Category Archives: Barth

Barth’s Covenant Theology in Human Action

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Barth’s covenant theology entails this: The triune God acts and becomes for the world in Christ, and in His action He creates the space for free human action in correspondence with Christ’s freedom for the Father by the Holy Spirit. It is a unilateral divine action that re-creates the space for their to be a genuinely free and human action in correspondence with God’s action. So, human action in this covenantal schema has never been grounded in an independent autonomous humanity, but only within God’s humanity for the world in Jesus Christ. Union with Christ by the Holy Spirit is where human freedom comes to spark towards God as God gives us, His creatures and re-creatures in Christ’s risen and ascended humanity, a share in His liberum arbitrium (freewill); but in grace and in creaturely correspondence to His. The circle between God and humanity is closed within the humanity of God for the world in Jesus Christ.

Constructively Correcting Calvin’s Doctrine of Assurance: Resourcing Barth and TFT

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From the conclusion on my personal chapter for my co-edited/authored book, Evangelical Calvinism: Dogmatics&Devotion: Volume 2. My chapter is entitled: “Assurance is of the Essence of Saving Faith” Calvin, Barth, Torrance, and the “Faith of Christ”. In it I offer a charitable corrective of John Calvin’s doctrine of assurance of salvation (or lack thereof), by resourcing the theologies of Karl Barth and Thomas Torrance, respectively.

What we have come to see is that assurance of salvation, dogmatically understood, is fully grounded in Jesus Christ. From Calvin, to Barth, to Torrance, union with Christ and the vicarious humanity of Christ provides the foundation for how to understand assurance of salvation and how it should be framed; that the faith of Christ for us is the only real saving faith, as such elect people can only participate from that faith for them. It is this reality, as we have seen, that allows the seeker (of assurance) to realize that indeed assurance is of the essence of faith; precisely because faith is a reality that comes from God in Christ and not individual human beings. We also came to see, particularly in Barth and Torrance, that election and reprobation should be understood to be fully concentrated in the vicarious humanity of Christ. Again, what this does is to evacuate the question of whether or not Jesus died for me, and instead allows all of humanity to keep their eyes fully on Jesus because Jesus, in this frame, died for all of humanity. As a result, any space that could allow for anxiety has been erased, and Jesus is understood to be the one that stands in the gap between God and all of humanity in his vicarious humanity. We have come to see that from this vantage point assurance is the essence of saving faith because to think salvation is to fully think Jesus and not ourselves. Assurance for the Evangelical Calvinist, then, is of the essence of saving faith because it is not an individual’s faith that saves them, but instead it is the vicarious faith of Jesus Christ. We look to Christ, then, and no one else, not even ourselves; particularly when we think things salvation. Jesus Christ is assurance.

 

The 20th Century Swiss Evangelical Church in Concert with the 21st Century North American Evangelical Church

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A Church in Basel, Switzerland

As an evangelical (at least that’s my pedigree from birth), here in the 21st century, things have become rather dire, in my opinion, with reference to finding sound so-called “evangelical churches.” This is no abstract thing for me, but an ongoing reality. We have literally been churchless for quite a while now (we watch a home church of ours back in Southern California online every Sunday morning, which isn’t ultimately sufficient; as far as real life in-person fellowship etc.) We have tried multitudes of “evangelical churches,” and not to be reductionistic, they are all almost exactly the same. They still have 1990s seeker sensitive programs ongoing—with 21st century technology—and/or personality cult driven pastorates that only stay viable until said pastor dies or retires (which such pastors rarely do). But the actuality of Christ is really nowhere to be found; in name only. Bibles are nowhere present, not in the hands of the people (some of that is tech related, but not really, I don’t think), and the sermons mostly mimic bad Ted Talks. The worship/music part of it appears to be something more like American Idol tryouts than it does actual leadership to worship of the triune God. Beyond that, and based on a relatively recent poll of evangelicals, most don’t even believe that or know if Jesus Christ is fully God. The sound doctrinal body of teaching is lacking to the point that it is non-existent; which then that vacuum only leaves room for bad doctrine. This is a lamentable thing.

And yet the aforementioned, unfortunately, isn’t unique to the 21st century evangelicals. Here is Karl Barth discussing his own experience of the “church” in his early to middle 20th century context in his native Switzerland:

It hardly needs to be said that we are dealing here with a point of view which has been most flagrantly neglected in modern Protestantism since the 18th century. From the visible standpoint our Protestant national Churches are little more than great unions, or communities of interest, of individuals who are Christian or are called Christian, individualists, each of whom—like the people of Israel in the time of the Judges—does that which is right in his own eyes, so that although some may act together in particular ecclesiolae [churches] called movements, we cannot inquire too closely what it really is that unites them. Even less can we inquire what these Churches are as a whole, a question which would yield the most gratuitous and to a large extent unconvincing answers. If we will and can and must maintain the form revealed in them, then we can only sigh: Kyrie eleison. Destroying as they do the relationship between the community and its members, they are hopelessly a-catholic Churches, hardly distinguishable, if at all, from heretical sects, or sects which verge on heresy, in the matter which now concerns us.

The most obvious example is the 1911 Constitution of the Evangelical Reformed Church of the City of Basel. It begins with a kind of hymnal introit to which a conscientious exegete could hardly give any but an Arian sense . . ..[1]

What is the common identifiable theme that holds Barth’s early to middle Evangelical Reformed church together with the North American evangelical church of today? Embedded in the passage from, where he notes, “It hardly needs to be said that we are dealing here with a point of view which has been most flagrantly neglected in modern Protestantism since the 18th century. . ..” It is the Enlightenment tentacles, and its anthropology of turn-to-the-subject that has helped to tie the whole modern and postmodern churches together (there are other factors, as well). A spirituality where individualism reigns prime, romanticist feelings cajole the heart-strings, and personal interest sublimates the interests of the living God. Kyrie eleison indeed!

Are there exceptions? Always. In fact, we are looking for an exception currently; so please keep that in prayer if you would. Note: I am not implying or presuming that we are looking for a “perfect church.” Nein. We are simply looking for the church in its local expression. An environ wherein the church is being the Church by genuinely bearing witness to her reality in Jesus Christ and the triune God.

I am remaining charitable in my language throughout this post. The so-called evangelical church has already gone right by the impasse, and she doesn’t even realize it. She indeed functions as a series of social clubs with the name of Jesus Christ splattered all over her programs and multimedia presentations. Good intentions, and smiles are not enough to gloss over the tragedy of it all. Only repentance, as if ancient Israel before God, will do. Kyrie eleison.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §62 [521–22] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 195.

PS. I also work on call 24/7 which makes “church shopping” that much more difficult. But I know we will eventually find something.

Divine and Human Agency Betwixt a Doctrine of Sanctification

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Human agency, a Theanthropology will be a central piece of development in treating a doctrine of Sanctification in the theologies of Barth and TFT, respectively. Without genuine human agency, human freedom before God, even as that is somehow unilaterally grounded by God’s Self-freedom, it isn’t really meaningful to think of a Christian doctrine of sanctification. That is, because agency without real human freedom only reduces the human to metaphysical abstractions acting out an automated history already done for them absolutely by God. But in reality, if thought well, both accounts of agency, Divine and human, must and can be thought together—hypostatically so.

On Barth’s Affirmation of Anselm’s ‘Proof of God’ and Rejection of A Natural Theology

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Being oppositional to natural theology is a hallmark of Karl Barth’s theological posture. His primary rejection of a natural theology isn’t a result of his socio-politico atmosphere in the Reich of Germany per se; even though it has application towards the type of Nationalistic Socialism that characterized Adolf Hitler’s vision of the golden age of Germany. Barth rejected natural theology for theological reasons; i.e., theological-anthropological reasons. He maintained a radical commitment to the reformational notion of the total depravity of humanity; albeit, in an Athanasian key. This commitment is best illustrated by his collegial correspondences, and even debates with Catholic German theologian, Erich Przywara. Przywara, was a modern advocate, and constructive builder, indeed, a retriever of the classical Thomistic analogia entis (‘analogy of being’). Przywara ultimately argued from something like a capaciousness left in fallen humanity, as if a residual spark continued to burn within the intellect; which when perfected by grace, even preveniently or objectively so, would allow fallen human beings to build an intellectual cathedral wherein its spire might reach into the heavens and touch the feet of God. But of course, this was a speculative measure by which human beings reason by a series of negations from their finite beings to its primary and first cause in the infinite being, the unmoved mover, who is, in the Przywaran frame, the God of Jesus Christ. Barth retorted to such machination with a loud Nein, such that the canton church bells in Basel were made to ring out.

Barth offered his own reading on thinking God. This has been identified by such theologians as Eberhard Juengal et al. as the analogia fidei -/relationis (analogy of faith -/relation). Barth contended that there was such a qualitative disjunction between God and humanity that outwith God’s invasion, His descending into the fallen world, outwith His assumptio carnis (assumption of flesh) it would be nigh impossible for human beings to begin to even imagine the living and triune God; let alone ‘know’ this God. What was required in Barth’s estimation was that God enter into the garb of our humanity, by becoming human Himself in Jesus Christ, and to do so unto the point of death; even death on the cross. Barth maintains that it was only this type of the dissolution of fallen humanity, and then via its resurrection in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, that humanity by the Holy Spirit, in union with Christ’s humanity (spiritually), might come to have a correspondence of faith, with Christ’s faith, through Christ’s relationship to humanity mediated through His humanity, and in turn, through His human nature in inseparable relationship with the divine Logos, who is the ground of Christ’s singular person, that humanity could ever have a center in God to rightly know God by.

With the aforementioned noted, Anthony Feneuil offers a helpful reading on how Barth engaged with Anselm’s so-called ‘ontological proof’ for the existence of God. As Feneuil shows, Barth could affirm Anselm’s proof without collapsing it into something like the analogia entis presented by Przywara et al. So, how could Barth affirm a ‘proof’ for God’s existence, without falling prey to his own critique of an analogia entis (which is a subset of a natural theology simplicter)? Feneuil writes (in extenso):

According to Barth, Anselm’s proof is not natural theology. Anselm never places himself on the —supposedly common to the believer and the unbeliever—ground of natural reason. The definition of God Anselm gives at the beginning of the Proslogion is not, says Barth, a definition in the strict sense of the term but, rather, a confession of faith. It does not define the nature of God but acknowledges a divine command, actually the first of the Ten Commandments (“You shall have no other gods before me”): “We believe that You are something than which nothing greater can be thought.” It is not about the abstract essence of God, but about the relation of lordliness between the revealed God and God’s creatures. Anselm does not place himself on the fool’s ground, he does not think on the same level. And the proof does not primarily prove the existence of God but, rather, the fact that, on the ground of this lordliness relationship that God initiated, it is not even possible for us to imagine, even as a mere hypothesis, the inexistence of God. The mere hypothesis of the nonexistence does not fit God. In that respect as well, God is very different  from any other object of the world (very different from a hundred–euro note, for instance). Therefore, Anselm’s proof is not an ontological proof, that is, a proof that would go from God’s essence in thought of God’s actual existence. It is not a proof in which human thought is above God, in which human thought decides about God’s existence. It is the other way around: the proof aims at showing, from the revealed name of God, that human thought cannot establish itself as a spectator above God. The proof shows that human thought, in relation to God, is unescapably limited.

Therefore, one could say that, in a sense, the proof aims precisely at negating the possibility of any natural theology, understood as a human attempt to escape the relation of obedience to God, and to establish oneself in the position of being able to make judgments about God’s existence, just as about the existence of any object. It is a proof that declares our wisdom as a folly before God. Hence, the insipiens, in Barth’s reading of Anselm—that is, the one who does not understand the proof—is not only the one who denies the existence of God, but also the one who tries to establish this existence on purely rational grounds. Who, then, is the insipiens? He is Descartes, not less than Kant, because when Descartes attempts to ground the certainty of God’s existence exclusively on human reason, he believes that he can consider God as a thought object similar to others, whose existence can always be put into bracket. Insofar, he is an insipiens: he believes that one can talk about God as about a thing or an absent person, using a third-person discourse, whereas one cannot talk about God without talking to God. Consequently, there is no fundamental difference between Anselm’s insipiens and Paul’s fool: both refer to those who do not acknowledge the foolishness of their own wisdom, but neither Anselm’s incipiens [sic.] nor Paul’s fool refer to the one who cannot reason well, for any contingent cause.[1]

If Feneuil is correct in his reading of Barth, and there is no reason to think otherwise, we can see, even in Barth’s reading on Anselm’s ‘proof’ how Barth’s rejection of a natural theology was operative. Ultimately, I would contend, Barth sees natural theology, and its subset in the analogia entis, as foolish because it attempts to decenter God’s ontology with fallen humanity’s; i.e., by asserting that there remains a residual foundation within the intellect of fallen humanity whereby knowledge of the true and living God has been retained; even if it might need a drop of God’s created grace to jumpstart it.

[1] Anthony Feneuil, “The Cross of Wisdom: Ambiguities in Turning Down Apologetics (Paul, Anselm, Barth),” in Christophe Chalamet and Hans–Christoph Askani, eds., The Wisdom and Foolishness of God: First Corinthians 1—2 In Theological Exploration (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 174–75.

Martin Luther’s Centraldogma, ‘Faith Alone’ by Barth

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Martin Luther preaches in the pulpit, pointing to the crucified Jesus. Among the audience, are his wife Katherina von Bora with the little son and Lucas Cranach the Elder. Woodcut engraving after a painting from the predella (bottom of the altarpiece) of a triptychon (1547) in the church at Wittenberg by Lucas Cranach the Younger (German painter, 1515 – 1586), published in 1881.

Is there a centraldogma for the Protestant Reformation? It depends on what angle we attempt to answer that question by. For Martin Luther, per Barth’s lights et alia, the foundation for his reformational work was the doctrine of justification (sola fide). For Luther, according to Barth, this was the great differentiator between what became Protestantism versus the Latin Catholic church’s position on justification; which would entail a cooperative matrix in the God-human relation (gratia infusa). After Luther read the Greek New Testament for himself, he realized the synergistic salvation that Roma propounded was contradicted by the perspicacious teaching of Scripture alone. Barth offers some rich insight on how he sees this centraldogma operative for Luther:

It was again Luther, above all others, who obviously regarded and described the doctrine of justification as the Word of the Gospel. To him it was not merely the decisive point, the hub, as it were, of the whole of Evangelical theology in controversy with the Romanists. It was this, in the sense of the Schmalkaldic Articles of 1537 (Bek.-Schr. der ev.-luth. Kirche, 415 f.)—in which it is called the first and principial article in this special sense: “In relation to this article we cannot doubt or yield an inch, though heaven and earth or all things passing may fall . . . . On this article stands all that we teach and live against the Papacy, the devil and the devil prevail against us.” The fact that Luther linked together the Papacy, the devil and the world shows us, however, that Luther was not thinking merely in terms of the polemic against Rome. In the praefatio to the 1535 Galatians we are told immediately before the passage quoted earlier: That one article reigns in my heart, namely the article of faith in Christ, by which, in which, and through which all my theological reflections flow back and forth by day and by night. If the doctrine is flourishing, then will flourish all good things, religion, true worship, the glory of God, and assured knowledge of all conditions and matters (l.c., 39). Then in the argumentum of the same commentary we read (l.c., 48, 28): If the article of justification is lost, then the whole of Christian doctrine is lost at the same time. And on Gal. 1.3 (l.c., 72, 20): If the article of justification lies in ruins, then all lies in ruins. Therefore, it is necessary that we sharpen it (in the manner in which Moses spoke of the Law) and cram it in. For it cannot be understood and held enough or too much. According to Luther’s exposition of Gal. 2.20 (l.c., 296, 23) this article and this article alone has the power to refute all sects, anabaptists and sacramentarians, etc., seeing that they are all at error in relation to it. Moreover, it is by the position on justification that Christianity is distinguished from all other religions: For only Christians believe this doctrine and are righteous not because of what they themselves do, but because they receive the works of another, that is, the passion of Christ (Schol. on Is. 53.2f., 1534, W.A. 25, 329, 15; 330, 8). And in the same context (l.c., 332): this doctrine is the basis of the New Testament, from which, as from an open fountain, all the treasures of the divine wisdom flow. Similarly in 1537 Luther could open a disputation (W.A. 39.1, 205, 2) with the words: The article of justification is master and emperor, Lord, ruler and judge over all kinds of doctrines, and it preserves and steers all the church’s doctrine. If it does not know and consider this article, the human reason is defenceless against the vainest errors. But a mind which is strengthened by it will stand against all their assaults. The dominating role which Luther assigned to the matter in his own sermons and other works corresponds to these declarations of principle. The well-known description of the doctrine as the article by which the church stands or falls does not seem to derive from Luther himself, but it is an exact statement of his view. He found in it the one point which involved the whole.[1]

As Barth has illustrated, rather definitively, Luther saw the doctrine of justification as the watershed locus of all that mattered for the Church of Jesus Christ. For, if the Church gets the Gospel wrong, then what type of Church is one left with?

Once this spark lit on fire Luther’s affections his reformation was underway. It wasn’t the 95 theses on the Wittenberg church’s door that was motivating Luther—that is on the matter of the indulgences, per se, even as that was directly relatable to this matter—it went into the theoanthropological roots of the teaching of the New Testament itself. What was required for humanity to be justified before God? What in fact, were the fundamental entailments of the Gospel? Was it what the Latin church had taught Luther the Augustinian monk; the gratia infusa way? Or was it instead the iustitia aliena (alien righteousness) of Jesus Christ which when the would-be believer comes into union with Christ, by faith alone and grace alone (sola fide sola gratia), all of these benefits of Christ’s person and work become theirs? For Luther, and for the other reformers, it was clearly the latter; it was solo Christo (Christ alone). Soli Deo Gloria

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §61 [521–22] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 8–9.

God’s Wrath in the Theology of Karl Barth: The Theologian’s Theologian

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Karl Barth is often accused (erroneously so) of being a liberal theologian. This mistakenly happens under the neo-orthodox label, as if, at best, maybe a soft form of theological liberalism. And yet, Barth is more critical of theological liberalism than most of the so-called Reformed and Lutheran critics of Barth in the 21st century. Barth was more intimately related to, and formed by the mediating and liberal theologians, in direct ways, much beyond his critics today (and yesterday). The whole premise of Barth’s radical shift was in response to what he finally perceived as theological slop, in regard to the theological liberalism he had been trained under. He realized, famously, from his pulpit in Safenwil, that the theological pablum he had been fed in his university training, was just that. It had no real power, no grist or grit in the face of the fallout produced by WW1. As a result, he famously took such theology to task, initially, in his commentary on Romans (Der Römerbrief), and finally, in his Church Dogmatics.

What I want to highlight in this brief article is how false the aforementioned is. Barth, whilst radically, or consistently, following the Protestant Scripture Principle, brought critique against both theological liberalism, scholasticism Reformed, and much of the medieval harvest, that all, just the same, promoted portraits of God that ran afoul of the simple teaching and witness found in Holy Scripture. In this instance, in the example I am culling forward for this article, you will see how Barth might even sound like a conservative Reformed theologian of today (okay, I’m stretching that—he’s better). Here we see Barth’s commentary on God’s wrath:

To the critics of the term “wrath of God” and especially A. Ritschl (Rechtf. u. Vers., II, § 16 f.) were quite wrong when they said that “wrath” is not a quality or activity or attitude which can be explained in the light of God’s being, or brought into harmony with His love and grace. In reply to this criticism we have to say plainly that the grace of God would not be grace if it were separated from the holiness in which God causes only His own and therefore His good will to prevail and be done, holding aloof from and opposing everything that is contrary to it, judging and excluding and destroying everything that resists it. And grace would not be free grace if it were bound to any single form of its appearance and manifestation, if God always had to show Himself monotonously as “love,” or what we think of as love, if He were not permitted to negate that which has to be negated, if He could not conceal Himself when He is resisted, revealing His grace only in the alien form of unwillingness and wrath. Above all, grace would not be grace, the serious and effective address of God to man, the effective establishment of fellowship with him, if God did not oppose man’s opposition to Himself, if He left man to go his own way unaccused and uncondemned and unpunished, if He ignored the miserable pride of man, if the man of sin had nothing to fear from Him, if it were not a fearful thing to fall into His hands (Heb. 12.29). That His grace would not be grace without His judgment is just as true as the supposed opposite with which it is indissolubly connected, that there is no holiness of God which can be separated from His grace, and therefore no wrath of God—this is something which, unfortunately, A. Ritschl did not even remotely understand—that can be anything other than the redemptive fire of His love, which has its final and proper work in the fact that for our sake, for the sake of man fallen in sin and guilt, He did not spare His only Son.[1]

Let it be known, I don’t care whether or not Barth is palatable to the so-called conservative Reformed and Lutheran theologians of today. But let it also be observed that Barth is no churlish reader and receiver of the Reformed tradition such that he simply discards with what might sound offensive to the Romantic’s and Rationalist’s eardrums. Barth is a Bible reader. As a result, he attempts to do his theology in light of Scripture’s reality (res), Jesus Christ. As the passage illustrates, Barth understands God’s grace (and love) from within the context of God’s Self-revelation as that comes for us in His dearly beloved Son.

This isn’t so much an apology for Barth (in fact I repudiate such things), as it is a call for people to be good theologians. Don’t let foreign limiting factors enter into the theological task, such that said factors delimit the Word of God of being the only source and ground for the outworking of a genuinely Christian theology. In the aforementioned from Barth, we have an example of this type of outworking in the context of his rebuttal of a mediating (liberal) theologian Albrecht Ritschl. And yet, de jure, the basis upon which Barth reads a constructively christologically conditioned notion of God’s wrath, against, in this case, Ritschl, applies catholically across the board and all around to every period of theological development; into the present and forthcoming.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §60 [490] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 131.

The Fittingness of God to Become Human / The Unfittingness of Humans to Become God

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It is unfitting for man to exalt himself to the status of God. But it is entirely fitting for God to become man (human). It is fitting for God to enter His creaturely sphere, to become His creaturely magnum opus, and redeem and elevate it from the inside up. It was so fitting for God to become human (man) that He freely elected that status for Himself, even before the foundations of the world, as He elected humanity for Himself; which was ultimately going to be for us (pro nobis). To invert that order is to imbibe the spirit of the Antichrist. The very spirit that slithered upon the Holy ground of Eden and whispered into Eve’s ear with its serpentine forked tongue: “you will be like God.” Barth writes,

We can state at once the impotence of this enterprise and therefore its inward futility. God becomes and is man. His condescension to us, His being as we are, is an event. It is actuality. It is the act of the One who is free and able to do this. It is the powerful execution of His eternal resolve. It is a triumphant and indisputable and irrevocable fact. But man, on the other hand, only wants to exalt himself and to be as God. He can never do it. He does not have the freedom or power. He may determine on it for long enough, but nothing will ever come of it. He will always fall back on himself and still be man. It is not paradoxical or absurd that God becomes and is man. It does not contradict the concept of God. If fulfils it. It reveals the glory of God. But it is certainly paradoxical and absurd that man wants to be as God. It contradicts the concept of man. It destroys it. Man ceases to be a man when he wants this. It does not involve any alteration in God for Him to become a creature. Even as such He is still the Creator. But it does require an alteration in man—and one that is not given to him—to become God. He cannot hope and he need not concern himself that this will finally be attained. For his own good it is provided that he cannot pass his own limits, try how he will. The only result of his attempts is the revelation of his impotence to do so, and, because he ought not to do so, the revelation of his shame.[1]

This bespeaks the goodness and very goodness of God’s creation. All things in their proper order (taxis) in relation to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and within that given, that gift humans have the capacity to flourish in the ways intended by the living God. Rebel against this order, as we are wont to do by our ‘sinful natures,’ and it all goes to hell.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §60 [419] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 61–2.

On a Knowledge of Sin

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Missing the mark; that’s what sin is, or so I was told in Sunday school. To be sure, it is ‘missing the mark,’ but what or who is the mark? All too often people, Christian and Heathen alike, presume to know what sin is; as if there is a self-understood, perceived standard for knowing what the depths of righteousness entails. That is, there is this notion that we inherently know what sin is by our own lights; as if we as a societas have the inner-Übermensch to stand outside ourselves, on our own self-generated will power, to look back at ourselves, the world, embedded in an unrighteousness, and name it as such. But this is to presume that humanity inhabits a pura natura (pure nature) wherein there remains a divine spark that allows humanity to operate as its own Deus ex machina, capable of self-salvation through its incalculable power and indominable ‘holy’ spirit of self-governance. And yet this is to beg the question: is it really nature after all, imbued with its own eternal law, albeit gifted by God’s voluntas, that brings God-knowledge as the person negates self-knowledge as if the self is merely a mirror reflection of the divine (so, an always already present analogia entis)?

Barth shouts a resounding NEIN! Barth properly argues that there can be no proper knowledge of sin without first a proper knowledge of God in Jesus Christ. Otherwise, if an abstract knowledge of sin could be known, then as corollary, an abstract knowledge of God and a subsequent salvation could obtain. If the sinner could properly search the depths of the human, the fallen heart, it would be conceivable that they alone have the attributes of the Christian God, and as such, could prescribe their own way of salvation. Some might even think of this abstract way of salvation and naming of sin as what has come to be called: secularism. But as is the case with modernity and other epistemic frames of reference, its antecedent ideation has a source, particularly in the West, in and from the various Christian theological syntheses afoot. Barth rightly argues that it is the theologians of the purported ‘neutral god’, the notion of godness synthesized with various and ostensible Christian expressions of purported dogmatic articulations of the Holy and triune God, that has led to the secular religion, both in the church and outside, that we swim in today.

Barth writes (at length):

But this knowledge of real sin takes place in the knowledge of Jesus Christ. Why in this knowledge? We will first give the comprehensive answer: Because the God against whom the man of sin contends has judged this man, and therefore myself as this man, in the self-offering and death of Jesus Christ His own Son, putting him to death, and destroying him; and because He has revealed and continually reveals him as this one who is judged and put to death and destroyed in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and His being and living and speaking and witness for all ages. Because the verdict passed in His resurrection from the dead unmasks this old man, showing that every man is before God, and therefore what I myself am before Him, the man who is judged and put to death and destroyed. All this came upon Jesus Christ for every one of us and therefore for me, in our place and therefore in my place. We are all those and that of which God Himself made an end in Jesus Christ, which transferred to the past in Jesus Christ. We are all wearers of the old garment which was there taken off and destroyed. Indeed, we are all the old man himself who there in Jesus Christ was overtaken by the wrath of God and condemned and executed. Jesus Christ suffered and died in our place, in solidarity with this old man and therefore with us, without any clever reservation in respect of a secret innocence or freedom or capacity for redemption which might be maintained and ascribed to this man and therefore to us; without any contradiction or protest as though what was happening to this old man and therefore to us in this judgment was unjust; without any control over the grace of God, which surely could not be too severe; without reckoning on any sudden turn in His favour, simply in hope in God, but in that hope only in the form of obedience in which Jesus Christ allowed that God was in the right and He Himself—and therefore the old man and ourselves whose place He had taken—in the wrong, taking it upon Himself to be one with us, and as such to suffer what our acts and we ourselves had deserved before God. Because He is the One who has done this for us, the verdict of God passed in His resurrection and revealed in His being and living and speaking and witness is relevant to all men and therefore to ourselves as we have described it in a first approximation. As the verdict of God it has this complete and comprehensive content, including ourselves and our activity and being, and excluding any conceivable possibility of self-excuse and self-justification. And as the verdict of God it has the authority of His own direct and personal self-knowledge as the basis of what is now our true self-knowledge—true because in the self-knowledge which has this basis we cannot turn to any other revelation of God, to any God in a more original form, to any faith in such a form of God, attaining there to what is supposed to be a better knowledge of ourselves. In this verdict we learn what God knows about us, and therefore how it really is with us. For this reason its content is valid. For this reason, when we hear it, we have no option but to receive it and accept its validity.[1]

Let the self be damned, for sure it has been in the death and burial of Jesus Christ; and elevated afresh anew in the resurrection and ascension of the Son of Man for all of humanity as humanity in Himself. We will never know what we genuinely need to know outwith inhabiting the bosom of the Father in union with the eternal Son of God, who is the Christ, who is the man, Jesus, son of David, from the hinterparts, of Nazareth in the Galilee.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §60 [391] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 34–5.

On Barth’s Christologically Conditioned Doctrine of Biblical Inerrancy

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Karl Barth is often derided by evangelicals and contemporary Reformed orthodox types for rejecting a doctrine of biblical inerrancy and its underlying fount in a doctrine of Divine-verbal inspiration. This reception of Barth is understandable insofar that Barth does in fact say that he rejects the modern development known as inerrancy. But what shouldn’t be taken from this is that Barth somehow is holding hands with the Teutonic higher critics of the Bible; he is not! In fact, Barth is desirous, in a sense, of rescuing the Bible from the fires of Mordor as those are stoked by the ‘Bible critics.’ I would contend that it can be argued that Barth has a higher view of Scripture, formally, than even those who claim to affirm a doctrine of biblical inerrancy and its attendant understanding of Divine inspiration.

Barth firmly believes that the Post Reformed orthodox theologians were intent on securing the veracity and infallibility of Holy Scripture; this can be seen, as Barth underscores, the ‘Protestant Scripture Principle,’ which became the formal principle of the Reformed reformational theology. Barth was of the mind that the early Reformed theologians were eager in safeguarding the Bible from her early critics within early modernity (as that was fomenting in the 16th and 17th centuries, respectively). But just as the Fundamentalists of the 20th century built a theology upon their reaction to the higher critics of the 19th century, thus allowing the higher critics to set the agenda and categories and questions that “needed to be responded to,” similarly, I would argue that Barth maintained that the earlier and middle Reformed theologians allowed the early and developing rationalists of the time to set the agenda and categories and questions that ostensibly needed to be responded to. As such, in Barth’s mind, even those purportedly committed to the Protestant Scripture Principle, its defenders no less, so allowed their categories to be sublimated by their counterparts, that they ended up denuding the category of revelation itself vis-à-vis Holy Scripture, such that Holy Scripture lost its “Holy” character by being relegated to the level of just another profane book.

Barth writes,

We must not forget that the transition from biblical to biblicist thought does involve the transition to a rationalism—supranaturalistic thought it is in content. Therefore the relationship of theology to the truths of revelation which it has taken from the Bible is no longer the relationship to an authority which superior to man. It has fundamentally the same assurance and control with regard to them as man as a rational creature has in regard to himself, his experience, his thinking and therefore his world, believing that he is the master of himself as subject and therefore of his objects, or of his own relation to them.

As is well known the supreme achievement of the older Protestant orthodoxy was the doctrine of the verbal inspiration of Holy Scripture as developed in the later 17th century and given confessional status in the Helvetic Formula of Concord in 1675. There can be no doubt, however, that this was not merely worked out as a bulwark against a growing rationalism, but that it was itself, not an expression of an over-developed faith of revelation, but a product of typical rationalistic thinking—the attempt to replace faith and indirect knowledge by direct knowledge, to assure oneself of revelation in such a way that it was divorced from the living Word of the living God as attested in Scripture, pin-pointing it, making it readily apprehensible as though it were an object of secular experience, and therefore divesting it in fact of its character as revelation.

The irremediable danger of consulting Holy Scripture apart from the centre, and in such a way that the question of Jesus Christ ceases to be the controlling and comprehensive question and simply becomes on amongst others, consists primarily in the fact that (even presupposing a strict and exclusive Scripture principle) Scripture is thought of and used as though the message of revelation and the Word of God could be extracted from it in the same way as the message of other truth or reality can be extracted from other sources of knowledge, at any rate where it is not presumably speaking of Jesus Christ. But if Scripture is read in this way, the Scripture principle will not stand very long. Secretly the book of revelation is being treated and read like other books; and the question cannot long be denied whether the message we gather from it cannot be gathered from other books either by way of addition or even basically; whether the truths of revelation in the Bible are not of a series with all kinds of other truths; whether in them we do no simply have concretions of what is revealed concerning God and His will to all other men as such and by nature, of themselves, by the dictate of their reason? If Jesus Christ is seen to be the whole of Scripture, the one truth of revelation, this question cannot even be put, let alone given a positive answer. There is no other book which witnesses to Jesus Christ apart from Holy Scripture. This decides the fact that only in Holy Scripture do we have to do with the one and the whole Word and revelation of God. But if we do not see this, it is inevitable that the question of other sources of revelation should be put, and that sooner or later it should be given a positive answer.[1]

Barth is attempting to correct what he sees as a misstep made early on by the scholastics Reformed in their attempt to protect and elevate Holy Scripture; and this, based upon what he takes to be the wrong foundations. As clearly indicated by Barth’s above passage he believes that it is only when Holy Scripture is grounded in and framed by its reality in Jesus Christ that it can maintain its elevated and ‘Holy’ status as the written Word of God for humanity, for the church. Barth’s concern is always to unhitch the holiness of God from our own fallen and abstract speculations, and instead to ground them in the holy and elevated revelation of God’s triune life for the world in the second person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ. His critique of the normal receptions and understandings of the scholastics Reformed up to and including contemporary Reformed and evangelical theology cuts across this whole swath.

Conversely, Barth isn’t out to destroy the veracity or authority of Holy Scripture. Au contraire, he is seeking to provide a truly evangelical basis and theory of revelation for Scripture’s elevated status as the place where its gladhands are securely connected to its reality in the big-Hand of the Father as that is extended to us in the pierced hands of Jesus Christ. I think Barth might, at times, overextend himself when he refers to biblical inerrancy (see his Göttingen Dogmatics and Evangelical Theology: An Introduction), and come off sounding like he rejects the absolute veracity and holiness of the Bible. But even in the short passage we just read from him, it ought to become immediately apparent that this was not Barth’s intention whatsoever. In fact, if Barth’s critique is sound, and I think it is, it is the ostensible stalwarts of a biblical inerrancy and verbal inspiration, the contemporary Reformed and evangelicals among us, who unwittingly lower Holy Scripture’s provenance into the wastelands of the rationalists (Socinians) and higher biblical critics. Barth offers an alternative theory of revelation, inclusive of biblical revelation, particularly as he articulates that in his threefold form of the Word of God (and please understand, dear reader, that the scholastics Reformed first developed what has been identified as a fourfold form of the Word of God—so the heuristic is not a novelty developed by Barth, per se). Give him a fair hearing, and not a distorted one based upon his antagonists. Barth has a higher view of Scripture, based upon his christologically conditioned theory of revelation, than do, ironically, his critics on this very subject.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §60 [368-69] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 11.