Eschatological Presence in Karl Barth's Gottingen Theology

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E S C H ATO LO G I C A L P R E S E N C E I N KAR L ¨ T TI N G E N T H E O LO G Y B A RT H ’S GO

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Eschatological Presence in Karl Barth’s Go¨ttingen Theology C H R I S TO P H E R A S P R EY

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York # Christopher Asprey 2010 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2010 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, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Library of Congress Control Number: 2010922495 Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn ISBN 978–0–19–958470–3 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For Nicholas and Bridget Asprey


Preface Barth studies have found a new lease of life in recent years, thanks in large measure to the release of previously unknown or unpublished works by Barth, as part of the Gesamtausgabe of his writings. The appearance of these works, in particular from the earlier parts of Barth’s career, has made it possible to get back behind the Church Dogmatics, to inquire more closely into his theological origins and to situate Barth more precisely against his own theological background. This research would hardly be worthwhile were it undertaken purely to further the interests and prestige of a Barthscholastik. Its rightful fruits, however, have been the kind of historical reconstruction of Barth’s theology that fosters both a certain critical distance from the dogmatic positions he came to defend, as well as the recovery of some fundamental theological insights, by which these positions can properly be explained and evaluated. The present book makes its contribution to this ongoing work by examining a cross-section of Barth’s theology from a transitional but highly productive five-year period, one that is less well known in English-language scholarship, when Barth was just embarking upon a career in academic theology. I am grateful to Theologischer Verlag Zu¨rich for granting me permission to reprint here a great deal of material from the Gesamtausgabe, as well as from other works by Barth. I am grateful too to the Karl Barth archive in Basel, for permission to use images of Barth’s manuscript for the cover design of the book, and especially to Hans Anton Drewes for his ready help and advice on a number of occasions. This book started out as a doctoral thesis at the University of Aberdeen. It would not have been written without the funding I received from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, throughout my Masters and doctoral studies. I should also like to thank Princeton Theological Seminary, where I spent a thoroughly rewarding semester, digging around in their libraries and archives, and enjoying many other benefits, thanks to their Doctoral Research Scholars Program. I received some expert advice there from Clifford

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Preface

Anderson, as well as from Bruce McCormack, with whom I was fortunate to have the chance to discuss my research. I also wish to mention here a number of other individuals whose friendship, advice, and support have contributed in different ways to the production of this book: my doctoral supervisor, John Webster, whose seminars were the most inspiring introduction to theological research one could wish for, and whose patience and encouragement never relented during the time I was researching and writing; my two examiners, Timothy Gorringe and Philip Ziegler, for an engaging viva that provided a thought-provoking conclusion to my doctoral work; Jean-Yves Lacoste and Marion Drobig, who read and discussed with me earlier versions of this book; Iain Taylor, who gave me the idea to work on Barth’s Go¨ttingen Dogmatics; Luigi Gioia, who encouraged me to take up theology in the first place. I also wish to thank some friends from Aberdeen—Brian Brock, Simon Gathercole, David Gibson, Morton Gould ({), Timothy Harvey, Brian Lugioyo, Francesca Murphy, Jonathan Norgate and his family—as well as various colleagues and friends who have supported me during my first two years of teaching at the Institut Catholique de Paris, above all Philippe Bordeyne, Camille de Belloy, Emmanuel Durand, and Jean-Louis Souletie. However, it is to my father, mother, brother, and sister that I owe the greatest debt of thanks, for their support particularly during some difficult months completing my thesis, while I was living with them in London. It is to my family, and most especially to my parents, that I wish to dedicate this book.

Contents List of Abbreviations of Barth’s Works

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Introduction

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1. The Problem of Dualism 2. Barth’s Theology in Go¨ttingen 1. Eschatological Existence in Barth and Bultmann 1.1 Eschatological Existence and Theological Language 1.2 Resurrection and Christology 1.3 Conclusion: Christology and Revelation 2. Revelation and the Problem of Christian Preaching 2.1 Revelation as Disruption 2.2 The Doctrine of Revelation as Prolegomena to Dogmatics 2.3 Revelation as a Theological Problem 2.4 Revelation, Preaching, and Theology 2.5 Revelation and Nature 2.6 Conclusion 3. Dogmatics 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4

The Dogmatic Correlation Dogmatics as Problematik The Eschatological Horizon of Dogmatics The Concept of Witness in Barth’s Commentary on John’s Gospel

4. Reformed Theology 4.1 Reformation as Reflection 4.2 The Theology of Zwingli 4.3 The Theology of the Reformed Confessions

2 16 29 31 43 52 56 56 64 68 72 80 92 95 97 105 110 122 136 137 144 152

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Contents

5. Christology 5.1 The Person of Christ 5.2 The Risen Christ 5.3 Christology and Reconciliation 6. Spirit, Religion, and the Christian Life 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4

‘Biblical Questions, Insights, and Vistas’ Religion and Freedom The Christian Life Sacramental Theology

164 167 175 185 194 197 204 216 243

Conclusion: Grace and Eschatology

260

Bibliography Index

267 281

List of Abbreviations of Barth’s Works AdT:

Die Auferstehung der Toten

CD:

Church Dogmatics

Chr. Dog.:

Die christliche Dogmatik

GD (UCR): Go¨ttingen Dogmatics (Unterricht in der christlichen Religion) TC:

Die Theologie Calvins

TRB:

Theologie der reformierten Bekenntnisschriften

TS:

Die Theologie Schleiermachers

TZ:

Die Theologie Zwinglis


Introduction The argument I will make in the following pages is that, in the period under examination, Karl Barth’s theology was driven by an overriding conviction that God’s presence is bestowed freely and actively, with the result that divine grace is never a stable reality in the world, but discontinuous with human history, a disruptive— ‘eschatological’—event whose effect is always to shake up, and hopefully to regenerate, the creatures with which it comes into contact. I make this case using texts taken, almost entirely, from between autumn 1921 and summer 1925, when Barth occupied his first academic post in Go¨ttingen. Apart from the second edition of the Commentary on Romans (Ro¨merbrief II), which was already complete on his arrival in Go¨ttingen, only one monograph was published during this time—a commentary on 1 Corinthians—together with a number of shorter, occasional essays and lectures. And yet, the years Barth spent teaching in Go¨ttingen were among the most productive of his career. From 1921 to 1924, almost every semester included an intense course of lectures on the history of Reformed theology and doctrine, together with exegetical lectures on a New Testament text. Then, in the summer of 1924, Barth began a first cycle of dogmatics lectures, known as the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics, which he completed in his first term at Munster in 1925–6. The period is not only a pivotal time in Barth’s development, but critical for understanding his theology as such. For it marks the turn from what is often referred to as his ‘dialectical’ theology—i.e. the theology which climaxed in Ro¨merbrief II, but arguably continued further into the 1920s, and perhaps beyond—to the dogmatic theology to which his subsequent theological career was dedicated.

Karl Barth’s Go¨ttingen Theology

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1. THE PROBLEM OF DUALISM As soon as Barth began to make an impression upon the theological community, his writing was subjected to heavy criticism. Indeed, the waspish reactions to it were inevitable, and probably sought after by Barth who, as Eberhard Ju¨ngel has pointed out, ‘was provocative from the very beginning’.1 One of the earliest critical responses to his theology came from Paul Althaus, writing in the first edition of the Zeitschrift fu¨r systematische Theologie.2 It inaugurated a reading of Barth which continues to enjoy prestige among many scholars to this day, a reading which (I will argue) is fundamentally wrong-headed. For Althaus, writing in the early decades of the twentieth century, the key issue in the human sciences was the question of history, and the historicity of being which, for theology, meant reflecting on revelation as the doctrine of God’s presence in and with history. However, in Barth’s dialectical theology, according to Althaus, such reflection is systematically excluded from the outset. For in its sustained criticism of the cult of experience in modern religion, this theology appropriates the idea of a metaphysical dualism, or opposition, between eternity and time, and feeds this back into the doctrine of God, making any historical revelation impossible in advance. [The concept of God in dialectical theology] is arrived at in a thoroughly aprioristic way. The starting point is not the reality and material determination of biblical or Christian belief in God. Instead, the meaning of biblical certainty about God is forcibly interpreted by an idea of God that is presupposed. It is not that the idea of God is taken from the witness to revelation, but the other way round: what ‘revelation’ may or may not refer to is decided in advance by a presupposed, self-contained concept of God. And this is characterized by a fundamental intuition about the relation between time and eternity.3

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Ju¨ngel, ‘Provozierende Theologie. Zur theologischen Existenz Karl Barths (1921–1935)’, 41. 2 Althaus, ‘Theologie und Geschichte: Zur Auseinandersetzung mit der dialektischen Theologie’. 3 Ibid., 742.

Introduction

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Once the point has been grasped that the key to Barth lies in his initial adoption of this metaphysic, the remainder of Althaus’ rather long essay unfolds with all the dreary inevitability of the dualistic logic which supposedly drives Barth’s theology, punctuated only by brief moments of light when Luther is introduced as an alternative. It is simply a matter of going through Barth’s texts and showing how the opposition between time and eternity is played out in the detail of his presentation of Christian doctrine. Thus (to name only the most salient features) any relation between God and humanity naturally becomes impossible from the outset, since Barth has replaced ‘the personal correspondence of one will to another’4 in historical Christianity with a purely formal idea of God. It then follows that the twin notions of God’s love and judgement, together with justification and the conscience, rather than relating to real events in the history between God and creation, now become purely formal abstractions as well.5 Furthermore, because the eternity–time dialectic is also the opposition between positive and negative, human time—in its anti-relation to divine eternity—is sheer negativity; creation is identical with sin; anything approaching ‘salvation history’ is dispensed with altogether (along with the Resurrection as a real event in time); and the result is a total historical scepticism, and with it the loss of moral responsibility.6 While these conclusions can often be proof-texted against citations in Barth, in fact they all simply flow from ‘the formal opposition between the divine and the historical’7 that is allegedly the Denkform of his theology. This same allegation, first made by Althaus in 1923, has recurred ever since as a way of explaining Barth’s theology, especially his ‘dialectical’ theology. In particular, it has often been something of an axiom for many of the leading exponents of Trinitarian theology in the twentieth century, notably Wolfhart Pannenberg, Ju¨rgen Moltmann, Robert Jenson, and Colin Gunton. Barth’s theology, it is said, is built around an opposition between time and eternity, around a Greek rather than a Jewish conception of time. That claim is then worked out in various ways, depending on the individual concerns and positive interests of the theologian in question. And yet, insofar 4 6

5 Ibid., 754. Ibid., 757–60. 7 Ibid., 743ff., 781ff. Ibid., 769.

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as the claim relates to Barth, the particular analyses converge over very similar territory. Therefore, rather than tackle a number of these theologians in turn, I shall take Jenson as my example. More than any other, he has sustained his own theological positions on the interpretation of Barth he worked out during his doctoral studies.8 Indeed, it has been observed that it is sometimes hard to tell where Jenson’s analysis of Barth ends and his own theology begins.9 For Jenson, the issue raised by Barth’s theology is as much a soteriological as a philosophical one: how to make sense of the claim that my life could be intrinsically bound up with that of a man, Jesus of Nazareth, who died two millennia ago.10 Yet the stakes in this question can only be sized up once we appreciate the sharp contrast Jenson draws between (Judaeo-Christian) faith and (gnostico-Platonic) religion. He interprets this contrast in terms of the doctrine of justification, read through something like an existential understanding of time. In the fearful anxiety caused by the experience of temporal flux, and especially by the unnerving onrush of an unknown future, ‘religion’ refers to the natural human impulse to seek refuge from history by positing the reality of our lives in an unchanging sphere of Being (‘God’). However, purchasing immunity in this way from time’s ravaging potential comes at the inevitable cost of being alienated from time, and condemned to remain the ones we are and always were. This is quite the opposite of the faith of Israel and the church. Above all else, faith means a life born out of divine promise, so that salvation does not involve retreat from time but the freedom from my past (forgiveness, justification) for a future in time, a future which God presents to me not as threat, but as opportunity. The word of the justification of the ungodly apprehends reality as history. If I am justified as ungodly, then my life is a constant departure from what I am toward what I am not yet. It is a choice for the insecurity of the non-given, for transcendence in time.11 8 See also the recent chapter, ‘Karl Barth’ in Ford (ed.), The Modern Theologians, 21–36. 9 Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth, 19, 21f. 10 Jenson, Alpha and Omega: A study in the theology of Karl Barth, 15. 11 Jenson, God after God: The God of the past and the God of the future in the work of Karl Barth, 19.

Introduction

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The Greek contamination of late Judaism and early Christianity did not result in a total loss of historical faith. Nevertheless, it generated a peculiar hybrid in which the liberating promise of God came to be replaced by a moralized religion whose adherents were both impotent and guilt-ridden. Instead of being orientated towards ‘the God who comes from and for the future’, the Hellenized church became fixated upon ‘the God of frozen history, the God of what has happened’, a God it identified with the perfected history of Jesus of Nazareth. And yet, once Jesus’ history is frozen in the past like this, it is no longer the history of my liberation from sin, but of my condemnation to be what I always have been—i.e. the very opposite of the meaning of Jesus’ history. ‘For of all the modes of time, it is the past which can be changeless, if it is not appropriated into a life lived from the future.’12 In short, the Christian orientation towards history became infused with a timeless notion of eternity, and produced an ‘historical religion’, an unhistorical or a-historical history, a contradiction in terms. According to Jenson, Barth’s dialectical theology is to be read as the conclusive statement of precisely this oxymoron, this impossible and unsustainable contradiction. He reads Ro¨merbrief II as the final event of historical religion, in which it destroys itself from within the logic of its own incongruity. Barth achieves this by focusing his commentary around the notion of the ‘eternal future’ (futurum aeternum), for this enables him to create in a single concept a perfect synthesis between historical faith and the religion of eternity. Time receives a consistently eschatological orientation, in accordance with the gospel of justification, yet this eschatology is simultaneously eternalized, generating an unremittingly critical negation of time. ‘The only thing wrong—but then everything is wrong—is that we cannot live under the God of this dialectic; his justification of the ungodly is bad news, not gospel.’13 In the text’s eschatology, the gospel of forgiveness and liberation, and the religion of guilt and condemnation, have converged, cancelling each other out, and creating a spiritual dead-end. ‘Therewith our religious devotion to eternity, and our faith as life in history from the future, finally completely immobilize each other—and the inner impossibility

12

Ibid., 22.

13

Ibid., 52.

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of the Christian religion becomes actual. This is the event in the Commentary on Romans.’14 Barth only moves beyond this impasse, Jenson thinks, when, in the Church Dogmatics, he grounds his theology in Christology and the Trinity. For taken together, these doctrines mean that ‘the event of eternity, and of eternity’s union with time, is no longer specifiable only by a play of abstractions, it is an event which can be narrated’.15 The doctrine of the Trinity becomes the grammar of an anti-religious theology, because it affirms that God’s very being is not ‘a drama played on the stage of infinity’,16 or removed wholly into past time, but the event of his history with his creatures in time. ‘God’s being is achieved temporal self-transcendence. God is the one who for the future leaves the past behind, without the past becoming a set of fixed conditions for his future, and without the future emptying the present.’17 Moreover, it is in the concrete story of Jesus of Nazareth that the narratives of human and divine life inseparably enmesh. Rather than our history being cancelled out by God’s in a purely conceptual clash between time and eternity, it becomes opened up in the narrative of Christ to the historical possibilities disclosed in the Resurrection. However, Jenson remains unsettled by recalcitrant elements in Barth’s dogmatic theology which indicate to him that the full integration of time and eternity is not being affirmed without qualification. Objections are levelled against an overblown doctrine of election,18 and a correspondingly attenuated pneumatology,19 which for Jenson is the sign that the ‘Platonizing’ impulse towards pre-temporality has not been fully quashed.20 It is no longer, of course, that divine eternity is being construed as a formless abstraction—Jenson explicitly rejects the 14 Jenson, God after God: The God of the past and the God of the future in the work of Karl Barth, 30. 15 Ibid., 78. 16 Ibid., 152. 17 Ibid., 128–9. 18 Jenson, Alpha and Omega, 81–3. 19 Jenson, God after God, 173–4. 20 Cf. the claim made by Jenson’s student, Colin Gunton, that in Barth ‘the history of God with man is telescoped, for the future is not understood eschatologically, as the year when there will take place new triune events, but seen to be merely the vehicle of the repetition of a timeless past’ (Becoming and Being: The doctrine of God in Charles Hartshorne and Karl Barth, 183).

Introduction

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well-known allegation made by Berkouwer that Barth had made grace into a general principle 21—for eternity is given definite shape through the story of Jesus Christ. And yet, as Barth narrates it, this Urgeschichte of God with humanity somehow leaves no room for ‘life-stories distinct from that of Jesus’.22 More precisely, the problem comes down to Barth’s loss of nerve in Christology, where he seemingly allows a Nestorian separation of Christ’s ‘natures’ to occur, so that the single history of Christ, in which God and humanity are at one, becomes ‘the history between the two natures of Christ’.23 Put differently, the problem of mediating historically between past and present, Christ and us, is ultimately resolved by Barth by removing Christ from time. Human and divine histories come apart once again, the former being described merely as an ‘analogy’ of the latter, like the ‘copy’ of a Platonic ‘prototype’, with all the deleterious consequences for the gospel that rupture entails:24 The problem [of relating Christ’s past to our present] is systematically solved by making the great christological identifications—God is what happens with Christ; we are what we are for him; creation is the carrying out of his life—ambiguous, and so leaving a loophole for God’s transcendence. But the ambiguity is precisely the shimmering possibility of reading all these statements in terms of timeless eternity.25

In short, even though the Christological and Trinitarian dogmas now shape Barth’s doctrine of God, his dogmatics continues to drift 21

In Berkouwer, The Triumph of Grace in the Theology of Karl Barth; see Jenson, Alpha and Omega, 102. 22 Jenson, Alpha and Omega, 134. Similar criticisms are made by Balthasar, who argues that Barth ends up squashing human history into ‘the Procrustean bed of Barth’s Christological schema’ (The Theology of Karl Barth, 242); and Ford, arguing that diverse or particular human histories are ultimately crowded out in Barth’s theology by a ‘monism of the Gospel story’ (Barth and God’s Story: Biblical narrative and the theological method of Karl Barth in the ‘Church Dogmatics’, 13). 23 Jenson, Alpha and Omega, 130. Stadtland traces what he refers to as the ‘dividing up of the whole of world-reality’ in Barth’s dialectical theology (Eschatologie und Geschichte in der Theologie des jungen Karl Barth, 127) back to a docetic Christfigure, ‘of whom much can be stated, except that he is a human being or has anything to do with Jesus Christ’ (ibid., 97). 24 Cf. Roberts’ description of the Church Dogmatics as ‘a profound theological totalitarianism stemming from the application of the principle of the analogia fidei in a context bereft of any vestiges of natural theology (and thus of natural reality or the natural order itself)’ (A Theology on Its Way? Essays on Karl Barth, 56). 25 Jenson, God after God, 154.


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ambivalently back towards the philosophical opposition between eternity and time, in keeping with what (for Jenson) is a seemingly unshakeable habit of thinking in Western theology. This same judgement—made initially by Althaus, and pursued with such consistently ingenious originality by Jenson—has at times been so commonplace as to be virtually taken for granted by commentators. It can then be used to support a large variety of different cultural– historical theories of how Barth’s theology is to be read. Albrecht Oepke, for instance, interpreting Barth as the representative figure of decline in post-war Europe, took his theology to be a cross between the mysticism of Eckhart and Sankara, typical of the kind of spiralling thought into which all cultures plunge when they lose confidence in the trajectory of their histories.26 Indeed, Barth’s mysticism (for Oepke) was not of the harmless, ‘affective’ type, which is common to any desire to deepen religious experience, but a ‘radical’ mysticism,27 built on an eschatological ‘theopanism’, the ultimate ontological annihilation of the creature’s history in eternity.28 Or again, in a rather different vein, it has been suggested that the strong opposition between eschatology and history was responsible for Barth’s disengagement from German politics in the 1920s and 30s.29 For example, Reinhold Niebuhr, who otherwise welcomed Barth’s criticism of the kind of naı¨ve historical optimism he disdained in Anglo-Saxon theology, nevertheless warned, as early as 1928, that his thought was beset by an ahistorical absolutism, which made it an impracticable guide amidst the trials and perplexities and tragic choices confronting human beings from day to day.30 The warning was confirmed, Niebuhr thought, by Barth’s ineffectiveness during the Nazi period, and then reissued subsequently when Barth refused to criticize communism in Hungary. Because

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27 Oepke, Karl Barth und die Mystik, 81f. Ibid., 23–5. Ibid., 54. Balthasar borrowed the idea of ‘theopanism’, which he describes as a ‘monism of beginning and end’, in his own reading of Barth’s dialectical theology (Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth, 84, 94). 29 The allegation that Barth was disengaged is, in fact, highly debatable. For a brief re´sume´ of some of the main lines of Busch’s defence of Barth in his huge study, Unter dem Bogen des einen Bundes: Karl Barth und die Juden, 1933–1945, see his short essay, ‘Indissoluble unity: Barth’s position on the Jews during the Hitler era’. 30 The articles are collected in Niebuhr, Essays in Applied Christianity, 141–93. 28

Introduction

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his theology was ‘constructed too much for the great crises of history’, Niebuhr held, by the time such crises occurred and Barth began to speak out, it was already too late.31 This was merely a reflection of the broad tendency in his theology for the historical and relative to be submerged by the eternal and absolute. ‘God, the will of God, and the Kingdom of God are conceived in such transcendent terms that nothing in history can even approximate the divine; and the distinctions between good and evil on the historical level are in danger of being reduced to irrelevancies.’32 A slightly different (and considerably more sophisticated) version of the same argument has been offered recently by German theological historians, who have tried to involve Barth in a wider ‘antihistorical’ tendency, said to pervade German culture in the 1920s.33 F. W. Graf, for example, taking up a thesis first proposed by Trutz Rendtorff,34 suggests that Barth developed a theory of God’s absolute subjectivity which was intent upon absorbing all historical reality into the divine life. By positing God as ‘an utterly unconditioned, voluntaristic, and uncompromisingly powerful acting subject’,35 the aim was to establish theology’s credentials as the total interpretative category of the real, thus robbing historical contingencies of any semantic value. Indeed: [t]hrough an act of semantic usurpation, Barth even de-historicizes the concept of history: empirical history is swallowed up by the divine ‘Urgeschichte’, ‘God’s eternal history’, ‘inner-divine history’, ‘the history of Jesus Christ’, ‘the history of revelation, ‘the history of God with humanity’,

31

Niebuhr, ‘We are men and not God’ (1948), in Essays in Applied Christianity, 172. See also Dannemann, Theologie und Politik im Denken Karl Barths, 118–20. 32 Niebuhr, ‘Barthianism and the Kingdom’ (1931) in Essays in Applied Christianity, 148. 33 Graf, ‘Die “anti-historische Revolution” in der protestantischen Theologie der zwanziger Jahren’; also, Novak, ‘Die “antihistorische Revolution”. Symptome und Folgen der Krise historischer Weltorientierung nach dem ersten Weltkrieg in Deutschland’. 34 Rendtorff ’s claim is that Barth’s theology should not be read as a post-Enlightenment revival of orthodoxy, but as the continuation of the Enlightenment project itself, albeit that the aim is now ‘not the freedom and autonomy of humanity, but the freedom and autonomy of God’ (‘Radikale Autonomie Gottes: Zum Versta¨ndnis der Theologie Karl Barths und ihre Folgen’, 164). 35 Graf, ‘Die “anti-historische Revolution”’, 395.

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‘salvation history’, and ‘the history of the community’. Everything finite only has history to the extent that it participates in God’s history.36

However, Graf argues, by divinizing the notion of absolute subjectivity, Barth is in reality disguising the fact that the concept itself has been retained in his anthropology as well, where it re-emerges in the form of a ‘will for the present’.37 In other words, although God appears to be a salutary point beyond the crises of historical relativism and scepticism, the real drive behind Barth’s notion of divine U¨ bergeschichtlichkeit is a doctrine of immediacy which excises all historical relations, enabling the human subject to realize itself, unencumbered by any ulterior historical preoccupations. Not only, then, does the anti-historical theology practised by Barth (and others) in the 1920s make engagement in complex moral dilemmas impossible, as Niebuhr had claimed. The quest for a break with the past, combined with ‘the religious longing for a life beyond all mediations’, actually makes Barth’s theology structurally parallel with the totalitarian political theories of the day, with their ‘pretensions to universal cultural leadership’ based on ‘exclusive access to the truth’.38 Finally, mention should be made of Barth’s own self-criticisms. At various stages, and with varying motives, he was ready to issue retractions of his earlier work by characterizing it in terms of a general failure to properly construe the relation of eternity and time. In a famous passage of the Church Dogmatics, he describes his earlier theology as heading towards the ‘systematic . . . reduction of God’s eternity to the denominator of post-temporality’.39 Furthermore, he was subsequently happy to confess that he, along with the other dialectical theologians, had made a philosophical dualism

36

Graf, ‘Die “anti-historische Revolution”’, 396. Ibid., 383 (italics original). 38 Ibid., 404. Pannenberg has consistently linked what he refers to as Barth’s ‘authoritarian supernaturalism’ with an anti-historical doctrine of time and eternity (e.g. ‘Can Christianity do without an eschatology?, 31). There is some truth to Graf’s claim that a desire for immediacy and ‘the removal of historical distance’ (‘Die anti-historische Revolution’, 390) drives Barth’s theology in the 1920s. Yet it would be wrong to imply that Barth sees this as being embodied in his own theology. More ambivalently, as we shall see, his theology inhabits a space in which historical distances remain, and theological immediacy is always hoped for, rather than achieved. 39 Barth, CD II/1, 634. 37

Introduction

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between God and world the basis of his theology: ‘We viewed this “wholly other” in isolation, abstracted and absolutised, and set it over against man, this miserable wretch—not to say boxed his ears with it—in such fashion that it continually showed greater similarity to the deity of the God of the philosophers than to the deity of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.’40 Nevertheless, for all that such readings (and the number could be multiplied many times over) can lead to highly suggestive theorizations of Barth’s theology—and notwithstanding the apparent authority lent to them by the author’s self-criticism—they rarely bother refer to the writings themselves in order to enquire whether the theory is actually borne out in them. Indeed, even when they do, this often just means lifting a quotation out of its context in order to prove the dualism the author already knows to underlie Barth’s work. To resort to a principle of timeless eternity, or the opposition between eternity and history, in explaining Barth’s theological writings in the early 1920s not only fails to deal with the complexity of the texts; it is a red herring, which talks past what is really happening in them. And yet, a similar claim can be expressed in rather different terms. Let us take, for example, the substantial early study of Barth made by H. W. Schmidt. Like Althaus, who is regularly referenced, Schmidt thinks that the idea of an opposition between time and eternity gives us access to the ‘ultimate presuppositions’ behind dialectical theology.41 However, his reading is philosophically better informed than that of Althaus, and the resulting analysis becomes considerably more challenging. Schmidt’s contention is that Barth’s theology is an attempt to move beyond the general historical and psychological categories used by liberal Protestantism to construe what he calls ‘the eschatological rhythm of history’,42 in God’s dealings with the world. ‘Where revelation is referred to,’ Schmidt agrees with Barth, ‘it is a matter of God, not of the pitiful remains and half-truths which historical criticism has clung onto from the old truths of faith, as it

40 41 42

Barth, The Humanity of God, 44f. Schmidt, Zeit und Ewigkeit: Die letzten Voraussetzungen der dialektischen Theologie. Ibid., 382ff.

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anxiously tries to prove them.’43 And yet, Barth is ultimately unable to move beyond liberalism because, into the eschatological-historical dialectic of revelation, ‘a philosophical, or better, a rational moment [is] dragged in from the outside’.44 However, Schmidt carefully corrects himself here. For his argument is not that Barth is dependent upon any particular philosophy as such;45 simply that his theology is an instance of the trespassing of reason beyond its due limits—the intrusion of what is inevitably and invariably non-eschatological reason upon an eschatological reality.46 This is by no means a new problem in theology, however, but the re-emergence of an unresolved controversy from the Reformation. In their anxiety not to reduce revelation to history, Schmidt claims, the Reformed theologians appealed to a logical mantra—finitum non capax infiniti—which ended up closing off the possibility of revelation in advance. In their anxiety to protect the historical reality of revelation, on the other hand, the Lutherans countered with a formulation—finitum capax infiniti—which simply repeated the same rational logic, but from the opposite direction. In other words, rather than being an eschatological history, revelation was treated in theology either as an impossibility or as a possibility, which could be accounted for from within reason.47 Schmidt’s argument is that Barth’s conflict with liberalism can be seen in similar terms. On either side, the eschatological–historical reality of revelation becomes the victim of laws dictated by an anti-historical, anti-eschatological, rationalism. With the Lutherans and liberals, revelation seems to retreat back to the merely historical. With Barth and the Reformed, the eschatological nature of revelation looks like it resolves up into a non-historical reality. Here too, then, Barth is interpreted as stuck in that same dialectic between eternity and time, and is said to advocate ‘the dissolution of a historical notion of revelation, and the claim that redemption and salvation are unhistorical’.48 43

Schmidt, Zeit und Ewigkeit: Die letzten Voraussetzungen der dialektischen Theologie, 159. 44 Ibid., 20 (italics original). 45 Cf. the more recent finding of Beintker that Barth’s relation to philosophy was ‘critically eclectic’ (Die Dialektik in der «dialektischen Theologie» Karl Barths, 242) rather than being directly influenced by one strand of philosophy. 46 Schmidt, Zeit und Ewigkeit, 174, 178. 47 48 Ibid., 158. Ibid., 108.

Introduction

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However, the grounds of Barth’s dialectic are traced back by Schmidt to the aporetic structures of reason itself. He concurs with what he thinks of as Barth’s attempt to maintain an ‘infinite qualitative distinction’ between God and creation. Barth ‘undoubtedly had a deep understanding of the indispensable fundamental truths of Christianity, and did not want to go along with the way in which modern mediating theology diluted these and thinned them out’.49 It is just that, in drawing on the dialectic of time and eternity to describe this truth, Barth in fact resorted to a rational category which ends up eliminating a distinction that can, finally, only be maintained by that history itself: We can almost say that the distance between eternity and time is reduced by dialectic, because the personal character of God’s relation with humanity is lost . . . We will best grasp God’s distance from all time by depicting it as beyond opposition [u¨bergegensa¨tzlich] and beyond dialectic [u¨berdialektisch].50

The problem with Barth’s theology is in fact the problem of theological rationality tout court: namely, it inevitably appears to contain God, by dictating in advance what is conceivably possible—even when this possibility is referred to as an ‘impossibility’.51 Thus, for Schmidt, Barth’s rhetoric about the ‘impossibility’ of revelation, salvation etc. is a clear indication of reason’s trespass into the domain of the eschatological, from where it can dictate terms over God. In turn, this means that the dialectical opposition of eschatology and history is merely symptomatic, a surface indication that theological reason has overreached itself. Although I believe this reading of Barth to be incorrect, it comes near to the heart of the issue. The acute pathos of Barth’s theology in Go¨ttingen stems, in fact, from his awareness of the danger Schmidt diagnoses: that theology might end up replacing the eschatological reality it intended to display. However, I shall argue (contra Schmidt) that Barth’s theological dialectic ought not be seen as evidence of this having occurred, but precisely as the struggle (albeit one whose outcome cannot be guaranteed from within the circle of theological argument) to prevent this occurring. Friedrich Seven has shown that 49

50 Ibid., 171. Ibid., 189. For Schmidt’s discussion of the philosophical notion of possibility, which Barth’s theology allegedly assumes, see ibid., 176ff. 51

14


the ‘metaphysics’ that Barth (like Heidegger) opposes, is the form or structure of reflection itself, as this brings Being into the presence of thought (im Akt des Gegenwa¨rtigens). Thinking, in other words, never occurs in the abstract, independently of a disposition of the human will, but by taking up a particular relation (Bezug) towards things. And so, it always remains plausible that thought might become governed by what Seven refers to as ‘the will to empower itself over Being’.52 Barth is, in fact, highly conscious of the risk of theological reason assuming control over, or replacing, God; and his theology at the beginning of the 1920s is to be understood as a sustained effort to avoid this happening.53 In and after Ro¨merbrief II, his writing developed into a self-aware and self-ironic process,54 designed to point up the inability of the rational human subject to tie God down conceptually. If Barth often resorts to a negative rhetoric in trying to depict the relation between God and humanity, the intention is to convey God’s non-containability, his capacity to evade the human will in thought. The eschatological disruption caused by God’s presence has nothing to do with any annihilation of history, as such, but concerns the ordering of the relation of creatures to the creator; an order registered, first of all, in theological reason itself. Barth’s theology is to be thought of as rigorously ‘anti-metaphysical’, in the sense that the possibility of reversing the order of that relation arises when thought operates a kind of double-objectification: of God apart from humanity, and of humanity apart from God. What he wants to avoid, above all, is a theology that describes God and humanity in abstraction from one another, for this is the gap into which human rationality is ready to insert itself in its efforts to escape the eschatological presence of God in thought. In the Church Dogmatics, it is the christocentrism of the doctrine of God which, together with theological ethics, guards against this abstraction. In CD II/2, } 33, for example, Barth at least gestures towards a position where the mysterium paschalis is definitive of the

52

Seven, Die Ewigkeit Gottes und die Zeitlichkeit des Menschen, 12. Thus, Barth’s theology in the 1920s is exactly the opposite of the ‘onto-theology’ Stadtland takes it to be (Eschatologie und Geschichte, 183, 188). 54 Frei refers to this as new mode of dialectic in Barth’s theology as the ‘dialectic of concepts or judgements’ (The Doctrine of Revelation in Karl Barth, 132). 53

Introduction

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eternal togetherness of God with humanity, so that it becomes God’s very essence to be Deus pro nobis. However strongly we read that audacious move,55 it is ruled out in advance for Barth’s theology in Go¨ttingen because of his anxiety about dogmatic over-description of God. ‘God is God’ (UCR I, 164), he insists: any further statement about God is an abstraction from that tautology.56 And yet, to say that ‘God is God’ is not to say that God exists in isolation. Quite the reverse: it is the confession, based upon God’s presence to the theologian, that the God of whom the theologian speaks will not suffer being replaced by what the theologian says of him. In other words, this moment of encounter between God and humanity, in which each of them is theologically defined, is attested by the theologian’s loss for words. If God is not Deus pro nobis, in Barth’s theology in Go¨ttingen, he is nevertheless most emphatically Deus cum nobis. This Denkform might be seen as an instance of the ‘Chalcedonian pattern’ of Barth’s theology.57 However, its more direct antecedent is to be found in the doctrine of revelation Barth inherits from his teacher, Wilhelm Herrmann.58 For Herrmann, it was not so much the domestication of God within historical and psychological realities that constituted the major theological danger, as the abstraction of God from human reality. For any hint of a gap here means that human life remains bound by law, a striving after God, remote from God’s gracious turn to be with humanity. ‘The chief end of 55 For a strong reading of the identity between God’s immanent being and his election of humanity, see McCormack, ‘Grace and Being’; for a very different reading of Barth’s doctrine of the immanent Trinity, Molnar, Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity, esp. 61–4. As McCormack points out (‘Grace and Being’, 102), Barth tended to guard against a total identification: ‘In Himself and as such [the Son] is not Deus pro nobis, either ontologically or epistemologically’ (Barth, CD IV/1, 52). 56 Migliore suggests that ‘God is God’ is ‘the theme of the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics’ (‘Karl Barth’s first lectures in dogmatics: Instruction in the Christian Religion’, xxvi). Busch goes further, arguing that it is the constant theme of Barth’s theology from 1916 to the end of his career (Die Anfa¨nge des Theologen Karl Barth in seinen Go¨ttinger Jahren, 21–2). 57 Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth, 185ff. 58 See Korsch, who shows how Barth’s doctrine of revelation takes up an aporia Herrmann left unresolved in his: namely, the grounds for the discontinuity of revelation within the continuity of the human consciousness (Korsch, ‘Fraglichkeit des Lebens und Evidenz des Glaubens. Karl Barth und Wilhelm Herrmann im Gespra¨ch u¨ber Offenbarung und menschliche Subjektivita¨t’, 135, 137ff.).

16


every religion’, Herrmann claimed, ‘is to secure God’s communion with each individual soul, and every devout man knows that he himself cannot bring about that communion, but that God does it for him.’59 This was the conviction that drove Herrmann’s sustained attack on the doctrinal orthodoxy of late-nineteenth-century Protestantism. So long as revelation is thought of, not as communion (Verkehr), but only as ‘information concerning God’, we are left in the ‘miserable condition’ of having in our own strength ‘to obtain the certainty of a real communion of God with ourselves’.60 Although Barth would come to regard as unnecessary the antithesis Herrmann describes between theological doctrine and the revelation of grace, his concept of revelation, in Go¨ttingen at any rate, shares the same conviction that revelation fundamentally means a communion—or rather, a coming together (for Barth wants to emphasize the eschatological novelty of this event)—between God and humanity, and that everything depends theologically on depicting them in this encounter. If Barth brings any ‘metaphysical’ presupposition to his theology, it is precisely the opposite of an abstract dualism whereby the reality of revelation is brought under threat. The distance between God and humanity is never an abstract transcendence of God and creatures, for Barth, but the distance between two counterparts bound in a personal encounter, an encounter which is constantly threatened by the human being’s attempt to become his or her own creator.

¨ T TINGEN 2. BARTH’S THEOLOGY IN GO The period of Barth’s work I analyse in this book—indeed, the wider period between 1921 and 1935 which he spent teaching in Germany—has lately come under new scrutiny from Barth scholars.61

59

Herrmann, The Communion of the Christian with God, 199. Ibid., 58. 61 See the collection of papers from the conference that took place in Emden earlier this decade, Beintker, Link, and Trowitzsch (eds.), Karl Barth in Deutschland (1921–1935): Aufbruch–Kla¨rung–Widerstand. 60

Introduction

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This is largely down to the posthumous publication of the academic lectures Barth delivered during these years, which has cast new light on the development of his theology between Ro¨merbrief II and the Church Dogmatics. My analysis here is based almost exclusively on works Barth produced while teaching in Go¨ttingen, and especially on the academic lecture courses he gave there. These lectures may be divided into three categories: Reformed theology and history, biblical exegesis, and dogmatics. Strangely, Barth almost never makes explicit crossreference between these, so that part of the work of the interpreter is to draw out some of the appropriate connections. The texts were not published by Barth, nor intended to be. They were preparatory work, partly for the sake of the students whom Barth was preparing for ministry in the German Reformed church, partly for Barth’s own theological career. Although he would gather materials together in the vacation before the start of term, and make a preliminary study of the literature before the lecture course began, the lectures themselves were written as he went along, and often late into the night before they were to be delivered. They are, therefore, not finished statements so much as Barth’s intuitive and somewhat rushed dealings with subjects he was generally becoming acquainted with from scratch. That they are often highly readable, penetrating and original pieces of writing is testimony to his remarkable capacity to assimilate large quantities of theology and quickly penetrate the heart of the matter. The recent availability of all this material has moved Barth scholarship forwards in various ways. In particular, the Reformed theology lectures have made clear the importance of reading Barth as the Reformed thinker he quite consciously became in Go¨ttingen. In that respect, Matthias Freudenberg has given an important and welldocumented account of the status and internal politics of the German Reformed church that Barth encountered in the early 1920s, as well as of the academic rivalries Barth ran up against as a Reformed theologian in the overwhelmingly Lutheran faculty.62 In addition, John Webster has shown how some of the most characteristic themes of 62 Freudenberg, Karl Barth und die reformierte Theologie, 17–86. See also the historical background given by Busch, Die Anfa¨nge des Theologen Karl Barth in seinen Go¨ttinger Jahren, 8–12.

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Barth’s writing, not least the connection between divine sovereignty and ethics, can be traced to Barth’s identity as a Reformed Christian.63 There has also been some recent interest in the exegetical lectures on 1 Corinthians (titled, Die Auferstehung der Toten), first published by Barth in 1923, soon after they were delivered in Go¨ttingen.64 However, most of Barth’s exegetical lecture courses are yet to appear in the Gesamtausgabe, and so they await further work. Of all the academic lectures from this period, the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics has received most attention, although this has primarily been as a means of indicating something about Barth’s development in the 1920s.65 One approach, for example in the introductory essays of Daniel Migliore and Hinrich Stoevesandt, has been to outline the continuities and differences between the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics and the Church Dogmatics.66 Stoevesandt, however, concludes his piece with the plea that the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics not only be read in terms of the later work, but given the chance to speak for itself. Indeed, he appeals for the two works to be granted ‘equal rights’, proposing that they be treated as complementary, even as ‘mutually corrective’.67 The ‘vertical open-endedness’ of the earlier lectures, he argues, might serve as a critical rejoinder to the rather more ‘finished’ CD, whose ‘tightly constructed architecture’ easily masks the ‘provisionality’ and the ‘venturesome nature’ of all dogmatic work.68 The most extensive analysis of the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics is by Bruce McCormack. Building on the work of Michael Beintker and Ingrid

63 Webster, ‘The theology of Zwingli’ and ‘The theology of the Reformed confessions’ in Barth’s Earlier Theology, 15ff., 41ff. 64 Fergusson, ‘Barth’s The Resurrection of the Dead: Further reflections’; Grieb, ‘Last things first: Karl Barth’s theological exegesis of 1 Corinthians’; Webster, ‘The resurrection of the dead’ in Barth’s Earlier Theology, 67ff. 65 In his study of Barth’s dialectic, for example, Beintker, contrasts the christological focus of dialectics in Barth’s Christliche Dogmatik im Entwurf (1927) with the dialectics in the GD (Beintker, Die Dialektik in der «dialektischen Theologie» Karl Barths, 177–82). 66 Migliore, ‘Karl Barth’s first lectures in dogmatics: Instruction in the Christian Religion’; Stoevesandt, ‘Die Go¨ttinger Dogmatikvorlesung: Grundri der Theologie Barths’. 67 Stoevesandt, ‘Die Go¨ttinger Dogmatikvorlesung’, 95. 68 Ibid., 96.

Introduction

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69

Spieckermann, his major monograph has two main purposes.70 The first is to reassess the claim, established principally by von Balthasar, that Barth’s theological development throughout the 1920s can be described in terms of a shift from dialectic to analogy.71 By showing that elements of dialectic and analogy are present in both the earlier and later Barth—and, indeed, by pointing out that the terms are not really equivalent, in any case, so that to talk of a shift from the one to the other becomes conceptually meaningless— McCormack has demonstrated a far greater continuity in Barth’s writings than was often previously assumed to be the case.72 He describes only one major ‘break’, occurring during the First World War, before which Barth had been ‘a dedicated and convinced theological liberal’.73 From 1915 on, however, Barth began to develop a ‘critically realist’74 position, a position which emerged from the realization that the theologies of religious experience in which he had been educated had made God into a human possession.75 The subsequent shifts and turns Barth’s theology would continue to undergo for two decades were simply (contra Balthasar) internal adjustments made to sharpen up Barth’s initial intuition about the supreme priority of God. McCormack’s further aim was to discredit the idea, virtually axiomatic in certain circles of Anglo-Saxon scholarship, that Barth’s theology was correctly describable as a ‘repristinated’ (neo-)orthodoxy. By studying the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics, in which the sources upon which Barth constructed his dogmatics are still very close to the surface, he is able to show in detail just how much of an innovator Barth was within the scholastic tradition he was now working on. Although McCormack goes so far as to describe the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics as a kind of ‘sentence commentary’ on Heppe’s Reformed Dogmatics, his point is that ‘Barth’s use of his basic text, like the Sentence Commentaries of

69 Beintker, Die Dialektik in der «dialetkischen Theologie» Karl Barths; Spieckermann, Gotteserkenntnis. Ein Beitrag zur Grundfrage der neuen Theologie Karl Barths. 70 McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its genesis and development, 1909–1936. 71 Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth, 86–113. 72 McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, esp. 16–20. 73 74 75 Ibid., 78. Ibid., 129–30. Ibid., 106–7.

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centuries past, was an exercise in original thinking.’76 In fact, Barth’s ‘critical realism’ made any return to the metaphysical positivism so ruthlessly exposed by Kant in orthodox Protestant scholasticism impossible. Even if the critical epistemology through which Barth read the scholastics did not make him an unreconstructed Kantian—since the limits to human knowledge, McCormack is careful to stress, are derived by Barth from the revelation of the divine mystery, rather than from philosophical reason—‘the problem being addressed is described in Kantian terms’.77 McCormack’s analyses of Barth’s dogmatics in the 1920s are designed to show the modernity of Barth’s thought by indicating how he developed this critical doctrine of revelation by reading it through the classical dogmas of the Trinity and Christology, which form the doctrinal heart of his dogmatics. The claim that Barth (in the words of Richard Roberts) ‘transmitted the tradition virtually entire at the cost of its alienation’,78 therefore becomes untenable. Notwithstanding the boldness of the argument, and the precision of analysis, McCormack’s thesis has not found universal agreement among Barth scholars, especially in Germany. The criticisms turn around the claim that McCormack does not take enough ‘theological distance’ from Barth;79 and that by buying into Barth’s polemics against neo-Protestantism, he has failed to see that the rhetoric of total repudiation is, in this case, a dialectical move operated from within that tradition.80 In short, because Barth presupposed, and made his own, the problems surrounding the constitution of the religious and moral subject that had preoccupied liberal Protestantism, the

76 McCormack, A Scholastic of a Higher Order: The development of Karl Barth’s theology, 1921–31, 563. 77 McCormack, ‘Revelation and history in a transfoundationalist perspective: Karl Barth’s theological epistemology in conversation with a Schleiermacherian tradition’, 32. 78 Roberts, A Theology on Its Way?, xiv. 79 Korsch, ‘Bruce L. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology’, 217. Cf. also the comment of Pfleiderer that McCormack’s argument ‘seems to presuppose what it wants to explain: namely, the particular theological Inhaltlichkeit of Barth’s theology’ (‘«Inkulturationsdialektik»: Ein Rekonstruktionsvorschlag zur modernita¨tstheoretischen Barthinterpretation’, 241). 80 As Harmut Ruddies observed in 1985, talk of a ‘Traditionsabbruch’, into which Barth sometimes liked to lapse, amounts, in the end, to a metaphor (Ruddies, ‘Karl Barth und Wilhelm Herrmann. Aspekte aus den Anfa¨ngen der dialektischen Theologie’, 52).

Introduction

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idea of a turn away from liberal to dialectical theology becomes questionable.81 It needs pointing out that there is more at stake here than historical accuracy. Although one generally struggles to find a precise definition of what is meant by ‘neo-orthodoxy’, its detractors seem to have in mind something more fundamental than the repristination of supposedly obsolete theological categories. The serious charge is that orthodox dogmatics is rationalist, and usually involves abstracting in one way or another from human reality. That being so, acquitting Barth of this would have to mean more than attending to his epistemology. Indeed, if he were singularly preoccupied with the problem of the knowledge of God, this might just be evidence of a rather superficial interest in human existence, which in real experience emerges as a more complex and troublesome phenomenon. McCormack has responded to criticism by restating that the heart of Barth’s doctrine of revelation was not his Kantian epistemology (which McCormack finds problematic) but ‘the situation of the first disciples . . . who were directly confronted by the man Jesus’.82 And so, ‘[w]hat determined [Barth’s] theology from now on was not

81 The point has been made in different ways more recently. Folkart Wittekind, for example, seeks to show that even while he was studying with Hermann in Marburg, Barth was never content simply to reproduce his teacher’s position, in the controversy between Herrmann and Troeltsch, which was peaking around that time. From the beginning he tried to make an original and critical contribution of his own, from within the Ritschlian tradition (Wittekind, Geschichtliche Offenbarung und die Wahrheit des Glaubens, esp. 148–53). Thus, the idea of a complete break between ‘liberal’ and ‘dialectical’ theology becomes questionable, since Barth was never straightforwardly ‘liberal’ in the first place, and never finally ceased to be so either. Christophe Chalamet has made a similar case recently, categorizing Herrmann, along with his two students Barth and Bultmann, as ‘dialectical theologians’, all three (Chalamet, Dialectical Theologians: Wilhelm Herrmann, Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann). His argument suffers, however, from a rather formal use of the term ‘dialectical’, so that the attempt to suggest the continuities between Barth and Herrmann never quite pierce through the surface of the way in which each of them elaborates Christian doctrine. The real point about Barth’s continuity with liberalism is, in fact, that he shares with it the question about agency and subjectivity. This claim is not new. It dates back, at least, to Rentdorff ’s programmatic essay, ‘Radikale Autonomie Gottes. Zum Versta¨ndnis der Theologie Karl Barths und ihre Folgen’. However, it denotes an approach that has had strangely little impact on Anglo-Saxon readings of Barth. 82 McCormack, ‘Der theologiegeschichtliche Ort Karl Barths’, 29.

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an “abstract epistemological theory” but the concrete material demands of the doctrine of the Trinity and Christology, which give the Subject of revelation his due.’83 And yet, as I shall be arguing, Barth’s worry about removing revelation from history ought to be understood within a broader, and more basic concern about the standing of the human subject in relation to God. His energies are devoted to describing the objective historical grounds of revelation and to what happens to the human being in revelation as well (an interest he shares with liberal Protestant theology). McCormack tends to emphasize the former when making the case for Barth as a ‘modern’ theologian. The most ingenious analysis of the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics comes from within a massive study by Georg Pfleiderer. Like McCormack, Beintker, and Spieckermann, Pfleiderer thinks that identifying what is modern about Barth means trying to establish his basic Denkform; but he is unsatisfied by their attempts to locate this in Barth’s epistemology. Instead, he wants to get at what he calls the ‘hidden architectural plan’84 below the surface of Barth’s writing, by demonstrating the ‘paradigmatic significance’85 of his cultural engagement as a systematic theologian. Pfleiderer’s approach—which might be read as an application of Wolfgang Iser’s reception theory to Barth’s theology86—involves a Rekonstruktion of the pragmatic ‘environment’ of Barth’s texts, in order to uncover the dilemmas which lie behind them. In the case of the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics, the dilemma concerns the production of what Pfleiderer calls ‘a scientifically teachable theology’.87 Rather like avant-garde theatre, the primary intention of the theology in Ro¨merbrief II had been to ‘chivvy away at the reader’ who, in the process, is ‘dispossessed of his role as spectator in theoretical control, and made into a religious–theological participant’.88 And yet, that commentary left behind a problem, which Barth would subsequently begin to tackle in Go¨ttingen: it ‘creates disciples rather

83

McCormack, ‘Der theologiegeschichtliche Ort Karl Barths’, 39. Pfleiderer, Karl Barths praktische Theologie: Zur Genese und Kontext eines paradigmatischen Entwurfes systematischer Theologie im 20. Jahrhundert, 460. 85 86 87 88 Ibid., 6. Cf. ibid., 11f. Ibid., 390. Ibid., 442. 84

Introduction 89

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than students’. By systematically denying his readers any theoretical standpoint from where they would become religiously independent from God (or ‘from theology’, as Pfleiderer sometimes puts it) Barth’s theology can only become reproducible, or methodologically learnable, by betraying its deepest impulses. Therefore, the ‘turn to analogy’, or to dogmatics, when Barth is in Go¨ttingen, is not to be understood according to epistemological theory alone but, more comprehensively, in terms of the practical theological dilemmas now facing him in his new institutional location. Now that Barth was addressing students who were training to become part of a ‘church elite’, he had to make his theology learnable, and his method explicit—and yet, this obligation already contradicted Barth’s most fundamental intentions. By turning itself into a science, Barth’s theology was threatened by nothing less than the loss of its religious–political claim to reality, its claim to be realized in real life, which transcends the academic system of reflection. The explicit interest in becoming institutional runs the risk of being counterproductive. The actual conceptual and figural problem of the dogmatician is how it is possible for theology to turn itself into a science without resurrecting the ‘spectator’, who is notoriously at home in the academy, and whose elimination Barth’s theology as a whole aims at.90 Pfleiderer’s discussion of how Barth copes with this problem is, perhaps, unnecessarily abstruse. It is also over-determined by the suspicion that Barth’s dogmatics was a form of theological authoritarianism, which was simply of a piece with the political trends of the day. Possibly, it is Pfleiderer’s commitment to reception theory which generates an over-interpretation, since reading texts backwards from their Wirkungsgeschichte inevitably tends to reduce their polyvalent complexity to the role they play within a rather unilateral historical trajectory. That aside, Pfleiderer’s analysis of the tensions in the dogmatics is largely borne out, I think, in my own readings of the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics. As Pfleiderer puts it, Barth is constantly torn between the ‘binary logic’ of pragmatic theological discourse (i.e. preaching) and the ‘tertiary structure’ of scientific reflection, which involves stepping back from the direct heat of that event. This means that, in the end, 89

Ibid., 377.

90

Ibid., 395.

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‘dogmatic statements are precisely not descriptive statements’ in this dogmatics,91 because Barth quickly resolves them into the binary logic of theological proclamation. ‘Dogmatics is preaching for preachers; it is inconceivable without its religious–persuasive meaning.’92 *** The argument being made here turns on the observation that Barth’s theology—like that of Rudolf Bultmann, who had also studied under Herrmann in Marburg—proceeds from the conviction that human beings exist before God eschatologically. Human ontology is not a settled condition, a ‘nature’ of any kind, but a response to the imposing presence of God, who summons me to live beyond myself. Therefore, what defines this God most fundamentally is not his superiority over all other beings, nor his providential governance of history, but his encounter with human beings as their God. Both aspects of this are indispensable: God is not conceived of in abstraction from his creation, yet he meets it with such commanding superiority that, just as importantly, it may not extract itself from him. This encounter is what is meant by revelation: a ‘dialogue’ between human beings and God through God’s Word. It is something of a fundamental perspective in Barth’s theology in Go¨ttingen, the single point towards which the entire economy between God and humanity tends. The singularity of Barth’s perspective, generates two major dilemmas. First, because revelation is the Word of God, which God himself utters by turning to human beings, and because this is the unique moment of theological ‘reality’, theology—indeed, Christian ministry as such—is caught between an obligation to minister to this moment and an inability to do so. It is when God addresses the human person that God is truly God, for he or she can now no longer keep God at arms’ length. Human language, however, is unable to convey God’s movement—more specifically, his movementtowards—and so must speak of God in such a way that he ceases to be God. The problem becomes especially acute because Barth wants to do more than reflect on religious language itself. As he

91 Pfleiderer, Karl Barths praktische Theologie: Zur Genese und Kontext eines paradigmatischen Entwurfes systematischer Theologie im 20. Jahrhundert, 404. 92 Ibid., 419.

Introduction

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tries to shift towards a positive theological idiom, he finds it difficult to wrestle free from a purely contrastive account of divine presence and human witness in Christian ministry. In God’s revelation, the one seems to cancel out the other. The second difficulty concerns Christian existence itself. The real dilemma raised by Barth’s doctrine of revelation in Go¨ttingen is not that of its historicity (or otherwise), but of the grounding of Christian existence in God. Barth is anxious that Christian existence should remain eschatological—an occurrence, rather than an ontologically stable reality—since any stabilizing of the human condition potentially provides a footing for the human subject to assert control over itself, and thus over God. The eschatological orientation of the Christian life means that it has no interior grounds, but is (re-)created in an act of divine grace which awakens a new type of subjectivity in relation to God. And yet, in denying any other than an eschatological basis to human action, the danger arises that the freedom of the human act is not generated by God at all, but is a selfgrounding spontaneity whose real impulse, after all, is wholly subjective. In other words, eschatological anthropology might topple back into exactly the problem it was invoked to avoid: creaturely independence from God. In the Church Dogmatics, Barth will deal with this by developing a strong Christology, combined with a theological ethics. Because Jesus Christ has universal human significance, he can become the ontological ground of my existence; a ground which, while established extra me, genuinely contains my reality as well—a fact which is then verified in the ethical sections of the dogmatics. However, Barth’s wariness about reifying human ontology means that, in Go¨ttingen, the doctrine of revelation is not structured around Christology, but around the encounter with God in the Word; and this in turn means that any positive account of human action always risks supplanting the moment of response to God’s presence.93 Ethics is an ‘auxiliary 93 In his analysis of the early Barth, Cullberg argued that ‘dialectical theology stands in the sharpest opposition to the tendency to ethicise faith’ because this would make faith into ‘an ethical achievement’ (Cullberg, Das Problem der Ethik in der Gegenwart, 17). More recently, Webster has argued that elements of a more positive ethics can be found even in Barth’s dialectical theology (Webster, ‘“Life from the third dimension”: Human action in Barth’s early ethics’ in Barth’s Moral Theology, 11–39).

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discipline’ (Hilfswissenschaft), Barth insists, ‘in no way to be confused with dogmatics’ (UCR I, 274). What must be avoided is obscuring the moral venture of human life with God behind a selfpossessed human identity, out of which a person becomes able to act etsi Deus non daretur, even if this human being continues to be construed as ‘religious’. However, this leaves Barth on a knife-edge: to give an account of human nature is to abstract from the eschatological encounter with God. And yet, not to do so leaves the human being exposed in the face of the sheer spontaneity of God’s Word, and so always ready to ground herself. This is the dilemma addressed by Barth’s doctrine of baptism, which I discuss in my final chapter. The argument of the book runs as follows. After this Introduction, I begin with a chapter comparing texts by Barth with others by Bultmann from the same period. Although there are certainly differences in approach which will prepare the way for later controversies between them, by setting Barth’s theology alongside Bultmann’s, my aim is to show that, at the outset, it confronts exactly the same problem as his: namely, the eschatological presence of God in revelation, and the character of Christian existence in that presence. Both of them share the sense that theology is deeply challenged to discover an idiom which will correspond to the reality of God, not because God is absent from the world, but because he is with it in all his otherness, and his presence remains ever-new. Although Barth does not presuppose the exaggerated dualisms between God’s Word and human language, and between objective and existential time, as Bultmann does, the comparison is also useful in preparing for the critiques of Barth’s theology I will make in subsequent chapters. In Chapter 2, I turn to the doctrine of revelation, around which the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics is structured. As I show, however, the primacy of this doctrine has little to do with epistemology; revelation, in fact, is Barth’s shorthand for talking of the eschatological presence of God. It is a formal, rather than a material doctrine, focusing theology onto the moment of encounter (or ‘dialogue’) between God and humanity in the Word. Barth works this out by making preaching the location of this event, as the church’s attempt to respond to the existential human question. By developing an account of the human person as ‘questioner’, Barth prevents his strong eschatology from implying the abstraction of any pure human nature. Surprisingly, this leads him to

Introduction

27

develop, in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics, a kind of negative proof for God, based in the phenomenon of the fragmentariness of human existence: the more acute the experience of divine absence, the more sure is God’s presence. In Chapter 3, I show that Barth’s turn to dogmatics did not, initially, envisage a positive theology of any kind, but was a direct rebuttal of modern religious anthropology. First, Barth indicates an absurdity in the latter: by making the religious subject its theme, Religionswissenschaft makes God an object, thereby falling prey to exactly the criticism it made of classical theism. Secondly, Barth proposes that to make preaching, rather than religious sentiment, the ‘raw material’ for dogmatics is, in fact, to provide a far less esoteric point of departure—which therefore better meets the empirical standards of modern science. However, because he is worried about detracting from the eschatological presence of the Word of God, Barth finds it difficult to move beyond the choice between identifying or opposing dogmatics and revelation. As I show at the end of the chapter, he will start to develop an alternative conceptuality in 1925–6 (his first term teaching in Mu¨nster) when, through his lectures on John’s Gospel, Barth articulates an understanding of witness which enables him to shift out of that contrastive account of Christian ministry. In Chapter 4, I turn back to Barth’s lectures on Reformed theology which were the major preparation work for the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics. Here, I introduce the themes that will be to the fore in the latter part of the book. Barth becomes interested in the Reformed account of the Christian life, and increasingly in its sacramental and Christological controversies with Lutheran theology. Their inability to reach a consensus position is a kind of historical confirmation of the impossibility of giving a direct statement of divine revelation. Yet equally importantly, the controversies indicated to Barth the need for Christian existence to be grounded objectively if it was not to slip into some form of subjectivism. In Chapter 5, I turn to Barth’s Christology. We shall find that his doctrine of the anhypostatic human nature of Jesus Christ is not the anti-historical move in Christology it has often been taken to be. In fact, I argue, Barth’s dialectic of revelation as hiddenness demands (at least formally) that Jesus be fully human if revelation is to occur at all.

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Similarly, in his doctrine of the Resurrection Barth does not simply locate the event beyond history, as he is often criticized for doing. On the other hand, I suggest that he does curtail the impact of the Resurrection, in effect making the doctrine identical with the ascension, because of his concern not to reify or stabilize the event, and so to detract from the novelty of divine presence. The problem, in other words, concerns the way in which Christology is related to his moral theology. Finally, in Chapter 6, I turn to Barth’s pneumatology. The chapter has three aims. First, I look at how Barth’s account of the Spirit is developed in opposition to modern Protestant exponents of ‘religion’ (Harnack and Schleiermacher). Secondly, I examine Barth’s doctrine of the Christian life, and suggest that it is the strong focus on revelation in Barth’s theology in Go¨ttingen which makes it difficult for him to develop the positive and wide-ranging account of Christian ethics he would articulate later in his career. Finally, I examine Barth’s sacramental theology which, far from being of secondary importance in Barth’s early dogmatics, is actually used to resolve a problem generated by the eschatological orientation he is working with here. Barth loses confidence in the ability of the eschatological Word to ground and sustain the existential act of the human subject, and so develops a baptismal economy of grace as well, in order to provide an objective ground for human freedom within the subject itself.94 94 For the sake of consistency, and because there are no English versions of a number of the texts I am using, all quotations of Barth are my own translations from the German editions.

1 Eschatological Existence in Barth and Bultmann I have two objectives in this chapter. The first is to examine the way in which Barth and Bultmann describe the form of existence to which the gospel summons Christians; the second, to indicate two issues which result from this (set out briefly in the introduction), showing how Barth and Bultmann approach these slightly differently. I do this by looking in detail at texts by each of them from the 1920s. For both theologians, to be a Christian is to be remade by God into a new type of subject, and therefore not to be defined by any possessed ontology or nature, but by the eschatological relation in which this subject now exists. However, because this mode of existence is inherently unstable, human beings are always liable to try to evade it where possible. Moreover, they seek to do so even by evoking ‘God’; indeed, especially by doing so, for it may be that what they bring to mind as they imagine the deity is not necessarily the God who truly is, but only the concept of an ideal Being designed to replace his reality. In that way, they succeed in offering themselves religious grounds for reasserting their ontological stability, isolated from God and securely protected from his presence. The first issue arises from this. It concerns the problem that theology might be abetting the process just outlined by supplying readers with a concept of God at which we can grasp, even as we are really emancipating ourselves from him. For Bultmann, avoiding this raises the challenge of a wholly different understanding of theological language. For Barth, on the other hand, the challenge will be to operate within the ordinary constraints of human language which, though not fit for purpose, must nevertheless try to develop

30


a sufficiently mobile theological rhetoric to counteract the reification of grace. A second matter is connected to this, in that it too concerns the problem of reification—not of God, but of history. Because the understanding of the Christian gospel shared by Barth and Bultmann emerges from their reading of the New Testament, Christian existence is always described in terms of the Resurrection. In 1 Corinthians, for example, ‘resurrection’ often refers to a new life of human beings with God, composed of God’s reconstitution of their identity and their free act of obedience towards him. In chapter 15 of the epistle, Paul sets this moral eschatology within an eschatological history book-ended by two events, the Resurrection and Parousia of Jesus Christ. However, these two conceptions can be played off against one another. The ‘history’ of human obedience to God in Christ can become something purely notional: the history of Christ through time, behind which I can actually hide as a historical subject. In response to this, Bultmann argues that Paul’s theology works with two different, and contrasting, notions of time, Christian–existential and ‘objective’ time; and he insists that the former, which is the most characteristic for Paul’s idea of the Christian life, must be allowed to criticize the latter, which Paul had simply picked up from the ancient Jewish conception of the world. Barth’s reading of 1 Corinthians is less drastic. He thinks that Paul is quite aware of the risk of abstracting the doctrine of the Resurrection from the moral existence he is focused on. Indeed, the fifteenth chapter of the epistle is to be read as a polemic against the tendency of the church in Corinth to do just that. And so, the challenge of interpreting that chapter simply becomes to draw out the moral significance already latent in Paul’s doctrine of Jesus’ Resurrection. The present chapter is organized as follows. Having examined the principal features of Bultmann’s most important early work, Jesus and the Word, I shall compare my findings with Barth’s lectures on Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians, delivered during his first semester in Go¨ttingen. Following that, I shall turn to Barth’s well-known commentary on 1 Corinthians, The Resurrection of the Dead, together with Bultmann’s review of Barth’s book. Finally, I shall offer some concluding remarks, designed to prepare the reader for the interpretation of Barth proposed in the remainder of the book.

Eschatological Existence in Barth and Bultmann

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1.1 ESCHATOLOGICAL EXISTENCE AND THEOLOGICAL LANGUAGE

1.1.1 Bultmann: Jesus and the Word The conception of revelation as the rebirth of the human subject in faith, which lies at the heart of Jesus and the Word, is likely to have been inspired by Wilhelm Herrmann. Indeed, it is possible to read Bultmann’s book as the attempt to bring historical-Jesus scholarship out of the impasse it had reached after Johannes Weiss, by reconfiguring Weiss’ findings on eschatology in early Christianity in the light of Herrmann’s construal of Christian subjectivity. Bultmann goes about this by drawing a tight connection between Jesus’ eschatological preaching and a Christian ethic (a link which Weiss had tended to sever),1 so that eschatology specifies precisely the moral and religious existence Jesus envisaged. The principle is as follows: An intrinsic connection of eschatological preaching and moral demand would evidently exist only if the coming Kingdom is so conceived that it becomes clear without further explanation that there can be no other condition except the one, radical obedience. On the other hand, this inner connection can exist only if in this demand for obedience nothing is involved which conflicts with the belief in the coming Kingdom, if rather the demand for obedience really coincides with the call to prepare for the future.2

The ‘demand for obedience’ describes, first of all, the ethos Jesus inherited from Judaism. According to Bultmann, it is to be distinguished, on the one hand, from the Greek principle of conformity to natural law, and on the other, from the modern idea of individual autonomy, where the good is understood in terms of self-realization.3 What characterizes both of these alternatives is that they abstract from the ethical moment itself, namely the moment in real time in which an 1 ‘That which is universally valid in Jesus’ preaching, which should form the kernel of our systematic theology is not his idea of the Kingdom of God, but that of the religious and ethical fellowship of the children of God’ (Weiss, Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of God, 135). 2 Bultmann, Jesus and the Word, 122. 3 Ibid., 72, 84.


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individual actually takes a decision. Instead, they observe this moment ‘from the outside’. They seek to deduce a systematized code of conduct from one or more fundamental rational axioms, so that when the moment arises, the individual will not be at a loss for what ought to be done. By contrast, Bultmann argues, Jesus did not arrive at principles of action following a process of moral reasoning, but took the good to be ‘intrinsically intelligible’ in the ethical demands that ‘arise quite simply from the crisis of decision in which man stands before God’.4 Indeed, he suggests, ethical deliberation, which draws on categories such as ‘law’, ‘nature’, ‘virtue’, ‘character’ etc., is exactly the opposite of Jesus’ theological ethic because, in preparing me for moral decisionmaking, such an ethic secures me from the historical contingency of the moment. In practice, this means that, at the point of deciding, I am no longer really answerable to God either. This is the case even if the ethic is then set alongside a theistic metaphysic, one in which God is conceived, say, as the ‘final cause’ or the ‘creative, active, formgiving power’ of the world. For the initial standpoint is still practically an atheistic one, according to Bultmann: the nature of God here is being idealized, determined in advance by the self-understanding of the isolated subject. ‘Such a representation of God corresponds to the conception which the Greek man had of himself as a microcosm, receiving form from a law identical with the great cosmic law, a form which is present as an ideal norm in human will and knowledge.’5 For Jewish thought, however, God is the ‘sovereign will’ which immediately claims human allegiance at every particular moment in life, and for this reason cannot be controlled under the human gaze. In short, Jewish (and Christian) theology does not simply propose a different conception of God. It completely reverses the relation of the human being to God: rather than being in a position to contemplate God from a distance, the human subject finds itself already under the claim of the God who becomes present. And yet, far from the presence of God being restrictive, Bultmann insists that it is to be regarded primarily as the basis of a positive determination of human personhood. In the obedience of the

4

Bultmann, Jesus and the Word, 87.

5

Ibid., 134.


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moment, I am released from the need to construct a false identity, behind which I continually retreat from true decision-making. In real obedience to God, in other words, I become free, because I am now entirely disposed towards, and unreservedly engaged in, the demands set by the present moment in time: ‘the choice between the possibilities is not determined by insight into them, but is free and responsible.’6 This responsible freedom is lost where authentic choosing in time is substituted for objective descriptions of a ‘world’, upon which I act only subsequently. For the ‘insight’ I have then acquired makes me a spectator of the world, rather than an agent in it. ‘Action loses its absolute character as the moment of decision when subordinated to the view-point of the end, the ideal.’7 This notion of moral obedience as unreservedly self-involved commitment sets Bultmann in an ethical tradition which includes Kant and, further back, Luther. The moral act is invariably a free act here, which means that it is not performed under the shadow of any externally constraining factors (state coercion, religious or moral law etc.) but because a person is inwardly or personally engaged by it. Unreserved commitment requires that there be no residue of ‘self’ outside the act— in Bultmann’s case, the act of obedience to God’s will. This is why he specifies Christian obedience as ‘radical’ obedience, as distinguished from a mere uncomprehending allegiance to, say, biblical commandments held by convention to be universally—timelessly—valid: For so long as obedience is only subjection to an authority which man does not understand, it is no true obedience; something in man still remains outside and does not submit, is not bound by the command of God. Criticism can still arise: in itself this does not concern me, in itself these things are indifferent—but I choose to obey. In this kind of decision a man stands outside of his action, he is not completely obedient. Radical obedience exists only when a man inwardly assents to what is required of him, when the thing commanded is seen as intrinsically God’s command; when the whole man stands behind what he does; or better, when the whole man is in what he does, when he is not doing something obediently, but is essentially obedient.8

Obedience to a moral programme of any kind can, Bultmann thinks, easily be harmonized with the self ’s strategies for escaping the moral 6

Ibid., 88.

7

Ibid., 101.

8

Ibid., 77.


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demands which arise from historical existence lived in the presence of God. Radical obedience, however, involves making a spontaneous response to the demands of God. Yet because of that, it will always take the form of a genuine existential freedom, my total self-presence in what I am doing. As Bultmann elucidates this idea, it is apparent that the turn towards God it involves is intrinsically eschatological: the call to obedience may be described as the impingement of the future upon the present. But this must be the real future, he insists, rather than one that is ‘subject to my own fantasies and wishes’.9 Indeed, the real future is exactly the opposite of an ideal utopia at some indefinite point in the future, because ‘so far as its essential nature is concerned [the latter] could already have been some time’.10 An indefinite or ideal future, in other words, removes the future from time as it is really experienced. This is what Bultmann finds creeping into later Jewish eschatology, and is to be strongly contrasted with the way in which Jesus envisaged the future. Whereas for Jesus the future was always the imminent and utterly new moment in time, summoning a person ‘to act in his present life in accordance with the will of God’,11 late Jewish apocalyptic tended to exchange this for an object of contemplation which could be observed from a distance. The contemplative space thus generated between the subject and the objective future can then be occupied by the idealized, a-temporal self, out of reach of the direct eschatological–moral claim of God in time. By contrast, the real future, the future I am actually faced by, does not permit this kind of withdrawal from existence, nor the self-isolated construction of identity; it always confronts me with the truth that my reality is to be present in the world. It should be noted here that Bultmann is not reducing external reality (‘world’) to the individual consciousness, as his critics have often supposed, but seeking to prevent precisely that from happening.12 His argument is that individualism is countered effectively only if the fundamental mechanisms of human subjectivity are reversed, 9

10 11 Bultmann, Jesus and the Word, 142. Ibid., 142. Ibid., 55. Contra, e.g., Moltmann, who thinks that Bultmann represents the ‘retreat into an individual chimney-corner’ where people ‘exist . . . only in relation to themselves’ (The Coming of God, 21). 12


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and the self-protective, self-controlling impulse of the subject in constructing its own world is subverted. Bultmann’s driving insight is that the propensity to evade the eschatological challenge of God, and to ‘retreat into one’s own world’, can involve constructing the external world as a system of related objects (including the self, and God, as objects) and substituting this for reality, a process which ultimately results in the enslavement of the self within its own thought processes. From that insight arises the dilemma which would occupy Bultmann and his school thereafter: if the human subject is always liable to supplant divine reality with theoretical content from the mind, how is it possible to communicate theologically without abetting this process? As he puts it at the start of his famous essay, ‘What does it mean to speak of God?’: ‘If “speaking of [von] God” is understood as “speaking about [u¨ber] God” then such speaking has no meaning whatever, for its subject, God, is lost in the very moment it takes place.’13 Talking about God appears to mean that God is treated as a He or an It, rather than as an ‘I’, a subject. The grammatical object reflects the status God has now acquired for the one speaking, which is precisely the reverse of the status God properly commands. Again, it is important not to over interpret Bultmann on this point, as commentators have often done, because they ontologize hermeneutical difficulties as he refused to do. The more one supposes, for example, that world-reality and the linguistic ‘world’ are nearly identical, the more it will appear that Bultmann’s reluctance to speak ‘objectively’ about God is of a piece with the idealist thought he was wanting to resist, a reduction of God to the contents of one’s own self-understanding. Yet Bultmann avoids this reductionism.14 On the other hand, the way out of the dilemma which he gestures towards at the end of Jesus and the Word, is not satisfactory either. He suggests that the problem arises only because we take ‘Word’ to mean selfexpression, rather than address, i.e. relatedness to an ‘other’.15 His 13

Bultmann, ‘What does it mean to speak of God?’ 53. That this reading is not warranted, at least in the case of the early Bultmann, is well illustrated by an essay in which he responds to Emmanuel Hirsch’s criticisms of Jesus and the Word (‘On the question of Christology’, in Faith and Understanding, 116–44). Here, Bultmann defends his choice not to reduce faith to experience, as Hirsch would have liked to see. 15 Bultmann, Jesus, 216–18. 14

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theological ‘solution’ to the problem of religious language, then, is merely to draw attention to this distinction, and so to the limits of human language; i.e. only to talk around the Word-event itself, and in that way to anticipate it without impeding its spontaneity. In other words, the strict opposition between ‘speaking about God’ and ‘speaking of God’ simply remains in place. ‘Speaking of God’ simply describes an existential dispossession, achieved in me by God, whereby I speak obediently as I am summoned to by God’s presence.16 However, this only raises, albeit in sharper terms, the following question: if God is not an object of thought, certainly, but a living reality, and if (as Bultmann agrees) the event of his presence evokes a human response, what is then to be said of this God? Merely to describe the disposition required for someone to speak of God aright does not yet address the fact that human language, for better or worse, does always say something. Assuming this ‘something’ is not wholly indifferent, the fact itself bears consideration; unless, that is, one argues that the right language will simply emerge once the proper existential conditions are in place. And yet, that cannot be what Bultmann means either, for then we are apparently back to the idea of language as self-expression—the very concept of the ‘Word’ he wanted to avoid.17 The terms he actually uses in referring to God (the ‘Wholly Other’, the ‘God of the future’, ‘God the remote and the near’ etc.) are supposed to convey the eschatological spontaneity of divine presence, and so they carry predominantly negative, or formal meaning. God is not determined otherwise than by being commandingly present in his inalienable otherness, for to over specify his ‘nature’ is, practically speaking, to deny his reality. And yet, as Bultmann knows, his own terms are no less exposed to that risk than any other; to speak about God as the one whose eschatological presence may not be conceptually tied down is still to speak about God. 16

Cf. Bultmann, ‘What does it mean to speak of God?’ 61–2. The best criticism of Bultmann has asked whether he has axiomatically presupposed the very Cartesianism he then sets out to overcome (cf. Gollwitzer, The Existence of God as Confessed by Faith, 113). Does he, that is, nearly end up implying that there is no objective (gegensta¨ndlich) reality at all because he is so concerned to avoid the specific danger of rendering it an object (Objekt) of the mind? 17


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1.1.2 Barth: Doxology in Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians I shall compare Bultmann’s book with Barth’s posthumously published course of lectures on Ephesians, prepared on his arrival at Go¨ttingen, in the winter semester of 1921–2. Barth was nowhere near completing his commentary on the epistle before the end of the semester, and the great majority of the time is devoted only to analysis of the opening doxology in Eph. 1.3–14. Although from a formal point of view Barth’s text is quite different to Bultmann’s— Bultmann’s book is a polished, carefully organized essay on New Testament eschatology, Barth’s lectures a hasty attempt to paraphrase a single epistle, structured only according to the order presented by the biblical text itself—materially there is substantial common ground. For what Barth is drawn to, in the epistle’s doxology, is the eschatological mode of existence generated by the gospel. And yet at the same time, he is also intent on grasping how Paul manages to articulate that gospel, in a rhetoric of sufficient conceptual mobility to counteract the kind of reifying tendencies in human language I have just been describing. As he reads the doxology in Ephesians, Barth is struck how its rhetorical value is not merely to introduce the moral theology that will preoccupy Paul in subsequent chapters. Paul is not paying ‘lipservice’ (Lippenwerk) to the opera Dei here,18 but praising God’s works in order to stimulate that praise among his readers. Indeed, it seems clear to Barth that ‘praising God’ is an act which Paul regards as being definitive of Christian existence as such. The text was ‘obviously addressed to his readers with the intention of summoning them to praise as he does, drawing them in, so to speak, to the fundamental orientation from which he will speak to them’.19 Furthermore, this orientation is an eschatological one, for praise is an act which bespeaks a new mode of existence: ‘If a person can PºªE, something new has happened to him.’20 To praise means to be personally caught up into the new self-definition one has received

18 Barth, ‘Erkla¨rung des Epheserbriefs’ in Erkla¨rungen des Epheser-und des Jakobusbriefes, 80. 19 20 Barth, Epheserbrief, 76. Ibid., 80–1.

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through, and in relation to, the works of God briefly recalled by the doxology. Furthermore, because this self-definition takes the form of a reference or relation, human ontology remains an eschatological orientation. Paul never resolves it into a stable condition or essential ‘being’ of any kind. Consider what it must mean: obviously a lofty being-outside-oneself, more lofty than what we tend to refer to in psychology as ecstasy; obviously an action in which man reaches out radically beyond the possibilities he knows . . . How, at any moment in time, could PºªE not mean the most extraordinary transformation, light out of darkness, the dissolution of time? No, says Paul: the origin, the spontaneity, what is essential about the human disposition as indicated by PºªE, truly never really lies in him, in the human being living in time . . . Entering the scene here, real in all its extraordinariness, is the divine possibility of man, which as such is beyond all perceiving, beyond the limits of humanity [Grenzen der Humanita¨t].21 But the divine possibility is as such necessity. It cannot express itself other than in absolute action.22

This ‘being-outside-oneself ’ is always expressed, as Barth says, in ‘absolute action’ because it remains a ‘divine possibility’. It is never collapsible into an interior human capacity of any kind, for this existence is intrinsically new; its newness is not just a contingent moment in its coming to be. And so, it is not re-describable as an internal rearrangement of the individual constitution, a new human ‘nature’ (Humanita¨t), as an abstract capacity with any substance beyond the act itself. One point in the lectures where this understanding of Christian existence clearly emerges is in Barth’s reading of Paul’s ‘through Christ’s blood’ (Eph. 1.7). In the course of his analysis of the verse, Barth passes comment on J. T. Beck’s doctrine of Christ’s blood as the ‘life-blood’ (Lebenskraft) of the Christian.23 Barth regards this as an illegitimate materialization of grace, whereby ‘blood’ is turned into the animating principle in a quasi-natural calculus of salvation. Instead of it, he argues that Paul’s phrase is to be taken as a reference 21 Barth is punning here on the title of Natorp’s book, Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der Humanita¨t. Ein Kapitel zur Grundlegung der Sozialpa¨dagik (Freiburg i. Br./Leipzig, 1894). 22 23 Barth, Epheserbrief, 82–3. Ibid., 110.


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to Jesus’ Crucifixion, ‘the suffering and action of Jesus in his Passion, in which that acquittal is declared by God in astonishing invisibility and hiddenness’.24 By referring ‘Christ’s blood’ back to those historical events, Barth does not mean to imply an externalist notion of grace. Rather, he is seeking to avoid the complete coincidence of grace and nature in human life, an identification which he takes to be utterly foreign to the epistle. For grace is never ‘direct communication of life’ in Paul,25 nothing ‘thing-like’ (dinglich), but an eschatological life, one which comes to be by virtue of an ever-new relation to ‘our absolute beyond’.26 Barth’s reading of the Ephesians doxology is suggested to him by Paul’s play on the words PºªE/PºªÆ in v. 3: ‘Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.’ By using the same terminology to refer to human action in relation to God and to the divine act in blessing humankind, Paul establishes a link between God’s action and the human praise that is to be its ‘echo’.27 In other words, there is a correspondence between the eschatological existence of the Christian (praise) and the set of divine acts Paul evokes in vv. 3–14, to which praise is the response. Moreover, Paul’s text itself becomes significant now, not just as a testimony to Christian existence, but insofar as it also seeks to state the acts of God by which that existence occurs. Paul has ‘something objective to communicate [eine sachliche Mittleilung]’.28 It is possible not just to ‘empathize with’ (nachempfinden) him, but also, and especially, to ‘follow him in thought’ (nachdenken) as well.29 Barth’s close textual commentary of Eph. 1.3–14 is the attempt to do just that. And yet, achieving that is not a straightforward task. Because Paul’s description is governed by the practical intention of summoning the reader to praise God, there is a ‘moment of surprise’ conveyed in Paul’s writing that must be captured by the interpreter.30 Barth is struck, for example, that Paul begins with a reference with which we might have expected his readers already to be familiar: ‘the God and Father [of Jesus Christ]’ (v. 3). He takes this as an indication that no ‘truth’ is to be regarded as familiar in theology, that all theological 24 28

Ibid., 109. Ibid., 56.

25 29

26 Ibid., 83. Ibid., 87. Ibid., 132 (Barth’s emphasis).

27 30

Ibid., 76. Ibid., 82.


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knowledge has an eschatological character. A statement about God always needs to be heard, in amazement, as something utterly new and unexpected, for in that way theology is received, not just as truth, but as revelation: On close inspection, the power of Pauline statements lies in Paul always beginning at the beginning, even at the foundations of his so-called system, and by not taking anything for granted, as religious thinkers usually do. He assumes nothing: that God is the Father of Jesus Christ, and that the Father of Jesus Christ is God, is as new and surprising today as it was on the first day. This is to be acknowledged and expressed again and again as revelation, not as something that is already known.31

However, there is still the question of how Paul manages to capture the newness of revelation in words, without reducing revelation to an objectified system of truths. Barth observes that the doxology is a single statement in Paul’s Greek, which means that any subdivisions within it must not be seen as ‘a series of dogmatic loci’—which would be a ‘dilution and falsification of their content’—but must be taken ‘in just as unified and mobile a way’ by us as they were by Greek readers.32 By dividing up the content of the passage, in other words, there is the danger of dissolving grace into its different aspects. Or as Burnett puts it, in his analysis of Barth’s hermeneutics, ‘[i]f God is the Sache of the Bible, and God must be understood as something whole, then the Sache of the Bible must be understood as something whole as well’.33 Paul achieves this unified perspective in the doxology by describing the entire action of God as turning around a single Christological point (designated by the repeated particle phrase, ‘in him’). Moreover, it is because this point is ‘the face of Jesus of Nazareth, the Crucified one’, Barth remarks, that it cannot be distilled into a ‘religious or philosophical pseudo-truth’.34 And yet, although Jesus focuses the action of God, this action is then designated in the doxology from three separate vantage points, which Barth classifies according to the divisions in time between

31 33 34

32 Barth, Epheserbrief, 81. Ibid., 78. Burnett, Karl Barth’s Theological Exegesis, 78. Barth, Epheserbrief, 52.


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past, present, and future. It is the constant shifting of perspective in the passage that helps ensure that this singular reality exceeds its theological depiction: first, vv. 4–6: election (i.e. past tense); secondly, vv. 7–10: forgiveness and freedom (present); finally, vv. 11–12, 13–14: hope of inheritance and sealing with the Spirit (future). Moreover, Barth notes how Paul complicates this schema as well. Already at the end of the first section, the idea of ‘praising God’s glorious grace’ is introduced, i.e. the final telos of divine election. Again, even when salvation is described as something ‘we have’ (å—v. 7), Paul concludes the second section by pointing forwards to the ‘fullness of times’ and the ‘recapitulation’ of all things in Christ. And again in the final division, the future perspective is qualified by the use of two aorist verbs (KŒºÅæŁÅ—v. 11; KçæÆªŁÅ —v. 13). Even when speaking of the future, Paul is not merely referring to ‘a future being and having’ for ‘[w]hat does future mean if it is a matter of God’s future, of the future we already possess, even if only as future? Is it not clear that this future could just as well be called past or present?’35 Paul has a single focus throughout the doxology, the saving action of God for human beings. If this is then explored through a differentiated perspective, that is not because the focus has shifted, but because it is only by shifting perspective that the focus is not distorted. However, this means that Paul bears theological witness to the eschatological character of divine action, not by a process of negation, by stripping language bare, but by supplying a richer conceptual pattern. For it is this linguistic abundance that helps ensure that eschatological reality is not being exchanged for a theological monoconcept: Could [Paul] have made it any clearer than he does in this change [of tenses], that past, present and future, the ŒÆØæ (v. 10) are in themselves really only schemata for him, that he does not wish to speak of them but of the ºæøÆ H ŒÆØæH, of the end-time, of eternity, which one cannot even speak about as such, but only by way of the schemata of the ŒÆØæ, and paradoxically only by continuously switching between them and dissolving [Aufheben] them one after the other? How could our attention be diverted

35

Ibid., 121.

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away from the human observer and onto that which is observed if we were somehow in a position to speak of it straightforwardly? It is precisely in the limit of our speaking and the recognition of this limit that we are guaranteed that it is appropriate. Paul is speaking of the åÆ , he is doing eschatology, quite irrespective of whether what he is speaking of begins æe ŒÆ Æ ºB Œı, whether he depicts it as something we have, or whether he depicts it as the inheritance for which we hope.36

In short, God’s eschatological reality is attested in Ephesians not apophatically but by a positive theology. And yet, this theology is also conceptually supple enough to ensure that its living subject matter is not condensed into a set of ‘truths’. The problem of the linguistic reification of grace is not circumvented by avoiding speaking about it altogether, but confronted by developing the selfsubverting mechanisms within a descriptive rhetoric. By piling up temporal perspectives, and allowing them to substitute for one another, even to the point of subverting the temporal schema altogether, Barth thinks Paul manages to find not a consummate theological language perhaps but at least one which, if carefully observed, is up to the task of speaking about God without its own conceptuality replacing divine reality. The question of language is therefore not merely a formal or methodological problem for Barth, but one generated by the reality of God himself. Moreover, unlike Bultmann, he does not regard the opposition between human language and divine revelation as absolute, but partially and imperfectly surmountable once sufficient mobility is generated in human language to prevent reification occurring. And yet, as we shall see in Chapter 3, Barth’s insistence in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics that theology (and preaching) must aspire to become the event of eschatological revelation itself results in a more contrastive relation between religious language and revelation. Although he never approaches the kind of absolute opposition we have found in Bultmann, by making the eschatological Word the conceptual horizon of theology, he finds it difficult to move beyond an alternative between the total identification between theology and the Word, and an absolute difference between them.

36

Barth, Epheserbrief, 106–7.


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1.2 RESURRECTION AND CHRISTOLOGY We have seen so far that, although Barth and Bultmann share an eschatological, non-essentialist conception of Christian existence, Barth remains considerably more sanguine than Bultmann about the possibility of a positive theological expression of this. The immediacy of God’s presence, which is axiomatic for both of them, is not necessarily subverted by human language grasping to describe it, according to Barth. A similar distinction re-emerges as I turn now to Barth’s 1923 book on 1 Corinthians (published under the title The Resurrection of the Dead), together with Bultmann’s review essay on it.37 Although they both regard Paul’s moral theology as the key to understanding his eschatology, for Barth this is the meaning of Paul’s doctrine of the Resurrection and Parousia of Christ; for Bultmann, on the other hand, it is impossible to square the epistle’s teaching on Resurrection faith with an eschatology oriented by the linear ‘history’ of the risen Christ. Both Barth and Bultmann are in agreement that the theme which unifies 1 Corinthians is the Resurrection. By reminding the church in Corinth of this, Paul draws a sharp distinction between eschatological Christian faith, and the goings-on in the church, which are driven by personal religious attachment to different doctrines. And yet, Bultmann disagrees with Barth over whether chapter 15 can therefore be taken as the heart of the epistle. For Barth, it is the Schlu¨sselpunkt of the letter, ‘from where light descends upon the whole, and where it becomes comprehensible as a unity’.38 For Bultmann, on the other hand, the climax comes in chapter 13; chapter 15 is an unwelcome distraction from the main theme. In part, the difference may be put down to a hermeneutical issue. Bultmann argues that Barth’s exegesis ‘lacks a certain clarity and intellectual precision’,39 because although Barth rightly devotes his energy to teasing out that material unity across the first fourteen chapters, he neglects to submit the language Paul uses (especially in 37 38 39

Barth, AdT; Bultmann, ‘Karl Barth, The Resurrection of the Dead’. Barth, AdT, i. Bultmann, ‘Barth, Resurrection’, 69.


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chapter 15) to a stringent Sachkritik. To Bultmann, this omission betrays a false divinization by Barth of the contingent linguistic forms of the biblical text, and entails a compromise of the rhetorical power of the Word it contains. He objects: We are not dealing here with a mere juxtaposition of genuine Pauline concepts and ideas which belong to the area of the thought of his time. The two interlace and interpenetrate. In my judgement there is need of much more rigorous exegetical work and of closer analysis of the text if assured results are to be attained.40

On the other hand, because Barth has a more positive (though not uncritical) appreciation of the part played by human language in the economy of revelation, content criticism becomes a less urgent (though not necessarily superfluous) task, considerably less important than textual commentary and paraphrase. Nevertheless, this hermeneutical point of difference reflects a deeper one, which Bultmann tends to skirt around in his review of Barth’s book. This can be illustrated by looking at what they each make of the Corinthian ‘heresy’. Barth sees the factions arising in Corinth as the result of ‘exchanging faith for particular human experiences, convictions, trends and hypotheses’.41 Rather than being oriented towards God, he surmises, Corinthian Christianity takes its rise from experiences or beliefs internal either to individuals or to particular groups. And so, the fractiousness this generates within the church is, in fact, symptomatic of a graver disease, which is at the bottom of all the issues discussed in chapters 1–14: rebellion against God. This is hinted at in the various particle phrases—Æ e F ŁF, KŒ ŁF, N Æ ŁF, etc.—sprinkled throughout the text, by which Paul tries to refer the Corinthian church back to its originator and Lord. Indeed, it is not only the more obviously worrisome aspects of Corinthian religion that are suspect to him, but the best of its spirituality too, as chapters 12–14 make clear. Everything, good and bad alike, is singled out by ‘the flashing sword of the Æ e F ŁF’42 wielded by Paul. For what compromises the whole lot is that Corinth has become a ‘Christian world’43 closed in upon itself; and since its religious life has become 40 42

Bultmann, ‘Barth, Resurrection’, 86. 43 Ibid., 15. Ibid., 55.

41

Barth, AdT, 3f.

Eschatological Existence in Barth and Bultmann 44

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entirely self-referential, it amounts to ‘pious godlessness’, an ‘utterly intolerable IªøÆ ŁF’.45 ‘Paul sees people, Christians to be sure, but nevertheless human beings, exalting themselves against God. And he does not simply regard this as a danger, but as the absolute danger. Christianity itself is under threat.’46 Bultmann is not at odds with any of this. Like Barth he thinks that Paul replaces the churchly monism of Corinthian Christianity with an ‘eschatological proclamation’, by which the entirety of the Christian life is then redefined by faith and hope in the Resurrection. ‘[Faith and hope] define the whole of the Christian’s existence and bring him into a particular relation to the world. Consequently, every question which arises in the area of his existence in the world can rightly be dealt with only from the point of view of eschatology.’47 However, Bultmann’s understanding of eschatological existence is rather more sophisticated than Barth’s, and trades on an antithesis between faith and knowledge which is considerably more clear-cut. This can be seen from a difference over what to make of Paul’s polemics against çÆ and ªHØ (1 Cor. 1.17–2.5, 8.1–3). What Paul refers to as the ‘knowledge’ which ‘puffs up’ (8.1) is, for Barth, a reversal of the right order of knowledge. God becomes reified if it is a matter of my knowledge of him, rather than what Paul refers to as ‘love’: i.e. my being known by God (8.3). Barth remarks here, ‘love must mean the surrender of the subject of knowledge to its object, objective rather than subjective “objectivity” [Sachlichkeit—orientation to the object]’; love involves being known (cogitari) rather than knowing (cogitare).48 In other words, what is distinctive about ‘love’, for Barth, is not that it bypasses the ordinary subject–object relations of human knowledge, but that it reverses them, marking a different kind of relation between the knower and the known from the one Paul refers to as ªHØ . In Bultmann, it is a different matter. Paul’s proclamation of the cross is substantially different to the ‘knowledge’ being debated over in Corinth, since it mediates a new mode of existence which will not permit itself to be presented as a ‘piece of knowledge’. What Paul describes as the ‘foolishness’ (1 Cor. 1.21) of his message is to be 44 47

45 Ibid., 100. Ibid., 71. Bultmann, ‘Barth, Resurrection’, 67.

46

Ibid., 56. 48 Barth, AdT, 22–3.

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understood as Paul objecting to the suggestion that knowledge, as such, could ever be a way to God: God’s saving act of the cross ( Æıæ ) cannot in any way be comprehended as a possibility of salvation; if it could be, it would not be an act of God. For men the Christian proclamation is ‘folly’ (øæÆ), and it cannot be legitimised to men’s reason as ‘wisdom’ (çÆ). As a comprehensible possibility, it would necessarily be no more than a possibility within the scope of man. Therefore, no relation to God is given in knowledge, in gnosis, as a human quality. Or as Barth says, God can be only subject, never the object in man’s relation to God.49

Bultmann’s cross-reference to Barth here disguises the fact that he has substantially reinforced Barth’s actual position. Barth makes much less heavy-handed use of the contrast between existential faith and objective knowledge than Bultmann does; indeed, he does not regard rightly ordered knowledge as being any different to Christian faith. It is just that he thinks that this ordering is not self-evident, not something given, but a reality generated by God’s initiative alone. This difference over the existential potential of religious knowledge plays out in a further difference over the connection between ethics and Christology in 1 Corinthians. For Bultmann, chapter 13 is the climax of the epistle because it is there, in Paul’s eschatological description of love, that the meaning of the Resurrection becomes most apparent: new life from God, beyond death; and that life, ‘not as an object of speculation but as a reality in the life of Christians . . . For when Paul speaks of the Resurrection of the dead, it is clear that he means to speak of us, of our reality, of a reality in which we stand.’50 If that is true, chapter 15 cannot be the high-point of the letter, as Barth had argued. Indeed, its eschatology is subject to the criticism that Paul has extrapolated from the reality of the Resurrection event itself, and divided it into ‘two temporal occurrences . . . objective “historical” events’:51 Jesus’ Resurrection and his final Parousia. Moreover, these 49 Bultmann, ‘Barth, Resurrection’, 69. When, later in chapter 2, Paul starts to speak of the cross as ‘secret and hidden wisdom’ (1 Cor. 2.7), Bultmann puts this down to ‘Paul’s pride’ (ibid., 72), a misguided attempt to play off the Christian gospel against the gnostic mysteries, even though the two are on wholly different planes, the existential versus the speculative. 50 51 Ibid., 80–1. Ibid., 84.


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events are not just harmless, even if scarcely credible, ideas for Bultmann, since to contemplate them puts me in exact contradiction to the true meaning of the Resurrection. If I am still a theoretical observer, the memory of Jesus’ Resurrection and the expectation of his final coming serve to reinforce my evasive objectification of the Resurrection, rather than my being grasped by God in the freedom of a completely selfinvolved decision. In other words, to cut the ties between Resurrection and Parousia, future and present, as Paul does, nearly amounts to a denial of Resurrection life altogether. For ‘this resurrection life is never something objective. It is between time and eternity’.52 This polemic against externality and objectivity in Bultmann is not to be understood as a total internalizing of the Resurrection, a deeschatologizing of the event, but an attempt to describe it as a historical movement. The Resurrection is always ‘between’, for Bultmann; an event in the happening, neither already nor not yet. ‘Christ is not the cosmic ground of a future condition of existence, but the historical foundation of the present life.’53 Bultmann does not claim a complete identity here between ‘Christ’ and ‘the present life’. And yet, if ‘Christ’ has any further external reality than as the founding event of the present life, human ontology risks being abstracted from the pressing immediacy of God’s presence. It is possible for the doctrine of the Resurrection to replace the eschatological instability of my history by setting before me a stable future condition, which underwrites my present existence. Once more, there is considerable convergence between Barth and Bultmann over this analysis. Indeed, if Barth devotes half his book to close exegesis of chapter 15, that is because, unlike Bultmann, he thinks Paul’s argument there can be read as resisting the disintegration of Resurrection-belief and eschatological Christian existence. Chapter 15 is not to be taken as an Endgeschichte, an effort on Paul’s part ‘to penetrate into the mystery of future existence’,54 and thus as a means of controlling the contingent, but as ‘methodology of the apostolic proclamation’. It is the Apostle’s attempt to describe the gospel movement itself—‘to depict the bird in flight’55—by standing back from the details of what he has to communicate to

52

Ibid., 94.

53

Ibid., 93.

54

Barth, AdT, 58.

55

Ibid., 62f.


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the Corinthian community in particular, and giving a more general indication of his perspective, of the Resurrection history which grounds Christian moral history. He does this to oppose the way in which, in Corinth, the church has seemingly managed to reconcile a universal belief in the fact of the Resurrection of Christ (cf. 1 Cor. 15.12 et seq.) with its brand of religious ‘monism’. For in Corinth the Christians have peculiarly managed to distance themselves from the ethical impact of Jesus’ Resurrection, Barth suggests, by treating it as mere brute fact, a miracle undoubtedly, but nonetheless one event among others, trapped within its own time, ‘something finished and satisfactory in its own right’.56 And so, in effect, he concludes, their belief in the Resurrection amounts to this: ‘He is God there but not here, in Christ but not for us. Christ is risen, but we know and live only this unending life, without horizon or final promise.’57 This is what Paul sets out to oppose in chapter 15. Rather than being ‘the divine horizon of all things’, Jesus’ Resurrection has receded into ‘the vast ocean of life’,58 where it can still be formally acknowledged by the Christians in Corinth without having ‘primordial meaning for their lives’.59 On Barth’s reading, in other words, the argument in that chapter is quite in line with the existential thrust of Pauline eschatology in the rest of the epistle. If he is less suspicious of chapter 15 than Bultmann, that is because he does not operate with the same axiomatic antithesis between the objectively factual and the existential. Barth may not put much emphasis on the factuality of Jesus’ Resurrection, but nor does it occur to him to affirm anything other than that it happened ‘in history, to be sure’.60 And yet, although Barth does not labour under the same dualism as Bultmann between objective and existential histories, his strong concentration on the ethical dimensions of the Resurrection can lead to a compression of Resurrection history. Barth’s focus on the reconstitution of moral identity results in a highly ‘integrative’ Christology, one where Christ is little more than the point of reference in the elaboration of an eschatological moral ontology. In part, of course, that is because the epistle itself is so focused on that theme. Yet Barth is, on occasion, capable of opposing this moral/existential eschatology 56 59

57 Barth, AdT, 100. Ibid., 89. 60 Ibid., 88. Ibid., 77f.

58

Ibid., 90.


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to a more ‘contemplative’ perspective on the Resurrection and Parousia of Christ since, he thinks, it was by treating the Resurrection as an object to be observed that the Corinthian church was, in practical terms, able to deny it. ‘[Paul] tears the questioner and the spectator from their comfort zone and sets them right in the midst of a struggle in which the Resurrection is true . . . Not in theory, only in the practice of this struggle can it be comprehended that the Resurrection is true.’61 As in Bultmann, the movement in this theology proceeds in one direction: the overcoming of the distinction between Christ and me—not resolved into a finished state, of course, a full identification, but nevertheless one that is complete eschatologically—which in this case means not only ‘in time’, but ‘in God’. We can observe this more precisely in the following three characteristic passages from Barth’s commentary: Dead!—That is what we are. Risen!—That is what we’re not. But the Resurrection of the dead is what we are not being posited as identical to what we are: the dead living, time eternity, being truth, things real. None of that is given except in hope, and so this identity is not to be completed . . . but in hope and in God, the Resurrection of the dead, the identification of the former with the latter, is already completed.62 The person that God creates and the person that God creates (the difference is best expressed in this change of emphasis) are not two but one. There is an indirect identity between what was later known as the ºª ÆæŒ , on the one hand, and the creature on the other: and corporeality is the third element, the one they have in common, and it is in and as this that the indirect identity must become direct. The truth of God is that we human beings must and will really become what is written in 15.44: the change of predicates which involves the return of the creature to its origin [Ru¨ckkehr aus der Kreaturlichkeit in die Urspru¨nglichkeit], the transformation from being the Adam created by God to being the Adam created by God, the change which cannot occur anywhere else than in the tangible and physical life of the human body.63 The tension in Paul’s thinking is extraordinary. I don’t think I have exaggerated it; in fact, I fear the opposite. It is not the tension of two things alongside one another [ein Nebeneinander] but of one thing within another (ein Ineinander) . . . It is the tension of faith.64

61

Ibid., 122.

62

Ibid., 62.

63

Ibid., 119.

64

Ibid., 129.

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In each of these passages, the point at which Barth is getting is the eschatological ontology of the Christian subject, situated in between two poles—death and Resurrection—which, although they are highly compressed, are nevertheless described as differentiated moments in time. It is important not to be misled by such idiosyncrasies as Barth’s dialectic of time and eternity, or his use of the term Ursprung, into supposing that he is simply Platonizing the Resurrection here. The language disguises the fact that he reads Paul’s teaching as deliberately anti-Platonic—in two respects. First, Paul refers to the soul as the predicate of the body (HÆ łıåØŒ—1 Cor. 15.44), not the other way round. Paul contradicts the Platonic priority of soul over body, Barth argues, because holding on to a more basic non-corporeal personal identity is one means of evading the divine claim. ‘To wish to belong to God without the body is to resist what God wants, secretly to deny God. For it is the body that suffers, sins, dies; and it is for the Resurrection of our bodies that we wait.’65 Secondly, Barth takes Paul’s ordering of ‘the spiritual’ after ‘the physical’ (1 Cor. 15.46) to be opposed to the Platonic doctrine of anamnesis. The creature’s connection with its origin (Urspru¨nglichkeit) is not achievable through any kind of psychic ascent, but only by the advent of ‘the second man from heaven’ (1 Cor. 15.47)—in that event of grace, rather than by the execution of a natural faculty. ‘Christ before us, coming, future: eternity is not a general truth’, Barth comments.66 In other words, Urspru¨nglichkeit is being used here to suggest the new relation to the creator, the eschatological restoration of the creature. In no way does it mean that the Resurrection event has become a timeless principle for Barth.67

65

66 Barth, AdT, 118. Ibid., 120. Moltmann’s claim that Barth’s 1 Corinthians book removes the Resurrection from history (The Way of Jesus Christ, 230f.) is sustained by the dubious allegation that his entire theology is underpinned by a metaphysical opposition between being and time which has beset Western thought since Plato. Even Stadtland, who is highly averse to all existential eschatology, does not find that opposition running through Barth’s book (even if it is practically everywhere else in Barth). Although the commentary ‘threatens to be obscured by an existential interpretation . . . the main emphasis now lies in insisting on a futuristic eschatology; it is a matter of emphasising the posttemporality of God’ (Eschatologie und Geschichte, 160). 67


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Nor should Barth’s language of ‘identity’ (e.g. ‘the resurrection of the dead is what we are not being posited as identical to what we are’) lead to the misapprehension that he is simply giving a theological rendition of Schellingian philosophy, carefully disguised by a set of negations which are, in the end, eschatologically negated themselves.68 The polemical weight of this claim of von Balthasar’s is relaxed somewhat in his later book on Barth, but if one refers back to the earlier study in Die Apokalypse der deutschen Seele it is obvious that this philosophical tradition raises a nearly demonic spectre in Balthasar’s mind. To set Barth’s dialectical theology in this line is to place him in a stream of thought which Balthasar can resume under Nietzsche’s epithet, ‘Dionysus against the Crucified’.69 However, contrary to this interpretation, Barth’s theology betrays no Promethean drive to divinize the human being here: the identity being posited is not between God and humanity tout court, but between the human being and Jesus Christ, the Logos ensarkos. Indeed, in that event, ‘identity’ language appears to find a warrant in Paul’s text: ‘Qualis terrenus tales et terreni; et qualis caelestis tales et caelesti’ (1 Cor. 15.48). For Paul, the human person ‘between’ Christ and Adam also is, or becomes, one with Christ. This is the ‘extraordinary tension’ Barth refers to in Pauline thought, the Ineinander of the Resurrection life: although Christ and the Christian are distinct, they are to become, and so to be thought of as (indirectly, eschatologically) identical. This eschatological union ensures, on the one hand, that Christ’s Resurrection is never reified or externalized in Paul and, on the other, that the Christian ethos is not merely a collection of discrete acts, but grounded in an ontological change in the human person by whom these acts are performed. Nevertheless, there is a tendency in the three passages cited above for Barth’s theology of the Resurrection to narrow down Christology to what is of consequence for the moral history between God and humankind—to restrict the doctrine of Christ to ‘Christus in 68 Balthasar, Theology of Karl Barth, esp. Part II, Ch. 2. See also Leuba, ‘Platonisme et Barthisme’, 84ff. Leuba thinks that, once the dust has settled from the negative dialectics of Barth’s earlier theology, a Platonic doctrine of identity continues unobtrustively to exercise a pivotal role in the denial of analogy—which Leuba takes to be the true meaning of the analogia fidei—in the CD. 69 Balthasar, Die Apokalypse der deutschen Seele, I, 8; III, 351–65.

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nobis’. Naturally, this has nothing to do with the moralizing of Christology in theological liberalism: ‘Christ’ here stands for the total remaking of a person by God, the undoing of secure moral identity, rather than the shoring up of it in an exemplary Jesus-figure. Still, this Christology only refers to what is ingredient in that eschatological event. Of course, this might only reflect a difficulty in Paul’s text itself. The pro nobis/extra nos aspects of Christ’s work have little part to play; indeed, they tend to be avoided by necessity, insofar as they might attenuate the actualistic ontology described by the Resurrection of Christ. This observation is almost exactly the opposite of the oft-rehearsed accusation that, especially in the early Barth, ‘the ethical situation is elevated entirely into the realm of the eschatological, which means that human life as it is given in time must ultimately be understood as ethically irrelevant’.70 On the contrary, the effect of eschatologizing the temporal life as Barth does is, in fact, the danger of making the ethical situation, as it is eschatologically construed, the only important component in the make-up of human identity. Ebeling’s charge of ‘the ethicizing of Christianity . . . the transforming of dogmatics into ethics’71 in Barth’s theology is more along the right lines. It may be hard to prosecute in the case of the Church Dogmatics,72 where the scope of Christology is so expansively explored. And yet, it does describe quite well at least the drift of his theology in Go¨ttingen.

1.3 CONCLUSION: CHRISTOLOGY AND REVELATION It is true that, while Barth certainly does not describe an unmediated, direct relation between God and the individual, what he wishes to avoid, above all else, is isolating Christology within the economy of 70

Cullberg, Das Problem der Ethik in der dialektischen Theologie, 152; see also Roberts, ATheology on Its Way?, Ch. 6, esp. 191ff.; Willis, The Ethics of Karl Barth, 21–39. 71 Ebeling, ‘Karl Barths Ringen mit Luther’, 557. 72 See here Webster, ‘“The grammar of doing”: Luther and Barth on human agency’, in Barth’s Moral Theology, 176f.


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revelation. And so, as we shall see in more detail in later chapters, the ‘interval’ between Christ and Spirit is always a brief one: revelation is always a ‘mediated immediacy’, Christ present. When it comes to the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics there is always in the background to Barth’s christology a version of Lutheran theology which tended to turn Christology into a metaphysical principle of the human relatedness to God. Barth would soon learn to distance himself from this Christology, by working out a Reformed version of the doctrine of the Incarnation: by placing greater emphasis on the intactness of the two natures in the hypostatic union he could avoid collapsing revelation entirely into Jesus’ human history (UCR I, 194–7; III, 26–74). I shall discuss this in some detail in Chapter 5. Even so, in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics Christology remains just one moment in a more comprehensive divine movement which includes the histories of human subjects. For that reason, Barth regards the Trinity as ‘the real heart of the concept of revelation’ (UCR I, 161),73 since it describes the entirety of that movement, which must always be understood as ‘the most positive relation of God to us’ (UCR I, 153). In that sense, he even advocates that ‘dogmatics . . . will have to . . . dare to be a little less Christocentric’ (UCR I, 110). His caution is to be explained in terms of the desire to avoid the ‘false objectivism’ (UCR I, 154) and ‘metaphysical claptrap’ (UCR I, 147) which results from arresting God’s eschatological movement and turning a single moment of it into a theory of his action in the world. There is an increasing move in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics to lay greater emphasis upon the contingency of revelation, its historical otherness and non-assimilability into the time of the church. Revelation means a differentiated history, two moments (past and present) which are not collapsible into each other. And yet, as we shall see, the reason for this is not that Barth worries about the historicity of revelation as such, but that the immediacy of the eschatological fellowship between God and humanity might be manipulated by the human subject unless there is a historically contingent warrant for it. 73 Migliore points out that the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics is ‘best described as theocentric or trinitarian rather than simply christocentric’ (‘Karl Barth’s first lectures in dogmatics’, xlviii–ix).

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For this to be the case, it is essential to Barth that Christ’s history and human history remain theologically distinct, even though they are eschatologically identified. To that extent, Christ’s ‘past-ness’ is not to be dissolved but retained. Christ’s history is not poured out, so to speak, into horizontal history like a cause with a stream of effects, but remains self-confined. Indeed, it is the very breach between Christ and the present which ensures that the present retains its eschatological aperture, for this prevents the relation to God from becoming automatic. At one point in the 1 Corinthians commentary, for example, Barth refers to the Resurrection as a ‘subterranean stream’.74 He means that, although it may run through horizontal time, the Resurrection remains a latent and hidden presence; it needs repeatedly to resurface. This introduces a discontinuity into the relation between Resurrection and history. We shall see something similar later in the way in which he construes the Resurrection (status exaltationis) in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics. In anticipation of that, consider the following remark from a passage towards the end of the dogmatics: Only in departing does Jesus Christ come as revealer in the status exaltationis, which is the Aufhebung of the status exinanitionis. Only in opposition to the previous and next moments, only between the times in which he is not known, is he known as [the exalted one]. Only after his death, which inevitably means beyond, and at the limit of his historical appearance— precisely beyond this limit—does he live as this one. As the one who comes, is knowable and lives in this way—as he came, lived and was known in his resurrection—he was the one who left the world; and all that we who are in the world can do is to believe and acknowledge him. [UCR III, 442]

Dogmatically, the move Barth makes here is to merge into a single event Jesus’ Resurrection appearances and his departure in the ascension. Moreover, it is because his appearance is now simultaneously his disappearance that the Resurrection becomes discontinuous with time; it occurs, as Barth puts it, ‘between the times’, ‘in opposition’ to our times. It is this doctrine of Christ’s ascension which ensures that, while Christ remains the objective reference point of God’s relation with 74

Barth, AdT, 99.


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creation, this relation is only established by the divine movement across the rupture between eternity and time. Finally, it should be noted that the Resurrection is being construed, in this passage, in terms suggested by the doctrine of revelation. This is not because (as commentators have often assumed) Barth thinks life in grace is something ‘purely noetic’; nor because he has elevated a formal matter to ‘first order’ status in his theology;75 nor because he thinks that, after Kant, epistemology has become the theological topic. Rather, he hopes that, by foregrounding the doctrine of revelation, in which the moment of encounter between divine and human subjects is the theme, he will avoid the danger, to which he sees theology forever exposed, of reversing the order of being between creatures and creator, and thus providing an objectified account either of God or the history of grace. This is the theme of the next chapter. However, as my argument continues, I shall also show how exclusive attention to the eschatological recreation of the human person in Christ can also leave this person morally exposed. In Christ, my history is repeatedly opened from above, but this still leaves unsaid how my moral history has also been restored and is sustained by Christ. 75 Gunton, A Brief Theology of Revelation, 58f. (Gunton appears to retract the allegation in the footnote on the following page.)

2 Revelation and the Problem of Christian Preaching 2.1 REVELATION AS DISRUPTION ‘The doctrine of revelation is central to Barth’s interests in the 1920s.’1 The claim could easily be verified from almost any of the texts of this period, and most especially from the two dogmatic prolegomena, to the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics and the Christliche Dogmatik, which prepare for the first volumes of the Church Dogmatics in the 1930s. And yet, it is not so easy to establish why Barth devoted so much of his energy to this topic. What I shall be suggesting is that, contrary to what might be expected, the reason has less to do with theological epistemology as such, than because revelation helps him to specify, more broadly, the way in which God and creatures relate in general. Along with the doctrine of election, revelation has been the most widely discussed and most controversial aspect of Barth’s theology, for various connected reasons. Early criticism quickly saw it as a response to the crisis in theology induced by a creeping relativism in the human sciences. The doctrine was said to be Barth’s ingenious attempt to make theology immune to psychological and historical criticism by setting revelation in a different sphere altogether. However, it was argued that he achieved this by introducing into theology an unbiblical ‘relation of radical exclusivity between time and eternity’,2 borrowed from philosophy, at the cost of the very credibility of 1

McCormack, ‘Der theologiegeschichtliche Ort Karl Barths’, 23. Schmidt, Zeit und Ewigkeit, 21. Schmidt argues that ‘[Barth] tried to overcome relativism by taking it completely seriously. Historicism and psychologism were 2

Revelation and the Problem of Christian Preaching

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Christian revelation. This analysis was reinforced in Germany by the epochal works of Moltmann and Pannenberg, whose attempts to suggest new points of departure for the doctrine of revelation were in large measure reactions against Barth’s work.3 In both writers, the contrast is drawn between biblical-Trinitarian revelation, in which divine disclosure is always bound up with unfolding historical events, and a Greek gnostic idea of revelation as theophanous intrusions of a deity into time; Barth’s theology was thought to amount to a somewhat Christianized version of the second.4 In Anglo-Saxon scholarship, interpretations of Barth’s doctrine of revelation often betray the influence of T. F. Torrance, his principal mediator to British theologians, who introduced Barth as the purveyor of a dogmatics that had succeeded in being scientifically credible.5 If one was suspicious of Torrance’s rather too untroubled presentation of rendered harmless to theology once it could be said that revelation has nothing to do with history, and that religion is anything but a psychic event or inner experience’ (ibid., 6). In the second edition of the Ro¨merbrief, however, Barth supplemented a conceptual dialectic, which in the first edition had legitimately registered the way in which theological language always lags behind the realities it describes, with an ontological dialectic between time and eternity which remains historically unresolved (ibid., 19–22). 3 See esp. Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 50–8; Pannenberg, ‘Introduction’ and ‘Dogmatic theses on the doctrine of revelation’ in Revelation as History, 3–21, 125–57. 4 Similarly, Gunton thinks that Barth is held back in his Trinitarian theology by a ‘residual Platonism’ which repeatedly gives the inference that divine action occurs not in history but in a timeless sphere above and beyond the world. ‘The root of the ambiguity would then seem to be a persistent tendency of Barth’s to contaminate the temporality of revelation with a conception of revelation as timeless theophany, which then reappears in the attempted combination of eminent temporality and timeless eternity. One is even tempted to wonder whether the very word revelation is not one of the chief culprits, in that it carries too heavy a load of inherited connotations to be able to bear the radical changes of meaning that Barth wishes to impose upon it’ (Becoming and Being, 181). 5 Torrance describes the ‘Copernican revolution’ of Barth’s theology as being the shift from an enslavement to the ‘unconscious dogmatisms’ of the modern human sciences and ‘the subtle determinisms of involvement in cultural heritage’ to the churchly freedom of ‘obedient discipleship to that primary Word’ (the Bible), which seems to parallel the ‘objectivity’ of the exact sciences. ‘It is sheer attachment to the object that carries with it detachment from all prior understanding and prejudicial thinking, and it is only in methodological pursuit of this detachment that we can achieve scientific objectivity.’ Karl Barth: An introduction to his early theology, 202. For a considerably more complex and historically nuanced account of Barth’s quest for a theological rationality, see MacDonald, Karl Barth and the Strange New World within the Bible: Barth, Wittgenstein and the metadilemmas of the Enlightenment.

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Barth’s theology as an achievement parallel with those in the exact sciences, it was again to Barth’s idea of revelation that one could turn, in order to show that a neat theological Wissenschaftlichkeit had been purchased at the expense of theology’s public accountability. In this vein, Richard Roberts criticizes Barth’s systematic removal of revelation from temporal reality, paving the way for ‘his method of deriving all theological explanation from the posited “reality” of revelation, a reality that appears to demand conformity and submission rather than critical investigation’.6 Similarly, Rowan Williams presents Barth’s theology as driven by the characteristically modern anxiety over a quest for certain knowledge. Barth thinks of dogmatics as ‘the sole authentic science, because it alone conforms (necessarily conforms) to the truths of its object . . . The [Church] Dogmatics begins with the question of how the security of faith and talk about faith is to be grounded, how the nature of dogmatics as pure science can be demonstrated.’7 The way in which such interpreters of Barth’s doctrine of revelation have regularly erred is by reading him in terms of the familiar problem in modern philosophical theology of how reason and revelation are to be coordinated. Often, the dilemma is set up by asking what unaided reason alone can tell us, on the one hand, and what we can know only by revelation, on the other. From this perspective (which assumes, incorrectly, that Barth thought in terms of ‘pure nature’)8 it immediately appears that Barth is trying to make the extreme case that we know nothing of God a lumine rationis.9 6

Roberts, A Theology on Its Way? 2. Williams, ‘Barth on the triune God’, 187. More recently, Susannah Ticciati has made similar remarks about revelation in Barth, in connection with his interpretation of Job. She judges Barth’s writing on the Bible to be ‘monotheological ’ (Job and the Disruption of Identity, 31–2), incapable of making much positive use of the biblical sciences; but this can be traced back to a doctrine of revelation which introduces a disjunction between the eschatological Christ-event and historical realities. 8 Frei showed some time ago that the critical reception of Barth’s refutation of Brunner among British and American scholars was based on the inability of those scholars to move beyond the notion of a ‘purely natural’ sphere of reality, which Barth himself had long since left behind (Frei, The Doctrine of Revelation in Karl Barth, 180ff.). 9 This conclusion has often been reached in discussions of the natural theology controversy in the 1930s. Thus, James Barr establishes his terms early on as follows: ‘The disagreement between Karl Barth and Emil Brunner, which set the stage for so much modern theology . . . took this form: is there any human knowledge of God antecedent to his self-revelation in Jesus Christ?’ (Biblical Faith and Natural Theology, 3). 7


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I suggest, however, that this is not a particularly illuminating way of reading what he has to say about revelation, since Barth (like Schleiermacher, against whom he is often reacting at precisely this point) simply refuses that initial dichotomy. As I shall show, Barth concentrates on revelation in Go¨ttingen not primarily because he feels the need to give an account of his epistemology—in other words, he is not following the familiar modern fallacy of giving priority to a formal, methodological or ‘second order’ theological locus10—but because he senses that this doctrine will enable him to depict his intuition about how creatures interact with God in the world. In some ways, then, it is misleading when Barth opens the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics (and subsequent dogmatics cycles) with the doctrine of revelation, in that it easily implies he has an independent interest in epistemological issues. In reality, though, the first volume of the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics is already underpinned by a quite definite concept of God; and in making revelation the first port of call Barth is drawing a dogmatic inference resulting precisely from that concept of God. In the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics, God is characterized by his ‘inexhaustible liveliness’ and ‘indissoluble subjectivity’ (UCR I, 120). He does not exist ‘as a still-only-objective God . . . enthroned in peaceful unity beyond his subjectivity, and at a safe distance from us’, but as ‘the object that turns and becomes a subject, wherever and however we may conceive it, if we are thinking of this object!!’ (UCR I, 123) In other words: God’s relation to man is not a contingent one. It is necessarily contained and grounded in God’s essence . . . there is nothing subsequent or episodic about God’s turning to man . . . God himself, the creator and redeemer, stands and falls with what takes place in time, in the outpouring and reception of the Holy Spirit, as God’s yes to man . . . God would not be God if the relation to man were not naturally intrinsic to him. [UCR I, 156–7]

Barth is not setting out here to develop a dynamic process metaphysics, rather than a ‘static’ Greek one,11 but to describe a God whose

10

Gunton, A Brief Theology of Revelation, 58. Jenson seems to read the Barthian project in terms of a shift from one metaphysical paradigm to another (e.g., Alpha and Omega, 15ff.). 11

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presence makes any metaphysical conception of God impossible. He rounds on ‘spectators, shirkers and referees’ who think they can conceive of God by ‘quietly looking in from the outside’ (UCR I, 126); and reserves particularly sharp judgement for the ‘metaphysical claptrap’ of the ‘only superficially more Christian, so-called Christocentric way’ in which some contemporary Lutheran theologies were seeking to deduce a principle of divine fatherliness from Jesus’ relation to God (UCR I, 147). By contrast, Barth’s concept of God therefore has ‘strictly anti-metaphysical significance’12 in the sense that it is a protest against such ‘false objectivism’ in theology which fails to see that God’s presence is always ‘acute, existential, inescapably personal’ (UCR I, 154). For ‘God’s being-as-God [Gottsein] is always his being-as-person [Personsein], not merely a being-something, not even merely a being-someone or a being-him, but his being-I’ (UCR II, 13). When Barth speaks of revelation, then, he means that God’s being is always a disruptive presence, a reality which has not been described adequately until the deeply unsettling impact it makes upon my person is fully registered. Revelation is ‘an event which takes place in space and time, to be sure’; but, still more crucially, it is ‘qualified history’: ‘to the degree that it is [revelation] it is not part of the sequence of occurrences in space and time’ (UCR I, 72). Because revelation refers to the presence of God, it is not simply the impartation of new factual information, even concerning God, but God speaking in person (Dei loquentis persona): ‘The presupposition of the Bible is not that God is but that God spoke. We aren’t referred in it to God as such, but to the God who communicates’ (UCR I, 69). Moreover, this means that, in revelation, the mode of relation between God and creatures is ‘address’ (Anrede). God discloses himself not ‘in the form of an ambiguous being, but in the form of a Word which wishes to be known—and gives itself to be known—as 12 McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 358; also 245–7. However, Barth’s opposition to metaphysics here is less to do with any respect for the conditions dictated by philosophical empiricism—what McCormack refers to in another context as Barth’s ‘good faith effort to respect the proper limits the historicity of human knowing places upon theology’ (McCormack, ‘Grace and Being’, 93)—than with the constant threat that the human subject might reify God, and thus reverse the proper order of divine—human relating.


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the bearer of truth’ (UCR I, 75). If that suggests that revelation means ‘Erkenntnis [i.e. personal knowledge], in the most pregnant sense of the word’ (UCR I, 74), the inference to be drawn here is not that Barth is attempting to secure the scientific ‘objectivity’ of his dogmatics. ‘Word’ is a suggestive category, rather, because it depicts God and humanity coming together, and doing so not within a religious synthesis, analysable in terms of emotion or feeling, but in a personal meeting; ‘word’—revelation—means ‘the encounter between an I and a Thou, between one person and another’ (UCR I, 69). For human beings, then, revelation involves a confrontation with God’s Word, yet because that Word has the full weight of divine authority behind it, its impact is directly personal, forceful and shocking. God’s Word means ‘the Word of God himself, God’s speech, of which he is the exclusive subject, and where no flesh speaks at the same time. He and he alone’ (UCR I, 68). Indeed, because the term refers to this direct human encounter with God, Barth thinks of it not just as one moment within the history between God and creatures, but as one way—indeed, perhaps, the best way—of referring to that history as a whole, and so of what happens at any given point in it. As he puts it later in the dogmatics, ‘in everything that is said about God, it is a matter of the God who per se addresses man, and in everything that is said about man, a matter of the man who per se is addressed by God’ (UCR II, 384). It could be said that revelation is the theological moment par excellence in this dogmatics, the point to which all theology refers and to which it aspires. One reason for this is that revelation describes a form of knowledge that is not innate or ‘natural’, and cannot be arrived at through mental processes (whether directly outward or inward) but which descends upon the knower from the outside, wholly unsolicited. And so, applied more broadly, it indicates that the relation to God is initiated at God’s liberty and sustained on God’s terms, rather than at the behest of a creature. If the whole history of God with humans is revelation, their relation must be seen as ‘utterly labile’, durable only as a ‘drama’, a ‘struggle’; it is not something ‘natural’ (naturhaft), a ‘constancy’ or ‘givenness’, with the ‘unchangeability of a mathematical relation’ (UCR I, 222). More strongly still, revelation hints at the wholly interruptive character of divine presence, so that the single—but overwhelmingly

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radical—condition for a human person to relate to God is that his or her continuity of being is brought to an end in that relation, and reestablished only on quite different grounds. Barth suggests this at one point by setting God’s revelation within an aporia given by the philosophy of subjectivity. He writes: There is no other dissolution of the crux of all philosophy of religion— which is that either the object escapes the subject or the object blasts apart the subject—than revelation itself, strictly understood. Revelation means the knowledge of God through and from God; it means that the object to be known becomes the knowing subject. It is not man’s work, if he hears God’s address and knows God in faith, but God’s work in a man. Either the human work is shattered by this knowledge, or it is successful, in which case the result is—an idol. But revelation means that God’s work happens to a man, whose own work must end, one way or another. [UCR I, 74]

The philosophical dilemma to which Barth is alluding here is this: to know (i.e. to be the subject of a knowledge-event) is to be in a powerrelation over against that which is known, in the sense that it means ‘possessing’ it as the ‘object’ of knowledge. The difficulty arising in the case of religious knowledge, however, is that what is taken as being known (God) cannot, by very definition, be under my control in this way. If God, in Anselm’s phrase, is id quo maior cogitari non potest, then should this ‘id’ be a reality (rather than a mere concept) the relation of subject and object in thought has either been reversed, or negated altogether. Once it is granted that God is truly God (not an idol) this conclusion appears to follow by necessity. Either I am the subject of my knowledge of God—in which case it must be conceded that I do not know God—or I am not—in which case God is not known by me at all. In speaking of revelation in terms of this aporia, Barth is not giving voice to a theological scepticism which denies any knowledge of God at all; nor is he merely alluding to an aporia in religious epistemology. He is trying to indicate that coexisting with God as his creatures is considerably more demanding than we might otherwise assume. The stringent condition under which it is possible to be related to God is a complete reversal in the ordinary way of human relating. The oftrehearsed objection that Barth hereby reduces the scope of Christian


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life to something ‘purely noetic’ fails to capture the severity of the dialectic. It is not that proper human action in response to God is merely ‘to listen’ to his Word (merely ‘to behold’ or ‘to follow’ the opera salutis divini); for what Barth refers to as ‘strictly understood’ revelation makes this impossible too. It means the end of all human self-origination, all self-grounding in one’s action—whether this self or this action are conceived only passively or not. Closer to the mark is to talk of divine revelation as bringing about ‘a deconstruction avant la lettre of the ontology of the subject’.13 Yet (as we shall see later) it does not follow that this ‘absolute attack on human beings’ is simply a denial of human reality as such.14 Quite the reverse; it is by undermining the natural and religious foundations of anthropology that Barth wishes to focus directly on the situation in which a person finds herself needing to take a real decision in the eyes of God. This focus is only achievable, he thinks, within an eschatological anthropology where structures of human being are not closed in upon themselves, but open out upon the moment in which the creature finds itself alongside God. In the context of this doctrine of revelation, I shall be examining the relation between God’s revelation and its human ministers— preaching and theology—in the first volume of the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics, and in some of the lectures and studies that surround it. We shall find Barth pulled in two directions at once, in ways that affect how that relation is described. On the one hand, he feels the meaning of theological witness to be intrinsically bound up with God’s movement in the Word, at whose eschatological power to topple the edifices of human self-presence this witness must set its sights. This means that the theological witness must seek to be part of the authoritative presence of that Word—and even to become identical with it, for otherwise the objectifying tendency of theological language would stand in direct contradiction to the commanding Subject of which it is to speak. 13

Roberts, A Theology on Its Way?, 191f. Cullberg, Das Problem der Ethik in der dialektischen Theologie, 38. It would only be true to state that Barth’s ‘(e)schatological ethics always threatens to annul the ethical “situation” itself ’ (ibid., 41) if it is recognized that this results precisely from the personal encounter between the ethical subject and God, not from any ‘dialectical opposition between God and man, eternity and time’ as Cullberg claims (ibid., 153). 14

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On the other hand, when revelation is so much the rubric under which church ministry is discussed, Barth struggles to depict that ministry itself. There is, by necessity, an eschatological lag between the human word and the divine Word, such that although the former may aspire to the latter, this identity is incomplete. Where Barth has trouble is in granting sufficient positivity to that gap in which the movement towards identity occurs, and therefore to human language itself. In Bultmann, the sharp opposition between Reden von Gott and Reden u¨ber Gott signals that the gap has approached an absolute opposition. In Barth, however, this dualism is eschatologically surmountable. And yet, the more revelation is made the leading theological category for discussing human ministry, the harder it is for Barth to avoid the alternative of a complete merger between divine Word and human word or (which is only the other side of the same coin) a completely contrastive account of them. The argument in this chapter now continues as follows. I begin by examining the way in which Barth sets up the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics as the problematization of the presence of God in revelation. I then return to two well-known public lectures, delivered by Barth 1922, during the course of a summer vacation lecture tour in Germany. In spite of—or perhaps because of—their ambiguity, obscurity, and rhetorical bombast, they give the clearest possible explanation of what is at stake in this problematizing of revelation.

2.2 THE DOCTRINE OF REVELATION AS PROLEGOMENA TO DOGMATICS One of the difficulties for the interpreter of the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics, as with Barth’s other dogmatics, is what to make of the prolegomena (UCR I). The volume serves a very different function to comparable ones in modern dogmatics. It is not an apologetic argument from the general to the particular, from a universally agreeable basis in rational truth to revealed truths ‘known only to faith’. Nor is it a fundamental theology which attempts to establish the validity of an authoritative source, whether Scripture or the church. Barth already presupposes the realities of which he will give account, and he does not bother to


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provide external grounds for agreement with him. What purpose, then, do the prolegomena really serve? An initial answer to this question is that he thinks the best way of giving an account of God’s turning in revelation is to make the difference between divine address and its human servants as explicit as possible, i.e. to problematize theological language. This can be shown through a brief examination of one passage in the doctrine of the Incarnation (UCR I, } 6). In the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics, revelation is only a reality (Wirklichkeit) as the work of the whole Trinity in consort (} 5). It follows from this that if revelation is broken down into objective and subjective components, the Incarnation of the Son (} 6) and the work of the Spirit in generating faith and obedience (} 7), these are to be thought of as, respectively, the objective and subjective possibilities (Mo¨glichkeiten) of revelation. Furthermore, when Barth turns in detail to the doctrine of the Incarnation, his discussion seems to take the form of an inductive argument: in order for there to be an objective possibility of revelation, Jesus would have to be fully God and fully human, without mixture or change of substance, and in a unique and non-repeatable way (} 6.2). At the end of that passage, Barth quickly adds that he has not been constructing a reality on the basis of a possibility, but begging the question all along by presupposing the reality, the conditions of whose possibility he has just laid out. ‘I have not spoken hypothetically about a hypothetical entity,’ he writes, ‘but about the possibility of revelation that in fact exists: about Jesus Christ and about the way in which God comes to us, which is known and confessed in the Christian church’ (UCR I, 173). This only raises the question, however, of why the argument needs to be made backwards like this, and in such a tortuous manner—why Barth has sought to demonstrate ‘the possibility of the possibility of revelation [sic]. . . the conditions under which it is possible to speak of this possibility’ (UCR I, 172), arguing from back to front, so to speak. The answer lies in Barth’s conviction about the hiddenness of revelation—not its non-reality, but the mysteriousness which surrounds God’s presence, and which theology may not be permitted to penetrate. Because revelation is not direct communication, dogmatics may not speak about it directly either, but must grant it its own ‘space’ from where its unmistakable uniqueness can remain apparent:


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It must try to describe the reality of revelation, but for that reason not posit it. It must keep its distance from its object, and know its limit, which is given in the fact that its object is God’s indirect communication par excellence. [UCR I, 186]

The circuitousness of Barth’s argument, in other words, is intended to draw attention to the problematic character of revelation itself. The fact that revelation is a reality rather than a concept needs to be recorded somehow: this can only be achieved by repeatedly drawing attention to the distinction between the theological reality itself and the dogmatic description of it. The purpose of the prolegomena as a whole is to indicate the limits of theological language in relation to revelation, to counteract its tendency to normalize and stabilize revelation, and in that way to suggest the non-substitutable liveliness and mobility of revelation itself. The volume is not intended to prepare the epistemological ground for a positive dogmatics to follow in the next two volumes, for this would risk the theological displacement of revelation. Rather, its task is to put a minus sign in front of all theological positivity, by drawing attention to the non-identity of revelation and theological language. Revelation is eschatological, in the sense that it occurs beyond the language that attests it. This is the message of the whole dogmatics. Thus, as Hinrich Stoevesandt has put it, the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics is to be thought of as a work of ‘fundamental homiletics [Fundamentalhomiletik]’: [It] reflects the conditions of the possibility of preaching as such throughout, precisely by not offering any preaching content itself—which could then intrude into the immediate relation between the sermon and its [biblical] text. It resists the possibility of that sort of naı¨ve practical application, and instead at every turn, makes the preacher stand with renewed directness—and that means helplessness—before the kerygma which is hidden in the text.15

This is strikingly borne out at various points throughout the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics, for example in the doctrines of election and of Christ’s person, where Barth urges his listeners that those expositions

15

Stoevesandt, ‘Die Go¨ttinger Dogmatikvorlesung’, 97.


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are to be thought of as background to their sermons (UCR II, 210–12; UCR III, 75–9), not material which they are to introduce directly.16 Or again, in the introductory paragraph (} 14) to UCR II—i.e. the point where it seems as though he is moving beyond dogmatic prolegomena into something like ‘positive’ theology (the doctrines of God and man). Barth is anxious to stress that the emphasis should not now be placed on the contents of what he will say, which in any case are largely drawn from the theological manuals he is using. He writes: The material itself is always somewhat unimportant. And for that reason we can approach it somewhat innocuously and without criticizing it. Everything depends on whether we manage to place it in the light in which it then becomes more than material, the light in which the church’s human word becomes transparent and its transcendental meaning finds voice and utterance: [the light of] God’s Word. [UCR II, 9]

A final example is Barth’s departing words to his students in Go¨ttingen: ‘the meaning and kernel of the theology I have been presenting to you here was and is, in its genesis and matter, nothing other than the utterly concrete and infinitely pressing question of the pastor: What must we do, and what can we do, as theologians?’ (UCR III, 377) In short, the purpose of this dogmatics from beginning to end is to introduce his listeners to the problem of preaching. For the theologian, this will involve both describing what he calls the ‘perplexity’ (UCR I, 321) of preaching (and with that, defining its place within the economy of God’s revelation),17 as well as the problematizing of 16 On the other hand, ‘One will say much else better and more convincingly when it is said with respect to God who can elect and reject, in whom alone is the power and the freedom to know him truly. The doctrine of predestination, when understood, is the death of all Pelagianism and Semi-Pelagianism’ (UCR II, 212). Again, he writes: ‘If the mystery of Christ’s person does not lie behind every statement of a sermon on his benefits, then it is not Christian preaching’ (UCR III, 78). 17 Barth’s term is not ‘economy’ but Offenbarungsverha¨ltnis—‘revelation relation’ (UCR II, 30 et passim. See index to UCR II for references). It suggests very well that he does not think of revelation in historical terms—even if it includes a past, present and future moment in it—but in terms of the I–Thou relation between God and the human person. It has been argued that ‘dialogical thinking’ like this cannot do justice to the complexities of historical life (see Welker, ‘Barth’s theology and process theology’, 388–9). Yet describing revelation in this way does not inevitably involve narrowing it. The Go¨ttingen Dogmatics might be taken as an attempt to conceive of revelation as fellowship with God (i.e. an I–Thou relation at some level), yet a

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the material content of what is preached, which is to be referred back to the Word of God which it is supposed to convey. Here, I shall concentrate on the first of these, preaching itself, and so begin to build up a picture of Barth’s understanding of the revelation economy in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics.

2.3 REVELATION AS A THEOLOGICAL PROBLEM The major move, which decisively determines how Barth sets about doing this, occurs at the very beginning of the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics, in the proposition that dogmatics is to be understood as ‘scientific reflection on the Word of God’ (UCR I, 8). This definition immediately indicates how Barth conceives of the identity and location, and therefore the responsibility and task, of Christian theology. It is defined by a twofold relation: to the university and to the church. Because theological reflection is ‘scientific’ (wissenschaftlich) it is to think of itself as an academic exercise. That dogmatics is to reflect upon the Word of God refers it to the church as well. More specifically, the task of dogmatics arises from the fact that the Word of God is ‘not buried in a book’ (UCR II, 4), but something living and present. It is not a datum of any kind, but the event in which God addresses human beings, and in so doing encounters them. In other words, ‘revelation is only revelation in full action’ (UCR I, 69). It is not a state of being, but something that must always occur, and then occur again; not ‘a direct being revealed [Offensein] of God’ but ‘always his becoming revealed [Offenwerden]’ (UCR I, 69). ‘Nothing, absolutely nothing, may coagulate or ossify, may come to a standstill or freeze’ (UCR I, 333). As we have seen, revelation is to be understood as a movement, on the part of God, towards humanity. Again, this movement is to be thought of as ‘Word’, not because revelation communicates a set of facts about historically mediated fellowship, which means one that is potentially open to complexity and multiplicity. (That is not to say that Barth is entirely successful here.)


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God, but because God himself, rather than being an empty concept onto which human beings can project their highest ideals, is unambiguously real. Revelation ‘comes to us in the form which corresponds to the truth: not in the form of an ambiguous being, but in the form of a Word which wishes to be known, gives itself to be known, as the bearer of truth: Spirit speaking to the spirit through the Spirit’ (UCR I, 75). In a later chapter, I shall examine in some detail what this entails for Barth’s understanding of dogmatics. In order for this to be intelligible, however, it is necessary to look more closely at what Barth means by the ‘Word of God’ in UCR I. Although in one sense the term just describes the concept of revelation I have outlined already, its form is not simple in the prolegomena, but carefully differentiated by a threefold notion of time. Barth thinks of revelation itself as God’s Word in eternity, Scripture as the Word of God set down in the past, and Christian preaching as the Word of God becoming present. By making these distinctions, he generates the problem of the Word of God from which dogmatic theology takes its rise. That problem is first of all the problem of Christian preaching, the becoming-present of the Word. The task of church proclamation, and with it its problem, arises because the first two forms of the Word (eternal and past) do not yet constitute the connection of revelation with our time. Let us take the following statement: The Word of God is a divine address, it goes forth, namely as Christian preaching. As revelation as such it does not go forth. Revelation does not go, does not occur at all, and never has done. The statement, ‘God has revealed himself ’ says something specifically quite different than the statement, ‘revelation has occurred’. It is what it is in time, to be sure, but as the limit of all time. It is as far from us as heaven is from the earth. As Holy Scripture too, the Word of God does not go forth. It is certainly completely and utterly in time, the testimony to revelation which has been given and has occurred, but for that reason a self-enclosed piece of history which, as the past, is as far from us as everything historical. [UCR I, 20]

Note how Barth sets up the Word of God as a problem here, expanding on the title of the opening paragraph of the dogmatics

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from which the citation is taken: ‘The Word of God as the Problem of Dogmatics’ (UCR I, } 1). The dilemma initially turns around the conceptual distinction he draws between revelation and Word: the Word of God seeks to ‘go forth’ (weitergehen), to occur again in the present as an event. Revelation, on the other hand, ‘does not go, does not occur at all, and never has done’; it is ‘as far from us as heaven is from the earth’. It would be overhasty to see these rhetorically charged descriptions of revelation as evidence of a metaphysical dualism in Barth, as though he considered that revelation were not in time at all: he states, precisely, that it is in time—but only as the limit of all time. The opposition is intended not to deny but to suspend its temporal presence, to introduce a rupture, such that access to it becomes acutely problematic. Its temporality cannot make it a historically available event, such that one could point to it and declare, ‘revelation has occurred’, for it is an event of which God always remains the initiating subject (‘God has revealed himself ’). Nevertheless, described as such, a fundamental problem remains: how can this revelation (which does not ‘occur’) become the divine Word (which does, or must)? This leads to a second form of the Word of God, now as Holy Scripture. If the Word of God is not an abstract idea, but a divine– human relation, an encounter ‘from person to person’ (UCR I, 69), then the fact that Scripture is ‘completely and utterly in time’ appears to be the first step in bridging the radical distance between heaven and earth which still lingers in revelation itself. And yet, that distance remains, albeit in a less radical way now, because Scripture so evidently belongs to the past, not to our time but to another time. As Barth will put it later, Scripture is a ‘relative heteronomy’, rather than an absolute one (UCR I, 256), but it is nonetheless heteronomous, so far as we are concerned, something external to ourselves. It is the church’s preaching which provides the ‘solution’ here, which finally overcomes the distance between eternity and time, past and present. In the church’s preaching the Word of God ‘goes forth’; it enters our time. It is through the church’s words (whether these be understood as the Sunday sermon, or just ‘what everyone “preaches” to himself in the quietness of his own room’ (UCR I, 20)) that what is


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18

an event at the limit of time may take place in time as well. In other words, it is the words of the church that bridge the gap between the eternal Word and time, and between the past Word and revelation in the present. Barth adds that although these three forms of the Word are not mutually independent, but related in an order which may not be reversed or shortcut, all are forms of the Word of God, within that particular economy. ‘Revelation is only from God himself, Scripture is only from revelation, preaching is from revelation and Scripture. But there is no “prius” or “posterius”, no “maius” or “minus”. It is the Word of God in the same splendour in the first, second and third case: “unitas in trinitate” and “trinitas in unitate”’ (UCR I, 19). Nevertheless, the eternal movement of revelation must pass through Scripture and into preaching—the equality of the forms of the Word does not mean that the Word ever ceases to actuate itself in the form of preaching—otherwise its existential impact will be lost. That is what makes it critical that preaching is to become the Word of God. As we shall see, it is not hubris when Barth seems to elevate it to this position. Quite the reverse: the nobility of the summons to preach the Word of God ought to evoke a sense of awe and impotence in those to whom it is charged. ‘We cannot think and speak too bashfully, cautiously and humbly about this third presupposition [of revelation—i.e. preaching]’ (UCR I, 326). As with the Trinity, with which he draws an analogy here, there is a distinction within this unity of the Word of God: ‘revelation remains revelation, Scripture remains Scripture and preaching remains preaching’ (UCR I, 328). The identity between preaching and revelation is eschatological; it cannot be taken for granted. And yet, what Barth refers to as the ‘bold equation’ (UCR I, 325) between the Word which God alone speaks, and the words of the Christian which are supposed to convey it, is something he takes to be utterly central to understanding what preaching is—or is to be.

18

In the Christliche Dogmatik, which draws heavily upon the contents of the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics lectures, Barth is notably keen to expand more explicitly the scope of the church’s Word, so as to include not just its preaching, but all ‘Christian talk’ (christliche Rede) as such (Chr. Dog., 34ff.) This is an attempt to broaden out the general theological inferences Barth wants to draw from the phenomenon of preaching.


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‘[T]o take it seriously means to take it as the Word of God, as the Word of God in the present for the future, based in the Word of God in the past, from which we come, in Holy Scripture, and in the eternal Word of God in revelation’ (UCR I, 44). The question is why this must be so? Why does taking preaching seriously make it necessary to assert its (indirect) identity with the Word of God? Could it not still be a serious and responsible enterprise, but as something less than the Word of God itself ? In order to understand this more fully, it is necessary to return to two wellknown lectures given by Barth during a summer vacation lecture tour in 1922, just after his arrival in Go¨ttingen: ‘The affliction and promise of Christian preaching’19 and ‘The Word of God as the task of theology’,20 delivered in Schulpforta and Elgersburg respectively.

2.4 REVELATION, PREACHING, AND THEOLOGY It is well-documented that Barth’s theology emerged out of his experience as a church minister in Switzerland, and in particular the difficulties he reports having had as a preacher in Safenwil. While he was in Go¨ttingen the direct link between his dogmatics and the practical dilemmas of Christian ministry is in evidence, although it would become less so later. Barth is highly conscious that those who attended his academic lectures were principally ones training to preach in the Reformed church. However, he decides he will best prepare them for the pulpit not by helping them out of the difficulties they will face there, but by assuming these as the problem of his dogmatics. ‘If the pathway of Christian preaching is a ridge between heaven and earth, the pathway of the science of its principles cannot be an easy country road’, he writes (UCR II, 6). This way of situating 19

Barth, ‘Not und Verheißung der christlichen Verku¨ndigung’. Barth, ‘Das Wort Gottes als Aufgabe der Theologie’. The title of the lecture is mistranslated in the English edition as ‘The Word of God and the Task of Ministry’ (Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man, 183ff.)—although this usefully serves to indicate how little Barth wanted to disassociate preaching and theology in the lecture. 20


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dogmatics in relation to the problem of preaching dates back to the two lectures he gave in Schulpforta and Elgersburg. Barth had been invited to Schulpforta in 1922 to address the conference of ministers which was taking place there that year. In the background to that conference, it can be inferred from remarks in Barth’s lecture, there seems to have been the earnest clamour among the Protestant churches for more ‘serious’, ‘competent’, and ‘devout’ pastors.21 And so it was that Barth had been invited to give an introduction to his theology. However, he immediately opens his talk with a disclaimer to these ministers: he has not come to them ‘armed with an astonishing new theology’,22 which they will be able to learn and then transmit to their congregations. Indeed, he does not have a ‘respectable theology’ (rechte Theologie) to impart, or any particular ‘standpoint’ (Standpunkt) at all. All he will do in the lecture is to give them a phenomenological description of the ‘perspective’ (Gesichtspunkt—i.e. point of view) they are already familiar with as preachers and which, since he is a theologian, is his own.23 And so, following this introduction, he begins to depict in vivid detail what happens on a Sunday morning. Bells ring, people are summoned to church, and as the organ begins to play and hymns are sung, a mood of ‘expectancy’ (Erwartung) grows. The expectation is directed with increasing intensity towards the minister, who is preparing to mount the pulpit to address his congregation.24 This is the moment Barth wants to capture as precisely as possible, the point of crisis for ministers where the meaning of their entire ministry crystallizes, which he describes as the ‘promise’—but also the ‘affliction’ (Not) and ‘perplexity’ (Bedra¨ngnis) of Christian preaching. Above all, Barth thinks of the situation both the preacher and the academic theologian are in, in dialogical terms. The public expectation of them (whether acknowledged or not) is that they are there to mediate the Word of God. As Barth puts it, ‘in the cherry tree, the symphony, the state, their daily toil’,25 people gain fleeting and vague intuitions of the divine—of some transcendent factor which appears in human life. It is to church ministers that they look to verify and

21 24

Barth, ‘Not und Verheißung’, 121. 25 Ibid., 104–5. Ibid., 112.

22

Ibid., 103.

23

Ibid., 99.


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clarify this for them; which means that this ministry takes on truly eschatological proportions: People obviously don’t need us in life. But they do seem to need us in death, in the shadow of which their whole life takes place. History continues on its course without us; but when eschatological things, the last things, pop up on their horizon—and which problem in history does not lie on the threshold of the last things?—then we must obviously be there to say something revelatory and decisive.26

The ‘dialectic of question and answer’,27 which thus describes the kerygmatic situation, plays out in an encounter between the congregation and the Word of God in the Bible, which it is the task of the preacher to communicate to them. People are ‘brought to us by the ultimate and most difficult questions’, and will not be fobbed off with ‘penultimate and easy answers’,28 Barth insists. ‘[E]ven from a human perspective the situation is literally end-historical [end-geschichtlich], eschatological, leaving aside the Bible for the moment.’29 The term ‘eschatological’ is being used here to refer not to the end of worldhistorical time, but to the limits of an individual’s history. It is only from beyond these limits that God appears to this individual. The situation is eschatological, in the sense that the questioner is not simply enquiring after what the preacher (or theologian) has to say about God, a word that could then be integrated into her present understanding of things, but after God himself: an answer coming not from within the world, but from beyond it. Or as Barth puts it, a human being is not after ‘solutions’ (Lo¨sungen)—‘something human again’—but ‘salvation’ (Erlo¨sung)—‘God, but God as the saviour of his humanity.’30 It is instructive that in neither lecture is God described any further than that: he is God tout court, or God-with-humanity; but otherwise, a God without attributes. The extraordinary peremptoriness and formality of the reference is the consequence of the question– answer dialectic Barth is using: because the questioner is looking to 26 27 28 29 30

Barth, ‘Das Wort Gottes’, 159. Beintker, Die Dialektik in der «dialektischen Theologie» Karl Barths, 76ff. Barth, ‘Not und Verheißung’, 107. Ibid., 108. Barth, ‘Das Wort Gottes’, 160.


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the preacher (or theologian) in order for God to communicate himself (rather than merely for the minister to talk about God) and because this questioner already has an intuitive knowledge of God (which was the basis of her questioning in the first place) the problem faced by the minister is apparently insurmountable. Two distinct, but related aporias arise. In the first place, there is a conflict between what Graham Ward has described as ‘two antithetical models of language’, a ‘communication model’ (God’s language) and a ‘semiotic model’ (human language).31 Barth puts it like this: We cannot speak of God. For speaking of God, if we mean that seriously, would mean speaking on the basis of revelation and faith. Speaking of God would mean speaking God’s Word, the Word that can only come from him, the Word that God becomes man. We can utter these four words, but in so doing we have not yet spoken the Word of God in which that is true. But it is our theological task to say this: that God becomes man, but as God’s Word, really as God says it.32

Because human language is bound to operate within a referential network of signs and objects, rather than as an event of pure communication, the divine self-communication sought by the questioner is simply not within the capability of the minister from whom she seeks it. Even in speaking of God’s turning towards humanity, the very structures of theological language cannot help conveying precisely the opposite of that event, an object at one remove at least. ‘God on his own is not God [Bloß Gott ist nicht Gott]. He might be something else. The God who reveals himself is God. The God who becomes man is God. And the dogmatician does not speak of this God.’33 Notice, however, that this does not result, as in Bultmann, in an absolute contrast between the two antithetical modes of language. The intention is still that their opposition will be overcome in an event where the minister communicates the arrival of God, really as God himself communicates this. A second dilemma is connected to the first one. Because the human question already contains an intuition of the divine answer, that answer cannot be external to the question: ‘Nothing else needs 31 32

Ward, Barth, Derrida and the Language of Theology, 28–9. 33 Barth, ‘Das Wort Gottes’, 166. Ibid., 169.

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adding to the question. The question is the answer’,34 Barth asserts. Putting it like this perhaps recalls the way in which Wilhelm Herrmann developed the problem of revelation in his religious psychology.35 The rupture generated by the Word of God occurs within the individual, just as the question being asked is not accidental to the questioner but an Existenz- or Lebensfrage, a question ontologically definitive of the person. If the answer involves any sort of talking past that existential reality, it is still not the Word of God which, because it is uttered by God himself, immediately makes a commanding impact upon those who hear it.36 If that is so, however, this dilemma refers to another form of objectification in language. Because human words are always nonidentical with the reality to which they refer, the preacher-theologian’s ‘answers’ will always appear to talk past the ‘questions’ to which they were supposed to respond. This is how Barth puts it in the Elgersburg lecture: [T]he answer may not consist in pushing the question to one side, nor merely in underlining it and making it acute, nor ultimately even in the bold assertion that the question is itself the answer—which is quite true but either far too simplistic or too ambiguous when we come to say it. No, the question must precisely be the answer, and just so the fulfilment of the promise, the filling of the hungry, the opening of the eyes of the blind and the ears of the deaf. This is the answer we ought to be giving, and it is precisely this answer that we cannot give.37

Theological language seems bound to fail to give an authoritative answer. For if God’s ‘answer’ is truly salvation, it must be so intimately connected to the question(er) as to be identical with it (her/him). The answer cannot ignore the question; it must be what Barth calls a ‘reversal’ (Umkehrung) of it, an answer which lends the question ‘a real sharpness and meaning for the first time’.38 34

Barth, ‘Not und Verheißung’, 114. Korsch has shown how Barth has directly appropriated here the problem of revelation as it had been articulated by his teacher (Korsch, ‘Die Fraglichkeit des Lebens und die Evidenz des Glaubens’, in Dialektische Theologie nach Karl Barth, 130–45). Indeed, Barth refers to Herrmann by name at the beginning of the Schulpforta lecture. 36 Cf. Barth, ‘Biblische Fragen, Einsichten und Ausblicke’, 70ff. for similar remarks. 37 Barth, ‘Das Wort Gottes’, 166–7. 38 Barth, ‘Not und Verheißung’, 113. 35


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Nevertheless, this involves more than simply the ‘assertion that the question is itself the answer’. It must mean the event in which this identification actually occurs; an event which Barth calls a ‘reversal’ because in it the human question is turned on its head. ‘Not only do human beings question God; all the more so, God questions human beings as well.’39 The human expectation of an answer from God is inverted, in God’s Word, and becomes God’s expecting something of the human being, so that the individual’s question to God, is now the very point at which she is confronted and questioned by God. This reversal, which is what occurs in the event of genuine questioning and answering, is beyond the scope of the preacher or theologian, and can only occur in the reality of God: ‘Only the Lord can talk thus, can make seeking and finding, questioning and answering, the same thing.’40 This double aporia just described is expressed in Barth’s famous syllogism from the Elgersburg address, ‘As theologians we must speak of God. But we are human beings and as such we cannot speak of God. We must know both these—our obligation and our inability—and in so doing give God the glory.’41 The twofold character of the aporia results from looking at the dialogue first from the point of view of the speaking, then of the hearing of the Word of God: from either perspective, the Word can be reified if its dynamic is brought to a halt. Two points should be emphasized here. First, Barth’s radical statement about the impossibility of theological language is not intended to absolve the theologian from the obligation to speak about God with which the discussion began, but sits alongside it. We have already observed that it is rather different to the settled opposition in Bultmann between two notions of ‘word’. As Ju¨ngel pointed out, in his analysis of the lectures, the aporia is prefatory to a career of speaking about God, not a resigned silence with which it concludes.42 Secondly, because Barth takes God to be in movement towards humanity, theological language (inadequate though it is) must refer 39 40 41 42

Beintker, Die Dialektik in der dialektischen Theologie Karl Barths, 77. Barth, ‘Not und Verheißung’, 115. Barth, ‘Das Wort Gottes’, 158. Ju¨ngel, Karl Barth: A theological legacy, 54–70.

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to this by giving explicit attention to the encountered human being. It is a matter, not just of anthropology becoming a theological locus, but of catching what Barth, in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics, calls ‘man’s reflection in revelation’ (UCR I, 86). Barth thinks of human reality as being always subjected to its own ontological reversal by God’s Word; but for this to be made plausible, the event must also be shown to occur. There is always the danger that the new human reality revelation generates will appear to be a second reality, and therefore not a reality at all, but a mere postulation.43 At all events, the double aporia results from a theology of the Word that places considerable emphasis on the need for an identification event between the preached word and the Word of grace itself. This emerges most clearly in the contrast Barth draws between the Protestant pastor and the Catholic priest, Word and sacrament. The purpose of the contrast (which is really an attack on the misconstrual of grace in the Protestant churches, rather than on a caricatured Roman Catholicism) is to reinforce Barth’s point about the necessary affliction of preaching, the irresolvable dialectic of its impossibility and its necessity. Unlike in the Protestant church, where salvation is communicated only through God himself speaking his Word, by virtue of ordination the Catholic priest enjoys power to administer grace ex opere operato in the sacramental elements, to make it available. Barth refers to this sacramental grace as ‘an ultimately provisional enormity [eine letzte enorme Vorlaüfigkeit]’ in which ‘the equilibrium of souls and of the world’ remains ‘undisturbed’.44 The total identification between grace and sacrament brings to a halt the movement of grace, the movement in which it is a reality. By contrast, the Protestant preacher does not possess this power over grace. ‘Under no circumstances and in no way should we seek to be creatores creatoris. We are not to bear [erzeugen] God, but to bear

43 For a similar statement of the problem, see Ticciati, Job and the Disruption of Identity, 7. In Ticciati’s judgement, an overbearing Christology, especially in CD IV/3, results in a ‘disjunction’ between human eschatological reality ‘in Jesus Christ’ and our present historical reality. I am suggesting that, in Barth’s earlier work, the problem is almost the opposite one: because of Barth’s anxiety about such a disjunction, grace tends to become solely an event in a person’s moral history. 44 Barth, ‘Not und Verheißung’, 110.


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45

witness [bezeugen] to him.’ Therein, however, lies the promise of preaching as well. For the reversal which the Word produces must occur first of all in the preacher himself, when he is confronted in the Bible by the Word with which he must answer his congregation’s question. And so, in his very person as preacher, he now serves as a sign of the thoroughly concrete reality of God’s turn towards humanity. In effect, then, the preacher or theologian is to become the ‘sacrament’ of grace, for as a ‘sign of distress [Notzeichen]’46 he represents the reversal of question and answer which occurs in the reality of the divine Word. If he did that, if he gave the answer to what people were asking, but gave this answer as a man who himself is questioned by God, then we can certainly say that he speaks the Word of God, which men are seeking from him and which God has commissioned him to speak. For as a man who is really questioned by God and who really questions God, he would know God’s answer and so be able to give people an answer, people who with their questions certainly await God ’s answer, even if they do not realize this.47

The preacher becomes the sacrament of grace here. He is not merely a substitute for the reality of grace itself (eine Vorlaüfigkeit), but the living embodiment of the event (res) itself, whose dynamism is therefore fully apparent in him, its reflection (signum). To his congregation he has become the prototype of all human existence before God.48 Unlike ‘Catholic’ sacramentalism, the theology or proclamation of the Word does not claim the power to generate the total identification between grace and creation. And so, it leaves a space in which

45

46 Ibid., 122. Barth, ‘Das Wort Gottes’, 162. Barth, ‘Not und Verheißung’, 116. 48 That Barth thinks of the ministerium verbi divini as being universally significant of the meaning of the presence of God is evident from his response to the suggestion that the impossibility of theology ought to mean the end of it. ‘The perplexity of our task is simply the sign of the perplexity in all human tasks. If it did not fall to us, then it would befall other theologians to operate under the same circumstances. A woman must stick with her children, just as the cobbler must stick to his last, and we can be quite sure that dialectic in a child’s playroom is no less pressing than it is in the theologian’s study. Giving up on theology has as little sense as giving up on life: doing so changes absolutely nothing at all. We must simply persevere, nothing more’ (‘Das Wort Gottes’, 176). 47

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God himself can make his move towards humankind. And yet, the eschatological reserve which is thus inscribed into this perspective by Barth extends, in fact, only to the point at which God utters his Word—at which point it is abolished in an event of total identification. The contrast between Word and sacrament Barth wishes to draw perhaps masks a fundamental similarity in the way in which he construes them. In each case, a final historical presence of grace is expected. Rather than God’s accompaniment of human history, grace interrupts it and turns it upside down.

2.5 REVELATION AND NATURE Barth makes use of this material in }} 3–4 of the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics, which set out the problem first from the preacher’s point of view (} 3), then from the perspective of ‘man and his question’ (} 4). In many respects, }} 3–4 are the crucial paragraphs of these dogmatics lectures. In calling dogmatics ‘scientific reflection on the Word of God’, Barth intends to define its job in relation to Christian speech (or ‘preaching’). ‘Dogmatics is quite specifically reflection upon the Word of God concerning this speech, insofar as it is and ought to be identical with this Word’ (UCR I, 30). A large portion of dogmatic work will then be to describe what we have called the ‘kerygmatic situation’ against which dogmatics itself makes sense, and to draw his listeners into this situation which is, in fact, their own.

2.5.1 Preaching and Christian Existence In the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics, Barth develops as tight a linkage as possible between revelation and preaching as an attempt to challenge the naturalistic understanding of human subjectivity. The fact that, in modern Protestant theology, preaching is correlated with quite different social or cultural ends—e.g. the maintenance of public order, moral education, intellectual formation—is an indication to Barth of the disappearance of God from that theology. In Schleiermacher’s school, it seems to belong merely within ‘the realm of the


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beautiful, in aesthetics’ (UCR I, 330). By referring to the purpose of preaching as the communication of ‘pure doctrine’ (} 11), Barth aims to undermine the anthropology which permits that view to flourish. [Doctrine] expresses very well what’s going on here: that one person gives some information to another, which he does not know. Christian preaching is a synthetic act. The anti-intellectualist fear of the word ‘doctrine’ rests on a secret or (in Schleiermacher’s case) open naturalism: nothing new may enter a person. The Word of God brings something very new to him. [UCR I, 331–2]

By describing preaching as ‘doctrine’ Barth is connecting it with revelation, the impartation of something new to a person, from beyond her possessed capacities. It is thus a direct challenge to post-Cartesian religious anthropology. As Barth sees it, this anthropology thinks God can be known, and is in fact known, in what he refers to as the ‘basic religious act [religio¨ser Grundakt]’ (UCR I, 55): ‘Because the idea of God exists in us, God exists in reality [an sich]’. This is the rationalist version of the argument. In Romantic thought, which is based on the experience of God, rather than the concept of God, the second part of the argument is condensed into the first: ‘the “because” becomes an “insofar as”’ (UCR I, 56). In either case, this basic approach to religious knowledge is intrinsically flawed, in Barth’s view. In the first place, he argues, we might grant that I really am the subject of my own knowledge of God. And yet, if that is the case, God has then become the object of my knowledge; in which case whatever I might claim to know, I do not really know God as such, who is never an object.49 However, Barth

49 This sounds like a critique of rationalist metaphysics from within a rationalist perspective. And yet, Barth insists that the aporia is generated by revelation itself, not philosophically (cf. UCR II, 11–12). ‘What is called into question [in revelation] is a knowledge of God of which a human being is the subject. Human beings must permit themselves to be told that God is not an object, that their human knowledge of God can therefore only refer to [beziehen auf] that divine self-knowledge. What is given, given to human beings in revelation, is this divine self-knowledge’ (UCR II, 16). In other words, the actual knowledge of God of which God shows that he is its subject, is what makes the knowledge of God by a human subject impossible.


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demonstrates that the argument comes apart from the opposite perspective too. For example, Schleiermacher claims that God is known in the ‘feeling of absolute dependence’, as the non-worldly ‘Whence’ of that feeling,50 and the claim rests on the absoluteness of the feeling—otherwise it would constitute a dependency upon another creature. Then, however, the question is whether actual human experience itself is capable of meeting this criterion. ‘How can I even arrive at the possibility of positing that object [i.e. God], when these are the demands placed on the subject?’ (UCR I, 57). Therefore, if preaching is thought merely to confirm the religious Grundakt that is structurally present within human subjectivity, it will have been based on an aporia, rather than any given reality. The knowledge of God always involves the upturning of the structures of the human subject, the Word of God which always communicates something new. Preaching, therefore, takes nothing for granted. It must be a ‘venture’ (UCR I, 55), an act of daring, since, if it truly communicates the Word of God, this will create a disturbance and a shock in those who hear it. Speaking of God does not fit into what people otherwise are and do, not even into what they are and do in their best moments. Within every human community, order and custom, speaking of God means the same thing the unsymmetrical window built into the front of many old Franciscan churches meant: a barb, a corrective, a reminder of eternity, the great divine disturbance to which alone hope can be attached. [UCR I, 59]

However, Barth’s argument goes further than that. It is not just that preaching shares some of the qualities of divine revelation itself. It is here, in preaching, that revelation is to be thought of as occurring, so far as the human subject is concerned. By suspending the reality of revelation until the kerygmatic event occurs, Barth aims to make reception of the preaching of the church the measure by which it can be judged whether I have accepted revelation as such. He declares: ‘Whoever fails to know the spoken Word today as this, does not belong to the Reformers but to the Baptists. He should check

50

Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, } 4.4.


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whether, in denying the Word of God in preaching, he is not also denying it in Holy Scripture and in revelation’ (UCR I, 40–1).51 On the other hand, this immediately raises the spectre in his mind of the second type of reification of grace we referred to earlier. Although, from an objective point of view, the identity of revelation in the preached Word seems to ensure its reality, its actual impact upon the human subject still needs recording lest the knowledge of God is mistaken for a theoretical abstraction. Thus, Barth’s first statement about revelation in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics appears in two paragraphs—‘Deus Dixit’ (} 3) and ‘Man and his question’ (} 4)—picking up on the dialectical structure of revelation we already identified in the Elgersburg and Schulpforta lectures. ‘[The preacher] claims to give the deepest answer to the deepest human question. He places in front of the I of the listener an incalculable, indissoluble and ineluctable Thou’ (UCR I, 54). In the ‘correlation between address and being-addressed’ or ‘between revelation and faith’ (UCR I, 80) both sides of the dialogue require specific theological attention. The challenge Barth faces here is to give a credible account of the impact made by revelation upon the human subject as she is seized and shaken up by the Word of God. He must avoid depicting a steady, continuous human essence, and instead must capture the critical moment in human subjectivity at which revelation occurs, and portray human beings as those who exist ‘essentially’, so to speak, in this instability. ‘What must man be because of revelation?’ is to be the defining anthropological question here (UCR I, 87). Once again, Barth approaches the topic through the dialectic of question and answer, and thus by referring back to the kerygmatic situation. The preacher is not to address people’s public persona— i.e. the social, cultural, religious, national etc. identities they either project or are assigned—but what Barth calls the Absconditum, ‘the humanity in man [der Mensch in den Menschen]’ (UCR I, 84). This Absconditum is not some interior essence that can be reached by a process of introspective examination, but the human person insofar 51 In justifying this ‘equation’ Barth appeals to the famous statement from the Second Helvetic Confession (art. 1.2): Praedicatio verbi divini est verbum divinum (see UCR I, 325).

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as she is subjected to examination by the Word of God. To see human beings like this is to determine them not conceptually, but in their actual existence—in an Existenzbestimmung, not a Denkbestimmung (UCR I, 93). Furthermore, this existence in revelation is defined, above all, as an existential questioning: ‘God’s revelation, in which Christian preaching is based, is the answer to the human question about the overcoming of the contradiction in our existence’ (UCR I, 82; thesis statement). Barth derives two homiletic principles from this anthropology. First, in speaking of God, the preacher is to assume that his listeners already know the realities to which he bears witness: We must set out by presupposing that people know, understand and accept God’s Word; which means not presupposing man’s godlessness, his ignorance, his incomprehension, his contradiction . . . I must count him as God’s with the same axiomatic certainty with which I place myself under the ‘Deus dixit’ . . . Counting him as God’s means that I see him standing before God in his lostness, and know that he is addressed by God, trusting that I say nothing new or foreign to him, but the most intimate and personal thing, summoning him, and myself together with him, to remember that God is on the scene. [UCR I, 103–4]

It may not seem easy to square this principle with Barth’s proposal that preaching be regarded as a challenge to naturalistic religious anthropologies. However, ‘in trusting that I say nothing new or foreign’ to those to whom I preach, I am not presupposing the existence of a religious knowledge grounded in, or presupposed by, the basic act of the human subject, but a prior knowledge of God grounded in, and initiated by, God. Barth is not reverting back to a self-contained anthropology here, but proposing that to be human is to be always already confronted by God in revelation. Secondly, the human question is not merely a preliminary anticipation of faith, but the essence of faith itself, the human correspondence to revelation. Barth puts it like this: ‘The correlation between revelation and faith is not genuine without the other correlation between faith and question’ (UCR I, 80). In other words, it is in the human question concerning God (Frage nach Gott) that God has already taken the initiative in addressing humanity. Therefore,


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preaching itself must directly refer to the human question, otherwise it speaks past the point at which God’s Word is real: [T]he question may not be stifled [tot gemacht]. Quite the opposite: it must be stimulated and kept alive. All answers that we could give must be given in the intention of placing people again and more truly in the question of their existence which they have perhaps, probably and even certainly forgotten again. [UCR I, 104]

Thus, although revelation is described as a rupture in the settled ontology of the human subject, Barth takes great care to ensure that this rupture does not take place over the head of the one in whom it occurs, but precisely within that person. God is not convincingly my God so long as grace remains an abstraction. ‘Doing away with the question would mean the same as doing away with revelation, not being addressed by God, or not any longer’ (UCR I, 104–5). In order to settle this point, Barth paints a picture of humankind as homo viator which deliberately alludes to passages in Goethe and Nietzsche, as well as to St Paul’s description of humanity in Rom. 7 (UCR I, } 4.2, esp. 87–9). He does not mean to suggest that this anthropology is based on a philosophical analysis. It is strictly a petitio principii, humanity in the image of revelation. And yet, ‘[t] he contact we make with philosophy here is to be welcomed as a subsequent confirmation to us of the fact that we have not described a phantom sub specie humani, but a figure which everyone can know’ (UCR I, 90).

2.5.2 Revelation and Natural Theology Barth’s concern not to allow his theology to slip into doctrinal abstraction emerges once again at the beginning of his chapter on the doctrine of God (UCR II, Ch. 4). Rather than launching directly into a discussion of the divine essence or attributes, he introduces this part of the dogmatics with a paragraph on the knowability (Erkennbarkeit) of God (UCR II, } 15), which concludes with a subsection on the natural knowledge of God (} 15.4). Although Barth makes considerable adjustments, this paragraph corresponds

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to the locus on natural theology, which often introduced Reformed dogmatics in the rationalist period.52 McCormack takes this section to be an inconsistency in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics, potentially even a contradiction of the doctrine of revelation Barth had been working out in the first volume.53 His explanation for it is that Barth had now begun to follow Heppe’s Reformed dogmatics textbook very closely (although not uncritically) in his own presentation of Christian doctrine.54 In other words, because Heppe begins with a chapter on natural and revealed theology, Barth feels the need to do so too, albeit with an important twist, in that Barth changes the order found in Heppe. ‘Barth does take up the subject of a natural knowledge of God at the same point Heppe does though significantly, in the reverse order: first, revealed theology and then natural theology.’55 Nevertheless, } 15.4 seems to McCormack to be an anomaly in Barth’s dogmatics, which comes close to ‘endangering his most basic principles’.56 It can only be put down to the ‘almost boundless confidence in the church’s teaching of the past’ which Barth had acquired by now.57 I am not sure, however, that Barth’s ‘respect for the confessionaltheological school’58 entirely explains what is going on in UCR II, } 15. In fact, Barth toyed with a natural knowledge of God here, because he was highly conscious of the danger of divorcing revelation from natural reality, a principle that is firmly rooted in the first volume. ‘People are to be spoken to, and to be collared, as those who can know God’, he declares (UCR II, 30). In this section, Barth wants to distinguish the way God is known in revelation from the way he is taken to be knowable in Lutheran dogmatics. Revelation is ‘real, sufficient and adequate knowledge of God’ (UCR II, 19), Barth agrees. In other words, although God does 52

Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, 1–11. I cite McCormack’s thesis here, which is the only place in the secondary literature to discuss in detail these passages in Barth. The expository sections from his thesis dealing with the second and much of the third volumes of the GD are omitted in Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology. 54 See McCormack, A Scholastic of a Higher Order, 564–5 for a table setting out in parallel Heppe’s dogmatic loci alongside Barth’s loci in UCR I and II. 55 McCormack, A Scholastic of a Higher Order, 579. 56 57 58 Ibid., 586. Ibid., 563. Ibid., 586. 53


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not hand over control to the human knower, he nevertheless makes himself available to be known in revelation, for ‘whoever disputed that God enters into this conditionality [Bedingtheit], into this subject– object relation, and becomes knowable in it, would be denying revelation’ (UCR II, 17).59 And yet, this does not mean that God is available to be known directly, whether objectively in Jesus,60 or through my knowledge of myself.61 Barth thinks of both of these as instances of what, at one point, he refers to as ‘Lutheranism’s inability or unwillingness to wait’ (UCR III, 107). ‘They impatiently and chaotically drag into the relation of revelation [Offenbarungsverha¨ltnis], into the knowledge of Christ and knowledge of faith, what belongs to the end of all things as their fulfilment, and [what belongs] in eschatology as the limit and dissolution of dogmatics’ (UCR II, 28).62 However, the eschatological suspension of revelation here is not an absolute denial of its reality, but an analysis of it. Barth points to two 59 It is probably an exaggeration, therefore, when Hans Frei suggests that in this period (until after the publication of the Christliche Dogmatik in 1927) Barth was so anxious about objectifying God that he did not think that faith had any real content at all. According to Frei, either ‘the knowledge of God is simply ac-knowledgment of myself as being known’ (Frei, The Doctrine of Revelation, 198), i.e. self-knowledge in an ‘epistemic vacuum’, or it is taken ethically as personal ‘venture’ or ‘risk’ (ibid., 116). Barth certainly intends to draw attention to the existential character of knowledge (e.g., UCR I, 242). Indeed, his doctrine of revelation is that to know God is to participate in God’s self-knowledge, rather than to possess that knowledge for ourselves (UCR II, 15–16). When he posits himself as subject, however, God nevertheless posits himself; Barth intends to express both ideas (UCR II, 13). 60 Barth cites Paul Althaus and Werner Elert as instances of this postivism: ‘In the life of Jesus, or in distinct traits of his life, it is supposed that we have the divine subject immediately and directly available [ablesbar] before our eyes. But that would mean that the divine subject, the “I am who I am!” who reveals his name by refusing it, was made into a named object’ (UCR II, 22). 61 Here Barth refers to Horst Stephan, as well as Hegel and Schleiermacher. This epistemology involves ‘a breaking-through of the subject–object relation’ (UCR II, 24–5) in which God initiates the knowledge of himself. 62 Barth thinks that this eschatological reserve makes his doctrine of revelation similar to that in Roman Catholic theology (and specifically Thomas Aquinas). Catholic dogmatics draws a distinction between the lumen gratiae and the lumen gloriae: the former is indirect and historically mediated knowledge; the latter direct knowledge, ‘mediated’ only by the bestowal of the lumen gloriae itself upon the mind in the consummatio mundi (for references, see UCR II, 26–7). However, this eschatological economy of revelation is rather different to Barth’s eschatology, the horizon of which is less the consummation of the world than the eschatological advent of the divine Word.

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well-known examples of God’s revelation of himself to Moses in Exodus. When Moses demands to know Yahweh’s name, he is not granted it directly, but referred to God’s irreducible subjectivity: ‘I am who I will be’ (Ex. 3.14). ‘Namensverweigerung als Namensoffenbarung’ (UCR II, 13), Barth observes; by refusing to hand over his name (i.e. who he really is), God really reveals it. Or again, when Yahweh shows himself to Moses, it is not God’s face that Moses is permitted to see, but his back, for ‘man shall not see me and live’ (Ex. 33.20–3). To know God in revelation can only mean to know ‘his mystery, the limitation [Grenze] he sets to our knowledge, the need to ask after him’ (UCR II, 19). Barth’s version of the ‘natural’ knowability of God is to be understood in the context of this doctrine of revelation. As Barth describes it, the human capax Dei cognitionis is something of a paradox. On the one hand, we are informed that, as a human capacity, it is never to be disconnected from its actual realization in revelation; it is asserted on the strictly theological basis of the knowledge of God which in fact is, not as an inductive philosophical argument (UCR II, 11–12, 32). It is based on the twofold premise that God in fact already addresses humanity, and that God does nothing in vain (UCR II, 31–2). In short, ‘natural’ does not refer to a possessed capacity which can be activated spontaneously by the human subject. As Christoph Schwo¨bel has stated it, ‘[t]he knowing subject does not determine the reality of the object of knowledge through the conditions for the possibility of knowledge’.63 And yet, on the other hand, Barth insists that ‘this capacity stands, even if . . . there is no actual knowledge of God’ (UCR II, 30); although it stands here not as a positive potentiality over against God, but as the existential question which a person actually is. In maintaining this distinction between the reality and its possibility, Barth is trying to make it clear that there is nothing subsequent or accidental about what a human being is, or becomes, in revelation; grace and nature never come apart. This is why it is not impossible that critical philosophy is capable of being in agreement with this

63

Schwo¨bel, ‘Theology’, 30.


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theological anthropology: the existential disruption caused by God is not notional, but real. It is at this point that Barth introduces his equivalent of a proof for the existence of God although, as he points out, the ‘proof ’ serves rather a different function in this dogmatics. Rather than being an induction from a given, generally agreed foundation to the reality of a previously disputed hypothesis (which would entail the erasure of the eschatological limit of the knowledge of God), Barth simply reaffirms the existential phenomenon of the unsatisfied quest for God (Frage nach Gott), for this is the very thing disclosed in God’s revelation: [T]he natural knowledge of God consists . . . precisely in the ‘facultas’ of coming up against the mystery, of allowing oneself to be limited, made finite, by an unanswerable question. A proof of the existence of God, the conviction that we are thrust [angewiesen] upon God with absolute necessity, that we cannot escape God, would, instead of opening up that refuge, have to consist in showing that pitiless limitation, that immovable but unanswerable question in the possibility of knowledge as such. It would not demonstrate before [a person’s] eyes the satisfactory completion of his total worldview, but its most unsatisfactory presupposition. [UCR II, 44]

This is not to be thought of as a ‘negative natural theology’, if that is taken to mean a theological proposal not rooted in revelation itself.64 ‘The knowability of God is given and called into question in revelation’, Barth insists (UCR II, 11—thesis statement, my italics). We might categorize it as a negative transcendental proof of God: the reality of God—not simply an idea of God, but his very revelation— is the horizon of the experience of, or the rational conception of, God’s unknowability. For McCormack, UCR II, } 15.4 comes very close to Emil Brunner’s ‘eristics’ programme, which Barth himself would famously oppose less than a decade later, but which already stands in contrast to the real intentions of his own dogmatics.65 And so, it is worth

64 Stadtland argued that the negations in Barth’s dialectical theology were based on a ‘negative natural theology’ rather than on revelation (Eschatologie und Geschichte, 120). 65 McCormack, A Scholastic of a Higher Order, 585f.

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comparing, briefly, this negative ‘proof ’ of God’s existence with the positions Brunner was busy developing at the same time.66 Brunner increasingly comes to see his own proposal as a response to the concern that Barth’s dogmatic theology was detaching itself from the concrete, existential environment in which the Word of God in fact occurs. Hence, in addition to providing an ‘objective science of the faith’,67 the theologian had a second task: to relate theological propositions to existence as it is actually lived out. Brunner elaborates his existential analysis in engagement with critical philosophy, which he decides to interpret through Kierkegaard rather than its neo-Kantian exponents. That is, the ‘seriousness’ (Ernst) of critical reason does not derive from a notion of pure science, from which Kant then derived his moral philosophy, but from the categorical imperative which is always present on the horizon of thought, and entails an original cleft between indicative and imperative, Ought and Is.68 Critical philosophy is theologically serious because it takes cognizance of the limits, the self-contradiction, the guilt, in which practical reason finds itself implicated, and thus demonstrates a ‘searching [fragendes] knowledge of God’69 Indeed, this can be seen from the fact that the more sophisticated this philosophy becomes, the more abruptly it comes up against the aporias which are built into its very structures: ‘The more reflection pushes through to its ultimate ground, the more the given and the non-given fall apart, and the deeper, graver and more unbearable the cleft becomes. In the knowledge of guilt or of radical evil, the critical principle reaches its completion.’70 This reading of critical philosophy seemingly has much in common with Barth’s positive reception of it in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics. He refers to it, at one point, as ‘clean philosophical thinking’ (UCR II, 217), i.e. a philosophy conscious of rational limits, which therefore avoids giving a conceptually complete picture of how God and the world relate. Moreover, as we have seen, Barth regards the critical 66 Brunner’s theological eristics can be seen emerging in two essays published in Zwischen den Zeiten, ‘Das Grundproblem der Philosophie bei Kant und Kierkegaard’ (1924) and ‘Die andere Aufgabe der Theologie’ (1929). 67 Brunner, ‘Die andere Aufgabe’, 256. 68 Brunner, ‘Das Grundproblem’, 37f. 69 Brunner, ‘Die andere Aufgabe’, 262. 70 Brunner, ‘Das Grundproblem’, 41.


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analysis of human existence as being the philosophical intuition about the limitedness of human creatureliness before God—and hence, as a kind of ‘proof ’ of revelation. And yet, there is a fundamental difference here from Brunner’s attempt to correlate theology and critical philosophy. In Barth, the unsatisfied existential ‘quest for God’ (Fragen nach Gott) is not so much the point of contact theology can make with natural reason, in order to resolve the dilemmas of the latter, as the condition to which all reason is consigned by revelation. Whereas Barth locates theology and faith within the limits and self-contradictions which attend human existence because God is, Brunner thinks that it is here that the existential struggle comes to an end. Theology, for Brunner, communicates the divine Logos in time, and so brings about ‘the contradiction of the contradiction of our existence’.71 ‘Faith is either the end of philosophy, or it is not faith at all . . . Faith knows (that is its witness, not philosophy’s) that it—that the divine Word of promise which creates it—is the fulfilment of the law, the fulfilment of critical thought.’72 For Barth, however, theology and faith are not exempt from that movement by which critical philosophy is afflicted, for it is precisely that affliction which attests a genuine knowledge of God. In short, to let theology or faith off the hook at this point is also to liberate them from God. Furthermore, if the search for God is therefore set by Brunner, not within the movement of faith, as it is by Barth, but as a necessary countermovement which precedes it and prepares for it, it becomes difficult to maintain that the initiative in grace is taken by God.73 71

72 Ibid., 45. Ibid., 46. It is clear that Brunner himself senses this problem, for he is quick to point out that human ‘nature’ is not simply identical with sin, but ‘borne by God and oriented towards God. And so, the “point of contact” for God in man is none other than God’s own creative work’ (‘Die andere Aufgabe’, 267 n. 7). In other words, he tries to maintain that the preliminary to the actual moment of grace is not a human work but providential grace: ‘Hearing, faith, assent are entirely God’s work, when they occur. But refusal is man’s work’ (ibid., 268). The claim remains unconvincing, however, when the overall flow of the argument is in exactly the opposite direction: unless Brunner can show that the process of human questioning occurs outside grace, as the autonomous movement of (practical) reason towards the realization of its own aporias, the worry that dogmatic theology can ever really lose its Existentialita¨t is unfounded, and there can be no ‘other task for theology’, as he proposes. 73

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(This objection on the basis of the doctrine of grace will be at the heart of Barth’s ‘No’ to Brunner in the 1930s.) By contrast, because the existential contradictoriness of human life is directly revealed in the event of grace itself, for Barth it is evident that the apprehension of it by critical reason cannot be a self-driven process, but is a moment within faith itself, and therefore the rational response to a divine impulse. Coming, as it does, at the beginning of his doctrine of God, this paragraph on the knowability of God, and the negative ‘proof ’ of God’s existence, is not merely incidental to that doctrine. Barth wishes to make it clear that the dialectic in which he unfolds the doctrine—setting one attribute against another, so as to prevent any one of them becoming a comprehensive statement about God—is based in the eschatologically limited condition in which human thought finds itself because of revelation. Conversely, the limits of language which become apparent in that way of speaking about God are not merely abstract rational limits, but the limits generated by the confounding reality of God: If, in the book of Job, it is the questioner Job who is in the right . . . rather than the friends who answer him (Job 42.7), then this must mean that pointing to God, or proving God, so far as anything of that kind is humanly possible at all, is to be found where we come up against God’s mystery. [UCR II, 46]

In a sense then, the critical-philosophical proof of revelation is an anti-proof, the proof of the reality of the existence of God by affirming the impossibility of such a proof.

2.6 CONCLUSION ‘Christian preaching is God’s Word in the present, for the present, just as Holy Scripture is God’s Word in [past] time, and revelation is God’s eternal Word’ (UCR I, 327). What we have been observing in this chapter is not a denial, by Barth, of temporal, past-historical revelation. Rather, the introduction of a break between eternity and time, past and present, is designed to ensure that grace does not simply


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‘flow’ into the present, but makes a disruptive arrival, stopping it in its tracks in order to set it on a new course. Barth decides to portray this event taking place in the aporia of what he calls ‘the painful and tragic riddle of Christian preaching’ (UCR I, 324): preaching must become nothing less than revelation itself, an impossible task. On the other hand, as we shall see more clearly in subsequent chapters, his deepest intention in describing the denaturalizing effects of revelation is not sheerly destructive, but the disclosure of a new kind of existence after grace, one that is genuinely human, and therefore genuinely free. And yet, Barth thinks that he cannot make that type of humanity fully apparent without, through the case of Christian ministry, claiming that it is to become eschatologically identical with revelation itself. Anything less than that aim would apparently indicate the kind of continuity between grace and history which revelation always resists: To be sure, if Christian preaching is something different than the Word of God then, precisely at that point, it is not a human task. It then stands on exactly the same plane as what occurs in nature. It is then an act of caprice, a product of the imagination, something which could be done in whatever way, or left undone as well. [UCR I, 330]

In other words, because preaching is directly responsible to the Word of God—and in this respect, it is to be thought of as paradigmatic of all human action—its freedom is not self-originating (caprice), but takes the form of a voluntary agreement of the individual’s will to a quite specific end. However, it is questionable whether the notion of an (indirect) ‘identity’ between preaching and revelation is really conducive to the full affirmation of the freedom of the human act. Unlike in Brunner, Barth insists upon an eschatological delay between the human word and the divine Word which it intends. Indeed, it is in the interstice between them that space is left in grace for human action. And yet, he finds it hard to express the delay in anything but negative terms: Preaching is precisely not there for its own sake, but to permit us, through human words, to see through to the present and living Word of God. The less they interpose a third thing between God’s Word and man, and the more

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that they negate any third thing, setting aside all false divinities and all arrogant humanities, the more they seek, in their positivity, to be only an indication, only a pointer, compelling us to see that other thing with which they are, nevertheless, indirectly identical, the more clearly the hiddenness of the Word of God can shine through the human word which conceals it, the more it is pure doctrine. [UCR I, 332]

Because Barth thinks of the church’s readiness to accept the disruptiveness of the preached word as, at the very least, the concrete mark of its acceptance of the troubling disturbance caused by the Word of God, he wants to assert, eschatologically, a total identity of the two. Yet the result is a description where human speech and divine Logos are always potentially crowding each other out, trying to occupy the same restricted space. The metaphor of ‘transparency’ simply confirms the gravity of this concern: the doctrinal purity to which preaching must aspire is less to do with a coherency which reflects revelation, than an entirely insubstantial clarity which will not impede it. Preaching is to be ‘only an indication, only a pointer’. However, because this indication and this pointer are obliged to be equal with the Word of God (eine Gleichung—UCR I, 332), it is hard to see how they can be positively rendered. Hence, as we shall see in more detail in Chapter 3, the last thing dogmatics may do, in serving Christian preaching, is to provide it with a positive version of the gospel. It is only when Barth lectures on John’s Gospel, in the first semester after leaving Go¨ttingen, that he manages to develop a convincing emphasis on the positivity of the church’s ministry as witness, for this takes its rise in the Son’s ministry of witness to the Father.

3 Dogmatics In this chapter, I return to the issue raised earlier (see 2.2 above) concerning the relation between preaching and dogmatics. We have seen how Barth was conscious of the danger of dogmatics interceding between the Word of God and the preacher, for that would blunt the direct impact of that encounter, in which the minister becomes the ‘sacrament’ to his congregation of the eschatological presence of the Word. Because of that, Barth’s dogmatics totters on a knife-edge between a negative theology and an abstract positivism. In the Schulporfta and Elgersburg lectures, examined earlier, he refers to theology as a critical science, both in relation to preaching and to other disciplines. Rather like critical philosophy, it must serve as a reminder to the positive sciences of the shakiness of their foundations, the sign that ‘the supposed academic cosmos is in reality an eddy of scattered pages blowing over the edge of an abyss!’1 Its essence does not lie in its positivity, but in being a ‘pinch of spice’, a ‘marginal gloss’ on other theologies; in short, Korrektiv.2 And yet, it is only because it allows itself to be directly exposed to the criticism of the Word that theology has this critical function. Theology does not speak from above preaching or the positive sciences, but with them and alongside them. It is a critical science not because it possesses a criterion of judgement, but precisely because it recognizes that it does not. In the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics, Barth will use the Reformed scholastic theology, systematized by Heppe, to lend structure and substance to his dogmatics, especially 1 2

Barth, ‘Das Wort Gottes’, 162. Barth, ‘Not und Verheißung’, 100.


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in the doctrines of God, creation, humanity in UCR II, and Christology and soteriology (UCR III). And yet, he still maintains that his theology is critical: the ‘worth and value’ of Reformed scholasticism, he points out in the concluding chapter of the dogmatics, depends on couching it in the ‘newly awakened understanding of eschatology’ (UCR III, 432). The moment dogmatics achieves ‘opacity’, or becomes a learnable language, it contradicts the eschatological reality of the Word which does not suffer that kind of containment. As Pfleiderer points out, the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics is intended to be ‘preaching for preachers’.3 However, this is not because of its ‘systematic and constructive potential’,4 but precisely because it seeks to draw attention to the eschatological interval between its own language and revelation. As I have suggested already, Barth’s dogmatics reflects a dialogical perspective on theological reality, the paradigm of which is the ‘dialogue’ between the preacher’s sermon and the congregation’s quest for God. And yet, it also applies to dogmatic discourse itself, which Barth plots quite consciously in relation to the dialogue. Dogmatics too is in an eschatological economy, structured by the expectation of God’s presence in the Word, and if it is a ‘critical science’ it is because it allows its limits to appear in that connection. It will be apparent that this eschatology must make it hard for Barth to construe the task of dogmatics in positive terms. To the extent that the reality of the Word—the horizon against which dogmatics takes place—moves into the foreground, the positivity of dogmatic assertions is cancelled out by the presence of the infinitely greater reality. We shall see that Barth tries to avoid this rivalry (not wholly satisfactorily) by extending the eschatological interval between dogmatics and this reality. A genuine conceptual advance occurs, however, in the lectures on John’s Gospel Barth gave at Mu¨nster in 1925–6 (the term after his departure from Go¨ttingen). In these lectures, Barth manages more convincingly to portray the positive luminary quality of the human witness—without that positivity being competitive with revelation itself—because he grounds this ministry in God, in the Son’s ministry of witness. The chapter concludes with an analysis of this commentary.

3

Pfleiderer, Karl Barths praktische Theologie, 419.

4

Ibid., 420.

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3.1 THE DOGMATIC CORRELATION Upon arriving in Go¨ttingen, Barth soon found himself invited to join what he referred to (not without irony) as the Stange-Kra¨nzchen, a closed circle of some of the Lutheran theologian Carl Stange’s colleagues from the theological faculty, which gathered at fortnightly intervals in Stange’s house for discussion and debate. On 22 January 1922, Stange proposed that at the next meeting he, Barth, and Emmanuel Hirsch each deliver short papers on the significance of Feuerbach for their own work. What we have of Barth’s paper is admittedly not much more than detailed, but informal notes,5 without the subtly and range of analysis we find in the well-known essay on Feuerbach Barth would later publish in Mu¨nster. And yet, the conclusions he draws about Feuerbach are essentially the same in the earlier piece as those he reaches in the later one. In both pieces, notwithstanding some criticism, Barth regards Feuerbach not as an opponent, but an ally. As he puts it in the later piece, ‘the position of Feuerbach the anti-theologian was more theological than that of many theologians, since in strict adherence to the old, accepted theological content, he wanted to say, not many things, but one thing with a tenacity which did not fear a thousand repetitions’.6 The 1922 paper is interesting, however, because it gives an important indication of how Barth thinks of dogmatics, not simply as a piece of discourse, but as situated within a particular strand of religious anthropology, from where it operates a dialectical negation. Feuerbach’s theological value, for Barth, is found in the consistently reductive psychology which he uses to generate his anthropological critique of religion. And yet, his reading of Feuerbach is somewhat complex. ‘Feuerbach saw something decisively true: what we call religion, even what we call Christianity, is a relative and a thisworldly phenomenon, across the whole spectrum in which it appears psychically and historically.’7 What Feuerbach perceived, that is, was that humanity is a singular reality, whose supposedly higher and 5 6 7

Barth, ‘Feuerbach’ (1922). Barth, ‘Ludwig Feuerbach’ (1926), 217. Barth, ‘Feuerbach’ (1922), 9.

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lower functions are in fact in inextricable concert, so that the religious motions of the soul can be linked directly to the needs and operations of the body. And yet, that notwithstanding, he basically remained sympathetic to the religious synthesis between God and humanity taught by modern Protestantism, criticizing it only for not going far enough. By continuing to appeal to a divine presence over and beyond human consciousness (even if only notionally so), Feuerbach worried that theology was putting a ceiling on the elevation of humanity, which was the meaning of all true religion. In other words, expressed in dogmatic terms, the human dignity intended by religion was only possible on condition that the unio naturarum between God and humanity be total and unqualified.8 Barth’s objection here is not, as might be expected, that the synthesis Feuerbach posits between God and humanity makes God wholly immanent within the world—rather than transcendent over it—but that God’s immanence to the world has not been construed historically. This means that, in the final analysis, Feuerbach’s anthropology amounts to ‘naı¨ve humanitarianism’,9 a bourgeois faith in ‘humanity’ as an unchanging essence instantiated in every historical present:10 He saw human willing and longing and thinking as the last thing, even at the point where its actual end becomes visible, and beyond the end the new thing, the other thing which is not of this world. He did not see that the lines of perceptible [anschaulich] humanity, which he was often capable of depicting so movingly, coincide at the invisible point beyond all graves, where the new man stands.11

In a word, what Barth finds missing from Feuerbach’s anthropology is the concept of death (Todesgedanke)—the recognition that the complete synthesis between God and humanity is an eschatological event; and therefore one in which human self-realization meets its divine limits. Without this, Barth argues, Feuerbach’s ‘anti-theology’ is really 8 The 1926 essay shows the fruits of Barth’s studies on Reformed and Lutheran Christology in Go¨ttingen, in that he links Feuerbach’s doctrine of religion back to the Lutheran communicatio idiomatum (a connection Feuerbach himself drew quite readily), and appealing for the need for a ‘Calvinist corrective’ to Lutheran Christology to put a brake on Feuerbach’s reductionism (‘Ludwig Feuerbach’ (1926), 231). 9 10 11 Barth, ‘Feuerbach’ (1922), 13. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 12.

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only an unrestrained Lebensphilosophie, and his critique of religion merely superficial. ‘Without the complete seriousness of the concept of death, [there can be] no sense of the Resurrection. But the concept of death must be precisely the norm of critical negation, to be used against the world and against religion, its noblest flower.’12 And yet, once the concept of death is introduced, the radicalism of Feuerbach’s reductionism can be turned back onto the religious symbiosis of God and world—not to abolish it as such, but to negate it eschatologically, i.e. to suspend its reality. Moreover, Barth connects this dialectical reversal directly with the task of dogmatic theology (and theological ethics): In the light of the concept of death, which Feuerbach never countenanced, it is not impossible to conceive the concept of eternity, and therefore to see questions concerning God where he only saw human answers. The task which I think Feuerbach sets theology, is a dogmatics and an ethics which, after the example of late scholasticism, dare to take that which is historically given in Christianity as the occasion for raising the question concerning God at the limits of humanity, aware of the this-worldliness [Diesseitigkeit] of all its achievements, but also aware of the other-worldliness [Jenseitigkeit] of what they point to; i.e. a dogmatics and an ethics [which dare] to be quite simply and honestly problematic [Problematik] again.13

It should be noted here that Barth does not leap from the concept of death to that of the Resurrection. The Resurrection cannot be allowed to be an abstract state of grace, posited in a sphere beyond human reality, for then (as Barth thinks) its morally subversive power would be lost. Dogmatics and ethics are to begin at the place of the total synthesis Feuerbach asserted, and from that point ‘dare . . . to be Problematik’: i.e. to problematize the positivity of the given, by identifying its eschatological horizon, on which the actuality of God’s presence becomes possible again. This is exactly the challenge taken up in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics. Barth will take what he refers to as the ‘raw material’, or ‘data’, that is Christian preaching—i.e. the teaching of the church ‘which is historically given in Christianity’—and problematize it. In so doing, it again becomes the possibility of a confrontation with the Word of 12

Ibid., 13.

13

Ibid., 13.


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God, rather than abstract theory, cut loose from the encounter itself. This critical process is the essence of what Barth terms ‘scientific reflection on the Word of God [wissenschaftliche Besinnung auf das Wort Gottes]’ (UCR I, 8). However, that means carefully distinguishing this definition of dogmatics from the two alternatives into which theology can slip: (a) scientia de Deo (i.e. a medieval-scholastic conception) or (b) scientia de religione (the modern Protestantsubjective reaction against it). Each of these possibilities corresponds exactly, of course, to the two abstractions Barth always sets out to avoid: of the reality of God from the human subject, and of the human subject from the reality of God.

3.1.1 Scienta de Deo Barth’s acquaintance with medieval theology was largely secondhand at this stage in his career, mediated through the extracts contained in various manuals on the history of dogma, combined with a sharp perception of the ‘spirit’ of the Middle Ages, which he developed by observing the various churches and works of art from the period, with which he was familiar. In the lectures on Reformed theology (in which there are brief treatments of the Middle Ages) because scholasticism forms the background to his discussion of the meaning of the Reformation, he is inclined to read it, not on its own terms, but through Luther’s polemics in the Heidelberg and Wittenberg Disputations. In other words, he tends simply to import Luther’s objections into his own analysis of medieval theology. Initially, he claims to be impressed by the ‘dialectical courage and consistency’14 of scholasticism, by the ‘extraordinary peace’15 that breathes over its debates, and by the ‘firm Catholic ground of balance’16 which made the medieval Summa rather like the great cathedrals of the age. However, the encomium is tinged with considerable irony. For all these attributes indicate to Barth that the Middle Ages had only the dimmest awareness of the disruptive potency entailed in any reflection upon God. To be sure, these theologians knew about the great themes of the Reformation: predestination, the forgiveness 14

Barth, TC, 32.

15

Ibid., 50.

16

Ibid., 53.

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of sins, gratuitous justification etc. ‘But why were these concepts so harmless in their thinking, so lacking in relevance, so very much in the background?’ he wonders. ‘How did they manage to turn them into the foundations of a theological-ecclesial system in which grace was mediated in a harmonious order—the peaceful cohabitation of nature and grace, immanence and transcendence, human and divine freedom?’17 Above all, it seems to Barth that, until and in spite of the Occamist turn, God and creatures are connected as one massive, uninterrupted continuity (effectively the same critique he would continue to make of Catholicism throughout the 1930s):18 ‘what stamps medieval theology is the fundamental accessibility of the mystery of the glory, of the o´Æ Łf’.19 Barth describes the scholastic thought process as a horizontal line which, taking God’s revelation as its starting point, stretches onwards and upwards into infinity, ‘not considering how seriously it is threatened from behind’.20 Medieval scholasticism represents a mode of theology which either disregards or is unaware of the fact that intellectual reflection has its limits. What it successfully attempts is to communicate a knowledge of God in his glory, purity and majesty. In the biblical Word and church dogma it sees not only an indication and paraphrase of the Mystery itself, but signposts along a path that, with a little dialectical effort, leads to the heart of the Mystery, so that it is no longer mysterious for the one who takes this path. It knows no restriction or obligation making it halt in front of the object intended by the biblical Word or dogma.21

Scholastic theology itself is the path of salvation which, if pursued, leads reliably upwards into eternity. ‘It is the one thing necessary; it is the blessedness of man. You only need read the descriptions of heaven given by these theologians to understand what theology meant to people in the Middle Ages.’22 In short, it is the mystical–intellectual equivalent (for all the differences) of the anthropology represented by Feuerbach. Barth regards modern rationalist objections to all of this as justified. And yet, that is because he thinks that human knowledge is 17 19

Barth, TRB, 126. Barth, TC, 38.

E.g. Barth CD II/1, } 26 esp. pp. 79–84. 21 22 Ibid., 61. Ibid., 33–4. Ibid., 35.

18 20

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bound, not by empirical limitations, but by moral ones, which go unacknowledged throughout the contemplative processes of scholastic thought. In that all knowledge always involves what he calls a ‘correlation’ (Korrelation) between subject and object, defining dogmatics as scientia de Deo, tout court, ‘does not give faith the rights it must have in fixing the object’ (UCR I, 13). As an approach to dogmatics, scientia de Deo suspends the incontrovertible principle that the human subject is to become thematic in any theological process. It should be noted here that we are a long distance away from the ‘disjunction and alienation of [Barth’s] theology from natural reality’,23 which some commentators have identified. The starting point of his dogmatics is the principle that revelation makes any such disjunction inadmissible.

3.1.2 Scienta de religione On the other hand, he insists, ‘recognizing this correlation does not yet mean the Copernican reversal from the divine to the human subject’ (UCR I, 13), i.e. making dogmatics scientia de religione. Although Barth does not think of Schleiermacher as the instigator of this development—he dates it back to earlier strands of Reformed theology, especially English Presbyterianism (UCR I, 11)—he was best acquainted with Schleiermacher’s version of it, having devoted a section from his 1923 lecture course on Schleiermacher to analysis of The Encyclopedia.24 As Barth notes, because Schleiermacher did not wish to follow Schelling by constructing theology on a purely speculative basis, and because (on the other hand) a purely empirical science of historical Christianity would not suffice to legitimate it, he had to demonstrate—if he still wanted to maintain that theology justified its place in the university (according to the Kantian concept)—that the concept of ‘religion’ was a necessary theme in philosophical ethics. As Barth points out, however, relating theology to ethics along these 23

Roberts, A Theology on Its Way, 57. Barth, TS, } 4. See Schleiermacher, Brief Outline of Theology as a Field of Study (New York: E. Mellen Press, 1990). 24

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lines, as the relation between the possible and the actual or given, immediately restricts theology’s critical scope in relation to the positive sciences: With the assurance that piety and the pious community are things which were also envisaged by ethics, a little lodging is generously provided for it within the scientific whole, just so long as it has given up any pretensions of being the science of revelation, as the real Master of the house desired, and contented itself with the theme of so-called ‘piety’ which is allotted to it instead.25

In other words, because theology’s academic legitimacy (for Schleiermacher) is derived from the capacity of religion to sustain a given order of practice, to unsettle this order, as revelation necessarily does, will involve calling its academic credibility into question. Barth discusses Schleiermacher’s efforts to get round the problem, by projecting Christian religion back to its historical origins. This relation gives the impression that ‘early Christianity’ has a certain normative value over the present, in his system. And yet, because Schleiermacher thinks of history as ‘a unity . . . within which there are only relative contrasts’,26 the ‘disturbance’ (Sto¨rung) created by referring religion to its historical origins is ‘not genuinely dangerous, and the consistency of Schleiermacher’s theology still wins through, even in this inconsistency’.27 As Barth keenly points out, to make dogmatics the study of religion ultimately fails to provide a justification for theology’s academic existence, in that it now becomes a fundamentally otiose and superfluous discipline (UCR I, 35–6). Its sole purpose is to record or paraphrase ideas which have arisen in church history, referring them back to the religious consciousness from which they have emerged. Since that consciousness is both the source and the norm of religious language, dogmatics loses its capacity to be self-critical, in any meaningful sense: ‘Here, in any case, man is measured by man, his pious words by his experience, his speech concerning God by his own psychological-historical determination’ (UCR I, 341).28 25 27

26 Barth, TS, 309–10. Ibid., 312. 28 Ibid., 313. Cf. ibid., 315–6.

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At its most fundamental level, however, Barth’s objection to Schleiermacher is based on a reductio ad absurdum of the concept of religion itself. The problem with a dogmatics which takes its rise in the religious subject is that it returns theology to exactly the same dilemma it was trying to escape: the abstraction and objectification of God. Barth expresses it in terms of the same subject–object aporia I have pointed out in previous chapters: ‘If God were not subject, the one who speaks and creates faith through his Word, what else could he be than the object of metaphysical knowledge?’ (UCR I, 14) The only way round this dilemma, Barth insists, is to make God the subject of religion. In other words, the rejection of metaphysics by modern theology, in the name of anthropology, is turned back on modern theology itself—which is shown to be simply another form of metaphysics. Unless the ground of human religion is the divine subject, God becomes practically abstract from the human being once more (the metaphysical object of the human subject), the very thing that was being rejected at the outset. The dilemma is only escaped by grounding the religious subject outside itself. If dogmatics is to speak of God, if it wishes to do this only in the correlation between God and faith, as Protestant dogmatics does, there can nevertheless be no doubt that it must recognize its primary theme, which is to be placed at the highest point in principle, in this generative ground of faith, in this confidential divine turning and address, without which faith is nonsense. [UCR I, 15]

However, it should be noted that this reversal is rather more complex than a turn away from human subjectivity to the theological ‘Sache’, since the latter is being strictly coordinated with faith, as faith’s transcendent origin. In this sense, as Stacy Johnson has observed, Barth’s ‘focal point . . . strikes a formal parallel to that of Friedrich Schleiermacher, for whom, as well, the object of theology is never God in the abstract’.29 By making God the ‘generative ground’ of faith, Barth resolves the dilemma arising in the structures of human 29

Stacy Johnson, The Mystery of God, 13. For Frei, the quest to correlate the Word of God and experience (which he takes to characterize Barth’s theology between, approximately, 1916 and 1927) is a sign that Barth was still tied to some of the ‘relationist’ patterns of thought from which was trying to cut himself free (Frei, The Doctrine of Revelation, 107–8).

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subjectivity which, whether in its metaphysical or its subjectivist form, is always bound to make God into the object of human thought (and thus the victim of the human will as well). If God is conceived as faith’s originator, this difficulty is circumvented; for then the knowledge of God is not metaphysically released from the problematic character of human knowing, while on the other hand, faith does not ultimately cause its own knowledge.

3.2 DOGMATICS AS PROB LEMATIK As we have seen, Barth does not think of dogmatics as a self-contained study of God, or of the Word of God, but as a service performed in relation to the church’s preaching. This is not a circumstantial detail, nor simply a point about the institutional identity of theology.30 Barth’s consciousness that he is addressing future ministers is intrinsic to the way in which he develops his dogmatics. If preaching may be compared to front-line battle in the trenches, he writes, then dogmatics performs a behind-the-scenes communica¨ bung), which tions service (UCR I, 334). It is a form of training (U prepares pastors for their ministry (UCR I, 335). McCormack construes it like this: ‘Dogmatics has the quite modest task of providing the preacher with those dogmas, those loci which guide the preacher in doing everything he/she can do to ensure that what he/she says will be pure doctrine’.31 Or again:

30 From an historical point of view, of course, Pfleiderer’s institutionstheoretisch reading of the GD is quite accurate, even if Barth’s texts are stretched a little in justifying the point. That Barth’s theology was becoming a Schultheologie (Karl Barths praktische Theologie, 390ff.) is apparent from the concerns the author himself expresses in 1926, in the preface to the fifth edition of the Ro¨merbrief, regarding an incipient ‘Barth-Scholastik’: ‘When I was writing the book, I thought I was swimming against the stream, hammering at closed doors, pleasing nobody, or only the few, by what I was saying . . . Was I wrong about the world and about myself, that I was willy-nilly a bad theologian, the slave of the crowd . . . ?’ (Ro¨merbrief II, xxv) On the rise of ‘Barthianism’ in this period, see also Freudenberg, Karl Barth und die reformierte Theologie, 55–7. 31 McCormack, A Scholastic of a Higher Order, 364.

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Dogmatics seeks to search out the meaning of the various loci in order to establish viewpoints which can then guide the preacher in knowing how at least to best avoid placing obstacles in the way of the Word of God. Everything which can be done, must be done to create a free space for God to step forward and speak of Himself when He is spoken of.32

In terms of the theological Denkform of the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics, however, the two definitions are far from interchangeable. Indeed, only the second is an accurate reflection of Barth’s intentions, as he himself articulates them. The idea that dogmatics can ‘provide’ preachers with dogmas in order to ‘ensure’ the purity of their preaching is exactly what he wants to avoid, insofar as this releases them from the direct confrontation with the Word in which they become the sacramental sign of the encounter between God’s Word and the congregation. Dogmatics is preparatory to preaching, less because it supplies ministers with reliable dogmatic content, than because the dogmatician’s exposure to the problem of the Word becomes a ‘paradigmatic example’ (UCR I, 368–9) of the confrontation they will face. Like preaching, dogmatics involves ‘bringing one’s own more or less chaotic thoughts and words—no matter whether or not they come from one’s experience, tradition, or history, or the Bible itself—to that counterpart [Gegenstand] to which they must be referred if they are really to be the medium, the bearer of God’s Word’ (UCR I, 369). Just as he had done in debate with Harnack a year earlier,33 Barth construes the theological task in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics as running parallel with the task of preaching, and so subject to the same fundamental crisis. ‘If the way of Christian preaching is a ridge between heaven and earth, the way of the science of its principles cannot be an easy country road’, he writes (UCR II, 6). To establish that claim, Barth dedicates the first section of the lectures (UCR I, } 1.1) to outlining the way in which dogmatics— unlike historical theology or homiletics—is a ‘mortally dangerous’ (lebensgefa¨hrlich) venture. Historical theology, he explains, involves mere reportage—setting out what the church has said or believed in 32

McCormack, A Scholastic of a Higher Order, 354. ‘The task of theology is at one with the task of preaching. It consists in the reception and transmission of the Word of the Christ’ (Barth, ‘Fifteen answers to Professor Adolf von Harnack’, 88). 33

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the past; homiletics is mere technique—how to go about expressing what one already knows must be said. Dogmatic theology, on the other hand, is confronted with the question, ‘What are you going to say [Was willst du nun sagen]?’ (UCR I, 6) That is, it does not simply consider what others have said, nor work out how to convey ideas which are already available for use. Rather, in dogmatics I accept the responsibility that it is I who am to speak; and I must discover what it is I ought to say. In short, dogmatics is preparatory for preaching to the extent that it takes on precisely the same personal responsibility for the Word of God as the preacher himself does.34 And yet, Barth consistently maintains that dogmatics is not identical to preaching, but a ‘second thing, an independent thing’ (UCR I, 22). Why does he want to draw this sharp distinction? The answer lies, first of all, in Barth’s wish to expose preachers to the kerygmatic situation, rather than to furnish them with the right words. For example, Barth refers to the doctrine of the person (natures) of Christ—to which nearly fifty pages are devoted (UCR III, } 28)—as ‘the absolutely decisive presupposition of his work’ (UCR III, 75), to the extent that the Apostle’s Creed, in speaking of Christ as redeemer, does not even mention Christ’s work at all as such (UCR III, 80–1). And yet, the doctrine of the persona Christi is not to be made the theme of Christian preaching, but ‘the mystery . . . behind every statement made by preaching about Christ’s benefits’ (UCR III, 78; my emphasis).35 Moreover, the distinction between dogmatics and preaching also reflects the need Barth felt to establish the scientific character (Wissenschaftlichkeit) of his dogmatics. That he sought to do this may owe, in part, to the censure he had received from Harnack36 (and other liberal theologians of the older generation) that his method and theology were unwissenschaftlich—subjectivist and arbitrary.37 More fundamentally than that, however, Barth thinks that the way in which 34

Gunton’s claim that Barth tended to see theology, conservatively, as the archaeological excavation and preservation of a ‘deposit’ given to the church in the past could hardly apply to the GD, nor (in my judgement) to the CD (‘Karl Barth and the development of Christian doctrine’, esp. 178–80). 35 See also, 2.2 above. 36 von Harnack, ‘Open letter to Professor Karl Barth’, 91–2. 37 For a discussion of this debate over the Wissenschaftlichkeit of liberal and Barthian theology, see Rumscheidt, Revelation and Theology: An analysis of the Barth–Harnack correspondence of 1923.

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the doctrine of religion can best be undermined is by attacking it at the point at which it thinks it is strongest: its academic credibility.38 Already in 1927, H. W. Schmidt could see that this is what Barth was intending, yet he misconstrues the argument. Schmidt thinks that the danger from which Barth is trying to retreat is the theological relativism which had been the consequence of Protestant liberalism assimilating theology into terms set by the empirical sciences (history and psychology). Barth attempts this, on Schmidt’s account, by removing revelation from empirical reality altogether. ‘Historicism and psychologism were rendered innocuous for theology, once one could say that revelation had nothing to do with history, and religion was anything but a psychic experience or an inner event.’39 Then, of course, the question must become: ‘What is the point of speaking of revelation at all, when this only means the Aufhebung and negation of all historical realities?’40 In fact, it is not relativism that troubles Barth about Protestant liberalism, but its conception of the human subject. Consequently, his argument works quite differently to the way in which Schmidt reconstructs it. In truth, Barth claims, it is when dogmatics is construed as Religionswissenschaft that an abstraction has occurred from historical realities, for what is referred to as ‘pious self-consciousness’ or ‘inner life’ is, according to Schleiermacher’s own definition of religion, never simply a given psychological disposition, but always only non-given and a priori.41 In other words, if the modern concept of science is an attempt to serve what Barth calls ‘the modern need for immediacy’ (UCR I, 31) the religious consciousness fails to meet this demand, for it is never simply available for analysis (UCR I, 34–5). 38 That Barth was seriously preoccupied with this issue is evident from the Chr. Dog., where the material is substantially expanded (Chr. Dog., 45ff., 150ff.) Barth clearly feels that the modern idea of theology as Religionswissenschaft will fall if it can be shown that it is not, in fact, wissenschaftlich. 39 Schmidt, Zeit und Ewigkeit, 6. 40 Ibid., 71. 41 McCormack appears to think that Barth did not see this, and that therefore his opposition to Schleiermacher rests on the misapprehension that the latter’s doctrine of religion simply made the relation to God into a psychological fact available to the theologian, a datum rather than a dandum. ‘[I]t is of utmost importance to remember that the feeling of absolute dependence as feeling lies beyond the conceptual grasp of the dogmatician. All the dogmatician has at her disposal is a representation of that feeling, constructed by the objective consciousness.’ (McCormack, ‘What has Basel to do with Berlin?’, 161) Yet (here at any rate) Barth does recognize this, and indeed it is the very point that generates his critique of Schleiermacher’s notion of Religionswissenschaft.

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By contrast, if preaching is made ‘the immediate point of relation for dogmatic reflection’ (UCR I, 33), the ‘raw material [Rohstoff ]’ (UCR I, 29) of dogmatics, this gives it a basis that is scientifically credible. Its point of departure is strictly ‘phenomenological’ (UCR I, 29), since ‘the pious words of the Christian preacher’ (UCR I, 339) are simply there, an available fact. Like the material sciences, ‘[d]ogmatics must therefore first simply listen, take on board, register’ (UCR I, 335). ‘Seen from one side, dogmatic work consists simply in validating the Word of God over against the word of man. The latter is what dogmatics simply finds to hand. It is that which is given, that on which it works’ (UCR I, 343). In short, dogmatics merits the label ‘wissenschafltich’, not by assigning a sphere of reality to theology which it can make its own (the religious), but by refusing to do so. Moreover, this also means that dogmatics is genuinely critical: it moves not from the non-given ground to the given (religious sentiment to its expression in religious language) but from the given to the non-given (religious language to the Word of God). In that way, ‘the pious words of the Christian preacher’ are given a criterion. ‘Dogmatics is quite specifically reflection (Besinnung) upon the Word of God, concerning this speech [the preacher’s], insofar as it is and ought to be identical with this Word’ (UCR I, 31). It is the ‘work of repentance’ (UCR I, 45) undertaken by the church, by which the latter expresses both its desire to be, and its natural inability to be, the Word of God. The task of dogmatics is therefore specifically to problematize this ‘identity’—not in the form of a direct denial, but by bringing to light the relation in which it can be affirmed. [Dogmatics] will do that by quite simply and literally taking the sermon at its word, trying to understand it better than Pastor X or Y does, who delivers it; by uncovering its connections backwards and its consequences, and allowing its relations to its origins to appear as clearly as possible; by underlining the pointer which is made well or badly in the sermon itself, completing and clarifying it, and thus critically or in agreement, always holding on to what in fact is expressed among us, making speakers and listeners aware of the scope of what they have spoken and heard, more powerfully than was perhaps previously the case. [UCR I, 47]

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In other words, dogmatics stands somewhere between the Word of God and Christian preaching, heuristically prizing them apart to indicate the act of divine freedom which lies behind their actual identity. (Note, also, that Barth can refer to the relation between the Word and preaching not simply eschatologically, but protologically as well—as an ‘original’ (urspru¨nglich) relation. It is not so much the direction of the relation—forwards or backwards—that is important to him, but that there is sufficient distance between the terms for a genuine relation to be possible. Problematik is about generating this distance.) One verb Barth uses to describe the process of dogmatics is ‘richten’, both in its sense of ‘judging’ and ‘directing’ (UCR I, 47). Preaching is judged not by dogmatics itself, but by the Word of God to which dogmatics refers it. Or again, he says that dogmatics proceeds by drawing attention to the ‘ambiguity’ (Zweideutigkeit) of the language used by the preacher (UCR I, 341–3). The term Zweideutigkeit (or zweideutig) is used here not just to suggest that human language lacks the clarity (Eindeutigkeit) of the divine Word, but that its ontology is defined by the relation in which it signifies (deuten—to ‘indicate’) the Word, rather than stating it directly. In pointing out the Zweideutigkeit of human language about God, then, dogmatics does not simply perform a negative task. It explicitly relates preaching to the divine Word, and in so doing justifies it as well.

3.3 THE ESCHATOLOGICAL HORIZON OF DOGMATICS Pfleiderer is unconvinced by Barth’s claim that ‘[w]e may not say that dogmatics generates pure doctrine’ (UCR I, 334).42 And yet, the weight of Barth’s argument errs towards the reduction of dogmatic 42 He thinks that Barth’s use of the term ‘pure doctrine’ to describe an unattainable ideal of preaching is a strategy for diverting his listeners’ attention away from his highly practical intentions. ‘The central concepts Barth uses to describe his theology, such as “pure doctrine” or above all “knowledge of God” are distinguished by the fact that they systemically conceal the systematic and constructive potential of his theology, and therefore especially its pragmatic dimension as well’ (Pfleiderer, Karl Barths praktische Theologie, 420).

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authority. To be sure, ‘[d]ogma and dogmatics stand over Christian preaching as a critical tribunal [Instanz]’; and yet the relation of dogmatics to preaching is not one of ‘lordship’ (Herrschaft) but of ‘service’ (Dienst), and in that sense it also stands beneath preaching (UCR I, 23). Barth remains highly suspicious of theology’s constructive potential—which makes it far-fetched to read the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics as the first text of a new Barthian ‘school’. In reality, Barth is seeking (negatively) to systematically dispossess his audience of ministers of their theological or religious wherewithal, so as (positively) to awaken them to their individual responsibility before the Word of God. Naturally, this process cannot be achieved in a purely negative discourse; and given Barth’s subsequent career it is unsurprising to see him breaking out of this purely critical construal of dogmatic theology, not least in the third volume where he addresses, at length, the doctrine of Christ’s work as reconciler (UCR III, } 29). However, what Barth intends in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics is not to re-establish theology on new grounds43 but to establish faith. This is achieved, he thinks, not by elaborating a positive dogmatics (which would not give faith the divine grounding it requires to transcend a merely human work) but by stripping positive theology of such pretensions, in order to make way for God’s Word to appear. And yet, Barth tries to alter this perspective in UCR I, }} 12–13 by extending the horizon upon which the Word of God occurs, so as to allow space for dogmatics to exert a relative, but nevertheless positive authority over preaching, in the eschatological interval that has been opened up. This horizon, ‘Dogma’ itself, continues to be an ideal designation, against which all concrete dogmas or dogmatics are only approximations (Anna¨herungen—UCR I, 49f.). In the foreground, however, dogmatics is to be ‘a designation, a signal, an announcement’ to preaching, which serves ‘to generate that crisis, that measuring of the human word by God’s Word’ (UCR I, 347). The way in which he proceeds is to situate this authority beyond the aporetic opposition between autonomy and heteronomy, so as to 43 Ju¨ngel writes that, at the beginning of the 1920s, Barth ‘was formulating a new theological approach which intentionally departed from the established theology. Assuming full responsibility for his actions, he began to search for ways in which theology might be reestablished’ (Karl Barth: A theological legacy, 54).

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ensure that the identity between dogmatics and the divine Word is always asymptotic. This means that: there is no theonomous dogmatics, i.e. neither a purely heteronomous dogmatics, in which God’s truth could be reproduced in human language without the cooperation of experience and thought; nor a purely autonomous dogmatics, in which God’s truth could be produced in human language out of experience and thought. [UCR I, 345]

These two pitfalls are not abstract, for Barth, but represent in his mind an (above all) Lutheran understanding of dogmatic authority, on the one hand, and a philosophical understanding, on the other. It is between these that Barth wants to set his own position. By making the doctrine of justification the dogmatic criterion of preaching, Lutheran theology (Barth argues) tends towards a theonomous identification of that dogma with the Word of God, i.e. towards a ‘purely heteronomous’ concept of dogmatic authority. On the other hand, philosophy (whether realist or idealist) does not conceive of any authority outside historical experience or thought itself, as it approaches ‘the truth’, so that there is no nomos for language beyond the process which has generated it. In either case, it should be noted, Barth interprets the failure as arising from the inability to prevent the divine Word and human words competing and cancelling one another out. A ‘heteronomous dogmatics’ is one in which God’s truth appears in language ‘without the cooperation of experience and thought’; in ‘autonomous dogmatics’, God’s truth appears in language ‘out of experience and thought’. By setting the concepts of heteronomy (} 12) and autonomy (} 13) over against each other in separate paragraphs, Barth wants to generate a dialectic in which the purely human (and therefore limited) character of dogmatic authority will emerge, without that authority becoming meaningless. I shall reverse Barth’s order in the following analysis.

3.3.1 The Limitedness of Dogmatic Authority (UCR I, } 13) As Gerhard Sauter has pointed out, dogma for Barth is ‘an eschatological concept’, before it refers to any particular symbol or confession

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44

developed by the church. To that extent, dogmatic authority results from striving towards Dogma, i.e. towards the Word of God (Zielstrebigkeit) (UCR I, 369): ‘precisely in its relativity, [dogmatics] is the arrow, the longing, the arm of our thinking stretched out towards the Word which we can never speak or express’ (UCR I, 370). It is because of this that Barth regards Schleiermacher’s intention to republish the Glaubenslehre as a piece of fundamental theology— without what Schleiermacher called ‘propositions which assert attributes of God and qualities of the world’45—as thoroughly suspicious. To Barth this sounds like the forgetfulness of the relativity (Relativita¨t) of dogmatic thinking which, because it is not and cannot be the Word of God, must always remain ‘determined by its counterpart [gegenstandsbestimmt]’ (UCR I, 367). ‘For the philosopher, it seems that the autonomy of his thought is to be posited as identical with the theonomy of truth per se. For the dogmatician, autonomy is relative autonomy from the outset’ (UCR I, 361–2). That is not to say that Barth thinks that such a thing as ‘pure theology’ is possible. Quite the reverse, he is aware that trespassing over these distances is inevitable, the ‘unavoidable bent towards a system’ (UCR II, 8) being an intrinsic hazard of intellectual work. In fact, it is only because ‘the centre, the content and the essence in the true sense (one could also say, the “system”) lies in principle outside every human word . . . in God’s Word itself ’ (UCR II, 8) that theology has any chance of not being ‘pure philosophy’.46 As Stacy Johnson has put it, drawing a comparison between theology and the spokes around the hub of a wheel:

44

Sauter, ‘Dogma—ein eschatologischer Begriff ’, esp. 178–83. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, } 30.3. He expressed these intentions in the second of his famous letters to Lu¨cke (Schleiermacher, Schleiermachers Sendschreiben u¨ber seine Glaubenslehre an Lu¨cke, 47f.). 46 ‘Pure theology’ is a phrase that crops up a number of times in Balthasar’s study of Barth (Theology of Karl Barth, e.g. 36, 93), but needs further clarification; particularly so, as one of the leading themes of the book is Balthasar’s uncertainty about what to make of Barth’s relation to idealism. On the one hand, he stresses that Barth is ‘anything but naı¨ve’ about his appropriation of idealist philosophy (ibid., 218), adding that the formal similarity between his theology and that philosophy is not in itself problematic. ‘Everything depends on the discretion with which theologians know how to handle their instruments’ (ibid., 219). On the other hand, he continues to worry that the influence of Schleiermacher and Hegel might extend into ‘an inner compulsion in Barth’s theology to become a system’ (ibid., 220). 45


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[T]heology finds its orientation in a ‘center’ that, although vitally real, remains beyond accessibility. It is a ‘center’ completely encircled by questions (the ‘spokes’) which never cease to be posed as questions. From a human point of view, God—and the relationship with God—are as impossible to possess as the empty center of this continually rotating wheel.47

The hub of the wheel (God) is ‘empty’ here, not because it is not real but because, although it is the point around which the entire theological mechanism revolves, it is not susceptible of being integrated within it. A theological concept of dogmatic authority, therefore, is one which systematically sustains the difference between its own statements and ‘the æ , the Word of God’ (UCR I, 347). In other words, it is only if it does not confuse this authority with its own that dogmatics can become authoritative. In that light, Barth sets out three marks of dogmatic thinking: it is faithful and obedient to God (UCR I, 371–3), dialectical (UCR I, 373–7), and responsible (UCR I, 377–8). Each of these characteristics is designed both to draw attention to the humanity of dogmatic work—it is specifically referred to as a ‘freedom’ (UCR I, 370–1)— and to maintain that dogmatics is referred beyond itself—to an ‘object’, a ‘counterpart’. ‘Dogmatic thinking must be the thinking of a person who stands before God, thinking which is conditioned and defined by his standing before God and being addressed by God’ (UCR I, 372); it is ‘the thinking of a specific individual who sees himself placed before this counterpart’ (UCR I, 377). In other words, because dogmatic thinking is a freedom, it is not, in the first place, authoritative. It is a matter of recognizing, in dogmatics, that the thoughts we think are ‘our own thoughts’ (UCR I, 377). This should not, however, be taken as a purely extrinsicist account of theological reflection, as if the rational freedom which is exercised in the presence of God were the entirely spontaneous act of the dogmatician over against God. The autonomy to which dogmatics is summoned is ‘primarily the autonomy of the Holy Spirit’ (UCR I, 378), Barth maintains, so that thinking in faith and obedience, although real determinants of the human act, are first of all operations

47

Johnson, The Mystery of God in Karl Barth, 14.

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of the Spirit within the human subject. However, he is also anxious to stress that this does not mean the human act is simply contained within the Spirit’s work, without qualification: It is [faithful and obedient reflection] in the Spirit, the Holy Spirit. But thinking stands outside, precisely the thinking which on the inside believes and obeys. And it stands outside, facing [vor] its limit, facing the mystery, facing the God whom it cannot conceive. [It stands] only in the utter impossibility of justifying itself to itself, i.e. to philosophical thinking, since it sins against the law of contradiction by positing, really positing, what by definition cannot be posited. But it binds itself in faith, it is bound in obedience to the Word in which that which can never be posited posits itself. [UCR I, 373]

By speaking of theology as a ‘sin’ against the law of non-contradiction, Barth is trying to draw attention to the inability of human thought to keep up with the logic of God, rather than to any intrinsic il-logicality in God as such. In short, the fact that dogmatics is characterized by faith and obedience means both that it is bound to the divine mystery which ‘posits’ (setzt) itself, and that it cannot itself ‘posit’ this mystery. Furthermore, this means that theological language must be ‘dialectical’: ‘Before God, human thoughts become dialectical’ (UCR I, 376). The disproportionate quantity and sometimes bewildering complexity of the literature on Barth’s dialectics is probably a reflection of his sundry use of this term, making comprehensive and conclusive statements (except of the most general kind) hard to reach.49 What is 48 Macken (whose analysis here takes up Rendtorff ’s) thinks that it is not until CD IV/4 that Barth was able to describe a ‘positive concept of autonomy’, one not overwhelmed by the prevenient action of Jesus Christ. At that point, however, Barth’s thought proceeds by a total divorce between divine and human action so that although ‘[t]he human being has a proper sphere of activity . . . this is admitted at the cost of allowing nothing of ultimate significance to happen within this sphere.’ (The Autonomy Theme in the Church Dogmatics, 181) On the contrary, not only do we see Barth at this early stage pushing for a ‘positive concept of autonomy’, but he is also concerned that this autonomy is included within the work of God the Spirit. 49 The most extensive study is Beintker, Die Dialektik in der «dialektischen Theologie» Karl Barths, although even in this account, there is still a tendency towards describing a general shift in Barth from ‘dialectic’ to ‘analogy’ (see part 5 of Beintker’s book)—a shift which, as McCormack demonstrates, makes little sense since the terms are not talking about the same thing (McCormack, Karl Barth’s Dialectical Theology, 10–20).

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perhaps surprising in Barth’s account here, is the remarkable unfussiness of the description. ‘Do not let yourselves be dazzled by the word’ (UCR I, 373), Barth reassures his students, since it is ‘ultimately a matter of something quite simple’ (UCR I, 376). He does not set dialectics against the background of German idealism, nor refer to it as a theological ‘method’. It means, quite plainly, ‘to dialogue’: In a sense which is quite bourgeois, and which should inspire confidence, ØÆºªØ means to hold a conversation or dialogue with someone, to deal with them. Therefore, to think dialectically simply means to think in such a way that a conversation is had. [UCR I, 374]

Applied to dogmatics, this merely describes the fact that, because it ‘stands under the sign of failure’,50 human language is unable to capture its theme in a single concept, and so must shift continually between one idea and another. Dialectics is little more here than a means of registering the limitations of human rationality as it comes up against God. For ‘[n]o dogmatician can think entirely undialectically, not even Luther or Schleiermacher or Althaus’51 (UCR I, 376). In short, the point at which theological thought becomes undialectical is the point at which it expunges the distance between itself and God’s Word, and so ceases to speak theologically at all. And so, the fact that Barth has now outlined a dogmatic method, by no means entails that dialectics have become ‘superfluous’.52 Indeed, in one sense the entire prolegomena is an attempt to establish the dialectical character of all dogmatic theology. As argued earlier, it needs to be treated quite differently to the dogmatic prolegomena during the rationalist period. In UCR I, Barth is not wanting to justify the presentation of Christian doctrine which follows, by dealing in advance with methodological or epistemological objections to it, but to draw attention to the limits which attend every dogmatics, because they give an account of God. Thus, for example, Barth criticizes Adolf Schlatter’s dogmatics, Das christliche 50

McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 311. Somewhat mischievously, Barth mentions Althaus here in the same breath as Luther and Schleiermacher in response to Althaus’ article criticizing dialectical theology (see Introduction above). 52 McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 349. 51

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Dogma, not so much for the positions Schlatter adopts, but because (after two brief introductory paragraphs) of the alacrity with which he sets about his positive presentation of Christian doctrine: As far as I’m concerned, dogmatics must not only be doctrine [Lehre], but instruction [Belehrung], it must be a bit of conversation, it must be discussable. And that is what Schlatter’s dogmatics is not, for all its other great advantages which, in part, go together with this fact. In my opinion, Schlatter’s dogmatics is like his exegesis: whoever has not made up his mind to follow him through thick and thin is probably thrown off from the very first pages, because he cannot see and hear, and he can then watch in humble awe and amazement as the horse gallops away from him, but not as one who has actually been taught. [UCR I, 25–6]

If Schlatter leaves us behind, in Barth’s view, it is because of the failure to keep in mind the distance between his version and the gospel itself. The ‘freedom’ of dogmatic thinking is precisely its ability consciously to orient itself away from its own presentation and towards the Word to which it is the response. Because dogmatics is an eschatological concept, according to Barth, authority is not installed into dogmatics as such, but occurs when the latter successfully distinguishes itself from Dogma. In short, although dogmatics is a free intellectual work, it is not this autonomy that gives it authority. Dogmatics becomes authoritative not because of the basic principles (Grundsa¨tze) it develops, but because of its ‘Grundsa¨tzlichkeit’ (UCR II, 2), i.e. by tending towards these principles.

3.3.2 The Authoritativeness of Dogmatic Reflection (UCR I, } 12) In his 1923 Reformed Confessions lectures, Barth had noted how the geographical, historical, and juridical scope of confessional statements was considerably narrower in the Reformed churches than the ambitions harboured in the Lutheran churches for the Augsburg Confession.53 In large measure, he concludes that this is because the

53

See Barth, TRB } 1, 1ff.

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Augustana claimed to possess, in the doctrine of justification by faith alone, the criterion of Christianity itself, a single material principle from which the whole of Lutheran dogmatics flows forth (UCR I, 364–5). This is what Barth means by a ‘purely heteronomous’ dogmatics: one in which the human character attending any dogmatic statement has been short-circuited in a single principle from which all others can be derived.54 Because Dogma is an eschatological concept, dogmatic reflection does not refer itself to any particular dogma or idea, but to the non-substitutable reality of God himself, present in his Word. By contrast, he argues, the normative principle of Reformed dogmatics is only ever a formal determination (Formbestimmung—UCR I, 348). Dogmatic authority is exerted from ‘behind the scenes’ rather than directly through its principles as such: ‘What makes Scripture and preaching the Word of God, the “Deus dixit”, revelation, is known only indirectly in its effects; not the Light itself, but only its reflection, or put differently: not the uncreated Light, but here too only a created light’ (UCR I, 348). Once again, this insistence that dogmatics is only formally authoritative needs to be understood in terms of what might be called its ‘performative’ character, to problematize religious language and experience by relating these to God’s Word. For in that relation, ‘these stand before a criterion which is in no way drawn from themselves, but which stands over against them all along the line: the criterion which is normative here by virtue of its content above all’ (UCR I, 359). Barth describes three characteristics of dogmatic reflection, by which it can become this criterion: ‘biblicism’ (UCR I, 349–53), ‘confessionalism’ (UCR I, 353–7) and churchliness (UCR I, 357–9). In each case, the marks of dogmatic authority are formal: they are not contained in dogmatic statements as such, but emerge in how dogmatic work positions itself. And so, ‘biblicism’, as it is defined here, is 54

If the doctrine of justification is simply a paraphrase of the claim that it is ‘God who saves’, it is not clear that it really qualifies as a material principle, as Barth thinks. However, he appears to interpret it as meaning that ‘God saves’—i.e. as a kind of definition of God—which is why it appears to him to reduce salvation to a theological principle rather than a divine act. Moreover, as Stoevesandt argues, it may be that justification does effectively become a fundamental concept in UCR III, in that human action seems to occur almost entirely under the banner of that doctrine (‘Die Go¨ttinger Dogmatikvorlesung’, 92–3). See 6.3.2 below.

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not a ‘material biblicism’, where a statement is proof-texted against a verse from the Bible. Rather, it means a ‘biblical attitude’ (biblische Haltung), a ‘bracket’ around all dogmatic reasoning, the ‘foundation’ (Boden) on which it is built. ‘Read from the Bible until you’ve got it, until (with the help of texts from the Old and New Testaments) you have become accustomed to it as a rule of thought like any other: one must think and speak in this way, in this formal determination, when one speaks of revelation’ (UCR I, 351).55 Similarly, by ‘confessionalism’ Barth does not mean the kind of dogmatic sectarianism that some of his Go¨ttingen colleagues considered typical of German Reformed Christianity,56 nor the ‘repristination of ancient Christian or Reformed dogmas’ (UCR I, 356).57 For ‘in principle all dogmatics must raise claims to universal validity . . . There cannot be a Catholic, Lutheran or Reformed dogmatics, but rightly understood only ever a Christian dogmatics, in principle, content and intention’ (UCR I, 354). Nevertheless, all dogmatics must also bear certain formal ‘features’ (Gesichtszu¨gen—facial features)—the ‘particular order, weighting, colouring, direction and practical intention, with which more or less every individual concept is treated’ (UCR I, 355)58—which give 55 It might be wondered here whether this description of a ‘biblical disposition’ comes rather close to the pure autonomy of philosophical thought, in that it seems not to be a determination towards the actual biblical text. It is as if dogmatics were capable of making its statements about God by by-passing this particular contingency. 56 It seems that Carl Stange’s pronouncement, that ‘the Reformed church in Hanover is of no more significance than a millennial sect’, was an accurate expression of the prevailing opinion about the Reformed in a faculty dominated by Lutherans. Indeed, Barth’s preparations for his first lectures in dogmatics were disturbed by disputes with the faculty hierarchy in 1923–4, who sought to have them posted as ‘Prolegomena to Reformed Dogmatics’, so as to draw attention to the limited viability of Reformed theology. (On this episode, see Freudenberg, Karl Barth und die reformierte Theologie, 58–64.) 57 Cf. Barth’s argument, in a public lecture the previous year, that neither an admiration for the spirituality of the Reformed fathers, nor attachment to particular Reformed ideals (e.g. a particular doctrine of God, theology of lay-ministry, openness to philosophy etc.) is sufficient justification for the rehabilitation of Reformed doctrine (Barth, ‘Reformierte Lehre, ihr Wesen und ihre Aufgabe’, 187–93). 58 Barth lists some of the key features which contribute towards family resemblance among Reformed theologies: (1) formalism in basic principles (i.e. the Word establishes the content, rather than the reverse); (2) overemphasis on the concept of God (so that human salvation is a function of the glory of God, rather than the reverse); (3) emphasis on the freedom, majesty and subjectivity of God; (4) dialectical Christology; (5) equal weight given to faith and obedience (UCR I, 355).

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it a kind of family resemblance to a particular Christian tradition. It is not which confessional tradition dogmatics belongs to that matters to Barth, but the belonging itself, which is to serve as a sign that ‘in no way can one dogmatize in an empty space’ (UCR I, 354). For ‘to lack a school makes for further uncertainty, subjectivization, the fragmentation of dogmatic work and therefore necessarily of preaching as well. Whoever can simultaneously think as a Lutheran and a Reformed will probably not be doing either seriously, but eclectically mixing them into a third, fourth or fifth thing’ (UCR I, 354–5). This is closely connected, then, to the third way in which dogmatics becomes authoritative: its will for the church. The work of the dogmatician is not a ‘private affair . . . a private, intellectually stimulating game’, nor ‘turned away from the present moment’ (UCR I, 357). ‘Dogmatic thinking and speaking must be tacitly pregnant with actuality, with their reference to what must be said here and now in every pulpit. Every dogmatic statement must be an arrow heading in that direction, even if perhaps from a great distance’ (UCR I, 358). In each of these characteristics, however, Barth is anxious to stress that dogmatics becomes authoritative not because of what it says as such, but because of how it performs its work. For this reason, indeed, it may be wondered whether he has really emerged with a positive understanding of dogmatic authority at all. Although, by manoeuvring the horizon of dogma momentarily into the background, he appears to allow an eschatological interval in which church dogma(tics) can lend positive support to the formation of preachers, he ultimately refuses to permit dogmatic authoritativeness to be connected with the words it uses. As Sauter has argued, because Barth’s concept of dogma is only articulated in an eschatological projection, it becomes impossible to describe the church’s dogmas along anything but negative lines: The eschatological reserve hardly indicates any positive reference of expectation; it is above all designed to limit, and thus prevent theological language thinking it can anticipate the knowledge that is assigned to redemption. It cannot, in fact, be an effective anticipation, for it would soon become

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apparent to what extent that boldness is part of the naturally asymptotic trajectory of the human attempt to speak.59

As Sauter goes on to point out, this framework does not allow for any ‘assertoric’ concept of dogma,60 i.e. for church dogmas as approved authoritative statements around which Christians assemble. Indeed, the task of dogmatics (and therefore, presumably, of dogma as well) is not to unite the Christian community, for Barth, nor to tell it what to say, but simply to set it in front of God. It should be noted that the original and classical format of Protestant dogmatics is the play between questioning and answering in the catechism, which extends to everything, as if nothing had been established in advance. This teaching method has material significance as well: you must earn something to own it. Even for children, it is not a matter of parroting but of knowledge. [UCR I, 49]

Although Barth concedes that a minimal number of church symbols may be thought of as ‘dogmas’, i.e. ‘principle[s] acknowledged and promoted as flowing from the Word of God, in accordance with revelation and Scripture’ (UCR I, 50), Sauter’s judgement seems accurate. Barth finds little to gain in defending the orthodoxy of church dogma; and the higher the quantity and profile of such dogmas, the more the responsibility taken for the Word of God will be lost. Although Barth is prepared to retreat from the point at which the Word of God and theology clash, and so to generate room for theology to emerge in a positive light, because nothing is ‘established in advance’ in this dogmatics, that light quickly extinguishes when the eschatological concept of revelation is recalled. In other words, Barth is caught between two unwelcome alternatives. If revelation is not conceived in an eschatological projection, there is a danger of dogmatics rehabilitating an ontologically stable human agent who

59 Sauter, ‘Dogma—Ein eschatologischer Begriff ’, 182. Cf. also Hu¨tter’s in-depth analysis of the debate between Barth and Erik Peterson, on the relation between dogma and theology (Suffering Divine Things, 95–115). Barth’s contribution to the debate (a lecture entitled ‘Kirche und Theologie’), produced during the autumn of his departure from Go¨ttingen in 1925, is based on the positions he had worked out a year earlier in these sections of the prolegomena to the GD. 60 Sauter, ‘Dogma—Ein eschatologischer Begriff ’, 186–8.

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relates to grace as to a principle or state of affairs. And yet, the positivity of human life or dogmatic work cannot be convincingly sustained if its only background is the eschatological dissolution of all things. In the final part of this chapter, I jump ahead to the lectures Barth delivers on John’s Gospel, after leaving Go¨ttingen to teach at Mu¨nster. Here, a rather different note is sounded, as Barth considers the theology of witness implied in the early chapters of the Gospel, in which the ministry of the witness, John the Baptist, is related to the ministry of Jesus Christ, the revealer.

3.4 THE CONCEPT OF WITNESS IN BARTH’S COMMENTARY ON JOHN’S GOSPEL Barth’s lectures on John are important for a number of reasons. They represent a first go at exegesis of a Gospel, informed now by some of the classical Christological and Trinitarian categories whose potential Barth had quickly learned to exploit in Go¨ttingen. They also indicate a new maturity in Barth’s theological exegesis: he is more adept than before at engaging with, and integrating, historical–critical scholarship, without compromising the originality of his own reading of the Gospel or being diverted from an unflinching theological focus. One of the most notable features of the first half of Barth’s commentary, however, is the attention he pays to the theology of witness in the Fourth Gospel, which Barth connects to its depiction of John the Baptist. Barth introduces his lectures with some remarks on Augustine’s Tractatus on John’s Gospel, which spell out some exegetical principles. Augustine had prefaced his own commentary with an Exordium, designed to give a theological meditation on the problems of communication and understanding. He draws Barth’s attention here to a paradox thrown up by Psalm 121.1–2: ‘I lift up my eyes to the hills. From whence does my help come? My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth.’ The paradox concerns the status of these ‘hills’: the Psalmist looks to them for help, even while he knows that help is to come from the creator.

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As Barth points out, Augustine chooses to introduce his Tractatus on John with a reflection on this Psalm because it deals with the same issue that arises out of the prologue of the Gospel as well: namely, the status of the witness. In the case of the prologue, the paradox turns on the relation between the ‘true light’ (John 1.9) and the one who has come ‘to bear witness to the light’ (1.7–8). ‘John’s prologue is really not just dealing with the general situation where man is confronted by revelation, but concretely with what happens when, in hearing a witness to revelation, we raise our eyes to the hills from whence our help comes, and yet can only await our help from the Lord who made heaven and earth.’61 Barth extracts three ‘hermeneutical’ principles from Augustine’s analysis. First, if what is involved in reading the Bible is a situation in which we ‘raise our eyes’ to the Scriptural witness as a petition for divine help, this is the ‘concretely determinate situation’ 62 from which it is impermissible either to extract ourselves as readers, or the Scripture that is read. To read the Gospel ‘objectively’ (sachlich) presupposes this reality (Sache). ‘The real Gospel of John which we are to study can only be the Gospel of John addressed to us’; and so, ‘truly objective readers and interpreters of John’s Gospel’ are those who read it from within this situation as ‘a Word which has opened up a conversation with us, even before we are able to hear’.63 Secondly, the paradox of the situation demands an awareness of the distinction between the ‘hills’ to which we look for help (i.e. the biblical text) and the divine creator, who alone is the source and supplier of that help. For John the Evangelist is ‘not a light in and of himself. If we look to him we look into the darkness of history, and not into the light. He mediates a light to us which he himself has received. But he only mediates it. The giver is the one from whom he has received it as well.’64 Thirdly, to read ‘objectively’ (sachlich) is not simply to be docile to the text, but to respond actively to the demands it makes upon us as readers. Where Augustine speaks, in ascetic terms, of ‘purification’ or ‘catharsis’, Barth describes a ‘readiness’ (Bereitschaft) on the part of readers: ‘a readiness to believe, or at least to understand what might 61 63

Barth, Johannesevangelium, 21. 64 Ibid., 5–6. Ibid., 7–8.

62

Ibid., 4.

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be at stake in, faith and in its Sache’.65 In other words, one of the conditions for reading Scripture objectively is to make oneself ‘ready’ for it; not merely being neutral readers, but becoming Scripture’s pupils (Schu¨ler).66 It is important to see that these three points, which Barth distils from Augustine’s Exordium, are not simply hermeneutical axioms generated in advance of the encounter with Scripture, and then applied in the reading of it. Rather, Barth is keen to point out that they are principles of reading that emerge out of John’s prologue itself. However, if this establishes a controversy with historical criticism at the outset, Barth’s real argument with New Testament scholarship concerns its interpretation of John the Baptist in the Gospel itself. A number of scholars had begun to focus on the Baptist figure in the early chapters of the Gospel, because it was thought that determining his relation to Christ would provide a clue to the Evangelist’s purposes in writing his Gospel, against the background of the religious politics of the first century. Such an approach often attempted to place early Christianity in its wider religious–historical setting by relating the picture of the Baptist emerging from the Gospel to what was known of the cult of John the Baptist from the Mandaean sects in the ancient Near East.67 Partly building on the thesis of Wilhelm Baldensperger,68 for example, Walter Bauer argued that the Evangelist introduces the Baptist into his Gospel for purely ‘practical’ reasons: he wishes to deliver a ‘conscious refutation [bewußter Widerspruch]’ of the Baptist, so as to discredit a cult which was now drawing Christian followers away from Jesus.69 Although Barth is largely indifferent to many of the historical preoccupations of such studies, his characteristic awareness of the human (and therefore historical) character of the biblical writings makes him sensitive to the problem of (‘practical’) authorial intention raised by NT scholarship. On the other hand, he is resistant to interpretations that permit the text’s meaning to be ‘exhausted in the reference to that historical–practical background’.70 65

66 Barth, Johannesevangelium, 10. Ibid., 11. Reitzenstein, Das iranische Erlo¨sungsmysterium: Religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen. 68 Baldensperger, Der Prolog des 4. Evangeliums: Sein polemisch-apologetischer Zweck. 69 Bauer, Das Johannesevangelium, 14—cited by Barth in Johannesevangelium, 17. 70 Barth, Johannesevangelium, 68. 67

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He sees this happening, in the commentary by Bauer, in two respects. First, the problem of the Baptist is reduced to a first-century issue of church politics, whose interest for the contemporary reader is purely antiquarian. By contrast, Barth is convinced that determining the status of the Baptist provides a key to John’s theology. Secondly, the depiction of the Baptist in the Fourth Gospel is interpreted as a piece of polemic, and Barth thinks that this glosses over a number of significant details which point in a quite different direction. In other words, Barth’s interpretation of the practical purposes behind the Gospel’s account of the Baptist differs in both respects. His reading, which is informed more by a literary than an historical approach to the texts, stems from the conviction that the Baptist figure carries ‘universal and typical significance’ in John’s Gospel.71 It seems his attention was drawn to this by Franz Overbeck, who had seen significance in the peculiarity that both the Baptist and the Evangelist are called John. Overbeck conjectured that the author of the Gospel deliberately adopts the name ‘John’ in order to ‘lean on John [the Baptist’s] authority’.72 The Evangelist is a witness at John’s side (‘Seitenzeuge’), who wishes to associate himself with the Baptist in order to allude expressly to his own part in communicating the events of the gospel: [He is named] John because of his vocation to write the Gospel, and because of the inner connection between that and the Baptist’s vocation in the whole economy of the revelation of the divine light in the world, in keeping with the fundamental concept of that economy on which, according to the prologue, the whole of the Fourth Gospel is based.73

In other words, the Baptist takes on a meaning in this Gospel which goes well beyond his personal history: he is the archetypal witness, whether as prophet (of which he is the last), or as Apostle (of which he becomes the first). The reading is supported by the Evangelist’s extraordinary statement that ‘[John] came . . . that all might believe through him’ (John 1.7). Barth comments on this: ‘In coming to faith, we cannot bypass or circumvent the witness, the prophet, the 71

72 Ibid. Ibid., 16. Overbeck, Das Johannesevangelium: Studien zur Kritik seiner Erforschung, 417—cited by Barth in Johannesevangelium, 16. 73

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Apostle. It is not for nothing, nor for his own sake, that the figure of John stands at the beginning of all the Gospels.’74 And so, Barth thinks, the perhaps surprising appearance of the Baptist in the prologue must be explained by the typological meaning the author (or redactor)75 intends to convey. The significance of the account therefore extends well beyond the narrow sectarian problems experienced by the early church. In casting the Baptist as universal witness, the writer wants to highlight the ambivalence of what he is doing as well, indeed to point up the dilemma inherent in the situation where revelation is passed on by witnesses: John the Evangelist can recognize and understand himself, and his own problems, in John the Baptist . . . [He] is obviously dealing with himself when he deals with John the Baptist. By ‘with himself ’ I mean with his existence and function as the human witness who steps in between revelation and human beings. He is teaching his readers about his own relation to his subject matter [Gegenstand], even while he is teaching them about John the Baptist in a similar relation. He wants to clarify what he, the Evangelist, does or does not do, can or cannot do, is or is not. He does this through his picture of the Baptist figure, the great paradigm of the ‘witness’ concept, who meant something to him and to his contemporaries.76

In short, references to the Baptist in the Johannine prologue take on the widest ramifications for Barth. They effectively constitute the basis for an evangelical hermeneutics, since they reveal this Gospel’s teaching about ‘what the Bible is: namely, witness to revelation in relation to, but also in distinction from, revelation itself ’.77 This relation between revelation and witness establishes quite a different relation between Christ and John the Baptist than the one emerging from religionsgeschichtlich analysis of the Fourth Gospel. Barth does not allow that the Gospel is only interested in describing a contrastive and competitive relation here. If the Baptist is representative of the witness as such, Barth concedes that his status is always ambivalent. Indeed, he agrees with the suggestion that the acclamation of the Baptist as the Christ probably lies in the background of the early 74

Barth, Johannesevangelium, 64. Barth was aware of Bultmann’s thesis that the verses in the prologue pertaining to John the Baptist (John 1.6–8, 15) were an editorial addition to an existing text. See Barth, Johannesevangelium, 15 n. 3 for bibliographical details. 76 77 Ibid., 19. Ibid., 21. 75

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chapters of the Gospel (as well as the other New Testament texts in which he crops up),78 and that it surfaces at certain points, notably John 1.8. And yet, he will not allow that verse to become the single key for understanding a complex figure. Indeed, he is careful to point out that even there, the Evangelist is not launching any polemic against John as such—only ‘against all false estimations of the Baptist’.79 In fact, the picture of the Baptist which emerges from the Fourth Gospel is perhaps surprisingly positive, Barth considers, given the apparent tendency of his followers to elevate him into a Messianic figure. He is allowed to make the first confession of Christ in the Gospel, both in the prologue (1.15) and the narrative itself (1.29); indeed, the Evangelist has him making statements which could rightly be taken as ‘the sum of his very own gospel’.80 As Barth points out, the ministry of John the Baptist is tied much more closely in the Fourth Gospel to his confession of Christ than it is in the Synoptics, where that ministry is only one of repentance and baptism for the forgiveness of sins.81 What strikes Barth—and what is striking about his reading here—is the positive, non-contrastive depiction of the function of the witness to the Word, in relation to the Word itself. What John does is not competitive with what Christ does, nor does the absolute perfection of what Christ does make superfluous what John does, for all its relative imperfection. It is true that there is a Kritik of the witness in the prologue, implied in the comparison between the testimony which announces the light and the arrival of the light itself. Nevertheless, this is to be seen as ‘positive Kritik’ rather than a biting polemic, an exploration of the inherent ambiguities involved where a witness appears: In no way can we say that the fourth Evangelist only takes a negative and polemical interest in his namesake . . . The Baptist is the one who witnesses the descent of the Spirit upon Jesus from heaven (1.32). If the Evangelist now testifies to Jesus and his mission as well, his doing this does not establish a new line [Reihe], let alone an opposing one. Rather, he places himself in the line that has already been established, precisely by John the Baptist. To be sure, he takes a critical position [u¨bt Kritik] towards him— which involves reservation, distinction, delimitation of place. However, that 78 81

79 80 Ibid., 65–7. Ibid., 65. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 17 (a point he takes from Overbeck, Das Johannesevanglium, 419).

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means not just Kritik but, we could also say, positive Kritik, the type of Kritik that is also directed against himself as well (for how could it be otherwise), as the Evangelist who belongs to the same line as he does.82

Kritik, then, simply refers to the qualified caution with which any witness is to be treated as such, and above all to the distinction the very concept demands be made between a testimony and its referencepoint, an awareness of ‘the danger of confusion and mix-up’83 which might crop up here. It certainly does not mean the possibility of dispensing with the witness as such in favour of a supposedly more direct access to revelation; nor even of distrusting the witness in any way. In this case, it means remembering that John is an authoritative herald of revelation, and listening closely to him in order to hear the Word which comes from above, for ‘John the Baptist is a mountain peak, visible from the valley, and lit by the morning sun which is not yet visible in the valley; no more, but no less either!’84 In short, John is not merely transparent to that light, but a genuine reflection of it in his own right. It will be helpful at this point to explore the way in which Barth reaches this conclusion exegetically, both from the relevant sections in the prologue (1.6–8, 15), and from the beginning of the Gospel narrative itself (1.19–34).

3.4.1 The Baptist in the Prologue to John’s Gospel Barth refers to John 1.6 (‘There came a man sent from God . . . ’) as a massive change of direction in the argument of the prologue up to that point, a great disruption (Sto¨rung).85 As he puts it, in the previous verse we were given a picture of history ‘from the outside’, which was regarded, all of a piece, as Œ Æ (darkness) in contrast to çH (light). Now, quite unexpectedly, we are taken to one particular point within history: ‘a man’ (¼Łæø )—whose name is John. That this man does indeed belong to the creation, within history, is highlighted by the verb (Kª —‘there came’) which picks up on 82 83

Barth, Johannesevangelium, 17–18. 84 Ibid., 21. Ibid., 70.

85

Ibid., 59.

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1.3 (Kª —‘became/were made’). In 1.3 the ‘criterion is obviously being laid down’86 that, because ‘all things were made through [the Word]’ (1.3a) ‘there is throughout the entire world no immediacy to God’: ‘[All things] stand before him in that absolute otherness, that absolute relativity, which can only be expressed precisely and radically through the Ø ÆP F, through the concept of creation.’87 Therefore, because of the contrast which is drawn between the Logos and the creation, the ¼Łæø in 1.6, John, also belongs ‘on this side of that contrast’.88 And yet, a turn comes with the predicate I Æº ÆæI ¨F(1.6b), which is placed in the middle of the same verse. Suddenly, this ‘man’ is set in an entirely different light, because he appears in ‘the same sphere and [with the same] function as [the Logos]’.89 For in 5.36, 38; 7.29; 20.21, ‘sent by God’ will be predicated specifically of Christ. In other words, these two subjects who originally belonged in two utterly distinct (and even opposing) spheres are now joined by this predicate; they are joined together in their mission: In the midst of the world which has come into existence [die gewordene Welt], the human world which, however, has fallen into darkness, there is— not an exception to the determinations which have been made of everything and everyone—but certainly a qualification in the midst of these determinations: being sent by God, singled out for one’s task and mission—and so in that sense: prophecy.90

This means that the Logos and the prophetic word, while remaining distinct, collaborate in making God known. Indeed, the prophet has a ‘share [Anteil] in the function of the revealer, and therefore in his significance and value, without himself being the Logos’.91 We are then informed that this man ‘came for testimony, to bear witness to the light, that all might believe through him’ (1.7). I have already referred to the significance Barth sees in this ‘all’. He also notes that almost every word in the verse is unconditionally affirmative, a point which he will not allow to be lost beneath the different tone 86

87 Ibid., 42. Ibid., 41. Ibid., 60. The point is intended to be a somewhat milder version of Baldensperger’s claim that 1.3 is introduced already, and specifically, with John the Baptist in mind (Baldensperger, Der Prolog des 4. Evangeliums, 5—referred to in Barth, Johannesevangelium, 42). 89 90 91 Ibid., 60. Ibid., 61. Ibid., 62. 88


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struck in the following verse. The only exception in 1.7 is the preposition ‘through’ (Ø), which contains the qualification that whereas all may believe through the Baptist, all are to believe in the Logos (1.12): Quite apart from the reservation which will be made in 1.8, the author finds it important to say that there is not only the absolute (as we like to put it), but a qualified relative as well; not only revelation, but also—derived from revelation, referring to it and serving it, and encountering all who are encountered by revelation—a witness to it, a pointer to it, the word from a human mouth, but from an individual who is ‘sent by God’.92

It is the genuine dignity of this ‘qualified relative’ that Bauer misses in his commentary on the prologue, Barth argues, when in his translation of N Ææ ıæE (1.7) and ¥ Æ Ææ ıæfi Å (1.8) he puts an ‘only’ (nur) in brackets.93 For, ‘[a] witness who really is a witness is not “only” a witness, given everything we’ve been told in 1.6–7’.94 There is of course a note of caution sounded in 1.8: ‘Ææ ıæÆ only occurs where the utmost care is taken both to speak of the “other reality” [Gegestand] from the greatest proximity, and to allow that “other reality” its distance, so that it can speak for itself.’95 And yet, Barth is anxious to point out that the meaning of ‘witness’ is positive, before that qualification needs to be made. Once again, at the most fundamental level, the honour of being a witness to revelation is to be traced back to the work of Christ himself (and, we might add, of the Father and the Spirit as well) whose ministry is also described as Ææ ıæE: The fact that Jesus’ speaking as the Word made flesh is also called a Ææ ıæE, a Ææ ıæÆ, at numerous points of the Gospel obviously sheds a light on the relative dignity of the one who in the prologue is juxtaposed with him as a mere witness, but nevertheless as a witness.96

It will not do, therefore, to construe the portrayal of the Baptist as a polemic, when this figure evidently enjoys the status of a witness, a position the Fourth Gospel dignifies. Furthermore, Barth finds it important for the notion of witness that John the Baptist is cast not only as the final prophet (as in the

92 93 94

Barth, Johannesevangelium, 63–4. Bauer, Das Johannesevangelium, 14f. Barth, Johannesevangelium, 69.

95

Ibid., 64.

96

Ibid., 18.

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Synoptics) but as the paradigmatic Apostle in this Gospel. He sees this coincidence of prophet and Apostle in a single figure as evidence that the distinction between before and after is subordinate to the category of witness itself. Indeed, if John the Baptist is the paradigm of the human witness to Christ, the prophet and the Apostle are to be taken as complementary figures, each drawing attention to a different aspect of the one act. The prophetic character of the witness is the sign of the indirectness of human testimony. Yet all human witness is also apostolic: it proceeds from a reality which the witness has seen (KŁÆŁÆ—1.14): If the Baptist rightly stands among the prophets, then he must also stand in the midst of the Apostles. If he is a representative [figure] there with his pointing finger, then he must also be a representative [figure] here, but in this case by pointing because he has seen something, because there is something to see. If he stands for the writer of the Gospel there, who shows in him how he wants himself to be seen, then he does so here as well, where the writer shows why he wants to be seen like that.97

What strikes Barth about 1.15—John’s second appearance as witness, now after the Incarnation—is that the Baptist quotes the words he had used to announce Christ’s advent (‘This was he of whom I said, “He who comes after me ranks before me, for before me he was.”’). He repeats the same statement, although preceding it with the words y q, thus giving a ‘concrete indication [konkreter Hinweis]’98 of the one he had previously been referring to. It is the concreteness of this witness, i.e. the givenness of the reality that John attests, which makes his prophetic word apostolic: When the Baptist says y q, he is prophet and Apostle, witness of the promise and of the fulfilment. For the y q, whereby he says that he knows the coming one when he is there, is something he says in participating in the KŁÆŁÆ (1.14).99 [I]t is not the prophet speaking any longer, but the Apostle, the prophet who has become an Apostle, or the Apostle speaking from within the prophet, for whom the being of the coming one is a completed fact.100

97 99

98 Ibid., 128 (my italics). Ibid., 137. 100 Ibid., 136. Ibid., 138–9.


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Just as witness and revelation were not in competition, then, so also (and as a result of this) prophet and Apostle exist side by side. The arrival of Christ does not alter the indirectness of John’s witness. Or, put differently, he is still a witness, both as prophet and Apostle: ‘All testimony to revelation is an Advent message as such, not çH but Ææ ıæÆ æd F çø .’101 However, the argument runs two ways. John is not only an Apostle by being a prophet; he is also a prophet because he is an Apostle. His ministry derives from the sheer reality of what he has seen. Barth is still reluctant to speak of this reality as prevenient; it remains strictly eschatological. And yet, part of the force of the metaphor of sunlight is that its radiance is already spread across the sky even before it has risen above the horizon. Although it is not visible in the sky, the sun already exercises a powerful presence in the world; and likewise, the presence of the incarnate one precedes its announcement by the prophet. Advent ‘only exists for the sake of Christmas’.102 Where there is brightness in the atmosphere, it reflects the rising sun, even if only weakly. The presupposition of Advent is Christmas. And so we must make the peculiar statement that the presupposition of the prophet is the Apostle. 1.14 spoke of this presupposition, of the light itself, the rising of the sun, of Christmas, of the Apostles. In the › ºª aæ Kª we heard the extent to which revelation (for which the testimony is given) is possible and real, the extent to which, with the givenness of the object of the testimony, the testimony itself receives its ratio; the extent to which the one for whom the testimony is given approaches the witness as such (as the witness does him!) in order that he can be a true and authentic witness. The Word became flesh; that is why there are words concerning the Word. The light shines directly: that is why it also shines and is seen indirectly. The witness is an Apostle; that is why he can also be a prophet.103

3.4.2 The Testimony of John’s Baptism In his lectures, Barth gives John 1.19–34 the title ‘John’s Testimony’,104 but in fact this testimony comes in two parts. The first part (vv. 19–28) is John’s testimony about himself, which he makes in response to the 101 103

Barth, Johannesevangelium, 72. 104 Ibid., 127. Ibid., 165.

102

Ibid., 71.

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Pharisees’ inquiries; the second part (vv. 29–34) is John’s testimony about Christ that occurs, we are told, on ‘the following day’ (1.29). However, Barth treats these two parts as running in parallel, rather than in sequence.105 In this way, he hopes to capture structurally what he takes to be the essential meaning of the pericope: that John does not wish to be seen as an independent religious figure, only as an anonymous ‘voice crying out in the desert’ (John 1.23). Even though he appears here as the new Elijah, and is explicitly connected with Elijah’s ministry of forerunner (Mal. 4.5) elsewhere in the New Testament (e.g. Matt. 11.14; Luke 1.17), John rejects the suggestion, not only that he is the Christ, but also that he is Elijah or ‘the prophet’ (John 1.21). He wishes to be seen, Barth says, as a ‘figure without any significance for salvation, without any role in salvation history befitting such a figure!’ For: ‘A genuine witness is always that against his own judgement.’106 And yet, John’s self-denial can be understood from a slightly different angle; for John ‘nevertheless calls out, he has something to call out’.107 By reading vv. 22–3 in the light of vv. 30–1—which open with John’s announcement, y K Ø (‘This is the one . . . ’)—Barth interprets the ‘riddle of the anonymity of this calling voice’108 in terms of the positive presence to which his proclamation is designed to draw attention: I have my mission and come with my water baptism because he is there [da ist] and must be revealed to Israel. I am conditioned by him, not the other way round. My baptism complements his baptism. Which means I do not stand in the air but on solid ground, since the one who comes after me holds me with his action. And so, the vox clamantis in deserto is resonant and eloquent—not for its own sake (on its own it is, so to speak, flat) but because of its object, through the one who orders it to cry out. And he is present [der ist da].109

Thus (contra Bauer)110 John’s baptism is not to be contrasted with Christ’s baptism in this Gospel, but is in correspondence with it. In 105 Barth draws attention to this parallelism in the following way: first (a) he juxtaposes vv. 19–21 with v. 19; then (b) vv. 22–3 are dealt with next to vv. 30–1; and finally (c) vv. 24–8 are taken together with vv. 32–4. 106 Barth, Johannesevangelium, 167. 107 108 Ibid., 170. Ibid., 170. 109 110 Ibid., 170. Bauer, Das Johannesevangelium, 32.

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this way too, his ministry is connected with the apostolic ministry, the ministry of the church, insofar as the latter too is baptism with water: Spirit baptism, which according to 1.33 is Christ’s prerogative, is precisely not a second sacrament alongside water baptism. It does not cancel it out (aufheben), but confirms and reinforces it. Thus it is that being born from above occurs through water and the Spirit, according to 3.5. These two cannot be in competition, precisely because the former is absolutely subordinate to the latter, the Baptist to Jesus.111

What we find here, then, is Barth moving towards a considerably more positive account of the relation between Word and human witnesses. Revelation has clarity to declare itself, above and beyond its human ministers, so that the two do not need to compete, but are able comfortably to occupy different spheres of action. The absoluteness of the distinction between Christ’s baptism with the Spirit and the baptism with water that reflects it means that the two never relate as rivals. If this represents a distinct change of tone, compared to how Barth describes Christian language related to revelation, it is because he is now impressed by the sheer presence of the reality to which Christian language refers. Because this reality has its own éclat, its servants never threaten to eclipse it. In this chapter, then, we have observed a marked progression in Barth’s thought, from his earliest reflections on the task of dogmatics in Go¨ttingen, to the account of the witness in the lectures on John’s Gospel. In the first place, the effort to conceive dogmatics as a polemical response to modern religious anthropology led Barth to a thoroughly critical conception of dogmatics: it is the theological reminder of the end of all things, and therefore (indirectly) of the Resurrection. As we have seen, this makes it hard for Barth to conceive of anything but a contrastive account of the relation between theology and revelation (if they are not, instead, to be purely identical). In the John lectures, we find Barth moving beyond this choice between identity and opposition: the Baptist is brought within the orbit of Christ’s ministry; he is unambiguously distinguished from Christ’s Light, even though (positively) he is its witness as well. 111

Barth, Johannesevangelium, 227.

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Accounting for shifts of emphasis in Barth’s thought is never easy— and one should avoid putting them down either to abstract theological decisions, or purely external circumstantial factors. It could be observed that the analogical account of John’s ministry simply emerges from the Gospel itself, where Barth would have been confronted by the distinction between its theology and his own on this point. Yet perhaps, after all, some change in circumstances was contributing to the mellowing of his psyche as well, which enabled him to perceive this.112 112 The John lectures were delivered in 1925–6, after Barth had left Lutheran Go¨ttingen to move to a rather different faculty in Mu¨nster. Around the same time (September 1925) he also got to know Charlotte von Kirschbaum more closely. In a letter dated 28 February 1926 he wrote, ‘What I have said [previously as a theologian] has, not without justification, had a very hard ring to it for many people; I have taken much (much indeed that is beautiful and dear) from many people, by pointing . . . to judgement . . . I think I have often spoken too sharply, too assuredly . . . a notable consequence of our experience together will be that my summer lecture course . . . will certainly turn out much more . . . compassionate than would ever otherwise have been the case!’ (cited by Busch in ‘Theologie und Biographie’, 334).

4 Reformed Theology Barth had been employed as a professor in Go¨ttingen to provide an ‘Introduction to the Reformed confession, Reformed doctrine and Reformed church life’,1 and (along with his lectures on Schleiermacher) his three series of lectures on Reformed and post-Reformation theology form the prelude to the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics. After its prolegomena, the latter is structured quite heavily around Heppe’s compendium of Reformed doctrine; and the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics continues the debate between Reformed and Lutheran options in Christology and soteriology which Barth had focused on in the earlier lectures on Reformed theology. I return to those lectures in this chapter. Although they are wide-ranging, it is possible to discern two salient themes running throughout. The first is Barth’s intuition that the key to Reformed Christianity is its emphasis on the Christian life. That he was determined (as we shall see) to trace this focus directly back to theological motives—rather than merely rational ones, as modern Lutheran historians were inclined to do—is perhaps down to the way Barth himself had been taught in Marburg. Wilhelm Herrmann used to insist that not just faith but ‘the moral will and achievements of the Christian lie within the sphere of his communion with God’.2 Reformed ethics, then, was not the beginning of modern secularism, but integral to the theological meaning of the Reformation.

1 2

Busch, Karl Barth: His life from letters, 128–9. Herrmann, The Communion of the Christian with God, 313.

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On the other hand, as we shall see especially later in Chapter 6, Barth would also share his teacher’s concern that this second emphasis might easily drift outside the sphere of Christian fellowship with God, and become an independent point of focus. ‘Moral conduct’, Herrmann warns, ‘must be capable of interpretation as an activity which is not merely a consequence and suspension of religious experience, but which itself belongs to the communion of the Christian with God.’3 Likewise, Barth’s insistence on deriving his theological anthropology from revelation—i.e. from the point of encounter between the human being and God—means that he is far more wary than, say, Zwingli about Christian action losing its grounding in God. Secondly, with increasing clarity Barth makes revelation the focus of his description of Reformed Christianity. He is astonished to discover that the commonplace distinction between the Reformed and Lutherans in terms of the Christian life was, in reality, not the subject of their controversy at all. What they debated over, well into the post-Reformation period, were the connected issues of the ascension, and Christ’s sacramental presence in the Supper. In other words, Barth surmises, they were unable to agree over the problem of the historical contingency of God’s presence in revelation. As Barth explores this, the conflict becomes an illustration from theological history of the impossibility of rendering a direct account of divine presence—as well as a salutary example of how Reformation theology sought to trace all its moral and religious concerns back to a concrete ground in revelation. In this way, its anthropology and ethics received an objective grounding in God.

4.1 REFORMATION AS REFLECTION Barth’s lectures on the Reformation are much more than his dutiful efforts to fill in gaps in his knowledge of the Reformed tradition, or to pass it on wholesale and unreconstructed. They are also an attempt 3

Herrmann, The Communion of the Christian with God, 320.

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to establish what, to borrow Harnack’s term, was the ‘essence’ (Wesen) of the Reformation—and in so doing, to challenge some of the conventions of church history at the turn of the century. In particular, Barth wants to get past the popular orthodoxy that the Reformation signified an age of emancipation from ecclesiastical power, based on religious or theological principles developed by Luther. Instead he turns with increasing focus to the internal conflict between Reformed and Lutheran theologies, a conflict he takes to be still unresolved, and integral to understanding what the Reformation stood for. He writes: ‘The struggle [of the Reformers] against the Catholic Church was the struggle for liberation from the past. Their struggle against the Enthusiasts was a matter of the correct interpretation of the present. Their struggle with each other, however, concerned the future. Whoever could understand this would understand the last four centuries.’4 The claim meant reassessing some of the key commonplaces about Reformation history. First, it meant carefully qualifying Luther’s status, granting him his central role in many of the developments in the early sixteenth century, but avoiding the tendency to distil the Reformation down to Luther’s theology (or its systematization by Philip Melanchthon).5 Barth suggests: A good Reformed churchman must always begin by simply recognizing Luther’s unique place in the Reformation, not drifting away from or abandoning Luther when, following the hints given by Zwingli and Calvin, he feels compelled to take a step beyond Luther. Rather, while being fully aware that this is what he is doing, he nevertheless constantly returns to Luther’s starting point.6

Connected with this is Barth’s resistance to the suggestion that the Reformation was the practical product of Luther’s theological genius, his discovery of the idea of justification by faith alone. Barth assesses his impact and influence quite differently:

4

Barth, TZ, 251. For hints of Barth’s suspicions about Melanchthon, ‘a man who had two faces— or maybe more’, see ibid., TZ, 9–10. 6 Ibid., 95. 5

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Not Luther as the discoverer [Entdecker], and the others as more or less called and graced discoverers and spokesmen after him, but Luther as one discoverer, albeit the one who knew how to say in the most convincing, comprehensive and fundamental way, what they had all discovered [entdeckt], and what it indeed meant that God unveiled [entdeckt— ‘uncovered’] himself.7

Barth’s play on the German ‘entdecken’ here is enlightening, intended as it is to qualify the idea of Luther as religious innovator. If Luther was a pre-eminent figure among the Reformers, this was not because he taught them a new concept, but because he best expressed an insight they had also had. Luther’s Entdeckung, then, was not an unprecedented development in the history of ideas, but his own highly influential expression of God’s Selbst-Entdeckung. In fact, Barth’s preferred term for describing the Reformation is not ‘discovery’ (Entdeckung) but ‘reflection/consideration’ (Besinnung). This seems to him to offer a better description of the way the Reformers considered their theology as secondary and responsive to divine grace: ‘Reformation means the reflection upon the turning of God to humanity [Besinnung auf die Zuwendung Gottes zum Menschen]’.8 This might be contrasted with, say, Troeltsch’s approach to the topic, whose ‘fundamental concern is with Luther’s religious ideas, and with the sociological results to which they gave rise’.9 Barth does not take the Reformation to be the socio-practical outcome of Lutheran ideas. Instead it is primarily the responsive movement of human beings to consider an act of divine condescension which has preceded them. Luther’s doctrine of justification is, therefore, less the normative formula for what constitutes the Reformation than one man’s effort to make sense of this divine act which he has been contemplating. It is, ‘so to speak a reflection within the reflection [eine Besinnung in der Besinnung]’.10 On the other hand, by limiting the significance of the doctrine of justification in this way, Barth is also seeking to expand the compass

7 9 10

8 Ibid., 57. Ibid., 52. Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches II, 465. Barth, TZ, 42.

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of the Reformation beyond the merely religious. It is not simply about doctrine, still less the awakening of personal religious interiority, but a human act of reflection in which every sphere of human life is implicated. It is both justification and sanctification, both Glaubensreformation and Lebensreformation:11 The Reformation was one of the great hours in which man began to reflect upon [besinnen] what he is, and even more, what he is not; to reflect how his life and action are completely and utterly impossible, and that only on the basis of the knowledge of this impossibility are they also perhaps possible; that he is judged and only as one who is judged is he perhaps pardoned; bound, and only as one who is bound is he perhaps free; a dying man, and only as a dying man is he perhaps alive.12

The dialectic between Luther and Zwingli plays itself out on this level as well, described by Barth in terms of the relation between two concentric circles. If, in contrasting the two Reformers, Luther represents the adamant determination not to relinquish or diverge from the core of the Christian gospel, Zwingli represents the vigorous determination to see through the implications of the same gospel for the Christian life. (I shall return to this point in my chapter on Barth’s pneumatology.) In a sense, then, Barth’s attempt to work out the ‘essence’ of the Reformation extends well beyond an investigation into a discrete moment in history. It is the endeavour to get to the heart of the essence of Christianity as such. For ‘understood essentially [wesentlich] . . . the Reformation is not a historical event at all’13 but, as Freudenberg puts it, ‘a sign of the essence of the church and theology through the ages’.14 It would be crude to read this as just another instance of the ‘will for the present’ (Wille zur Gegenwart) which allegedly pervaded German theology during the 1920s.15 Barth is not saying that ‘nothing at all happened’ in the early sixteenth century, but seeking to allow the gospel’s meaning to interpret those events.

11

12 13 Barth, TZ, 254–5. Ibid., 39. Ibid., 52. Freudenberg, Karl Barth und die reformierte Theologie, 294. 15 Graf, ‘Die “anti-historische Revolution” in der protestantischen Theologie der zwanziger Jahre’, 383. 14

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One notable feature of this approach is that it enabled Barth to be fair and hospitable to bits of the history of the church for which he did not have any obvious affinity. He did not think of history as a succession of epochs leading up to the present, in which the past was always aufgehoben, but as a living presence from which he could learn. An example of this principle is provided by the early parts of Barth’s lectures on Calvin. In trying to identify what was new about the Reformation, compared with the Middle Ages, Barth writes three separate paragraphs: } 1—Connections; } 2—Contrasts; } 3— Common Features. The structure itself is indicative of his intent not to historicize the Reformation novum, and so to mythologize it as the dawn of a new age. In different ways, this novum was already present in medieval monasticism, Augustinian Platonism and ‘Paulinism’, in the reaction against Thomism on the part of Scotus and Occum, in German mysticism or the European Renaissance. ‘The new is not something [ein Ding] that we can establish in the Reformers—and the old is not something we can establish in the scholastics or mystics who preceded them.’16 Stoevesandt has criticized a tendency, in these early paragraphs of the Calvin lectures, towards Geschichtsphilosophie.17 Indeed, Barth’s efforts to work out a distinction between the absolute novum of the knowledge of God, and the relatively/historically new ways in which this has taken shape in the world are somewhat schematic. On the other hand, although this procedure is abstract, it points to an approach which seeks to cultivate utmost hospitality towards the past, indeed to free historical theology from absolutizing the historical process in a way that skirts round and ignores the truly contingent.18 Be that as it may, Barth’s main attention turned away from external comparisons between the Middle Ages and the Reformation, and increasingly onto the controversies within the Reformation between Zwingli and Luther and their successors. This was, in fact, a quite deliberate move on Barth’s part, since it meant transferring the focus

16

Barth, TC, 19–20. Stoevesandt, ‘Karl Barths Calvinvorlesung als Station seiner theologischen Biographie’, 112–13. 18 For more detail here, see 6.3.1 below. 17

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of inquiry directly onto the matter of revelation itself, as this was debated through the theology of the sacraments. He puts it like this: In its own way, the Reformation age was a classical age in theology, not only because it pursued the matter of the relationships between God and humanity with a gravity and power which have not been matched since then, but also because it pushed on to the presuppositions in these relations, to the question of their reality. The intentions of Reformation theology were far from being merely phenomenological. The presupposition of every statement in it was the most powerful and lively presence of God, in which alone such statements would become true. That is why Luther makes the Supper the focus of his interest (already long before the controversy over it). But instinctively, Calvin too had a quite definite and positive interest in the Supper in particular, while Zwingli had at least an ardent critical interest in it.19

Concentrating, as he does, on this issue meant a different perception of the significance of the Reformation than the one that had become the standard of liberal Protestant historiography. Indeed, it implied a judgement about the more recent history of the Protestant churches in Europe, where theological strife had been forced to yield to the demands for political peace. Barth was fond of contrasting the debate in 1631 between Reformed and Lutheran theologians, which took place in Leipzig at the height of the Thirty Years’ War, with the state-sponsored unification of the two churches at the beginning of the nineteenth century.20 He was astonished how, with so much resting on achieving theological consensus, the Leipzig theologians were able to debate the hypostatic union of natures in Christ, making concessions along the way which rendered the differences between the two parties virtually unrecognizable—but they nevertheless cordially parted company in the end without having reached any concrete results. The statements they drew up, writes Barth, show just how close each was to the other, indeed the extent to which they were both actually saying one thing. But nevertheless, and unavoidably, [there was] a division over precisely this one thing. We are almost

19 20

Barth, TRB, 258. Ibid., 307–20; also, UCR III, 63–5.

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confronted with a reflection of the great matter itself, as we behold the dialectic of this controversy as it presents itself at its zenith!21

By contrast, the Prussian Union of the Protestant confessions would be pushed through on the basis of a conviction that those material theological differences were unimportant for unity, even though they touched on this most central concern of Christian identity. Barth comments: ‘It was not the triumph of truth but of indifference which later, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, brought about that longed-for peace for a time [vorlaüfig].’22 ‘If what is essential were to move us again as it moved the fathers, then the battle would probably be resumed at the same point. For the problems are still as important and unresolved today as they were back then.’23 By invoking these old disputes in Christology Barth did not, however, intend to reopen old divisions between the Protestant confessions, but to provoke sustained reflection upon the Christian ‘centre’—by which alone such divisions could be genuinely overcome. He also meant to draw attention to the peculiarity that this ‘centre’ could only be approached indirectly, dialectically, by allowing two apparently opposed positions to join as contrasting perspectives, focused on the same thing from different, but complementary, angles. The logic of the principles of Reformed Christianity could only be interpreted by presupposing Lutheran ones, and vice versa. Thus, describing the Reformation as ‘reflection on revelation’ becomes the means of construing Protestantism, not in terms of the birth of a new type of human subject, but of a point beyond subjectivity and history, from which the latter acquire their essence. The split between Reformed and Lutheran theologies is simply the consequence, then, of the impossibility of incorporating this ‘point beyond’ into a single theological position. And yet, as we shall see, this is not a pure objectivism of revelation. Rather, by situating it beyond the subject, Barth means to deny the subject’s ability to ‘contain’ revelation in faith, and so to ensure that revelation’s subjective dimension is immediately perceived in terms of an active (moral) anthropology. I shall return to this in Chapter 6.

21

Barth, TRB, 315.

22

Ibid., 320.

23

Ibid., 259.

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Karl Barth’s Go¨ttingen Theology 4.2 THE THEOLOGY OF ZWINGLI

4.2.1 Zwingli and Luther Together ‘Paradoxically, it may be that we can only understand Zwingli aright when we understand why Luther could not understand Zwingli at all’, writes Barth.24 As he was preparing his course on Zwingli, Barth was struck by how Lutheran historians had characterized the Zurich Reformer. He begins his lectures by rehearsing a number of the received caricatures: Zwingli was more a politician or humanist than a theologian; he was a moralist and a rationalist; such theological ideas as he employed were largely taken over from Luther, usually without the latter’s spiritual profundity or understanding. Although he qualifies and mitigates these claims, Barth does not deny them. ‘I do not intend to snatch this picture of Zwingli away from you, and to replace it with an alternative one’, he writes. ‘In its own way it is a true picture. But it can possibly look different than it usually does, when viewed through a different lens.’25 Indeed, Barth perceived that, although the picture remained basically the same, it was possible to make out two versions of it among the Lutherans. The prevailing one among most of Barth’s contemporaries and more immediate predecessors made all the usual criticisms of Zwingli, while regretting, and failing to understand, how Luther could remain so intransigent over the Eucharist; any quibbles between him and Zwingli on this point were surely not a matter for condemnations and excommunication. Barth takes this incomprehension to be a sign of indifference, typical of Ritschlian theology, to the central moment in Christian doctrine, to revelation.26 On the other hand, there was an older and more hostile group of Lutheran critics who, while advancing similar objections against Zwingli, sought to relate these back to the Christological disputes, and regarded him as dangerous for the position he adopted at precisely that point. Among these were Friedrich Julius Stahl and Gottfried Thomasius.27 While Barth is sympathetic to Zwingli’s 24 26

Barth, TZ, 39. Ibid., 22–36.

25 27

Ibid., 36. Ibid., 13–22.

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perspective as they are not, he regards their approach, which was to attack Zwingli by concentrating on his doctrine of revelation, as the only way in which criticism of Zwingli could be made theologically intelligible. For, he writes: ‘People like Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin do not dispute about absurdities. Such conflicts must be a fight about the essential thing, a fight over God. That is the canon with which I permit myself to approach history, before I am even familiar with it. But I believe that I find it confirmed by history at every stage.’28 Thus, the conflict between Luther and Zwingli is read by Barth as a theological dialectic, a sign both of the impossibility of approaching Christology through direct statements, and of the readiness to make revelation the point over which every theological topic is to be argued. Zwingli and Luther belong together, for Barth, a conviction which he allows historical events themselves to confirm in the most concrete ways during the lectures, by drawing out parallel developments in their lives and careers. For example, he notes that they were born within weeks of each other;29 again, 1516, the year of Luther’s Romans Commentary, was the year in which Zwingli for his part began to distance himself from Renaissance humanism;30 and later, in 1522, anti-religious riots broke out in Zurich, coinciding with Luther’s return to Wittenberg where he preached against the rioting of Karlstadt in Wittenberg.31 It is as if a conspiracy of circumstances is mounting up towards their controversy in Marburg in 1525. Finally in 1531, ‘[w]hen Zwingli, the unheeded watchman, the defeated dissenter, died,’ Barth judges, ‘there perished with him the really living, prophetic, reforming Luther’.32 Barth’s sense of the providential order of church history33 is such that he regards the confluence of events as a narrative instructing us about a theological point. For him, Luther and Zwingli belong together, as antithetical representatives of the one gospel, each incomprehensible without the other; but together, the sign that the Word of this gospel, ‘the turning of God to humanity’,34 is the Christian mystery which only God can utter. ‘This object will not let itself be grasped’,35 he comments. Thus, the 28 31 34

Ibid., 293. Ibid., 130. Ibid., 62.

29

30

32

33

35

Ibid., 113. Ibid., 510. Ibid., 64.

Ibid., 116. See e.g. Ibid., 311–12.

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Reformation debates over Christological/sacramental presence have lasting theological significance, for Barth, precisely because they are unresolved. Their dialectic attests the possibility of focusing directly upon the historical/Christological moment of revelation without reifying the event in language.

4.2.2 Reformation Debates on the Sacraments As Barth traces Luther’s sacramental theology up to the public outbreak of the controversy with Zwingli, he is astonished to note how close Luther’s own doctrine of the Eucharist comes to one which a Reformed Christian would have found perfectly acceptable.36 Up to the early 1520s, Luther’s writings on the subject had primarily been polemics informed by the sola fide axiom, against medieval sacramental theology. ‘Above all, his concern is to make it clear that in the institution and celebration of the Supper it is primarily a matter of God and faith, or the “Word”, to use Luther’s most characteristic term.’37 The sacrament is not a human work or service or sacrifice, for Luther, but God’s gift, a beneficium, enjoyed by faith alone. It is always to be viewed together with the divine promise (Testament), i.e. as the Word of God. And so, the sacramental sign is subordinate to the Word;38 and the emphasis is on the right ‘use’ of the sacrament (i.e. in faith). Luther opposes the idea of transubstantiation at this stage, because it seems to disqualify the need for faith by making the presence of Christ in the elements an opus operatum. Instead, he insists, the sacrament ought properly to be thought of as the opus operantis of faith, which corresponds to the divine gift.39 The celebration itself is an act of memorial, instituted by Christ to edify and strengthen believers in their faith and confession. 36

Barth, ‘Ansatz und Absicht in Luthers Abendmahlslehre’, 277–8 (This essay was a distillation of the argument in the Zwingli lectures, which Barth first published in the 1923 edition of Zwischen den Zeiten.) 37 Barth, TZ, 271–2. 38 Ibid., 275. 39 Barth refers to the idea Luther even had of establishing a consistory to monitor whether those going to receive the sacrament had manifested a genuinely repentant attitude (ibid., 278).

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The conclusion Barth draws from this evidence is the following: ‘The concept of faith had become such a radically critical force that Luther had almost become—Calvin.’40 Indeed, Barth thinks that the only discernable difference at this stage between Luther’s view and a Reformed one was one of emphasis. Because he was more interested in working out the ontology of the Supper, Luther was more inclined to describe it as a Testament or Word; Zwingli, by contrast, was invested in specifying the purpose of the sacrament, and so stressed that it was for the ‘nourishing of the soul [Speisung der Seele]’41 in memory and hope. Yet these positions were not fundamentally opposed: if what we have thus far presented as Luther’s ideas were his whole view, we would have to say that the protest registered against it by Zwingli is incomprehensible. We should not ignore the fact that for Luther, as Zwingli had also established in 1523, the idea of Testament, i.e. the Word spoken by God, was in the foreground, and that the Supper was seen above all from the perspective of its institution; whereas for Zwingli the idea of the memorial, i.e. the Word heard by man, was the dominant idea, because his interests were attached first of all to the church’s celebration and its significance. It is the classic distinction between seeing something ‘from above’ and ‘from below’ which is characteristic of each of them.42

As things turned out, however, this complementarity would never be allowed to surface, as differences in emphasis hardened into unshakeable positions after Zwingli and Luther clashed in Marburg. Initially, there is a purely contingent reason for this development. After his return from Wittenburg, Luther found himself confronted by Karlstadt’s attempts to purge the church. As Barth puts it, Karlstadt was ‘a man who had become intoxicated with the wine of the Reformation knowledge of justification, freedom and love, which was much too powerful for him.’43 Moreover, his understanding of these ideas was simplistic: Reformation meant emancipation, the turn from the object to the subject, from the metaphysical to the psychological, from the transcendent to the pragmatic, from dogma to 40 41 42 43

Barth, ‘Ansatz und Absicht in Luthers Abendmahlslehre’, 272. Barth, TZ, 256; cf. 258–9, 319–20. Ibid., 283. Ibid., 313.


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experience.44 In response to this, Luther now felt compelled in his teachings on the Eucharist to press the objectivity, corporeality and sheer givenness (for faith) of Christ in the sacrament—the other side of Luther’s dialectic, which he had been hitherto disinclined to bring out. And yet, already in 1523, the Karlstadt affair opened up the gap between Luther and the Swiss, and reinforced the possibility of Luther understanding their emphasis as being of a piece with Karlstadt’s subjectivism. However, more fundamentally than this, Barth finds that there was already a material difference between Luther and the Reformed from the very beginning, observable in what Luther referred to as the ‘fruits’ of the sacrament.45 For Luther, it was not sufficient to say that the sacrament merely bears the Word of God to those who receive it. In so doing, it also establishes fellowship—communion— between the individual and Christ, and then between the members of the church. Above all, the Eucharist is the ‘sacrament of love’.46 To be sure, the same idea is not absent in Calvin either, or even Zwingli.47 And yet, Barth contends, this was the sticking point of Luther’s concept from the start, even when he was writing to attack the Roman position. In fact, Barth suggests, Luther had never really been interested in either affirming or denying the doctrine of transubstantiation, not even in the doctrine of consubstantiation. These were only scholastic definitions, to which faith itself was not to be directed. He was only adamant that no distance should come between the sacramental signs and what they signified. Barth remarks, ‘To eat the body of Christ in the bread is no longer a symbol of our union with him; it is the event of that union [itself], as signified by the symbol. That which is sought is now found, what is promised becomes a possession, the likeness [Gleichnis] becomes an identity [Gleichung].’48 ‘[Luther] did not in fact want to deny the real presence, but to assert it.’49 From a Reformed perspective, it is here that the danger lies. Barth perceives that what is troublesome is not so much what Luther 44 47 48 49

45 46 Barth, TZ, 314. Ibid., 284ff. Ibid., 286. Ibid., 289. Barth, ‘Ansatz und Absicht in Luthers Abendmahlslehre’, 288. Ibid., 303.

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affirms, his strong theology of sacramental grace, but what he leaves unsaid. What is missing, Barth concludes, is a doctrine of the Holy Spirit as God’s means of offering himself in the Supper.50 This would not have meant a compromise over the reality of divine presence, nor a ‘spiritualizing’ (i.e. non-materialist) construal of that presence; it would, however, have drawn explicit attention to its miraculous and gracious character. Connected with this, Barth thinks it telling that in only one passage in Luther can any mention be found of the Eucharistic exhortation, ‘Lift up your hearts!’ (sursum corda), i.e. raise your vision beyond the earthly sphere (which belongs within the Eucharistic celebration). Once again, properly understood this would not mean an abstraction from Christ’s fleshly union, but a reminder of his Resurrection and ascension to heaven. Both these ideas emphasize that this fellowship must always be the overcoming of a distance, a bridge over an abyss. One cannot just pluck this fruit from the tree like that. Just as one reaches out to do it, a Halt! is sounded— which is certainly more like a Forwards!— but which is a Halt! to the extent that it calls a person loudly and clearly away from that which is visible to a fellowship of worship and grace.51

It is in qualifying his position like this, Barth thinks, that Zwingli might have been useful to Luther, had Luther been able or willing to accept it. However, what might have united them—concern for the priority of the Word of God—is now the very thing that divides them, since they are unable to agree over what the Word is.52 Whereas all Luther’s energies go into arguing that the Word is the mode of God’s presence, for Zwingli to say that grace is mediated by God’s ‘Word’ is to recall that if God makes himself present, he does so only across the great expanse between heaven and earth. In that sense, Zwingli’s position sets an enduring eschatological reservation around Luther’s sacramental identification of Word and grace. Indeed, the moment Luther fails to comprehend it, is the moment at which his own position begins to lose its theological justification:

50

Barth, TZ, 290f.

51

Ibid., 291.

52

Ibid., 292–3.

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Luther should have allowed Zwingli’s contribution to stand. From the moment that he stopped thinking dialectically any more, as he had once done, when he finally made up his mind to ignore the watchman’s voice, however unpleasant it might have been for him, from that moment Luther’s theology too was cast into the shadows where all rigid theological thinking is condemned to abide.53

In short, the anxiety to emphasize the immediacy of revelation (which Barth wants to bring out as well) results, in Luther’s case, in the availability of revelation (Barth thinks)—revelation not as the event in which the infinite distance between God and creation is crossed, but as simple fact. On the other hand, Barth does not spare Zwingli either (although this is more evident in his letters than from the texts of the lectures themselves).54 His is not quite the Lutheran criticism (such as is expressed by Stahl or Tschackert)55 that Zwingli sees the relation between God and humanity in purely ‘negative’ terms. Barth instinctively recognizes that Zwingli’s insistence on the separation between God and humanity—and so his apparently Nestorian tendency to separate the two natures in Christ—was made for the sake of a positive relation between the two, in which both nevertheless keep their full integrity intact. What drives Zwingli’s theology, Barth submits, is ‘the doctrine of parallels’,56 i.e. the desire to emphasize that the point of encounter between God and human beings is a differentiated togetherness, a

53

Barth, TZ, 489. For example, on 23 January 1923, he reports that he is now deeply embroiled in the controversies over the Lord’s Supper, and that ‘I am reaching the painful but inescapable conclusion that the picture is turning increasingly against Zwingli.’ As a Christian humanist, Zwingli still stood for an important truth, but as a ‘Reformer’ he was of no greater quality than Sebastian Hofmeister or William Farel. And yet, it is as a theologian that Zwingli’s shortcomings were most pertinent to Barth: ‘For his is simply the familiar modern Protestant theology to a T, albeit with a few ancient churchly egg-shells: a pale and bland-tasting spiritualism, an evident reconciliation between faith and knowledge, religion as experience, a fundamental conjuring away of the miraculous, an utter confusion between knowledge and enlightenment—all that and more. The puzzle of Luther’s anger towards him is very sadly no longer puzzling to me’ (Barth, ‘Rundbrief ’, in Bar.—Thu. Briefwechsel II: 1921–1930, 132). 55 56 Barth, TZ, 96. Ibid., 318. 54

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complementariness in their relation, which enables them to live alongside one another without competition. If Zwingli has an almost deterministic account of divine providence, this is precisely because he needs a means of avoiding the synergism which could result from the strong doctrine of human freedom which, for him, is a theological rather than a rationalist credo.57 And yet, it is here that Zwingli’s position becomes problematic as well. For in consistently taking umbrage against Luther, he does not manage to make it clear how the divine–human relation is always a mediated, rather than a direct, one. It is not that Barth is opposed to Zwingli’s theological ‘parallelism’ as such, which in sacramental theology meant maintaining the distinction between sacramental signa (bread and wine) and the res to which they refer (Word and faith). The problem arises, however, because Zwingli attached all significance to the ‘upper parallel’ (i.e. faith in Christ), so that the link between this and the ‘lower parallel’ (the consuming of the bread and wine) remained purely external and arbitrary. This left the door open for confusion between faith (as the action of God the Spirit) and subjective acts of remembrance, a confusion which Barth took to be a decisive in establishing Zwingli’s connection with modern Protestantism. Barth explains: There is certainly a mystery [Geheimnis] for Zwingli, the mystery—God, Christ, the Spirit, in his relation to us—but no multiple mysteries, i.e. no mysterious relations to God from our side, no mysteries [Mysterien] in the well-known religious–historical sense of a possible or real union between God and man.58

In short, Zwingli’s parallelism between God and creatures remained uninterrupted, limitless; his moral theology unchastened by the summons to humility, by the need to wait, which Luther felt so keenly.59

57

58 See ibid., 486–7. Ibid., 98. ‘Luther’s objections must be appreciated: as a criticism of Zwingli’s position they were justified, even if Luther’s position, which lies behind them, was not unobjectionable either. One would like to ask Zwingli, “Where’s the humility? Where’s the waiting”—and to ask Luther, “Where’s the courage? Where’s the hastening?”’ (Barth, TC, 136). 59

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And yet, in the disputes between these two Reformers, Barth finds the reason for their classical status. Each stood for a different aspect of the gospel—Luther, for divine presence and the reality of grace; Zwingli, for God’s irreducible glory and majesty, and for the Christian life conducted confidently in that light—and they debated their positions, and stood their ground, not by maintaining these as abstract standpoints, but by arguing concretely over Christology. Luther refused to back away from the ‘Hoc est corpus meum’ (Mark 14.22 et par.); Zwingli held fast to Christ’s ‘Caro non prodest’ (John 6.63). Nevertheless, just as importantly for Barth, they agreed that this was the point at which theological controversy began and ended. This is the insight taken up by Barth in the lectures on the theology of the Reformed Confessions.

4.3 THE THEOLOGY OF THE REFORMED CONFESSIONS

4.3.1 The Controversy with Lutheranism In Barth’s lectures on the Reformed Confessions, the passages on Christology are to be found in } 3.3 (‘The Controversy with Lutheranism’).60 Here, as elsewhere in the lectures, we find Barth positioning himself theologically in the course of his analysis of the confessional texts: his instincts favour the Calvinist documents, for he thinks they succeed in combining what is valid in Lutheran and Zwinglian positions, without falling prey to their respective dangers. It is important to point out that he does not think of Calvin as a via media, the exponent of an ecumenical compromise.61 Rather, Calvin exemplifies for Barth what he sometimes calls ‘dialectical courage’: 60

Barth, TRB, 238–320. ‘Like Luther, [Calvin] thought everything turned on God’s objectivity, and like Zwingli, on his real relationship with humanity and the world. And so, the sacramentalism of the former must have been just as foreign to him as the spiritualism of the latter. Or rather, he took the true concern that lay behind both these “-isms” to be a single one [eines], and therefore had to follow his own path between these two arguing brothers. Moreover, it must be said here that Calvin was not some kind of 61

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the necessary conceptual agility to avoid getting trapped within a single perspective. As John Webster has remarked, the lectures on the Reformed Confessions are the most demanding of all Barth’s lectures on historical theology in Go¨ttingen, in that he was obliged to take a vast amount of material (i.e. the contents of E. F. K. Mu¨ller’s edition of the Reformed confessional documents)62 and impress some kind of order upon it.63 After the initial discussions on the nature of a confession, and the Scripture principle, Barth deals with ‘Reformed doctrine as a whole’ (} 3), organizing this long paragraph into four sections, of which the first three are most important. The first (} 3.1) deals with ‘the controversy with the old church’,64 the second (} 3.2) with ‘the positive doctrine of Christianity’,65 before Barth turns to the section on the controversy between the Reformed and the Lutherans (} 3.3). In dividing his material up like this, Barth consciously gives it a loose Trinitarian structure. The Reformed objection to Catholicism (} 3.1) was raised in view of what Barth calls ‘the truth of salvation [die Wahrheit des Heils]’:66 whereas Luther tends to protest against how the individual is saved in Catholic soteriology, the Reformed wanted to clarify who performs the act. In other words, in speaking of salvation, the Reformed emphasis is on the doctrine of God, and especially on the eternally predestinating God, as ‘the theme of Christian theology . . . the known, and yet unknown, Christian presupposition’,67 which (it was alleged) the medieval church had casually neglected. On the other hand, } 3.2 centres around the distinctively Reformed interest in Christian sanctification, the pursuit of an ethos for individual and community, in accordance with the spirit of evangelical truth. Barth notes that in both matters—which can be taken as corresponding in turn to the first and third articles—a marked difference

mediator, neither in this matter nor any other. He was no Bucer, busily rushing back and forth between Zurich and Wittenberg’ (Barth, TC, 232). 62 Mu¨ller, Die Bekenntnisschriften der reformierten Kirche. 63 Webster, Barth’s Earlier Theology, 43–4. 64 65 Barth, TRB, 110–28. Ibid., 129–237. 66 67 Ibid., 127. Ibid., 128.

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was evident, at least in emphasis, between Reformed and Lutheran theologies. In the first case, the Lutheran objection against Rome had been levelled from an anthropological, rather than a narrowly ‘theological’, perspective (i.e. from the point of view of the doctrine of salvation, rather than the doctrine of God). In the second, the Reformed interest in the Christian life seemed to contrast decidedly with the narrower Lutheran focus on the via salutis, as this was exemplified in Luther’s own spiritual biography.68 And yet, with considerable surprise and notwithstanding the obviousness of the differences, Barth notes that these matters were not the point at issue between the two main strands of Protestant Christianity, a fact he finds unexplained in the main literature on the subject: Take any account you like of the world of early Reformed thought—by Max Goebel, Schweizer, Schneckenburger, or more recently the works of Troeltsch. You’ll observe precisely in these researchers, who have immersed themselves lovingly and attentively in this world, how the distinctive Reformed character, as compared with the Lutheran, is brought out very sharply by them, illuminated from a particular point of view. But, on the basis of the character thus depicted, they have no idea how to explain not that a serious controversy was unavoidable here—for they can certainly grasp that—but that it was precisely this controversy that is documented in the confessional writings on each side, and the history as a whole.69

Though the distinction appears to be subtle, it is critical for Barth, and crucial for understanding what catches his attention in the confessional texts. He is not interested so much in the way in which a typical Reformed or Lutheran Anschauung would obviously colour one’s approach to Christology as well. Rather, he says, the Reformation was a ‘classical age in theology’70 simply because, in the first place, this was what these theologians debated over. ‘This, and only this, was at stake in the controversy with Lutheranism.’71 Barth finds contemporary Protestant histories of the period misleading at this point, for they are caught out by the inability to move beyond their predisposition to see the controversy as scholastic quibbling over esoteric, adiaphorous and abstract metaphysics: 68 70

Barth, TRB, 132. Ibid., 258.

69

71

Ibid., 240–1. Ibid., 246.

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We and the fathers are obviously talking completely past each other at the moment . . . Our observations about the principal differences [Gegensa¨tze] can sometimes, if they are correct, usefully serve to illuminate the actual differences as they were then, and help to understand them. But if they do not do that—if the actual difference as it was then is still lying there in the middle like a tangled knot—then obviously we cannot have understood the contrast as a whole, and all our observations, even the most correct ones, have no value.72

On the other hand: if we take it that the specifically Reformed manner of attacking and defending against Rome, and the specifically Reformed concept of the positive essence of Christianity, are well-grounded and meaningful in their own right, then we must entrust ourselves in advance to the men behind these ideas, at least to the extent that their attitude in this new front to which we are now turning must at least have been well-grounded and meaningful as well, and not just a foolish quirk.73

So long as we cannot bring ourselves to trust that it was revelation that was really at the heart of the debate, Barth insists, we fail to get to the bottom of the division and to learn the lesson it teaches. What modern theology can learn from it, he concludes, is that the Protestant emphasis on religious conversion collapses into subjectivism if attention is not given to its external grounds.

4.3.2 The Christological Presupposition John Webster has observed that often, at this point in Barth’s lectures, ‘the doctrines are handled instrumentally rather than descriptively, to solve problems rather than to depict the ways and works of God’.74 If Barth does indeed set up his discussion in } 3.3 as a problem (with Christology as its ‘solution’) it is partly because he regarded the tenacious controversy between the Lutheran and Reformed fathers as a genuine puzzle, which had neither been truly resolved by a

72 74

73 Ibid., 251–2. Ibid., 238. Webster, Barth’s Earlier Theology, 54.


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political or ecumenical sleight of hand, nor adequately explained by recent historians. The way Barth approaches the Christological controversy in the Reformed Confessions lectures owes much to his instinctive drive to discover the theological meaning of the body of material he was dealing with, and so to put it in its proper order. As mentioned above, he does this by loosely structuring the theology of the Reformed Confessions around the Trinitarian distinctions: the debate with the Catholic Church was over the principle of God’s deity (God the Father), the proprium of Reformed doctrine was its distinctive ethos (God the Spirit), and the disputations with the Lutherans were over divine presence in the Supper (God the Son). That Barth thought he was touching on something especially significant with the last of these is surely demonstrated by the fact that he reprises the same material in consecutive lectures on 3 and 5 July 1923.75 It is as if he knows he has seized on a matter of momentous importance here, and must run the argument through a second time, to drive its logic firmly home. We must follow this short passage closely. Barth has noted that real points of divergence between Reformed and Lutheran theologies may rightly be identified in what he calls the first and third ‘presuppositions’ (Voraussetzungen) of Christianity— the Father and the Spirit. And yet, although both sides may have sensed their differences here, with rare exceptions they chose not to argue their causes over these, but over the second presupposition, Christology, which ‘stands in the middle between the other two’.76 In short, their battleground was revelation, the ‘objectification of the presence of God par excellence’.77 The fact that this was their topic is what Barth finds striking (as much as the different nuances they gave it), that it was the ‘tangled knot’ at the heart of this complex period of intellectual history. Why should it be that they made this their point of reference? The question is answered for Barth by referring to the dilemma thrown up by describing God’s relation to the world in terms of divine immanence and transcendence.

75

Barth, TRB, 246–51–9.

76

Ibid., 255.

77

Ibid., 258.

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The idea of God’s immanence in the world and in humanity is absolutely not the presence of God the Spirit per se [an sich]. In itself [an sich] it could just as well be another expression for world or humanity, the hypostasizing of given reality. And the idea of God’s transcendence of the world and humanity is absolutely not the presence of God the Father per se. In itself it could just as well be another expression for the non-worldly and non-human, merely the empty negation of given reality. In order for both ideas really to refer to God—i.e. if they were to be not mere ideas but the presence of God the Father outside us, and of the Spirit within us—a guarantee [Gewa¨hrleistung] is required. But where can this come from? Who can give it, but God himself?78

It might be suggested that in taking this approach to Christology, where it will be introduced as the warrant for divine reality, Barth is allowing his doctrine of the Trinity to be defined by modern epistemological concerns in the doctrine of revelation.79 That would only be correct here if we qualify things carefully. Barth is some way from wishing that a human individual (or collective) be in sure possession of a knowledge that would facilitate any kind of mastery over revelation—human rationality in revelation has little in common, for him, with a ‘technological’ reason empowered to manipulate reality. Quite to the contrary, Barth is highly conscious of the destructive potential of the human mind to generate religious justifications for its projects. Revelation’s ‘guarantee’ is God’s limiting of what Barth calls ‘the infinities [Unendlichkeiten] of immanence and transcendence’80 which the mind is disposed to conjure up: And if [the guarantee] were really to be given—given in such a way that the presence of the Spirit in us was unambiguously distinguished from the infinite positivity of all given reality; and the presence of the Father outside us just as unambiguously distinguished from the equally infinite negativity which is its unavoidable other side—if the guarantee were to be given that, both in the former and the latter, we are dealing with the reality of God, then evidently this guarantee must itself be finite, temporal, and contingent. It could not be confusable with the infinity of the world, nor with the infinite negation of the world, but over against these two mutually

78 79 80

Ibid., 255–6. Cf. Williams, ‘Barth on the triune God’, 187. Barth, TRB, 266.


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exclusive [gegenseitig aufhebend] infinities, overcoming and reconciling them, [it would have to be] something absolutely singular, unrepeatable and particular in between them [in ihrer Mitte]: revelation.81

The reason Barth is so impressed by the Reformed and Lutheran fathers is their willingness to allow this topic, revelation, to decide over the correctness or otherwise of their theologies and practices. This indicates to him their awareness that they really came under God’s authority—rather than of an individual, or of the opinio communis, overlaid in theological fabric. Between immanence and transcendence, revelation was the refusal of the alternative between the happy or resigned acquiescence with the given, and wide-eyed subservience to an ideal, and was distinguishable from these two potential infinities precisely by its finitude. Barth is homing in here on the idea of ‘contingent revelation’, perceiving its significance, possibly for the first time—and certainly with a new intensity. Although he had never wished to deny its reality previously, even in the highest points of his ‘dialectical theology’, the burden of his writing was always weighted towards the new, the eschatological reversal of subjectivity, as the presupposition of a theological ethics. Here the balance has shifted decisively: By its very nature, this problem certainly does not bring peace on earth, but the sword (cf. Matt. 10.34). Can there be any more urgent task for theology than Christology? And once this task has been identified, is there anything else to be done but—to dispute over it; just as any intractable task can only even be disputed over, and yet must be disputed over, for all its insolubility, once it has been given?82

The statement contains what appears to be a deliberate allusion to, and alteration of, Barth’s question posed at the end of the Elgersburg address, ‘Can or should theology ever move beyond prolegomena to Christology?’83 It is still true that theology is unable to make anything but indirect Christological statements. Nonetheless—in fact, precisely for that reason—Barth is now adamant that it must be ‘Christocentric’. For its ‘Christocentrism’ becomes the warrant that it does not incorporate God into its own realist or idealist schema. 81

Barth, TRB, 256.

82

Ibid., 250.

83

Barth, ‘Das Wort Gottes’, 178.

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And yet, it still needs adding that when Barth refers to Christology here he has in mind less the positive material reality of Jesus Christ than a formally contingent revelation as such, adapted to bracket out the potential infinities of the religious subject. This is one aspect of the ‘instrumentalizing’ of Christology in these lectures, referred to by Webster (see above). Christology does not stand for itself—is not articulated for its own sake by Barth—but as a means of settling a problem in religious subjectivity: namely, the propensity of the human subject to project itself onto an infinite ‘screen’, whether that is the ‘historical’ or the ‘absolute’. Strangely, the fruits of Barth’s discovery of the ‘Christological presupposition’ in Protestant theology are not put to use in Christology as such, in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics. As we shall see, this is because Barth thinks of the ascension as entailing a gap between Christ and the present—a kind of Christological absence—so that Christology itself is not capable of being that ‘point’ at which the human subject is taken beyond itself. That point is (as we have already seen) the preached Word, for Barth. Increasingly, however, he becomes wary about the intangibility of the latter: perhaps it represents a departure from that principle of the historical contingency of revelation, and so is also capable of being incorporated within the projections of the subject. And so, the sacrament will become the ‘point beyond’, from which the subject will be oriented in a way that is both highly tangible and external to itself. (See the final sections of Chapter 6 below.)

4.3.3 Calvinism and Zwinglianism We have seen how, in explaining divergences between Reformed and Lutheran construals of divine presence in revelation, Barth takes these to be two poles of a single dialectic. And yet, he is always conscious of a possibility beyond the ceaseless interplay between positives and negatives, conscious that Zwingli’s ‘beginning was the first, but fortunately not the last word in Reformed theology’,84 that being Reformed could not simply mean being implacably opposed to 84

Barth, TZ, 461.

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the Lutheran ‘est’, but responding to it with a ‘Yes—but’.85 It is this third way—not of consensus through compromise over a middleground, but where the claims of both sides are fully upheld—that Barth now explores in the Reformed confessional writings. On the other hand, he does not think of Calvinist theology as a theological escape from the ‘necessity yet impossibility of rendering an account’,86 a panacea for rendering God’s presence theologically. This is not, he warns, a ‘spectator position’87 from which the relative correctness of each side is affirmed. Rather, the perennial dilemma may be considered only as divinely overcome, where there is close cooperation between Word and Spirit. In working this out, Barth’s contrasting treatments of the 1545 Zurich Confession and Calvin’s 1537 Confessio Fidei de Eucharistia stand out in particular. As he examines the Zurich Confession, Barth notes that the Zwinglian denial, the incapax infiniti can be read in a quite different way: not as an attenuation of the unio naturarum in Christ, but as a reminder that the union occurs at that point alone. Put differently, the Lutheran insistence on the communicatio idiomatum might compromise the historical specificity of that union; for it was introduced to support the doctrine of the ubiquity of the human nature, as the theological prolegomenon to a doctrine of Christ’s sacramental presence: The contingency of revelation and the fact that Christian faith has to do with the concretissimum Jesus Christ, the years 1–30, is more strongly emphasized [in the Zurich Confession] than it is by the Lutherans. If one wanted to incriminate them, one could accuse the latter of gnostically spiriting away [verflu¨chtigen] the historical Jesus . . . In any case, one cannot hold on more firmly to the real humanity of the Son of God than the Reformed fathers did.88 85 ‘In its own manner, Reformed doctrine will happily accompany Luther all the way, both here and elsewhere, so that, when the last word is spoken, the Lutheran Yes is crossed through, completed, explicated—not by a Reformed No, but by a But; a reminder that, when this last word is spoken, the path comes full circle, and the point is reached once again, from which Luther started out, where the identification [Gleichung] must become a likeness [Gleichnis] again, and the critical question come to life again, in order for the divine answer to be and to remain the truth’ (Barth, ‘Ansatz und Absicht in Luthers Abendmahlslehre’, 305). 86 Ward, Barth, Derrida and the Language of Theology, 244. 87 Barth, TRB, 314. 88 Ibid., 261.

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As Webster explains, the point of the Reformed emphasis ‘is to resist the generalisation of Christ’s presence (whether by sacramental realism or by religious psychology), and to retain the otherness and particularity of God’s revelatory presence’.89 And yet, Barth remarks, the gap between this particular presence and the believer tended to be bridged, for the Zurich theologians, by an act of mental or spiritual exertion. In other words if Luther’s doctrine of sacramental immediacy tended to blur the specific Einmaligkeit of revelation, it nevertheless avoided the danger caused by rigidly insisting on that specificity: the interiorizing of divine presence. Because they conceived of the believer’s relation to revelation as something like ‘the believing soul boldly soaring ever higher, until it finally manages to find and to enjoy the humanity of Christ who rules in the loftiest heavens’,90 Barth thinks the Zwinglians fell foul of just such a danger. When this over-inflated functioning of human faith is applied to sacramental practice, we are again in the realms of that parallelism between mental and physical activity, where it is never entirely clear why the external act of eating and drinking should not drop altogether, to be replaced by the internal act of remembrance.91 By contrast, perhaps because he was less invested in internal Protestant polemics than Zwingli, in Barth’s judgement Calvin manages to avoid being trapped like him in what Burgess has called a ‘dialectic of presence and absence’.92 The subjectivism to which Zwinglian theology tends ‘has nothing to do with the Reformed intention as such’,93 Barth insists. Indeed, it can be avoided by tying the Spirit’s work more closely to that of the risen and ascended Christ. For then, Christ’s ascension need not only describe his departure from the world, but more significantly it emphasizes the gracious freedom in which he makes himself present, across the divide between heaven and earth.

89

Webster, Barth’s Earlier Theology, 55. Barth, TRB, 262. 91 Ibid., 264. 92 This, in the author’s view, is what Barth manages to avoid in his doctrine of the ascension in the CD (Burgess, The Ascension in Karl Barth, 95). 93 Barth, TRB, 264. 90

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This is what Barth takes to be the theological achievement of the Calvinist text, the Confessio Fidei de Eucharistia.94 Here, the Spirit does not simply effect an ‘isolated relation’ between Christ and the believer, but one that is ‘borne and realized by the power of the presupposition, by contingent revelation. What the Spirit does is to create our fellowship with the caro Christi; otherwise he would not be the Spirit.’95 In this document, the ‘Reformed reservation, the decisive But’ still holds, over against the Lutherans: ‘We are and remain “peregrinantes in mortalitate”; our hands are still empty. No identification between divine action and human possession is ever reached; God remains God.’96 ‘[Christ’s] flesh and blood are hidden from us. Christ the revealer is in a different space to our own, absolutely separated from the vale of mortality in which we make our pilgrimage.’97 And yet, crucially, Calvin leaves no room for any kind of psychological mediation in the surmounting of this difference: The Lord is the subject of the participatio which occurs here. It is not our faith, but the Spirit from above that overcomes the difference in location, bringing near what is far off, uniting us with Christ’s humanity, effecting our relation to contingent revelation, whose local presence we can still never and nowhere assert.98

We should note two features here. First, in Calvin (as read by Barth) the reality of the Offenbarungsverha¨ltnis is based on its ‘objective’ grounding in an act of the Holy Spirit. This ensures that it is divinely established, rather than dependent on any mediating rational process. The ‘circle’ of revelation is fully completed by God; the distance 94

Freudenberg has remarked on a tendency of these lectures to regard the Calvinistic confessions as the dogmatic standard by which all others must be judged (Freudenberg, Karl Barth und die reformierte Theologie, 272). This may well be true, although it is perhaps the inevitable corollary of Barth’s preference for a predominantly synchronic rather than a diachronic arrangement of the material. As regards Barth’s historical judgements, one of the strengths of the Reformed Confessions lectures is to trace the ‘turn to the subject’ right back to the psychological and pastoral concerns of Beza’s doctrine of predestination (Barth, TRB, 189–93); but arguably, one of its weaknesses is that he can slip into a pattern of regarding the history of Reformed doctrine as the history of its decline (ibid., 212ff.; also UCR I, 11). 95 96 Barth, TRB, 264. Ibid., 268. 97 98 Ibid., 267. Ibid., 267.

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between Christ and us is not closed by the human act of reception, even if the closure of this distance does not exclude the act of faith. Secondly, however, according to Barth the action of the Spirit is to unite the believer not merely to God, but specifically to Christ in the flesh. This means that, without erasing the difference between Christ and us, the Spirit acts to establish the Christological ground for the Christian life, rooting the human act objectively a second time, by effecting a participatio of the Christian in Christ. The connection with Christ is not a total identity, so that it is possible to stress either the proximity, or the distance that nevertheless remains. In any case, the achievement of Calvin’s text, as Barth describes it, was to have kept the connection tight so that, without making Christ in heaven identical with his spiritual presence, he could affirm that presence without further reservation. However, notwithstanding this observation of Barth’s, we shall find that, in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics, he has considerably more investment in the negative moment than Calvin in the widening of the gap. For he wants to prevent at all costs the stabilizing of the relation between Christ and the believer. Yet at the same time, as we shall see in the final chapter, he realizes that this creates a potential danger: for the destabilizing of the grounds of Christian existence opens up the possibility of that existence becoming self-grounded, grounded (as with Zwingli) in the spontaneity of the subjective act, as this occurs externally to divine grace itself. It is only by developing an anthropology of the Christian as being always-already-baptized that he finds a way to avoid this, so that the sacrament (rather than the religious impulse) becomes the ground of human subjectivity.

5 Christology The Christology in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics comes in two separate sections. There is an initial discussion in the prolegomena (UCR I, } 6), where the Incarnation of Christ is treated as the ‘objective possibility’ of the revelation event. Secondly, there is a more extensive treatment of the person and the work of Christ, in the first half of the doctrine of reconciliation (UCR III, }} 28–9). The problem I identify in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics—that the eschatological reconstitution of the human subject becomes detached from, or is not fully related to, its Christological ground—results partly from the structural fact that the Christology is confined to these two places in the dogmatics. This is first of all the consequence of Barth’s following the dogmatics manuals, in which doctrines appear as separate loci. However, it also corresponds to the dialogical structure of the dogmatics, in which subject and object are set over against each other. Christology appears on the objective side of this dialogue—leaving the subjective side exposed. The Christology here therefore lacks the inventiveness with which the theme would be treated in volume IV of the Church Dogmatics. The expositions are particularly dependent upon Heppe’s dogmatics manual; rather than seeking to integrate his Christology into the dogmatics, Barth uses it as a means of reprising the issue that has occupied him in Go¨ttingen from the beginning: the relation between Reformed and Lutheran theologies. And yet, if Barth’s Christology in these lectures therefore drifts towards abstraction—there is little in

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1

the way of detailed exegesis, the treatment of Christology is conceptual, and lacks in narrative features—nevertheless, even his rudimentary first sketch defies easy classification. It certainly escapes some of the cruder caricatures of his Christology that can sometimes be found in the secondary literature. For example, although Alister McGrath is right to point out that Barth is more at ease in dialogue with seventeenth-century dogmatics on this topic than with the dominant strands of post-Enlightenment Protestantism, this does not mean (as McGrath thinks) that Barth’s interest in Christological metaphysics involved a total disengagement of Christology from human history or critical inquiry.2 In fact, it is best understood in terms of a deliberate reversal of the taxis of God’s relation to history, which had been largely taken for granted in modern Christology, rather than a simple denial of it. If Barth found the seventeenthcentury dogmaticians more congenial here than nineteenth-century ones, it is because he thought he discerned in them a prioritizing of

1 Although Stoevesandt has pointed out that the third volume of the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics (UCR III) is an advance on the prolegomena (UCR I) in that it makes increasing use of the Bible. This chimes, perhaps, with the distinction between reconciliation (Verso¨hnung) and redemption (Erlo¨sung) which is made for the first time in UCR III (H. Stoevesandt, ‘Die Go¨ttinger Dogmatikvorlesung’, 89–90). On the latter distinction (which had previously been obscured by Barth in the Ro¨merbriefe) see M. Beintker, Die Dialektik in der «dialektischen Theologie» Karl Barths, 150–6. In the first edition of the Ro¨merbrief, redemption is collapsed into reconciliation; in Ro¨merbrief II, the reverse is true, reconciliation is collapsed into redemption. The first dogmatics lectures mark the first occasion in which the tension between the two is kept open (although the balance is weighted decidedly in favour of redemption, i.e. eschatology). 2 ‘[T]he development of the Christology of German-speaking Protestantism from 1750 to the present day is an essentially continuous process, an evolving dialogue during which possibilities are explored, in order that they may be accepted, rejected or modified. Barth’s Christology represents a deliberate disengagement from the process of dialogue, apparently on the assumption that the “theology of the Word” is immune from the critical questions raised by the modern period, particularly those arising from the historicization of reality’ (McGrath, The Making of Modern German Christology, 115). Schmidt also recognized that the ‘theology of crisis’ was a rehabilitation in modern guise of the debates over sacramental presence between Reformed and Lutheran confessions— i.e. debates precisely about revelation. And yet, this does not assuage his doubts about this theology, since he regards the Reformed claim, finitum non capax infiniti, as a rationalizing abstraction from history (Schmidt, Zeit und Ewigkeit, 157–61).

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the Christological particular over the general and universal, which matched his own priorities. Barth’s response to orthodox Christology not only manifests a profounder and subtler understanding of it than is often the case of its (or Barth’s) detractors. It also indicates that, even in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics, his own Christology cannot easily be dismissed with the labels ‘docetic’,3 ‘Alexandrian’,4 ‘Nestorian’.5 The chapter is divided into three parts. In the first part, I analyse Barth’s doctrine of the person of Christ, which he develops by resorting to a metaphysic of the Incarnation. I show that, far from potentially compromising the humanity of Jesus (as is sometimes alleged) Barth connects this doctrine with the hiddenness of revelation—which is ensured, precisely, and only, because Christ is human. The second and third parts of the chapter are devoted to examining Barth’s accounts of the kenosis and exaltation of Jesus, both from the lectures he delivered on Philippians in 1924 (repeated in Mu¨nster in 1927), and in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics. I argue that Barth’s doctrine of the Resurrection, and therefore of the royal office of Christ, is substantially reduced in both cases, because he tends to look in Christology for what is directly pertinent to the eschatological moral ontology he wishes to ground.

3

Stadtland, Eschatologie und Geschichte, 93, 117. This is Waldrop’s conclusion, although it is cautiously stated, and reached through careful analysis of Barth’s positions (Waldrop, Karl Barth’s Christology: Its basic Alexandrian character). It is unclear, however, whether the debate between ‘Alexandrian’ and ‘Antiochian’ Christologies can really be mapped on to a theology like Barth’s. Furthermore, because (as Hunsinger points out) his position always presupposes the logic of the Chalcedonian definition, the allegation that he sits on one side or the other in that debate is hard to prosecute (see Hunsinger, ‘Karl Barth’s Christology: Its basic Chalcedonian character’, esp. 140–1, n. 5). 5 Jenson speaks of a ‘transposition of the history between God and man “inside” the person of Jesus Christ’: ‘For classical Christology the history of salvation, the history of Christ and His people, is the history between God-in-Christ and mankind. For Barth’s Christology it is the history between God and man as these are present in the two natures of Christ. One almost wants to say without qualification: It is the history between the two natures of Christ’ (Jenson, Alpha and Omega, 130). 4

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5.1 THE PERSON OF CHRIST

5.1.1 Incarnation and History One might easily read Barth’s treatment of the Incarnation in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics as a de-historicizing of divine presence, the retreat behind more than a century of historical-Jesus research to a conceptual Christology. Indeed, when he read through Barth’s manuscripts, Brunner was suspicious of Barth’s efforts throughout the lectures ‘to breathe new life into the withered bones of Reformed high-scholasticism’.6 Nevertheless, Barth is highly aware of the possible objection that his recourse to Aristotelian terminology could be taken as a metaphysical flight from temporal existence. Yet he feels compelled to resort to this conceptuality, he says, because of the present ‘state of emergency’ (Notstand) in Christian theology, which has trouble fixing itself upon the theological Sache: ‘It is possible and legitimate to say much that is bad about the orthodox fathers. But they knew what they were talking about. That is what we must learn again as well, in one way or another’ (UCR I, 206). One might also be wary about how Barth uses the doctrine of the Incarnation in his dogmatics. In the prolegomena it functions as what he calls the ‘objective possibility of revelation’, in conjunction with the doctrine of faith and obedience, the work of the Spirit, as the ‘subjective possibility’ (UCR I, 160–3). Because, as von Balthasar pointed out in analysing the prolegomena of the CD, he is borrowing here from Kantian ideas about ‘conditions of possibility’,7 it might seem again that Barth’s argument functions by abstracting Christology from real historical process into an ahistorical metaphysics. However, Barth does not think of the Incarnation as an atemporal transcendent a priori, but a real event. When he uses the category ‘Urgeschichte’ (UCR I, 182) this is intended to ensure that God’s historical presence in the world remains spontaneous, and subjectively ungraspable. It is not designed to convey that God is removed from the world, for the doctrine of the Incarnation refers explicitly, Barth thinks, to the 6 7

Barth, Bar.—Brun. Briefwechsel 1916–1966, 145. Cf. Balthasar, Theology of Karl Barth, 191.


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temporality (Zeitlichkeit) and historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) of revelation (UCR I, 163). Indeed, Barth explains in } 6.2 that the argument works deductively, rather than inductively—i.e. proceeds from the factual reality, rather than towards it. He writes: ‘I have not spoken hypothetically about a hypothetical entity, but about the possibility which actually exists, of revelation: about Jesus Christ, about the way—known and confessed in the Christian church—which God takes to reach us’ (UCR I, 173). By setting out the exposition in reverse order, Barth is not contradicting that statement, but emphasizing that the historical fact of revelation is eschatological: a divine act, rather than just a datum. On the other hand, it is not quite true that the doctrine of the Incarnation functions in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics as a response to the question (as McCormack puts it): ‘How is it possible to be encountered by God’s revelation in history?’8 If McCormack is right that Christology increasingly becomes the critical focus of Barth’s theology (the an-/enhypostasis doctrine replacing a dialectic of time and eternity)9 this is not because Barth worries (as McCormack does) about whether that dialectic might give the lie to the historicity of revelation. Almost the reverse, Barth’s question is: How is it possible to speak about the encounter with God in revelation without making God’s presence historically ‘available’? Indeed, we shall see later in the chapter that this very worry causes problems in the dogmatics. In UCR I, } 6 Barth sets out the doctrine of the Incarnation, as the objective possibility of revelation—revelation in concealment; which he sets against the Resurrection, as the objective reality of revelation—revelation in concealment: ‘A miracle at the beginning; a miracle at the end’ is the principle here (UCR I, 199). And yet, the second miracle, the Resurrection, is merely referred to. It is not to be incorporated within Barth’s ‘system’, lest that means making God theologically available. The obvious risk is then that the Resurrection loses any historical resonance; as event, it becomes the punctiliar moment of the knowledge of God, with no reality beyond the moral histories it reconstitutes. 8 9

McCormack, Barth’s Critically Realist Dialectical Theology, 359. Ibid., 367.

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5.1.2 The Doctrine of the Incarnation and the Person of Christ In order to understand the doctrine of the Incarnation, as it is first introduced by Barth in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics, it is necessary to emphasize that it belongs as one moment within the movement of revelation. If the Trinity is ‘the real centre of the concept of revelation’ (UCR I, 161), revelation taken as a whole, the Incarnation is a snapshot of one particular instant in that event. Situating the Incarnation within the Trinitarian economy like this means that it may not be isolated as a claim about the direct immanence of God. In UCR} 6, Barth tries to uphold the principle that revelation is not the Aufhebung of God’s mystery (i.e. of his being as subject) but is the moment in which that mystery confronts us in all its hiddenness. Even in his revelation, precisely in his revelation, God is the hidden God . . . God is not so hidden, then, because of the relativity of all human knowledge, but because he is the living God who reveals himself as he is, the threefold one, the inexhaustibly living one, the indissoluble subject, from his perspective, not ours. He himself is the barrier that makes our knowing so relative; we founder on him, that is: on the revelation of his glory. [UCR I, 165]

The doctrine of the Incarnation serves as an elaboration on this claim by stressing specifically that God’s ineffability is not threatened or qualified in any way by the history of Jesus Christ, but revealed and confirmed by it. The Incarnation here is being used to stress that when God makes himself present in the world he hides himself, lest his appearance be reified in revelation. It does not unlock the divine mystery, but seals it. This is how Barth understands the extra Calvinisticum. In maintaining the distinction between the divine Logos and Jesus’ humanity, Calvinist theology did not want to detract from the reality of God’s presence by denying the hypostatic union, but to supply the rejoinder that this union was ‘a divine miracle [Wunder Gottes]’ (UCR I, 197), not simply a given historical reality. Thus in UCR III, where Barth develops his own Christology through commentary on the debate between Lutheran and Reformed theologies, he repeatedly prefers a

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Reformed Christology because he thinks it capable of affirming the reality of the union, without making grace into an available reality. When he deals with the doctrine of Christ’s person for the second time, in UCR III, } 28, Barth lays a good deal of importance on the order of exposition. Firstly, he deals with Christ’s person before his works; and secondly, he treats the unio personalis before the unio naturarum. Treating person before works is intended to counter the procedure of liberal Christologies which, based on a general idea of divine causality, work back from ‘effects’ (salvation) to ‘cause’ (Christ’s person). Barth objects to this: ‘When speaking of what Christ did and does, so long as we do not proceed from a definite notion of who is acting here, we are exposed to every kind of arbitrary habit of thought, or to our own capricious ideas’ (UCR III, 75). In other words, causality language is dangerous when construing the relation between Christology and soteriology because it generates a gap between cause and effect into which the human subject can project itself in God’s place. Understanding Christ’s work as the work of his person ensures that grace is described in terms of a personal relation established by God with human beings, rather than a static human condition whose origin is merely attributed to Christ. In short, ‘everything depends on seeing and understanding the work as his work, the work of this agent, just as this agent can only be seen and understood in the act of this work he performs’ (UCR III, 76). Giving the doctrine of the hypostatic union of the Logos priority over the union of divine and human natures is a decision in preference for Reformed over Lutheran Christology. Barth makes this choice because he is worried that prioritizing the unio naturarum blurs the eschatological distinction between Christ and the Christian, allowing grace to become a general state of affairs, rather than an event mediated in a historical relation. The difference is expressed in the following pair of summary statements: Reformed: God’s faithfulness triumphs in the person of Christ above (u¨ber) the unresolved (unaufgehoben) opposition between God and man. Lutheran: God’s faithfulness triumphs in the opposition between God and man, resolved (aufgehoben) in Christ’s humanity. (UCR III, 62)

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Because Barth thinks of grace (i.e. God’s faithfulness) as the movement to bridge the divide between God and humanity, he takes it to be necessary that its ‘triumph’ be affirmed in Christ’s person, but not transferred outside him. Barth thinks of reconciling grace (God’s faithfulness) as the overcoming of the opposition between God and creatures. And yet, this can be thought of in different ways. Whereas the Reformed statement locates grace in Christ’s person—and so stresses that the opposition is not overcome outside Christ—the Lutheran statement stresses that the opposition is overcome in Christ. It therefore emphasizes the redeemed character of Christ’s humanity. Barth tends to worry that the Lutheran statement, which takes for granted the communion of divine attributes with Jesus’ human nature, might lead to the generalizing of grace (UCR III, 54). And yet, he does not want to deny the communicatio idiomatum as such. He rejects Zwingli’s Christology at this point, for he thinks it impermissible to state that the hypostatic union could leave Jesus’ human nature apparently unaffected. ‘The unio personalis in the God-man stands above, but not within the dialectic of God and man’ (UCR III, 52–3). In other words, in Christ there is a real triumph. The opposition between God and humanity does not extend itself into Christology; it is genuinely resolved there. However, because the unio naturarum is secondary to the unio personalis there can be no general deductions made from Christology. The point Barth wants to make is that the hypostatic union so binds the Son’s divinity with his humanity as to make them inextricably interlocked in this person, which forbids speaking abstractly about human (or divine) nature.10 Barth’s accusation that Lutheran 10 Barth does not seem to have decided here whether the ‘genus majestaticum’ entails the total erasure of human nature altogether, or whether it is simply an overconfident assessment of the human condition before the return of Christ (UCR III, 59). Later, in the doctrine of redemption, he wonders whether the difference between Lutheran and Reformed Christologies is describable not just in terms of the degree of realization in eschatology, but as the indicator of a different conception of salvation, which in Lutheranism potentially involves the complete elimination of human nature in union with God (UCR III, 482ff.) Deciding this is, however, of secondary importance for him to the point that, as things stand in the present, it is solely in Christ that the union occurs. For his anthropology is not constructed around the notion of nature, but around an eschatology in which human beings are situated between two ‘natural’ states, the status peccati and the status redemptionis.

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Christology was guilty of a lack of ‘eschatological reserve’ (UCR III, 59) refers not so much to what he considers to be an overemphasis on the ‘already’ over the ‘not yet’, as to an impermissible tendency to draw ontological consequences from a unique event. Hence, one of the key principles of the Incarnation is its singularity (Einmaligkeit): If God were really to reveal himself in the hiddenness of a human life, that would then have to be valid once and for all. That would then be his encounter with humanity—there could be no second, third, or fourth one alongside it, as surely as revelation is one. [UCR I, 171]

The ‘once-ness’ of the Incarnation is not only the denial of multiple ‘Christs’; it is the denial of the attempt to make the Word-made-flesh an all-purpose principle beyond the specificity of this (Jesus’) flesh. The very contingency of the event means that it will not tolerate being diffused into a general metaphysics. In other words, Barth’s unequivocal statement that the relation between God and humanity is not simply analogous to the correspondence between two parallel lines, but involves a genuine union, is accompanied by the eschatological proviso that this union occurs in one particular case. He takes it that the Hegelian apotheosis of history, and Romantic claims about experiential immediacy, are traceable back to a misapplication of the communion of attributes in Christology (UCR III, 56–7), which permits ‘Christ’ to become the Gestalt of a religious metaphysics. By contrast, a Reformed version of this doctrine keeps its logic in strict check by invoking the hypostatic union at the critical moment: ‘The God-man is always primary, over against Christ’s humanity’ (UCR III, 58). And so, although ‘[t]he properties of both natures are attributed, in fact, to the person of the God-man’ (UCR III, 57), the attribution remains unique. It is sometimes claimed, however, that Barth underplays the humanity of Christ, that Jesus ‘often seems to become an ideal rather than a concrete figure’11 in his theology. In the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics the claim could certainly be supported by Barth’s preference for a conceptual rather than a narrative Christology: for the lack of exegesis of the gospel texts leaves him somewhat exposed here. And yet, it is 11

Gunton, Becoming and Being, 185.

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often alleged that the source lies, more deeply, in borrowing a problematic doctrine of the hypostatic union from traditional Christology; this supposedly makes it impossible for Barth to render Jesus’ full humanity, because here the Logos substitutes for some human ‘organ’ in Jesus. However, a brief examination of what Barth has to say on the virgin birth, followed by the an-/enhypostatis doctrine, suggests that this is a misapprehension. There is nothing in his Christology that structurally prevents him from affirming Jesus’ full humanity. The virgin birth is essential to Barth’s Christology in securing the crucial point that, in Christ, it is God who acts as saviour. It is not designed, therefore, as a polemic against human sexuality, even if it has often been treated like that. What is circumvented in the Incarnation, for Barth, is not sexuality as such but a certain style of human agency. That is what Barth means in the following quotation by the contrast between the human-as-person and the human-as-nature. The human being is a person (i.e. that which must fall away here), and acquires his or her name, and place in history, and status, and right from the father, not from the relation to the mother, but to the begetting male. It is not for nothing that world history is the history of men, that industry, politics, art and sciences, leaving aside exceptions and exceptional circumstances like ours today, are men’s affairs, and that the creative shaping of things, the personal fashioning of existence is the privilege of men, so far as the eye can see . . . What remains of humanity once the person has been subtracted is human nature as such, humanity as such, the impersonal substrate of history, humanity not as a little creator, but as a creature. The bearer of the creatureliness of humankind is the woman. [UCR I, 200–1]

Barth has been criticized here for construing male–female difference along active–passive lines.12 Yet, taken with other statements, he can be read more instructively as promoting a different kind of agency (even if one might still wonder whether it is best construed through generalizing gender distinctions). In fact, Mary is not merely the passive receptacle of the divine Son, Barth says elsewhere: for conception is not simply caused in her, but involves the interaction between the Spirit’s command and her free assent (UCR I, 204). Mary is ‘the human 12

Migliore, ‘Karl Barth’s first lectures in dogmatics’, l.

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possibility over against the impossible possibility of God’ (UCR I, 202). However, because God is the agent of conception, this interaction is not synergistic: God intervenes to reverse the trend of human history; the human being follows. Thus, an entirely human act is also involved in the conception of Christ, although in this qualified sense. The dogmatic language Barth draws upon to express the Christological consequences of the virgin birth is the anhypostatic–enhypostastic union between the Logos and the human nature it generates.13 Taken together the two terms mean that it is only insofar as he is the incarnate Logos that Jesus exists as a human being; otherwise he would have had no human form of existence at all: ‘he is the person of this human individual, through which this individual exists, and beside and outside of whom it does not exist’ (UCR III, 37). In other words, the terms do not mean that in Jesus the divine Logos takes the place of, say, the human soul or mind, making Christ less than human. At this point, Barth draws on a distinction he finds in Heppe, between ‘individuality’ and ‘personality’. To be an individual, he says, is to be a single member of a particular group or species; in a typical anthropology, this might mean to be composed of a soul and a body. To be a person, on the other hand, is to have a name, to be ‘this individual [dieser Einzelne]’ (UCR III, 47). The Incarnation does not fill a gap in Jesus’ humanity, which is complete in itself, but it specifies the personal identity this individual has. In trying to make a dogmatic statement about Christ’s person, Barth is fully aware of the objection that it might be taken as substituting an abstract conceptual objectivity for existential realism. The objection can appeal, of course, to comments of Luther’s, as well as to Melanchthon’s well-known remark: ‘Hoc est Christum cognoscere, beneficia eius cognoscere, non quod isti [i.e. the scholastics] docent, eius naturas, modos incarnationis contueri’.14 Whether or not this polemic against medieval scholasticism was justified, however, Barth does not accept the more general claim that Chalcedonian metaphysics necessarily involves an abstraction from actual experi-

13 14

On this, see McCormack, Barth’s Critically Realist Dialectical Theology, 360–7. From the prologue to the Loci communes, cited by Barth in UCR III, 27.

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ence. ‘Can there be a more existential relation than this one, if it is taken seriously?’ he asks (UCR III, 31). And yet, ‘taking it seriously’ would mean seeing the ‘two-natures’ Christology not in isolation, but as ingredient within soteriology, as the focal point of the reconciliation between God and humanity. In his original plans, Barth had intended to deal with Christology and soteriology separately, by allotting a different chapter to each (UCR II, 8). Yet at the start of the doctrine of reconciliation, he seems to have become aware of the need to treat the two distinct elements of this doctrine—Christology and soteriology—‘as a single whole [in einem Zusammenhang]’ (UCR III, 1). When it comes to achieving this, however, he will find himself constrained by the organization of the loci in the dogmatics manuals he is using, where Christology and soteriology are treated in different chapters. This constantly hampers his intentions (as it will not do later in CD IV, where Barth took time to integrate the material much more successfully); and the result is often a somewhat abstract discussion of the issues at stake in Reformed–Lutheran debates on Christology, as well as the disconnection of soteriology from its Christological grounds, in subsequent paragraphs of the doctrine of reconciliation.

5.2 THE RISEN CHRIST Although the claim is unjustifiable that Barth’s theology allows insufficient scope for the real Incarnation of God in the human being Jesus, a further suspicion still lingers: does Barth press the eschatological presence of God so strongly that the Resurrection of Jesus appears as an instantaneous point in time, without ramifications for the past or the future? Does that event really make an impact in the world? I shall deal with these questions by examining the Christological sections of Barth’s commentary on Philippians (initially delivered as academic lectures in 1924), followed by relevant passages from the doctrine of reconciliation in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics. Barth does not interpret the hymn in Philippians (Phil. 2.6–11) as an isolated Christological tract, but in the light of its immediate textual surroundings, Paul’s command to ‘mind the one thing


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[ e ÆP e çæB ] (2.2). Yet Barth’s interest in the epistle is not reducible to the dogmatic and the ethical, but includes a third factor, ‘something personal [etwas Perso¨nliches]’,15 comprising Paul’s evident fondness for the Christians in Philippi, and his order not to worry (for his sake, or theirs) as he awaits his trial (4.6). Because of that, it is also ‘one of the most extraordinary documents of Christian humanity’,16 Barth concludes. Indeed, a pleasing feature of his commentary is his feel for the distant or otherwise entirely lost historical circumstances of the letter: Paul’s imprisonment, the sending of Epaphroditus back to Philippi (2.25–30), the dispute between Euodia and Syntyche (4.2). Barth is not interested so much in speculatively reconstructing the events behind these references (although there is an element of this in his reading) but in dwelling on how Paul thought the gospel cast even relatively ordinary matters such as these in a quite new light: Especially in Paul, we may not disregard passages like these, in which we seem only to be dealing with this peculiarly exalted humanity, mirrored in the discussion of concrete, earthly concerns, long since forgotten. Even if we hear nothing new in them about what he meant and proclaimed, they show us all the better what he did and how he actually lived. They are like parts of a picture book, first of all illustrating his ethical instructions: he seeks to carry out himself what he requires of his congregations as the Lord’s will. But they also illustrate his theological ideas: this is how things look when someone not only has to think these ideas but (because they are true and necessary ideas) to live in their shadow continually, no longer shaking himself free from them in his concrete decisions.17

Barth’s analysis of the hymn is based on this insight into the interpenetration in Paul’s writing of a rich dogmatic conceptuality with the human and everyday. The hymn’s Christology is introduced suddenly and unexpectedly, he notes, as if Paul were lifting a curtain or opening a door, to reveal the theological ‘background’ against which his apostolic admonitions make sense.18 It should be pointed out that Barth does not merely think of Paul as presenting an ideal ethical model in 2.6 et seq., which he enjoins

15 16

Barth, Erkla¨rung des Philipperbriefes, 43. 17 18 Ibid., 126. Ibid., 74. Ibid., 54.

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upon the Christians in Philippi to copy. More strongly, the kenosis and exaltation of Christ are an indicative, the location (Ort) and reality (Wirklichkeit) of the church already. Paul’s paraclesis: is distinguished from all merely moral teaching by the forcefulness, the necessity, the unconditionality, the utterly compelling urgency of the command of God fulfilled in Christ, a fulfilment in which Christians exist as such, so that everything other than this fulfilment would have to mean something impossible for them, a return to non-existence.19

In the hymn, in other words, Paul is not simply holding up Christ as an exemplary moral figure, but describing in brief the ‘world’ these Christians simply occupy, a world describable in terms of Jesus Christ. Indeed, for that very reason, his exhortations shift from being just good counsel, whose authority rests on Paul’s greater wisdom or experience, to being something utterly urgent and compelling: ‘To contemplate [Christ’s] way immediately means to contemplate the command which is effective in his congregation, without the need for any particular application.’20 There is, however, a further point to be made about the Christological hymn. Barth takes it that its context is the ‘selfish’ and ‘conceited’ behaviour of parts of the church in Philippi, alluded to by Paul, in which individuals were looking each to ‘his own interests [ a Æı H]’ (2.3–4). Although Paul does not go into further detail here Barth suggests that we ought to have in mind not so much ‘ordinary, common selfishness’ (although this is not out of the question either) but primarily ‘processes, conflicts and errors of a subtle, spiritual and religious kind’.21 This speculation is justified if (as Barth implies) we take 2.3–4 as an anticipation of Paul’s discussion of the ‘mutilators of the flesh’ in Chapter 3. In that case, Paul is drawing the contrast between ‘eschatological existence’22 in Chapter 2, and a religion of ‘possession’ in the following chapter, where religious existence is described as a sort of capital investment a person can own, on which she may accrue interest.23 By describing the career of Christ,

19

20 21 Ibid., 63. Ibid., 54 (my underlining). Ibid., 52. McCormack, ‘The significance of Karl Barth’s theological exegesis of Philippians’, xxiii ff. 23 Barth, Philipperbrief, 103–4. 22


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however, Paul is not merely setting out a contrast between one moral option and another. He is reminding the church of the ground of its very existence, not just to condemn their grasping jealousy, but to make it ontologically impossible. For: Christ too has something of his ‘own’ [ein «Seiniges»], he too could be right, he too could pride himself on his Æ (his glory), and with incomparably more cause than us. His own is precisely his being-equal-with-God [Gottgleichsein]. He could seize hold of this, upholding and defending his property like a robber with his booty.24

Because Christ does not behave like this, it is impossible for Christians to do so and still belong to his body. And yet, Barth goes further. He also wants to account for the disparity that has now been made apparent between Christ’s selfrestraint and the self-assertiveness of his followers in Philippi. He explains the behaviour of these Christians as status anxiety, a crisis in confidence, the failure to believe that self-denial will ultimately be vindicated by God. By contrast, Christ proceeds on the basis of a total ontological certainty about his status, his equality with God. This provides him with the assurance that God will see to his rights, and allows him the total freedom to ‘empty’ himself utterly: He is equal with God to the extent that he is not obliged in any way desperately to assert his being-equal-with-God. That is not because he could also relinquish it, but because what he has is not in question—in contrast to the best that [the Philippians] can have. One does not need to cling on, robber-like, to what one is unconditionally certain of. For example, the extent to which two lovers really belong to one another is the extent to which they can also allow each other freedom, without fear of losing each other. Thus God’s Son does not give away [preisgeben], or give up [aufgeben], his equality with the Father, but he does let go of it [freigeben]. From now on, he is equal to God in the hidden form of a servant. In humility, he is the most high. The robber-like behaviour of those in Philippi, their anxious and greedy grasping, and their preening vanity, betrays the uncertainty of their possession. Because he is equal with God, he has no need to assert himself in this, or clamour for it, and can even forego the appearance and esteem which belong to this being, without thereby abandoning it—indeed, in order to make it known [zur Geltung bringen] in precisely this way (2.9ff.).25 24

Barth, Philipperbrief, 55.

25

Ibid., 56.

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Christ’s total equality with God, then, is not abandoned in his kenosis, nor even in tension with it. Rather, it is the only ontological condition on which his self-abasement is at all possible. The fact that Christ is God’s equal, and is sure of this status, explains his freedom in undertaking such self-abasement. His ability to humble himself is not viewed as moral achievement, but is rooted in the unshakeable knowledge of his being in relation to God. As Barth begins to describe this kenosis, it is evident that Schleiermacher (on whom he had lectured the previous semester) is hovering in the immediate background. In his study of the Christology in Schleiermacher’s festive sermons, Barth had found that the relation between Jesus and humanity could be described as being akin to two foci linked by an ellipse, which separated these foci only quantitatively.26 This commitment to the basic continuity between Christ and humanity meant that Schleiermacher tended not to see the Incarnation as an act of divine condescension but, quite the reverse, as the divine disclosure of the exalted possibilities of human life. The point of Christology then lay for Schleiermacher, (as it had for Osiander, to whom Barth connects his Christology), in ‘the infusion and reception in us of the same obedience that was in Christ’.27 Even when it came to the Crucifixion, Schleiermacher still appeared to make no allowance for any real disruption of this continuity: the suddenness of the conversion of the repentant thief on the cross (Luke 23.39 et seq.) is an optical illusion, Schleiermacher thinks, since the thief was really a ‘secret believer’ all along;28 Jesus’ cry of dereliction (‘My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?’) in which he cites Psalm 22, is to be understood in terms of the triumphal note of resolution on which that Psalm concludes. In short, Jesus’ death is merely exemplary here; it serves only to illustrate the peaceful composure of his union with the Father.29 What Barth regrets in all this is the lack of real drama, since he thinks this is evidence that the relation of Jesus to the Father is not in fact genuine. There is nothing ‘eventful’ at all about the Passion; it simply illustrates in narrative form an eternal human essence, the human religious capacity. Moreover, this construal of Christ’s self26 28

Barth, TS, 95. Ibid., 155.

27

29

Ibid., 166. Ibid., 160.

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abasement appears to Barth to bring Schleiermacher’s Christology close to the very ethos Paul wants to oppose. Because the religious disposition is the ground of a universal anthropology, Barth thinks it is the reverse of the way of Jesus; it turns out to be the tacit selfelevation of humanity under the guise of religious humility. And so, Barth’s reading of Phil. 2.6 et seq. is designed to show that the epistle rules out any ‘religious’ construal of Christology. He begins by emphasizing that Christ’s kenosis must be understood as his assuming an ‘incognito’,30 a total camouflage of his divine identity. As he focuses on Phil. 2.7–8, he observes that a crucial feature of the kenotic movement is that it is grounded entirely in Christ’s own decision: he ‘emptied himself ’ (Æı e KŒø). In other words, Christ becomes human because ‘[t]his is what he wills’;31 it is not fate, or even the Father’s requirement, overriding what he wants. Barth notes this, not so much to stress the extent to which the Son is divinely self-determinative, but to make a point about the hiddenness of revelation. That the Father will later glorify Christ in the Resurrection is one thing; but it may not detract from the act (which in its way is equally free and lordly) whereby the Son foregoes all glory of his own, and deliberately hides himself in a form which belies his divine reality. Because his earthly career is thoroughly defined by this act of self-concealment, the effort to grasp (psychologically or historically) something intrinsically glorious about this man is rendered futile: ‘The utter freedom and royal sovereignty of God’s equal himself is the ground of this incognito. We mustn’t, therefore, seek to penetrate it. The will of God himself would prevent this.’32 The point of 2.7, then, is that Christ conceals himself, and (more strongly) that this concealment is the result of his will. The following verse, which takes us forward from the Incarnation to the Crucifixion, is not taken by Barth as a new idea, but a parallel one which describes and explains the same process. Later in the hymn we shall be told that Jesus is given by the Father the ‘name above all names’ (2.9), the name Kyrios (2.11). Here, however, 30 This term, which Barth uses, is taken originally from Kierkegaard. See e.g. Training in Christianity, Part II, esp. 124ff. 31 32 Barth, Philipperbrief, 57. Ibid., 58.

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the point is that he has determined that he will not exert the authority he has as God’s equal, but renounce all prestige and position. With 2.8, therefore, his glory is now doubly obscure: he is both human, and servile. Or put differently, Jesus’ servility is to be understood as the renouncement of the authority to reveal himself. The final step in the argument is to show that this self-denial cannot be regarded as the revelation of Jesus’ moral or religious virtuousness. For he is manifestly executed not as a good man, but as a criminal: At the most fundamental level, [2.8] designates the opposite of all Kyriosglory—thus precisely not (as Schleiermacher used to say in almost all his Good Friday sermons) the consummate union of Christ with the Father, but precisely the high point of that appearance of God’s equal which utterly calls into question his equality with God, his union with the Father. Notwithstanding that God’s equal was found as nothing other than an obedient slave, he was God’s equal, acknowledged and confirmed as such by God—because of the humiliation of God’s equal that went the length of this obedience, not because of this person’s ethical achievement.33

From beginning to end, in other words, the life of Jesus is to be thought of in terms of a kenotic movement which tends further and further away from the possibility of discovering anything intrinsically divine about this human being: ‘in his most personal and innermost being he took on the form of a servant.’34 Once more, the fact that the full energy of the Son’s divine will is devoted to this self-disguise makes any penetration of it impossible and counterfactual. Paradoxically, however, Barth does not think of 2.9 et seq.—the Resurrection—as a reversal of Christ’s kenosis but, initially, as a further reinforcement of it. This he takes to be the significance of the statement, ‘God exalted him . . . ’: in contrast to his humiliation, Christ is exalted as Lord through an act of the Father’s will, not Jesus’ own. And so, the church’s confession of Christ as its leader and head does not result from its spontaneous declaration that he possessed some particular quality or other, but from God’s declaration that he is to be its head. 33

Ibid., 59.

34

Ibid., 61.

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Thus, the Resurrection is not taken by Barth to be a twist in the plot of Jesus’ life, whereby he leaves behind the identity he took on in the Incarnation and Crucifixion. Once again, the divine will of the Son prohibits this conclusion; it is not overcome or opposed to the will of the Father. Rather than undoing what has preceded, then, the Resurrection serves to ‘underline’ (unterstreichen) it. ‘There is no other Christ than this one who is God’s equal, made man.’35 As Barth notes, there is no mention of any resumption of the æç ŁF in 2.9 et seq. The point he wants to make is the one he thinks underlies the moral theology of Paul’s epistle: the emphasis is laid not so much on this servant being raised up in the Resurrection, but on the head of the church being a servant. The frequent allegation that Barth’s theology of the Resurrection, especially in this period, construes the event dualistically, locating it in the eternal, supra-historical rather than temporal and historical sphere, fails to get to the heart of the issue.36 By situating the event beyond the historical sequence of Christ’s life, Barth is not simply repeating a Platonic or ‘Western’ prejudice against temporal reality, but trying to draw attention to the moral dynamics of Christology. The Resurrection is God’s public vindication of his Son, but not an event that revokes the human and servant identity he has chosen. Barth’s point is that it is only because the Resurrection does not alter Jesus in this respect that he is able to be head of the church—not just a moral example to it, but its real moral identity. If the Resurrection meant that Jesus left his earthly career behind him, it would immediately lose its moral force: Only when it is not punctured does this image [of Christ’s abasement] remain what in any case it also is, insofar as it is the revelation of saving grace: namely, a command which claims and sanctifies. It is a command— and in this context that is undoubtedly why we are reminded of it—because God acknowledges this abased and humbled one, because Jesus is risen from 35

Barth, Philipperbrief, 60–1. Jenson connects Barth’s description of Jesus’ Resurrection appearances in CD III/2 with a Platonic doctrine of time (God after God, 152ff.). For Stadtland, the Resurrection in Barth’s dialectical theology simply belongs on the eternal side in the ‘dividing up of the entirety of world-reality’ (Eschatologie und Geschichte, 120–2) See also the discussion of the secondary literature on Barth’s doctrine of the Resurrection in ch. 1 of Dale Dawson, The Resurrection in Karl Barth, esp. 13–17. 36

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the dead, because he is God’s equal in the form of a servant. There is no way round this exclusive, paradoxical meaning of the æłø (‘God exalted him’).37

What Barth means is that unless an act of God (revelation) establishes that Jesus’ way is Christianly imperative, the imperative does not have the categorical status a divine command will always have. In other words, if a process of moral reasoning is what leads to Jesus being given an elevated position over the church, following him is no longer obedience to a divine command, but to a human directive; and so, paradoxically enough, it becomes an act of self-assertion against God. The question here, however, is whether Barth’s focus on this point results in reducing the Resurrection to the significance it bears in subverting human moral history, and realigning the latter under God. Put differently, it might be asked whether the Resurrection has a different role to play in shaping human action than merely generating an eschatological break in it. On occasion, one detects behind what Barth has to say about the Resurrection a broadly Kantian assumption that opposes moral agency and natural or historical incentives. When he insists, for example, that Paul’s theology of the Resurrection is not designed ‘to achieve a consoling, triumphant conclusion to the image of Christ descending to the depths’,38 he implies that introducing any suggestion of historical triumphalism into the Resurrection would immediately negate its moral impact. The eventual prospect of a positive historical outcome, a reversal of the kenotic movement in history, would prevent the Christian from becoming seriously united with Christ now, in his self-abasement and death. A similar issue seems to lie behind Barth’s interpretation of Paul’s repeated command to rejoice, which he takes to be ‘the central core of our epistle’.39 In instructing the Philippian church to do this, Paul is asking them to follow his lead (2.17 et seq.) as he awaits the outcome of his trial. Paul can rejoice, Barth establishes, because whatever the outcome of the trial (i.e. whether Paul lives or dies) ‘Christ will be magnified in my earthly body’ (1.20). As Barth puts it, 37

Barth, Philipperbrief, 61.

38

Ibid., 60.

39

Ibid., 78.

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this ‘magnification’ is a ‘third occurrence [dritter Vorgang]’,40 which will take place irrespective of the result. If Paul lives, ‘Christ’ will continue to be his life. On the other hand, his execution will be a ‘gain’ (Œæ ), for it will mean the chance ‘to depart and be with Christ, which is far better’ (1.21, 23). At this point, Barth’s reading becomes somewhat forced. He takes it that Paul’s departure to ‘be with Christ’ must be understood (in connection with 3.10) in terms of ŒØøÆ in Christ’s sufferings, i.e. a reference to the imminent prospect of his martyr’s death. Barth reasons that Paul has already expressed the fullest possible union with Christ in his statement, ‘For me, to live is Christ’ (1.21). In which case, Paul cannot think of his departure to ‘be with Christ’ in terms of a departure to heaven, a place of greater proximity to Christ;41 he must be referring to the chance to follow Christ’s way of the Cross more perfectly. This way indicated here by Paul leads, then, ‘not to a Christian triumph but to a Christian defeat’.42 If the exegesis of individual passages just about works, the overall interpretation is strained and reduced in this matter, and does not obviously do justice to Paul’s ‘rejoicing’, which surely needs reading in terms of faith in the Resurrection. Moreover, it does not harmonize with Barth’s insight that the reason for the selfish behaviour among the Christians in Philippi could be traced back to a basic lack of assurance of their being in Christ. For if the moral disorder results from epistemic uncertainty, a forceful statement of the triumph of God, announced in Jesus’ Resurrection, will also carry meaningful ethical implications. Although Paul’s injunctions to rejoice and ‘stand firm’ (1.27) may be explained without that assurance—for Christ will be ‘magnified in my body’ whatever happens—they would become more compellingly credible with it. The Philippians’ hymn certainly seems to support such a view. Its longest section (2.10–11: ‘that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow’) is in fact a resounding statement of Jesus’ lordship in the

40

Barth, Philipperbrief, 29. Ibid., 31. Likewise, the ‘prize’ Paul describes himself as ‘pressing towards’ in 3.14 cannot mean a reward of any other kind than the divine calling itself, Barth states (ibid., 106f.). 42 Ibid., 42–3. 41

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Resurrection, which extends well beyond what is significant about Christ merely in constituting the church’s moral identity. Barth seems to agree: ‘God’s equal has been vindicated by being Lord over all things, in his abasement and humiliation.’43 Yet only fourteen lines of the German text are given to describing this passage, and it has no hermeneutical part to play in interpreting the moral theology of the epistle as a whole. In short, Barth’s desire to stress the direct moral implications of Paul’s text, together with his worry that the Resurrection might easily make Christ’s humiliation seem morally unintelligible, lead to an attenuated account of Jesus’ lordship. Moreover, this may well have deleterious consequences in ethics, which Barth seems to have overlooked. So long as Christ is Lord only of the moral history between God and creatures, that history may not have the kind of providential teleology necessary to completely sustain Christian moral practice.44

5.3 CHRISTOLOGY AND RECONCILIATION I shall now turn to the last part of Barth’s Christology, from the third volume of the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics. The doctrine of Christ’s work (} 29) is the longest single paragraph in the dogmatics, extending to more than 125 pages in the Gesamtausgabe. It is divided up into four main subsections (after a brief introduction): the doctrine of Christ as mediator, the officium mediatorum (} 29.2), under which heading Barth gathers all the various aspects of Christ’s reconciling work; followed by three more subsections devoted to the munus triplex, Christ as prophet (} 29.3), priest (} 29.4), and king (} 29.5), each offering a different angle on that reconciling work. Here I will focus only on the last of these, which deals with Christ’s exaltation as Lord. 43

Ibid., 62. Barth’s omission here gives some credence to Moltmann’s judgement that Barth’s construal of the Resurrection follows the modern deistic trend of conceding history to the naturalism of the historical sciences (Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ, 227–9). 44


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Paragraph 29.5 begins with a discussion of Christ’s humiliation (exinanitio) and exaltation (exaltatio), treating these as a single topic as part of the doctrine of Christ’s work. Ordinarily, they were discussed as a separate locus in Protestant dogmatics, on the ‘states’ of Christ, following the munus triplex.45 Partly to save time, but also for material reasons, Barth sets it as a linking passage between Christ’s priestly and royal offices (UCR III, 149ff.). Doing this shores up his effort to unite these two offices as closely as possible, and so reinforces the point that Christ’s rule is part of what he does as the reconciler. It cannot simply be extended to underwrite a doctrine of general providence. As it was traditionally, this section in the dogmatics is effectively a discussion of Phil. 2.6–11, and we find Barth advancing an argument similar to the one we have already examined above. In this case, it is not directly Schleiermacher’s Christology that Barth has in mind, but the Christologies of Herrmann, Althaus, and Elert (UCR III, 155–6). Nevertheless, the core problem is the same: they think of Christ’s pre-eminence in terms of a moral, personal, or religious superiority above his fellow humans. The Philippians’ hymn immediately contests this, Barth argues, by describing Christ’s career in terms of a descent. If Christ surpasses all his peers, this is not because he was morally superior to them. On the contrary, he did not fulfil the law in this way: ‘He fulfilled the law by placing himself before God as fallen man must do, i.e. completely, utterly and unreservedly as a sinner’ (UCR III, 151). Barth therefore opposes the Lutheran doctrine that Christ’s kenosis merely means the concealment of the glory that now (following the hypostatic union) belongs to his human nature. The implication behind it is that the Incarnation is understood as the elevation of Christ’s human nature, rather than his divine self-abasement. No, Christ’s humiliation means emphatically that ‘he did not become man in the way he could have’ (UCR III, 152), i.e. that his Incarnation was genuinely the self-abasement of the divine Son. The purpose of the doctrine of Christ’s states is to address the topics of Christ’s priestly and royal offices by asking two questions, in respect to each one: ‘How is it that the Lord finds himself on the

45

Cf. Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, chs. 18–19.

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cross? (That is the first question, which concerns the exinanitio.) How can he be king from the cross? (That is the second question, concerning the exaltatio.)’ (UCR III, 150) The answer to these questions, Barth insists, must involve ‘praising God’ (UCR III, 163). That is, it must mean ‘relativizing sin and death’ (UCR III, 157, 162) as factors in trying to explain Christ’s abasement and exaltation, and explaining these events in terms of divine causality alone. The key move Barth makes is to take Christ’s states as identically, rather than sequentially, related (an Identita¨t, not a Nebeneinander— UCR III, 148). This can already be seen from how Barth frames the two questions quoted above: the identity between the states is a strictly paradoxical one. To try to resolve (auflo¨sen) it in any way rationally is to ignore the point that the reality itself forbids such a thing: ‘we do not understand that the Crucified One is risen, and that’s what this is about’ (UCR III, 149; my underlining). Furthermore, asserting this identity is also an important hermeneutical decision for Barth: it allows each element to be interpreted in the light of the other. Retrospectively, the Resurrection attests that Jesus’ humiliation and Crucifixion may not be construed tragically. For what is revealed in the Resurrection is that the Crucified One was, in fact, not the victim of historical forces, but master of his destiny from the very start—God’s equal. Thus, it indicates that the impenetrable mystery behind Christ’s death is not the mystery of evil, but of his own gracious decision in favour of humanity: The reality of Christ’s abasement is precisely not comprehensible from the point of view of the well-known factors which appear to cause it. Deduced from these, it would actually be utterly incomprehensible. It is only comprehensible on the basis of the unknown factor, the factor of all factors, the free and almighty will of the God whose will is intent upon our reconciliation. [UCR III, 157]

On the other hand, because an almighty will for reconciliation is the only cause sufficient to explain Jesus’ death—it was a passio activa (UCR III, 155)—the Resurrection cannot be interpreted as God’s rescue of the Messiah from historical forces, for these did not overpower him in the first place. It is the revelation that this man truly is that divine Lord, God’s equal. Thus, to believe in the Resurrection is not to believe that God can ultimately triumph over evil (for in his

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self-abasement that was never in question) but to believe that God’s reconciliation has been achieved in Christ. No, what we cannot understand is—not the limiting of history and the suspension [Aufhebung] of the laws of nature, which undoubtedly occurs in Christ’s exaltation. That would be an unchristian thought again, for we should understand precisely this limiting and contradiction in Christ. Rather, it is God we cannot understand, in the reality of the reconciliation which he brings about. It is only because we are known and overcome by him through the Holy Spirit that we can surrender in the face of its facticity, that we can believe and obey. [UCR III, 162–3]

It is superfluous to point out the circularity of this position, of which Barth is well aware, which gives it an air of irrefutability. Because the Resurrection is the disclosure of the divinity of Jesus, his Crucifixion cannot have been tragic without him ceasing to be divine in the event. Furthermore, because the Crucifixion was not the unleashing of uncontrollable historical forces, such forces were not, and did not need to be, overcome in the Resurrection anyway. Nevertheless, we may well ask whether this says enough about the gubernatorial character of Christ’s elevation. Stoevesandt notes that, although Barth gives more importance to the royal office in UCR III than did the Reformed and Lutheran source books he was using, this novelty still does not overturn the preponderance of the priestly office, an imbalance characteristic of Western dogmatics.46 The priestly office in UCR III helps Barth secure the point that reconciling grace is a ‘monergistic’ act on God’s part (UCR III, 112–13, 118, 121),47 whereas 46

Stoevesandt, ‘Die Go¨ttinger Dogmatikvorlesung’, 91–2. That is not to say that Christ’s sacrifice then becomes an external and timeless principle of grace for Barth, as Berkouwer claimed was the case in the CD. Christ’s priestly intercession, Barth insists, is ‘an event which, though it happened once definitively, continues to happen, is a continuous event, an actio, and not merely a factum’ (UCR III, 146) (cf. Berkouwer: ‘The triumph is so unassailable that it has become pure fact’, The Triumph of Grace in the Theology of Karl Barth, 261). Indeed, in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics Barth is keen to point out that what Christ does as priest, he only does together with his acts as prophet and lord of his own work: ‘Hearing ears are presupposed here . . . as well as subjects in the kingdom of Christ’ (UCR III, 121). Reconciliation is therefore not merely an objective work achieved by Christ (The Triumph of Grace, 123–50), but must always correlate with an event in the human subject as well. Turning grace into a purely objective reality is exactly what Barth takes pains to avoid in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics. 47

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Barth is reticent about Christ’s royal office because he thinks that it might give support to a doctrine of general historical providence, as had often happened in nineteenth-century Protestant theology. When Barth develops the munus regium from within the previous discussion of the identity between Christ’s exinanitio and exaltatio, this is the danger he is trying to avoid. It allows him to reinforce the principle that the royal office of Christ is only exercised in conjunction with the other two (UCR III, 168–71). And yet, notwithstanding the brevity of its treatment in } 29.3, it is really the prophetic office— i.e. the doctrine of revelation—which is taking most of the dogmatic strain in his Christology, and causing a curtailment of the royal office. At one point, Barth refers to the munus regium as ‘the vocational power of the Word which goes out to humanity . . . his effectiveness as revealer’ (UCR III, 436). Is this not to subsume Jesus’ sovereignty in history almost completely within his prophetic office? This is not quite to suggest that Barth’s theology of Christ’s lordship is altogether ahistorical, as if the Resurrection were simply the disclosure of the eternal essence of things. Barth places considerable emphasis on the fact that, because he has become Incarnate, the Word-made-flesh was not automatically lord. He had to become king; something had to happen ‘in absolute facticity’ (UCR III, 178). Although the Resurrection is a Gotteswunder, rather than a Naturwunder or a Geschichtswunder (UCR III, 182–3)—i.e. what it reveals is not God’s power over natural–historical forces, but the power of God’s reconciling love—Christ’s status as reconciler is ‘not merely a general state of affairs hovering above time, and above history; it is not merely metaphysics but physics through and through, albeit divine and utterly unique physics’ (UCR III, 178). Because the Gotteswunder occurs ‘in reference to Christ’s humanity’ (UCR III, 183), the hope of salvation is to be ‘complete hope [ganze Hoffnung]’ (UCR III, 193), i.e. hope for soul and body. In other words, the Resurrection is an event in time, not merely an idea. However, Christ’s exaltation includes a further element, as the prelude to his royal rule: his ascension into heaven. This takes us back to the Christological controversies within Protestant theology. Barth again has his eye squarely on the differences between Reformed and Lutheran doctrines here, which inevitably result from their divergent interpretations of the hypostatic union. Because, for the


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Lutherans, the union of natures involves the communication of divine properties (including omnipresence) to Christ’s human nature, the ascension cannot be taken as meaning that Christ’s body literally changes place, for it is now ubiquitous in any case. Accordingly, what appears from the NT to be an upwards ascent is, in reality, to be understood as a disparitio—not Christ’s departure, but his becoming invisible in the world. By contrast, because the Reformed had insisted on the fact that Christ’s human nature remained intact (if not unaffected) in the hypostatic union, they had less difficulty imagining the ascension as Christ’s ‘visible departure from this space, and his entry into a new space, into God’s space’ (UCR III, 194). Once again, Barth follows the Reformed doctrine here. He does not discuss the potential conceptual difficulty raised, about thinking of God as inhabiting a particular space. The important thing is that this space is not simply ‘everywhere’, but a distinct location (certum F), indeed a ‘different space’ (UCR III, 195). And yet, there is a further aspect to this: the ascension means that Christ’s rule is exercised, in some sense or other, in absentia. It is not (as some Zwinglian theology perhaps implied) that Jesus leaves his earthly humanity behind when he ascends into heaven. This would have achieved precisely what Barth wants to avoid: divorcing Christ’s heavenly rule from his work of reconciliation on earth. No, Christ’s whole, enfleshed being departs to that place. Nonetheless, crucially, this is a departure for Jesus, a fact which (as Burgess has pointed out) ‘guards and enforces His lordship’,48 for it marks a break between Christ and the world. It means that the relation between God and the world, which he establishes by his reconciliation, cannot be resolved into a stable ontology, by being equated either with universal history (as in Hegelian dialectic) or church history (as, perhaps, in some Catholic accounts). The ‘true church’ cannot regard itself as ‘unbroken, undialectical, stabilized’, Barth insists, for after the ascension it must always be constituted ‘vertically from above’ (UCR III, 174). Yet it must be asked here whether that event in which the true church is constituted, has sufficient ontic depth behind it, when Barth describes it, whether it is embedded in an affirmation which

48

Burgess, The Ascension in Karl Barth, 97.

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really establishes Jesus’ credentials to create and sustain the church in this way. Does Jesus’ heavenly ministry here become separated from his earthly career after all—not, of course, from his atoning work— but from the event which confirms that his authority in the church is rooted in his authority over all things? Let us take the following quotation: As a single moment, the exaltatio is different from the exinanitio, corresponding to and ultimately the same as the single moment of the act of the knowledge of God in Christ. The transfiguration was a moment, Peter’s confession was a moment, the miracles were moments. Peter did not continuously [auf die Dauer] know the being and action of God in Christ—such knowledge absolutely did not fill time—this is fundamentally called into question by the death of Christ. We do not know it continuously either, in such a way that it fills time. Only God himself knows it in this sense. We know it when God gives us a share in his knowledge, in the knowledge of our not-knowing, in the power of the moment in which time is fulfilled, in which the empty before and after is given a centre, a content and a meaning, without thereby ceasing to be empty as such. We know it at a particular place in time between before and after, not in general—if before, then in anticipation, in the hope for this moment; if afterwards, then in recollection of it. The moment itself, the ŒÆØæ , is the moment of the Holy Spirit (n.b. of the Holy Spirit, not our own!).’ [UCR III, 191; my underlining]

Barth slips so quickly here between Christology and pneumatology that the Resurrection (the exaltatio) seems to disappear into ‘the moment of the Holy Spirit’; it has ultimately become identical with ‘the single moment of the act of the knowledge of God in Christ’. Barth is wary, of course, that the doctrine of the Resurrection might generate an ontological abstraction powerful enough to permit human beings to take control of God. However, does projecting this dilemma back into the economy of Revelation not amount to a different version of the kind of religious subjectivism Barth wanted to resist?49 It seems, in fact, that revelation is functioning as a

49 Frei reached a similar conclusion in his analysis of Barth’s theology during the same period. For Frei, although Barth managed to invert liberal subjectivism, he still remained trapped within its structures of thought until the early 1930s (The Doctrine of Revelation in the Thought of Karl Barth, esp. 189–201).

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fundamental doctrine at this point, through the thin mesh of which all analysis of the Resurrection is to pass. Moreover, the Christological dogma which permits Barth to achieve this is a doctrine of the ascension which construes the event predominantly in terms of a departure. Stressing Christ’s absence ensures the indirectness of his rule, and therewith the continual need for his kingdom to be mediated in a fresh act (UCR III, 196–7). Furthermore, it is not just that the problem of revelation is allowed to affect Barth’s doctrine of the Resurrection. It is also arguable that his attenuated account of Christ’s Resurrection and royal office helps generate the problematic on which the entire theology of revelation is constructed in the prolegomena to the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics (and perhaps in Barth’s subsequent dogmatic prolegomena as well). As we have seen, that prolegomena is not so much a theological resolution of a difficulty in the philosophy of religion as an attempt to make the problem generated by religious subjectivity the basis of the task of Christian dogmatics. In UCR I, the Trinitarian event of revelation (} 5) is broken down into two basic components: the Incarnation of God, which is the objective possibility of revelation (} 6), and the miracle of faith and obedience performed by the Holy Spirit, which is the subjective possibility (} 7). Crucially, though, Barth leaves the objective side of revelation hanging in the air as a possibility. The virgin birth, he states, is the miracle of divine self-concealment in the world which provides the basis, at the beginning of Jesus’ life, for the wonder of his revelation in the Resurrection, at the end: That the God-man is the objective possibility of revelation is what is asserted in the miraculous conception; that it is the objective possibility of revelation is stated in the Resurrection. The miraculous conception is revelation in concealment, the Resurrection is revelation in concealment. [UCR I, 199]

The Resurrection is given no fuller treatment in the prolegomena than that. To include a discussion of the Resurrection as the objective side of the reality of revelation would, at this point (i.e. prior to the pneumatology in } 7), have undermined the polemical purposes of these paragraphs on revelation. It would potentially have seemed possible to play off the sheer miraculousness of faith as divine gift against the factual positivity of the Resurrection. And yet, as we shall

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see in the following chapter, because the Resurrection does not exert any dogmatic pressure here as a material historical occurrence, the strain must be taken up by pneumatology instead. Spotting the trap of slipping back into theological subjectivism, of the kind he thinks Zwingli inaugurated, Barth will find himself having to develop an increasingly robust sacramental realism to ward this off. A similar problem attends the doctrine of reconciliation. In this case, Barth is not necessarily helped by the loci organization favoured by his dogmatics source books, since this makes it hard to prevent Christology and soteriology floating apart. Because his own dogmatics follows a similar arrangement, Barth finds it difficult to follow his rule that the two themes ought to be treated ‘as a single whole’ (UCR III, 1). Again, though, it is a sacramental theology, rather than Christology, that is introduced to avert a potentially subjectivist soteriology. The irony in all this is that, in spite of Barth’s stated preference for Calvin over Zwingli, in relating revelation and faith, Word and Spirit, his own dogmatics therefore seems to be tangled in similar problems to those he had identified in Zwingli’s theology. Barth’s consciousness of the danger makes him more careful than Zwingli perhaps was in finding ways of resisting it. Yet in both cases, there is considerable investment in using the ascension as a limiting doctrine to generate a discontinuity in God’s presence: Christ’s heavenly presence always requires mediating by the Spirit. Rather than heaven being the place at ‘God’s right hand’ from which Christ secures his triumph ‘with angels, authorities and powers subject to him’ (1 Peter 3.22), it can almost appear to imprison Christ, impeding his activity and inhibiting his freedom to rule.

6 Spirit, Religion, and the Christian Life The doctrine of the Spirit has been one of the most criticized regions of Barth’s theology among commentators. The criticism comes in stronger and weaker forms. In a programmatic article, for example, Robert Jenson reports that there is ‘near-unanimity’ among commentators in agreeing that the Spirit often ‘disappears’ from his theology altogether.1 In a more balanced study, on the other hand, Philip Rosato identifies a ‘bipolar’ principle running throughout Barth’s theology which, because Barth systematically forbids any separation between Christ and the Christian, opens up a distinct field of action for the Spirit in soteriology.2 And yet, Rosato too concludes that, although Barth’s theology is as ‘pneumatocentric’ as it is ‘Christocentric’, the pneumatology is nevertheless ‘subordinationist’ in key places.3 One way in which this criticism is fleshed out is by alleging that the Spirit ceases to be an agent, and becomes ‘the power of the Son without, or with scarcely any, audible remainder’.4 For Christian 1

Jenson, ‘You wonder where the Spirit went’, 296. Rosato, The Spirit as Lord, 12–22. 3 Ibid., 181ff. This ‘subordinationism’ is evident, for example, in Barth’s practically wholesale assimilation of the spiritus creator to the spiritus redemptor (ibid., 131– 4). For similar remarks about a subordinationist pneumatology in Barth, see Gunton, Becoming and Being, 182. For a different reading, see Thompson, The Holy Spirit in the Theology of Karl Barth, esp. 197–211, where, in his concluding chapter, Thompson offers a critical evaluation of Rosato’s analysis. 4 Rogers, ‘The eclipse of the Spirit in Karl Barth’, 179. Jenson puts it similarly: ‘When does the Spirit disappear from Barth’s pages? Whenever he would appear as someone rather than something’ (Jenson, ‘You wonder where the Spirit went’, 304). In Jenson and others, this loss of agency is taken to be typical of a wider trend in postAugustinian Western theology. See also Smail, ‘The doctrine of the Holy Spirit’. 2

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Link, who compares Barth and Calvin on this point, such is evident in Barth’s failure to explore the contribution made by the Spirit to Christ’s earthly career. Whereas in Calvin the Spirit’s constitutive involvement at the beginning and end of Christ’s ministry (baptism and Resurrection) open up a ‘horizon’ of the Spirit’s transformative action, large enough to incorporate a history of the church within it, in Barth the insistence on Christ’s sovereignty renders this virtually obsolete. ‘For Barth, Christ must be the autocratic origin [selbstma¨chtiger Ursprung]: he is the “exalted” man, the original Adam, the sovereign one who proves to be the life-giving spirit through his own reality, which has been revealed through his resurrection.’5 Whether these commentators are right that the Spirit is ‘eclipsed’ in Church Dogmatics vol. IV would probably need to be judged by attending to the fragmentary paragraphs on ethics Barth left behind, for the argument in CD IV does not stop at the third part-volume. In any case, we shall see that this claim does not hold for Barth’s theology in Go¨ttingen where, because the problem of human subjectivity is at the heart of his theology, the Spirit plays a pivotal role. Another criticism made of Barth’s pneumatology is that, when it appears under the rubric of revelation, the Spirit’s work is limited to reorienting the mind rather than the heart or will. As Rowan Williams puts it, the part played by the Spirit in Barth is to be ‘the seal of epistemological security’;6 the result of this reductionism being ‘a certain lack of concern with human growth, human diversity, and human freedom of response—and with the possibility and character of adult relationship with God’.7 We have already seen, however, that Barth’s attention to revelation is not purely epistemological: the doctrine is given quasi-fundamental status in his dogmatics because a matter in theological epistemology helps him draw attention to the total transformation of the human subject in communion with God. The approach I take in this chapter pursues my previous lines of enquiry by considering the relation between Christ and the Spirit. As

5 6 7

Link, ‘Der Horizont der Pneumatologie bei Calvin und Karl Barth’, 38. Williams, ‘Word and Spirit’, 118. Williams, ‘Barth on the triune God’, 192.

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we shall see, there is no question of the Spirit ‘disappearing’ in Barth’s theology here: he is not merely a ‘force’, for Barth, but a living personal presence. Rather, the question is whether the Spirit takes up a void in his theology, left by the absence of Christ. McCormack indicates something like this when he suggests that the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics must be seen as ‘largely pneumatocentric’, rather than christocentric.8 More generally, Hans Frei found that, in the 1920s, Barth’s preoccupying concern to stress the absolute subjectivity of God meant that he tended to make faith an ‘enduring dwelling in contradiction’, an existential venture devoid of objective epistemic content.9 This captures something of the implications of what I have been identifying. It is not that the Spirit is entirely passive in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics, but that his work is often not correlated with that of Christ. Making this case will require tracing Barth’s pneumatology back to some of his core convictions about the nature of the interaction between God and humankind. And so, I begin this chapter by turning back to a famous lecture he delivered at the student conference in Aarau in 1920, while still a pastor in Switzerland. This will help identify the way in which he sets up that interaction, in contrast to liberal Protestantism. After that, the chapter is divided into three main sections: Religion and Freedom (6.2), the Christian Life (6.3), and Sacramental Theology (6.4). These are three different angles from which I address the doctrine of the Spirit in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics. In the first place, I discuss the way in which Barth sets his pneumatology off against Schleiermacher’s doctrine of religion. Secondly, I examine his constructive alternative, which involves construing Christian existence as the action called forth by the presence of God. Finally, I turn to the sacramental theology in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics, to which Barth resorts in order to ensure that the free act called for by God is given an ontological grounding within the human subject.

8

McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 328. For McCormack, the result is seen especially in the ‘actualistic’ and ‘theocentric’ doctrine of election in the GD, which is dogged by a ‘hint of divine arbitrariness’ (ibid., 371–4, 453–63). 9 Frei, The Doctrine of Revelation in the Thought of Karl Barth, 190.


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6.1 ‘BIBLICAL QUESTIONS, INSIGHTS, AND VISTAS’ Barth delivered his talk, entitled ‘Biblical questions, insights, and vistas’, on 17 April 1920. Earlier that day, Adolf von Harnack had lectured the same student conference in Aarau, taking as his theme the question, ‘What firm knowledge has history to offer us for interpreting world events?’10 Harnack’s lecture sets out some of his key beliefs about history, while at the same time being a response to Oswald Spengler’s cultural fatalism, which had become fashionable after the war. Harnack’s concern is that Spengler’s doctrine of societies and civilizations, and his apocalyptic predictions of decline in the West, would lead to total cultural paralysis. In attacking Spengler, Harnack begins by making the basic claim that historical research aims at the discovery of institutions. For institutions, more than isolated events, people, or cultural monuments, are those products of history that have made an enduring impact upon the world.11 And yet, institutions may be examined either synchronically (by taking a latitudinal cross-section of a particular culture at one point in time) or diachronically (by inspecting a longitudinal section, where one institution is studied through its appearance in various cultural guises at different times and places). Spengler’s flaw consists in his failure to allow for the second approach, his tendency to conceive of civilizations as if they were a series of consecutive beads on a string, possessing internal coherence but not passing on any cultural capital from one civilization to the next.12 To Harnack, the idea of civilizations simply dying out amounts to sheer materialism, the construal of historical forces in analogy to the entropic forces at work in the natural realm. It is also blasphemous, he thinks, for historical process is not only the product of physical developments, but of the movement of Geist (whether this 10

‘Was hat die Historie an fester Erkenntnis zur Deutung des Weltgeschehens zu bieten?’ Eng. tr. in Rumscheidt (ed.), Adolf von Harnack: Liberal theology as its height, 45–63. 11 Harnack, ‘What has history to offer’, 34. 12 Ibid., 61.

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is the divine or human ‘spirit’, or both, is not made explicit by Harnack), which tends toward the unity of all things, not their dissolution.13 In short, to study the history of institutions is to study the ‘history of the Spirit’ in operation (Harnack’s Geistesgeschichte is more commonly translated as ‘intellectual history’). For Harnack, this is the only way of overcoming the paralysis which can otherwise easily overwhelm the historian. For the proper observation of history is not made by the objective, detached ‘eye’, but by an engaged subject whose ‘spirit’ (Geist) is fully caught up in the Spirit’s progress: ‘We are allowed, for that very reason, to illumine history by means of our own experience and life circumstances, assured that from them we will surely understand history in growing measure for it is spirit which unveils spirit.’14 Although Barth presumably hadn’t had access to a full copy of Harnack’s lecture before writing his own, the talk he delivered later that day was evidently intended to be a more or less direct attack on some of its claims.15 Where Harnack had questioned what knowledge history could provide for interpreting world events, Barth asked ‘What knowledge the Bible has to offer us for interpreting world events . . .?’16 Indeed, the response he gives to the question ultimately involves a deconstruction of the term ‘history’, as it was used by Harnack and others: Biblical history is only natural history [Naturgeschichte], history of the Spirit [Geistesgeschichte], or world history [Weltgeschichte] to the extent that it is first and foremost human history [Menschengeschichte]. God is the subject of this history, he alone, but God behind and above man as the element in 13

Harnack, ‘What has history to offer’, 58–9; Harnack takes this teaching to be the essence of what Augustine had meant by caritas (ibid., 60). 14 Ibid., 57. 15 Harnack himself experienced it as such. He subsequently reported that ‘The effect of Barth’s lecture was staggering. Not one word, not one sentence could I have said or thought. I saw the sincerity of Barth’s speech, but its theology frightened me . . . The severity of the charges made in that address is still very vivid in my mind’ (quoted in Rumscheidt, ‘Harnack’s liberalism in theology: A struggle for the freedom of theology’, 30). 16 Harnack: ‘Was hat die Historie an fester Erkenntnis zur Deutung des Weltgeschehens zu bieten?’; Barth: ‘Was uns die Bibel an Erkenntnis zur Deutung des Weltgeschehens zu bieten hat’, Barth, ‘Biblische Fragen’, 70. Barth’s wording seems intentionally to echo Harnack’s.


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which man originally lives, moves and has his being, and who must be sought and found by man, who wishes to give man the first-fruits of the Spirit.17

Barth prioritizes the term Menschengeschichte over other definitions of history because he thinks that a biblical–theological perspective needs, above all, to disentangle God and humankind as distinct but related agents. The relation between the agents is easily blurred, he thinks, by a category such as Geistesgeschichte. For, he adds, history ‘in the Old and New Testaments is not really history at all but (seen from above) a series of free divine acts, and (from below) a series of fruitless attempts to undertake something that is, in itself, impossible’.18 And so, the lecture does not take on a liberal doctrine of progress by articulating an alternative, less optimistic, Geschichtsphilosophie (perhaps one like Spengler’s), but by refusing to be drawn into using the term ‘history’ at all. Instead, Barth sketches an anthropology that is ultimately rooted in God’s election of humanity.19 Barth begins his lecture by proposing something like a transcendental argument. However, in so doing, he is not intending to supply an apologetic proof of God’s existence, but to describe the following truth about revelation: ‘We are insiders, and not outsiders . . . insiders to the knowledge of God and of the last things, which the Bible speaks about.’20 The knowledge of God conveyed by the Bible, in other words, is not extrinsic to our being. When its Word reaches us, it finds us already inside its circle, and so primed to hear it. This is not the basis for a hermeneutical investigation into pre-understanding but the anthropological claim that God always precedes human beings, rather than the reverse. The argument works by evoking what is a basically (neo-)Platonic idea of the singularity of all being, which is then contrasted with our surface apprehension of reality as a complex and diverse manifold. The purpose is to force into the open an epistemological aporia: all individual acts of knowledge presuppose a fundamental unity of being, and yet that unity is original (urspru¨nglich)—it cannot be the particular object of knowledge, only the non-objectifiable presupposition of the act itself. This ensures that the knowledge of God 17

Ibid., 97–8.

18

Ibid., 83.

19

Ibid., 98.

20

Ibid., 71.

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communicated in the Bible is the knowledge of this God, who is not confusable with the world: ‘the beginning and end, the origin and boundary, the creative unity and ultimate problem of all knowledge’. What the Bible does not furnish, then, is ‘particular knowledge, this or that piece of knowledge [diese oder jene Erkenntnis]’, for then God would be less than that original unity of all things.21 It can sound here as if this transcendentalism is functioning like a fundamental theology for Barth: just as Schleiermacher before him, he seems to be drawing on an idealist Identita¨tsphilosophie, although positing a protological–eschatological monism in place of Schleiermacher’s religious monism. As Balthasar noted in his discussion of the relation between Barth and Schleiermacher: ‘Everything depends on one point of highest intensity.’22 Nevertheless, Balthasar is incorrect to surmise that the driving motif in Barth’s dialectic is a mystical one.23 Barth’s preferred term is, in fact, Einheit (unity between two parties) rather than Identita¨t (absolute identification). This is not a trifling observation; it reflects the fact that Barth’s argument is not built on an ontology in which all alterity is forcibly denied by a basic monistic logic (as is arguably the case with Schleiermacher’s basic definition of religion). It is structured simply around the eschatological condition of human beings, whose life occurs in between two determinate points. Just as importantly, however, Barth is not primarily interested in articulating an ontology at all, but in undercutting any such ontology by alluding to an inescapable eschatological dualism which besets everything that happens between the times. In other words, this mode of theological reasoning never ‘freezes into ultimate affirmations or negations’, even though it is ‘thinking and speaking from the origin [urspru¨nglich], from the whole [das Ganze] and to the whole’, 21 Harnack: ‘Was hat die Historie an fester Erkenntnis zur Deutung des Weltgeschehens zu bieten?’; Barth: ‘Was uns die Bibel an Erkenntnis zur Deutung des Weltgeschehens zu bieten hat’, Barth, ‘Biblische Fragen’, 70. Barth’s wording seems intentionally to echo Harnack’s, 70. 22 Balthasar, Theology of Karl Barth, 201. 23 Balthasar thinks that Barth’s claim about reality is that all positive distinctions and relations between God and creatures are finally wiped out in a ‘theopanist’ eternity, a ‘monism of beginning and end’ (ibid., 94). For a similar accusation that Barth’s eschatology was ‘theopanist’, see Oepke, Karl Barth und die Mystik, 35.


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and although it is conscious of ‘the starting point [Anfang] from which both Yes and No proceed’.24 Above all, Barth is aiming to avoid replacing that ultimate reality with his or any concept of that reality. In fact, an ‘ultimate reality’ continues to be evoked, not because it is a redundant abstraction from concrete reality, but to prevent the historical process itself from becoming ultimate. Furthermore, Barth claims that this ‘transcendentalism’ is not a piece of inductive rationalism, but a theological position. It is based on the presence of the Spirit as ‘an original unity and grounding [Gru¨ndung] of the soul in God’.25 That is why, when the Bible speaks of God as the absolute origin of everything, it strikes a chord with us: ‘The simple and universal thing the Bible offers us is joyfully met by something equally simple and universal in ourselves. “The Spirit bears witness that the Spirit is truth.”’26 Thus there is a ‘quest for God [ein Fragen nach Gott]’ that is integral to human nature by virtue of the Spirit’s inner witness. The commonplace remark that Barth counters Schleiermacherian immanentism by positing a God transcendently removed from the world therefore has little to recommend it. As Frei pointed out, against a long tradition of Anglo-Saxon readers, ‘Barth does not intend to deny that faith is an immanent state in which God is present. He does not intend to counter-attack so directly against Schleiermacher. For to do this would mean that Barth would still share common ground with Schleiermacher’s own presuppositions.’27 In short, Barth refuses to entertain the possibility that a person is wholly alien to the reality of God, because he does not think of revelation as something utterly extrinsic to human beings. And yet, having established that, Barth makes a further move which defines a second major axis of his anthropology: the very fact that we are in pursuit of God indicates equally that we are outsiders as well as insiders, since that pursuit would otherwise be unnecessary. This is the reverse side of Barth’s Platonic holism: our intuition of a unifying source of everything does not simply resolve 24 25 26 27

Barth, ‘Biblische Fragen’, 84. Ibid., 72. Ibid., 71. Frei, The Doctrine of Revelation in The Thought of Karl Barth, 179–80.


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all difficulties, but opens up a join which ruptures, even while it binds. ‘This, above all, is what the Bible has to offer: the awareness that the knowledge of God is the eternal problem of our personal existence, the origin from which we live and yet do not live, from which we are separated and yet not separated.’28 Thus our knowledge of God is a ‘duality’ (ein Zweierlei), and even a ‘dualism’ (ein Dualismus): it is the basis of a kind of estrangement between creator and creation, so that the connection with God established in revelation is both salutary and contradictory: The last things impinge upon us like distant, strange, problematic immensities. The complexity of our lives, our culture of this-and-that, revolts against the simplicity of the knowledge of God; our individualism revolts against its comprehensiveness. The unredeemed human spirit, split off from the Creator Spirit, now denies its origin, and denies itself.29

Being simultaneously insider and outsider is the existential equivalent of the eschatological anthropology which Barth takes to be the biblical view of humankind. Barth then uses the middle section of the lecture to contrast this anthropology with a ‘religious’ anthropology, and so to dismantle some of the key categories of theological liberalism (religion, history, personality, etc.). In place of an historical progressivism, Barth puts the biblical doctrine of the Resurrection. Because ‘the characteristic rhythm of progress [in the Bible is] from life to death—from death to life’30 mere durability through time cannot be the criterion of historical value that Harnack had taken it to be. In fact, the Bible is not populated by personalities who place an enduring stamp upon history but by: broken and humanly unsatisfactory characters. They are precisely the opposite of heroes, their life-story is incomplete, their life’s work unfinished, the state of their souls and their practical achievements are more than problematic, there is no question of their having founded or even strived for any institutions, the criterion for the historical value of things.31

The Bible serves to interpret ‘world events’, then, by redescribing the world from the perspective given to all things by the presence of God. 28 30

Barth, ‘Biblische Fragen’, 75. 31 Ibid., 92. Ibid., 87.

29

Ibid., 71.


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Moreover, God’s presence does not simply provide a religious grounding for the infinite positivity of the given, but arrests it and recasts it in a new light. On the other hand, the way in which the Bible conveys this is not by replacing one cosmology with another. At the end of his lecture, Barth is worried that the five-point description of the Resurrection he gives in the final pages has run the risk of just that, of replacing the reality of the Resurrection with an ontology of it, a sort of biblical cosmology. Whether this has happened or not, he says, depends on whether the following rule has been kept, which governs all the Bible’s language: ‘The Bible sometimes tells us more, sometimes less, according to the much or little we are capable of hearing and converting into action and truth.’32 This means, Barth concludes, that the ‘ultimate biblical perspective’33 is not the doctrine of the Resurrection, but divine election. He does not mean the doctrine of election, which has come to be connected with personal salvation or status, but the basic character of all God’s action in relation to humankind. Election thus functions as a general descriptor of agency, much as ‘causality’ might, although in a way deliberately intended to avoid the sub-personal, quasi-natural resonances inferred by speaking of causes. Election depicts divine action not as a cause which produces effects, but as an act of free initiative on God’s part, which therefore does not produce natural results, but moral agents, a corresponding human freedom: [The electing decisions of God] are related precisely to the freedom of the individual, and for that reason do not occur once for all but again and again. Indeed, opposing decisions exist simultaneously alongside one another in the same individual. There is not a Yes which, however decisive, does not carry with it the possibility of a No—nor a No which, however decisive, could not topple over into a Yes.34

The idea of election, as Barth construes it, is especially well-adapted to freedom because it establishes a distinction between God and his activity in the world, thus introducing a certain kind of hiddenness into all God’s action: ‘God’s election alone is eternal; all psychic and 32

Barth, ‘Biblische Fragen’, 98

33

Ibid., 98.

34

Ibid., 75.

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historical determinations which result from it are temporal.’35 This in turn generates instability in the divine–human relation, which Barth deems necessary for freedom to be genuine. We have already come across Barth’s wariness of causality language, and this feeds into a more general theme that corroborates with previous findings: in his determination to describe the spontaneity of the relation between God and creatures, Barth tends to contrast universal or world history with the moral history generated between these two agents. A second factor needs noting, however, which I shall explore in greater depth in the next section. When he insists upon some eschatological distance in the divine–human relation, this is not just to prevent a reversal in the order of this relation but also to ensure that it is defined in terms of mutual freedoms. As we shall see, this becomes the point of controversy with the liberal construal of religion, and a crucial factor in Barth’s doctrine of the Spirit in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics.

6.2 RELIGION AND FREEDOM In the first volume of the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics, pneumatology is discussed in } 7, under the rubric of the ‘subjective possibility of revelation’, thus pairing it with the ‘objectivity possibility of revelation’ (} 6), discussed earlier in 5.1 above. Barth develops his doctrine of the Spirit here in polemical engagement with Schleiermacher’s doctrine of religion. Indeed, } 7.3 contains the only sustained treatment of a single writer in the whole dogmatics; it is ‘a critical discussion of the concept of religion’ based on the Reden and the Glaubenslehre. The concept, Barth writes, ‘will crop up in my train of thought, so as to disappear again immediately’ (UCR I, 223). In its place, Barth will substitute the two terms, ‘faith’ and ‘obedience’, which situate the human person along a ‘vertical’ and a ‘horizontal’ axis—relating her to God and the world at once—yet without these two relations being resolvable into a single idea. 35

Barth, ‘Biblische Fragen’, 75.


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And yet, Barth’s doctrine of the Spirit is by no means a flat denial of the idea of religion. His primary target is not religion itself, but the modern German tradition of treating theology as Religionswissenschaft. In fact, Barth hints at how a different understanding of religion from Schleiermacher’s could be quite congenial to his own perspective: The way the word ‘religio’ is usually rendered by philologists today—as meaning trepidation, awe, veneration, reverence—I could ultimately quite easily (with the help of a bit of dialectical reasoning) claim it as a generic term for ‘faith and obedience’, with better justification than Schleiermacher had for his definition of it, in my opinion. [UCR I, 224]

Barth objects to, and avoids, the idea of religion for historical reasons, as much as for any material ones: it stands for a failure of courage on the part of modern theology, for the tacit admission that ‘as a modern person one no longer dares to speak principally, primarily and in a loud voice, about God’ (UCR I, 225). On the other hand, he also thinks that there is a substantial difficulty with Schleiermacher’s definition of religion as the ‘feeling of absolute dependence’,36 which seems to make such theological spinelessness unavoidable. As Barth reads him, Schleiermacher defined religion in this way so as to locate religion in a place beyond pure and practical reason at a point of absolute identity between consciousness and the world, subject and object, which he designated as religious feeling. This condition is deemed to be a feeling of dependence insofar as it consists in the interior intuition that I belong within a universe of being which is then superficially ruptured at the moment of consciousness, when subject and object appear to exist only as opposite counterparts. And yet, that feeling of dependence must, at the same time, be absolute (i.e. an utterly symbiotic union with the world) for otherwise the implication would be that the rupture is not fully overcome, that the point of synthesis is merely a quasi-metaphysical fiction, and therefore, that all empirical knowledge of the world is an illusion within the mind.37 Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, } 4. For a highly detailed and philosophically well-informed discussion of the problem of realism in Schleiermacher, see Brandt, The Philosophy of Schleiermacher, 71ff. 36 37

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The problem arises because Schleiermacher alleges that ‘God’ is coposited in and with this feeling of dependence, as its source or cause. For this appears to contradict the previous assertion that the feeling of absolute dependence may have no external counterpart. One possible interpretation involves not taking Schleiermacher’s externalism literally; but then it becomes difficult to see how ‘God’ is any more than the Feuerbachian symbolization of an intrinsic human value. On the other hand, a literal interpretation of Schleiermacher here would contradict the theoretical foundations on which the whole system is constructed, and so fail to meet the only possible conditions under which religious knowledge was possible in the first place, according to Schleiermacher.38 In other words, Schleiermacher finds himself compelled by his concept of religion not to speak of God ‘primordially, primarily and in a loud voice’, as Barth puts it, because he systematically excludes God in advance from the field of his theological vision. Unlike in the case where religion is defined as something like ‘reverence’ (Ehr-furcht), implying the exterior presence of an object of reverence, in Schleiermacher ‘[i]ts pathos rests precisely on its objectlessness: nothing and no one is external to it, worthy of honour [Ehe] or even fear [Furcht]. Everything is on the inside’ (UCR I, 231). Furthermore, because God is not an ‘objective’ reality for Schleiermacher (in the strongest sense; i.e. God has no ‘theoretical’ existence, beyond his presence in the human person), he is also incapable of being a subject. It is this point above all that Barth is getting at in his criticism of the concept of religion. Even if one accepts Schleiermacher’s definition of God as the ‘source’ (Woher) of religious feeling, it nevertheless compels him to construe God’s relation with the world in causal, rather than subjective, terms: At precisely the point where there ought to be a fellowship of spirits [geistliche Gemeinschaft]—speaking and listening, commanding and obey-

38 For, as Barth puts it in his lectures on Schleiermacher, if any differentiation is made between the feeling and the source of the feeling then ‘it is obviously not the feeling of absolute dependence, since this can have no counterpart. [The feeling] is itself the presence of “God” in the consciousness, or of the Whence, the all-crushing causality. A consciousness that could distinguish and distance itself from its Whence is not the absolute consciousness of being dependent’ (Barth, Die Theologie Schleiermachers, 287–8).


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ing—God (or whatever is called God) overwhelms humanity with violent and fate-like force. In precisely this respect, Schleiermacher ought to serve as a warning for what happens when God and humanity are brought as closely together as he brought them. [UCR I, 233]

It should be noted here that Barth does not criticize Schleiermacher’s ‘immanentism’ in the name of God’s transcendent freedom but, more subtly, because he thinks it poses a serious threat to human freedom. Schleiermacher has bought into the common modern perception that divine exteriority is implacably opposed to human freedom, and so that ‘standing-before-God’ is a ‘Semitism that needs quickly to be overcome’ (UCR I, 231). However, if divine ‘causality’ is anything more than a metaphor in Schleiermacher, his proposed alternative turns out to exacerbate the problem. For the attempt to modernize the doctrine of God by making God immanent within human subjectivity fails to meet the modern criterion of personal freedom, even more spectacularly than the ‘traditional’ doctrine of God is supposed to have done. It is worth pointing out, in passing, just how different this is to the way in which Brunner interpreted Schleiermacher, in the monograph he published on his theology a couple of years earlier. According to Brunner, Schleiermacher’s idea of religion is a recrudescence of classical (Catholic) mysticism, with a modern cultural-historical twist. That is, Schleiermacher’s theology is to be read as the attempt to bring mystical experience into the modern age by combining it with the concept of process taken from the natural sciences.39 Drawing on the Lutheran critique of a striving works-righteousness, Brunner goes on to argue that the optimism of nineteenth-century religio-cultural aspirations is to be opposed utterly to an authentic Christian faith in the Word of God.40 For Barth, however, the problem of Schleiermacher’s doctrine of religion is quite different to this: what troubles him is not simply that religion is a form of human self-

39

Brunner, Die Mystik und Das Wort, 392–3. This opposition between works and faith then becomes the inspiration behind Brunner’s ‘eristics’ programme, which is based on Brunner’s reading of Kantian/ Kierkegaardian philosophy as a negative preparatio evangelica, disclosing the limits of human thought and culture (see here Brunner, ‘Das Grundproblem bei Kant und Kierkegaard’). 40

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justification before God, but that it places human freedom in jeopardy. Indeed, pace John Hart, who believes that ‘[o]f the many issues causing stress between Barth and Brunner, ethics was a minor one’,41 it would be quite plausible to suggest that this starkly contrasting instinct about the positivity of human freedom is the original causa belli between them. Be that as it may, Barth identifies a further difficulty with Schleiermacher’s concept of religion: the ‘refuge [Zufluchtsort]’ (UCR I, 224) which Schleiermacher wins for theology in the university by redefining the discipline as he does is ultimately purchased at the price of an abstraction. The point needs making carefully, however, since Barth’s reading of Schleiermacher here is again importantly different to Brunner’s. Whereas Brunner thinks that Schleiermacher’s cultural ideals are just mysticism transposed onto a horizontal teleology, Barth is conscious that Schleiermacher’s thought always describes a differentiated dialectical interplay between the active and the contemplative, the rational and the irrational. The feeling of absolute dependence does not just exist as an isolated state of consciousness; its perfection consists in its ability to express itself in and through the ‘sensory and objective self-consciousness [das sinnlich-gegensta¨ndliche Selbstbewußtsein]’42 (i.e. in thought and action), which for their part are always reliant on religious feeling to provide the vital and sustaining drive behind their productivity. It is a matter of a circular movement, which begins with man gathering himself together [Sammlung] before God or in himself, as he is compelled to do in view of the polymorphous diffuseness of the active life; and which rises up to the perception that this act of gathering oneself together cannot take place for its own sake, but can only be intended as a spiritualizing gathering up of one’s entire life, since it relates to God or to the absolute point of perfection given within man himself—and so descends from that peak once again, into activity which is thus transfigured and is to be transfigured more

41 Hart, Karl Barth versus Emil Brunner, 116. Hart thinks their moral theologies really only differed over created orders, an issue which first surfaced in the 1930s, by which time their theological alliance was substantially over. However, a more fundamental difference concerns the identity of the human subject in their respective anthropologies. 42 Barth, TS, 390.


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and more, only to return again to a new gathering together and interiorization, as something distinct which occurs in its own right [fu¨r sich].43

It is this ceaseless and dynamic fluctuation between religious interiority and active social involvement that, in Barth’s judgement, explains the appeal of his anthropology to the modern reader. The same dynamic is beautifully illustrated by Barth in his reading of the Weihnachtsfeier, Schleiermacher’s fictional evocation of a Biedermeier family Christmas. He shows how the narrative shifts between animated intellectual debate about Jesus (among the men), and the aesthetic pleasures of music in the home (associated with the woman and the child).44 Barth interprets the story as the symbolic depiction of the oscillation between (intellectual–rational–male) activity and (religious–emotional–female) passivity, the movement around which he thinks Schleiermacher’s entire thought is built. And yet, for all that religion is in a dialectical movement with the sensory, rational, and active dimension of life, in its own right it is always at one remove from this, the inner constancy behind the turbulence of ordinary living. And if that is so, Barth continues, the question quickly becomes what religion really is. It seems to him as though, in Schleiermacher, ‘revelation, truth, God (or whatever is so called) resound through all living creatures like a monstrous waltz’ (UCR I, 234). Insofar as these are religious ideas for Schleiermacher, they bear no relation to the actual existence of people, since they always refer to a tranquil vanishing point somewhere beyond it. As Wolf Kro¨tke has pointed out, Barth does not think that the doctrine of religion brings theology into too close an identity with ordinary reality, but that it conceives of human beings as being withdrawn from their real and complex environments. What Barth seeks, over against this, is ‘[to bring the human person] to light in his multiple realizations, which must not be smoothed over, and in his particular richness as a person. To that extent, Barth’s thought (contrary to what he is accused of) aims to come as close as possible to reality.’45 The way in which Barth develops his alternative is by recurring to his dialogical concept of revelation, and so to the subject–object 43 45

44 Ibid., 64–5. Ibid., 108–34. Kro¨tke, Der Mensch und die Religion nach Karl Barth, 12.

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problem this relation generates. This is now construed in terms of the relation between Christology and pneumatology: How can God approach man without ceasing to be God? The doctrine of the Incarnation gave us an answer to that question. But how can man stand before God without ceasing to be man? That is obviously a second and separate question, no less weighty and urgent than the first. [UCR I, 214]

It should be noted that the doctrine of the Spirit is therefore being developed from the focal point that is the relation between God and humankind. As Frei has put it, Barth’s doctrine of revelation at this stage is ‘correlationist’.46 Indeed, although revelation is opposed to religion here, that opposition is to be understood as an argument articulated from within the Religionswissenschaft tradition, not a doctrinal positivism which altogether passes it by.47 Barth articulates his doctrine of the Spirit from out of the dramatic moment of encounter between God and the (real) human person which he calls ‘revelation’; it is this reality that shatters the idea of religion for him, not an alternative theological rhetoric, removed from ordinary human contingencies. Barth’s argument here is generated by focusing on two paradigmatic Christian moments. The first is the kerygmatic situation I already outlined in some detail in Chapter 2. Barth is not just interested in what this situation implies for the theology of revelation, but also (reversing the perspective now) in how ‘revelation reflects back on man [das Spiegelbild des Menschen in der Offenbarung]’ (UCR I, 86). The short answer to this is that, as Barth puts it, ‘hearing the Word of God requires distance’ (UCR I, 87). The Word of God is an event of communication which, by the sheer logic of the thing, implies a gap, and in so doing it shatters the synthetic relation 46 Frei, The Doctrine of Revelation in the Thought of Karl Barth, 107–8. It is, however, more contentious to suggest (as Frei does) that this indicates Barth has still not broken his structural attachment to the liberal perspective. The correlationist structure of Barth’s theology—although it is a dialectical negation from within liberalism—is anti-liberal. Contrary to Frei’s reading, the problem of liberalism for Barth is not that the human relation with God is ‘synergistic’, but that there is no real relation at all. 47 See Korsch, ‘Wort Gottes oder Fro¨mmigkeit? u¨ber den Sinn einer theologischen Alternative zwischen Karl Barth und Friedrich Schleiermacher’ in Dialektische Theologie nach Karl Barth, 109–29.


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of God and humanity in religious interiority. Schleiermacher himself forces the choice here because he holds that religion is the only real point of union; all others—e.g. an epistemological one (faith) or moral one (obedience)—are symbolic projections of the human consciousness from within its fragmented state. Once it is seen that revelation and religion are incompatible, revelation makes the religious synthesis impossible, since it discloses human estrangement from God ‘in a far-off country [in der Fremde]’. The human being is a wayfarer (der Wanderermensch, homo viator), restlessly on pilgrimage to his homeland (Heimat). The idea that the union between God and humankind could already be present in a religious fundamentum becomes impossible because of the eschatological reserve placed over human existence by revelation: This homo viator presupposed in revelation cannot in any way be the same as the man who, being with himself, is somehow also with God; who knows no longing for God because God is something he already possesses in his heart or his conscience, his morality or his works, his relation with nature or the pathos of his life’s course. This man is not the same as the man who knows himself and is at peace and satisfied with himself, and because of that, and in that sense, is at home with God. If there really were such a person, the Word of God—the Word from the homeland into the far-off country, the Word to the homo viator who (like Paul) wanders away from the Lord (cf. 2 Cor. 5.6–9)—would not be for him. What would it have to say to him? He would not need a Word of God; he would be unable to hear it at all. [UCR I, 87]

If this situation is an insight into what humankind is like before God, then a doctrine of the Spirit will have to keep to the principle of distance involved in this encounter. In other words, as we saw in the previous section, the human person exists not just as an insider, but as an outsider as well, in relation to God. It should be noted, in passing, that this passage does not resemble anything like the timeless eschatology to which Barth was allegedly attached in the early 1920s. Humanity here is oriented towards a time in the future: the return—‘homecoming’—to be with God. Barth regards Schleiermacher’s religious synthesis as suspect because it does not account for ‘last things which were not in any sense in our soul, but which we literally have to wait for’.48 48

Barth, TS, 187.

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The second paradigmatic moment is the disciples’ encounter with the risen Christ, and their confession of him as Lord, out of which Barth developed his doctrine of the Trinity earlier in the prolegomena (UCR I, 126, 134ff.). If, as Barth shows, the deity of each of the divine persons can and must be derived from within the single confession, IÅF ˚æØ , the argument for the deity of the Spirit depends upon the prior confession of Jesus’ deity. Paul’s statement, ‘No one can say Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit’ (1 Cor. 12.3), is necessarily true if confessing Jesus as Lord means acknowledging that he is entirely God’s equal in heaven. For Jesus really to be known and confessed as God here (and not simply the epitome of what the disciples are choosing to call divine) this confession cannot be a spontaneous act on their part, but an act grounded precisely in God, even though it must meet with their innermost agreement as well: Here a new element comes on the scene. It is not the same as their believing and confessing, but obviously the a priori of their believing and confessing. To know the Kyrios to whom Jesus points was one thing; to know the Kyrios in Jesus himself was another thing. But what is the third thing in which this knowing itself, which is evidently in the human sphere, must be grounded? And yet not grounded in any sense by and in us, as those words already indicate; and therefore not to be confused with religion and suchlike—the

FÆ –ªØ. [UCR I, 153]

Although the disciples really make this confession, it is only valid because of the act of the Spirit which has made confessing possible in the first place. Together, the situation of the first disciples confronted by Jesus, and that of the congregation confronted by the preached Word of God, establish the ‘place’ from which Barth will develop his pneumatology: the encounter between revelation and the human subject. From here, Barth derives three major points for his doctrine of the Spirit. First, ‘Geist’ is not the spontaneous welling-up of something within a person, inspiration from within the heart or conscience or soul, etc. He readily concedes that ‘higher moods, moral flights, religious experiences, and enthusiasms and, who knows, perhaps even ecstatic–mystical trance-states’ (UCR I, 218) may well accompany the Spirit’s work. What the Spirit actually does, however, takes


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the form of an external influence upon a person: ‘The Spirit compels us [Der Geist zwingt uns]’ (UCR I, 243) is how Barth unambiguously puts it. The work of the Spirit is not something indeterminate or ambiguous, then, but must involve an absolutely incontestable presence: ‘The One whom man steps beyond himself to approach here, and who appears to him, is the One man would have to know with the same definiteness with which he knows himself as man, i.e. in the autopistia of revelation’ (UCR I, 220). This has nothing to do with any need for interior certainty; the point Barth is making here is that the Spirit’s presence and action are something irreducibly other than my own self-presence. Above all, this presence and action of the Spirit must be construed as personal, rather than analogous to a causal or natural principle: His working—that new qualification of our fragility, known as the faith and obedience which are pleasing to God—can have nothing to do with any natural occurrence. The mechanistic relation of cause and effect, of pressure and impression [Druck und Eindruck], of greater and lesser quantities, may not be determinative here; nor may the organic one of growth in its multiple stages, or of life in its multiple forms. If what we are calling God cannot be pinned down (in the sense that God is not a ‘that’ but a He, the Spirit, a person) then there can be no talk of that reversal. [UCR I, 221]

In other words, the doctrine of the Spirit, for Barth, cannot describe a non-differentiated synthesis between God and creatures, nor a relation in which they are quantitatively differentiated within a single system of being. It must involve a ‘distance’ being created and sustained between God and his creatures, which permits a personal (and therefore spontaneous) relation between them. Secondly, as Spirit, God is present in an eventful and miraculous way; his presence is not a steady continuity. Indeed, ‘[i]t is a miracle [Wunder] no less great than God’s Incarnation, but precisely corresponding to it, if the subjective possibility of revelation in faith and obedience in fact obtains’ (UCR I, 236). This point emerges from the paradox that human beings exist historically both inside and outside the relation with God. This paradox, referred to by Barth as the ‘fatal equation’ (UCR I, 215) between two apparently opposed conditions, is expressed as follows: ‘it is precisely on the inside that means being on the outside, precisely the Yes means a No, precisely in proximity to God

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the distance of man from God is revealed!’ (UCR I, 215) In the anthropology of religion, by contrast, there is ‘no fatal equation which needs overturning, no incurable damage that needs setting right’ (UCR I, 227). And yet, Barth’s doctrine of the Spirit does not mean a resolution of the paradox but, more radically, a ‘reversal’ (Umkehrung) of it (UCR I, 219). In other words, exactly the same equation must also be observed from its opposite and positive side, ‘so that we could then say that the individual who cannot stand before God is now precisely the individual who is standing before him’ (UCR I, 215). This ‘paradoxical equation’, then, means that the presence of the Spirit is always an event. There is an ‘empty space’ (UCR I, 217) left open for the Spirit’s arrival, whose reality may not be substituted for any other—i.e. for theological rhetoric, historical process, religious experience etc. ‘It is regrettable’, Barth comments, ‘when a person must admit to himself that the Holy Spirit has become superfluous for him, since he already has it, and faith and obedience are superfluous since he has something better than these’ (UCR I, 219). Finally, although pneumatology is discussed within the doctrine of revelation, the Spirit’s work is not merely correlated to epistemology, the closure of the historical distance between Jesus and the present. It is true that Barth thinks of Christ and humankind as separated by an expanse (although, because of Christ’s ascension, this is not merely an historical distance but an eternal abyss between heaven and earth). However, the Spirit does not draw Christ and humanity together in any straightforward way; he also ensures that their relation is not reified, whether as a flat dualism or a monistic identity. The Spirit is intrinsic to the whole economy of revelation, not just in forging a link between subject and object, but, because it is the Spirit who does this, in allowing God to remain subject even in his self-presentation in revelation. In other words, the doctrine of the Spirit ensures that revelation describes a fully personal relation, not merely the relation between a person and an historical fact or principle. The extent of Barth’s desire to avoid relating human beings to a divine principle, rather than to God himself, results in some rather surprising statements in his doctrine of the Trinity. Throughout his exposition, Barth uses the Trinitarian rule of the indivisibility of the opera trinitatis ad extra as a means of preventing a ‘false objectivism’ (UCR I, 154) from occurring in his doctrine of God. Thus, for


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example, because God is only Father ad extra in connection with the Son’s reconciling work and the Spirit’s sanctification of the believer, God’s paternity cannot be spun out into a general principle of divine world governance (UCR I, 139). And yet, he is so concerned about reifying God by extracting him from his relation to the world, that he appears to deny the immanent perfection of God, rather as a process theology might do. For example, he writes: God’s relation to man is not a contingent one. It is necessarily included and grounded within God’s essence. Everything the Father and Son do the Spirit does with them. The Spirit—this express turning-to-man by God—is already the creator and also the ruler and sustainer of all things, is also redeemer and mediator. We have highlighted repeatedly that ‘opera ad extra sunt indivisa’, and here in the third article the statement is more important than ever: there is nothing subsequent or episodic about this turning-to-man by God. God himself, the creator and redeemer, stands and falls with what takes place in time, in the outpouring and reception of the Holy Spirit, as God’s Yes to man. That is the very concrete and living thing in what is apparently such an abstract doctrine: that the Spirit is also divine. It did not arise out of the need for theoretical completeness, or by striving to complete the number 3, but out of the deepest insight that God would not be God if the relation to man were not naturally intrinsic to him. [UCR I, 156–7]

And yet, for all its ambiguity, it would be a mistake to read this passage as though Barth were intending to suggest that God’s perfection were somehow limited by his engagement with the world. Barth’s point is not to deny antecedent divine perfection as such (although it is true that seems to be strongly implied as well) but to prevent any of God’s actions being annexed away from their purpose: namely, to establish, sustain and redeem the relation with his creatures, in which (and this is why God’s being is so closely identified with this relation) they find themselves inextricably caught up. In invoking the indivisibility of the opera ad extra Barth’s eye is firmly on the way in which the Spirit is intrinsic to the economy of revelation, and not merely an afterthought. Barth’s alternative to the concept of religion is a pneumatology in which the synthesis between God and humanity is not being denied but eschatologized. The nodal point of his doctrine of God remains the same, however: it is the point of utmost existential concretion at which human individuals are claimed and challenged by God in real time.


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6.3 THE CHRISTIAN LIFE

6.3.1 The Eschatological Horizon of Christian Ethics In order to introduce the positive conception of the Christian life in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics, I return first of all to Barth’s studies of Reformation theology and ethics, for it is here that the main lines of his moral theology begin to emerge. As Barth focuses on the Reformed understanding of the Christian life, his sympathies are divided. On the one hand, he is convinced that the gospel places equal emphasis on action as on faith, and yet he holds on to a concern that ethics might easily become a form of moral activism, the like of which had so troubled Luther. As usual, Calvin represents for Barth the viable alternative, a dialectic in which both these emphases are retained. As I shall show, it is a certain kind of dualism in Calvin—one which is not absolute, but set against an eschatological horizon—which Barth takes to be the key to his ethics. Barth’s 1922 lectures on Calvin open with a lengthy reflection (approximately eighty pages in the Gesamtausgabe) setting the Reformation against its background in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. In large measure, these paragraphs (} 1–3) are Barth’s response to a long-standing debate among German theological historians (notably Seeberg, Loofs, and Troeltsch) over the extent to which the magisterial Reformers could be credited for the arrival of the modern era. The most influential contribution to this debate was a controversial address by Troeltsch delivered in Stuttgart to the 1906 Congress of German Historians. Troeltsch’s claim (to which Loofs would later take exception) was that that the magisterial Reformers belonged firmly in the Middle Ages: their theologies were responses to characteristically medieval religious problems, and they continued to believe that social and personal life could be adequately regulated by external religious authorities.49 And yet, Troeltsch concedes that, by maintaining that only the individual’s faith and conscience could assure salvation, Luther did decisively prepare the way a ‘new Protestantism’. For even though it would discard the idea that faith was 49

Troeltsch, Protestantism and Progress, esp. 54–69.


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oriented towards an eternal destiny, the modern age would still hang on to the principle of the individual, which Troeltsch thought had been taught by Luther.50 Barth enters this debate by challenging the underlying presupposition, accepted on all sides, of a fundamental shift in epochs. The real novum was the Reformation, he argues, but this was equally alien to the modern period and the Middle Ages: ‘The Reformation . . . is antimodern just as it is anti-medieval. Its front cuts squarely through the conflicting fronts of these two antagonists. That is the insight which I do not find clearly acknowledged in Troeltsch, Loofs, or Seeberg.’51 Barth argues this case by analysing Luther’s Heidelberg and Wittenberg Disputations (1517–18). In these texts, he finds that what Luther was objecting to in the theologia gloriae and its associated currents and practices was a certain moral anthropology. In positive terms, Luther’s ‘discovery’ can be thought of simply as a new awareness about God. And yet, Barth notes that that consciousness immediately included a realization that the vitality of the creature needed to be sharply arrested, in order that God would make it live again: [The Reformation] made the discovery that theology has to do with God; [it was] the shatteringly great discovery of the object of all theology; the secret of this theology consists quite simply in taking this object seriously in its uniqueness, calling God God, allowing God to be the God who cannot possibly become one object among others through any rash human grasping, curiosity or advancing. God is. He lives. He judges and has mercy. He kills and he brings to life (1 Sam. 2.6). He is creator, redeemer and Lord.52

As Barth reads him, then, Luther’s polemic is to be understood as the insight that revelation is not simply the divine basis for human projects of self-fulfilment, but that it interrupts that process and questions such a concept of human personhood altogether. The point is that the target of Luther’s protest is always more fundamental than a corrupt church.53 It is the pretension that human life is self50

51 52 Ibid., 96–8. Barth, TC, 88. Ibid., 51. Oberman has made this point very clearly in his biography of Luther. ‘Luther was by no means indifferent to the general decline of morals, but moral rearmament is not the primary goal of his reformation . . . The heart of the Reformation is the recovery of sound doctrine—only true faith will lead to the renewal of life’ (Oberman, Luther: Man between God and the Devil, 57). 53

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directed and self-constituting, a belief that can even (or especially?) characterize such anthropologies that describe humankind as being essentially dependent upon God: The ultimate and highest possibility is that man is a sinner. This thoughtprocess is an attack on scholasticism, indeed on the very core of scholasticism, not because it expresses man’s humility before the eternal God—which the Middle Ages also knew about!—but by standing stock-still in this humility. For if Luther’s protest is correct here, then it is not some sort of distortion or subsidiary teaching that is called into question, but primarily the best, highest, most inward and vital thing in Thomas or Dante or Meister Eckhardt.54

Barth’s shorthand metaphor for Luther’s attack is the vertical line cutting through a horizontal. By ‘horizontal’ here, he means ethics or practices (‘works’): to know God is to abandon my instinctive belief that my own personhood is ultimately sustained by my action, and thus that the object of my action—even where I might appeal to my relation with God—is ultimately myself. It is here that a fundamental continuity between the medieval and modern ages may be established, in Barth’s view, beyond the superficial phenomenon that they thought of themselves as bitterly opposed. It is true that ‘modernity thinks itself cleverer [than the Middle Ages] by refraining from shooting the arrow of longing so far’; for it no longer aims at eternal human salvation, but at ‘that which is directly intuitable in space and time’.55 And yet, the trajectory of their anthropologies is really no different. ‘Common to the Middle Ages and to modernity is the idea of a gradual process of striving towards a goal [Zielstrebigkeit]. For both, the goal lies in the horizontal; it is the goal of human willing and knowing.’56 In this sense, then, the Reformation was a thoroughly distinct moment, cutting straight through the arrival of modernity or the passing of the Middle Ages. It did not object primarily to institutional corruption, petty scholastic quibbling, a theology disconnected from its 54

Barth, TC, 56. Ibid., 87. 56 Ibid., 87. Cf. Balthasar’s remarks on how Barth’s ‘standpoint’ permits him to draw structural similarities between Catholicism and modern liberalism (Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth, 34ff.). 55


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historical origins etc., as Renaissance humanism did (although the Reformers also fought such things on occasion); nor did it struggle primarily for individual freedom, the nation state, or the authority of personal conscience (although these were also among its battles). As we have seen,57 Barth thinks of the Reformation above all as a period of heightened awareness of God (Besinnung auf Gott), and it fought against indifference to this awareness, in whatever form. In making God its unique object in all matters, the Reformation could not be aligned with medieval or modern objectives. It was not simply a matter of stressing human relationship with God, but of noting that in this relation it was by no means inevitable that God would remain God. And yet, Barth does not think of the Reformation as utterly discontinuous with the Middle Ages or the new period that was beginning to emerge during the Renaissance. In his Calvin lectures, the theme on which Barth dwells increasingly is the way in which the latter shaped the Reformation positively, in Switzerland if not in Germany. Calvin is presented by Barth as standing on the threshold between Luther’s discovery of God and the Renaissance discovery of humanity; he is ‘entirely a Reformer, and just as entirely a Renaissance man’:58 The problem of human living and striving, pursued so unbrokenly in the Middle Ages, cannot simply be cut short by being set in the shadow of its finitude, i.e. in the light of its origin . . . The Middle Ages were dead with Luther’s discovery, but the problem of the Middle Ages, and of the active life, of ethics in the broadest sense, did not die with them. Nor may this problem be put to death.59

Barth draws on a number of images to illustrate the relation between this second dimension of the Reformation and the Lutheran one. They are like concentric circles: Luther’s Glaubensreformation is the essential core, the Reformed Lebensreformation more peripheral. It is focused on the same centre, but also radiates out beyond it: ‘According to the Reformed view, Lutheran was not related to Reformed 57 58 59

See 4.1 above. Barth, TC, 90. Ibid., 65.


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Christianity as error is to truth, and therefore not as one circle to another, each with different centres, but as a narrower to a broader understanding of truth, as a smaller to a larger circle, each with the same centre.’60 Or again, reading Luther is like watching a flame approach a curtain, and anticipating that it will set it ablaze; but the two never quite make contact, and the curtain remains untouched. In this case, the image carries more critical implications. Luther’s call for a reformation of faith both captures and loses something essential in the Reformation: [T]he conflagration that could and perhaps does occur when the flame touches the curtain obviously means that the vertical now really intersects the horizontal; that the cross really becomes visible in our lives; that time and eternity, God and man, do not stand before each other in metaphysical antithesis, but in an indissoluble relation; that the power of the afterlife is the power of this life, as Troeltsch puts it; or put differently, the problem of socalled dogmatics is the problem of so-called ethics.61

Barth does not think that Luther was unconcerned by ethics per se; just that his main interests lay elsewhere, in ‘fighting against papist works and not fighting for works of the Spirit and of love’.62 Consequently, Luther’s investment in human works was quite different from that of the Swiss Reformers, for whom human activity was ingredient within any conceivable theological anthropology. Whereas Zwingli ‘believed because he wished to act, and without faith could not act as a man in the world’,63 Luther ‘acted because he believed, and because without acting he could not believe. If it were possible, he would also perhaps have not acted.’64 In short, ‘good works’ were necessary for Luther, but always consequent upon faith. In Zwingli and Calvin, the ethical moment occurs earlier; indeed, it occurs at the same time as faith. The image of converging vertical and horizontal axes, which Barth uses to describe the Swiss Reformation, is intended to convey that belief and action are both entirely coinherent and distinct from each other. It is because they are not two kinds of the same thing, but two completely different kinds of thing, occurring on different axes, that they are not in potential conflict. 60 63

Barth, DZ, 38–9. Barth, TZ, 131.

61 64

Barth, TC, 98. Ibid., 132.

62

Ibid., 102.


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They can occur simultaneously in the same person. Barth is not saying that the Swiss had two agendas: a socio-practical as well as a religio-theological one. He is trying to get away from the idea that these two are separate, an idea he thinks easily emerges in Luther’s theology. The Reformed position is not simply the consequence of ‘certain subtle differences of religious and ethical thought’ as compared with Lutheranism, notwithstanding an ‘essential agreement in their dogmatic basis’.65 Rather, the differences in ethics go right back to a basic disagreement over what it means for a human being to exist in the presence of God. To be related in this way to God, for the Reformed, always means both to believe and to act. Put differently, human action does not emerge from out of human faith, but is already part of what it means to appear before God: for the Reformed, ‘the ratio of justification grasped by faith had immediately to be the ratio of ethical action’.66 Note that Barth writes ‘to be’, not ‘to become’: Christian action takes its rise directly from God’s Word, rather than from a point within the new type of subject that has been produced. This intuition about the direct ethical dimension of Christian anthropology is inscribed into the very structures of Barth’s lectures on Calvin. His original aim was to arrive at a systematic presentation of Calvin’s teaching, in his sermons, commentaries and the Institutes. However, Barth resolves to take a circuitous route in getting there, via a historical–biographical presentation of his subject. In the event, he never actually got past the first section, and so we are left without any systematic treatment of Calvin’s theology at all. And yet, the vita Calvina is not simply an ornamental introduction to a presentation of Calvin’s writings. Calvin’s life is the ‘presupposition’ (Voraussetzung) of Calvinist teaching, Barth writes, in a strong, Kantian sense of the term: it already contains the entire meaning of Calvinist doctrine; the biography is ‘the whole of Calvin’s theology’. ‘The fact that, after the presuppositions, Calvin’s theology must still be examined as something separate and particular is more due to our hardness of heart (cf. Matt. 19.8) than to anything else.’67

65 66

Troeltsch, Protestantism and Progress, 38. 67 Barth, TC, 133. Ibid, 174.

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In fact, the Calvin lectures are something like the Reformed equivalent of a ‘Life of Luther’. Just as the latter was typically a tool for illustrating the master’s teachings on the guilty conscience, and on Christian freedom through the assurance of faith, so Barth’s Life of Calvin depicts his central claim about Reformed theology that the gospel was a matter of obedience to the Word of God. And so, when he takes for the motto of his lectures Cicero’s dictum historia magistra vitae68 (which Calvin himself had cited to sum up how the Old Testament can instruct Christians), Barth means more than just that aspects of Calvin’s teaching are mirrored in his life. Calvin is depicted as Geneva’s prophet, much as Moses was prophet in Israel. The life of Calvin is instructive ‘historia’ in the sense that it is to be understood as God’s challenge to a particular people at a particular time, by which they were both liberated and bound in very real ways. Just as the Old Testament, which the Reformed rediscovered, highlighted the moral implications of God’s presence for his people,69 so Barth’s narrative of Geneva in the 1530s is designed to illustrate how the gospel is a thoroughly concrete and practical affair for Christians. Calvin’s Reformation was not reducible to a change of heart or will or mentality, but intrinsically meant a visible reordering and restructuring of life. Moreover, what was remarkable about the ‘Geneva experiment’,70 according to Barth, was how it held together Luther’s vertical reorientation of all life towards God—and so the consequent awareness of the limitations of human activity—simultaneously with a humanistic interest in the secular, without any tension between these two foci: It is self-evident that even then this transcendent factor only became visible right along the line in a broken and incomplete way: even then, the otherworldly did not become this-worldly. But what is more important is that this transcendent factor did in fact become visible back then (or better, perceptible) with such incomparable intensity that it was almost impossible not to notice it.71

This double-orientation of Calvinist Christianity emerges repeatedly through the biographical approach Barth takes, which aims to bring 68 70

Barth, TC, 1. Ibid., 356.

69 71

Ibid., 124. Barth, TC, 399.


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out ‘the point where the cardinal [prinzipiell] and historical lines cross, at which the object is to be found’.72 One passage in which this is nicely illustrated is Barth’s account of Calvin’s first meeting with Guillaume Farel in Geneva.73 Barth situates the encounter at the end of his section on Calvin’s ‘beginnings’ (Anfa¨nge), in order to suggest how Calvin’s commitment to the cause of the Genevan church is to be seen as integral to his Christian existence. Barth notes how, in Calvin’s own recollection of the occasion (in the preface to his Psalms commentaries), Farel’s admonishment that Calvin must participate in the reform of Geneva is described as no less than a call to conversion. Calvin becomes ‘a broken, a doubly broken man’74 after he meets Farel. In other words, his conversion to evangelical Christianity was incomplete until he had committed himself concretely to Geneva. Equally importantly, however, Barth remains anxious to describe this second element—the practical, social, and concrete dimension of Calvinist Christianity—together with the Lutheran emphasis on the incommensurability of human action before God. In this way, the positivity of human action is also thoroughly limited: Once again, Calvin was humbled, broken, and converted, perhaps more decisively and with greater consequence than when he had previously turned from the papacy to Lutheranism. Indeed, Calvin was truly not just stepping out of the study and into the practical life to which Farel was summoning him but, hidden behind this inconsequential move, he was stepping from the humility [Demut] of faith into the courage [Mut] of faith. And what can be more humbling than the obligation to prove one’s humility, which is supposedly already being exercised now, through one’s courage? In this demand is contained the essence of the Reformed and Calvinist Reformation.75

Calvin’s ‘second conversion’, in other words, is not simply his transformation into another Farel. In this passage, the care Barth takes to phrase Calvin’s moral conversion as a more serious form of humility reflects the anxiety that the positive turn might entail a form of independence from God. ‘Farelism, i.e. audacious pastoral daredevilry for God’s glory and the world’s betterment, is truly not Calvinism’, 72 74

Ibid., 174. Ibid., 335.

73 75

Ibid., 329–36. Ibid., 333–4.


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he stresses.76 Unlike Farel, perhaps, Calvin’s life was insured against a Godless activism by a consistent orientation to its own limits. The vertical is to intersect the horizontal repeatedly, as it were, as the indispensable condition of the Christian validity of the horizontal, so that human action is always determinatively restricted by the limitations implied by its divine teleology: A picture of Calvin without the great restraint . . . which only portrays the so-called theocrat striving for the gloria Dei in the world, racing and rushing about, speaking and writing, organizing and planning, burning and burning to death, without reflecting whether the gloria Dei is a humanly possible task at all . . . such a picture of Calvin, whether sympathetic or hostile to him, is not just distorted but false.77

This lies at the heart of Barth’s reading of Calvin. He does not just represent for Barth the turn to the practical life in the Reformation, but a way of construing Christian action without casting the Christian as a self-grounding moral agent. Moreover, the finely balanced dialectic of faith and works, not as competing but composing the Christian life along different axes, exposes the apparent extremes, activism, and passivity, as opposing aspects of the same problem of perspective. Neither is able to conceive human action in time, without this threatening to become absolutized. Calvin only manages to sustain that balance because his moral theology begins by accepting a limited, eschatological dualism, from which it takes its bearings. At the end of his brief preliminary summary of Calvin’s form of Christianity (} 6), Barth writes: [Meditatio futurae vitae], together with the doctrine of predestination, forms the basis of the Calvinist ethos, the guarantee of its authenticity, and an insurance against the danger of superficiality which threatens every ethos. It is not a foreign body in Calvinist teaching but the true whence and whither of the Calvinist way.78

In other words, Calvin’s ethics are fenced in by a double boundary (election and eschatology) which limits human action behind and before. Indeed, he points out, this means that the type of dualism 76

Barth, TC, 332.

77

Ibid., 331.

78

Ibid., 171.


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which therefore lies at the heart of Calvin’s understanding of the Christian life has some affinity with Platonism. Just as, in Plato, the immortality of the soul after the death of the body is essential to Socrates’ teaching that the intellectual life is to be prized over the pursuit of physical happiness, so the Christian life is determined by an eschatological grounding, beyond the limits of a particular human lifespan. In Calvin, this eschatology is related to his ethics. The vita futura is not just a eudaemonist utopia, but carries the full weight of a divine imperative, which means that it is related to the present not so much as a future prospect, or as an outcome reached through historical processes, but as a transcendent factor. What has sometimes been thought of as Barth’s ‘eschatology of the hic et nunc’79 is not really to do with the concentration of all time into the present moment as, in fact, with an effort to situate this present moment under God, to orient it towards its divine teleology. As in Plato, the death-limit (Todesgrenze) is taken seriously as a factor regulating human existence. However, the decisive gap that has now opened up between what is this side of the death-limit, and what is beyond it, does not render existence in time meaningless; it is a distinction that immediately places human existence under an imperative: In the light of the Lutheran concept of grace on the one hand, and the need, on the other, to relate this vertical and all its extraordinariness to the horizontal of human living and striving—i.e. really to bring it into the light of grace—Calvin pushed through to precisely the point where theological and philosophical views of life have always met, and always must meet: he conceived the idea of death as being the criterion by which everything that lives is measured. He becomes a strict and essential [wesentlich] figure who no longer seeks what is really and truthfully positive and existent in greater proximity, but precisely beyond the negation of everything provisionally and superficially positive and existent. And yet, for him it is just this infinite distance which, because it is that which is real and truthful, becomes that which is closest and most immediate, most serious and important, the 79

Kreck, Die Zukunft des Gekommenen, 40ff. Kreck’s phrase is preferable to Torrance’s ‘timeless eschatology’, for the latter is heavily dependent upon a schematic distinction between Greek and biblical understandings of time, borrowed from Cullmann, which hardly captures what is going on in Barth’s dialectical eschatology (Torrance, ‘The modern eschatological debate’, 53, 94f.).

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burning concern and most pressing motif in everything in the present. He is an eschatologist as an ethicist, and an ethicist as an eschatologist.80

Thus, the result of this dualism in Calvin—which involves the bracketing out all temporal positivity, and locating the absolute in an eschatological ‘beyond’—is not to deny the goodness of creaturely reality, nor to make historical action pointless, but to introduce a ‘transcendent factor’ into it which sets it under both a limit and a law. This eschatological dualism—which Barth thinks of as the heart of Calvin’s theology—is then contrasted with both Lutheran and radical Protestantism. Barth takes radicalism to mean the desire to erase the distinction between the absolute and the relative, and so to locate ultimate reality in history directly. Indirectness and eschatological distance are definitively overcome at one specific moment in time. One place in which he sees the contrast between this perspective and a Calvinist one clearly emerging is in the discussion of the legitimacy of the State, which crops up in the final chapter of the 1536 Institutes. Calvin was writing here against Christian radicals who thought the true church could exist as a parallel Christian ‘state’ under its own laws, whose citizens had been extracted from the secular kingdom and now lived under the direct rule of God. In Paul Wernle’s book on Calvin (with which Barth is frequently at odds) three explanations are given for Calvin’s rejection of this position: his fidelity to the French monarchy, his fidelity to St Paul (and therefore to Romans 13), and finally Calvin’s pragmatism (a recurrent theme in Wernle’s book).81 However, Barth objects to Wernle’s reading here on the basis that it fails to make sense of why Calvin placed the entire discussion under the heading ‘De Libertate Christiana’; for if this rubric is taken at face value, it must be seen as the basic principle for understanding Calvin’s theology of the State, Barth thinks. Because God’s rule is implemented indirectly, for Calvin, he can make no final contrast in history between church and State. The State, indeed, has a limited authority in the present time, given that direct theocracy is not yet a reality: God is to be obeyed through obedience to the State. This means that the State has its own legitimacy: 80 81

Barth, TC, 206. For references, see ibid., 298.


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in a parabolic sense, not directly but indirectly, not in its givenness but in its relatedness [Bezogenheit] as the temporal imago of the eternal righteousness of God, in its reference to this as its purpose and origin. Relatedness means relativity [Relativita¨t]. The radicals wished to leap beyond relativity directly to the origin, to God’s absoluteness.82

And yet, Calvin’s refusal to absolutize the distinction between church and State is not to be understood as a ‘pragmatist’ concession to Realpolitik, on Calvin’s part, nor as an apology for State power. Rather, it is a theological claim, against the radical Reformation, that the church’s existence is a relative one. Its essence is not given, but derived from its relation to God. The meaning of this churchly relativity, and so of the relative validity granted to the State, is that it allows the church to be construed not as the place of law, but of Christian freedom. And yet, the same tendency to absolutism is in evidence, according to Barth, in the Lutheran emphasis on faith rather than works. For this opposition immediately raises the suspicion that faith, understood as confidence in God, appears able to achieve something other types of activity cannot, namely to bridge the irreconcilable abyss Luther exposed in Catholicism between works and salvation: ‘In Luther, faith is undoubtedly something of a hypostasis, something of an intermediary between God, man, and the world, which, like the Alexandrian logos, is mythologically equipped with its own independent characteristics.’83 By contrast with this, because the Swiss Reformed did not object so much to the Roman Catholic doctrine of works as (more fundamentally) to its doctrine of God,84 they are never in danger of introducing an opposition between faith and works into their doctrine of grace. [W]hen it speaks of grace, because the Reformed confession is thinking essentially about what God does, and essentially considers faith only from that perspective as well, in terms of God’s action upon man, it achieves the necessary distance to establish that faith is not God’s only action upon man, that the same God also makes man obedient for his service.85

Note once again here that the ‘distance’ between God and humanity which Barth finds in Reformed Christianity is essentially connected 82 84

Ibid., 299–300. Ibid., 127–8.

83

85

Barth, TRB, 154. Ibid., 231.

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in his mind with the link between grace and action. If faith means a kind of immediacy to God in which that distance is erased, Barth worries that ethics will inevitably fall outside the bounds of theological concern. Indeed, one suspects that the reason Barth finds Luther’s anthropology unsatisfactory is ultimately a concern that, in Luther, the object of reference for human action might not be God but faith itself.86 In any case, Barth thinks that the common tendency in both radicalist and Lutheran theologies towards eschatological immediacy—or rather the erasure of eschatological distance—explains how radicalism enjoyed so much success in Lutheran territories. Although Luther fought it with notorious ferocity, religious enthusiasm of a radical kind was really always a latent possibility within his own fundamental perspective. For, Barth finds, just as Luther’s doctrine of faith betrays the need for an absolute form of Christianity, so too does his ethics. Whereas the Reformed ‘were convinced from the start that we live in the world, not in heaven, that God’s commands too are an instruction to live in the world, not in heaven, that there is no human action, even the most holy, that is somehow justified by faith per se’,87 Luther derived his whole ethics from the single commandment to love. To Barth, this seems like another infringement upon the eschatological distance between heaven and earth. For Christian radicalism can be interpreted not simply as moral rigorism but as the attempt ‘to have iustificatio ex fide bestride the world’s stage in person, so to speak, and without disguise, avoiding ethics, simply by inspiration and the power of the Spirit’.88 Because it is deeply determined by a de-eschatologized soteriology, Barth finds it unsurprising that, notwithstanding Luther’s strong contrast between faith and works, Lutheranism could so quickly topple over into a Christianity where faith and works simply become equated: The real life for Calvin is eternal life, much more meaningfully and emphatically than it was for Luther. We could also put it this way: the idea of death 86 For a rather different reading of Luther’s ethics, stressing the primacy of the divine commandment, see Wannenwetsch, ‘Luther’s moral theology’, esp. 121–4. 87 88 Barth, TC, 111. Ibid., 111.


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and the hereafter was much more intimately linked for him than for Luther himself to the concept of salvation, which Luther’s doctrine of faith and justification had [initially] helped him clarify.89

Barth is not suggesting, of course, that Luther had no concept of eschatology at all; only that, unlike for Calvin, this concept plays no serious role in Luther’s determination of this life. In other words, ignoring the basic eschatological orientation of salvation is a form of religious enthusiasm, and tends—whether in its activist or passive form—towards a theological anthropology in which the human subject revolves about itself.

6.3.2 The Doctrine of Reconciliation in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics In this section, I discuss the treatment of the Christian life in the third volume of the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics, the doctrine of reconciliation. We shall see the same dialectic emerging in Barth’s account here as in the lectures on Protestant theology: on the one hand, Christian existence is to be thought of as thoroughly active; yet on the other, that action may never be allowed to become detached from its grounds in God. Christian existence is simply the life-act performed by the human being who finds himself addressed by God. As we shall see, although Barth develops this position in the course of a treatment of the doctrines of justification and sanctification (6.3.2.2 below), the overall account weighs decisively in favour of the former. Because of this, it is necessary to begin with an analysis of the doctrine of Christ’s priesthood, on which justification is based (6.3.2.1. below). This part of the chapter then concludes with a discussion of the problem of continuity in the Christian life (6.3.2.3 below).

6.3.2.1 Christ and Justification Barth’s doctrine of justification—and therefore his entire soteriology—is grounded in an understanding of the sacrifice made by 89

Ibid., 205.

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Christ. Although Barth states that Christ’s reconciling work comprises the entirety of what he does—and so includes his prophetic and royal offices as well—he thinks that the idea of representation (Stellvertretung), a term borrowed from cult liturgy, is the idea that most efficiently describes Christ’s work as a whole.90 Central to the religious idea of representation is the concept of the priest who offers sacrifices to God as a ‘substitute payment [Ersatzleistung]’ (UCR III, 129), a token of goodwill in place of what is really due. As described by Barth, this priesthood contains two distinct elements, both of which have significance in his Christology. First of all, Christ the priest offers a sacrifice which others do not, or cannot, offer themselves: It is precisely the priest who intercedes before God on behalf of a people who are weighed down by their sins and cannot themselves proffer effective sacrifices or prayers. [He is] the mediator and vicar who, thanks to his sacred office, makes the cult legitimate and indeed possible at all, and (although this second sense is not envisaged in our case) is then also in a position to serve as a channel for the interaction between God and the people. [UCR III, 114]

Here the priest is above all a replacement figure who is somehow capable of rendering (partially) the sacrifice human beings do not themselves offer. This is especially clear because Barth discards the second element when drawing the analogy between the priest and Christ: to say that Christ is priest does not mean that he opens up a ‘channel’ for human converse with God, but that he takes the place of such a channel. He does not generate a new human capax, but substitutes for the human incapax. This is the point Heb. 7 is making, Barth notes, when it removes the doctrine of Christ’s priesthood from Israel’s sacrificial system and associates it with Melchizadek’s sui generic priesthood (UCR III, 116); or again Heb. 9.27 et seq., which describes Jesus’ sacrifice as occurring just once: ‘The whole doctrine of reconciliation, and ultimately the whole doctrine of Christ’s work, rests on knowing this “once!”’ (UCR III, 128)

90 Stellvertretung is ‘co-constitutive of the concept of reconciliation between God and man as a whole, insofar as this cannot occur except through God acting in the God-man by taking the place of his brothers’ (UCR III, 112).


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To describe Christ as priest, then, means that while Christ is a truly human representative, what is decisive about his reconciling act is its exclusivity. ‘[I]t is not our action that makes this happen, but the representative action of Jesus Christ on our behalf, reckoned to us’ (UCR III, 136); and so, it is not that ‘we somehow also do what he does, becoming like him, being assumed into the power of his Godconsciousness (that is the æH łF of Schleiermacher’s christology)’ (UCR III, 136). In short, Christ does not act ‘upon [an uns]’, but ‘strictly on our behalf [fu¨r uns]’ (UCR III, 118). Secondly, however, this view of priesthood must then govern how sacrifice is interpreted. Barth thinks that the Levitical sacrifice is to be regarded both as a gesture of the people’s desire to be reconciled to God and, by the same measure, a demonstration of its inability to offer itself completely. The very notion of priestly sacrifice implies an IÅØ ±Ææ ØH (Heb. 10.3); it is a quid pro quo (UCR III, 129). Moreover, this inherent limitation in the Levitical system is further emphasized by the totality of Christ’s self-sacrifice, so that the sacrifice of grace reveals what Barth calls the ‘law of sacrifice’ (UCR III, 130) as well. This law is simply the statement that our sacrifices are always ‘trapped on this side of the history of religions’ (UCR III, 132). In Jesus Christ, we come to realize both the ‘implacable need’ we have to offer up sacrifice to God and the inadequacy of all our sacrifices (UCR III, 130). In short, Jesus’ sacrifice itself (rather than a liturgical theory of sacrifice) determines what sacrifice means. At the most general level, the content of Jesus’ sacrifice is his obedience to God, an obedience which distinguishes Christ from all others (UCR III, 133–4). And yet, this obedience does not take the form of a moral achievement, but an association with the disobedient, with ‘tax-collectors and sinners’. That this solidarity extends to the point of a total self-identification is indicated, for Barth, by Jesus’ acceptance of John’s appeal for baptismal repentance at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, and by his execution as a criminal, at the end. Although, being obedient, Jesus did not commit a sinful act (Tatsu¨nde), his obedience was never exercised in isolation but within the environment of sin. This meant him entering ‘the broken covenant between God and man, submitting to the wrath and judgement, the punishment of God’ (UCR III, 36–7). This context decisively alters what it means to be righteous and holy. Jesus is obedient as the ‘lamb

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of God who bears the sins of the world, not denying but acknowledging them, not casting them off but taking them on, not pushing them off onto someone else or God, but taking them upon himself (John 1.29)’ (UCR III, 137). This concept of Jesus’ sacrifice as his willingness to bear sin is not to be confused with a concept of Jesus’ passivity. Commenting on what he regards as a dubious distinction (introduced into Protestantism by Osiander) between active and passive obedience, Barth writes that Christ’s obedience must be seen simultaneously as both ‘actio passiva’ and ‘passio activa’ (UCR III, 134–5). Although fulfilling the law never takes the form of self-promotion, it nevertheless always involves something like strain or effort on Christ’s part. Likewise, as we shall see in more detail in the following section, divine grace is to be received by us both in knowledge and action: ‘Not for a single moment’s duration can the gospel stand alone, only to be believed, however certain it is that justification is by faith alone. It’s fundamentally a matter of God, of his will and his glory; which means not just being justified and believing’ (UCR I, 212). On the other hand, if human action is to correspond to Christ’s obedience, it cannot take the form of a kind of religious immaculateness. Indeed, it will be exactly the reverse of that. For if Christ reveals what true obedience is, the religious desire to distinguish oneself from the sinner is the very essence of sin itself, the opposite of the holiness he manifested: As Adam violates God’s glory by wishing to be more than man, so we violate it by wishing to be more than sinners, when our lives are the continual attempt to cover up, blur and justify our character as sinners, to elevate ourselves above what we are. And this now makes us even more fundamentally what we are, namely sinners. [UCR III, 137]

This argument is familiar, of course, from Pauline polemic against first-century Judaism, or from Luther’s polemic against medieval Catholicism, where aspects of religious worship are unmasked as presumptuous, even as they claim to be directed towards God. Here, in Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation, it results in a strong critique of the idea of personal sanctity. Christian sanctification does not mean setting oneself apart, but ‘putting aside all self-sanctification, and all the glory one could somehow procure for oneself through this’


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(UCR III, 313). It is not just that self-sanctification might be selfglorification over against God. It is the very epitome of this practical kind of atheism: making God merely an accessory to personal improvement. In two ways, then, the priesthood of Christ determines the model of Christian life Barth depicts in his doctrine of reconciliation. First, because Christ is the unique human priest, human beings may not represent themselves before God. Their action therefore never has this absolute character; it is only ever defined by its relation to Jesus. Secondly, because Christ’s sacrifice of obedience—which is the model for Christian holiness—meant a willingness to come under the law and its condemnation of sin, Christian sanctification is understood primarily not as setting oneself apart from sin, but as the readiness to confess one’s sin. The follower of Christ is the one who does not seek to avoid this reality, but is prepared to obey God only from within it.

6.3.2.2 Justification and Sanctification Because Christ’s sacrifice is representative, in the exclusivist sense I have indicated, it is evident that justification is ‘forensic’ for Barth: the individual does not become righteous in herself, but in Christ. And yet, because ‘there is nothing subsequent or episodic about God’s turning-to-man’ (UCR I, 156f.) there can be no sense that Christ’s sacrifice is a transaction which simply takes place outside the human subject. Justification is not an ‘illusion’ or ‘fancy-dress’, but really a ‘making-just’ of the individual (UCR III, 279); and sanctification, likewise, means that the individual ‘is holy, is made holy’ (UCR III, 309). In the first place, this point could be secured in Christology alone. Because the Logos did not assume a particular individual but an anhypostatic nature, Jesus is truly a universal human being (UCR III, 46–7). Therefore, ‘soteriology can in principle only be an exposition of Christology, and may never and nowhere acquire the traits of an independent Christian anthropology’ (UCR III, 308). However, because of the loci arrangement Barth is borrowing from Heppe, the tightness of this connection between Christology and soteriology never really emerges in his exposition. Instead, the link between Christology and soteriology is made by the doctrine of the


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‘call’ (vocation/Berufung), which Barth refers to as the ‘fundamental thing’ in Christian soteriology (UCR III, 241). Even so, it is misleading to think of this as a ‘monism of the Word of God’.91 It is not merely an ‘extrinsic analogy of attribution’92 which leaves human beings in the same condition they were in before. For the Word, Barth maintains, is ‘the Lord’s Word . . . Christ, who draws us to himself through the Spirit and makes us his’ (UCR III, 249). Although grace is not to be thought of as becoming ‘naturalized’ in the one who receives it, it nevertheless carries real ontological weight, because the call effects an ‘insertio in Christum’ (UCR III, 245). In other words, resuming grace under the concept of vocation is not making it external, for calling makes ‘participation’ or ‘koinonia’ with Christ the basis of salvation.93 Indeed, Barth can evoke this reality in terms that echo Luther’s richly ontological metaphor of a marital exchange of gifts: ‘in addition to his life, [Christ] lives mine; in addition to my life, I live his life. He does so freely as giver; I do so dependently as recipient’ (UCR III, 247). The significance of the Word’s soteriological efficiency is as follows: it means that union with Christ occurs at the beginning of salvation—indeed it is salvation—so that justification, rather than being a purely external reality (as it seems to Barth to become in postMelanchthonian Lutheranism), is based on an original identity between Christ and the Christian. ‘The concept of iustificatio is always secondary, derived from insertio in Christum. Because in faith we are one with Christ the righteous one, on the basis of eternal election, therefore we are justified in him before God, not vice versa’ (UCR III, 249). In other words, because calling is not merely ‘imputatio’ but a divine act which incorporates a person into Christ, the claim that justification is truly ‘iustum facere’ (UCR III, 281) is ontologically credible. And yet, while Christ never acts as a ‘Privatmann’ (UCR III, 136), being ‘priest’ singles him out in such a way that the identification between him and humankind is never finally complete. There is a ‘substantial union’ between them (UCR III, 287), it is true, but this occurs ‘not in the form of an actus physicus, but of an actus forensis’ 91 92 93

Balthasar, Theology of Karl Barth, 94. Ibid., 110. Hunsinger, ‘A tale of two simultaneities’, 77–83.


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(UCR III, 282). Therefore, ‘in practice, iustum facere means iustum declarare, iustum pronuntiare hominem peccatorem’ (UCR III, 283). Again, it needs stressing that the index of this ambivalence is the term ‘Word’, with its heavy ontological meanings together with its implied distances. Word describes the mode of gift and reception of grace as occurring in an event; never becoming straightforwardly factual. ‘[Man] will never be able to have righteousness, always only to receive it. The great transformation which he undergoes consists in his receiving, receiving again and again. All glory remains with the giver. The glory of the recipient is in the receiving’ (UCR III, 284).94 Any completed transfer of the gift—any view of grace as being more ‘substantial’ than the event of the giving itself—risks turning the human being into one capable of representing himself before God, and so making Christ’s priesthood superfluous. Barth’s theology has frequently been misread at this point, because it is assumed that the forensic moment in his soteriology indicates a purely extrinsic notion of grace. Take the following remark by Ticciati, who thinks that Barth exemplifies a problem in Protestantism in general: [Sola gratia] can lead . . . to a disjunction between the human being as sinner, embroiled in the complexities of history, and the same human being as one who is saved in faith and has a new hidden life in Jesus Christ, which cannot be perceived by the historical eye . . . The sinner and the one who has been saved are indeed the same person, but it is hard to see how this unity is more than a mere postulation.95

Yet, in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics at any rate, Barth does not speak of the eschatological distance between peccator and iustus in terms of the difference between a real and a postulated identity. That would 94 For Hunsinger, this ‘again and again’ is the essence of Barth’s soteriology, which Hunsinger would like to see supplemented with a ‘more and more’. Yet the danger lurking within such ‘soteriological gradualism’ (‘A tale of two simultaneities’, 75), is that it will result in a reinstatement of the graced moral subject over against God. It is arguably an overstatement of Barth’s difference from Calvin to argue that Calvin thought of salvation as ‘the process of becoming righteous’ (ibid., 69), or that the again-and-again aspect recedes from prominence in favour of a strong emphasis on the more and more’ (ibid., 87; cf. Hunsinger, ‘The mediator of communion’, 194, n. 15). 95 Ticciati, Job and the Disruption of Identity, 7.

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indeed render problematic the connection between the justified human being and history, experience, psychology etc. Rather, peccator and iustus are to be thought of as the two poles within which human existence moves in time, so that human beings are neither wholly identical with the sinner, nor with Christ. The extrinsic moment in Barth is not a stasis or a dualism; it represents an end-point to which the human being is drawn forwards. Moreover, ‘Word’ is never intended to imply that grace is a merely noetic reality. The human act which corresponds to grace is ‘a single thing’, Barth maintains, in the sense that faith and obedience occur simultaneously, not consecutively, in the Christian life. ‘But in that unity it is twofold, and the vitality of the relation with God depends on it being twofold’ (UCR I, 240). On occasion, Barth insists that the Word is not less than the impartation of information (‘facts’)— ‘God’s Word that you are righteous on the basis of Christ’s righteousness is true, however things stand with man in his sphere’; yet it is invariably more than that, for ‘the truth of reconciliation cannot be without reality’ (UCR III, 310–1). The Word, then, is ‘an alarm call, a disruption, a question, an attack on [man’s] existence . . . his house of sin, however large and spacious and magnificent it may be, has been set ablaze from top to bottom, so that it is high time for him to leave his bed’ (UCR III, 316).96 A number of points could be made about the existential nature of this theological anthropology. The first concerns the active character of faith itself. Just as Barth does not want to describe Christ’s kenosis in passive terms—it is to be understood as ‘passio activa’ (UCR III, 96

However, Barth occasionally moves away from the ‘Word’ and uses the distinction between the ‘eternal/absolute’ and the ‘historical/relative’ to describe the intersection between the human ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ grace. Applied to the present topic, this metaphor creates the following description of grace. Justification is to be thought of as the ultimate truth about the sinner, ‘in Christ’ and eternally, and yet, if that ‘perfect’ and ‘absolute’ truth of being is to be more than a mere postulate, it must be reflected in what Barth calls an ‘imperfect’ and ‘relative’ ‘series of steps’ in time (UCR III, 317), a process of ‘growth’ (Wachstum), which is something like ‘the temporal image of an eternal and complete transformation’. (UCR III, 405) Construed in this way, this time–eternity metaphor is less satisfactory for describing grace than the notions of call and response, because it immediately gives credence to Ticciati’s criticism, mentioned earlier, that what happens ‘in Christ’ always occurs at one remove from human reality.


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135)—so Christian faith is not to be thought of as a form of passivity. Indeed, Barth expresses the concern that the terms in which he had spoken of faith in the second Ro¨merbrief—as a type of ‘vacuum’ (Hohlraum) in the human subject—might tend towards exactly that misunderstanding (UCR III, 301). Above all, Barth is worried about faith becoming mistaken for a psychological quality. It is, he maintains contra Schleiermacher, ‘a human activity, absolutely not a subconscious or supra-conscious event’ (UCR I, 238). Ultimately, the problem with understanding faith in terms of human passivity is that it sets divine and human action on the same plane, so that they are forced into competition with each other, and cancel each other out. However, Barth is also quick to draw attention to the limits of human action. Although he maintains that the doctrine of reconciliation must reach ‘the boundary of an independent Christian anthropology’ (UCR III, 308)—in that it involves a real human event—Barth is always quick to bring to mind the existence of this boundary. It is true that hearing the Word in faith means being ‘an existential hearer’ of the Word (UCR III, 316); and so it means being a ‘doer of the Word’ as well (UCR III, 311), in order that the presence of the Word be fully registered in human experience. And yet, Barth is worried lest the de-centring of the Christian subject in God’s justification be reversed again. ‘It cannot be a matter of finally putting man back in the saddle after all, and letting him cooperate in his reconciliation, but of expressing how, as reconciled man, he does indeed find himself in that closed circle of divine monergism’ (UCR III, 307). On the other hand, this limit does not have purely negative significance. Barth thinks of it, first of all, as the condition upon which human action can become free. Because he thinks of living in time as being ‘on the way’ between two absolute points, sin and grace, the human being only lives ‘in the relative’. Although what we do is defined by the telos of grace, its arrival does not depend upon our performance: ‘None of our decisions is an absolute decision’ (UCR III, 319). It is not that Barth is unconcerned with ‘the possibility and character of adult relationship with God’.97 It is just that

97

Williams, ‘Barth on the triune God’, 192.


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human responsibility does not extend to the pressures of having to create or sustain personal identity in time by one’s action. This relativity is crucial to the formal description Barth provides of the eschatological character of human action: We are on the way, but that means we are only on the way. We have cause to consider that there is a divine seriousness beyond even our deepest joy, and a divine humour beyond even our greatest seriousness. If we consider that, we shall not be any the less joyful or serious in our sphere. It is only then that we shall become truly serious and truly joyful. [UCR III, 319]

In short, the eschatological boundary that makes human activity relative is not a flat denial of its value, but liberates it to be what it is without suffering anxiety over successful accomplishment. Moreover, grace is also to be thought of as a goal, so that the relativity of human action does not mean that it becomes a pointless ‘walking on the spot’. ‘As those who are justified,’ Barth writes, ‘our “spot” is not a spot but a step, precisely with reference to the forgiveness of sins’ (UCR III, 294). In a brief section in the doctrine of sanctification, he then outlines some of the characteristics of this ‘step’. It will mean: attentiveness to the Word, sorrow for sin, hungering and thirsting after righteousness, neighbourly fellowship, gratitude, patient hope, and the fear of the Lord (UCR III, 319–29). This passage in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics, in which these concrete dimensions of Christian living are set out, is not merely decorative. On the other hand, nor is it anything like a complete list, or a programme of action. Barth includes it, he maintains, to avoid creating the impression that the reconciled person is ‘some sort of heavenly doppelga¨nger of the sinner, gliding alongside him like his shadow’ (UCR III, 306). This miniature ‘ethics’ is a crucial part of establishing the claim that grace is not a fiction or a postulate, but an historical reality, an event in human life. And yet, if Barth’s later theology manages to sustain this case in part through ‘the sheer extent and richness of his description of human moral action’,98 the same cannot be said of Barth’s description of moral action here. At one point, he refers to Christian sanctification as ‘letting one’s reason be caught within Christ’s obe98

Webster, Barth’s Ethics of Reconciliation, 226.


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dience’ (UCR I, 243). The phrase seems designed to suggest that the Christian ethos is not, like the Kantian one, based on a ‘pure practical reason’ which ‘orients itself ’,99 but is a mode of rationality ordered by a relation it is given in Christ. In revelation, Barth adds, human reason is ‘limited’ by God, ‘who puts himself in man’s way, becoming his limit, demanding that his commandments be kept’ (UCR I, 244). However, when the opportunity arises to flesh this out in UCR III, Barth provides only (echoing Kant here) a ‘Prolegomena to an ethics which might in the future be able to claim to be Christian’ (UCR III, 320). The brevity of the treatment could be put down to the pure contingency that Barth was running out of time to complete the doctrine of reconciliation before the end of term. Yet that does not completely explain it. For Barth often appears less interested in particular actions themselves than in evoking any particular action as a means of drawing attention to the inherent limits of all action. For example, Barth reflects at one point that, if forced to choose, an optimistic activism would be preferable to a resigned acceptance of the way things are. The terms he uses to describe this positive– negative dialectic are ‘hungering and thirsting for righteousness’, on the one hand, and ‘sorrow for sin’, on the other. In other words, the positive aspect is not as ‘optimistic’ as the dialectic might suggest because ‘hungering and thirsting’ are terms designed to convey ‘a lack of something one does not have, but absolutely requires’ (UCR III, 323). Even though Barth never advocates a mode of passive resignation, then, Stoevesandt is surely right to draw attention to the relatively light doctrine of sanctification in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics.100 To explain it, one could refer back to the deeper structural decision that we have identified in the centre of this dogmatics: the construal of the relation between Christology and pneumatology in terms dictated by Barth’s dialogical doctrine of revelation. Setting Christology and pneumatology over against each other risks allowing soteriology to be cut adrift from its moorings in Christ. The implications of this re-emerge at a key place in the doctrine of reconciliation,

99 100

Cf. Kant, ‘What does it mean to orient oneself in thinking?’ 8–10. Stoevesandt, ‘Die Go¨ttinger Dogmatikvorlesung’, 92–3.

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¨ bergang) that needs to be where Barth reflects on the ‘transition’ (U made from Christology to soteriology: The justification and sanctification of humanity, the establishing of the church through the sacrament and its existence, are Christ’s work. But it would be more appropriate to the self-movement of the concept of God which occurs in this for us to make that transition to receiving, believing, obeying humanity—to the utterly new thing that once again is given with it [but which must] be conceived anew from the beginning—if we ourselves as Christians at least apparently and methodologically become the focus of attention in this final part of dogmatics; so that we can formulate it as a special veneration of the Holy Spirit. For in relating reconciliation to our own existence like this, to this direct turning of God to us in grace, we acknowledge him to be the Holy Spirit—once again, he himself, interceding with and for us, doing himself what can nowhere and never be our work, even partially. [UCR III, 175]

There are good reasons for insisting on this ‘transition’: one might otherwise unconsciously ignore the problem of human subjectivity altogether, which would then leave the human subject to mediate its own relation to grace. And yet, because Barth thinks of the Spirit–Son relation in terms dictated by the subject–object relation, pneumatology quickly has to wrestle with the danger of falling back into a type of subjectivism, as we shall see in more depth when we turn to Barth’s sacramental theology in the final part of the chapter.101 The point here, however, is that because Christology tends to disappear into the background of Barth’s soteriology in UCR III, he repeatedly feels obliged to refrain from positive description of Christian sanctification, so as to avoid the potential re-instalment of a self-grounded religious/moral subject. What would have helped his argument here, specifically, are the doctrines of Christ’s Resurrection and heavenly session; for if the risen Christ were more evidently the ontological ground of Barth’s 101 Hu¨tter has diagnosed a ‘spiritualistic individualism’ (Suffering Divine Things, 113) in Barth’s theology in the 1920s (and beyond), although he puts this down to a ‘pneumatological deficit’ (ibid., 108)—rather than to the failure to ground subjectivity in Christology, which I have identified. According to Hu¨tter, the result is that Barth’s ecclesiology remains trapped in the opposition that has often beset Western Christianity, between an institutional and a charismatic ecclesiology (Barth, naturally, tending toward the latter).


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theological anthropology he would have less cause for concern that human action might spontaneously ground itself. And yet, as we saw in the previous chapter, Barth’s theology in Go¨ttingen has the tendency not to grant full ontological value to these doctrines. The irony, then, is that Barth’s inability to sustain a description of the positivity of the Christian life for long results ultimately from the too-generous provision he makes for human existence within the structures of the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics. For in making divine Word and ‘human question’ dialectical counterparts (albeit in a relation where Word retains the priority) he cuts against a conviction, which the doctrine of the priestly office of Christ establishes, that authentic human life is always generated by a reality which lies beyond and outside it.

6.3.2.3 Continuity and the Christian Life This leads us, finally, to consider an accusation that has repeatedly been levelled against Barth’s moral theology: that it is unable to describe continuity within the Christian life. There are stronger and weaker versions of this criticism. Among the stronger ones is Je´roˆme Hamer’s proposal that Barth’s theology be read as a constructive renewal of Kierkegaard’s doctrine of the ‘moment’.102 According to Hamer, however, Barth goes further than Kierkegaard by dispensing with the controlling idea of personal subjectivity, an idea which ultimately prevented Kierkegaard from sliding into theological ‘occasionalism’. And so, in Barth, revelation (and grace) amount to no more than ‘divine contacts [touches] which occur as often, and for as long, as God takes an interest in us’.103 Stanley Hauerwas, by contrast, offers a more favourable reading of Barth, taking care to distinguish his moral theology from Bultmann’s ‘ethics of discontinuity’. ‘Faith for Barth is not just a matter of this or that particular decision; it is the determination of our whole being and action to God—a determination of our entire life in its individual moments and duration.’104 Nevertheless, because Barth does not think of ethics as ‘description 102 103 104

Hamer, L’Occasionalisme Theólogique de Karl Barth, 198. Ibid., 167. Hauerwas, Character and the Christian Life, 169.


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of human behaviour as such’,105 but as description of the content of divine commandments, Hauerwas believes he is compelled to reduce the range of moral concepts at the theologian’s disposal—notably those concepts (such as character or virtue) which make up the consistency and integrity of the agent—and so to construe ‘the actual life of the Christian in terms of atomistic acts’.106 If we consider these criticisms in the light of the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics it must be said that, although Barth indeed refers to grace as ‘a sort of interruption of time’, and although justification and sanctification involve ‘continually questioning temporal continuity’ (UCR III, 332), Hamer’s reading is still incorrect. Barth does not think of everything happening ‘on two levels: the level of divine action and of human action’,107 as Hamer thinks, levels which never intersect. Hauerwas is right to point out that Barth does not conceive of existence in time as merely the aggregation of discrete, disconnected acts. ‘[M]an certainly exists in his relation to God in moments,’ Barth writes, ‘yet precisely as man, as the totality of an uninterrupted series of psycho-physical acts which fill out an entire life-time without gaps’, so that humanity persists ‘in uninterrupted temporal continuity’ (UCR III, 333–4). More strongly still, Barth suggests that there must be a point at which the opposition between human continuity and gracious interruption is overcome: the ‘movement of grace’ must be grounded in something like a ‘state of grace’, he concedes. Without that, reconciliation becomes incomplete (UCR III, 333). The question is how to achieve this ‘state’ without de-eschatologizing grace. As usual, Barth wants to discount any version in which permanency in grace reinstates the self-grounding human subject. This makes him suspicious of the doctrine of the ‘perseverance of the saints’, which gained currency in Reformed dogmatics through the Westminster Confession (UCR III, 335), and of the Lutheran doctrine of Heilsgewißheit (salvation assurance). Both of these, he thinks, make the human person the centre of gravity again. Instead, stability is to be sought only in another divine action—‘the new, particular grace of divine preservation, of the abiding presence of Jesus Christ 105 106 107

Hauerwas, Character and the Christian Life, 138. Ibid., 172. Hamer, L’Occasionalisme Theólogique de Karl Barth, 170.


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through the Holy Spirit’ (UCR III, 331)—not in ‘the depths of our self-consciousness’ (UCR III, 339). Assurance, in other words, is not to be thought of as Glaubensgewißheit (i.e. an assurance implicit in, or given with, human faith itself) so much as the assurance of God’s faithfulness (constantia) which, since this faithfulness is an act of divine grace, always involves God overcoming human unfaithfulness (UCR III, 337). The required ‘state of grace’, then, is not a human condition but a completely reliable divine act. Stadland has argued that, because he shifts assurance into the doctrine of God like this, Barth ‘hasn’t the slightest understanding of the problem of Heilsgewißheit’, there being ‘no noetic reality corresponding to this ontological state of affairs’.108 And yet, Barth’s purposes are not to engender anxiety over salvation. To the contrary, he thinks that such anxiety remains inevitable if assurance is sought in a human constant: ‘Heilsgewißheit is the type of certainty where man must always confess his uncertainty; it is based only on the power of the promise and command which proceed from its object, in spite of human uncertainty. Then it is legitimate; then it is Heilsgewißheit’ (UCR III, 340). Nevertheless, it is this question of the grounding of what occurs in the human subject in correspondence to grace that is the main issue in Barth’s soteriology. Here he resorts to a concept from the doctrine of God—divine faithfulness—to provide the stable condition in which faith can be grounded without finding its assurance in its own act. And yet, because (as we observed earlier) the entire soteriology is constructed around a notion of divine ‘calling’—i.e. the eschatological Word by which the human subject is repeatedly grasped anew—the problem of finding a stable ground re-emerges again and again. It is with this in mind that we turn, finally, to Barth’s doctrine of the sacrament.

6.4 SACRAMENTAL THEOLOGY In the final part of this chapter, I consider the sacramental theology Barth develops in the doctrine of reconciliation, and which he later 108

Stadtland, Eschatologie und Geschichte, 110, 112.

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introduces into the doctrine of revelation in the Christliche Dogmatik. I shall concentrate especially on baptism, the sacrament in which Barth is most interested. As we shall see, it is by no means true that sacramental theology plays only a peripheral role in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics, as it arguably would in the later volumes of the Church Dogmatics. In fact, Barth uses the sacrament to address a dilemma that I have already drawn attention to on a number of occasions. He thinks of the human subject as being (re-)constituted eschatologically by the Word of God in an act of faith (Glaubensakt), an existential venture (Wagnis). And yet, this eschatological anthropology constantly confronts the risk that the act is only superficially evoked by grace: in reality, it can easily be seen as a self-willed, self-originating human decision. In that case, it would simply be an existential version of the same kind of ‘naturalizing’ of grace that Barth was objecting to in the first place, of a humanity without any serious grounding in God at all. Barth quickly recognizes the dilemma in his dogmatic theology, and in the brief period I am examining, he looks to the sacrament of baptism to resolve it. Baptized Christians are always those who find themselves already marked by grace, as they engage themselves in action.

6.4.1 Baptism and Revelation As he came to the conclusion of his lectures on Schleiermacher, Barth made the statement that Schleiermacher’s theology called for a ‘theological revolution’, a change of direction, which would involve ‘a reconstruction at precisely the place we have seen him repeatedly rushing past, with that astonishing obstinacy, artfulness and audacity of his’.109 This ‘place’ is the moment of revelation. Barth’s early attempt at an alternative to Schleiermacher is made through a doctrine of the Word of God as the place at which the religious subject is broken down, and summoned to respond to the presence of God. Thus, the Word—whether this is the preached Word, the Word of Scripture, or Jesus himself—may be thought of as a ‘divine external 109

Barth, TS, 462.


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[go¨ttliches Außerhalb]’ (UCR III, 203). It is God himself addressing me, and so calling me out of myself to respond to him. My movement towards God, in other words, is initiated by God. The religious synthesis is broken apart in this moment, as I discover that my relation to God is ‘eschatological’: not a possession, but a gift, real only in the giving. I am no longer the centre of gravity in the relation. And yet, Barth continues, if the asymmetry that has now been established is not to restabilize itself again, what must correspond to this Word in me is not simply my hearing of it, but a ‘prior hearing’ (Vorho¨ren) of the Spirit in me, to which my hearing is subsequent (a Nachho¨ren). Revelation must maintain its monergistic character from start to finish, in the objective and subjective dimensions of which it is comprised. What begins as a ‘divine external’, must correlate in me with a ‘divine internal [go¨ttliches Innerhalb]’ (UCR III, 203). It might be said at this point that any further attempt to explain the revelation event would be superfluous, and perhaps involve catastrophic abstractions. When in his epistle to the Romans Paul refers to the ‘Word of faith which we preach’ as being ‘near you’ (Kªª ı; Rom. 10.8), it is precisely this proximity which makes further inquiry unnecessary. Because Christ is preached through the apostolic Word, faith does not need to ask, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’ or ‘Who will descend into the abyss?’ (Rom. 10.6–7). The Word–faith relation is sufficient grounding for the Christian life. Indeed, in UCR I, Barth insists that that relation itself is the ‘subjective possibility of revelation’, since both Word and faith are acts of the Holy Spirit. Moreover, he takes care to distinguish this from a Catholic position, in which the act of faith is embedded within a doctrine of the sacrament. Take, for example, the following statement, from a fairly recent Catholic doctrine of baptism: ‘One’s own decision is an accepting of and a letting oneself be accepted into the decision that has already been made.’110 It is this sort of sacramentalist understanding of the Christian ‘decision’ that Barth is objecting to in UCR I, because it seems to him to reverse the order of faith and sacrament, and in so doing to objectify grace: 110

Ratzinger, ‘Baptism, faith and membership in the church: The unity of structure and content’, 37.

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Faith is the condition for receiving the sacrament properly and effectively, receiving the sacrament is not the condition for faith, even if right faith will not neglect to do this . . . The correlate of the Word is precisely faith, not the ‘opus operatum’ of sacramental reception. [UCR I, 208–9]

Behind these words lies the worry that giving sacrament priority over faith will threaten what John Webster has called ‘the non-transferable character of faith’,111 stifling the vitality of the relation with God beneath a sub-personal mediation of grace. For that reason, Barth decides quite deliberately and explicitly to leave baptism out of his doctrine of the ‘subjective possibility of revelation’ (UCR I, } 7.1). Some three years later, however, in the equivalent passages from the Christliche Dogmatik, Barth has ostensibly changed his mind. Whereas in 1924 introducing the sacraments into the doctrine of revelation would apparently have meant ‘the liquidation of Protestantism’ (UCR I, 208), the corresponding paragraph in the 1927 dogmatics concludes with a subsection on baptism as the ‘epistemological foundation of grace’.112 Examining this evolution affords an insight into the tensions at play within the deeper structural choices Barth takes in his early dogmatic theology. In one of the early paragraphs of the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics, Barth argued that the ‘correlation’ between revelation and faith had to imply a second ‘correlation’ within anthropology itself, between faith and human ‘questioning’ (Fragen). This refers back to our earlier discussion of Barth’s doctrine of assurance. Barth wants to avoid at all costs any ‘substantial’ transfer of grace, which would establish grace as a continuous reality within the human subject: ‘in order to be genuine certainty, our certainty about God must lie and remain in God’s hand’ (UCR I, 81). However, he notes, this then means that faith rests on an infinite regression, without any deeper point of reference than the act of faith itself: ‘we can only believe— even that our faith is true faith is something we can only believe’ (UCR I, 81).113 This is where the difficulty arises for a dogmatics 111

Webster, Barth’s Ethics of Reconciliation, 170. Barth, Chr. Dog., } 17.3. In the margins of Barth’s manuscript at this point he makes the following note: ‘Infinite dialectic? Infinite parable of the eternal. God!’ (UCR I, 81) He seems to think, in other words, that the infinite regression of faith upon itself might be the anthropological image, or analogy, of divine infinity. 112 113


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which seeks to maintain both the monergistic causality of grace and its interpersonal character as a relation between two acting subjects, God and humanity. In the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics and Chr. Dog. Barth opts for a dialectical structure, focusing on the point of relation, insofar as the most obvious alternative to religious subjectivism seems to be to concentrate on the moment at which the selfgrounding identity of the human subject is systematically undermined (and eschatologically reconstructed in God). Yet this soon results in the dilemma that to deprive faith of any inner foundation other than an infinite regression (which is no foundation at all) risks making faith into a self-originating act, defined by reference to its own decisions, rather than oriented towards a prior electing act of God. As he says in the Chr. Dog., ‘The Holy Spirit acts upon our existence so that, apart from the Spirit himself, we would in fact be referred to our own existence, our existence as sinners, in asking about the certainty of our knowledge of that action.’114 In other words, to maintain the eschatological spontaneity of Christian existence, and so to refuse to provide an essentialist doctrine of the subject in whom this existence occurs, is to run the gauntlet of a regressio ad absurdum when accounting for the origins of the existential Christian act. In the Chr. Dog. Barth introduces baptism to resolve this problem. It allows him to provide an objective grounding within the individual for the act of faith, without abstracting from the dialogical structure of revelation on which this dogmatics too is built. Because of baptism, he writes, I have the right and obligation ‘to take myself seriously in the greater or lesser confidence I have in [grace]’,115 yet without ‘the autopistia of my self-consciousness [becoming] the basis and measure of all certainty’.116 Thus, Barth has reversed the position he took in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics which allowed the Word-faith relation to be the sole ground of revelation. Human faith is now being grounded here a second time, in the sacramental ‘Word’, which gives the act of faith a further ‘epistemological ground’. For this argument to work, however, Barth needs to develop a particular brand of sacramental theology. 114 115

Barth, Chr. Dog., 394. 116 Ibid., 396. Ibid., 393.


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Baptism must have sufficient ontological value to make a difference, yet sacramental grace may not be so realistic that it overrides the venturesome aspect of faith, established by the theology of the Word.

6.4.2 Sacrament It has become common for recent theology to note a ‘ritualistic’ trend in modern sacramental practice, where the sacraments have lost their connection with, and formative significance for, the Christian life. It is this observation which has led, for example, Joseph Ratzinger, to recommend that ‘a theology of the sacraments ought to avoid abstraction and remain as close as possible to the liturgical event itself’.117 In the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics, Barth notes a rather similar trend occurring in the Protestant church. From the time of the Reformers, he claims, sacramental theology has been treated as a subsection of the doctrine of the church, rather than being tied in directly to the acts of divine grace in which the Christian life was originally rooted. This was not a problem so long as it was acknowledged that the whole of soteriology was the immediate result of the eternal act of divine election. Nevertheless, when federal theology (in the seventeenth century) began to think of salvation in historical terms, the primordial importance of election—and with it, the significance of the sacraments—became obscured. Now prised apart from the sources of grace, baptism and communion came to be regarded as just two of many other possible acts of allegiance, whereby the church constituted her own identity (see UCR II, 381–2; III, 200–1). And yet, notwithstanding the similarity of diagnosis, Barth’s approach to rectifying the situation is the exact reverse of Ratzinger’s proposal that the liturgical event ought to become the focus of attention. Rather than concentrating on the event of baptism itself—and so, for example, attempting to draw out the symbolism of the waters, of the neophyte’s submersion, and setting all this within a broader catechetical process of Christian enculturation— Barth begins by deliberately abstracting from all this. Paradoxically, the practical significance of baptism, its sacramental meaning, is 117

Ratzinger, ‘Baptism, faith and membership in the church’, 28.


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achieved not by setting Christian identity within this event but keeping it outside it. Although Barth’s doctrine of baptism is far from being ‘communitarian’, nor is his account anything like the ‘individualisme de´vot’ which the Nouvelle theólogie would identify.118 For Barth’s concept of grace does not trade on the inner repose of an individual soul in communion with God, but on a Word which the individual hears announced by the church, in its preaching and its sacramental life. Barth wishes, then, to rectify a trend in modern Protestant practice by restoring baptism to its constitutive place in the Christian life. On the other hand, he will not reach this goal by any form of reification of the sacramental elements or performance. The sacraments are not causa efficiantes vel instrumenta of the Spirit, nor are they possessed of vis conferrendi gratiam; for ‘there is only one bearer of the Spirit, namely Christ in heaven’ (UCR III, 208, 210). Part of the force of making baptism the ‘epistemological foundation’ of grace is negative: baptism is no more than that. Grace is only ever a Word-event: Word and sacrament therefore lie on different planes. Only when this is seen can the actual value of the sacrament be recognized. When it comes to communicating grace, the Word is monarch; it has nothing beside it. It is true in itself and effective through itself. In the question of how man comes to be reconciled, the sacrament can play no role. [UCR III, 208–9]

If grace is to be correlated only with the Word, what role then can the sacrament play? The sacrament is not effective, Barth insists, through any ‘psychic magic’ (UCR III, 225) attributable to the elements themselves, but because of the dominical command which instituted baptism. First of all, then, Christians do not baptize because they perceive in the water some symbolic value, but simply as a response to Jesus’ orders. Baptism is ‘a usage of the church appropriated and respected in obedience’ (UCR III, 228). Barth is happy to agree with historical critics that the instituting command cannot be traced historically back to Jesus. Indeed, he takes this finding to be a support for his argument, since it ensures that the command to baptize is not being taken from ‘history’ but from Scripture, the Word of the risen Jesus 118

de Lubac, Catholicisme: Les aspects sociaux du dogme, 73.

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Christ (UCR III, 229–30). This means that baptism is neither voluntary nor optional for the church. Moreover, it follows that any account of baptism which seeks its motivation elsewhere than in the divine order given by Jesus is to be thought of as a kind of polytheism (i.e. obedience to a different god): baptism is ‘absolutely not one symbol among many others, any more than God is God among many other gods’ (UCR III, 216). In other words, like revelation the origins of the sacrament lie entirely within God: ‘its particular particularity [besondere Besonderheit] is already there as a fact [faktisch]’ (UCR III, 227). Baptism is objectively required of the church by a divine order (necessitas praecepti), and so tied in to the divine economy of grace; indeed, because it is a command, it is entirely commensurate with the moral dimensions of that economy, which Barth has been stressing throughout. ‘The baptismal requirement arises because a person (or his parents) wishes to obey the divine command in the prescribed manner, and in that way to receive the divine promise of his being in grace’ (UCR III, 214). And yet, that does not mean that baptism simply becomes a locus within Christian ethics. At this point, there is a marked difference between Barth’s position here and the Verantwortlichkeitstaufe later in CD IV/4.119 In a short, but important passage (UCR III, } 30.3), Barth steps back to reflect upon the significance of what he terms the ‘sacramental sphere’. He describes it as a special ‘place’ of its own, neither identical with (objective) grace nor with the (subjective) human response to grace. The sacrament is like a ‘dependent territory’, he insists, situated off the ‘mainland’ (grace itself). Indeed, this particular location brings it tangibly within concrete human reality, 119 On Barth’s later doctrine of baptism, see esp. J. Webster, Barth’s Ethics of Reconciliation, 148ff., and Ju¨ngel, ‘Karl Barths Lehre von der Taufe’. The difference between Ju¨ngel’s own doctrine of baptism and Barth’s (both here and in CD IV/4) is brought about by a slightly different understanding of the idea of, or use of the term, ‘responsibility’. For Barth, a ‘responsible’ doctrine of baptism is one that stresses it as ‘response’ to a divine order; for Ju¨ngel, responsibility towards baptism is to be understood (in the terms of Sachkritik) primarily as critical responsibility to a Christian tradition which is simply given, but without any institutional basis in the divine will (see Ju¨ngel, ‘Zur Kritik des sakramentalen Versta¨ndnisses der Taufe’, 295– 6, 307). This difference reflects a more fundamental divergence in theological approach between a trustfulness of the church-scriptural witness to revelation and a critical acceptance of it.


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without it simply becoming identical with that reality: it is ‘a consecrated, sanctified province within the earthly-human-sinful sphere of our existence, a bordered space which is a place of quite specific functions: divine sign-giving and human venture on that basis’ (UCR III, 234–5). Barth is anxious to secure not just the difference between sacrament and grace, the subordination of the one to the other, but also as tight a connection as possible between them. For drawing the connection between grace and sacrament will help ensure that the concept of grace in his dogmatics is truly distinct from the kind of subjectivism, or individualism, in liberal Protestant Christianity. In other words, there is a ‘striking similarity’ (UCR III, 235) between the sacrament and the modern doctrine of religion, in that the latter is a sustained effort to make theological sense of ‘the problem of God’s immanence’ (UCR III, 236). And yet, the difference is crucial: in the sacrament something is ‘given to me, precisely in the earthly-sinful-human sphere in which I myself am to be found, in the world of objective consciousness’ (UCR III, 233). Rather than abstracting from human reality and positing the idea of religious feeling as an ideal point in the human subject, the sacrament occurs at a particular place within the tangible, external reality in which we find ourselves, where ‘everything is fragile and questionable’ (UCR III, 234). And so, Barth argues, the sacrament may be thought of as the analogy of the contingency of revelation: it describes an immanence of grace in the world without that collapsing into a monistic identification. It depicts grace ‘in the world of objective consciousness’—i.e. in the world I really experience, in my world—and yet in a world that is also extra me, external to my subjective consciousness. Therefore, in the case of baptism, Barth simply denies the apparent difficulty faced by sacramental theology: that its contingency—the fact that it only happens once in a person’s life—is something that must be overcome if baptism is to be practically relevant.120 Quite the 120 He alludes to four possible ways in which the contingency of baptism seems to disqualify it from being part of the workings of grace: the idea that water (a natural element) could be significant for salvation (a supernatural event); the fact that an imperfect minister can participate in effecting salvation; that the practice is inherited from tradition rather than derived on rational grounds; that the baptismal tradition is, in any case, part of a general religious phenomenology (UCR III, 220–1).

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opposite, Barth argues that this is an intrinsic part of its hermeneutical significance, in two important respects. First (and disconcertingly, in view of his better-known and contrary statements in CD IV/4) infant baptism: rather than being the indicator of a creeping ritualism in medieval Christianity, the development of this practice is interpreted as integral to the very logic of baptism. ‘Baptism is always infant baptism’, Barth insists, insofar as this expels any ‘secret synergism’ from the doctrine of grace (UCR III, 218). In analogy to the humanity of Jesus Christ, in which my personal reality is contained, but with which it is not identical, I was present at my own baptism, yet in an equally important sense I was not: ‘Our baptism is fortunately something we have not experienced!’, Barth maintains (UCR I, 81). In baptism, it is apparent both that I am the recipient of divine grace, and that in grace God ‘works everything on his own [allein alles wirkt]’ (UCR III, 204); he is sole cause (alleinwirksam). As a child, I was present in my baptism, though as a pure recipient, rather than as an agent. The second aspect is linked to this, and pursues it further. The question is how an event occurring just once in the past can have any impact on the present. It is here that Barth’s conclusions are markedly different from ‘participational’ baptismal theologies. Rather than setting the Christian life within the sacramental event, and thus setting ethics within sacramental practice, Barth takes the opposite tack. What makes baptism practically significant is its very singularity (Einmaligkeit), i.e. the fact that it was a unique event in my past, and that it remains in the past: ‘I was baptized back there and then, but not subsequently. The sign of my state of grace is located in an imperceptibly far-off solitariness, in an ever-increasing distance from my here-and-now’ (UCR III, 221). Again, this externality is not to be thought of as part of a mechanistic or ritualistic view of grace: what is ‘back there and then’ is a sign, rather than grace itself. It needs to be understood in terms of the doctrines of Christ’s priesthood and justification, discussed previously. In that light, the attempt to ‘actualize’ baptism (Barth has in mind the practice of confirmation) is to be regarded as the religiously sinful attempt, on the part of individuals wishing to mediate their own relation to God, to replace Christ’s work extra nos:


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If we can see that [the repetition of the sacrifice of Golgotha] is not just superfluous but wicked, that Christ died for our sins Kç v Æ (cf. Heb. 9.28), that the foundation, the real foundation of our reconciliation is laid down— and no one can lay another foundation (cf. 1 Cor. 3.11)—then its epistemological foundation, its symbol, its memorial sign, must evidently also be something singular, unique in our life, unrepeatable, not needing of any confirmation; except that which belongs to the thing itself: a growing temporal distance, a there-and-then. Baptism is the signum of this res precisely as the scandalous there-and-then. [UCR III, 223]

In short, the very impact made by baptism depends on its sheer externality and pastness. It is precisely because it presents to my memory a picture of myself-as-object—both as the object of divine grace, and as object to myself, in a past which is always receding away from me—that baptism is effective. I am present at the event, although not as a subject. This peculiar suggestion depends upon a perspective that Ju¨ngel has sought to make philosophically plausible in recent times, in his notion of ‘privative effective history’. What Ju¨ngel means by this is that the past can make its presence felt not simply by bearing down upon the present, ‘handing itself down intact to the future . . . in constantly new historical mediations’,121 but also by the very process of ‘withdrawal’ which wrenches it apart from the present; so that ‘sometimes a piece of the past (a person, situation, event) is effective only as it recedes further and further into the distance, whether for good or ill. In such a case it is the withdrawal that has effects.’122 Ju¨ngel’s point is that the familiar Enlightenment dilemma about how a contingent past event can have enduring practical significance without a mediating act from the present—a mediation which would, of course, only render the past practically insignificant again—is a red herring. Rather than being an impediment to it being meaningful for the present, the pastness of the past can be seen as intrinsic to its presence, to the modality of its presence. It is in this sense that, for Barth, the ‘growing temporal distance’ between myself and the event of my baptism belong to the essence and meaning of that event. Barth drives his point home with the 121 122

Ju¨ngel, ‘The effectiveness of Christ withdrawn’, 230. Ibid., 223.

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rather exaggerated claim that the protesting cries of the infant are to be perceived as the indispensable note of the ‘dogmatic clarity’ of baptism (UCR III, 219). The deeper point here is not the extolling of an infantile, passive kind of relation to God, but making human ontology-in-grace God’s concern alone. In short, the effectiveness of the sacrament is that of a word (signifier), albeit one with pronounced visibility, which therefore reaches the Christian ‘in the sphere of his being-human-and-sinner’ as ‘an invitation and command to take seriously his relatedness to the sphere [of grace where God is subject]’ (UCR III, 234). Baptism makes Christians ‘ansprechbar’:123 they become responsible for their Christian identity, and so may be addressed (both by the sacrament itself and by the words of others) as ones who belong to Christ. Thus, by associating the practical meaningfulness of baptism with its pastness, Barth manages both to correlate it with a genuinely free responsive act (a ‘venture’— UCR III, 234), and to ensure that this act is not self-generative, because it is rooted in a prevenient sacramental ontology. Furthermore, it is important that sacraments are not just ‘signifiers’ (like words) but visible ‘signifiers’. For it is through that quality (in which sacraments are different from words) that they serve also to indicate that God’s Word is not a projection of my consciousness, but external to me, and therefore wholly different from myself. It is because of this that Barth insists on the relation between Word (grace) and sign being one between ‘parallels’. The point is neatly expressed in the following hermeneutical rule: ‘For understanding the sacrament as such, everything depends precisely upon sign and reality not just being quite strictly distinguished but also quite strictly connected, not just quite strictly connected but also quite strictly distinguished’ (UCR III, 344). It is this parallelism that has often been criticized in Barth’s later doctrine of baptism, for these two planes—sign and grace—seem almost entirely to come apart.124

123

Ju¨ngel’s term, ‘Barths Lehre von der Taufe’, 284. The criticism is expressed in various ways. Mottu, for example, argues that Barth confines his attention to ‘sacramental hermeneutics’, i.e. to a perspective which inevitably implies a distinction between divine and human action, and argues that this ought to have been supplemented by a ‘sacramental pragmatics’ in which the connection between grace and sacrament would inevitably appear to greater advan124


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Here, however, Barth is intent upon securing the union-in-distinction between sign and reality.125 The linking of sacrament and grace becomes essential in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics because Barth needs to secure the point that revelation is a contingent event in the life of the human subject. Indeed, Barth goes so far as to say that the sacraments are the point where revelation becomes really tangible in the Christian life: It is precisely the sacrament that is the place where revelation immerses itself, so to speak, within universal religious history, the religious history of unreconciled man, assuming the garb of an earthly-human order, and so becoming an analogy for the paradox of the Word becoming man and becoming Scripture, anonymously, as it were, and indeed pseudononymously, hidden to unseeing eyes and unhearing ears. [UCR III, 342]

Equally, though, it is because the sacrament has the function of indicating the contingency of grace that the sacramental event (washing with water, consuming of bread and wine) must remain only parallel to grace itself, never identical with it. If any change of substance occurs here—if the sacraments lose any of their materiality—they are rendered incapable of signifying that grace is truly an event for me. The point is made clearly in Barth’s discussion of Jesus’ baptism in his commentary on John’s Gospel (John 1.29–34). Although there is no report of John the Baptist actually baptizing Jesus in this pericope, he nevertheless witnesses Jesus’ baptism by the Spirit, an event which, tage (‘Les Sacrements selon Karl Barth et Eberhard Ju¨ngel’, 49). Ju¨ngel demonstrates that what is missing from Barth’s account is a hermeneutical ‘reflex’ of Spirit baptism back onto water baptism: the metaphor of ‘washing’ indicates something about the work of the Spirit, but the ‘washing’ from sin performed by the Spirit has no hermeneutical value in explaining the church’s practice of baptizing (Ju¨ngel, ‘Karl Barths Lehre von der Taufe’, 263–8). 125 In part, this intention may be put down to Barth’s differences with Zwingli, whose flatly ethical interpretation of the sacraments seemed to him to threaten the fellowship God at the heart of the Christian ethos: ‘There is certainly a mystery for Zwingli, the mystery of God, Christ, the Spirit in his relation to us, but not several mysteries, i.e. no mysterious relations to God on our side—no mysteries in the sense (well-known to the history of religions) of possibilities and realities of communion between God and humanity’ (Barth, TZ, 98). Indeed, as Barth intimated at the time to one of his students, in the background to his objections against Zwingli is a dissatisfaction with the idea of ‘immediacy’, by which Herrmann Kutter was grounding a religious-socialist ethics (Barth, Vortra¨ge und kleinere Arbeiten: 1922–1925, 248–9).

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like Christian baptism, includes a material sign, the descent of the dove (John 1.32). In Barth’s reading, everything rests on interpreting the Spirit’s descent ‘as a dove’ (‰ æØ æa) not figuratively, but in the most material sense possible: ‘ æØ æa does not mean that [John] saw something like a dove but that, in fact, he really saw a dove physically and, on the basis of the sign given to him in this dove, the Spirit’s presence (present in Jesus, that is).’126 And so, Barth takes the verbs in the same verse (ŒÆ Æ ÆØ . . . Ø K ÆP ) as referring not just to the Spirit but, first of all to the dove—and so, because of the tangibility of the sign, to the Spirit as well. In short, the spiritual and natural processes are operating in parallel; and that does not mean a denial of sacramental grace: ‘Therefore, there is a sacrament’, Barth concludes.127 Moreover, this means that to lose sight of the wholly physical descent and coming to rest of the dove is to lose sight of the spiritual reality it refers to. Any notion of a transformation in the ‘substance’ of the sacramental sign ends up in a loss of meaning, even preventing it from functioning at all as a sacrament: the moment the natural reality is altered, it cannot serve the spiritual reality it is to indicate. This is apparent too in Barth’s doctrine of the Lord’s Supper (UCR III, } 33.2) which, again, Barth thinks in terms of corresponding divine and human acts. As Barth describes it, the particular rationale of the sacrament stems from the problem of continuity in grace, discussed earlier. By virtue of its regularity, the Supper demonstrates, in a way that baptism cannot (being a strictly one-off event), that God is ‘not just the God of the moment, but the God of the series of all moments as well’ (UCR III, 342–3). And so, frequent repetition is as much a part of its meaning, as singularity was of the meaning of baptism: for the Supper is to be the sign of ‘the abiding presence of Christ through the Holy Spirit . . . the abiding of Christ in us’ (UCR III, 342). Furthermore, because the permanency of grace is not a settled ontology, but a constantly renewed act of divine faithfulness, the knowledge (or assurance) that corresponds to it must take the form of gratitude (eucharistia). The Supper, therefore, signifies both divine constancy and this gratitude towards God within the Christian 126 127

Barth, Johannesevangelium, 174. Ibid.


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community: ‘The community eats of this bread and drinks of this cup in solemn confirmation of its praise of the Lord, its gratitude towards him, and its fellowship with him’ (UCR III, 341). Here too, the efficiency of the sign depends upon its parallel simultaneity with the spiritual reality. The lexical marker of this is to be found in the German ‘wie . . . , so . . . ’: ‘Just as the elect person eats the bread and drinks the cup, so Christ’s body and blood become his very own life’ (UCR III, 348). The meaning is lost, in other words, if the Supper is any less than a meal in which food and drink are consumed. Barth thinks this loss is inevitable if the sacrament is understood as anything more than ‘a solemn confirmation of the communication of salvation which occurs simultaneously (simul) through Word and faith—but in unconditional independence from it’ (UCR III, 212). Where divine grace is made identical with eucharistic celebration, in a ‘bread-wine-Christ, so to speak’ (UCR III, 345), the reassuring qualities of the Supper inevitably evaporate into the logic of increasingly frequent and anxious repetitions. Finally, we see the same parallelism in Barth’s doctrine of baptism. By comparison with his later teaching on baptism, Barth’s description of baptism in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics is less reticent about drawing out ‘the meaningfulness of its orderly execution’ (UCR III, 230), i.e. the way in which the sacramental event itself may be aligned with grace. Barth is clear that what occurs in baptism is not simply an individual act of Christian obedience to a divine command, but an action performed vicariously (vikarierend) by the church, as it douses the neophyte in water. And yet, he continues, although this action is meaningful, the meaning refers to the Trinitarian formula pronounced over the neophyte by the minister, according to the command issued in Matt. 28.19: ‘Baptizo te in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritu Sancti’. The water is significant here as a cleansing agent; yet what is important is what is washed away: not sin, but personal identity, one’s name, to be replaced with God’s name: The words ‘Baptizo te in nomen . . . ’ are ambiguous. On the one hand, they express the vicariousness of churchly action, and on the other they explain this action, or rather define what the action of water baptism means: man is submerged into God’s name. He loses his own name. [UCR III, 231–2]

In short, the baptismal act performed by the church is not arbitrary, but intrinsically significant to the sacrament.

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And yet, because the meaning of the washing is not the removal of sin but of a ‘name’, and signing of the neophyte in God’s name, the sacramental economy belongs to the church’s ministry of the Word. The church here is not empowered to be a mediator of grace, whereas the Word of God otherwise remains an impossibility for it. This means that the hermeneutical significance of the sacrament does not extend only to the ecclesia audiens but to the ecclesia docens as well. It is a sign of grace to the individual, and of the meaning of Christian ministry to the church. Once again, the effectiveness of this sign depends upon the sheer materiality of the sacrament. Because the sermon is the Word addressed by God, it is distinguished from mere ‘philosophy’. It is this distinction—the sanctification of preaching for that task—that is indicated by the sacraments which ‘surround’ (umgeben) the ministry of the Word. Their ‘eventfulness’ indicates the event that preaching too is to be: Christ (who is the A and O of his people) and the grace of the Holy Spirit, calling and confirming, are as real here and now [i.e. in the sermon] as the water of baptism and the bread and wine of the Supper. That is what [the church’s] word says. And because of that it is not uttered as a profane word, a philosophy . . . but surrounded by the sacrament—pointing back to baptism and forwards to the Supper—precisely in that sacramental sphere which indicates that the perfect presence and reality of God speaking his Word is the freedom with which it remains his own Word in this presence and reality. [UCR III, 369]

By virtue of their materiality, then, the sacraments are a sign of the task and limit of Christian preaching. They indicate both that preaching is required to be an event of God’s Word, and—because of the sheer eloquence of the visible Word—represent the limits of human eloquence in communicating divine grace. *** There is real ambiguity about the way in which Barth develops his sacramental theology in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics. It is worked out in response to the need both to avoid a self-constructivist ethic by providing objective grounds for the act of faith, i.e. to articulate a sufficiently contingent concept of revelation to resist the capacity of the individual human subject to reincorporate grace back within


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itself; and to ensure that the objective grounding does not cut across the freedom of faith, which Barth regards as being essential to that act. That is ultimately the reason why the lines between the sacrament and grace itself may never be permitted to cross. As Webster has pointed out, Barth shares with Zwingli ‘an acute sense of the potential losses entailed by a theology of mediation’:128 the loss of God’s freedom in his presence, and of the human character of sacramental actions.129 Indeed, when after the 1930s, and for largely political reasons, Barth’s energies become devoted to opposing natural theology and Volksreligion, it is not surprising that the parallels drift much further apart. As far as possible, the event of grace in Christ, and the Christian life that event calls forth, will be dissociated from the pretensions of the national church to be the appointed mediator of grace. At the same time, Barth’s concerns will move away from the grounding of the eschatological subject, because the ground of the Christian life will already be given in the Christological focus of his dogmatics. In the meantime, however, he continues to explore the potential of a more realist theology of baptism, which will reach an apogee in the Christliche Dogmatik. And yet, it is already apparent on theological grounds why this sacramental theology will not quite serve the purposes to which Barth wishes to put it. The significance of the sacrament lay in its capacity to contain the act of faith within a prior objective determination of my existence by the Holy Spirit. Thus, it was thought, that act would have originated in God, and so outside itself. However, it could never be possible to provide entirely unambiguous objective grounds of Christian eschatological existence, as Barth seems to want to do here. Doing so would immediately undermine the venturesome spontaneity that is of the essence of that new existence when it is regenerated by God’s grace.

128

Webster, Barth’s Earlier Theology, 37. The same idea that an alteration of the physical substance of the elements directly undermines their ability to signify originates in Calvin. If all that remains of the bread is its external appearance (accidens) ‘that figure of bread is nothing but a mask to prevent our eyes from seeing the flesh’ (Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, IV.17.13). 129

Conclusion: Grace and Eschatology I have been arguing that the heart of Barth’s dogmatic theology in Go¨ttingen is a dialogical concept of revelation: the eschatological encounter between human beings and God, in God’s Word, is the point from which his theology takes its bearings. Everything else is an abstraction from this. Indeed, insofar as theology itself is unable to communicate this Word, it is repeatedly forced to face up to this abstraction. In the final chapter of the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics, Barth looks back on the dogmatics and puts it like this: dogmatics is centred, quite simply, on grace, on the reconciliation between humanity and God. ‘It knows nothing about God and humankind except on the basis of grace. It may define these two entities, “God” and “man”, no differently than how they must be defined because of grace’ (UCR III, 397). Yet grace, for Barth, is not merely a principle—not even the principle of divine love or forgiveness; it is ‘the Yes of the eternal divine love addressed to man as God’s Word’ (UCR III, 403; italics mine). To say that grace is ‘address’, or ‘Word’, is to say that the ‘Yes’ that grace is, is not a fact, a state of affairs, a theory, a metaphysic, so much as a relation: the relation God himself initiates and enters into with humanity, a relation he has on his terms. It is grace, understood as this relation, which is the ‘presupposition and illumination’ (UCR III, 397) of everything dogmatics has to say. Precisely for that reason, however, Barth thinks that dogmatics cannot make grace its presupposition without also presupposing ‘that this relation must first be created and given . . . that this mystery is not yet revealed’ (UCR III, 397). For grace is ‘not a self-evident relation between God and humankind, not a given-ness, but a gift; not


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a revealed, but a self-revealing mystery’ (UCR III, 397). What Hinrich Stoevesandt has called ‘the venturesome character of undertaking dogmatics’1 derives from this paradoxical double-presupposition that Barth wants to maintain. Dogmatics must presuppose grace, when it speaks of God and humankind; yet in so doing, it must also presuppose that grace cannot be taken for granted—cannot, in that sense, be pre-supposed. The Go¨ttingen Dogmatics is the venture to do theology under the conditions set by this double-presupposition. The impact of these conditions can be seen most clearly, perhaps, in Barth’s arrangement of the two chapters, the doctrines of God and humankind, which compose the second volume of the dogmatics. Each doctrine consists of six main paragraphs (UCR II, }} 15–20; and }} 21–6 respectively), which Barth bases on the loci of Heppe’s Reformed Dogmatics. He changes Heppe’s order around,2 however, gathering the six paragraphs/loci together as a single conceptual movement within each chapter. In both the doctrine of God and the doctrine of humankind, this movement builds towards a climax in the fourth paragraph: ‘The election of grace’ (} 18) and ‘God and humankind in the covenant’ (} 24). And yet, these paragraphs are not simply further developments of the argument within the doctrines of God and anthropology. Election (predestination) and covenant are formal pointers towards the theological ‘presupposition’ around which the whole exposition is built in each case. [A]s the constitutive part of the doctrine of God, the doctrine of predestination is the highly acute reminder that the attempt made in Christian preaching and dogmatics to paraphrase the object designated by the term ‘God’ is under no circumstances physics or metaphysics, or theory—a theatrical drama we watch unfold from a safe seat in the auditorium. It sets us back on the stage, as ones who are utterly involved, should we at any point have removed ourselves from it while describing God’s essence and attributes. God is the living God, God acts—towards human beings, to be specific. [UCR II, 213]

1

Stoevesandt, ‘Die Go¨ttinger Dogmatikvorlesung’, 96. For a table setting out the parallels and differences between the paragraphs of the GD and Heppe’s Reformed Dogmatics, see McCormack, A Scholastic of a Higher Order, 564–5. 2

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Predestination is not just another locus in the doctrine of God. It is the point—the presupposition—from which every statement about God is made, the point at which God is not regarded as abstract, but is found acting with human beings. In fact, election is not a doctrine at all. It is the vacancy left in the doctrine of God for the reality presupposed by that doctrine. ‘It’s the difference between painting and the plastic arts; or, put differently, it’s as if a painting were suddenly to step out of its frame and approach us’ (UCR II, 171). And yet, this ‘presupposition’—this empty space left for the reality of election (grace) itself—appears after the substantial treatment of the doctrine of God (the divine essence and attributes, }} 16–17). The divine attributes themselves are constructed around the classical Reformed division between communicable and incommunicable properties (UCR II, 106ff.), a division which Barth recasts as a dialectic: ‘the communicable perfections have their power precisely by participating in the mystery of the incommunicable ones, and the truth of the incommunicable ones lies precisely in their participation in the unveiling of the communicable ones’ (UCR II, 78; thesis statement). By construing the attributes dialectically, Barth ensures that the account remains indirect, so that expressing the divine essence itself ‘is reserved for God’s own mouth, which is the ground and limit of our concepts’ (UCR II, 79; thesis statement).3 God’s gracious election itself—his relation with humankind in his Word, which is his gift, but never a given-ness—is thus the unpresupposable presupposition of the doctrine of God. A similar procedure can be identified in Barth’s theological anthropology, which likewise climaxes at the point where God and humanity are seen together: the covenant. Election and covenant, in other words, are really the same thing—the togetherness of God and humanity by an act of divine grace—seen ‘from above’ and ‘from below’ respectively. Like election, covenant is not a further step in the exposition of the doctrine of humankind, but the vacancy left open for the ‘actuality of revelation’ (UCR II, 384) itself: 3 The doctrine of the divine essence (Wesen) in UCR II, } 16 also turns around a dialectic: between divine aseity and divine personality (UCR II, 68–78), the unity is a theological aporia which will only be revealed and resolved eschatologically, in God’s presence (UCR III, 485–6).


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Both [election and covenant] actually say nothing new, whether about God or humankind . . . They simply underline in the most pregnant way that in everything that is said about God it is a matter of the God who addresses humankind as such; and in everything that is said about humankind, of the human being who is addressed as such by God. [UCR II, 384]

Here too, though, the presupposition is not placed at the beginning of the doctrine of humankind, but after two paragraphs which state materially what human beings are. Human beings are described, first, as creatures composed dialectically of a body and soul, whose unity dogmatics is unable to posit (} 22). Secondly, they are made in God’s image (} 23); but since ‘when we say imago Dei . . . we are saying Jesus Christ’ (UCR II, 376), a gap is inscribed into this concept as well, to be filled only by the reality itself. Like the doctrine of God, the doctrine of humankind ‘points beyond itself ’ (UCR II, 386–8), grace remaining its un-presupposable presupposition. ‘We are doing eschatology backwards . . . we are proceeding towards the place from which we are also coming’ (UCR II, 376). The doctrines of God and humankind can, of course, be read at face value as theological statements about God and human beings. And yet, the truth is that Barth has very little to say about God and human beings in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics. The conceptuality around which UCR II is built is simply lifted from the dogmatics textbooks he had got hold of. The originality of that volume depends almost entirely upon the way the material is then arranged. Nor does Barth want to say anything particular about God and humanity either. The dogmatics demands to be understood, in fact, as a meta-theological exercise. The material content itself is always somewhat unimportant. And for that reason we can approach it somewhat indifferently, and without criticizing it [mit einer gewissen Harmlosigkeit und Kritiklosigkeit]. Everything depends on whether we manage to set it in the light in which it then becomes more than material content, the light of God’s Word, in which the human word of the church becomes transparent, and its transcendental meaning finds voice and expression. [UCR II, 9]

This statement is a hermeneutical claim, which any interpretation needs to register. The Go¨ttingen Dogmatics can be read as a piece of positive Christian doctrine; yet it can only be understood as it was intended to be if the connection is repeatedly made between its

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doctrine and its presupposition, the presupposition of grace which theology itself may not take for granted. ‘Woe to us, were we not to understand it as grace, were we to count on it as on a penny-piece’ (UCR III, 7). *** Grace is the Yes of the eternal divine love addressed to man as God’s Word; n.b. the Yes addressed as such to fallen man, the Nevertheless! which forgives sin, declares the unholy holy, and promises life to the one trapped in the clutches of death. [UCR III, 403]

Throughout the argument I have been making, I have occasionally suggested difficulties resulting from the eschatological view of grace Barth makes the presupposition of his theology. Collectively, these difficulties could be explained in terms of the statement just cited by saying that Barth is more interested by the ‘addressed to man as God’s Word’ than by the description of the ‘Yes of the eternal divine love’, which is the content of this Word. Everything depends for him upon the content of grace—forgiveness, sanctification, promise of life—taking the form of grace: the divine address. Among the problems created by this formal focus in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics are: insufficient weight given to the ontological reality of the resurrection; a difficulty dealing with Christian ethics without human action coming apart from its theological ground; and the tendency to construe the ministerium verbi divini in contrast to the divine Word, rather than as its positive witness. As I have frequently insisted, none of this is to suggest that there is anything like a dualist or anti-historical metaphysic driving Barth’s theology. His (un-presupposable) presupposition is the historical encounter between God and humankind—revelation, in which, because this encounter is personal (and a personal encounter between two incommensurable beings at that), God and human beings are also carefully distinguished. However, in the final chapter of the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics Barth goes further. It is because this encounter is defined as grace—the act of divine mercy by which he rescues his creature— that the distinction becomes so acute, that it is even an opposition: What can be left unsaid about the unsearchable greatness of God, if he is the one whose work is grace? And what can be left unsaid about man’s misery, if


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this is the man who is dependent upon grace? It is precisely in the light of grace that God must be named as God, without reduction or diminution, and man be named as man, without hiding or improving anything about him—not in spite of the light of grace being the light of reconciliation, but precisely because of it. [UCR II, 402–3]

Unlike a Hegelian type of synthesis between God and humankind in history, the Christian doctrine of reconciliation insists on a consistently dialectical view of divine grace, a unity within an opposition. ‘The Christian synthesis is decisively distinguished from the Hegelian one by the fact that it is not a last word, that beyond it there is still eschatology, the last things, which are not to be anticipated’ (UCR III, 3). Indeed, it is because of this eschatological prospect that the dialectical opposition between God and humanity in history can be sustained so acutely. The basis of the dialectic of grace is the sure hope that God’s last Word will be an ‘unconditionally and undialectically true and valid Word’ (UCR III, 403). If I have criticized aspects of Barth’s theology at various points in my argument, these criticisms can be thought of in terms of a question concerning the elaboration of this dialectic of grace. The paradox of grace, which is at the heart of Barth’s dogmatic theology—the point at which, by an act of divine mercy, the real God and real human beings really encounter each other—is also the point at which the distinction and opposition between them becomes apparent. Indeed, it is the resulting opposition on which Barth concentrates in the Go¨ttingen Dogmatics (presupposing, of course, the un-presupposable unity). However, if that is the case, the question must be asked whether grace has really been presupposed at all, whether grace is genuinely a reality in this theology—not just in the sense of not being a concept, but in the sense of exerting some positive ontological leverage over other realities, affecting what human beings actually are (or become), and what dogmatics may actually say. Put differently, what is the force of the claim that grace is the ‘presupposition’ of dogmatics, when it is maintained that the presupposition itself is quite so resistant to being treated as such? Yet perhaps, after all, Barth’s dogmatic theology in Go¨ttingen is consistently focused around grace, even though grace appears in it only as an empty space. For it may be that it is only by consistently

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protesting against every ‘synthesis of words’ that the ‘real and concrete synthesis’ of grace itself will not be cheapened (UCR III, 401): The genuine synthesis of grace, the miracle of Bethlehem and the riddle of Golgotha, on the basis of which all reflection and speech proceed, functions as dynamite: it tears apart all syntheses which are not of equal value, which have not proceeded from [the synthesis of grace] itself. It will not tolerate the oppositions that are overcome here being seen as something harmless, which obviously does not correspond to the way they are overcome in Jesus Christ; it will not tolerate something being cheapened which, in Jesus Christ, was obviously costly. [UCR III, 402]

Bibliography Primary Literature Barth, Karl, ‘Ansatz und Absicht in Luthers Abendmahlslehre’ in Vortra¨ge und kleinere Arbeiten: 1922–1925, ed. H. v. Finze (Zurich: TVZ, 1990), 248–306; Eng. tr. in Theology and Church (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 74–111 —— ‘Biblische Fragen, Einsichten und Ausblicke’ in Das Wort Gottes und die Theologie (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1925), 70–98 —— Church Dogmatics, 14 vols. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1936–69) —— ‘Das Wort Gottes als Aufgabe der Theologie’ in Das Wort Gottes und die Theologie (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1925), 156–78 —— Das Wort Gottes und die Theologie (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1925); Eng. tr., The Word of God and The Word of Man (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957) —— Der Ro¨merbrief, 1922 (Zollikon-Zurich: Evangelischer Verlag, 1940) —— Die Auferstehung der Toten: Eine akademische Vorlesung u¨ber I Kor. 15 (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1926) —— Die christliche Dogmatik im Entwurf, ed. G. Sauter (Zurich: TVZ, 1982) —— Die Theologie Calvins, ed. H. Scholl (Zurich: TVZ, 1993); Eng. tr., The Theology of John Calvin (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995) —— Die Theologie der reformierten Bekenntnisschriften, ed. Karl BarthForschungstelle an der Universtita¨t Go¨ttingen (Zurich: TVZ, 1998); Eng. tr., The Theology of the Reformed Confessions (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002) —— Die Theologie Schleiermachers. Vorlesung Go¨ttingen 1923/24, ed. D. Ritschl (Zurich: TVZ, 1978); Eng. tr., The Theology of Schleiermacher (London: Continuum, 1982) —— Die Theologie Zwinglis, 1922/1923. Vorlesung Go¨ttingen 1922/23, ed. M. Freudenberg (Zurich: TVZ, 2004) —— Erkla¨rungen des Epheser- und des Jakobusbriefs. 1919–1929, ed. J.-M. Bohnet (Zurich: TVZ, 2009) —— Erkla¨rung des Johannesevangeliums. Vorlesung Mu¨nster 1925/26, wiederholt in Bonn, 1933, ed. W. v. Fu¨rst (Zurich: TVZ, 1999); partial Eng. tr., Witness to the Word: A commentary on John 1 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986) —— Erkla¨rung des Philipperbriefs (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1928)

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Barth, Karl, ‘Feuerbach’ (1922) in Vortra¨ge und kleinere Arbeiten: 1922–1925, ed. H. v. Finze (Zurich: TVZ, 1990), 6–13 —— ‘Fifteen answers to Professor Adolf von Harnack’ in M. Rumscheidt (ed.), Adolf von Harnack: Liberal theology at its height (London: Collins, 1989), 87–91 —— Karl Barth–Eduard Thurneysen Briefwechsel II: 1921–1930, ed. E. Thurneysen (Zurich: TVZ, 1987) —— Karl Barth–Emil Brunner Briefwechsel 1916–1966, ed. E. Busch (Zurich: TVZ, 2000) —— ‘Kirche und Theologie’ (1925) in Die Theologie und die Kirche (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1928), 302–28 —— ‘Ludwig Feuerbach’ (1926) in Theology and Church (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 217–37 —— ‘Not und Verheißung der christlichen Verku¨ndigung’ in Das Wort Gottes und die Theologie (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1925), 99–124 —— ‘Reformierte Lehre, ihr Wesen und ihre Aufgabe’ in Das Wort Gottes und die Theologie (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1925), 179–212 —— The Go¨ttingen Dogmatics: Instruction in the Christian religion (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991); Eng. tr. of the first volume and of the first third the second volume of the «Unterricht in der christlichen Religion» —— The Humanity of God (London: Collins, 1960) —— «Unterricht in der christlichen Religion», I: Prolegomena, 1924, ed. H. Reiffen (Zurich: TVZ, 1985) —— «Unterricht in der christlichen Religion», II: Die Lehre von Gott/Die Lehre vom Menschen, 1924–5, ed. H. Stoevesandt (Zurich: TVZ, 1990) —— «Unterricht in der christlichen Religion», III: Die Lehre von der Verso¨hnung/Die Lehre von der Erlo¨sung, 1925–6, ed. H. Stoevesandt (Zurich: TVZ, 2003) —— Vortra¨ge und kleinere Arbeiten: 1922–1925, ed. H. Finze (Zurich: TVZ, 1990) Secondary Literature Althaus, Paul, ‘Theologie und Geschichte: Zur Auseinandersetzung mit der dialektischen Theologie’, Zeitschrift fu¨r systematische Theologie 1 (1923) 741–86 Baldensperger, Wilhelm, Der Prolog des 4. Evangeliums: Sein polemischapologetischer Zweck (Freiburg: Mohr, 1898) Balthasar, Hans Urs von, Die Apokalypse der deutschen Seele: Studien zu einer Lehre von den letzten Haltungen, 3 vols. (Salzburg: Leipzig, 1937–8)

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Index Althaus, Paul 2–3, 8, 11, 87 n., 116, 186 analogy7, 19, 23, 51 n., 115 n., 135, 234, 251, 252, 255 apologetics, see theology Baldensperger, Wilhelm 124, 129 n. Balthasar, Hans Urs von 7 n., 8 n., 19, 51, 113 n., 167, 200, 218 n., 234 n. Barr, James 58 n. Bauer, Walter 124–5, 130, 133 Beintker, Michael 12 n., 18, 22, 74 n., 77 n., 116 n., 165 n. Berkouwer, Gerrit 7, 188 n. Brunner, Emil 58 n., 90–3, 167, 207–8 Bultmann, Rudolf 21 n., 24, 29–55, 64, 75, 77, 126, 128 n., 241 Burgess, Andrew 161, 190 Burnett, Richard 40 Busch, Eberhard 8 n., 15 n., 17 n., 135 n. Calvin, John 138, 141–2, 145, 147–8, 152, 159–63 see also theology, Reformed Chalamet, Christophe 21 Christology, see Jesus Christ Cullberg, John 25 n., 63 n. Cullmann, Oscar 225 n. Dannemann, Ulrich 9 n. Dawson, R. Dale 132 n. dialectic 18–19, 78, 79 n., 92, 97, 99–101, 114–17, 140, 144–6,

152, 161, 171, 200, 224, 239, 246, 262–3 of question and answer 72–80, 83, 241 of time and eternity 3–16, 50–1, 56–7 n., 168, 182 n. Hegelian 190 Schleiermacherian 208–9 see also theology dogma 101, 106, 111–13, 117–22 dogmatics, see theology Ebeling, Gerhard 52 election 66, 196 n., 199, 203–4, 224, 234, 248, 261–3 epistemology, see knowledge of God eschatological future 31–6, 40–2, 211, 225 eschatological horizon 42, 48, 74, 87 n., 96, 99, 111, 120, 216–29 Farel, Guillaume 150 n., 223–4 Fergusson, David 18 n. Ford, David 7 n. freedom 30, 31–6, 47, 203–15, 237, 254–9 Frei, Hans 14 n., 58 n., 87 n., 104 n., 191 n., 196, 201, 210 Freudenberg, Matthias 17, 140, 162 n. Gollwitzer, Helmut 36 n. Graf, Friedrich Wilhelm 9–10 Grieb, Katherine 18 n.

282

Index

Gunton, Colin E. 3, 6 n., 55 n., 57 n., 59 n., 107 n., 172 n., 194 n. Hamer, Je´roˆme 241–2 Harnack, Adolf von 106–7, 138, 197–202 Hart, John W. 208 Hauerwas, Stanley 241–2 Heppe, Heinrich 19, 86, 95, 136, 164, 174, 186 n., 233, 261 Herrmann, Wilhelm 15–16, 21 n., 24, 31, 76 n., 136–7, 186 Holy Spirit 53, 59, 65, 69, 114–15, 134, 146–63, 173, 191–3, 194–259 Hunsinger, George 4 n., 15 n., 166 n., 234–5 n. Hu¨tter, Reinhard 240 Jenson, Robert 3–8, 59 n., 166 n., 182 n., 194 Jesus Christ: anhypostatic/enhypostatic Christology 168, 173–4, 233 ascension 54–5, 149, 159, 161, 189–93, 214 hypostatic union 7, 53, 98, 107, 160, 167–75, 186, 189–90 Incarnation 53, 65, 131–2, 167–75, 179, 186, 189, 192 kenosis 166, 176–81, 183, 186, 236–7 lordship 180–1, 184–90, 212 priestly office 185–6, 188–9, 229–35, 241, 252 Resurrection 43–55, 99, 134, 149, 166, 168, 175–93, 195, 202–3, 241–2 two-natures doctrine, see Jesus Christ, hypostatic union Johnson, William Stacy 104, 113–14

Ju¨ngel, Eberhard 2, 77, 111 n., 250, 253–5 Justification 207–8, 221, 232–43 Kant, Immanuel 20–1, 33, 55, 90, 102, 167, 183, 207 n., 221, 239 see also philosophy, critical Kierkegaard, Sren 180 n., 207 n., 241 knowledge of God 20–3, 45–6, 55, 56–92, 101–2, 105, 116, 141, 157, 168, 191, 195–6, 199–202, 205–6, 210–11, 214, 246–7, 249, 253 see also theology, natural Korsch, Dietrich 15 n., 20, 77 n., 210 n. Kreck, Walter 225 n. Kro¨tke, Wolf 209 n. Leuba, Jean-Louis 51 n. liberalism 11–12, 19–22, 52, 107–8, 142, 170, 197–204, 210 n., 251 Link, Christian 194–5 Loofs, Friedrich 216–7 Lubac, Henri de 249 n. Luther, Martin 33, 100, 116, 136–63, 174, 216–29, 232 see also theology, Lutheran McCormack, Bruce 15 n., 18–22, 56, 105–6, 108 n., 115–16, 168, 174 n., 177 n., 196, 261 n. MacDonald, Neil B. 57 McGrath, Alister 165 Macken, John 115 n. mediation 7, 10, 73, 87 n., 106, 123, 149, 151, 162, 170, 192–3, 240, 252–3, 258, 259

Index immediacy 10, 43, 47, 52–3, 66, 108–9, 129, 150, 161, 172, 228, 255 n. metaphysics 2–3, 14, 16, 20, 32, 50, 53, 59–60, 70, 104–5, 165–7, 172, 189, 205, 220, 260–1, 264 Middle Ages 100–1, 141, 216–20 see also theology, scholasticism Migliore, Daniel 15 n., 18, 173 n., Molnar, Paul 15 n. Moltmann, Ju¨rgen 3, 34 n., 50 n., 57, 185 n. monism 7 n., 8 n., 45, 48, 200, 214, 251 Mottu, Henri 254 n. Mu¨ller, E. F. K 153 mysticism 8, 141, 200, 207–8, 212 nature 7 n., 24, 29, 38, 50, 58, 61, 102, 171 n., 173, 197–8, 203, 213, 256 see theology, natural neo-orthodoxy 19–22 Niebuhr, Reinhold 8–10, Novak, Kurt 9 n. Oberman, Heiko 217 n. occasionalism 241–3 Oepke, Albrecht 8, 200 n. Overbeck, Franz 125, 127 n. Pannenberg, Wolfhart 3, 10 n., 57 Pfleiderer, Georg 20 n., 22–4, 96, 205 n., 110 philosophy 11–13, 51, 62, 81 n., 112–13, 258 critical 85–92, 207 n. identity 200, platonic 57 n., 199–201, 224–6

283

preaching 56–94, 95–6, 105–12, 159, 212, 244–5, 258 predestination, see election Ratzinger, Joseph 245, 248 Reformation 136–63, 216–29 radical Protestantism 226–9 Reitzenstein, Richard 124 n. religion 2, 4–8, 43–8, 80–5, 97–100, 139–40, 159, 179–81, 191–2, 194–215 Religionswissenschaft 102–5, 107–10, 172 Rendtorff, Trutz 9 Roberts, Richard H. 7 n., 20, 52 n., 58, 63 n., 102 n. Rogers, Eugene F. 194 n. Rosato, Philip 194 Ruddies, Harmut 20 n. Rumscheidt, H. Martin 107 n. sacrament 78–80, 160–1, 243–59 baptism 132–4, 243–56 Lord’s Supper 142, 146–52, 256–8 Sauter, Gerhard 112–13, 120–1 Schlatter, Adolf, 116–17 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 59, 80–3, 87 n., 102–5, 108, 113, 116, 179–81, 200–1, 204–11, 231, 237, 244 Schmidt, Hans W. 11–14, 56 n., 108, 165 n. Schwo¨bel, Christoph 88 Seeberg, Reinhold 216–17 Seven, Friedrich 13–14 Spieckermann, Ingrid 18–19, 22 Spengler, Oswald 197–9 Stadtland, Tjarko 7 n., 14 n., 50 n., 89, 166 n., 182 n., 243 Stoevesandt, Hinrich 18, 66, 118 n., 141, 165 n., 188, 239, 261

284 theology apologetics 64–5, 199 dialectical 1–16, 72–80, 114–16 dogmatic 95–135 Lutheran 12, 53, 60, 86–7, 98 n., 112, 117–20, 136–63, 164–5, 169–72, 186, 189–90, 234, 242 natural 7 n., 80–94, 259 Reformed 12, 17–18, 86, 102, 119–22, 136–63, 169–72, 188–90, 219–29 scholasticism 19–20, 95–6, 100–2, 105 n., 167, 174, 218 see also religion; Religionswissenschaft theopanism 8, 200 n. Thompson, John 194 n. Ticciati, Susannah 58 n., 78 n., 235 n., 236 n. Torrance, Thomas F. 57 n., 58

Index Troeltsch, Ernst 21 n., 139, 154, 216–17, 220, 221 n. Trinity (doctrine of the) 53, 57, 71, 153, 157, 169, 214–15 Waldrop, Charles 166 n. Wannenwetsch, Bernd 288 n. Ward, Graham 75 Webster, John 17–18, 25 n., 52 n., 153, 155, 159, 161, 238 n., 246, 250 n., 259 Weiss, Johannes 31 Welker, Michael 67–8 n. Williams, Rowan 58, 157 n., 195 n., 237 n. Willis, Robert 52 n. witness 122–35, 201 Wittekind, Folkhart 21 n. Zwingli, Huldrich 138, 140–2, 144–52, 159–63, 220, 255 n., 259 see also theology, Reformed

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