Karl Barth’s doctrine of human agency and salvation in general, as John Webster underscores, is largely in response to Rudolf Bultmann’s existentialist from below anthropology vis-à-vis soteriology. Barth became concerned with Bultmann’s et al. turn to the subject in Christian salvation, insofar that the humanity in need of salvation, in Bultmann’s frame, had its own independent resource to turn to Christ outwith Christ first and unilaterally turning to and for them. Barth spied in Bultmann a type of monistic humanity wherein humanity simpliciter could actualize ‘their salvation’ almost in a symmetrical way to God’s own agency for the world in Christ. And of course, this type of Herculean action, for Barth, not to mention the clear teaching of Holy Scripture, represented the heights of human idolatry. Webster writes on Barth in extenso:

As often in Church Dogmatics IV, Barth’s hidden dialogue partner is Bultmann. Already in the Foreword to IV/1, Barth remarked that ‘throughout I have found myself in an intensive, although for the most part quiet, debate with Rudolf Bultmann’, and Barth’s critical distance from Bultmann here, as earlier, revolves around the question of how and on what grounds the reality of God impinges upon our existence. The distance between the two dates back at least as far as Bultmann’s critical remarks on Barth’s Christliche Dogmatik for working with ‘uncritically adopted concepts of an older ontology’. By 1930, Barth had come to see the rift between the two as once concerning the entire grounds of Christian faith and theology: writing of Bultmann, Gogarten and Brunner, he says:

From my standpoint all of you, though your concern differs from mine in different ways, represent a large-scale return to the fleshpots of Egypt. I mean that if I am not deceived, all of you – in a new way different from that of the nineteenth century – are trying to understand faith as a human possibility, or, if you will, as grounded in a human possibility, and therefore you are once again surrendering theology to philosophy.

Where Bultmann read Barth as a return to a post-Reformation scholasticism, Barth came to read Bultmann as espousing a relatively independent sphere of human existence and its capabilities with which faith and theology must be coordinated, thus compromising the absolute originality and gratuity of the basis of faith. By the time Barth came to deliver his famous response in the early 1950s, Rudolf Bultmann – An Attempt to Understand Him, he presented his quarrel with Bultmann in terms of a widely divergent understanding of the place of the pro nobis aspect of the Christ event. For Bultmann (in the tradition of Schleiermacher, Melanchthon, and the young Luther), the pro nobis is accorded such central importance that soteriology swallows up Christology, and the exposition of the gospel becomes caught within ‘the anthropological triangle of law, sin and grace’. What Barth fails to find in Bultmann is a sense that the Christ-event ‘possessed an intrinsic significance of its own, and that only because it has that primary significance has it a derived significance here and now’. And, in response to Bultmann’s reply to Rudolph Bultmann, Barth writes thus:

I have become increasingly a Zinzendorfian to the extent that in the New Testament only the one central figure as such has begun to occupy me – or each and everything else only in the light and under the sign of this central figure. As I see it, one can and should read all theology in some sense backwards from it: down to anthropology, ethics, and then methodology . . . [I]n this light it has become for me a very positive business . . . One cannot discuss the fact that ‘Jesus lives’, as we are both convinced. But one can, as a theologian, either refrain or not refrain from thinking to and from this ‘objective’ reality. I myself cannot refrain from doing so.

The issue here, as throughout Dogmatics IV, is not simply one of the importance assigned to the subjective realm in talking of the work of Christ: on that, both are in some measure agreed (Barth more than is commonly realised). The issue is much more one of the grounds upon which the subjective realm is affirmed. By securing that realm by reference to the ‘prophetic’ character of Christ’s work (rather than by reference to the dynamics of human existence or faith), Barth is denying that there are two realities, the reality of Christ on the one hand and, on the other hand, the quasi-independent reality of human existence in terms of which Christ’s reality has to be made meaningful. Any such affirmation, Barth has come to propose, is in the end a form of unbelief, a covert disqualification of the absoluteness of Jesus Christ as the God-man who embraces both sides of the covenant relation. Over against Bultmann, Barth presses the point that what matters is not that – in apologetic fashion – Jesus’ history be made meaningful in our history (as if there were any real human history ex Christum), but the opposite: what matters is our being drawn into his sphere, which is in truth the sphere in which alone we may properly be said to exist:

Whatever it may or may not mean for us subjectively; whatever may be its reflection in our consciousness, the fact that reconciliation is also revelation and Jesus Christ lives and works as Prophet means that objectively we can no longer be remote from Him in a private sphere, but that we are drawn into His sphere, into what takes place in Him.

Barth’s protest, then, is that by according to such significance to the existential conditions for the gospel’s realisation, Bultmann fails to see the objective history of Jesus as ‘history in the supreme sense, history in which we have a share whether we realise it and like it or not, history in which our own history takes place’. In sum: on the basis of his doctrine of hypostatic union, Barth stresses that the existential realm is ‘a minor and conclusion’ deduced from ‘a given major’.[1]

In nuce, as Webster develops, Barth wants to ensure that it is God’s initiation, God’s unilateral act of love as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit whereby a salvific history has the potency to obtain. And for Barth, and dare I say, the Bible, it is this history, God’s own elected and Self-given history for us where the occasion for human agency before God comes to be made actualized and event[ual] reality. It is by his entrance and assumptio carnis into our humanity, which first was always already his humanity, whereby the covenant relations between God and humanity have a concrete ground; indeed, a nexus wherein the human has re-creational freedom to move and breathe and have its being in and before, and most significantly, from God’s being for humanity in his graciously elected humanity in the man from Nazareth, Jesus Christ.

[1] John Webster, Barth’s ethics of reconciliation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 91–93.