Barth, at the tail end of his Church Dogmatics volume one §22, gets into the question of ‘Dogmatics as Ethics.’ In it he wants to squash any sort of what he takes to be an artificial division between dogmatics and ethics; as if the latter can serve as the master of the former; as if ethics can be thought from purely anthropological premises over against the theological (his examples, among others, are Schleiermacher and Ritchsl). Within this context he wants to elevate the sui generis or utter uniqueness of the Christian reality; that is, insofar as that reality serves as the distinctive ‘other-worldly’ yet, by Grace, ‘this-worldly’ reality that it has become because of its Lord. Barth believes that if this reality is properly appreciated that there can be no generic or ‘general’ form of ethics; precisely because the Christian reality is grounded in the scandalous Revelation of God in Jesus Christ. This, for Barth, is why ethics cannot be thought apart from ethics; it is because God is the ground of everything, of all that there is or can be.

It is from this context that I want to share part of a paragraph from Barth where he is attempting to drive home just how the Christian reality is one that can only be known by faith, not sight. As such, for Barth, just because Christian Dogmatics is representative of the process of articulating the implications of the Revelation of God, it is within this predicator wherein what is ‘right’ can be illumined for the Christian heart and soul. But he really wants to press just how contingent the Christian whole is on God’s Word who is the living Christ. He writes:

Christians are found only in Christ, not independently. They are seen only from above, not from below, only by faith, not by sight. They do not exist, therefore, as do Mohammedans, Buddhists, atheists, Catholics or Protestants. If we speak of Christians, Christendom and Christianity in this way, we must realise that we are speaking of the Christian world which is cosmos (like the rest of the world in the sense of St. John’s Gospel). We are speaking untheologically. And why should we not speak untheologically of Christianity? There is no doubt that in himself the religious man and even the Christian can be a rewarding, interesting and instructive object of learned investigation. There is even a whole ancillary theological discipline—Church history—in which dialectically, for the sake of instruction, the object of theological investigation and scholarship is the Christian man as such, and the history of scriptural exegesis rather than Holy Scripture itself. But it is just Church history which makes it so clear that this Christian man is not in himself the man addressed by God’s Word, and it can never at any point be a question of a sanctity intrinsic to himself, even though he may be an Augustine or a Luther. It is Church history which shows us that the Christian and Christianity are in themselves phenomena in the cosmos alongside many others. It is Church history which makes it clear, with its (dialectically framed) untheological questioning, that we must ask and answer theologically when it is a question of understanding the Christian as something other than a part and parcel of the cosmos. And that is clearly the question when in theology we ask about the goodness of human conduct and the Christian life, that is to say, when the problem of ethics is raised.[1]

Christianity can indeed be studied alongside other religions, within the frame of ‘religious phenomena’; where generic and even historiographical questions can be asked and traced out. In this way Christianity can be placed next to the other great world religions, and belief systems that people the world-over might adhere to. But Barth is saying that the genuine Christian reality is distinct, and not even categorizable in this benign way. For Barth the Christian reality is radical, and even, dare I say: apocalyptic! When dealing with ‘Christian questions,’ all of those interrogatives are given impetus by the Revelation that spawned them in the first place. In other words, the questions Christians deal with are not ones generated by the profane world, but instead from God’s world as that is understood and explicated in and through Jesus Christ; the Word from God for the world.

I really like this thought immensely; viz. that Christians have a ground for their being that is extra nos (outside of us), and not subject to our control, but God’s. I find great encouragement in knowing that I have absolutely no control over my life; that I am at the behest of God’s eternal mercy. And that His mercy actuates as Grace from the inner and eternal relationship of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; as that is given flesh, in the Son’s becoming human in the man from Nazareth, Jesus Christ. To be a Christian means that we are not able to be fitted into a general religious phenomenon, just because the reality of our lives is a purely theological and thus not ‘untheological’ reality. This world cannot impose itself on God’s way; God, instead, has imposed Himself on the way of the world, such that this world does not have self-resource to stop His movement upon it.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/2 §22: The Doctrine of the Word of God (London/New York: T&T Clark, Continuum Imprint, 2009), 48-9 [emphasis mine].