The primacy of Jesus Christ is the doctrine of pre-destination. That is, pre-destination within God’s free life of koinonial love and grace, to be not God without us, but with us; Immanuel. God has freely Self-determined to always already be with us, to be for us, to be in us, to ‘be closer to us than we are to ourselves.’ This is the summary of a Christian doctrine of predestination, of election. The focal point, the centraldogma of this elegant doctrina is the eternal Logos, Huios (Son), who cannot be thought of outwith His election to be the elected Son of Man for the world.

Thinking of predestination under these terms, christological and trinitarian terms, reorients this oft divisive doctrine, among the saints, in a way that it becomes an occasion to focus on Jesus once again. As I recall, Jesus taught that the Holy Spirit would speak and confirm Jesus’ words to us; that the Holy Spirit would point us to the Christ all our days and in all our ways. So, if that is the litmus test for knowing whether or not something is a sound doctrine or a false doctrine, then we are on safe ground when we consider this doctrine within Barth’s articulation.

He “is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature: For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible . . . all things were created by him and for him: And he is before all things, and by him all things consist” (Col. 1.15f.). It is to be noted that the One of whom all this is said is called “the head of the body, the church” and the “first-born from the dead” in v. 18, and that according to v. 20 it can be said of Him, this αὐτός, that it pleased the Father in Him to reconcile all things to himself, “having made peace through the blood of his cross.” But there could obviously be no sense in talking of the blood of the eternal Son of God as such, or of this Son as the firstborn from the dead. The declarations of predestination from v. 15 onwards, cannot, therefore, relate only to the Son of God, to a λόγος ἄσαρκος [discarnate Word].

But again, the statement in Jn. 1.2: “The same (οὗτος ἦν) was in the beginning with God,” would be a meaningless repetition of the second statement in Jn. 1.1 if it were not an anticipation of the incarnate Logos attested and declared by John the Baptist in the words: “This was he (οὗτος ἦν) who coming after me is preferred before me, for he was before me” (πρῶτός μου ἦν). The result is that we cannot possibly refer abstractly to the eternal Logos either Jn. 1.3: “All things were made by him; and without him (χωρὶς αὐτοῦ) was not anything made that was made,” or Jn. 1.10: “The world was made by him.” The event attested in Jn. 1.14 is one to which the whole Prologue looks back. So, then, the whole Prologue (with the possible exception of the first phrase of v. 1)—although it certainly speaks of the eternal Logos—speaks also of the man Jesus. The saying in Jn. 8.58, which reaches back to the Prologue: “Before Abraham was, I am,” must be understood in the same way. And nothing could be more explicit than the way in which, in Jn. 6.51, “the living bread which came down from heaven” is equated with “my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.”[1]

Barth’s reference to and development of a Logos asarkos (disincarnate Word) brings with it some knotty stuff within the Barth studies’ world. Suffice it to say: Barth is simply referring to the patristic notion that the Son as the image of God, always already within Himself, within the inner-life and mystery of the triune fellowship, had freely chosen to become human, ever before the foundations of the world (i.e., supralapsarian). This is where we get the Latin phraseology, Logos incarnandus (‘the Word to be incarnate’) and Logos incarnatus (‘the Word incarnate’). Here Barth is appealing to that type of theological thinking about the incarnation vis-à-vis God’s eternal life. That is, for Barth (and me) there is no other way to theologically imagine or know God outside of God for us, and always forever to be for us, in and through Jesus Christ, the eternal Logos who is also the Logos ensarkos (the Word enfleshed). As Barth is indicating, it is this image that humanity was originally created and recreated in, in the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. Christ, the firstborn from the dead, who unioned with us before we ever existed so that we might by His gracious life, union with Him by the Holy Spirit, as we came into existence, is the very essence of what a genuinely Christian doctrine of predestination is referring to in Barth’s (and the Apostle Paul’s) theology.

In this way, a doctrine of predestination loses all of its speculative, worrisome baggage, and finds refreshment in the smiling face of the Son of God for us, for the world.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/2 §64 [033-4] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 31-2.