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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.

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.

The Church as Prolongation of the Incarnation or as Witnesser: The Catholics and Protestants

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Ecclesiology for people in the churches is an underdeveloped, and even undeveloped teaching for most. Unless a Christian person is self-motivated to pursue study of this important doctrine they will most likely live their Christian existence within the darkness of absence (of teaching). I think this, in fact, has a lot to do with many so-called Protestant Christians swimming the shallow end of the Tiber River; i.e., to become members of the Roman Catholic church. In nuce, Roman Catholic ecclesiology entails the notion that the Roman church itself prolongates the incarnation of Jesus Christ. That is to say, that the Roman ecclesia, for proponents of Roman Catholic theology, believe that its church is the visible embodiment of Jesus Christ Himself; thus, their reference to the mystici corporis Christi (‘mystical body of Christ’). Here is a snippet of a longer encyclical that Pope Pius XII wrote for the Catholic church with reference to understanding just what the Roman Catholic understanding of the Church is:

But if our Savior, by His death, became, in the full and complete sense of the word, the Head of the Church, it was likewise through His blood that the Church was enriched with the fullest communication of the Holy Spirit, through which, from the time when the Son of Man was lifted up and glorified on the Cross by His sufferings, she is divinely illumined. For then, as Augustine notes, [39] with the rending of the veil of the temple it happened that the dew of the Paraclete’s gifts, which heretofore had descended only on the fleece, that is on the people of Israel, fell copiously and abundantly (while the fleece remained dry and deserted) on the whole earth, that is on the Catholic Church, which is confined by no boundaries of race or territory. Just as at the first moment of the Incarnation the Son of the Eternal Father adorned with the fullness of the Holy Spirit the human nature which was substantially united to Him, that it might be a fitting instrument of the Divinity in the sanguinary work of the Redemption, so at the hour of His precious death He willed that His Church should be enriched with the abundant gifts of the Paraclete in order that in dispensing the divine fruits of the Redemption she might be, for the Incarnate Word, a powerful instrument that would never fail. For both the juridical mission of the Church, and the power to teach, govern and administer the Sacraments, derive their supernatural efficacy and force for the building up of the Body of Christ from the fact that Jesus Christ, hanging on the Cross, opened up to His Church the fountain of those divine gifts, which prevent her from ever teaching false doctrine and enable her to rule them for the salvation of their souls through divinely enlightened pastors and to bestow on them an abundance of heavenly graces.[1]

The Roman Catholic church maintains, as indicated by Pope Pius XII, that the Holy Spirit, as the enlivener and Creator of the Church has so mystically tied Himself into the visible manifestation of the Roman See, along with all of her sacraments, hierarchy of pastors, so on and so forth, that the only ‘place’ union with God in Christ can obtain is if someone is brought into union with the mystical body of Jesus Christ; or, in the Roman view, with the Roman Catholic church herself. This union is supervened by the bishops and priests of the Catholic church, not least of which, is the Pope himself. Once inducted and confirmed into the Catholic church, through baptism and partaking in the Mass of the sacraments, it is at this time that the Catholic convert becomes a ‘feeder’ on and mystical participant within the visible body of Christ on earth; or the Roman Catholic church. In this sense, and per Pius XII’s aforementioned words, there is a real sense wherein the Roman ecclesiology, with its insistent assertion on their status as the visible body of Christ on earth, that the Church itself becomes a prolongation of the incarnation. That is, for the Roman, the Church has become and is so entwined with the notion that Roma is now the apple of God’s eye, that she alone is God’s visible body on earth; that in order for communion with God to obtain for humanity, would-be Christians must come into, again, union with the mystical body of Christ; which is none other, according to Roman doctrine, but the Latin Catholic church.

Protestants, on the other hand, rooted in a radical theology of the Word of God, maintain that the body of Christ is fully present within the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ; indeed, even as Christ has resurrected with that body, ascended with that body, intercedes in priestly session at the right hand of the Father with that body, and will come again with that body; His glorified body. For the Protestant, thusly, there is no prolongation of the incarnation of Christ as a mystical body of Christ, but rather its concrete existence in the flesh and blood of Imannuel’s veins as He has freely elected to be for us, with us, and not God without us in Jesus Christ.

Hence, Protestants are not burdened with the notion that we must present some type of mystical body of Christ to each other and the world writ large, as if that body is constituted by a physical address in Vatican City, Italy. On the contrary, Protestants understand that the esse of the Church is constituted by the literal body of Christ Himself for us. Resultantly, the Protestant doesn’t seek to point a would-be or already Christians to a particular iteration or expression of the Church in the world as the Roman does. The Protestant understands that their respective Christian existence is constituted, indeed by the Holy Spirit, by way of union with Christ immediately, directly. The Protestant bears witness to the finished work of God in Christ as the reality (res) of the Church in the triune God. Karl Barth writes on this status of the Protestant Christian similarly,

. . . Their existence in the world depends upon the fact that this alone is their particular gift and task. They have not to assist or add to the being and work of their living Saviour who is the Lord of the world, let alone to replace it by their own work. The community is not a prolongation of His incarnation, His death, and resurrection, the acts of God and their revelation. It has not to do these things. It has to witness to them. It is its consolation that it can do this. Its marching-orders are to do it.[2]

Barth rightly notes that the work of the Church is absolutely finished in the work of Jesus Christ. It is His work of salvation, of building His Church, that He has already accomplished; the Church’s task, by the Spirit, is to bear witness to this, her reality, in her Head and reality, Jesus Christ. The Roman church, alternatively, believes that it constitutes itself by re-presenting the Mass, the death of Jesus Christ, through the primary sacraments of baptism and the eucharist. There remains an unfinished work within the Catholic ecclesiology which makes the prolongation of the incarnation of Jesus Christ the most organic outcome. That is, because their remains a proving ground, so to speak, of the Christian’s worth to inherit eternal life through the treasuries of Christ’s merits, over and beyond the work of Christ’s atonement. And so, for the Catholic Christian, the Mass and its sacraments remain the portal whereby salvation might be constantly offered, affirmed, reaffirmed, over and again, as the Christian seeks to establish a level of sanctification whereby they are found worthy enough to in fact become real and ultimate participants within the mystical body of Christ. If the Church, as it is for the Roman, is a prolongation of the incarnation, then the incarnation, logically, requires further re-establishment and curation by the faithful; if in fact, the body of Christ can be shown to be the true body of Christ in the world today.

This requires further fleshing out. But hopefully there has been enough provided for the reader to start to digest.

[1] Pope Pius XII, MYSTICI CORPORIS CHRISTI: ENCYCLICAL OF POPE PIUS XII ON THE MISTICAL BODY OF CHRIST TO OUR VENERABLE BRETHREN, PATRIARCHS, PRIMATES, ARCHBISHOPS, BISHIOPS, AND OTHER LOCAL ORDINARIES ENJOYING PEACE AND COMMUNION WITH THE APOSTOLIC SEE, published by, The Holy See, accessed 05-05-2026.

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §59 [318] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London:T&T Clark, 2010), 312.

On the Orders and Disorders of the God-World Relation: With Reference to Augustine, Athanasius, Barth, and Torrance

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There are two orderings in the world structure: God’s real order, and man’s real disorder in an attempt to be contra God. God has freely and graciously elected to be for this world, as both the electing God and elected man, in Jesus Christ. Soteriologically driven theologies, like Augustinianism, sets these two worlds in a competitive relationship. Contrariwise, the Athanasian-Barthian-Torrancean combine thinks these orders from within the nexus of God and humanity in the reconciling and hypostatically uniting person, Jesus Christ. This combine allows the Christian to think the God-world relation from within the strictures God has setup, even in-spite of humanity’s inherent urge to fight against God as a condition of their fallen nature as lapsarian humans. Against the Augustinian effort to think the elect of God into God through a decree of God (decretum absolutum), the Athanasian complex is required to think the God-humanity relation from within the gift of God’s Self-givenness for the world, for humanity, from within the confines of His own second-person, the eternal Son en sarkos, Jesus Christ. This Athanasian frame offers a cosmic frame of reference when it comes to things worldly, things salvific, so on and so forth.

Barth writes of this relationship presciently:

This is obviously the underlying form of our problem—the real distance in which the God appearing in the human sphere, and acting and speaking for us in this sphere, confronts us to whom He turns and for whom He acts. Note that on the one hand it is God for man, on the other man against God. There are two orders (or, rather, order and disorder), two opposite world-structures, two worlds opposing and apparently excluding one another. Note that it is He and we—and He and we in a direct encounter, we before Him—how can we live before Him and with Him?—we with the God who by Himself reconciles us with Himself, we in His presence, in the sequence of His work and Word. On the side of man the only possible word seems to be a deep-seated No, the No of the one who when God comes and acts for Him and tells him that He is doing so is forced to see that his day is over and that he can only perish.[1]

As Barth rightly emphasizes there is no such thing as a competitive relationship between God and humanity. That is, because God has already become both the Yes and the No on behalf of humanity’s rebellion against God in His free movement towards humanity in Christ, and His equipoise movement of humanity towards God, in a Yesward movement, of Christ’s making. This is not to say, of course, that humanity no longer sees itself, consciously or subconsciously, in a Noward stance before the living and triune God; it does. It is just to say that even in that ongoing rebellious spirit, the one that has already been put to death in the archetypal humanity of the Second Adam, there remains no power behind it. Humanity’s rebellion, its no to God, has already been put down, and thus risen up in the Yes and Amen of God in Jesus Christ. Rebellious humanity, at this point, simply lives against their humanity already won for them in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ.

The work of God in Christ’s salvation for us is finished!

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §59 [291] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London:T&T Clark, 2010), 284.

The Scandal of Easter

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The early Christian community spoke of the scandal of the particular–the God of the universe revealed in flesh and blood. They felt the strange, incongruous power of this idea. They felt too the awful strangeness of beholding the very image of God in a human being broken and beaten and hanging on a cross. The scandalous, revelatory power of the particular. It has a special claim on the Christian imagination. It shapes and refracts what we find significant, how we live, against what powers we struggle.[1]

–Douglas Burton-Christie

18 For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19 For it is written:

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise;
the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.”

20 Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. 22 Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24 but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.

–I Corinthians 1:18-25

The Christian is no stranger to strangeness; indeed, it might even be said that the Christian is no alien to the foolishness and weakness of the things of God in Christ. It is this theme, the scandal of particularity, the foolishness and weakness of the cross, the notion that the very God who upholds all of seen and unseen reality by the Word of His power, became flesh and dwelt among us; that He dwelt among us even as a mere man, obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. It only takes a matter of moments of meditation, spirated by the Holy Spirit, to become consumed by this tremendum mysterium et fascinans, the majesty and reality of the cosmic Christ; the notion that the eternally triune God freely and graciously became ensarkos. I think if most people, especially Christians, allowed this fact to become the very grist of their daily lives, that all there would be left to do is worship. How does this God of gods squeeze Himself into the flesh and blood of a particular human being, into a man from the squalors of the Galilee in Nazareth? It remains a miracle; for some to the point that it is the ultimate skandalon upon which they cannot get past; and instead, indeed, they inhabit a stumbled-existence all the days of their vain lives. God forbid it if this becomes the trajectory of the professing Christian.

Barth writes presciently on this particular scandal of Eastertide,

It is content simply to tell the story—this is how it was, this is how it happened. There is interpretation only in the lightest and sometimes rather alien strokes, of which we have to say much the same as we did of what we called the softenings occasionally found in the first part. The real commentary on this first part and the whole is, of course, the Easter story, which we can describe as the third and shortest part of the Gospel history. This tells us that God acknowledged this Jesus of Nazareth, the strange Judge who allowed Himself to be judged, by raising Him from the dead. It tells us of forty days in which this same One—whose history this was and had to be—was again in the midst of His disciples, differently, but still actually in time and space, talking with them, eating and drinking with them, beginning with them a new Gospel history, the time of His community, the time of the Gospel as the good news about the Judge who allowed Himself to be judged, the time of the proclamation of this event. He Himself was and is this event, the origin, the authority, the power, the object of the proclamation laid on the community. He Himself, He alone: He who was alone and superior and majestic in Galilee; He who was again alone but beaten and humiliated in Jerusalem, in the very midst of Israel. He, the Judge who allowed Himself to be judged, lives and rules and speaks and works. He is Himself the word which is to be proclaimed to all creatures as the Word of God. That is what the Easter narrative tells us. It gathers together the sum of all that has been told before. Or, rather, it tells us how the sum which God Himself had already gathered together in all that had gone before was revealed as such to the disciples—again by Jesus Himself. The Easter story is the Gospel story in its unity and completeness as the revealed story of redemption. The Easter story is the record of how it became what it was (in all its curious structure a history of redemption) for the disciples—not by their own discovery but by the act of God in the word and work of Jesus Himself. It tells us, therefore, that this history, Jesus Christ Himself as He exists in this history, is significant in and by itself. It tells us that all the significance which Jesus Christ as the subject and subject-matter of this history can acquire for individual men by means and as a result of proclamation (which has Him as its origin and object), has its basis and truth and practical and theoretical power in the fact that He is significant in and by Himself—even as He exists in this history. What is significant in itself has the power to become significant and will in fact become significant. But only that can become significant which is already significant, and in such a way that this being is the power of the corresponding becoming.[2]

Χριστὸς ἀνέστη Christ is risen! He is risen!

[1] Douglas Burton-Christie, “The Scandal of the Particular,” Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 2.1 (2002) vii-viii.

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §59 [227] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 220–21.

” . . . the illusion of an abstract monotheism”

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There is no God, but the One God; and we know this One God by the Son of God made flesh in the humanity of Jesus Christ. This One God is not known any other way. He is not known by the philosophers nor made known by the philosopher-theologians. He is only and ever centrally known as He has freely made Himself Self-known in the face of Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit; indeed, He would have no face for us without the Holy Spirit. The genuinely Christian God is One (de Deo uno) in Three (de Deo trino), Three in One in eternal koinonia from His a se existence. It is by the humility of this God, as exemplified by the free obedience of the Son in the Father by the Holy Spirit, whereby this God becomes known. The theological Philistines have attempted to reason their way to this God, but only because they first became aware of this God by this God’s Self-revelation; even as inchoate in His mediated presence through the Hebrews. In other words, it was only ever because of this triune God’s gracious stooping to the sons of men that the notion of One God was contrived in the first place. And the mesmerizing thing about this God is that He has always already been vulnerable enough in His inner and triune life to make this impossible a possibility; that is, to be willing to be made known, even with the possibility of being mistaken for some type of mechanistic simple Monad of the brutish thinkers. Even so, this God has contradicted such triteness; even by Him becoming obedient to the point of death, even the death of the Roman cross. There is no space for the monadic on the scandalous cross; this God is altogether too complex to be imagined, even in the greatest of the philosophical imaginaries among us. This God, the triune and eternal God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in perichoretic bondedness, has taken on human blood in His own humanity as the Son of Man, Jesus Christ.

Someone else gets at the aforementioned much more eloquently thusly:

As we look at Jesus Christ we cannot avoid the astounding conclusion of a divine obedience. Therefore we have to draw the no less astounding deduction that in equal Godhead the one God is, in fact, the One and also the Another, that He is indeed a First and a Second, One who rules and commands in majesty and One who obeys in humility. The one God is both the one and the other. And, we continue, he is the one and the other without any cleft or differentiation but in perfect unity and equality because in the same perfect unity and equality he is also a Third, the One who affirms the one and equal Godhead through and by and in the two modes of being, the One who makes possible and maintains His fellowship with Himself as the one and the other. In virtue of this third mode of being He is in the other two without division or contradiction, the whole God in each. But again in virtue of this third mode of being He is in neither for itself and apart from the other, but in each in its relationship to the other, and therefore, in fact, in the totality, the connexion, the interplay, the history of these relationships. And because all division and contradiction is excluded, there is also excluded any striving to identify the two modes of being, or any possibility of the one being absorbed by the other, or both in their common deity. God is God in these two modes of being which cannot be separated, which cannot be autonomous, but which cannot cease to be different. He is God in their concrete relationships the one to the other, in the history which takes place between them. He is God only in these relationships of its modes of being, which is neutral towards them. This neutral Godhead, this pure and empty Godhead, and its claim to be true divinity, is the illusion of an abstract “monotheism” which usually fools men most successfully at the high-water mark of the development of heathen religions and mythologies and philosophies. The true and living God is the One whose Godhead consists in this history, who is in these three modes of being the One God, the Eternal, the Almighty, the Holy, the Merciful, the One who loves in His freedom and is free in His love.[1]

Well said, Uncle; well said.

Please notice maybe an almost unnoticed profundity when Barth refers to the history that obtains between and in and among the fellowship of the triune persons. It is within this space, this Father-Son-by-the-Holy Spirit relationship wherein all of human history and being takes place; indeed, as the electing God, the elected Man, the eternal Logos, the Son of God, graciously and freely chose to become us that we, by that act and actualism of Grace, might become human before God. It is His history, within His own Self-predestined and inner-triune life, whereby the creation obtains; wherein the redemption, the recreation, the elevation of humanity occurs. Just as the Son, before the foundation of the world, is freely Logos incarnandus (‘the Word to be incarnate’), it is within this freedom of God’s life by which the whole created order finds its determination. This, in the Eschaton, in the final and consummate reality actualized, and finally realized, is how it is that humanity becomes and is sustained as humanity simpliciter. That is by God’s freedom, by the obedience and humility intrinsic to the life of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, within the mysterium Trinitatis, by which anything, not least of which, humanity, exists at all; as worshippers and witnesses of their very life before God, by God, in God by the Spirit anointed humanity of the free God, the Son of Man, the Man from Nazareth, the Son in the bosom of the Father, Jesus Christ.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §59 [203] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 196.