Introduction

It is important, in my view, to recognize that there is nothing natural about the Gospel. If theology is the explication of the Gospel, therefore, there is nothing natural about the theological task. In other words, as the Apostle Paul notes in Galatians: “For I would have you know, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man.  For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.” In the realm of apologetics this might be troubling. But we aren’t doing apologetics, per se, we’re doing Christian Dogmatics; which done well, is its own best apologetic.

For the remainder of this lengthy post we will take a look at a section from George Hunsinger, as he describes the way Karl Barth did Christian theology. What I hope stands out is how a genuinely Christian theology looks, one based strictly on the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. On the negative side: I hope that Christian Dogmatics is understood to be something fully distinct, and even greater than, what has come to be called Christian apologetics. As these elements are underscored, my further hope is that as we come to better understand how a genuinely Christian Dogmatics is undertaken (i.e. which is to say: its prolegomenon, or methodological soundings), we will understand why I think it is a false errand for the Christian to interpose an apologetic ground into their respective theologies and Christian Dogmatics. This post will dovetail nicely with the one I recently published on foundationalism.

The Genuinely Christian Dogmatic Way

Before we get to the Hunsinger quote, let us hear from Robert Dale Dawson on Barth’s theology of resurrection. What Dawson draws out in Barth’s theology is fundamental to understanding what Hunsinger will latterly develop. Dawson illustrates for us just how primal resurrection or recreation ought to be for how the Christian thinks at both a theologically ontological level, and epistemological level. What Dawson shows, if Barth’s thought is to be taken seriously, is that all of reality, God’s reality, can only be known and engaged with at its Archimedean point when a person has been given eyes of faith to see it with.

A large number of analyses come up short by dwelling upon the historical question, often falsely construing Barth’s inversion of the order of the historical enterprise and the resurrection of Jesus as an aspect of his historical skepticism. For Barth the resurrection of Jesus is not a datum of the sort to be analyzed and understood, by other data, by means of historical critical science. While a real event within the nexus of space and time the resurrection is also the event of the creation of new time and space. Such an event can only be described as an act of God; that is an otherwise impossible event. The event of the resurrection of Jesus is that of the creation of the conditions of the possibility for all other events, and as such it cannot be accounted for in terms considered appropriate for all other events. This is not the expression of an historical skeptic, but of one who is convinced of the primordiality of the resurrection as the singular history-making, yet history-delimiting, act of God.[1]

For Barth, according to Dawson, the resurrection, as corollary with something like creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing), is such a basic and primal reality that all of created reality is contingent upon its first order reality. We might say in this frame, for Barth: there is no going behind the back of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. His resurrection or recreation is as fundamental to all reality to such an extent, that without it there would be no ‘real’ creation for real[ist] thought and living to take place within. To put it in an Athanasian key: if Christ had not come and resurrected all of created reality would have simply evaporated back into the nothingness it had been thrust into at the fall. In other words, what was determined at the Noahic flood of utter destruction would have been the worldwide reality without the coming and going forth of Christ in the belly of Jonah’s big fish. As David Fergusson has rightly noted: “The world was made so that Christ might be born.”[2] The point: all that is, seen and unseen, is because of and for Christ; without Christ coming the first time, the world simply would not be. And without Christ coming the second time, the world would simply slip off into the oblivion we see attempting to overtake her currently. For Barth, according to Dawson, supplemented by the thought of others, all of reality is contingent upon God’s new life for us in the vicarious humanity of the resurrected Christ.

In light of what we just considered, Hunsinger offers further substantiation on how Barth thought from the particularity and concreteness of the incarnation of God in Christ. Here, Hunsinger is detailing how Barth operated from what Hunsinger identified as Barth’s ‘Chalcedonian pattern.’ What the reader will see is the way Barth, according to Hunsinger, deployed the categories of the hypostatic union, and/or Chalcedonian Christology, towards the way he attempted to think all reality; which is to say, theological reality. We will read along with Hunsinger for a moment, and then attempt to elucidate how Hunsinger and Dawson’s readings of Barth converge.

Testing for Incoherence Within the Framework of the Chalcedonian Pattern

The coherentist mode of testing, as it emerged in the survey of rationalism, also plays a decisive role in Barth’s justification of his position on double agency. Directly and indirectly, therefore, it serves to justify his reliance on the conceptions of miracle and mystery in that position. On the exegetical or hermeneutical premise that the terms of the Chalcedonian pattern are rooted in the biblical testimony regarding how divine and human agency are related, the mode of doctrinal testing proceeds as follows. The Chalcedonian pattern is used to specify counterpositions that would be doctrinally incoherent (and also incoherent with scripture). “Without separation or division” means that no independent human autonomy can be posited in relation to God. “Without confusion or change” means that not divine determinism or monism can be posited in relation to humanity. Finally, “complete in deity and complete in humanity” means that no symmetrical relationship can be posited between divine and human actions (or better, none that is not asymmetrical). It also means that the two cannot be posited as ultimately identical. Taken together, these considerations mean that, if the foregoing conditions are to be met, no nonmiraculous and nonmysterious conception is possible. The charge of incoherence (as previously defined) thereby reveals itself to be abstract, in the sense that it does not adequately take all the necessary factors into account. It does not work inductively from the subject matter (as attested by scripture)–as the motif of particularism would prescribe. Instead, it starts from general considerations such as formal logic and applies them to certain isolated aspects of the more “concrete” position. At the same time, the charge may well have implicated itself, wittingly or unwittingly, in one of the rejected couterpositions.[3]

The reader will have noticed that Hunsinger is attempting to defend Barth from the charge often made against him that his theological paradigm is incoherent. What Hunsinger is attempting to show (and he does) is that Barth is simply attempting to think God and all of reality from the analogy of the incarnation. Barth starts with the premise that Jesus Christ is God’s exegesis alone (cf. Jn 1.18), and he never strays from this commitment in his theological method. If we couple this with what Dawson highlights, in regard to Barth’s understanding of the primal history and ontological delimiting reality of the resurrection/recreation of Jesus Christ, these things start to make sense.

Barth’s whole approach to theology is to think from the scandal of the cross, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ (cf. I Cor. 1.17-25). There is no general or natural ground, in Barth’s schema, to approach God through. There is only the holy ground He creates for Himself in the penetration of all humanity by His assumption of that humanity in Christ. The most obvious biblical illustration of this is Moses and the burning bush. None of that scenario was contingent upon Moses discovering just the right conditions for thinking God. God showed up in the most unexpected way, and his ‘showing up’ was what made that ground hallowed and receptive for what He desired to accomplish therein.

The point of this is that for the Christian, we are not attempting to ‘prove’ God’s existence prior to our ability to speak about God. We are folks who know and speak God only after He has spoken (Deus dixit) to us in and through His Word, who is the Christ. As the evangelist John makes clear: “My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me; and I give eternal life to them, and they will never perish; and no one will snatch them out of My hand.  My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all; and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand.  I and the Father are one.”[4] But what stands behind this, as we have been developing throughout this post, is that we know and hear the living God’s voice not based on anything we have discovered, but based on the fact that God has first acted for us in Christ that we might know and hear Him.

Conclusion

What atheists and agnostics, and other pagans, fail to recognize is that the Christian God just is. He isn’t at our behest; we are at His. What the unbeliever fails realize is that the Christian God is fully hidden in the holiness of His own inner and eternal life; and that without His mercifulness and graciousness to reveal Himself to and for the world, the world could never know of Him. It is only by the faith of Christ that people come to have eyes of faith to see Him with, and ears of faith to hear Him with. It isn’t a blind faith, so called, it is the concrete faith of Christ that came with His sweaty and bloody cross-work, which resulted in the new creation of resurrection and new life. It is the new life that the Christian is able to think God from. It isn’t a dead thinking, but a living thinking in con-versation with the risen Christ who sits at the right hand of the Father. There is no apologetic in the world that can think this type of God in abstraction from God’s willingness to first be for us. The atheist might think they have “disproven” God’s existence by reliance on metaphysical naturalism, or based on assertion and self-will. But the Christian God can neither be proven nor disproven; He can only be known and heard as the person bows their knee in submission to Christ, and acknowledges that He is Lord. This, not by might, nor by power, but by the Spirit.

⁵ Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, ⁶ who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, ⁷ but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men. ⁸ And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross. ⁹ Therefore God also has highly exalted Him and given Him the name which is above every name, ¹⁰ that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven, and of those on earth, and of those under the earth, ¹¹ and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. –Philippians 2:5-11

[1] Robert Dale Dawson, The Resurrection in Karl Barth (UK/USA: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007), 13 [Emphasis is mine].

[2] David Fergusson, “Creation,” in The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology, edited by John Webster, Kathryn Tanner, and Iain Torrance, 76-7.

[3] George Hunsinger, How To Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 195-98 nook version. 

[4] John 1:27-30.