Here is a little more insight on Karl Barth’s doctrine of election for those who maybe haven’t been exposed to it. This is John McDowell (contributor to both of our Evangelical Calvinism books, by the way) describing the development of Barth’s Christ concentrated conception of election in concert with, and according to Barth himself, motivated by his French friend, Pierre Maury:

Consequently, Maury and Barth force the Reformed tradition to ask substantively what is meant by claiming that “God was in Christ” if Revelation is separated from the very Word of God eternally articulated, and God’s being (as will) is hidden behind Christ so that the gracefulness of God expressed in Christ is particularized in the decretum absolutum and is therefore not essential to what is meant by God. Can this two-stage deity make sense of the development of Christian Trinitarianism and therefore the Christological doctrine of the homoousion? Reasoning strongly that it cannot, Maury and Barth locate here the regulation of philosophical abstraction in much of the tradition. Criticizing both the Calvinist and Lutheran versions of the doctrine of predestination, Barth detects in them “traces of a natural theology . . . traces, that is, of a general view of the freedom of God, based on one philosophical system or another.” The appeal to “natural theology” and “one philosophical system or another” is rather imprecise, but the import of the shorthand criticism is nonetheless clear enough. The Gospel has to do with what Barth suggestively delineates in his seventh Gifford Lecture through the phrase “the Revelation of God, the God who deals with man.” This he would articulate as the irreducible “concreteness, the contingency, the historical singularity of the eternal, absolute, divine Word” of God (and, of course, as CD III/2 impresses, of humanity as well). Accordingly, Maury appeals in “Election et Foi” to election as being “about God.”[1]

It is interesting. Pierre Maury gave impetus to Barth’s doctrine of election, its reformulation of the classical Calvinist understanding, but as you read the particular essay Maury presented and wrote, that gave Barth his impetus what you’ll find is something of a transitional movement from John Calvin’s view (which is classical) to a more concentrated and revised focused on Christ. Barth simply takes Maury’s reworking to its logical conclusion. (I’ve written more on this here)

Beyond the history of development, materially as McDowell brings out, for Barth (and Maury) relegating election to the absolutum decretum abstracts election from the person of God and relegates it to mode of nature wherein God’s life in Christ is no longer necessary for election; that God is not revealed in his election for humanity; that an abstract decree (abstracted from God’s personal life) is the basis for election, a basis grounded in the creation itself (i.e. individual human beings). An implication of this is that Christ only becomes an instrument to accomplish God’s decree of election for the elect individuals he gives his life for with the purchasing power of the cross. The Son, in the incarnation, could in fact be a demi-urge in this scheme rather than the eternal Word of God. If Christ is only an instrument of salvation, and not the sufficient condition for it, then in what way can we be sure that God himself is ultimately even revealed in the redemptive event? If the ground of election is a decree rather than the person of God in Jesus Christ then it’s not possible to say, for sure, whether or not God actually gave his life for humanity.

Maybe this will help understand better some of Barth’s motivation for wanting to reify a doctrine of election that is concretely grounded in God’s life in person, rather than placing this doctrine into a set of decrees. It is this kind of reasoning that helped me to see why Barth’s reformulation of election was so important. Christ is genuinely the key in his framework, and the Chalcedonian Pattern (language from George Hunsinger) is radically present in Barth’s reconstrual of election. An election that looks personally to Jesus Christ rather than abstractly to a Jesus who is only meeting the conditions set out by the absolute decree. I see this as an advancement of theological development; building upon the past, but not settling for the past’s conclusions.

[1] John C. McDowell, “Afterword,” in Simon Hattrell, ed., Election, Barth, and the French Connection: How Pierre Maury Gave a “Decisive Impetus” to Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Election (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2016), loc 3769, 3778.