I have plenty of direct engagements with Karl Barth’s doctrine of election here at the blog. But I also like to hear from various other commentators, and how they attempt to distill Barth’s theological oeuvre. The following commentary comes from theologian, David Kelsey. Kelsey isn’t of the Barthian stream, in fact he is situated more comfortably among contemporary classical theologians like Katherine Sonderegger, John Webster et al. The passage from him below is his brief sketch of Barth’s doctrine of election, and how it finds its ultimate purposiveness in the singular will of God. Kelsey will be critiquing Barth (with Aquinas write alongside Barth et al.) on the notion that God only has one overarching purpose (we might say, will) for creation; Kelsey argues that God has many purposes, and thus they should not be reduced to one totalizing purpose. Kelsey writes:

For Karl Barth in the twentieth century, the overall goal of God’s various ways of relating to all else is to actualize God’s eternal decree to enter into covenant relation ad extra with a particular “other,” the particular humanity of the eternal Son of God Incarnate, Jesus Christ. The overall movement to that goal — except for the impossible possibility of sin — is the unfolding of the logical implications of that one eternal decree: Because Christ’s humanity is intrinsically social, the creation of fellow human beings is required. Because fellow human creatures are bodied, the creation of the physical world is required. Because God has eternally decreed to be in covenant fellowship with the Incarnate Son, Jesus Christ must be born into that world whether or not creatures have “fallen” (Christological supralapsarianism). Because in the fall Jesus’ fellow human creatures are estranged from God, Jesus’ reconciling death is unavoidable. Because God eternally decrees that God’s covenant fellowship with Jesus and his human covenant partners be actualized and manifested in an eschatological consummation, the resurrection of the crucified Jesus is required. This is a logical, not a chronological, sequence although it is played out in time as a “history.” For Barth “the eternal covenant which God has decreed in Himself as the covenant of the Father with His Son as the Lord and Bearer of human nature is the “inner basis.” [sic] not only (as Barth explicitly has it) of creation, but of every other moment in the economy moving toward the actualization of God’s eternal decree, except sin.[1]

Rather than focusing on what Kelsey will be critiquing in Barth vis-à-vis the singular and totalizing purpose of God, I want to respond to the way that Kelsey characterizes Barth’s understanding of the decree.

Kelsey, when referring to God’s decree in Barth’s theology, makes it sound too abstract; as abstract as the classical decretum absolutum (absolute decree of predestination and election) that Barth vociferously critiques in longform over and again throughout his Church Dogmatics. This might seem like a subtle thing to harp on, but it’s precisely because it is so subtle that I want to harp on it. It isn’t that Kelsey ultimately misses the gist of Barth’s thinking on election, and God’s telos for the world therein; it is that Kelsey fails to speak of the decree in the types of relational and personalist ways that Barth does. Barth thinks of election not through an abstract decree, in the tone we hear in Kelsey, but, again, in the Trinitarian and relational ways that Barth thinks God from God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. Let me end this with Barth himself:

§33

THE ELECTION OF JESUS CHRIST

The election of grace is the eternal beginning of all the ways and works of God in Jesus Christ. In Jesus Christ God in His free grace determines Himself for sinful man and sinful man for Himself. He therefore takes upon Himself the rejection of man with all its consequences, and elects man to participation in His own glory.

1. JESUS CHRIST, ELECTING AND ELECTED

Between God and man there stands the person of Jesus Christ, Himself God and Himself man, and so mediating between the two. In Him God reveals Himself to man. In Him man sees and knows God. In Him God stands before man and man stands before God, and is the eternal will of God, and the eternal ordination of man in accordance with this will. In Him God’s plan for man is disclosed, God’s judgment on man fulfilled, God’s deliverance of man accomplished, God’s gift to man present in fulness, God’s claim and promise to man declared. In Him God has joined Himself to man. And so man exists for His sake. It is by Him, Jesus Christ, and for Him and to Him, that the universe is created as a theatre for God’s dealings with man and man’s dealings with God. The being of God is His being, and similarly the being of man is originally His being. And there is nothing that is not from Him and by Him and to Him. He is the Word of God in whose truth everything is disclosed and whose truth cannot be over-reached or conditioned by any other word. He is the decree of God behind and above which there can be no earlier or higher decree and beside which there can be no other, since all others serve only the fulfillment of this decree. He is the beginning of God before which there is no other beginning apart from that of God within Himself. Except, then, for God Himself, nothing can derive from any other source or look back to any other starting-point. He is the election of God before which and without which and beside which God cannot make any other choices. Before Him and without Him and beside Him God does not, then, elect or will anything. And He is the election (and on that account the beginning and the decree and the Word) of the free grace of God. For it is God’s free grace that in Him He elects to be man and to have dealings with man and to join Himself to man. He, Jesus Christ, is the free grace of God as not content simply to remain identical with the inward and eternal being of God, but operating ad extra in the ways and works of God. And for this reason, before Him and above Him and beside Him and apart from Him there is no election, no beginning, no decree, no Word of God. Free grace is the only basis and meaning of all God’s ways and works ad extra. For what extra is there that the ways and works could serve, or necessitate, or evoke? There is no extra except that which is first willed and posited by God in the presupposing of all His ways and works. There is no extra except that which has its basis and meaning as such in the divine election of grace. But Jesus Christ is Himself the divine election of grace. For this reason He is God’s Word, God’s decree and God’s beginning. He is so all-inclusively, comprehending absolutely within Himself all things and everything, enclosing within Himself the autonomy of all other words, decrees and beginnings.[2]

The reader at this point might be thinking, so what! If we were to uncritically take Kelsey’s tone in regard to Barth’s doctrine of election we might be tempted to miss the whole project that Barth has attempted to construct. That is, we might place Barth alongside the post reformed orthodox theologians, or even someone like Theodore Beza. But this would eradicate the whole point of Barth’s reformulation of election, and the relational impulses funding said reformulation. We might be tempted to think, along with Kelsey, that we could speak of the decree of God in abstraction from God’s subject in election, in His beloved Son, Jesus Christ.

[1] David H. Kelsey, Human Anguish and God’s Power (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 169-70.

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/2 §32-33: Study Edition (New York, New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 99-100.