritual wisdom than Ragaz’s liberal socialist theology. Ragaz conflated too readily the gospel faith with the politics of social democracy, but Kutter and Blumhardt preached about waiting for a God that does not submit to human plans. In April 1915 Barth visited Blumhardt in Bad Boll, which pulled him in Kutter’s direction. Barth thanked Thurneysen for helping him to see that Kutter understood the kingdom of God better than Ragaz. This was the crucial turn in Barth’s twisting and turning path to a neo‐Reformation theology. Barth judged that he had to start over, waiting upon a Wholly Other God of grace and glory. He exaggerated Ragaz’s supposed politicization of theology to boost his own position, notwithstanding that Ragaz propounded key Barthian tropes before Barth did. During the war, Ragaz said the kingdom of God comes from God as the negation and abolition of religion, and Jesus cared only about the coming of a new order. Barth became famous by taking over these signature themes of Ragaz, Kutter, and Blumhardt, but by the time he did so, he fashioned them as reasons not to support religious socialism and lauded only Blumhardt, who was easier than Ragaz and Kutter to bend to Barth’s purpose. According to Ragaz, religion was mostly bad, but it sometimes conveyed the spirit of Christ, which raised the question of how theology should draw a line between politics and good religion. The socialist movement, he reasoned, was not wholly political. It was partly political and partly religious because on both sides it sought to replace the old order of domination with a new order of justice and solidarity. Ragaz judged that the socialist movement was a low‐medium form of good religion. Being political, it had no chance of reaching the kingdom level, but it was about the same things the kingdom was about. That was not where Barth wanted to land. Ragaz’s cheering for antiwar, feminist, and social democratic movements as signs of the kingdom smacked too much

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of identifying the kingdom of God with progressive social movements. Barth countered that before the kingdom could become real to modern Christians “there must come a crisis that denies all human thought” (Barth 1957, p. 80). Crisis theology was a reaction to the slaughter and destruction of World War I and a response to the ferocious judgment of the war on European cultural pretension. Liberal theologians gave the impression of being comfortable with God and proud of their sophistication. Crisis theology was about shattered illusions, the experience of emptiness before a hidden God, and what Barth called the unexpected surge of spiritual meaning he found in “the strange new world within the Bible” (Barth 1957, pp. 28–50). A new world enters and suffuses our ordinary world by the grace of God’s Spirit. Barth’s first edition Römerbrief, published in December 1918, interpreted Paul as the apostle of a new age of the Spirit that could not be grasped by historical criticism or by cutting Paul’s theology to fit the worldview of modern culture. Liberal theology contrasted the Christ myth of Paul to the social gospel of Jesus, dispensing with Paul’s Christology, blood redemption, typology of Christ and Adam, disregard of the historical Jesus, devotion to scriptural authority, and nonhistorical exegesis. Barth had entered the ministry believing that Luther was superior to Paul and Schleiermacher was superior to everyone. Now he proclaimed that Paul’s mythical gospel of redemption and resurrection was the true gospel of Christ. Barth said it exuberantly, conveying his joyful discovery that Paul was greater than Luther, Calvin, and even Schleiermacher. Paul was an apostle of the kingdom of God who speaks to people of every age. Liberal theology was weak because it cut the gospel to fit modern presumptions. Barth preferred “to see through and beyond history into the spirit of the Bible, which is the Eternal Spirit” (GA 16, p. 3). This was still a version of liberal theology, replacing historicist liberalisms with progressive spiritual idealism. It emphasized experiences of value and treated the gospel message as a progress report, placing Moses, Plato, Kant, and Fichte in the same kingdom‐bringing line as prophets of God’s righteousness. Barth lumped religious socialism with liberal theology, Pietism, and conventional church religion as faulty vehicles of salvation, but he still described the kingdom in Christian socialist terms as the hidden motor driving the world into its true history. The book got a smattering of critical and enthusiastic reviews just before Barth gave a sensational address at Tambach that showed where he and Protestant theology were going. Two German pastors affiliated with the Independent Social Democratic Party (Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, USPD) organized the conference at Tambach. The USPD broke away from the prowar SPD during World War I and subsequently opposed the acquiescence of the SPD to the capitalists and military in the November Revolution of 1918. Most of the 100 attendees were USPD clerics or professors, along with a sprinkling of SPD supporters and Evangelical Congress veterans. Most came for an encouraging word in a traumatic time. Ragaz and Kutter were invited to speak, but declined. The organizers invited Barth to substitute for Ragaz, believing he belonged to the Ragaz camp. Barth swiftly disabused them, chiding the organizers for asking him to address how the teaching of Jesus should be applied to the postwar economic, racial, national, and international order. This was the wrong question, he said, always yielding a bad answer.

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What mattered was to ask what it means to be indwelt by Christ. The wrong question yielded hyphenated Christianities – social Christian, religious socialist, and the like. All were bad ideas, like liberal theology. Barth feared a revival of Ragaz idealism, declaring that if social Christians succeeded with their old theology, Christ would be betrayed once again. He mocked their enthusiasms, the kind of thing Ragaz would have said about supporting progressive causes. He countered that Christians needed to relearn from Jeremiah and Paul that God alone saves the world. Barth electrified the ministers and academics gathered at Tambach. His message and commanding performance spoke powerfully to ministers grappling with the problem of the sermon in a time of crisis. Many said they had never heard anything like it, although some parted in despair, realizing the upshot for progressive Christianity. The doors of German universities and church groups opened to Barth. Politically he situated himself between German social democracy and Bolshevism, much like Blumhardt and Ragaz. During this period Barth favored the image of a “sentinel” (Wächterpost), telling audiences that good socialism was a sentinel standing between the sorry paths of the SPD and Bolshevik Communism (Barth 1920, p. 640). He aspired to the path of the sentinel in politics and theology, two things that had to be kept separate, as classic political liberalism had always said. By 1920 Barth could see that liberal theology was tottering, despite holding the prestige theological chairs in Germany. At a student conference at Aarau he proclaimed that biblical piety held fast to a peculiar kind of worldliness that refused to regard anything as sacred. Only God is sacred, and in the scriptural witness God is holy, incomparable, and unattainable: “He is not a thing among other things, but the Wholly Other, the infinite aggregate of all merely relative others. He is not the form of religious history but is the Lord of our life, the eternal Lord of the world” (Barth 1957, pp. 73–74). One bewildered listener, Harnack, was appalled. He told a friend that Barth’s speech was “staggering” and frightening to him, containing “not one word, not one sentence” that Harnack could have said or thought (Zahn‐Harnack 1951, p. 415). He compared Barth’s thinking to a meteor hurtling toward disintegration. To Harnack, Barth’s theology was apocalyptic and self‐negating. If Barth was the future, modern theology was finished as a rational enterprise worthy of academic respect. The worst aspect of Barth’s theology was its eschatological mania. Barth, however, decided the opposite. To really break from liberalism, he had to heighten his eschatological alternative. He had written Römerbrief in the fresh excitement of a conversion experience. Then he read uncomprehending reviews, plus Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Swiss antitheologian Franz Overbeck, and completely rewrote the book. The exuberant mood of the first edition gave way to the angry, sharp‐edged, immediately famous second edition of 1921. Barth said the new world could not be born until the old world died. Liberal theology taught that history has an inner capacity for renewal because God is an aspect of the temporal order. Barth countered with a version of Kierkegaard’s Religiousness B and the sickness unto death: History is not a life process brought to fulfillment by a divine indwelling. History is the life of the old world under the judgment of death. The second edition treated paradox as the language of faith, abounding with metaphors of disruption and cleavage. For Barth, as for Kierkegaard, God was an impossibility whose possibility cannot be avoided. Barth likened the grace

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of God to an explosion that blasts everything away without leaving a trace. Divine grace is not a religious possibility standing alongside sin. It is a shattering assault bringing everything into question. Christianity is true only as eschatology. That eliminated the possibility of systematic theology, which was fine with Barth, until he became a theology professor.

Barth, Herrmann, and Schleiermacher After he became a professor of Reformed dogmatics, Barth had to figure out how to ground his claims about God; otherwise he could not have written 12 volumes of Church Dogmatics. His answer featured a threefold doctrine of the Word of God that emphasized preaching and rejected any identification of the divine Word with the biblical text. He never acknowledged that he took the linchpin of his theology, the idea of revelatory self‐revealing, from Herrmann, who got it from Hegel. Herrmann, however, appealed to the autonomy of faith as a revelatory experience. Barth appealed to the totalizing efficiency of God’s revelation in the Word. Theology is explication of the Word of God as spoken by God in revelation, reported in the Bible, and proclaimed in Christian preaching. Barth dropped Herrmann’s Monophysite Christology, emphasis on individual experience, appeal to the inner life of Jesus, overreliance on Luther, passing use of Scripture, rare mention of the Trinity, and rejection of scriptural authority. By 1928 he rarely mentioned Herrmann at all, which obscured that Barth got crucial things from Herrmann that he never relinquished. Revelation as self‐revelation headed the latter list, a liberal idea that could not be dressed up as orthodox, unlike the idea of self‐authenticating faith, which Barth identified with Calvin after he began teaching at Göttingen. From these two arguments Barth retained the Herrmannian claims that revelation is not a doctrine, faith is not assent to doctrine, revelation is not any “thing” at all, faith is not the outcome of an argument, apologetics is not a legitimate enterprise, Christian faith is not a worldview, history is not the basis of faith, and Christian truth, while belonging to history, is independent from the canons of historical criticism. Even Barth’s respect for historical criticism came from Herrmann, who taught Barth that historical criticism had ample coherence and integrity on its own terms. Though historical criticism should not be a constitutive element or form of theology, it was valuable as a means of attaining intellectual freedom from Christian dogma and tradition – the germ of Barth’s later insistence that he welcomed the most radical forms of it (Dorrien 2000, pp. 22–32, 168–182). Barth lost interest in liberal Protestant theology because it did not grapple with Scripture to hear what God is saying. He stopped referring to Herrmann on that account and rarely looked back. When Barth launched the Church Dogmatics in 1932, he roared against Roman Catholicism and the analogy of being, relegated Herrmann to a footnote, and dismissed liberal Protestantism as pathetically self‐negating. His book on the history of modern Protestant theology, written during the same period, ended with a brutally short chapter on Ritschl, who was not worth remembering. The exception was Schleiermacher. Barth admired Hegel for trying to become the Protestant Thomas Aquinas, but he judged that Hegel was insufficiently Christian to

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pull it off, and his project was impossible anyway within the culture of modernity. For better and worse, Schleiermacher was the theologian of liberal Christianity and the modern era. For seven years, until 1921, Barth struggled with the question whether Schleiermacher launched modern theology down a sub‐Christian path. He was slow to render a verdict because he wanted desperately to be linked to Schleiermacher. He accepted Herrmann’s reading that Schleiermacher’s understanding of Christianity did not derive from a general theory of religious consciousness; Schleiermacher centered on Jesus and redemption. As for the capitulation of German theologians in 1914 to nationalism and militarism, Barth did not believe it was a logical outgrowth of Schleiermacher’s nationalism and modernism. For the rest of his life, Barth insisted that Schleiermacher would not have signed the dreadful manifesto of October 1914. Barth’s second edition Römerbrief announced that he was done with Schleiermacher because Schleiermacher turned the gospel into a religion and thus betrayed Christ. He told his students at Göttingen that they needed to study Schleiermacher in order to understand themselves. Modern theologians simply assumed the subject of theology is religion. All presumed to understand the meaning of Christianity by studying the phenomenon of religious self‐consciousness. To be sure, Barth acknowledged, Schleiermacher inspired a variety of liberal theologies, and the nineteenth century produced a few notable dissenters. Kierkegaard was always number one on Barth’s very short list; sometimes Barth included his father. But these figures made little impact, whereas Schleiermacher grew larger through every decade after his death. Ritschl tried to historicize liberal theology, but look what happened to the Ritschlian School! It folded in disgrace and retreated to Schleiermacher. Barth told Thurneysen that he struggled not to cry out in class that Schleiermacher’s theology was a gigantic fraud; he told students that preparing for class was shattering for him because Schleiermacher distorted every Christian doctrine. Schleiermacher was worst on the most important issues – revelation, the Bible as Holy Scripture, miracles, God, and immortality. Barth worried that Protestantism might never recover any confidence in the power of its truth. He implored his students to believe that the age of  Schleiermacher could be brought to an end, but first they had to recognize Schleiermacher’s brilliance and accomplishment. The latter note grew stronger in Barth’s teaching after the Barthian revolt overthrew liberal theology. Barth had plenty of partisan cunning in plotting the attack on liberalism, but he lacked the essential qualities of a movement leader, he disavowed the party labels assigned to him, and he flushed with revulsion when Emil Brunner and Friedrich Gogarten made cocksure pronouncements about saving theology. By 1932 Barth was embarrassed at the simplistic antiliberal rhetoric that prevailed among Barthians. He insisted that his own broadsides were not simplistic. He never forgot that liberals invented modern theology, developed the tools of modern scholarship, and built a vast structure of knowledge. Things had changed so dramatically that now the field was loaded with shallow types who did not bother to learn Schleiermacher’s system before they dismissed it as ridiculous. Barth put it grandly in 1932, telling his class at Bonn, concerning Schleiermacher: “We have to do with a hero, the like of which is but seldom bestowed upon theology.

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Anyone who has never noticed anything of the splendor this figure radiated and still does – I am almost tempted to say, who has never succumbed to it – may honorably pass on to other and possibly better ways, but let him never raise so much as a finger against Schleiermacher” (PTNC, 427). Barth appreciated that Schleiermacher stood for peaceable mediation in politics and theology. He grasped that the different sides of Schleiermacher’s thought made it possible for him to be a speculative philosopher and Christian apologist while excluding both from his theology. As a moral philosopher and philosopher of religion, Schleiermacher took up apologetic and speculative questions belonging to these fields, suspending his beliefs about Christianity. When he wrote and taught theology, he expounded Christian doctrines as he construed them. Philosophical arguments and apologetics did not belong in theology, except perhaps in the prolegomenon; Barth and Schleiermacher had similar misgivings about methodological introductions. To be sure, Schleiermacher had an idealistic system of knowledge, but he united knowing and being in an objective way only in the idea of God; otherwise he placed knowledge and being in opposition. Barth caught that on the subjective level, Schleiermacher held together thought and being only by the feeling that correlated to  the idea of God, which accompanied all knowledge and action. This was Schleiermacher’s idealism pushing through – a kind of bracket beyond his antithesis of knowledge and being. In his philosophical and apologetic modes, Schleiermacher played Christianity like a violin. In his theology, it was all Christian redemption. Here  Barth struggled to be fair, noting that Schleiermacher’s Romantic fear of objective pronouncements yielded a method so strenuous there was no difference between his formal and material principles. Schleiermacher’s rendering of Christianity was entirely about Christian pious self‐awareness contemplating and describing itself. In the very places where Luther and Calvin appealed to the gospel, the Word of God, or Christ, Schleiermacher appealed to religion or piety. The  Reformers correlated the Word of God with human faith, which was based ­completely in the Word of God. Schleiermacher reversed the Reformation dialectic, putting everything on pious self‐awareness reaching out to God. Barth did not deny that one could work up a passable Christian theology in this fashion. He even allowed that Schleiermacher could be interpreted as a theologian of the Holy Spirit. What if everything that Schleiermacher said about religious experience was predicated on a doctrine of the prior action and call of the Holy Spirit? Barth could imagine a liberal theology that commendably took this option. He doubted that Schleiermacher had done so, because Schleiermacher consigned the Trinity to an appendix and he didn’t hold together the Word and Spirit. The Lord Jesus, as an objective historical motif, was a problem for Schleiermacher. He struggled to offer a Jesus that modern consciousness might accept, and the strain showed. The later Barth acknowledged that Schleiermacher saved as much of Christianity as was possible on modern terms, and he did it with consummate skill. Unlike many Barthians, Barth never regarded Schleiermacher as not belonging to the Christian community. He prized Schleiermacher for distinctly grasping the beauty of theology. And he told theologians, with puckish delight, that Schleiermacher was the greatest in their line.

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References Barth, K. (1920). Vom Rechthaben und Unrechthaben, Rede, gehalten zu einer sozialdemokratischen Volksversammlung. Das neue Werk, Eine Wochenschrift. 4 January (40). pp. 635–641. Barth, K. (1957). The Word of God and the Word of Man (trans. D. Horton). New York: Harper. Barth, K. and Rade, M. (1981). Karl Barth‐ Martin Rade: Ein Briefwechsel (ed. C.

Schwöbel). Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn. Dorrien, G. (2000). The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology. Louisville: Westminster John Knox. Dorrien, G. (2012). Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit: The Idealistic Logic of Modern Theology. Oxford: Wiley‐Blackwell. Zahn‐Harnack, A. (1951). Adolf von Harnack. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

CHAPTER 58

Barth and Biblical Studies Mark S. Gignilliat

Scriptural exegesis rests on the assumption that the message which Scripture has to give us, even in its apparently most debatable and least assimilable parts, is in all circumstances truer and more important than the best and most necessary things that we ourselves have said or can say. (CD I/2, p. 719)

Introduction Few theologians in the church’s long history engage the Bible with the breadth, depth, and vigor of Karl Barth. Sola Scriptura and Tota Scriptura are flip sides of the same coin for him. Where the modern critical approach to Scripture tends toward the microscopic and atomistic, Barth reads Scripture with a wide‐angle lens bringing its “multiplicity and variety” into critical and creative conversation around a single subject matter. The singularity of God’s Word and Scripture’s inexorable identification with it unleashes Barth’s hermeneutical sensibilities in this interpretive direction. Even though Barth was a theologian for the church, his work took place in a university context with its academic rhythm of lectures, seminars, research, and intellectual exchange. Nevertheless, Barth’s approach to Scripture breathed the air of the Reformation’s Scripture Principle and the hermeneutical implications stemming from it. These interpretive instincts often left Barth at odds with the prevailing tendencies of the modern, critical approach, even though Barth was happy to make ad hoc use of modern criticism and its textual achievements. Karl Barth defines the Reformation’s Scripture Principle as “the church recognize[ing] the rule of its proclamation solely in the Word of God and find[ing] the Word of God solely in Holy Scripture” (TRC, p. 41). For Reformed confessional writings, this Scripture Principle exists as the articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae (the article of faith by which The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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the church stands or falls). Likewise, Barth’s hermeneutical approach bears the marks of the Scripture Principle from beginning to end with his use of critical methods shaped by it. The frontloading of theological commitments in the hermeneutical process brings him into an uneasy relationship with modern criticism where theological presuppositions are displaced in order to gain a maximal hearing of the Bible in its textual, religious‐historical and social contexts. Modern criticism tends to leave the biblical text in these literary and historical locales. For Barth, such readings might offer a first step in the interpretive process but were certainly not the task in toto. Rather, the interpretive priorities of modern critics are stages along the way toward a fuller understanding of the text’s continuing theological witness. John Barton identifies three defining character traits of modern biblical criticism. Two of them relate to textual matters  –  identification of genre and a sensitivity to literary semantics (Barton 2007, p. 58). The third is a philosophical presupposition that Barton identifies as the “bracketing out” of theological commitments or truth claims on the front end of the exegetical enterprise (Barton 2007, p. 58). Barth does demonstrate a willingness to hear Scripture afresh, departing from traditional readings where he believes the text itself demands it, for example, Barth on the relation of Genesis 1:1 and 1:2ff (CD III/1, p. 100). Nevertheless, Barth’s exegesis does not nor could not “bracket out” theological commitments on the front end of biblical exegesis. For Barth, faithful, biblical exegesis necessitates an ontology of Holy Scripture. The Bible’s proper dogmatic location resides within the self‐revealing identity and reconciling activity of Christianity’s triune God. Deus dixit. Holy Scripture is something and demands to be read within the light of what God intends it to be and do. Commenting on the Scripture Principle, Barth claims the following: “That statement that the authors were striving to make was this: If we assume that we possess a holy text, then it cannot be a historical science that decides on its authentic form, especially because such a science by its very nature has no sensitivity for the holy, as does the theological decision making of the church” (TRC, p. 61). Scripture as a “holy” text requires theological commitments even when attending to the literary and historical concerns that occupy the interests of modern criticism. Barth inhabits the theological and hermeneutical space of this Reformation instinct. As a series of letters between Barth and Walter Baumgartner reveal, Barth’s theological approach to exegesis created tension with the biblical studies guild. There is a notion that complete impartiality is the most fitting and indeed the normal disposition for true exegesis, because it guarantees a complete absence of prejudice. For a short time, around 1910, this idea threatened to achieve almost canonical status in Protestant theology. But now we can quite calmly describe it as merely comical. (CD I/2, p. 469)

Karl Barth and Walter Baumgartner: An Illustrative Case‐in‐Point An extended Auseinandersetzung (debate) between Barth and Walter Baumgartner took place in a series of letters spanning 15 years (1940–1955). Baumgartner was Basel’s leading Old Testament scholar and Hebrew lexicographer. The lexicon that bears his

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name is standard fare for Hebrew students and scholars to this day. Barth and Baumgartner engaged one another on the points of divergence between a theologian and Old Testament scholar’s methods and reading of the Old Testament, along with clarifying points of Barth’s Old Testament exegesis in the CD. The stakes in this debate were high because both parties occupied space within the theology faculty at the University of Basel. Moreover, both parties displayed an interest in their students and the discordant views they were learning within the same faculty. Baumgartner’s first letter to Barth clarifies the neuralgic point of Baumgartner’s concern (7 January 1940). He concedes and affirms that theologians and Old Testament scholars see something different when reading the Old Testament. “[D]as ist sein gutes Recht” (“That is right and good.”) (Smend 1986, p. 243). Nevertheless, Baumgartner has a lingering concern stemming from his initial reading of CD I/2. On Baumgartner’s reading, Barth appears indifferent to the research (Forschung) of Old Testament scholars. According to Baumgartner, Barth mixes sharp and negative statements about Old Testament scholars with affirmations of the critical discipline’s right to exist. Baumgartner wants a clearer statement from Barth on his position. Does Barth take his cues from E.W. Hengstenberg, Baumgartner inquires? Hengstenberg was the leading conservative Old Testament scholar of the nineteenth century who, in a moment of historical irony, took Wilhelm de Wette’s chair at the University of Berlin in 1828. Though de Wette and Wellhausen’s critical approaches envelop Old Testament scholarship in the nineteenth century, they elicited considerable criticism from confessional scholars such as Hengstenberg (Smend 2007). For example, his 1823 dissertation submitted to the University of Bonn advanced the following thesis: Falsa est de Wette de Pentateucho sententia (De Wette’s opinion about the Pentateuch is false) (Smend 2007, p. 494). As observed from his dissertation, Hengstenberg was a polemicist and apologist whose editorial page in the Evangelische Kirchen‐Zeitung took aim at critical methods and conclusions over a span of 42 years. Baumgartner is quick to remind Barth that current Old Testament scholars have departed sharply from Hengstenberg on critical questions. So where does Barth stand? Before Barth responds to the first letter, Baumgartner sends another (20 March 1940). He provides two points of reflection, seeking to clarify the interpretive differences between them. One, the object of Barth’s exegesis is the Old Testament as a completed whole (Smend 1986, p. 244). Baumgartner’s critical instincts find this approach unfeasible (undurchführbar) because uniform exegesis makes sense only in consideration of an author’s intention, becoming sand through the fingers before a collection comprised of multiple authors and redactors. Baumgartner makes use of a metaphor to clarify his point. The various and sundry sources and traditions of the Old Testament are flowers. The “canon” functions as the vase housing them. In other words, the concept of canon for Baumgartner is accidental and external to the biblical material itself, playing no constitutive role in exegesis. As an external phenomenon, canon does not influence the biblical material’s coming to be and provides no hermeneutical lens by which to read the whole of the Old Testament and its chorus of voices. According to Baumgartner’s understanding, the theological concept of canon, beholden as it is to the church’s confession regarding Scripture’s divine authorship, becomes part of the text’s history of reception not its composition. He is right to see himself and Barth on radically different hermeneutical tracks at this point.

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To hear this [God is gracious to humanity in Jesus Christ] is to hear the Bible – both as a whole and in each one of its separate parts. Not to hear this means eo ipso not to hear the Bible, neither as a whole, nor therefore in its parts. The Bible says all sorts of things, certainly; but in all this multiplicity and variety, it says in truth only one thing – just this: the name of Jesus Christ, concealed under the name Israel in the Old Testament, revealed under His own name in the New Testament, which therefore can be understood only as it has been understood itself, as a commentary on the Old Testament. The Bible becomes clear when it is clear that it says this one thing: that it proclaims the name Jesus Christ and therefore proclaims God in His richness and mercy, and man in his need and helplessness, yet living on what God’s mercy has given and will give him. (CD I/2, p. 720)

Baumgartner raises a second point of differentiation. Barth’s hermeneutical object is the Old Testament as book. Taking his cues from the dominant religious‐historical approaches of the day – Baumgartner was a student of Hermann Gunkel – Baumgartner identifies the historical people of Israel (Volk Israel) as the object of scholarly pursuit. New Testament scholars seek the historical Jesus; Old Testament scholars seek the historical Israel (Smend 1986, pp. 245–246). The biblical texts, along with other literary and archeological sources, are vehicles for the reconstruction of the religious history of ancient Israel. For Baumgartner, there is a fundamental relationship between Old Testament theology and the history of religions. Without an understanding of the religious historical causes leading to textual effects, knowledge of the biblical books remains at arm’s length. Baumgartner’s exegetical sensibilities bear all the marks of Spinoza’s hermeneutical legacy, mingled as it is with Romanticism’s concern for the culturally particular over against universals. Barth is less inclined to affirm the positive relationship between theology and the history of religions because they operate with different hermeneutical objects and goals. Moreover, Barth views the history of religions approach as in bed with the theological instincts of nineteenth‐century “liberal” thought where theology becomes a species of anthropology. In CD I/2 Barth makes his understanding clear. “Theology at least, even and especially historical theology, which applies itself particularly to the biblical texts, ought to have (let us say it at once) the tact and taste, in face of the linking of form and content in those texts of which it must still be aware, to resist this temptation to leave the curious question of what is perhaps behind the texts, and to turn, with all the more attentiveness, accuracy and love to the texts as such” (CD I/2, pp. 493–494). Again, Baumgartner hits the nail’s head in his description of the differences between himself and Barth. The letters continue for years, sporadic as they were. Baumgartner picks at Barth’s exegesis in the CD, and Barth provides responses with varying measures of depth. At one point, Barth describes Baumgartner and himself as “line judges” on each side of a football match (Smend 1986, p. 258). Despite the letters’ elongated time span, Barth’s initial responses to Baumgartner’s inquiries remain instructive for the purposes of this essay. In the first missive, Barth identifies his primary misgiving with Baumgartner’s approach (23 March 1940). They differ substantially in their understanding of the scientific or academic character of theology (theologische Wissenschaft). Does theology as an intellectual discipline differentiate itself from other intellectual disciplines in view of its object of study? (Smend 1986, p. 247). Rightly, Barth senses a tension between

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himself and Baumgartner on the answer to this basic epistemic question. Barth also believes this epistemological cacophony within the school of theology creates chaos for students who wander from lecture hall to lecture hall where different professors are working with competing conceptions of theology’s task (Smend 1986, p. 247). Barth’s second letter is more thorough and thoughtful than the first (12 July 1941). He is responding to a lecture of Baumgartner’s that he gave Barth to read. In the lecture, Baumgartner makes allowance for the Christian witness of the Old Testament in homiletics – Luther’s famous was Christus treibet – as long as preachers and theologians know they have moved beyond Old Testament exegesis itself into the realm of Christian practice. Baumgartner’s positivist approach constrains exegetical inquiry to the text’s religious historical moment in time. Barth will have none of it because the clear consequence of Baumgartner’s position is that work on the Old Testament can confidently proceed with no concern for its relation to Christ. All such matters are “homiletical” or “practical” or “part of the text’s history of reception” but not exegetical. In Barth’s view, Baumgartner’s historicist approach is ontologically deficient regarding the nature of the Old Testament, displacing it from its location in a two‐testament canon. Baumgartner, according to Barth, is a positivist in epistemological and methodological instinct (Smend 1986, p. 249). Though Barth may disagree with particular instances of Wilhelm Vischer’s exegesis, he agrees with him in substance and is glad to be associated with his Christuzeugnis approach to reading the Old Testament (Smend 1986, pp. 251, 257; cf. Bächli 1987, pp. 44–45). Barth’s interpretive sensibilities mirror the church fathers who sought to relate all of Scripture to the governing hypothesis of the Logos (Smend 1986, p. 249). For Barth, Baumgartner drives an iron wedge between the disciplines of exegesis and theology and the consequences are fatal for the life of the Old Testament in the church. Barth believes Baumgartner’s position can only lead to three conclusions: (i) students should be forbidden to attend any instruction on the Old Testament in preaching, teaching, and dogmatic argumentation; (ii) the Old Testament should be eliminated from the church; and (iii) the Old Testament faculty should be transferred from the theology faculty to the philosophy/history faculty (Smend 1986, p. 250). In Barth’s estimation, isolating the Old Testament from its canonical context can only lead to a Marcionite end. Although such exegesis may boast of its wissenschaftliche character, on final analysis its fails on this account as well. For Old Testament exegesis in the social contexts of a theology faculty and the church is “scientific” in so far as exegetical methods comport with the nature of what is studied. Moreover, the understanding of Scripture’s nature can only be achieved by the governing logic of faith. Barth crosses swords with the New Testament guild as well, as will be observed in the next section. Yet, the Old Testament poses unique challenges for theological exegesis, especially given the dominant academic tendency to view the exegetical task primarily as one of excavation.

Historical Critics Need to Be More Critical Barth’s engagement with Baumgartner is illustrative of the long‐term tensions he had with the biblical studies guild of his day. The heart of these tensions may be traced to

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Barth’s publication of Der Römerbrief (RII) and the response he offers to his critics in the preface to its second edition (1927). “I have been accused of being an ‘enemy of historical criticism’” (RII, p. 6). Adolf Jülicher, a preeminent New Testament scholar of the time, labeled Barth a “gnostic,” a “pneumatic,” and other derisive terms (Burnett 2001, p. 15). Barth describes the language of his detractors as “nervous and high strung,” as he presses against their characterization of him as an enemy of historical criticism (RII, p. 6). “I have nothing whatsoever to say against historical criticism,” Barth retorts (RII, p. 6). What Barth does have against the practitioners of historical criticism is their delimitation of the exegetical task to historical critical aims and intentions. “My complaint,” he clarifies, “is that recent commentators confine themselves to an interpretation of the text which seems to me to be no commentary at all, but merely the first step towards a commentary” (RII, p. 6). Barth affirms his indebtedness to historical critics who provide invaluable resources for understanding the text. Insofar as historical criticism aids in understanding the text as text, “I follow him carefully and gratefully” (RII, p. 7). The historical‐critical textual and historical findings are “prolegomenon” to understanding and gratefully received as such. Nevertheless, “prolegomenon” is not coterminous with understanding nor is it the exegetical task simpliciter. On this matter, Barth and his critics arrive at a critical juncture with sharp divisions. The pressing through the text to its subject matter is where understanding takes place. Without this interpretive move, commentaries remain species of textual prolegomena. Barth turns to the tradition for exemplars of theological exegetes who, after the establishment of the text by responsible use of whatever exegetical tools were available, pressed through the text to its living and dynamic subject matter. “[H]ow energetically Calvin, having first established what stands in the text, sets himself to re‐think the whole material and to wrestle with it, till the walls which separate the sixteenth century from the first become transparent! Paul speaks, and the man of the sixteenth century hears. The conversation between the original record and the reader moves round the subject‐matter, until a distinction between yesterday and to‐day becomes impossible” (RII, p. 7). As Barth later demonstrates, to engage the Bible is to move toward an encounter with God as electing God and humanity as elected humanity (CD II/2, pp. 148–149). Absent this anticipatory move toward encounter, toward the place where the divine “yes” and “no” confronts humanity in the face of Jesus Christ, biblical exegesis remains denuded and static, a human endeavor and intellectual achievement indistinguishable from other disciplines in the humanities. Jülicher, by contrast to Calvin, attends himself to the historical Paul and separates the textual dimension of Paul’s writing from its ideas, from what Paul is speaking about. Where the text offends a modern sensibility, Jülicher can dismiss it by appeal to the historical Paul’s opinions or ecstatic experiences. Is this procedure “genuine exegesis,” Barth wonders? “The whole procedure assuredly achieves no more than the first draft of a paraphrase of the text and provides no more than a point of departure for genuine exegesis” (RII, p. 8). These ruminations lead to Barth’s oft‐repeated dictum: “The critical historian needs to be more critical” (RII, p. 8). A critical historian requires a “wider intelligence” than that offered by the “boundaries of his own natural appreciation” (RII, p. 8). If the words and phrases of historical documents are not measured by what the documents are speaking about, then genuine exegesis and understanding remains at arm’s

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length. For Barth, in line with the company of “orthodox” commentators that precede him, “The Word ought to be exposed in the words” (RII, p. 8). For the historical critic, biblical texts are “words” with little to no relation to the “Word.” As with Baumgartner, Barth registers his concerns for theology students preparing for pulpit ministry. Do critical scholars give any thought to such matters? “I myself know what it means year in year out to mount the steps of the pulpit, conscious of the responsibility to understand and to interpret, and longing to fulfil it; and yet, utterly incapable, because at the University I had never been brought beyond that well‐known ‘Awe in the presence of History’ which means in the end no more than that all hope of engaging in the dignity of understanding and interpretation has been surrendered” (RII, p. 9). “Never been brought beyond” is a pregnant phrase in Barth’s jeremiad. Barth insists, once again, that he is no “bitter enemy of historical criticism” (RII, p. 9). He is, however, a bitter enemy of historicism’s hegemony in the interpretation of scriptural texts. Biblical texts as the product of history are not hemmed in by that history in their enduring service to God’s self‐disclosure. Barth’s interpretation of Scripture is not an atavistic retrieval of premodern methods. His theology and exegesis are Zeitgemäß (contemporary), taking full advantage of various historical‐critical conclusions. Barth does not drive a wedge between history and revelation. He does believe that his critics have done so, leaving revelation and the direct communication of the gospel to theologians and practitioners. In the preface to RII, Barth registers his misgivings about the intellectual scope of historical‐critical instincts when attending to Holy Scripture.

Barth and Historicism When Barth decries his university training with its “Awe in the presence of History,” he does so not because history understood as space/time events are superfluous to biblical exegesis and theological engagement. Famously, Barth begins chapter XIV of the CD with, “The atonement is history” (CD IV/1, p. 157). He continues, “To try to grasp it as supra‐historical or non‐historical truth is not to grasp it at all” (CD IV/1, p. 157). It is a fool’s errand to identify Barth’s “event” theology as detached from unique temporal moments in the divine economy, for example, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ as a space/time phenomenon. Barth’s lack of “Awe in the presence of History” takes aim at historicism’s hubris and reductionist methods, not history per se (see CD I/2, p. 464). If one seeks to ground revelation’s claims on the assured results of modern historical scholarship, then a dead end awaits (CD IV/1, p. 335). Speaking of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, Barth affirms modern historicism’s ability to make a claim about the death of Jesus Christ but not his resurrection (CD IV/1, p. 336). This space/time event, an actuality affirmed in the New Testament witness as an experienced phenomenon, is not history in the modern sense. Barth means “history” as deciphered by the canons of late nineteenth‐century historicism (e.g. Troeltsch’s historical principles of criticism, analogy and correlation; see Plantinga 2000, pp. 390–395). Rather, it is a space/time event whose availability requires God’s speech and remains at arm’s length for those

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who seek to secure it according to historicist modes of inquiry. Barth is pushing back against the towering presence of the German historicist tradition and its shaping of critical approaches to the Bible. The German historicist tradition entered the philosophical stage with force after the demise of Hegel’s long reign in the German philosophical tradition. Frederick Beiser provides a compelling account of philosophy’s fight for existence in university life after Hegel (Beiser 2014). The natural sciences posed challenges to the intelligentsia of the day and their affirmation of philosophy as a stand‐alone discipline. Put in terms most academics understand, what departments are going to receive the money? In response to Hegel’s vacuum, enter the materialist controversies, enter Schopenhauer, and, more germane to the subject matter at hand, enter historicism. Historicism as an intellectual movement arose in search of transcendent warrant for moral, political, and societal values. Though the Enlightenment had rejected classic Christian metaphysics where God and God’s providential ordering of history toward his own ends played center court, it had not rejected metaphysics outright. Rather, it sought to ground metaphysics in universal principles of reason located in the rational and ordered inquiry of humanity. These universal principles are irrespective of historically conditioned places, times, or cultures. Historicism, like its nominalist forbearers, rejects universals in favor of the particular. As Beiser summarizes, “To talk about reason, value or human nature in general, apart from their specific expressions or embodiments in a specific time and place, is to indulge in mere abstractions” (Beiser 2011, p. 5). Historicism denies both Christian and Enlightenment metaphysics, resisting any account of the transcendent apart from the historical conditions of particular peoples, places, times, and culture. As Beiser concludes, “The fundamental principle of historicism is that all human actions and ideas have to be explained historically according to their specific historical causes and contexts” (Beiser 2011, p. 19). This account of “history” and its concomitant “philosophy of history” reveals something of the intellectual environment of the university training with its “Awe in the presence of History” that Barth castigates in Der Römerbrief. Perhaps Barth’s most helpful clarification of his understanding of the relation between history and revelation is found in the following: “Revelation is not a predicate of history, but history is a predicate of revelation” (CD I/2, p. 58, emphasis his). For Barth, “history” (Historie) is not an independent or neutral wissenschaftliche discipline, and, accordingly, Barth’s resistance to Historie’s independence distanced him from the ­university training he received. The criterion for understanding the significance of history is made possible via the vehicle of divine revelation and not vice versa. To confuse the priority of revelation to history is to reject “the way of obedience” (CD I/2, p. 58). This confusion allows history or historical methods to run aground the centrality of the confession “God reveals Himself ” (CD I/2, p. 58), all the while distancing history from its eschatological framework (see Higton 2004, p. 123). The distinction between historicity  –  the eventfulness of a historical event  –  and historicality  –  the substance or essence of the event  –  is a helpful clarification of the issues at hand (MacDonald 2000, p. 111). Historicity or history in general concerns itself with the event as a historical occurrence, for example, death on a Roman cross as

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a political warning against grassroots threats to Rome. Jesus died this way. So too did Spartacus. The eventfulness of Jesus’s death as a historical phenomenon is not unique in Roman history. However, Spartacus’s death did not entail with it the reconciliation of humanity with the God of Israel and the death blow to sin’s long tyranny and reign. Jesus’s did. To speak in this way is to speak of the historicality of the event of Jesus’s death. Only revelation makes this historicality available when dealing with the historical events of the divine economy (see also Burnett 2001, pp. 100–110). Barth’s misgivings about “historicism” is not a rejection of space/time events in favor of transhistorical encounters with the divine. Rather, Barth places the self‐revealing character of God as the epistemic entry point for understanding the essence of historical phenomena in the divine economy. As the gospels make plain, proximity to historical events, even miraculous ones, is no guarantee of genuine understanding of the event’s significance (see Seitz 2011, pp. 36–39, 154–156). Revelation makes such understanding possible.

Barth and the History of Religions School The prizing and protecting of the claim, “God reveals Himself,” ranges near the heart of Barth’s dissatisfaction with the religious‐historical school of his day. Barth sat under Herman Gunkel during his university days and recalls the vigor of Gunkel’s lectures. He confessed that the Old Testament became a real option for him because of Gunkel’s impressive teaching abilities (Busch 1994, p. 39). Rudolf Bultmann also came under Gunkel’s influence at Berlin, devoting himself to the study of the Hebrew Bible because of the influence of this founding father of the “religious‐historical school” (Hammann 2013, pp. 26–27). William Wrede, Wilhelm Bousset, Ernst Troeltsch (who came later), and Hermann Gunkel, all under the leadership of the church historian, Albert Eichhorn, formed a small school of scholars seeking to apply Ritschlian methods and instincts to biblical studies. The influence of this group of scholars on early to mid‐twentieth‐ century biblical scholarship refuses overstatement. As Smend claims, “No scholar had so deep an influence on the methods of biblical exegesis in the mid 20th century as Hermann Gunkel, an influence reaching far beyond the borders of Germany” (Smend 2007, p. 118). The “history of religions school” concerned itself with “the re‐presentation of the religious consciousness” by means of historical analysis of the religious ideas, institutions, and affections of peoples in particular times (Smend 2007, p. 121). The influence of Albrecht Ritschl and the quest to ground theology in historical facts rather than metaphysical speculation fueled much of this school’s engine (see PTNC, pp. 640–647; McCormack 1995, pp. 38–40, 49–53). Yet, the history of religions school cannot be fairly described as “positivistic,” aiming for historical facts alone by means of a detached attentiveness to what really occurred. A co‐religious and empathetic spirit is necessary to appreciate the religious consciousness of another people. The distancing of this school from metaphysical trappings reinforced the trading of revealed religion for natural religion. Gunkel states the matter starkly: “The Old Testament reveals its true greatness only when we have made up our minds to ­surrender

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unreservedly the ancient doctrine of inspiration. We have brought it down from heaven to earth, and now it rises majestically before our eyes from earth to heaven” (Gunkel 2001, p. 26). The form‐critical project with its analysis of literary types and forms serves the dual interest of locating texts in their religious‐historical moment and uncovering something of the religious affection/spirit of it. As such, texts become windows into religious times and sentiments. Barth’s interpretive instincts are more patristic in flavor. He traverses across the whole of the biblical canon, reading the diverse texts of Scripture in associative relation with a shared subject matter and divine source (see Barth’s figural exegesis of Scripture with the question of election and rejection before him, CD II/2, pp. 340–409; cf. Frei 1972, preface). The biblical text’s range of theological significance is not constrained by its religious prehistory. Barth bristles against exegetical methods whose stated object is something other than the text as revealed “witness” (see CD I/2, p. 494). If form‐critical insights may provide entry points for understanding the written text, then Barth could and would make use of them. Nevertheless, “[h]owever brilliantly and happily conceived, the ­‘history of Israelite religion’ is not the ‘biblical theology of the Old Testament’” (CD I/2, p.  79). What unites the Christian canon is not a “kinship” or “homogeneity” of two different religions (CD I/2, p. 79). What holds it together is a “unity of revelation” ­proceeding from the self‐same Triune God who is the subject matter of both testaments (CD I/2, 79). “God reveals Himself ” is an exegetical principle of utmost importance to Barth, placing his hermeneutic at odds with the history of religions school’s exegetical quest for religion within the realm of human consciousness (see McCormack 1995, p. 135).

Conclusion: Barth and Critical Methods Barth insisted throughout his long career that he was not an enemy of historical criticism per se. Much like his use of philosophy, Barth could make ad hoc use of historical criticism’s finding without becoming beholden to the governing epistemology or disciplinary goals of the biblical studies guild. A few examples from CD IV/1 will suffice. • In CD IV/1 Barth engages the Emmanuel traditions of Isaiah 7–9. He shows his awareness of the tradition history of the three oracles. “The three passages in Isaiah seem to belong to three independently transmitted oracles” (CD IV/1, p. 5). He then nods in the direction of the redaction‐critical achievement of bringing these three “independent” oracles together in the text’s final form. His canonical sensibilities privilege the final form and the interpretive imprint left on the “independent” oracles now situated together in Isaiah’s canonical shape. Whoever the Emmanuel figure was in the original Sitz im Leben of the independent oracles, matters little because of the Emmanuel traditions’ role in their current canonical context (CD IV/1, p. 6). • Barth recognizes the possibility of the temptation narratives in the synoptic gospels originating in three different sources (CD IV/1, p. 261). He then seeks to orient the accounts together on the level of their shared substance. • Barth concludes his section, “The Pride of Man,” with 10 pages of small‐print exposition of Jeremiah’s prophecy (CD IV/1, pp. 468–478). “Here, again we can

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learn from the Old Testament” (CD IV/1, p. 468). Throughout the exposition, Barth refers to the work of Bernard Duhm, Martin Noth, and Wilhelm Vischer. Barth leans on Duhm’s resolution to the “literary problem” of Jeremiah 45, namely, why does this chapter appear at this location in Jeremiah’s oeuvre (CD IV/1, pp. 474– 475)? The fact that Jeremiah 45 is chronologically earlier than its surrounding context reveals something of the redaction‐critical motivation for placing it at this location in the prophetic book. Jeremiah 45 provides an answer to the pressing question readers of Jeremiah might have: what is the fate of Jeremiah and the unfaithful people in Egypt? Jeremiah 45 gives an account of the relationship of sin with the “consequent destruction of the people” and its effects on the prophetic persona (CD IV/1, p. 475). Duhm’s redaction‐critical understanding of the “depth dimension” of Jeremiah’s final form provides an interpretive entry point for Barth’s exposition. All the while, Barth understands Jeremiah as a figure, second only to Moses, who is “a witness to Jesus Christ at the very heart of the Old Testament” (CD IV/1, p. 473). Duhm would not concur. The list could continue throughout the CD regarding Barth’s appreciative and ad hoc use of historical‐critical research: for example, his appreciative appeal to Noth’s understanding of “covenant” in his History of Israel (CD IV/1, pp. 24–25) or his  positive use of Gunkel’s insight into the creation accounts (e.g. CD III/1, pp. 124–125) or his affirmation of the two‐creation accounts stemming from different sources and providing Barth a theological handle regarding an external and internal account of creation (e.g. CD III/1, p. 229, see MacDonald 2000, p. 139ff.). All of these examples and more confirm Barth’s early insistence in RII that he is not an enemy of historical criticism. Nevertheless, Barth remains committed to the Bible as a written text and privileges its final form as the object of exegetical inquiry. Holy Scripture as a written text endures as the unique means by which God reveals himself in the church and also in the world. The Bible as a creaturely reality is the product of history, and as such, biblical exegesis benefits from various and sundry historical‐critical insights into its creaturely character. Yet the Bible’s subject matter, that toward which it witnesses, is not of history; thus the Bible’s subject matter would not be available to historicist methods or modes of reasoning. Rather, the Bible’s subject matter is given to history by the gracious self‐ revealing of that self‐same subject, namely, the one God whose name is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. History, in the relevant sense, is a predicate of revelation. A suitable conclusion to the subject matter at hand comes from Barth’s own clear statement. “As I see it, this does not mean the annulling of the results of biblical scholarship in the last centuries, nor does it mean a breaking off and neglect of efforts in this direction. What it does mean is a radical re‐orientation concerning the goal to be pursued, on the basis of the recognition that the biblical texts must be investigated for their own sake to the extent that the revelation which they attest does not stand or occur, and is not to be sought, behind or above them but in them. If in reply it is asked whether Christianity is really a book‐religion, the answer is that strangely enough Christianity has always been and only been a living religion when it is not ashamed to be actually and seriously a book‐religion” (CD I/2, pp. 494–495).

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References Bächli, O. (1987). Das Alte Testament in der Kirchlichen Dogmatik von Karl Barth. Neukirchen‐Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag. Barton, J. (2007). The Nature of Biblical Criticism. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. Beiser, F.C. (2011). The German Historicist Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Beiser, F.C. (2014). After Hegel: German Philosophy 1840–1900. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Burnett, R.E. (2001). Karl Barth’s Theological Exegesis, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 2, vol. 145. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Busch, E. (1994). Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts (trans. J. Bowden). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Frei, H. (1972). The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gunkel, H. (2001). Why engage the old testament? In: Water for a Thirsty Land: Israelite Literature and Religion (ed. K.C. Hanson) (trans. A.K. Dallas). Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Hammann, K. (2013). Rudolf Bultmann: A Biography (trans. P. E. Devenish). Salem, OR: Polebridge Press.

Higton, M. (2004). The Fulfillment of history in Barth, Frei, Auerbach and Dante. In: Conversing with Barth (eds. J.C. McDowell and M. Higton), 120–141. Surrey: Ashgate Press. MacDonald, N.B. (2000). Karl Barth and the Strange New World within the Bible: Barth Wittgenstein, and the Metadilemmas of the Enlightenment. Carlisle: Paternoster Press. McCormack, B.L. (1995). Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909–1936. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Plantinga, A. (2000). Warranted Christian Belief. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Seitz, C.R. (2011). The Character of Christian Scripture: The Significance of a Two‐ Testament Canon. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. Smend, R. (1986). Karl Barth und Walter Baumgartner: Ein Briefwechsel über das Alte Testament. Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 6: 240–271. Smend, R. (2007). From Astruc to Zimmerli: Old Testament Scholarship in Three Centuries (trans. M. Kohl). Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

CHAPTER 59

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rom the beginning of his theological revolution, Barth asserted: “If Protestant theology is to recover once more from its emaciation, and it is by no means certain that it will, then let our Old and New Testament scholars, without prejudice to what they do as historians (as an avocation!), be theological exegetes, and as such really also work in obedience to “the truth” (GA 19, p. 373). What is the basis of this conviction and what did Barth mean by theological exegesis?

Background As the son of a New Testament professor at the University of Bern who was absorbed throughout much of his career with questions about the “historical Jesus,” Barth was not unfamiliar with scientific analysis of the Bible when he began his studies at Bern in 1904. Though his father, Fritz, was more conservative in his conclusions than his colleagues, the Bern faculty was as committed to historical critical analysis of the Bible as any in Europe. Several members were students of F.C. Baur and J. Wellhausen. One of them, Rudolf Steck, Barth’s first New Testament teacher, was so “tediously exact” he did not think even Galatians was genuinely Pauline. Though Barth found his “Bern masters” mostly “dry,” he later expressed gratitude for them: “They gave me such a thorough grounding in the earlier form of the ‘historical‐critical’ school that the remarks of their later and contemporary successors could no longer get under my skin or even touch my heart – they could only get on my nerves, as is only too well known” (TS, p. 262). Neither his dutiful studies under the conservative New Testament scholar, Schlatter, at Tübingen, his prodigious historical study of The Book of Acts under Harnack, nor his appreciation for Gunkel’s approach to the Old Testament at Berlin

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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touched his heart either. Kant having immunized him from any easy move from below to above, and Herrmann alone having touched his heart with his talk of Jesus’ “inner life,” Barth left his university studies at Marburg a devoted liberal, knowing “how to swear no higher than by the man, Daniel Ernst Friedrich Schleiermacher” (TS, pp. 261–262). After an assistantship in Geneva, Barth became a pastor in the small, industrial village of Safenwil, Switzerland, where he encountered many unforeseen challenges. Yet a significant change occurred in October 1914 when 93 German intellectuals signed a “horrible manifesto” justifying Kaiser Wilhelm II’s war policy, and that among them were most of his esteemed former German teachers. This event called into question an entire theological tradition that could be traced back to Schleiermacher and was so cataclysmic Barth said: “An entire world of theological exegesis, ethics, dogmatics, and preaching, which up to that point I had accepted as basically credible, was thereby shaken to the foundations, and with it everything which flowed at that time from the pens of the German theologians” (TS, pp. 263–264). The deeper crisis was actually closer to home: that of his own preaching. “The textual basis of my sermons, the Bible, which hitherto I had taken for granted, became more and more of a problem” (GA 1, p. 296). As he later reflected, mounting the pulpit became increasingly difficult: “I know what it means to have to go into the pulpit year in and year out, obliged to understand and explain, and wishing to do so, yet being unable to do it because we were given almost nothing at the university except the famous ‘respect for history,’ which despite the beautiful expression means simply the renunciation of earnest, respectful understanding, and explanation” (Barth 1968, pp. 93–94). Acknowledging their theological bankruptcy, Barth and his friend, Eduard Thurneysen, decided to return to the Bible: We made a fresh attempt to learn our theological ABCs all over again. More reflectively than ever before, we began reading and expounding the writings of the Old and New Testaments. And behold, they began to speak to us – very differently than we had supposed we were obliged to hear them speak in the school of what was then called “modern” theology. The morning after Thurneysen had whispered to me our commonly held conviction, I sat down under an apple tree and began, with all the tools at my disposal, to apply myself to the Epistle to the Romans. (TS, p. 264)

“What Is in the Bible?” Barth’s discovery of “The New World in the Bible” reflects a kind of Copernican revolution: “It is precisely not the right human thoughts about God that form the contents of the Bible, but rather the right thoughts of God about humans” (WGT, p. 25). In this address, Barth repeats a single question, “What is in the Bible?” He echoes answers typical of his day: the Bible is full of History! Morality! Religion! Piety! After discussing the inadequacy of these answers, he asks: What is the “highest answer”? What is really the “main subject” of the Bible, to which we are so ineluctably driven? Barth says it is God. Of course, the Bible also contains history, morality, religion, and piety. But none of these

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constitute the real “content of the contents.” “‘God’ is the content of the Bible!” (WGT, pp. 26–27). This marks the beginning of Barth’s pursuit of theological exegesis. Prior to his break with liberalism, Barth too had read the Bible primarily as a document of piety. Placing a premium on establishing an inner relationship with its authors, he immersed himself in their thought‐world and piety, especially the New Testament writers, who, as he told his confirmation classes, provide “the earliest reports and thoughts about Jesus, written down by men who experienced themselves the glory of Christian certainty to the liveliest degree” (GA 18, p. 67). Elaborating a psychological profile of Paul (GA 22, pp. 555–557), Barth admired Schleiermacher’s hermeneutical method of balancing the psychological and grammatical sides as well as the historical and divinatory sides of interpretation, and appears to have embraced its highest goal: “to understand an author better than he understands himself ” (TS, pp. 178ff). Since his 1910 article extolling the art of empathy (Einfühlung) as an interpretive key in achieving this goal and a means of overcoming the sterile historicism of his day (GA  22, pp. 149–212), Barth was convinced his approach was at least superior to the reductionistic methods of most historical critics. Yet his encounter with the apostle Paul revolutionized his thinking. Barth described Paul’s voice as “strange” and “new to me” (GA 16, pp. 581–602). “The task of understanding Paul verse by verse has been,” he said, “an assault upon my and the whole of today’s thought and sensibilities” (GA 16, p. 587). “Paul – what a man he must have been, and what men also those for whom he could so sketch and hint at these pithy things in a few muddled fragments! I often shudder in such company,” he wrote to Thurneysen. “The Reformers, even Luther, are far from the stature of Paul; only now has that become convincingly clear to me. And behind Paul: what realities those must have been that could set this man in motion in such a way! What a lot of farfetched stuff we compile then in commentary on his words, of which perhaps 99 percent of their real content eludes us!” (GA 3, p. 236). Barth claimed this encounter was the great turning point of his life. Yet it was not Paul the man or religious personality, but the subject matter to which his words point that was decisive, viz., what Paul says about God, about Jesus Christ, “I still do not get past the fact that he … was eyes and ears to an event which our expressions of excitement, horror, suspense, or astonishment simply do not sufficiently describe.” In reading Paul’s letters, Barth reported: “I seem to see behind the banner of such a document a personality who is actually thrown off all ordinary courses and primarily off his own course by seeing and hearing what I for my part do not see and hear – who is, so to speak, precisely as a personality, annihilated [aufgehoben] in order to be dragged from land to land as a prisoner to do strange, hasty, unpredictable, and yet mysteriously well‐ planned deeds.” Such appears to be the case with all the prophets and apostles, Barth said, which led him to ask: What could possibly have moved individuals to say and do such peculiar things? “We all know the uneasiness that comes over us when we look out our window and see the people on the street suddenly stop, turn their heads, shade their eyes with their hands and look straight into the sky at something that is hidden from us by the roof. The unease is not necessary; it is probably an airplane. But in the face of the sudden stopping, focused gazing, and tense listening that is characteristic of individuals in the Bible, we are not so quickly put at ease” (WGT, pp. 80–81 rev.).

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No longer content to read the prophets and apostles merely as sources, Barth began to read them as witnesses, pointing away from themselves to Christ as resolutely as did John the Baptist in Grünewald’s Crucifixion. This had important exegetical implications. To introduce his Römerbrief, Barth wrote several preface drafts distinguishing his own approach “from the method of today’s dominant science of biblical exegesis.” In one he explained: To understand an author means for me mainly to stand with him, to take each of his words in earnest (so long as it is not proven that he does not deserve this trust), to participate with him in the subject matter …. But today’s theology does not stand with the prophets and the apostles; it does not side with them but rather with the modern reader and his prejudices; it does not take the prophets and apostles in earnest; instead, while it stands smiling sympathetically beside them or above them, it takes up a cool and indifferent distance from them; it critically or merrily examines the historical‐psychological surface and misses its meaning. That is what I have against it.

Describing “the chasm” between himself and the biblical scholars’ guild, but also between himself and his own past exegetical approach, Barth added: “The decisive prerequisite for the interpretation of a text for me therefore is participation in its subject matter. No historical meticulousness and no art of empathy [Einfühlungskunst] and no trip to the Orient can offer even the slightest substitute for this participation” (GA 16, p. 587). Instead of publishing these comments, however, or one of his longer, more polemical preface drafts “explaining” his own exegetical approach in contrast to – and as a kind of preemptive strike against – the dominant science of biblical exegesis, Barth published a more irenic preface that contained only a few brief, mildly stated remarks. But he gave the guild plenty to criticize when he stated that Paul was undoubtedly “a child of his age” and “addressed his contemporaries” as such, and “the differences between then and now, there and here, no doubt require careful investigation and consideration. But … these differences are, in fact, purely trivial.” More contentious was his statement: “The historical‐critical method of Biblical investigation has its rightful place: it is concerned with the preparation of the intelligence – and this can never be superfluous. But, were I driven to choose between it and the venerable doctrine of Inspiration, I should without hesitation adopt the latter, which has a broader, deeper, more important justification. The doctrine of Inspiration is concerned with the labor of apprehending, without which no technical equipment, however complete, is of any use whatever.” Barth added, “Fortunately, I am not compelled to choose between the two.” Critics, nevertheless, generally ignored this statement. They focused rather on his assertion: “my whole energy of interpreting has been expended in an endeavor to see through and beyond history into the spirit of the Bible, which is the Eternal Spirit” and, especially, his claim to have written his commentary with a “joyful sense of discovery” (GA 16, p. 3; RII, pp. 1–2).

A Bitter Enemy of Historical Criticism? Rather than ameliorating criticism that he rightly anticipated would follow the publication of his Römerbrief, Barth’s comments about his exegetical approach only

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inflamed critics. Indeed, reviewers focused on it more than the commentary itself. Several asked whether it should even be called a commentary. They could not fathom anyone saying what Barth said in the name of an “exegesis” of Paul’s Romans. They said it was more the product of “eisegesis,” that Barth had simply read too much of the present, his own situation and concerns, into the text. Some concluded that Barth’s commentary said more about him than it did about Paul. Adolf Jülicher called Barth a gnostic, a pneumatic, an Alexandrian. With Karl Schmidt, he likened him to Marcion. Carl Mennicke said the commentary was the product of sheer “dogmatism”; Rudolf Steinmetz, of “impressionistic tendencies”; and Philipp Bachmann, of “enthusiasm” and “pneumatic‐prophetic exegesis.” Paul Wernle, professor of New Testament and Church History at Basel, renowned liberal churchman and Paul scholar, charged that Barth was a “biblicist”; he simply could not understand how Barth could interpret Paul with so much “Kongenialität.” With respect to his own interpretation of Paul, Wernle admitted: “I know I do not have the whole Paul on my side, nor do I even want that. I want to hold on to that which speaks to my heart and conscience, to that which is eternal in [Paul’s] message.” But to do so, he insisted, “I must distinguish and choose.” But this is what Barth refused to do. “Everything between Paul and his exegete remains in harmony …. There is absolutely no point in the thought of Paul that he finds uncomfortable … not even the most modest r­ emnant conditioned by the history of the times is left over” (Wernle 1919, pp. 168–169; see Burnett 2004, pp. 16–23). The basic charge was that Barth had not done justice to the “real,” “historical” Paul. As insightful as his commentary may otherwise be, it was written at the expense of Paul’s historical context. Several declared that he had done “violence” to Paul. Barth was deemed a “bitter enemy of historical criticism” (RII, p. 9). Jülicher scorned Barth’s “holy egoism” and warned: “He who despises the past because only he who is alive is right cannot gain anything from the past.” The problem, as Mennicke described it, was that Barth did not make “the least attempt to deal with the difficulties of modern consciousness.” Wilhelm Loew said the difficulty with Barth’s approach was that one has “intensive experience without any feeling of distance” (Loew 1920, p. 586). Barth immediately began work on a second edition of his Römerbrief. But because most reviewers had focused their attack on his exegetical method, he decided that instead of allowing himself to be pummeled over it again, he would come out swinging. In his “pugnacious” preface of RII, he declared: “I am no ‘bitter enemy of historical criticism’” (TS, p. 265; RII, p. 9 rev.). I have nothing whatever to say against historical criticism. I recognize it, and once more state quite definitely that it is both necessary and justified. My complaint is that recent commentators confine themselves to an interpretation of the text which seems to me to be no commentary at all, but merely the first step towards a commentary. Recent commentaries contain no more than a reconstruction of the text, a rendering of the Greek words and phrase by their precise equivalents, a number of additional notes in which archaeological and philological material is gathered together, and a more or less plausible arrangement of the subject‐matter in such a manner that it may be made historically and psychologically intelligible from the standpoint of pure pragmatism. (RII, p. 6)

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Barth acknowledged his indebtedness to “historians” for their “preliminary effort” to understand Paul and said he “never dreamed of doing anything else than sit attentively at [their] feet” (RII, 6–7). What disturbed him was their pretense of modesty. Comparing Jülicher with Calvin, Barth noted how patiently and energetically the latter “sets himself to re‐think the whole material and to wrestle with it, till the walls which separate the sixteenth century from the first become transparent! … The conversation between the original record and the reader moves round the subject‐ matter, until a distinction between yesterday and to‐day becomes impossible.” Yet with Jülicher, “How quick he is, without any real struggling with the raw material of the Epistle, to dismiss this or that difficult passage as simply a peculiar doctrine or opinion of Paul! How quick he is to treat a matter as explained, when it is said to belong to the religious thought, feeling, experience, conscience, or conviction – of Paul!” More disturbingly, “when this does not at once fit, or is manifestly impossible, how easily he leaps, like some bold William Tell, right out of the Pauline boat, and rescues himself by attributing what Paul has said, to his “personality,” to the experience on the road to Damascus (an episode which seems capable of providing at any moment an explanation of every impossibility), to later Judaism, to Hellenism, or, in fact, to any exegetical semi‐ divinity of the ancient world!” (RII, pp. 7–8). In short, the scholars who apply such methods to Paul are the ones guilty of “violence” against him. Historicism and psychologism, the two main tools in modernity to reduce theological claims to matters of mere history or psychology, has not only reduced Paul to his historical context and/or his psychological parts but made him unintelligible on his own terms. Hence, Barth said, “Modern pictures of Paul seem to me – and not to me only – simply incredible, even historically” (RII, p. 11 rev.).

Historical Critics Must Be More Critical “In contrast to all this,” Barth said, “the historical critics must be more critical to suit me!” Theological exegesis is such only to the extent that it takes theological claims seriously, yet not at the expense of “using all the crowbars and wrecking tools needed to achieve relevant treatment of the text.” To establish “what is there,” theological exegesis cannot stop with this “first primitive attempt at explanation.” “For how ‘what is there’ is to be understood cannot be established by an appreciation of the words and phrases of the text, strewn in from time to time from some fortuitous standpoint of the exegete, but only through an entering, as freely and eagerly as practicable, into the inner tension of the concepts presented by the text with more or less clarity.” The task is to measure what is written (the signa) by what is written about (the res). “Krinein [to be critical] means for me, in reference to a historical document,” Barth said, “the measuring of all the words and phrases contained in it by the matter of which it, unless everything is deceptive, is clearly speaking, and the relating to the questions it unmistakably poses all the answers given, and the relating these again to the cardinal question, which contains all questions, the question of the meaning of everything that it says in the light of ‘all that can be said’, and therefore really ‘all that is said.’” In other words, the whole must be read in light of the parts and the parts in light of the whole. “As little as possible

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should be left of those blocks of merely historical, merely contingent, merely accidental concepts; as far as possible the connection of the words to the Word in the words must be disclosed.” Too many parts “left over,” suggests the whole may not yet be rightly understood (Barth 1968, p. 93 rev.). More provocatively, Barth claimed: “As one who would understand, I must press forward to the point where insofar as possible I confront the riddle of the subject matter and no longer merely the riddle of the document as such, until I can almost forget that I am not the author, until I have almost understood him so well that I let him speak in my name, and can myself speak in his name” (Barth 1968, p. 93). To some this sounded like Schleiermacher. To others it confirmed that Barth was a “mystic” or “pneumatic.” In line with his tactic of “upping the ante” on his interlocutors’ claims only to refute them, Barth’’ point was that the hermeneutical tradition of Schleiermacher did not go far enough. The sort of contemporaneity cannot be achieved by hermeneutical skill, “historical scrupulosity,” or “art of empathy.” It took another kind of spirit to breach the walls separating us from Paul’s words and their subject matter. Until this happens, Barth insists, interpreters cannot afford to dismiss “uncomfortable points” as merely “relics of the past”  –  for example, Paul’s talk about Christ’s divinity, about our relationship to Adam, about atonement, about predestination, and so on, as Wernle does. “Imagine a commentary on the Epistle to the Romans which left these … points unexplained,” Barth objected. “Could such a commentary really be called an interpretation? In contrast with this comfortable dismissal of uncomfortable points, it has been my ‘biblicism’ which has compelled me to wrestle with these ‘scandals to modern thought’ until I have found myself able to undertake the interpretation of them, because I have discovered precisely in these very points the characteristic and authentic discernment of Paul.” Barth conceded, “Whether I have interpreted them correctly is, of course, another matter.” Not only were there many passages he still found “very hard to understand,” but “no single verse seems to me capable of a smooth interpretation” (RII, p. 12 rev.). Being “more critical” means being more aware of one’s own interpretive limits and assumptions. But, as Barth articulated in his preface to the third edition of his Römerbrief, it derives from something more basic.

A Relationship of Faithfulness Bultmann expressed appreciation for the second edition of Romans but criticized Barth for not acknowledging that Paul did not always speak “from the subject matter itself.” Rather, Bultmann said, “In [Paul] there are other spirits speaking besides the pneuma Christou” (Barth 1968, p. 120). He thought Barth needed to be more radical. Barth responded: “I do not wish to engage in a controversy with Bultmann as to which of us is the more radical. But I must go farther than he does and say that there are in the Epistle no words at all which are not words of those ‘other spirits.’” Yet, Barth asks, “can the Spirit of Christ be thought of as standing in the Epistle side by side with ‘other’ spirits and in competition with them? It seems to me impossible to set the Spirit of Christ – the authentic subject‐matter of the Epistle – over against other spirits, in such a manner as to deal out praise to some passages, and to depreciate others where Paul is supposedly

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not controlled by his true subject‐matter” (RII, pp. 16–17 rev.). Notwithstanding “a Word within the words,” of the “Spirit of Christ” amid voices of “other spirits,” Barth asks from what standpoint does Bultmann think he can distinguish them? By what standard can he play off the “Spirit of Christ” against “other spirits,” separating out the divine from the human, when “everything” Paul says is human? How can he tell me to abandon ship when something struck “me as especially bizarre where everything is bizarre!” (RII, pp. 17–18). Here Barth elaborates another hermeneutical principle. “The question is whether or not [the exegete] is to place himself in a relation to his author of utter loyalty [Treueverhältnis]. Is he to read him, determined to follow him to the very last word, wholly aware of what he is doing, and assuming that the author also knew what he was doing?” Barth says such loyalty means writing with rather than about the author. It means trusting, until proven otherwise, that the author may know something we do not but could know if we took his words as seriously as we take our own. It means when misunderstanding occurs, instead of playing the “schoolmaster,” we attribute the misunderstanding to ourselves rather than the author. Barth does not deny this involves “much sweat and many groans” in the case of Paul, nor that such loyalty to his words requires “criticism of the letter by the spirit,” and that certain ideas in the words of the text must be “expanded” whereas others are “contracted.” What Barth rejects as “irresponsible” is the approach of those who were so “completely spooked by the voices of those other spirits” – who are willing to write with Paul so long as everything is clear but write about Paul when things are not – who refuse seriously to try to read the fragments in light of the whole, “so that all the other spirits are seen in some way or other to serve the Spirit of Christ” (RII, pp. 17–19 rev.).

From Special to General Hermeneutics Most biblical scholars dismissed Barth’s exegetical approach as “unscientific.” They charged that he had privileged Paul or given his claims special treatment. Barth said they had mistaken a lack of bias, impartiality, and neutrality with scientific objectivity. He replied that for many moderns “the mistrust one has, the unwillingness to understand, the non‐participatory distancing of oneself, has simply been made into a scientific principle” (GA 16, p. 596). Rather than disinterested observation – or the cool, detached, and unprejudiced analysis of a spectator – scientific interpretation demands a deeper, more intense form of participation. Scientific means allowing the object to be known to determine the way taken in knowing (Wissenschaftlichkeit bedeutet Sachlichkeit). It means “total respect for the unique way of its chosen theme” (RII, p. 515 rev.). Rather than maintaining “critical distance” or “neutrality,” Barth said, “Neutrality is really a decision of unbelief ” (Barth 1939, p. 18). Barth denied he had privileged Paul’s writings. He admitted he could not maintain such loyalty to every author, in other words, “to stand and to fall” with him or her “to the very last word.” Some authors must be loyally opposed, a posteriori. “Indeed, there are many historical personages regarding whom it is possible only to speak about,” rather than “with” (RII, p. 18 rev.). Nevertheless, from the beginning, Barth claimed he would have applied the same method to Plato, Goethe, or Lao‐Tzu had it been his job to interpret them (GA 16, p. 644; RII, p. 12).

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Barth’s discovery that Scripture’s object is “sovereignly free” had revolutionary ­hermeneutical implications. It meant that the question of truth precedes the question of method, that ontology precedes epistemology, that “the question of the right hermeneutics” cannot be decided “in a discussion of exegetical method, but only in exegesis itself,” i.e. “methodus est arbitraria” (Busch 1976, p. 389). It meant not only refusing to place a priori restrictions on objects of interpretation, but a willingness to grant them unrestricted freedom and respect relative to the truth of Scripture’s object. Instead of moving from general hermeneutics to a special, biblical hermeneutic, in order to read the Bible “like any other book,” it meant reading other books like the Bible. It is because interpreters since the Enlightenment (e.g. J.A. Turretin) have tried to interpret the Bible like any other book without guarding “against the totalitarian claim of a general hermeneutic” that “general hermeneutics had been so mortally sick for so long.” Thus, Barth said: “For the sake of better general hermeneutics [biblical hermeneutics] must therefore dare to be this special hermeneutics” (CD I/2, p. 472). Each of these moves was implicit from the beginning of Barth’s Römerbrief period, which is why Hans‐Georg Gadamer in Truth and Method, deemed RI “a kind of hermeneutical manifesto” (Gadamer 2011, p. 510). As his exegesis courses at the University of Göttingen grew in popularity and the smoke began to clear from his Römerbrief – that “bombshell that fell on the playing field of theologians” – not all were as quick to dismiss Barth’s exegetical approach. Soon after his appointment as Professor of Dogmatics and New Testament Exegesis at the University of Münster on 22 July 1925, a debate over “What is Exegesis?” boiled throughout the German‐speaking theological world until the early 1930s. Proponents and critics alike credited Barth with having ignited a “pneumatic exegesis” movement (Burnett 2004, pp. 26–29). Barth admitted his work had “occasioned” this movement but expressed ambivalence towards it because. “There is no method by which revelation can be made into the kind of revelation that is actually received, no method of scriptural exegesis which is truly pneumatic, i.e. which articulates the witness to revelation in the Bible and to that degree really introduces the Pneuma” (CD I/1, p. 183). Method was one thing, the reception of revelation through the Holy Spirit quite another.

Explicatio, Meditatio, Applicatio Barth did not fully elaborate his understanding of theological exegesis until the second half‐volume of the Church Dogmatics under the rubric, “Freedom under the Word” (CD I/2, §21.2). As “the focal point of the church’s action,” Barth argued that exegesis was, after prayer, the “decisive activity” (CD I/2, p. 695) through which Jesus Christ governs the church and thereby sets her free (e.g. from dialogue with herself). The church is free only to the extent that she is bound to biblical exegesis. Yet biblical exegesis is free only to the extent that it is bound to Scripture’s content and theme. Following his claim, “The universal rule of interpretation is that a text can be read and understood and expounded only with reference to and in the light of its theme” (CD I/2, p. 493), Barth elaborated his key thesis that Jesus Christ is Scripture’s central subject matter, content, and theme. “Jesus Christ as the name of the God who deals graciously with man the sinner …. To

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hear this is to hear the Bible – both as a whole and in each one of its separate parts. Not to hear this means eo ipso [by that very fact] not to hear the Bible, neither as a whole, nor therefore in its parts. The Bible says all sorts of things, certainly: but in all this multiplicity and variety, it says in truth only [this] one thing” (CD I/2, p. 720 rev.). Therefore, any effort to interpret Scripture apart from this content and theme is no interpretation at all, no matter how many parts are otherwise “explained.” Because interpretation occurred in the presence of and with reference to this “sovereign name,” Barth claims: “The necessary and fundamental form of all scriptural exegesis … must consist in all circumstances in the freely performed act of subordinating all human concepts, ideas and convictions to the witness of revelation supplied to us in Scripture” (CD I/2, p. 715). Subordination is the “fundamental form of all scriptural exegesis,” because “our own ideas, thoughts, and convictions, as such, as ours, certainly do not run in the direction of the testimony which has this particular content” (CD I/2, p. 721). Rather, when “the Word of God meets us, we are laden with the images, ideas and certainties which we ourselves have formed about God, the world and ourselves” (CD I/2, pp. 716f.). God’s Word is inherently clear, but because it meets us in the “fog of our own intellectual life,” it “always becomes obscure.” Indeed, “God’s thoughts in His Word do not come to us in abstracto but in concreto in the form of the human word of prophets and apostles.” God’s Word needs no explanation “because like the light of the sun above our atmosphere, it is clear in itself. But as such it would not have come to us, and we could have nothing to do with it.” Though “clear in itself (even in the form of the scriptural word)” (CD I/2, p. 722), it still needs to be explained because it “has assumed the mode of our intellectual world and is thus exposed to the risk of being understood, or rather not understood, by us according to the habits of our mentality” (CD I/2, p. 717). Exegesis (Auslegung) is, “as the very word suggests, the unraveling or unfolding of the scriptural word which comes to us in a, so to speak rolled‐up form, thus concealing its meaning” (CD I/2, p. 722). Exegesis in this narrower sense is only one phase in a threefold “process of biblical exposition.” It was a process that includes explicatio, meditatio, and applicatio. As the “first plainly distinguishable aspect of the process,” explicatio is “the act of observation” or of seeing what is there. Because the divine Word in the scriptural word has “adjusted itself to our human world of thought, thus exposing itself to the darkening prism of our human understanding,” what is there is not self‐evident. Exegetes might not always be able to follow Scripture’s self‐presentation, but their task is to present it as “intrinsically intelligible,” and this is “the problem of scriptural interpretation” (CD I/2, p. 723). To understand the prophets’ and apostles’ words they must be understood in “their concrete historical situation.” Here “literary‐historical investigation” is the appropriate tool. Literary criticism aims to determine “the most likely inner connection” of the words of a given text and questions of literary dependence using “the methods of source‐criticism, lexicography, grammar, syntax, and appreciation of style,” etc. Historical criticism seeks to determine what has taken place “on the spot to which the words of the author refer, and of what has occasioned the author to use these particular words” (CD I/2, p. 724). Literary‐historical examination presents pictures of what stands in and behind the text. Everything depends, however, on whether “we really form an accurate picture of the object reflected in prophetic‐apostolic word.” This object may force us to “modify, shatter, and remold” pictures already in our minds and bring to

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“understanding possibilities which hitherto and in other circumstances we regard as impossibilities” (CD I/2, p. 725 rev.). Theological exegesis demands fidelity to the prophetic‐apostolic words and the singular object reflected in them. “This fidelity does not imply a necessary suspension of historical orientation and criticism,” but neither does it “tolerate any restrictions” as to what is possible. Barth calls such fidelity “the freedom of loyalty” (CD I/2, p. 726). The second moment in exegesis is reflection (meditatio). It does not follow explicatio in time but indicates “the moment of the transition of what is said into the thinking of the reader or hearer” (CD I/2, p. 727). Neither does explicatio occur independently of meditatio, for no one observes what is there “without at the same time reflecting upon and interpreting what is there.” Barth described the modern “scientific” ideal of unbiased, presuppositionless exegesis as “comical” (CD I/2, 469 rev.). Everyone approaches “the text from the standpoint of a particular epistemology, logic or ethics, of definite ideas and ideals concerning the relations of God, the world and man …. Everyone has some sort of philosophy …. This is true even of the simplest Bible reader (and of him perhaps with particular force and tenacity)” (CD I/2, p. 728 rev.). Thus, the question is not whether but how exegetes use philosophy. We must neither to fear nor commit ourselves unreservedly to any philosophy. Some may prove fruitful if they help us follow the text. But they must be crucified, dead, and buried before they could be raised again in service of “the freedom and sovereign power of [Scripture’s] object.” (This critical process of reception – of affirmation, negation, and negation of the negation – was basically what Barth meant by Aufhebung.) To the extent that this critical process occurs, Barth claims, “Even from a human point of view, it is possible to regard scriptural exposition as the best and perhaps the only school of truly free human thinking – freed, that is, from all the conflicts and tyranny of systems in favor of this object” (CD I/2, p. 735 rev.). The third moment in exegesis is applicatio, i.e. appropriation or assimilation. Like explicatio and meditatio, applicatio does not occur abstractly or independently. “No appropriation [practical application] of the Word of God is possible without critical examination [explicatio] and reflection [meditatio]” (CD I/2, p. 736). Yet neither do “valid and fruitful” examination and reflection occur without appropriation or assimilation. “Assimilation means assuming this witness into our own responsibility.” It means “contemporaneity” and “indirect identification … with the [human] witness of the revelation” [mit dem Zeugen der Offenbarung]. We do not merely reflect upon the content of this testimony (Zeugniss) but to think after it, in accord with it, in a certain sense to follow it [nachdenken], “from inner impulse and necessity … because it has become a fundamental orientation of our whole existence.” Contrary to the “unholy doctrine of ‘theory and practice,’” exegesis has not properly occurred if “it stops short of assimilation” (CD I/2, p. 737 rev.). In assimilation we stop “using” Scripture, but learn that it “uses us,” that it is “not the object but subject, and the hearer and reader is not subject but object” (CD I/2, p. 738). Interpreters are thus de‐centered, liberated “from the system of [their] own concerns and questions,” to focus on the scriptural word and to follow it in the sense of nachdenken (CD I/2, p. 739). This is freedom under the Word. Barth produced more biblical exegesis than any major theologian since Calvin. His contribution continues to be assessed. However, he insisted that exegesis is “the decisive presupposition and source of all dogmatics” (CD I/2, p. 821). As testimony to this con-

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viction, his final words to his students in 1935 before being dismissed by the Nazis from his teaching post at Bonn were: “Take now my last piece of advice: Exegesis, Exegesis, and once more, Exegesis! If I have become a dogmatician, it is because I long before have endeavored to carry on exegesis” (GA 31, p. 428). References Barth, K. (1939). Die Souveränität des Wortes Gottes und die Entscheidung des Glaubens. In: Theologische Studien 5. Zollikon‐Zürich: Evangelischer. Barth, K. (1968). Foreword to the Second Edition. In: The Beginnings of Dialectical Theology (ed. J. Robinson) (trans. Keith Crim). Richmond: John Knox Press. Burnett, R.E. (2004). Karl Barth’s Theological Exegesis: The Hermeneutical Principles of the Römerbrief Period. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

Busch, E. (1976). Karl Barth (trans. John Bowden). Philadelphia: Fortress. Gadamer, H.‐G. (2011). Truth and Method, 2e (trans. Joel Weinsheimer, Donald G. Marshall). London: Continuum. Loew, W. (1920). Noch einmal Barths Römerbrief. Die Christliche Welt 34: 585–587. Wernle, P. (1919). Der Römerbrief in neuer Beleuchtung. Kirchenblatt fur die reformierte Schweiz 34: 163–164, 167–169.

CHAPTER 60

Barth on Actualistic Ontology Shao Kai Tseng

Introduction This chapter examines the substance and implicit grammars undergirding what has in recent Anglophone scholarship come to be called Barth’s “actualistic ontology.”1 For the most part this term has been associated with the view that “the action of God in electing to be God for humanity in Jesus Christ is not the act of an already existing agent. Rather it is an act in the course of which God determines the very being of God” (Nimmo 2007, p. 8). This trend draws heavily on the revisionary contention that “there is for Barth ‘no state, no mode of being or existence above and prior to this eternal act of self‐ determination as substantialistic thinking would lead us to believe’” (Nimmo 2007, p. 8; citing McCormack 2004, p. 359). Notwithstanding its undeniable importance to Barth studies, this interpretational trajectory has left a number of technical issues unaddressed. The aim of this essay is to reconstrue Barth’s actualistic ontology and its underlying grammars by a close examination of key terms like “determination,” “nature,” “essence,” and “being.” I will argue that in and through formal Chalcedonian patterns, this ontology dialectically operates on both a substantialist grammar of being and a process grammar of becoming, while remaining ever critical of the metaphysical worldviews behind both grammars. In speaking of Barth’s actualistic “ontology,” I am mindful of George Hunsinger’s caveat that the Swiss theologian rejects ontology in the stricter sense of the term as a branch of metaphysics that might offer a prior framework within which to unfold 1  This article comprises excerpts from my Barth’s Ontology of Sin and Grace: Variations on a Theme of Augustine (London: Routledge, 2018).

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Christian theology. “Metaphysics” in this context refers to the philosophical enterprise that, positing intrinsic connections between the human mind and supposedly intelligible realities above and behind the sensible world, seeks to uncover the first principles or ultimate truths of the universe, so as to speculatively explain them. Revisionism’s express intent is to offer a “strictly ‘anti‐metaphysical’” reading of Barth (McCormack 1995, p. 246). As Hunsinger points out, however, proponents of what he calls the “revisionist” agenda nevertheless “seem to trade on the ambiguity” of the term “ontology” by “slipping into” the forbidden area of metaphysics in a way that runs contrary to Barth (Hunsinger 2015, p. 2). In what follows, I shall heed Hunsinger’s reminder and speak of Barth’s “ontology” only in the extended meaning of the term (which Hunsinger accepts) to refer to any “general area of action, inquiry, or interest” that addresses the notion of being (Hunsinger 2015, p. 2).

“Substantialism” Defined The term “substantialism” has gained a considerable degree of importance in the secondary literature on Barth’s actualistic ontology. Paul Nimmo offers a succinct summary of “substantialist ontology” that he and others have argued to be diametrically opposed to Barth’s actualism: it is the basic metaphysical tenet according to which “what a person ‘is’ is something complete in and for herself, apart from and prior to the decisions, acts and relations which make up her lived existence” (Nimmo 2007, p. 10n). Opposed to this “substantialist ontology,” they contend, is Barth’s “actualistic ontology” that describes being as determined by act and history. This broad definition is correct, as long as “determination” is not confused with “constitution.” Understood more simply, central to Barth’s actualistic ontology is the notion of “being‐in‐act.” I shall argue, however, that Barth’s actualistic ontology is significantly but not diametrically opposed to substantialism. Without acknowledging Barth’s continuities with the substantialist tradition, his actualism could easily be misconstrued as some variant of Hegel’s process metaphysics (Molnar 2017, p. 112n74). Although the basic meaning of “substantialism” has generally been clear in the secondary literature on Barth, what Paul Dafydd Jones calls “the connotative richness of substance terminology” in classical theology has only been mentioned in passing and rarely explained in any sufficient detail (2008, pp. 32–33). Even the very term “substantialism” is seldom given any explicit elaboration in the revisionist oeuvre. The way “substantialism” is used in recent Barth studies originated from the tradition of process philosophy of which Hegel is often considered the direct or indirect patriarch.2 It refers to what Hegel famously dubbed the “tendency towards substance” in the history of western metaphysics (Seibt 2010, p. 28). Substantialism as understood from a process‐philosophical perspective may be defined in his words as the view that

2  There are two broad versions of process philosophy, the one dialectical, the other more organic. The one is represented by Hegel, the other by Whitehead and Hartshorne.

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the substance(s) constituting reality is an “abstract universality” characterized by “bare uniformity” – it is “undifferentiated, unmoved substantiality” (Hegel 2003, p. 80). Against substantialism, Hegel insists that “everything depends on grasping and expressing the ultimate truth not as Substance but as Subject as well” (Hegel 2003, p. 80). This means that “true reality … is the process of its own becoming, the circle which presupposes its end as its purpose, and has its end for its beginning; it becomes concrete and actual only by being carried out, and by the end it involves” (Hegel 2003, p. 81). Upon a (traditional or revised) metaphysical reading of Hegel, the difference between substance and process approaches to metaphysics can be understood as follows.3 Substance metaphysics envisions the essential nature of reality statically. “Nature” is the potentiality of a thing that dictates what it is to become in actuality: being determines becoming. Hegel, by contrast, contends that what a thing is is determined by what it has in it to become: becoming determines being. This metaphysical priority of becoming over being leads to a radical “reconceptualisation of God as dynamic Spirit in, with, and under the world, rather than as the perfect unchanging being fully transcendent to the world,” which “signalled a radical modern alternative to classical theism” (Rasmussen 2017, p. 16). This Hegelian metaphysics appears to be what revisionist scholars tend to read into Barth. It goes without saying that their works have drawn our attention to important issues in Barth studies. I shall contend, however, that his actualistic ontology is more complex than what they have depicted: Barth adopts the grammars of both substantialism and process philosophy, in eclectic and dialectical ways, while remaining ever critical of their underlying metaphysics taken as a system.

Substance Grammar: Natur and Wesen One confusion in recent Barth studies with regard to the theologian’s extensive use of substantialist nomenclature is reflected in Paul Jones’s contention that “Natur and Wesen take up no meaningful role” in Barth’s later theology (Jones 2008, p. 33). He, following the revisionist line, falls short of recognizing Barth’s grammatical use of Natur/Wesen as a means of distinguishing between the “ontological constitution” and “historical determination” of the human being. Bruce McCormack is right (so are Jones and Nimmo) in juxtaposing “substantialist ontology” to Barth’s “actualistic ontology” (1993, p. 21). Barth is indeed against the physiocratic view that the human being’s actual mode of existence is inescapably predetermined by its inherent nature. However, as Hunsinger has suggested, it is a mistake to suppose that Barth simply supplants one metaphysical view with another. Revisionism’s assertion that Barth “understood ‘nature’ to be a function of decision and act” begs some serious interpretational questions (McCormack 1993, p. 21). True

3  Here I do not intend to side with the metaphysical schools of Hegel studies against the post-Kantian school. I adopt a metaphysical interpretation here only because it is in line with how Barth reads Hegel.

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enough, Barth sees the originally substantialistic terms Natur and Wesen as in need of revision, but he does not simply “historicize” them. What he seeks to avoid is the metaphysical (be it substantialist or historicist) attempt to define human nature in the framework of a general anthropology and divine nature from the starting point of some general notion of divinity. Yet he retains the traditional definition of nature as the formal‐ causal aspect of different kinds of substances. Even in IV/2 Barth adopts substantialist grammar to state that “‘human nature’ means quite simply that which makes a man a man as distinct from God, angel, or animal …, his humanitas” (CD IV/2, p. 25). It is seldom noted that the Swiss theologian’s employment of substance vocabularies is generally in line with their more or less standard grammatical delimitations in the Latin tradition. Barth notes that in western theology, “the essence [das Wesen] of God is the being [Sein] of God as divine being” (CD I/1, p. 349; KD I/1, p. 369). In Latin theology, “essentia” primarily denotes “being.” An essentia can also be called a natura in the sense that a real thing is “intelligible” only through a definite essentia in and through which a thing “has existence [esse]” (Aquinas 1968, pp. 31–32). In the stricter senses of the terms, however, essentia is already actual and is the subject of its existence, whereas natura is a potentiality that becomes and is actual only in and through essentia as its agent. Barth, basically adopting the grammatical construct of this Latin terminological framework, uses Wesen and Natur as the direct German renderings of essentia and natura, respectively. The common usage of Wesen, like essentia, can sometimes denote “essence” in the sense of “nature,” but Natur is the direct equivalent of natura.4 In this light, Jones’s assertion that the Greek substantialist “concept of physis” is “translated both as Natur and Wesen” in Barth’s writings reflects a technical misperception on Jones’s part (2008, p. 31). He claims that “Natur and Wesen” are “basically interchangeable” for Barth (Jones 2008, p. 18). As we have seen, however, Barth’s terminological framework is derived from the Latin tradition and not directly from the Greek. Natur and Wesen, just as natura and essentia, are sometimes interchangeable, but not basically so.

Two Conceptions of “Being”: Wesen and Sein With regard to the concept of “being,” Barth sometimes uses “Wesen” and “Sein” synonymously (e.g. KD II/1, p. 300). However, the grammatical connotations are again different. Wesen is a direct equivalent of the originally substantialist term essentia, whereas Sein is reflective of a process grammar. Barth’s distinction between Wesen and Sein, uncharacteristic of traditional metaphysics, may initially seem reminiscent of Hegel. In Hegel’s vocabularies, Wesen designates the conceptual underpinning of a thing: it is the determination (see definitions later in the chapter) of the thing as it really is (i.e. what it has in it to ultimately become), 4  This is well reflected in the Torrance-Bromiley edition. “Gottes innerem, ewigem Wesen” (KD II/2, p. 102), for example, is translated as “inward and eternal being of God” (CD II/2, p. 95). The same word is translated as “nature” in CD I/2, p. 53.

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behind the veil of appearance (Schein). Sein, by contrast, is the essence of a thing as it appears, disclosed phenomenally through the veil of contingencies, transience, and irrationalities (Inwood 1992, p. 39). In other words, Schein is the phenomenal veil through which an essence appears (scheint), and the subject determined by the verbal predicate scheinen is “being” (Sein): being is determined by the act of appearing. Barth’s usage of Sein in formulating the notion of being‐in‐act (Sein in der Tat) is grammatically similar to Hegel’s, but there is a fundamental difference. Unlike Hegel, Barth does not grammatically associate God’s Sein with Schein. Barth draws a clear distinction between God’s ad intra essence and ad extra activity. Even the incarnation as the becoming flesh of the I am (sarx egeneto, John 3:14) should not be thought of as a phenomenal appearance of God’s essence. Appearance involves historical process, and God’s “immutable” essence would never “appear” in any Hegelian sense of the term (CD II/1, p. 496). The man Jesus is not an imperfect appearance of God’s essence. Rather, he is truly and fully God. In becoming human, God’s immutable essence never ceased to be immutable. Barth firmly rejects Hegel’s ontological logic of mediation in which spirit evolves through the moments of being (immutability) and nothingness into the moment of the absolute, characterized by becoming. Barth unequivocally denies that God’s “being [Sein], speaking and acting are only a semblance [Schein]” of God’s eternally immutable essence (CD II/1, p. 496; KD II/1, p. 558). There is a fundamental difference “between the divine and the appearance of the divine [dem Schein‐Göttlichen]”: the latter must be regarded as “the demonic” (CD II/1, p. 409; KD II/1, p. 461). As far as creatures are concerned, however, Barth would agree with Hegel that a being (Sein) can either manifest or contradict its own essence (Wesen) in historical appearance (e.g. CD IV/1, pp. 90–91; KD IV/1, p. 96). This is why Barth consistently uses Sein instead of Wesen to describe the human “being” as radically and totally sinful in the “state of corruption” (CD IV/1, p. 492). As explained earlier, in Barth’s theological grammar the originally substantialist term Wesen denotes substance defined by its inherent nature, that is, that by which a thing is what it is. It comprises something complete in itself that no activity from below can ever alter. His usage of Wesen, then, differs significantly from Hegel’s. Hegel defines the essence or essentiality of a thing as what it has in it to become in the final stage or moment of its evolution. By contrast, Barth’s usage of Wesen incorporates both a substantialist dimension and a process one. In the perfect tense of the one and inseparable triune economy pro nobis (which perfectly corresponds to but remains abidingly distinct from the immanent Trinity), our essence is a God‐given covenantal nature in Jesus Christ that cannot be altered. In the present and future tenses (which are distinct and ontically necessary aspects of one and the same triune economy) of the historical reenactment of God’s work by the Holy Spirit in nobis, our essence is what we are to ultimately become in Christ, which is distinct, albeit inseparable, from what we already are in him. And because our essence is determined by our being in Jesus Christ, sin and nothingness have no power over our essence. Sin for Barth pertains to the category of act, not essence/nature. The subject of the act of sin is the existential human Sein, not ontological Wesen (Krötke 2005, p. 73). Sin, in other words, is an ontological impossibility.

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The Process Grammar of “Determination” (Bestimmung) Hegelian Origin of the Term Another keyword closely associated with Barth’s notion of “being” is “determination” (Bestimmung), which he critically borrows from Hegel. This difficult term can be understood as a dialectical notion with which Hegel seeks to reinvigorate the originally substantialist conception of Natur/Wesen, as well as Kant’s more or less mechanical notion of Beschaffenheit (constitution), both of which Hegel considers to be lifelessly static. Stephen Houlgate describes “determination” in relationalist terms as “the specific quality or character that something manifests or asserts in its relation to an other” (2006, p.  348). A more historicist nuance is expressed in Terje Sparby’s explanation of the notion as “the uncovering of the essential nature of something” through the dialectical process of history (2015, p. 200). Barth rejects Hegel’s view that God needs the world in order to realize Godself as God, but he critically adopts the Hegelian grammar of “determination” as an overarching notion supporting the construct of his actualistic ontology. A determination qualifies but does not constitute an entity’s nature or essence. Twofold Determinations of the Human Being In the case of “human nature,” Barth actualizes this originally substantialist notion by speaking of it as a determination from above (von oben) by the covenantal history of God and humankind in Christ. It is a determination in the sense that it is an essence enacted by the history of the covenant toward its ultimate fulfillment in the outward arena of creation. In line with the Latin substantialist tradition, “nature” is grammatically associated with creation. Barth moves beyond the tradition by identifying creation as the external ground of the covenant, thus overcoming what he perceives to be the nature–grace dualism characteristic of Augustinian substantialism. Contra Augustine, Barth contends that nature as a product of creation was never ontologically antecedent to and thus independent of reconciliatory grace in Christ. The gracious history of the covenant is what determines the nature of the external ground on which it is enacted (Krötke 2005, p. 73). With this redefinition of Natur, the connotations of Wesen are also actualized. Barth retains the grammatical relations between natura and essentia in classical Latin substantialism. But since Natur now refers to God’s determination of the human essence by the history of the covenant, Wesen is no longer understood as merely the agent of Platonic forms. Rather, the human Wesen is determined by the active and concrete history of Jesus Christ to correspond to that gracious history. On this view, Barth makes a significant and subtle move. He insists that human Natur remains good after the fall and consistently avoids using Wesen to describe the human being‐in‐sin. He thereby posits more (but not less) than the traditional understanding of the inherent goodness of creation. In the ontological framework of the broad Augustinian tradition, to say that human nature is in itself sinful is tantamount to

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saying that sin is either created by God, or else uncreated and self‐existent as some kind of a second god. Barth accepts this substantialist grammar but argues that sin is a foreign intrusion that is not proper to good human nature. As Barth carries through with this Augustinian insight, he registers a critical correction against Augustine’s meontological understanding of a corrupted nature. Barth deems this understanding “quite untenable” because “the Bible accuses man as a sinner from head to foot, but it does not dispute to man his full and unchanged humanity, his nature as God created it good” (CD IV/1, p. 492, italics added). Whereas mainstream theologians of the Augustinian tradition claim that only what remains of human nature is still good in the state of corruption, Barth contends that humankind “has not lost — even in part — the good nature which was created by God” (CD IV/1, p. 492). Barth holds to the premise that only God has the power to alter human nature (CD IV/2, p. 421). If human nature were somehow corrupted, then even if what remained of it was still good, it would nonetheless have been altered. This outcome would imply either that God authored the corruptio, or else that sin possessed quasi‐divine powers to alter the nature of God’s creatures. These were precisely the implications that Manichaeism could not avoid, and Barth rejects them with Augustine. For this reason, too, he insists against Augustine upon the full integrity of human nature after the fall. To be sure, Barth stresses that in the “state of corruption” the human “being [Dasein]” is totally and radically sinful (CD IV/1, p. 492). On one hand the human being is determined “from above” by the “powerful and superior reality of God and man” in Christ – this determination is what human nature signifies (CD IV/3, p. 477). On the other hand, “from below it [the human being] is also continually determined by the falsehood of man in a sinister but very palpable manner” (CD IV/3, p. 477). This determination “from below” by sinful human activities is foreign and contradictory to human nature as determined “from above,” and yet both determinations are total with respect to the human Sein. This actualistic rendition of anthropological ontology allows Barth to say that the human being is totally and radically sinful while also maintaining that human nature remains totally good and uncorrupted under the sway of nothingness. It is true that he sometimes speaks loosely about the corruption or distortion of human nature. In such passages, however, he would often clarify that strictly speaking, sin is “un‐nature [Unnatur]” foreign and contradictory to human “nature” (CD IV/2, p. 26; KD IV/2, p. 26). At this juncture it might help to clarify that the unaltered goodness of human nature does not mean for Barth the tenability of natural theology, which, as he sees it, asserts that what remains of original human nature still enables fallen humans to reason their way up to God apart from Christ. Against this view Barth contends emphatically that the human being is totally corrupted by sin, such that human beings are utterly incapable of actual knowledge of God. Furthermore, because human nature is the determination of the human being by the history of God’s perfect and thus unrepeatable work of reconciliation in Christ, the actualization of human knowledge of God completely hinges upon the present‐tense reenactment or actualization of Christ’s grace extra nos by the renewing work of the Holy Spirit in nobis. More simply, what Christ accomplished in his finished and perfect work of salvation there and then, the Holy Spirit actualizes in us here and now in a secondary and dependent form.

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Analogia Relationis: An Actualistic Analogy Up to this point we have only discussed God’s works as the ontological grounding of human nature. We would fail to do Barth justice if we stop here, however, for he is not afraid to follow the Augustinian tradition in rooting his anthropological ontology in the doctrine of God’s being. However, we must also stress that his trinitarian account of the imago Dei differs significantly from Augustine’s famous notion of the vestigium trinitatis (God’s image in humankind as a vestige of the Trinity). Nimmo rightly cautions that although “the relationship between God and the true human revealed in Jesus Christ is analogous to the prior intra‐trinitarian relationship of God the Father to God the Son,” this analogy does not consist in “any correspondence or similarity of being, an analogia entis, but in terms of what Barth calls ‘an analogia relationis’” (2007, p. 89). Barth introduces the crucial concept of an “analogy of relations” in III/2 as an actualistic repudiation of the substantialist concept of divine–human analogy that had been instituted by Augustine (Spencer 2015, p. 22). Augustine’s emendatory use of the Platonist language of imago carried the implication that there is an ontological similarity (though not consubstantiality) between the human being and the being of the triune God that allowed him to speak of God analogically. This Augustinian formulation, as Barth sees it, fails to identify Christ as the imago Dei that determines the essence of all humankind. From III/2 onward Barth insists that the image of God in which all human beings are created is none other than Jesus Christ. By “the term ‘image’” he means “a correspondence and similarity between the two relationships,” namely, “the relationship within the being of God on the one side” and “between the being of God and that of man on the other” (CD III/2, p. 220). This is “not … an analogia entis,” but an “analogia relationis” that “consists in the fact that the freedom in which God posits” Godself as the triune God “is the same freedom as that in which he is the Creator of man, in which man may be his creature, and in which the Creator– creature relationship is established by the Creator” (CD III/2, p. 220). The particular Creator–creature relationship that serves as a “copy” of the “divine original” (the intratrinitarian relationship) is none other than Jesus Christ who is very God and very human (CD III/2, p. 221). Christ is the true imago Dei not just by virtue of his consubstantiality with the Father (as Augustine would have it), but by virtue of the analogy between the intratrinitarian relationship within God’s eternal essence and the divine–human relationship in Christ’s incarnate person, by which he is at once consubstantial with God and consubstantial with us. “In this [covenantal] relationship ad extra, God repeats a relationship proper to himself in his inner divine essence” (CD III/2, p. 218 rev.). It is only in this sense that the human essence, determined by the very name Jesus Christ, can be described as having been made in God’s image. As Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are for one another, and as the one triune God is for us, “it is the essence of this man [created by God], to be for God” (CD III/2, p. 71). Herein consists precisely Barth’s understanding of the unalterable goodness of human nature. It is not some general idea of the good, but the concrete determination of the human essence in and by Jesus Christ to be for God as God is for us.

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God’s Self‐Determination: Election and the Trinity Revisited The foregoing discussion suggests that writers following the revisionist line in thinking of election as constitutive of God’s triune essence do not seem to have fully grasped the grammar underlying the term Bestimmung in Barth’s usage. They have consistently exhibited a tendency to confuse “determination” with the essential “constitution” of a being. This is a mistake on revisionism’s part that Hunsinger pointed out early on in the Trinity‐election debate (Hunsinger 2008, p. 181). Yet proponents of the revisionist agenda persist in committing the same mistake rather consistently, trading on Barth’s language of “divine self‐determination” to contend that election is “a constitutive or necessary aspect of God’s being” (Gockel 2016, p. 260). Against this reading, the case of Barth’s anthropological ontology shows that “nature” as the constitution of a being and its “determination” are grammatically distinct concepts in his vocabularies. The determination of the human being (Sein) “from above” constitutes human essence (Wesen); the determination “from below,” by contrast, is by no means constitutive of the human being. It is thus an interpretive mistake to treat “determination” as a synonym of “constitution.” It is true that Barth sees the covenantal grace of election as in some way “necessary” to God’s being: “it is almost integral to [God’s] very nature and essence to be our Saviour” (CD III/2, p. 218). He stresses that this “inner necessity with which Jesus is at one and the same time both for God and for man” reveals to us that “there is freedom in God, but no caprice” (CD III/2, pp. 218–219). The contrast between freedom and caprice at this point is a reference to Barth’s actualistic construal of the Trinity and election in II/1–2. It occurs in the context of the overarching theme of God’s love and freedom, first set forth in §28. On one hand, God is love, and God loves necessarily. On the other hand, God is free, and God loves in complete freedom. Barth explicates these predications, which might seem contradictory, with a qualified appeal to Augustine. Borrowing Augustine’s notion of God as the subject, object, and act of love, Barth posits a kind of objectivity in God’s eternal triune essence, calling it God’s “primary objectivity.” “We have seen that the freedom of God, as his freedom in himself, his primary absoluteness, has its truth and reality in the inner trinitarian life of the Father with the Son by the Holy Spirit” (CD II/1, p. 317). God’s love, in other words, is free in the primary sense that “even if there were no such relationship [between God and the creature], even if there were no other outside of him, he would still be love” (CD II/2, 6, italics added). Thus Eberhard Jüngel (whom both McCormack and Nimmo purport to follow) comments that for Barth, “God can be the God of humanity without being defined as God by his relation to humanity … God’s being‐for‐us does not define God’s being” (Jüngel 2001, pp. 119–120; McCormack 2010, p. 204; Nimmo 2007, pp. 3–6). As Barth himself puts it, God “is the same even in himself, even before and after and over his works, and without them … They are nothing without him. But he is who he is without them” (CD II/1, p. 260). God is love a sé (in and for Godself), and the freedom of God’s love means primarily the aseity of God’s loving essence.

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Yet God’s primary freedom and absoluteness would have been unknowable to us without the covenant into which God has entered. To talk about divine aseity apart from the concrete history of the covenant would be to commit what Barth considers to be the idolatry of natural theology. This covenant relationship is precisely the secondary sense in which God’s love is free. It is God’s freedom in God’s secondary objectivity without which God’s primary objectivity would have been noetically inaccessible to us. In addition to (but not in place of) Barth’s own definition of divine freedom as aseity and unconditionedness, he states that God’s love is free in the secondary sense that God freely binds Godself to covenant with the creature without altering God’s essence. God remains perfectly free in this ad extra self‐binding in a way that corresponds perfectly to God’s essence ad intra. Jüngel explains that “God’s being for itself … grounds and makes possible God’s being‐for‐us” (2001, p. 121). For Barth, true freedom is not voluntaristic caprice, but perfect correspondence between inner essence and ad extra activities. Barth’s actualism differs from Hegel’s process philosophy precisely in that the former speaks of God as being‐in‐act rather than being‐as‐act.5 The covenantal relationship between God and humankind “is a relation ad extra, undoubtedly; for both the man and the people represented in him [in Christ] are creatures and not God” (CD II/2,p. 7). However, “it is a relation which is irrevocable, so that once God has willed to enter into it, and has in fact entered into it, he could not be God without it. It is a relation in which God is self‐determined, so that the determination belongs no less to him than all that he is in and for himself ” (CD II/2, p. 7; emphasis mine). Proponents of the revisionist interpretation of Barth, as we have seen, have capitalized on this idea of God’s self‐determination to assert that in Barth’s actualistic ontology, God’s acts and decisions are ontologically constitutive of God’s being. This metaphysical misreading overlooks the difference between the Hegelian background of Barth’s grammar and his un‐Hegelian and antimetaphysical ontology. We have already discussed the Hegelian term “determination” at some length. It would be helpful to add here that in Hegel’s usage, per Michael Inwood, this term refers to the process of “making a concept [Begriff] or a thing more determinate by adding features to it, or the feature(s) so added” (1992, p. 77). Self‐determination is “the autonomous development or operation of something … in contrast to its determination by external forces” (Inwood 1992, p. 77). In other words, self‐determination is the process by which a being is determined by its own essence, defined in Hegel as what a thing has in it to ultimately become. As we have seen, however, Barth’s definition of Wesen, unlike Hegel’s, comprises a strongly substantialist dimension to convey the quality of something that is complete in and of itself. When he adopts the Hegelian grammar of Bestimmung to describe God, then, he has in mind an un‐Hegelian notion of God’s essence that is perfect in itself, and whatever features added to this essence in the process of Selbstbestimmung does not alter

5  Although on the odd occasion Barth refers to God as act or event, he does not in those places depart from his basic conception of God as being-in-act. The context shows that what he means to emphasize there is simply that God is the living God. See CD II/1, pp. 263, 264; CD IV/3, p. 47.

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God’s being ontologically.6 What God self‐determines is God’s Sein – God’s being‐for‐us ad extra – not God’s triune Wesen. God’s act of entering into covenantal relationship with humankind is perfectly free on God’s part, but God’s freedom is not the caprice of a tyrant. God’s will corresponds perfectly to God’s essence, which is according to Barth “entirely self‐sufficient” as the intratrinitarian act of love (CD II/2, p. 10). Precisely because election corresponds perfectly to God’s triune essence ad intra, it is a decision that the immutably faithful God does not revoke. In this sense God “could not be God without” the loving relationship into which God has freely decided to enter (CD II/2, p. 7). We must bear in mind that whenever Barth speaks of the necessity of God’s acts ad extra, he is honoring the “necessity of his actual manifest will, his potentia ordinata [ordained power]” (CD I/2, p. 41). Far from denying the aseity of the immanent Trinity, his language of necessity is intended to affirm the immutability of God’s will as a perfect expression of God’s immutable essence.

Conclusion: A Chalcedonian Dialectic This essay has focused on the grammatical relations between some key terms of Barth’s actualistic ontology. We may conclude here with the observation that the Swiss theologian’s emendation of the Hegelian correlations between these terms has to do with a rudimentary problem that he sees in Hegel, one that often resurfaces in revisionist portrayals of Barth’s actualistic ontology. Hegel’s grammatical association of Wesen and Sein with Bestimmung and Schein suggests a subject‐predicate reversal typical of his process‐metaphysical objection to substantialism. The all‐encompassing notion of “the absolute” (das Absolute), for instance, is an adjectival noun (German) or nominal adjective (English) reflecting an especially interesting grammatical manipulation on Hegel’s part. Theologians of the substantialist tradition are accustomed to the predication, “God is absolute.” When the adjective here becomes the subject and vice versa, an interesting reversal arises: “the absolute is God.” Because “absolute” is originally an adjective, it is void of actual existence without corresponding subjects that it predicates. Indeed, Hegel frequently uses “absolute” as an adjective to describe subjects such as spirit, which evolves into “absolute spirit” through the process of a subjective‐objective‐absolute triad. The absolute, in other words, is spirit fully actualized qua spirit in the consummate moment of becoming. The problem with attributing ontological priority to the predicate is that in order to avoid abstraction, Hegel must assert an ultimate identity between the adjectival noun and all the subjects it predicates. Reality then becomes one living substance or subject. What Kierkegaard would later call the infinite qualitative difference between God and creation would then be ultimately wiped out in Hegelian metaphysics. This is why Barth insists that subject‐predicate relations must never be reversed in predications involving “God is.” Even the predication “God is being” requires us to bear

6  So rightly Hunsinger 2015, pp. 139–142; cf. 127–136.

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in mind the strict subjectivity of God. Thus Barth: “it is not being in an ascribed ­simplicity and pure actuality which is God, but God who is being. We do not believe in and pray to being, but to God who is being” (CD II/1, p. 564). To make the predicate ontologically prior to the subject  –  which is to make “becoming” the essential constitution of “being” – would be to repeat Hegel’s error. This is really the same error committed by the “alte Metaphysik” of the substantialist tradition: natural theology. Barth unequivocally declares with a nod to Feuerbach that “Hegel’s living God … is actually the living man” (PTNC, p. 405). Barth is in partial agreement with Hegel against the substantialist tradition that God is a living subject rather than abstract substance. His usage of the term Sein is reflective of this agreement. His retainment of the traditional grammar of Latin substantialism, however, shows that he has dialectically incorporated classical theism, and so a certain concept of substance, into his actualistic ontology along with his adoption of Hegel’s insights. It is not hard to see that this ontology is regulated by the grammar of a basically Chalcedonian dialectic: becoming is an addition to, rather than a subtraction or alteration of essential being. In the case of Barth’s theological ontology, this dialectic stands in sharp contrast to Hegel’s logical trinity of spirit an‐sich, für‐sich, and an‐und‐für‐sich. In Barth’s case, God‐in‐and‐for‐Godself became God‐for‐us without ever ceasing to be God‐in‐and‐for‐Godself. For Barth, God was free to enter into the world in Christ, and so to become part of the world, without entering into self‐contradiction, without surrendering the complete perfection of his eternal trinitarian essence, and without becoming actual and concrete only by entering into process with the created world. For Barth, from the beginning of Church Dogmatics until the end, God was always actual and concrete in and for Godself prior to and apart from the world. References Aquinas, T. (1968). On Being and Essene (trans. A. Maurer). Toronto: Pontifica Institute of Mediaeval Studies. Gockel, M. (2016). How to read Karl Barth with charity: a critical reply to George Hunsinger. Modern Theology 32: 259–267. Hegel, G.W.F. (2003). The Phenomenology of Mind (trans. J.B. Baillie). New York: Dover. Houlgate, S. (2006). The Opening of Hegel’s Logic: From Being to Infinity. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Hunsinger, G. (2008). Election and the trinity: twenty‐five theses on the theology of Karl Barth. Modern Theology 24: 179–198. Hunsinger, G. (2015). Reading Barth with Charity: A Hermeneutical Proposal. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. Inwood, M. (1992). A Hegel Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell.

Jones, P.D. (2008). The Humanity of Christ: Christology in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. London: T&T Clark. Jüngel, E. (2001). God’s Being is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology of Karl Barth (trans. J. Webster). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Krötke, W. (2005). Sin and Nothingness in the Theology of Karl Barth (edited and trans. P. Ziegler and C. Bammel). Princeton: Princeton Theological Seminary. McCormack, B. (1993). For Us and Our Salvation: Incarnation and Atonement in the Reformed Tradition. Princeton: Princeton Theological Seminary. McCormack, B. (1995). Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology. Oxford: Clarendon.

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McCormack, B. (2004). The ontological presuppositions of Barth’s doctrine of the atonement. In: The Glory of the Atonement (eds. C. Hill and F. James III), 346–366. Downers Grove, IL: IVP. McCormack, B. (2010). Election and the trinity: theses in response to George Hunsinger. Scottish Journal of Theology 63: 203–224. Molnar, P. (2017). Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity: In Dialogue with Karl Barth and Contemporary Theology. London: T&T Clark. Nimmo, P. (2007). Being in Action: The Theological Shape of Barth’s Ethical Vision. London: T&T Clark.

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Rasmussen, J. (2017). The transformation of metaphysics. In: The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth‐Century Christian Thought (eds. J. Rasmussen, J. Wolfe and J. Zachhuber). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Seibt, J. (2010). Particulars. In: Theory and Applications of Ontology: Philosophical Perspectives (eds. J. Seibt and R. Poli), 23–55. New York: Springer. Sparby, T. (2015). Hegel’s Conception of the Determinate Negation. Leiden: Brill. Spencer, A. (2015). The Analogy of Faith: The Quest for God’s Speakability. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic.

CHAPTER 61

Barth and Philosophy Kevin Diller

If we open our mouths, we find ourselves in the province of philosophy CRE, p. 183

Introduction The question of Karl Barth’s relationship to philosophy could be and has been analyzed in a number of ways. We might consider which philosophical figures and ideas most influenced the formulation and articulation of his thought. We could investigate the historical evolution of his pronouncements about and explicit interactions with philosophy. We might even review the ways in which significant philosophical figures have understood and engaged his ideas. Some of this ground is covered in other chapters of this work and has been undertaken elsewhere.1 The narrower aim of this essay is to give attention to what place philosophy or philosophizing has, in Barth’s view, in the service of theology. Barth has serious concerns with philosophy, and in expressing those concerns, he has often been misunderstood. I will attempt to clarify his concerns and argue that, in Barth’s view, the criterion for evaluating the usefulness of philosophical assumptions and methods in the service of theology is the same criterion by which theology itself must be evaluated. To this day, Barth continues to be considered by many to be a despiser of philosophy who pits faith against reason. Rodney Holder calls Barth an “irrationalist” (2012, p. 49). Matthew Rose says that Barth is guilty of “rejecting the speculative power of the

1  I would highlight particularly the work of Kenneth Oakes (2012), which includes an extended treatment of many of these questions along with references to several important earlier studies.

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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intellect” (2014, p. 44). Pope Benedict XVI called Barth’s position the “amputation of reason” (Ratzinger 2004, p. 139). Even Nicholas Wolterstorff once said that “Barth made clear that in his theology he had little use for philosophy” (1997, p. 166). It is commonly held that, in his zeal to preserve the character and freedom of theology, Barth dismisses any role for philosophy. Contemporaries leveled this charge as well. H.L. Stewart concludes that in Barth’s theology, philosophy is “excommunicated as not merely an alien but an enemy” (1950, p. 231). To be sure, Barth issues strong warnings about the deployment of philosophy; but these warnings are misunderstood entirely when taken as a blanket interdiction, or regarded as a posture of isolation. On the contrary, we will find that Barth acknowledges the use of philosophy in the theological task as inevitable and unavoidable. To grasp Barth’s primary concerns, we will begin with a consideration of some explicit statements he makes concerning philosophy and how it differs from theology. It is not philosophy per se that Barth rejects, but the way in which philosophy typically operates. We turn next to Barth’s censure of the uncritical acceptance in theology of modernist philosophical presuppositions. Here we touch the heart of Barth’s resistance in his rejection of specific epistemological starting points. Finally, we highlight Barth’s reflections on the boundaries for philosophy and the criterion for evaluating the usefulness of philosophical assumptions and methods in theology’s service.

The Distinction and Indivisibility of Theology and Philosophy What Difference Is There Between Theology and Philosophy? From the 1920s onward, Barth’s main position did not change. Theology cannot avoid philosophy because theology is done in philosophy’s own arena.2 In fact, Barth begins his Church Dogmatics with the observation that there is only a pragmatic justification for distinguishing theology from philosophy. Philosophy is not necessarily “secular or pagan.” “There might be such a thing as philosophia christiana” (CD I/1, p. 5). He later expands on this suggestion, by proposing the possibility of a Christian philosopher who is in fact a “Krypto‐Theologe” (1960, pp. 85–86). Barth’s strict cautions about philosophy are not aimed at philosophy “in principle” but only at the stance that philosophy often adopts toward its objects of inquiry. There is no reason why there could not be a Christian ­philosophy, but the fact is “there never has actually been a philosophia christiana, for if it was philosophia it was not christiana, and if it was christiana it was not philosophia” (CD I/1, p. 6). It is philosophy’s abandoning of the theological task and way of knowing that has occasioned the need for theology, but really only as a stopgap measure. Both theology and philosophy, and the other sciences for that matter, are human concerns to know the truth that theology knows to be the Truth, which has made itself 2  In 1928, Barth says that theology is done in the domain “das Gebiet” of philosophical reflection (ETH, p. 21). In 1929, Barth writes that theology works within the room “im Raum” of philosophy (FI, p. 27). And, in 1960, Barth places theologians and philosophers in the same room “Raum” confronted by common problems, “gemeinsamen Probleme,” taking different paths (1960, p. 94).

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known as the ground of all other being and truth. As fellow‐human beings engaged in this enterprise, the philosopher and theologian are companions. Barth says they face “common difficult tasks” (1960, p. 80). However, it is exactly this commonality that gives rise to confrontation. It is the way in which philosophy approaches the Truth that has provoked theology to take its artificial independent stand. The theological way of knowing is “motivated wholly by the power of the primordial movement from above to below. The theologian stands and falls with this sequence, in fact, with its irreversibility” (1960, pp. 84–85). It is significant to note that Barth sees the movement from below to above as legitimate and important, but only as a secondary movement from the first movement that is irreversibly from above to below. The faux pas of philosophy has been to reverse this order, believing that it has started from below with creation and the light of independent human reason. If indeed there is any consideration for the Creator, it is made in philosophy on the basis of the creation. In so doing philosophy judges according to “alien principles” (CD I/1, p. 6) rather than theology’s first and final criterion, Jesus Christ, the revelation of God. The distinction between philosophy and theology, therefore, must be drawn carefully. Barth identifies two unworkable strategies. The first is to distinguish theology as a special offshoot of philosophy submitting to the same general criteria of evaluation. This is the strategy of apologetics as Barth uses the term – “the attempt to establish and justify theological thinking in the context of philosophical, or, more generally and precisely, nontheological thinking” (ETH, p. 21). The second strategy, connected to the first, is “the method of isolation” (ETH, p. 24). Theology is distinguished as the enlightened and now independent philosophy. There are, however, two reasons why theology cannot assert a special superiority to philosophy. First, Barth stresses that “Just as well and just as badly as philosophy, theology is a human science” (ETH, p. 34). It has no special superhuman access to the Truth by which to demonstrate its truth. Second, “all truth is enclosed in God’s Word” (ETH, p. 27). There is no unique preserve of theological truth that is by nature hidden from philosophy. In fact, a philosophy that “has the hearing of the Word of God as its presupposition” would be an “equal partner” to theology (ETH, p. 23). Such philosophy would “speak very differently but will not in fact have anything different to say” (ETH, p. 33). Barth’s aversion to philosophy is not, therefore, a ban on the language, conceptions, or questions of philosophy; these are all fair game for the theologian and part of what it means is that theology is inevitably done in the overlapping realm of philosophy. The difference is that theology stands in an orientation acknowledging the primacy of God’s self‐revelation for the understanding and appropriation of everything with which it and philosophy share an interest. It is not the realm of philosophy to which Barth objects; that would be to cut theology off from its own turf. It is the antitheological orientation that philosophy may adopt which requires vigorous resistance.

Responding to the Antiphilosophical Charges of Harnack and Pannenberg The charge that Barth’s theological epistemology is finally antiphilosophical and possibly even irrational is one that Barth himself addressed. In some deployments of the

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“neo‐orthodox” designation, it is implied that Barth champions a return to a ­premodern, precritical era of positive orthodoxy, choosing to remain naïve to the epistemological questions raised by modernity. The notion that Barth was advocating a premodern or prescientific theology began several years before the first volume of the Church Dogmatics and is addressed directly by Barth in correspondence with Adolf von Harnack (1957). Barth had challenged what Harnack would call “contemporary scientific theology” (1957, p. 36), which marked its origins from the Enlightenment. Harnack was clear that to abandon this Enlightenment project was, in his view, to abandon “the only possible way of grasping the object epistemologically” (1957, p. 36). He advanced the notion that “historical knowledge and critical reflection” were the conduits for a proper human reception of revelation (1957, p. 29). In response, Barth catalogs and rejects those human grounds that had been proposed to fulfill the Enlightenment’s foundationalist requirements. However, and this is the salient point, Barth categorically rejects any simple “repristination” of classical or pre‐Enlightenment theology. He sees the value of reclaiming for theology the “idea of a determinative object” unconstrained by “the determinate character of the method”; but he is resolute, in the face of the question of “repristinating a classical theological train of thought,” that, as theologians, “we must think in our time for our time” (1957, pp. 41–42). The idea that Barth advocates at any stage a positive neo‐orthodoxy, which is uncritical with respect to epistemological problems, is indefensible even on a surface reading. Barth recognized that a theology which thinks in and for its time would have to take seriously the question of theology’s way and ground of knowledge; and, he does just that by giving this very question pride of place in CD I/1. Harnack could not fathom the validity of a starting point that grasps the knower but is not grasped by the knower independent of the given knowing relation. Harnack’s commitment to the exclusive rationality of the way of knowing from below to above forces his conclusion that Barth was rejecting critical thought en masse. Harnack’s difficulties with Barth are similar to those of Wolfhart Pannenberg. Like Harnack, Pannenberg determines that Barth’s rejection of an earth‐bound scientific epistemology must leave Barth hopelessly mired in subjectivism. Pannenberg believes that if human reason and experience are subjugated, only two options remain: subjectivism and fideism. In explicit agreement with the Enlightenment, Pannenberg states that “a ‘positive’ theology of revelation which does not depend on rational argument can rely only on a subjective act of will or an irrational venture of faith” (1976, p. 273). It is clear, moreover, that for Pannenberg these two alternatives collapse into each other. Both are an indication of a wholly arbitrary and irrational positivism that stifles intersubjective dialogue (1976, p. 274). Neither Pannenberg nor Harnack could understand Barth’s revelation “from above” as anything other than making an arbitrary human start. But this conclusion follows only if one rules out a priori that God has acted to give himself in Jesus Christ by the Spirit as the ground of theological knowing. An a priori ban on the givenness of divine self‐revelation is the arbitrary assumption driving Pannenberg’s conclusions. He writes, “Barth’s apparently so lofty objectivity about God and God’s word turns out to rest on no more than the irrational subjectivity of a venture of faith with no justification outside itself ” (1976, p. 273). Dependence on faith, however, becomes fideistic in Pannenberg’s sense only if that faith is an arbitrary human

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choice. The tables turn dramatically if that faith is the gift of divine self‐revelation. Barth would agree that it has no justification outside itself. What justification could be more secure than God’s own self‐attestation? Far from fideistic, this alternative, seemingly invisible to Pannenberg and Harnack, offers what Barth would see as the only escape possible from the ghettos of human reason. For those who would presume that cognitive human knowledge of God could not be given from above, Barth’s rejection of a from‐below way of philosophical knowing is patently irrational and amounts to an uncritical and naïve wholesale rejection of philosophical thought. For Barth, however, the distinction between philosophy and theology is only necessary to preserve the independence of a way of knowing that originates with the self‐revealing action of God. In no way does this require a retreat on the part of theology from the realm of philosophy. On the contrary, it is this order of knowing that motivates a critical awareness of and response to the language, concepts, and questions raised by philosophy.

Contesting the Epistemological Assumptions of Enlightenment Modernism The question could be raised whether the reading of Barth being advanced here is at odds with the recognition that in Barth’s theological prioritization ontology is prior to epistemology. In Barth’s view, God in God’s self‐revealing action precedes ontologically and makes possible theological knowing. The ontological priority of the object of theological knowing provides the epistemic basis for theology. Nevertheless, conceding priority to the question of theology’s way and ground of knowledge does not mean that Barth allows epistemological assumptions to go unquestioned. Barth sees that, despite all appearances, Enlightenment modernism begins with its own ungrounded ontological assumption – an assumption about the constitution and capacity of unassisted human reason to provide the basis for knowing God from‐below. Originating with Descartes, and extending through Locke, Kant, Schleiermacher, Harnack, and many others, this ontology came with its own set of epistemological ­corollaries. Barth is not willing to accept the imposition of these epistemological constraints. His question is: what is the “particular way of knowledge taken in ­ ­dogmatics”? (CD I/1, p. 25). Barth’s insistence on the priority of God’s self‐revelation leads to his dismantling of the following epistemological assumptions of Enlightenment modernism: 1. The obligation assumption. An explanation or an account of the way of theological knowledge is an obligation upon which the legitimacy of the theological knowledge claim rests. 2. The general starting‐point assumption. An account of the way of theological knowing must stem from a general epistemology that grounds all knowing or all metaphysical claims. 3. The access foundationalist assumption. The way of theological knowledge must be anchored in trustworthy and readily accessible grounds.

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These three assumptions are related and given in order of increasing specificity. The first assumes an obligation to give an account; the second conditions the scope of that account; and, the third presents stipulations on the nature of that account. As we will see, Barth raises objections for all three. The Obligation Assumption First, Barth rejects the notion that theology is obligated to give a reckoning of its particular theological way of knowing in order to establish its legitimacy. In fact, he does not grant upfront that giving such an account is even possible. He does resolve retrospectively that an account can be given but maintains that it would not necessarily undermine the scientific character of theology if it had no prolegomena whatsoever (CD I/1, p. 25). It could be sufficient to note that, beginning with reflection on the fact of the esse (being) of the knowledge of God, renders its posse (possibility) a foregone conclusion requiring no account (CD I/1, p. 25). So, the possibility of theological knowing is a valid assumption, not on the basis of a foregoing confidence in human noetic capacity, but only as nachdenken (reflection, lit. thinking after) on an already given reality. This is not to say that theology has no requirement or obligation to give an epistemological account. Theology is required to give an account subsequent to the reality of divine self‐revealing. It is called to witness to a given reality, not to concoct a self‐­ justifying preamble. It cannot be understood as a foregoing obligation to establish the grounds for theological knowing. Barth rejects the classical deontological view of epistemic justification, which maintains that one is required, or duty bound, to produce an epistemological account in order to have a right to one’s beliefs. In Barth’s view, it is in accepting its designation as a science that theology recognizes an obligation to “submit to itself, i.e. everyone who has a share in it, an account regarding this path of knowledge” (CD I/1, p. 275). What is clear here is that theological knowledge is already granted. Never is the knowledge itself contingent upon fulfilling the obligation. The General Starting‐Point Assumption The general starting‐point and access foundationalist assumptions drew Barth’s sharpest attacks. Unlike the first assumption, these two assumptions cannot be affirmed even after the fact (CD I/1, p. 131). Barth has been charged with naïveté for suggesting that theology finds its noetic grounds in the object of theology itself and not in a general epistemology with indubitable, accessible foundations. Bultmann accuses Barth of having “failed to enter into debate with modern philosophy and naively adopted the older ontology from patristic and scholastic dogmatics” (1928, p. 38). This charge cannot be sustained, however, as Barth demonstrates time and again that he is fully aware of the problems, issues, and various alternatives in play. Moreover, he launches the counter charge that the real naïveté is displayed by those who uncritically accept these packaged assumptions (PTNC, p. 394).

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Barth is emphatic and relentless in his rejection of the general starting‐point assumption. We simply do not have and cannot create for ourselves an independent ground on which to stand. He observes that, The in abstracto and a priori question of the possibility of the knowledge of God obviously presupposes the existence of a place outside the knowledge of God itself from which this knowledge can be judged. It presupposes a place where, no doubt, the possibility of knowledge in general and then of the knowledge of God in particular can be judged and decided on way or another. It presupposes the existence of a theory of knowledge as a hinterland where consideration of the truth, worth and competence of the Word of God, on which the knowledge of God is grounded, can for a time at least be suspended. But this is the very thing which, from the point of view of its possibility, must not happen. (CD II/1, p. 5)

In rejecting the requirement that theology must be grounded in a general epistemology it has been argued that Barth was following along in the footsteps of Albrecht Ritschl and Barth’s Marburg professor Wilhelm Herrmann. Both Ritschl and Herrmann sought independent epistemological footing for theology that would protect its scientific character while keeping it epistemically differentiated from philosophy. These positions are interesting and helpful in clarifying Barth’s own dissent. We will look at Ritschl in connection with the general starting‐point assumption. Like Barth, Ritschl rejects the possibility that the way of knowing in theology can be anchored in a general epistemology that serves as the basis for all philosophical knowing. Although agreeing with Ritschl’s conclusion, Barth does not agree with the reasons he employs in its support. Ritschl held that cognition in theology and cognition in philosophy are of two fundamentally different kinds, namely, Natur und Geist. The way of knowing followed in religion and pertaining to morals is sui generis. The search for a shared foundation between natural and spiritual knowing cannot be conducted without obscuring their fundamental differentiation. This move served to insulate theology from philosophy and vice versa. In a time when the scientific character and academic legitimacy of theology was often in question, carving out an independent noetic position for theology was strategic. Reductionist tendencies in materialism and idealism that cast doubt on the object and foundation of theology as a science were avoided by Ritschl’s firm epistemological dualism. On his view, philosophical reasoning cannot be used to undermine Christian truth claims. By the same token, attempts to establish theology with general metaphysical arguments, simply “fall short of their goal” (1881, p. 154). Barth agrees with many of Ritschl’s conclusions. Vis‐à‐vis the other sciences, dogmatics “does not have to justify itself before them, least of all by submitting to the demands of a concept of science which accidentally or not claims general validity” (CD I/1, p. 8). He even agrees on a sui generis concept of knowledge for theology, which “cannot be definitively measured by the concept of the knowledge of other objects, by a general concept of knowledge” (CD I/1, p. 190). For Barth, however, the uniqueness of the way of knowing in theology is entirely dependent on the uniqueness of its object and not a dualist epistemology. Barth explicitly rejects the notion that human cognition in theological knowing is of a different kind from other instances of human cognition: “We are speaking of the human knowledge of God on the basis of this revelation and

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therefore of an event which formally and technically cannot be distinguished from what we call knowledge in other connexions, from human cognition” (CD II/1, p. 181). In Barth’s view Ritschl did not prevail over the Enlightenment by overturning its false assumptions. Quite to the contrary, he saw Ritschl’s thought as the “quintessence” (CD I/1, p. 276) and the “fulfillment” (PTNC, pp. 655–656) of the Enlightenment. Barth recognized in Ritschl little more than a return to the Kantian division between theoretical and practical reason. It is not the freedom of God to determine for us the way to know God, rather it is a general principle of practical reason that provides and anchors theological knowing. For Barth, the way in which theology goes about its task can be considered scientific, but whether or not theology is viewed from the outside as a science according to criteria external to theology is unimportant. Ritschl’s concern to preserve theology as a science, in contrast, stemmed from his conviction that prevailing scientific standards really did have a proper claim on theology if theology was to be considered a rational enterprise. The distinction between Barth and Ritschl is crucial though somewhat counterintuitive, and therefore often missed. Ritschl’s division of knowledge is in fact positivistic but derives from an underlying commitment to an Enlightenment movement of knowledge flowing from general and generally accessible principles of reason. Barth, on the other hand, often accused of positivism, is actually much more concerned with the direction rather than the division of knowledge. He is not pitting revelation against reason; he is merely rejecting the assumed priorities of an Enlightenment view of reason concerning what it means for theology to be reasonable or scientific. Unlike Ritschl, Barth is willing to grant that theology does not “know an object of enquiry necessarily concealed from other sciences” (CD I/1, p. 5). The distinction that Barth makes, once again, is that theology is not held to the same way of knowing that may govern contemporary science, because the way of the knowledge of God does not begin from below with a general theory of knowledge.

The Access Foundationalist Assumption This brings us to the access foundationalist assumption, the final of the three mentioned assumptions traditionally smuggled in with the question of the way of knowing in theology. The assumption here is that theological knowledge, like every other set of beliefs that aspires to the rank of knowledge, must spring from trustworthy grounds that are readily accessible to the theologian. This assumption is at the heart of the modernist commitment to classical foundationalism so roundly criticized in the latter half of the twentieth century (cf. Bonjour 1978). It is important to note that there are two parts to this assumption, just as there are two aspects to the traditional foundationalist claim. On the one hand there is a thesis about the structure of human knowing, on the other hand there is a requirement that the human knower have self‐reflective access to the basis of that structure. The first claim is that theological knowledge must spring from solid and dependable grounds. This means that there exist bedrock experiences or ideas that yield foundational beliefs that can be trusted to be true; and, that all knowledge must either be an instance of such a belief, or in a linear inferential relationship to it.

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The second claim is that these grounds are readily accessible. This means that the human knower must be in a position to provide a reason for accepting a belief by demonstrating how that belief is inferentially connected to a foundational belief or itself could not fail to be true. I’ll refer to the first claim as the foundation requirement and the second claim as the accessibility requirement. I will argue here that it is clear only that Barth rejects the accessibility requirement. Once again, Barth’s position can be clarified by distinguishing it from one of his theological predecessors – this time it is his most esteemed Marburg mentor, Wilhelm Herrmann.3 The most obvious attempts to meet the requirements of the access foundationalist assumption have been through philosophical proofs for the existence of God or truth of Christianity, beginning with Descartes Meditations and proceeding with more or less subtlety right up to the present day. Herrmann thoroughly rejected the use of rational proofs in theology, whether as prolegomena or apologetics. Barth was a dutiful disciple of Herrmann: “The God of faith is neither ‘demonstrable’ reality nor is he merely a possibility.… he is known only where he reveals his life; and where and to whom he will reveal it is his concern alone” (TC, p. 243). There is no hint here of an epistemological dualism (à la Ritschl) employed to secure theology’s independence. It would seem that the independence of theology is itself secured by God’s freedom in revelation and not the sui generis quality of a general ethical/ religious knowing. Does this agreement between Herrmann and Barth, however, extend to the rejection of the access foundationalist assumption? Barth acknowledges his indebtedness to Herrmann for imparting to him “one essential truth” (TC, p. 239). He is undoubtedly speaking here of what Herrmann sometimes referred to as the autopistia of Christian truth, “the conviction of Christian truth as based on itself ” (TC, p. 258). In Barth’s view, however, this insight was shrouded by Herrmann’s emphasis on the role of individual human experience in getting theology off the ground. Barth seizes on this statement of Herrmann to illustrate his point: “Knowledge of God is the expression of religious experience wholly without weapons” (TC, p. 248). Barth hails the “without weapons” precisely because of his rejection of the accessibility requirement, that requires human knowers to come armed with an argument to defend their claims to knowledge. For Barth a human defense is not possible. “Only the Logos of God Himself can provide the proof ” (CD I/1, p. 163). Such knowledge “has no basis or possibility outside itself ” (CD I/1, p. 120). Barth, however, cannot countenance a double mindedness he perceives in Herrmann. While insisting that Christian truth is self‐grounded, Herrmann persistently undermines this claim with an appeal to the “inherent power of our (that is the believing Christian’s) experiencing intuition” (TC, p. 265). Conscience (Gewissen) becomes the human point of contact with God. It is important to see that the difference between Barth and Herrmann on this point is not a minor nuance or trivial detail; in Barth’s view, the separation is “only by a blade’s breadth and yet by a chasm’s depth” (CD I/1, p. 213). It finally makes the difference between an outright dismissal of the requirement for human access to the grounds of knowledge and merely a slight modification of that

3  Kenneth Oakes observes that, “The story of Barth on theology and philosophy is the story of a recovering Herrmannian” (2012, p. 245).

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requirement that remains essentially unchanged. At this point Herrmann is more akin to Ritschl; the kind of human access granted to the basis of the religious knowledge claim does not take the form of syllogistic reasoning or scientific proof. Nevertheless, the basis remains accessible in the intuition of human experience. One might argue that Herrmann does not claim that accessibility is required, only that it exists. But this is all we need to differentiate his position from Barth’s. It should be clear that Barth makes a clean break with the accessibility requirement. Theological knowing does not require human access or defense in order to be considered legitimate knowing primarily because it is self‐grounded by its object – God. Barth not only denies cognitive accessibility to epistemic grounds as a requirement, he denies the very possibility that we could ourselves provide a complete and independent justification or demonstration of the basis of our theological knowing. Having addressed the accessibility requirement we now turn to the foundational requirement. It is possible to be a foundationalist without accepting the accessibility requirement – without accepting the requirement to have an independent means of demonstrating the legitimacy of foundational beliefs. Barth rejects the accessibility requirement because it violates the above‐to‐below way of theological knowing encountered in revelation. His is a theological epistemology that eschews all human foundations. We should resist, nevertheless, referring to Barth’s position as “nonfoundational,” as if it lacked grounding altogether. Nowhere does Barth commend an insulated coherentism. Barth is a foundationalist – not a classical foundationalist, but a theo‐foundationalist. In its most unassuming form, the foundational requirement stipulates that the structure of knowledge includes and is anchored in trustworthy foundational beliefs. In Barth’s view our knowledge of God is anchored in a trustworthy foundation. Barth’s theological epistemology, based on the reality of revelation breaking through from above to below, certainly rules out antifoundationalism or pure coherentism. What serves as the trustworthy foundation in Barth’s theological epistemology is unambiguously God himself who is his speaking to us. The speech of God is his Word, Jesus Christ, self‐revealed as we are brought into communion with God by the Spirit. This being‐ revealed‐to is the trustworthy foundation and wellspring of all human knowing of God. Is there such a thing then as a foundational belief? The answer to this question, and therefore the answer to the question about Barth’s attitude toward the foundational requirement, turns on what counts as a foundational belief. It is clear that human knowledge of God for Barth involves believing. Knowing God is the gift of faith where knowing, believing, and obeying the Truth are inseparable. We are given the gift of trustworthy foundational believing, but we are not given the gift of the knowledge of God packaged in individual foundational truth‐statements. The concept of truths of revelation in the sense of Latin propositions given and sealed once for all with divine authority in both wording and meaning is theologically impossible …. The freely acting God Himself and alone is the truth of revelation. (CD I/1, p. 15)

Individual propositional expressions in human language do not have the power to ­contain the Truth. That is not to say that there are not objectively better and worse ways

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of striving to express in human terms the trustworthy human knowledge of God. But these expressions are always second order reflections, derivative and dependent on the actual knowing relation. What we have then is an affirmation of the absolute certainty of the foundation but a rejection of any confidence in human attempts to build to it. We should acknowledge that this is to undo completely what the foundational requirement was intended to do. The foundational requirement assumes that truth can be adequately conveyed in belief‐ statements, and furthermore that truth value can be transferred to belief‐statements in  a direct inferential relationship to previously established belief‐statements. At one level, this is indeed rightly how we strive to build our knowledge. Drawing inferences from propositions to conclusions is an implicit assumption in all human reasoning. For Barth, however, this striving, which is indeed part of the task of theology, is ever only a striving after the given foundation in an inevitably imperfect effort to aim at the truth of revelation, in which we succeed only by the grace of the Holy Spirit.4 This means that the foundation of our theological knowing is also its apex. We cannot independently build self‐secured structures on this knowledge but only revel in, reflect on and point to it – subjecting our speech to the criterion of Christ the one and only True Revelation of God. Truth in this sense is not transferred to our belief‐ statements but rather sits in judgment over them. Another way to put this is that Barth is not first an epistemological foundationalist but first an ontological foundationalist. The ontological foundation of theological knowing is taken to provide the epistemological foundation and basis for judging all theological reflection. This brings us to the close of our brief excursus on Barth’s rejection of the epistemological assumptions of the Enlightenment. I have argued that it is on the basis of the way of knowing established by the ontological priority of God’s self‐revelation that Barth refuses to accept these assumptions. For Barth, theology is not required to accept the obligations, direction, or rules of any philosophy that would impinge upon its way of knowing. In short, Barth’s theo‐foundationalism shares the conviction that knowledge has a ground, while granting nothing to Enlightenment foundationalist assumptions about the nature of that ground. Our focus in this section has been on epistemological assumptions that Barth believes theology must reject. In our final section we will consider what conclusions can be drawn about the relationship between theology and philosophy.

Conclusions About the Relationship Between Theology and Philosophy [Theology] involves a fundamental reflection upon reality by means of that very same thought which is also the tool of the philosophers. (FI, p. 32)

4  The formulation of dogmas and dogmatic propositions is always only a striving to aim at the truth of revelation without any possibility of succeeding outside of the grace of God. The truth of revelation cannot be isolated and contained in a mere human proposition, “in abstraction from the person of Him who reveals it and from the revelatory act of this person in which it is given to other persons to perceive” (CD I/1, pp. 267–270).

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Barth recognizes that engagement with the realm of philosophy is inevitable for theology. “Familiarity with the thinking of the philosopher,” is a requirement for the theologian (CD I/1, p. 283). But, as we have seen, Barth’s theology of revelation dethrones philosophy as the founder and judge of theological knowledge. From these two assertions, one affirming the other cautioning, we can expect that in Barth’s view there is a proper though constrained role for philosophy in theology.

An Example: Realism and Idealism in Theology The boundaries of philosophy are established by revelation in its movement from above to below. But what is to guide the theologian in the proper use of philosophy? An excellent source for locating Barth’s material concerns for the interaction with philosophy is in his 1929 essay “Schicksal und Idee in Der Theologie.” Here he highlights the benefits and dangers for theology of realism and idealism, which he sees as opposite poles in philosophy. Barth begins with realism because he finds a measure of realism to be an unavoidable starting point. God is objectively real; and, by claiming that God is real we include God in the reality in which we experience ourselves and the world (FI, p. 36). But philosophical realism must be kept in check. The danger, if taken uncritically, is that the realist will suppose that knowledge of God can be read directly from the data of given experience, whether subjectively or empirically. The confidence with which the theologian knows God is a “confidence in God’s self‐giving” that is “rather different from realism’s confidence in God’s givenness” (FI, p. 40). A confidence in God’s givenness entails an unwarranted anthropological assumption that we have a properly functioning human capacity to know God by means of the use of our own endowments applied to the data of given experience. This assumption is not entailed in the presupposition of revelation; in fact, the order of knowing in revelation and the powerlessness of the creaturely form independently to deliver the knowledge of God suggests quite the opposite. The knowledge of God requires the accompanying action of God breaking through in revelation, in which he himself is the very content (FI, p. 35). God lifts our reason to give us a knowledge of himself through the medium of creaturely experience, but that knowledge can never be reduced to that experience. This is where the chastening of idealism is helpful. In its pursuit of truth, idealism is critically reflective about the limits of human knowing (FI, pp. 42–43). Idealism recognizes the problem of our inability to secure a neutral ground of knowing outside of ourselves. We have no unobscured access to the knowledge of God through the data of experience. If we are to know God, God must make himself known to us. “If theology is to remain grounded in God’s revelation, then the idealist is going to have to dampen his ardor for a generally accessible truth, and to join forces with the realist” (FI, p. 47). But the chastening of a critical idealism should never be seen to repudiate what Barth has affirmed in a proper critical realism – namely, that God really reveals himself to us in otherwise inadequate creaturely thoughts, experience, and words, without becoming identical to them. Those who would claim Barth for postmodernism are in danger of hearing the second word of chastening idealism as a repudiation of the first word of critical realism, which stakes its confidence in the Word that became

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flesh. The fact that knowing God is, from below, a human impossibility does not change the fact that God, from above, has made it possible for humans to know God.5

The Regulating Criterion What we can see from this example of Barth’s interaction with philosophy is that the guiding principle he employs for determining the boundaries of philosophy is the very same criterion that guided his rejection of Enlightenment foundationalism. Philosophy is of use to theology so long as it allows theology to remain grounded in God’s self‐revelation. Revelation breaks through to us in a creaturely form bringing us face to face with the very Word of God in that creaturely form. Philosophy may not trespass the dynamics of revelation by separating or collapsing the form and content – by equating the creaturely form with the divine or by suggesting that we can have direct access to the divine content without the creaturely form. “The one would be realistic theology, the other idealistic theology, and both bad theology” (CD I/1, p. 175). The criterion regulating the use of philosophy is therefore the same criterion that regulates theology itself, Jesus Christ the Word of God, the Revelation of God, self‐revealed to human beings in a creaturely form. Barth saw Feuerbach’s critique of religion as a clarion call to Christian theology. Feuerbach exposed the fact that Christian theology, when justifying itself by an analogy from the human being to the divine being, grounded the knowledge of God in humanity. This is precisely why there can be no philosophical compromise on the priority of the particularity of God’s self‐revelation in theological knowing. The way of knowing in theology is initiated by and in God from above to below. Human knowers are given clear and unambiguous knowledge of God when they are brought by the power of the Spirit into communion with Christ and given a sharing in his knowledge. Barth explicitly and repeatedly acknowledged and critically embraced the inescapable presence and use of philosophy in theology. His concerns about philosophy go no further than seeking to safeguard theology’s receptive and responsive stance toward actual divine revelation. Barth’s denunciations are leveled against philosophy’s presumed competency, based on an ungrounded ontological assumption (CD I/1, p. 159) to regulate and establish from below truth about God independent of revelation. It was this presumed competency that inveigled the theology of the nineteenth and twentieth century to accept the demands of Enlightenment foundationalism without notice of the cost. And yet, Barth still holds out the possibility for a Christian philosophy or philosopher who also works in the light of and strives for obedience to the revelation of God. Philosophy can and must be employed in a way that observes the dependence of human theological knowing on the grace of the miracle and mystery of God’s self‐revelation.6 5  Although much is made of the influence of Kantianism or neo-Kantianism on Barth, it is clear that in Barth’s view Kantian idealism could not get past its antithesis with realism, and theology admits no more of a proof from practical reason than it does from pure reason. Kantianism may be helpful in its critique of realism, but it has no privileged philosophical status with Barth. 6  Some material from this chapter is published in an earlier form in a 2010 article in the Heythrop Journal and in a chapter of Theology’s Epistemological Dilemma (2014).

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References Barth, K. (1957). Ein Briefwechsel mit Adolf von Harnack. In: Theologische Fragen und Antworten, 7–31. Zollikon‐Zürich: Evangelischer Verlag. English trans. Revelation and Theology: An Analysis of the Barth‐Harnack Correspondence of 1923, ed. H. Martin Rumscheidt. Cambridge: University Press, 1972. 29–53. Barth, K. (1960). Philosophie und Theologie. In: Philosophie und Christliche Existenz: Festschrift für Heinrich Barth (ed. G. Huber), 93–106. Basel: Helbing & Lichtenhahn. English trans. ‘Philosophy and Theology,’ in The Way of Theology in Karl Barth: Essays and Comments, ed. H. Martin Rumscheidt. Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications, 1986. 79–95. Bonjour, L. (1978). Can empirical knowledge have a foundation? American Philosophical Quarterly 15 (1): 1–14. Bultmann, R. (1928). 47. In: Karl Barth‐ Rudolf Bultmann Letters, 1922–1966 (eds. B. Jaspert and G.W. Bromiley), 38–39. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1981. Diller, K. (2010). Karl Barth and the relationship between philosophy and theology. Heythrop Journal 51 (6): 1035–1052.

Diller, K. (2014). Theology’s Epistemological Dilemma: How Karl Barth and Alvin Plantinga Provide a Unified Response. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. Holder, R. (2012). Natural Theology and the Legacy of Karl Barth: The Heavens Declare. West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press. Oakes, K. (2012). Karl Barth on Theology and Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pannenberg, W. (1976). Theology and the Philosophy of Science. Philadelphia: Westminster Press. Ratzinger, J. (2004). Introduction to Christianity. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. Ritschl, A. (1881, 1972). Theology and metaphysics. In: Three Essays, (trans. P. Hefner), 149–218. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Rose, M. (2014). Karl Barth’s Failure. First Things (244, June–July): 39–44. Stewart, H.L. (1950). The “reverent agnosticism” of Karl Barth. Harvard Theological Review 43 (3): 215–232. Wolterstorff, N. (1997). The reformed tradition. In: A Companion to Philosophy of Religion (eds. P.L. Quinn and C. Taliaferro), 204–209. Cambridge: Blackwell.

CHAPTER 62

Barth and the Natural Sciences Andrew Torrance

Introduction Karl Barth is not always viewed as having a positive voice to contribute to the conversation about theology and the natural sciences. For some, he held “a somewhat derogatory view of the natural world in relation to salvation history” (Deane‐Drummond 2015, p. 194). For others, he had “an ambivalent attitude to science” (Murray and Wilkinson 2005, p. 58). Most commonly perhaps, he is critiqued for laying “such exclusive stress on the primacy of divine self‐revelation in Christ as to seem to relegate to insignificance the role of any investigations that looked at the possibility of collateral illumination offered by other sources of insight or ways of seeking truth” (Polkinghorne 2008, p. 7). Although caricatures of Barth’s position abound, Barth shares responsibility for some of the governing assumptions that generate them. In the opening preface to part one of CD III, The Doctrine of Creation, he notes that “there can be no scientific problems, objections or aids in relation to what Holy Scripture and the Christian church understand by the divine work of creation” (CD III/1, p. ix). For him, the natural sciences have nothing to say that will make a decisive difference to a Christian doctrine of creation. There is a boundary between theology and the natural sciences, which means that both theologians and natural scientists should be free to press on with their respective tasks without getting in the way of each other. He writes: There is free scope for natural science beyond what theology describes as the work of the Creator. And theology can and must move freely where science which really is science, and not secretly a pagan Gnosis or religion, has its appointed limit. (CD III/1, p. x)

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Barth is never entirely clear as to how exactly we should understand the boundary ­between natural science and theology, nor does he try to be. He is happy to leave this task to others: “I am of the opinion … that future workers in the field of the Christian doctrine of creation will find many problems worth pondering in defining the point and manner of this twofold boundary” (CD III/1, p. x). At the same time, he does have some constructive things to say about how we might understand the relationship between the two. To explore what these might be, we shall begin by thinking about how Barth’s understanding of theology as a science can help us to understand the place of the natural sciences in relation to theology. Second, I shall turn to look at one of Barth’s few attempts to provide focused engagement with the relationship between science and religion, in a little‐discussed but highly significant lecture entitled “Religion und ­ Wissenschaft.” Here I shall look at some of the concerns that Barth articulated about confused ways of drawing on the natural sciences – particularly Darwinian science – to make broad claims about the natural order. Third, I consider how he thinks we should read certain biblical passages, such as the Genesis creation narratives, in ways that do not put them in competition with the natural sciences. Finally, I engage with Barth’s concluding message in “Religion und Wissenschaft,” closing with some comments on what it might mean for a Christian to think theologically about the natural sciences.

Theology Among the Sciences Although Barth maintains that there is a certain boundary between theology and the natural sciences, he does not think that Christians should feel a need to close off their theological commitments from the task of the natural sciences. A Christian should be able to recognize not only that her faith is compatible with a scientific study of the natural order but also that her faith can deepen her scientific understanding of the natural order. This is because the object of the natural sciences has been designed and created by God, the object of theology. Furthermore, the object of theology will at times involve himself in the natural order in particular ways. According to Barth, the Christian natural scientist should be able to acknowledge both of these things in the name of science even if they cannot be discerned by the current methods of natural science. To understand this point better, it will be helpful to consider how Barth ­understood the place of theology as a science among the sciences. Like the natural sciences, Barth views theology as a science that endeavors to discern a real object in a manner “directed by the phenomenon itself ” (ET, p. 4). It “seek[s] to understand [its object] on its own terms and to speak of it along with all the implications of its existence” (ET, p. 4). As a science, theology does not permit its researchers to let their imaginative and speculative activity run wild. Rather, it relentlessly yet humbly endeavors to attend to and learn from a given object. Unlike the natural sciences, ­however, it strives to make sure that its investigation is regulated by the Word of God, as it is mediated to theologians through Scripture, within the sphere of the church. By seeking “to apprehend, understand, and speak of ‘God’,” theology is “a special science, a very special science” (ET, p. 4). It does not simply attend to natural phenomena but to the one who creates, orders, maintains, and defines all natural things. This means that the object of theology is much more relevant for understanding the object of the

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natural sciences than the other way around. Whereas God defines what the natural order essentially is, the natural order does not define who and what God essentially is – even if there are (veiled) ways in which the natural order bespeaks God’s creative activity. There is, therefore, a certain asymmetry in the relationship between God and the natural order. This does not, however, rule out the possibility of the natural sciences serving the task of theology. Barth was willing to let nontheological sciences, particularly human sciences, inform his reading of Scripture by helping him to become more attentive to the sociocultural world within which it was written. As we shall discuss, this can serve to help readers be attentive to the particular genre and meaning of certain texts, which can, in turn, help the theological discernment that grows out of reading these texts. The only way that theology could advance beyond a conversation with the natural sciences would be if it were operating sub specie aeternitatis, with a divine knowledge of God and creation. But Barth is very clear that theology “is itself no more than human ‘talk about God’” (CD I/1, p. 4). It is, therefore, every bit as fallible as any other human discipline. “Theology does not in fact possess special keys to special doors” (CD I/1, p. 5). Indeed, the hiddenness of its object is such that there are ways in which theology is even more likely to go astray. It cannot achieve the kind of self‐confident mastery we see in the natural sciences. As a science, therefore, theology must be sensitive to the fact that it “is continually exposed to judgment and never relieved of the crisis in which it is placed by its object, or, rather to say, by its living subject” (ET, p. 4). Despite the hiddenness of its object, Barth does think theology can be a positive science. It does not simply reflect on what cannot be known but speaks positively about God’s self‐revelation, by expounding the biblical canon and ecumenical creeds.1 By trusting in its given content, under the guidance of the church, theology can dare to take steps forward, cautiously but with a faithful confidence in its calling to be a positive witness to God’s Word. As it does so, theology understands that it is not open to critique from “sciences” that see themselves as essentially secular or naturalistic – “sciences” that rule out a priori the existence of that reality who shapes the science of theology. If it is challenged by such “sciences,” theology must be able to recognize when it is being met by “alien principles rather than its own principle” – principles that would “[increase] rather than [decrease] the mischief which makes critical science necessary for the church” (CD I/1, p. 6). Moreover, by recognizing itself as a "science" – as a rule-­governed discipline of intellectual inquiry – Christian theology knows that secular or naturalistic commitments in theology are unscientific, because such commitments would go against the very nature of reality as confessed by faith. At the table of the sciences, theology “makes a necessary protest against a general concept of science which is admittedly pagan” (CD I/1, p. 11). With its awareness of the bigger picture of reality, there are ways in which theology can keep the other sciences in check; it can stop them from veering into metaphysical error. It does this, not simply by the use of philosophical acumen, but because, as a science, it recognizes that it has been 1  To be clear, Barth does not think that ultimate authority lies with the church or, indeed, with the authors of Scripture – as though their voices were the voice of God. Rather, the church recognizes that its voice is an instructed voice that is always open to further instruction with regard to its established orthodoxies (CD I/2, p. 480).

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given to know the truth of metaphysical reality – that the triune God is the first principle who defines and gives reality to all else that exists. So, if a natural scientist advances a theory that is somehow at odds with the mind of the church, because it is metaphysically overdetermined, the theologian can know to question such a theory. It can show that such a theory goes beyond the means of the natural sciences in ways that distort the conclusions that are being drawn. Because the theologian speaks to the ultimate foundation of the natural order, and therefore knows creation beyond its surface appearance, theology has a much wider purview than the other sciences – a purview that looks to the one who upholds and orders all those phenomena that are the objects of other sciences. Can Barth provide examples of ways in which theology can be critical of developments that have emerged from philosophizing on the natural sciences? There are two issues in particular to which he draws attention. As I consider again later, the Christian theologian can point out (i) why it can be problematic to associate the evolution of the natural order with a notion of “progress.” It can insist that the true teleologies of creatures are not simply those things that can be observed as contributing to survivability within the natural order. Rather, they are those teleologies for which God has created them. Also, theology can point out (ii) the limited ways in which the natural sciences can discern what it is that makes human beings distinctive or indistinctive from the rest of the animal kingdom (see CD III/2, p. 87). Christian theology can make it clear that human beings are not simply a part of the evolutionary process that drives the rest of the natural order. For Barth, the kind of distinctiveness that defines what it truly means to be human is not something that can be reduced to phenomena that we can discern directly (see CD III/2, p. 89). Rather, it is defined by the God who creates human beings with a particular purpose – a purpose that finds its ultimate telos in the person of Jesus Christ: the logos in, through, and for whom all things are created. By drawing on God’s revelation, theology has a much deeper insight into the nature of creation – insight that cannot simply be discerned from studying the visible surfaces of the universe. This means that there is a certain sense in which the scientific task that faces all the other sciences will be subordinate to the theological task. Accordingly, Barth quotes Francis Turrettini: Theology … is thus the judge and lord of all things, so that it judges concerning them and is itself judged by no other science; for all other disciplines must be examined according to its criteria, so that whatever they have that is not consonant with theology is to be rejected. (CD I/1, p. 6; Turrettini 1679, pp. 1, 6, 7)

By recognizing theology as a science among the sciences, theology can help us to ­understand the secondary place of the other sciences within the grand scheme of things. This enables us to develop a proper appreciation of both their range and abilities but also their limitations. On the one hand, theology can stop other sciences from ­closing themselves off from the theological world in favor of a “heathen pantheon,” by drawing “too clear‐cut a distinction between theology and the sciences” (CD I/1, p. 11). On the other hand, although it may not make a practical difference to other sciences, it can help the scientist to recognize the deeper truth of the object of their study. By so

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doing, the Christian can come to see the natural sciences as a discipline and vocation that is most at home within the life of the church: the community whose movements seek to track the fundamental reality of things.

Dodelian Darwinianism One of the few works in which Barth focuses specifically on the place of the natural sciences was written early in his career, in 1912, after recently taking up his pastorate in Safenwil. This was a lecture given to the Safenwil Arbeiterverein (Workers’ Association) on the topic of “Religion und Wissenschaft” (Religion and Science). Here, he offers a rebuttal of the book Moses oder Darwin (1889), written by Arnold Dodel‐Port (1843–1908) who had been professor of botany at the University of Zürich. This book had become popular in the public sphere and one of its major claims was that an either‐or choice had to be made between science and religion. For Barth, this betrayed “the greatest possible confusion of concepts” (GA 22, p. 425). But, despite his own low opinion of the book, it had successfully managed to capture the social imagination in Germany – as he wrote to his brother Peter, “all” the socialists in Safenwil were reading it and taking it seriously (GA 22, p. 418). For this reason, he felt an obligation to offer a public response in the form of a lecture. What made this lecture so critical at the time was the fact that, as Carys Moseley shows, Darwinism was “being used by atheists within the wider socialist movement in western Europe as a means of ousting the influence of Christian socialist movements and propounding a secularist social and political vision for western nations” (2013, p. 41). As Barth had begun to notice, with great concern, Darwinism was being commandeered by the socialist movement to encourage and advance the myth that human beings were to be defined by the “progress” of the natural order – a progress that was measured according to the criteria and principles of Darwinism. It is remarkable to see how astute Barth’s concerns would prove to be in light of the course that history would take in the ensuing decades. In his lecture, Barth describes Darwinism as “the scientific doctrine of the gradual and slow development of things, the doctrine of the progressive development of the living world by the action of the natural forces still active today” (GA 22, p. 419). This doctrine was inflated and systematized by Dodel‐Port to draw the following conclusion: The world is not created at all, but eternal. Its origin is due not to an external effect, but to a natural evolution from within itself. And to speak of a personal God is the result of human imagination. The naturalist of today recognises only the spatially and temporally unlimited universe. (GA 22, p. 419)

Such conclusions, for Barth, “cannot be based on experience at all … but [from a natural scientific perspective] are just as arbitrary and dogmatic as the assumption of creation from nothing” (GA 22, p. 426). They emerge by generalizing a natural scientific theory of evolution into a metaphysical “doctrine” – “a structure of closed knowledge” (GA 22, p. 429). Whereas Dodel‐Port purported to have a scientific basis for his views, Barth is clear that his position goes well beyond the natural sciences to establish a “new

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religion,” one based on “Darwin’s law of nature” (GA 22, p. 421). This religion is committed to two principles in particular: (i) “man is a natural being among others,” who cannot be clearly distinguished from other creatures; and (ii) human beings develop like “other natural beings in slow but steady progress from good to better” (GA 22, p. 421). Barth refers to the notion of progress as “the gospel of natural knowledge” (GA 22, p. 421). For Dodel‐Port, this notion should shape our understanding of what it means to be human and can, therefore, help us to understand how to order ourselves as a society. According to Barth, Dodel‐Port’s intention was that the natural sciences displace religion in society. Indeed, it was his hope that the Darwinist message of progress would become “the basis of religious youth education” (GA 22, p. 421). For Barth, Dodel‐Port’s attempt to derive a general understanding of reality from the natural scientific conclusions of Darwinism constituted a “fallacy.” His position “claims to have the truth, while it has only the truth of experience”; it assumes that “the world of our senses, the world of which we have experiences, is reality” (GA 22, p. 429). Not only was he drawing on Darwinism to make claims about what is the case but also about what ought to be the case: because it appears as though human beings are a part of natural evolutionary progress, they should act accordingly. It was precisely this kind of pseudo‐Darwinist teleology that would eventually undergird the philosophy of Nazi Germany, with its vision of an emerging Aryan race and its espousal of social Darwinism. Barth, however, was not only critical of the way that Dodel‐Port employed the natural sciences to draw metaphysical and moral conclusions. He also thought his overestimation of Darwin’s conclusions was a problem for the natural sciences as such. For Barth, the humble pursuit of scientific knowledge was such that it should always be searching for a deeper understanding of the natural order. It should be extremely hesitant to draw fixed or unrevisable conclusions, and should never see itself as capable of establishing speculative theories about the ultimate nature of reality. “Real science knows that no knowledge is definite, but that every recognition is only a start, a down payment on new findings, a preliminary experiment that serves to convey empirical facts to us through the senses” (GA 22, p. 430). Barth then proposed a way in which Dodel‐Port might have better approached his task: The circumspect opponent of religion would proceed quite differently from Dodel. He would not play scientific doctrine off against the religions, but would rather show how science, as a tireless mode of exploration and investigation, could not reconcile itself to the kind of religious doctrine that had sunk into inert and self‐satisfied appropriations of truth. (GA 22, p. 431)

Barth was not here, in 1912, developing a full‐blown response of religion to science. As a Christian pastor and theologian, he was obviously committed to certain religious ­doctrines. Indeed, for him, theological science was an academic discipline that required such commitment  –  even if theology also had to be self‐critical and open to revision when operating according to its own sources and norms. As Barth would later see such matters, by holding firm to church dogma, theology served the natural sciences by testifying to the theological space in which the natural

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system of reality found itself. It was a space in which the idea of nature was framed by the idea of creation. Creation as a divinely posited reality was much more than the surface phenomena that could be observed by the natural sciences. By framing nature in this way, theology could relativize attempts to absolutize the natural sciences. It could thereby resist attempts to read them as Dodel‐Port did – a way that would later, in a more degenerate mode, serve the purposes of Nazism.

Scripture and the Natural Sciences One of the reasons that Dodel‐Port insisted that there was a choice to be made between religion and science was because he believed we are obliged to choose between science and the witness of Scripture  –  between Darwin and Moses. Then as now, one of the main obstacles facing a constructive conversation between theology and the natural sciences is a tendency to read the Bible in ways that place it in tension with mainstream science. Although there is a certain sense in which Barth saw the natural sciences as secondary to theology, he refused to view Scripture as an authority within the domain of natural science. Scripture is not a scientific textbook. This distinction of differing domains meant that the value of the Bible was not to be judged by the fact that it “knows less about science than Darwin” (GA 22, p. 426). Therefore, when Dodel‐Port posed a choice, Barth agreed he was not completely wrong. When the Bible is read “from a natural scientific point of view,” the theologian could “calmly admit” that it is “incorrect” according to contemporary understanding (GA 22, p. 426). In this respect, he stated, “I agree with Darwin” (GA 22, p. 426). However, to see such a choice as categorical was, in his view, to be confused about the nature and purpose of Scripture. At the same time, Barth was also critical of those “friends of religion” who would insist on a particular interpretation of Scripture over against mainstream natural science (GA 22, p. 427). This group posed the same choice in reverse. “Either the whole Christian‐religion doctrine, as we understand it, or nothing at all … ‘All or nothing’” (GA 22, p. 427). They feared that if “a hole is punched in the unconditional authority of the Bible, in its teaching and reports, then the rest of the wall will soon collapse” (GA 22, p. 427). Consequently, they “either set Moses in opposition to Darwin, asserting against all appearances: that [Moses] is right! Or they try to justify this assertion on scientific grounds, by proving that the biblical accounts are somehow scientifically justified” (GA 22, p. 427). The problem with both Dodel‐Port and the “friends of religion” is that they place a biblical account of the natural order in competition with the natural sciences. For Barth, they are both involved in the same category mistake. When the Bible speaks about the natural order, it is not way ahead of its time, but written “according to the manner of its time” (GA 22, p. 426). From this point of view, there is no reason for Christians to struggle to negotiate the findings of contemporary natural science with their faith in the Bible. Although Barth views Scripture as an inspired witness to the truth, he does not think that Scripture’s inspiration extends to the domain of truths about natural phenomena.

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How then does Barth interpret those passages that are perceived as standing in conflict with contemporary science, such as the Genesis creation narratives? For Barth, the witness of Scripture does not pertain to phenomena that can be studied by the natural sciences. It is a witness to God and God’s covenantal purposes. In its capacity as witness, it will at times speak in a conditioned way about the natural order – with words that are not meant to be judged according to the criteria of the natural sciences. Its statements about natural phenomena are secondary to its theological witness. The truth of its witness does not depend on the scientific validity of its historically conditioned statements about the natural world. The reality of God is one thing, the natural world is quite another. There can be no conflict between the scriptural witness and natural science, because the methods of modern science reach their categorical limit when confronted with the reality of God. The truth about God as attested by the scriptural narratives cannot possibly be determined by the methods of modern science one way or the other. These methods pertain only to natural phenomena, whereas the biblical narratives, by means of conditioned statements, pertain only to God. Barth states that when he hears a logical statement like 2 × 2  =  4, he feels “completely cold” (GA 22, p. 427). However, he adds: When I hear the biblical story of creation, the truth of which is in some respects inaccurate, I hear the Good News that I do not live in a world of blind senseless fate but in a world created by the Father. A so‐called true story may be infinitely boring while a so‐called saga can speak a word of God to me. Whoever undertakes to deny religion, because he considers its teachings and accounts to be false, does not know what he is doing. (GA 22, p. 427)

It is interesting that here in1912 Barth already associates the creation stories with the genre of “saga,” a term he had apparently picked up from Gunkel (CD III/1, p. 81), whose lectures he had heard in 1907 as a student in Berlin. Later, in CD III/1, Barth would go on to provide a detailed discussion of this genre, describing saga as “­ ‘historicised’ myth” (“historisierter” Mythus) (CD III/1, p. 87). “The concept of saga,” he wrote, “has to be marked off from that of myth as well as “history” [Historie]” (CD III/1, p. 84). Let me make two clarifying points on this statement, beginning with Barth’s concept of Historie. A key distinction needs to be noted between Historie and Geschichte, both of which are translated as “history” in the Church Dogmatics. Historie refers to observable history; it is the kind of history that can be known by the “objective” or “neutral” methods of modern historical‐critical investigation. The reality of God as  an acting subject is excluded, in principle, from historical narratives that are c­ onstructed by such methods. Geschichte, on the other hand, pertains to history as seen from a different standpoint. As used by Barth, it refers to history that takes God into account. History in this sense, whose narratives focus on God as an acting subject, can be known only from the standpoint of faith. Barth notes that in Scripture Geschichte includes “nonhistorical” (Unhistorische) features that cannot be directly observed or investigated by the methods of modern historians or natural scientists, such as the essence and purpose of creation. At the same time, Geschichte also includes features of history that can be known by modern historical criticism. The biblical narratives mix together aspects of both Geschichte

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and Historie. For Barth, “it is necessary and obligatory” for the ecclesial theologian to recognize “that in genuine history [Geschichte] the ‘historical’ [Historische] and ‘non‐­ historical’ [Unhistorische] accompany each other and belong together” (CD III/1, p. 81). My second point of clarification relates to Barth's insistence that the creation stories (Geschichten) in Genesis are "sagas" not "myths." Whereas timeless myth pertains to structures of reality that are always and everywhere the present, saga pertains to singular and unrepeatable events. The upshot is that for Barth the biblical creation ­narratives fall into the category of Geschichte not Historie, and of saga not myth. They depict the Lord God as the primary acting subject in the history of the world’s creation as constituted by singular and unrepeatable events. The creation narratives consist of sagas, Barth writes, that are “intuitive and poetic” accounts of an enacted “pre‐historical reality” [praehistorischen Geschichtswirklichkeit] that took place “once for all within the confines of time and space” (CD III/1, p. 81). Therefore they are not so much reports to be investigated by neutral methods as witnesses to be received by faith. They bear witness to God’s creative activity, which is always miraculous; they disclose the reality of creation, according to its origin, essence, and goal, as it comes from the mystery of God. These creation sagas “try to say how things actually were” (CD III/1, p. 87). Unlike “godless myths” (1 Tim. 4:7), they depend upon the grace of revelation – upon God revealing himself both to the authors of the sagas as well as to their readers. For Barth, therefore, “we are no less truly summoned to listen to what the Bible has to say here in the form of saga than to what it has to say in other places in the form of history [Historie]” (CD III/1, p. 83). The Genesis sagas should be read neither as reports of a fantastical order, nor as accounts of a reality that has been lost after Adam’s fall. They bear witness not only to the divine purposes that encompass the creation but also to the creation as it depends ­absolutely on grace. The sagas are not properly grasped as “history in the historicist sense [historische Geschichte]” (CD III/1, p. 78). They do not offer a scientific account of natural‐ historical phenomena. They are rather a prophetic reimagining, under the influence of grace, of creation’s singular occurrence in its absolute origin and goal. By not being bound strictly to natural history, the biblical sagas attest the ultimate foundations of creation as established by God. Therefore, although Barth affirms the reliability of Scripture in its witness to certain singular occurrences within time and space, such as Jesus’ bodily resurrection or his virgin birth (Hunsinger 2000, pp. 210–225), he also understands that Scripture is, first and foremost, a witness to some things that cannot be directly apprehended through a scientific account of the natural order.2 On this point, he quotes Adolf Schlatter approvingly: With all the obscurities of his historical hindsight and his prophetic foresight, the biblical narrator is the servant of God, the one who awakens the recollection of him and makes known his will. If he doesn’t do it as knower, he does it as dreamer; if his eye should toil, his imagination steps in and fills the gaps as needed. In this way he passes on the divine gift 2  Whether such occurrences might be indirectly apprehended by neutral observers or modern methods of investigation was, arguably, not a matter that sufficiently claimed Barth’s attention (cf. Hunsinger 2015, pp. 182–186).

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that entered into the course of history and makes it fruitful for posterity. The fact that he has to serve God not only as knower and thinker but also as poet and dreamer is grounded in the fact that he is human, and we human beings are unable to arrest the transition from thought to poetry. (1923, p. 337; cited in CD III/1, p. 83; Green’s translation [1990, pp. 28–29])

A good example of how Barth sees the genre of saga at work can be found in his ­reflection on the Garden of Eden. In the second of the Genesis creation narratives, he notes, the Garden is presented as “a real place on earth”; the author seems to associate the Garden with the physical earth in which we now find ourselves (CD III/1, p. 253). “Like the land of Canaan, it is [presented as] a definite earthy space”; it is not merely “an elysian wonderland” (CD III/1, p. 267). For Barth, it is a crucial feature of this saga that it offers an account that is “so close to the ‘historical’ [historischen]. …that the inquisitive question, Where was Paradise situated? is continually raised and can never be wholly silenced” (CD III/1, p. 253). Nevertheless, he quickly adds that “to be true to this passage, we must drop the question [of its geographical location] as soon as it is raised” (CD III/1, p. 253). Moreover, he goes on to describe the river system as “hydrographically impossible and geographically indefinite” (CD III/1, p. 280). For Barth, this passage serves to bind the second creation narrative to the reality of this world, so that readers can read this narrative as speaking truth (rather than mere myth) to the world we live in – truth about God’s meaning and purpose in creation and the place of human beings within it. At the same time, it seeks to do this without intending to offer the kind of geographical data that could be discovered by the contemporary historian or natural scientist. In sum, Barth does not think that the Genesis creation narratives offer an account of natural history. Nonetheless, he insists that they offer a true witness to the reality of how God relates to the history of creation. As sagas, they are to be read as historical (geschichtliche) narratives that speak to us of the nature of creation’s history as real but singular occurrences. Further, they are to be interpreted as foundational to the narrative of God’s covenantal engagement with the history (Geschichte) of creation. For Barth, when God speaks into history, through the words of Scripture, God tells creation about its history. As a result, creatures are given the opportunity to develop a more complete picture of the natural order from the standpoint of a higher but otherwise hidden dimension. The biblical witness that God instigates and intends is one in which the faithful human imagination is allowed and required to play a part in the reception of God’s communicative presence. This extra dimension means that poetry and saga can be no less decisive than historical report in testifying to God’s purposes and works, and thereby to the true nature of reality.

Conclusion Clearly, for Barth, the task of theology is very different from the task of the natural sciences. Theology speaks to the underlying foundation and purpose of the natural order. By contrast, the natural sciences speak to the history, structure, and behavior of phe-

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nomena that lie within this same natural order. It is possible for these two tasks to bump into one another; for example, when Scripture makes claims that appear to relate to the inner workings of the natural order. Nevertheless, as we have seen, a careful understanding of the differences between Scripture and a contemporary scientific textbook, between theological witness and naturalistic report, make it possible for such clashes to be negotiated without detriment to either one of them. At the same time, for Barth, the differences between theology and the natural sciences do not entail that these two tasks be isolated from each another. It is possible for the two of them to participate in a constructive, mutually enriching conversation. Although Barth is generally more negative than positive about the possibility of natural science making a difference to the theological task, he does not rule out the possibility altogether (see especially CD III/1, pp. 330–344). Indeed, there are several points in his writings that show his theology to be conversant with the natural sciences. The point is that each discipline can learn indirectly from the other, but only by honoring the methods and norms distinctive to each of them respectively – a point that much contemporary dialogue between theology and science has yet to grasp (see Stevick 2016). Theology can no more dictate the course and results of scientific investigation than natural science can dictate the doctrine of God. Barth is less hesitant to recognize ways in which theology might serve the natural sciences. In the conclusion to “Religion und Wissenschaft,” he points out that there is much that the natural sciences assume that they are not themselves able to discern. Although he doesn’t go into detail about what these things are, he does note that the natural sciences tacitly presuppose the existence of a fact‐giving reality  –  a rational order. That the cosmos is a systematic reality is taken for granted; it is not questioned with the same rigor with which scientists question the visible objects of their study. Such a presupposition, for him, is a sign that the natural sciences function with a certain faith in an ultimate foundation to the cosmos – a faith that can give them a confidence to get on with their task. This faith can, of course, be in the natural cosmos itself, as a self‐existent, self‐ordering, self‐regulating reality – as is the case with Dodel‐Port. But the coherence and adequacy of such a view are not self‐evident and, for Barth, requires a faith that is perhaps no less religious than Christianity. In response to Barth, a natural scientist could retort that questioning the ultimate nature of reality is beyond the remit of the natural sciences, which is true. But this would not lessen the fact that the natural scientific method will assume the reality of an ultimate foundation – a reality that the natural sciences are “never able to touch” (GA 22, p. 438). Being in touch with such a foundation requires a theological orientation. If there were no theological assumptions to stabilize the natural scientific task, Barth notes that “science would be, and would remain, the pursuit of an elusive shadow that could never be captured” (GA 22, p. 438; cf. Polanyi 1966). It would always be characterized by a destabilizing uncertainty that would undermine the scientific pursuit of truth. For this reason, he suggests: All true science is, rather, carried and driven by religion. That there are people who undertake the never‐ending task of science is due to an actuality that gives people the courage and modesty that science requires. And that is precisely the fact of religion. We now know

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what it is: it is the eternal creative life of the redeemed people of God. It is just such people that have the capacity to sustain the scientific enterprise. (GA 22, p. 438)

For Barth, theology can perhaps play a role in helping the natural sciences understand the reality of the framework that it tacitly presupposes. Even if a majority of natural scientists might reject the Christian account of this framework, theology serves to challenge them to think more critically about the presuppositions that inform, shape, and justify their scientific criteria and methods. It is worth adding here, however, that there are reasons why some natural scientists might be uncomfortable with accepting a Christian framework for the natural sciences. Christianity does not provide natural science with an underlying structure that would give it absolute stability. This is because, for Barth, Christian theology does not allow natural scientists to presuppose a natural fixedness to things. Although Christian theology can certainly help science to be confident that regularity is indeed integral to the natural order, it also understands that that same natural order does not guarantee regularity for itself but depends upon the sustaining power of God. This God is lord over the natural order and is in no way constrained by the orders and laws of nature. This means that God is free to act in ways that do not entirely conform to the regularity that is discerned by the natural sciences – as, for example, when miracles occur. The Christian natural scientist must humbly recognize, therefore, that her trust in the natural order is first and foremost a trust in the God who, on the one hand, orders nature in such a way that it possesses regularity but who, on the other hand, is under no pressure whatsoever to be constrained by that regularity. So, although Barth can maintain that Christian theology can be a supportive friend to the natural sciences, he also recognises that it can be “a disruptive influence” (McCormack 2006, p. 59). Creation is always subject to the creative and sometimes unpredictable love of the one who creates it and sustains it.3 References Deane‐Drummond, C. (2015). The wisdom of fools? A theo‐dramatic interpretation of deep incarnation. In: Incarnation: On the Scope and Depth of Christology (ed. N.H. Gregersen), 177–202. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Green, G. (1990). Myth, history, and imagination: the creation narratives in bible and theology. Horizons in Biblical Theology 12 (2): 19–38. Hunsinger, G. (2000). Beyond literalism and expressivism: Karl Barth’s hermeneutical realism. In: Disruptive Grace, 201–225. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

Hunsinger, G. (2015). The daybreak of the new creation: Christ’s resurrection in recent theology. In: Evangelical Catholic and Reformed, 169–188. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. McCormack, B. (2006). Theology and science: Karl Barth’s contribution to an ongoing debate. Zeitschrift für Dialektische Theologie 22: 56–59. Moseley, C. (2013). Nations and Nationalism in the Theology of Karl Barth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Murray, P. and Wilkinson, D. (2005). The significance of the theology of creation

3  I am grateful to Mitch Mallary for some helpful feedback on an earlier version of this chapter.

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within Christian tradition: systematic considerations. In: God, Humanity and the Cosmos, 2e (ed. C. Southgate), 39–62. London: T&T Clark. Polanyi, M. (1966). The Tacit Dimension. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Polkinghorne, J. (2008). Theology in the Context of Science. London: SPCK.

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Schlatter, A. (1923). Das Christliche Dogma. Stuttgart: Calwer Vereinsbuchhandlung. Stevick, T.M. (2016). Encountering Reality: T.F. Torrance on Truth and Human Understanding. Minneapolis: Fortress. Turrettini, F. (1679). Institutio Theologiae Elencticae, Pars I. Geneva: Samvelem de Tovrnes.

CHAPTER 63

Barth and Interdisciplinary Method Deborah van Deusen Hunsinger

Introduction Karl Barth is not known for being open to interdisciplinary dialogue. His rejection of apologetics, his insistence on God’s complete “otherness,” his critique of religion’s captivity to culture, and his famous “No!” to the natural theology of Emil Brunner, have led many to suppose that he wasn’t open to dialogue with thinkers from other disciplines. Yet this conclusion is belied by the actual dialogues  –  substantive interactions with thinkers contemporary and historical – that Barth engaged in throughout his life. Barth conversed with other disciplines throughout his career. He was open to truth wherever he found it, while objecting to claims that would compromise the gospel. Whether it was engaging with socialist politics in his early years as the “red pastor” of Safenwil, articulating his assessment of a variety of philosophies and theologies, entering into dialogue with natural science, or opposing Hitler’s regime, Barth was indefatigable in discerning what was and what was not compatible with his understanding of the gospel. Because the subject matter of theology was the living Lord Jesus Christ, who was the same yesterday, today, and forever, and yet also new each morning, theology could not be made into a system. Following Kierkegaard, who argued that existence is not a system, Barth argued that the living Christ is not a system. The relationship between God and human beings in Jesus Christ could be described in a narrative with a history‐like character, but it could not be captured by a set of principles or abstract thought organized into a system or worldview. Recall that Barth did not consider himself to be a “systematic” theologian but rather a “dogmatic” one. His task was to elucidate Christian dogma on the basis of Scripture. The opening sentence of his Church Dogmatics announced this point with clarity: “As a theological discipline dogmatics is the scientific self‐examination of the Christian church with respect to the content of its distinctive talk about God” (CD I/1, p. 3).

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Six Criteria for Theological Anthropology Barth proposed six criteria to assess what would count as an adequate understanding of theological anthropology, based on the patterns of God’s self‐revelation in Christ as attested in Scripture (CD III/2, pp. 68–69, 71, 73–74, 109; G. Hunsinger 2015b, pp. 246–249). • God is present to human beings, not as an idea, principle or symbol, but as a living person, Jesus Christ, who is both fully God and fully human. Jesus Christ is not only present to us but is also the one through whom we are made present to God. In and through him we belong to God (CD III/2, pp. 68, 73). • The history of our fellowship with God is a history of deliverance. In Christ, God comes to us again and again as Savior (CD III/2, pp. 68–69, 73). • Our human life is not an end in itself. In and through Christ, we live for the glory of God (CD III/2, pp. 69, 74). • God’s lordship and sovereign power is revealed in Jesus’ death and resurrection. Through God’s love and freedom, we are delivered from our bondage to sin and death (CD III/2, pp. 69–70, 74). • Because of Jesus’ freedom to obey God, we are made free to respond to God’s grace by aligning our lives and wills with God’s own purposes of redemption. Human freedom consists strictly in loving and deciding for God (CD III/2, pp. 70, 74, 109). “Freedom in the substantive sense does not include the possibility of rejecting grace, because when grace is rejected, freedom contradicts itself and is lost. It enters into the bondage of sin and death” (G. Hunsinger 2015b, p. 248). • Just as Jesus’ life was one of service, so our lives are also to be lived in the service of God. We serve God when we bear witness to God’s presence, history of deliverance, glory, and lordship, as they come to us in Christ. When our lives are shaped by a corresponding service to God and others in love and freedom, we fulfill our divinely given vocation (CD III/2, pp. 71, 74). By means of these criteria Barth established the uniqueness of Christian thought about what it means to be human. Describing the history of God with us, in this way, was the work of ecclesial theology. No other discipline engaged directly with this unique and unrepeatable history. “Jesus Christ is the one Word of God” became Barth’s way of articulating what lay at the center of his entire opus: Scripture finds its unifying and controlling center in the person of the incarnate Son. No other proposal about what it means to be human was guided by the scriptural narrative of God with us. Neither philosophy nor psychology, neither sociology nor history, nor indeed any of the humanities or sciences; no other discipline or theoretical system had this particular content as its normative subject matter. Barth wrote: What other word speaks of the covenant between God and the human race? What other of its character as the work of God, and indeed of the effective and omnipotent grace of God on the basis of eternal love and election? What other of the fulfillment of this covenant in the humiliation of God and the exaltation of the human race? What other of a comprehensive justification of the human race by God and sanctification for it? What other of the fact

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that this reconciliation of God with the human race and the human race with God is no mere idea but a once and for all event? … What other is directed so concretely to each and every human being? (CD, IV/3, pp. 107–108 rev.)

As so conceived theological anthropology had a very different character and mode of inquiry than any “nontheological anthropologies.” According to Barth, these latter views were of two types: what he called a “speculative theory of man” and the “exact sciences of man.”

Speculative Theories Versus Exact Sciences “Speculative theories” of human existence set forth a philosophy or worldview by articulating “axiomatic principles” apart from the Word of God. When they attempted to theorize the essence of humanity apart from its relationship with God, they could not but be at variance with Scripture. Speculative proposals attempted too much. They proceeded as if they were developing a “system of truth exhaustive of reality as a whole” (CD III/2, p. 22). Barth could only regard such totalizing systems as competitors, as an “enemy” that had to be opposed (CD III/2, p. 23). “We are not able to see the essence and nature of [human beings] apart from the Word of God. We cannot enter that sterile corner, nor can we argue from it. And there can be no question of theological anthropology being constrained or even able to enter the framework of an anthropology that has such a different basis” (CD III/2, p. 23). Here we can recognize Barth’s “Nein!” By contrast, the “exact sciences” were more tentative. They acknowledged the relativity of their conclusions and accepted their partial character. They studied human life from a particular standpoint as phenomena to be understood according to current research. Their proposals might grow as new findings came to light. Barth acknowledged the contributions that social sciences could make toward “the wider investigation of the nature of [the human being] and the development of a technique for dealing with these questions” (CD III/2, p. 25). Because of their hypothetical character, they were open to the Christian witness and did not necessarily conflict with it. The problem with speculative theories, according to Barth, laid precisely in their presupposition that it is possible to know the essence of human existence apart from the Word of God. Because he considered our relationship to God in Jesus Christ to be the defining center of human existence, he thought it imperative to guard the “frontier” against all such speculative theories. At the same time, however, he was open to the possible contributions of the “phenomena of the human” described by the “exact sciences.” The difference between these two approaches (their presuppositions and their claims) explained why in one context Barth could utter an unambiguous “Nein!” whereas in another, he would show remarkable openness. Barth appreciated Calvin’s openness to thinkers outside of Christian faith because he agreed essentially with Calvin’s conviction that Jesus Christ is the “only fountain of truth.” Calvin wrote:

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Whenever we meet with heathen writers, let us learn from the light of truth which is admirably displayed in their works, that the human mind, fallen as it is, and corrupted from its integrity, is yet invested and adorned by God with excellent talents. If we believe that the Spirit of God is the only fountain of truth, we shall neither reject nor despise the truth itself, wherever it shall appear, unless we wish to insult the Spirit of God. (Calvin 1902, II.2.15)

Although Barth preferred to speak of the Word of God, rather than the Spirit of God, as the only source of truth, he, like Calvin, also believed that truth could be found even among those unaware of the gospel or unsympathetic to it. If Jesus Christ is Lord of all creation, and not just Lord of the church, we could trust that he is at work in myriad ways throughout the world. God’s speech and action – indeed God’s living presence – was not limited to the church, nor to its worship, but could be posited as present in “an infinitely bewildering variety of ways” (CD II/1, p. 319). “Words of great seriousness, profound comfort, and supreme wisdom,” he wrote, were found “not only in the church but also in the world… How can it be otherwise if Jesus Christ is really sovereign over the whole world of creation and history?” (CD IV/3, p. 97). He could go so far as to say that “God may speak to us through Russian Communism, a flute concerto, a blossoming shrub, or a dead dog. We do well to listen to him if he really does” (CD I/1, p. 60). The question, then, was not whether true beliefs might appear apart from faith. The question was how the truth of proposals arising from secular sources could be discerned and assessed. This became the cardinal question for interdisciplinary dialogue. There obviously needed to be a certain “fit” between nontheological proposals and those arising from Scripture. Not every insight from a hypothetical science could be brought into fruitful relationship with dogmatic theology. But there were clearly some disciplines that, though they investigated their subject matters differently (phenomenologically or empirically, not from faith in the scriptural witness) offered valuable insights into human existence. Their truth was determined by the “faithfulness, genuineness and reliability of what they impart” (CD IV/3, p. 110). When satisfying this standard, they had the status, for Barth, of “secular parables of the truth” (G. Hunsinger 1991, pp. 234–280).

Secular Parables of the Truth: Four Criteria These parables had to be recognizable from the standpoint of faith. Their adequacy as parables was subject to four criteria: 1. The proposals needed to be in agreement with the witness of Holy Scripture. No secular word would be adequate if it contradicted or usurped the “general line” of the biblical message. The Bible had to be “understood in the light of its center.” Therefore, the definitive test was that the secular proposal “will harmonize at some point with the whole context of the biblical message as centrally determined and characterized by Jesus Christ” (CD IV/3, p. 125). 2. They needed to be in agreement with the historic dogmas and confessions of the church. Barth considered the confessions of the church to be authoritative guideposts – for example, the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene‐Constantinopolitan Creed, and the

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Chalcedonian Definition, the Heidelberg Catechism, the Barmen Declaration – in helping the church to understand and interpret Scripture faithfully (CD IV/3, p.  125). The Christian church could learn “new things” about God, as new proposals were tested against its historic confessions, creeds and catechisms ­ (G. Hunsinger 1991, p. 268). 3. They needed to be tested by the fruit that was produced. Barth considered this to be a crucial point. Is this proposal in harmony with the fruit of the Holy Spirit? “Now the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self‐control” (Galatians 5:22–23). “In what direction do they [the proposals being assessed] lead human beings?” he asked. “What spirits do they seem to evoke? … Have they led to … greater freedom or … greater bondage? Is the phenomenon in question one which is uplifting to the human spirit or does it cast one down into the mire?” (CD IV/3, p. 128 rev.). 4. The proposals needed to be significant for the life of the community. “If it is a true secular parable, it will help the church to reflect on the truth which is attested, bringing it to a place of repentance on those issues where it has strayed from its own path. Yet it will also offer a voice of comfort, a voice which lifts up and edifies the church” (CD IV/3, p. 128). Because God’s mercy transcends human sin, a secular parable will have this double aspect: it will be a word of judgment and a word of grace, a word that acknowledges the reality of human disorder and evil, while remaining open for good to arise. Barth proceeded to test proposals from other disciplines against these four criteria, using them to assess whether or not they were compatible with the gospel. Obviously, nontheological anthropologies derived their knowledge of human existence from methods other than a theology based on biblical revelation. They grounded it in empirical observation, statistical data, or phenomenological description. Theology alone relied on revelation as its source and norm of knowledge. Such differing approaches had different aims, subject matters, methods of investigation, and linguistic conventions. Nevertheless, secular fields of inquiry could enrich the church in its theological imagination and witness.

A Chalcedonian Imagination Barth’s way of relating theological claims to the truths of secular disciplines can be grasped more fully if we turn to a particular aspect of his thought. When seeking to relate two different terms in their unity and distinction, he often made use of the “Chalcedonian Pattern.” It was a technical device he could employ, among other things, for relating political, social, or cultural issues to theological anthropology (G. Hunsinger 1991, p. 85). The Chalcedonian Pattern needs to be kept distinct at this point from the historic Chalcedonian Definition. The definition pertains to the person of the incarnate Son. How is this complex figure, who is proclaimed as God with us in person on earth, to be understood? The ecumenical council held at Chalcedon in 451 ce was convened to prevent misunderstandings about this mystery, namely that Jesus Christ is at once fully God

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and fully human. It did not seek to define the person of Christ exhaustively, but only to demarcate clear boundaries for orthodox teaching. Its definition was not a substitute for Scripture but a grammar for reading Scripture. It set forth Christ as one person in two natures: perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood, truly God, truly [human] … one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only‐begotten, recognized in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, and only begotten, God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ. (Schaff 1931, p. 63)

According to this definition, the two terms of Christ’s divine–human identity were related without separation or division and yet without confusion or change. In addition, the relation was such, Barth thought, that priority had to be accorded to the divine nature. The person of the eternal Son, begotten of the Father from before the foundation of the world, was joined in humanity with Jesus, the son of Mary, a Jew, at a particular time and a particular place near Nazareth. The two natures, divine and human, though incommensurable, were inscrutably united in one person. A relational pattern was embedded within the definition. Its features, according to Barth, were “inseparable unity” (without separation or division), “indissoluble differentiation” (without confusion or change), and “indestructible order” (with priority of the divine over the human). Barth took this pattern as a formal device that could be applied to other cases. When he wrote about the relationship between heaven and earth, for example, or about justification in relation to sanctification, or gospel in relation to law, or faith in relation to works, or church in relation to state, in each case (among others) he employed this pattern to order the relationship (CD III/2, p. 343). As Hunsinger remarks, “It is probably safe to say that no one in the history of theology ever possessed a more deeply imbued Chalcedonian imagination” (G. Hunsinger 1991, p. 85). Whereas the definition was substantive, the pattern was merely formal. As noted, the pattern could be applied to a variety of different relationships, whereas the Definition was specific to Christology. The pattern offered a kind of “grammar” whereas the definition set forth a unique and unrepeatable prototype. The pattern, being merely formal, could be abstracted from the definition and applied to other relationships. It could be applied to the relationship between dogmatics and other disciplines (D. Hunsinger 1998, pp. 27–28). “Indissoluble differentiation” meant that each discipline retained its relative autonomy. Each had its own sphere of inquiry that secured its integrity. Each investigated its subject matter according to the methods proper to it. Although there might be overlapping areas of investigation (such as the meaning of love, for example, as examined by a variety of disciplines), each discipline proceeded in its own way. The results obtained by one discipline would not necessarily be interchangeable with those of another, nor would they necessarily be saying the same thing in different words. The particular linguistic and disciplinary context of each meant that concepts could not necessarily be translated back and forth from one discipline to another without distortion or loss.

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“Inseparable unity” meant that, in particular cases, a theology of revelation could be correlated with proposals that describe human existence phenomenologically. As Jesus Christ was both fully God and fully human, so our human lives had, in their own way, a double aspect, a hidden spiritual dimension discernible only to faith and an empirical dimension that could be described by secular methods. Sin and grace, for example, could not be seen as such; they could be perceived only with the eyes of faith. Human wickedness could certainly be seen throughout history, but the Scripture was needed to interpret it as sin against God and the neighbor. Sin, like grace, could not be known for what it was apart from revelation. Nevertheless, secular accounts of human wickedness (e.g. the horror of the Holocaust, the terror and trauma of war, the abominations of slavery, the monstrosities of racism and sexual abuse, the depredations of capitalism) have helped the church to repent and to work and pray toward ending these evils. They have prompted the church at its best to offer concrete help and solace to those who suffer oppression and victimization. When wickedness is acknowledged as sin, the whole conversation is reconfigured. It expands to include not only God’s judgment and wrath but also God’s grace and forgiveness. Repentance and amendment of life come into the horizon. “Indestructible order” meant that revealed truths took priority and precedence over truths derived from secular methods. Concepts from the “exact sciences,” for example, while retaining their autonomy and distinctiveness, were contextualized by a theology with Christ at its center. Ordering other disciplines to theology followed from the First Commandment, to place no other gods before the God who was revealed through the covenant. In relation to theology the norms and values of other disciplines were relativized, critiqued and affirmed. Job’s confession of faith, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him” (Job 13:15 KJV) may be taken as an example. Psychological accounts might question Job, evaluating his statement by different norms. Was it not a sign of deep depression or even masochism rather than an valid statement of faith? Even allowing for complexities, from a theological perspective, Job was affirming, in the midst of unutterable suffering, the One to be loved and feared above all else. Other norms and values needed to be relativized if they threatened to become absolute. Faith, or rather God as the object of faith, took precedence over other considerations. Other values and relationships had to be ordered to theological norms (D. Hunsinger 1998, p. 36). Theology and other disciplines remained “logically diverse even when they are existentially connected, that is to say, even when they reside in the same breast. In that case, one could not systematically co‐ordinate the two” (Frei 1981, p. 103). A psychological account might retain its relative validity while still needing to be qualified or complexified by a larger theological framework of meaning. Barth was clear that the one Word of God “cannot be combined with any other, nor can he [Jesus Christ] be enclosed with other words in a system prior to both him and them” (CD IV/3, p. 101). The uniqueness of Jesus Christ was the reason for the asymmetrical ordering principle. For interdisciplinary dialogue, asymmetry meant that although there could be ad hoc correlations, there could be no “systematic coordination” with truths governed by other norms. There were finally no direct equivalencies. “As the one Word of God he [Jesus Christ] wholly escapes every conceivable synthesis envisaged

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in them” (CD IV/3, p. 101). This approach differentiated Barth’s way of engaging other disciplines from the kind of “correlational” or “revised correlational methods” commonly found in contemporary pastoral theology (Miller‐McLemore 2010). It was the stipulation of an asymmetrical ordering principle that differentiated ad hoc (and therefore critical) correlations from systematic coordination. Otherwise there was the danger of “confusion or change.” In any particular case, the conversation needed to be determined by the subject matter under investigation. The Chalcedonian Pattern was a relational tool not a method of inquiry. In a private letter to a colleague, Karl Barth’s son Markus Barth, the New Testament scholar, could speak of his father’s use of this pattern of thought as a “master key.” He wrote that “the references to the ‘Chalcedonensian’ Creed [sic], … its formulations on the interrelation of Christ’s two natures, [are] the only or supreme passe‐partout [passkey] for depicting and applying to contemporary issues the Christology of my father” (D. Hunsinger 2001, p. 22). This point might be re‐stated as follows. The Chalcedonian Pattern (not Creed) offered a device for relating diverse fields of inquiry. At their best secular proposals could be coordinated in an ad hoc way with normative theological claims. Materially diverse proposals could be coordinated by a pattern of asymmetrical unity‐in‐distinction. It was a matter of ad hoc coordination not systematic integration. Secular proposals about human existence were not to be synthesized with the truths of revelation. Barth was aware of the hazards that arose when conceptual integration or systematic coordination was attempted. We are certainly not required either to systematize this formal connection or to discern it everywhere. There are important points of Christian knowledge where we cannot speak of such analogy and where only lack of taste and direct error combined would try to discover it… In each case, we must consider whether and how far the points concerned may be brought into mutual relationship, in cross connections. At this point no certain conclusions result from logical possibilities alone. For theological truths and relationships of truth have in their own place and way their own worth and fullness, the light of which can be increased but may also be easily diminished when they are set in relation to others. (CD III/2, p. 343 rev)

There was simply “no totality” by which divine and creaturely being could be synthesized. Any contingent and ad hoc connections were ultimately grounded in God’s freedom (D. Hunsinger 1995, pp. 235–236). Nothing could obscure more completely the ­sovereign freedom of grace, nor the free human response it elicited, than trying to encapsulate them in some kind of grand systematic scheme. “Free grace is not one element in the totality of a nexus. … It is the event of the shattering and destroying” any such self‐enclosed nexus (CD IV/2, p. 402 rev.). Divine and human being were incommensurable for Barth, because they shared no common standard of measure (G. Hunsinger 1991, pp. 286–287). Therefore, they could not be ordered hierarchically within a common scheme. They were not ordered by common scheme but by a common history. Moreover, their asymmetrical ordering did not mean that theology somehow had divine standing or that it could not err. It was obviously a fully human

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enterprise, and just as subject to sin and error as any other human undertaking. Asymmetry simply meant that any nontheological proposal had to be tested by theological criteria to assess its aptness, reliability, and fruitfulness for Christian witness. An example of “reverse asymmetry” would be one where an attempt was made to integrate theological norms into a superior psychological framework. Integrating prayer, confession of sins, and forgiveness into a secular framework would tend to distort their meaning. Newton Maloney once asserted, for example, that “the only legitimate function that any methodology, including spiritual practices, can serve in a counseling situation is to alleviate distress and enhance adaptation to the culture in which a person chooses to live” (Maloney 1997, p. 119). If prayer were understood in this way, God would tend to become little more than an instrumental value for achieving our self‐determined ends. Although prayer might indeed help us to alleviate distress or adapt to a culture, this way of ordering two disciplines would tend to place emotional or mental health at the center of our lives instead of serving God. It makes a difference whether one attempts to subordinate or integrate biblical principles and practices into a psychological framework or to bring psychological principles and practices into an ad hoc correlation with divine revelation as attested by Scripture. The latter way of understanding the relationship between disciplines honors the “indestructible order” of the Chalcedonian Pattern (D. Hunsinger 1998, pp. 35–36).

A Case Study: Human Trauma In the final decades of the twentieth century, thinkers from a variety of disciplines began to investigate the profound effects of psychological trauma on human beings. A growing body of research into trauma, undertaken for more than 35 years, has made great strides toward contributing to “the wider investigation of the nature of human beings and the development of a technique for dealing with these questions” (CD III/2, p. 25). Indeed, multiple avenues for healing trauma have been developed, from medication to meditation, from talk therapy to group therapy, from dream analysis to mindfulness, from breathing and relaxation to yoga and movement (Herman 1997, pp. 158–160; Wilmer 1986, pp. 47–61; Allen 2005, pp. 249–278; van der Kolk 2015, pp. 265–278). The analyses of trauma and the methods developed for its amelioration or healing have drawn upon a wide variety of resources. Yet all the researchers without exception consider two things to be of fundamental importance for healing and growth to occur: first, the primary importance of interpersonal connection, and second, the necessity of creating a personal narrative that makes some kind of sense of one’s suffering. If we were to boil down the essential presuppositions at work, we might state them in this way: • Emotional healing and growth occur in the context of an emotionally significant relationship. • And they occur in a context of developing a meaningful personal narrative.

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Dialogue Between Trauma Studies and Barth’s Theological Anthropology Let us examine these presuppositions in the light of Barth’s criteria for fruitful interdisciplinary dialogue. 1. The proposals need to be in agreement with the witness of Holy Scripture. Because Barth sees our relationship with God to be central to human life, the focus on the quality of our relationships does seem to correspond to the “general line” of the biblical message. Because God comes to us as our deliverer and Savior, our “interpersonal relationship” with God could in fact serve as a constant wellspring of hope in the midst of incessant temptations to despair. Persons afflicted by trauma can place their lives into God’s own hands, offering prayers for healing, not for themselves alone but for all persons who suffer from terror or victimization. Barth assumes that our relationship with God is clearly the most emotionally significant relationship we have. At the same time, because Jesus Christ is not to be understood apart from his people, his followers also have emotionally significant relationships with one another, who care for each other and hold one another in prayer. Even though “secular” approaches to trauma do not take their bearings from Holy Scripture, their presupposition about relationship being at the center of healing and hope makes it possible in turn to set their findings into a biblical framework. There is thus a kind of “fit” between the empirical findings of the secular parable and the larger framework of the gospel narrative. In order to develop a meaningful personal narrative of the traumatic event, the survivor learns how to speak aloud to another human being what she considers unspeakable. Feelings of outrage, grief, bewilderment, and shame need to be felt and acknowledged. Those who are successful in recovering from trauma through this process are able to “reconstruct a coherent system of meaning and belief that encompasses the story of the trauma” (Herman 1997, p. 213). Clearly, both the norms and limits of the therapeutic relationship require that the therapist make no assumptions about the specific meaning the traumatic event has for the person (Herman 1997, p. 179), nor does she attempt any substantive contribution of her own toward the person’s narrative. Instead, her role is “not to provide ready‐made answers, which would be impossible in any case, but rather to affirm a position of moral solidarity with the survivor” (Herman 1997, p. 178). In delimiting her role to one of “moral solidarity,” Herman conveys respect for the person’s faith (or lack of it). She also demonstrates respect for the modest, but indispensable role of her psychological work. She makes no claims to any absolute truth for all times and places, but pays exquisite attention to the particularities of the situation the person finds herself in. Psychological counseling helps the person to create a personal narrative, whereas spiritual and theological guidance helps the person to place that narrative into the larger of narrative of God with us. By giving the person opportunities to lament the evil done to her as well as confess the evil she has done, the gospel offers a path toward new life in the midst of catastrophic loss (D. Hunsinger 2015a, pp. 1–21, 83–100).

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2. They need to be in agreement with the historic dogmas and confessions of the church. Dogmatic affirmations about humanity as being made in God’s image would mean at a minimum that the dignity of human life would be upheld by the secular investigator. At the same time, some acknowledgment of the human capacity for evil would need honestly to be acknowledged. Though secular authorities cannot speak of sin (for the category of “sin” is by definition unique to biblical revelation), they can – and do – speak honestly of the terrifying reality of humanity’s seemingly endless capacity for evil. For example, Judith Herman comments on the enormity of difficulty of creating a narrative that makes sense of the traumatic event: “She [the survivor of trauma] stands mute before the emptiness of evil, feeling the insufficiency of any known system of explanation” (Herman 1997, p. 178). 3. They may be tested by the fruit which is borne. This criterion, which Barth considers the “preeminent practical test,” is where the field of trauma studies potentially shines. As persons engage in healing relationships, they are led toward greater freedom as well as toward deepened capacities for love and trust. When put into the larger narrative of their life in Christ, trauma victims may create a new narrative in light of their faith. Jesus’s loving compassion toward those who come to him for help may become a dependable source of ongoing hope. Although there may not be any “system of explanation” that adequately accounts for the evil they have suffered, they are nevertheless given comfort by the living presence of God. Their healing becomes a “sign” pointing toward their ultimate “salvation” in Christ. The Chalcedonian Pattern of thought, discussed previously, would stipulate the importance of (i) keeping clear conceptual distinctions between the causes of trauma and sin, on the one hand, and between healing and salvation, on the other. Trauma may occur because of human sinfulness but these two concepts cannot simply be equated with each other. Trauma comes about not only because of sin but also because of tragedy or overwhelming suffering or any number of natural evils. The concept of sin functions in a completely different context from that of trauma, and they need to be kept distinct. Only those who have faith in God understand the analogies that might be drawn between trauma and sin. They see trauma as pointing analogically toward the realm of sin and death from which Jesus Christ delivers us. Similarly, psychological healing is not the same thing as forgiveness or salvation. They function on different conceptual levels. (ii) recognizing the unity of the psychological concepts with those of theology when the person afflicted with trauma places her personal narrative into the larger narrative of faith. Human beings are at once fully biological, psychological, social and spiritual beings. When we seek to understand ourselves in our wholeness, we cannot separate or divide ourselves into component parts. We are instructed to understand our lives not only  as an empirical reality, but at its center as an unfolding dynamic of faith. (iii)  giving priority to God’s narrative as given in the scriptural witness over one’s personally constructed narrative. Personal healing in the context of therapeutic work points beyond itself analogically to the salvation won for us in Jesus Christ. The gospel promise of our ultimate deliverance from sin and death is unimaginably greater than anyone’s little life story. Reading Scripture with its ­realistic depictions of overwhelming horror (war, rape, dismemberment, murder,

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disease, betrayal, the downfall of whole civilizations) not only displaces one’s own life from the center of one’s preoccupation, but also puts one in spiritual communion with those who have suffered throughout the ages. When the gift of faith is given, the scriptural narrative also becomes a life‐giving wellspring of hope for deliverance (D. Hunsinger 1995, pp. 90–94; 2015a, pp. 13–18). 4. The phenomena may be significant for the life of the community. “If it is a true secular parable, it will help the church to reflect on the truth which is attested, bringing it to a place of repentance on those issues where it has strayed from its own path. Yet it will also offer a voice of comfort, a voice which lifts up and edifies the church” (CD IV/3, p. 128). Three brief examples may suffice to indicate the significance of trauma studies as a “secular parable” for the life of the church: • Sexual abuse by clergy. When people of faith listen with compassion to those who have suffered sexual abuse by their priests and ministers, they can see the long‐ lasting – sometimes lifelong – nature of such traumatic suffering. Not only is there a loss of trust in these church leaders, but often a catastrophic loss of faith in God. Trauma studies help the church to imagine the scope of the devastation of people’s lives and call the church to repent, make amends, and offer r­ estitution to the victims and their families. • Violence toward women and children. The traumatic harm that has been done for years (perhaps for centuries) by the church when those in authority encourage easy forgiveness or “dutiful submission” of wives toward their abusive husbands is well documented (Fortune 1993, pp. 275–288; see also Fortune 1995). “Easy forgiveness” is nothing but “cheap grace” (Bonhoeffer 1995, pp. 43–56). Similarly, when children are taught to “Honor [their] father and mother” when abusive parents are unworthy of being so honored, children become alienated from the church community and rightly consider it an unsafe place (D. Hunsinger 2015a, pp. 42–69). When this trauma is acknowledged, and understood, abusers can be held accountable and called to repentance. For the survivors of violence, the gospel can once again be clung to as a source of comfort and hope. • War. The traumatic impact of war cannot be overestimated. The horror of what is witnessed, the moral injury inflicted by being required to act against one’s own conscience, the terrifying nightmares, hallucinations, and tenacious sense of ­overwhelming evil – both the evil one has suffered and the evil one has perpetrated – all these features of war mean that the church needs to wake up to its responsibility to become witnesses and agents for peace. Trauma studies bring to life the stories of veterans who languish for decades trying to numb their pain with alcohol and drugs, living an entire life at the edge of rage, desperation and despair. By bringing empathic understanding to this traumatic suffering, the church can offer genuine comfort and hope to soldiers and their families and rededicate itself to become a church committed to peace (Tietje 2019). Trauma studies acknowledge that under certain favorable conditions, recovery from trauma is possible. One author writes: “When I have been traumatized, my only hope for being deeply understood is to form a connection with a brother or sister who knows the same darkness” (Stolorow 2007, p. 49). On the interpersonal plane of psychological

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or philosophical study, this is as large a claim as one can make. Yet, how much incomparably deeper and wider is the darkness known by God in Jesus Christ, who bears in his body the magnitude of the world’s sin in order to bear it away. When confronted with its complicity in afflicting human beings with trauma, the church will recognize that “godly grief that produces a repentance that leads to salvation” as the narrow gate that leads to new life (2 Cor. 7:10 RSV). When the church is brutally honest about the extent of its participation in incalculable webs of sin, it will find God’s comfort and mercy as it turns in grief and penitence toward making amends.

Conclusion Although Karl Barth does not have a systematic methodology for determining how to engage in interdisciplinary dialogue with nontheological anthropologies, he does have a characteristic way of going about it. It is of paramount importance to Barth that God’s sovereignty, initiative, and freedom as a living, acting God not be compromised or imprisoned by any system of thought, and certainly not by a system that effectively denies the centrality of Jesus Christ. Speculative theories that make (sometimes implicit) theological claims about what it means to be human are rejected while Barth remains open to learning from what he calls the exact sciences. Those who appreciate Barth’s understanding of the incommensurability between a theology based on revelation and a science based on empirical research or phenomenological description will be unlikely to conflate or confuse concepts from one field with those of another. One cannot translate a psychological concept into a theological one the way that one can translate English into French or vice versa. It is not a matter of saying the same thing in a different idiom. No, the disciplines do not function at the same logical level. The logic (and the scope) of the claims they make about the nature of human reality is not equivalent from one discipline to the next. Spiritual reality is not only more comprehensive than biological, emotional, interpersonal, social, or cultural realities, it also requires the kind of spiritual perception that comes with the gift of faith. At the same time, these perceptions cannot be separated from empirical contextual knowledge. Faith learns from these other disciplines and needs them in order to address human life in its particularities. Such a “Barthian” approach to interdisciplinary dialogue will eschew reducing theology and other disciplines to a supposed lowest common denominator. Instead, where analogical comparisons among the various disciplines might prove fruitful, promising concepts from the sciences can be understood as “parables” of the kingdom of God. If we by faith, believe that the gospel itself is the source of what is ultimately and finally true in the world, that the witness to Jesus Christ as given in Scripture is what orients us toward reality, then we can expect to see parables of this truth in other forms of thought. Thus, psychotherapeutic approaches to healing, although certainly not offering salvation, can be seen as possible eschatological signs when placed into a theological framework of meaning (Martyn 1977, p. 285). It is important to notice that in saying this, we are starting within a hermeneutical circle that already has Jesus Christ at its center. We are not beginning with some kind of supposed “neutral ground” of common human experience.

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Although no conceptual synthesis is possible between an “exact science” based on empirical observation and a theology such as Barth’s, a Chalcedonian approach to the dialogue among disciplines offers clear guidelines that allow theology to retain its distinctiveness and its logical priority. Each discipline brought into conversation with theology retains its integrity as a discipline and has the freedom to develop methods appropriate to its own sphere of investigation. Theology can say nothing about the methods they choose as long as they remain hypothetical in character and do not make sweeping claims that conflict with the overall character of what is claimed by the gospel. A theological anthropology that is faithful to the scriptural witness affirms God’s presence as a living being in the person of the resurrected Jesus Christ. At all times, God’s lordship and sovereign power, divine freedom and initiative is acknowledged. This divine freedom becomes the condition for the possibility for human beings to respond to God freely and gladly in obedience. When Barth’s theological anthropology provides the overarching framework for our psychological, ethical, and social approaches to human problems and their amelioration, we can see exactly how valuable the “exact sciences” can be. Trauma studies, when placed within a framework of the living gospel with its living, active Lord, offers human beings concrete practices that can help persons move toward renewed interpersonal relationships based in trust. A new narrative can be created that recognizes Jesus Christ at its core as Deliverer and Savior. The person can even flourish through what is known as “posttraumatic growth” (Tedeschi 1999, pp. 319–341).1

References Allen, J.G. (2005). Coping with Trauma: Hope Through Understanding, 2e, 249–278. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing. Bonhoeffer, D. (1995). The Cost of Discipleship. New York: Touchstone. Calvin, J. (1902). Institutes of the Christian Religion (trans. J. Allen). Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication. Fortune, M. (1993). The nature of abuse. Pastoral Psychology 41: 275–288. Fortune, M. (1995). Keeping the Faith: Guidance for Christian Women Facing Abuse. San Francisco: Harper One. Frei, H.W. (1981). An afterword to Eberhard Busch’s biography of Barth. In: Karl Barth

in Review (ed. H.M. Rumscheidt). Pittsburgh: Pickwick. Herman, J. (1997). Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books. Hunsinger, G. (1991). How to Read Karl Barth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hunsinger, D.v.D. (1995). Theology and Pastoral Counseling: A New Interdisciplinary Approach. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Hunsinger, D.v.D. (1998). The Chalcedonian pattern. In: Between Two Languages: Spiritual Guidance and Communication of Christian Faith (ed. T. van Knippenberg), 25–37. Tilburg, The Netherlands: Tilburg University Press.

1  A different version of this essay, Pastoral Theology in a ‘Barthian’ Key, appeared in Pro Ecclesia, 28 (1) (2019): 4–21.

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Hunsinger, D.v.D. (2001). The master key: unlocking the relationship of theology and psychology. Inspire 5 (2): 20–22. Hunsinger, D.v.D. (2015a). Bearing the Unbearable: Trauma, Gospel and Pastoral Care. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Hunsinger, G. (2015b). Evangelical, Catholic and Reformed: Doctrinal Essays on Barth and Related Themes. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Maloney, N. (1997). Review of psychology, theology and spirituality in Christian counseling, by Mark McMinn. Journal of Pastoral Care 51 (1): 119. Martyn, D.W. (1977). A child and Adam: a parable of the two ages. Journal of Religion and Health 16: 275–287. Miller‐McLemore, B. (2010). Cognitive neuroscience and the question of theological method. Journal of Pastoral Theology 20 (2, Winter): 64–92.

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Schaff, P. (1931). The Creeds of Christendom: With a History and Critical Notes, vol. 2, 63. New York: Harper. Stolorow, R.D. (2007). Trauma and Human Existence. New York: Analytic Press. Tedeschi, R.G. (1999). Violence transformed: posttraumatic growth in survivors and their societies. Aggression and Violent Behavior 4: 319–341. Tietje, A. (2019). Contra Rambo’s theology of remaining: a Chalcedonian and pastoral conception of trauma. Pro Ecclesia 28 (1): 22–38. Van Der Kolk, B. (2015). The Body Keeps the Score. New York: Penguin. Wilmer, H.A. (1986). The healing nightmare: a study of the war dreams of Vietnam combat veterans. Quadrant 19 (1): 47–62.

CHAPTER 64

Barth and Practical Theology Richard R. Osmer

Introduction In contemporary practical theology Karl Barth is not always appreciated as a resource for its work. Don Browning, for example, characterizes Barth in the following way: A theologian as recent as Karl Barth saw theology as the systematic interpretation of God’s self‐disclosure to the Christian church. There was no role for human understanding, action, or practice in the construal of God’s self‐disclosure. In this view, theology is practical only by applying God’s revelation as directly and purely as possible to the concrete situations of life. The theologian moves from revelation to the human, from theory to practice, and from revealed knowledge to application. (1991, p. 5)

As I intend to suggest in this essay, such a characterization of Barth is misleading, ­showing little understanding of his theology and its possible contribution to the field of practical theology. We see another example of this sort in David Buttrick’s foreword to the English translation of Barth’s Homiletics. Buttrick ignores Barth’s long history of radical politics and the social context in Nazi Germany addressed by these lectures. He claims that if Barth had been living in South Africa instead of Germany, he would have told prominent figures in the struggle against apartheid, like Desmond Tutu and Allan Boesak, “to stop referring to apartheid in preaching” (Barth 1991, p. 9). It is astonishing that such a comment could be made in the United States a full 15 years after the appearance of George Hunsinger’s Karl Barth and Radical Politics (1976; 2nd edition 2017), in which a number of scholars trace the close connection between Barth’s theology and his progressive political views. In that book Barth is quoted as stating toward the end of his career, “Don’t forget to say that I have always been interested in politics, and consider The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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that it belongs to the life of a theologian” (Hunsinger 1976, p. 181). Nevertheless, the misreading of Barth as an acontextual theologian can be found in many practical theologians. Not many English‐speaking practical theologians have engaged with Barth in any depth. Early proponents of Barth’s theology, moreover, did not have the entirety of the Church Dogmatics available when they wrote. For example, Barth’s friend and colleague Eduard Thurneysen published the German edition of his most important work on practical theology, Die Lehre von der Seelsorge, in Thurneysen (1946), seven years before the first volume of Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation appeared in German. James Smart studied with Barth in Basel and wrote a number of important books in the field of practical theology, but he did not directly engage Barth’s writings on practical theology (Smart 1954). Elmer Homrighausen was an early translator and proponent of Barth’s thought who taught and published in the area of practical theology at Princeton Theological Seminary (Mikoski and Osmer 2011, pp. 117–131). But he never reflected on the implications of Barth’s writings for practical theology as a field. Only recently has a more serious engagement with Barth by practical theologians begun to appear as part of a broader revival of interest in Barth in the United States and Great Britain. Deborah van Deusen Hunsinger (1995, 2006, 2015), Gary Deddo (1999), Darrell Guder (2000), Theresa Latini (2011), Hancock (2013), Patrick Johnson (2015), and Nathan Stucky (forthcoming) are strong scholars representative of the renewed interest in Barth as offering substantial guidance for practical theology. Closely related is the renewed interest in Barth’s ethics as seen in the writings of John Webster (1995, 1998), Gerald McKenny (2010), and William Werpehowski (2014). His political views and their implications have been explored by such theologians as Timothy Gorringe (1999), Haddorff (2011), and not least G. Hunsinger (1976 [2017], 2000, 2015a, 2018). Swimming against the stream is how Barth sometimes characterizes his theological posture and the corresponding stance of the church (CD IV/3, p. 528). This is a fitting image for practical theologians in dialogue with Karl Barth. They are swimming against the tide of contemporary practical theology in its modern and postmodern forms. In this essay I highlight some of the differences and explain why engagement with Barth’s theology represents a promising alternative to practical theology as widely practiced. I attempt to illustrate it by pointing to Barth himself and to others influenced by his thought.

The Priority of Revelation and Reconciliation in Practical Theology Across the twentieth century and into the twenty‐first, the field of practical theology has been dominated by so‐called “correlational” approaches to theology under the influence of Paul Tillich (1951, pp. 3–8, 30–31, 59–66), David Tracy (1975, pp. 32–33, 43–56), Rebecca Chopp (1987, pp. 120–137), and more recently postmodern and postcolonial philosophers. Correlational approaches seek to bring theology and other disciplines into a mutually influential relationship. Important dialogue partners in correlational practical theology are the human sciences, philosophy, feminism, critical

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social theory, empirical research methodology, and various forms of emancipatory praxis. Practical theology in its correlational modes constructs theological and practical knowledge out of the dialogue and interaction of these resources. By contrast, Karl Barth rejects “correlational” approaches in their standard forms. He affirms the centrality and normativity of God’s self‐revelation and self‐giving in Jesus Christ (CD I/1, p. 173). He focuses on the themes of revelation and reconciliation in ways that are often hard to find in contemporary practical theology. This leads him to  give priority to the dialogue of practical theology with other theological disciplines  –  dogmatic, historical, and biblical  –  rather than to interdisciplinary dialogue with the social sciences, philosophy, and other fields. He did, however, offer a programmatic essay on how to approach the results of other disciplines in his important “Phenomena of the Human” (CD III/2, pp. 71–132).1 Some of Barth’s argument is only summarized here because it is treated more fully elsewhere in this Companion. Barth’s theology affirms the absolute uniqueness of Jesus Christ as the source and norm of our knowledge of God. Jesus Christ is Emmanuel: God with us. When we look at Jesus we do not merely see what God is like (a semi‐Arian idea). We encounter the full mystery of God in human flesh. Barth’s theology is christocentric. More precisely, it represents a trinitarian christocentrism in which the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus both reveal and enact in history God’s election from all eternity to be the God of grace for the whole world. Christ is sent into the world to reconcile it to God. At the same time he calls a community into being, which he builds up and sends out to bear to God’s victory over sin and death in anticipation of creation’s final redemption. For Barth, revelation and reconciliation go hand in hand. We know God as the One who loves the whole world in freedom, and who brings it into harmony with himself, in and through Jesus Christ (Eph. 1:10). This stance means that any formal definition of theology, including practical theology, needs to be grounded in normative and material claims about God derived from God’s self‐giving in Christ as attested in Scripture. Other starting points, inevitably, define the nature and purpose of theology, to a significant degree, in terms of “alien” norms or “unbaptized” frameworks derived from philosophy, the social sciences, history, general hermeneutics, critical social theory, and so on. Barth’s theology rules out defining practical theology in terms of any independent or unreconstructed hermeneutical discipline, action‐science, empirical‐practical discipline, or accrued cultural wisdom – to name but a few of the ways it has been set forth in recent decades. In Barth’s view the subject matter of theology must govern the methods appropriate to its investigation. He argues that the appropriate subject matter for Christian theology is the God revealed in Jesus Christ as attested in Scripture. Through Scripture we encounter God’s self‐interpretation and learn to think about the world in that light. Other fields have their own subject matters and methods of investigation. Their findings should be respected on these matters insofar as they are not inflated to the point of becoming countertheological proposals. In any case their findings need to be critically

1  For survey and analysis of this material, see G. Hunsinger, “Barth on What It Means to be Human” (Hunsinger 2015b, pp. 245–259).

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tested and appropriated according to the norms of Christian theology. A good example can be found in Deborah van Deusen Hunsinger, Theology and Pastoral Counseling (1995), where contemporary research in psychology is appropriated according to theological norms. Moreover, Barth affirms that as a “science” or academic discipline (Wissenschaft), theology develops positions that are tentative, subject to criticism, and historically situated. He makes this point when describing Christian theology as it listens to God’s Word in a particular situation and follows after it. In the first volumes of the Church Dogmatics, Barth develops his understanding of revelation through a new appropriation of the Reformed tradition’s doctrine of the threefold form of the Word of God: God as revealed through Jesus Christ, Scripture, and church proclamation. He develops a dynamic understanding of revelation that portrays knowledge of God as something that must be sought and received again and again, as an event and encounter that can never merely become a human possession. His theology is dialectical in various respects, both affirming and negating what is humanly known of God. Christian theology resists bringing God’s Word under human control, as may occur when God is treated as a subject matter that can systematized in terms of independent patterns of autonomous rationality or interpretation. Barth rejects such efforts as misguided, being comparable to the ways religion has attempted to manipulate God in order to make the divine serve its interests. Barth remains free in his methodological commitments over the course of his work (methodus est arbitraria) and encourages theologians to maintain a stance of humility and openness as they pursue the task of critiquing the speech and action of the church in light of God’s Word (CD I/2, p. 860). When Browning and others portray Barth as offering a timeless dogmatic system or a theory that is subsequently applied to practice, they misrepresent him (Browning 1991, p. 7, 49).

The Differentiated Unity of Theology: Dialectical Inclusion One of the most significant implications of Barth’s approach to theology is the way it situates practical theology in an ongoing conversation with other theological disciplines. This idea emerges in Barth’s discussion, as previously mentioned, of revelation in terms of the threefold Word of God. Theology, he argues, serves the church by examining critically its communication of God’s Word through proclamation, the third form of the Word. Is the church’s proclamation faithful to Scripture? Is it guided by the doctrinal teachings of the church as these are given fresh expression in dialogue with the church’s past confession? Is contemporary proclamation at once faithful to the gospel and fitting for the concrete situation in which it is rendered? These questions indicate the need for three different forms of theology: biblical, dogmatic, and practical (CD I/1, pp. 4–5). They can also be described as explicatio, meditatio, and applicatio (CD I/2, pp. 766–777). In his later treatment of theology as a ministry of the church, Barth adds ecclesiastical theology (CD IV/3, pp. 879–880). Each of these forms poses the question of truth to contemporary proclamation in different ways:

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Does Christian utterance derive from him [Jesus Christ]? Does it lead to him? Is it conformable to him? None of these questions can finally be separated, but each is to be put independently and with all possible force. Hence, theology as biblical theology is the question of the basis, as practical theology the question of the goal, and as dogmatic theology the question of the content of the distinctive utterance of the church. (CD I/1, pp. 4–5 rev., italics added)

Each of these questions is distinctive in focus, but they share a common criterion: “Jesus Christ, God in his gracious revealing and reconciling address to man” (CD I/1, p. 4). How these forms of theology are related is described with the image of three circles “which intersect in such a way that the center of each is also within the circumference of the other two” (CD I/1, p. 4). The image implies aspects of overlap, mutual dependence, and interpenetration. Barth describes dogmatic theology in just this way: How, then, can there be dogmatics unless exegesis not only precedes but is included in it? … How, then, can there be dogmatics unless practical theology, too, not only follows but is already included in it? (CD I/2, p. 767)

This depiction of the interrelationship among the theological disciplines represents an alternative to the way that the unity of theology has been seen since the rise of the modern research university with its emphasis on the specialized research of various fields. In that context the relationship among the specialized disciplines is like a relay race in which each field runs its own leg and then hands off the baton to the next discipline. Each has its own specialized task, methodology, and subject matter. Typically, practical theology is portrayed as running the last leg and bringing the baton across the finish line to the church in the form of practical application. By contrast, the differentiated unity of theology that Barth describes is closer to the collaboration and mutual assistance of a medical team working to save a person’s life. The expertise and ongoing cooperation of each member is essential to a successful operation. This means that the practical field must engage biblical and dogmatic theology as it carries out its own constructive work. It also means that the converse is true. Biblical and dogmatic studies must engage practical theology in their commitment to examine and strengthen the proclamation of the church. There is no fixed order in which biblical, practical, and dogmatic theology has to be carried out. They fructify one another in the course of their mutual interaction. Theology is a differentiated unity in which each part contributes to and receives from the larger whole. Barth takes this a step further. Not only is each part of the theological enterprise a contributing member of the larger whole, but the whole is reiterated within each part. This way of conceptualizing the differentiated unity of theology reflects a pattern that appears throughout the Church Dogmatics, a pattern that George Hunsinger calls dialectical inclusion. He describes it in the following way: Each part is thought to contain, from a certain vantage point, the entire structure. The part includes within itself the entire pattern and way of functioning of the whole. The part is not just a division of the whole but a reiteration of it. (1991, p. 58)

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The best example of dialectical inclusion in the theological disciplines is the way Barth himself works as a dogmatic theologian. Not only does he draw on the biblical scholarship of others, but he also undertakes his own explication of Scripture again and again in the small print sections of the Church Dogmatics (Ford 1985; Webster 2003; Hunsinger 2012). Moreover, he repeatedly addresses matters that are important to  practical theology, like sermon preparation, catechetical instruction, baptism, and Christian vocation. These are not afterthoughts tacked on to the “real” work of ­dogmatics. They are part of the very fabric of dogmatics as Barth pursues it. The construction of church doctrine cannot take place without engaging Scripture, the ­history of the church’s prior confession and action, and the challenge of proclaiming the gospel in contemporary circumstances. As Hunsinger’s definition of dialectical inclusion helps us see, the theological whole is reiterated within dogmatic theology, even as this particular part of theology carries out its own distinctive task. In Barth’s view the same should be true of the other theological disciplines as well. The interpretation of Scripture in biblical theology reiterates explicatio, meditatio, and applicatio in its own way (CD I/2, pp. 722–740). Likewise, practical theology must reiterate the theological whole from the perspective of its particular discipline. Perhaps the clearest example of this pattern in Barth’s own contribution to practical theology is his Übungen in der Predigtvorbereitung  –  Exercises in Sermon Preparation  –  examined in depth by Hancock (2013). Originally, these were classroom lectures and exercises offered by Barth while teaching at the University of Bonn in 1932–1933 as Hitler was ascending to power. They later were published in several versions on the basis of notes by students and Charlotte von Kirschbaum, Barth’s co‐worker and secretary. We lift up four dimensions of the Exercises that provide insight into Barth’s approach to ­practical theology and the importance of its dialogue with other theological disciplines. It is no accident that Barth emphasizes the importance of such dialogue in his opening lecture (Barth 1991, p. 17).

Contextual and Public In these lectures Barth offers a theory of preaching, while providing practical guidelines for students who are just learning how to preach. Both are developed with an eye to the political, cultural, and religious context that preachers had to face at the dawn of the Third Reich. The preaching classroom, in effect, became a “place of resistance in Germany” (Hancock 2013). Barth challenged the overwhelming number of nationalistic scholars, denominational leaders, pastors, and politicians who were championing Hitler’s rise to power as God’s work through the history and culture of the German people (Hancock 2013, p. xiv). He encouraged his students to recognize that preaching the gospel demanded “resistance to the easy identification of God with popular movements and dominant ideologies in contemporary culture” (Migliore 1991, p. xxxi). Barth was moved to teach this course by students taking his classes in dogmatics, who often displayed Nazi sympathies, as well as his personal reservations about the current professor of practical theology who was preparing students to preach, Emil Pfennigsdorf. Pfennigsdorf had joined the first pro‐Nazi group to appear in Bonn in

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1929; he was sympathetic to theological currents lending support to the extreme nationalism and völkisch anti‐Semitism of the National Socialist movement (Hancock 2013, p. 90). Barth was determined to offer his students an alternative that would prepare them to preach the gospel in the crisis situation they would soon face as pastors. Barth had this context in mind as he developed his theory and practice of preaching. He did not see himself as developing a model of preaching relevant to all times and places  –  a key insight into his understanding of practical theology. This acontextual approach was readily apparent in his response to a request by learned Scottish pastor John McConnachie. McConnachie asked Barth to write an introduction to a book he was writing, Karl Barth and the Preacher, which would address practical questions and demonstrate that Barth’s theology was “preachable.” Barth refused, writing to McConnachie that it would be better if preachers and theologians would become “thoroughly disturbed and unsettled in their praxis” instead of moving swiftly “from one magnificent and lively praxis to another.” What was needed was a “new questioning and seeking,” rather than turning to practical matters as quickly as possible. He added, “I have much too much respect for the peculiarity of the spiritual situation in another country to judge offhand if another way is pursued there than in my own” (Hancock 2013, pp. 189–191). Barth’s understanding of practical theology  –  much like his ethics  –  was deeply ­contextual. Models appropriate to one context could never be directly transferred to another, eviscerating the need to ask anew how best to preach the gospel in that particular time and place. Moreover, Barth’s preaching lectures represented a form of public theology different from the way it is often conceived by practical theology today, which relies on an autonomous tertium quid (philosophy, social theory, or ethics) to mediate between Christianity and particular social contexts. In Barth’s teaching of how to preach, the classroom became a site of Christian resistance to the idolatry of Nazism, a witness rendered before the world in obedience to God. Throughout his writings and church leadership, Barth called the church and individual Christians to resist the disorder of life flowing from the world’s rebellion against God. He was not just thinking of extreme situations like Germany under the domination of the Nazi party. He was also thinking by implication of institutions and everyday practices that we might easily take for granted, like global capitalism, racism, inequitable distributions of wealth, and so on. His politics were democratic and radical, for he believed the church should publicly announce and embody, at least provisionally, the liberty of the children of God who live in the light of Christ’s victory over sin and death in anticipation of his parousia. This is practical theology in the service of the church’s public witness. It is readily apparent in the Exercises in Sermon Preparation.

Reflection on the Theology of Preaching The need to rethink the why and how of preaching in ever new situations, however, is grounded in something deeper than an awareness of context. It is rooted in Barth’s theology of preaching as proclamation of the Word of God, which resists all forms of “systemization” – Barth thinks systematically but not in terms of a system – including the

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formulation of a prepackaged practical program. In this material Barth offers his own dogmatic reflections on preaching and its relationship to revelation only after he examines eight theologians who have defined the theory and practice of preaching in the past. He covers a broad spectrum, from the seventeenth‐century orthodox Lutheran theologian, David Hollatz, to the father of modern liberalism, Friedrich Schleiermacher. He concludes that each of these figures addresses nine elements that are constitutive of a theology of preaching: revelation or the Word of God, the church, the divine command, the office of the preacher, the nature of preaching as an “attempt,” Scripture, preaching as the preacher’s “own speech,” the church as a community, and the Holy Spirit. He provides his own definition of preaching and then unpacks these constitutive elements in detail. Those familiar with the Church Dogmatics will recognize how Barth draws on his own work here as a dogmatic theologian. In developing a theology of the nature and function of preaching, he devotes special attention to the unity‐in‐distinction of divine and human action as well as to the church as the community commissioned to receive and attest the gospel. A dialogue between dogmatic theology and practical theology is necessary whenever the latter reflects on any form of Christian ministry. It is impossible to describe, much less evaluate, Christian speech and action without a theological understanding of what this practice is and how it ought to be assessed. As Barth observes, preaching in theory and practice always implies, whether openly or secretly, some ideas of divine revelation, the nature of the church, the work of the Holy Spirit, and so on. Practical theology is not dogmatic theology, and it need not develop a full‐scale treatment of doctrine in its work. Nevertheless, it does need to point to the dogmatic sources and norms on which it draws, or else its use of theological concepts will be haphazard. Even worse, it will adopt the implicit values and beliefs of an independent community or discipline and fail to examine them critically.

The Special Importance of Scripture One of the central tasks of these lectures was to help students learn an alternative to the kind of modern “theme” preaching that was being coopted for propagandistic purposes. The preacher, Barth argued, should not come to the task of sermon preparation with a preexistent theme in hand, based on the “needs” of the local community or the German people. Rather, the sermon had to grow out of the preacher’s encounter with a particular biblical text. Here Barth explored practical theology’s dialogue with biblical theology, which was portrayed as making an important contribution to sermon preparation. The preacher should begin with a close reading of the text, explicating to “what is said.” The text should be read in its original language, for every translation is an interpretation. Then the “content” of the text should be grappled with by attending to its context and background. Only after preachers have wrestled with these matters should they should turn to commentaries. Barth recommended commentaries based on modern historical criticism as well as older, premodern commentaries, such as those by Calvin, that explore the theological significance of biblical texts as they point to God.

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Barth then explored how particular texts may attest God’s revelation by explicating two themes: “the peculiar way of witness” in a text and the “present situation” with respect to this “peculiar way of witness.” He argued that biblical texts are not only are “historical monuments” embedded in a particular time and place, but also “living documents” whose ultimate theme is none other than Jesus Christ. He explored how to take seriously the witness of a text to God’s Word as it was spoken into a particular situation. He sought a “repetition” of its way of witness in contemporary preaching. As Scripture, it speaks also to us “at this particular moment and does so as the one and only witness to the revelation of God, a Word which God has spoken to this age” (Barth 1991, p. 102). Barth provided concrete guidance for how preachers might approach texts in this situation. As examples, he offered sermon sketches focusing on Psalm 121, John 13:33–35, and Ephesians 2:1–10. He concluded the lectures with sessions looking at guidelines for the actual writing of sermons, inviting the class to reflect with him on two sample sermons. Beyond the era of his lectures, Barth’s approach to biblical theology has since inspired new directions in the theological interpretation of Scripture (Treier 2008; Hunsinger 2012, 2015c, 2019). The dialogue between biblical and practical theology is important in the Exercises in Sermon Preparation for two reasons. First and most important, Scripture is the second form of the Word attesting the identity of Jesus Christ. The church cannot respond to God in faith, hope, and love without continually turning to Scripture. It is not merely a matter of mastering certain methods but of openness to the text itself. The interpreter becomes the one interpreted. Second, the authoritative status of Scripture has implications for all forms of Christian practice, as preaching exemplifies. Preachers must learn how to interpret Scripture faithfully and so proclaim it as God’s Word. So too must Christian teachers, caregivers, leaders, and evangelists, for it is here that the church deepens its understanding as God’s people and nurtures a living relationship with its Lord. The neglect of the dialogue with Scripture in contemporary practical theology signals an improper reliance on other sources of authority, especially the philosophical and social‐scientific.

The Expectation of a Human Response Barth pays less attention in the Exercises to the question of grace and freedom than he does elsewhere, particularly in the ethical portions of the Church Dogmatics. However, these themes do emerge in his discussion of “listeners” and “hearers” of the Word. Preachers must first listen to the texts through prayer and study if they are to have anything worthwhile to say. They are like heralds who must listen first and then “speak after.” Moreover, they must speak as persons who belong to the same community, not as superiors who stand “over against” the people to whom they preach. They must take their place alongside them in a solidarity of sin and grace. Explication of the Bible becomes a form of “address” to the entire community, including the preacher who mediates it. Under the rule of grace, the preacher is set apart for a special task but not for an elevated status (Barth 1991, pp. 111–119).

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Because Barth is sometimes misunderstood as emphasizing the Godness of God to the virtual exclusion of human action, it is worth reflecting on how he views the human response to God’s Word, drawing on recent scholarship that explores his ethics. It is true that Barth is critical of the modern affirmation of human autonomy in which human beings view themselves as the masters of nature and history, or as empowered but not judged by divine grace. Having lived through the inhumanity of two world wars, the rise of weapons of mass destruction, and the devastating economic inequalities of the new world order after World War II, Barth viewed modernity’s quest for autonomy as one more example of human pride and folly, masquerading under the illusion of human progress. He took seriously the realities of sin and evil, which hold human beings in their grip and require the coming of Christ to set them free. Yet it is also the case that Barth draws on theological themes like covenant to portray human responsibility under the sovereignty of divine grace. Preaching, like all forms of proclamation, expects and even requires a human response, a response of freedom in obedience as enabled by grace. For Barth as for Augustine, God commands what he wills and gives what he commands. Freedom is not an autonomous possession. It given by grace only as it is put into practice, but as put into practice it is given indeed. Grace without freedom is just as much a contradiction in terms for Barth as freedom without grace. The practices of freedom in obedience through grace are indispensable to his theology. Barth uses a variety of terms to describe the response of freedom in obedience, like correspondence, analogy, and (nonidentical) repetition. What God has done in Christ represents the perfect and finished work of reconciliation; human beings in response are to live in correspondence to their forgiveness in Christ and to the new direction they receive under his Lordship. They receive the freedom of disciples who are to love their neighbors as God commands. They are summoned to “revolt” against the disorders of the world in opposition to God (CL, pp. 205–212). They are set free again and again to expose the injustices of human societies and to become “disturbers” of the false peace. They are called to serve as witnesses, however fragile and imperfect, to God’s victory over sin and death. They receive their vocation, first of all, in their corporate life as members of a worshipping community. Barth’s understanding of human freedom decenters human agency as the means of saving, judging, and transforming the world. God alone does these things in Christ, and humans may participate in them, but only as witnesses and instruments through the ongoing action of the Holy Spirit. Preachers do not control how their hearers receive the Word. Nor do teachers, evangelists, care‐givers, and other witnesses to the gospel. It is not a matter of the right sermon technique, educational program, or evangelistic method. Reflection on these matters is not ruled out, as we have seen in Barth’s Exercises in Sermon Preparation. But such reflections remain contextually specific. They are provisional models that seek to communicate God’s Word in particular times and places. By way of summary, practical theologians who engage seriously with Karl Barth swim against the stream of modern and postmodern practical theology for three main reasons. First, they take seriously God’s work of revelation and reconciliation in Christ as the grounding point of Christian practical theology. Second, they prioritize the ­dialogue of practical theology with other disciplines of Christian theology, which are

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viewed as contributing knowledge that is more decisive for their work than philosophy, the human sciences, and other nontheological fields. Finally, they do not neglect such secular disciplines but make use of them according to theological norms derived from exegesis and doctrinal reflection. References Barth, K. (1991). Homiletics (trans. G. Bromiley and D. Daniels). Louisville: Westminster/John Knox. Browning, D. (1991). A Fundamental Practical Theology: Descriptive and Strategic Proposals. Minneapolis: Augsburg. Chopp, R. (1987). Practical theology and liberation. In: Formation and Reflection: The Promise of Practical Theology (eds. L. Mudge and J. Poling), 120–138. Philadelphia: Fortress. Deddo, G. (1999). Karl Barth’s Theology of Relations – Trinitarian, Christological, and Human: Towards an Ethic of the Family. Bern: Peter Lang. Ford, D. (1985). Barth and God’s Story: Biblical Narrative and the Theological Method of Karl Barth in the Church Dogmatics. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock. Gorringe, T. (1999). Karl Barth Against Hegemony: Christian Theology in Context. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Guder, D. (2000). The Continuing Conversion of the Church. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Haddorff, D. (2011). Christian Ethics as Witness: Barth’s Ethics for a World at Risk. Eugene, OR: Cascade. Hancock, A.D. (2013). Karl Barth’s Emergency Homilectic 1932–1933: A Summons to Prophetic Witness at the Dawn of the Third Reich. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Hunsinger, G. (ed.) (1976 [2017]). Karl Barth and Radical Politics, 2e. Philadelphia/ Eugene, OR: Westminster/Cascade Books. Hunsinger, G. (1991). How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology. New York: Oxford. Hunsinger, D. (1995). Theology and Pastoral Counseling: A New Interdisciplinary Approach. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

Hunsinger, G. (2000). Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Hunsinger, D. (2006). Pray without Ceasing: Revitalizing Pastoral Care. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Hunsinger, G. (ed.) (2012). Thy Word Is Truth: Barth on Scripture. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Hunsinger, D. (2015). Bearing the Unbearable: Trauma, Gospel, and Pastoral Care. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Hunsinger, G. (2015a). Conversational Theology: Essays on Ecumenical, Postliberal and Political Themes. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark. Hunsinger, G. (2015b). Evangelical, Catholic, and Reformed: Doctrinal Essays on Barth and Other Themes. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Hunsinger, G. (2015c). The Beatitudes. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist. Hunsinger, G. (ed.) (2018). Karl Barth, the Jews, and Judaism. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Hunsinger, G. (2019). Philippians, Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos. Johnson, P. (2015). The Mission of Preaching: Equipping the Community for Faithful Witness. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity. Latini, T. (2011). The Church and the Crisis of Community: A Practical Theology of Small Group Ministry. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. McKenny, G. (2010). The Analogy of Grace: Karl Barth’s Moral Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Migliore, D.L. (1991). Karl Barth’s first lectures in Dogmatics: instruction in the Christian religion. In: The Göttingen Dogmatics: Instruction in the Christian Religion, vol. 1

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(ed. H. Reiffen) (trans. G.W. Bromily), xv–lxii. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Mikoski, G. and Osmer, R. (2011). With Piety and Learning: The History of Practical Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. Berlin: Lit Verlag. Smart, J. (1954). The Teaching Ministry of the Church. Philadelphia: Westminster. Stucky, N. (2019). Disorienting Grace: Youth, Sabbath, and the Hope of a Grace‐Rooted Identity. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Thurneysen, E. (1946). Die Lehre von der Seelsorge. Zurich: Evangelischer Verlag AG. English trans. (1962). A Theology of Pastoral Care, trans. Jack Worthington and Thomas Wieser. Richmond: John Knox. Tillich, P. (1951). Systematic Theology, vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Tracy, D. (1975). Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology. New York: Seabury. Treier, D. (ed.) (2008). Introducing Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Recovering a Christian Practice. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker. Webster, J. (1995). Barth’s Ethics of Reconciliation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Webster, J. (1998). Barth’s Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth’s Thought. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Webster, J. (2003). Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Werpehowski, W. (2014). Karl Barth and Christian Ethics: Living in Truth. New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER 65

Barth and Liberation Theologies Nathan D. Hieb

Introduction Liberation theologies consider the sociopolitical dimension of God’s work, provide grounding for struggles against oppression, and advocate for peace and justice. Arising in the mid‐ twentieth century in Latin America, black communities in the US and South Africa, and feminist circles in North America, liberation theologies demonstrate how Christian thought might identify and challenge unjust social relations; celebrate the influence of cultural, social, and historical contexts upon theological reflection; and integrate theory and practice in an effort to foment sociopolitical transformation and ongoing critique. Postcolonial theologies, influenced to various degrees by Edward W. Said’s Orientalism (1978), expand the liberationist project by critiquing forms of colonial domination and by foregrounding the theological contributions of oppressed people, often in the Majority World. Today liberation and postcolonial theologies form an expansive body of literature that expresses the distinct experiences and perspectives of various oppressed communities. Karl Barth’s thought has often been regarded by liberation and postcolonial theologians as typical of the Western theological tradition, which frequently assumes the universal applicability of its particular cultural, social, and historical perspectives, and whose conceptual abstraction seems to bear little relevance to the experiences of the oppressed.1 A closer look, however, reveals strong liberationist elements in Barth’s theology, arising from his lifelong sociopolitical engagement. Here I consider aspects of Barth’s thought in the Church Dogmatics that anticipate some of the concerns of

1  Gustavo Gutiérrez was a partial exception. Although not uncritical of Barth, he recognized that Barth echoed the message of Scripture by affirming that “God takes sides with the poor” (Gutiérrez 1983, pp. 125, 160, 219). The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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liberation and postcolonial theologies and that provide theological resources that may facilitate broad, constructive conversations on sociopolitical challenges today. In particular, I will briefly discuss Barth’s views of God’s mercy, the believer’s necessary sociopolitical response, diaconal service, Jesus as the nonpartisan revolutionary, contextuality and theological construction, and the affliction and liberation of the Christian. In conclusion, I suggest that Barth interweaves the eternal and spiritual with the temporal and material dimensions, thereby enabling us to integrate more deeply our Christian faith and sociopolitical responsibility.

God’s Mercy For Barth, God’s mercy as demonstrated in Israel’s history and Christ’s ministry provides the basis for Christian sociopolitical engagement. In “The Mercy and Righteousness of God” (CD II/1, pp. 368–406), Barth describes mercy as a perfection of God’s love that flows inseparably from God’s grace. God’s act of turning toward suffering creatures, rather than abstract conceptual analysis, reveals the close interrelation of God’s grace and mercy. God’s grace is manifest in “his free offer of love to those without rightful claim or demand upon it.” His mercy takes the form of “his readiness to share in sympathy the distress of another” and “to take the initiative himself for the removal of this distress” (CD II/1, p. 369). As he underscores the actuality of God’s mercy, Barth avoids any notion that creaturely suffering moves God involuntarily. “God finds no suffering in himself. And no cause outside God can cause him suffering if he does not will it so.” Nothing can manipulate or compel God to have compassion. Yet, God freely chooses to extend ­compassion to suffering humanity. In this, God’s “powerful,” self‐originating, self‐ directing compassion fundamentally differs from ours, which is marked by the “powerlessness” and vulnerability of our finite, human condition. For God, the ­initiating impetus of compassion lies in God’s self‐moved being, not in any external circumstances that inspire human compassion. This means that before any creaturely distress arose, God already from all eternity “is open and ready and inclined to the need and distress and torment of another.” When God chooses to demonstrate mercy in specific moments in history, God reveals the eternal “perfections of the divine loving” that exist before all instances of temporal distress. Rather than responding to human affliction as to an external stimuli that compels mercy, God’s “compassionate words and deeds” in salvation history emerge from “his heart … his very life and being as God” (CD II/1, p. 370). Although God’s mercy originates from God’s being, and remains free of external compulsion, his mercy actively responds to specific instances of creaturely distress by willing to relieve the suffering of God’s creatures. In this way, God’s mercy is more than a sympathetic emotional response, for it also entails active involvement in the world to overcome all that causes affliction. Barth writes, “For the fact that God participates in [the distress of another] by sympathy implies that he is really present in its midst, and this means again that he wills that it should not be, that he wills therefore to remove it”

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(CD II/1, p. 369). This participation involves both “compassion” and the “assistance” by which God acts and acts decisively to “relieve this distress” (CD II/1, p. 370). Scripture provides frequent examples of God’s merciful deliverance of those in need. In the Old Testament, God often extends righteous mercy to the “harassed and oppressed people of Israel,” who suffer under “the superior force of its enemies.” Those who most often receive God’s aid are “the poor, the widows and orphans, the weak and defenceless.” This indicates, Barth argues, that God stands “on this and only on this side, always against the exalted and for the lowly, always against those who already have rights and for those from whom they are robbed and taken away.” In this we see, with particular clarity, God’s uncompromising commitment to deliver the poor and oppressed from their suffering (CD II/1, p. 386 rev.). In the New Testament, Jesus Christ vividly demonstrates God’s compassion and assistance for afflicted humanity throughout his earthly ministry. In his discussion of Christ’s kingly office in “The Royal Man” (CD IV/2, pp. 154–264), Barth argues, “the man Jesus, like God himself, is not against men and women but for them” (CD IV/2, p. 180 rev.). He then points to Christ being filled with compassion (ε̕ σπλαγχνίσθη) for the shepherdless crowds around him in Matthew 9:36 as evidence of this solidarity. Echoes reverberate here of Barth’s extensive description of the atonement (CD IV/1, pp.  211–283): “[the misery which surrounded Jesus] went right into his heart, into himself, so that it was now his misery….He took it from them and laid it on himself. In the last analysis it was no longer theirs at all, but his. He himself suffered it in their place.” By demonstrating in his particular cultural, social, and historical context the compassion eternally present within God’s heart, Jesus “was on earth as God is in heaven” (CD IV/2, p. 184). Christ’s miracles reveal with unique clarity God’s compassionate response to those in distress. Consistently, Christ aids those caught in various forms of suffering: “the blind and deaf and lame, the lepers and demon‐possessed, the relatives of a sick friend who is dear to them, the bereaved and those who walk in the fear and shadow of death” (CD IV/2, p. 221). From this, we may discern God’s concern for the temporal and material conditions of human life, which often give rise to affliction in its various forms. Barth describes these conditions as humanity’s “‘natural’ existence in the narrower sense, its physical existence … determined by the external form and force of the cosmos to which it belongs” (CD IV/2, p. 222 rev.). Christ’s concern to relieve the misery of suffering people possesses such great urgency that, in the accounts of his miracles, he often does not address the sin of those he heals and delivers. His overriding aim is to relieve their affliction, and he heals them “quite irrespective of their sin” (CD IV/2, p. 223). Nevertheless, Christ indeed confronts and overcomes sin, which Barth describes as the “power of destruction” that threatens humanity and creation, that leads to tremendous suffering, and that exists as God’s “true enemy” and “also the true enemy of humanity” (CD IV/2, p. 225 rev.). By contradicting sin and its destructive influence upon human life, Christ supports and protects human life in its material, physical dimension, which is why Christ’s acts take “necessarily … the crucial and decisive form of liberation, redemption, restoration, normalisation” (CD IV/2, 225). Barth calls this “the Gospel in action” (CD IV/2, p. 226).

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The Believer’s Necessary Sociopolitical Response In light of God’s frequent intervention for those in need, and in view of the merciful character of justification, followers of Christ receive the ethical demand to act consistently with God’s righteousness and mercy. In “The Mercy and Righteousness of God,” Barth goes so far as to suggest that the character of justification itself entails a specific human response to “a very definite political problem and task” (CD II/1, p. 386). Barth reaches this conclusion by arguing that God’s righteousness takes the form of “a saving divine intervention for humanity directed only to the poor, the wretched and the helpless” (CD II/1, p. 387 rev.). Here Barth signals that he is using an expansive definition of poverty and oppression, one that includes humanity’s destitute existence as separated from God by sin, in order to underscore the specific response that believers must have toward those who live in material poverty and sociopolitical oppression. “When we encounter divine righteousness we are all … menaced and altogether lost according to [our] own strength. We are all widows and orphans who cannot procure right for themselves” (CD II/1, p. 387). In this state of separation from God, in which we as humans cannot mend the breach on our own, God acts on our behalf and thereby establishes human righteousness in Jesus Christ. Believers respond in faith by accepting God’s action on their behalf, recognizing that by this action God reveals both God’s mercy and their own desperate need. The believers’ faith, as total reliance upon God’s intervention to overcome their poverty as those cut off from God, leads necessarily to “a political attitude” and “a political responsibility” to advocate for the poor and oppressed. Believers respond to the oppressive sociopolitical realities around them by working to liberate those who suffer, because in the oppressed they see in pointed terms their own poverty “in the sight of God.” Here Barth is not suggesting that believers blunt the sharp, jagged edge of the material suffering around them by spiritualizing poverty in such a way that minimizes its specific, material forms. Rather than diminishing the acute affliction of the oppressed, believers operate with an expansive view of poverty that recognizes their own spiritual poverty within the material poverty of the destitute around them (Hunsinger 2000, pp. 49–53). Believers already stand in solidarity with the oppressed. As God’s saving grace extends to all who are spiritually poor, so too God’s liberating deliverance extends to all who are materially poor or oppressed. Christians, therefore, acknowledge “that the right, that every real claim which one [person] has against another or others, enjoys the special protection of the God of grace.” Christians then advocate for “human rights,” and work to achieve “a state which is based on justice” (CD II/1, p. 387; Hunsinger 2017, pp. 181–192). The “human righteousness” expressed by God’s people in response to God’s righteousness and mercy in this way “has necessarily the character of a vindication of right in favour of the threatened innocent, the oppressed poor, widows, orphans and aliens” (CD II/1, p. 386). To do otherwise than to act to liberate the oppressed would constitute a denial of the mercy by which God delivered them from their impoverished estrangement from God. “By any other political attitude [the Christian] rejects the divine justification” (CD II/1, p. 387).

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Diaconal Service Barth returns to necessary sociopolitical action in “The Ministry of the Community” (CD IV/3). There he describes Christian ministry as uniting speech and action in analogy to Christ’s ministry, which models “speech which is also action … and action which is also speech.” God calls Christians to act in the world, and thereby to communicate “the same thing in another way, with the speech of their acts, with their hands as well as their lips,” by engaging in diaconal service (CD IV/3, p. 862). The “diaconate” (from διακονία) refers to the church’s service to those in need physically or economically. As it serves in diaconal ministry, the Christian community “explicitly accepts solidarity with the least of little ones … with those who are pushed to the margin … with fellow‐creatures who temporarily at least, and perhaps permanently, are useless and insignificant and perhaps even burdensome and destructive.” Matthew 25 teaches that through its diaconal ministry, the church demonstrates that those in need are the “brothers [and sisters] of Jesus Christ.” If the Christian community ignores them, then “even though its proclamation of Christ is otherwise ever so powerful, it stands hopelessly on the left hand among the goats,” and it loses its “concrete witness to Jesus the Crucified” (CD IV/3.2, p. 891). By performing “the good deed which corresponds to the good Word,” the church “enabl[es] the good Word to be understood in the fulness of its truth” (CD IV/3, p. 892). Diaconal ministry, alone among all the other activities of the Christian community, uniquely displays the actual character of witness that must determine all other ministries: it is “pure, selfless and unassuming service which might well be hampered or even totally spoiled by even occasional attempts at domination.” Unlike other forms of Christian ministry, that “can so easily be encircled by an ambiguous glory in which their character as service is easily lost,” diaconal service necessarily engages those on society’s margins, and therefore those far removed from the world’s attention and concern. Furthermore, the immense scale of unmet need continually overshadows the contributions made by diaconal ministry, thereby deepening its unimpressive and inconspicuous character. Barth believes that this modesty reveals the actual character of all Christian ministry, and thereby “makes the diaconate formally so important and indispensable as a basic form of witness” (CD IV/3, p. 891). Although unassuming, diaconal ministry challenges the “prevailing social, economic and political conditions” that cause the suffering it seeks to alleviate. As they confront the “social injustice” that afflicts human communities, Christians must humbly recognize their own “partial responsibility” and shared guilt as members of societies marked by injustice. Nevertheless, this recognition should neither silence the church nor immobilize it, but rather inspire it to speak “the open word of Christian social criticism” that confronts all forms of injustice, especially those in which the church participates. By identifying the root causes of social ills, and its own complicity in the injustices it combats, the church discovers “a new place … for Christian action” aimed at sociopolitical transformation (CD IV/3, p. 892). On the other hand, “The diaconate and the Christian community become dumb dogs, and their service a serving of the ruling powers, if they are afraid to tackle at their social roots the evils by which they are confronted in detail” (CD IV/3, p. 893).

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Jesus as the Nonpartisan Revolutionary In his earthly ministry, Jesus models the sociopolitical advocacy that should mark the lives of believers, without succumbing to the political options of his day. In “The Royal Man,” (CD IV/2, pp. 154–264), Barth describes Jesus as “the poor man who if He blessed and befriended any blessed and befriended the poor and not the rich.” Furthermore, Jesus reveals God’s concern for those relegated to the underside of history and God’s opposition to our human systems of power and domination. Jesus is “the incomparable revolutionary who laid the axe at the root of the trees, who pitilessly exposed the darkness of human order in the cosmos” (CD IV/2, p. 179). If we fail to recognize that God “absolutely” contradicts “our whole world which has fallen away from him,” then we are really only observing a reflection of ourselves rather than the living God (CD IV/2, pp. 179–180). By revealing Godself in Jesus Christ, God has forever shattered all false claims that God validates the endless accumulation of wealth and power, for in Jesus God demonstrates God’s solidarity with the poor and oppressed. To know God as God truly is, we must look to Jesus who comes to us “as this poor man, as this (if we may risk the dangerous word) partisan of the poor, and finally as this revolutionary” (CD IV/2, p. 180). In spite of God’s advocacy for the poor and oppressed in Jesus Christ, Barth argues that Jesus remained free and unaffiliated in regard to all sociopolitical systems, parties, and solutions. Jesus “did not represent or defend or champion any programme — whether political, economic, moral or religious, whether conservative or progressive” (CD IV/2, p. 171). Jesus “set all programmes and principles in question,” treating them with an unconstrained freedom that exposed “their provisional and relative character,” “humanly conditioned” nature, “secret fallibility,” and “transitory validity.” Yet, he did so without “particularly attack[ing] any of them” (CD IV/2, pp. 172–173). Jesus’ ministry could not be reduced to any human system because he upends them all: “For where are these orders when He expresses both in word and deed th[e] abasement of all that is high and exaltation of all that is low? Do they not all presuppose that the high is high and the low low? Was not the axe really laid at the root of all these trees in and by His existence?” (CD IV/2, p. 172). By transcending, and “cut[ting] right across all these systems,” Jesus demonstrates God’s sovereign “freedom and kingdom and over‐ruling of history,” which limits and decenters all human programs and agendas (CD IV/2, pp. 172–173).

Contextuality and Theological Construction Many liberation and postcolonial theologies advocate a perspective rooted in a specific cultural, social, and historical context as the starting point for theological construction. Acknowledging the influence of context upon our theologies, and hearing differing views through cross‐contextual conversation, enables us to identify gaps and blindspots in our own perspectives. Humility then tempers our theological contributions, for we realize that no single perspective may encapsulate the church’s complete doctrinal understanding due its inherent, contextual limitations. When we fail to acknowledge the way our contexts shape, enhance, and limit our perspectives, we risk deploying our

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views uncritically, assuming their universal relevance and unerring correlation to ultimate reality, and unfairly dismissing alternate perspectives. Nevertheless, in spite of inherent limitations, each contextual perspective offers unique contributions to the church’s theology, broadening and enriching the church’s multicontextual understanding. In Barth, we find support for such contextual self‐awareness and for the humility that recognizes the provisional and transient character of all our humanly constructed theological systems. His words regarding human sociopolitical systems may apply also to our contextualized, constructive theological work: “God gives them their times and spheres, but without being bound to any of them, without giving any of them his own divine authority, without allotting to any of them a binding validity for all people even beyond their own time and sphere, without granting that they are vitally necessary and absolutely authoritative even for their own time and sphere” (CD IV/2, p. 173 rev.). In “The Task of the Community” (CD IV/3, pp. 795–830), Barth argues that we are summoned to maintain both the contextual and unchanging character of Christian witness. If the Christian community fails to recognize the dynamic, living vitality of its message on one hand, or its consistent integrity on the other, then “distortions and falsifications … of the Gospel” occur (CD IV/3, p. 813). “The living Word of the living Lord of the community” encounters each “particular age,” and the people living within it, with a specific admonition and call to obedience. Barth explains that “the Gospel of Jesus Christ” calls the people of each specific cultural, social, and historical context, “addressing them here and now in their own particular situation.” Jesus Christ lives as the risen Lord of the church, and speaks clearly through the Holy Spirit, giving the church a living Word to guide it according to his will. When this is forgotten, the “concrete meaning” that Jesus speaks into our specific contexts “dissolve[s] … into an abstract signification.” The forms and traditions of the past may become calcified and unreflectively applied to current settings for which they are no longer appropriate. The gospel maintains “its identity in every age and therefore its universality.” Nevertheless, at the same time, it “penetrates each specific historical situation with a specific intention to be specifically received and attested by the community” (CD IV/3, p. 813). When the church no longer displays living contextuality, a specific symptom will arise: its proclamation will no longer “go forth as an invitation to or demand for a concrete decision of faith and obedience … which entails a distinction of word and act at a specific time and in a specific situation” (CD IV/3, pp. 813–814). An emphasis on timeless, abstract truth may in this way drift into irrelevance. When this occurs, the world will often affirm the ­“invisible” church and its “innocuous” activity, for the world’s “contradiction and opposition will usually be directed only against a community which brings out the concrete relevance of the Gospel.” The irrelevant church, though, “forfeit[s] its own true right to exist” and “hopelessly” severs the one thing that matters above all else: “its vitally necessary connexion with its Lord” (CD IV/3, p. 816). When the church realizes the irrelevance of its abstract proclamation, it faces “a dangerous moment,” for it will be tempted to swing toward “the opposite error.” The church may overreach in its effort to speak in a timely, significant, and contextual way, and thereby forget the identity the gospel maintains in every context, and the commonality that unites every contextually appropriate presentation of the truth and love of

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Jesus Christ. When this happens, the church’s proclamation within its specific context “loses the identity or constancy which is proper to it as the living but one Word of the living but one Lord, as His eternal Word in every age and situation.” Abandoning constancy for the sake of relevance has its root not in “evangelical radicalism,” but rather in “a very unevangelical conservatism” that has led to “the great heresies of all ages.” Proponents of this error begin by regarding “the Gospel [as] a tolerably well‐known magnitude,” and therefore “as … an object” and “as a sure and certain knowledge which stands in no need of renewal” (CD IV/3, p. 818). The Christian community follows by shifting in its view of the gospel, no longer regarding it as “the Word of God which is superior to the community and the world and which must be obediently attested by the community to the world.” Rather, the community begins to regard itself as superior to the gospel, and the gospel as a tool that may be utilized and applied however the community chooses according to “the criteria, principles and methods which … are normative in the given time and situation” (CD IV/3, p. 819). The community’s proclamation, then, becomes a “secularised Gospel, deprived of its original meaning and power, i.e. ‘another’ Gospel,” which “is no longer the Gospel of Jesus Christ” (CD IV/3, p. 822). Failing to acknowledge the constancy of God’s Word, unified across all contexts, resembles the first error of failing to recognize the living relevance God’s Word, spoken afresh in every time and place, in that they both involve “the breaking of the vital direct contact between the community and its living Lord” (CD IV/3, p. 823). Furthermore, each of these mistakes leads to the other as a “reaction,” which triggers the opposite “counter‐action” (CD IV/3, p. 813). Both the contextuality and unity of Christian witness must be maintained together, or else the church will actually affirm neither: “For the Gospel can be on [the church’s] lips a concrete and pointed Word relevant to specific times and situations only when it is proclaimed in its unity and constancy as the eternal Gospel” (CD IV/3, p. 824, cf. p. 813). Likewise, “If [the Gospel] loses its living quality in the witness of the community, it will soon be all up with its constancy” (CD IV/3, p. 813). Living in close relationship with Jesus Christ provides the key to maintaining the proper proclamation of the gospel, which balances contextual relevancy and faithful constancy (CD IV/3, p. 823). By this, Barth is not proposing a conceptual balance but rather a relational connection to Jesus Christ, who maintains in his own person, as the risen and faithful one, the living and constant character of Christian proclamation.

The Affliction and Liberation of the Christian Barth believes that we may only properly understand Christian liberation in its unity with Christian affliction, and that affliction and liberation together meet Christians who participate in their prophetic vocation of witnessing to Jesus Christ (“The Christian in Affliction,” CD IV/3, pp. 614–647; “The Liberation of the Christian,” CD IV/3, pp. 647– 680). Christians stand with God on one side and the world on the other as they demonstrate the reality of reconciliation through their speech and acts. The affliction they experience arises from three sources. First, the world reacts against the Christian’s proclamation of reconciliation with God, which it regards as “monstrous” and “insolent”

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(CD IV/3, p. 620). By claiming that the world stands in need of reconciliation with God through Jesus Christ, Christians contradict the world’s interpretation of reality, as well as its attempts to resolve its own problems. The world then receives the “Yes” of God proclaimed by Christians as an offensive “No” to its own agenda and efforts, regards the gospel as “pressure” to which it may respond only with “counter‐pressure,” and views the Christian as its “worst enemy” (CD IV/3, pp. 622, 617, 625). Second, Christians bring suffering upon themselves through their faithfulness to their calling to witness to Jesus Christ and through their refusal to compromise the content of this witness (CD IV/3, pp. 626–628). “The impossibility of making the witness of the Christian tolerable as it stands thus includes the impossibility of evading the rejection and ill‐will with which the surrounding world must react against it” (CD IV/3, p. 628). Third, Christians experience affliction because of Jesus Christ and their fellowship with him. As a result of their close proximity to their Lord, “[the world’s] opposition and resistance detected by the Christian in affliction is its reaction to the action of Jesus Christ in fulfilment of His prophetic office” (CD IV/3, p. 634). Affliction meets Christians unavoidably as their own participation in Christ’s suffering; as an analogy, echo, and reflection of Christ’s passion; and as a confirming sign of the reality of their vocation “under the shadow of His cross” (CD IV/3, p. 637). In this, Christians do not contribute to the reconciliation of the world with God in Jesus Christ; rather, their affliction functions as a witness directing the world’s attention to Christ’s cross, where alone God reconciles the world to Godself (See also “The Dignity of the Cross” IV/2, pp. 598–613). With affliction, Christians experience liberation in the form of benefits that confirm the reality of their reconciliation with God in Jesus Christ (CD IV/3, pp. 648–649). Here we must keep in mind that Barth employs an expansive view of liberation, one that encompasses the spiritual, eternal dimension as well as the temporal, material aspect of human life. For Barth, humanity’s reconciliation with God in Jesus Christ enfolds and transforms sociopolitical reality, and earthly liberation from oppression finds its proper placement within the drama of reconciliation and redemption. A clear place is given to sociopolitical transformation, as an indispensable effect of Christ’s work of reconciliation, but Barth maintains a specific ordering in which God’s action in Jesus Christ takes priority as primary and determinative, and its sociopolitical outworking remains always only secondary and derivative. Rather than minimizing sociopolitical transformation, Barth would argue that this ordering properly grounds sociopolitical change within humanity’s healed relationship with God in Jesus Christ. With their affliction, Christians will experience specific forms of liberation that function as signs that verify “the content of [their] witness” (CD IV/3, pp. 648–649). Just as Christians should not seek out affliction, for it will meet them as an unsought, unavoidable aspect of their vocation, so too they should not make their own liberation their overriding concern. As they carry out their vocation, they will receive their own liberation, which takes the form of “the benefits which Christ has won for the whole world and for all [people]” (CD IV/3, pp. 651–652), which will lead to specific improvements in their life circumstances. Their prophetic vocation excludes self‐focus, for Christians “are referred, not to themselves, but to God who points them to their neighbours, and to their neighbours who point them to God” (CD IV/3, p. 652 rev.). Yet, as they proclaim humanity’s reconciliation with God, through word and deed, they

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­ emonstrate “a care for [their] own best interests” (CD IV/3, p. 653). In this way, d ­selflessness unites with self‐care in a liberating dialectic actualized in the lives of Christians. “[T]he history of [the Christian’s] ministry should become as such the history of his/her own liberation” (CD IV/3, p. 654 rev.). Indeed, Barth goes so far as to regard the “little personal liberation[s]” of Christians as “an indispensable prerequisite, a condition sine qua non,” of effective witness (CD IV/3, p. 657). Threefold “indispensability” determines Christian liberation. First, liberation functions as evidence for the actuality of God’s reconciliation of humanity with Godself. Christians, in their “little but very personal liberations,” function as self‐witnesses to God’s transformation within their own life histories. Here “the action of the Christians” is not the crucial disclosure, but rather the Christians “themselves in their action” (CD IV/3, pp. 658–659 rev.). In this way, Christian self‐witness exists in analogy to the self‐ witness of Jesus Christ (CD IV/3, pp. 658–659). The “intrinsically true” content they proclaim gains “the ring and authority of truth which applies to other [people]” through its confirmation in Christian liberation (CD IV/3, p. 657). Second, Christians may serve as witnesses to the truth of the gospel only as those who have personally encountered both “the shadow” of the cross and “the shock of [their] own little liberation” (CD IV/3, p. 660). This experience does not contribute to the objective reality of the content of Christian witness, but prepares Christians to fully attest to its truth. Third, through their own liberation, Christians display the joyfulness of humanity’s reconciliation with God, and the “immeasurable benefit” of liberation in Christ (CD IV/3, pp. 660–661). Barth goes on to list seven ways that Christians experience liberation: from isolation to fellowship, from unbounded options for life to the single focus of prophetic witness, from overvaluing things to properly valuing people, from being driven by “desire and demand” to being able to freely receive, from “indecision” to “action,” from legalism to “forgiveness and gratitude,” and finally “from anxiety to prayer” (CD IV/3.2, pp. 664– 673). Although this list is by no means exhaustive, as Barth himself admits, what Barth claims of the Christian’s freedom to receive (the fourth form of liberation) seems to apply to all forms of Christian liberation generally: liberation always reflects a specific aspect of Christ’s reconciling work, and therefore an element proclaimed by Christians in their prophetic witness to reconciliation. “The correspondence, conformity, and congruence of liberation’s forms with Christ’s reconciling work determine the legitimacy of these forms” (Hieb 2013, p. 228). Because Barth has already established the necessary link between our experience of God’s mercy and our own merciful action to aid those in need (CD II/1, pp. 369–387), the transformation of sociopolitical conditions that cause temporal, material oppression qualifies as a form of Christian liberation, and one in which God calls Christians to participate. We are lifted from the depths only to be led back into the depths by our Crucified Lord, in sacrificial service for others.

Conclusion: Toward an Integrated Theology Perhaps Barth’s greatest contribution to our theological reflection on sociopolitical life is his refusal to separate the eternal and the spiritual from the temporal and the material. Rather, he unites the eternal, spiritual and the temporal, material dimensions as legitimate

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domains, each with their own validity, integrity, and function. Through Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, eternal and spiritual reality breaks into the temporal, material context of an oppressed people suffering under Roman imperial domination in the first century. Concurrently, in Jesus Christ, sociopolitical contextuality is taken up into, and enfolded within, a narrative that transcends earthly life, that finds its center in God’s work in Jesus Christ, and that includes election, creation, the fall, reconciliation, and redemption. Through his life, death, and resurrection, Jesus Christ in himself integrates eternal, spiritual reality and temporal, material reality in such a way that we will never understand one fully without reference to the other. Humanity’s reconciliation with God and sociopolitical liberation interweave in unity and distinction and find their proper place within a larger, Biblical drama that regards each as eternal and temporal, spiritual and material. References Gutiérrez, G. (1983). The Power of the Poor in History: Selected Writings. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Hieb, N. (2013). Christ Crucified in a Suffering World: The Unity of Atonement and Liberation. Minneapolis: Fortress. Hunsinger, G. (2000). Karl Barth and liberation theology. In: Disruptive Grace, 40–59. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

Hunsinger, G. (2017). Karl Barth and human rights. In: Karl Barth and Radical Politics, 2e, 181–192. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock. Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Penguin.

CHAPTER 66

Barth and Near and Distant Neighbors Derek Alan Woodard‐Lehman

Introduction Requirements follow from relationships. To stand in a particular relationship is to stand under certain requirements. Because I am their father, I am required to provide for my two sons and to protect them. Because they are my sons, they are required to respect me and to abide my direction. These requirements are not without limits. The provision I owe my boys does not run to luxury. The obedience they owe me does not extend to servility. The requirements on both sides of the relationship are limited by justice. Because my sons and I enjoy the goods created and cultivated by our relationship – above all, the relationship itself  –  justice demands that we uphold those requirements which make possible our relationship and our enjoyment of it. The goodness of our relationship grounds the rightness of its requirements. Justice itself extends beyond this relationship to include others. The requirements of relationships to others impinge on relationships closer to hand. For example, if I coach a baseball team that includes one of my sons on its roster, my obligation to provide him opportunity to play is constrained by my obligations of impartiality and equity to his teammates. I cannot put him in our lineup if, on the basis of his skill, he has not earned that place. In this case, as in almost every case, more than one relationship is in view. Multiple requirements are at work. Issues of parental favoritism aside, we encounter more perplexing issues of competing relationships and far more vexing issues of conflicting requirements in cases of social justice, including those Barth calls “the problem of nations.” For him, I can no more prefer my people within the international order than I can prefer my son in the batting order. Barth takes up this problem in the fourth part of his doctrine of creation: “The Command of God the Creator.” He does so in §54: “Freedom in Fellowship.” There, in

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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the third section – “Near and Distant Neighbors” (KD III/4, pp. 127–366; CD III/4, pp. 285–323), he considers the divergent and conflictual requirements that arise within relationships of varying racial‐ethnic, cultural‐linguistic, geopolitical, and/or sociohistorical proximity. The requirements that are assumed to follow from such “nearness” are loyalty and fidelity, patriotism and nationalism. These requirements are taken to qualify those that arise within more “distant” relationships. It is assumed that I may, and at times – especially times of war – must, prefer my own people over others within the international order. Barth takes up this problem in order to challenge the ideology of national identity. At the same time he challenges the natural theology on which nationalist ideology and propaganda are often based. He denies the possibility of any “independent theology and ethics of place, home, and fatherland” (KD III/4, p. 329; CD III/4, p. 292). Such natural relationships are not a means of revelation through which God’s will can be known. Nor are their requirements through which God’s will must be done. Although nearness and distance bear on the context of divine command, they do not bear on its content. National identity provides “an allotted framework in which [we] have to express [our] own distinctive obedience.” It cannot decide “in what this obedience has to consist” (KD III/4, p. 324; CD III/4, p. 288). That national identity is divinely ordained does not mean that nationalism is divinely commanded. Barth’s most immediate concerns are self‐evident. Writing less than a decade after the Nazi Reich and the Confessing Church Struggle, he had seen firsthand the demonic consequences of attaching messianic significance to national identity. The race theology and culture Protestantism of the German‐Christian Movement (Deutsche Christen) were major factors in the ascension of Hitler and the abomination of the Holocaust. Far too many Christians at that time, and the majority of Protestants, believed that to receive divine command in their context as Germans meant that the content of the command was to be German. They believed that the law of the Reich was the Law ­accompanying the gospel, that the Spirit of the Volk was the Holy Spirit, and that the Führer’s word was the Word of God itself. Barth’s deeper concerns are readily apparent. In Church Dogmatics from his earliest lectures on revelation (CD I/1–2) to the final lecture fragments on reconciliation (CD IV/4), he grounds dogmatics in the one Word of God. The divine Word in its threefold form is theology’s first source and final norm. Whatever may be proposed about national identity by the lights of nature or reason must be criticized in light of Scripture. In the ethics of creation (CD III/4) and the ethics of reconciliation alike (CL), Barth resists direct identification of the kingdom of God with the kingdoms of this world. Church and state, the community of Christians and the community of citizens (Christengemeinde und Bürgergemeinde), are not two separate realms governed by different values but concentric spheres centered on Christ within the one kingdom of God. Whatever must be done within the nation‐state will need to be an analogy, parable, and witness of Christ’s kingdom but can never be more than that. From start to finish, Barth’s entire doctrine of creation reverses the anthropocentrism of natural theology, while also relativizing and resisting any absolute claims by the state. Whatever a nation or nation‐state is, it “must not be artificially hypostasised… It must not be decked out as an ‘order of creation’” (KD III/4, p. 344; CD III/4, p. 304).

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In what follows, Barth’s account of the problem of nations will be taken up first (CD III/ 4 §54.3, “Near and Distant Neighbors”). Its overlooked connections with his account of the problem of war will then be explored (CD III/4 §55.2, “The Protection of Life”). Three reasons underlie this approach. First, the problem of war is an acute instance of the problem of nations. In war the political requirements arising within national relationships are taken to nullify those arising within all other relationships. Second, Barth never completed his ethics of reconciliation. We lack the constructive account of the state and the political form of God’s command that would have rounded out his ethics. Finally, we turn to the wartime writings collected in A Swiss Voice (ESS) in order to resolve some ambiguity and controversy surrounding Barth’s ethics of war. In particular we will examine his claims that certain nations have a special commission from God and that Switzerland is one such nation. Although his claims for special national commissions may not be cogent, they are consistent with his theology of the nations in “Near and Distant Neighbours.” Such claims need not be endorsed in order to reframe the obligations of the state to God, as Barth understood them, to suit a more viable social ethic.

Neighbors and the Problem of Nations Barth begins “Freedom in Fellowship” with this thesis: “As God calls humanity to Godself, God also turns them toward their fellow human beings. The divine command says in particular that in the encounter of man and woman, in the relationship between parents and children, and on the way from near to distant neighbors, they may affirm, honor, and enjoy the other with themselves and themselves with the other” (KD III/4, p.  127; CD III/4, p. 116). Barth then refers to his account of “Humans in their Determination as the Covenant Partner of God,” reminding his readers that “an acquaintance with CD III/2 §45 is assumed here” (KD III/4, p. 127; CD III/4, p. 116). In that earlier section Barth defines the “basic form of humanity” as “fellow‐humanity” (Mitmenschlichkeit) (KD III/2, pp. 264–344; CD III/2, pp. 222–285). He concludes that “every purported humanity that is not already radically and inherently fellow‐humanity is inhumanity” (KD III/2, p. 272; CD III/2, p. 228). Barth’s own language in the original does not quite follow the English translation of “near and distant neighbors.” He writes simply about “the near” and “the distant.” He does not mention either the two love commandments or the Good Samaritan parable, which he discusses at length earlier in the Dogmatics (KD I/2, pp. 442–504; CD I/2, pp.  401–454). Nevertheless, the translation conveys a sense‐for‐sense dynamic equivalence with regard to Barth’s text. We can continue to speak of near and distant “neighbors” as long as we bear in mind that we are in the sphere of the political rather than merely the personal. These “neighbors” are nations and peoples whose collective relationships belong to social ethics. Barth identifies those who are near and distant as different Volk. This term can mean “nation,” “people,” or even “race.” A “nation” is not, in the first instance, a “nation‐state.” When Barth speaks about a nation, he means the English or German peoples rather than England or Germany. By “race” he means something closer to “ethnicity.” He seems to

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think there is something like an English or German race when what he means is closer to what we would call culture. In order to avoid confusion with contemporary notions of race and racism (see, e.g. Omi and Winant 1994 [2004]), I will use nation(s) and people(s) to signal Barth’s emphasis on cultural, social, and historical factors rather than supposedly biological ones. The near neighbor is the fellow‐human with whom I am familiar “by nature and by the fact of [my] existence.” We are familiar to one another because we share a common social form of life. This commonality may be cultural‐linguistic, geopolitical, and/or sociohistorical. Taken together, these commonalities constitute what Barth describes as a “recognizable totality” to which I am bound and in which I am at home. “[We] breathe so much in this relationship, in fellowship with these near neighbors, that [we] may well think it impossible to breathe or think or feel or act at all without them.” We might say that those near neighbors amongst whom I am at home and with whom I share this fellowship are my native community (KD III/4, pp. 321–322; CD III/4, pp. 286–287). The distant neighbor is the fellow human being with whom I have less familiarity  –  perhaps, even none whatsoever  –  again, “by nature and by the fact of my existence.” We are unfamiliar because we do not share a common form of life. We lack cultural‐linguistic, geopolitical, and/or sociohistorical commonality. This lack notwithstanding, Barth refuses any final division between the near and distant neighbor. He insists that, from the first, nearness “presupposes there are other nations different from [ours],” to whom, despite this distance, we are “indirectly and perhaps very directly” related, and, thus, obligated. Because of humanity’s radical and inherent fellow humanity, “The human being is directed to these near and distant neighbours, is determined to a being and action as a member of a particular people and as a member of humankind” (KD III/4, pp. 321–322; CD III/4, p. 286 rev.). Just as no human person is ever without other fellow human persons, no people are ever without other peoples. Barth is not suggesting an essentialist account of nearness. He explicitly denies the existence of “any abstract idea of ‘blood and soil’ … [or] Volksnomos” (KD III/4, p. 329; CD III/4, p. 292). His basic point is uncontroversial. Most of us have a locality and a community whose language and customs are most familiar. Although not “natural” in the sense of being biologically determined, the language and customs of our community function as what philosophers and social theorists from Aristotle to Adorno describe as a “second nature.” Just as other animals behave based on unconscious natural instinct, humans act and interact out of subconscious social habit. Because this habit and the community it reflects are so deeply ingrained, Barth worries that the bonds of nearness may become a form of bondage. Without scrutiny they can function as an unalterable totality with unquestionable authority. They can devolve into being authoritarian and totalitarian, as happened in the Nazi Reich. Barth resists this bondage by qualifying the distinction between the near and the distant. He argues that their “counterposition,” “confrontation,” or “vis‐á‐vis” (Gegenüber) must be seen as “fluid” (KD III/4, p. 339; CD III/4, p. 300). The distinction between them is “relative,” “reversible,” “reciprocal,” and even “removable.” As relative, the distinction is scalar rather than binary. At the far ends of the spectrum stand my own people and foreign peoples. In between, there is an ethnic, linguistic, and historical overlap (KD III/4, pp. 321–322, CD III/4, p. 286). As reversible, relationships of relative nearness and

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­ istance can be inverted. Nearness and distance are not only relative to a particular d standpoint. They also are relative between standpoints. My “near” neighbor is someone else’s “distant” neighbor (KD III/4, p. 338; CD III/4, p. 299). As reciprocal, relationships of relative nearness and distance carry correlative requirements. If my relationships of nearness require “loyalty,” then so do those of my distant neighbor (KD III/4, pp. 336–338; CD III/4, pp. 297–299). As removable, relationships of relative nearness and distance are provisional. The distance created by language, custom, geography, and history can be overcome through education and relocation. Most important, the spiritual unity of the church is itself a basis for nearness that transcends all natural and historical forms of distance, yet without denigrating or eliminating human diversity altogether. Barth illustrates this fluidity with a passing reference to the Alsatians. The region of Alsace sits on the plain between the upper Rhine River to the east and the Vosges Mountains to the west. Geopolitically, it sometimes has been the westernmost territory of Germany. At other times it has been the easternmost territory of France, as it is at present. Historically, it has been shaped by centuries of intermingling between French and German culture. Linguistically, traditional Alsatian is an Alemannic dialect of Upper German similar to Schweizerdeutsch. Today its common tongue is French. Barth’s point is that, like the territory and identity of Alsace in particular, the constitution and relation of the nations more generally is dynamic rather than static. To these initial observations, Barth adds a biblical and theological account of the nations. The exegesis of Genesis with which he concludes “Near and Distant Neighbors” (KD III/4, pp. 349–366; CD III/4, pp. 309–323) provides the “fundamental and comprehensive reflection on the Word of God witnessed in scripture” that he commends at the beginning of the volume (KD III/4, p. 24; CD III/4, p. 23). He makes three basic points. First, the content of Scripture is not a generic history of humanity and the nations but the specific history of the covenant in its twofold form as Israel and church (KD III/4, p. 350; CD III/4, p. 309). Whatever is to be known about the nations can be known only in light of the one holy nation. Second, the problem of the nations is, in Barth’s words, “initially invisible” in scriptural passages describing creation, and “strangely” so (KD III/4, p. 351; CD III/4, p. 310). Whatever is to be known about the nations and about the divine command concerning them can be known only from the standpoint of election and reconciliation. Finally, the emergence of the nations and the theological problem of their existence takes place in the caesura between the creation of humanity and the election of Israel. Whatever is to be known about this problem as a matter of the doctrine of creation can be known, theologically, only from Genesis 9–12. As seen through the doctrine of creation, the nations are not natural phenomena. This claim is not empirical but exegetical. Barth’s point is not to deny the existence of nations at this point in human history. His point is that, within these chapters, the narratives “screen off ” their existence and place it “in the shadows” (KD III/4, p. 351; CD III/4, p. 311). The nations don’t yet exist in any exegetically/theologically relevant sense, because Israel does not yet exist as the holy nation. The theological significance of the nations is not their objective existence. Their significance is in their intersubjective existence as the nations (the ethnoi, the goyim, the Gentiles) relative to Israel. Because the existence of the nations is not an “order of creation,” Barth concludes: “The will of God has no relationship to them as such” (KD III/4, p. 351; CD III/4, p. 311).

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Although Genesis 10–11 offers two distinct literary accounts of how the nations emerged, Barth reads them as “unanimous in substance” (KD III/4, p. 352; CD III/4, p. 312). In chapter 10, their emergence is narrated as a feature of the Noachic covenant, which resumes the commission to Adam to be fruitful and multiply. In chapter 11, their emergence is narrated as a feature of linguistic confusion and geographic dispersion. In either case, the substance is “provisional.” It indicates the precovenantal purpose of the one original humanity that continues in multiple forms as the many nations. Along with chapters 9 and 12, Genesis 10–11 form a sequence that narrates the transition from creation to covenant. Barth reads Genesis 10–11 as offering two parallel accounts rather than a single sequential account. Reacting against an interpretation common to the “neo‐German pseudo‐theology” of his time, he instead reads Genesis 11 as a specific episode in the longer covenantal epic described in Genesis 10. Chapter  10 describes a “general development” over time. Chapter 11 describes a “single event” at some time within that development. The consequence of this reading is that the second account cannot be interpreted as a restoration of the “natural development” and “organic formation” of the nations. It must be seen as an intervention of divine providence within the covenant of grace (KD III/4, p. 354; CD III/4, p. 313). Barth is not pitting nature against grace. Nor is he denying that relationships of nearness and distance are natural and organic as the product of sociohistorical processes. The emergence and existence of various nations belongs to the creaturely development of the species. Nevertheless, these processes are not governed by some natural law of necessity, whether biological or historical. Because “covenant is the internal basis of creation” (KD III/1, pp. 258–377; CD III/1, pp. 228–329), they are governed by nothing other than the logic of election. The division of nations is, from the start, “arranged so that the curves of the separated ways point to a later new meeting” (KD III/4, pp. 358–359; CD III/4, p. 317). Babel does not return human beings to a previously intended natural trajectory. It turns them forward to their eternally intended covenantal telos. The narratives of Genesis 9–12 are not primarily the story of the one people (humanity) or the many peoples (the nations). They are theologically the story of the singular people (Israel). The trajectory that begins with the judgment at Babel ends with the promise at Pentecost. Acts 2 relates the scene in which the many nations are enfolded into the single nation through the Jews gathered from the diaspora. These sons and daughters of Israel return from their geographical dispersion. They bring with them the linguistic diversity of the nations. In the power of the Spirit, which Barth describes as the “authoritative and effective” presence of Christ, diasporic Jews speak and are understood by native Jews (KD III/4, p. 362; CD III/4, p. 320). The praises of the God of Israel are heard in the tongues of the Gentiles. This makes it clear that the reunion of the nations “takes place wholly within the sphere of Israel” (KD III/4, p. 364; CD III/4, p. 322). It marks the transition from Jesus to the church, from Jesus’ own messianic ministry regarding “the lost sheep of Israel” (Matthew 15:24) to the apostolic ministry of the church’s outreach to “all nations” (Matthew 28:19). What begins with the election of the Abrahamic family is fulfilled in the commission of the apostolic community. According to Barth, this trajectory  –  from Adam through Israel to Jesus and his community to the nations – is the biblical perspective on the problem of nations. The

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linguistic confusion and geographic dispersion of humanity is an act of divine judgment. But it is “not an ultimate word but only a penultimate word” (KD III/4, p. 358; CD III/4, p. 317). In Barth’s characteristic phrasing, it is a No for the sake of a Yes. That nations and cultures exist is an expression of the basic form of fellow humanity. Fellow humanity is part of the created order. It is the essence of human nature. That this nation or that culture exists as one particular form of fellow humanity among others is not part of the created order. They are accidents of human history. This is not to say that the existence of specific peoples is merely contingent. God remains provident over their world occurrence. Barth turns to the scholastic distinction between ordo (orders) and ordinationes (ordinations) to coordinate the eternal and historic aspects of providence. “Orders” (Ordnung) are permanent “determinations” (Bestimmungen) of the divine will. “Ordinations” (Anordnungen) are provident “dispositions” (Verfügungen) of the divine will. As Barth explains, “God’s governance of world‐occurrence is permanent, but God’s individual dispositions and ordinances have their time and hour, then dissolve, and are replaced by new ones.” “The existence of this and that people,” he concludes, “is based on such ordinances of God’s providence, but, precisely, they are not permanent orders of God’s creation” (KD III/4, p. 341; CD III/4, p. 301). The emergence of the nations occurs by divine providence within the order of reconciliation. Therefore, no “nationhood” or “statehood” can be allowed to impose itself as “originally and ultimately determinative and binding” (KD III/4, p. 345; CD III/4, p. 305). Especially worthy of vigilance are ideas of the nation‐state where an ethnic community (Volk) is purported to coincide with the political community (Staat) in perfect identity. When nation and state are so identified, the result is nothing less than ideology and idolatry. Politically speaking, it is fascism. Theologically speaking, it is henotheism. Barth connects idolatry with ideology just before his concluding excursus. When ultimate allegiance to the nation is commanded, the idea of the nation becomes “‘heretical’ in the most concrete sense of the concept.” It becomes a false god before which to bow the knee. “It inevitably introduces an alien god into the scheme: a national god from whom this special command comes and who has created humanity in accordance with this command. The Father of Jesus Christ, who as such is the Creator, is unrecognizable in this national god” (KD III/4, p. 345; CD III/4, p. 305). It is precisely this, the comprehensive coordination of nation and state (Gleichschaltung) that Barth rejects in the fifth thesis of the Barmen Declaration as “a sole and total order of human life” (Bax 2014, p. xxiv).

The State and the Problem of War National identity is neither the terminus (conclusion) nor the telos (goal) of fellow humanity. Neither scriptural narrative nor covenantal history leads to back to a lost unity. They point forward to a promised reunion. This reunion is both gift (Gabe) and task (Aufgabe). Barth cautions: “One’s own language must not be developed into a prison for those inside and a bunker to those outside” (KD III/4, pp. 327–328; CD III/4, p. 293). Likewise, “one’s own people in their own space cannot, and must not, be a wall, but a door” (KD III/4, p. 331; CD III/4, p. 294). On the contrary, “persons who are really in their own people, among those near them, are always on the way to those more d ­ istant,

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those other peoples” (KD III/4, p. 326; CD III/4, p. 294 rev.). What Barth calls being “on the way” from near to distant neighbors, we might call “the task of the nations.” Barth says little more in his ethics of creation. He says almost nothing about “the call of God to the state” and the “political form” of divine command (KD III/4, p. 343; CD III/4, pp. 303–304). His argument is almost entirely negative. To find the affirmations that are implicit in these negations, Barth instructs us to look elsewhere, to “borrow from other spheres of ethics” (KD III/4, p. 343; CD III/4, p. 304). In particular, we must look to reconciliation rather than creation. We must borrow from CD IV, to which Barth defers his more positive account of the state. However, the Dogmatics remained unfinished at the time of Barth’s death. He never provided a full account of how he saw the state and the political form of divine command. To gain light on these matters, I will stay within his ethics of creation. I will look to his response to the problem of war in “The Protection of Life” (§55.2) while also borrowing from the problem of the nations as set forth in “Near and Distant Neighbors” (§54.3). I do so in order to work toward a clearer understanding of Barth's conception of the state. Barth’s discussion of war in §55 is among the most ambiguous and controversial in all his writings (KD III/4, pp. 515–538; CD III/4, pp. 450–470). The ambiguity arises from his unconventional use of conventional just war criteria. Even the best readers disagree as to whether he articulates a “strong presumption against war” (e.g. Werpehowski 2010) or a “presumption in favor of war” (e.g. Bowlin 2010). The controversy arises from his explicit claim that some nations bear specific divine commissions, and his implicit claim that Switzerland is one such nation. Most readers agree that Barth’s ethics of war are in tension, if not contradiction, with the rest of his ethics, including “Near and Distant Neighbors” (e.g. Yoder 1970; Biggar 1993; Clough 2005; McKenny 2010). Unlike his wartime writings from the previous decade, Barth does not argue here for permission or obligation to fight on the basis of the lawlessness or godlessness of a totalitarian state. He no longer mentions ideology or idolatry, whether as generic features of the borderline case or as specific features of the Swiss case. He now appeals solely to the divine commission of certain nations, including Switzerland. The question of contradiction depends on whether Barth relapses into an account of national identity tied to the territorial integrity and political sovereignty of the state. The answer depends on two passages in particular. He remarks that he would regard the potential Nazi invasion of Switzerland as a “borderline case,” and that he would “speak and act accordingly” (KD III/4, p. 529; CD III/4, p. 462). In the first, and contrary to traditional just‐war thinking, however, he denies that unjust aggression and national self‐preservation are sufficient justifications for war. In the second he nevertheless describes a “divine commission” that would justify armed self‐defense. In the first passage Barth explains the “borderline case” (Grenzfall) in which war may be contemplated. As with capital punishment, he insists that only the “wholly abnormal situation of emergency” might justify the exercise of lethal force (KD III/4, p. 527; CD III/4, p. 461). Only a state of emergency in which the very existence of the state is at stake permits even contemplating resort to its ultima ratio (final argument) and opus alienum (strange work) of killing. Nevertheless, even then, Barth stipulates: “It [the threatened state] will not be allowed to deal with anything less than this final question

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if there is to be talk of a commanded, a just determination, to wage war” (KD III/4, p. 528; CD III/4, p. 461). Only the emergency raises the question of just war. At this point, Barth’s readers rightly detect a resemblance to the standard jus ad bellum criteria of just cause and last resort. However, this resemblance to conventional accounts of just war is superficial. Conventional accounts assume that when the jus ad bellum criteria are met – especially just cause – we are permitted, even obligated, to fight. Barth, however, does not see it this way (see, Puffer 2012). He plainly states: “Even the existence or non‐existence of a state does not always constitute a valid reason for war” (KD III/4, p. 528; CD III/4, p. 461). Even the emergency does not in itself answer the question of just war. The second passage indicates how the question of war is to be answered. Barth asks why these circumstances might, “in light of divine command”  –  and only in its light – justify resort to war. He answers: “It may be that the members of a people are entrusted with something in and with their independent existence, that they (without claim and boast vis‐á‐vis the others) have the commission to bear witness to through their existence, and which they, therefore, cannot be permitted to surrender” (KD III/4, p. 529; CD III/4, p. 462). This remark makes it clear that it is not national identity, territorial integrity, or political sovereignty that warrant self‐defense. Only this enigmatic “something” that may be “entrusted” to a people, to which they might be “commissioned to bear witness,” and, perhaps, “cannot be permitted to surrender,” does so. Neither nation or state in themselves, nor the state of emergency or the borderline case as such, are enough to justify resorting to war. The command to fight and kill depends entirely on this specific divine commission. What is this commission? Barth doesn’t tell us here. He does tell us elsewhere in several of the wartime writings collected in A Swiss Voice. If we want to know what this divine commission might be in the all‐important borderline case, then we need to understand what the commission is in the case of Switzerland. If we want to know how Barth “would speak and act accordingly” in a hypothetical situation, we need only look at how he spoke and acted in similar historical circumstances. A pair of lectures are particularly illuminating: “Our Church and Switzerland Today” and “In the Name of God Almighty.” These set forth Barth’s explicit claims for Switzerland’s divine commission, while also establishing the basis for similar claims implicit in the Dogmatics. In his 1940 lecture, “Our Church and Switzerland Today,” Barth states: “Switzerland is entrusted to us as something precious” and “what is entrusted to us with Switzerland is the determinate order of our life.” This order of life is a “community in which there is freedom and such freedom as serves the community” (ESS, p. 164). Such freedom, Barth tells us, “requires the members of the various languages, confessions, and professions, and the twenty‐five large and small cantonal‐states, and the three thousand municipalities which form the Confederation, but also all the individuals in our people, to respect each other in order to assure the protection of their rights.” Switzerland’s peculiar order of life thus “establishes the constitution and the laws of the country, and their implementation, through common deliberations, common decisions, and therefore through a free formation and expression of the judgment and conviction of all

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these individuals” (ESS, pp. 164–165). In the Swiss Confederation the basic form of fellow‐humanity has been institutionalized as a state form. A year later Barth gave a lecture whose title is taken from the preamble to the Swiss Constitution, “In the Name of God Almighty.” In it he fills out his description of the Confederation’s unique national identity and political community. He first draws a contrast between Switzerland’s political system and those of its neighbors. “As Germany is a Reich and France is a republic (or, more recently, the French state), so we are – not a Reich or a republic  –  but rather this other particular thing: a confederation” (ESS, p. 202). Barth then draws out the underlying difference that follows from this form of political community. “It is an oath which makes us Swiss comrades,” Barth contends, “not ethnic, not linguistic, not geographic unity, not the commonality of economic interests, nor political tradition and conviction, not the 650 years of more or less common history, but rather – the grounding of all this – an oath” (ESS, pp. 202–203). Swiss identity is not an accidental consequence of natural proximity. It is a product of intentional political activity. “Without any pretension or presumption,” Barth claims in the second lecture, “we cannot conceal that, with our homeland and its order of life, a certain mission is entrusted to us vis‐à‐vis the other nations” (ESS, p. 166). It is the mission of peaceful neutrality. “The Swiss polity is a confederation of free commonwealths, which in turn are made up of free citizens. It is a polity which, to those outside – that is the meaning of our neutrality – makes no claim to block off its alpine passes. That is, it is to be for all others a peaceful road from north to south, from east to west” (ESS, p. 166). “Such a political system is a light,” Barth concludes, “which however small and dim, stands openly, and must burn not only for its own sake but for the future of all nations” (ESS, p.  166). Over against the nationalism and fascism of World War II, the Swiss were commissioned to bear witness to internationalism and liberalism. In these lectures, the status of Switzerland’s divine commission is obvious. Its basis is less so. Nevertheless, the salient point is the way Barth’s particular description of the Swiss nation resonates with his general description of the nations in “Near and Distant Neighbors.” In both lectures he valorizes the ethnic, linguistic, religious, and political diversity of the Confederation. He further emphasizes, in the second lecture, that Swiss national identity is not based on ethnic, linguistic, or geographic nearness. The Confederation is not a nation‐state in which people (Volk) and polity (Staat) coincide. It is a nation composed of many nations. It is a multiethnic “justice‐state” (Rechtstaat) of free peoples and free persons bound by law. It is a political community in which near and distant neighbors are already on their way to one another. It is a “parable of the kingdom” that witnesses, albeit unwittingly, to the task of the nations and the promise of Pentecost. Barth does not coordinate his abstract claim about national commissions in the Dogmatics with his concrete claims about Switzerland’s commission in these wartime writings. Nor does he calibrate his arguments for the historical possibility of Swiss resistance to Nazi aggression in the 1940s with his argument for the hypothetical possibility of Swiss resistance to future aggression in 1950. These omissions are puzzling. Even so, when we fill them in, three things become clear. First, Barth’s overall response to the problem of war is neither a contradiction nor an exception to his response to the problem of nations. It is a consistent iteration of it. In

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“The Protection of Life,” as in “Near and Distant Neighbors,” Barth distinguishes between the content of divine command and the context in which it is received. And he again denies the independent authority of sociocultural (nation) and/or geopolitical (state) nearness. The requirements that follow from relationships of nationhood and statehood are neither foundational nor ultimate. Second, Barth’s claims for Switzerland’s commission are not, as Yoder asserts, sheer voluntaristic judgment or mere patriotic sentiment (Yoder 1970, pp. 75–94). They are a coherent – though not cogent – application of his theology of the nations. Switzerland’s commission subsists in its embodied fulfillment of the task of the nations. Although absent from “Our Church and Switzerland Today,” and silent in “The Protection of Life,” the biblical and theological basis for the Swiss commission is present in “Near and Distant Neighbors.” Third, Barth places constraints on killing that are both stronger and stranger than previously supposed. Stronger, because even satisfaction of conventional just war criteria is insufficient. More is required to justify resort to war. Stranger, because the borderline case is not simply a situation of political emergency. It is an occasion of theological exigency. What justifies resort to war does not, as Biggar suggests, simply boil down to “justice.” Nor does it merely add up to the justice‐state or social democracy (Biggar 1993, pp. 39–40. 169–177). What is at stake is more than the relative justice of two nation‐states, or even the absolute injustice of an antistate. To claim to be commanded to kill in war is, in this case, to claim to be divinely commissioned to bear witness.

Conclusion Barth’s ethics of war follows the covenantal logic of relationship and requirement. Just as Abraham was blessed to become a mighty nation in order to be a blessing to the nations (Genesis 12), some nations are blessed with a divine commission in order to be a blessing to other nations through their witness. This means that, for Barth, self‐ defense is not motivated by patriotic affection for family, friends, and fellow citizens. It is motivated by evangelical mission to strangers and even enemies. The nearest neighbors are not defended for the sake of their nearness or dearness. They are defended for the sake of the distant neighbors in all their unfamiliarity and even hostility. These are curious claims, to say the least. That Barth makes them is beyond doubt. That we should make them our own is doubtful. I myself find the idea of divinely commissioned nations dubious and somewhat dangerous. Dubious, because I think his depiction of the Swiss Confederation is overly optimistic. Dangerous, because I know all too well the mischief and malice that so‐called American exceptionalism has wrought across several centuries. These reservations notwithstanding, we can adapt Barth’s general conception of the call of God to the state to our own social ethics even if we don’t adopt his specific concept of national commissions. Within Barth’s specific concept of Switzerland’s commission, we can discern his general conception of God’s call to the state. For Barth, Switzerland’s commission consists in its embodiment of the basic form of fellow humanity and so in its accomplishment of the task of the nations. Swiss identity is not based on ethnic or linguistic commonality

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but on social and political solidarity. The Swiss Confederation is not a nation‐state (Volksstaat), but a multiethnic and polylinguistic justice‐state (Rechtstaat). It is a state in which the nations are already on their way to and from one another. Although Barth stops short of identifying constitutional democracy as the Christian state‐form, he does not shrink from specifying several analogies between democracy and “the Christian line that comes from the gospel” (CSC, p. 181). What we might make out of this, Barth’s general conception of the state  –  as something liberal, consensual, internationalist – in our time and place is finally more important than what we might make of his specific conception of Switzerland’s commission in his time and place. References Bax, D.S. (2014). The barmen theological declaration: a new translation. In: Christ, Justice and Peace: Toward a Theology of the State (ed. B. Jüngel), xxvii–xxxv. New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark. Biggar, N. (1993). The Hastening that Waits: Karl Barth’s Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bowlin, J. (2010). Barth and Werpehowski on war, presumption, and exception. In: Commanding Grace: Studies in Barth’s Ethics (ed. D.L. Migliore), 83–95. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Clough, D. (2005). Ethics in Crisis: Interpreting Barth’s Ethics. Farnham: Ashgate. McKenny, G. (2010). The Analogy of Grace: Karl Barth’s Moral Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Omi, M. and Winant, W. (1994 [2004]). Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2e, 3e. New York: Routledge. Puffer, M. (2012). Taking exception to the Grenzfall’s reception: revisiting Karl Barth’s ethics of war. Modern Theology 28: 478–502. Werpehowski, W. (2010). Karl Barth and just war: a conversation with Roman Catholicism. In: Commanding Grace: Studies in Barth’s Ethics (ed. D.L. Migliore), 60–82. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Yoder, J.H. (1970). Karl Barth and the Problem of War. Nashville: Abingdon Press.

CHAPTER 67

Barth and Ecumenism Michael Welker

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n the spring of 1962 the young Princeton theologian Charles West invited Karl Barth to contribute to a publication in honor of the ecumenical scholar Willem Adolph Visser ’t Hooft, the first general secretary of the World Council of Churches (1930–1968). Although Barth had been in lively correspondence with Visser ’t Hooft over the years since 1930, he declined the invitation. He wrote: “In ecumenics, I have always been a minor player.” “Theology,” he continued, “is merely being tolerated rather than actually being heard there” (GA 6, p. 51). Six years earlier, however, Visser ’t Hooft had honored Karl Barth with a contribution to his Festschrift, arguing that the ecumenical movement had Barth’s cautionary and critical voice to thank for its current sense of direction. In a memorial service marking Barth’s death in 1968, he reinforced his previous statement. He called Barth a “Pastor Pastorum Oecumenicus” (a pastor to ecumenical pastors) and a “Wegbereiter der Ökumene” (“pioneer of the 20th century ecumenical movement”) (Wolf et al. 1956, pp. 14f.). Whose perspective is on the right track? If we consult Barth’s Church Dogmatics, and look for references to terms and topics regarding ecumenical theology and its leading representatives, we might conclude that Barth did not pay significant attention to the movement and its tasks. A closer look at his life and work, however, and especially at his correspondence with Visser ’t Hooft (GA 43), would suggest a different view.

Ecumenical Engagement from 1922 to 1948 During the 1920s, as a young professor of theology at Göttingen and Münster, Barth set about to clarify the differences between Protestants and Roman Catholics. He ­discovered many theological similarities between Roman Catholicism and modern

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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neo‐Protestantism, declaring that Roman Catholic positions were preferable to most positions of the neo‐Protestants, which he regarded as theologically empty (Matosevic 2005, esp. pp. 21–30). From 1922 on, Barth continued to explore these differences. He examined them in lecture courses on Calvin and on systematic theology (dogmatics) as well as in articles on Christian proclamation and the role of the church. He prepared a formal lecture on “Roman Catholicism: A Question to the Protestant Church.” He offered a seminar on Thomas’s Summa Theologiae. In 1929 he invited the brilliant Jesuit academic Erich Przywara to give a presentation in Münster and enter into discussion with himself and his students. After two intensive days with his guest, Barth wrote to his friend Eduard Thurneysen (9 February 1929), asking, slightly dazed: What is it about Catholicism which, despite all our Reformation celebrations, makes it so lively on the contemporary scene? Is it an angel of the antichrist or an appointed instrument of the Lord? The Grand Inquisitor or a disciple of the apostle to the Gentiles? Is it both at the same time or none of the above? … Somehow I find it healthy for the time being not to have progressed very far beyond an astonishment full of revulsion and admiration …. After all, in this great conflict who can see things from heaven’s vantage point, who can see things rightly? (GA 4, p. 654)

As Lidija Matosevic has shown, Barth’s engagement with Przywara, especially his teaching about the church (Przywara 1929), made an abiding impression on the Reformed theologian’s view of Roman Catholicism and contemporary ecumenical challenges. During Barth’s time in Bonn (1930–1935), and in battles beginning in 1930s with the ideologically corrupted German church, and then in Basel after being deported by the Nazis in 1935, we can discern Barth’s first personal contacts with leaders of the ecumenical movement. The young Dutch General Secretary of the World Student Christian Federation (at that time), Visser ’t Hooft, and the French Reformed pastor, Pierre Maury, would become his ecumenical conversation partners. They invited him to an International Student Conference in 1934 and to attend lectures in Geneva in 1935. In these settings, Barth developed the first structures he would envision for an ecumenical ecclesiology: “The Unity of the Church,” “The Plurality of the Churches,” “The Task of Unifying the Church,” and “The Church within the Churches” (see Herwig 1998, pp. 41–47). When Barth was threatened with expulsion from the university of Bonn, Visser ’t Hooft urged him to take up a teaching post in Geneva, in the hopes of “binding him firmly to the sphere of ecumenical discourse” (Herwig 1998, p. 33). Barth declined, however, not least because he was disappointed that the ecumenical movement was doing so little to support the German Confessing Church in its struggle against the German Christians (Deutsche Christen) and the Third Reich. In May 1934 the Ecumenical Council of Churches admitted the German Protestant Church into the Faith and Order commission, despite Barth, Bonhoeffer, and others having protested that the German Protestant Church was under the control of German Christians who supported the Nazi regime. This step considerably strained Barth’s

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relation to the ecumenical movement as well as his friendship with Visser ’t Hooft. Although they continued their correspondence, at times it now had a nervous edge (GA 43, pp. 40–163). Once World War II broke out, Barth had to realize – it was a painful experience – that the Ecumenical Council of Churches was not going to develop a clear position toward the German Christians and German war‐politics. He therefore started writing a long series of ecumenical circular letters to Christian communities in different countries. In these letters he explained the position and message of the German Confessing Church. He stressed the importance of the “Barmen Theological Declaration” not only for Germany but for the whole ecumenical movement. These letters were published in 1945 under the title Eine Schweizer Stimme (A Swiss Voice) (Herwig 1998, pp. 76–94). For Barth, it was not always easy to explain his position even to his friends and former students. In 1939, for example, he wrote an open letter to the Prague theologian Josef Hromádka, calling for military opposition to the German aggression and expressing the conviction that “every Czech soldier will stand or fall, not only for the freedom of Europe but for the Christian church.” A storm of indignation broke out, and it was not only the National Socialist press that denounced Barth as an evil warmonger. More difficulties were to face Barth as he attempted to explain his views immediately after the war and during the 1950s. He stressed time and again that the church stood “above powers and world‐views,” that it could not allow itself “to be bound in principle by any tradition, ideology or interpretation of history,” and above all that it was bound only to “the one task of preaching the Gospel.” Yet this task had to be tackled in the full candor of faith, “that Jesus Christ also died for the Marxists, yet also for the Capitalists, the Imperialists and the Fascists” (quoted in Hromádka 1969, p. 63). Many could not, and still cannot, understand this position. They just could not comprehend how the preaching of free grace was supposed to be consistent with the very concrete and engaged political statements that were pouring out of Basel from this famous theologian and were then transmitted to the entire world (Herwig 1998).

From Amsterdam 1949 to the Visit in Rome 1966 Barth’s participation in the 1948 Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam was probably the high point of his involvement the ecumenical movement. He had been asked to open the assembly by speaking on the theme: “Man’s Disorder and God’s Design.” Not liking this formulation, he made a move reminiscent of his famous 1919 Tambach lecture, “The Christian in Society.” He turned the tables by insisting that a genuinely theological approach would have to speak first about God’s plan for salvation, and only on that basis about the “chaos” and “disorder” in the world. He warned the assembly that otherwise they might easily slip into the kind of nontheological critique that would end up condoning or even congratulating the world. Instead of focusing on God, instead of taking their bearings from his Word and Spirit, they were in danger of vacillating among a variety of secular plans and human needs. “Only a church receptive to the saving work and word of God in Jesus Christ is in the position to perceive itself as part of this lost world. Only under this presupposition will the church

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expect everything from God whose victorious reign has been inaugurated in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead” (italics added; Herwig 1998, p. 157). Beyond this key contribution, Barth participated constructively in several commissions of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam. In the consultation on “Questions about the Church and its Unity,” he offered suggestions for a hermeneutical approach to ecumenical differences, suggestions that were gratefully received by very different prominent theologians, for instance, the Anglican A.M. Ramsey, the Orthodox Georges Florowsky, and the Lutheran Anders Nygren. His participation in the “Committee of the Life and Work of Women in the Church” was less successful. Nonetheless, Barth admitted that his general view of ecumenical theologians had changed. He admired their search for a genuine theological orientation, their ability to cooperate in constructive ways, and their avoiding the building of factions. He was particularly impressed by what were then called the “younger churches” outside Europe and North America, and he spent a lot of time in discussions with their representatives. Borrowing an image from Luther that God’s Word and Spirit were coming down like a heavy downpour (“ein fahrender Platzregen”), he wrote: it has become clear to me “that while the passing rain shower here in Europe might cease, it would simply mean that in the meantime it has begun to pour somewhere else.” In 1948 he could even describe himself as a “newly converted ecumenist” (“neubekehrter Ökumeniker”) (Herwig 1998, pp. 182–194). The 1950s and 1960s saw a deepening reception of Barth’s theology among leading Roman Catholic theologians. In 1951 Hans Urs von Balthasar published his important book The Theology of Karl Barth: An Exposition and Interpretation, the outcome of 10 lectures on “Karl Barth and Catholicism,” given in Basel in 1948–1949 (Balthasar 1951). Barth himself had attended these lectures and discussed them with his colleague over a glass of wine in his favorite local Restaurant Charon. Then in 1956 two Roman Catholic theologians, one French, the other Swiss, produced major doctoral dissertations on the theology of Karl Barth. The first, by Henri Bouillard, was a monumental tome of 1200 pages, defended at the Sorbonne in a five‐hour examination and published in three volumes. Shortly afterwards, Hans Küng also defended his dissertation on Barth in Paris, although he had written it in Rome. Küng argued that Barth’s doctrine of justification, the flashpoint of the Reformation, was completely compatible with the Roman teaching and thus provided a bridge between Roman Catholicism and Protestant theology. With obvious delight, Barth commented to his son that “a wonderful Catholic contemporary, Küng, the very resolute theologian from Lucerne, has written a text about my doctrine of justification at the Germanicum in Rome, that is to say, under the very nose of his Holiness” (Busch 1998, p. 437). Barth wrote the foreword to the book in which he acknowledged that Küng had presented his own views responsibly and well. “Furthermore, like Noah from the window of my ark, I greet your book as a further clear sign that the great flood of our times is over in which Catholic and Protestant theologians only want to talk, if at all, either polemically against one another, or else in noncommittal pacifism” (Küng 1957, p. 13). In 1959 Barth published some positive remarks about the ecumenical movement in his Church Dogmatics (IV/3, §69.1), which were enthusiastically received by Visser ’t Hooft and other ecumenical theologians (Hoffmann 2004).

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In 1963 the office of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity in Rome asked Barth “indirectly and unofficially” whether he would want to join in the last two sessions of the Second Vatican Council as an external observer. For health reasons, Barth could not go to Rome. In 1966 however, he gave a signal that he would like to come to the Vatican in order to discuss his perspectives on the results of Vatican II He prepared for this visit by intensively studying the decrees and declarations of the council and by drafting a series of questions. On 22 September 1966, the 80‐year old Barth set out for the “Holy City,” where he stayed for one week, accompanied by his wife and a Catholic friend, his medical doctor, Alfred Briellmann. He had several good encounters with the Benedictines and Dominicans and also in particular with Karl Rahner and Josef Ratzinger. A discussion with the Jesuits on the roof of the Pontifical Gregorian University particularly pleased him. An encounter with Cardinal Bea, the director of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, however, did not run as smoothly as the others. Alfred Briellmann reports that the discussion finally came to the topic of the “natural knowledge of God,” which the cardinal defended “in a quiet and measured way.” “Yet in the exchange Karl Barth, a well‐known opponent of this idea, became more and more adamant in his arguments and finally began audibly banging his fist down on the right arm of the chair with every sentence.” With “gentle kicks under the table” Briellmann tried in vain to tone down the theological professor’s agitation (Briellmann 1979, pp. 20f.). At the end of his visit to the Vatican, Barth had a personal audience with Pope Paul VI, an encounter which he summarized as follows: “The Pope had heard that I would prefer to see Joseph, the father of Jesus, regarded as the symbol of the nature and function of the church as opposed to belatedly elevating the ancilla Domini (handmaid of the Lord) to being hailed as the regina caelorum (queen of heaven). He assured me that he would pray for me, that even in my old age I might be granted a still deeper insight into this matter” (Barth 1967, p. 16). Looking back on his visit, Barth remarked that he “returned from Rome as defiantly Protestant as he had been upon his arrival” (Barth 1967, p. 16). But he greatly valued the renewal that was taking place after the Second Vatican Council and above all the renewed attention of Catholic theology to Scripture. In 1967 he published his questions for his Vatican conversation partners and a report about the trip to Rome in a small book entitled Ad limina apostolorum (At the Threshold of the Apostles). He summarized his impressions: “I have met at close range a church and a theology which has been set in motion – the consequences of which are incalculable, slow, but certainly real, and which can no longer be reversed. One can only wish it would be allowed that something similar should occur with us” (Barth 1967, p. 17).

Ecumenism in the Last Years and a Systematic Conclusion On 3 October 1967 Barth wrote to Pope Paul VI thanking him for the hospitality he had received at the Vatican in the previous year and congratulating the Pope on his 70th birthday. In November, a response arrived from the Vatican that was personally signed by the Pope. In January 1968, a gift of books arrived from the Vatican. Barth returned

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his thanks in March and, as we can see from the correspondence in the last years of his life, he was extremely happy about this honor and about his “direct contact with Rome.” At the end of July Barth received two more valuable books via the papal nuncio of the Vatican secretariat. He responded in September with a letter, in part formulated with great humility, addressed to the “Holy Father.” Yet in the second portion he responded to the papal encyclical “Humanae Vitae” (on birth control), released on 25 July 1968. He not only described differences of opinion but also delivered a sharp ­critique. The issue that concerned him was the problem of “natural law.” He thought it generated serious problems within the encyclical  –  in particular its assessment of natural law as a second source of revelation. Many of the encyclical’s Catholic opponents had also appealed to a second source of revelation, namely to individual conscience. Hence Barth found that he could agree neither with the encyclical’s supporters nor with its opponents. “In the long course of my occupation with theology, it has become impossible for me to join with Thomas Aquinas at this point and to follow his path, down which your Holiness yourself, as well as friends and critics (not to mention far too many non‐Roman Catholics) are moving.” With regret, Barth stated that “neither for my part can I reconcile this encyclical with the constitution ‘Dei Verbum’ of the last Council, in which I find no reference to ‘natural law,’ nor with ‘conscience,’ as supposed sources of revelation” (GA 6, p. 501). Cardinal Cicognani was given the task of responding to Barth on the Pope’s behalf. The cardinal did agree with Barth that natural law and conscience are not sources of revelation in the strictest sense (“il est bien évident que la loi naturelle, pas plus que la conscience, ne sont, au sens propre, sources de la Révélation”). However, with appeal to the constitution of the council “Gaudium et Spes” §I 6, he objected that it is also undeniable that human beings, on the basis of their conscience, find a law that they have not given to themselves, but before which they find themselves duty‐bound. Even when this way of recognizing God’s will may often be obscured, that is not to say that it radically leads us astray (“radicalement trompeuse”) (see Barth 1975, pp. 573–574). Barth replied to the cardinal a few days before his death. He argued that the issue they were discussing was “nothing less than the formal and factual question that lies at the base of all Christian ecclesiological and theological thought and speech, a question that has been considered and discussed in the churches of all confessions, of every land and in every century.” He assured the cardinal that he did not wish to dispute the idea that nature and conscience exercise an “influence” on the form that the attesting of divine revelation takes “at all times and in all places.” Yet he asked: “Shouldn’t we agree that a fundamental difference, not merely a contrast, exists between the revelation of God, on the one hand, and nature and conscience, on the other?” (GA 6, p. 535, italics added). For Barth, “God’s revelation is God’s own personal word, as spoken loud and clear, for example, in the epiphany of his Son.” In Psalm 19, he continued, we read that nature and conscience speak “without language, without word, and with a voice we cannot hear.” Thus unless and until they are clarified by divine grace, nature and conscience are incapable of testifying to God’s Word. Barth also appealed to 2 Cor 1:19–20 (here paraphrased): “Jesus Christ was not Yes and No, but through him the Yes was also the Amen.” This affirmation could not be made about nature or conscience. Therefore, argued Barth, we cannot “put ‘nature’ and ‘conscience’ on the same level as revelation,

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as if they were ‘equally divine’ [également divine].” But that is what one encounters in the cardinal’s letter, in the papal encyclical, and also in its opponents. Barth pressed the issue: “Where in Holy Writ does such an equation occur? Where in Holy Writ is this idea permitted to the church, or even postulated?” (Barth 1975, p. 536). Barth made it clear that despite his respect for the reform movement under way in the Catholic church, and despite his joy at the reception of his work in recent Catholic theology, his stand on this fundamental question was firm and had not changed over the decades. At the very outset of his Church Dogmatics, Barth described what happens when an alien belief takes root within the church. The situation is paradoxical. The alien belief assumes the appearance of Christian faith even while its content is contradicted. Following Irenaeus, Barth described this kind of dissonant belief as “heretical” (CD I/1, p. 32). He noted two ways in which Christian faith might fall into conflict with itself; one was Roman Catholic, the other was Protestant. In the Roman Catholic version, a second source of revelation (tradition) is posited “alongside or even in preference to Holy Scripture” (CD I/1, p. 35, italics added). This was the form taken in the sixteenth century by Catholicism in its fight against the Reformation. In the Protestant version, normativity is transferred to some sort of rationality or religious consciousness, again alongside or even in preference to Scripture. This was what Neo‐Protestantism represented in both its pietistic and rationalistic varieties, with “roots in the mysticism of the middle‐ages and the humanistic Renaissance” (CD I/1, p. 34). Compared with this “twofold fact” about Catholicism and Neo‐Protestantism, the secular denial of revelation was “quite irrelevant” (CD I/1, p. 34; cf. Matosevic 2005). Barth departed from Roman Catholicism primarily on the basis of the way he read Thomas Aquinas, the Council of Trent, and contemporary Catholic dogmaticians. He did not deny that Catholicism possessed genuine Christian dimensions. “The concept of the acting God, of that which is radically beyond all human possibilities is taken seriously as the source of dogmatic knowledge, at least in intention” (CD I/1, p. 40). To give Catholicism its due, “the self‐originating and self‐grounded reality of divine revelation was supposed to correspond to a supernatural faith.” Nevertheless, “the God who acted outside of all human possibilities corresponded in the end to a human possibility, one that was supposed to be supernatural, but which was still a human possibility” (CD I/1, p. 40 rev., italics added). In the Catholic idea of revelation, Barth argued, the supernatural becomes natural, grace becomes nature. “The action of God immediately disappears and is taken up into the action of the recipient of grace, that which is beyond all human possibilities changes at once into that which is enclosed within the reality of the church, and the personal act of divine address becomes a constantly accessible relationship” (CD I/1, p. 41 rev.). The idea that grace was a naturally accessible possibility – as opposed to being an ongoing, absolute, and irreducible miracle – was precisely what worried Barth about the analogia entis (analogy of being), a concept he had picked up from Przywara. It implied that a “divine likeness” remained intact even in the fallen human creature. Barth would famously describe this analogy as “the invention of Antichrist.” He saw it as separating him decisively from Roman Catholicism. “I believe that because of it, it is impossible ever to become a Roman Catholic, all other reasons for not doing so being to my mind short‐ sighted and trivial” (CD I/1, p. xiii). Contrary to what is sometimes supposed, Barth never abandoned this worry.

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Understanding the conflict with Roman Catholicism was not a self‐contained pursuit. Ever since his Göttingen years, Barth’s grappling with it was closely connected with his attempt to gain a better grasp of that other “heresy” – Protestant modernism – and to counteract it. He regarded neo‐Protestantism as an alien faith that was even more dangerous, being open to ideological appropriation by nefarious forces. His ­dissociation from Protestant modernism was carried out not only through his conflict with Schleiermacher, though that was primary, but also with other theologians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries under the influence of idealist philosophy. What was it that Barth found so problematic about modern Protestant theology as an interpretation of religious self‐consciousness? He believed that it set up “a domain of being superior to the being of the church, and consequently a domain of technical conceptual problems [wissenschaftlichen Problemzusammenhang] superior to dogmatics” (CD I/1, p. 38 rev.). Revelation came to be regarded as the actualization of a prior religious self‐consciousness. The being of the church became one – and only one – determination of human existence, whether it was called “authentic existence,” “God‐consciousness,” “piety,” or whatever. Given the prior, universal phenomenon of religious self‐consciousness, Christian dogmatic statements became the instance of a larger class. Revelation became the subordinate expression of a merely generic “religion.” It could no longer be considered “from outside all human possibilities, that is, from the acting God himself ” (CD I/1, p. 38, italics added). It could no longer be interpreted in terms of its own unique and irreducible history, and so no longer understood on its own terms. It had to be understood instead “in terms of a general capacity or the general historicity of human existence” (CD I/1, pp. 38–39). Revelation as a function of generic religion, Barth worried, had no indispensable connection to Christ and the gospel. Barth protested against this alien seizure of theology and church, against this anthropocentric embrace, and against the compulsion to adjust revelation to a prior religious self‐consciousness. Over against the two defective forms of faith, whether neo‐ Protestant or Roman Catholic, Barth’s brand of dialectical theology emphasized that God’s free revelation was inaccessible apart from its own operation. The being of the church was dependent, absolutely dependent, on God’s unique activity in Christ and through the Holy Spirit. Theology was not rooted in an accessible phenomenon of religious self‐consciousness that could be transferred away or manipulated. Nor did it become such a phenomenon. To defend the thesis that the actions and decisions of God were not generally accessible, and yet still to speak of God – that was the task which genuine theology had to set for itself. Based on the covenantal promises of God, the church awaited the decision of its Lord regarding the faithfulness of its speech about revelation. It bore witness to God in expectation that the living Word would confirm what the church was commissioned to speak. The church depended not on religious self‐consciousness, but on “the promise of future revelation” as based on “the revelation that had already occurred” (CD I/1, p.  92 rev.). It was called to orient itself again and again to the unique intervention, beyond all human possibilities, promised from above. Barth elaborated his point by referring concretely to proclamation. Modernism had blurred the way that proclamation was distinctive relative to other functions of the

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church. Not only the word, but the actions, the music, the gestures, and so on, were all supposed to convey religious experience. The priority of the Word was lost. Proclamation became one of many expressions in the life of the church, all fundamentally equal in value. The unique content of revelation disappeared. “In relation to God human beings have constantly to let something be said to them, have constantly to listen to something which they constantly do not know and which under no circumstances, and in no sense, can they say to themselves” (CD I/1, p. 61 rev.). Against the Catholic understanding of proclamation, Barth again stressed that God was inaccessible apart from the special operation of revelation. In Catholicism, he thought, the Word was displaced by the sacrament, so that the sacrament became the center of church life. Barth did not deny that proclamation could occur through the sacrament as well as through the sermon. It was indeed the sacrament that made it clear that the word of God was not restricted to the human word as spoken and heard. It made clear that God’s word was not disembodied but truth as reality, and that God’s word had to be proclaimed as his work. It made clear that God acted in his word (CD I/1, pp. 60–61). Nevertheless, for Barth, “the Word is the primary thing” (CD I/1, p. 71). It possesses a supremacy that the sacrament lacks. The Word existed before the sacrament was. The Word stands alone, the sacrament cannot stand alone. The Word is God’s original essence, the sacrament is first aroused by our need. The Word will remain after our need, the sacrament will disappear after our need. With this presupposed, I must say that the Word is the audible sacrament and the sacrament is the visible Word. The Word was before the sacrament. It exists without the sacrament, and will also still exist afterwards. (CD I/1, p. 71 rev.)

For Barth, the sacrament was the visible sign which confirmed the sermon as God’s act. The sermon, not the sacrament, was the constitutive element, “the perspicuous center of the church’s life.” Therefore, he believed that “the sacrament exists for the sake of preaching, not vice versa” (CD I/1, p. 70). Near the end of his dogmatics Barth took up the question of church unity in a brief section of CD IV/3. He affirmed that the divided churches were one in Christ and that their divisions contradicted their reality. They were therefore called to strive for the unity that was already theirs. Ecumenical impulses had been present from the beginning of the modern period, he observed, but recently they “have visibly and palpably increased in strength.” Nevertheless, the ecumenical movement was threatened by several weaknesses. The main one was that the unity of the divided churches ought not to be sought as “an end in itself.” Furthermore there was a perennial ecumenical dilemma. Either loyalty could be maintained at the expense of unity, or else unity could be sought at the expense of loyalty. Although loyalty could be maintained to what had been confessed in the past about “true Christian faith and order and practice,” the danger was that on that basis the ecumenical rifts would never be overcome. On the other hand, if love, friendliness, and tolerance were allowed to triumph for the good of unity, the threat was “an unprincipled and featureless relativization, or even the surrender of insights and convictions previously felt and declared to be necessary” (CD IV/3, pp. 35–38).

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Barth felt that the dilemma might be overcome though a renewed emphasis on the centrality of Christ as attested by Scripture. On that basis the ecumenical movement might become “teleological and dynamic.” Grounded in exegesis and prayer, it would be the search for a “a union which derives from Jesus Christ and is thus union for him, namely, for the attestation of his work in the world and for the world” (CD IV/3, p. 36, italics added). The alternative to unity for its own sake was therefore unity for the sake of witness. It would mean an ecumenical movement understood as coming from Jesus Christ and then directed back to him. That was the standard Barth proposed against which ecumenical developments could be assessed as good or problematic. Barth agreed with the search for alliances and worldwide affiliations, including the associated conferences, organizations, and reports. He affirmed such developments, even though he constantly worried about their becoming ends in themselves, not least at the bureaucratic level. He affirmed these developments even when he saw the “fog of indecision and sterility which envelops … all the ecumenical papers so industriously prepared at Bossey and elsewhere.” Too often they displayed a lack of clarity about what “the church has to proclaim to the disorder of secular politics and economics as the message of salvation” (CD IV/3, p. 37). In any case he valued the new ecumenical beginnings. Faced with the world’s turning from the gospel, by church was responding by turning toward the world. Faced with the world’s need for reconciliation on many levels, the church had taken the lead. To sum up: for Barth the ecumenical movement and the search for church unity ought never to become an end in itself, because the church was not an end in itself. The church existed only in service to the living Christ. Its unity had to derive from him. The mission of the church was to bear witness in the world to God’s love for the world. With this insight Barth became a leading thinker of the ecumenical movement despite his existence on its margins. He constantly emphasized the special operation of revelation in the church’s witness to Christ. He stood for two things above all: scriptural exegesis and an absolute dependence on grace beyond all human possibilities. This twofold conviction was in accord with the basic insight by which he had moved throughout his career against Roman Catholicism and Protestant modernism. The true and blessed unification of the church could not be an end in itself, nor could it be it the result of human plans and efforts. It could emerge only from testimony to the self‐revelation of God and would be, in the end, a divine gift.1

References Balthasar, H.U.V. (1951). Karl Barth: Darstellung und Deutung Seiner Theologie. Köln: Verlag Jakob Hegner. Barth, K. (1967). Ad limina apostolorum. Zurich: EVZ.

Barth, K. (1975). Briefe 1961–1968 (ed. J. Fangmeier). Zurich: Theologischer Verlag. Briellmann, A. (1979). Karl Barth als okumenischer Christ. In: Das theologische Erbe Karl Barths und die Kirche von heute:

1  This chapter is a revised and partly extended version of Welker 2004.

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Erinnerungsfeier zum 10. Todestag von Karl Barth. Zurich: Theologischer Verlag. Busch, E. (1998). Die große Leidenschaft: Einführung in die Theologie Karl Barths. Gutersloh: Kaiser. Herwig, T. (1998). Karl Barth und die Ökumenische Bewegung: das Gespräch zwischen Karl Barth und Willem Adolph Visser ’t Hooft auf der Grundlage ihres Briefwechsels 1930–1968. Neukirchen‐ Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag. Hoffmann, K. (2004). Die große ökumenische Wegweisung: die Bedeutung der Versöhnungsethik Karl Barths für die ökumenische Bewegung im konziliaren Prozess für Gerechtigkeit, Frieden und Bewahrung der Schöpfung heute. Frankfurt/ Main: Lang Verlag. Hromádka, J. (1969). Evangelium für Atheisten. Zurich: Arche.

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Küng, H. (1957). Rechtfertigung: Die Lehre Karl Barths und eine katholische Besinnung. Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag. Matosevic, L. (2005). Lieber katholisch als neuprotestantisch: Karl Barths Rezeption der katholischen Theologie 1921–1930. Neukirchen‐Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag. Przywara, E. (1929). Das katholische Kirchenprinzip. Zwischen den Zeiten 7: 277–302. Welker, M. (2004). Karl Barth: from fighter against the “Roman heresy” to leading thinker for the ecumenical movement. Scottish Journal of Theology 57: 434–450. Wolf, E., Kirschbaum, C.v., and Frey, R. (eds.) (1956). Antwort: Festschrift zum 70 Geburtsag von Karl Barth. Zurich: Evangelischer Verlag.

CHAPTER 68

Barth and Roman Catholicism Amy Marga

The Great War and the Fate of Protestant Christianity European Protestants and Catholics did not have the friendliest relationship at the turn of the twentieth century. The glory days of the Holy Roman Empire were behind it; Catholicism had been sidelined. Protestantism ruled the day in countries like Germany and Switzerland. In the long nineteenth century, Napoleon secularized France. Meanwhile in Germany, Bismarck waged an anti‐Catholic Kulturkampf in the 1870s, and the Catholics themselves fought bitter internal battles over culture and dogma. Average Catholics mostly lived in ghettos of low‐educated, marginalized communities, while Protestant professors filled university posts. But with the outbreak of World War I, things began to change. Soldiers from both Protestant and Catholic communities felt ecstasy, adventure, and excitement. They fought side by side: Protestants proudly fighting for Altar and Throne and Catholic men enlisting to show their loyalty to the State. Karl Barth began his theological career in this kind of environment. But in the tragic aftermath of the Great War, there were grave doubts about Protestantism’s ability to steady a traumatized and tattered country like Germany. For young pastors like Karl Barth, theology on the continent had not only lost its footing but also its credibility. European Protestants became deeply disillusioned about the church’s ability to cope with the postwar crises facing Germany. They often turned to psychology, philosophy, history or the natural sciences to talk about God in a modern, industrialized age. They sought to explain how a supernatural divinity could be real in a secular world that had essentially fallen apart. The longing for some kind of objectively divine presence drove the trend toward spiritual creativity and toward bold new forms of community. Forward‐thinking Catholics like Romano Guardini and Karl Adam paved the way for Catholicism to reengage modern German culture. On both the

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Catholic and Protestant side, people were ready for a new kind of exchange that would challenge the entrenched theology of both sides.

Early Engagements: Erich Przywara and Erik Peterson Barth’s Romans Commentary was an early opportunity for such a new kind of exchange. His nondogmatic, loosely systematic treatment of Paul’s letter to the Romans was in many ways typically Protestant with its prejudice against the “Gothic and Thomas” of European Catholicism (GA 16, p. 443). But Barth also held on to a commitment that many of his Protestant colleagues no longer shared in quite the same way: he was still committed to the living presence of God in the modern world. He still believed that the Christian God was a real presence whose act in Jesus Christ changed the course of history. While Barth’s Protestant colleagues grappled with his unconventional treatment of New Testament, young Roman Catholic scholars were warming up to his commitment to the Bible and to God’s living presence in the world. Barth’s close friend Eduard Thurneysen pointed out to him the growing Catholic interest in his work (GA 4, p. 190). Barth was thrilled by the “unexpected” Catholic attention, especially that of the Polish Jesuit, Erich Przywara (RII, p. 21). But Przywara had a profound critique of the Romans Commentary. To him, the dialectical theology represented by Barth, Eduard Thurneysen, Rudolf Bultmann, and Friedrich Gogarten seemed to prioritize God’s cosmic No to all of creation. Przywara saw this divine No as a “genuine rebirth of Protestantism:” it began with Martin Luther and inevitably ended in the nihilistic faith of Friedrich Nietzsche (Przywara 1923, p. 351). In articles written in the popular Catholic academic journal, Stimmen der Zeit, Przywara engaged Barth’s work in a serious and systematic way. Barth was intrigued by Pryzwara’s critiques, and the Jesuit’s work would occupy him for much of the 1920s. Both thinkers seemed to be committed to the same basic thing, namely, that God was a living, moving, divine Subject, with an existence that was independent from the world. God was not the product of human subjectivity or historical ideals. Nor was God the product of the believer’s imagination. And faith did not exist simply for its own sake. Przywara’s critique caused Barth to carefully consider his articulation of God’s divine No. At stake was nothing less than the doctrine of God and the meaning of the Incarnation. Barth’s ambivalence toward Roman Catholicism had now turned into a serious interest. He received Thomas’s Summa from his brother, Heinrich, for Christmas in1924, and started reading pages and pages of Thomas’s theology “pell‐mell” alongside neo‐Protestant authors (GA 4, p. 243). He ventured into a Thomas seminar offered by his colleague, Erik Peterson at the University of Göttingen. Through these explorations and his own teaching, Barth’s theology began to take on a more organized and structured form, evolving into a dogmatic style. He became even more curious about Roman Catholic dogmatic theology. Even though some of his friends in the dialectical theology movement were perplexed by Barth’s new interests, it was in this fruitful period that he began to discover just how lively and graceful the God of Roman Catholicism really was.

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Karl Barth in the Catholic City of Münster 1925–1929 When Barth moved from Göttingen to a new position at the University of Münster in 1925, he found himself working among living, practicing Catholics. The Westphalian city breathed Roman Catholic culture. He joined a local theological discussion group comprised of highly educated lay Catholics that included a fellow lecturer at the university, Bernhard Rosenmöller, and the university chaplain, Robert Grosche. Even the editor of the local newspaper, Gottfried Hasenkamp, joined them. Their regular evening discussions brought them together in each other’s living rooms where they explored topics from divine grace to human faith. They found common ground in shared doctrinal commitments like the Trinity; they agreed to disagree on topics like Mary. This intimate dialogue circle became the impetus for Barth to reach even further beyond Protestant theology more deeply into the theology of the Reformers in order to clarify his own commitments. Barth’s participation in this group of Catholic thinkers was a bold step. His prominence as a Protestant theologian and his scholarly interest in Catholicism signaled that Protestantism had something at stake in the relationship once more. Catholic theology stood to become the kind of legitimate conversation partner perhaps not seen since the Reformation itself. Catholicism was slowly moving from the margins of modern society back toward its center. In this heady atmosphere of theological exchange, Barth began a new cycle of lectures on dogmatic theology in the winter semester of 1926 in which he took seriously several theological concerns central to Roman Catholicism. In these lectures, which can informally be called the “Münster dogmatic lectures,” he dealt with the theology of the First Vatican Council as it compared to Protestant theology. In unexpected ways, Barth also acknowledged the Catholic commitments to creation, and he explored the idea of creaturely reality as the arena where grace and nature interact. He recognized the goals of Roman Catholic natural theology and tested Protestant theology for some form of the analogia entis. He even considered the idea that creation could be a presupposition to reconciliation. The ecumenical spirit with which Barth engaged Catholic theology in the Münster dogmatic lectures was not simply about friendliness. Nor did it aim to smooth over Catholic‐Protestant differences. Barth explored Catholic theology of the First Vatican Council and Book I of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica out of a sense that his own theology had open questions and unfinished agendas. This was not ecumencity for its own sake but rather a season in which Barth was intensely working to deepen the foundations of his own constructive thought. He found himself working through several issues that overlapped with Catholic theology such as the legitimate grounds for a natural theology (GA 4, p. 211) and the grace–nature relationship. Like the Catholics, Barth was keenly interested in naming how God becomes an objective reality to be known within creation for a world that was rapidly secularizing. This was an open question in Barth’s mind at this point in his thought, for he had not yet fully and self‐consciously connected God’s act of revelation directly to God’s act of reconciliation in the events of election and the incarnation. He was still working with assumptions that gave creation a role in the incarnation. With this assumption in place, it is no wonder that Barth was open to Catholic thought, for they too, held that the incarnation presupposes creation. Barth and his Catholic interlocutors had this starting point in common.

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Barth came to realize that he could not encounter Roman Catholic theology with any good modern Protestant ideas: he had to encounter it as a Reformation theologian. He had to reach back into Reformation commitments about grace, God, and faith to be a good conversation partner to Catholicism. This is evident in the series of public lectures that Barth gave in 1928 that included the titles of The Concept of the Church, and Roman Catholicism as a Question to the Protestant Church. In these lectures, Barth worked through the ideas of nature and grace and the way that Catholicism and Protestantism are bound together by God’s objective work.

Exploring the Analogia Entis with Erich Przywara Although he was developing more consistent arguments from Reformation theology, the topic of grace and nature continued to occupy Barth, and he brought these questions to the classroom. As his exploration expanded, Barth dove back into the theology of Thomas Aquinas, offering a seminar on Book I of Thomas’ Summa Theologica in 1929. The seminar represents something of a high point in Barth’s relationship with Catholicism in that decade. It led him to consider Erich Przywara’s work more closely, and he had the class read Przywara’s monograph, Religionsphilosophie katholischer Theologie. This prepared them for the highlight of the seminar, a visit by the Jesuit himself. It was during this visit that Barth gained a key insight into Przywara’s use of the analogia entis – a central theological concept that Przywara utilized to express his own modern Catholic theology. In Przywara’s thought, the analogia entis was the linchpin behind Catholic theology because it described the relationship that grace has to nature. Through the use of analogy, Catholic theology described God’s creating and reconciling activity as well as the human response to it. Przywara argued that the analogia entis is a peaceful concept, not because it is a static, metaphysical concept but because it describes God’s reconciling and atoning activity within the created order. It describes how the created order is moving toward similarity to God while remaining ever dissimilar to God. It points toward the peace in the God‐human relationship that grows out of creation and reconciliation. But by this time, Barth’s suspicions were growing stronger about the peaceful way that Catholic grace and nature interacted. He reached further into Reformation theology to respond to Przywara’s use of the analogia entis, drawing heavily from the theology of the Lutheran simul iustus et peccator and Paul’s letter to the Romans, especially chapter 7. He argued that there can be no peace between God and the human because sin is constantly curving humanity in on itself and disrupting the relationship of God and humanity. The only peace that comes between the human sinner and God is the peace of the newly created person through the Holy Spirit. But it is a hard‐won peace because God’s grace never stops actively working on fallen creation and human sinners. To speak of a peaceful analogy – or a peaceful similarity in dissimilarity – between God and the human runs the risk of overlooking people as actual, active sinners. Humans commit concrete sins that need God’s actual grace. Indeed, the “actualism” seen in Barth’s thought is on full display at this time in his career. God’s being is an act of grace that operates upon the human being moment by moment. Grace does not just perfect sinful humanity; it actually creates a new person

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out of the sinful person. Theology cannot speak of a peaceful economy between the fallen world and God without first speaking of the way that God’s grace works creatively upon the human mind. This commitment to the renewing of the mind became central to Barth’s theology. In contrast to the Catholic notion of God’s economy of grace, Barth argued from the Reformation understanding of sin and grace. The Reformation drama of killing sin and making the human alive questioned Thomas’ peaceful, seamless exchange between divine grace and created nature. Barth argues in two lectures from 1929, Fate and Idea in Theology and The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life, that the true analogia entis exists only when God creates that similarity  –  in ever greater dissimilarity – between grace and nature. Barth also drew on the Reformation understanding of faith in order to counter the emphasis on being in Catholic thought. His evolving ideas converged in 1931 in his book on Anselm, Fides quaerens intellectum, which on some level was also influenced by his friendship with the Catholic analytic philosopher, Heinrich Scholz. In this short book Barth took a definitive stance against the analogia entis. He proposed an analogy of faith rather than an analogy of being. He argued for the objectivity of God based on the knowledge of faith in contrast to the objectivity of God in created nature – no matter how “graced” that nature might be. Fides quaerens intellectum was clearly Barth’s Protestant stake in the ground. Although he was indebted to Catholic theology, Barth’s turn to Anselm was a turn away from Aquinas for the time being. It was a clear rejection of the Catholic assumptions about grace and nature, faith and being.

Karl Barth Under Pressure: Leaving Germany Events in Germany took a calamitous turn in the early 1930s with the rise of Adolf Hitler. Barth moved from Münster to a teaching post in Bonn, and by this time, his engagement with Catholicism became less irenic and more polemical. Although Barth offered another seminar on Catholic theology in 1932, he was not seeking to have a friendly exchange but rather to argue against Catholic ideas. In the seminar, The Problem of Natural Theology, Barth made his view clear: the analogia entis represented a relationship between nature and grace that did not take sin seriously. However indirectly, the slippery concept of analogy could ultimately lead to “natural theology” – a Christian concept that the Nazis were in the process of hijacking. The pressures on Barth grew from many sides. Not only was he under scrutiny by the Nazi regime, he was also suffering under criticism from other liberal Protestant theologians. By this time, the paths of the dialectical theologians such as Friedrich Gogarten and Georz Merz split off from Barth. Other prominent Protestant thinkers such as Georg Wobbermin began attributing recent conversions to Catholicism to Barth’s “so‐called dialectical theology” (GA 35, p. 214). The converts were none other than Barth’s Protestant colleagues, Erik Peterson and Oskar Bauhofer. These developments led Barth to include an angry condemnation of the analogia entis in the 1932 preface to the first volume of his new project, the Church Dogmatics. This was yet another opportunity for him to stake out a Protestant position against Catholic theology. However, it did not bear the kind of fruit that perhaps was needed during these turbulent years. Barth’s outburst

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called the analogia entis an “invention of the Antichrist” (CD I/1, p. xiii). (To his credit however it was apparently the only thing stopping him from becoming Catholic.) This harsh tone consequently brought his groundbreaking dialogue with Catholic colleagues to a screeching halt. When Przywara asked Barth in that same year to review his new book, titled Analogia Entis, Barth declined. Shortly afterward, Barth lost his position in Bonn and was forced out of Germany. He returned to his native Basel in 1935. Unfortunately, Barth’s harsh language in the preface to the first volume of the Church Dogmatics became a hallmark of his feelings about Catholic theology. Decades later, in 1964, during a conversation with theology students at the University of Tübingen about the analogia entis, Barth would acknowledge the unfortunate effects of his angry tone. He explained to the group that his comments were never meant to be anything more than “polemical splashes” (GA 28, p. 89) in a heated political time. They were never intended to be his defining thoughts on Roman Catholicism.

Barth’s Critique of Catholic Epistemology The angry rhetoric aside however, Barth did have a legitimate worry about the analogia entis. It seemed to him that it was just another iteration of what he saw as Catholicism’s most profound mistake. Catholic epistemology traveled down one particular path to gain knowledge of God the Creator and Lord but it took another path to gain knowledge of God’s act of reconciliation. Knowledge of the Creator came through nature and philosophical contemplation whereas knowledge of God’s saving grace came through Jesus Christ. The Catholics did not seem to hold, as he did, that God’s revelation itself was an event of reconciliation and, likewise, that God’s act of reconciliation in Christ was God’s revelation. There was only one way to come to know God, and that was through God’s own self‐revelation as Reconciler: through reconciliation God comes to be known as Creator. Barth explains his suspicion in Church Dogmatics II/1 that Catholicism always starts with knowledge of God as Lord and Creator. This means it has no real need for Jesus Christ to reveal anything about God or God’s grace. In other words, Catholic epistemology was a “special theology of the first article, grounded and established in itself ” according to Barth (CD II/1, p. 80). It was philosophical knowledge, not faith knowledge. It was not based on God’s revelation of Jesus Christ but could arise from nature. It did not require that the human mind be transformed by Christ. Protestant theological epistemology is based on faith – the analogia fidei. It is a different kind of knowledge than the knowledge of history, philosophy, or any other discipline; it does not arise out of being or out of the self‐consciousness about being created. Christians make sense of their religious experiences by encountering God’s own being in sources like the person of Jesus Christ, Scripture, and preaching. Romantic idealism, philosophy, creaturely nature, poetics, analogies from experience, or even church councils could never get us to God who is the Father of Jesus Christ. Barth was never sure that Catholicism understood revelation in the same way as he did despite their strong commitment to God’s work in the world. And he was not certain at this point that they understood what was at stake by not putting Jesus Christ as the

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center and starting point of all theological knowledge. By starting with knowledge of the Creator, Roman Catholicism had little room for allowing God alone to define divinity and humanity through Jesus Christ. Roman Catholic moral theology (ethics) came under the same kind of judgment. Barth again pointed to the analogia entis to show how Catholic moral theology fails to take into consideration God’s actual work on human sinners. Christian ethics must derive from proper knowledge of God through the transformation of the human mind in Jesus Christ. Catholic theology makes the mistake of placing the human into a relationship with God, analogia entis, prior to the transformative and creative power of Jesus Christ. This was unacceptable to Barth. Theological ethics can only derive from God’s own “divine praxis” in Jesus Christ (CD II/2, p. 531). By the mid‐1930s, as Barth brought his teachings about Trinity and election to mature expression, he definitively moved away from the assumptions about the incarnation and creation that he previously had held, however lightly, in common with Catholic theology. God’s divinity is determined by God’s own action as the One who elects Jesus Christ eternally. God is the One who comes into the far country for the sake of us sinners. This is who God is. The Trinity contains in itself the objectivity and the created “otherness” of Jesus Christ, as Barth spells out in Church Dogmatics II/1. Therefore the ground of the incarnation need not lie in the creaturely world but rather in God’s own eternal, Triune being and God’s eternal act of election, which Barth lays out in Church Dogmatics II/2. Once Barth came to these conclusions, he presented Catholicism with a thoroughgoing Protestant view of God’s objective reality in the world. From here on out, his criticism of Catholic theology consistently turned on Trinity, election, and revelation in Jesus Christ.

Barth’s Theology for New Generation of Catholics As Barth was turning away from his sustained engagement with Catholic thought, young Catholic theologians were turning toward him. Barth’s theology became a must‐ read for up and coming Catholic thinkers in the 1930s for his work offered a “solid basis” for better understandings between Catholics and Protestants (Rosato 1986, p. 660). It attracted scholars such as Jakob Fehr, Georg Feuerer, and the Protestant, Gottlieb Söhngen. After World War II, Barth engaged the analyses of his work by Catholic scholars such as Jerome Hâmer and Henri Bouillard. Barth did all this under the delightful suspicion that his thought was being introduced into Catholic thought in a subversive fashion. A new generation of ecumenically minded Catholics were doing theology with his Reformation commitments in mind. In his view, they were offering more meaningful critiques of his work than Protestants at this point (GA 13, p. 5). Although Barth had turned from Aquinas to Anselm in the early 1930s, he never fully left the Angelic Doctor behind. Thomas had always represented more to him than just an outdated version of Catholicism. Thomas’s medieval theology was a living, breathing conversation partner even though much of Aquinas’s thought came to Barth by way of thinkers as varied as the philosophically minded Erich Przywara and the traditional dogmatician, Bernhard Bartmann.

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Nevertheless, as many scholars on both the Catholic and Protestant sides have shown, Barth and Thomas have much in common. Theologians like George Lindbeck have argued that they both worked to show how theology plays a “unifying” role among different forms of discourse (White and McCormack 2013, p. 7). They also both argued that theology is the most useful discipline for making meaning in the lives of secular people. This sets Barth apart from many of his liberal Protestant contemporaries who tended to draw from other modern disciplines rather than reach back into medieval Christianity. However, other contemporary Barth scholars in the English‐speaking world such as Bruce McCormack have also emphasized the differences between Barth and Aquinas, arguing that Barth prioritized a revival of the confessional tradition of sixteenth‐century Reformation theology rather than consistently seeking to find common ground. There is truth in both views. Barth also took seriously doctrines that Protestants had long left behind, like Mariology. Taking a classical Protestant stance on Mary and the Virgin Birth, Barth affirmed that her own flesh bestowed on Jesus Christ his real, actual human flesh. She experienced a normal human birth and gave birth to a real human son. However, she also was a virgin. Barth maintained the classical Christian doctrine of the virgin birth because it was a doctrine that clearly shows the mystery of God’s revelation: no human cooperation works in God’s acts of revelation. Hence, Barth could affirm language of Mary as Mother of Christ, the theotokos. She plays a role in mystery of Jesus Christ as vere Deus vere homo, namely, she is part of a “legitimate expression of christological truth” (CD I/2, p. 138). Mary as the Queen of Heaven, on the other hand, Barth soundly rejected. By no means was she mediatrix or corredemptrix. Barth saw such a veneration of the mother of God in the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception as “arbitrary” and excessive (CD I/2, p. 141). It suggests that the human creature can somehow cooperate with God in grace and be a part of his or her own redemption. Drawing upon the Magnificat, Barth showed that Mary’s own biblical words speak against the Catholic veneration of her – for she points to God and not to herself. She does not declare that she is blessed, but rather declares that others will bless her (CD IV/2, p. 188). There was also no evidence – or need – for the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Against the modern Mariology he encountered in the works of contemporaries like Franz Diekamp, Karl Adam, and Bernhard Bartmann, Barth argued that where Mary is venerated, “there the Church of Christ is not” (CD I/2, p. 143). But in sticking to strictly doctrinal expressions of Mary, Barth excluded any kind of exploration of art, history, and piety to understand Mary’s importance to average Christians. He did not explore the profound role that Mary played as comforter or as helper in the Middle Ages when Christ was seen as an exacting Judge of whom to be frightened. Mary was the intercessor in these dark centuries when Christ demanded punishment for human sin. This Protestant blind spot to Mary’s role in the Christian imagination of grace and reconciliation placed limits on Barth’s views when it came to understanding just how broad and inclusive the spiritual‐theological center of Catholic theology was. Further, with Mary at the center, Catholic thought made room for women’s roles in God’s own saving activity, despite the church hierarchy’s refusal of female leadership. Barth’s views on women and the limits of the dogmatic theology that he studied prevented him from exploring these aspects of Mariology.

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Open to Hope: Hans Urs Von Balthasar and Hans Küng on Barth Almost 20 years after Barth called the analogia entis an invention of the Antichrist, he found himself thrust into a new and rather exciting relationship with the Catholic theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar. Von Balthasar was a younger contemporary (and student of Erich Przywara’s) who also lived in Basel. It was a relationship conducive to all sides. Von Balthasar’s insightful analysis of Barth’s work “grabbed” him “by the coat” (GA 28, p. 89), and he went to hear the series of lectures that von Balthasar was giving on Barth’s theology. According to later Catholics, von Balthasar’s book pulled the Catholic reaction to Barth out of the stagnation of the 1930s and 1940s (Foley 1961, p. 137) and began a new chapter in Protestant‐Catholic dialogue. Von Balthasar’s lecture series was published as a book in 1951 titled The Theology of Karl Barth. In it, he argued that Barth’s Christology itself contained the kind of analogia entis that Catholicism held at its heart. But Barth’s Christology was too narrow for von Balthasar, and he labeled Barth’s theology as christomonist. Although Barth rejected the christomonism label, he nevertheless agreed that von Balthasar got many things right about his theology. Namely, at every point of the Christian system, the center and subject was to be Jesus Christ. Through his abiding engagement with von Balthasar, Barth began to see the possibilities of common ground on the issue of the analogia entis. There were ways that Catholicism understood the analogia entis as growing out of God’s act of electing to be God in and through Jesus Christ. This matched the epistemological foundation that Barth had insisted upon for decades. It also meant that the Catholics understood God’s divinity and God’s being‐in‐act in a way that was compatible with his own Protestant theology. Barth chose to name the analogy that von Balthasar found in Barth’s Christology the analogia relationalis, but he conceded later to the Tübingen theology students in 1964 that perhaps the difference is not such a big one at all. This common ground went deeper with the work of the young Hans Küng, another Catholic who drew upon Barth’s theology. A forward‐thinking theologian, Küng took seriously secular society, ecumenism, and the faith of the Catholic Church. He published a groundbreaking analysis of Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation titled Justification: The Doctrine of Karl Barth and a Catholic Reflection in 1964. In it Küng argued compellingly that Barth’s presentation of the Reformation understanding of justification by faith was not qualitatively different from that of the Council of Trent – and that in fact Barth had learned from Catholic theology as his work developed. He invited Barth to write the foreword to the book. Barth was so persuaded by Küng’s thought that he happily obliged. If Küng’s research was sound, he mused, then the tridentine doctrine of justification indeed looked a lot like Barth’s own Protestant view.

From the Second Vatican Council to the Joint Declaration of the Doctrine of Justification Barth’s interactions with modern Catholic thinkers like Hans Küng and von Balthasar were an important milestone in modern ecumenical dialogue projects of the twentieth century. Throughout the ebbs and flows of Barth’s relationship with Rome, his life was

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a witness to the gradual but radical transformation of Catholic theology. It was moving in a crescendo up to the most important ecclesiastical event of the twentieth century: The Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). And this signaled a new kind of hope for Barth. Barth’s theology had penetrated into the heart of Catholicism and he followed the proceedings carefully, setting up an entire bookshelf in his library just for the publications and proceedings from the council and Catholic thinkers. He was invited in 1963 by Cardinal Augustin Bea to participate as an observer in the proceedings. Unfortunately, he was not physically fit enough to attend but he faithfully read all the news and texts that came out of the council. He did finally get a chance to visit with Cardinal Bea in Rome in 1966 to discuss the significance of the council. Barth was received by Pope Paul VI as well. In many ways, his interest in Vatican II brought his relationship to Catholicism full circle. Just as he had looked earlier to Roman Catholic theology as the blade upon which to sharpen his own thought, Roman Catholics were now considering his theology to inform their decisions. His sentiments about this historical moment for the Christian faith are captured in a short monograph Ad Limina Apostolorum (1967). In it, Barth celebrated the new movement of Catholic theology. And in typical fashion, he did not hesitate to pose his own set of critical questions to it. Although seeing with clear eyes that he still had disagreements with Catholic theology, Barth had an uncanny sense that Catholicism was looking to the future of modernity in a way that Protestantism perhaps never had. Catholics were deeply engaging in cultural developments, from the popes down to the most average lay person. The ecumenical curiosity that prompted Barth to engage Catholic theology in the first place blossomed and evolved into a serious ecumenical relationship after his death in the decades after Vatican II. The openness that Barth displayed in the early decades of the twentieth century culminated in a high point of Roman Catholic and Protestant relationships at the very end of the century. Namely, the two church bodies came together on 31 October 1999 – 70 years after Barth first invited Erich Przywara into his classroom – to sign the Joint Doctrine of the Doctrine of Justification (JDDC). This historical document, which affirms common ground on issues like God’s reality in the world, grace, and faith, was signed by the Catholic Church’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and the Lutheran World Federation.1 Barth’s theology is unquestionably a source of this profound historical rapprochement between Catholics and Protestants. His early engagement with a newly awakening Catholicism after World War I, his serious consideration of Catholic dogma and doctrine, his engagement with Hans Urs Von Balthasar and Hans Küng’s theology, and his acknowledgement that post‐Conciliar Catholicism was a part of the fabric of modern European society helped Catholicism rise to a new level of religious and moral authority in Europe. Barth’s continued and steady engagement in Catholicism as a living faith tradition that honored its roots and faced modernity head on has allowed Protestants to become trustworthy conversation partners to Rome.

1  The JDDC was formally endorsed by the World Methodist Council in 2006 and by the World Communion of Reformed Churches in 2017.

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Conclusion Karl Barth participated in the birth of a Catholicism whose future held the rise of liberation theology in South America, cell churches, and martyrs against corrupt governments. It saw profound changes to Catholic liturgy and a renewed engagement in politics and society. His theological heritage helped produce faithful Catholic leaders who still believe deeply in God’s presence in the world, such as Pope Francis I, who insists that God’s revelation is alive and real in the world. It is an open question as to how Barth would have treated Catholicism had he explored it in its expansive nature and international footprint. He engaged primarily in European Catholic theology and its historical doctrines and dogma. He did not bring Catholic political movements or American Catholic developments into the grid of his own theology. He did not show much interest in the ways that American Catholic theology or Catholic communities abroad contributed to mystical and prophetic theology, nor did he deeply explore social Catholic movements and their theology. The major and abiding work of American Catholic thinkers like Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, or the Catholic Worker movement did not really influence Barth’s understanding of the liveliness of Catholic dogma and tradition. One wonders what he would make of the deep humanism that was at the center of those pre‐Conciliar movements and the ways that they fed into Vatican II. Based on his own political commitments to forms of political and economic socialism, it seems that Barth would celebrate the bold Catholic perspectives today by those who stand up to power like the Nuns on the Bus, the encyclicals of Pope Francis, or the myriad of Catholic organizations that lobby for and work for the poor and disenfranchised. But because Barth’s engagement was limited to theology as a scientific and doctrinal pursuit, it is difficult to say how he would judge these movements today. Perhaps Barth’s theology might have been richer were his engagement in these living theologies more intentional in his day. Yet the curiosity that he displayed early in his career about those Catholics “over there” blossomed into something in Christianity and European culture that no one could have imagined in the aftermath of the Great War. References Foley, G. (1961). The Catholic Critics of Karl Barth. Scottish Journal of Theology 14: 136–155. Przywara, E. (1923). Gott in uns oder über uns? Stimmen der Zeit 105: 343–362.

Rosato, P.J. (1986). The influence of Karl Barth on Catholic Theology. Gregorianum 67: 659–678. White, T.J.O.P. and McCormack, B. (eds.) (2013). Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: An Unofficial Catholic‐Protestant Dialogue. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

CHAPTER 69

Barth and Eastern Orthodoxy John P. Burgess

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oth Karl Barth and Eastern Orthodox Christianity are deeply concerned with the relation of theology and church practice (lex orandi, lex credendi), and a comparison of their respective approaches can be fruitful for Christian theology more generally. Although Barth and Orthodoxy agree that thinking the faith and living the faith are integrally related, Barth and Orthodoxy relate them in different ways, and these differences raise larger questions about who God is and about how a person comes to know God. For Barth, theology helps the church encounter Jesus Christ as a living Word who addresses us today through the Scriptures. In contrast, Orthodoxy asks believers to immerse themselves in the church’s inherited practices of worship, prayer, and ascesis (rigorous spiritual discipline) in order to know God and to enter into his life (what Orthodoxy has called theosis, or “deification”).

Interactions Between Barth and Orthodoxy We have no evidence that Karl Barth ever stepped into an Orthodox church, attended an Orthodox liturgy, or visited an Orthodox monastery. Moreover, his encounters with Orthodox thinkers were fleeting and unproductive. After Father Georges Florovsky delivered a paper to Barth’s students in Bonn, Barth wrote, “I did not have an overwhelming impression that we really needed this Oriental theology” (Baker 2016, p. 67). Barth also spoke negatively of Nicholas Berdyaev’s philosophy; by one account, he called it “more Platonic than evangelical” (Cocksworth 2016, p. 218). And at the 1948 World Council of Churches Assembly in Amsterdam, Barth assigned his Orthodox “friends” to an “extreme right wing” whose thinking was so dense that they “­threatened to disappear in the fog” (Barth 1949, p. 12).

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Barth was, of course, deeply familiar with the patristic theology that is foundational to Orthodox thinking, and some of his comments on Roman Catholic thought and practice (such as his rejection of hierarchical church structures) apply to Orthodoxy as well. In addition, Barth was aware of Orthodox participation in the ecumenical movement and had limited knowledge of the situation of the Orthodox Church in the Soviet Union. But nowhere in the Church Dogmatics do we find a direct engagement with Orthodoxy and its practices of worship, pilgrimage, or monasticism. Nor have Orthodox thinkers extensively engaged Barth. In an appendix to his popular book, For the Life of the World, North America’s leading Orthodox theologian of the twentieth century, Father Alexander Schmemann, refers to “Barthianism” only in passing and as a typical western theology that wrongly separates the spiritual and the natural (Schmemann 1988, p. 129), though it is possible that his heavy emphasis on the category of “witness” may owe something to Barth (Schmemann 1987). Orthodoxy in Russia and Eastern Europe, where it has traditionally been strongest, was cut off from western theological thinking during the time of communism, and, hence, from Barth’s work. Although some of Barth’s works have appeared in Russian since the fall of the Soviet Union, Orthodox theological education has reestablished itself in its traditional setting, the monastery, and study of western scholarship has remained secondary to immersion in the liturgy and the rhythms of the church year. Although a discipline of “comparative theology” has emerged, its goals have been largely apologetic, that is, to demonstrate the errors of Catholicism and Protestantism and therefore the superiority of Orthodoxy. Only in recent years have a few scholars in the West explicitly compared Barth and Eastern Orthodoxy, as represented by the 2016 volume, Correlating Sobornost: Conversations between Karl Barth and the Russian Orthodox Tradition. In a foreword, Rowan Williams argues that Barth and Orthodox thinkers employ a similar theological method. Both understand that “theology requires a disturbance of the subject: a recognition that in this discipline the initiative does not belong to the individual finite thinker and that the hypostatic being of God is actively recreating the human subject in a new mode of existence” (Williams 2016, p. xiv). Other contributors examine particular theological themes, such as ecclesiology, revelation, election, and sobornost (catholicity, conciliarity), that lend themselves well to comparison between Barth and Orthodoxy. However, while offering creative comparisons and insights, the essays primarily explicate the well‐known Russian Orthodox thinkers of the early and mid‐twentieth century – Sergei Bulgakov, Vladimir Lossky, Nikolai Berdyaev, Vladimir Solovyev, and Georges Florovsky – and do not touch directly on church practices, such as proclamation of the Word, celebration of the sacraments, formation of Christian community, and growing in the Christian life.

The Critique of “Religion” Orthodoxy’s emphasis on ritual and religious practice has often evoked a Protestant objection to “works righteousness.” Of additional concern to Protestants has been Orthodoxy’s exclusive claim to be the “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church” and its

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reluctance to rethink inherited theological formulations or reform traditional liturgical forms. At the turn of the twentieth century, Adolf Harnack in his famous lectures on What Is Christianity? asserted that the Eastern churches (“Greek Catholicism”) had succumbed to three fateful temptations: a stagnant traditionalism that honors the past for its own sake, a reduction of the Christian faith to abstract intellectual categories borrowed from ancient Greek philosophy, and an empty ritualism that artificially evokes a sense of mystery. Harnack’s rebuke was sharp: “It was to destroy this sort of religion that Jesus Christ suffered himself to be nailed to the cross” (Harnack 1957, p. 238). He added, “Correct doctrine, reverence, obedience, the shudderings of awe, may be valuable and edifying things … but they have nothing to do with the Gospel” (Harnack 1957, p. 241). Barth takes up similar concerns in his Church Dogmatics, although he does not mention Orthodoxy by name. In a section on “Religion as Unbelief ” within “The Doctrine of the Word of God,” Barth draws a fundamental distinction between revelation and religion (CD I/2, pp. 280–297). “Religion,” including Christian religion, relates to human efforts to define God and how humans should relate to God. In religion, we project human notions of truth, justice, and goodness as absolute, transcendent values and devise rituals and practices to align ourselves with them. But, says Barth, religion is ultimately unbelief because it substitutes an idol that we create and control for the living God. Religion confuses our human capacity for self‐transcendence with the transcendence of a God who breaks in to us from beyond us. Barth argues that humans, although continually attracted to religion, nevertheless sense its inherent contradictions. By seeking to define God, religion makes the idea of God revisable and even dispensable. Barth asserts that in the history of religions mysticism has often become a strategy for overcoming religion’s contradictions. The mystic looks for an inner spiritual meaning to the external forms and practices of religion, although paradoxically the mystic remains dependent on these outer forms in order to transcend them. Again, Barth does not mention Orthodoxy by name, although Protestants and Catholics thinkers have frequently thought of Orthodoxy, especially in its monastic expressions, as cultivating a mystical dimension of Christian faith. In contrast to religion, revelation, according to Barth, is a matter of God coming to us on his terms. God chooses to confront us with the truth of who he is. Revelation therefore places us under judgment for our religion. But revelation not only condemns us and calls us to repentance; it also frees us for obedience to God. Barth believes that Scripture continually sets forth God to us in Jesus Christ, and that Christ is the resurrected One who lives and speaks to us today as the church proclaims the Scriptures. Barth’s critique of religion is directed first of all not at the religions of the world in general but rather at Christianity specifically. Moreover, “Religion as Unbelief ” does not single out Catholicism or Orthodoxy; Barth believed that all Christians succumb to religion, regardless of their tradition. At the same time, Barth does not call for eliminating religion. Rather, he asserts that “true religion” becomes possible insofar as God elects, sanctifies, and justifies humans’ religious impulses. In so doing, God frees the church to critique its religious behaviors so as to redirect humans to God himself. Although no specific form of Christianity can claim to be “true religion,” Barth does suggest throughout the Dogmatics that Reformation Protestantism has practiced self‐critique better than the “neo‐Protestantism” of Schleiermacher and liberal German theology,

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the Protestant Orthodoxy of Dort or Westminster, or traditional Roman Catholicism (and, by implication, Orthodoxy). Although we do not know whether Alexander Schmemann knew this portion of the Church Dogmatics, he offers his own extensive critique of “religion” (Schmemann 1988, pp. 117–134). As religion, Christian faith reduces itself, says Schmemann, to personal salvation from a threatening, evil world. Schmemann sees Orthodoxy as especially prone to this temptation. Its ancient rituals and ceremonies and its mystical atmosphere can offer people an escape into an otherworldly experience of spiritual safety and moral purity. Schmemann was especially critical of Orthodox monastic practice and “spirituality.” But religion is not the only problem. A second temptation is what Schmemann calls “secularism,” and he thinks that Protestantism is especially vulnerable to it. Secularism does not necessarily entail the denial of God, but it does reduce faith to morality. Christian secularism can be highly ritualistic, but its rituals serve not to put believers in touch with the God who is the Creator and Redeemer of the world, but rather to motivate human commitments to justice and peace. Schmemann believes that Orthodoxy at its best has represented a third approach: Christian faith as “sacramental.” Here, Christian rituals are neither a way of escaping into a spiritual world nor merely a means of motivating ethical action; rather, they are symbols that disclose God’s transformation of this world and that draw believers into that transformed world. In contrast to religion, which reduces eschatology to a personal destiny after death, and to secularism, which focuses only on the here and now, a sacramental faith sees the kingdom of God as already dawning among us and drawing us into a new kind of existence in this world. For Schmemann, it is especially as believers participate in the liturgy and the Eucharist that they enter into the life of the resurrected Jesus Christ on earth. In sum, for both Barth and Schmemann, religion is an expression of human sin. Religion is an effort to flee from God and create a god on human terms. In religion, humans focus on themselves and their self‐defined religious needs, rather than receiving God’s revelation. But Barth and Schmemann differ in their understanding of how God comes to us. Barth speaks of God as One who addresses us and commands us through the proclamation of the gospel, whereas Schmemann understands God as a transcendent, transfiguring presence among us, especially as mediated through the Eucharist and other sacraments. Barth emphasizes hearing and obeying God’s living Word in Jesus Christ; for Schmemann, God draws believers into a different way of seeing the world. Barth is suspicious of claims that ritual and sacraments are means of grace, whereas Schmemann wishes to recover their capacity, as Orthodoxy has traditionally asserted, to transform us into the image of Christ.

Orthodox Practice and Eschatological Vision Although not all Orthodox thinkers have accepted Schmemann’s critique of religion, his understanding of worship eloquently explicates Orthodoxy’s eschatological dimensions. The Orthodox liturgy and sacraments draw the worshipper away from the sinful, broken condition of the everyday world into the perfect and righteous kingdom that

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God has initiated in Christ, the Son of the Father. In Orthodox worship, one momentarily joins Peter, James, and John on the Mount of Transfiguration, a favorite Orthodox motif. By grace, God makes it possible for us to see Jesus not as an ordinary human being but rather as the One who is truly human because he is fully transparent to the glory of God. And this vision of Jesus as fully human yet fully divine changes the way believers experience their lives and indeed all of reality. Orthodox worship trains believers to see God’s transfiguring glory in all things. By means of the incarnation, God has entered into created matter, and through Christ’s ministry, suffering, death, and resurrection, God has redeemed it from sin and corruption (Burgess 2013, p. 21). Now all of reality is capable of setting forth God’s light and life. The kingdom of God is at hand. The question is whether humans will have eyes to see and ears to hear (see Matt 13:14–15). Orthodoxy emphasizes that believers cannot attain this vision by their efforts alone; rather, it is as much God’s gift to believers today, as it was to Peter, James, and John. But Orthodoxy does insist that the church and its ritual practices, although not automatically transforming the heart, do invite the believer into a space in which he or she can prepare for, receive, respond to, and cooperate with God’s transfiguring presence. The very place in which worship takes place invites one into such a space. An Orthodox church is typically divided into three parts: a vestibule (a transitional area that draws one out of the secular, fallen world toward God); a nave (which represents Eden or paradise and thus the place in which God placed humanity to know him); and an altar area (representing heaven, the place of God’s throne and Christ’s ruling presence). The nave and altar are separated by an icon screen (iconostasis) on which the icons of Jesus the World Ruler (the Pantocrator) and Mary the Mother of God (the Theotokos, or God‐ bearer) are especially prominent. Normally, only the priest and deacon move between the nave and the altar, representing their mediation between God and his people. The iconostasis also mediates, both concealing and revealing God. The iconostasis blocks our view of “heaven,” thus reminding us that God is inaccessible. God is beyond the world. God completely transcends his creation. God is the mystery in and behind all that exists. We cannot experience God in himself (in his essence). We can know God only partially (as represented by the opening of the doors of the iconostasis at particular moments during the liturgy, thus enabling worshippers to glimpse – but only glimpse – what is beyond). But the icons on the iconostasis also set forth God’s presence to us, especially as God comes to us in Jesus Christ, Mary’s child yet the world’s Savior. In Christ, God’s energies illuminate all that exists; the iconostasis and its open doors invite humans to enter into God’s life. Icons elsewhere in the church (or in a person’s home) further represent, and invite us into, this paradox of divine transcendence and immanence, hiddenness and revealedness. An icon separates us from the one that it represents: Jesus, Mary, or a saint. We belong to the fallen world, whereas those holy ones dwell in the life and light of God on the other side of the icon. Nevertheless, the believer who stands before an icon in a spirit of receptivity and reverence sees more than an illustration of a saint and therefore more than just a moral ideal toward which he or she should strive. Rather, the icon becomes a window through which he or she truly encounters the living presence of the saint “behind” the icon. We look at the saint, and the saint looks at us, seeing us not only as sinners but also as the image and likeness that God has created to reflect his life and light as the saint does.

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The liturgy, which always includes celebration of the Eucharist, further enlarges the space in which we may enter into God’s life. A distinctive characteristic of Orthodox worship is its “materiality.” Whereas Protestant worship tends to be word and idea centered, Orthodox worship engages the senses as well as the mind. The worshiper is literally surrounded by icons – on the iconostasis, on the walls (sometimes as frescos), and even on the ceiling (traditionally, Orthodox churches have a central dome with an icon of Christ the Pantocrator looking down at the assembly). The liturgy is sung without instrumentation, and the chanting (by the priest, deacon, choir, and sometimes the congregation as a whole) proceeds according to ancient canons that distinguish it from the rhythms and tones of secular music. At specific moments during the liturgy, the priest and/or deacon censes the altar, the nave, the icons, and the people. Clouds of incense fill the room, like the prayers that the worshipers are offering up (see Ps. 141:2). The Eucharistic elements, pieces of a special kind of bread (prosphora) mixed into a chalice of wine, engage the tongue; their taste is enhanced by reason of the communicants having fasted since midnight. Orthodox worship is also tactile. As worshipers stand (sometimes for several hours), they feel their bodies grow tired. At numerous points in the church’s prayers, people cross themselves and bow; during the Great Lent, they fall to their knees and make prostrations on the hard floor. People sense each other’s physical presence as they move from one part of the nave to another, come forward to receive the Eucharist, or step aside to light a candle before an icon. The Orthodox liturgy aims at healing and redirecting each of our senses so that they can receive and reflect God’s holiness in Jesus Christ. Although the sermon is so central to Protestant worship and a regular part of worship (especially on Sundays), in most Orthodox parishes today, hearing the Word is only one part of this larger movement of the self – body, soul, and spirit – into life in and with God. For Orthodoxy, words and things become instruments through which God touches the worshiper and invites him or her into a heavenly reality. But these words and things ask that the worshiper receive them reverently and wait on God to reveal himself through them in his own time and manner. Fasting, almsgiving, observing hours of prayer, and other spiritual practices and disciplines train us to deny our sinful selves so that we may open ourselves to God, but in the end God comes to us only in the mystery of his freedom. Even the liturgy and the Eucharist are as much about anticipating God as about actually encountering his light and life. However, the Eucharist differs in one key respect from the other material elements and spiritual practices that characterize Orthodox piety. Orthodox believers regard the Eucharistic bread and wine not only as instruments of grace but also as the very body and blood of the resurrected Christ (although Orthodox thinkers today generally reject any specific explanation of how the change occurs, in contrast to the Catholic notion of transubstantiation). The Eucharistic elements do not simply open up a space for encountering God’s transformative presence; when received in faith, they also bring that transformative presence into the believer’s very being. The believer becomes a God‐bearer like Mary, who was privileged to bear Jesus in her womb. All other material elements and spiritual practices of Orthodox piety fulfill their purpose by leading a person up to Eucharistic union with Christ and therefore with God himself. The communicant him‐ or herself begins to become an icon of the divine glory, not merely a witness to it.

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Monasteries have traditionally cultivated spiritual practices and disciplines and a Eucharistic life in an especially disciplined way and on behalf of the whole church. Monks and nuns have a special calling to represent what God asks of every believer: to die to an old life of sin in order to enter into Christ’s transfiguration of reality. In theory, the monastic calling is not higher or better than “worldly” ones (although in practice monks and nuns are sometimes perceived as holier than “ordinary people”), but it does demand greater attention to traditional ascetical exercises than most people with responsibilities to work and family can give. Monastics typically fast more strictly – sometimes removing all animal products from their diets not only during the Great Lent but also during nonpenitential seasons – and prepare more intensively, through confession and spiritual direction, for receiving the Eucharist. Monastics may devote more of their day to worship and prayer, observing the traditional seven hours of prayer of the day and the one hour of prayer of the night. In a monastery, a liturgy or prayer service may be celebrated in its entirety (over several hours) – with all of the appointed hymns and readings – whereas parishes usually abbreviate them. And monastics seek to model in an especially intentional way Christian obedience, confession, forgiveness, and charity in their way of life together. Monastics are also especially committed to cultivating beauty, peacefulness, and order. The grounds of a monastery typically have well‐tended flower gardens and a well or fountain from which people can draw water. Worship services are conducted with particular splendor; monastic choirs often become renowned. Although the monastic’s first responsibility is to pray, many monasteries also become famous for their hospitality, and they attract pilgrims, who wish to pray and work alongside the monks or nuns. A monastery, like other holy things and holy places in Orthodoxy, opens up a space in which people may glimpse the transfigured world that is the kingdom of heaven on earth. For Orthodoxy, this cultivation of a vision of transfigured reality makes an especially important witness to the gospel. Other forms of church service, such as religious education or social ministries, aim at bringing people into the transfigured and transfiguring spaces of the monasteries and the churches and, ultimately, of the liturgy and the Eucharist. Although the Orthodox have sometimes engaged in active missionary outreach (as in Alaska and California in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), they have also understood the very presence of a parish or monastery to make a witness, an idea that has recently begun to appear in Protestant theology (Newbigin 1989). Even from afar, the sight of a church with gold or silver onion domes and the sound of their clanging bells invite people  –  both Orthodox and non‐Orthodox  –  into God’s presence in the everyday world around them. Those who adopt the spiritual practices and disciplines that Orthodoxy commends may enter even more fully into this vision, which is life in Christ.

Word or Sacrament Like other Christians, Orthodox believers and Karl Barth agree about the possibility of living, personal communion between God and humanity. For both, Christ is the decisive revelation of God and God’s purposes; the church is essential to God’s work of salvation; and Christians are responsible to the world. More than some forms of Christian faith,

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Barth and Orthodoxy make common cause in emphasizing the paradoxical character of God as transcendent and immanent, wholly other yet wholly for us and wholly present to us. Moreover, Barth and Orthodoxy are similar in rejecting a reduction of faith to morality, while emphasizing that faith calls believers into a transformed way of life in Christ. But Orthodoxy and Barth differ in significant respects in their understanding of the relation of theology and church practice.

Sacramentality and the Word Barth is a thoroughly Reformation Protestant in his emphasis on the Word of God as the principal instrument by which God encounters us. Barth understands the Word of God as having three distinct yet interrelated forms: Jesus Christ, the Scriptures, and the church’s proclamation. When the church is faithful in its proclamation, it explicates the Scriptures such that they set forth Christ as the living Word. This Word speaks directly to us here and now, frees us from lesser powers that would command our allegiance, and calls us into obedience to the God who alone is Creator, Reconciler, and Redeemer. For Barth, Christians are first of all listeners. We turn to the Scriptures because they help us listen more faithfully for the living Word that is the Lord Jesus Christ. However, we do not attend to Scripture as a collection of isolated, divinely dictated sayings, but rather as the story of God’s covenantal faithfulness as it comes to fulfillment in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. For Barth, the theologian has the task of guiding the church as it listens to Scripture, so that its proclamation remains true to the God whom we know in Jesus Christ. The great creeds, confessions, and teachers of the past help the theologian clarify the biblical witness. Further, the theologian is attentive to the insights of other Christians, both in the immediate context of particular congregations and in the wider Christian community throughout the world. None of this theological work can determine God’s living Word in Christ to us in advance. Rather, that Word always comes immediately to us in our specific moment and context. Nevertheless, to the extent that we have listened faithfully, the Word that we hear today will confirm and not contradict the Word that the church has heard in other times and places. Barth describes our encounter with this living Word as an event. The living Word of God remains free; we can never pin it down once and for all or place it under our control. This Word comes to us ever anew from outside of us, offers us God’s grace, and draws us into a new way of life that is faithful to God’s righteousness and love as God has manifested them in Jesus Christ. We become more fully the humans that God created us to be. Because of his theology of the Word, Barth focuses the church’s worship on the Scriptures. They are to be read, sung, and proclaimed, with the minister listening along with the congregation for Christ’s living Word. Barth himself loved to preach, and he saw his Church Dogmatics as an aid to preachers. Because nothing should distract us from the Word, Barth affirmed Reformed iconoclasm. He rejected organ solos during worship as well as artistic representations of Christ in the place of worship (CD IV/ 3, p. 867). This iconoclasm is also reflected in his understanding of the sacraments, in which he is closer to Zwingli than to Calvin (or Luther). Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are not means of grace but witnesses to grace; they confirm the church’s proclamation

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of God’s Word and become occasions for Christians to declare their commitment to Christ and his ways. For Barth, the church’s only sacrament is Christ. For the Orthodox, God not only encounters humans with his Word in Jesus Christ but also claims of all reality to mediate his life and light. Barth focuses on Christ’s work of reconciling humans to God and to each other; Orthodoxy further emphasizes Christ’s transformation of the entire cosmos, a theme Barth too might have developed if he had lived to write CD V. In his thoughts about “parables of the kingdom” and the “little lights” (CD IV/3, pp. 112–165), Barth acknowledges that peace and beauty in nature or history can show forth God and his work in Jesus Christ. But for Orthodoxy not only can natural beauty and historical breakthroughs to peace and justice point beyond themselves to God, but they themselves can become icons, and thus mediations, of God’s glory. Whereas Barth speaks of the church as the provisional representation of the kingdom of God, Orthodoxy regards the church as nothing less than a manifestation of God’s eschatological reign on earth. Both Orthodoxy and Barth affirm the tension of the eschatological already/not yet, but the elements of realized eschatology in Barth’s thinking relate primarily to humans’ capacity, by God’s grace, to witness to God in word and deed, whereas Orthodoxy speaks confidently of God’s energies in holy things and holy people, the liturgy, and (in a unique and especially concentrated way) the Eucharist.

Cooperation vs. Partnership For neither Orthodoxy nor Barth does God’s grace reduce the human to a passive, submissive recipient. Rather, grace calls a person into active participation in God’s work in the world. Barth speaks of believers as covenant‐partners with God. But Barth avoids language of “cooperating with” God. Rather, we participate in God’s purposes by “corresponding to” God’s character and will. Our task is to witness both individually and corporately to what God has done, and continues to do, in Jesus Christ. Barth emphasizes that this covenantal relationship has a distinct order. God initiates, and humans follow. God is “above,” and we are “below.” But humanity’s secondary status in the covenant does not demean or depreciate us; on the contrary, God’s raises us up by calling us into partnership with him. We are not “deified,” but we do become truly human, no longer distorted by sin but rather able to declare to other humans that they too can be truly human and therefore be genuinely humane in their relations with each other. In contrast, Orthodoxy speaks of a “co‐operation” or “synergy” between God and humans. God freely offers us his grace, but we will be able to appropriate it only if we actively seek God and not resist him. If the believer strives to overcome his or her sinfulness in order to live in God’s ways, God will give the believer strength to grow in holiness. To be sure, our efforts do not win us any merit; we remain wholly dependent on God and give him the glory for whatever good we finally achieve. But we must do what we can to obey God’s commandments – a stance that explains why Orthodoxy has typically approved of historic church figures such as Evagrius Ponticus and John Cassian whom the West has labeled as semi‐Pelagian. Barth does not deny the place of sanctification in the Christian life. He understands God’s grace not only as a declaration that we are forgiven in Christ but also as a healing and redirecting of the self away from sin toward life in Christ. But Barth, like Luther,

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emphasizes not progress in holiness but rather our need to encounter and receive this justifying, sanctifying grace ever anew. Our growth in faith is so limited and imperfect that it only calls us back to faith in Christ and his holiness. In contrast to Calvin and subsequent Reformed theologians who turned to biblical law (and especially the Decalogue) in its “third use” to delineate a pattern of life for growing in Christian faith, Barth resists defining specific spiritual exercises or disciplines that a believer practices in order to progress in holiness. Indeed, Barth was suspicious of spiritual regimens, as when he commented to Bonhoeffer that Finkenwalde with its rhythms of daily prayer and mutual service had an odor of “monastic eros and pathos” (Bonhoeffer 2013, p. 268).

Asceticism For Orthodox believers, ascetical practices play a key role in promoting sanctification. The believer must deny “fleshly” desires in order to open him‐ or herself to God. Although the sins of the flesh are ultimately rooted in the selfish human ego, Orthodoxy sees bodily impulses as especially prone to sinful distortion. Physical desire for food, sex, sleep, and physical comfort tends to drive us inside of ourselves and blind us to God’s transfiguration of reality through Jesus Christ. Barth does not deny that bodily impulses can become sinful and demonic. But he emphasizes that God in his mercy comes to us and sets us free to serve him and our fellow humans. The basic stance of the believer toward the world is therefore joyful confidence in God’s victory over sin, rather than a grim obsession, as Orthodox asceticism might seem to Barth, with rebellious bodily impulses. What matters for the Christian life is not so much denial of the body as a focus on Christ’s saving work. The body and its impulses have a limited but rightful place within our humanity as defined by Christ (CD III/4, p. 347). Barth assigns sexual relations a rightful place in serving the purposes of love in marriage (CD III/4, p. 139), allows for the eating of meat in thanksgiving as God’s gracious provision for us (CD III/4, p. 355; cf. CD III/1, p. 208; and CD III/4, p. 348), and celebrates the delights of the human arts in pointing us to the God who delights in his creation (one thinks, of course, of Barth’s love of Mozart). However, Barth does acknowledge that certain people can be called to a more “ascetical” way of life and that the wider Christian community needs their witness. The vegetarian bears witness that animals are also God’s creatures. Animals do not live simply for us; we must have God’s permission to kill them (CD III/4, p. 355). The person who is celibate reminds us that marriage is a calling from God, rather than a basic social norm to which all people should conform (CD III/4, pp. 144–148). Those Christians who accept certain physical discomforts in order to serve God teach us that our lives belong in their entirety to God and that he can ask us to achieve great deeds in his name but also to endure disappointing defeats (CD III/4, pp. 675–676).

The Character of God These different understandings of church practice raise key questions about the nature and ends of theology. Barth emphasizes the completeness of God’s revelation in Jesus

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Christ. The biblical witness to Christ gives us everything that we need to know about God’s character and will. But we do not receive mere information about God; rather, God’s self‐revelation in Jesus Christ redeems us. It frees us from sin and any worldly powers that would dominate us, and it frees us for joyful witness to God and his ways. By focusing the church ever again on the living Christ, theology helps Christians listen more carefully for God’s living Word to them here and now as they worship, proclaim the gospel, and work for the reconciliation of humans with God and each other. For Barth, the freedom of the gospel therefore has political implications. Christians will work for a social order that opens up space for people to know that they are affirmed in their humanity – and that gives the church space to proclaim freedom in Christ. Like Barth, Orthodoxy begins from the Scriptures and their witness to Christ, and for Orthodoxy as for Barth, the living Christ encounters us and transforms our way of relating to God and the world. But Orthodoxy, more strongly than Barth, emphasizes that through Christ we enter into the mystery of God. We encounter a presence that we cannot fully take in. Like the disciples on the Mount of Transfiguration, we are driven to our knees and hide our faces. The divine light that illuminates all of created matter comes forth from a divine essence that is still shrouded in mystery. For the Orthodox, the task of theology therefore includes but goes beyond verbal clarification of the gospel witness. The theologian is, above all, the one who prays, and he or she prays more fully by venerating icons, undertaking ascetical exercises, participating in the liturgy, and receiving the Eucharist. Church practice clarifies the gospel message by guiding us into those special spaces in which we glimpse the kingdom of God as a “beyond” that is nevertheless in our midst. The one who enters into those spaces confesses that in knowing God he or she also stands before One who is unknowable. As Alexander Schmemann recognized, this dimension of Orthodoxy can deteriorate into spiritual escapism. It can also result in political passivity, as worried Barth when he heard about the submissiveness of the Russian Orthodox Church to the Soviet government (GA 28, p. 515), a refection perhaps of the old “Eusebian” as opposed to the “Augustinian” vision of how the church ought to relate to secular authority (Peterson 1935). Schmemann worked tirelessly to demonstrate that God’s transfiguring presence calls believers instead into active witness to a world that denies the presence of the kingdom. Barth’s theology can further assist Orthodoxy in thinking about the social and political character of Christian witness. But Orthodoxy can also teach something to those who follow in Barth’s footsteps, namely, to ponder more deeply what “God with us” means not only for humanity but also for all of creation and the redemption of the cosmos.

References Baker, M. (2016). “Offenbarung, Philosophie, und Theologie”: Karl Barth and Georges Florovsky in Dialogue. In: Correlating Sobornost: Conversations Between Karl Barth and the Russian Orthodox Tradition (eds. A.J. Moyse, S.A. Kirkland and J.C. McDowell), 59–94. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

Barth, K. (1949). Unsere reformierten Kirchen und der Weltrat der Kirchen. In: Amsterdamer Fragen und Antworten, Theologische Existenz Heute (Neue Folge Nr. 15) (eds. R. Niebuhr, K. Barth and J. Daniélou), 11–15. Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag.

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Bonhoeffer, D. (2013). Theological Education at Finkenwalde: 1935–1937 (ed. G. Barker). Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Burgess, J. (2013). Encounters with Orthodoxy: How Protestant Churches Can Reform Themselves Again. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. Cocksworth, A. (2016). “Soborny” Spirituality: Spirit and Spirituality in Berdyaev and Barth. In: Correlating Sobornost Conversations Between Karl Barth and the Russian Orthodox Tradition (eds. A.J. Moyse, S.A. Kirkland and J.C. McDowell), 213–240. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Harnack, A. (1957). What is Christianity? (trans. T. Bailey Saunders). New York: Harper & Row.

Newbigin, L. (1989). The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Peterson, E. (1935). Der Monotheismus als politisches Problem: ein beitrag zur geschichte der politischen theologie im Imperium romanum. Leipzig: Hegner. Schmemann, A. (1987). The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Schmemann, A. (1988). For the Life of the World. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Williams, R. (2016). Foreword: changing the subject. In: Correlating Sobornost: Conversations Between Karl Barth and the Russian Orthodox Tradition (eds. A.J. Moyse, S.A. Kirkland and J.C. McDowell), xi–xviii. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

CHAPTER 70

Barth and the Religions Sven Ensminger

Introduction The field of Christian theology of religions is a fairly new area of systematic theology. When thinking about Karl Barth and the religions, one is faced with immediate problems in light of the common classification in the field. Commonly, there are three main views in Christian approaches to other religions. The first is the exclusivist approach, which maintains that “only those who hear the Gospel proclaimed and explicitly confess Christ are saved” (D’Costa 1995, p. 292). The second is the inclusivist approach, which holds the position that “Christ is the normative revelation of God, although salvation is possible outside of the explicit Christian Church, but this salvation is always from Christ” (D’Costa 1995, p. 292). One of the most prominent defendants of inclusivism is Karl Rahner with his concept of “anonymous Christianity.” The third is the pluralist approach, where “all religions are equal and valid paths to the one divine reality and Christ is one revelation among many equally important revelations” (D’Costa 1995, p. 292). Although Barth clearly is not a pluralist, at various instances he offers helpful insights in response to the demands put to the question of the relation between Christianity and non‐Christian religions. Defying traditional categories of the Christian approach to other faiths, Barth’s approach has been classified as “being exclusivist, inclusivist, and universalist all at once” (D’Costa 2005, p. 630). Barth has been interpreted with considerable range by two distinct groups of scholars. The first group denies Barth’s theology any usefulness in the development of a Christian theology of religions. These criticisms have at times been quite harsh, in part due to Barth’s centering on the person of Jesus Christ and in part because of his critical stance on religion. However, although he remains firmly rooted within the Christian faith,

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Barth does not avoid difficult questions but instead calls the Christian community to see their presuppositions challenged in the most unexpected circumstances. The Christian community is called to look beyond human categories and affirm the dignity bestowed on all of humanity through the divine Yes in the person Jesus Christ. The reading, interpretation, and application of Barth’s thought – with its different emphases, never losing sight of the grace in Jesus Christ  –  provides a helpful basis for the members of the Christian church as they encounter people of different faiths on a daily basis. Therefore, it provides an example of a framework that is “both open and faithfully committed to its tradition‐specific way of narrating the world” (D’Costa 2000, p. 138). A second group of scholars comprises those who understand Barth as a paradigmatic example of exclusivism. Despite more nuanced statements such as the one just cited by D’Costa, the classification of Barth’s theology in this category has been reiterated repeatedly. However, a careful consideration shows that this labeling of Barth as an exclusivist is off the mark. A truly theological understanding of non‐Christian religions can be achieved not only in spite of, but precisely because of Barth’s critical stance on religion. The charge that Barth is an exclusivist originates from a narrow reading of Barth’s writings. Scholars in this group tend to look exclusively at §17 of Barth’s Church Dogmatics and turn Barth’s critical stance on religion into a judgment on religions. Others take their point of departure in §17 and also including Barth’s remarks in §69. For an accurate reading of Barth and the religions, however, an in‐depth engagement with Barth’s writings that goes beyond his critical stance on religion is required. This includes topics such as revelation, theological anthropology, and soteriology (Ensminger 2014). These individual topics are discussed more extensively elsewhere in the Companion; this essay provides a brief outline of how these aspects relate to the topic of religions. Furthermore, a critical exposition of key doctrinal areas of Barth’s writings is needed – together with a dialogue between Barth and a range of scholars from different perspectives – on the question of how Christianity should relate to non‐Christian religions. If read closely, Barth’s theology as a whole offers a Christian theology of non‐ Christian religions that is deeply rooted in the Christian faith and sees engagement with other religions as both benefit and enrichment for the Christian church. Barth himself had planned to develop a theology of religions “where Jesus Christ would be the foundation from where the conversation with the religions might possibly begin a completely new conversation” (Barth, quoted in Fangmeier 1969, p. 62).1 However, he never accomplished this before his death in 1968. Finally, it should be stated at the outset that Barth does not offer a full‐fledged academic engagement with non‐Christian religions. Yet Barth encourages the Christian church to extend great mercy and patience to members of all religions (see KD I/2, p. 357; CD I/2, p. 326). The issue goes thereby beyond mere “tolerance” as Barth clearly states that “tolerance in the sense of moderation, or superior knowledge, or scepticism is actually the worst form of intolerance” (KD I/2, p. 326; CD I/2, p. 299). He continues: “Religion and religions must be treated with a tolerance which is centered on the

1  Translations of this and subsequent German sources are my own.

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patience of Christ, which derives therefore from the knowledge that by grace God has reconciled to Himself godless man together with his religion” (KD I/2, p. 326; CD I/2, p. 299). Taking this thought as a starting point, this chapter examines Barth’s theological thought as a whole and point to some of the areas where Barth’s approach might be useful in the dialogue with other religions.

Revelation For Barth, the starting point of theological statements is the person of Jesus Christ. Concretely, this means the uniqueness of the revelation of the light of Jesus Christ. Barth underlines: “We must make a conscious because necessary application of the definite article. Jesus Christ is the light of life. To underline the ‘the’ is to say that He is the one and only light of life. Positively, this means that He is the light of life in all its fulness, in perfect adequacy; and negatively, it means that there is no other light of life outside or alongside His, outside or alongside the light which He is” (KD IV 3.1, p. 95; CD IV 3.1, p. 86). Barth acknowledges that this is a difficult claim that invites controversy and discussion: “The whole difficulty would be removed if we could be content with the mere assertion that Jesus Christ is one light of life, one word of God: the clearest perhaps; a particularly important one, and of great urgency for us; but only one of the many testimonies to the truth which have been given by others and which have also to be studied and assessed together with His” (KD IV 3.1, p. 96; CD IV 3/1, p. 87). According to Barth, however, “we have no option in this matter. Christian freedom is really the freedom of the confession of Jesus Christ as the one and only Prophet, light of life, and Word of God” (KD IV 3.1, p. 99; CD IV 3/1, p. 90). However, an important insertion is made at this point: “The fact that Jesus Christ is the one Word of God does not mean that in the Bible, the Church and the world there are not other words which are quite notable in their way, other lights which are quite clear and other revelations which are quite real” (KD IV 3.1, p. 107; CD IV 3.1, p. 97). The relationship between the lights and the Light of Christ is multifaceted, yet it becomes more complex when turning to the written attestations (words) about Jesus Christ (the Word of God). The question becomes, “whether there really are other words which in this sense are true in relation to the one Word of God” (KD IV/3.1, p. 126; CD IV 3.1, p. 113). Barth had already at the very early stages of Church Dogmatics established the threefold character of the Word of God as revealed, written, and proclaimed (see e.g. KD I/1, p. 124; CD I/1, p. 121). Now he applies this formula to the specific questions raised in this context. He establishes the concept of circles around the center of Jesus as the Word of God. There are three more spheres that circle around this center – the Bible as the written word of God, the church, and the world. About the church and the world, Barth says: “In both spheres there are human words which are good because they are spoken with the commission and in the service of God. In both spheres, there are words which are illuminating and helpful to the degree that God Himself gives it to them to be illuminating and helpful as such words” (KD IV/3.1, p. 108; CD IV 3.1, p. 97). Barth encourages the Christian community to be attentive to these words; in fact, he asks them to “be grateful to receive it also from without, in very different human words, in a secular parable” (KD IV 3/1, p. 128; CD IV

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3/1, p. 115), while simultaneously remaining “grounded in and ruled by the biblical, prophetico‐apostolic witness to this one Word” (KD IV 3/1, p. 128; CD IV 3/1, p. 115). There is no reason then for Christians to display arrogance by turning away from the worldly domain: “We must thus be prepared to see His sovereignty at work in these other spheres, even though we cannot see or understand it. We must be prepared to hear, even in secular occurrence … as signs and attestations of the lordship of the one prophecy of Jesus Christ, true words which we must receive as such even though they come from this source” (KD IV 3.1, p. 139; CD IV 3/1, p. 124). In other words, there may be, and indeed are, many different and diverse parables of the one Word of God. Certainly, Barth argues against blind trust to receive revelation in the secular sphere and there will always be some fear and reservations, yet “in no case must they be stronger than our confidence, not in the potentialities of world history, nor in individual men, but in the sovereignty of Jesus Christ [under which those in the worldly sphere also stand]. In no case must it be stronger than the readiness to hear, and to test whether what is heard is perhaps a true word which Christianity cannot ignore as such” (KD IV 3.1, p. 139; CD IV 3.1, p. 124). For the Christian community, therefore, Barth encourages openness to other lights and therefore toward those of other faiths – yet these lights will be recognized as such only after encountering the one source of light.

Revelation and Religion A second aspect surrounds Barth’s position on religion and the relation to revelation. At this point, a reminder is necessary that Barth does not endorse a view that goes completely against religion as such. Contrary to the view that Barth established the basis of “a program for religionless Christianity” (Ratzinger 2004, p. 50), Barth argues for a clear differentiation between religion and revelation as a foundation for his line of reasoning. Although it is true that Barth is critical of religion, “the concern of godless man” (KD I/2, p. 327; CD I/2, p. 300), he also argues that God reconciles the human being together with his or her religion. Additionally, revelation also functions in a positive way (see e.g. Green 1995). Therefore, the critical attitude to religion forms an essential part of the benefit of Barth’s approach. Instead of trying to rank religions in their closeness or distance to the Christian religion, as suggested for example by the Roman Catholic tradition (see Ensminger 2014, pp. 157–164) – or to confuse someone’s religion with who they are (CL, p. 269)  –  Barth’s call for a critical attitude to religion, starting with one’s own, reframes the discussion to look at the way those of Christian faith can relate to those without that faith. Wolf Krötke illustrates this point by stating that “a theology of religions without critique of religion is … for Christian theology impossible” (Krötke 2007, p. 334). Barth has been misunderstood as aiming for an absoluteness of the Christian religion, a claim for absolute truth of the Christian religion that Stoevesandt correctly denies (Stoevesandt 2005, p. 225). Put differently, a key aspect of Barth’s approach to religion is primarily introspective: Christians are called to show in humility in that they do not have a monopoly on the truth by their mere adherence to the Christian religion. Barth’s point is that Christian faith as a response to God’s revelation is, at its core, “not a religion … [but] the echo and the reflex of a movement

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that does not originate in the human being and is carried out by him, but a movement that simply happens to the human being and simply needs to be responded to by him” (Barth 1963, p. 437). This is the main reason it is necessary to examine Barth’s theology in relation to religions with a starting point in revelation. On the one hand, this results in a high degree of solidarity between those of Christian faith and those who do not have a Christian faith. The shared co‐humanity encompassing all human beings is central here: “We recognize and confess that not we alone, nor the community which, following the prophets and apostles, believes in Him and loves Him and hopes in Him, but de iure [every human being, even the whole creature derives] from His cross, from the reconciliation accomplished in Him, and are ordained to be the theatre of His glory and therefore the recipients and bearers of His Word” (KD IV/3.1, p. 130; CD IV/3.1, p. 117 rev.) This means that the nonexistent absolute truth claim enables the Christian to “sit down next to the unbeliever on the sinner’s bench (aufs Sünderbänkchen), and then we can also talk to them; we are just as embarrassed, but we also have the same hope”(GA 41, p. 148). This shared co‐humanity is thus far more than a simple sense of superiority of the own religion, because the Christian cannot claim ownership to the reconciliation achieved in Jesus Christ. Again, in Barth’s own words, this means that “[w]ith Jesus Christ, you [non‐Christians] are confronted as well, whether you know it already or not, no matter where you come, no matter which visible or disguised religion you belong to … He has died for all human beings and he lives for all of them” (Barth 1963, p. 438). Thus, just as the Christian believer cannot claim any ownership of the reconciliation achieved in Jesus’s life and death, it is precisely the life and death of this person that makes them universally applicable: “Theological statements are … truth claims bearing universal intent, although they can claim no universal demonstrability, but rest on a series of ultimate faith commitments’ (Hart 1999, p. 137). At its core, the Christian message is therefore one that proclaims the gospel of Jesus Christ, but it does so as a call to faith in awareness that the Christian is always responding to God’s grace. This results in the core aspect that “once the proclamation of the grace of God towards all religious activities appears, this does precisely not result in religious fanaticism or religious propaganda, but in something completely different: grace itself ” (GA 28, p. 145).

Theological Anthropology and Election Theological anthropology and soteriology expand on this line of thought. Barth’s christological focus means that, through the divine Yes to all of humanity in the person of Jesus Christ, the members of the Christian church are called to be alongside all those who are not aware of the divine Yes to humanity. This leads to the interrelated aspects of the human being’s bearing of the image of God and the human being as a being in relationship. Put differently, it means that the Christian community’s awareness of divine grace means that they are in no position to be judge over others. This does not rule out Christians having to say “No” to some issues. However, God’s “Yes” to humanity has to be proclaimed in word and deed by the Christian, both individually and corporately; and

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the Christian’s “a priori is not a cause, however great, necessary, or splendid it may appear to be or is. It is the righteousness of God in Jesus Christ” (CL, p. 268). Central to the character of God is Barth’s refusal to allow any overarching principle to reign over God’s sovereignty and freedom. Although it is true that God’s character can be known from the way God has been revealed in Jesus Christ and in God’s Word, the “infinite qualitative difference” between God and the human being remains. Barth suggests an openness to the possibility that others have also encountered God’s revelation. Yet to formalize this possibility as Karl Rahner does with the “anonymous Christian” leaves this possibility based on God’s action rather than formalizing it in a principle. Similarly, the point about asserting different words and lights of revelation – although pairing this with a warning not to become “prophets” of these means – shows that a degree of openness to God and God’s working throughout all spheres of creation does not coincide with a fixed formula. Thus, although it is true that Barth did not achieve “the concrete process of making the dimensions and signs of God’s truth which we can encounter in all religions visible” (Krötke 2007, p. 335), it should be equally clear that this was not something that Barth desired to achieve. The two aspects of openness to God being able to use unfamiliar media and the refusal to systematize these in a principle are therefore closely connected in Barth’s thought. A result of this is that Christians “confess solidarity at every point with man himself, they show themselves to be his companions and friends without worrying about his garb or mask, and they make his cause their own. Knowing what he for the most part does not know, namely, that those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, that those who, however mistakenly or strangely or impotently, ask after and seek the right and dignity of man, have God on their side and will be satisfied [Matt 5:6], they cannot separate this from him no matter what name he bears or what kind of man he is” (CL, p. 270). It is here where the complex approach to universalism is of great usefulness, as Barth reminds the Christian community: “How does it stand in detail with [the creature who wants to] and must demonstrate and express their freedom without the knowledge of Jesus Christ, without enlightenment by the Easter event, and therefore without realising that their reconciliation with God is accomplished? Jesus Christ has died and risen again for [him] too. He is [his] Lord and Head and Saviour too. In Him [he], too, [is] reconciled to God. His Word comes to [him] too” (KD IV 3.1, p. 389; CD IV 3.1, p. 337 rev). This is a statement of faith for the Christian needing to be maintained and held in balance with the fact that the Christian believer cannot approach others simply as future brother or sister, another important distinction from the formalized relationship of an “anonymous Christian” (see CL, p. 271). The solidarity with others is founded on the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ, not on the possibility that others might be encountered by the Gospel. How does this work out in practice? The starting point of all of Barth’s theology in revelation and derived from God results in the supremacy of divine judgment and cannot translate into a human judgment. This is Barth’s argument in Church Dogmatics §17 where the revelation of God worked as the Aufhebung of religion to show that religion cannot stand on its own. The judgment of religion as unbelief is to be applied to all religions; however, the divine judgment does not – and indeed must not – correspond to a human judgment (see GA 25, pp. 114, 433). Second, in Barth’s theology, the human being is distinguished by the fact of being human. This becomes particularly important in the context of theological anthropology

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and the imago Dei, yet Barth makes this feature of the human being a primary characteristic of the Christian perspective in the engagement with the world: “On the basis of the eternal will of God we have to think of every human being, even the oddest, most villainous or miserable, as one [who has in Jesus Christ his or her brother and in God himself his or her father]” (HG, p. 53 rev.). This is the fundamental determination of every human being, and, for the purpose here, it forms the core aspect of the Christian understanding of the non‐Christian in Barth’s theology: “The human being as himself or herself is not isolated from God or against God. Whether he believes or not, he is as such determined for God. And this determination of the human being for God cannot be destroyed” (GA 25, p. 109). This is meant as challenge to the Christian believer, as “on the basis of the knowledge of the humanity of God no other attitude to any kind of fellow man is possible. It is identical with the practical acknowledgment of his human rights and his human dignity. To deny [this attitude] to him would be for us to renounce having Jesus Christ as Brother and God as Father” (HG, 53 rev.). For that reason, the Christian is called – both individually and as part of the Christian church – to be firmly in the world and to take God’s Yes to humanity seriously by being open to God’s freedom “to produce even in human activity and its results, in spite of the problems involved, parables of His own eternal good will and actions” (HG, p. 55). However, Barth also encourages a high degree of support for other human beings in light of the humanity of God founded on the “affirmation of the human being” (HG, p. 60). The Christian’s solidarity with those without Christian faith involves therefore the looking beyond any differences based on human categories: “Christians will not see the human being as the member of this or that country or sociological stratum … as a Christian or a non‐Christian, as a good or bad, a practicing or non‐practicing Christian … All this is good and right and relevant, but Christians cannot stop here, looking only at humankind in these disguises. These are not the human being itself ” (CL, p. 269 rev.). The Christian is thus certainly called into the world to engage with others. However, the Christian’s one persistent message to the world is one of witness to the Good News of Christ: “the task of bringing the gospel to light is more urgent than manifesting that earnestness [of uncovering misunderstandings] and bringing this gift [of penetrating analysis] into play” (HG, p. 61 rev.). Here one encounters again the image of light, a central motif both in Barth’s understanding of revelation and reconciliation. In the context, it is necessary to clarify that the message and the messenger are two very distinct entities. Christians are called to be “witnesses, shining lights of hope, to all men. They have to make the promise known to them in its direct wording and sense as a call to faith” (CL, p. 270). Therefore, on the one hand, the “infinite qualitative difference” between God and the human being is seen, through this analogy of light, as a particular aspect that the humanity of God has not erased. Linked to the point made previously in regard to the attitude of the theological message denying equality of God and the human being but hinting at correspondence, it is essential that God remains the creator and the human being the creature: “God is on the throne. In the existence of Jesus Christ, the fact that God speaks, gives, orders, comes absolutely first – that man hears, receives, obeys, can and must only follow this first act” (HG, p. 48 rev.). This means, therefore, that the call to be lights of hope will be possible only because of and through the dependency on the light who is the Light of the world but also in the context of religion and the call for

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the Christian religion to be the human face of revelation. As Krötke aptly summarizes in this context: “What mattered to him [Barth] was that the Christian community explains to the human beings of other religious conviction that they are respected and regarded as God’s creatures by Christians, just as God respects and regards them … The illumination of humankind with the light of his (God’s) truth is only in his hands” (Krötke 2007, p. 335). As children of God, therefore, Christians are called to be salt and light to the world (Matt 5:13–14). They “are ordained, engaged, empowered, and separated to [declare aloud] this witness in its [the world’s] midst. They owe it to their Lord, the world, and not least their own existence to do this” (CL, p. 97 rev.). This leads, on the other hand, to the necessary distinction between the Christian existence as individual and as member of the Christian community. Just as in Barth’s doctrine of election, being an individual Christian and being part of the Christian community are intimately linked while simultaneously not the same. That is to say, the individual encounter with God, or being encountered by God, is central to Barth’s theology; yet, it is simultaneously important to consider the group of Christian believers. “[T]he acknowledgment of God’s work accomplished in Him (Jesus Christ) implies that it has taken pro nobis [for us] and thus only in this way also pro me [for me]’ (CL, p. 63 rev.). It calls the individual Christian and the Christian church to witness to Jesus Christ in constant openness to the factual reality that that person, too, is someone for whom Jesus died and rose again. Practically, it means the constant pointing away from themselves and to Jesus Christ.

Barth’s Framework for a Christian Theology of Religions To summarize, the following can be said about Barth and the religions. First, Barth’s doctrine of revelation in its trinitarian shape and with its christocentric directionality has been established as the basis of all of Barth’s theology. Barth is careful not to point to this or that aspect where revelation might occur, and he warns particularly against becoming “prophets” of particular, unfamiliar ways that God has used as a means of revelation. This is not to deny the presence of many forces and truth claims scattered throughout creation, “but all of these do not belong to that on which Christians can build their trust in life and death; they are strictly to be distinguished from that which the Church is called to proclaim” (Stoevesandt 2005, p. 206). In the confession of faith, the church thereby exposes itself to be challenged in engagement with the world; however, those making the confession will always have to return to the fact that it is Jesus Christ who is proclaimed. In this sense, the Christian church in the world will need to avoid the following two pitfalls. On the one hand, the church cannot become a community that is self‐centered and self‐sufficient. The church belongs to Christ, not vice versa (see CL, pp. 136–137). On the other hand, the church will also be called to live in constant primary dependency on revelation (see Link 1980); and the church must not be intimidated to accommodate her message to the world’s demands (see CL, pp. 137–140). The church – and, indeed, theology – “will never be justified by its work but only, if at all, by the forgiveness of sins” (Barth in Rumscheidt 1986, p. 78). All this is done by allowing the church and its theology to be challenged by the world and to acknowledge that “God may speak to us through a pagan or an atheist, and thus give us

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to understand that the boundary between the Church and the secular world can still take at any time a different course from that which we think we discern” (KD I/1, p. 56; CD I/1, p. 55). Second, in regard to religion it is important to acknowledge the directionality of the examination of religion. Barth’s approach is based on a strict a priori of revelation when speaking about religion and the self‐critical attitude toward one’s own religion that precedes judgment of any other religion. Because any classification of religions according to human categories is discouraged – and because an emphasis on religion as an independent entity not judged by any criterion is avoided – Barth achieves a theology of religions that is fully aware of religion but refuses to put it center stage. Barth’s position thus succeeds by being clearly positioned within Christian theology, and it challenges the Christian community to become more faithful to revelation. By doing so, it proclaims the gospel that God has reconciled the community in Jesus Christ together with their religion. Third, in regard to theological anthropology, Barth’s theology offers a helpful basis by arguing for the distinction between God and the human being and by affirming the intrinsic human dignity that transcends all human categories. Crucially, the starting point in revelation provides the basis for the affirmation of human beings themselves. The way God relates to the humans thus is characterized by grace, visible most clearly in the divine Yes to the human being. God, as creator, creates the human “as the one whom He summons into life” and longs for obedience from His creatures by doing so (KD III/2, p. 186; CD III/2, p. 155). The demand for obedience is a direct result of this relationship: “The obedience of Christians follows from the fact that in Jesus Christ they may recognize God as his Father and theirs, and themselves as his children. Obedience is their action to the extent that it is ventured in invocation of God, in which, liberated thereto by his Holy Spirit, they may take God at his word as their Father and take themselves seriously as his children” (CL, p. 49). As the Christian church invites others to come to faith and proclaim the Good News of the gospel in thought, word, and deed, the members of the Christian church will always have to remember who they are as God’s children. Fourth, Barth’s warning that the Christian cannot be judge over anyone’s salvation is essential with regard to the perspective from which the Christian church engages with those without a Christian faith. Jesus Christ as the basis of Barth’s theology is thereby the key to this approach. Certainly, faith and the invitation to faith from the Christian community also play a major role. Yet the reason Barth is calling for radical openness to universalism, yet refuses an outright commitment to anything but the universal reconciler Jesus Christ, is found here (see e.g. GA 25, p. 189). As it is Jesus Christ who is at the center of Barth’s theology and his doctrine of election, the fundamental emphasis will always remain on the proclamation of this Good News, as “nowhere can it be the case of the confession, not to mention the case of theology, to anticipate God’s judgment and to decide on whether, in the end, salvation is granted to all people, or only to a subsection of them, or to anticipate the criterion, manageable to us, by which God will decide on this selection” (Stoevesandt 2005, p. 221). By maintaining this tension between divine sovereignty and human responsibility, Barth offers a meaningful framework in which to discuss salvation. For the Christian living in a multireligious society, Barth’s theology delivers an invitation to come to a better understanding of the God they believe in and share the Good

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News of the grace they have received in Jesus Christ with those who do not know him. They also are opened to the possibility of God speaking through them in unfamiliar ways. This new awareness of grace takes place together with increased respect for the dignity bestowed upon all human beings. Barth thus challenges the members of the Christian community not to shy away from difficult questions but to see their presuppositions challenged while looking beyond human categories to affirm the dignity bestowed upon all of humanity as a result of the divine Yes in the person of Jesus Christ. Centered on the grace personified in Christ, Barth provides the church with a helpful foundation as her members walk alongside other humans; and he presents a framework that is “both open and faithfully committed to its tradition‐specific way of narrating the world” (D’Costa 2000, p. 138). This approach is made possible through the work of Jesus Christ: “it is the extreme particularity that makes the universality of the work and word of Jesus Christ possible in the first place; the particularity is the precondition of the universality” (Stoevesandt 2005, p. 221). A final note: it is a worthwhile reminder in this regard that a theological understanding of non‐Christian religions can be achieved not only in spite of but precisely because of Barth’s critical stance of religion. Barth provides with his argument a framework that is built on the work achieved by Jesus Christ. This results in a position characterized by openness to God’s revelation being possible extra muros ecclesiae and using unexpected means for revelation. Barth’s critical attitude toward any religion – especially his own  –  is held simultaneously alongside an affirmation of the inherent dignity bestowed upon all human beings and an emphasis on the divine Yes spoken in the cross and resurrection. Although Barth has for long been considered an unhelpful voice in the theology of religions, these reflections are aimed at encouraging further use of Barth’s theology as a resource in the dialogue with the religions. It might be considered unfeasible, but “the function of utopias is to encourage an ironic distance from prevailing conceptions and so recount the past and envisage the future from a different point of view, thereby provoking serious self‐criticism” (Webster 1998, p. 24). For Christians, as they live alongside non‐Christians, Barth’s theology offers a promising framework for a Christian theology of religions that would look beyond differences as defined by the categories of this world to the One who has “overcome the world” (John 16:33). As Christians live in this world, they are reminded to point in thought, word, and deed to the God who has said Yes in His Son to all human beings. References Barth, K. (1963). Das Christentum und die Religion. Junge Kirche 24: 436–438. D’Costa, G. (1995). Christian theology and other faiths. In: Companion Encyclopedia of Theology (eds. P. Byrne and L. Houlden), 291–313. London: Routledge. D’Costa, G. (2000). The Meeting of Religions and the Trinity. Edinburgh: T&T Clark.

D’Costa, G. (2005). Theology of religions. In: The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology since 1918, 3e (eds. D. Ford and R. Muers), 626–644. Oxford: Blackwell. Ensminger, S. (2014). Karl Barth’s Theology as a Resource for a Christian Theology of Religions. London: Bloomsbury T & T Clark.

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Fangmeier, J. (1969). Der Theologe Karl Barth. Zeugnis vom freien Gott und freien Menschen. Basel: Friedrich Reinhardt Verlag. Green, G. (1995). Challenging the religious studies canon: Karl Barth’s theory of religion. Journal of Religion 75 (4): 473–486. Hart, T. (1999). Truth, the trinity and pluralism. In: Regarding Karl Barth: Essays Toward a Reading of his Theology (ed. T. Hart), 117–138. Carlisle: Paternoster Press. Krötke, W. (2007). Impulse für eine Theologie der Religionen im Denken Karl Barths. Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 104: 320–335. Link, C. (1980). Das menschliche Gesicht der Offenbarung – Bemerkungen zum Religionsverständnis Karl Barths. Kerygma und Dogma – Zeitschrift für theologische

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Forschung und Kirchliche Lehre 26: 277–302. Ratzinger, J. Cardinal [Pope Benedict XVI] (2004). Truth and Tolerance – Christian Belief and World Religions (trans. H. Taylor). San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press. Rumscheidt, H.M. (1986). The Way of Theology in Karl Barth – Essays and Comments (intr. S. W. Sykes). Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications. Stoevesandt, H. (2005). Wehrlose Wahrheit – Die Christus bekennende Kirche inmitten der Vielfalt der Religionen. Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 102: 204–225. Webster, J. (1998). Theological Theology – An Inaugural Lecture Delivered before the University of Oxford on 27 October 1997. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

CHAPTER 71

Barth and the Jews Mark Lindsay

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n his Christmas letter of 1952, Karl Barth likened his relationship with Rudolf Bultmann to the meeting of an elephant and a whale, a comparison he had also used for his relationship with Emil Brunner. Regardless of which animal Barth saw himself to be, his point was that the two could hardly meet without each experiencing “boundless astonishment” at the other (GA 1, p. 192). Perhaps the imagery was chosen to signify that he and Bultmann (or he and Brunner) were “of essentially different natures,” and thus that their relationship could only be construed in “static ontological terms” according to which “all possibilities [had been determined] in advance” (so Congdon 2015, p. 11). Or perhaps he was merely humorously suggesting that they were so separated by differing fundamental premises that they might as well have belonged to different species. One might wonder how this analogy bears on the theme at hand. It comes to mind because it has sometimes been assumed that the relationship between Barth and “the Jews” was not unlike his fraught association with Bultmann. It has been suggested that for Barth “the Jews” were, like Bultmann, also seen as “whale‐ish” in their very otherness and intractability, which consequently made them an object of astonishment and aversion for him (GA 6, p. 421). It is precisely that assumption that I wish to interrogate through the following pages. I shall first provide a brief overview of the scholarship by which Barth’s relationship with the Jewish people has been recounted. Then I will outline the history of Barth’s actual relationships with individual Jews. Finally, I will examine how these relationships informed his theology.

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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The Scholarship so Far In her book That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew, Katherine Sonderegger argues that, in Barth’s theology, Judaism has no independent existence, and is present only as a negative witness to Christ and the church (Sonderegger 1995, p. 104). That is to say, the witness that Jews and Judaism bear, even to the God of Torah, is meaningful only in its connection to Christian testimony, without which it lacks any self‐sustaining identity. Notwithstanding the debt of gratitude that Sonderegger has acknowledged she owes to Barth, her contention is finally a more careful and sympathetic version of a claim that has long been made by others. Barth’s friend, the French pastor Georges Casalis, once wondered, for example, whether Barth’s dogmatic portrayal of the Jews “represent[ed] a depiction of any actual Jew” or was instead “an abstract theological concept rather than the description of a living, flesh‐and‐blood group of real people” (Casalis 1964, p. xli). More pointedly, F.‐W. Marquardt declared in 1967 that “the Jews” were present in Barth’s mind “as mere forms of our perception and the stuff of our alienated consciousness” (Marquardt 1967, p. 316). Perhaps this abstract conception of Jews and Judaism was nothing more than what ought to be expected from Barth. The brilliant, perhaps irascible Emil Fackenheim – whose bitter hostility toward Markus Barth, it has to be said, may have influenced his reading of Karl – claimed in 1981 that “Barth made [only] a few attempts to speak to Jews toward the end of his life – when … it was too late” (Fackenheim, 1989, p. 284). How could Barth have written about the Jews in any other way than by traditional caricatures if, as Fackenheim argued, he had encountered so few of them? Barth has apparently been condemned by his own testimony. Responding in September 1967 to Marquardt, Barth wrote that “you have explained and expounded my doctrine of Israel with great skill and finesse. Historically and materially I can raise no objection” (GA 6, p. 420; ET; Fangmeier and Stoevesandt 1981, p. 262 rev.). Barth went on to confess: I am decidedly not a philosemite, in that in personal encounters with living Jews (even Jewish Christians) I have always, so long as I can remember, had to suppress a totally irrational aversion, naturally suppressing it at once on the basis of all my presuppositions, and concealing it totally in my statements, yet still having to suppress and conceal it. Pfui! is all I can say to this in some sense allergic reaction of mine. But this is how it was and is. A good thing that this reprehensible instinct is totally alien to my sons and other better people than myself (including you). But it could have had a retrogressive effect on my doctrine of Israel (GA 6, pp. 420–421; ET; Fangmeier and Stoevesandt 1981, p. 262).

Along with his confession to Eberhard Bethge earlier in the same year that he had long felt guilty that the “Jewish question” had not been as decisive for him as it had been for Bonhoeffer (GA 6, p. 403; ET; Fangmeier and Stoevesandt 1981, p. 250), this statement has frequently been used to justify the argument that Barth’s allegedly anti‐Judaic theology arose from his deep‐seated aversion to real‐life Jews, from which he was never able to escape. As the notorious Holocaust historian, Daniel Goldhagen, charged: “Karl Barth, the great theologian, leader of the Protestant Confessing Church, and bitter opponent of Nazism, was also an antisemite” (Goldhagen 1996, p. 113).

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Nevertheless, as anyone who has read Barth knows, the last thing he is guilty of is being uncomplicated and simple. A deeper exploration of his life, not to mention the theology that arose from it, would suggest a different, more nuanced conclusion than is evident in some of his critics. Barth was not an antisemite. Moreover, far from being mere ciphers in a predetermined ontology, or mere shadowy figures whose individuality was suppressed, Jews were known closely and well by Barth throughout his life. Perhaps most tellingly, for Barth the Jews with whom he met, as well as the many more he did not meet, were not at all “whales” to his “elephant” but, on the contrary, reflections to him of his own self.

Barth’s Personal Connections In 1962, Karl’s son Markus was asked by the Jewish scholar Jacob Taubes if, during his father’s forthcoming visit to the United States, he would be able to host a small gathering of prominent Jewish leaders who wished to meet with Karl. Markus, who was at the time closely associated with a number of prominent members of America’s Jewish communities, happily agreed. And thus it was that the elder Barth met not only Taubes himself but also the up‐and‐coming scholar Michael Wyschogrod. So taken with Barth was Wyschogrod that, four years later, he traveled to Basel to talk with him at greater length. Important and mutually edifying as each of these meetings were, they might be read as offering proof for Fackenheim’s accusation. The meetings came late in Barth’s life and were convened at someone else’s instigation. Were they not, then, evidence that Barth spent as much of his life as possible avoiding contact with “flesh‐and‐blood” Jews, meeting with them only when no other alternative was available? If these had been the “few and only attempts” made by Barth to speak with Jews, as Fackenheim alleged, we would be compelled to concede the point. But to do so would be to falsify history. These meetings in the 1960s, arranged largely by Markus, were not the only significant encounters that Barth had with Jewish people. On the contrary, from his earliest student days, right through the tumultuous years of Nazism and the Holocaust, and on into his retirement, Karl Barth was engaged at every level with the people, plight, and promise of Israel. Then as now, the Switzerland into which Karl was born was home to very few Jews. In 1888 the Jewish population was only 8000 (0.3% of the population), most of whom were scattered throughout Basel, Geneva, and Zürich. Had Barth stayed in Basel, from where so many of his ancestors on both sides had come, he would probably have had little cause to meet many Jews. But because his theological studies took him into Germany  –  first Berlin, then Tübingen, and finally the longed‐for Marburg  –  he was hardly able to avoid making Jewish acquaintances, even had he wanted to. According to Eberhard Busch, Barth’s lodgings in Tübingen were at Neckargasse 10 (Busch 1994, p. 42). This placed him almost exactly halfway between the old Judengaße and the ­synagogue at Gartenstraße, both within easy walking distance. In Marburg, too, Barth lived in close proximity to the hub of Jewish life. His accommodation at Hirschberg 4 (Busch 1994, p. 44) was an easy three‐minute stroll to the site of the old synagogue at Ritterstraße, and a four‐minute walk to the newer and grander synagogue, the

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­ orshipping center for about 500 Jews, which had been consecrated only about 20 years w before Barth’s arrival. It was in Marburg that Barth’s first encounter with Jewish life and tradition took place in a way that would have lasting influence. One of his main reasons for wanting to study there was to learn from Wilhelm Herrmann, who exercised a formative influence on his early theology. As scholars have shown, however, Barth was equally influenced by the neo‐Kantianism with which Marburg and Herrmann were thoroughly infused and which was embodied most fully by the Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen (McCormack 1995, pp. 42–77; Fisher 1988). Barth was greatly impressed by Cohen. He cited him in his Ethics to add credence to his repudiation of Germany’s rising tide of racism (ETH, p. 195), and in 1911 Barth even tried to introduce Cohen’s ideas to the local trade‐union hall in Safenwil (GA 22). This is not to suggest that Barth’s enthusiasm for Cohen was due to his Jewishness, or even that Barth learned from Cohen anything approximating orthodox Judaism. Nonetheless, it is clear that from as early as his student years and initial pastorate, Barth sought out, and was influenced by, Jews with whom he felt at least an intellectual affinity. Once he was installed in a village pastorate, Barth’s opportunities for academic engagement were few. His efforts to “educate” the local unionists in socialist and ethical traditions by using Cohen were neither understood nor welcomed. Nonetheless, his final years in Safenwil did provide occasions for contact with individual Jews and Jewish Christians, at both the social and academic levels. Many of these were Germans, with whom Barth struck up friendships following his famous Tambach lecture of September 1919. Most notably, he came to know Hans and Rudolf Ehrenberg, Eugen Rosenstock‐ Hüssy, and the great German Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, who together made up the so‐called Patmos Circle. This eclectic but eminent band of philosophers, theologians, and scientists was convinced – in the aftermath of World War I – that civilization could be saved only by the daily spiritual and practical renewal of the Logos, as embodied in speech and action. They drew both their name and their inspiration from John the Apostle, the “Seer of Patmos.” Barth was never really a member of this circle, but his association with it lasted at least until the founding of Patmos Verlag in the 1920s. Indeed his Tambach lecture, “Der Christ in der Gesellschaft,” which had initiated Barth’s association with the group in the first place, was printed in 1920 as the Patmos Verlag’s very first publication. Although he sought later to distance himself from the group (he believed that the spirit of the group was essentially gnostic), Busch does note that he regarded them, at least for a time, as “friends” (Busch 1994, pp. 112–113). After the war, Barth could say of this association that they were “positive relationships” and that, if they taught him anything, it was that “God has a great variety of lodgers” (Busch 1994, p. 113). Regarding Franz Rosenzweig, there is no evidence that he and Barth ever met face to face, despite Rosenzweig’s heavy influence on the Patmos group. Eberhard Busch reports, however, that “in 1920 Rosenzweig presented Barth with the gift of a prayer‐ book containing texts from the Psalms. In the dedication he wrote: ‘To the Jewish Christian of Safenwil’” (Busch 2018, p. 25). Rosenzweig may well have been an intellectual influence on Barth. We know from Barth’s correspondence with Miskotte that in 1928, at Miskotte’s suggestion, he read Rosenzweig’s Der Stern der Erlösung. It was as he

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admitted a hard book to understand, but it seems to have resonated with him. Specifically, Barth’s use of terminology in CD II/2 suggests that he concurred with Rosenzweig’s vision of both the church’s evangelical role and of the fundamental unity of God’s community as comprised of Israel and the church (Stoevesandt 1991, pp. 79, 104; Busch 2004, p. 68; Busch 2018, pp. 33–34). It appears, then, that Barth was engaging with the works of leading Jewish theologians and philosophers of the day. It is equally important to note that the exchange was reciprocal. In his I and Thou, for example, Martin Buber writes that “God is the ‘wholly Other’; but he is also the wholly Same, the wholly Present. Of course he is the Mysterium Tremendum that appears and overthrows; but he is also the mystery of the self‐evident, nearer to me than my I” (Buber 1937, p. 79; Busch 2018, pp. 32–33). Maurice Friedman sees in this a qualified agreement with Barth’s Romans theology; on the one hand endorsing Barth’s emphasis on God’s “Godness,” but on the other hand not losing sight of what Barth would later come to refer to as “the humanity of God.” It may be that Buber’s reference to God as Wholly Other owed more to Søren Kierkegaard than to Barth, but the timing of Ich und Du (1923) in relation to the appearance of Barth’s two Romans commentaries (1919, 1922) suggests that he was at least aware of, if not in some measure responding to, Barth’s work. Ronald Gregor Smith suggests as much when he states, in his preface to the second English edition of I and Thou, that there were “intricate connexions” between Buber and Barth that could not be confined to “talk of any mere ‘influence’.… in a simple way.” He goes on to note that “Buber’s own Nachwort to the volume, Schriften über das dialogische Prinzip. … has an interesting comment on Barth’s position as expressed in his Kirchliche Dogmatik, in the second part of the ‘Doctrine of Creation’” (Buber 1958, p. vi). Other examples of the reciprocity of engagement between Barth and contemporary Jewish theologians come from the time of Barth’s teaching career in Germany. In 1934, Berlin’s pro‐Zionist Rabbi Emil Cohn sent Barth a copy of his Judentum, ein Aufruf der Zeit. While Barth was busy reading Cohn’s book, the Swiss theologian’s own writings were being read “with lively interest” within Cohn’s Berlin synagogue (Busch 2004, p. 75). Barth’s interaction with Cohn was not simply at a literary or theological level. In late February of the same year, Barth remarked to Cohn that, “as a Christian, I could only think with shame and terror” about what Jews in Germany were having to endure (Busch 1996, p. 151). Clearly, their conversation touched upon the political realities of Nazi Germany as much as upon their respective theological endeavors. Aside from the probable influence of Rosenzweig, there is no suggestion that Barth was especially enamored with his Jewish dialogue partners of the 1920s and early 1930s. However, the charge that he was unfamiliar with modern Judaism and contemporary Jewish philosophy is clearly problematized by these connections with Rosenzweig, Buber, Cohn, and the Patmos Circle (Busch 2018, pp. 24–26). Barth maintained contact with Jews, through personal relationships and organizational networks, throughout the Nazi period, both before and after his expulsion from Germany.1 Recent archival research by Eberhard Busch has uncovered some previously 1  For more on Barth’s position on the Jews during the Hitler era, see the essay by Eberhard Busch in Hunsinger 2018.

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neglected material. In an address to a packed lecture hall in Berlin on Reformation Day 1933, Barth spoke out: “What has been going on in the concentration camps? What has been done to the Jews? Isn’t the Christian church guilty because of its silence?” He invoked the decisive norm: “Whoever is called to proclaim the Word of God in such circumstances has to make clear just what the Word of God requires” (quoted in Busch 2018, p. 30). Later in 1933 Barth preached an Advent sermon in Bonn, where he caused a scandal by proclaiming that Jesus Christ was a Jew, that Jewish blood flowed in his veins, and that God had not abandoned his people the Jews (Hunsinger 2018, p. 27). Busch believes that episodes like these, not merely his refusal to give the Hitler salute in the classroom, led to Barth's expulsion from Germany in 1935. In 1935, the year in which he was dismissed from his post in Bonn, the Basel government appointed him its Commissioner for Refugees. Barth undertook this role with passionate dedication and involvement, even providing financial support from his own pocket, and opening his home to German Jewish refugees. One such recipient of his aid was the celebrated pianist Rudolf Serkin, who fled to the USA in 1939 via Barth’s St Albanring home. In return for Barth’s hospitality, Serkin gave free piano lessons to his daughter, Franziska (Busch 1996, p. 269). Barth was also in regular but secret contact with one of his former students, Kurt Müller. A German lawyer‐turned‐pastor, Müller had established a set of safe houses in Stuttgart for German Jews, with Switzerland – and Barth – one of the final destinations. Müller may also have been the link between Barth and Helmut Hesse, the Lutheran pastor of Elberfeld. In mid‐1943, Hesse proclaimed that: As Christians we can no longer tolerate the silence of the Church on the persecution of the Jews. What leads us to this conclusion is the simple commandment to love one’s neighbor. … The Jewish question is an evangelical, not a political, question. The Church has to resist anti‐Semitism in its territories. … and to stand up against the state to testify to … make every effort to oppose the destruction of Jewry (Gordon 1984, p. 258).

Only two days after making this statement, Hesse was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in Dachau, where he died five months later. According to Busch, the statement that was read out by Hesse, and which subsequently led to his arrest, was delivered to Germany by Müller after having first been personally formulated by Barth (Palmer 2000, p. 8). In June 1939, the Berlin pastor Heinrich Grüber arranged safe passage to the Barth house for a Jewish couple named Königshöfer, though apparently without informing either Barth or von Kirschbaum beforehand. Although the situation caused Barth’s entire household some perplexity, Barth was “nonetheless prepared to write a letter of introduction” for the Königshöfers to assist them in getting safe passage. Barth was not the only member of his household who was active in providing aid to Jewish refugees. Charlotte von Kirschbaum was also a crucial part of the rescue network. In late 1938, for example, she wrote to Paul Vogt on behalf of Gerda Schmalz, a Jewish‐ Christian girl in Berlin for whom she was keen to acquire a visa. Her letter included greetings from Barth himself, suggesting that he both knew of and supported her endeavors. Barth’s commitment to such Jewish relief efforts was not based on mere goodwill or humanitarianism, nor even on his socialist leanings. It was rather predicated upon a

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theology that, despite the allegations of some, was neither indifferent nor hostile toward Jews. On 5 December 1938, under the auspices of the Swiss Evangelical Society for Aid, and in explicit response to Kristallnacht, Barth delivered his lecture “Die Kirche und die politische Frage von heute.” Invitations to the lecture were prefaced with the recognition of the recent “dreadful consequences of the Jewish persecution in Germany,” and it was in this lecture that Barth declared that “anti‐Semitism is a sin against the Holy Spirit” (ESS, p. 90). In Barth’s view, the “really decisive biblical‐theological reason” for the church’s No! to National Socialism was Nazism’s intrinsic anti‐Semitism that “precisely in these last few weeks has so especially moved us” (ESS, p. 89). If four years earlier Barmen (under constraints as a consensus document) had been silent on the “Jewish question,” Barth’s 1938 Wipkingen address delivered a full and frank condemnation of Nazi anti‐Semitism, not merely on behalf of Jewish‐Christians but indeed for Jews per se. We ought not to forget, either, the crucial role played by Barth in the heroic (but ultimately unsuccessful) efforts to halt the mass deportation of Hungarian Jews in 1944. On 7 April 1944 Rudolf Vrba, a Slovakian Jew who had been a prisoner in Majdanek and then Auschwitz since June 1942, made a dramatic escape from Auschwitz‐Birkenau, together with Alfred Wetzler, another Slovakian Jew. Four days later the escapees were in Zilina, Slovakia, compiling a detailed and graphic account of the conditions in Auschwitz, an estimate of the number of Jews already murdered and the means by which it was done, and a chilling warning of the impending deportation of Hungarian Jews. The Vrba‐Wetzler report (or, as it came to be known, the Auschwitz Protocol) was immediately disseminated by representatives of the Zilina and Bratislava Jewish Councils, first throughout Slovakia and Hungary, and then also to the Allied forces in the West. At least one copy ended up in the possession of the Budapest Gestapo. Another copy, however, made its way to Barth, via Romanian and then El Salvadorean diplomatic channels. Having received the report from Georges Mandel‐Mantello  –  Acting First Secretary of the El Salvador Consulate in Geneva  –  Zürich’s Oberrabbiner Zwi Taubes visited Barth at his home in Basel on 25 June with the specific aim of passing on the Vrba report (Busch 1996, p. 515). Barth’s response was immediate. That very day, he wrote to Bundesrat Nobs and the entire Federal Council, urgently pleading for the Swiss authorities to act. For hundreds of thousands [in Hungary] all help is already too late, as it is for millions of fellow‐Jews in Germany, France, Poland, Russia. … Every day, a further thousand or ten thousand die in Hungary, and the same fate undoubtedly hangs over the whole [Jewish population]. In two, three weeks it will be all over. Yet it is not out of the question that a further hundred thousand could still be rescued (Busch 1996, pp. 515–516).

On 4 July Barth wrote a second letter to the Federal Council, this time having it countersigned by colleagues Paul Vogt, Emil Brunner, and Willem Visser ’t Hooft. We are sending you two reports from Hungary and a covering letter, dated 19 June 1944, which originated from a wholly reliable source and has come to us via a diplomatic channel in Switzerland. The reports have shocked us most deeply. Out of our sense of duty, we are obliged to give you both reports. … We do not doubt that you will take the trouble to read them and to circulate them among your circles (Lindsay 2007, p. 34).

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History records, of course, that while Swiss government policy altered from qualified neutrality to a more humane attitude toward Jewish refugees in the days and weeks following these two letters, the West’s reaction was too late. By 9 July, when the Hungarian deportations stopped, all of Hungary – with the exception of Budapest – had been made judenrein. The intense campaign undertaken by the Swiss press and initiated, in part, by Barth’s letters, had failed to stop “the single most concentrated killing orgy at Auschwitz” (Goldhagen 1996, p. 160). Largely due to the dissemination of the Vrba‐Wetzler report, in which Barth had played a key role in Switzerland, there had been widespread and public foreknowledge among the Allied nations of the Nazis’ plans for the Hungarian Jews. Yet nothing official was done to prevent the catastrophe until it was all but over. This failure to prevent the Hungarian tragedy notwithstanding, there exists overwhelming evidence to show that Barth was intimately involved with resistance efforts from Switzerland on behalf of Jews and Jewish‐Christians. Moreover, it is clear that this involvement was based, not upon an abstract understanding of Israel or a merely theoretical acquaintance with “the Jew,” but indeed upon a very real engagement with individual Jews, Jewish organizations, and contemporary Jewish thought. As we have seen, this interaction can be dated back at least to the days of his Safenwil pastorate, and probably even to his student years.

Barth’s Theology of Israel It is, of course, one thing to note Barth’s active engagement with modern Jewish life and culture, but it is something else entirely for this engagement to have had material influence on the work for which he is most famous, his theology – and most specifically, his Church Dogmatics. In the concluding section of this essay, then, I will briefly consider what role the Jews play in Barth’s dogmatic construction. My thesis is that, even more compelling than the evidence of close and sympathetic personal engagement, is the evidence internal to Barth’s dogmatic work. This evidence demonstrates that, far from modern Jewish thought and politics being alien to him, he was at least aware of, and to a degree conversant with, its contemporary trends. Far more than that, though, Jews are not portrayed simplistically as abstractions of Barth’s consciousness but as the eternally beloved and upheld people of God’s covenant. In CD I/2, which Barth completed in the summer of 1937, he notes specifically the contributions to Old Testament scholarship of Martin Buber, Hans‐Joachim Schoeps, and Emil Cohn, whose Aufruf der Zeit he had already read. These men are “instructive to listen to,” says Barth, “both in what they say as earnest Jews, and in what they cannot say as unconverted Jews” (CD I/2, p. 80). The slightly patronizing tone of the last comment should not be overstated. That there are things that even such eminent Jewish scholars as Buber and Schoeps cannot say with regard to the christological unity of the Testaments is obvious. Although Barth acknowledges the boundary beyond which they cannot go, he also registers his appreciation for what their scholarship can say. Indeed, in Barth’s opinion, the contributions of these Jewish scholars to Old Testament exegesis far surpasses the utility of Christian scholarship that has, over the past 200 years, fallen into a state of careless flippancy [Unbekümmertheit] (KD I/2, p. 87).

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Given the esteem in which he evidently held Jewish exegetical scholarship, we have cause to ask what he had to say theologically about Jews themselves. One of Barth’s first and most substantive explorations of the Jewish people occurs in CD II/2, written at the height of World War II and against the background of the Sho’ah. Much has been written on Barth’s doctrine of election, with which this volume of the Church Dogmatics is principally concerned, and in which Israel is quite naturally foregrounded. As is well known, the emphasis of CD II/2 is on a christologically reconfiguring the Reformed position, in a move by which Jesus Christ is understood to be both: the subject and object of election in whom the election of all humanity is grounded; and the one bearer of our reprobation, by which it becomes impossible to consign any particular group of people (e.g. “the Jews”) to damnation. There are, however, within  –  and consequent upon  –  this doctrinal architecture, numerous passages in which Barth affirms the specific elected continuity of postbiblical Israel  –  that is, modern‐day Jews. Perhaps most movingly, Barth insists that “in and with the election of Jesus Christ [Israel] and no other is God’s elected people” (CD II/2, p. 237). Neither biblical nor postbiblical Israel, says Barth, can “create any fact that finally turns the scale against their own election” (CD II/2, p. 209). The uncaused freedom of God to act for this people is why, irrespective of their faith or unbelief, “the fundamental blessing, the election, is still confirmed. … [The] final word is one of testimony to the divine Yes to Israel” (CD II/2, p. 15). It is noteworthy that Barth expressed this affirmation of the Jews’ divine election during the Nazi years, when both state and church were acting in complicit unity to consign European Jewry to a genocidal reprobation. Against that background, it should not surprise us that Barth would, in the postwar years, stand in both theological, and also political, solidarity with the State of Israel. In serendipity, Barth began working on CD III/3, in which de providentia Dei is the overriding theme, in the summer of 1948 – the very time at which David Ben Gurion announced the establishment of the Israeli State. Joseph Mangina has lamented that it is precisely here that Barth comes closest to disembodying Jews and depicting them through the faceless cipher of an “Israel‐concept.” The irony of Barth’s account of Israel is that while he in one sense accords it the highest possible dignity – it is the irrevocably elect people of God – he fails to honor the material, embodied existence of the Jewish people in history (Mangina 2004, p. 185).

Mangina fears, in other words, that even as he discusses their return to the land, Barth runs the risk of portraying Jews as little more than constitutive elements of a paradigmatic construct. It cannot be denied that there is some truth to Mangina’s claim. Nevertheless, there is more to be said than Mangina has suggested. For Barth, the establishment of Israel after the catastrophe of the Sho’ah was a temporal sign of God’s providential care for his elect people. Furthermore, the fact that God’s fatherly love is demonstrated on the land and not in diaspora is neither a contingent happenstance nor a product of Zionist lobbying but yet another example of the concrete particularity of God’s mysterious governance that is always actualized in specific times and places. We have to think, says Barth,

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Of definite periods in human history. … And we have to think of definite places – the land of Canaan, Egypt, the wilderness of Sinai, Canaan again, the land on the two sides of the Jordan, Jerusalem, Samaria, the towns and villages of Judea and Galilee, the various places in Syria, Asia Minor and Greece, and finally Rome (CD III/3, p. 177).

And now, he is keen to add, we must think also of the land and newly proclaimed State of Israel. [I]n spite of the destruction and persecution and above all the assimilation and interconnexion [sic] and intermingling with other nations, the Jews are still there, and permanently there. … not often loved or even assisted or protected from the outside by [other nations], but quite the reverse; usually despised for some obscure reason, and kept apart, and even persecuted and oppressed by every possible spiritual and physical weapon, and frequently exterminated in part; yet always and everywhere surviving (CD III/3, p. 212).

This, for Barth, is the “simplest and most impressive factor” of Jewish history since 70 ce (CD III/3, p. 211). Despite the myriad persecutions the Jews have had to endure, they nonetheless do still endure. That they have done so, however, ought not astonish us. Why not? Because in their history and survival, the Jews enact God’s providential gubernatio and in so doing demonstrate that the they are a people unlike any other. Why is it that we are so unwilling. … to be told that [the Jews are] the elect people? Why is it that we ransack Christianity for proofs that it is no longer so. …? From the existence of this people we have to learn that the elect of God is not a German or a Swiss or a Frenchman, but this Jew (CD III/3, p. 225).

That is to say, the Jews are unlike others simply because they alone are the one people who exist and are upheld as the people of God’s covenant. They serve as an “actualization and demonstration of the man [sic] who [is] … God’s partner in the covenant. …,” existing and surviving – including, says Barth, now on the land – only as the people of God. No matter what may be thrown at them, the Jews cannot be “overlooked, or banished, or destroyed – for the grace of God upholds [them]” (CD III/3, p. 220). For Barth the gracious favor and faithfulness of God is the ultimate reason why the Jewish people exist and persist. Their continued existence demonstrates that “divine election is a particular election, that we ourselves have been completely overlooked. … [It] is the election of another.” To put it more sharply, the inclusion of non‐Jews into God’s covenanted community “can be only in and with this other” (CD III/3, p. 225). It was for this reason – much to the astonishment of some detractors – that Barth championed so vocally the necessity of Christian solidarity with the Israeli State. It should not be overlooked that in Barth’s theology there is a shadow side to the Jews being irrevocably God’s people. On the one hand, their everlasting election secures their survival against all odds and assaults. Yet on the other hand, argues Barth, precisely as the elect, Jews “embody and reveal” the true nature of humanity as existing against God in the presence of God. They are chosen to stand before the whole of humanity as representatives of our shared sinfulness. Barth wants to insist that this symbolic function

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does not make the Jewish people objectively worse than any other group or race. On the contrary, in the Jews there is revealed the primal revolt. … in which we are all engaged. … and that is why [they are] not pleasing to us. … That is why we ascribe to the Jews as such every possible crime. Our annoyance is not really with the Jew himself. It is with the Jew only because and to the extent that the Jew is a mirror in which we immediately recognize ourselves (CD III/3, p. 222).

Anti‐Semitism is therefore “shameful and damnable” (CD III/3, p. 221), because it is intrinsically hypocritical. Jews act as a mirror in which we see “who and what we all are, and how bad we all are” (CD III/3, p. 221). Despite the fact that we might hope to parse this section of the Dogmatics in fundamentally positive ways, it remains the case, as Mangina and others have argued, that Barth here succumbs to a regrettable form of “othering.” In depicting “the Jews” as symbols rather than as fellow human beings  –  as archetypal ciphers of disobedience  –  he marginalizes their individual subjectivity as particular human beings. No matter how much Barth’s intent is to demonstrate that the non‐Jewish world is at least as unfaithful to God as the Jews, and at least as undeserving of God’s grace, nonetheless the Jews are burdened with being the typological representation of human disobedience and infidelity.

Conclusion A great deal of controversy, not to say confusion, remains surrounding Barth’s personal attitudes toward Jews and Judaism. His own comments on this subject, made late in his life, and perplexing in light of the actual record, have hardened the perception of his critics that he held nothing but a deep‐seated suspicion of Jews and perhaps even an animosity toward them. It has to be admitted, however, that the picture is more complex than is often realized, although aspects of his theology of providence – written in the shadow of Auschwitz – do undermine the very particularity of individual Jewish people by narrating them typologically. That Barth’s intent is to repudiate anti‐Semitism, especially the Christian variety, is clouded by an unfortunate resort to typology. Nevertheless, as we have seen, the historical record suggests a complex story. Rather than espousing an ill‐informed and abstract notion of “the Jews,” Barth in truth had significant relationships with individual Jews through whom he also became acquainted with contemporary Jewish thought. If, in the early 1920s, he kept these acquaintances at a distance, the Nazi years – particularly as the persecution of the Jews intensified to genocidal proportions – saw him take important risks and adopt a far more positive perspective, from which he was able to stand in both theological and humanitarian solidarity with the persecuted people of Jesus. Barth’s association with people like Buber, Schoeps, and Cohn in the 1920s and 1930s, his outspoken comments while living in Germany during the early Hitler era, his work on behalf of Jewish refugees from Nazism in the 1940s, and his engagement with Jews like

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Wyschogrod and Taubes in the 1960s confronted him with a human rather than an abstract embodiment of postbiblical Jews and Judaism. At the end of his life, despite the regrettable rhetoric of his depersonalized typology, Barth was equally certain that the actualization of God’s fatherly care for the Jewish people was also real and historically specific. The relationship of Barth to the Jews cannot, in my view, be analogized along the “whale and elephant” motif with which we began. His personal contacts with Jewish people over many years served to undercut any abstract or simplistic conceptions of them. Even in his unfortunate “othering” of the Jews in CD III/3, insofar as that occurred, Barth insisted that neither he nor anyone else can finally be othered from the Jews, for only in, with, and alongside them can others be incorporated into God’s covenant community. References Buber, M. (1937). I and Thou, trans. R.G. Smith. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Buber, M. (1958). I and Thou, 2e trans. R.G. Smith. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Busch, E. (1994). Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts, trans. J. Bowden. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Busch, E. (1996). Unter dem Bogen des einen Bundes: Karl Barth und die Juden 1933– 1945. Neukirchen‐Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag. Busch, E. (2004). Indissoluble Unity: Barth’s position on the Jews during the Hitler Era. In: For the Sake of the World. Karl Barth and Ecclesial Theology (ed. G. Hunsinger), 53–59. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Busch, E. (2018). Karl Barth and the Jews: the history of a relationship. In: Karl Barth, the Jews, and Judaism (ed. G. Hunsinger), 24–36. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Casalis, G. (1964). A Portrait of Karl Barth. New York: Doubleday & Co. Congdon, D. (2015). The Mission of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann’s Dialectical Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Fackenheim, E. (1989). To Mend the World: Foundations of Post‐Holocaust Jewish Thought. New York: Schocken Books. Fangmeier, J. and Stoevesandt, H. (eds.) (1981). Letters, 1961–1968. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Fisher, S. (1988). Revelatory Positivism? Barth’s Earliest Theology and the Marburg School. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Goldhagen, D.J. (1996). Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Alfred Knopf. Gordon, S. (1984). Hitler, Germans and the ‘Jewish Question. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hunsinger, G. (ed.) (2018). Karl Barth: Postholocaust Theologian? London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark. Lindsay, M. (2007). Barth, Israel and Jesus: Karl Barth’s Theology of Israel. Aldershot: Ashgate. Mangina, J. (2004). Karl Barth: Theologian of Christian Witness. Aldershot: Ashgate. Marquardt, F.‐W. (1967). Die Entdeckung des Judentums für die christliche Theologie: Israel im Denken Karl Barths. Münich: Christian Kaiser Verlag. McCormack, B.L. (1995). Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909–1936. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Palmer, R. (2000). Eberhard Busch on “Charlotte von Kirschbaum, the collaborator”. In: Karl Barth Society Newsletter, No. 22. Omaha: University of Nebraska. Sonderegger, K. (1995). That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew Karl Barth’s ‘Doctrine of Israel.’. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Stoevesandt, H. (ed.) (1991). Karl Barth – Kornelis Heiko Miskotte. Briefwechsel 1924–1968. Zürich: Theologischer Verlag.

CHAPTER 72

Barth and Islam Glenn Chestnutt

Introduction: Barth’s View of World Religions Karl Barth’s theology does not give particular attention to the religions of the world. There are only a few passages in his Church Dogmatics and other writings where he is explicitly concerned with other religions. The most detailed in this regard is his dialogue with Buddhism (CD I/2, pp. 340–344). Otherwise, however, the religions only appear in a rather general way. When Barth does speak of them, he usually does so in the context of his examination of the understanding of “religion,” a term that does not have the religions of the world primarily in view. No religion, including the Christian religion, can be true, except in the sense of the “justified sinner” (CD I/2, p. 325). All religions, including the Christian religion, stand under the judgment of ‘divine revelation’ (CD I/2, p. 326). What gives the Christian ­religion an advantage is solely “the name of Jesus Christ” entrusted to it, not anything intrinsic to it as a comprehensive set of rituals, beliefs, and practices. “It has its ­justification either in the name Jesus Christ, or not at all” (CD I/2, p. 356). It is this name  alone that is “decisive for the distinction of truth and error” (CD I/2, p. 343). Any discussion about Barth and Islam must recognize this general understanding.

Islam in Barth’s Early Writings and During the Nazi Era In Barth’s early writings he comments polemically and sporadically on Islam, seeing it as but one case of his general critique of “religion.” In this context he understands it as

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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a false religion. An example of this is in a sermon on 1 John 1:5, which he delivered on Sunday, 7 May 1916 to his congregation in Safenwil: God is light and nothing else! … God is not Allah, the god of the false prophet Mohammed, who sends good and evil mysteriously and indiscriminately. God is not fate that does not know what it wants. God is light and what He wants is love and life within His creation. (GA 29, p. 187)

Hermann Schmidt believes that Barth’s early knowledge of Islam can be traced back to the work of Conrad von Orelli’s Allgemeine Religionsgeschichte. Here von Orelli believes that, although Islam is a religion that proclaims the omniscience and omnipotence of God, its understanding of God’s sovereignty and also of God’s majesty presents God as a rigid, remote, and absolute God in relationship to humanity (1911, p. 380). Schmidt also contends that Barth’s spelling of the Prophet’s name as “Mahommed” in this early sermon is influenced by Goethe’s depiction of the Prophet in his play “Mahommet,” a translation of Voltaire’s Enlightenment drama of the same name (GA 29, pp. 187–188). In the confirmation classes of 1909–1910 and 1915–1916 in Safenwil, Barth teaches on world religions. These classes are a mix of fact and opinion. For instance, the notes for the 1909–1910 session include some general facts about the Prophet and Islam as understood at that time, as well as Barth’s opinions not only of Muhammad as a religious and intelligent, yet self‐deluded, deceptive, and polygamous prophet, but also of Islam as a mechanical religion, which is outwardly moral, but promises a sensual afterlife (see GA 18, pp. 63–64). Jürgen Fangmeier’s footnotes to the 1915 lesson Die Religionen confirms Schmidt’s thesis, citing similarities between Barth’s statements about different world religions and statements made by von Orelli on the same topics (GA 18, pp. 127–130). Just a few years later, in a letter written to Eduard Thurneysen in 1921 dated Monday, 12 December, Barth critically comments on a lecture given by Carl Stange about developments in the history of religions school: He comments on Indian religious history, Islam, on the conditions in the heart of Africa, old and new missionary methods, research into fairy tales, Homeric heroes etc., with a knowledge that makes me stand open‐mouthed; but I had hardly even heard the name of most of these things, and that is still not even the special subject of this contortionist. I mentioned at the end how much [they] are … unpleasant to me. (GA 4, p. 23)

The first glimpse of Barth’s understanding of Islam as a particular threat to contemporary “Christendom” is in an article titled “Questions to Christendom,” published in 1931. Here Barth says that Christendom is faced with “a whole series of alien religions different from those of the past” (Barth 1932, p. 3) that “have an irrational power over the individual” (Moseley 2006). The “new religions” listed by Barth that are a threat to Christendom are “Genuine Communism (Russian),” “International Fascism,” “Americanism,” and “New Islam” (Barth 1932, pp. 4–6). On the latter he writes: Now it is surely no accident that even in this our time the renowned historic religions of the East, the nearest to us and most striking of which is Islam, seem to have acquired new

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vitality. As a “religion” (in that power so distinctive of religion which unites all men and is ultimately a riddle) Islam seeks to be accepted quite differently and seriously. At various places Islam is crying to the Christian missionary an almost irresistible Halt! In the wonderfully complicated forms of “anthroposophy,” i.e. “man’s wisdom,” and Islam is sending its roots deep down into the soil of land where Christendom had sway. (Barth 1932, p. 6)

Of the new religions listed, the two most closely tied to each other over the next decade would be International Fascism, in the particular form of German National Socialism, and New Islam. In December 1938, Barth delivered the lecture “The Church and the Political Questions of our Day”  –  an analysis of Hitler’s attack on the Jewish people. Timothy Gorringe calls this his “most outspoken account of the church’s political responsibility” (1999, p. 156). He paraphrases Barth: The church has to pray for [the suppression of anti‐Semitism] and [its] elimination as in former days it prayed for the overcoming of Islam. In face of it silence is impossible and only speaking out will do. (Gorringe 1999, p. 157)

In this lecture Barth clearly links National Socialism and Islam. He describes National Socialism as a “proper church.” He speaks of a “new Islam, its myth as a new Allah, and Hitler as this new Allah’s prophet,” against which decisive and final action must be taken (Barth 1939, p. 43). What Barth means by calling National Socialism a “proper church” is spelled out clearly in a short reply he makes to a letter by Emil Brunner in 1948 on the difference between National Socialism and Communism (ATS, pp. 113–118). The major threat in National Socialism – which made it an unmitigated evil to be opposed at all costs – lay in the fact that both in Germany and elsewhere, people “had succumbed to Hitler’s spell” (ATS, p. 114). It was the fact that the pseudoreligious ideology put forth by the National Socialists had captured the imaginations and minds of the people and threatened to become the ruling loyalty of their lives, that overshadowed, finally, even its obvious totalitarianism, its virulent anti‐Semitism, and the militarism that brought about its extension throughout Europe. The danger posed by National Socialism, then, was not simply “a matter of declaiming some mischief, distant and easily seen through” (ATS, p. 115). It was a matter of life and death, a historical crisis of the first order, and it called for resolute and unyielding resistance (ATS, p. 115). Barth’s understanding of National Socialism as an all‐encompassing threat to Europe in the 1930s and early 1940s (as a false religion) bears similarities to the understanding of Islam “as a strong political force and … perpetual threat” in the Europe of Martin Luther’s time (Rajashekar 1990, p. 179). J. Paul Rajashekar contends that from the beginning of the First Crusade until the “zenith of the Ottoman imperialism” of the sixteenth century, “Muslims and Christians understood themselves to be two mutually exclusive societies at war. A good measure of Christian perception of Islam was influenced by this factor” (Rajashekar 1990, p. 180). Specifically, Barth understands Islam as a cipher to speak of National Socialism. Like National Socialism, Islam’s image of God is idolatrous (CD I/2, p. 302) and hence false (CD IV/3, p. 875). The worship of God by the Turk (Muslim) of Luther’s time was a form of natural religion that parallels Barth’s view of the pseudoreligion of National

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Socialism (CD I/2, p. 287).1 He cites Luther as saying that the Turks’ desire to know God directly is a form of “righteousness by works” that “means the fall of Lucifer and despair” (CD I/1, p. 169). In contrast to this, God in his revelation – Jesus Christ – does not allow humanity to come to terms with life, either to justify or sanctify itself. Jesus Christ takes on the sin of the world and wills that “all our care should be cast upon him, because he careth for us” (CD I/2, p. 309). Barth quotes Luther as saying: By this article our faith is sundered from all other faiths on earth. For the Jews have it not, neither the Turks and Saracens, nor any Papist or false Christian or any other unbeliever, but only proper Christians. … (Luther, Heer‐pred. wid. d. Türcken, 1529, W.A. 30 II 186, 15). (CD I/2, pp. 309–310)2

And again: We cannot do any greater despite to our Lord God than by unbelief, for by it we make God a devil. Again, we cannot do him any greater honour than by faith, when we regard him as a Saviour. Therefore he cannot abide a doubting heart, like the Turk [italics mine] who doubts, … by good works we do not become a Christian but remain a heathen (Pred. üb. Joh. 447–54, 1534, E.A. 5, 229 f.). (CD IV/1, p. 415)

Luther clearly sees the Turk as “an instrument of the devil” – Allah (Rajashekar 1990, p. 184). By comparison, Barth sees devotion to Adolf Hitler – the new Mohammed – as evil. He endorses Luther’s attitude to the Turkish War as providential (CD III/3, p. 25). Islam was a tangible threat to the Christian world in the Middle Ages (CD IV/3, p. 20). The Turks had to be repelled then (CD III/3, p. 100) just as the Nazis have to be now. Illustrative of this last point of comparison is Barth’s powerful use of the imagery from “the fusion of statecraft and religion in Islam” (Moseley 2006) in his “Letter to Great Britain From Switzerland” to argue that Christians should support the war against Hitler: We shall not regard this war, therefore, either as a crusade or as a war of religion. We shall spare ourselves the peculiar passions and the vain expectations and hopes which are wont to be bound up with such an undertaking; we may safely leave all such things to the modern Mohammed [italics mine] and his deceived hordes. (Barth 1941, pp. 20–21)

Islam in Barth’s Dogmatic Writings: Monotheism Islam is referred to in the Göttingen Dogmatics in a discussion on the uniqueness of the “oneness” of God. Here Barth uses Islam as an example of the misunderstanding that God’s oneness is in fact monotheism and that Christianity has this attribute in common with Islam. 1  Barth uses the word Turk in the same sense as Luther. Rajashekar contends that this was a common medieval expression that is synonymous with Islam or Muslims (1990, p. 177). 2  Barth is quoting here from advice Luther gives to Christians, anticipating that many would be captured during Turkish raids into Germany. While in captivity in Turkey, Christians should practice private devotions as an effective means of sustaining an inward faith (Grislis 1974, p. 278).

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It was not a good moment when the discovery was made that Christianity and Islam at least have monotheism in common as compared with other religions. If by the uniqueness of God what is meant is so‐called monotheism, the religiously clarified and embellished idea of the “one,” the cult of the number 1, then the uniqueness of God is certainly not meant. (GD, p. 430)

Jennifer Diane George argues that for Barth “there is no way to speak ‘generically’ about God” (2003, p. 196). One can speak correctly about God only if one has been enabled to know God by means of God’s self‐revelation. She states that for Barth this means that “one cannot correctly speak about God unless one does justice to the triune nature of revelation” as “only God can reveal God, and that’s precisely what God does reveal”: Godself in a threefold manner (p. 196). “God is Triune.” Hence “to speak of God without holding on to this recognition, is to be speaking falsely of God” (p. 196). George contends that this has “to be held dialectically in tension” with the recognition that at all times one should have in mind the one God who was revealed to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses (2003, p. 197). There is but one God and this “oneness” must be recognized as highly particular (p. 197). It is not meant in any way to be understood in continuity with Islamic monotheism or indeed any other form of monotheism or pantheism (see GD, p. 431). In fact Islam is a “lofty and refined” type of monotheism, an attempt to “bypass God’s Word” (GD, p. 431). But “there is no way of getting around God’s Word, of bypassing revelation, if [one is] to understand what is meant by God’s three‐in‐oneness” (George 2003, p. 202). God’s ‘three‐in‐oneness’ is “absolutely unique, without creaturely equivalence” (p. 203). The starting point for deriving the doctrine of the Trinity has a specific origin: “the confession of revelation in Jesus, the confession Iēsous Kyrios” (GD, p. 103f). This confession is fundamentally at odds with Islam (CD IV/1, p. 183). The Christian faith, in its evangelical form, has to be opposed to all other faiths, specifically Islam, as Christianity is “the confession of truth as opposed to that of error and untruth” (CD I/2, p. 828). The oneness of God is again addressed in the Church Dogmatics. In CD I/1 §9, The Triunity of God, Barth warns that the church must speak very carefully about God’s “oneness.” As in the Göttingen Dogmatics, Barth emphases that there is no excuse for speaking of the Christian faith in God as “a kind of monotheism,” another representation of which is Islam (CD I/1, p. 353). George contends that for Barth “monotheism is not some general category, but has a very specific content” (2003, p. 252). Reiterating the Göttingen Dogmatics, Barth believes that it is only in revelation that the church recognizes that it must speak of God as both one and three, and that the “oneness” of God is only such that it includes the idea of the “threeness” (CD I/1, p. 351). Again echoing the Göttingen Dogmatics, Barth contends that revelation must be allowed to serve as the only source for describing the being of God (CD I/1, pp. 351–353). In God’s revelation God discloses Godself to be the God of unity in trinity in whom only the equality of Father, Son and Spirit is compatible with true monotheism – not the monotheism of abstraction (e.g. the monotheism of Islam), but the monotheism of the true God in God’s self‐revelation (CD I/1, p. 353). Many religions are explicitly or implicitly monotheistic, but at issue in the unity of self‐revelation is the unique revealed unity that must not be confused with the singularity or isolation of numerical unity (CD I/1, pp. 353–354). The unity of God includes

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a distinction and order in deity that is the distinction and order of the three divine persons (CD I/1, p. 355). Barth believes that speaking of “modes of being” to describe the persons of the Trinity does more to protect against charges of abstract monotheism than the traditional theological concept of “person.” George explains that this also “does much to prevent the distinctions from being dissolved into a single essentially undifferentiated concept of an Absolute Personality or Spirit” (2003, p. 254). “Father, Son and Spirit are not encountered as three individual centres of consciousness, three persons, which are then somehow to be reconciled with the idea of God as one person. In revelation, God addresses the human being as the one God here, here and here; again and again and again. The single subject is repeated in three modes of being, distinguishable, yet inseparable” (George 2003, p. 254; see also CD I/1, pp. 360–361). Barth follows “Tertullian, the Cappadocians, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Calvin and Luther” in making the relationality of these three modes “that which constitutes the Trinity” (Moseley 2006). Father, Son, and Spirit are “three distinctive modes of being of the one God subsisting in their relationships one with another” (CD I/1, p. 366). Quoting Luther he argues that this relationality guards against false religions, including Islam: With this faith I here guard myself … against … Mahomet, and all that are wiser than God Himself, and mix not the persons into one person, but in true Christian faith retain three distinct persons in the one divine, eternal essence, all three of which, to us and creatures, are one God, Creator and Worker of all things (Von den letzten Worten Davids, 1543, W.A., 54, 58, 4). (CD I/1, p. 365)

Barth’s external critique of Islam as a “false religion” is reinforced by an internal critique of absolute monotheism in general in an exposition of the unity of God as one of the perfections of the divine freedom in §31 of CD II/1: God is free both in Godself, in an absolute sense, and in being free from external conditioning. Thus, although God in God’s freedom can relate and indeed does relate to the real world, the world is rendered relative to God: The relativity of the other is made necessary … by God’s absoluteness. It is made irrevocably necessary. There cannot, then, be any divinisation of the world. (CD II/1, p. 309)

This is “a designation of his freedom, of his being as it is self‐grounded and therefore absolutely superior to every other being” (CD II/1, p. 447). God is absolute in both a noetic and an ontic sense. God is not “one instance in a genus” (CD II/1, p. 447). God is absolutely unique, “an instance outside every genus” (CD II/1, p. 447). Therefore one cannot ascribe the unity that is a predicate of creaturely unities to God, otherwise unity and uniqueness would be absolutized above God. The concept behind absolutizing unity and uniqueness above God is monotheism (CD II/1, p. 448) and an example of the “absolutizing” of “uniqueness” is “the noisy fanaticism of Islam regarding the one God, alongside whom, it is humorous to observe, only the baroque figure of his prophet is entitled to a place of honor”(CD II/1, p. 448; GD, p. 430). The artifice adopted by Islam consists in its developing to a supreme degree what is at the heart of all paganism, revealing and setting at the very centre its esoteric essence, i.e.

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so‐called “monotheism.” … Monotheism … can be impressive and convincing as knowledge of God only so long as we fail to note the many‐sided dialectic in which we are thereby inevitably entangled and in which Islam is incurably entangled. For the cosmic forces in whose objectivity it is believed that the unique has been found are varied. It is only by an act of violence that one of them can be given pre‐eminence over the others, … Who is the first and foremost and really the one who is unique – Allah or his prophet, Allah or his devotees? Monotheism is all very well so long as this conflict does not break out. But it will inevitably break out again and again. (CD II/1, pp. 448–449)

By contrast Christ is the unique way that God has chosen to reveal Godself, and this uniqueness is what is recognized through Christian faith. It is only by reference to the norm of Jesus Christ that humans are enabled to receive God’s revelation. The divine immanence in all its varied possibilities has its origin in Jesus Christ and therefore its unity in him, but only in him, in the diversity of its actions and stages. … All other unities of immanence which we seek and think we find cannot constitute the unity of his immanence, …. We are simply making an idol of the ruins of his immanence … and in the service and worship of this idol we can only more and more blind ourselves to the true God present to his creation. (CD II/1, pp. 318–319)

For Barth, the cause of Islam as one of the “various heathen religions” is that it does not know or refuses to know the “ground of divine immanence in Jesus Christ” (CD II/1, p. 319). Ultimately Islam is “enslavement to a false god” (CD II/1, p. 319).

Islam in Barth’s Dogmatic Writings: A “Paganised” Form of Rabbinic Judaism Islam is referred to in the Church Dogmatics as a “paganised” form of “the semi‐biblical religion of post‐Christian Judaism,” that is, Judaism shorn of the doctrines of election and grace (CD III/3, p. 28). This statement is posited in the context of a discussion of providence and creation, in which Barth denies that belief in a divine creator in the three faiths of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity is anything more than a superficial similarity between them. For Barth, the Christian God is different from the God of Judaism and Islam (CD III/3, p. 30), where Islam is understood as a “later caricature” of Jewish monotheism (CD II/1, p. 453). David Fergusson is correct to describe Barth’s discussion of Israel as “rich, ­complex and ambivalent” (Fergusson 2003, p. 13). It is the case, as Fergusson points out, that some concepts within the Barthian corpus point toward “earlier anti‐Semitic tropes.” Judas (and behind him the Old Testament figure of Saul) is the type of the rejected in whom we see mirrored our own sin, pettiness, self‐righteousness and rebellion. The synagogue, in its persistence across history, attests human stubbornness before the grace and demand of God. (Fergusson 2003, p. 13)

In particular, Barth portrays the synagogue as the enemy of God that practices Jewish obstinacy to the gospel. It is “the personification of a half‐venerable, half‐gruesome

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relic, of a miraculously preserved antique, of human whimsicality unwilling to take up the message ‘He [Christ] is Risen!’” (CD II/2, p. 263). This leads Katherine Sonderegger to contrast a portrait of Barth as a political supporter of Israel with a portrait of him as an anti‐Judaic theologian attached to his anti‐Judaic presuppositions. She argues that although Barth has a deep interest in Jews, he has almost no interest in Judaism. She writes: The solidarity between Christians and Jews that Barth so vigorously advocates is based upon the quiet assumption that Judaism does not exist. Jews exist, the people Israel exist, even the synagogue exists in error, but Judaism  –  an independent religious system and institution – does not. (Sonderegger 1992, p. 142)

Sonderegger contends that although Barth retains a place for Israel in the economy of salvation, it is as the negative counterpoint to the church. The Jewish people exist because the promises of God are irrevocable and the Jews remain elect in spite of their blindness. Sonderegger also rightly cautions the reader not to make the association between biblical and rabbinical Judaism as quickly or directly as Barth arguably does. Contemporary Judaism and Jewish practice, are postbiblical and rabbinic  –  they are Judaism without “temple worship” (Sonderegger 2004, p. 82). In a parallel vein, one should not make the hasty assumption that Islam is, in Barth’s words, a “paganised” form of “the semi biblical religion of post‐Christian Judaism” (CD III/3, p. 28). As has been shown, Barth had very little interest in or understanding of Islam throughout most of his life, except in its guise as a threat to medieval Christendom, which he used as a cipher for National Socialism and as an example of absolute monotheism. This is consistent with his general disinterest in and impressionistic understanding of world religions in general. It could also be argued that Barth’s limited understanding of Islam as a “paganized” form of post‐Christian Judaism corresponds to his residual anti‐Judaism. This can be seen most clearly in his understanding of Ishmael, which in many ways parallels his understanding of the synagogue. Ishmael, who according to Islamic tradition is the progenitor of the Arab nations and, along with Abraham, the cofounder of the Ka’bah (the central sanctuary of Allah) in Mecca, is described by Barth as being excluded by God in favor of Isaac as the “repetition and establishment” of God’s election of Abraham (CD II/2, p. 214). But Ishmael is not rejected because of some fault of his own. Consequently Barth recounts that Ishmael is not forsaken by God, but instead will in time become the founder of a great nation (CD II/2, pp. 216–217). For Barth, Ishmael is clearly aligned with the “refractory synagogue” of those who are rejected within elected Israel (CD II/2, p. 217). But like that of Judas, Ishmael’s rejection is “superseded and limited” (CD II/2, p.  226) because of Jesus Christ, “who died on the cross for the justification of God” (CD  II/2, p. 223). In fact, the future of the lost people of Israel, which according to Barth’s logic must include Muslims as paganized Jews, is present in the calling “of the Gentiles,” which – according to Barth – justifies “the God of Israel even as the God of Ishmael” (CD II/2, p. 231). Theologically, then, it would seem that “the name of Jesus Christ” and the history it represents not only justifies the future of Jews but also justifies the future of Muslims. This contention is strengthened by Barth himself when he

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encourages the reader “to recognize Jesus Christ not only in the type of … Isaac and his sacrifice but also in the very different type of Ishmael and his expulsion and miraculous protection … not only in the type of the Israelite nation but also in the very different type of the excluded and yet not utterly excluded heathen nations” (CD II/2, p. 366).

Islam in Barth’s Later Writings in the Context of God’s Covenant with Israel and Its Fulfillment in Jesus Christ After the 1967 war between Israel and five Arab nations  –  the so‐called Six Day War – Barth expressed publicly his remarkable yet controversial position in support of the state of Israel (Marquardt, cited in Sonderegger 1992, pp. 136–137). Reflecting on Israel’s victory, Barth understood it as God’s faithfulness to his promise for Israel rather than as an analogy to the conquest of Canaan under Joshua (see Haynes 1991, p. 81). However, he was not blind to the political reality in Palestine. His concern about Islam is evidenced in his dialogue with J. Bouman from Beirut, Lebanon. In a letter to Hendrik Berkhof in Leiden (1968), Barth reports on his conversation with Bouman: “In the theological assessment of the local situation [in Lebanon] … we agreed completely” that “a new understanding about the relationship between the Bible and the Quran is an urgent task for us” (GA 6, pp. 504–505). In the letter Barth expresses the belief that his dream of developing a “theology of the Holy Spirit” was a dream that he could “only envisage from afar, as Moses once looked on the promised land” (Busch 1976, p. 494). Busch suggests that Barth “was thinking of a theology which, unlike his own, was not written from the dominant perspective of christology, but from that of pneumatology, and in which the concerns of the theology of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were not so much repeated and continued as understood and developed further” (Busch 1976, p. 494). Another glimpse of Barth’s increasing awareness of both rabbinic Judaism and Islam comes in his book Ad Limina Apostolorum (1967). Here Barth devotes himself to serious study of the 16 Latin texts of Vatican II, especially those concerning Israel and non‐ Christian religions. For Barth, “later and contemporary Judaism (believing or unbelieving)” is the sole natural proof of God (ALA, p. 36). The primary division the church needs to confess is the division between the church and Judaism, even more profoundly than divisions between fellow Christians. Barth therefore posits: “Would it not be more appropriate, in view of the anti‐Semitism of the ancient, the medieval, and to a large degree the modern church, to set forth an explicit confession of guilt here, rather than in respect to the separated brethren?” (ALA, pp. 36–37). Such confession would also be appropriate, in Barth’s view, with regard to Islam, because of the deplorable role of the church in the “so‐called Crusades” (ALA, 37). Fangmeier contends that in his last meeting with Barth in September 1968 Barth disclosed to him that he (Barth) would devote himself to a conversation with the non‐ Christian religions, if he had enough time (1969, p. 62). According to Bertold Klappert, the following relative plan was crucial: a relation between Christendom and Judaism, a relation between Judaism and Islam, and finally a relation between Buddhism and Hinduism (1994, p. 48). Of particular interest is the proposed relation between Judaism

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and Islam. It is plausible to believe that the foundation of Barth’s interreligious plan would have been found in his understanding of God’s covenant with Israel and its fulfillment in Jesus Christ: For Barth the promise of a new covenant in Jeremiah 31 cannot mean the replacement of the old covenant with Israel by a different one. It has to mean the “revelation and confirmation of what he had always willed and indeed done in the covenant with Israel” (CD IV/1, p. 34). The promise, however, does aim at a “complete change in the form of the covenant which is to take place in the last days and therefore beyond the history of Israel considered in the Old Testament” (CD IV/1, p. 33). Then it will be so “filled” with grace that the “covenant with Israel is made and avails for the whole race” (CD IV/1, p. 35). For Barth then, there is in Christ no new or different covenant made with the nations. Busch contends that “this is Barth’s basic thesis. This is the issue for him, and not that the covenant with Israel is replaced by a different one” (Busch 2004, p. 99). Barth writes: There is no question of repeating the covenant. For Peter, for John, for Paul, for the churches in Corinth and Rome, it was concluded in Christ. It was quite unthinkable that it should have to or could be concluded anew with Peter or John or Paul or the Corinthians or Romans. There can be no question of anything but their inclusion in the one covenant. (CD I/2, p. 105)

Through Christ the covenant has now become a truly “perfect covenant,” perfect in that it is now God’s covenant not only with Israel but with humanity in general and as a whole (CD IV/1, p. 33; DO, p. 74). The fact that the “world” is now reconciled to God means that, through this ‘perfect covenant,’ “as an act of God … [people] of all times and places … [have] their situation … objectively [and] decisively changed, whether they are aware of it or not” (CD IV/1, p. 245). That God has in fact accepted humanity in Jesus Christ is attested in the world by the visible “community” of those accepted by God who are gathered together by and through him in order to bear witness to the world that they belong to him. Barth writes: The people of Israel in its whole history ante et post Christum and the Christian church as it came into being on the day of Pentecost are two forms and aspects … of the one inseparable community in which Jesus Christ has his earthly‐historical form of existence, by which he is attested to the whole world, by which the whole world is summoned to faith in him. For what the Christian church is, Israel was and is before it – his possession (John 1:11), his body. … We are dealing with two forms, two aspects, two “economies” of grace. But it is the one history. … having its centre in Jesus Christ. … It is the arc of the one covenant which stretches over the whole … To try to deny this unity would be to deny Jesus Christ himself. (CD IV/1, pp. 669–671 rev.)

In all their distinctiveness, Israel and the church are the one community of God. They are both, in their distinctiveness, witnesses of God to one another and together to the rest of the world. They also need each other. But not only do they need each other, they are in union with one another, “a unity which does not have to be established but

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is already there ontologically” because of their common foundation in grace (CD IV/1, p. 671). For Barth a relationship between Christianity and Judaism exists ontologically. “Moreover,” as Mark Lindsay argues, “this unity is not merely a relic of the biblical age, but remains in force; the Jews … remain loved and elect by God right up to the present day, irrespective of their attitude to Jesus” (2007, p. 109). Lindsay continues: “If Judaism needs the witness of the church, so too the church needs the witness of the synagogue as the indispensable root from which it has sprung and in which it must remain if it is to be complete” (p. 109). But more than that, rabbinic Judaism “testifies to divine grace in ways that are positive, salutary, and capable of contributing constructively to the theological and ethical self‐understanding of the church” (Fergusson 2003, p. 13).

Conclusion For Barth, Muslims are “paganized Jews” who are clearly aligned to the “refractory ­synagogue.” Like Judas, however they cannot ultimately be rejected in Jesus Christ, the fulfillment of God’s covenant with Israel. This is because the God of Israel is also the God of Ishmael. It has to be recognized though, that this understanding is in tension with Barth’s belief that the Christian God is in fact different from the God of Judaism and Islam. Moreover, although Barth’s awareness of both rabbinic Judaism and Islam grew during the latter part of his life, his understanding of both world faiths needs repair and development. It is reasonable to suggest that his understanding of an ontological relationship and mutual dependency between Judaism and the church should be adapted to create a space for Ishmael and his descendants, the people of Islam. This interpretation would then allow for Islam to also be ontologically linked to Judaism and the church under the arc of the one covenant of grace. This potentially opens a space for “a theology of the Holy Spirit” to be developed where Islam can also testify “to divine grace in ways that are positive, salutary and capable of contributing constructively to the theological and ethical self‐understanding” of all three Abrahamic faiths. References Barth, K. (1932). Questions to Christendom (or Christendom’s Present‐Day Problems), trans. R. B. Hoyle. London: The Lutterworth Press. Barth, K. (1939). The Church and the Political Problem of our Day. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Barth, K. (1941). A letter to Great Britain from Switzerland. In: A Letter to Great Britain from Switzerland, trans. E. H. Gordon and G. Hill. London/New York: The Sheldon Press/Macmillan.

Busch, E. (1976). Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts, trans. J. Bowden. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Busch, E. (2004). The Great Passion: An Introduction to Karl Barth’s Theology, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Fangmeier, J. (1969). Der Theologe Karl Barth. Basel: Friedrich Reinhardt Verlag. Fergusson, D.A.S. (2003). Contemporary Christian theological reflection on land and covenant. In: Theology of Land and

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Covenant, a Report to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Edinburgh: The Church of Scotland Board of Practice and Procedure. George, J. D. (2003). I Am the Lord Your God: Karl Barth’s Doctrine of the Trinity and Jewish Monotheism, PhD thesis, Princeton Theological Seminary. Gorringe, T.J. (1999). Karl Barth: Against Hegemony. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grislis, E. (1974). Luther and the Turks: Part II. Muslim World 64 (4): 275–291. Haynes, S.R. (1991). Prospects for Post‐ Holocaust Theology. Atlanta: Scholars Press. Klappert, B. (1994). Versöhnung und Befreiung: Versuche, Karl Barth kontextuell zu verstehen. Neukichen‐Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag. Lindsay, M.R. (2007). Barth, Israel and Jesus: Karl Barth’s Theology of Israel. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Moseley, C. 2006, ‘Karl Barth’s Theology of Religion: Interpreting Religious Change Yesterday and Today,’ Paper presented to the Society for the Study of Theology, Leeds, 3–6 April. von Orelli, C. (1911). Allgemeine Religionsgeschichte. Bonn: A. Marcus & E. Weber’s Verlag. Rajashekar, V.J.P. (1990). Luther and Islam: an Asian perspective. Lutherjahrbuch 57: 174–191. Sonderegger, K. (1992). That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew: Karl Barth’s “Doctrine of Israel”. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Sonderegger, K. (2004). Response to indissoluble Unity. In: For the Sake of the World: Karl Barth and the Future of Ecclesial Theology (ed. G. Hunsinger), 80–88. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

CHAPTER 73

Barth and Sexual Difference Faye Bodley‐Dangelo

Introduction Karl Barth’s discussion of the difference and the relationship between the sexes appears in three sections of Church Dogmatics. In III/1, §41.3, his detailed figural exegesis of the creation of Adam and Eve (Gen 2:18–25) builds the biblical and figural metastructure to which he will refer in the two later sections. In III/2, §45.3 he locates the marital relationship at the normative center of human relationality, and in III/4, §54.1 he outlines the ethical dimensions of his doctrine of man and woman. In these discussions he advances a set of claims that locate a male‐privileged, normative heterosexuality at the center of human fellowship, identified with the divine likeness of Gen 1:27. However, the function of this concept is unstable, due to his christocentric, methodological commitments. I shall first outline his central claims about sexual difference. I then examine the way that the celibate Christ disappears and reappears in his account. At the same time I take a critical look at how Barth seeks to support his understanding of interhuman alterity and relationality by providing it with a christological and biblical basis. Barth’s first claim is that sexual difference is the one structural difference that distinguishes human beings from one another. He sees it as the primary form of interhuman otherness, running through all other differences. The decisive social fact, he proposes, is that all human beings are created either male or female. Barth is reticent, as he acknowledges, to explain what this difference entails. He refuses to draw from biological, psychological, sociological, or philosophical considerations to add flesh to its bones. To do so, he fears, would be to resort to natural theology, one that looks beyond God’s revelation in Christ for knowledge of the Creator and the creature. He depicts the human being’s sexed identity as a divine gift and obligation. It is something to be obediently and gratefully carried out. As human beings created by God, we are not to envy, appropriate,

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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belittle, or dismiss the prerogatives and particularities of the opposite sex. Rather our sexed existence (as either male or female) is to be carried out gladly. In doing so we will need to deliberate critically on the ever‐changing social norms and conventions through which we expresses our sexual identities. Second, in our existence as either male or female, we are fundamentally constituted in relation to the opposite sex. We exist in and for relationships that involve dialogical, interpersonal encounters with the sexually differentiated other. We are also culturally and historically situated so that we need to interact with contemporary social norms and conventions. The difference between man and woman makes possible a degree of fellowship – with one both like and unlike oneself – that is unattainable, Barth claims, with someone of the same sex. There can be no question that man is to woman and woman to man supremely the other, the fellow‐man, to see and to be seen by whom, to speak with and to listen to whom, to receive from and to render assistance to whom is necessarily a supreme human need and problem and fulfilment, so that whatever may take place between man and man and woman and woman is only as it were a preliminary and accompaniment for this true encounter between man and fellowman, for this true being in fellow‐humanity. (CD III/2, p. 288)

Barth envisions a relationship between the sexes that is driven by shared needs and obligations. It is a matter of constant giving and receiving. As questions are posed and answers given, we critically correct the misperceptions and assumptions of the other person. At the same time, we depend upon the other’s critical corrections of what may be our own misguided assumptions about the other sex. We each stand in need of the caregiving and assistance that these shared self‐revelations make possible. It is through this process of self‐revelation and assistance vis‐à‐vis the sexually differentiated other that we are conformed to the likeness of the imago Dei. Barth identifies this interhuman structure and process with Christ’s self‐revelatory and saving activity on behalf of his fellow human beings. Barth regards this dialectical and dialogical encounter as being broad enough to include concrete, everyday interactions between individuals of the opposite sex. However, he sees this encounter as tailored most especially toward the marital relationship. He identifies marriage between a man and a woman as the context in which this self‐revealing, aid‐lending fellowship might be most fully realized. Consequently he places the monogamous marital encounter at the normative center not only of the relationships between sexes but also of human relationality in general. Barth sees the significance of opposite‐sex relations as including even the most mundane moments of decision. There is hardly a possibility of everyday life which is ethically irrelevant in this respect or falls outside the scope of this distinction [between man and woman], even down to the problems of dress and outward bearing. Nothing is indifferent in this connexion. The decision with regard to this requirement of faithfulness to sex is made at every point by both man and woman. (CD III/4, p. 155)

In this light, opposite‐sex relations exceed the confines of mutual, dialogical interaction. They become entangled in culturally pervasive social norms. At least Barth seems

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to suggest as much when he declares, “As a norm and criterion the opposite sex is always and everywhere invisibly present” (CD III/4, p. 168). Finally, Barth also makes a third and very important move. He superimposes an asymmetric ordering upon the relationship between male and female. On the one hand, he depicts opposite‐sex relations as unfolding in a mutual and reciprocal exchange in which each person depends on the other in the course of self‐revelation and mutually helpful criticism. On the other hand, he assigns an exclusive prerogative to men as agents who are supposed to lead, inspire, and direct women in some (never clearly specified) capacity. It is, Barth claims, the man’s prerogative to assume responsibility for the relationship. It is the man who is ordained to discern and decide upon the best interests of both parties in the encounter. Here too, Barth intends his ordering of the sexes to cover the full spectrum of relations between men and women. He sees the hierarchical pattern of priority and subordination in opposite‐sex relations as applying to all spheres of life, whether domestic or public. He regards it as bearing most especially on the context of marital relationships. Remarkably, he is as reticent about explaining how this ordering is to be lived out as he is about describing the difference between the sexes. He makes no attempt to reconcile this male‐privileged ordering with what he affirms as the mutuality of a man–woman relationship structured upon reciprocal dialogical and critical exchange, shared dependency, and obligation. He fails to explain how men might perform their part in the order without eviscerating the women’s part in their mutual exchange. The egalitarian mutuality of the relationship is unreconciled with its hierarchical ordering. Many critical engagements with Barth’s account have focused on its patriarchal dimensions. They tend to focus on the tension between mutuality and hierarchical ordering (Campbell 1981; Renich Fraser 1986; Fiddes 1990, pp. 138–153; Frykberg 1993; McKelway 1986, pp. 231–243; Stephenson 2008, pp. 435–449). More recently, critics have begun to challenge the heteronormative dimensions of his theological anthropology (Ronaldo Balboa 1998, pp. 771–789; Rogers 1999; Ward 1998, pp. 52–72). With this challenge in view, I will focus my discussion on the central place that the marital relationship occupies in his account. I have discussed Barth’s claims about sexual difference in detail elsewhere and have argued that because of his assumptions about the givenness and ordering of sexual difference, Barth’s viability has been underappreciated for contemporary theological approaches to sex, gender, and sexuality. Several features of his account make it a useful resource: his refusal to anchor sexual difference in naturalizing discourses, his rejection of natural theology, and the critical and performative dimensions in his account of the self ’s relationship to the sexually differentiated other. He himself grants that our sexed existence (as male or female) is to be lived out in an unending practice of critical interactions with the cultural norms that mediate the exchange between self and other. On that basis, his own account of man and woman demands an interrogation of the unexamined assumptions underlying his assertions about the obvious givenness and ordering of sexual difference. Furthermore, in much that he says about the everyday enactment of our sexed specificities, he gives us some helpful tools for conducting such an interrogation (Bodley‐Dangelo ­forthcoming‐a, 2019).

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In what follows I will use the figure of the celibate Christ to interrogate and trouble Barth’s christological authorization of these heteronormative constraints. If Christ himself is the imago Dei, and if the divine likeness to Christ is most fully realized in a monogamous marital relationship with the opposite sex, then some account must be given of Christ’s unmarried status. Nevertheless, Barth’s efforts to reconcile Christ’s celibacy to his account are not only fleeting and few but also fail to do justice to the challenge itself. It is not surprising, then, that although critics have been quick to recognized that Christ’s unmarried status poses a challenge for the privileged place the sexual relationship holds in Barth’s theological anthropology, little attention has been given to Barth’s efforts to address this challenge. When he does take up the topic, he buries it in fine‐print sections where he strives to secure scriptural support for his doctrine while at the same time fending off anticipated counterarguments from Scripture. I will track Barth’s elision of and references to Christ’s unmarried status in order to foreground its destabilizing effects upon his heteronormative configuration of the divine likeness in human relationality.

Marital Prefigurations of Christ Barth is conspicuously silent on the unmarried status of Christ in his first two discussions of sexual difference. Considering his christocentric doctrine of revelation and its rejection of natural theology, this is a noteworthy gap. From the beginning of Church Dogmatics, Barth construes the dogmatic project as one that must remain open and vulnerable to the divine address – the revelation of God in Christ – as mediated through the human voices and language of the biblical witness. Dogmatics needs to be continually open to being confronted, challenged, redirected, and disturbed, because God’s revelation disrupts all human enterprises, especially any dogmatic reflections that would master and distort Scripture to its own ends. The life, death, and resurrection of Christ, the incarnate second person of the Trinity, contains within itself all that the dogmatician dare claim to know of the nature and work of God, the creation, and the human creature. To look uncritically to the sciences, to social orders or conventions, or to appeal to common sense, could easily mean resorting to a natural theology built on something other than the knowledge of Creator and the creature revealed in Christ. Barth’s doctrine of creation thus locates Christ as the secret key to knowledge of the “heavens and earth.” Barth finds prefigurations of Christ throughout the Genesis creation narratives, while his theological anthropology posits the humanity of the incarnate Logos as its criterion and starting point. It is actually these christocentric and epistemological constraints that make possible the open‐ended aspects of sexual difference in Barth’s account. At the same time they also provide, in the figure of Christ, the locus from which to challenge and subvert his rigid man–woman binary. An unmarried Christ in his close company of 12 male disciples must not only find a place within the relational sphere that Barth has outlined, but must stand as its authorizing center and criterion. By rehearsing the major steps in Barth’s biblical and figural metastructure for securing the privileged place he gives to sexual difference, I shall show that Barth’s attempts to secure Christ as the secret and

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key to the heterosexual marital relationship depends upon his omission of the relational details of Christ’s life as attested in the gospels. Barth’s doctrine of man and woman relies heavily on his christocentric, figural reading of the relationship between Adam and Eve in Genesis 2. He names the scene of Eve’s creation in Genesis 2:18–25 and the relationship between the lover and beloved in the Song of Songs the two “Great Charters” (alluding to the “Magna Carta”) of humanity, identifying them as the interpretive key that unlocks the theological significance of the relationship between the sexes in the scriptures (CD III/2, 45.3). They do so insofar as he is able to detach the relationship between the man and woman in both texts from sexual reproduction, patrilineage, and any naturalizing discourses. He secures the theological significance of the sexual relationship in the marital covenant itself, a covenant understood as free decision and counterdecision, monogamous fidelity, care, and the whole‐hearted joyful embrace of the other. In Barth’s reading, Gen 1:27 links God’s creation of the human being as male and female to the image of God, while in Gen 2:18–25 this divine likeness is enacted in the scene of Adam’s recognition and joyful acceptance of Eve as the companion he sought in vain among the animals: one both like and unlike himself, for whom he must care as he cares for his own body. The Song of Songs likewise presents man and woman in the same terms of seeking, desiring, election, and counterelection, and all without any reference to progeny. Here the woman seeks and rejoices in finding the man, as Adam does with Eve (CD III/1, pp. 288–310; CD III/2, pp. 291–299). Two moves are important here: first Barth’s focus on the agential dynamics of election and counterelection, and second his disentanglement of the relationship from sexual reproduction. Together they serve his efforts to secure the analogical relationship of (i) the male‐female relationship in these two texts with (ii) Yahweh’s election of Israel in covenant history and with (iii) Christ’s election of the church in the New Testament. The Adam–Eve relationship prefigures the Yahweh–Israel relationship and the Christ– church relationship respectively. At the heart of covenant history, to which the Old Testament bears witness, Barth finds a relationship that the prophets frequently depict as a flawed marital relationship: Yahweh the longsuffering faithful husband of an unfaithful wife. In Eph 5:25–26, Paul then proceeds to use a marital metaphor for Christ: the husband who lays down his life for his bridal church, in order to render her spotless and pure. In both marital metaphors, the relationship privileges the long‐suffering divine husband in his ever faithful love and care for an unworthy wife. Barth uses these marital metaphors to secure a christocentric anchor for the male–female relationship, which, on account of these metaphors, becomes inextricably entangled with the marital covenant. Via the marital metaphors of the prophets and Paul, Barth locates the relationship between Adam and Eve, husband and wife, in the saving narrative arc of the covenant history between Yahweh and Israel that culminates in Christ’s relationship to the church. Paul’s marital metaphor casts a revelatory light backward over covenant history, disclosing its hidden christological meaning. Christ and his community are the original of which Adam and Eve (and, by extension, husband and wife) are but a copy, a sign, and a pointer. It is in this way that Barth locates the relationship between the sexes as the central sphere in which human fellowship reflects the image of God. It is

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also on the basis of these texts that Barth identifies the lifelong, monogamous marital relationship as the normative center of human fellowship. Barth’s figural interpretation locates the theological significance of sexual difference in the relationship itself. Such a relationship is a matter of the free decision, election, and care of each for the other. Consequently, when securing the centrality of the male‐female relationship in his account, sexual difference, the sexual relationship, and the marital relationship converge at the center of human relationality, removed from any naturalizing descriptions (CD III/1, pp. 310–324; CD III/2, pp. 297–298, 313–315). We shall see shortly, however, that these interconnected components become untethered in different ways when Barth defends his position against scriptures that threaten it.

Procreation Displaced Whatever sexual difference in itself is for Barth, it is clearly not to be reduced to sexual reproduction. He discreetly avoids any of the sort of reference to bodily markers, organs and their processes that would enable him to ground the difference and relationship between the sexes in a reproductive framework. These factors are, in part, what render his account viable to contemporary progressive theological appropriations. But what does Barth do with the themes of fertility, barrenness, and lineage in the Old Testament? Barth recognizes that in the Old Testament the difference and relationship between the sexes tend to be entangled with worries about sexual infidelity, sexual reproduction, patrilineage, and, above all, the desire for a son. Barth positions his two “Great Charters” as isolated texts on the periphery of a dominant picture, which he construes as marred by sin, hostility, and disorder. Genesis 2 stands at the beginning of creation history whereas the Song of Songs exists on its far eschatological horizon. Taken together, they secure an alternative picture of the sexual relationship, precisely as the created origin and eschatological goal of the man–woman encounter. In the time between creation and eschaton, however, the relationship between the sexes is distorted by sin. It is this tarnished picture that the Old Testament typically has in view. A tragic and fallen relationship is depicted. It is characterized not by a mutual glad embrace of the sexes but rather by hostility and strife. Its features are male tyranny, female envy of male prerogative and rebellion against it, infidelity, and shame. In its misery the Old Testament ­picture reflects and bears witness to the tragic relationship of Yahweh and Israel throughout covenant history. That explains the prophets’ fondness for marital metaphors to symbolize the relationship, or so Barth argues. It is in the context of this tragic and flawed relationship that Barth situates the theological role and function of sexual reproduction. He claims that, with so flawed a relationship in view, the Old Testament focuses on the parental identity of man and woman and their bearing of children – above all, sons. The Old Testament interest in patrilineage Barth now configures as prophetically oriented in anticipation of the coming Son/Messiah, whose arrival will restore the broken relationship between Yahweh and Israel. It is this restored relationship that the Song of Songs anticipates and prefigures – finding in it hope for the tragic relationship between the sexes. If we read backwards from the New Testament, and from Paul’s insights in Ephesians 5, the eschatological figure of Christ and his spotless bride lend direction to the hope of the Song of

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Songs and the Old Testament genealogies. In these interconnected marital images, then, the hope for a restored relationship between God and God’s elected people embeds the promise of a restored relationship between the sexes. In turn, the restored man–woman relationship would entail the restoration of the divine likeness: the human being created as male and female, with each partner receiving in gladness the companionship and aid of the other (CD III/2, pp. 292–294, 300, CD III/4, p. 143). Barth writes: But the beginning and end, the origin and goal, both between Yahweh and Israel and between man and woman, are as depicted in Genesis 2 and the Song of Songs. In retrospect of creation and prospect of the new creation of the last time, we can and may and must speak of man and woman as is done in these texts. (CD III/2, p. 294)

With the arrival of the Son and his bride, the church, Barth effectively detaches sexual reproduction from the relationship between the sexes, and with it the parental roles of man and woman. For now the marital relationship itself can be seen and recognized in Genesis 2 and the Song of Songs, as the free and glad decision of each for the other. And so marriage (minus talk of children) takes center stage as the fullest realization of the creation of the human being. Indeed, now that its prototype — Christ and the community — has emerged as a historical reality, it [marriage] can and must receive quite a new consecration, not so much as an institution for procreation, but rather as a representation of what is its essence according to Gen. 2:18–22 namely, as a typical representation of fellow‐humanity, and therefore of man’s determination as the covenant‐partner of God, in the perfect fellowship of man and woman. (CD III/4, p. 143)

One might ask why marriage and sexual reproduction are not together displaced by the advent of the childless, celibate Son, but Barth does not anticipate this particular line of inquiry (for a detailed analysis of Barth's account see Bodley-Dangelo 2019).

Celibacy Effaced How does Barth account for Christ’s celibacy, not to mention Paul’s preference for and praise of the celibate life? In his first two sections on the relationship between the sexes (CD III/1 and CD III/2), Barth does not so much as mention these hurdles. Instead he proceeds as if Paul’s bridal‐church metaphor in Ephesians 5 readily substitutes for the flesh‐and‐bone wife, companion, and helper that neither Christ nor Paul sought or needed. In securing the christological authorization for the privileged place Barth posits for the male–female relationship, Paul’s metaphor does Barth’s heavy lifting. But although Barth relies heavily on Paul’s apostolic authority to secure a wife for Christ, he merely notes in passing the scriptures in which Paul discusses celibacy (1 Cor 7:1–19, 7:35–49). Oddly enough, he cites them only for the purpose of declaring them inconsequential to his discussion of the marital relationship (CD III/2, p. 309). He does not mention the higher status Paul confers upon celibacy in these texts – a deafening silence.

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In rallying New Testament texts to secure his position, Barth is more occupied in waging a shadow war with feminists (in the fine‐print sections of CD III/2), where he uses the apostolic authority of Paul to counter the objections he anticipates feminists will raise. However, in one fine‐print section, in the process of fending off feminist critique, he detaches sexual difference itself from that of the marital dynamic of mutual election and care. The context is one of his several attempts to neutralize the challenge to his doctrine of man and woman, found in the words of Gal 3:28, a text Barth knows to be a favorite among feminists. His usual response is to defend the difference as difference, by appealing to Paul’s instructions that the women of Corinth wear veils to express their subordination to men (1 Cor 11). It is the difference and the ordering of the sexes that Barth wants to secure over against the hurdle erected by Gal 3:28 (CD III/2, pp. 294– 296, 307–312). He therefore argues that, although Paul declares that in Christ there is neither male nor female, Jew nor gentile, slave nor free, he means only that the hostility across differences is done away with, because all now live by a grace manifest equally to all. The structural difference and the ordering between the sexes remain. Having made this claim, Barth finds it necessary to address the question of whether sexual difference persists beyond the limits of this fallen eon and into the new world of the resurrection. Here he turns to Mk 12:18–27, where Christ responds to the hypothetical scenario put to him by Sadducees: if a woman is married successively to seven brothers but has no children with any, to which husband does she belong in the resurrection? Jesus’s response is one to which Barth returns in later part‐volumes: “For when they shall rise from the dead, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage; but are as the angels which are in heaven.” “Does this mean that they will no longer be male and female?” Barth asks (CD III/2, p. 295). In answering his own question, the response, which he puts into the mouth of Jesus, devalues, and diminishes the normative place that Barth otherwise assigns to the marital relationship. This, whole concern for marrying and giving in marriage and the raising up of children, says Jesus, can no longer occupy human beings in the resurrection…. With their death the necessary cares which now lie like a cover over their lives will be lifted and left behind…. For the fact that she married and was married will then be a past event with many other happenings and finally with the death of those concerned. The only thing that will count is that like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob they have lived in their time for God, the God of the living, and therefore live eternally…. But there is no reference here, and cannot be, to an abolition of the sexes or cessation of the being of humankind as male and female. (CD III/2, pp. 295–296 rev.)

These words would suggest that marriage remains intertwined with sexual reproduction, and that, together, both marriage and sexual reproduction are displaced by the advent of the Son. It is only the man–woman difference as such that remains. In defending the perpetuity of sexual difference here, Barth thus actually decenters the marital locus as the occasion for the fullest realization of human fellowship. That dynamic exchange in which he thinks we most closely conform to the image of God is, in this section of fine print, presented as but one of many past events. It is rendered as no more consequential to the new age than the past bearing of children. With the male–female relation reduced to difference as such, what becomes of such central themes as free decision, election, and mutual care that Barth has installed at the heart of the marital relationship? What

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becomes of them as the eschatological alternative to the Old Testament’s picture of misery and strife between the sexes? Only a few pages earlier, Barth had inextricably intertwined sexual difference with the mutual desire and decision that culminates in a lifelong monogamous, marital relationship. Man remains what he is, and therefore a being which intends and seeks his true partner in woman and not in man, and woman remains what she is, and therefore a being whose true counterpart cannot be found in woman but only in man…. Yet it is obvious that the encounter between man and woman is fully and properly achieved only where there is the special connexion of one man loving this woman and one woman loving this man in free choice and with a view to a full life‐partnership; a connexion which is on both sides so clear and strong as to make their marriage both possible and necessary as a unique and definitive attachment. (CD III/2, pp. 287–288 rev.)

We must recall, also, that it is through this very relational dynamic that Barth secures the figural connections by which he anchors Adam and Eve, husband and wife, to the relationship of Christ and the church, thereby securing the christocentric authorization for his ordering of the sexes and his privileging of the man–woman relationship. With marriage, in its dynamism of free decision and election, so readily done away with by the resurrection (Mk 12:18–27), we must then interrogate the eschatological hope for the healed and restored sexual relationship that Barth discerns in the Song of Songs. For in Barth’s reading, Christ’s words would imply that the resurrection does not restore and heal the broken relationship between the sexes but rather dispenses with its relevance altogether, when in heaven all become angel‐like children of Abraham. In his efforts to neutralize the challenge that the celibate Christ poses to his account (not only by his example but also by his teaching), and at the same time to neutralize one line of feminist critique, Barth thickens the cloud of ambiguity covering the connection between male–female sexual difference, the sexual relationship, and marriage. Is the man– woman relationship normative and privileged in some exclusive sense or not, whether anthropologically or eschatologically or both? In the text immediately following this fine print discussion, Barth returns unfazed to the figural language of free decision and election at the heart of the male–female sexual relationship. The words of Christ in Mk 12:18–27 pose a challenge to Barth’s account that, at this juncture, he does not appear to recognize. However, this text will reappear to cause more trouble later on in Church Dogmatics, when Barth finally attempts to come to terms with the hurdle, hitherto ignored, of the celibate Christ and Paul.

Marriage Displaced Only in his third and final discussion of sexual difference (CD III/4) does Barth grapple with Christ’s celibacy and Paul’s words in praise of celibacy (again in a section of fine print), over the course of which Christ’s response to the Sadducees reappears. The broader context is Barth’s development of his three claims about man and woman, with which I opened: the primacy of their structural difference, the normativity of their fellowship, and the ordering

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that privileges the male. With a view to these claims, he summarizes the major steps of his figural reading of Genesis 2:18–25 (described previously), which continues to authorize the heterosexual, male‐privileged, marital relationship as the normative center of interhuman fellowship. Furthermore, he explicitly depicts the homosexual as having rejected “the primal form of fellow‐humanity, refusing to hear his question and to make a responsible answer, but trying to be human in himself as sovereign man or woman, rejoicing in himself in self‐satisfaction and self‐sufficiency” (CD III/4, p. 166 rev.). Barth does not explain why a relationship of free decision and election, of aid‐lending care, of question‐posing and answer‐giving cannot be had between two persons of the same sex, or why such a relationship between two persons of the same sex should betray a sinful self‐sufficiency. When Barth finally turns to the topic of celibacy, in a different section of fine print from the one in which he rules out homosexuality, he admits that marriage is but one way of living a life patterned after the relationship of Christ to his community. For while Christ does not instruct others to abstain from marriage, Barth writes that, in addition to Christ’s own example, “He [Jesus] has given clear reasons which might persuade any one to abstain from marriage.” Among these reasons is Jesus’s announcement of the cessation of marriage in the resurrection (Mk 12:25), his identification of his disciples with those who hate father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters, and their own lives (Lk 14:26), and his reference to those who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven (Mt 19:12). Of these words of Christ Barth writes: “These are not prohibitions or discriminations, but marriage is obviously relativized” (CD III/4, p. 144). Nor is marriage universally a better and higher way, for there are special situations wherein one might abstain from marriage. Here Barth not only acknowledges Christ’s unmarried life as one such special situation but also allows that marriage is not the only way of imitating Christ’s relationship to his community (CD III/4, pp. 143–144). Turning next to Paul’s discussion of marriage and celibacy in I Corinthians 7, Barth concedes that in certain situations abstaining from marriage might be the higher way, as it is for Paul, who commends celibacy to his readers (CD III/4, pp. 146–148). The reason is that, as Paul indicates, the marital relationship might bring obstacles to one’s service of Christ and distractions from it. Moreover, marriage might do this precisely because of the mutual care at the heart of the marital relationship, its reciprocal adaption and obligation to strive to please one another. Barth writes: “How far does marriage carry with it the threat of diversion, disturbance and distraction? Paul’s judgment is that it does so because it involves a person in care” (CD III/4, p. 147 rev.); and so celibacy for Paul is the higher way. Barth continues, “Marriage necessarily involves one in distracting cares, and celibacy necessarily guarantees freedom for the Lord” (CD III/4, p. 148). It is in reference to this point that Barth again recalls Christ’s words in Mk 12:25, which now have a bearing on why Paul and others might abstain from marriage, this side of the resurrection. “The light of the resurrection of the dead, when there will be neither marrying nor giving in marriage, shines already in the present” (CD III/4, p. 147). How are we to understand this concession despite all that Barth has said about the imago Dei, Adam and Eve, and the Song of Songs? If we recall that homosexuality is, for Barth, a rejection of the fellow man, a rejoicing in self‐sufficiency, would not the same apply to Paul and any others who should choose to abstain from marriage for the reason that the required care for one’s counterpart is a distraction from the busy work of s­ erving

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God? How is embracing this higher way and its refusal of the sort of helper that God has provided (as Barth reads Gen 2) not, in itself, a shunning of one’s fellow, an embracing of solitude and self‐sufficiency? Barth himself recalls at this juncture that precisely such care lies at the very heart of the Ephesian 5 marital metaphor of a Christ who must lay down his life in care for his bridal‐church. In this section of fine print, then, we have rapidly traveled a great distance from the divine likeness of Adam’s free decision and election of his God‐gifted bridal helpmeet, to Paul’s abstention from marriage in order to avoid the distractions that such Christ‐like care for a helpmeet imposes. Yet the larger implications of Barth’s concessions on celibacy do not appear in the fine‐print discussions to trouble the dominant heteronormative metastructure for human fellowship, upon which Barth doubles down in III/4, §54.1. If celibacy is a higher calling than marriage, and if in heaven marital fellowship is done away with, how can Barth’s claims about the unconditional primacy and normativity of the male–female relationship be sustained? Much later on, in Church Dogmatics IV, in the heart of Barth’s Christology, we find another brief discussion of Christ’s celibacy (CD IV/2, pp. 173–179). Here Barth recalls the same set of texts in which Christ’s words undermine the universality of the marital norm: Mk 12:25, Lk 14:26, Mt 19:12. Only here, “The conformity of the man Jesus with the mode of existence and attitude of God consists actively in what we can only call the pronouncedly revolutionary character of his relationship to the orders of life and value current in the world around him” (CD IV/2, p. 171). Barth goes on to identify various ways in which Christ clashes not only with such orders, marriage included, but also with the interpretations commonly placed on them. For although Barth finds in the Jesus of the gospels a “passive conservativism” wherein he appears to tolerate the prevailing orders (CD IV/2, p. 173), Barth also speaks of a radical and comprehensive “crisis which broke on all human order in the man Jesus.” Jesus is the new wine that bursts the old wine skins, for “the new thing of Jesus is the invading kingdom of God revealed in its alienating antithesis to the world and all its orders” (CD IV/2, p. 177). Barth’s words here are worth quoting at length: Everything else that we have to say concerning the radical antithesis of the new thing which was actualized and appeared in Jesus to the totality of the old order can be said only in relation to its complete ignoring and transcending of this order. We can merely attempt to see with what profundity he attacked it by this ignoring and transcending. He attacked it — in a way from which it can never recover — merely by the alien presence with which he confronted it in its own sphere. What was, in fact, this way in which he confronted it? In the first place, he himself remained unmarried — no one has ever yet explained with what self‐evident necessity. And in Mt 19:12 he reckoned with the fact that there might be others who would remain unmarried for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. In this way he set against the whole sphere of the family (in addition to the sayings already adduced) the basic question of its right and permanence to which there could be given only a provisional and relative answer. “For when they shall rise from the dead, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage” (Mk 12:25). (CD IV/2, p. 177, italics added)

Now we see that the order of marriage, as Barth has construed it, is no longer simply relativized as one path alongside the celibate path that Christ and Paul chose. Rather it

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is assaulted by its inability to assimilate Christ’s way of living. Barth shows himself, finally, unable to account for Christ’s celibate status, unable to find a place for Christ in the sphere of human relations as he has construed it.

Conclusion If we want to think critically about the privileged place that the relationship between the sexes occupies in Barth’s theology, it is significant to note that he confines the topic to only three sections of the entire corpus of Church Dogmatics. Considering that this one relationship is linked to the divine likeness, we might expect to find its appearances throughout Dogmatics, to be reminded frequently that the sexually differentiated other is the central ethical locus  –  the “neighbor” whom we are commanded to love. Yet outside these three sections, the privileged place of the relationship between the sexes is consistently neglected. Barth’s interest in the ways in which human action conforms to the saving work of Christ is directed toward a far wider range of ethical interactions. To take but one notable example, it is a Samaritan man who serves for Barth (in imitation of Christ) as the parabolic neighbor of the second great commandment, in the very care that the Samaritan shows to an Israelite man fallen among thieves (CD I/2, §18, CD III/2, p. 210). Set within his broader dogmatic project, Barth’s account of the difference and relationship between the sexes appears as inadequately integrated, as a doctrinal appendage with totalizing aspirations. For commentators troubled by its patriarchal and heteronormative structure, Barth’s doctrine of man and woman can be easily bracketed, or perhaps even ignored, as little more than an embarrassing aside. In his according unconditional primacy to the male– female relationship, and in his male‐dominated ordering of the sexes, a seemingly intransigent conservativism drives him to compromise the political and critical cutting edge of his christocentric doctrine of revelation. Taken together, the sort of internal inconsistences that plague his account (a mutual yet hierarchical relationship, a marital versus a celibate norm for living out sexual difference) along with the ambiguities shrouding each of the three major claims he makes about the male–female relationship (unconditional primacy, normativity, and hierarchy), and the finally unconvincing interpretive typologies used to garner scriptural support add to the impression that we have in hand an anomalous doctrinal appendage. I have used Barth’s treatments and effacements of the celibacy of Christ and Paul to highlight the instability and ambiguity shrouding sexual difference in Barth’s theology. I have tried to show how readily his patriarchal and heteronormative conception of human fellowship drifts free of its christological moorings. But my purpose has not been to call for a bracketing or ignoring of this topic in Barth’s theology. Rather, by exposing the tenuous connection of his patriarchal and heteronormative conception of interhuman relationships to the imago Dei, my hope is to clear away a major obstacle to any future critical and constructive engagements with Barth’s discussion of sexual difference. For although the relational dynamics between self and the sexually differentiated other do not appear frequently throughout Barth’s Church Dogmatics, a recurring

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self‐reflexive, ethically oriented pattern of human agency does appear from the very beginning. Barth posits an agent in need of being challenged and redirected by divine and creaturely others, in need of having its central categories, frameworks, and assumptions questioned, challenged, and undermined by God’s self‐revelation in an incarnate Christ who cannot be absorbed into contemporary orderings of social relations. Barth’s neglected account of the agent’s ethical relation to the sexually differentiated other retains this sort of openness and vulnerability to the human other, this need for critical challenge and redirection. Furthermore, it demands a critical relationship to ever changing social norms. Barth therefore harbors at the heart of his patriarchal and heteronormative teaching on man and woman the critical reflexive mechanisms that render his own heteropatriarchal structure highly unstable and vulnerable to the sort of internal critique I have undertaken here. Barth’s late and fleeting admission of Christ’s radical challenge to the orders of marriage and family betray his final inability to account for Christ’s unmarried status in a satisfactory way. It is the critical edge that Barth gives to the incarnate Logos that renders his account of sexual difference so vulnerable to critique and so open to constructive reconfigurations. References Bodley‐Dangelo, F. (forthcoming‐a). Barth and Gender. In: Oxford Handbook of Karl Barth (eds. P.T. Nimmo and P.D. Jones). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bodley‐Dangelo, F. (2019). Sexual Difference, Gender, and Agency in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, T&T Clark Explorations in Reformed Theology. London: Bloomsbury. Campbell, C. M. (1981). ‘Imago Trinitatis: An Appraisal of Karl Barth‘s Doctrine of the Imago Dei in Light of His Doctrine of the Trinity.’ PhD dissertation, Southern Methodist University. Fiddes, P.S. (1990). The status of woman in the thought of Karl Barth. In: After Eve: Women, Theology and the Christian Tradition (ed. J.M. Soskice), 138–153. London: Collins Marshal Pickering. Frykberg, E. (1993). Karl Barth’s Theological Anthropology: An Analogical Critique Regarding Gender Relations, Studies in Reformed Theology and History. Princeton: Princeton Theological Seminary.

McKelway, A.J. (1986). Perichoretic possibilities in Barth’s doctrine of male and female. Princeton Seminary Bulletin 7: 231–243. Renich Fraser, E. (1986). ‘Karl Barth‘s Doctrine of Humanity: A Reconstructive Exercise in Feminist Narrative Theology.’ PhD dissertation, Vanderbilt University. Rogers, J.E.F. (1999). Sexuality and the Christian Body: Their Way into the Triune Life. Oxford: Blackwell. Ronaldo Balboa, J. (1998). Church Dogmatics, natural theology, and the slippery slope of “Geschlecht”: a constructivist‐gay liberationist reading of Barth. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 66: 771–789. Stephenson, L.P. (2008). Directed, ordered and related: the male and female interpersonal relation in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. Scottish Journal of Theology 61: 435–449. Ward, G. (1998). The Erotics of redemption: after Karl Barth. Theology & Sexuality 1998 (8): 52–72.

CHAPTER 74

Barth and Socialism Andreas Pangritz

“Karl Barth was a socialist” (Marquardt 1972, p. 39). Today, this statement, which ­provoked the harshest protest when Friedrich‐Wilhelm Marquardt set it at the beginning of his second dissertation, “Theology and Socialism,” can be regarded as historically undisputed in Barth scholarship. There is, however, an ongoing controversy about the theological relevance of the biographical fact. The debate extends to at least three fields: (i) the precise sociohistorical meaning of Barth’s socialist commitment in his time as a pastor in Safenwil, (ii) the theological ramifications of Barth’s political inclinations with regard to the origins of “dialectical theology,” and (iii) the traces of socialism in Barth’s later theological development including Church Dogmatics.

Theology and Socialism: The Example of Karl Barth Today, it is difficult to understand  –  or perhaps since the crush of the systems of so‐ called “real socialism” in eastern Europe it has become understandable again – why the opening sentence of Marquardt’s study on the connection between theology and socialism in Barth’s work evoked massive controversy in 1970. The indignation must be interpreted against the background of the conflicts between the students’ movement of the sixties and the conservative majority of the faculty of the Kirchliche Hochschule [Church Seminary] in Berlin, to which the dissertation was submitted. After Marquardt’s thesis had been turned down in 1971 by the majority of the faculty in spite of positive internal and external reviews, Helmut Gollwitzer resigned from his position as a professor at the seminary. On occasion of a conference of Barth’s friends and former students at the Leuenberg near Basel, where Marquardt’s thesis was discussed in 1972, the convener Max Geiger

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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observed that the gathering “tended to split into two factions, a ‘left wing’ dominated by Helmut Gollwitzer and Georges Casalis, and a ‘right wing’ dominated by Hermann Diem and Eberhard Jüngel” (Hunsinger 1976b, p. 10; cf. Geiger 1973, p. 45; cf. M.  Barth 1974, p. 91). However, when Marquardt’s book Theology and Socialism was published in 1972, it soon was regarded as a major though controversial work of Barth studies. Already in the same year a second edition became necessary. Beyond Marquardt’s study Theology and Socialism at least some of the relevant secondary literature on the topic should be recalled: Already in 1972 Helmut Gollwitzer published his essay in defense of Marquardt’s thesis: “Kingdom of God and Socialism in Karl Barth” (Gollwitzer 1972; ET 1976, pp. 77–120). Eduard Thurneysen, too, concurred with Marquardt’s thesis: “Karl Barth was a socialist. …Barth’s theology is not one thing situated beside the other of his socialist practice; rather this practice is a consequence of the word of God as it is heard and theologically reflected by Barth, which immediately reaches for the whole, that is, the social reality” (Thurneysen 1973, pp. 7, 31). Dieter Schellong agreed that “Something anarchistic, something syndicalistic, something in search of spontaneity characterized the intellectual socialism of that period. …One sought a vanguard that would inwardly permeate the whole, whether this vanguard was now a band of poets or intellectuals, or whether it was – as in Barth’s case – the church” (Schellong 1973, p. 244; ET 1976, p. 148f.). However, he was not convinced that Barth in his openness for socialist perspectives had vindicated something like “natural theology” from the left, as Marquardt had maintained (Schellong 1973, p. 249; ET 1976, p. 156; cf. Diem 1976, p. 132). George Hunsinger, who had received knowledge of the debate during his study at the University of Tübingen in 1972, prepared a volume, Karl Barth and Radical Politics, documenting the whole debate for the English‐speaking world. “The point at issue was whether or not Barth’s socialist commitment had had a decisive impact on the shape of his later theology. Although it seemed to me that it had, once the connection was pointed out, competent Barth scholars were raising serious objections to any such view, and the matter seemed far from settled” (Hunsinger 1976a, p. 7). In his essay “Toward a Radical Barth,” contained in the volume Karl Barth and Radical Politics, Hunsinger agrees with Marquardt’s basic assumption on the connection between theology and socialism in Barth’s thinking. However, he questions some of the more provocative statements, where Marquardt tends “to reduce Barth’s doctrine of God to its political function,” making theology “subservient to politics.” According to Hunsinger “[i]n this interpretative mode Barth dwindles to a kind of socialist Ritschl” (Hunsinger 1976c, p. 189f.). Marquardt himself published a number of essays contributing additional evidence to the possibility or even necessity of reading Barth from the left: an essay dealing with the history, analysis, and meaning for today of Barth’s Tambach lecture (Marquardt 1980), a “First Report on Karl Barth’s Socialist Speeches” (Marquardt 1981; ET in Marquardt 2010), and an essay on Barth’s role as “The Secretary” of the church congregation in the industrial village of Safenwil (Marquardt 1986; ET in Marquardt 2010). In addition, Marquardt’s essay “After Thirteen Years” critically deals with the reception of his book on Theology and Socialism on occasion of its third edition in 1985 (Marquardt 1985). Marquardt’s book triggered a number of dissertations elaborating additional aspects of the connection between theology and socialism in Barth. In his dissertation “Theology and Politics in Karl Barth’s Thinking,” submitted to the University of Bochum, Ulrich

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Dannemann extends the lines suggested by Marquardt interpreting Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation as a theory of “reconciled society” (Dannemann 1977, pp. 184–229). In his dissertation “Resisting Theology,” submitted to the Free University in Berlin (West), Peter Winzeler provides evidence for Barth’s ongoing political orientation toward the left during the Weimar period, when the Swiss theologian hesitated to publicly intervene into the political landscape of Germany, and at the beginning of the Nazi era. Winzeler maintains that even Barth’s concentration on theological work in those years can be read as political resistance against the nazification of the German society and of the Protestant church (cf. Winzeler 1982). In his dissertation “On Church Dogmatics and Marxist Philosophy,” submitted to the University of Amsterdam, Rinse Reeling Brouwer verifies Marquardt’s basic assumptions on the connection between Barth’s socialist commitment and his theological thinking in a comparative perspective, examining similarities and differences between Barth’s Church Dogmatics and Marxist philosophy as the theoretical form of socialism (cf. Reeling Brouwer 1988). In her dissertation “The Lordless Powers,” submitted to the University of Heidelberg, Sabine Plonz aims at rereading Barth’s dogmatics in the perspective of liberation theology, as represented by Franz Hinkelammert. She argues that “the strength of Barth’s theology consists in the critique of ideology directed at bourgeois society” (Plonz 1995, p. 353). Two more recent books represent a similar line of reading Barth contextually. Timothy Gorringe interprets Barth’s theology as a thinking “against hegemony.” “[W]ith the heart of the Christian tradition, Barth understands that only grace can bring liberation, but unlike the mainstream of that tradition his break with idealism led him to understand grace in its radical political consequences, in its consequences for the body and for the whole of human life” (Gorringe 1999, p. 271). In other words, “the implication of revelation is revolution because it is the God who makes all things new who is revealed” (Gorringe 1999, p. 274). Accordingly, Paul Chung struggles for the liberation of Barth’s theology from its neo‐orthodox reception, emphasizing the liberating dimensions of Barth’s theology as “God’s word in action” and especially its relevance for the unfinished project of religious pluralism (Chung 2008).

Historical Discussions Around Marquardt’s Thesis Marquardt’s thesis can be summarized, with Hunsinger’s words, as follows: “Barth was a radical socialist with strong anarchist tendencies; … his theology not only arose from but aims toward socialist action; … revolution was the basic concept for Barth’s understanding of both God and society; … Barth’s mature Christology provided the final grounding for leftist convictions arrived at earlier; … in Barth’s view a church which bears witness to God’s kingdom must herself become a revolutionary agent in society. … Far from being peripherical, politics – radical, socialist politics… – is central and integral to Barth’s theology” (Hunsinger 1976b, p. 9). In other words: “Marquardt’s work makes it possible to see for the first time the intimate connection in Barth’s thought not simply between theology and ethics or between theology and politics, but precisely between theology and socialism” (Hunsinger 1976c, p. 184).

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There were strong objections against this thesis. Marquardt himself asks: “Aren’t social action and Christian dogmatics generically irreconcilable modes of human self‐ expression and assertion? … Barth certainly created anything but a socialist or Marxist theology, and he allowed no Christian‐socialist amalgamation of any kind to dominate his thought. The difference between Barth’s explicitly political and his explicitly theological statements makes this clear: He neither theologizes politics or politicizes theology” (Marquardt 1972, p. 16; cf. Diem 1976, p. 126). An early discussion revolved about the historical question of which socialist tendency Barth is to be associated with in his time as a pastor in Safenwil and, more precisely, how his attitude toward Leninism should be judged. Lenin was in exile in Switzerland until 1917, and he had some influence on the development of Swiss social democracy at that time. Marquardt characterizes Barth’s socialism as belonging to the anarchist tendency within the workers’ movement, which was regarded by the emerging Leninist tendency as a children’s disease of socialism. Others have emphasized the pragmatic character of Barth’s socialism (cf. Marquardt 1972, p. 132–134): “Political action … as such is not ‘anarchist,’ but rather, as Marquardt can also see …, ‘reformist’ – at any rate elastic and pragmatic, even if on no account indeterminate” (Schellong 1973, p. 242; ET 1976, p. 146). “[W]hile Barth shared certain tendencies with anarchist theory, he shared none with anarchist praxis. When it came to praxis, Barth’s socialism was thoroughly pragmatic, with affinities both to the more conservative ‘social democrats’ and the more radical ‘left‐wing socialists’, depending on the situation” (Hunsinger 1976c, p. 185). More intricate was the controversy aroused by Marquardt’s suggestion that Barth explicitly referred to Lenin’s revolutionary manifesto State and Revolution in the first edition of his commentary to the Epistle to the Romans. Marquardt points to Barth’s claim in his exposition of Romans 13 that the kingdom of God is “more than Leninism” and to the grammatically strange sentence, “Their [the Christians’] state and their revolution is in heaven…” (GA 16, p. 380), sounding like “an indirect quotation” from Lenin’s pamphlet (Marquardt 1972, p. 127). In State and Revolution, published in 1917 in Russia, Lenin developed the concept of a “dictatorship of the proletariat” for the postrevolutionary time. Marquardt’s assumption that Barth expressly discussed Lenin’s concept provoked fierce protest. On the historical level, Wilfried Groll detected that Lenin only “suggested a translation and publication of his work ‘State and Revolution’ for the German speaking world” on 20 November 1918, by which time Barth was “already busy with collecting addresses to which a ‘flyer for the Epistle to the Romans’ should be sent.” He could not therefore have, “while working on his exegesis of Romans 13 … yet known Lenin’s text ‘State and Revolution’” (Groll 1976, p. 67; cf. Jüngel 1982, p. 26). In the afterword “After Thirteen Years” of the expanded third edition of his book, Marquardt remarks: “I – temporarily – retract my thesis of Barth’s direct literary dependency on Lenin’s manifesto ‘State and Revolution.’ Wilfried Groll’s considerations to the contrary make sense to me, as long as a most precise Lenin philology does not … finally bring elucidation. In 1918 there was already more than one German translation of the manifesto; and unfortunately the DDR [East German] editors explain … that regarding the translation of Lenin’s manifesto in foreign countries, only ‘incomplete information’ is available” (Marquardt 1985, p. 378). More important than the question of historical detail seems to be the theological‐ political question, whether or not one believes Barth would actually have been inclined

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to refer to Lenin in such a way. The sentence, “Here is more than Leninism,” points to a conscious discussion on Barth’s part with the Bolshevik wing of the socialist movement. In his afterword, Marquardt explains: “Lenin’s presence in Switzerland, where, since 1916, he had worked on this manifesto” – State and Revolution – “had absolutely had its effects in Swiss socialism, for he did not live in a lonely cell while in Zurich.” While serving as a pastor to the congregation of Safenwil Barth participated in the internal socialist discussions about the “Zimmerwald Left” founded by Lenin, which wanted to turn the world war into world revolution (Marquardt 1985, p. 378). Therefore, the possibility should not be denied that Barth could have made reference to unofficial translations, at least of excerpts, of Lenin’s influential manifesto or to oral transmission within the international socialist movement. In more than one of his “Socialist Speeches” Barth explicitly referred to Lenin, whom he compared with “personalities in the history of religion” like Mohammed, Innocence III, Zwingli, Calvin, and Cromwell (GA 48, p. 494; cf. Pangritz 2014, p. 76). In addition, it should be noted that Rudolf Bultmann, who worked closely with Barth in the making of “dialectical theology,” already read Lenin’s manifesto in 1919. In a letter dated 8 September 1919, he writes: “In short, when a second and this time real revolution does not come, everything will remain the way it was and in fact will get much worse.…I do not believe that it will work without a period of ‘dictatorship’. Since reading Lenin I am filled with enthusiasm for his personality. I only fear that we have no Lenin …, but it would be good if one could neutralize a sufficient number of bigwigs and bourgeois both in and outside the university” (cf. Evang 1988, p. 81).

Barth’s “Socialist Speeches” The “Socialist Speeches,” delivered between 1911 and 1919, prove that during World War I and still after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia Barth participated in the controversial political discussions within the socialist movement. Marquardt had prepared these speeches for publication already in the 1970s. However, this edition has never seen the light of publicity. Instead, Marquardt presented a “First Report on Karl Barth’s ‘Socialist Speeches’” (cf. Marquardt 1981; ET in Marquardt 2010, pp. 103–122). In this essay he distinguishes three phases in Barth’s early socialist engagement in correspondence to the changes of the political landscape in Europe: a first phase from 1911 to 1914, in which Barth advocates a religious socialism; a second phase, which begins with the outbreak of the war, in which Barth’s socialism becomes more radical – it is to be noted that the Social Democratic Party he entered in 1915 was still a revolutionary party; and a third phase beginning with the Russian revolutions of February and October 1917, in which he seeks a middle way between the Second (social democratic) and the Third (Leninist) International. Swiss social democracy represented, together with the Italian socialists, a “2½ International” (cf. Marquardt 1981, pp. 478 –485; ET in Marquardt 2010, pp. 111–119). Barth’s collection of “Socialist Speeches” consists of 43 manuscripts from his time as a pastor in Safenwil, some completed, others only outlined with keywords. The texts were conceived for presentation at various workers’ associations, local groups, and

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lower branches of the Social Democratic Party in the Aargau canton. In his “First Report” Marquardt distinguishes four thematic groups: (i) speeches about the inner problems of social democracy; (ii) speeches on the war question (starting in 1914), upon which the socialist movement, especially since the Bolshevik “October Revolution” of 1917 in Russia, had split into a Second and a Third International; (iii) reports on the state of world politics, not least of all on the progress of the revolution in Russia; and (iv) speeches on the relationship between religion and socialism (cf. Marquardt 1981, pp. 471–473; ET in Marquardt 2010, pp. 104–106). To the fourth group belongs the speech “Jesus Christ and the Movement for Social Justice” (17 December 1911), which was published in the socialist daily newspaper Freier Aargauer (The Free Aargauian). In this speech Barth starts with the following statement: “Jesus is the movement for social justice, and the movement for social justice is Jesus in the present” (GA 22, p. 386f.; ET Barth 1976, p. 19). And he concludes by addressing his “socialist friends”: “I have said that Jesus wanted what you want, that he wanted to help those who are least, that he wanted to establish the kingdom of God upon the earth, that he wanted to abolish self‐seeking property, that he wanted to make persons into comrades. Your concerns are in line with the concerns of Jesus. Real socialism is real Christianity in our time” (GA 22, p. 408; ET Barth 1976, p. 36). The speech “Religion and Socialism” (7 December 1915), in which Barth justifies his decision for socialism, also belongs to this group. Here Barth explains: “I have become a socialist in a very simple way, and I live socialism in a very simple way. Because I would like to believe in God and his kingdom, I place myself at the point where I see something of God’s kingdom break through. You should not believe that thereby I have constructed an ideal picture of socialism for myself. I think I can see the mistakes of socialism and its proponents very clearly. But much more clearly I see in the grounding thought, in the essential endeavor of socialism, a revelation of God which I must recognize before all and about which I must be delighted” (GA 48, p. 218; cf. Marquardt 2010, p. 105). Already on 5 February 1915, Barth had explained to his friend Eduard Thurneysen the practical reasons why he had joined the Social Democratic Party: I have now become a member of the Social Democratic Party. Just because I set such emphasis Sunday by Sunday upon the last things, it was no longer possible for me personally to remain suspended in the clouds above the present evil world, but rather it had to be demonstrated here and now that faith in the Greatest does not exclude, but rather includes within it, work and suffering in the realm of the imperfect. The socialists in my congregation will now, I hope, have a right understanding of my public criticisms of the party (GA 3, p. 30; ET in Barth and Thurneysen 1964, p. 28; cf. Hunsinger 1976c, p. 203)

The Tambach Lecture (1919) The speeches on the theme “religion and socialism” point directly to the question of whether and to what extent Barth’s socialist engagement had an impact upon his theology. Here, the event by which Barth achieved fame in Germany must be mentioned: the conference in Tambach, Thuringia, in September 1919, at which Barth gave the lecture “The Christian in Society.” In contrast to a widespread perception according to

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which Tambach marks Barth’s turn away from socialism, “The Christian in Society” should be read as the climax of Barth’s early socialist orientation. It was Marquardt again who in a detailed study contributed at clarifying the historical context and the theological‐political meaning of this speech (cf. Marquardt 1980). Timothy Gorringe concurs: “This lecture, it should be clear, is anything but a retreat from revolution” (Gorringe 1999, p. 51; cf. Plonz 1995, pp. 147–173). Two Hessian pastors with inclinations toward a kind of Christian socialism had organized a convention in the sanatorium “Tannenberg” at Tambach from 22 to 25 September 1919. “Here Swiss Religious Socialism was to be presented to any Germans who might be interested” (Busch 1976, p. 109; cf. Marquardt 1980, pp. 7–21). After Leonhard Ragaz, the leading person of Swiss religious socialism, had declined, Barth was asked to be one of the speakers. About 100 participants showed up, partially from the youth movement, partially outsiders of all sorts, who, for all their differences, had in common that “they were deeply concerned at the revolution which had taken place in recent years and now as Christians were on the look‐out for new ways in political and church life” (Dehn 1964, p. 217; cf. Busch 1976, p. 110). On the last day of the conference Barth delivered his lecture “The Christian in Society.” He characterized the lecture as “a rather complicated kind of machine that runs backwards and forwards and shoots in all directions with no lack of both visible and hidden joints” (GA 3, p. 344; ET in Barth and Thurneysen 1964, p. 47; cf. Busch 1976, p. 110). According to the first section of his lecture Barth understood the topic in a way that “the Christian in society” could naturally be no other than “the Christ,” that is, Jesus Christ himself (GA 48, 557; WGT, 36). Barth’s “clear and fundamental distinction between Christ or the kingdom of God on the one hand and human actions, whether conservative or revolutionary, on the other” caused a stir at Tambach (Busch 1976, p. 111). The goals of the religious socialists were thereby heavily relativized, for Barth expressly cautioned against the danger of “secularizing Christ for the umpteenth time  –  today (for example) for the sake of social democracy, pacifism, the Christian Youth Movement [Wandervogel], just as it was in the past for the sake of our fatherlands, for being Swiss and German, and for the sake of the liberalism of the educated classes” (GA 48, p. 560; WGT, p. 38). However, he also cautioned against the danger of “clericaliz[ing] society”; instead he recommended “to learn once again to wait upon God” (GA 48, p. 562f.; WGT, pp. 40f.). This has widely been interpreted as a denial not only of religious socialism, which it actually was, but also as a denial of socialism and more generally of political engagement as a whole. But this was a fatal misunderstanding: In the second section Barth clarifies that he does not start from a “standpoint,” but from a “moment in a movement, comparable to a freeze‐frame portrait of a bird in flight” (GA 48, p. 564; WGT, p. 42). “It is about God, about the movement that proceeds from God, about our being moved by him, not about religion” (GA 48, p. 566; WGT, p. 43 rev.). Indeed, God is “the Wholly Other,” but “[i]n spite of the inapproachability of God, there must be a way from there to here” (GA 48, pp. 568f.; WGT, p. 45). “It is the living God who, in his encounter with us, compels us to believe in our life too” (GA 48, p. 569; WGT, p. 46). The movement of God “is the revolution of Life against the powers of death that surround it, in which we are caught” (GA 48, p. 571; WGT, p. 47 rev.). “And who could see the resurrection without participating in it, without being made alive, without joining in the victory of

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life?” (GA 48, p. 574; WGT, p. 50). We are therefore “not disinterested observers. We are moved by God. …We stand in the turning of times, in the reversal of the unrighteousness of humans to God’s righteousness, from death to life, from the old creature to the new” (GA 48, pp. 575f.; WGT, p. 51 rev.). When Barth, toward the end of the second section, explains that “[t]he last word is rightly called the kingdom of God; creation, redemption, the completion of the world by God and in God” (GA 48, p. 576; WGT, p. 51), then he already announces what will be the content of the following three sections: an exposition of the movement of the kingdom of God through its three stages of regnum naturae (creation), regnum gratiae (redemption), and regnum gloriae (completion). This is his doctrine of “three kingdoms,” developed already in the speech on “Christian Life” (9 June 1919), in Aarburg (GA 48, pp. 503–513), which – together with the introductory sections about the Christian as “the Christ” and God as “movement” from above  –  already prefigure the structure of the Church Dogmatics with the three stages of creation, reconciliation, and salvation (cf. Pangritz 2014, pp. 77–79). Marquardt proposes the following headlines for the three sections on the three kingdoms: Section 3 is about the “Regnum naturae: against a ­narchism and abstract negation,” Section  4 is about the “Regnum gratiae: new r­ adicalism – within the party!,” and Section 5 is about the “Regnum gloriae: exclusion of the political for its own sake” (Marquardt 1980, p. 39). Again, it must be emphasized that the critical statements against the political for its own sake in these sections should not be understood as a dismissal of practical socialist actions. It is true, regarding the perspective on the “regnum naturae,” that “[t]he kingdom of God does not begin with our protest movements. It is a revolution that precedes all revolutions, just as it precedes the whole prevailing order of things” (GA 48, p. 577; WGT, p.  53 rev.). But this distinction does not mean political abstinence or quietism. The ­relativization of the revolution and of the prevailing order does not take place in the name of the prevailing order but in the name of revolution, the revolution of God. It suggests a search for “analogies” of the kingdom of God in the social revolution more than in the status quo. According to the gospels “parables” of the kingdom are to be expected in human history (GA 48, p. 580; WGT, p. 55). We can therefore “recognize the analogy to the divine in the worldly things that surround us, and rejoice in it” (GA 48, p. 582; WGT, p. 56). This includes the “freedom” to “visit the house of the atheistic social democracy” as it finally includes even “the house of the Church” (GA 48, p. 585; WGT, p. 58 rev.). Accordingly, in the perspective of the “regnum gratiae,” it becomes obvious that “We stand more deeply in the No than in the Yes, more deeply in criticism and protest than in naïvety, more deeply in the longing for the future than in the ­participation in the present” (GA 48, p. 587; WGT, p. 60 rev.; cf. GA 47, p. 620; RII, p. 462). In this way “the kingdom of God turns to the attack upon society” (GA 48, p. 588; WGT, p. 61 rev.). Therefore, “fundamentally, despite our many penultimate objections, we cannot resist giving in to the protest raised … by Socialism with ­summarizing vehemence against the intellectual and material structure of society as a whole” (GA 48, p. 589; WGT, pp. 61f. rev.). In this context Barth coins s­ entences of socialist partisanship such as the following: Have we comprehended that which we have understood – that the challenge of our day is not only to stand in opposition to some or many details of life, but a reorientation toward God

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in face of our life in its entirety? Have we comprehended that this turn in its entirety must be verified and proved … by making courageous resolutions and taking steps, by  taking on uncompromising challenges and patient work of reform, in our day in particular in an open‐hearted, broad‐minded and honest attitude toward social ­democracy, precisely not as disengaged onlookers or critics of it but, since to our time the problem of the opposition to the prevailing order is posed and the parable of the kingdom of God is given here, as hope‐sharing and guilt‐bearing comrades within it? (GA 48, p. 592; WGT, p. 64 rev.)

In contrast to the religious‐socialist synthesis of religion and radical politics Barth’s speech asks for a “theologically founded preference” exactly for godless – as it usually was decried – social democracy (Marquardt 1980, p. 28). Finally, in the perspective of the “regnum gloriae,” Barth once more points to “the source of our involvement” (Gorringe 1999, p. 51). It is “the wholly other thing of the kingdom, the kingdom of God.” And “[t]here is no continuity that leads from the realm of analogies into the divine reality” (GA 48, pp. 593f.; WGT, p. 65). But again, this does not mean “a retreat from revolution” (Gorringe 1999, p. 51). Rather it means an encouragement to look for analogies of the kingdom on earth. In this context Barth quotes Ernst Troeltsch: “The power of the ‘other side’ is the power of ‘this side.’” Accordingly, Barth can say “that the resurrection of Christ from the dead is the power that moves both the world and us,” because “it is the appearance of a corporality that is … ordered totaliter aliter, in a completely different manner than our corporality” (GA 48, p. 595; WGT, p. 66 rev.). While “waiting for the new Jerusalem to come down from God out of the heavens” (GA 48, p. 596; WGT, p. 67), “our eschatological faith guides our political action” (Gorringe 1999, p. 51). Thus in our works we have no other choice than “to follow closely that which is done by God” (GA 48, p. 598; WGT, p. 69). In the Aarburg speech on “Christian Life” Barth had been even more explicit at this point: “The spes futurae vitae [hope for the coming life] has been the secret lever of any true progresses and revolutions. Perhaps it serves at quietening down or disquieting, if I say that in view of these last deliberations I more than ever rejoice in being a Social Democrat” (GA 48, p. 511).

The Commentaries on the Epistle to the Romans and Their Political Implications First Edition (1918–1919) The Tambach lecture paved the way in Germany for the reception of Barth’s commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, which had been published on Christmas 1918 under the date of 1919. This book can be regarded as the most important theological outcome of Barth’s pastorate in the industrial village of Safenwil. Although it is conceived as a strictly theological treatise it has its radical political implications, because it is about “God’s world revolution” (GA 16, p. 380). This becomes obvious particularly in the exposition of Romans 13, where “Barth explicitly places himself to the left of Lenin. The state as such is evil and stands under the wrath of God. Christians should have nothing to do with it. …

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Christians have only one concern – not the corrupt goals of the state, but the coming of God’s kingdom, ‘the absolute revolution that comes from God so that it leaves the whole realm of the penultimate to the process of dissolution’” (Hunsinger 1976c, 207f.; cf. GA 16, p. 379; Marquardt 1972, pp. 126–141). Accordingly, Barth states, “That Christians have nothing to do with monarchy, capitalism, militarism, patriotism, and liberalism, is so self‐evident that I do not even need to mention it.” It is to be taken for granted that Christians will stand “on the extreme left” (GA 16, p. 381). It is in this context that Barth states: “Here is more than Leninism” (GA 16, p. 379; cf. Dannemann 1977, pp. 77–81). However, even in this horizon of political radicalism Barth cautions against any religious sacralization of revolution, against any identification of the kingdom of God with political movements: “Strike, general strike, and street fighting if it must be, but no religious justification or glorification of it! Military service as soldier or officer, if it must be, but on no condition a military chaplain!” Christians therefore have to become “social democratic, but not religious socialist” (GA 16, p. 390). This criticism of religious socialism is by no means to be perceived as an alienation from socialism; on the contrary, it represents a radical criticism from the left of the revolutionary upheavals taking place in Russia, Germany, and Switzerland. Barth even considers the possibility that theology and church might contribute to a resurrection of socialism, when he looks forward to the day “when the now‐ dying ember of Marxist dogma will blaze forth anew as the world’s truth, when the socialist church will be raised from the dead in a world become socialist” (GA 16, p. 332).

Second Edition (1922) The impression of an apolitical Karl Barth during the Weimar period in Germany was reinforced by the impact of the expressionistic second edition of his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans. It is true that – at least with regard to politics in the exposition of Romans 13 – “the dialectical coach cuts the corner in an extremely sharp turn here” (GA 47, p. 640; somehow, this sentence seems to be missing in the ET: RII, p. 478), so that misunderstandings are nearly unavoidable. Rightly Hunsinger observes that in the second edition “Barth recast his radical theology as dialectically as possible” (Hunsinger 1976c, p. 211). Politically, this means that “[e]very positive effort to approximate God’s kingdom through socialist action must be counteracted by an equal and opposite recognition of the complete sinfulness of that action. … Only the self‐negation of theological thought can do justice both to the self‐contradiction of socialist action and to the concrete reality of the living God who alone makes all things new” (Hunsinger 1976c, p. 212). Therefore: “In spite of, and because of, being so close to the truth, socialist revolution meets its crisis when confronted with the sovereignty of God. Whereas in the earlier Romans God was conceived from the standpoint of revolution, revolution in the later Romans is conceived from the standpoint of God” (Hunsinger 1976c, p. 213; cf. Marquardt 1972, p. 143). However, it is to Marquardt’s merit that we are enabled to understand the political subtext of the second edition of Romans more precisely. “While stressing the negative function of God’s revolution as limit, crisis, and judgment, … Barth did not mean to deny its positive function as orientation and ground. He did not urge political passivity, but a new quality of political action which allowed more room for social reform and less

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for revolutionary hubris. God’s eschatological revolution remained as the ground and orientation of human hope – and thus of socialist action” (Hunsinger 1976c, p. 213; cf. Marquardt 1972, p. 158). As Barth writes in his exposition of Romans 12:16: “Finding truth more in ‘No’ than in ‘Yes’,…Christianity displays a certain inclination to side with those who are immature, sullen, and depressed, with those who ‘come off badly’ and are, in consequence, ready for revolution. There is, for this reason, much in the cause of socialism which evokes Christian approval” (GA 47, p. 622; ET: RII, p. 463). Hunsinger concludes: “Despite the greater political sobriety, Barth did not abandon his socialist commitment even at the height of his dialectical period. His 1919 slogan  –  ‘Social democratic, but not religious socialist!’ – remained in force” (Hunsinger 1976c, p. 217).

Ongoing Orientation Toward the Left Whereas orthodox “Barthianism” has always insisted on the autonomy of Barth’s theology with regard to its political context, Marquardt maintained that “dialectical theology” has had its roots in Barth’s early socialist engagement and therefore cannot be understood exclusively in terms of a new reading of the Bible. Marquardt’s thesis is supported by Barth’s speech “The Problem of Ethics Today,” where the kingdom of God is described as the ethical “goal,” which “enthusiast, idealist, communist, anarchist, and (despite all genuinely Lutheran teaching) … always again Christian hope envisions as a reality here on earth: freedom in love and love in freedom as the pure and direct motive of societal action, with a community constituted in justice as its direct objective” (GA 19, p. 123; cf. Plonz 1995, pp. 174–201). Although a certain suspension of political praxis can be observed in Barth’s performance as a university professor during the Weimar period in Germany, his concentration on theological work at that time should be read as political resistance against the creeping nazification of society and church (Winzeler 1982). The continuity of Barth’s political orientation toward the left can be demonstrated by the fact that in 1931 he joined the German Social Democratic Party “as an act of political witness in the midst of a deteriorating situation” (Hunsinger 1976c, p. 217). His refusal to leave the party in 1933 seems to have contributed to his dismissal as a professor at the University of Bonn by the Nazi authorities and his expulsion from Germany in 1935.

Socialism in Church Dogmatics It can be expected after all that Barth’s socialism also had effects on his theological work on Church Dogmatics. However, the question arises if a socialist profile can be proven in the text itself.

The “Doctrine of God” According to Marquardt the most obvious example is §28 of Church Dogmatics, the first actual paragraph devoted to the doctrine of God, bearing the title “The Being of God as

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the One Who Loves in Freedom” (KD II/1, pp. 288–361; CD II/1, pp. 257–321). If Godself “is the one who loves in freedom” (KD II/1, p. 288; CD II/1, p. 257), then this can be interpreted as a translation of Barth’s earlier ethical statement into the concept of Godself. In the speech on “The Problem of Ethics Today” (1922) Barth had developed “the social vision of a kingdom of love in freedom and of freedom in love.” Now, in CD II/1, he “goes on … to describe God as he who loves in freedom” (Schellong 1973, p. 241; ET 1976, p. 144; cf. Marquardt 1972, p. 238). Before going into a more detailed explanation of God as “the one who loves in freedom,” Barth describes God’s being as a “being in action” (KD II/1, p. 288; CD II/1, p. 257). According to Marquardt, this phrase can be interpreted as a reformulation of Barth’s decisive point of interest since his youth, the belief in a “personal God,” a God active in history (cf. GA 22, pp. 494–554; cf. Marquardt 1972, pp. 231–236). Humans may, as Barth writes in fine print, “live with the fact that not only sheds new light on, but materially changes everyone and in everyone everything – the fact that God is” (KD II/1, p. 288; CD II/1, p. 258 rev.). According to Marquardt this is the decisive sentence in Barth’s doctrine of God and at the same time a paraphrase of the earlier formulation of “God’s revolution.” In this sense God’s being is not simply “in becoming” (cf. Jüngel 1965; ET 2001), but in intervening action, in real transformation of societal relations (cf. Marquardt 1972, p. 240). God’s reality is readable as the expression of his acting in history. Already in his lecture “Destiny and Idea in Theology” (1929) Barth had described “God’s existence” (Wirklichkeit) not so much as “reality” (Realität) but rather as “actuality” (Aktualität) (GA 24, p. 360). It is against this background that Marquardt suggests to read Barth’s formulation in Church Dogmatics on the being of God as “the fact that not only sheds new light on, but materially changes everyone and in everyone everything” as an allusion to Karl Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it” (Marx 1845 [1969], p. 7). In this sense Marquardt has seen “trace elements of Marxism in Barth’s concept of God” (Marquardt 1972, p. 241; cf. Reeling Brouwer 1988). Even if this formulation continues to be debated, the revolutionary dynamic in Barth’s description of God’s being as “being in action” should not be denied (cf. Chung 2008). The fact that socialist allusions extend into Barth’s doctrine of God can be underlined by the observation that, especially the section on “The Mercy and Righteousness of God” of §30 (The Perfections of the Divine Loving), the freedom of God’s love is described in a way resembling to the emphasis on God’s primary option for the poor in liberation theology: “the human righteousness required by God … has necessarily the character of establishing right for the innocent who are threatened and the poor, the widows, the orphans, and the strangers who are oppressed. …God stands at every time unconditionally and passionately on this and only on this side: always against the exalted and for the lowly, always against those who already have rights and for those from whom they are robbed and taken away” (KD II/1, p. 434; CD II/1, p. 386 rev.).

Postwar Reflections After World War II we find a very similar passage in Barth’s important speech “The Christian Community and the Civil Community” (1946), where he expresses his ongoing

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commitment to socialism in the context of political ethics. Because “the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost,” the Christian community will correspondingly “concentrate first on the lower and lowest levels of human society. The poor, the socially and economically weak and threatened, will always be the object of its primary and particular concern, and it will always insist on the civil community’s special responsibility for these weaker members of society.” The Christian community “must fight for social justice in the political sphere.” And that means that for Christians there is only a choice “between the various socialist possibilities (social liberalism, cooperativism, syndicalism, free‐money economy, moderate or radical Marxism)” (Barth 1946, p. 27; ET in Barth 1991, p. 284 rev.). Barth’s socialist inclinations including Marxism became obvious again in his draft for the declaration “On the Political Way of Our People,” the so‐called “Darmstädter Wort” (8 August 1947), a confession of guilt by which the Brethren Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany tried to draw political consequences from the failures of German Protestantism during the Weimar and Nazi periods. According to Barth, “economic materialism of the Marxist doctrine has put a widely forgotten important element of biblical truth (resurrection of the flesh!) into the light again.” The church had been mistaken in opposing this truth by “an unbiblical spiritualistic Christianity” and by refraining in its wrong struggle against Marxism from making “the issue of the poor” the issue of the church “in the superior light of the coming kingdom of God” (Barth1 in Klappert 1994, p. 228). However, in the published version of the declaration Barth’s allusion to the resurrection was omitted.

The “Doctrine of Creation” Returning to Church Dogmatics, more traces of Barth’s socialist commitment can be found in the “Doctrine of Creation.” It is not by chance that Barth, in the context of the section on “The Togetherness of Soul and Body” of §46 (Humanity as Soul and Body), discusses “the doctrine of Karl Marx,” that is, “historical materialism.” Barth savors “the hope, the eschatology, which Karl Marx gave to his followers as the supreme good and as the appropriate driving motive for socialist action on the way to it” (KD III/2, p. 465; CD III/2, p. 388; cf. Gollwitzer 1972, p. 46; ET 1976, p. 103). Most of the allusions to socialism, however, occur in the ethics of creation: “The Commandment of God, the Creator.” In the section on “The Active Life” of §55 (Freedom for Life) we find a passage on the ethics of labor, containing a radical criticism of capitalism, because it violates the dignity of human labor by the “principle of exploitation” (KD III/4, p. 622; CD III/4, p. 542). Although the exploitation of the workers has been reduced since the times of Karl Marx (cf. CD III/4, p. 543), no one should believe that classes and class struggle have been abolished: “What we cannot say, however, is that this exploitation has been brought to an end, that there are no classes with opposing interests, and that there is therefore no more class struggle” (KD III/4, p. 624; CD III/4, p. 544). In any case, “God’s revolution” (CD III/4, p. 545) implies the commandment that

1  Barth’s “Entwurf zum ‘Darmstädter Wort,’ Juli 10, 1947” is contained in the chapter “Das Wort von der Versöhnung hören und tun! Karl Barths Anstoß zum ‘Darmstädter Wort’ 1947.”

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Christians are encouraged to participate in “counter‐movements” against capitalism (KD III/4, pp. 620, 623, and 624; CD III/4, pp. 541, 543, and 544; cf. Dannemann 1977; pp. 184–216). Although the “decisive word” of the Christian community “can consist only in the proclamation of the revolution of God against ‘all ungodliness and unrighteousness of man’(Rom 1:18), i.e. in the proclamation of His kingdom as it has already come and comes” rather than “in the proclamation of social progress or socialism,” it should be noted that this does not exclude human fights for social justice: “The Christian community both can and should espouse the cause of this or that branch of social progress or even socialism in the form most helpful at a specific time and place and in a specific situation” (KD III/4, p. 626; CD III/4, p. 545 rev.).

The “Doctrine of Reconciliation” In the “Doctrine of Reconciliation” Barth “takes up the concept of revolution into Christology” (Schellong 1973, p. 242; ET 1976; cf. Dannemann 1977, pp. 150–159). In the section on “The Royal Human Being” of §64 (The Exaltation of the Son of Man) we find the following statement: “The conformity of the man Jesus with the mode of existence and attitude of God consists actively in what we can only call the pronouncedly revolutionary character of His relationship to the orders of life and value current in the world around Him. …Jesus was not in any sense a reformer …” (KD IV/2, p. 191; CD IV/2, p. 171 [emphasis in the German original]). In Jesus God acts “in a way which is all the more revolutionary, as the One who breaks all bounds asunder, in new historical developments and situations …” (KD IV/2, p. 193; CD IV/2, p. 173). In the section on “The Call to Discipleship” of §66 (The Sanctification of Man), where Barth praises Bonhoeffer’s book Discipleship as the best that has ever been written on the subject (KD IV/2, p. 604; CD IV/2, pp. 533f.), he returns to his earlier way of speaking about “God’s revolution” again: “The call to discipleship makes a break. …The kingdom of God is revealed in this call; the kingdom which is among the kingdoms of this world, but which confronts and contradicts and resists them; the revolution of God proclaimed and accomplished in the existence of the man Jesus” (KD IV/2, p. 614; CD IV/2, p. 543 rev.; emphasis in the German original). Translators G. W. Bromiley and T.  F. Torrance somehow obscure the revolutionary content of the passage rendering Barth’s talk of ‘the revolution of God’ by “the coup d’état of God.” On the next page, ­however, they translate correctly: “It is the kingdom, the revolution, of God which breaks, which has already broken them,” that is, the powers that be. It is interesting to see that Barth in §69 (The Glory of the Mediator), where he treats “The Third Problem of the Doctrine of Reconciliation,” associated with the prophetic office of Jesus Christ, recalls in fine print the “Religious Socialist movement” of Hermann Kutter and Leonhard Ragaz (KD IV/3, p. 30; CD IV/3, p. 29). He exhorts Christianity to humbly accept that the “social message of the Gospel” and the Christian “responsibility … in state and society” mean a “turning around” toward the world outside of the church, a turn that has taken place simply by “discovering” as exemplary “the positive meaning” of “more or less humanistic, a‐Christian or even anti‐Christian uprisings (particularly Socialism!)” (KD IV/3, p. 31; CD IV/3, p. 30 rev.; emphasis in the German original; cf. Dannemann 1977, pp. 217–229). It is therefore not at all arbitrary that Gollwitzer, drawing on Marquardt’s

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suggestions, maintains that Barth, speaking about “true words” in the secular world in the section on “The Light of Life,” alludes to socialism, where he talks about “the disquiet, not to be stilled by any compromise, … at the great disorders in state and society, and at the human beings who are inevitably crushed by them” and about “the iron decisiveness of will to attack just these great disorders” (KD IV/3, p. 140; CD IV/3, p. 125 rev.; emphasis in the German original; cf. Gollwitzer 1972, p. 34; ET 1976, p. 94). In the posthumously published manuscripts on The Christian Life, which should have become the ethics of reconciliation, Barth protests, in his exegesis of the second petition of the Lord’s Prayer (§78: “Thy kingdom come”), against what he calls “the lordless powers” (GA 7, pp. 363–399; cf. Plonz 1995, pp. 319–337). It is the “demony of the political” that “consists in the idea of the empire, which always and as such is inhuman,” and it is especially “Mammon,” possession as an “idol” or a “demon” (GA 7, pp. 374, 378). In this context Barth defends Leonhard Ragaz and religious socialism against the charge of identifying the kingdom of God with the socialist state of the future (cf. GA 7, p. 418). “Courageously praying” for the coming of God’s kingdom entails that those who pray will not only look out for the kingdom but rather they will “run themselves toward the kingdom” (GA 7, p. 454). The prayer for the coming of God’s kingdom implies the demand: “Fiat iustitia! That is, Christians are claimed for action in the effort and struggle for human righteousness. At issue is iustitia, not Iustitia, human, not divine righteousness” (GA 7, p. 456; ET in Barth 1991, 255 rev.; emphasis in the German original). However: “A little righteousness and holiness of works – there will certainly never be a great deal! – does not have to be an illusion or danger here. The only danger arising out of the (ill‐founded) anxiety that one might become too righteous and too holy, a ‘works Christian,’ is the temptation to remain passive where what is required, with a full sense of one’s limitations, is to become active” (GA 7, p. 459; ET in Barth 1991, p. 256). Finally: “The action of those who pray for the coming of God’s kingdom and therefore for the taking place of his righteousness will be kingdom‐like, and therefore on a lower level and within its impassable limits it will be righteous action” (GA 7, p. 458; ET in Barth 1991, p. 257). Righteous action, fighting for human justice and especially for social justice, can be regarded as the ethical expression of socialism.

Conclusion After having read Eberhard Bethge’s biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer the old Barth wrote a letter to the author (22 May 1967; GA 6, pp. 403–406) containing a kind of a confession of guilt with respect to the lack of solidarity toward the Jews during the Nazi era in Germany. In addition, Barth reflects on the reasons why especially in Germany his theology had been misunderstood as unpolitical. He comes to the conclusion that during his years in Germany he possibly had not sufficiently explained “the outlook which I presupposed without so many words and emphasized merely in passing, namely ethics, co‐humanity (Mitmenschlichkeit), a servant Church, discipleship, socialism, movements for peace – and throughout all these, politics” (GA 6, pp. 404–405; ET in Barth 1971, pp. 120–121 rev.). In other words: It does not suffice to accept, in terms of biography, that “Karl Barth was a socialist.” Barth’s theology itself cannot adequately be interpreted as long as the context of his “outlook” toward socialism is ignored.

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References Barth, K. (1946). Christengemeinde und Bürgergemeinde, Theologische Studien, vol. 20. Zürich: Theologischer Verlag. Engl. trans.: The Christian Community and the Civil Community, in: Barth, K. (1991), 265–296. Barth, K. (1971). Fragments Grave and Gay (ed. H.M. Rumscheidt) (trans. Eric Mosbacher). London: Collins. Barth, K. (1976). Jesus Christ and the movement for social justice (1911). In: Karl Barth and Radical Politics (ed. G. Hunsinger), 19–45. Philadelphia: Westminster Press. Barth, K. (1991). Karl Barth. Theologian of Freedom, The Making of Modern Theology, vol. 5 (ed. C. Green). Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Barth, K. and Thurneysen, E. (1964). Revolutionary Theology in the Making: Barth–Thurneysen Correspondence, 1914– 1925 (trans. J. D. Smart). Louisville, KY: John Knox Press. Barth, M. (1974). Current discussion on the political character of Karl Barth’s theology. In: Footnotes to a Theology: The Karl Barth Colloquium of 1972, Supplement to Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses (ed. H. Martin Rumscheidt), 77–94. Waterloo: Corporation for the Publication of Academic Studies in Religion in Canada. Busch, E. (1976). Karl Barth. His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts, (trans. J. Bowden). Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock (Reprint from SCM Press, 1976). Chung, P.S. (2008). Karl Barth: God’s Word in Action. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock. Dannemann, U. (1977). Theologie und Politik im Denken Karl Barths. Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag. Dehn, G. (1964). Die alte Zeit, die vorigen Jahre. Lebenseinnerungen. Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag. Diem, H. (1976). Karl Barth as socialist: controversy over a new attempt to understand him. In: Karl Barth and Radical Politics (ed. G. Hunsinger), 121–138. Philadelphia: Westminster Press.

Evang, M. (1988). Rudolf Bultmanns frühe Jahre. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Geiger, M. (1973). Karl Barth‐Tagungen auf dem Leuenberg. In: Karl Barth – ‘Theologie und Sozialismus’ in den Briefen seiner Frühzeit (ed. E. Thurneysen), 41–46. Zürich: Theologischer Verlag. Gollwitzer, H. (1972). Reich Gottes und Sozialismus bei Karl Barth, Theologische Existenz Heute, vol. 169. Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag. Gollwitzer, H. (1976). Kingdom of god and socialism in the theology of Karl Barth. In: Karl Barth and Radical Politics (ed. G. Hunsinger), 77–120. Philadelphia: Westminster Press. Gorringe, T.J. (1999). Karl Barth: Against Hegemony. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Groll, W. (1976). Ernst Troeltsch und Karl Barth – Kontinuität im Widerspruch. Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag. Hunsinger, G. (1976a). Preface. In: Karl Barth and Radical Politics (ed. G. Hunsinger), 7–8. Philadelphia: Westminster Press. Hunsinger, G. (1976b). Introduction. In: Karl Barth and Radical Politics (ed. G. Hunsinger), 9–13. Philadelphia: Westminster Press. Hunsinger, G. (1976c). Toward a radical Barth. In: Karl Barth and Radical Politics (ed. G. Hunsinger), 181–232. Philadelphia: Westminster Press. Jüngel, E. (1965). Gottes Sein ist im Werden. Veranrtwortliche Rede vom Sein Gottes bei Karl Barth. Ein Paraphrase. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Jüngel, E. (1982). Einführung in Leben und Werk Karl Barths. In: Barth‐Studien (ed. E. Jüngel), 22–60. Zürich/Köln: Benzinger, Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus. Jüngel, E. (2001). God’s Being Is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology of Karl Barth, (trans. J. Webster). Edinburgh: Bloomsbury T&T Clark. Klappert, B. (1994). Das Wort von der Versöhnung hören und tun! Karl Barths Anstoß zum ‘Darmstädter Wort’ 1947.

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In: Versöhnung und Befreiung. Versuche, Karl Barth kontextuell zu verstehen, 216–228. Neukirchen‐Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlagsgesellschaft. Marquardt, F.‐W. (1972). Theologie und Sozialismus. Das Beispiel Karl Barths. Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag. Marquardt, F.‐W. (1980). Der Christ in der Gesellschaft 1919–1979. Geschichte, Analyse und aktuelle Bedeutung von Karl Barths Tambacher Vortrag, Theologische Existenz Heute, vol. 206. Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag. Marquardt, F.‐W. (1981). Erster Bericht über Karl Barths Sozialistische Reden. In: Verwegenheiten. Theologische Stücke aus Berlin, 470–488. Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag. Engl. trans.: First report on Karl Barth’s ‘Socialist Speeches,’ in Marquardt, F.‐W. (2010), 103–122. Marquardt, F.‐W. (1985). Nach dreizehn Jahren. In: Theologie und Sozialismus, 3e, 360–407. Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag. Marquardt, F.‐W. (1986). Der Aktuar. Aus Barths Pfarramt. In: Karl Barth: Der Störenfried? Einwürfe, 3 (eds. F.‐W. Marquardt, D. Schellong and M. Weinrich), 93–139. Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag. Engl. trans.: The Secretary of the Church Administration. From Barth’s Pastorate, in Marquardt, F.‐W. (2010), 123–171.

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Marquardt, F.‐W. (2010). Theological Audacities. Selected Essays (eds. A. Pangritz and P. Chung). Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock. Marx, K. (1845 [1969]). Thesen über Feuerbach. In: Marx Engels Werke, vol. 3, 5–7. Berlin: Dietz Verlag. Pangritz, A. (2014). Neuer Bericht über Karl Barths Sozialistische Reden. In: Theologie im Umbruch. Karl Barths frühe Dialektische Theologie (eds. G. Pfleiderer and H. Matern), 63–80. Zürich: Theologischer Verlag. Plonz, S. (1995). Die herrenlosen Gewalten. Eine Relektüre Karl Barths in befreiungstheologischer Perspektive. Mainz: Matthias Grünewald Verlag. Reeling Brouwer, R. (1988). Over kerkelijke dogmatiek en marxistische filosofie. Karl Barth vergelijkenderwijs gelezen. Gravenhage: Boekencentrum. Schellong, D. (1976). On Reading Karl Barth from the left. In: Karl Barth and Radical Politics (ed. G. Hunsinger), 139–157. Philadelphia: Westminster Press. Thurneysen, E. (1973). Karl Barth – ‘Theologie und Sozialismus’ in den Briefen seiner Frühzeit. Zürich: Theologischer Verlag. Winzeler, P. (1982). Widerstehende Theologie: Karl Barth 1920–1935. Stuttgart: Alektor Verlag.

Further Reading Andresen, D. (1999). Fünfundzwanzig Jahre danach: Theologie und Sozialismus. In: Wendung nach Jerusalem. Friedrich‐Wilhelm Marquardts Theologie im Gespräch (eds. H. Lehming et al.), 353–368. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus. Hunsinger, G. (1983). Karl Barth and liberation theology. Journal of Religion 63: 247–263. Lehmann, P. (1972). Karl Barth: theologian of permanent revolution. Union Seminary Quarterly Review 28 (1972–73): 67–81. Lindt, A. (1975). Karl Barth und der Sozialismus. Reformatio 24: 394–404.

Marquardt, F.‐W. (1967). Die Entdeckung des Judentums für die christliche Theologie. Israel im Denken Karl Barths. Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag. Marquardt, F.‐W. (1976). Socialism in the theology of Karl Barth. In: Karl Barth and Radical Politics (ed. G. Hunsinger), 69–75. Philadelphia: Westminster Press. Schellong, D. (1973). Theologie und Sozialismus. Zeitschrift für evangelische Ethik 17: 238–250.

CHAPTER 75

Barth and War Matthew Puffer

Introduction From youth to retirement and from Romans to Final Testimonies, Karl Barth’s biography and writings bear witness both to an uncommon interest in war and to war’s considerable influence upon his theological development. The text that garners the greatest attention in Barth studies appears within “The Protection of Life” in Church Dogmatics III/4. A mere 20 pages of his magnum opus, this exposition dispels illusions about war and focuses instead on the fashioning and proclamation of peace, albeit allowing for a possible situation in which the command of God might require waging war for the protection of life. We will consider the arguments of CD III/4 after necessarily brief observations regarding a selection of Barth’s extensive earlier writings on war. Although far from exhaustive, this truncated survey aims to contextualize the critical role that war plays in shaping Barth’s practical theology of peace. Beyond observing that Barth’s biography exhibits a lifelong interest in war, that his theology is shot through with martial imagery and metaphors, that the crisis of war “launched Barth’s theological career” (Hunsinger 2000, p. 44), and that without war his contributions to modern theology might well have been lost, this essay contends that the “real emergency” or “serious case” (Ernstfall) toward which Barth’s writings on war consistently direct attention is neither war itself nor the ethics of war as such but rather the divine command regarding the establishment of a just peace. Barth’s foremost concerns are neither jus ad bellum (justifiable reasons for going to war) nor jus in bello (justifiable means in waging war) so much as jus ante bellum (just conditions prior to war) and jus post bellum (erecting them after war has ended). Perhaps better, what really concerns Barth is jus ad pacem (just conditions that tend toward peace) and

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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jus in pacem (establishing them in the midst of peace) (KD III/4, pp. 525–526, 529, 533; CD III/4, pp. 458–460, 462, 465). If states, churches, and individuals understood the peace that God has already accomplished in Christ, Barth argues, they would take more seriously the great responsibility of fashioning the conditions for a just peace while there remains time and opportunity to do so. Matters of war would then remain less pressing. They would take their rightful place at the periphery. The “No” that Christian ethics speaks to war follows from the prior “Yes” that the Word of God speaks in reconciliation. War is not inevitable though it may become necessary. When it does, it is a consequence of our failure to respond faithfully to God’s reconciliation. It exposes our failure to establish a just peace within and between nation-states, a peace that corresponds to the faithful peacemaking activity of God in Jesus Christ.

Shattered Illusions: The Crisis of World War I A romanticized vision of war played a role in Barth’s early imagination. On the night before his first day of school, Fritz Barth put his son Karl to bed with the verse, “Along to school the children go, and soldiers go to war, let each one strive …” (Busch 1976, p. 14). Karl’s son Markus, the New Testament scholar, reported of his father: “Asked as a first grader in school to propose a sentence for grammatical analysis, he suggested, ‘Wellington and Blücher beat Napoleon at Waterloo’” (Barth 1974, p. 77). As a nine‐ year‐old, Karl followed “with great interest and excitement” the First Sino‐Japanese War (1894–1895). “Like any boy, I delighted in the victory of the lesser power over the greater. From that time on the word ‘Japan’ has always stirred me” (Busch 1976, p. 16). “Until I was sixteen, I lived and dreamed of military exploits. My brothers and I would play with lead soldiers for hours on end and did so with great seriousness [Ernst]” (Busch 1976, p. 16; cf. Barth 1974, p. 77; Aboagye‐Mensah 1988, p. 43). Barth’s interest waned little, if at all, as he witnessed firsthand the serious devastation of several wars during his lifetime. In the fateful summer of 1914 Barth was serving as a pastor in the small industrial village of Safenwil. His friendship with Eduard Thurneysen and his exposure to the religious socialism of Hermann Kutter and Leonhard Ragaz shaped his theological imagination. Just as “Breathing fire, [Kutter] thunders away about trenches and grenade throwers,” so also, in Barth’s correspondence with Thurneysen, do “images of every kind; military metaphors, especially those of artillery, [play] a decisive role.” Barth explains: “You must understand that as we were at war with the world during those years, such metaphors flowed almost automatically from our pens” (Busch 1976, p. 74). As the drums of war became increasingly boisterous, Barth’s 26 July sermon proved prescient – “possibly today we are on the eve of a war that could set the whole of Europe ablaze” (Barth 2016, p. 52). Neither he nor his congregation anticipated the 18 million deaths and 23 million casualties precipitated by the 28 July assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and the following week’s cascading public declarations of war. As the nations mobilized, Barth was still able to preach on 2 August, “We shall not soon forget these days…. There is a kind of magical power in that little word ‘war’! None

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of us has experienced it firsthand” (Barth 2016, p. 59). Within weeks the experience was harrowing. God has spoken to us so clearly for almost two months that it would be difficult, it seems to me, not to understand God. In this short time we have been able to gain more knowledge and experience of God than we did earlier over a period of ten or twenty years…. We have experienced something of what humanity is and how it is interconnected in joy and suffering, as well as in sin and righteousness … on account of the course of outside events. (Barth 2016, p. 125, 128)

The outbreak of war brought “senseless hoarding of money and foodstuffs in our homes, whereby many people betrayed the fatherland and the general public…. This spirit of feverish, ruthless acquisitiveness has returned again in society from top to bottom…. This spirit is not of God. It is not the spirit of truth, righteousness, and peace” (Barth 2016, pp. 130–131). Even in the neutral state of Switzerland, the spirit of war was wreaking havoc in economic and domestic life. In light of John Howard Yoder’s influential narrative that Barth’s writings exhibit a “trajectory” toward “Christian pacifism” (Yoder 2003, p. 89, 171), it is noteworthy that Barth’s early World War I sermons, preached as the dark clouds of war were still only beginning to gather, include some of his strongest denunciations of militarism and war: “We are not to accept war as a necessity … war is wrong, war is sinful, war is no necessity, but, rather, stems from the evil of human nature … God does not will war”; “war is sin and guilt and punishment” (Barth 2016, pp. 59, 63–64, 146). Whereas Barth’s appraisals of World War I and the Cold War are remarkably similar, the heresy of Hitlerism in Nazi Germany would set World War II apart for Barth as qualitatively different. Anticipating many later writings, Barth’s August 1914 sermons identified war as not only a divine judgment on the institutions of social and economic injustice but also as a natural consequence of capitalism, racism, nationalism, and militarism. In the relative peace of Safenwil, Barth, the “red pastor,” had railed against the economic exploitation of his blue‐collar neighbors by factory owners who failed to see that “inequality and dependence is precisely the injustice” (Barth 1976, p. 44). In war Barth saw such dynamics at work on a massive international scale. The forces some had expected to avert war instead became its catalyst. The capitalist system’s economic interests, a temporary preservative of an unjust international order, became a driving force for military expansion. Nation‐states perceived their international investments as being locked in competition. They saw their socioeconomic well‐being increasingly at risk and in need of armed protection. Meanwhile, churches and political parties had failed to cultivate international solidarities sufficient to deter war. Divine judgment in the form of war was therefore not a supernatural intervention in the natural order of things, so much as a natural, historical consequence of unjust social arrangements. “So much artificiality and sin are hidden in our European culture, even in what one customarily and officially calls Christianity, more than what could survive in the long run…. It cannot have been otherwise in a world in which commercial rivalry is premised on the principle that might is right; a world like that cannot but end up with war, with mutual murder and destruction” (Barth 2016, p. 91). War was not

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the interruption of “peace” so much as the outworking of a prior “war of all against all” that was capitalism’s premise. Such peace was exposed as a lie by the expansionist economic justifications tendered by politicians in support of the war. “The peace that we had was no peace; it was a disguised, deceitful, veiled war” (Barth 2016, p. 91). Racism and nationalism became so toxic that Barth began to wonder whether Swiss neutrality might have “a special calling among the nations” (Barth 2016, p. 96). In newspaper accounts from various countries, he noted enthusiastic depictions of the war as “largely a racial conflict” (Barth 2016, p. 97). German, French, and Slavic peoples were portraying themselves not only as naturally superior to others but also as existing in conflict with them. As a nation uniquely constituted by German, French, and Italian populations, Switzerland’s citizens by contrast “do not recognize that there has to be hatred and war between foreign nationalities…. We have put together three ‘foreign’ nationalities and said to one another that we want to be a united nation of brothers and sisters” (Barth 2016, p. 97). The venomous role of ethnic animus in war and the possibility of a pacific national vocation, whether Swiss or otherwise, would recur throughout Barth’s later writings (cf. ESS, pp. 157–178, 201–232; CSC, p. 143; CD III/4, p. 462). Economic, ethnic/racial and nationalist forces in confluence exposed the war for what it was: a competition of “wills to power,” a drive for economic dominance and political supremacy. The war was a “struggle regarding who has or should have first place in Europe or on the world stage” (Barth 2016, p. 98). While the surrounding nations raged, claiming “God himself must definitely be on our side,” Barth warned that no side in this war fights for a just cause (Barth 2016, p. 99, 110). He admonished his parishioners to embrace international solidarity. He called them to reject the confusion of God’s cause with narrow economic, racial, and militaristic nationalisms. “No more idolatry of money and power … no more racial arrogance and no militarism” (Barth 2016, p. 123). Much as he would later argue in the context of the Cold War, Barth proclaimed that “this power struggle is not our affair. We have no reason at all to take the side of one or of the other” (Barth 2016, p. 98). On the contrary, with a “belief in the unity of humanity … for no nation do we desire victory or defeat…. We hate no one and should hate no one” (Barth 2016, p. 99). Barth appealed for solidarity on the basis of common humanity. “The only thing that matters is the mindset that with one’s brothers and sisters one seeks and cultivates community in all things, thereby signaling the end of all rivalry and conflict between the nations” (Barth 2016, p. 123 rev.). Such a peace could be achieved only through means more suitable than war. What disturbed Barth most in the early days of World War I was “how God’s name is now bandied around and drawn into the sinful, impassioned activity of humankind, as if God were one of the old warrior gods to whom our heathen ancestors appealed” (Barth 2016, p. 100). He warned his congregation against the lure of self‐deception, a “foolish mixing of patriotism, war enthusiasm, and Christian faith” (Barth 2016, p. 101). As Barth uttered these warnings, he had as yet only a limited awareness of how the war was being received by theologians in Germany. He was distraught by what he found in the pages of Die Christliche Welt in late August. It carried representative responses from the German theological scene displaying what

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he had found so appalling in the newspapers: “love of the Fatherland, enjoyment of war, and Christian faith, all in hopeless confusion” (Schwöbel 1985 p. 96 rev.; McCormack 1995, p. 111). Even this experience, however, did not prepare him for the 4 October public release of “The Manifesto of the Ninety‐Three.” On that terrible day “ninety‐three German intellectuals issued a terrible manifesto, identifying themselves before all the world with the war policy of Kaiser Wilhelm II and Chancellor Bethmann‐Hollweg. For me it was almost worse than the violation of Belgian neutrality. And to my dismay, among the signatories I discovered the names of almost all my German teachers (with the honorable exception of Martin Rade).” “It was like the twilight of the gods when I saw the reaction of Harnack, Rade, Eucken and company to the new situation,” and discovered how religion and scholarship could be changed completely, “into intellectual 42 cm cannons.” As a result, Barth did not know what to make of “the teaching of all my theological masters in Germany. To me they seemed to have been hopelessly compromised by what I regarded as their failure in the face of the ideology of war.” Their “ethical failure” indicated that “their exegetical and dogmatic presuppositions could not be in order.” Thus “a whole world of exegesis, ethics, dogmatics and preaching, which I had hitherto held to be essentially trustworthy, was shaken to the foundations, and with it, all the other writings of the German theologians.” (Busch 1976, p. 81; cf. McCormack 1995, pp. 78–79, 111–117)

The manifesto accelerated Barth’s critical reexamination of Protestant liberal theology. It was an inquiry for which the crisis of World War I had already proven a catalyst. His 11 October sermon lamented that recent theological and ethical failures were not a result of the war but had always been present, if below the surface, waiting to be unveiled. “The war has after all only revealed what we really are” (Barth 2016, p. 136). From Safenwil Barth followed the warring nations’ self‐laudatory news reports of great and admirable qualities, impressive military feats, noble sentiments, and popular ecstasy expressed by the warring nations, each of which took these as evidence that “God is on our side” (Barth 2016, p. 146). He found impressive the appeals for internal unity and “what all the millions of women have accomplished … an invisible army of women and children and of the elderly, of poets and scholars, who by their involvement, their confident spirit, their love, joy, and courage give support to the fighting armies there on the front!” (Barth 2016, p. 147). The war effort produced a laudable solidarity within communities: “Many a closed purse has now suddenly opened, many lazy hands have now suddenly become active for others. People now feel they are obligated to one another. We must ‘bear one another’s burdens’ (Gal 6:2), … we must act as brothers and sisters toward one another” (Barth 2016, p. 148). To such newfound unity in each country, Barth could only say “Yes, and No”: “The war has surprisingly conjured up many good and even divine things among people,” however, “we must see the events very, very differently than the warring nations. We have to view these good, divine character traits in humanity that are now evident in all nations, not just in a single people” (Barth 2016, p. 148–149). However, the various nations’ competing claims that “God is on our side” were wrong to deny an extension of internal solidarity beyond national borders. Barth preached, “We do not see angels pitted against devils, but instead, admirable, conscientious, highly gifted individuals contending against one

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another” (Barth 2016, p. 149). On Reformation Sunday, Barth lauded internal solidarities as far as they go, critiquing only their premature limitations: “The different forms of religion on either side are not the obstacle. Rather, the obstacle is that we, on both sides, have still not acted with sufficient seriousness [Ernst]” (Barth 2016, p. 171 rev.). Solidarity and the outworking of peace are much more serious matters that cannot be contained by, but must transgress, national boundaries for the sake of internal and external peace. Looking back on this period, Barth would recall: “In 1914 the whole world was preoccupied with the outbreak of war. I felt obliged to let the war rage through all my sermons, until finally a woman came up to me and asked me for once to talk about something else” (Busch 1976, p. 81). Barth complied. As the war went on, he was disappointed not to have been called up for military service, though this did not dissuade him from contributing in his own manner. “On a number of occasions, armed with a rifle, he joined the ‘home guard’ and spent nights on duty” (Busch 1976, p. 81). Stationed more regularly at his writing desk, the critical gaze of the Red Pastor of Safenwil was not restricted to his theology professors alone. There was much to find wanting, not least among church structures, popular piety, and European socialist parties whose fractured transnational solidarity proved insufficient to brake the expansionist, racist, war‐mongering of the nationalist parties. As his sermons focused less on the war, armed with pen, paper, and martial imagery, the lonely pastor sought other outlets, eventually launching his attacks on the illusions of war in the form of a Romans commentary begun in 1916, and, shortly afterwards, a heavily revised second edition. These volumes along with countless letters and critical reflections from the interwar period set out to reexamine the church’s proclamation in relation to war and the state.

War Between the Times: “So Far As It Depends on You, Live Peaceably with All” The two decades between world wars brought significant professional transitions for Barth. Over a span of less that 15 years, he moved from Safenwil to Göttingen (1921– 1925), to Münster (1925–1930), to Bonn (1930–1935), and finally back home to Basel (1935–1968). In these posts he faced diverse political challenges amidst the failures of the Weimer Republic and the rise of National Socialism. On the strength of Romans I the Safenwil pastor, who had never studied for a doctorate, received an unexpected appointment to a professorship in Göttingen. As he delved more deeply into biblical texts and Reformed theology, which consumed most of his time, he did not abandon his concerns about war. He still called the churches to develop a theological and practical witness against war within each state. He also called for greater justice among nation‐states than was effected by the Treaty of Versailles. Barth’s 1922 Romans II raised the martial rhetoric to a new pitch, describing God’s grace as an attack on the natural human propensity for idolatry and war. Christ’s crucifixion revealed and concealed the “fundamental assault that is made upon human beings by grace” (RII, p. 466 rev.). The bombardment with which God’s grace advances against

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human sin besieges sinful human existence while at the same time God in Christ establishes solidarity with humans who suffer under the attack of grace (cf. Jones 2010, p. 95). Barth referred to the commentary as “bomb‐shell theology.” The critical reviews confirmed that the commentary had found its target:. “It fell like a bomb on the playground of the theologians” (Gorringe 1999, p. 69; McConnachie 1927, pp. 385–386). Barth’s eschatology was especially on display. The conditional imperative, “If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all” (Rom 12:18), points to a “broken command” that “bears witness to the peace of the Coming World” (RII, p. 471). In the time between the times, “war is a natural activity … of human beings engaged in the process of making themselves God” (RII, p. 470 rev.). Militarism is the function of a deficient eschatology. It displays precisely the idolatry prohibited by the First Commandment and by the revelation that “God is God.” In our present war‐torn world, “God is not known, he will be known” (RII, p. 470). Within the dialectic of already and not yet, “Christ is our peace;” but human beings are sinful and turn to war. “When we assert that we behold Jesus Christ in our fellow human beings, … we behold peace in the midst of war” (RII, p. 470 rev.). Humanity’s militarism, its idolatrous usurpation of God’s reign, constitutes war against God and the neighbor. At the same time, Barth’s eschatology ensured that the Pauline imperative “is not an absolute command” but is limited in its scope by the qualifier, “so far as it depends on you” (RII, p. 471). Thus, “the possibility that we must engage in conflict with our fellow human beings” cannot be absolutely ruled out (RII, p. 470 rev.). Barth therefore appreciated Calvin’s practical pursuit of peace and his affirmation that governments should strive to enter into defensive treaties. They should maintain standing armies in anticipation that “only as a last resort … all other steps” having been taken, war may prove to be unavoidable (TJC, p. 211). The churches are ill prepared, Barth lamented, to speak the necessary word with boldness against war within their respective states. “The church must have the courage to speak today … upon the fascist, racist nationalism which since the war is appearing in similar forms in all countries” (TC, p. 133). His Ethics lectures delivered in Münster (1928–1929) and Bonn (1930–1931) critiqued old and new “war ideologies” as well as the “war theology” that emerged in support of each nation’s “will to power” in World War I (ETH, pp. 154–160). The old ideology of war in the Middle Ages prohibited clergy from wielding weapons, whereas the waging of wars was reserved to a military class. This provision had the salutary effect of casting war as an activity of a morally suspect nature. It remained so at least until the rise of territorial princes and the emergence of a bourgeois class in the eighteenth century, when wars of conquest were naturalized and normalized (cf. PTNC, pp. 29–31). The individual soldier was not responsible for the justice of a prince’s war declaration any more than an executioner was for the justice of a judge’s sentence. The modern “ideology of war,” with its mass conscription, had the beneficial effect of disclosing what had always been true – namely, that all members of society are bound up in the activity of war. A great danger of the modern ideology of war, however, was that in spite of placing the practical responsibility for war on all citizens, it continued to outsource moral responsibility to either the political authority or the nation as a whole. It thereby failed to reckon properly with either the church’s or the individual’s moral responsibility to discern the justice of a potential or actual war. Barth insisted that just

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as all are practically and morally responsible for war, so also all are responsible for securing the peace that prevents war and resists the idolatry of militarism. These Weimar‐era statements provide a useful backdrop against which to interpret writings that respond to Hitlerism, whether directly or obliquely. In Theological Existence Today Barth argued that after Hitler’s seizure of power, Evangelical Christians should get on with the task of proclaiming God’s Word “as if nothing had happened.” By this phrase, widely misunderstood in later times, Barth was deflating as idolatrous the theo‐ political euphoria rampant in the churches about “the supposed revelation from God in Adolf Hitler” (Barth 1986, pp. 76–77). The Barmen Declaration, for its part, cast the totalitarian Nazi state as a rank heresy. It “cannot recognize any task, proclamation, and order other than its own, nor acknowledge any other God than itself, and which therefore in proportion to its development had of necessity to undertake the oppression of the Christian church and the suppression of all human right and freedom” (HIC, pp. 46–47). Because National Socialism had set itself up as “a religious institution of salvation” it was qualitatively different from the nefarious nationalisms of World War I. Therefore, “in the face of National Socialism, there is no longer neutrality for the church today, no longer delay with her Yes and No” (Barth 1939, pp. 37, 41). Reversing his rhetoric but not his essential point, Barth asserted that churches were placed in a new situation where “it is surely impossible that [they] carry on as if nothing had happened” (Barth 1938, p. 21). As Nazi Germany became increasingly expansionist and aggressive, Barth argued that the church must call nation‐states to armed resistance for reasons of maintaining freedom to proclaim the gospel for the sake of the world, whether in national self‐defense or in fidelity to mutual‐defense treaties. On 19 September 1938, amidst Germany’s military annexations of the Sudetenland, Barth sent Josef Hromádka in Prague a letter indicating the political implications of his theology. “Every Czech soldier who fights and suffers will be doing so for us too, and I say this without reservation – he will also be doing it for the church of Jesus, which in the atmosphere of Hitler and Mussolini must become the victim of either ridicule or extermination” (Bethge 2000, p. 606). The international response to Barth’s “summons to armed resistance” was fierce and seemingly unanimous. “A loud chorus of protest began: even apart from the whole of the German Press, which by command published the same article under a number of different headlines: ‘Professor of Theology is Warmonger,’ ‘Jews‐Czechs‐Karl Barth,’ ‘The True Fame of Karl Barth’” (Busch 1976, p. 289 rev.). Barth recalled “anxious, troubled and above all dismayed comments rained down on me, even from those who were my friends and in sympathy with my cause,” including “the leaders of the Confessing Church [who] dissociated themselves in a ‘formal letter of censure’” (Busch 1976, p. 289). Barth considered 30 September “the most terrible day in recent years” when France’s Prime Minister Daladier joined Chamberlain and Mussolini in signing the fateful Munich Pact, violating the Treaty of Versailles, which had recognized the independence of Czechoslovakia (Barth 1944, p. 21). As Germany occupied the Sudetenland, “Peace in Our Time” was celebrated across the continent, and churches honored the day with services of thanksgiving. For his part Barth was dejected at the folly of an international community that was proving incapable of keep-

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ing faith. “I wrote in my diary: ‘Catastrophe for European freedom in Munich.’ I saw myself unutterably alone in this view” (Busch 1976, p. 289). From World War I to World War II, it was not Barth’s mind that had changed but the context in which he found himself, including the outlooks of his audiences, whether in Germany, Switzerland, or beyond. According to Barth, “the practical relevance, the struggle, and the confessional character of my theological teaching have become visible to many, and now for the first time to most, against the background of a time which has taken shape at the hands of National Socialism” (HIC, p. 49). With the rise of Nazism, with its idolatry, anti‐Semitism, and aggression, the situation from which Barth wrote his theology had transformed into a borderline case. Unlike World War I, Barth had an opportunity to serve in the Swiss auxiliary corps during World War II. “His assignment was to guard bridges and public utility buildings against potential saboteurs” (Barth 1974, p. 77), a task that did little to hinder his literary output. Letters to Canada, France, Holland, Great Britain, and America documented his responses to individual requests from churches to speak to their specific situations in light of Nazi Germany’s aggression. In each letter Barth explained not only that most past wars were waged for “national, territorial, economic, and strategic aspirations and claims” and were unnecessary, including World War I (Barth 1941, p. 28), but also that “the causes of the present war may be traced back chiefly to the Treaty of Versailles and the conduct of the victorious powers since Versailles,” (Barth 1940, p. xxvi; cf. 1941, pp. 2–4, 28; 1944, p. 25). Nazi Germany now presented the parties to Versailles with “a cause which is worthy of being defended by all the means in our power – even by war; … this cause could no longer be defended by any other means than war” (Barth 1941, p. 28). As the German army began tallying victories and the pox of Nazism spread, Barth’s confidence in the justice of the war did not waver. Nevertheless, Barth’s exhortations were again out of step with popular sentiment when his concern for the defeated nations mirrored his concern for German citizens: “[National Socialism] has only conquered a certain number of nations, including your own, just as it first conquered the German nation, the most unfortunate of all” (Barth 1941, p. 18). Barth refused to demonize the German people both during and after the war. In the spring of 1945 Germany’s impending defeat was apparent to all. Barth took the occasion to travel throughout Switzerland giving a lecture called “The Germans and Ourselves.” In it he laid out the postwar obligations he saw for the victorious nations in fashioning a just peace (jus post bellum) in relation to the German people. He vigorously opposed the widespread scapegoating of Germans as evil enemies deserving of hatred. He presented them as “most seriously ill” (Barth 1947, p. 3). He depicted them sympathetically as having suffered unimaginably from National Socialism and under it. The cure for this ailment would require great care and a sober “Christian Realism.” This meant the cultivation of a “healthy conception of citizenship” and “fundamental changes in the political, social, and economic structure of the German people” (Barth 1947, p. 17, 39; 1941, p. 28). In this work of restorative justice Barth insisted that the Germans be regarded as “neighbors” and as “friends in spite of everything” (Barth 1947, p. 96; Busch 1994, p. 35). His message remained much the same in the 1947 Darmstadt Declaration that

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he helped to draft. It affirmed that divine reconciliation was the model on which to proceed. It required a responsible confession of the injustices that had been perpetrated. It called all parties to a necessary conversion in support of a harmonious relationship among former enemies. Barth’s resistance to scapegoating the German people as the sole perpetrators of World War II, his placing considerable onus on the World War I victors and “the iniquitous Treaty of Versailles” (Barth 1938, p. 25), and his refusal either to oppose, without qualification, socialist communism in the East or to support, without reservations, the liberal democracies of the West, all contributed to considerable consternation in the emerging Cold War (cf. Niebuhr 1959, pp. 184–189; DeCou 2015, pp. 71–72).

The Ernstfall of Peace and the Grenzfall of War Barth rescued a bust of Schleiermacher from the rubbish heap of the Bonn Kurfürsten Schloss after the war. He did this at the university from which he had been dismissed in 1935 and to which he returned in 1946 to deliver lectures on the Apostles’ Creed before each day’s reconstruction efforts. Like this serendipitous find, Barth’s postwar lectures, later published as Dogmatics in Outline, bore the marks of sifting through the ruins in the hopes of reconstructing a better future. Perhaps the same might be said about Barth’s concise treatment of the problem of war in CD III/4 published in 1951. There Barth distilled insights developed over the course of four decades from before, during, and after the world wars. The term “Grenzfall” (borderline case) has received considerable scholarly attention in relation to Barth’s ethics of war, in spite of the fact that the term does not appear in these 20 pages (cf. Puffer 2012). The urgent task to which Barth wishes to direct the church’s attention is not war but peace. “Peace is the real emergency [Ernstfall]” (CD III/4, p. 459). Barth exposes three “illusions” and suggests three “lessons” before a concluding excursus on the merits of conscription and conscientious objection. First, he again contests old and new ideologies of war. “It is an illusion to believe that there can be an uncommitted spectator” (CD III/4, p. 451). Willingly or unwillingly, directly or indirectly, everyone in a society participates in the burdens and benefits of military conflicts, and therefore, all share in the responsibility for discerning whether a war is just or unjust. Second, like Socrates and Hannah Arendt, Barth is concerned that we have not yet appreciated what wars ought to have taught us about the human condition in relation to economic power and the logics of political economy in the absence of armed conflict (Plato 1991, II: pp. 372a–373e; Arendt 1976, p. 137, 153). Perpetual war, he suggests, is but the logical outcome of a society possessed by such power. “We can and should realize that the real issue in war, and an effective impulse towards it, is much less we ourselves and our vital needs than the economic power which in war is shown not so much to be possessed by us as to possess us, and this to our ruin, since instead of helping us to live and let live it forces us to kill and be killed” (CD III/4, p. 452 rev). If we desire a state of affairs other than war, then a peaceful political economy needs to be developed. It would be a political economy capable of being possessed by human beings, rather than one in which economic power holds human beings in its grip, outstripping their capacities to avert war.

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A third illusion, the so‐called “humanization” of war, veils the reality that in war “whole nations as such are out to destroy one another by every means possible” (CD III/4, p. 453). With memories of London, Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki still fresh, Barth observes the lack of restraint or consideration for either enemy forces or civilians in modern war. The inhumanity of war is manifest in “the increasing scientific objectivity of military killing; the development, appalling effectiveness, and dreadful nature of the methods, instruments, and machines employed; and the extension of the conflict to the civilian population” (CD III/4, p. 453). Turning to “lessons” for Christian ethics, Barth redirects attention from God’s No in war to God’s Yes regarding peace. The first lesson the church must embrace and attest before the state is that the state’s normal task is not war but the fashioning of a just and lasting peace that maintains and fosters life within the state. Not war, but “Peace is the real emergency [Ernstfall] to which all our time, powers, and ability must be devoted ‘from the very outset’ in order that human beings may live and live properly” (CD III/4, p. 459, rev.; KD III/4, p, 525, quotation marks restored). Peace is not something passive or private, nor is it the mere absence of conflict but rather the outworking of individual and communal flourishing that engages public institutions, social policy, and structures of political economy. The second lesson is the cultivation and sustaining of good faith among and between nation‐states. The church attests to the state that its proper work is not the annihilation of human life but extending externally the peace for which it is working internally, ensuring through mutual‐aid and mutual‐defense treaties that this too is a just peace and not a peace that leads inevitably to war. “If only the church had learned both of these lessons: of Christian concern for the just fashioning of a peace that keeps war at bay within nation-states, and of Christian concern for entirely peaceful measures and solutions in the relationships among states that avert war” (CD III/4, p. 460 rev.; KD III/4, p. 527). Those who have learned the first two lessons regarding the imperative of peacemaking within and between nation‐states might then have less need of the third lesson: “Christian support for war and in war is not entirely beyond the bounds of possibility” (CD III/4, p. 460). A state whose existence is attacked in a war of aggression may discern that it is responsible “for the whole physical, intellectual, and spiritual life of the people, and therefore their relationship to God, … that in and with the independence of a nation there is entrusted to its people something which … they are commissioned to attest to others, … that with the independence of the state they … would have to yield something which must not be betrayed, which is necessarily more important to them than life itself ” (CD III/4,p. 462). Similarly, a neighbor state with which a state pledged faith in a treaty may be attacked by an aggressor such that the state might defend its neighbor in solidarity with and out of responsibility for its independent existence. Like the first two lessons, obedience to the third lesson contributes to the preservation of peace insofar as public preparations to uphold mutual‐defense treaties serve to constrain nefarious expansionist impulses. Similarly, a concluding excursus on conscription and allowances for conscientious objection considers how each of these policies advances the cause of peace by reinforcing the conviction that “all citizens share responsibility for [war] both in peace and war,” with the “salutary effect of bringing

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home the question of war” to each person (CD III/4, p. 466). The church that proclaims all three lessons will not be taken in by propaganda and the aforementioned illusions. It will bear witness to the priority of peace before the just and unjust alike. It will work for peace under the constant prayer, “Grant us peace.” “Ora! and therefore Labora!” (CD III/4, p. 534).

Proclaiming Peace, Reconciliation, and Salvation Looking back on the discussion of war in Church Dogmatics some 14 years later, Barth approvingly described it as “ninety‐nine percent anti‐war,” noting that its “denunciation of war was among the most effective that have been made” (Barth 1971, p. 81). Barth regretted only that he had not sufficiently reckoned with the implications of Hiroshima and thus failed to articulate a statement about nuclear weapons as clear as had subsequently been achieved in Pacem in Terris (cf. Clough 2005, 96n31; Hunsinger 2000, p. 277). Today, as the Doomsday Clock sits somewhere near two minutes to midnight, the foreseeable causes of war remain much the same – authoritarianism, thermonuclear proliferation, expansionist capitalism, and gross resource inequalities within and between nation‐states – all accelerating under technological advances and the conditions of global climate change, warming, and food and water scarcity and insecurity. More than ever, peace is the real emergency. And we are responsible for the serious, joyful work of contributing to a just peace with our near and distant neighbors. The tasks before us outstrip our individual and perhaps even our collective capacities. In the face of such challenges, Barth’s theology calls not for winning but for witness. Among his clearest statements about the witness of just peacemaking that corresponds to the reconciliation accomplished in Christ appears in a 1963 letter to Hiderobu Kuwada that might serve as a benediction to this essay. … In holy scripture which is normative for me, the word “peace” is identical with the much broader concept of salvation…. The salvation that includes peace within it is … the reconciliation of the world with God which includes the reconciliation of human beings with one another … which God has already accomplished in the history of Jesus Christ … What the world lacks is the knowledge and awareness of our human responsibility for that peace which is not just a beautiful idea but the reality that God has set up and revealed within world history. The pity is that the nations live with eyes and ears closed to it. But so long as they do not see and hear God’s gift, they cannot and will not take it, and so long as they do not take it, war and many other evils will come. Why do they miss it? Why do they not see and hear it, why does our world continue to show itself to be a world of war? I seek the blame for the disasters that constantly threaten the world afresh less in the corruptions that have become humankind’s second nature than in the laxity of the Christian churches throughout the world in fulfilling their special task of proclaiming to men the objective reality of salvation and therefore of peace too, by word and also by example, and doing so with the clarity and definiteness, the joy and consistency, that are commensurate with this great matter.

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… The nations – and this applies to Christians and Christian churches themselves – must be called to Jesus Christ in such a way that their eyes and ears are opened, that they cannot withstand and evade knowing the reality of salvation and therefore of peace, that the irrefutable covenant between God and man, and man and man, will be written on their hearts and consciences as the law of their conduct…. Among other things a good deal of better theology is needed. Thus, dear colleague, we come to the contribution that you and I must make to peace among the nations. (Barth 1981, pp. 89–91 rev.)

References Aboagye‐Mensah, R. (1988). Karl Barth’s Attitude to War in the Context of World War II. Evangelical Quarterly 88: 43–59. Arendt, H. (1976). Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt. Barth, K. (1938). Introduction to the English Edition. In: Cross and Swastika: The Ordeal of the German Church (trans. J. McNab) (ed. A. Frey), 9–32. London: SCM. Barth, K. (1939). The Church and the Political Problem of Our Day. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Barth, K. (1940). Preface: With a Letter from Karl Barth. In: The Church and the War (ed. A. Cochrane). Toronto: Thomas Nelson and Sons. Barth, K. (1941). This Christian Cause (A Letter to Great Britain from Switzerland) (trans. E. Gordon). New York: MacMillan. Barth, K. (1944). The Church and the War (trans. A. Froendt). New York: MacMillan. Barth, K. (1947). The Only Way: How Can the Germans Be Cured? (trans. M. Neufled and R. Smith). New York: Philosophical Library. Barth, K. (1971). An Outing to the Bruderholz. In: Fragments Grave and Gay (trans. E. Mosbacher) (ed. M. Rumscheidt), 71–94. Glasgow: William Collins Sons and Co. Barth, M. (1974). Current Discussion on the Political Character of Karl Barth’s Theology. In: Footnotes to a Theology: The Karl Barth Colloquium of 1972 (ed. M. Rumscheidt), 77–94. Waterloo: Corporation for the Publication of Academic Studies in Religion in Canada. Barth, K. (1976). Jesus Christ and the Movement for Social Justice. In: Karl Barth

and Radical Politics, (trans. and ed. G. Hunsinger), 1–23. Philadelphia: Westminster. Barth, K. (1981). Letters: 1961–1968 (trans. and ed. G. Bromiley). Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Barth, K. (1986). A Karl Barth Reader (eds. R. Erler and R. Marquand) (trans. G. Bromiley). Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Barth, K. (2016). A Unique Time of God: Karl Barth’s WWI Sermons (trans. and ed. by W. Klempa). Louisville: Westminster John Knox. Bethge, E. (2000). Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography (trans. and ed. V. Barnett). Minneapolis: Fortress. Busch, E. (1976). Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts (trans. J. Bowden). Philadelphia: Fortress. Busch, E. (1994). The Great Passion: An Introduction to Karl Barth’s Theology (trans. G. Bromiley) (eds. D. Guder and J. Guder). Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Clough, D. (2005). Ethics in Crisis: Interpreting Barth’s Ethics. Aldershot: Ashgate. DeCou, J. (2015). The First Community: Barth’s American Prison Tours. In: Karl Barth and the Making of Evangelical Theology (eds. C. Anderson and B. McCormack), 67–87. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Gorringe, T. (1999). Karl Barth: Against Hegemony. Oxford: Oxford. Hunsinger, G. (2000). Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Jones, P. (2010). The Rhetoric of War in Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans: A Theological Analysis. Journal for the History

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of Modern Theology/Zeitschrift für Neuere Theologiegeschichte 17: 90–111. McConnachie, J. (1927). The Teaching of Karl Barth: A New Positive Movement in German Theology. Hibbert Journal 25: 385–400. McCormack, B. (1995). Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909–1936. Oxford: Clarendon. Niebuhr, R. (1959). Why is Barth Silent on Hungary? In: Essays in Applied Christianity (eds. D. Robertson and B. New), 183–193. York: Meridian.

Plato (1991). The Dialogues of Plato (trans. Jewett). New York: Washington Square. Puffer, M. (2012). Taking Exception to the Grenzfall’s Reception: Revisiting Barth’s Ethics of War. Modern Theology 28: 478–502. Schwöbel, C. (ed.) (1985). Karl Barth – Martin Rade: Ein Briefwechsel. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn. Yoder, J.H. (2003). Karl Barth and the Problem of War and Other Essays on Barth. Eugene, OR: Cascade.

CHAPTER 76

Barth and the Weimar Republic Rudy Koshar

Introduction Historians regard the Weimar Republic as a turning point in the secularization of German culture. Religion became more privatized, so the narrative goes, partly through legal‐constitutional means, and partly through the evolution of industry, art, literature, music, architecture, travel, sports, cinema, and theater – which in varying degrees took on those attributes of heroic secular modernism for which the republic has been praised and studied. Underlying narratives of Weimar cultural vibrancy is an account of how the polity was also “freed” from religious influences, as the collapse of the imperial government decoupled “throne and altar.” Although scholars emphasize Weimar’s political demise, there is nonetheless a sense that Germany’s first democracy was a stepping stone in the march toward political modernity, if for no other reason than it became a cautionary tale by which a progressive, democratic, secular, and stable “Bonn” became something other than ill‐fated “Weimar” (e.g. Weitz 2007). The implication of this ­narrative – despite the (now waning?) centrality of the Holocaust in scholarship – is that secular society’s victory was somehow worth the enormous cost. As compelling as this narrative is – and as much as one sympathizes with the efforts of a flawed democracy – it stands in tension with recent critical understandings of religion’s place in modern society. “Religion is always receding and returning and its repeated tidal flow is essential to the self‐image of modernity, which can no more dispense with religion than embrace it,” writes Jonathan Sheehan (2005, p. ix). Whether one defines secularity as the separation (more or less) of church and state, decline of religious practice, or belief in God as one option among many (Taylor 2007, pp. 1–22) older models of irrevocable secularization have been questioned. Moreover, just as religion’s tidal flow punctuates modernity, scholarly and political critiques of

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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secularization advance and recede. What marks the recent wave of critique is a sense that “the logic of secularism is imploding.” Not definitive triumph, it is argued, but a “soulless, aggressive, nonchalant, and nihilistic” ambience characterizes secularism’s stance in the world (Milbank et al. 1999, p. 1; cf. Milbank 1990). The point of departure of this paper is that such critique demands parallel reconsideration of Weimar’s iconic role in the secularization paradigm. This is not simply a matter of redirecting attention to the persistence of religious belief or the continued strength of churches after 1918. Nor is it an argument about how fundamentalist Protestantism made nationalist assaults on democracy. The issue here is rather how Weimar theological discourse redescribed secularity in ways that prefigured contemporary, radical understandings. It is a matter of viewing the republic not only for its insistent secularization but also for its distinctly “foundational” theological apperception of liberal secularity. Discussing what theological discourse was up to in Weimar demands rethinking the role of political theology, a subject that attracts attention from scholars across disciplines (Scott and Cavanaugh 2004; de Vries and Sullivan 2006; Lebovic 2008). Political theology is a contested concept that may refer to theory or practice. Defining political theology also depends on whether the political or theological takes precedence (Taubes 1983). Such complexities aside, my focus is on that strand of political theology that interrogates power relations through interpretation of God’s action in the world, gives precedence to critique over practice (without eschewing practice), and sets the theological over the political. Klaus Scholder has argued that political theology was a new departure in Weimar German‐evangelical theological circles, associating its rise with conservative theologians such as Paul Althaus and Emanuel Hirsch, who as a result of World War I integrated a more muscular concept of the Volk into their thinking (Scholder 1977, p. 125). My interest here is “dialectical theology,” the most original and controversial product of Weimar political theology. The political meaning of interwar dialectical theology was unclear to contemporaries. Its historical indeterminacy is reflected in research on the leading exponent of dialectical theology, Karl Barth. Scholars have devoted much attention to Carl Schmitt, who has been praised or damned as the right‐wing godfather of modern political theology (see Meier 1998). By comparison, scholarship on Barth has been uneven, and his thought has been ascribed a variety of political positions, from conservative quietism to radical socialism, and from antimodernism (or even postmodernism) to liberalism.1 Barth himself contributed to such divided opinions throughout a long career by stressing the context‐specific nature of Christianity’s political interventions – and by taking stances toward National Socialism and Communism that many readers found paradoxical (e.g. West 1958). My goal is twofold: to discuss Barth’s Weimar‐era political theology with respect to its redescription and critique of liberal modernity and to understand how he saw the role of the theological in an age notionally shaped by secular triumph. 1  Barth’s general absence from the Anglophone historical narrative of the interwar period is a problem in its own right; see my “Where Is Karl Barth in Modern European History?” Modern Intellectual History 5(2), August 2008: 333–362.

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My argument is that Barth’s theology “demythologized” both liberal secularity and Christianity’s role within it. Barth’s erstwhile ally Rudolf Bultmann is famous for demythologizing Scripture by interpreting the Word of God in critical‐existential terms. It is ironic that Bultmann’s idea of demythologization, which he introduced formally in 1941, was aimed at “Barthians,” who in Bultmann’s view repristinated Scripture at the expense of critique. Yet Barth was also intent on demythologizing, though not biblical text but rather theological tradition (Chalamet 2005, pp. 266–267, 272). I propose that an analogous aspect of Barth’s thought was to interrogate the myth of secularism’s historical separation of theological and political spheres and its consequent “containment” of religion. Barth’s accomplishment becomes clearer with reference to a recent seminal study of political theology in the West. Mark Lilla celebrates the fact that for centuries western political culture, especially since Thomas Hobbes’ thought, assumed that political questions dealt with this‐worldly concerns rather than with revelation. Lilla terms this achievement, which he regards as a central moment of western tradition, the Great Separation. This, he argues, enabled a psychological perspective whereby ultimate questions about God and immortality were relegated to the margins in deference to the penultimate aims of political life. First things gave way to second and third things, which then came to dominate political conflict. Lilla worries that this separation is now endangered, both within and outside “the West,” which stands on “the other shore” of a “narrow, yet deep” river that serves as a border between a secularized, liberal civilization and the “opposite bank,” but where one finds men and women who regard attitudes toward God or doctrinal purity as having a central place in political discourse (Lilla 2007, pp. 3–4). This evocative language sets the stage for a discussion of how “we” (Lilla never gives the imperial pronoun a specific social content) came to the other side of the river, what that journey entailed, and what often unintended consequences followed from the work of numerous key thinkers, most of them with German names, who kept traversing back and forth between the two banks, thereby undoing, or at least seriously undermining, the arduous political‐theological work of the Great Separation. Of most importance for me is that Barth appears in Lilla’s penultimate chapter as a gnostic figure who unintentionally built bridges from one bank to the other, thereby fostering, with others, the “theological celebration of modern tyranny” (2007, p. 278; see also Scholder 1988; Wagner 1975). I take issue with Lilla’s discussion on two points. First, Barth did not unintentionally weaken the hard‐won gains of the modern secular polity but rather intended to move beyond the Great Separation through demythologization. The critical, directional nature of Barth’s project was there from the start (all debates about the periodization of his various theological turns notwithstanding) and hardly an unforeseen consequence of fuzzy thinking or naiveté. Second, the political consequences of this move during the Weimar Republic (and for liberal secularity in general) were opposite to what Lilla maintains. Barth continued to value liberal culture and politics, and his early Weimar critique, for all its radical and “gnostic” resonances, supplied a note of sobriety in an otherwise tense and indeterminate political context. In short, demythologizing the Great Separation carried the potential – in the long run as well as in the heat of the moment  –  for stabilizing the polity in ways impossible for liberal secularists. But

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s­ tabilization did not entail a departure from some of the most relevant and defensible elements of liberal society. Indeed, as John Milbank and others argue, Barth’s theology contained “a certain liberal residue” that more “radically orthodox” thinkers find problematic (Milbank 1999, p. 21). Yet Milbank’s criticism overlooks that such “residue,” if that is the proper term, was an intended consequence of Barth’s theological project. Just as Bultmann’s research program did not reject myth but interpreted it critically (Chalamet 2005, p. 269), so Barth’s thought addressed secular myth existentially without abandoning its political‐cultural foundations.

The State and the Church It is useful here to rely on Barth’s imagery of concentric circles, which originated in his writing of the 1930s but was implicit in his earliest scholarship. In his discussion of relationships between church and state, or to use his words (from 1946), between the “community of Christians” and “community of citizens” (CSC, pp. 154–155),2 Barth sketched a vision in which the state worked as the outer ring to the church, the locus of God’s Word, which in turn was “the inner circle within the wider circle.” Even when the state overlooked or misunderstood its relation to the Christian faith, even when it acted in a decidedly (and necessarily) un‐Christian way by dirtying its hands in messy quotidian politics, it operated as the outer edge of a nucleus built up on Barth’s vision of church authority. The state’s efforts were designed “to achieve an external, relative, and provisional humanizing of man’s life and the political order instituted for all” in an unredeemed world. It is important to note that in this schema, the state could operate, at least at the level of appearance, which means also at the level of human history, in a neutral fashion, a point of view broadly compatible with liberal theories of the state. State action, political parties, and the law could mark out analogies with the kingdom of God – external, relative, and provisional analogies, but analogies nonetheless. The church’s role, in contrast, took shape more directly and portentously in relation to God’s Word; its significance was to serve a “theology of witness” (Rashkover 2005) grounded in humankind’s dependence on God’s grace. Here the attributes of externality, relativity, and provisionality that Barth identified for the state were still applicable, but they operated much more closely, and therefore had to be approached more responsibly, to the Word of God as evidenced in church proclamation and Scripture. I translate these terms into a center‐periphery metaphor in the following pages. It is worth noting that Barth’s use of terms such as “community of Christians” or “church” was malleable. When he spoke of church he often paid little attention to denominational differences, notwithstanding his often strident critique of Lutheran, Catholic, and Calvinist theologies. But it should also be noted that his work evolved, 2  The terms date from Barth’s 1938 essay, “Church and State” in CSC, pp. 101–148, but I alter them slightly. “Community of Christians” and “Community of Citizens” capture more concretely Barth’s sense of persons acting in communities, and allow for the community of citizens to include Christians without necessarily ascribing in principle to Christian values. My thanks go to George Hunsinger for this insight.

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gradually and not without controversial articulations, a “covenanted solidarity” with Judaism, not solely as a response to the Holocaust but rather also as a derivation of his theology (Lindsay 2001). His demythologization of liberal secularity made possible critique of Christian theological discourse just as it opened a potential for dialogue with Jewish thought. It is important to note this possibility in relation to a critical scholarship on Barth’s response to the Holocaust (Ericksen and Heschel 1999). Barth understood the historical process by which modern states, through a long struggle, acquired the means to dominate and control ecclesiastical power, often with the collaboration of church authorities themselves (see Cavanaugh 1995). This assertion of civil over religious authority preceded the so‐called “religious wars” of the early modern age. Whereas Christian belief was once defined in terms of daily practice or participation in the Body of Christ, the state now took command of bodies, leaving souls to the church. The modern state defined Christianity as interiorized faith, thereby opening the door to multiple “religions,” the tolerance of which enabled the state to regulate religious affiliation. Whereas pluralization of the religious “marketplace” was not without roots in Christian denominational conflicts, it was also closely tied to the state’s ability to define religion as private. The periphery thereby “tamed” the center, which remained a threatening and potentially destabilizing element despite its many accommodations to political regimes. Helmut Lehmann argues three major “waves” of secularization took place since the French Revolution, one in 1789–1815, another in 1815–1878, and a third in the period of world wars (Lehmann 1998, esp. pp. 84–85). We can identify Germany’s experience with democracy, fascism, and war as part of the third wave. Because Lehmann argues that the most important religious engagement with the third wave of secularization took place after World War II, it is clear that Barth’s Weimar‐era critique anticipated or even prefigured the later activity. We must leave aside the still open question of whether Barth’s critique substantially shaped postwar theologies and the secularization debate, or whether it was primarily a precocious offshoot of the Weimar moment whose full effect came later, a possibility Barth himself mentioned obliquely in the forward to the first edition of his Romans (Hotam 2007). In the historical narrative sketched out here, the Weimar Republic works not only as a way station in the history of secularity in modern Europe but also as a significant point in a longer trajectory by which the periphery dominated and defined the center of German political life. This domination had not gone unnoticed before the republic but was part and parcel of German intellectual heritage as it grappled with the Enlightenment’s legacy and the theological roots of modernity. If the periphery’s power was premised on the state’s reliance on modern economic structures, a scientific worldview, rationalism, and a growing “liberation” from religion as societal knowledge, then how did Germany’s rich theological heritage relate to the new developments? Did the new represent a loss or gain? Many German intellectuals  –  from J.G. Hamann to Hermann Cohen to Max Weber – had given answers to such questions, and, all nuances notwithstanding, German thinkers were sensitive to the limits of liberal secularity even if they eschewed a “theologized” perspective. Barth felt the influence of such critiques, just as he was aware of how theologians had registered intellectual debates on the subject. War and revolution only heightened the salience of the issue.

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After 1918 new political realities brought forth new implications for the churches and for theological culture. The Weimar Constitution envisioned a pluralist society shaped by competing interests, the churches among them. Religious belief was left to each citizen, and although Christian churches continued to have an important public profile (in education, health care, ministries in the armies, and hospitals), their close identification with the government had ended even if the churches’ worst fears about separating church and state never materialized. Even so, Christianity – as institutional matrix, pattern of belief, and intellectual‐theological discourse – now came more fully under the periphery’s legal‐political power. The Weimar Constitution did not establish a fully “irreligious” state, as conservative critics claimed, but it went far in reducing the political‐institutional influence and public status of the church. The church’s “aura” had been damaged, and it was arguably this more than concrete circumstances of the church’s existence that led conservative Protestants to despise or distrust the new order (Tanner 1989; Nowak 1981). The Protestant church’s role in nationalist opposition to the republic, though ostensibly focused on bringing religion back into politics, in fact reinforced the periphery’s dominance. One of the most outspoken critics of Weimar was the Göttingen theologian Emanuel Hirsch, a former colleague of Barth’s and the prime interpreter of Kierkegaard in Germany after World War I (Ericksen 1985). In Hirsch’s existentialist thought, Christianity would reinvigorate the German Volk. Hirsch understood that modern secularity’s corrosive questioning of everything had created a crisis of reason. Only a leap of faith could help modern Germans respond to postwar dislocations. But whereas his primary concern was theology, Hirsch embraced nationalist, antidemocratic viewpoints. Unlike Barth, who wrote that “Christianity is unmoved by Nordic enthusiasm” (RII, p. 462), Hirsch opened the leap of faith to nationalist goals and later to Nazism itself. Even Friedrich Gogarten, Lutheran theologian and coeditor with Barth of the groundbreaking journal Zwischen den Zeiten, a flagship of the dialectical theological movement, unintentionally reinforced the periphery’s reduction of the center in his Politische Ethik of 1932. By premising his thought on the concrete, historical side of an “I‐Thou” diad, he left too little room for the absolute nature of God’s authority – and thereby opened the way to divinizing secular history, nation, family, and Volk (Hauser 1949, p. 97). The drift of Weimar culture, especially in the second half of the 1920s, reinforced the periphery’s power. It would be difficult to overlook Weimar culture’s “spirit of innovation,” which included theological creativity (Myers 2003, p. 94). (It may be noted in passing that most general treatments of “Weimar culture” give short shrift to the religious dimension.) The Weimar Constitution defined the German state not only as a Sozialstaat but also a Kulturstaat promoting freedom from censorship and liberation from the notionally suffocating influence of Imperial Germany’s official culture (Peukert 1992, p. 141). Historians now regard the culture of Wilhelmine Germany as more open and “modern” than once thought (Jefferies 2003; Marchand and Lindenfeld 2004). Even so, for most contemporaries, Weimar was a major cultural departure, which was in turn reflected in legal‐institutional arrangements. Yet for many conservatives as well as parts of the Social Democratic and Communist parties, the new cultural freedoms made for “modernity without restraint,” as Eric Voegelin would later write. Voegelin’s catalogue of sins was broad, including “economic

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materialism, racist biology, corrupt psychology, scientism, and technological ruthlessness” (Voegelin 2000, p. 241). But Voegelin’s phrase would no doubt have summed up many contemporaries’ response to the pleasure‐seeking and decadent elements of Weimar cultural expression as well. For these critics, the progressive elements of the culture, including challenges to patriarchal gender norms and a more tolerant attitude toward homosexuality, were cut from the same cloth of unrestrained license. The church’s formal ethical teachings and prohibitions appeared to have little traction for those anxious critics who saw only irresponsibility and chaos in Germany’s “roaring twenties.”

The Church in History Barth himself extended the periphery’s power through his critique of liberal theology, which not only cut the ties between the bourgeoisie and theology (Schellong 1975, p.  96) but also called into question nineteenth‐century Protestantism’s linking of Christianity and modernity. Liberal theology’s embrace of modernity had enabled the church to retain influence (largely by translating Christian practice into ethical discourse) while still participating in state power. But this close identity between Protestantism and “progress” was shattered by World War I, the social dissolution of the Bürgertum, and Barth’s and others’ insistence on God’s otherness. At the same time, Barth attacked a conservative Protestant political theology that had linked Lutheranism and “orders of creation” in which nation, family, and (in some instances) race appeared as God‐ordained institutions. Much like the defining ideas of liberal theology, orders of creation were conceptual and ideological tools attuned to national state power. Barth also critiqued attempts to link leftist political ideologies and religion in the form of religious socialism, as discussed later. Barth reserved some of his fiercest criticism for the Christian church, Protestant and Catholic, and for “religion” as such, which in his theology was finally sublimated by God’s revelation in Christ (Barth 2006). Yet Barth’s critique was only the premise for a larger project of redescribing and reorienting the Christian community’s role at the center of modern history. Against the tides of secularization, against pluralization and individualization of theological identities (Graf 2005), against the diverse political uses of God’s Word, against Christian pride and church arrogance, Barth attempted to resituate Christian dogmatics so as to restore the proper relation between the community of Christians and community of citizens. This was less an attempt to create a “counter‐world in itself ” than it was the effort to reinterpret and expose modernity in an original way (Rendtorff 1985, p. 498). Barth’s evolving “Christological concentration,” as he termed it, rethought the theological, not by ascribing new importance to theology as such (indeed, if anything, Barth cautioned humility when considering theology’s role; see ET). Rather, through Christology Barth interrogated modern secularism’s instrumentalization of both the church and theology. In Barth’s oeuvre Christ encompassed society, politics, the state, cultural expression, the family – humankind in all its pride and sorrow, its successes and violent assaults on human dignity, and its constant turning away from God’s Word. What in liberal secular society had been the periphery (or on the periphery), that is, religion and other “special interests,” was now reaffirmed at the center of things. But Barth

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made no special claim for the church in human affairs; he did not call for “Christian” politics, science, art, or music. (Famously, Barth’s favorite composer was Mozart, hardly an exemplar of religious devotion.) The church as institution was in many ways as provisional as the state or other human social organizations. Still, the church was not “just like” other associations, as the state insisted (Hauser 1949, pp. 65–66). Rather, the church was the unique site in which God’s Word was spoken most directly and positively; in this sense, it was a site of waiting and listening, not pride or self‐assured politics. The church – or rather the Word of God for which the church listened  –  uncovered liberal society’s mythical veil of human self‐reliance, exposing “Absolute Man’s” fraudulent aspirations (PTNC, esp. ch.  2). Underneath the veil was a creature entirely dependent on God’s freedom of action  –  his judgments as well as his blessings  –  toward humankind. The church provided the literal and figural space in which human beings stood their ground in anticipation of and longing for God’s Word. It was the outworking of a subterranean process in human society, a process the logic of which illuminated liberal myths of the Great Separation as the myths they were. If God’s freedom of action defined this re‐centering of the theological in modernity, then it should also be pointed out that – as Barth insisted throughout his career – God’s freedom enabled humankind’s freedom for responsible action in this world (HG). No Great Separation, no mythical compartmentalization of revelation and reason, no final distinction between religion and politics, no cordoning off of church from state, no segmentation between private faith and public agnosticism were admissible here. But human freedom took place under the sign of “waiting,” which suggested not a theologization of politics in the sense Lilla and other have warned against. Instead, “eschatological realism” characterized Barth’s position. My argument is that Barth’s position had a potentially stabilizing effect on politics during the Weimar Republic. In other words, its direction and logic were different than what Lilla’s second main claim (outlined previously), that is, his idea that Barth unintentionally contributed to the erosion of faith in “western” ideas of parliamentary politics and the rational negotiation of opposed interests, would lead one to believe. I use the term eschatological realism to refer to Barth’s idea that all human endeavors take place only within God’s gracious turning to the world, a turning that both relativizes human action and gives it gravity in specific historical moments. The “real” gains eschatological direction only as it is worked out in human history, which unfolds without (from a human standpoint) a predetermined pattern even if illuminated in a divine light. A moment of extreme eschatological tension, Weimar exposed the jagged edges of a society at war with itself. Taking full measure of the situation, Barth’s political theology outlined a response: First, his writing, in both editions of the commentary on Romans, recognized God’s absolute claims on human action. Second, though this claim inevitably called for a critical reduction of all political ideologies, it did not lead to passivity or quietism, nor did it imply revolutionary upheaval. Instead, adjustment and responsible participation hic et nunc, reform against both revolution and reaction, was the only possible option. This position took coherent form in Barth’s September 1919 address before religious socialists in Tambach (Barth 1925). This speech has been one of the most thoroughly

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researched political statements of Barth’s early career (Marquardt 1980). It was arguably more influential in the first years of the Republic than the two editions of Romans. Theologically, the Tambach address occupied an intermediate position between Barth’s early insistence on man’s diastatic relation with God, and his later understanding of the analogical relationships between worldly and divine realms (McCormack 1995, pp. 201– 202). It began with an eschatological ambience, just as Lilla would anticipate, insofar that Barth stated: “Today we yearn for something else precisely because our eyes are wide open to the uncertainty of the world’s realities” (Barth 1925, p. 33). He developed the argument as an assault not only on all manifestations of Christian piety but also on all political ideologies, including religious socialism, a critique both disappointing and shocking to many attendees, who were looking for inspiration, not a resounding “No.” For my purposes, the key part of the speech came when Barth insisted on: Generous, far‐sighted, steadfast conduct toward a social democracy — no, not toward it, as irresponsible spectators and critics, but within it, as those who share hope and guilt with their comrades — in which today we are confronted with the problem of opposition to that which exists, we discover the likeness of the Kingdom of God, and we prove whether we have understood the problem in its absolute and in its relative significance (Barth 1925, p. 64).

Bruce McCormack argues that Barth’s speech offered a qualified acceptance of the Weimar Republic whereby the theologian showed himself to be a Vernunftrepublikaner of left‐wing coloration. Historical scholarship on the “republicans of reason” has been substantial. Deployed to cover a range of political positions, from moderate liberalism to social democracy, the concept Vernunftrepublikaner has usually had a bad press. If only the “republicans of reason” had developed a more emotional attachment to democracy, the argument has gone, they might have saved the political center and created a strong base of middle‐class and working‐class voters who supported the republic. If only they would have voted from their hearts instead of their heads. Yet this argument overlooks that democracy was not the only political option in Germany in this historical moment. In a context where authoritarian movements from both left and right threatened the fledgling democracy, Barth’s “republicanism of reason” constituted a strong subject position rather than a lukewarm acceptance of Weimar. Barth’s argument was that all political positions were contingent. Strong emotional attachments to a political program ran the risk of idolatry, just as Christianity’s endorsement of a political system could result in using God for human purposes. Barth’s republicanism of reason sounded a note of sobriety similar to that voiced by Max Weber at the  same time  –  the sociologist’s differences with Barth notwithstanding. Weber argued  that  the true politician’s actions stemmed from an “ethic of responsibility” (Verantwortungsethik), which balanced and counteracted the “ethic of intention” (Gesinnungsethik) of revolutionary politics (Mommsen 1959, pp. 46–47). When Barth assumed the mantle of Vernunftrepublikaner he endorsed just such an ethic, which meant keeping one’s head, counseling reason and patient political work, sharing responsibility and guilt. Barth advocated guarding against the “dangerous short circuits” that emerged from the “hyphens we draw with such intellectual audacity” (Barth 1925, p. 36). The “hyphens” were of course the religious‐social, Christian‐social, and

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evangelical‐social groups that sprang up in the turbulent first years of the republic. This was anything but a gnostic undermining (intentional or not) of the infant republic. Yet to invoke Weber is also to call attention to the radicalism – in the etymological sense of the term – of Barth’s political decision, and to signal how Barth took Weber one step further (Eichhorn 1994, pp. 148–149). Weber’s view of politics was predicated on power over the state. His critique of German political weakness stemmed from a sense that the country lacked political “personalities” who could wield effective power domestically and internationally. This weakness had everything to do with the weakness of the German Bürgertum, argued Weber. Barth was as critical of the bourgeoisie as Weber was. But Barth’s view of politics rested on the Church’s centrality, not political power in the sense Weber meant. “The polis has walls,” wrote Barth, because it, like Pontius Pilate, knew no truth; but the Christian community needed no walls (CSC, p. 151). Its truth implied witness, critique, and ethical ordering (though always in the context of the “crisis” brought about by revelation). Weber’s imagined political personalities were guilty of “titanism” in Barth’s thinking. The ethics of responsibility, as Weber outlined it, never escaped a certain self‐righteousness that derived finally from liberal secularity’s mythological projection of Absolute Man. This difference demonstrated, moreover, that Barth disagreed with Weber’s concept of the “disenchantment” of modernity. Mythological elements still characterized modern secular society, Barth maintained, but they were now dressed in the garb of scientism, rationality, nation, and the self‐ reliant individual. The modern polis needed these elements to build its walls, to be sure, and Barth did not begrudge its need to do so, but they were to be recognized for what they were: artificial (hence changeable) constructs based on humankind’s arrogant turning away from God’s Word. Barth’s was not a position of political indifference, as Richard Hauser once averred, or one in which “all sides are gray,” as Lilla maintains (Hauser 1949; Lilla 2007, p. 272). Barth referred to the political process as a “game,” but games can be serious, and decisions can have grave, game‐altering consequences. Precisely because it rested on the radical and unequivocal theological position of God’s total otherness, Barth’s response tended toward sobriety and moderation, even compromise. It required not emotional identification but a willingness to work within the bounds of the given democratic order. Precisely because freedom to choose (social) democracy stemmed from God’s grace alone – and not human ingenuity or political “personality” or the traditions of a revered political culture – it was as serious as any game could be even if it was disinterested with respect to all but the first things. If God’s justification of humankind preceded working toward “the good,” then in Barth’s estimation support for the political order as it was constituted in the republic would be the outcome of that ethical action. Though scholars debate Barth’s political involvement in the years before Nazism assumed power, there can be little doubt of his insistence on political sobriety. In the summer of 1930, just before the Nazi electoral breakthrough in the September Reichstag elections, Barth warned of an ominous parallelism between the theological desire for consolidation and restoration after the spirited debates of the 1920s and the rightward drift of a German politics seeking authoritarian order and an end to political irresolution. Theology, in Barth’s critique, could neither lend a hand to political restoration, nor

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could it occupy a place of stability or permanent meaning within German culture (Schellong 1982, pp. 104–135). Its task was to witness to the Word of God – a position consigning it to a permanent, this‐worldly homelessness that was unlike anything comparable to Gnosticism. Eric Voegelin defined Gnosticism as a belief that “the end realm is no longer a transcendent community of the spirit but an earthly condition of perfected humanity” (Voegelin 2000, p. 60). Neither in his most “gnostic” phase in the early republic, nor late in the republic, when Gnosticism had taken on dangerous new political forms in Communism and National Socialism, did Barth endorse such a position. Scholarship correctly emphasizes apocalyptic and eschatological strains in Weimar‐ era thought. Whether Germanophone intellectuals were writing in the “shadow of catastrophe” or giving way to an allegedly typical German “seduction of culture,” their work has generally been regarded by scholars as both destabilizing and world denying, and thereby detrimental to a new democracy (Rabinbach 1997; Lepenies 2006). Karl Barth’s theology was a species of “eschatological realism,” and it has been easy to group him alongside other antidemocratic pessimists, as Lilla does. But Barth warned against political “hysteria, or intuition, or suicide, or a step back into the order of bourgeois religious moderation” (quoted in Gorringe 1999, p. 93). His politics oriented to a spiritual hinterland from which God’s message, a “word of redemption,” sounded through the confusions of the moment. Yet just as this word pointed to the possibility of world revolution, the real revolution of the gospel, it was firmly tied to Christianity’s need to assume responsibility for unity and order. To fight against or weaken this ethical obligation was as “titanic” in its own way as the position adopted by (in Barth’s thinking) Roman Catholicism and liberal Protestantism, which assumed the kingdom of God was at hand, and hence complacency or withdrawal was possible. Through the middle decades of the century, Barth remained consistent in his preference for political‐institutional relationships that enabled such hopeful, redemptive practice, relationships that he found most directly expressed in liberal democracies, his numerous criticisms of the West notwithstanding. These structures allowed the church to “represent the inner within the outer circle” and be “a model and prototype of the real State” (CSC, p. 186). Moreover, liberal institutions opened the church to healthy criticism. In 1946, when Germany’s postwar shape was still undefined, Barth worried the church was taking an indefensible position in favor of bureaucratic authority and nationalism when “the rudiments of law, freedom, responsibility, equality, and so on, that is, the elements of the democratic way of life” ought to have been the core of church teaching if the goal was “to lead German politics out of an old defile” (CSC, p. 187). If in the Weimar Republic hearing God’s Word led “the inner circle” to work within a flawed social democracy, it meant a more explicit articulation of the “democratic way of life” after the second great catastrophe of German politics. In both cases, the “outer circle,” the dominant but always unstable periphery of the secular state, could not have the last word. Rather, the inner circle would have to be recognized and acknowledged for its reassertion of authority and for the vision it opened up in Barth’s theology  –  a vision rooted within but still oriented beyond the liberal order.

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Conclusion Little doubt exists that Weimar‐era political theology, from both right and left, generated significant threats to western parliamentary traditions. But it also produced prescient critiques of the political order that tended toward stability and direction. My argument is that Barth’s thinking in particular did much to create such possibilities at a time when conflict had reached the level of “the political,” that is, in Carl Schmitt’s equation, a dangerous moment of decision in which collectivities struggled as friends and enemies not over a division of goods or a balance of negotiated ends but over existence as such (Schmitt 1976). Barth’s resounding No to the political in this sense issued into a sober Yes to the republic. Barth’s project was not merely to offer a little (or a lot) of “religion” in the political sphere as an antidote to indirection or absolutist revolutionism. Rather, organized Christianity was as much an accomplice as it was a victim in the Weimar Republic’s separation of the theological and the political. Instead, Barth offered revelation, and in doing so became a theologian of freedom  –  of God’s above all but also thereby of humankind’s. Barth’s thinking has left behind a long train of scholarship, especially among theologians, but he has not yet found his place in the historiography of the Weimar Republic, not even among intellectual historians, who to the degree they study political theology, have been drawn far more consequentially to Carl Schmitt, the right‐wing nationalist evangelicals, or the Frankfurt School. If what has been sketched out in the foregoing has merit, then focusing on Barth allows us to rethink the now iconic narrative of Weimar as a symbol of heroic if tragic secular modernism in ways that scholarship on these other figures is unable to do. For in the case of all the others, political theology was allowed to become political theology, which is to say it allowed the secular center to dominate the religious periphery even when, as in the case of the nationalists and conservative revolutionaries, strident criticisms of modern irreligiosity could be heard. In this sense, “fundamentalists” and “secularists” had more in common with each other than might be expected. Barth reversed the position of the inner and outer circles in a way that even someone such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer was incapable of doing. He did so because, as one commentator has remarked, Barth’s was a “theological politics” above all else (Haddorf 2004), rooted in the Pauline and Reformation traditions and motivated by a systematic attempt to get behind the secular dwelling in which European theology had found a comfortable if at times contentious place. And because Barth’s thinking reasserted the primacy of church over state, of the real center over the periphery, of the community of Christians over the community of citizens, it represented a definitive break with centuries of secularization. In short, the Weimar moment, for all of scholarship’s celebration of its cultural vitality and significance as the forecourt to a subsequent mature democracy, is more accurately described as a switching point on the road to a more theonomic polity. But with reference to that new polity, still incompletely adumbrated in the 1920s, Barth would no doubt have reversed Jonathan Sheehan’s polarities, quoted at the beginning of this piece, saying it could no more dispense with secularity than embrace it.

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References Barth, K. (1925). Der Christ in der Gesellschaft. In: Das Wort Gottes und die Theologie. Gesammelte Vorträge, 33–69. Munich: Chr. Kaiser. Barth, K. (2006). On Religion: The Revelation of God and the Sublimation of Religion. London: T&T Clark. Cavanaugh, W.T. (1995). “A fire strong enough to consume the house:” the wars of religion and the rise of the state. Modern Theology 11: 397–420. Chalamet, C. (2005). Dialectical Theologians: Wilhelm Herrmann, Karl Barth, and Rudolf Bultmann. Zurich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich. Eichhorn, M. (1994). Es wird regiert! Der Staat im Denken Karl Barths und Carl Schmitts in den Jahren 1919 bis 1938. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Ericksen, R.P. (1985). Theologians under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus, and Emanuel Hirsch. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ericksen, R.P. and Heschel, S. (eds.) (1999). Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust. Minneapolis: Fortress. Gorringe, T. (1999). Karl Barth: Against Hegemony. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Graf, F.W. (2005). Euro‐Gott im starken Plural? Einige Fragenstellungen für eine europäische Religionsgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts. Journal of Modern European History 3: 231–257. Haddorf, D. (2004). ‘Karl Barth’s theological politics,’ introduction to Karl Barth. In: Community, State, and Church: Three Essays, 1–70. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock. Hauser, R. (1949). Autorität und Macht: Die staatliche Autorität in der neueren ­protestantischen Ethik und in der katholischen Gesellschaftslehre. Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider. Hotam, Y. (2007). Gnosis and modernity: a Postwar German intellectual debate on secularisation, religion, and “overcoming” the past. Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 8: 591–608.

Jefferies, M. (2003). Imperial Culture in Germany, 1871–1918. New York: Palgrave. Koshar, R. (2008). Where is Karl Barth in modern European history? Modern Intellectual History 5: 333–362. Lebovic, N. ed. (2008). Theme issue: Political theology, New German Critique 35(3) Lehmann, H. (1998). Neupietismus und Säkularisierung. Beobachtungen zum sozialen Umfeld und politischen Hintergrund von Erweckungsbewegung und Gemeinschaftsbewegung. In: Protestantische Weltsichten: Transformationen seit dem 17 Jahrhundert, 81–104. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Lepenies, W. (2006). The Seduction of Culture in German History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lilla, M. (2007). The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West. New York: Knopf. Lindsay, M.R. (2001). Covenanted Solidarity: The Theological Basis of Karl Barth’s Opposition to Nazi Anti‐Semitism and the Holocaust. New York: Peter Lang. Marchand, S. and Lindenfeld, D. (eds.) (2004). Germany at the Fin‐de‐Siècle: Culture, Politics, and Ideas. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Marquardt, F.W. (1980). Der Christ in der Gesellschaft 1919–1979: Geschichte, Analyse und aktuelle Bedeutung von Karl Barths Tambacher Vortrag. Munich: Christian Kaiser. McCormack, B.L. (1995). Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909–1936. Oxford: Clarendon. Meier, H. (1998). The Lesson of Carl Schmitt: Four Chapters on the Distinction between Political Theology and Political Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Milbank, J. (1990). Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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Milbank, J. (1999). Knowledge: the theological critique of philosophy in Hamann and Jacobi. In: Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (eds. J. Milbank, C. Pickstock and G. Ward), 21–37. New York: Routledge. Milbank, J., Pickstock, C., and Ward, G. (1999). Introduction. Suspending the material: the turn of radical orthodoxy. In: Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (eds. J. Milbank, C. Pickstock and G. Ward), 1–20. New York: Routledge. Mommsen, W. (1959). Max Weber und die deutsche Politik 1890–1920. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr. Myers, D.N. (2003). Resisting History: Historicism and its Discontents in German‐ Jewish Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Nowak, K. (1981). Evangelische Kirche und Weimarer Republik: Zum politischen Weg des deutschen Protestantismus zwischen 1918 und 1932. Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger. Peukert, D.J.K. (1992). The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity. New York: Hill and Wang. Rabinbach, A. (1997). In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rashkover, R. (2005). Revelation and Theopolitics: Barth, Rosenzweig and the Politics of Praise. London: T&T Clark International. Rendtorff, T. (1985). The modern age as a chapter in the history of Christianity: or, the legacy of historical consciousness in present theology. Journal of Religion 65: 478–499. Schellong, D. (1975). Bürgertum und christliche Religion: Anpassungsprobleme der Theologie seit Schleiermacher. Munich: Christian Kaiser. Schellong, D. (1982). Ein gefährlichster Augenblick’: Zur Lage der evangelischer Theologie am Ausgang der Weimarer Zeit. In: Religions‐ und Geistesgeschichte der Weimarer Republik (ed. H. Cancik), 104–135. Düsseldorf: Patmos.

Schmitt, C. (1976). The Concept of the Political. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Scholder, K. (1977). Die Kirchen und das Dritte Reich, Vol. 1: Vorgeschichte und Zeit der Illusionen 1918–1934. Frankfurt am Main: Propyläen. Scholder, K. (1988). Neuere deutsche Geschichte und protestantische Theologie. In: Die Kirchen zwischen Republik und Gewaltherrschaft. Gesammelte Aufsätze (eds. K.O. von Aretin and G. Besier). Berlin: Siedler. Scott, P. and Cavanaugh, W.T. (2004). The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology. Oxford: Blackwell. Sheehan, J. (2005). The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tanner, K. (1989). Die fromme Verstaatlichung des Gewissens:Zur Auseinandersetzung um die Legitimität der Weimarer Reichsverfassung in Staatsrechtwissenschaft und Theologie der zwanziger Jahre. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Taubes, J. (ed.) (1983). Religionstheorie und Politische Theologie, Vol. 1: Der Fürst dieser Welt. Carl Schmitt und die Folgen, 2e. Munich: Wilhelm Fink/Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh. Taylor, C.C. (2007). A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap. Voegelin, E. (2000). The Collected Works, Vol. 5: Modernity Without Restraint (ed. M. Henningsen). Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press. de Vries, H. and Sullivan, L.E.e. (2006). Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post‐Secular World. New York: Fordham University Press. Wagner, F. (1975). Theologische Gleichschaltung. Zur Christologie bei Karl Barth. In: Die Realisierung der Freiheit: Beiträge zur Kritik der Theologie Karl Barths (ed. T. Rendtorff), 10–43. Gütersloh: Mohn. Weitz, E.D. (2007). Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. West, C.C. (1958). Communism and the Theologians: Study of an Encounter. Philadelphia: Westminster Press.

CHAPTER 77

Barth and the Nazi Revolution Arne Rasmusson

Barth in Germany Before 1933 When Adolf Hitler became chancellor on 30 January 1933, Karl Barth had lived in Germany for more than 11 years. During that time he had become perhaps the most famous Protestant theologian in the German‐speaking world and the leading theologian in the emerging movement of dialectical theology. Together with Friedrich Gogarten, Eduard Thurneysen, and George Merz, he had in 1922 founded the academic journal Zwischen den Zeiten that was the primary forum for this new theological movement. At the same time, however, Barth was an outsider in German university theology and church life, and his influence outside academic theology was limited. Barth did not lecture or write much on politics from the time he arrived in Germany in 1921 through 1928. He was Swiss, and he concentrated on developing his theology. Moreover, his critique of the religious socialism he had earlier supported required new thinking about how to understand the role of church and theology in political life. The German academic world as a whole, both professors and students, was dominated by conservative nationalism. Many were deeply critical of the new democratic Weimar Republic. This was true also of Protestant theology. Several leading theologians were, as theologians, deeply politically engaged. The small minority of politically liberal theologians also shared the nationalist perspective. From the beginning of his time in Germany Barth was criticized for what was described as western rationalistic beliefs in socialism, democracy, and pacifism (Althaus 1921; Hirsch 1922, pp. 155–166). This has its background in the critiques of nationalistic and militaristic theology that Barth began to develop from 1914 onwards (Rasmusson 2005). In 1925, in the context of discussing the possibility of a new Reformed confession, he describes militarism, völkisch nationalism, and anti‐Semitism as necessary confessional issues (GA 19, pp. 604–643).

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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However, in his ethics lectures, given in Münster in 1928–1929 and again in Bonn in 1930, he extensively treats issues like state and politics, nationhood, and war. He defends a constitutional state, with clear separation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers, based on the consent and participation of the population, that protects the freedom of the “civil society” and that leads to something like a social democratic economic policy (ETH, pp. 440–451). He also has a nuanced discussion about people‐ and nationhood that is very different from the views dominant in Germany at the time (ETH, pp. 191–196). This social outlook is set forth in direct polemic against what he sees as a strongly biased denigration of the Weimar democracy from people like his former colleague in Göttingen Emanuel Hirsch and his supposed ally Gogarten (Rasmusson 2007). These lectures were not published at the time. But he did, very publicly, describe their content. Pastor Günther Dehn, a religious socialist turned dialectical theologian, had become nationally known in 1928 because of a lecture in which he criticized Christian militarism and nationalism and questioned the practice of placing monuments in churches honoring war dead. This created a public outrage. When he received calls to chairs in both Heidelberg and Halle, new protests emerged. After the theological faculty in Heidelberg failed to support him, he accepted the position in Halle. There he encountered massive student protests when he started lecturing in November 1931. Many of his faculty colleagues also turned against him. Hirsch publicly attacked him for lacking the devotion to the nation necessary for any university teacher. In 1933 Dehn’s writings were among those burned in the famous book burning instigated by student organizations (Ericksen 2012, pp. 76–83). In February 1932 Barth published a defense of Dehn in the Frankfurter Zeitung. If one attacks Dehn, he writes, one also has to attack Karl Barth. The views put forward by Dehn are basically the same as the ones put forward in Barth’s public ethics lectures in 1928 and 1930. The attack is really an attack on dialectical theology. So why are the students and the academics, including Hirsch, only turning on Dehn and not on dialectical theology as such? (GA 35, pp. 170–207). Barth is later self‐critical that he had not taken the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) seriously enough earlier. The NSDAP became the second largest party in 1930 (at the time he described the election result as “catastrophic,” GA 45, p. 157) and by far the biggest in 1932 (although never reaching a majority). It had strong support among Protestant voters. Because the Catholics had their own parties, the support from Catholic voters was much weaker. As a personal response to these developments, Barth publicly became member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in 1932. In March 1933 the SPD recommended that members who were threatened with losing their jobs because of their affiliation with the party not sacrifice their positions for the sake of their membership. They could still be socialists in their heart. In a letter to Paul Tillich, who supported this position, Barth considers this course of action completely wrong. The state can fire him, but it cannot change who he is. In response Barth writes to the Reich Minister of Culture, Bernhard Rust, and asks him if he can continue to teach even though he will not leave the SPD. Rust, who has read Barth, promises that he will not be dismissed (Barth 2004, pp. 107–110; Prolingheuer 1977, pp. 2–3).

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Die Wende 1933 During the spring of 1933 the National Socialist Revolution, hailed as die Wende (the turning point), was greeted with broad enthusiasm and celebration in German society and also in the churches. On the first day of the 1933 Easter celebrations, the following statement was read in Prussian Protestant churches: “This year the Easter message of the risen Christ goes forth in Germany to a people to whom God has spoken by means of a great turning point in history” (Scholder 1988a, p. 236). In a sermon in May, later published, Gogarten said that the church also has to be part of and involved in the great change and national renewal that has moved the German people (Beintker 2013, p. 100). Gogarten himself entered the German Christians (a Protestant group highly supportive of the Nazi movement) in August, only to leave again in December. Because of the conflict, Zwischen den Zeiten was closed down at Barth’s initiative (GA 49, pp. 492–515). Another leading theologian, Paul Althaus, although critical of the German Christians, wrote: “Our Evangelical Church has greeted the German Wende in 1933 as a gift and miracle of God” (Althaus 1934, p. 5). A broad movement in the church saw the political change as a sign that the Protestant Church should also be renewed and reformed, including the creation of one unified National German Protestant Church out of the many Landeskirchen. The Nazi Party and the German Christians saw this objective as part of the process of Gleichschaltung (coordination, the nazification of all parts of the society). More controversial was the attempt to implement the new Aryan law banning Jews from civil service to cover also appointments in the church. In May the Young Reformers Movement was created as a movement defending the church’s historic confessions against the German Christians’ radical proposals for church reform. In September the Pastor’s Emergency League was created to protest the implementation of the Aryan law in the church. However, many members in these organizations were still positively inclined toward the political revolution as well as to the need for restricting the role of Jews in society as a whole. In the declaration in which the Young Reformers Movement rejected the implementation of the Aryan law in the church, they could also proclaim the Evangelical Church’s “joyful yes to the new German state” (Schmidt 1934, p. 146) and the need this turning point creates for church reform, although they rejected a general Gleichschaltung (Schmidt 1934, pp. 145–148). The NSDAP strongly supported the German Christians in the church election that was held in late July, and the German Christians won an overwhelming victory.

Carry on Theology as If Nothing Had Happened It is in this context that Barth publishes a pamphlet on 1 July that will be of crucial importance for the resistance inside the Protestant church. The title is Theological Existence Today! During the first two weeks 12 000 copies were sold, and then 25 000 more before it was confiscated a year later. He also sent it directly, accompanied by a personal letter, to Adolf Hitler (Barth 2004, pp. 267–270). The most famous, but also

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most misunderstood, sentence in the essay is his statement that he “endeavour[s] to carry on theology, and only theology, now as previously, and as if nothing had happened” (TET, p. 9). This statement does not mean churchly or academic isolation or inactivity, but rather the rejection of the euphoria about the Nazi seizure of power. What Barth is saying is that theology and church should disregard all claims that a new beginning has occurred or that God has acted. It means proceeding soberly “as if nothing had happened.” Only Jesus Christ as attested in Scripture is God’s revelation. Church reform should not be guided by political events and changes. What has happened in Germany should therefore not lead to a reform of the church’s confessions, theology, or institutional structures. He thinks that the German Christians with their theology and worldview stand in contradiction to the Christian faith. However, he also thinks that the confessional moderate middle is more dangerous than the extremist German Christians, precisely when they accept the agenda and questions raised by the German Christians. The church should not only say no to Gleichschaltung but also to compromise and accommodation. “The prime need of our time is for a spiritual centre of resistance” (Barth 1933, p. 76). That does not mean passivity. “Of course something has to be done; very much so; but most decidedly nothing other than this: that Church congregations should be gathered together again, but aright and anew in fear and great joy, gathered to the Word by the means of the Word” (Barth 1933, p. 77). This renewed commitment to the Word, he claims, this renewed commitment to Christ and to Scripture, from which alone true guidance can come, is to think and act realistically in this new situation. Barth’s pamphlet met much opposition. Emanuel Hirsch, who had become a member of the German Christians, attacked the statement that we should proceed “as if nothing had happened” because, he claimed, it isolates church and theology both from what God is doing in the world and from the actual life of human beings. God is speaking to the German people in and through the ongoing historical events they are witnessing, and the people and the church have to respond (Hirsch 1934, p. 139f.). The Sicherheitsdienst (intelligence agency) wrote in 1934: “The Barth movement must be marked out as a real danger. He creates in his theology islands on which people isolate themselves so as to be able to evade the demand of the present‐day state on religious grounds” (Norden 1997, p. 55). Even the Confessing Church bishop Theophil Wurm was critical. “Even the church and the Christian faith must relate itself to this powerful völkische movement” (Busch 1989, p. 409). From a later perspective, it has often been said that Barth’s concentration on the theological existence of the church placed the church’s political engagement and resistance on the margin. In particular, it failed to place resistance to the Nazi policy against the Jews at the center. He did strongly oppose the implementation of the Aryan law inside the church: “If the German Evangelical Church excludes Jewish‐Christians, or treats them as of a lower grade, she ceases to be a Christian Church” (Barth 1933, p. 52). But in this text he did not, as he was later to do, attack, or even discuss, the Nazi policy against Jews in general. The reason Barth did not make the Nazi anti‐Jewish policy the central issue was that he thought that how the church handled this issue was dependent on how it justified its theological and moral convictions. The protest, he wrote in a piece written in November

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1933, “must be directed fundamentally against the fact (which is the source of all individual errors) that, beside the Holy Scriptures as the unique source of revelation, the German‐Christians affirm the German nationhood (Volkstum), its history and its contemporary political situation as a second and normative source of revelation, and thereby betray themselves to be believers in ‘another God’” (Barth 1965, p. 16). Moreover, as we have seen, it was not just the German Christians who thought along these lines. It was, in one form or another, the dominant view in German Protestant theology, conservative, moderate, or liberal. “The whole proud heritage of the eighteenth and nineteenth century proved incapable of resistance, obviously because it contained nothing that it had to resist and could not give away” (Barth 1965, p. 41). It would, however, not have been inconsistent with the position taken in Theological Existence Today! to say that Christians can never accept any anti‐Semitism or any other racial discrimination and should never be part of its practice. And he did, in fact, say this at other occasions in the crucial years of 1933 and 1934. In his comments in October 1933 on a draft of the so‐called Bethel Confession and the implementation of the Aryan paragraph in the church, he makes this position clear. He asks: “Is the civil treatment that is systematically imposed upon the Jews in present‐day Germany of such a kind that ‘we’ don’t have anything to say about it? That ‘we’ accept and participate in it as something initiated by God, since it is decreed by the ‘authorities’?” (Busch 1996, p. 134f.). A confession should be so formulated that it became possible for the church to protest against the policy that suppressed Jews. On the second Sunday of Advent 1933, Barth delivered a sermon in the Schloßkirche in Bonn on Romans 15:5–13 (GA 31, pp. 296–305). Following the theme of the text, and focusing on how we all are embraced by God’s free grace, he elaborates on God’s covenant with Israel and how salvation comes from the Jews. “That is to say: Christ belonged to the people of Israel. This people’s blood was in his veins, the blood of the Son of God. He adopted this people’s ways when he assumed human existence, not for the sake of this people alone, not because of the pre‐eminence of its blood and its race, but for the sake of the truth, i.e. to attest God’s truthfulness and faithfulness” (GA 31, p. 299). The necessary solidarity between the church and the Jews is thus an intrinsic part of the gospel. Attacking the Jews means attacking Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and thus God’s way of salvation. From this conviction it follows, as Paul writes, that gentiles and Jews have to welcome each other. It is God’s command and has to be followed without any exceptions. Afterwards, in a letter to someone who heard the sermon and who was herself of Jewish kinship, he wrote that “those who believe in Christ, who was himself a Jew, … simply must not participate in that contemptuous and abusive treatment of the Jews which is the order of business these days” (Busch 1996, p. 173). This ­sermon was published, even directly sent to Hitler, and is said to have been more widely read than any other similar statement (Busch 1996, p. 165). In his introduction to the published version of the sermon, Barth says that he does not support political preaching. He deals with the so‐called “Jewish question” only because the given text from Scripture required him to do so. This statement has been criticized, but in this context it is best understood as strengthening the authority of his message. He is not spreading his own political opinions; he is saying that the church must stand with the Jews, because this is the message of the Word of God.

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Hence to do theology as if nothing had happened did not mean “apolitical” theology or concern only for the independence of church and theology. But it is still difficult to know exactly how to interpret Barth at this time. His main concern was that the church should not base its teaching and practice on normative sources other than or alongside God’s revelation in Jesus Christ. According to Barth, the German Christians were now doing the same thing as the religious socialists had been doing, and he did not want a resisting church to make the same mistake (Barth 2004, pp. 155–159). The earliest and most successful National Socialist church parties emerged in the areas where the religious socialists had been strongest and had pioneered the strategy of taking over the churches through church elections (Scholder 1988a, p. 196). However, he later lamented that he had not been more explicit earlier in his theological protest against National Socialism and the Nazi state, as well as against developments and tendencies in German society and church life during the 1920s (GA 15, p. 50). At times he gave the impression that he could not do that in principle, for theological reasons, or in practice because he was Swiss. But so much in his writings before 1935 points in another direction. One can, for example, mention his 1925 discussion about how to formulate a new Reformed confession or his comments on the draft of the Bethel Confession in 1933. He  himself did not, however, incorporate explicit ethical and political issues when ­drafting the Barmen Declaration in 1934, although the claims of the declaration implicitly say no to the claims of National Socialism. On Reformation Day in October 1933, when discussing the task of preaching, he says to a packed Berlin auditorium that he does not advocate political resistance from the churches, but he can still insist that the preacher must go where the text goes: “What needs to be made concrete could then become dangerously concrete. There will be questions asked in quite specific terms, such as: What happened this summer in Germany? Was it right or wrong? This seizure of power? This elimination of all other parties? This appropriation of assets? What is happening in the concentration camps? What is happening to the Jews? Can Germany, can the German church answer for the abundance of suicides? Does not the German church share the guilt, because it kept silent? I am just raising questions! Whoever is called to proclaim the Word must confront these events with what is stated in the Word of God” (Norden 1997, p. 49f.). In a letter in January 1934 he says that the church needs to protest vehemently against the Nazi policy toward Christian and non‐Christian Jews (Koch 1979, p. 511). In another letter, however, he said that a public statement by theologians was a practical impossibility. It would totally silence the church and theologians, and would even make it impossible to protest against putting the Aryan law into effect in the churches. Moreover, the so‐called “Jewish question” is for the church just one part of the wider struggle, but a struggle that will at least have consequences indirectly for resistance against the Aryan law in civic affairs (Barth 2004, pp. 529–531). In politics he was from the beginning personally strongly opposed to National Socialism and the policies of the Nazi state. However, as he wrote in 1942, in an article published in 1943 in the prestigious American journal Foreign Affairs (Barth 1944, pp. 1–18), up until 1934 he did not think he could require the church to say an absolute no to the Nazi state as such. One could not yet be sure how that state would develop, and he realized that even the majority in the Confessing Church had sympathies with many of the aims of National Socialism. Moreover, it was necessary first to defend the church’s independence and to

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rethink the foundations for how to understand theology, ecclesiology, the Christian life, and the relation between church and state. Otherwise, the church would just have capitulated – as did, he says, “the German political parties, German jurisprudence, science, art, and philosophy” (Barth 1944, p. 7f.). The churches’ struggle for independence became, in effect, the first major opposition to the totalitarian aims of the state. The problem was that “they did not go on from there” (Barth 1944, p. 9).

The Barmen Declaration The most important response to the German‐Christian and Nazi‐controlled church was the declaration adopted in late May 1934 by the Confessing Church in its initial synod at Barmen. Barth was, as part of the drafting committee, the main author of the text. Its final version consists of six articles (Cochrane 1976, pp. 238–242). Here we find themes similar to those in Barth’s writings from 1933. The first article, which provides the theological foundation for the declaration, describes Jesus Christ as “the one Word of God … that we have to trust and obey in life and death.” This is followed by the rejection of the doctrine that “the Church could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and besides this one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths, as God’s revelation.” Both German Christians and many moderates could, as we have seen, describe the “events” of 1933 as a work of God, the “powers” of Volk and race as normative ­creational “orders,” the “figure” of the Führer as a tool of God, and the “truths” as National Socialistic ideology. The second article talks about Jesus Christ as “God’s mighty claim upon our whole life” and rejects the doctrine that there are “areas of our life in which we would not belong to Jesus Christ.” This thesis is directed against the idea that different spheres of life have their own autonomy. In theology this autonomy was often understood as an expression of God’s law. The command or “mandate” of God for life in the world is encountered in the “natural” orders [Ordnungen] of life, such as family, Volk, state, and race. Against this conservative idea, the second article claims that gospel and law, God’s grace and God’s command, have to be understood together as two forms of the one Word of God (gospel/law). The third article elucidates the consequences for congregational practice. Jesus Christ is presently active in the church, and the church witnesses to him both in its proclamation and its church order. It rejects the idea that the church can shape and change the order of the church just as it sees fit or according to political and ideological developments. This article attacks the idea that the 1933 revolution needed to be followed by changes in church order, such as Aryanization of the church and its leadership. The fourth article talks about the servant nature of the offices of the church, given to the whole church, and rejects special ruling leaders (like the Nazi‐appointed Reichsbishop) and thus the new (Nazi‐sympathizing) leadership structure in the German Evangelical Church. The fifth article claims that the state is divinely appointed to provide for justice and peace. And it rejects the idea of the state providing a totalitarian order for the whole of life (including the church), as well as the idea that the church should function as a tool of the state to fulfill this order.

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The final article describes the mission of the church as proclaiming the gospel through preaching and sacraments, and it rejects the idea that the church could be used for other purposes. Given the nationalism present even in the Confessing Church, Barth was astonished that the declaration was accepted in this form. He later talked about “the very miracle that against all expectation had once again happened to the church” (CD II/1, p. 176). Although able to subscribe to this declaration (which the traditionalists would not honor as a “confession”), the Barmen synod was deeply divided not only along confessional, theological, and ecclesiological lines but also in terms of politics and political worldviews. The Barmen majority, though not party members, were nationalist ­conservatives. Indeed there were also quite a few who before 1933 had been members of various conservative nationalist parties, and six were already NSDAP members before 1933. Six more had become NSDAP members early in 1933. Only two had been SPD members (Greschat 1993). Paul Althaus, although critical of the German Christians, clearly understood the radical theological and political implications of the declaration. Reading the draft, he wrote to bishop Hans Meiser that the acceptance of this text would mean the betrayal of Lutheranism and of his church. God’s Word is both law and gospel, and the law of God is expressed through the natural orders (Ordnungen). Moreover, “the concept of state here at hand is the liberal constitutional state, as in all Barth’s writings.” For Lutherans the state should serve the life of a Volk (Nicolaisen 1985, pp. 86–88, quotation from 88). And after Barmen, Werner Elert and Althaus wrote a counterdeclaration, the so called Ansbacher Counsel, in which family, Volk, and race are included among the natural orders, the means God uses to preserve human life. The church should both proclaim these orders and be shaped by them in its own life. Christians should accept the Führer as a gift of God to the needs of the German Volk. They should recognize that God’s call to the German church includes cooperating with Hitler in building the Nazi state (Schmidt 1935, pp. 102–104). Despite holding several reservations, the church historian Klaus Scholder writes: “Theologically speaking, the Theological Declaration of Barmen … was without doubt the most important event of the church struggle” (Scholder 1988b, p. 147). It had not only a strong short‐term effect on the confessing congregations, providing the theological basis for resistance, but also long‐term effects in changing the understanding of both church and state in German Protestantism. It did these things, he says, “more deeply than any other event since the Reformation” (Scholder 1988b, p. 148; cf. also Meier 1992, p. 68).

Church Struggle and Barth’s Dismissal During the autumn of 1934 radical attempts were made not only by the German Christians but also by the government to take control of the south German dioceses that were still not under their control. Two bishops, Hans Meiser and Theophil Wurm, were placed under house arrest. Large public protests erupted. A second synod of the Confessing Church was convened in late October in Dahlem outside Berlin, in which the

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Confessing Church was declared the one legitimate Evangelical Church of Germany. No cooperation should be had with the German Christians (Schmidt 1935, pp. 157–162). Barth was chosen to represent the Reformed in the governing structures of the Confessing Church, the so‐called Council of Brethren. Circumstances then changed dramatically. The church policy of the government had received massive opposition from German churches, but protests were also coming in from the international church, which worried the Foreign Ministry. Hitler himself intervened and reinstated the two bishops. This created hope that the state would recognize the Confessing Church as the legitimate church. A process began that led to the creation of a Provisional Church Government headed by Bishop August Marahrens. When Marahrens was chosen, Barth resigned from the Council of Brethren along with a few of his allies. For him this choice meant that the dangerous middle now had taken control and that Barmen and Dahlem had effectively been abandoned. Others saw Barth as an uncompromising dogmatist who threatened to make the church into a sect or an overtly political agency; he was therefore a threat to good relations with the Nazi state (Besier 2001, pp. 19–43; for Barth’s own account, see Prolingheuer 1977, pp. 39–40, 261–264). It is reported that Marahrens, for his part, described Barth as currently “the greatest danger to the German Evangelical Church” (Prolingheuer 1977, p. 39). Barth later described the administration under Marahrens as “more like that of a liquidation commission” (Barth 1965, p. 48). Despite strongly opposing the German Christians and attempts at Gleichschaltung, Marahrens was also a strong German nationalist and could sometimes publicly, as bishop, support Nazi policy, including its racial policy. In 1939 he signed the Godesberger Declaration that not only made the Nazi worldview necessary even for Christians but that also stressed the need for struggle against the influence of the Jewish race on the German people (Strohm 2011, p. 80). As late as 1943, he refused to sign a protest letter written by Bishop Wurm against the persecution and annihilation of non‐Aryans. Although Marahrens wrote a letter in the same year to the Minister of the Interior, defending the sanctity of life, he also said that “the race question as a völkisch‐political question is a responsibility for the political leadership to solve” (Perels 1996, p. 173). Barth left the council on 22 November 1934. Four days later he was dismissed from his university post by the Reich Minister of Culture. Bishop Marahrens informed the minister that the Provisional Church Government would not interfere in the Barth affair (Besier 2001, p. 42). As university professor in Bonn, Barth was a civil servant. It was quite easy for the authorities to take control of universities because they were state‐funded institutions. Many professors were dismissed during the first years of the Nazi government for political reasons or for being Jews. The great majority of professors, however, were neutral or supportive of the Nazi revolution. Little opposition came from the universities. Nazi politics soon became the criterion for appointment, teaching, and research. The Bonn theological faculty, which in 1933 was dominated by dialectical theology, had after 1935 become a completely German nationalist faculty (Meier 1996, pp. 365– 373). At the local level it was usually the students who pushed for the Gleichschaltung of the universities; they used campaigns and disruptions of lectures as tactics for dismissing professors (Ericksen 2012; Evans 2003, pp. 422–431).

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Barth, however, had strong student support in Bonn. He began preparing for ­dismissal as early as the spring of 1933 because he was a member of the SPD. But because he was a Swiss citizen as well as a German citizen, and because of his international fame and his central role in German theology, he was not immediately dismissed. The initial pretext for the official process against Barth was based on two things: his refusal to make the Hitler salute in the classroom, and his refusal to swear loyalty to the Führer without adding the proviso that this loyalty was limited by his “commitments as an Evangelical Christian” (Busch 1976, p. 255). After the Provincial Church Government announced that when Christians referred to God in taking an oath, they exempted themselves from all actions contrary to God’s commandments, Barth withdrew his refusal. But the court ruled that Barth’s initial attempt to qualify his oath to Hitler showed that his view of the Nazi state was inappropriate, and so the suspension was upheld. Barth appealed and in June 1935, unexpectedly, the suspension was repealed. He was only fined for refusing to give the Hitler salute and for certain public statements he had made. But a week later the Minister of Cultural Affairs ­dismissed him anyway. He had already been banned from speaking in public on 1 March. After his final dismissal he was immediately offered a position in Basel (Prolingheuer 1977; Busch 1976, pp. 252–262).

Opposition from Switzerland From his new, freer position in Switzerland, Barth maintained his relationships with people in the Confessing Church and continued to write against the Nazi “state” and its policies. He also circulated a running commentary on the German church struggle (Barth 1965, pp. 41–76). In the summer of 1935 he writes pointedly that the church has fought for its freedom to preach, but has been silent on the treatment of the Jews, political opponents, and the press (Barth 1965, p. 45). And in 1939 he bemoans the fact that “many of the best people in the Confessing Church shut their eyes to the truth that the Jewish question, and thus the political question as such and as a whole, has become today a question of the faith,” in other words, a question by which the church stands or falls (Barth 1965, p. 75). Barth’s most systematic text about church and state from this period is the booklet Church and State from 1938 (Barth 1939a). The task of the church is primarily preaching, teaching, and the celebration of the sacraments. This is always of more political significance than direct political action. The church should also pray for peace, freedom, justice, and order, so that it will be able to live according to the gospel. But it also needs to work for what it prays for. This means working for a limited state (Rechtsstaat) governed by the rule of law. The church can live under many types of states, although some forms are more preferable than others. When the state, however, transgresses its limits, as the Nazi “state” had clearly done, the church has to resist. His most forceful argument for the necessity of the church to resist the Nazi “state” was provided in a lecture given soon after the Kristallnacht in late 1938 with the title The Church and the Political Problem Today. Here Barth argues vigorously that the church cannot be neutral in the present

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situation in Germany. The church’s witness to Jesus Christ consists “of the actualizing of this confession in definite decisions in relation to those contemporary questions which agitate the church and the world” (Barth 1939b, p. 12). The political problem in 1938 is German National Socialism. Nazism is a combination of political experimentation and a doctrine of salvation. Its absolutist and totalizing claims mean that if one cannot see the kingdom of God in National Socialism, then one has to reject it. It is simply impossible to reconcile National Socialism with Jesus Christ. However, there is, Barth continues, an even stronger argument for rejecting the Nazi state, its anti‐Semitism. “But the really decisive, biblical, theological reason for the church entering into this opposition does not lie in the various anti‐Christian asseverations and actions of National Socialism. On the contrary it lies in that thing which just in this last week has especially alarmed us: the anti‐Semitism that is one of its principles. Were this principle to stand by itself, that alone would be more than enough to justify opposition; National Socialism is the anti‐Church fundamentally hostile to Christianity” (Barth 1939b, p. 50). He continues: “Whoever rejects and persecutes the Jews rejects and persecutes him who died for the sins of the Jews – and then, and only thereby for our sins as well” (Barth 1939b, p. 51). The result is, Barth argues, that the Nazi “state” can no longer be regarded as a legitimate authority such as depicted in Romans 13, and that the church should pray and work not only for its overthrow but also for the restoration of a just state. This includes, Barth argued, a resort to force both internally and externally. Earlier in 1938 Barth had in an open letter to the Czech theologian Josef Hromàdka, published in several countries, argued against the western policy of appeasement toward Germany’s aggressive designs on Czechoslovakia and advocated in favor of military resistance (GA 36, pp. 107–133). The German reactions, even from the Confessing Church, were severe.

Wartime Similar themes are repeated again and again in Barth’s writings after the onset of the war: the Nazi “state” is not a legitimate state, National Socialism represents a nihilistic cult, it has to be resisted and overthrown, and a major reason is its persecution and destruction of God’s people, the Jews. There is an absolute antithesis between the church and National Socialism. Concerning his own Switzerland, he says that its policy of armed neutrality should include the welcoming of refugees, especially Jews, and the refusal of financial and military aid to Germany and its allies (Barth 1945, pp. 201–232; Busch 1996, p. 358). His writings were censured, and for some time he was prohibited from speaking publicly. His phone was tapped and his letters opened. He published several texts in other countries. The authorities tried to stop Swiss newspapers from reporting about these writings. The German government threatened the Swiss government if they did not silence Barth (Busch 2008; Busch 1999). In A Letter to Great Britain from Switzerland from October 1940 on the war, he writes that “we approve it as a righteous war, which God does not simply allow, but which he commands us to wage” (Barth 1941, p. 4). He further describes the war as a necessary

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“large‐scale police‐measure” (Barth 1941, p. 21). True to the Barmen Declaration, he bases his argument on Jesus Christ, not on natural law. Natural law arguments are not only ambiguous; they may also lead to fanaticism, in contrast to the humility and sincerity that properly characterizes faith in Christ. Inside Switzerland he swung into action, together with Jewish leaders, to get the Swiss government to try to intervene, for example, against the deportation and killing of the Hungarian Jews in 1944 (Busch 1996, pp. 515–517, see further pp. 494–537). After the war ends, Barth lectures in Germany and writes extensively about a necessary new beginning – for Germany, for German intellectual life, for the German church, for German theology. He discusses the need for Germans to take responsibility for their crimes and to confess their guilt, as well as the need for people outside Germany to be their friends, to be for, not against them – just as Jesus Christ is for them. He talks also about learning from his own failures and those of his allies. Politically, he commends a form of hopeful realism grounded in Christ and the gospel (Barth 1945, pp.  334–432). One cannot continue in these circumstances “as if nothing has ­happened.” A new beginning, not just a restoration, is needed for church life and ­theology (GA 15, p. 56f.). References Althaus, P. (1921). Religiöser Sozialismus: Grundfragen der christlichen Sozialethik. Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann. Althaus, P. (1934). Die deutsche Stunde der Kirche. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Barth, K. (1933). Theological Existence Today! A Plea for Theological Freedom, trans. R. Birch Hoyle. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Barth, K. (1939a). Church and State, trans. G. Ronald Howe. London: SCM Press. Barth, K. (1939b). The Church and the Political Problem of Our Day. New York: Scribner. Barth, K. (1941). A letter to Great Britain from Switzerland, trans. E. H. Gordon and George Hill. London: Sheldon Press. Barth, K. (1944). The church and the War, trans. Antonia H. Froendt. New York: Macmillan. Barth, K. (1945). Eine Schweizer Stimme, 1938–1945. Zollikon‐Zürich: Evangelischer Verlag. Barth, K. (1965). The German Church Conflict, trans. P. T. A. Parker. London: Lutterworth Press. Barth, K. (2004). Briefe des Jahres 1933. Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich.

Beintker, M. (2013). Krisis und Gnade: Gesammelte studien zu Karl Barth. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Besier, G. (2001). Die Kirchen und das Dritte Reich: Spaltungen und Abwehrkämpfe 1934–1937. Frankfurt am Main: Propyläen. Busch, E. (1976). Karl Barth: His life from letters and autobiographical texts, trans. John Bowden. London: SCM Press. Busch, E. (1989). “Endlich ein Wort zur Lage!”: Karl Barths Streitruf an die Protestantische Kirche am Ende der zwanziger und zu Beginn der dreißiger Jahre. Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 2: 409–425. Busch, E. (1996). Unter dem Bogen des einen Bundes: Karl Barth und die Juden 1933– 1945. Neukirchen‐Vluyn: Neukirchener. Busch, E. (1999). Der Theologe Karl Barth und die Politik des Schweizer Bundesrats. Evangelische Theologie 59: 172–186. Busch, E. (2008). Die Akte Karl Barth: Zensur und Ü berwachung im Namen der Schweizer Neutralität 1938–1945. Zürich: Theologischer Verl. Zürich. Cochrane, A.C. (1976). The church’s confession under Hitler. Pittsburgh: Pickwick Press.

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Ericksen, R.P. (2012). Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and universities in Nazi Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Evans, R.J. (2003). The coming of the Third Reich. London: A. Lane. Greschat, M. (1993). Die Bedeutung der Sozialgeschichte für die Kirchengeschichte. Historische Zeitschrift 256: 67–252. Hirsch, E. (1922). Deutschlands Schicksal: Staat, Volk und Menschheit im Lichte einer ethischen Geschichtsansicht. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Hirsch, E. (1934). Die gegenwärtige geistige Lage im Spiegel philosophischer und theologischer Besinnung: Akademische Vorlesungen zum Verständnis des deutschen Jahrs 1933. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Koch, W. (1979). Karl Barths erste Auseinandersetzungen mit dem Dritten Reich (mit besonderer Erlaubnis der Nachlaßkommission dargestellt an Hand seiner Briefe 1933‐1935). In: Richte unsere Füsse auf den Weg des Friedens: Helmut Gollwitzer zum 70. Geburtstag (eds. A. Baudis, D. Clausert, V. Schliski and B. Wegener), 491–513. Munich: Chr. Kaiser. Meier, K. (1992). Kreuz und Hakenkreuz: Die evangelische Kirche im Dritten Reich. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. Meier, K. (1996). Die Theologischen Fakultäten im Dritten Reich. Berlin: de Gruyter. Nicolaisen, C. (1985). Der Weg nach Barmen: Die Entstehungsgeschichte der Theologischen Erklärung von 1934. Neukirchen‐Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag. Norden, G.V. (1997). Die Weltverantwortung der Christen neu begreifen: Karl Barth als homo politicus. Gütersloh: Kaiser.

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Perels, J. (1996). Die hannoversche Landeskirche im Nationalsozialismus 1935‐1945: Kritik eines Selbsbildes. In: Bewahren ohne Bekennen? Die hannoversche Landeskirche im Nationalsozialismus (eds. H.W. Grosse, H. Otte and J. Perels), 153–177. Hamburg: Lutherisches Verlagshaus. Prolingheuer, H. (1977). Der Fall Karl Barth, 1934–1935: Chronographie einer Vertreibung. Neukirchen‐Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag. Rasmusson, A. (2005). Church and nation‐ state: Karl Barth and German public theology in the early 20th century. Nederduitse Gereformeerde Teologiese Tydskrif 46: 511–524. Rasmusson, A. (2007). Historiography and theology: Theology in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 20: 155–180. Schmidt, K.D. (1934). Die Bekenntnisse und grundsätzlichen Äusserungen zur Kirchenfrage. Bd. 1, Das Jahr 1933. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Schmidt, K.D. (1935). Die Bekenntnisse und grundsätzlichen Äusserungen zur Kirchenfrage. Bd. 2, Das Jahr 1934. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Scholder, K. (1988a). The churches and the Third Reich: Volume One: 1918–1934, trans. J. Bowden. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Scholder, K. (1988b). The churches and the Third Reich. Volume Two. The Year of Disillusionment: 1934 Barmen and Rome, trans. J. Bowden. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Strohm, C. (2011). Die Kirchen im Dritten Reich. Bonn: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung.

Index

Adam, Karl, 73 Adorno, Theodor, 409–410 affections, 361–363 analogia entis, 27, 99–100, 188, 342, 619, 623–624, 628–629, 674, 839, 848–851 analogia fidei, 100–101, 674 analogia relationis, 648–649, 746 Anselm, 90, 257, 409, 435–448, 522, 568 apologetics, 755 ascetism, 866 Athanasius, 47 Aquinas, Thomas, 47, 99, 449–460, 532, 839, 846, 851 Augustine, 26, 47, 304, 421–434, 531 Baillie, John, 659 Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 113, 435, 619–632, 836, 853 baptism infant, 271–272 of the spirit, 266–268 in water, 268–271, 356–358, 481–482 Barmen Declaration, 259, 278–280, 636, 686–687, 971–972 Barrett, Lee C., 553, 559 Barth, Christoph, 658 Barth, Karl

and creeds, 109–112 and Eastern Orthodoxy, 857–868 and interdisciplinary dialogue, 781–795 and Islam, 893–904 and the Jews, 881–892 and liberation theologies, 809–820 life of, 9–22 method of, 27–28, 83–93 and natural science, 767–779 and natural theology, 95–107, 188 as outdated, 14–15 and philosophy, 753–766 and religions, 869–879 and Roman Catholicism, 845–855 and socialism, 13, 919–935 Barth, Markus, 265, 659, 883, 938 Bartmann, Bernhard, 450–451 Barton, John, 716 Bauhofer, Oskar, 849 Baumgartner, Walter, 716–719 Beiser, Frederick, 722 Berkouwer, G.C., 57, 305 Bethge, Eberhard, 565, 882, 933 Blanshard, Brand, 663–664 Bloch, Ernst, 9 Bonaventure, 23 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 314, 565–576, 834 Bouillard, Henri, 851

T he Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth in Dialogue, Volume II, First Edition. Edited by George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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index

Bromiley, Geoffrey, 132, 659 Brunner, Emil, 63–64, 103–104, 188, 542, 555–556, 641, 781 Buber, Martin, 885 Bultmann, Rudolf, 73, 450, 555–556, 562, 577–589, 673, 723, 733–734, 846, 923, 953 Burman, Francis, 484 Buttrick, David, 797

falsehood, 204–206 Fehr, Jakob, 851 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 74, 543, 765 Feuerer, Georg, 851 Florovsky, Georges, 857 freedom, 372–379, 394–395, 470–471, 496–498 Frei, Hans, 610, 614, 645–656 Fuchs, Ernst, 670–672

Calvin, John, 47, 56, 126, 186, 231, 291, 408, 427, 473–482, 554 Cary, Philip, 427 Chopp, Rebecca, 798 christomonism, 113–115 Chung, Paul, 921 church, 178–179, 241–252, 327–338, 957–958 Cocceius, Johannes, 120, 494–493 Cohen, Hermann, 306, 884 Cohn, Emil, 885 Congdon, David, 334 conversion, 311–313 Council of Toledo, 36 Cullmann, Oscar, 217–218

Gadamer, Has‐Georg, 10, 735 Geismar, Eduard, 552 gender, 190–191, 374–375, 445, 688–692, 905–917 general revelation, 66–69, 105–106 Gerrish, Brian, 273 Geschichte, 774–776 God election of, 49–50, 105, 295–296, 343, 476–479 fullness of, 498–501 as missionary God, 252, 331, 338 perfections of, 501–504 self‐determination of, 747–749 as wholly other, 11–12, 75, 552–553 Goertz, Hans‐Jürgen, 544 Gogarten, Friedrich, 102–103, 543, 555, 846, 849, 967 Göhler, Alfred, 305 Gorringe, Timothy, 921 gratitude, 361–362 Gregory of Nyssa, 438 Griffiths, Paul, 437, 446 Grumett, David, 281 Grünewald, Matthias, 253, 730 Gunkel, Hermann, 723–724 Gutiérrez, Gustavo, 809

Darwinism, 771–773 death, 213–214, 217–227 Dehn, Günther, 966 deification, see theosis de Lubac, Henri, 620 demons, 214–216 Descartes, Rene, 528, 531, 583 determination, 744–745 diaconal ministry, 813 Diekamp, Franz, 450–451 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 540 divinization, see theosis Dodel‐Port, Arnold, 771–773 Duffy, Eamon, 533 Ebeling, Gerhard, 16, 670–673 ecclesiology, 241–252 Edwards, Jonathan, 495–506 Elert, Werner, 670 embodiment, 191–193 ethics, 369–380, 821–832 eucharist, see Lord’s Supper evil, 129, 207–216, 696–699

Harnack, Adolf von, 103, 540, 566, 703, 710–711, 756–757 heaven, 174 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 519–534, 740–743 Heidegger, Martin, 219, 552, 578, 580, 671 Heppe, Heinrich, 484–488 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 73 Herrmann, Wilhelm, 96, 254, 407, 538–539, 703–707, 711–713, 884

index

Hirsch, Emanuel, 10, 102–103, 552, 555, 956, 968 Historie, 774–776 Hitler, Adolf, 101, 112, 126, 261, 330, 545, 568, 577, 636, 683, 781, 944 Hoffman, Piotr, 219 Holl, Karl, 566 Holy Spirit, 229–239, 247–249 Horkeimer, Max, 409–410 Hossenfelder, Joachim, 101–102 Howsare, Rodney, 628–629 Hunsinger, George, 272, 288, 292, 508, 640, 654, 739–740, 920 Idealism, 764–765 Jaspers, Karl, 556–557 Jenson, Robert, 230 Jesus Christ ascension of, 173–183 election of, 50–51, 186–188, 343–346 resurrection of, 159–171 Jones, Paul Dafydd, 740 joy, 362–363 Jülicher, Adolf, 720, 732 Jüngel, Eberhard, 669–680, 920 justification, pp. 291–301, 462–463, 466–470 Kahler, Martin, 80 Kant, Immanuel, 16, 74, 507–517, 537–538, 583, 704 Kerr, Fergus, 457 Kierkegaard, Søren, 551–564, 781 Kilby, Karen, 611, 614 Kirschbaum, Charlotte von, 572, 658, 681–692 Kubly, Herbert, 407 Küng, Hans, 610, 836, 853 Kutter, Hermann, 707–709, 938 Lenin, Vladimir, 922–923 Lessing, Gerhard, 527 Lilla, Mark, 953 limitation, 378–379 Lindbeck, George, 852 Lombard, Peter, 23, 437, 457 Lord’s Supper, 277–290 love

981

agape, 386–391, 694–696, 699–700 eros, 386–391 for God, 382–383 of God, 494–496 for neighbor, 383–386 Lücke, Friedrich, 538, 544 Luther, Marin, 61, 200, 255, 279, 292–293, 313, 461–472, 509, 554, 584, 896 MacCulloch, Diarmaid, 533 Mackintosh, H.R., 657–658 Mann, Thomas, 208 Marquardt, E.W., 882, 919–921, 928–930 Marshall, Bruce, 608–609, 613–614 Marx, Karl, 409, 411, 931 Mary, 852 Maury, Pierre, 48, 834 McConnachie, John, 657 McCormack, Bruce, 54–55, 160, 436, 610, 646, 852, 959 McKinnon, Alastair, 559 Mezei, Balázs M., 62 mission, 327–338 modalism, 31–32 Molnar, Paul, 287 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 424, 694 Müller, Ludwig, 102 Murdoch, Iris, 439 Natorp, Paul, 306 natural law, 372 natural theology, 95–107, 451, 479–480 nature, 115–116 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 198, 633–644 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 208 Nimmo, Paul, 273, 288–289, 740 nothingness, 207–216 Nygren, Andreas, 387–391, 557–558 Oberman, Heiko, 462 Otto, Rudolf, 538 Pannenberg, Wolfhart, 756–757 participation in Christ, 320–324, 341–353, 466–470, 480–481 Patriarch Photius, 36 Peterson, Erik, 675, 849 Pfennigsdorf, Emil, 802–803 Plathow, Michael, 131–132

982

index

pneumatology, 229–239 Polanus, Amandus, 488–489 Pope Benedict VIII, 36 Pope Leo III, 36 Pope Paul VI, 837 positivism, 89–94, 573–574 powers, 364–365 prayer, 358–360, 393–403 pride, 201–203 Przywara, Erich, 99–100, 608, 619, 623, 834, 846, 848–849 Pseudo‐Dionysius, 438 Quenstedt, Johannes, 306 Rade, Martin, 538, 708 Ragaz, Leonhard, 707–709, 925, 938 Rahner, Karl, 607–618 realism, 764–765 religion, 255, 405–418, 594–600, 858–860 representation, 153–155 Ritschl, Albrecht, 705 Rosenzweig, Franz, 884–885 sacraments, 266–290 Said, Edward W., 809 sanctification, 303–316 Satan, 215–216 Schlatter, Adolf, 705 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 16, 73, 83–86, 128, 231, 461–462, 535–550, 554, 583, 705, 711–713 Schmemann, Alexander, 860 Scholz, Heinrich, 435 Schweitzer, Albert, 350, 484 sexuality, 445 sin, 197–206, 213–214 sloth, 203–204 Söhngen, Gottlieb, 104, 851 sola fide, 299 Sonderegger, Katherine, 52, 583, 882, 900 Stapel, Wilhelm, 102

substantionalism, 740–741 substitutionary atonement, 151–153, 442 Sutz, Erwin, 567–568 Taylor, Charles, 516 theosis, 351–352 Thurnheysen, Eduard, 74, 102, 539, 552, 707, 728, 846, 894 Tice, Terrence, 546 Tillich, Paul, 9, 555, 591–606, 798 time, 193–195, 218–222 Tolkein, J.R.R., 693–700 Torrance, Thomas F., 657–668 Tracy David, 798 trauma, 789–794 Trillhaas, Wolfgang, 542 Troeltsch, Ernst, 11, 103, 538, 706, 723 Turrettin, Francis, 489–490, 735 Van Til, Cornelius, 507, 513–514 Vatican II, 451–452, 854 vestigiatrinitatis, 26 Visser’tHooft, Willem Adolph, 833–834 vocation, 309–311, 317–326 Vogel, Heinrich, 671 Walsh, Sylvia, 560 war, 827–831, 937–950, 975–976 Watson, Francis, 53 Webster, John, 273, 436, 542 Weimar Republic, 951–964 Welker, Michael, 526 Wendel, Francois, 130 Wernle, Paul, 731 Williams, Rowan, 858 Wobbermin, Georg, 849 works, 314 Yoder, John Howard, 939 zeal, 360–361, 400–402 Ziegler, Philip, 561 Zwingli, Huldrych, 12, 126, 279, 408

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