Category Archives: CD

‘Very Man’

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Not only is Jesus Very God, but he is also Very Man. This is the Nicene-Constantinopolitan-Chalcedonian settlement in regard to the hypostatic union of Jesus person’ being both fully God, at His very being, and fully human as the ground of His being the Man from Nazareth in the Galilee. This post is meant to dovetail with the other side of this union where we looked at the way that Barth treated the personhood of Jesus Christ as ‘Very God.’ But without Very God, the Son of God, becoming Very man, we would of all people be most to be pitied. This is the stuff of the Gospel itself.

If God did not freely elect to become human, as both the electing God and the elected man, then there would be no way into reconciliation with the inner and triune life of God. We could not become partakers and thus participants in the divine nature if God did not first become us in Christ. As any good Bible reader understands, fallen humanity left to its own devices only remains in a vicious circle of self-love; a life constrained by the love of self, and its base desires, rather than being constrained by the love of God in Christ and His holiness. It took God to invade our war torn and dead sub-humanity, and re-create it such that the fallen person can finally be elevated into the throne-room of God’s life as the Son ascends with us back to the glory He has always already eternally shared with the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. All of this to say: the ‘man’ (human) part of the Gospel is just as important as the God part, insofar that without God becoming us it would be absolutely impossible for us to pierce into His inner and triune life and be saved. So, the man part, funded by the God part, both hypostatically united in the singular person of Jesus Christ is in fact the Euaggelion (Gospel). And for this we should be full of gratitude and worship to our Father who is in heaven.

Barth writes:

This means primarily that it is a matter of the Godhead, the honour and glory and eternity and omnipotence and freedom, the being as Creator and Lord, of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Jesus Christ is Himself God as the Son of God the Father and with God the Father the source of the Holy Spirit, united in one essence with the Father by the Holy Spirit. That is how He is God. He is God as He takes part in the even which constitutes the divine being.

We must add at once that as this One who takes part in the divine being and event He became and is man. This means that we have to understand the very Godhead, that divine being and event and therefore Himself as the One who takes part in it, in the light of the fact that it pleased God—and this is what corresponds outwardly to and reveals the inward divine being and event—Himself to become man. In this way, in this condescension, He is the eternal Son of the eternal Father. This is the will of this Father, of this Son, and of the Holy Spirit who is the Spirit of the Father and the Son. This is how God is God, this is His freedom, this is His distinctness from the superiority to all other reality. It is with this meaning and purpose that He is the Creator and Lord of all things. It is as the eternal and almighty love, which He is actually and visibly in this action of condescension. This One, the One who loves in this way, is the true God. But this means that He is the One who as the Creator and Lord of all things is able and willing to make Himself equal with the creature, Himself to become a creature; the One whose eternity does not prevent but rather permits and commands Him to be in time and Himself to be temporal, whose omnipotence is so great that He can be weak and indeed impotent, as a man is weak and impotent. He is the One who in His freedom can and does in fact bind Himself, in the same way as we all are bound. And we must go further: He, the true God, is the One whose Godhead is demonstrated and plainly consists in essence in the fact that, seeing He is free in His love, He is capable of and wills this condescension for the very reason that in man of all His creatures He has to do with the one that has fallen away from Him, that has been unfaithful and hostile and antagonistic to Him. He is God in that He takes this creature to Himself, and that in such a way that He sets Himself alongside this creature, making His own penalty and loss and condemnation to nothingness. He is God in the fact that He can give Himself up and does give Himself up not merely to the creaturely limitation but to the suffering of the human creature, becoming one of these men, Himself bearing the judgment under which they stand, willing to die and, in fact, dying the death which they have deserved. That is the nature and essence of the true God as He has intervened actively and manifestly in Jesus Christ. When we speak of Jesus Christ we mean the true God—He who seeks His divine glory and finds that glory, He whose glory obviously consists, in the fact that because he is free in His love He can be and actually is lowly as well as exalted; He, the Lord, who is for us a servant, the servant of all servants. It is in the light of the fact of His humiliation that on this first aspect all the predicates of His Godhead, which is the true Godhead, must be filled out and interpreted. Their positive meaning is lit up only by this determination and limitation, only by the fact that in this act He is this God and therefore the true God, distinguished from all false gods by the fact that they are not capable of this act, that they have not in fact accomplished it, that their supposed glory and honour and eternity and omnipotence not only do not include but exclude their self-humiliation. False gods are all reflections of a false and all too human self-exaltation. They are all lords who cannot and will not be servants, who are therefore no true lords, whose being is not a truly divine being.

The second christological aspect is that in Jesus Christ we have to do with a true man. The reconciliation of the world with God takes place in the person of a man in whom, because He is also true God, the conversion of all men to God is an actual event. It is the person of a true man, like all other men in every respect, subjected without exception to all the limitations of the human situation. The conditions in which other men exist and their suffering are also His conditions and His suffering. That he is very God does not mean that He is partly God and only partly man. He is altogether man just as He is altogether God—altogether man in virtue of His true Godhead whose glory consists in His humiliation. That is how He is the reconciler between God and man. That is how God accomplishes in Him the conversion of men to Himself. . ..[1]

Very meaty stuff!

Without getting too distracted let me lift up one aspect of this, particularly as found in the second paragraph above. Some critics might latch onto the fact that Barth writes, “. . . the conversion of all men to God is an actual event.” They might claim that this makes Barth a dogmatic universalist (or maybe some Christian universalists might want to take this in the positive from Barth). But that would be to miss Barth’s theology. Barth has just got done communicating that ‘the man’ Jesus Christ is the conversion of God for all of humanity in actuality. Even so, whilst this christological objectivism is rightly present in Barth, this should not lead the reader to imagine that Barth is operating from some type of Aristotelian theory of causation; to the contrary. Barth’s primary focus is on the primacy of Christ’s archetypal humanity as the humanity ‘converted’ to God. And within this, it can be (and should be) explicated that for Barth’s theology this entails all of humanity after Christ’s. So, there is a universalist aspect to the incarnation and its implications for Barth, just as there is for the Apostle Paul. But it would be wrong and foreign (to Barth’s total theology) to conclude that this necessarily leads to all of humanity subjectively bowing the knee to Christ as their Savior. This freedom in Christ for God has now been recreated in God’s freedom for us in Jesus Christ. But it is still required that by the power of the Holy Spirit a person says ‘Yes’ to God, from God’s ‘Yes and amen’ for them in Christ, in order to become full participants in the actual humanity of the Godman, Jesus Christ. In other words, the way of salvation has been ordained for all of humanity in and from Christ’s humanity. But the lost person must still recognize this reality and finally acknowledge (repent in Christ’s repentance for them) that without them echoing Christ’s yes and amen for them that they will be left out on the shadow-side of God’s lefthand of final judgment. Which in the end remains as mysterious as the first fall of humanity in Adam and Eve’s rebellion to God’s Word.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §58 [130–31] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 125–26.

‘Very God’

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Karl Barth develops what he calls, The Three Forms of the Doctrine of Reconciliation, in Church Dogmatics IV/1 §58. The first form is with reference to the ground of Christ’s person; i.e., the second person of the Trinity, the eternal Logos, the Son of God. As many of the early church fathers understood without the ground of Jesus’ person being the triune God in the eternal Logos, there could be no salvation for the weary wayfarers of a fallen humanity. Justification before and with God required that the “bridge” between the Holy God and the fallen humanity be God Himself; for He alone could bear the wages of sin in His own assumed humanity in the flesh and blood of the man from Nazareth, Jesus Christ. If Christ was not God’s pleroma (fullness) for us all he would have  been was some type of exemplar to ostensibly show a way to God; a way of works-righteousness, with the hope that fallen humanity, like the Christ consciousness, could elevate itself to God’s throne room based on their own merits; albeit, infused with an abstract power (or created grace) provided for by God—of the type that Jesus as the exemplar modeled for us in his own humanity. This might be one expression of attempting to develop a soteriology outwith Jesus being fully God. Genuine Christian salvation required that God reach down to us, become us, and then ascend with us in the garb of his full humanity whereby we might be participants in the triune holiness forevermore; indeed, as the Son has always already constituted that in His inner life with the Father by the Holy Spirit.

Barth writes:

The first is that in Jesus Christ we have to do with very God. The reconciliation of man with God takes place as God Himself actively intervenes, Himself taking in hand His cause with and against and for man, the cause of the covenant, and in such a way (this is what distinguishes the even of reconciliation from the general sway of providence and universal rule of God) that He Himself becomes man. God became man. That is what is, i.e., what has taken place, in Jesus Christ. He is very God acting for us men, God Himself become man. He is the authentic Revealer of God as Himself God. Again, He is the effective proof of the power of God as Himself God. Yet again. He is the fulfiller of the covenant as Himself God. He is nothing less or other than God Himself, but God as man. When we say God we say honour and glory and eternity and power, in short, a regnant freedom as it is proper to Him who is distinct from and superior to everything else that is. When we say God we say the Creator and Lord of all things. And we can say all that without reservation or diminution of Jesus Christ—but in a way in which it can be said in relation to Him, i.e., in which it corresponds to the Godhead of God active and revealed in Him. No general idea of “Godhead” developed abstractly from such concepts must be allowed to intrude at this point. How the freedom of God is constituted, in what character He is the Creator and Lord of all things, distinct from and superior to them, in short, what is to be understood by “Godhead,” is something which—watchful against all imported ideas, ready to correct them and perhaps to let them be reversed and renewed in the most astonishing way—we must always learn from Jesus Christ. He defines those concepts: they do not define Him. When we start with the fact that He is very God we are forced to keep strictly to Him in relation to what we mean by true “Godhead.”[1]

Significantly, for Barth, it is because Jesus is truly God, that He can genuinely reveal God to humanity; indeed, to the very humanity He assumes in the womb of Mary. This is the only way, as Barth rightly presses, that salvation might actually obtain for a fallen humanity. That is, for God to be brought into humanity, in Christ, and for humanity to be brought into God, by the grace of Christ’s life for us.

In synopsis: The above passage from Barth could be taken as the guiding premise of his whole theological offering. Without salvation, without reconciliation being fully God and fully man, in the hu[man]ity of Jesus Christ, for Barth, and more importantly, for Holy Scripture, there is no eternal life to be had; there is no salvation to be enjoyed; and there is no vision of God to be experienced. This is the all or nothing reality that fortifies not just Barth’s Gospel, but the Gospel of Christ itself as revealed by Himself in the Father by the Holy Spirit.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §58 [129] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 124–25.

The Goliath god of the Philosophers Versus the Father God of the Son

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. . . It is not a loud and stern and foreign thing, but the quiet and gentle and intimate awakening of children in the Father’s house to life in that house. That is how God exercises authority. All divine authority has ultimately and basically this character. At its heart all God’s ruling and ordering and demanding is like this. But it is in the direction given and revealed in Jesus Christ that the character of divine authority and lordship is unmistakably perceived.[1]

This follows from knowing God first as Father of the Son mediated through the Son by the Holy Spirit. And this is to the point and heart of an Evangelical Calvinism Athanasian Reformed mode of theological and Christian existence. The Son, the eternal Logos conditions the way we approach the Father, just as the Son has eternally indwelt the bosom of the Father. There is no discursive routing here and there on a way up to God to be taken. There is only the Son descended (exitus) to the point of death the death of the cross, and new humanity ascended (reditus) on the healing wings of the Holy Spirit as He in Christ takes us to the glory the Son has always already shared eternally with the Father. Indeed, it is in this oikonomia (economy) that God has freely chosen to make Himself known to and for the world, in the face of Jesus Christ. God’s exousia (authority) is not an authority of an abstract monad back yonder in the ethereal gases of the philosophers; such that He is some type of Goliath God. Nein. God’s authority, His sovereignty, His power is that of a gentle father with his children; it is a filial familial authority.

This is the interminable perduring seemingly unquenchable battle of the God of Jerusalem versus the God of Athens. God is Father of the Son, as Athanasius has intoned, or he is simply an abstraction plastered onto the God of the Bible; as if some type of graffiti that would seek to draw attention to its own self-projected beauty rather than the beauty of God’s manger and cross in Christ. Choose you this day who you will serve.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §58 [100] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 97.

On A Critique of the Pactum Salutis and its Inherent Social [subordinationist] Trinitarianism

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Karl Barth operated with his own reformulated Christologically conditioned Covenantal theology. For Him there is one covenant (of grace), just as sure as there are two covenants, if not three (covenant of works, covenant of grace, pactum salutis i.e., covenant of redemption) that the Federal or classically covenantal theologians such as Cocceius, Ursinus, Olevianus, Bullinger et al. articulated. Barth was a strident critic of Federal or classical Covenantal theology, insofar that he detected a primacy of the Law as the antecedent ground upon which the conditions of the covenant of grace are ultimately fulfilled in the coming of Christ for the elect. That is to say, when Christ comes, as the decree of God prescribes, according to Federal theology, Jesus actively obeys all of the commands of the covenant of works (Law) thereby fulfilling the conditions required for a full justification, again, for the elect, to obtain. This fulfillment, per the federal structure, as decretally determined by God before the foundations of the world (e.g., decretum absolutum), is what the “Feds” identify as the covenant of grace. And within this schema, many of the federalists, also place what is often referred to as the pactum salutis (pact or contract of salvation), into the mix of the economic outworking of the covenant of works/grace within the type of Heilsgeschichte (‘salvation history’) they envision.

Conversely, we have a theological incoherency; or so I will suggest, and Barth will identify in the passage I share from him shortly. Ultimately, the incoherency present within the schema presented by Federal theology affects a proper doctrine of God. What I will suggest, after Barth’s passage is shared, and in concert with his critique of the pactum salutis, is that Federal theology, inadvertently, suffers from a subordinationist, even an eternal functional subordination of the Son (EFS), insofar that the Son is understood to be a distinct center of conscious, indeed, organ of God in obediently carrying out the decree of God (and a decree that is abstract and decoupled from the triune personage of the Monarchia [‘Godhead’]. Here is what Barth has to communicate with reference to the errancy of the Pactum:

[5] The riddle posed by the older Federal theology at this its strongest point appears to be insoluble. But perhaps we shall find the solution if we examine rather more closely how it understood the eternal basis of the covenant of grace. As we have seen, it was taken to consist in an intertrinitarian decision, in a freely accepted but legally binding mutual obligation between God the Father and God the Son. Now there are three doubtful features in this conception.

For God to be gracious to sinful man, was there any need of a special decree to establish the unity of the righteousness and mercy of God in relation to man, of a special intertrinitarian arrangement and contract which can be distinguished from the being of God? If there was need of such a decree, then the question arises at once of a form of the will of God in which this arrangement has not yet been made and is not yet valid. We have to reckon with the existence of a God who is righteous in abstracto and not free to be gracious from the very first, who has to bind to the fulfilment of His promise the fulfilment of certain conditions by man, and punish their non-fulfilment. It is only with the conclusion of this contract with Himself that He ceases to be a righteous God in abstracto and becomes the God who in His righteousness is also merciful and therefore able to exercise grace. In this case it is not impossible or illegitimate to believe that properly, in some inner depth of His being behind the covenant of grace, He might not be able to do this. It is only on the historical level that the theologoumena of the foedus naturae or operum [covenant of nature or works] can be explained by the compact of the Federal theology with contemporary humanism. In fact it derives from anxiety lest there might be an essence in God in which, in spite of that contract, His righteousness and His mercy are secretly and at bottom two separate things. And this anxiety derives from the fact that the thought of that intertrinitarian contract obviously cannot have any binding and therefore consoling and assuring force. This anxiety and therefore this proposition of a covenant of works could obviously never have arisen if there had been a loyal hearing of the Gospel and a strict looking to Jesus Christ as the full and final revelation of the being of God. In the eternal decree of God revealed in Jesus Christ the being of God would have been seen as righteous mercy and merciful righteousness from the very first. It would have been quite impossible therefore to conceive of any special plan of a God who is righteous in abstracto, and the whole idea of an original covenant of works would have fallen to the ground.[1]

Briefly, points of response. Firstly, Barth argues: there is no point in constructing a covenant of works to begin with. He argues that this ultimately is really a matter of adding a hermeneutical exemplum where God’s Self-revelation, attested to in Holy Scripture, never prescribed the need for one; at least not beyond what the text of Scripture itself is premised upon in regard to its reality in Jesus Christ. If our first encounter with God in Christ is Genesis 1:1, “in the beginning God created,” then it becomes artificial to construct a latterly construed beginning point with God that is based upon an ad hoc construct wherein God first relates to us on some aspect of Law (e.g., covenant of works). Secondly, for Barth, to posit this type of negative or abstract starting point for a God-human relationship, ends up relying on the speculative machinations of the philosophers and theologians rather than the positive affections provided for by God first encountering us in the face of Jesus Christ (in the grace of creation by God’s Word cf. John 1:1). Thirdly, for Barth, when this type of competitive relationship between God and humanity, based on an abstract notion of Law, is introduced into the eternal life of God, we end up with two distinct concepts of righteousness within the Godhead; i.e., wherein the Son, subordinately, submits whatever His sense of righteousness might be to that of the Father’s sense of righteousness. This is where I would argue the pactum salutis inherently lends itself to a social trinitarianism of the type where the Son can be understood as eternally subordinate to the Father. Fourthly, as inferred from Barth’s reasoning, we end up with a ’God behind the back of the covenantal schema’ in Federal theology, which entails the notion that we can never be quite sure if His ostensible revealed will is eternally in correspondence with His eternal or hidden will insofar there is no necessary relationship between His eternal and triune person and His work in salvation in the lineaments of a historical history.

Alternatively, and rightly, Barth simply scrubs the whole framework posited by a federal theology in favor of building his covenantal schema on the direct and immediate Self-revelation of God; indeed, without additions. Barth’s approach, I would argue, fits Occam’s Razor much better than Federal theology does, insofar that Barth doesn’t need to add unnecessary accretions to what God has already and intelligibly revealed in regard to the Gospel. That is, that rather than constructing a salvation-framework that adds more to the Gospel understanding, ostensibly, that Barth is biblically comfortable with working from the person and work of God in Christ as if the whole revelation of God without adumbration. When accretions are added, we end up with the heterodox and heretical liminalities that Barth has correctly highlighted for us in his critique of the pactum salutis in particular, and Federal theology in general. In other words, for Barth (and TFT and John the theologian): ‘when we see Jesus we see the Father’ without hesitation.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §57 [065] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 61–2.

The Cipher-Jesus Predestined by the Fallen Heart

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German anthropologist and philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach stated: God is “the outward projection of a human’s inward nature.” A very telling observation with reference to a postEnlightenment turn-to-the-subject worldpicture. This remains a fitting observation even for our 21st century time; i.e., that people, by nature (according to Scripture, and empirical observation), in the inverse, have collapsed the classical attributes of God into the mirror of their own image. A postmodern, normative relativistic people simply wake up in the morning, look in the mirror in the bathroom, and say: “hello there God.” Even if not this overtly, it is the way us sinners operate enslaved, enbondaged to the incurvature of our in-turned hearts. We are, in the first Adam sense, slaves of our polluted, stained, dead souls; souls that by sinful being (ousia) naturally believe that our way is the way.

This is being played out every single day, not just out there, but in here; indeed, in our own daily lives. This is why the Apostle Paul by the Holy Spirit exhorts us to reckon ourselves dead to sin, and alive to Jesus Christ. Even so, the pagan, the heathen has no resurrection power to mortify these first Adam ways of life that dominate every shred and depth of the marrow of the bones; they are simply enslaved to love of themselves; and left to themselves have no capacity to not sin; to not worship the self as God. It is whilst inhabiting this type of beleaguered existence that in an attempt to worship, the person will name their own person as the Messiah. The urge to worship, of course, is because the human animal has been created by the living and alien God to worship; to worship Him in spirit and truth. But absent the Holy Spirit’s indwelling, the only reality the fallen person knows to worship, most immediately, is themselves. And yet, there seems to be some type of cultural pressure (maybe the Christian witness and the Holy Spirit’s conviction in the world) that leads said fallen people to worship something or someone outside of themselves; even though they haven’t the capacity to actually achieve a genuinely extra worship. And so, they might in parody, and for convenience’s sake, attribute their self-worship to the worship of Jesus. But their respective Jesus, as has already been alluded to, is really a Jesus who does what their deepest desires yearn for; the desires that are enchained to the kingdom of darkness; to their father of lies and death, the devil.

Barth helps us,

It is not, therefore, doing Him a mere courtesy when it names the name of Jesus Christ. It does not use this name as a symbol or sign which has a certain necessity on historical grounds, and a certain purpose on psychological and pedagogic grounds, to which that which it really means and has to say may be attached, which it is desirable to expound for the sake of clarity. For it, this name is not merely a cipher, under which that which it really means and has to say leads its own life and has its own truth and actuality and would be worth proclaiming for its own sake, a cipher which can at any time be omitted without affecting that which is really meant and said, or which in other ages or climes or circumstances can be replaced by some other cipher. When it speaks concretely, when it names the name of Jesus Christ, the Christian message is not referring simply to the specific form of something general, a form which as such is interchangeable in the phrase of Lessing, a “contingent fact of history” which is the “vehicle” of an “eternal truth of reason.” The peace between God and man and the salvation which comes to us men is not something general, but the specific thing itself: that concrete thing which is indicated by the name of Jesus Christ and not by any other name. For He who bears this name is Himself the peace and salvation. The peace and salvation can be known therefore, only in Him, and proclaimed only in His name.[1]

There are much too many cipher-Jesuses running around, reigning supreme in the world. There is only one Jesus Christ, and He alone puts His words in His own mouth in perichoretic conversation with the Father and Holy Spirit. The zeitgeist would make us think that Jesus is simply an imprimatur of our own waning and base desires; that Jesus is whomever our enchained souls would determine Him to be. Whether this be for interpersonal reasons, or collectivist political reasons. When Jesus simply becomes a cipher for me and my tribe, for our self-determined predestined agendas, He has simply been collapsed into us, as we have stolen His name and badged ourselves with it. God forbid it!

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §57 [021] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 18.

Church Dogmatics, V1 V2 V3 Done V4 To Go

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Just finished Volume 3. 2/3 of the way through the 6M words. All that remains is Volume 4 (the blue ones not pictured). I think I’m gonna take a bit of a sabbatical from the CD till I start V4. I have a bunch of other readings I need to get caught up on. We are richly blessed in our country to have the freedom and access to such great doctors of the church. Amen. In the meantime you can always stay in touch with Barth through my Barth Reader. And Merry Christmas!

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘To the Sewer with Them!’: On Christian Vocation

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The Christian place of vocation has been given its famous Protestant explication by Martin Luther. But not to be outdone, Karl Barth, has his own offering on the subject. Here he is writing on, in a small print excursus, what ultimately matters as the Christian lives coram Deo (before God).

As an instructive example, we may cite the verdict of August Bebel (Die Frau und der Sozialismus, ed. 1913, 1,409 f.): “Strictly speaking, the worker who drains sewers to protect humanity from unhealthy miasmas is a very useful member of society, whereas the professor who teaches falsified history in the interests of the ruling class, or the theologian who seeks to befog the brain with supernatural, transcendental doctrines, is an extremely harmful individual.” We must be careful not to be guilty of what is here stated to be the activity of theologians, and if we cannot do better than this we should make all haste to become good drainers of sewers. Similarly, if the professor of history cannot do better than teach history which is falsified in the interests of a class, to the sewers with him also![1]

With reference to the theologians, per Barth, to the sewer with them if all they have to offer the church, the people of God, is speculative metaphysical non-sense that has no contact with the concrete reality of God for us in the Man from Nazareth, Jesus Christ.

Part of my aim through my ongoing writings is to bring truly theological theology to the people of God. To let them know that to be a theologian is to be a worshipper of the triune God, as God has Self-revealed and explained Himself to us in Jesus Christ. That when we see Christ, we see the Father. And that it is from this filial kerygmatic point of contact that the Christian can genuinely know and speak God; indeed, from the heart of God for us, in Jesus Christ. If the Christian desires to know God ever deeper, and if they attempt to read the theologians in this pursuit, and all they find is a notion of Godness that is indeed constructed on a speculative, discursive model of human and philosophical reasoning, then to the sewer with such theologians; they have indeed failed their calling to edify the body of Christ.

As far as vocation goes, in general, the Christian has ultimate purpose in all they say and do, insofar that they bear witness to their Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ and the triune God. And this holds true whether someone is a plumber, or the head of the theology department at the most prestigious divinity school in the land.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/4 §55 [534] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 202.

On the Fructification of the Church: The Church of the Theologians of the Word

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Barau, Emile; The Village Church

Barth is opining on the place that each Christian has within the Christian community, even as individual members in it. This gets him into a discussion on the role that theology, the Word of God, the teachers and the listeners each have, respectively, within the Church. In a way, I think the following passage, abridged as it is, represents the core of Barth’s heart, as that has been and is being expressed throughout the writing of the Church Dogmatics. And for that reason, I felt compelled to share some of this section with the readers, who will.

. . . At every place and time—and this is basic to all else—it must be a life in knowledge, a life with and under and from and in the Word by which it is commissioned. It may be noted that as such it cannot satisfy itself, nor can it try to be an end in itself. As the edification of the community generally is not an end in itself but edification with a view to external service, so it is not an end in itself in its basic character as edification by and in the Word, as theological edification. Its ministry of the Word has an external goal; it does not seek only a fundamentally egoistic enjoyment of the Word. For the sake of this external ministry, however, however, there must be an internal. Hence the assemblies of the community are assemblies for the proclamation of the Lord and His kingdom as this is to be continually heard afresh by Christians themselves. The worship of the community in all its conceivable forms implies a reestablishment of the community by a new and common perception of the kingdom. Since this is a common perception, the human service to be rendered therewith must be understood and put into effect as a joint responsibility in this matter. We should never lose the sense, however, that this is only a quid pro quo, a practical makeshift. The division of the community into a teaching and a listening Church must never be accepted in principle. In principle the inner edification of the community in this concrete sense, i.e., as theology, is a matter for every Christian. What is at stake is not theology in its erudite technicalities but in its essence and spiritual function, i.e., reflection, orientated on and inspired and guided by the prophetic and apostolic testimony concerning the mystery of Jesus Christ, the reality of the kingdom as it has appeared in Him, and the bearing of this event for the men of all nations, tongues and times; in other words, investigation of the original meaning and the present significance of this event.

                To participate in this, and therefore to accompany even the work of erudite theology in the stricter sense, is the task of the community and therefore of each individual member. . ..[1]

I had planned on sharing more of the second paragraph, but it is another page and a half of meaty prose that might end up off-putting some of my readers (because of length). The above should suffice in regard to grasping the gist, the spirit of Barth’s heart for the Church. He sees everyone, respectively, as both the listeners and teachers; even if the latter, might rest on some more than others (by calling etc.) Even so, as the last clause indicates, for Barth, every Christian has a duty, a responsibility to be involved in the acquisition and communication and proclamation of the ‘erudite theology’ that we have all become participant in, as those in participation in and with God in Jesus Christ, the man from Nazareth. So, for Barth, indeed as the Christian is by definition in participation with the triune life, she has been given to both an external and internal service; as if a centripetal-centrifugal dialectal movement is inhering within the body itself. For sure, as the Church is being fructified by the umbilical cord of the Holy Spirit into the bosom of the Father, where the Son is seated at the Right Hand always living to make intercession for us. It is the Christ, for Barth, who ultimately is the inner reality of the Church, even whilst those adopted, are the external expression whereby He proclaims Himself, through the Church’s lips; first for herself and upbuilding, and in the overflow of this exuberant worship, to the world. Barth is contending that the Church operates as a correspondence of Christ’s faith for us; as a correspondence of His intercessory work for us, for the world, the us for whom Christ died. Amen.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/4 §55 [498-99] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 168–69.

Suicide as Self-Deicide, A Theological Thought

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Barth in his continuing development of a Christian Ethic, in this section, has been discussing self-power versus real power, which is God’s. In this development he has arrived at a discussion on suicide. He is taking self-power, in abstraction from God’s power, to entail a pseudo-power (self-power), and reducing it to its logical conclusion; which ironically, is at the heights of illogicality. He refers to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s thinking on this, even as Barth goes on to paraphrase Bonhoeffer’s position.[1]

To the best of my knowledge, the Ethik of D. Bonhoeffer (1949, 111–116) gives us the most cautious statement so far written on this matter. We cannot expect every man at every moment to know from his own experience the meaning of real affliction and assault, “when we are in the greatest distress and do not know which way to turn.” A man assailed and afflicted is hid from all others and sometimes even from himself. He is alone with God, and tortured by the terrible question whether God is really with him and for him, or whether he must regard himself as an atheist, i.e., a man who God has rejected and abandoned. Many theologians and theological moralists do not in practice know properly what affliction is because exegetically, dogmatically and even pastorally they know only too well in theory. In all cases, however, suicide is consciously or unconsciously this final assault and affliction. Even the most confirmed theological moralist ought to see this, and therefore to remember that perhaps he does not finally now what takes place between God and the suicide, nor therefore what is the decision which drives him to this dubious act. Is he really a self-murderer? A readiness to recognise that he may not have been a self-murderer at all is required of all who know what it is to be assailed and afflicted, even if only in theory.[2]

So, a twist. Indeed, suicide represents a complexity. In order to actually go through with a suicide a person must be at such a point of travail, by whatever antecedent and present circumstances, that it seems like the only choice left; the one last choice to take control in the midst of the utter chaos, pain, tribulation of whatever the moment is presenting the person with, and end it all (at least on the side where the visibly and physically seen predominates). I have been at these points myself; whether that be in the years long spiritual battle I had with anxiety, depression, dark nights of the soul; or whether that be at the tail end of my incurable/terminal cancer treatment (being so worn down, in so much pain, that it was starting to seem like “ending it all” might be the way out).

Conversely, as Barth paraphrases and riffs Bonhoeffer, even though it starts to become understandable why someone might feel the ultimate desperation of ending it all, even so, this remains a matter of self-power. It is an appeal to the body of death we inhabit to muster all of its resources and conjure up a solution to the desperation; particularly in the absence of that, in regard to the pastors, the doctors, the psychologists, psychiatrists, so on and so forth. Our frames are but dust, and God in Christ knows that, even experientially; and at heights we cannot begin to imagine. And yet, there are seasons of life when God seems utterly absent, as if he has left us alone to travail the path without the Light of His Lamp for us. And again, like Job, it is at this point that we have come to despair of existence itself. Job’s resolve, even in the face of “curse God and die,” was “though You slay me, yet shall I praise You.” This is the resource, beyond our bodies of death, that God in Christ alone provides for us. It is as we come to realize that we are genuinely participatio Christi, that we are constantly being given over to Christ’s death for us, that the mortal members of our bodies might exemplify Christ’s body in us, that we can have the Jobian resolve. Even so, it is as if we are merely hanging on at that point. The enemy of our souls keeps pushing us to refer to the resource and reserve of our bodies of death, which, as we have noted, concludes in suicide. It is only when we have bought the lie of Deicide, that suicide seems to be the final solution for our personal and individual existences. When we have self-deified, and concluded that the body of death we inhabit, these dusty apparatuses, in the face of tribulation and despair, that the only way forward is self-deicide (as if our body of death is ultimately the only real deity left to turn to).

[1] It isn’t often that you get a Barth paraphrase on Bonhoeffer.

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/4 §55 [404] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 77.

Barth’s Engagement with Mary Baker Eddy and Christian Science: A Quasi Critique of the New Age

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Mary Baker Eddy

The following represents something that I found rather surprising in Barth’s Church Dogmatics. In a context where Barth is discussing the strength and weakness of the human body, he goes into a small-print excursus on Christian Science and Mary Baker Eddy. As I have been reading through the CD what I have found is that many of the themes Barth is known for, while present, only really represent a fraction of his overall corpus. Indeed, those themes (election etc.) are contextually conditioning for all of his work, even his thinking on the human body and physicality. But still, Barth is far more interesting than many folks might imagine, within their caricatured and reductionistic picture of him.

For the remainder of this post, I am going to quote Barth’s full excursus on Christian Science, if nothing else to illustrate the types of exposures Barth had to the broader world of ideas in his 20th century Swiss milieu. Ironically, here Barth is engaging with a fringe American “thinker,” in the person of Mary Baker Eddy.

The tenet that sickness is an illusion is the basic negative proposition which in the seventies of the last century the American Mary Baker Eddy said that she did not lay down but “discovered” through the authoritative inspiration of a book now regarded as canonical, namely, Christian Science. What was at first a small group of adherents has since spread to all parts of the world in the form of religious societies which are particularly popular among the upper and middle classes and more especially among women. Karl Holl has depicted and done it almost too much justice in a careful study entitled “Scientismus” Ges. Aufs. Z. Kgsch. III, 1928, 460 f.). The positive basis of this teaching is that God is the only reality, that he is Spirit and that the whole creation is only a reflection of his spiritual essence. Apart from God there are only powers, which in reality are only thoughts. All matter as such represents a mere appearance, and the same is true of all such associated features as sin, sickness, evil and death. Man as the image of God always was and is and shall be perfect. Everything that contradicts this perfection is in reality only an illusion and misunderstanding rooted in the forgetfulness of God, which in turn evokes fear. And fear is the true basis of all illness; indeed, it is actually illness itself. For fear creates a picture of illness which then falls externally upon the body. “You maintain that an ulcer is painful; but that is impossible, for matter without mind is no painful. The ulcer merely reveals by inflammation and swelling an appearance of pain, and this appearance is called an ulcer.” The true and psychical man is not touched by it. He is only as it were enveloped in a mist and has disappeared from consciousness. Evil is unreal. “Take away fear, and at the same time you have also removed the soil on which sickness thrives.” Jesus was and is the embodiment of truth which scatters and breaks through the mist of these false appearances. The power bestowed and the task presented by Him consist in recognising that God is Spirit. It thus consists in freeing oneself from the false appearances of sin (which even Mrs. Eddy regards as particularly evil, is replaced by “mind-reading,” which is possible at a great distance and in which the thought images which only be a matter of acknowledging the cure already effected by God, of understanding His completed work and of initiating it in the patient. The “healer”—the name given to the active members of the Christian Science Association—is not then to rouse and fortify the will of others through his own, but simply to make a free path in the sufferer for the divine operation. “Call to mind the presence of health and the fact of harmonious existence, until the body corresponds to the normal condition of health and harmony.”

This doctrine has several features which remind us of the message of the New Testament, and which are of course derived from it: the recognition of fear as the basic evil in man’s relation to God; an unconditional trust in the efficacy of prayer; and bold reference to a work already completed by God. But these are all devalued by the fact that they are related to a view which has nothing to do with that of the New Testament but in the light of it can only be described as utterly false. The fact that Christian Science can undoubtedly point to successes in healing—as well as disastrous failures—cannot of itself commend it to Christians. As is well-known, the magicians of Pharaoh could do quite a number of things. And the concession that Karl Holl (loc. cit., p. 477) is willing to make, namely, that its positive presupposition at least is correct, is one which cannot really be made to it. God is indeed the basis of all reality. But He is not the only reality. As Creator and Redeemer He loves a reality which different from Himself, which depends upon Him, yet which is not merely a reflection nor the sum of His powers and thoughts, but which has in face of Him an independent and distinctive nature and is the subject of is own history, participating in its own perfection and subjected to its own weakness. As the coming kingdom, the incarnation of the Word and the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in His true humanity are not just an appearance, so it is with man in general, whether in his nature of perversion, in his psychical being or his physical, in his divine likeness or his sin and transgression. It is because Mrs. Eddy did not understand this that sin, evil and death—in conquest of which Jesus Christ did not “disappear from our level of consciousness” but actually died on the cross—are for her mere “appearances” of human thinking, and redemption is only the act of man in which he submerges himself in God and leads a life submerged in God in order that God may work in him, putting an end to those “appearances” or thought images and bringing to light the perfection of psychical essence which was never lost, the presence of health and the fact of harmonious being. On this point we can only say that both the Old and New Testaments regard not only God and man, not only sin, evil and death and their conquest, but also sickness in a different light. They certainly do not see it as an illusion, and its conquest as the dispelling of this illusion. Whether Christian Science is really “science” need to occupy us here. But there can be no doubt that it is not “Christian” science.[1]

As Barth describes Christian Science vis-à-vis Holler, what we get is a type of pantheistic, Eastern monistic, neo-Gnostic mind cult, that today, and in a broad sense, fits well with the New Age ideology that is almost absolutely pervasive; even among professing Christians (Yoga, “Best Life Now,” self-actualization, therapeuticism etc. etc.). Surely, there are still Christian Science centers here and there, but they are mostly dilapidated signs of a past long been surpassed; except, ideologically. The New Age seeks to liberate and control the mind by abdicating it to the universal soul, the universal mind, the ancient secrets of the forever cosmos. And so that remains the universal thread that attaches something like a Christian Science with the New Age, as a broader category of the same thing.

What I found interesting about this engagement with Barth is that he felt compelled to engage it at all. But I’m glad he did. What this ought to help illustrate is that, indeed, there really is “nothing new under the sun.” Ideas and their ideologies are cycled and re-cycled over and over again; just in newer shinier packaging. Underneath it is the same old jalopy. Christian beware! As noted, these types of psychical mind cults represent the precise thing Christ came to save us from; our inward curved selves (homo incurvatus in se). There is no inner-salvation latent in our supposed Caspar-like-ghosts; the universe has no soul; there is no Word of God from within. There is only God extra nos (outside of us), and His iustitia aliena (alien righteousness) in Christ pro nobis (for us). Without Him in-breaking and disrupting our lives with His ‘militant Grace,’ we are simply enslaved in bondage to the hooks of our own thoughts and intellects and hearts. We might attempt to construct a way of salvation within the tempests of our own self-possessed cathedrals of grey matter, as Mrs. Eddy attempted to systemize in her own self-deluded way. But in the end without the transposition of our ‘bodies of death,’ into the grave with the body of death Christ took for us, and then our transposition of new life and resurrection with Christ’s elect body of ascension, we are of all people the most to be pitied.  

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/4 §55 [364-5] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 39-41.