Maybe you’ve heard of the ‘Companion Controversy,’ which later came to be called The Barth Wars, by some. I have been published, a wee bit, on this here; as far as some commentary. In nuce, it entails an embroilment within Anglophone Barth studies; that is, between, in particular, Bruce McCormack and George Hunsinger/Paul Molnar respectively. It has to do with the way McCormack reads Barth’s doctrine of election as a sort of organizing dogma for his doctrine of God; in a highly actualistic sense. Hunsinger/Molnar demur and claim that the ‘textual’ (Hunsinger’s word) Barth, and his doctrine of God, has an antecedent reality (which is the classical position), and as such the economic God cannot be fully read back into the immanent (in se) God, as McCormack proposes. That’s a very rough sketch of the matter.

In general, Hunsinger’s critique, in particular, has been that McCormack offers a revisionist Barth; and thus, doesn’t actually offer Barth’s theology at all—at least when it comes to a doctrine of God proper. McCormack has maintained that he has been offering something of the logic of Barth’s doctrine of election vis-à-vis God proper, even if Barth didn’t follow through with the logic itself. Even so, at the end of the day, McCormack has claimed to be reading the grain of Barth’s theology faithfully; more so than his ‘opponents,’ Hunsinger/Molnar. And now, in his most recent work,1 McCormack seems to finally admit that he is doing something different than Barth when it comes to Barth’s textual doctrine of election (although read me below, as I’ve been thinking this through, even as I write this, I’m developing). In other words, as I’ve been reading McCormack’s new book (which is excellent thus far), a rather striking thing gets communicated. He acknowledges that he disagrees with Barth, or that Barth’s doctrine of election represents “the limit of how far I [McCormack] can follow him.”2

Here is the full passage from McCormack:

Looking back at Barth’s early appropriation of Calvin’s exegesis of Phil. 2 in support of a Reformed Christology, which laid its emphasis upon the preservation of the “natures” of Christ in their original integrity subsequent to their union, Barth’s understanding of the divine kenosis in his later Christology clearly points in the direction of providing an explanation for the susceptibility of the eternal Son to the human experiences of suffering and death. His way of upholding divine immutability was to anchor the existence of the Logos “in the form of a servant” in the divine election — understood as a “primal decision” (Urentscheidung). Barth’s later Christology thus became the epistemological ground of our knowledge of election. Election then was posited as the ontological ground of Barth’s later Christology. Clearly, he wanted to understand the human experiences of suffering and death as essential to God in his second mode of being. Whether his doctrine of election was fully adequate to this task is debatable — which marks the limit of how far I can follow him.3

So, what is rather interesting about this development is that McCormack seems to be affirming his reading of Barth’s doctrine of election, the one that Hunsinger says is a revisionist reading, but then coming to the conclusion that he cannot follow Barth down this path; i.e. of reading human suffering and death into the second mode of being of the triune God into the essential or ‘eternal’ or in se being of God. As I reflect on this, even in this moment, it almost seems as if McCormack says he cannot follow Barth here; and yet on the other hand Hunsinger/Molnar are saying you don’t have to, because you never were to begin with. In other words, it’s almost as if McCormack is de facto agreeing with Hunsinger/Molnar, in the sense that if one were to follow through on McCormack’s “revisionist” Barth, that that theologian would be the pantheist, or panentheist that Hunsinger/Molnar have said “McCormack’s Barth” indeed reduces to. So instead of admitting that he has been misreading Barth’s doctrine of election, which would be a sort of recanto to Hunsinger/Molnar, he continues to maintain that he has indeed read Barth’s doctrine of election correctly, but that he cannot follow Barth in that direction. He seems to be making a “classical turn,” potentially, albeit one that seeks to repair Chalcedon’s Cyrillian misstep with the resources that he seems to have found in a burgeoning ‘Spirit Christology’ (I’m still reading, so we’ll see).

1 Bruce Lindley McCormack, The Humility of the Eternal Son: Reformed Kenoticism and the Repair of Chalcedon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). 

2 Ibid., 121. 

3 Ibid., 120-21.