Karl Barth is a covenant theologian. But just as with anything, when it comes to Barth, he retexts the older pretexts into new theological contexts as those then are given shape by the pressure of God’s triune life for the world in Jesus Christ. Barth was critical of the early federal or covenant theologians, because he saw the inherent bilateralism present within it in a God-world/human relation. In other words, Barth rightly identified the dualism, or competitive fund between God and humanity, built into the very fabric of the magisterial federal theologians. He was critical of the doctrine of God that would present us with a “God’s side” in the covenant and an abstract “humanity’s side” (even if they were the “elect side”) in the covenant; indeed, just as that elixir is present within the federal theological frame. Rinse H Reeling Brouwer offers his commentary:

Barth writes ‘For the rest you shall enjoy Heppe’ s Locus xiii only with caution. He has left too much room for the leaven of federal theology. It was not good, when the foedus naturae was also called a foedus operum’. In Barth’ s eyes, the notion of a relationship between God and Adam as two contractual partners in which man promises to fulfil the law and God promises him life eternal in return, is a Pelagian one that should not even be applied to the homo paradisiacus. Therefore,

one has to speak of the foedus naturae in such a way that one has nothing to be ashamed of when one speaks of the foedus gratiae later on, and, conversely, that one does not have to go to the historians of religion, but rather in such a way that one can say the same things in a more detailed and powerful way in the new context of the foedus gratiae, which is determined by the contrast between sin and grace. For there is re vera only one covenant, as there is only one God. The fact that Cocceius and his followers could not and would not say this is where we should not follow them – not in the older form, and even less in the modern form.

In this way paragraph ends as it began: the demarcation of sound theology from federal theology in its Cocceian shape is as sharp as it was before. Nevertheless, the attentive reader will notice that the category of the covenant itself is ‘rescued’ for Barth’ s own dogmatic thinking.[1]

Even so, as Brouwer presciently notices, Barth doesn’t want to discard the mechanism of covenant, but to retool it; again, under the pressures of a Christological conditioning wherein God’s relationship with humanity/world is grounded in His singular being as the triune God, with the corollary being that His action toward the world in Christ is sheerly based on His unilateral act to both give and receive for us in Jesus Christ. For Barth, God’s covenant with humanity has conditions, but God graciously places the onus of those conditions (of righteousness) on Himself for us (i.e., think Barth’s “Judge judged”). As such we, the people, are freely able, by the awakening work of the Holy Spirit, to loving respond to God’s call for us to come unto Him and sup with Him, with the cost laid on His account for us, and not on our account for Him.

[1] Rinse H Reeling Brouwer, Karl Barth and Post-Reformation Orthodoxy (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2015), 112-13.