KARL BARTH’S KENOTIC DOGMATICS

by

Scott Allan Butler

B.A.Th., Rocky Mountain College, 2005

Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Theology, Acadia Divinity College, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (Theology)

Acadia Divinity College, Acadia University Spring Convocation 2015

© by SCOTT ALLAN BUTLER, 2015

This thesis by SCOTT ALLAN BUTLER was defended successfully in an oral examination on 8 April 2015.

The examining committee for the thesis was:

Dr. Anna Robbins, Chair

Dr. John Webster, External Examiner

Dr. Glenn Wooden, Internal Examiner

Dr. William H. Brackney, Supervisor

Dr. Craig A. Evans, MA Director

This thesis is accepted in its present form by Acadia Divinity College, the Faculty of Theology of Acadia University, as satisfying the thesis requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (Theology).

ii

I, SCOTT ALLAN BUTLER, hereby grant permission to the University Librarian at Acadia University to provide copies of my thesis, upon request, on a non-profit basis.

Scott A. Butler Author

Dr. William H. Brackney Supervisor

8 April 2015 Date

iii Table of Contents

Abstract ...... vi

Acknowledgements ...... vii

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter One: Historical Sketch ...... 4

Karl Barth the Youth ...... 6

The Barths of Berne ...... 6

From Huber to Herrmann by way of Aeschbacher ...... 9

Karl Barth the Pastor: From Marburg to Aarau by Way of Kaiser Wilhelm ...... 24

The Pastorate in Safenwil ...... 24

Publication of the Commentary on Romans ...... 30

Karl Barth the Professor: From Dialectic to Dogmatic by way of St. Anselm .....33

The Dialectical School ...... 33

The Foundation of Dogmatics ...... 40

Karl Barth the Activist ...... 46

The Difficult Thirties ...... 46

A Testing Ground ...... 48

Summary ...... 50

Chapter Two: Dogmatic Method ...... 52

The Departure from Liberalism as a Human-Centered Endeavor ...... 54

Philosophy of Eighteenth-Century, ‘Modern’ Man ...... 54

Immanuel Kant ...... 59

Friedrich Schleiermacher ...... 65

iv The End(s) of Modernist-liberal Theology: Feuerbach and National Socialism ... 72

Reestablishing the Priority of God in Dogmatic Theology ...... 74

Barth’s Discovery of Anselm as His ‘Vital Key’ ...... 74

Barth’s Interpretation of Anselm as a Key to Dogmatics ...... 78

Towards Barth’s Dogmatic Task and Method ...... 86

Summary ...... 92

Chapter Three: Kenotic Christ ...... 94

Act ...... 97

Jesus As the Unveiling of God ...... 97

God With Us as God For Us ...... 104

The Revelation of Humanity ...... 112

Perfect Covenant Partnership ...... 117

Disposition ...... 120

A Life of Obedience: From Desert to Garden ...... 121

Obedient Servant as Lord ...... 125

Lowliness Proper to God’s Nature ...... 128

Summary: The Kenotic Christ as Exemplar of Dogmatic Method ...... 136

Conclusion ...... 140

Bibliography ...... 144

v Abstract

Swiss theologian Karl Barth played a key role in the development of Protestant Christian theology in the twentieth century. This purpose of this thesis is to investigate the links between Christology and method in Barth’s dogmatics. It examines the theologian from an historical perspective in his transition from the liberal Christian tradition through his dialectical period and into his substantial prolegomena to the Church Dogmatics. Paying special attention to Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Ludwig Feuerbach, the second chapter contrasts Barth’s dogmatic method as based in faith and prayer with the anthropocentric principles of the Enlightenment. The final chapter gives shape to the

Swiss theologian’s integrated doctrines of revelation and reconciliation by looking at

God’s acts and disposition in Christ. In it I argue that dogmatics is Christological specifically as it reflects the content and character of the kenotic – obedient servant –

Christ. I suggest, finally, that Barth’s kenotic Christ correlates with the prohibitive name he found in Anselm’s Proslogion: ‘that beyond which no greater thing can be conceived.’

vi Acknowledgments

I would like to express my deep gratitude for the constant support and encouragement of my wife, Jane, without whom this project would have remained the impossible possibility. I am deeply indebted to my mother and father who devoted significant resources getting me started in a discipline that rarely returns those kinds of resources. My thanks extend also to my mother and father-in-law who offered their support and specifically in the gift of my very own Church Dogmatics set. Not only did they get this project off the ground but by the same means saved me an enormous amount in the cost of erasers alone.

Thank you Drs. MacRae, Wooden, Wilson, and Ramm for four very key instances of encouragement that you didn’t know were helping me get past my obstacles. Thank you, finally, to Dr. Brackney for access to opportunities, people, finances, and thinking without which I would have remained a ‘poor mule in the fog.’

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Is est ergo cogito

viii 1

INTRODUCTION

Karl Barth has come to be known through the nexus of strong positions, influential roles, theological controversies, and poignant phraseology that punctuated his long career. Often hailed as a modern Church Father, the Swiss theologian is credited by some as having single-handedly dismantled the liberal Protestant movement. Perhaps as frequently criticized as lauded, Barths theology is characterized by conflicting notions and notable conflicts; he is famous both for his paradoxical characterization of sin as the

impossible possibility and his paralyzing and schismatic Nein! to long-time ally Emil

Brunner in 1934.

As a child, Karl played-acted pope and emperor. As an adult, he held his own with both. In terms of both personality and production the Swiss theologian deserves to be described as nothing less than a juggernaut. It is somewhat surprising, then, that in

1966 when controversial death of God theologian William Hamilton (1924-2012)1 was looking for a way to make Christianity relevant and enticing, he took hold of Karl Barths vision of Christ which insists over and over that we must allow Jesus lowliness and humiliation to determine what we mean by God.2 Barths Christology, often overshadowed in popular circles by his position on scripture and natural reason, is the centerpiece of Church Dogmatics. Though immense in scope, Barths doctrine of reconciliation is built on the foundational concept that Jesus Christ is Lord as Servant.

1. See Lloyd Steffen, “The Dangerous God: A Profile of William Hamilton,” Christian Century 106, no. 27 (September 1989): 844-847. 2. William Hamilton, The New Essence of Christianity (New York: Association Press, 1966), 96; emphasis added.

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What connection exists between the theological method Karl Barth adopted and the content of his Christology? On the eve of Barths debut volume of what would become the monumental Church Dogmatics, the Swiss theologian remembers having a breakthrough that finally allowed him to lay the solid foundation for his mature theology.

It came after a brief but careful study of Anselms Proslogion in which Barth argued that

Anselms case for Gods existence was not from reason but from faith. This thesis will ask how the concept of Christ as lowly servant is connected to and possibly arises from

Barths foundational method in dogmatics.

Dogmatics for Barth, and the working definition for what follows, is an ongoing self-criticism undertaken by the church as it seeks to conform its message to the Word

God has spoken and continues to speak in Jesus Christ. The Church Dogmatics, Barths major work published in thirteen part-volumes between 1932 and 1967, does not represent a completed series of propositional truths held together in systematic form.

Rather, as a continual and rigorous effort to interact with Scripture and traditional creeds as material deposits of truth, Church Dogmatics takes up the wider task of calling the church to evaluate, refine, and embolden its voice.3 Dogmatics is an active undertaking that listens, obeys, celebrates and, I will suggest, adopts the posture of the kenotic Christ who did not seek equality with God but pointed to God in the way Anselm conceived: as

that beyond which no greater thing can be conceived.

The Barthian corpus in-every-way mountainous quality permits only that it be ascended in stages. This thesis is written in three chapters and takes a cumulative

3. Richard E. Burnett ed. The Westminster Handbook to Karl Barth, The Westminster Handbooks to Christian Theology (Louisville, KT: Westminster John Knox Press, 2013), 55-57, Kindle.

3 approach. The first chapter lays an historical-biographical foundation for Barths dogmatic efforts. Special attention is given to the events in his life that led him toward a theological career and away from the liberal tradition. Here we look specifically at what caused Barth to develop the particular stance he took in the early Church Dogmatics. The second chapter gives shape to his developing methodology with special attention upon

Barths critiques of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schleiermacher as well as his study of

Anselm. In focus here is Barths development of dogmatics as an act of prayer and obedience to the God who reveals himself. The third chapter examines the specific notion of Christ as servant in Church Dogmatics. A case for the kenotic Christ as the exemplar of the dogmatic method is made by looking specifically at the acts of God and the disposition of Christ that support Barths doctrine of reconciliation. The concluding chapter will reiterate the suggested connection between dogmatic method and kenotic

Christology. Here I will give some brief evaluation to the usefulness of such an understanding as it relates to the doctrine of sin and the task of educating Christians.

Having set up base camp, we now begin our ascent.

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CHAPTER ONE: HISTORICAL SKETCH

At first it may seem ironic to study so closely the historical details of a man who offered strong criticism of the historicist school of thought. Late in his life, Karl Barth criticized Roman Catholic and Reformed preachers alike for wasting precious minutes on the familiar details of history instead of getting straight to the matter.1 Yet the biography of this remarkable Swiss theologian is of critical importance if one to is navigate the enormous landscape of his theology with any success. The reason for this is that Barth’s perspective continued to develop throughout his life. More than once, he made major revisions to his work — ‘starting again at the beginning,’ as he was fond of saying. In fact, ‘starting again at the beginning’ was not just Barth’s tendency but reflected his own experience of God. That is to say that Barth’s habit of changing his mind was a function of his central theological discovery: that the revealed Word of God alone sets the agenda for theological knowledge. The active Word of God can and does intervene in the life of the theologian to completely change his or her presuppositions, methods, and conclusions. So on one level, if we are to understand what Barth has said at any given place in his theological corpus, we must know where he was at that point in his life. But on another level, if we are to appreciate the underlying meaning of Barth’s ‘theology of the Word,’ it is vital to see how his story gives rise to his method, and, most importantly, how he came to his mature position by starting over again. We must, therefore, follow the

1. Karl Barth, Final Testimonies, ed. Eberhard Busch, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company), 47. “Barth’s protest was not directed against historical research as such but against the historicism of the historians who sought to reduce all valid (truly ‘scientific’) explanation of the biblical texts to historical explanation alone.” Bruce L. McCormack, “The Significance of Karl Barth’s Theological Exegesis of Philippians,” in Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008), 92.

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Swiss theologian’s own advice by doing the work of an historian — but letting that work be “but merely the first step towards a commentary.”2

Markus Barth (1915-1994) was fondly remembered by his father for having asked him one day, “Do you know who Mr. Essential is?” The young boy, who had once tried to pass off Calvin’s theology of predestination as his own invention, answered himself:

“God.”3 Two features of this heartwarming anecdote inspire this chapter. First, that like the young boy who had picked up the wisdom of his father in the mundane routines of the household, many in the ‘theological household’ down through the years have come to their own understanding because of what ‘church father’ Karl Barth has said — perhaps, even, without knowing it.4 Second, that among the ways to encapsulate the theologian’s voluminous work, his own boy’s words are as penetrating as any: ‘God is Mr. Essential.’5

This chapter will trace the biography of Karl Barth into the years of the Second World

War in an effort to provide the context for his prodigious Church Dogmatics.6 It will bring into focus important aspects of his life including his upbringing, personality, teachers, literary influences, academic career, crises, and personal reflections by developing an involved chronology of his life. My goal is to understand Barth’s formative years as student, pastor, dialectician, and dogmatic theologian for the purpose of studying his Church Dogmatics with greater insight. We will see that Karl Barth’s

2. Karl Barth, “Preface to the Second Edition,” in The Epistle to the Romans, 6th ed., trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 6; also referred to as Römerbrief in text. 3. Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts, trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976), 163-164. (Bowden’s translation is used in the majority of citations and referred to as Busch unless otherwise noted). 4. John Bowden, Karl Barth, SCM Book Club 201 (Naperville, IL: SCM Press, 1971), 11. 5. ‘God is’ - he is living existence: ‘I am,’ ‘Mr.’ - he has personhood, agency, and relational qualities well defined by a respectful title. ‘Essential’ - God at the basis of everything, the one from whom all things come and in whom all things end. He is inestimably valuable to real human life. 6. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, trans. G. W. Bromiley, et. al. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2004). Hereafter abbreviated by CD. CD I/1, the first half of the prolegomena, was published in 1932. CD I/2, the other half, appeared in 1938. World War II spanned from 1939-1945.

6 story is intimately linked to his method and theological self-understanding.

Karl Barth the Youth

The Barths of Berne

In 1930 fellow theologian Friedrich Gogarten (1887-1967) asked Karl Barth a question that annoyed him. “Herr Professor, who are you really?” For Gogarten, Barth concluded, “a person is a father, a mother, a husband, an official, a Swiss, or whatever, and that is his or her make-up. I objected, and said that I could not allow myself to be dissolved into relationships in that way.”7 It seems like a strong response, especially in light of the Swiss’ fascination with historical characters. Young Karl took hold of his grandmother’s keen interest in history; into his last days he continued to add portraits to the collection of great figures she had started for him.8 Captivated by those figures, he was known to inhabit their personalities. In games with the other schoolboys, young Karl often took on the persona of Napoleon.9 At age seventeen he ‘ruled’ his childhood home as Pope under the name ‘St. Ulichen,’ composing a papal bull with his own personal seal.10 Indeed, this was a fitting childhood for the man who not only etched out his spot among Friedrich Schleiermacher and Thomas Aquinas11 but who also stubbornly refused to salute Adolf Hitler at the height of his power.

Perhaps Barth was hesitant to answer Gogarten’s question because he knew that

7. Busch, 194. 8. Busch, 19; Karl Barth, How I Changed My Mind, introduction and epilogue by John D. Godsey (Edinburgh: The Saint Andrews Press, 1969), 13, 11. Godsey’s biographical sketch brackets Barth’s own reflection for Christian Century. I will refer to Godsey’s work in this book by his name in subsequent citations, unless otherwise noted. 9. Godsey, 18. See Barth, How I Changed My Mind, 59, for Barth’s own reflection on his visit to Napoleon’s tomb and Paris as the first love to which he often returned. 10. Busch, 11, 24. 11. Godsey, 30.

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‘gang-leader’ could be added to the roles he listed. Barth’s last assistant and principal biographer Eberhard Busch (b. 1937) drew widely from the Swiss theologian’s personal reflections to note that as much as Karl was imaginative, sensitive, and musical as a boy, he often got into real fistfights.12 At one point, while living on the Schosshalde, young

Karl led a gang in a “bitter feud with another gang led by Martin Werner, a neighbour’s child, who was later to become Professor of Dogmatics in the University of Berne.”13

Busch’s biography includes a well-timed photograph from a family outing where it is obvious that Karl and his father Fritz were in sharp disagreement over matters of conduct.14 Johann Friedrich ‘Fritz’ Barth (1856-1912) taught at the ‘College of

Preachers’ in Basle, Switzerland from 1886-188915 and then at the University of Berne in the field of New Testament and Church History until his death.16 Fritz’s theology positioned him in ‘positive’17 schools that trained pastors and preachers in Scripture.

While he attempted to steer his son Karl away from the strong liberalism18 of Marburg, it

12. Busch, 15-16. 13. Busch, 25. Regarding the ongoing feud with Werner: after Barth’s sharp and injurious No! to Emil Brunner in 1934, he was so nice to Brunner at a meeting of the German-Swiss faculties “that people might have thought that the millennium was … just round the corner, though the presence of Martin Werner was enough to shatter this illusion [!]” Busch, 356; emphasis added. 14. Busch, 23. 15. Busch, 1. 16. Godsey, 17. 17. ‘Positive’ here refers to a method of theological study that develops its content from the material deposit of faith: Scripture and tradition being foremost. It stands in contrast to natural or speculative approaches that seek theological truth in philosophical arguments and also in contrast to a purely naturalistic or psychological approach to religion. Positive theology relates to the ancient school of Antiochene theology in this way, in contrast with Alexandrine. 18. Liberalism, or liberal Protestantism, was developed by a number of European and American theologians in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in response to the critique of eighteenth-century Enlightenment rationalism. In an effort to give Protestantism renewed currency, liberals envisioned Christian faith as chiefly experiential and moral as opposed to objectively authoritative and verifiable by empirical investigation. Liberalism was characterized by dual emphases on human reason as normative and on the immanence of God, leading human beings in a continued progression toward a moral ideal. The term ‘modernist-liberal’ is used herein to underscore the connection between the eighteenth-century critique and the nineteenth-century response. See Kenneth Cauthen, The Impact of American Religious Liberalism (New York: Harper & Row, 1962); Bernard M. G. Reardon, ed., Liberal Protestantism (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1968); and William R. Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism

8 is important to note that he was not conservative in the sense that North Americans might assume.19 He had active association with liberal thinkers including Adolf von Harnack

(1851-1930) and often represented a mediating position.20 Twice he was denied professorships because he did not hold to the doctrine of virgin birth.21 Karl Barth gained from his father a penchant for scientific work as well as a balance of “sober objectivity and… joyous carefree spirit.”22

Anna Barth (1863-1938), by contrast, may have given her son his harder edge.

Karl remembered his mother as vivacious, “outspoken and energetic,” noting, “‘when my mother had made her mind about something, it was usually done.’”23 According to Drew

University professor Suzanne Selinger, who interviewed the Barth family and others about Karl’s relationship with his long time assistant Charlotte Kirschbaum (1899-1975),

Anna could be overbearing and aggressive and may even have frightened her son to some extent.24 One wonders whether Karl Barth was influenced by what he called his mother’s

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976). 19. Bruce McCormack, Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909-1936 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 36, notes that ‘positive’ theology was mild conservatism and that Fritz Barth had a strong appreciation of the experiential aspect of Pietism claiming it had saved orthodoxy from ossification. (Hereafter referred to as Critically Realistic). 20. Karl Barth may have been attracted to this quality in his lifelong friend Eduard Thurneysen who wrote to Barth in 1923 and described his participation in a Social Democratic Party meeting thus, “I spoke, as we like to do, very much more brokenly, tried to find the unity in the uncertainty of both sides.” Karl Barth and Eduard Thurneysen, Revolutionary Theology in the Making: Barth-Thurneysen Correspondence, 1914-1925, trans. James D. Smart (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1964), 134. 21. Busch, 10. For texts pertaining to Karl Barth’s position on the virgin birth see CD I/2, 176- 179, 182, 202; CD IV/1, 207; and CD IV/2, 90. “I came to the position of holding fast to the Virgin Birth from having ascertained in the New Testament that here a kind of signal is given to which the early Church was at all events sufficiently important to be received into the Credo.” Karl Barth, Credo, (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1962), 179. 22. Lucas Christ quoted in Godsey, 17. 23. Busch, 5. 24. Suzanne Selinger, Charlotte von Kirschbaum and Karl Barth: A Study in Biography and the History of Theology (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 6, 57. Selinger’s perspective on Anna Barth is shaped in part by Wolfgang Schildmann, Was sind das für Zeichen? Karl Barths Träume im Kontext von Leben und Lehre Originalausg, Kaiser Taschenbücher 101 (München: Kaiser, 1991). Schildmann also makes suggestions regarding Karl Barth’s distrust of psychology and lack of introspection in his writing. Thurneysen, Revolutionary Theology, 13, notes that

9

“original contribution to language… ‘We need to take one [of the children] and beat the others with it’” in his public scolding of Zürich theologian Emil Brunner (1889-1966) in the early 1930s.25 Though the picture of Anna Barth is faint and incomplete, it helps to round our understanding of Karl Barth’s personality. John Godsey (1922-2010) described

Barth, his doctoral supervisor, as someone who took warm interest in the personal life of those he met. Eberhard Jüngel (b. 1934), by contrast, declared that Barth was vigorous in his polemic, exacting in his criticism, rarely self-deprecating, and profoundly impatient with human stupidity.26 Thomas F. Torrance (1913-2007), giving balance, has said that

Barth’s personality was relentlessly critical in search of God’s revelation and at the same time gave cause for comfort because of his unique willingness to learn.27 “With Karl

Barth ruthless criticism is made the servant of his will to listen.”28

From Huber to Herrmann by way of Aeschbacher

Biography and analysis of Karl Barth continues to grow in part because of the host of people who were influential to his development. Although he later recognized the large role his father played in shaping his presuppositions, it was another man to whom the Swiss theologian gave credit for having set off his passion for theological work — a passion that carried on undeterred until the very night he died. In 1899 Karl Barth was a difficult pupil who held long grudges for being disciplined by his teacher Rudolf Huber.

“Inevitably, now there were often special remarks in Karl’s school reports about his

Barth was not an abstract thinker. 25. See 77n99 below. 26. Cp. Godsey, 12 and Jüngel 17, 20. 27. Thomas F. Torrance, Karl Barth: And Introduction to his Early Theology 1910 - 1931 (New York: T & T Clark, 2004), 19, 21. 28. Torrance, 21; cf. Bowden, 20-21.

10 behaviour: ‘dreams often,’ or ‘three hours detention for misbehaving,’ or — about his behaviour in religious instruction — ‘needs to pay attention’.”29 It was Robert

Aeschbacher, the pastor of the Nydegg church in Berne and Karl’s confirmation class teacher, who caught his attention. Aeschbacher held theological inquiry together tightly with questions of real life. Like Fritz Barth and also Barth’s later professor, Wilhelm

Herrmann (1846-1922), Aeschbacher would not allow theology to become merely a speculative exercise but tended his flock with active concern. Barth remembered that upon his confirmation at age sixteen he decided to become a theologian and to pursue a clear understanding of the creed.30

Upon this decision,

his father tried to exercise a guiding hand in his choice of university and Karl to begin with did his best to comply. His five years of university study began in Berne [in 1904], under the direction of his father, where he received a solid diet of Reformed theology. However, towards the end of his second year he came up against two new influences: the theoretical and practical philosophy of the idealist Immanuel Kant, author of a ‘Copernican revolution’ in the theory of knowledge at the end of the eighteenth century, and the analysis of religion and faith made by the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, who was to dominate German theology for a century after his death in 1834.31

The positive line was not enough for Barth. He reflected later that he was glad for the inoculation he received against the ‘historical school’ in those years, commenting that in

Berne he “smoked much stronger tobacco than anything which could be found years later under the brand of demythologizing.”32 Nevertheless, Barth’s foray into the main centers of liberalism, while delayed, was inevitable.

29. Busch, 25; emphasis added. 30. Busch, 30-31. Cp. Fritz Barth in McCormack, Critically Realistic, 36, and Gary Dorrien, The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology: Theology Without Weapons (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000), 23, regarding Herrmann’s dictum: ‘No one has ever been saved by information.’ See Wilhelm Herrmann, The Communion of the Christian with God, trans. J. Sandys Stanyon, ed. Robert T. Voelkel (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971), 58. 31. Bowden, 31. 32. Busch, 34.

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If Robert Aeschbacher awakened a desire for theology in the young Karl,

Immanuel Kant redivivus (1724-1804) brought it into focus. Barth and many of his liberal teachers were influenced by Kant’s philosophy, which had effectively broken the strict, pre-modern bonds between religion and scientific reason.33 Though eventually the Swiss theologian would differ sharply with the Königsberg philosopher regarding the function of moral reasoning, Kant’s lasting influence on Barth was the “discovery that the divine truth was not a complicated, difficult construction with hundreds of different propositions and opinions and hypotheses, but a simple, clear knowledge, accessible to any child.”34

Kant gave Barth a rubric of sorts by which to evaluate his own theological formulations as well as what he received from his teachers. In his later attempt at Christian ministry,

Barth oriented himself to what was ‘essential’ and returned to it again and again.35

Something inside Barth thirsted for the liberalism of the University of Marburg.

As a compromise to his father’s wishes that he attend a conservative, Pietist institution like Halle, Karl agreed to attend the University of Berlin. Founded in 1809 as Humboldt

University, Berlin’s earliest mandate was to provide advanced instruction in the sciences.

The original theological faculty in Berlin included Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), practically-oriented New Testament exegete August Neander (1789-1850) and Leopold

33. Dorrien, 170. This is the very earliest stage of Barth’s long departure from liberalism and Pietism. Barth’s very first assertions in Church Dogmatics in 1932 express his rejection of Schleiermacher and others’ modernistic attempts to “surrender theology to a general concept of science” (CD I/1,10; see also 8, 36). Barth was criticized by those in conservative American evangelical tradition of Francis Turretin, Thomas Reid, and Charles Hodge for having rejected the postulates of science the way he did. See Roger Olson, The Story of Christian Theology (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1999), 557-558; Carl F. H. Henry, “Chaos in European Theology: the Deterioration of Barth's Defenses,” Christianity Today 9, no. 1 (1964): 15-19; Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority Volume I: God Who Speaks and Shows, Preliminary Considerations, (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1999) 205-207; Klaas Runia, Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Holy Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1962); and Gordon H. Clark, Karl Barth’s Theological Method (Philadelphia: The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1963). 34. Busch, 35. 35. Busch, 35; see also Eberhard Jüngel, Karl Barth, A Theological Legacy, trans. Garrett E. Paul (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1986), 18.

12 von Ranke (1795-1886) who, specifically, “helped make the study of history an independent discipline based on critical analysis of sources.”36 Humboldt was re-named the University of Berlin in 1828 during a period of Protestant, Christian revival. In a series of second-generation faculty appointments, which included Ernst W. Hengstenberg

(1802-1869) in 1826, August Twesten (1789-1876) in 1835, and Karl Nitzsch (1787-

1868) in 1847, a mediating theological solution was established between the pure, objective historicists and the “belligerent confessionalist[s].”37 Perhaps it was both the spirit and the content of this mediation that prompted the compromise between Fritz and his son.

The bulk of Barth’s time in Berlin in 1906-1907 was split between seminar table and study desk as he attended to coursework under Adolf von Harnack. The boy who had been told to pay more attention in religious studies turned his considerable intellect to a

158-page seminar paper entitled ‘Paul’s Missionary Work According to the Account in the Acts of the Apostles.’38 In Berlin, Harnack may have read Barth, but Barth was reading Schleiermacher. He later described finding Schleiermacher’s Speeches on

Religion to its Cultured Despisers (1799) as his ‘eureka’ moment. It fast became an orienting influence. Berlin proved itself an intermediate step to Marburg in another way when Barth “became a committed pupil and follower of Wilhelm Herrmann”39 after reading his Ethics (1901). Herrmann not only sealed the interest Aeschbacher had forged in the young Karl but cemented his essential Christological foundation.

36. Gangolf Hübinger, “Ranke, Leopold von,” in Religion Past & Present: Encyclopedia of Theology and Religion, ed. Hans Deiter Betz, et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 10:625. 37. Kurt-Victor Selge, “Berlin, University of,” in Betz, 1:699. 38. Eberhard Busch, Karl Barths Lebenslauf: Nach Seinen Breifen und Autobiographischen Texten (München: Chr. Kaiser, 1976), 51. (Die Missionsthätigkeit des Paulus nach der Darstellung der Apostelgeschichte eine Quelle zweiten Ranges) 39. Busch, 40.

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Barth was not only taken by his new-found theological mentors in Berlin but also with what seems to compel many young men who are freshly liberated from their childhood — namely, beer. As a result, Marburg as a physical reality was put on hold as young Karl was compelled to continue his studies back in Berne in 1907. Frustrated with his son’s revelry, Fritz made arrangements for study in Tübingen.40 Even in his early days as a university student, Karl Barth’s ability to maintain both an active social calendar and voluminous literary output was evident. He produced a 194-page qualifying dissertation on ‘The Decent of Christ to Hell in the First Three Centuries.’41 Only a few weeks into

Tübingen, however, Karl wrote his father with a similar theme in mind and complained that the positive lecture hall was in fact a ‘wretched hole.’ Interestingly enough, even as

Barth was on the verge of finding the full expression of his liberalism in Marburg, it was a Tübingen association with Christoph Blumhardt (1842–1919) that provided him a resource to draw upon when in the pastorate he found liberalism wanting. Nevertheless,

Barth was fiercely bored with Tübingen and, after some insistence, his father gave way to his pursuing studies at Marburg.

In Marburg, Barth imbibed the liberal tradition. Founded in 1527 as the first

Protestant university in Germany, the University of Marburg originally promoted the goals of Humanism and the Reformation and adhered to the principle of sola Scriptura.

40. The University of Tübingen was originally founded in 1477 and later given direction by reformer and theologian Philipp Melanchthon (1497-1560). In the nineteenth century (ca. 1835) a school of exegetes and theologians formed under Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860) and his student David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874) that would have far reaching effects on the disciplines of New and Old Testament exegesis as well as historical theology. The so called ‘Tübingen school’ advocated for “the purely historical, non-supernatural, and non-miraculous interpretation of Christianity”’(Horton Harris, The Tübingen School [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975], 246) which departed sharply from the older Tübingen School’s understanding of ‘Biblical Supernaturalism.’ Around the time of Baur’s death his movement lost sway in its own environs and was replaced with a more positive approach. It was instrumental, nevertheless, in the development of historical-critical studies and gave rise to the work of, among others, Ritschl, Troelsch, and Harnack. 41. Busch, Karl Barths Lebenslauf, 54. (Der Descensus Christi ad Infernos in den Ersten Drei Jahrhunderten).

14

“From the beginning, [however,] the theological faculty… [was] characterized by the coexistence of different schools of thought.”42 After a series of transformations linked to

German socio-political and religious evolution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Marburg came to boast a renowned palate of neo-Kantians and historical critics, including Paul Natorp (1854-1924) and Herrmann Cohen (1842-1918), and Adolf

Jülicher (1857-1938) and Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976), respectively. Barth’s theology was coloured by the unique position that Wilhelm Herrmann had etched out in

Marburg.43 “Herrmann44 was the theological teacher of my student years,” he remembered. “Only because of him were the following three semesters in Marburg ‘far and away my happiest student memory.’”45 At one point Herrmann was the celebrated, if not tortured, pupil of liberal theologian Albrecht Ritschl (1822-1889). Ritschl is noted for having drawn liberal theology away from the subjectivity of Friedrich Schleiermacher in the latter’s attempt to deliver the Christian faith from its ‘cultured despisers.’46

Schleiermacher had described religion as “a way of thinking, a faith… [and] a way of acting, a peculiar desire and love… having to do with life and art.”47 He emphasized the sentimental nature of faith and found religion in a sort of common self-consciousness

42. Barbara Regina Renftle, “Marburg, University of,” in Betz, 8:42. 43. McCormack, Critically Realistic, 68. 44. Wilhelm Herrmann’s principal works include: Die Religion im Verhältnis zum Welterkennen und zur Sittlichkeit (1879; Religion in Relationship to Knowledge of the World and Morality); Der Verkehr des Christen mit Gott (1886; ET: The Communion of the Christian with God, 1971); Ethik (1901; Ethics); Christlich-protestantische Dogmatic (1906); Die Wirklichkeit Gottes (1914; The Reality of God); Dogmatik (1925; ET: Systematic Theology, 1927). 45. Busch, 44; emphasis original. Barth recognized that he probably wanted to go to Marburg as much as he did because it was withheld from him. After receiving ‘bucketsful’ of theology at the liberal school the appeal waned. 46. McCormack, Critically Realistic, 50. See Albrecht Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation: The Positive Development of the Doctrine. 2nd ed., ed. H. R. Mackintosh and A. B. Macaulay (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1902), 155-157, 188. 47. Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, trans. John Oman (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1958), 27-28. (Hereafter shortened to Speeches.)

15 shared by all humankind.48 According to Schleiermacher,

The contemplation of the pious is the immediate consciousness of the universal existence of all finite things, in and through the Infinite, and of all temporal things in and through the Eternal. Religion is to seek this and find it in all that lives and moves, in all growth and change, in all doing and suffering. It is to have life and to know life in immediate feeling, only as such an existence in the Infinite and Eternal…. Wherefore it is a life in the infinite nature of the Whole, in the One and in the All, in God, having and possessing all things in God, and God in all. Yet religion is not knowledge and science, either of the world or of God. Without being knowledge, it recognizes knowledge and science. In itself it is an affection, a revelation of the Infinite in the finite, God being seen in it and it in God.49

While Barth is known to have ultimately rejected the tenets of liberal theology as developed by these remarkable men, this excerpt of Schleiermacher demonstrates, as we will see, that Marburg left an indelible stamp upon the student from Berne.50

Barth’s time in Marburg was marked by the ongoing debates having to do, chiefly, with Albrecht Ritschl. Ritschl had worked to establish a firm link between personal commitment and historical reality in the Christian religion:

Christianity, then, is the monotheistic, completely spiritual, and ethical religion, which, based on the life of its Author as Redeemer and as Founder of the Kingdom of God, consists in the freedom of the children of God, involves the impulse to conduct from the motive of love, which aims at the moral organization of mankind, and grounds blessedness on the relationship of sonship to God, as well as on the Kingdom of God.51

To a large degree Ritschl and his Berlin colleague Adolf von Harnack rested their theological conclusions on the reliability of the historical critical apparatus.52 Pure

48. Dorrien, 170. 49. Schleiermacher, Speeches, 36. 50. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation, trans. Edward T. Oakes (San Francisco: Communio Books, Ignatius Press, 1992), 199-200, charged that even as Barth departed from Schleiermacher (and liberalism in general) he was still possessed by his modern impulse to systematize. Barth’s systematization, according to Balthasar, was hidden in the indefinable revelation of God in Christ. See also Stephen D. Wigley, Karl Barth and Hans Urs Von Balthasar: A Critical Engagement (London: T & T Clark, 2007), 44f; and James O. Duke and Robert F. Streetman, eds., Barth and Schleiermacher: Beyond the Impasse? (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), 105. 51. Ritschl, 13; see also 281 for Ritschl’s strong connection between the community of loving obedience and its Lord. 52. Dorrien, 20.

16 historical investigation that examines the profound effect of Jesus’ message, argued

Harnack, provides an objective standpoint over and against the speculation and subjectivity of philosophical religion.53 But it was not merely the ‘facts’ of history that interested Ritschl and Harnack. Ritschl maintained that the greatest task of historical criticism was not only to expose the Greek cosmology undergirding Patristic creedal formulations, but to draw out Jesus Christ’s own values — values that invested his disciples’ lives with meaning and truth as they actively sought to realize God’s final end, namely, the Kingdom of God.54 Only with this very personal, practical, and ultimately value-rich reality, claimed Ritschl, can anyone come to know the nature of God.55

Harnack, likewise, stressed that historical study of the Apostles uncovers the sheer moral force of Jesus’ message, providing access to his elevation of the individual human soul and the imperative to a ministry of love.56

While this certainly does not exhaust either man’s contribution, these positions established a point of departure. Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923) followed Ritschl and

Harnack’s historical emphasis to its extreme end. Troeltsch was something of a prodigy, having achieved a full professorship at the University of Heidelberg in 1894 at age twenty-nine. Early in his academic career he took up a devoted critical analysis of the history of religions. Following the tradition of the Tübingen school, his

Religionsgeschichtliche Schule57 left behind the underlying theological and axiological

53. Adolf Harnack, What is Christianity? trans. Thomas B. Saunders (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1957), 6-15. 54. Ritschl, 203-206, 211, 225-226, 368. 55. Ritschl, 398, in contrast to “the sphere of disinterested scientific knowledge, like the formula of Chalcedon.” Furthermore, when one has observed and learned from Jesus and then invested God’s final end with ultimate value, he or she overcomes the world, rendering powerless any dissatisfaction that might arise in the course of life (458). 56. Harnack, 99-100, 111-112, 142, 147. 57. Translated into English as “history of religions school” and sometimes referred to as

17 presuppositions held by teachers like Ritschl for a purely historical study. “The Christian religion is in every moment of its history a purely historical phenomenon,” he claimed,

“subject to all the limitations to which any individual historical phenomenon is exposed, just like the other great religions. It is to be investigated, in every moment of its history, by the universal, verified methods of historical research.”58 Where Ritschl and Harnack were concerned to identify the moral community of values buried underneath the

Hellenistic dogmatism of the early Christian Church,59 Troeltsch’s investigation was an amoral reckoning of the raw historical data.60 That is, he refused to work deductively by assigning general principles or values and then working to prove them. His descriptive method61 was similar to Ritschl and Harnack, however, because it took into account both the historical events and their subjective effects, recognizing that the picture available to the historian is what ‘becomes’ for those experiencing their lives. Christian history produces, thus, “a theology of consciousness instead of a theology of facts.”62 When studied in this manner the features of “this immensely powerful event of history… appear[s] clearly before our eyes as the supreme inspiration of awe and admiration.”63

Like Barth, Troeltsch’s significant scholarly output continued to develop and adapt throughout his career – one that was cut short by his death at age fifty-nine. Among others, Barth’s friend Eduard Thurneysen (1888-1974), with whom he became much better acquainted in Safenwil, was a student of Troeltsch.

Religionswissenschaft (“science of religion”). 58. Ernst Troeltsch, The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religions, trans. David Reid (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1971), 85. 59. Harnack, 200-201, 234-238. 60. Dorrien, 16. 61. Ernst Troeltsch, The Christian Faith, Fortress Texts in Modern Theology, trans. Garrett E. Paul (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1991), 111. 62. Troeltsch, The Christian Faith, 115. 63. Troeltsch, The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religions, 123.

18

Barth’s own allegiance at the time, however, was with the man who departed from Ritschl in a different direction. Wilhelm Herrmann,

like Ritschl, never doubted that Christianity is founded historically in what he called ‘the fact of Jesus.’ Like Ritschl, he did not invest much religious significance in the results of historical criticism pertaining to the life of the historical Jesus. What was important to Herrmann, as for Ritschl, was not the historicity of any particular details in the gospel narratives, but the historicity of Christ’s redeeming and reconciling action in the life of the Christian community.64

Herrmann’s departure from Ritschl, like Troeltsch’s, may be better described as ‘out- pacing’ him. Herrmann looked back to Schleiermacher’s ‘religious feeling’65 and away from Ritschl’s highly criticized tendency to ground faith in presuppositions gained from historical or philosophical sources. In 1884, he broached the topic in his essay: ‘Why

Does Our Faith Need Historical Facts?’ Two years later his position was fortified in The

Communion of the Christian with God when he redefined the concept of ‘historical grounding.’ For Herrmann, history’s relevance to faith is its description of the real moment of God’s communion with those he chooses.66 “No human being,” he taught,

“can so help another by the information he may give him that the latter shall be put in the possession of what is best in religion. Each individual must experience it for himself as a gift from above. … At such a time God makes Himself felt, and sets the man in that inward condition which is blessedness.”67 To be sure, Ritschl understood the great importance of looking not only to events recorded in history but also to their effect — to

64. Dorrien, 21. 65. Herrmann, Systematic Theology, trans. Nathaniel Micklem and Kenneth A. Saunders (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1927), 31-32. 66. McCormack, Critically Realistic, 52. Herrmann knew he had broken ranks with Ritschl when, after reading the book, Ritschl exclaimed that he could not find himself in it. 67. Herrmann, The Communion of the Christian with God, 19; cf. Herrmann, Systematic Theology, 19. The science of religion, then, cannot set one’s face to the experience of faith but can make more clear the “unrecognized craving for religion” and “defend from distortion the religious experience” of the community of faith.

19 the value that lay behind the fact.

Herrmann brought this to the fore in a fresh way by loosing even more the threads of philosophy and history woven in Ritschl’s epistemology. Moreoever, in contrast to the later Schleiermacher, Herrmann understood that “communion with God can consist in nothing else than the experience of dependence”68 rather than it being “a constituent part of every human consciousness.”69 Of critical importance to Barth’s future ‘Word of God’ theology, Herrmann’s move invested God with a substantive identity and active role.

“Our communion with God is, first of all, utter submission to His majesty. But submission is only possible when God makes us certain of Himself and of His grace, or, in other words, when He is present to us and comprehensible to us in the historical figure of Christ.”70 That is to say, he began to give God initiative and priority in the domains of revelation and faith. Here he drew sharp contrast to the Marburg neo-Kantian philosophers Natorp and Cohen — the former of whom reduced religion to a non- cognitive, solely human function, and the latter having given God the functional capacity of “zero: a very important place-holder in the system but completely without content; featureless and colourless.”71 Herrmann’s distinct brand of theology was pivotal in

Barth’s development.

68. Herrmann, The Communion of the Christian with God, 243. 69. Herrmann, Systematic Theology, 28-29, 35-36; McCormack, Critically Realistic, 57. 70. Herrmann, The Communion of the Christian with God, 267-268. 71. McCormack, Critically Realistic, 49. Barth followed his teacher in seeking to invest God with positive value. Barth’s theological anthropology, in particular, followed Herrmann’s fundamental reversal at this point to position God as the one who gives definition to man. Moreover, Herrmann’s idea that ‘selves’ come to know who they are in the interaction with other ‘selves’ is remarkably similar to Barth’s comments about authentic human interactions being characterized as ‘eye to eye’ and so forth (CD III/2, 266-267). See Herrmann, Schriften zur Grundlegung der Theologie, ii. 88-113 as noted in McCormack, 58. “Barth’s ‘dialectical method of theology’ is almost identical to Herrmann’s ‘way to religion’ except that Barth replaces the individual experience of faith, which every serious individual can find somewhere in his or her life, with the event of faith in the biblical Christ, which God, in his freedom, has [made] available.” Joachim Weinhardt, “Herrmann, Wilhelm,” in Betz, et. al, 6:107.

20

Herrmann laid particular stress upon the individual’s ability to perceive the truth of God in the faith relationship.72 For him, the neo-Kantian system failed to explain the depth of personal experience and the desire to seek forgiveness. Troeltsch’s historical- moral principle73 and Schleiermacher’s general religious impulse likewise failed to accurately explain the heart of Christian truth and experience.74 Even Martin Luther, according to Herrmann, had not gone far enough in his reformation project to see that the essence of the religion was not in the biblical propositions solely but in the real, inner encounter of ‘faith apprehending truth.’75

Revelation, at its core, is an event that creates faith, opens communion, nurtures trust, and communicates truth.76 It produces “invincible certainty” that exceeds historical or epistemological probability and is not bound in any way to the principles that govern them.77 Scriptural revelation, according to Herrmann, was not to be understood in the way Ritschl and Harnack supposed, but as a self-authenticating experience.78

72. See Herrmann, The Communion of the Christian with God, 348. Though he advocates experience as the evidence of faith and historical reality, Herrmann does not hold that this experience is a personal, mystical relationship with God, nor the sort of piety that is initiated by an individual in order to facilitate that short of relationship. 73. John Webster, “Introducing Barth,” in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, ed. John Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 3. 74. McCormack, Critically Realistic, 57. 75. Dorrien, 24. See Herrmann, The Communion of the Christian with God, 220-224. 76. Dorrien, 25. 77. Herrmann, The Communion of the Christian with God, 200; see Christophe Chalamet, “Wilhelm Herrmann and the Birth of the Ritschlian School,” Zeitschrift Für Neuere Theologiegeschichte 15, no. 2 (January 1, 2008): 275, for Herrmann’s early rejection of human mastery over the supernatural through scientific observation, a theme in Barth. 78. Dorrien, 27; Hans Schwarz, Theology in a Global Context: The Last Two Hundred Years (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2005), 128-129, critiques Herrmann’s disengagement from ontological and historical grounding: “Are we not thrown back upon ourselves?” In his estimation Herrmann has returned to Schleiermacher’s notion of feeling; Robert Voelkel, The Shape of the Theological Task (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1968), 24-25, on the other hand, argues that Herrmann actively avoided Schleiermacher’s mysticism by understanding concrete religious history in relationship to human personality; see also Robert H. Cubillos, “Herrmann’s Communion of the Christian with God: Contributions to an Evangelical Perspective on the Importance of Experience and the ‘Inner Life’ of Jesus?” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 33, no. 2 (June 1990): 182-184; Brent W. Sockness, "The Ideal and the Historical in the Christology of Wilhelm Herrmann: The Promise and the

21

Specifically, “a man learns how to see this glory of the sacred Scripture when there has begun in him the same life whose rise and whose perfection are there incomparably described.”79 To the neo-Kantians, Herrmann asserted that “in the encounter with the gracious Self-revelation of God, the individual experiences forgiveness and freedom from the guilt of sin.”80 Moreover, the encounter of God and human originates in faith. Not only did Herrmann reject the vigorous efforts of natural theologians, scientists, apologists, biblicists, and philosophers to define God by their deeply held presuppositions but he denied the Pietists the similar right to open the lines of communication with God merely on the basis of deeply felt feelings. Revelation is Jesus Christ’s prerogative; his real encounter with fishermen and tax collectors in Galilee is evidence of his continuing intention to encounter the bookbinders and university rectors in Germany. The historical details of Jesus’ life, then, are secondary in a very important way to the profound impact that Jesus’ presence made in the lives of those who spoke to Him and made Him the uncontested Lord of their lives.81 “The Person of Jesus becomes to us a real power rooted in history,” according to Herrmann, “not through historical proofs, but through the experience produced in us by the picture of his spiritual life which we can find for ourselves in the pages of the New Testament.”82 The God-given experience of Jesus

Christ’s revelation, by which God creates faith in the life of he who receives it, becomes

Perils of Revisionary Christology,” Journal Of Religion 72, no. 3 (July 1992): 366-388; and Chalamet, 283. 79. Herrmann, The Communion of the Christian with God, 43. Cp. Harnack, 147: “A man can think and teach rightly about Christ only if, and in so far as, he has already begun to live according to Christ’s gospel.” Also Barth in 1920: “The only real way to name the theme of the of the Bible, which is the Easter message, is to have it, to show it, to live it.” “Biblical Questions, Insights, and Vistas,” in The Word of God and the Word of Man, 86. 80. McCormack, Critically Realistic, 59-60; emphasis added. See Herrmann, The Communion of the Christian with God, 140-143. 81. Herrmann, The Communion of the Christian with God, 72-73, 90. See Dorrien, 172-173; McCormack, Critically Realistic, 61-63. 82. Herrmann, Systematic Theology, 51.

22 the standard by which to understand and relate to the authors of the Bible, who bear witness in its text, the same event in their own lives. “It was precisely because he insisted that the power of the inner life of Jesus was a present reality that Herrmann could be content to let the fires of historical criticism rage.”83

Karl remembered his teacher as having steel in his voice, Christ on his tongue,84 and a drive that inspired profound confidence in his thought. Barth left Marburg well acquainted with the great theologians of the age. “As one of their followers, he was prepared to be a theologian strictly dependent on the sole criterion of historical investigation, and a preacher whose message would be determined by the anthropological question of religious experience.”85 It was, however, his encounter with Herrmann’s

Christology that proved the enduring influence of Marburg.86

As much as he was gripped by Herrmann’s theology, the student from Berne had never experienced for himself what was at its core. In 1909 Barth published an honest appraisal of his Marburg education as it related to the transition into pastoral work.

“Modern Theology and Working for the Kingdom of Theology” explained that he and his

83. McCormack, Critically Realistic, 62; See Herrmann, The Communion of the Christian with God, 69-70, 75-76. A similar position comes be held by Emil Brunner, Revelation and Reason: The Christian Doctrine of Faith and Knowledge, trans. Olive Wyon (London: SCM Press, 1947), 169-170; The Christian Doctrine of the Church, Faith and the Consummation, vol. 3 of Dogmatics, trans. T. H. L. Parker and David Cairns, (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1962), 186-187; as well as Augustus Hopkins Strong, Christ in Creation and Ethical Monism (Philadelphia: The Griffith and Rowland Press, 1899), 133; and William Newton Clarke, Sixty Years with the Bible: A Record of Experience (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1909), 71-72, 107, 178-179. Barth’s break with Herrmann’s theology centered on his insistence “that the divine being was real, whole, and complete in itself apart from the knowing activity of the human subject; indeed, the reality of God precedes all human knowing.” McCormack, Critically Realistic, 67. He had to consistently start with this theological understanding before asking any questions about anthropology or ethics. Starting again at the beginning was Barth’s method and his theology. 84. Busch, 45. 85. Georges Casalis, Portrait of Karl Barth, trans. Robert McAfee Brown (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1963), 41. 86. Jüngel, 28; see also Salai Hla Aung, The Doctrine of Creation in the Theology of Barth, Moltmann, and Pannenberg: Creation in Theological, Ecological, and Philosophical Scientific Perspective (Regenburg: Roderer Verlag, 1998), 26.

23

Marburg fellows had filled their satchels with religious individualism and historical relativism and were hesitant to abandon them for the demands of the Reformed pulpit.87

As in his early days of confirmation class, Barth was not inclined towards the strictly pastoral side of Christian ministry.88

Herrmann’s theology, which had proved such an attraction, was very much a theology of human experience and particularly of the human conscience. The ground of faith was man’s innate moral sense, the still small voice inside him, which was aroused by the impact of Jesus, his life and teaching. Contact with Jesus, the perfect religious personality, nourished a man’s own religious experience and contributed to his religious growth. To be an honest exponent of this theology, Barth believed, he had to share its fundamental conviction and bring to it the necessary depth of experience. But this he was unable to do, and he was too honest to go on as he was.89

In a phase that is underdeveloped by some of his biographers, Karl was ordained 1908 but did not go immediately into the pastorate. Eberhard Jüngel and George Casalis’ portraits of Barth generally depict him as confident and forward moving. Jüngel draws attention to the definitive steps Barth took in terms of his theological positions, suggesting that lectures he gave in 1910 and 1911 were clear steps away from Harnack and Herrmann’s historical emphases.90 John Godsey and John Bowden, by contrast, are more sensitive to the longing in Barth for the aspect of Herrmann’s thought concerned with a ‘Christ-experience.’ The division between theory and practice was palpable not

87. Karl Barth, “Moderne Theologie und Reichgottesarbeit,” in Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche (1909): 317-321. 88. Busch, 31, 51. 89. Bowden, 32. 90. Jüngel, 28-29; ‘Der christliche Glaube und die Geschichte’ (1910; ‘The Christian Faith and History’); and ‘Jesus Christus und die soziale Bewegung’ (1911; ET: ‘Jesus Christ and the Social Movement’ in Karl Barth: Theologian of Freedom, ed. Clifford Green (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1991), 98-113; cf. Busch, 56-58. Jüngel’s emphasis on historicism in Herrmann is not entirely consistent with the picture presented by McCormack and Dorrien. It seems that Jüngel’s portrayal is oriented towards Barth’s decisive and divisive impulses. His orientation seems to gloss over the nuance of Barth’s relationship to Herrmann. Jüngel’s thematic development is, to be sure, much more objective than Casalis’ unabashed hero worship.

24 only to Barth but Marburg professors Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918) and Ernst Troeltsch as well. Both men recognized the impact of their work on pastoral candidates and asked to be placed in faculties other than theology.91 Here again a picture of the sharp and sensitive Barth emerges, one depicting the struggle with doctrine in public and experience in private.

Karl Barth felt ill prepared to enter the pulpit as preacher or hospital as pastor so he spent some time after graduation working with Martin Rade (1857–1940) in the publication of the liberal journal Christliche Welt. It was a positive time for Barth even if his editorial powers did cause him some measure of pride. After a brief assistantship in a

Genevan church characterized by academic and perhaps less-than-pious sermons, Barth found himself pastor to the Swiss village of Safenwil in 1911.

Karl Barth the Pastor: From Marburg to Aarau by Way of Kaiser Wilhelm

The Pastorate in Safenwil

If Marburg had captured Barth’s interest in theology, Safenwil demanded it.

Safenwil is located in the canton of Aargau in Switzerland about seventy-five kilometers northeast of Berne and it meant great changes for Karl Barth. He opened his tenure in the pulpit with a sermon from John 14:21 on the commands of God wherein he clarified his own order of decrees, so to speak. “I am not speaking to you of God because I am a pastor,” Barth declared, “I am a pastor because I must speak to you of God.”92 He remembered his experiences with both the church and the public as full of conflict. They

91. Bowden, 33. Godsey, 19. 92. Busch, 61.

25 demanded that he speak the truth but offend no one. To this Barth retorted: “If I wanted to be liked, I would keep quiet.”93

Eduard Thurneysen reflected upon the man he knew in the pastorate as one who made special efforts to help his confirmation students but pained about the expectation to please his congregation:

Karl Barth appears before us as one who has heard a call from beyond and has now to follow it. The ‘others,’ however, are not yet seized by this call and surround the one who is already captive to it as men who for the time being are still free and have no desire to follow this prisoner on a road that diverges so far from their own. Yes, they actually restrain him from it and will not let him go on through. … Perhaps it is very good for us, and in fact comforting, to know… [that] Barth with his great self-possession and superiority… was also at one time in ferment — and how!94

Thurneysen played an inestimably valuable role in his friend’s life.95 Not only did he encourage the misfit pastor with his steady correspondence but also critiqued and collaborated on important projects. Above all, Thurneysen opened to Barth a wide and far-reaching social circle, often exercising his gift at mediation in issues requiring social finesse.

Barth became intensely interested in the issues facing the struggling labor class of

Safenwil — issues he ultimately found to be greater than the solutions his liberal education could provide.96 More and more the old adage that ‘religion began with Kant’ was emptied of its meaning. Motivated to respond to the labor crisis affecting Safenwil’s industrial-textile workers in particular, Pastor Barth turned for a whole year to the book

93. Busch, 63. 94. Barth and Thurneysen, 22, 23. 95. Godsey, 20. 96. “Jesus was no social reformer.” Harnack, 97-98,

26 of Amos as text for his sermons.97 He actively took up the cause of the Social Democratic

Party of Switzerland, engaging the members of a local chapter, the Laborers’ Party, with increasingly practical, topical addresses. Having a rich philosophical education and the influence of top teachers, he felt equipped to survey and address the undergirding elements of his flock’s economic struggle and did so in a total of forty-three addresses during his tenure in Safenwil.98 Along with Thurneysen, Barth began to converse with religious socialists Hermann Kutter (1863-1931) and Leonhard Ragaz (1868-1945).

Kutter, in particular, used the labor crises to emphasize his point that “the divine power of the gospel is to be found in the organizational genius of social democracy.”99 In other words, social democracy as a movement issued a prophetic call to the Church to marshal its theology for an active engagement and struggle with society for the sake of the

Kingdom of God. Kutter, who never actually joined the Social Democratic Party, was concerned with it “as an instrument to awaken the church” and not a political mechanism per se.100 Ragaz took a more assertive tact by joining the Socialist Party in 1913. He claimed that by its very ideology God himself was rebelling against a rebellious world and, moreover, that Marxism was God’s spiritual act of messianism for the economically oppressed.101 Ragaz, more than Kutter, put considerable stress on the power of the political ideology to effect ethical and social change.

For a time Barth drew upon the resources of religious socialism, declaring at one

97. Busch, 71; Karl Barth, “The Need and Promise of Christian Proclamation,” in The Word of God and Theology, trans. Amy Marga (London: T&T Clark, 2011), 105-130. Originally given in the 1922 pastor’s conference in Schulpforta, Barth summarizes therein his ‘conversion’ to the Bible during the 12 years of ministry in Safenwil. This volume contains the unabridged lecture where Horton’s translation is abridged. 98. Paul S. Chung, Karl Barth: God’s Word in Action (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2008), 47. 99. Jüngel, 30. 100. Chung, 73. Christoph Blumhardt joined the party in Germany in 1899 as a statement of solidarity with the poor and not for the purpose exercising political power (71). 101. Schwarz, 171.

27 point that a real Christian is a socialist and a socialist is a real Christian.102 He began to see a weakness in Kutter and Ragaz’s program,103 however, when he came into contact again with Christoph Blumhardt whom he had formerly met during his brief stay in

Tübingen. Diverging from the strong political interests of religious socialists, Blumhardt emphasized to him that change was only possible through radical and personal spiritual change. What captured Barth was not the younger Blumhardt’s pietistic qualities but his broad understanding of modern questions and his insistence that God’s universal love, initiated, “incarnated and fulfilled in Jesus Christ, makes it impossible for us to assume that men’s estrangement from God and their hostility to the message of salvation is final and definitive.”104 It might be said that here Blumhardt put Jesus into Herrmann’s

Christology. Barth met with the reality behind the Bible and from then on God’s Word would set the trajectory for Barth’s career — ‘Jesus is Victor.’105

The many lectures Safenwil’s pastor gave at the Aarau Student Conference and similar venues, gathered and published under the title The Word of God and the Word of

Man, trace a growing understanding and passion that had discovered him in the reading of scripture. As early as 1916 Barth explained, “it is not the right human thoughts about

God which form the content of the Bible, but the right divine thoughts about men… how

102. Busch, 83; see also Jüngel, 60; Godsey, 21-23, on Barth’s specific shift from Marburg liberalism in this regard. 103. Barth and Thurneysen, 31, demonstrates Barth’s negative appraisal of Kutter-Ragaz ‘religious socialism’; see also Karl Barth, God in Action, trans. E. G. Homrighausen (Manhasset, NY: Round Table Press, 1963), 125; Shwartz, 169, claims “ties loosened when Kutter noticed that Barth’s eschatology was missing the essential eschatological urgency in the sense of Blumhardt’s. Barth’s eschatology was perceived as too static with regard to the realization of the kingdom of God.” 104. Casalis, 42. See also, Chung, 101-103. 105. Jüngel, 31-32; emphasis added. See also Christian T. Collins Winn, "Jesus Is Victor!" The Significance of the Blumhardts for the Theology of Karl Barth, Princeton Theological Monographs Series 93 (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2009). McCormack, Critically Realistic, 61-63, notes that Herrmann had taken the first steps towards God-initiated contact but Barth had to complete the journey himself.

28 he has sought and found the way to us… The word of God is within the Bible.”106 In

1919 at Tambach, Barth further solidified his position. “Our concern is God, the movement originating in God, the motion which he lends us — and it is not religion.

Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done. The so-called ‘religious experience’ is a wholly derived, secondary, fragmentary form of the divine.”107 In these and other lectures he began upsetting old paradigms and charting new territory.

It is important to note that for the Swiss pastor these discoveries ran parallel to his pressing social concerns. On the one hand, he refused to become a political marionette.

One the other hand, he appreciated the seriousness that political socialism paid to God.108

He assured Thurneysen in 1915 that while it was “no longer possible… to remain suspended in the clouds above the present evil world,” his joining of the Social

Democratic Party would not result in “becoming unfaithful to [their] ‘essential’ orientation as might very well have happened… two years ago.”109 It was not the ideology of the Social Democrats that prompted Barth’s involvement but rather his desire to be responsible to his community, his observation in Scripture of God’s desire to inhabit the imperfect realm, and his opportunity to critique the party from the inside.110 In

106. Karl Barth, “The Strange New World Within the Bible,” in The Word of God and the Word of Man, trans. Douglas Horton (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957), 43; Barth showed early signs of departure from liberalism in Lenzburg in 1913 with his address “Faith in a Personal God.” According to Busch, 80, Barth’s 1914 sermon on Romans 1:16 and Matthew 6:30 represents a definitive change in the order of Barth’s understanding, “God is” gave priority to God and not to man. It seems that to a certain extent Busch (63) saw Barth’s development as happening almost without his knowledge. That is, and fittingly so, that Barth was not the one who changed the priority of God in his own mind. Perhaps this is the genesis of Barth’s conception of revelation in CD I/1 of the proclamation of the Church as containing God inspired truth despite the efforts of the preacher. This was Barth’s mature position as he preached in the Basle prison in his latest years (see Casalis, 89). 107. Barth, “The Christian’s Place In Society,” in The Word of God and the Word of Man, 285. 108. Jüngel, 93. 109. Barth and Thurneysen, 28. 110. Karl Barth, Final Testimonies, ed. Eberhard Busch, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company), 34, 37-38; Barth and Thurneysen, 28; George Hunsinger, Karl Barth and Radical Politics (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976), 47.

29 an address given in 1915 entitled ‘Religion and Socialism’ Safenwil’s so-called ‘red pastor’ claimed to see both the mistakes and the promise in the Swiss Social Democratic

Party:

[In] the simple brotherhood of solidarity [that appears] first among the poor and underprivileged of all countries — I must recognize all these new [features], which socialism brings into political and economic life, as something new from God’s side. … Socialism — despite its imperfections… is for me one of the most gratifying signs of the fact that God’s kingdom does not stand still, that God is at work, and hence I may not and cannot stand against it indifferently.111

Barth’s early dedication to hold doctrine and ethics together in this way came to be an essential feature of his theological career.

In all of this, the defining event for Barth was not his positive associations but the failure of his liberal teachers at the advent of World War I. Barth remembered that for him the “entire world of theological exegesis, ethics, dogmatics, and preaching, which up to that point I had accepted as basically credible, was thereby shaken to the foundations, and with it everything which flowed at that time from the pens of German theologians.”112 He witnessed his former professors — Adolf von Harnack and Wilhelm

Herrmann among them — offer support to Kaiser Wilhelm II’s (1859-1941) war policy, which, for Barth, effectively changed scholarship and religion “into intellectual 42 cm cannons.”113 How could this be the product of a fully developed ethical consciousness

111. Barth quoted in Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt, Theological Audacities: Selected Essays, Princeton Theological Monograph Series 137, ed. Andreas Pangritz and Paul S. Chung, trans. Don McCord, H. Martin Rumscheidt and Paul S. Chung (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2010), 105-106. For focused treatment of Barth’s socialist concerns see also George Hunsinger, Karl Barth and Radical Politics; and Michael D. O'Neil, Church As Moral Community: Karl Barth's Vision of Christian Life, 1915- 1922, Paternoster Theological Monographs (Milton Keynes: Authentic Media, 2013). 112. Karl Barth, “Concluding Unscientific Postscript on Schleiermacher” in The Theology of Schleiermacher: Lectures at Göttingen, Winter Semester of 1923/24. ed. Deitrich Ritschl, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1982), 264; cf. Karl Barth, The Humanity of God, trans. John Newton Thomas and Thomas Wieser (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1960), 14. 113. Busch, 81. See Professors of Germany, “To the Civilized World,” The North American Review 210, no. 765 (August 1919), 284-287, for the full text and list of ninety-three individuals who signed the document in support of the Kaiser.

30 enmeshed with the practical realization of Christian faith, as Ritschl and Herrmann had conceived?114 Barth’s involvement with Blumhardt and the Social Democrats provided him with the resources and drive he needed to establish his newly forming position amidst the upheaval. In other words, the war gave Barth pause, Blumhardt allowed him to go on, and the Bible carried him. Gary Dorrien thinks of this time in Barth’s life as serendipitous: Safenwil’s pastor was uniquely postured to respond to the tremendous practical and theological catastrophe brought about by world events. More importantly, he was put in a position where his unique intellectual gift and strong, uncompromising voice could be put to work shepherding the flock.115 It was during this pivotal time that

Barth began work on his defining treatise, Römerbrief. “With its appearance, twentieth- century theology began.”116

Publication of the Commentary on Romans

Römerbrief, or Barth’s commentary The Epistle to the Romans, was defining in the sense that it drew a theological line in the sand: “the absolute difference between God and the world… the ‘line of death’ that separates what God is and does from human being and action.”117 It set Barth’s position at the time into a substantial written

114. Chalamet, 284-285. 115. Dorrien, 51. This was where Barth could shine as a pastor, albeit atypically; see also Godsey, 22, on Barth’s post-liberal pastoral effectiveness. Thomas H. L. Parker, “Learning the Meaning of What I Believe,” in How Karl Barth Changed My Mind, ed. Donald McKim (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1998), 80-81, calls the lecture material that was later published under The Word of God and the Word of Man, “strong, clear, and masculine language” that excited, refreshed, and encouraged him in ministry. Römerbrief directed his course. Barth became the literary pastor of many. 116. Dorrien, 51. 117. Christoph Schwöbel, “Theology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, 21. See also Donald M. MacKinnon, “Revised Reviews: XII – Barth’s Epistle to the Romans,” Theology 65, no. 3 (1962): 3-7; R. S. Barbour, “Biblical Classics: X. Karl Barth: The Epistle to the Romans,” The Expository Times 90, no. 264 (1979): 264-268; Gerhard O. Forde, “Does the Gospel Have a Future? Barth’s Romans Revisited,” Word & World 14, no. 1 (Winter 1994); 67-77; Paul S. Minear, “Barth’s Commentary on the

31 argument. Another metaphor used to describe its publication is that it dropped like “a bombshell on the theological playground.”118 In 1917 Barth worked in the strictest seclusion as he peeled back the layers of the text in an effort to discover what could possibly have set Paul into motion in such a way. Despite poring over the translations and commentaries, Safenwil’s pastor was afraid that he perceived but one per cent of the reality behind the text. That reality consumed him, nevertheless. What was this voice of

Christ that had knocked Saul to the ground, renamed him, and propelled his life in a completely different direction? Truly, the voice that had challenged both Jacob and Paul was setting Karl Barth in a new direction. This voice, he was convinced, demanded that the Bible be allowed to speak.119

The first edition of Römerbrief, completed in 1918, brought together many of the themes Barth had been developing in his Aarau lectures during World War I. For Barth, the position of his liberal teachers signaled a fundamental problem in theology going all the way back to the Reformation. He began to see Schleiermacher in a new light — one that exposed the Prussian thinker’s anthropocentric theology as the underpinning of the current political crisis.120 More and more his study of Scripture motivated Barth to reverse the modernist-liberal principles he had come to know in Marburg. His 1916 lectures “The Righteousness of God” and “The One Thing Needful,” as well as 1917’s

“The Strange New World Within the Bible” laid the groundwork for Barth’s substantial but eminently simple proclamation: ‘God is God.’ With “the drilling machine… going

Romans, 1922-1972, or Karl Barth vs. the Exegetes,” in Footnotes to a Theology: The Karl Barth Colloquium of 1972, ed. Martin Rumscheidt (Waterloo, ON: Corp. for the Publication of Academic Studies in Religion in Canada, 1974), 8-29. 118. Godsey, 25. 119. Barth and Thurneysen, 43. 120. Busch, 81-82.

32 full strength and an unbroken pillar of smoke from [his] pipe to the ceiling,”121 Barth solidified his reversal in a 1920 address to the Aarau Student Conference entitled

“Biblical Questions, Insights and Vistas:”

Behold, I make all things new! The affirmation of God, man, and the world given in the New Testament is based exclusively upon the possibility of a new order absolutely beyond human thought; and therefore, as prerequisite to that order, there must come a crisis that denies all human thought…. In any case it is necessary, as we come to the last Biblical vista, to renew our insight into the problem of our own existence. But the source even of our sense of problem is in God. Our searching as well as our mistaking the way, our standing as well as our falling, our remembering as well as our forgetting, our Yes as well as our No, is compassed about and upheld by him.122

After eleven grueling months of rewriting, Safenwil’s pastor released the second edition of Römerbrief late in 1921. He constructed the new edition so as to remove from it the liberal, anthropological presuppositions he felt had surfaced in the first. This would become a habit in his literary career as he scrapped his 1927 Christian Dogmatics for similar reasons. In Römerbrief Barth rallied under the point that God is ‘wholly other,’ adopting in the commentary “what Kierkegaard called the ‘infinite qualitative distinction.”123 He etched out his position in contrast to the liberal tradition by asserting that “revelation is from God; it cannot be compelled to flow between the banks of an empty canal… for it is not bound to the impress which it once had made, but is free. …

The claim [to salvation] is where every claim is surrendered and broken down by God

121. Barth and Thurneysen, 49. 122. Barth, “Biblical Questions, Insights, and Vistas,” in The Word of God and the Word of Man, 80; emphasis removed; see also 95. 123. Barth, “Preface to the Second Edition,” in The Epistle to the Romans, 10. John Brown, in his introductory remarks to Casalis, Portrait of Barth, 10, notes that Kierkegaard was a way station from which Barth had to depart in order to keep to his program of dialectic theology, which forbade philosophical underpinning. See also Barth and Thurneysen, 46-47, where Barth is reported in 1919 to have also come into contact with Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy in and have seen in it a way to “surmount Ritschlism.” He was taken by Otto’s concept of God as “the mystery that simultaneously frightens and attracts” according to Frank Jehle, Ever Against the Stream: The Politics of Karl Barth, 1906-1968, trans. Richard and Martha Burnett (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2002), 37.

33

Himself… and this occurrence is — in Jesus Christ.”124 Römerbrief became the keystone in an arch of conference addresses and personal revelations quarried in Safenwil during

World War I. It completes a bridge in Barth’s biography and bibliography between his student days in Marburg and teaching post in Göttingen. Moreover, it represents the bedrock from which took place both Barth’s rebuttal to the old liberal school and his desperate efforts against the violence of Adolf Hitler and National Socialism. Barth’s experience in the years leading up to World War II is well characterized by the sharp connection he drew between the two.

Karl Barth the Professor: From Dialectic to Dogmatic by way of St. Anselm

The Dialectical School

“They say that the ink-bottle is as much a danger to the Barth family as the wine- bottle is to others.”125 Early in 1921, before the second edition of Römerbrief was even published, a letter arrived in the post inviting Safenwil’s pastor to the chair of Reformed theology at Göttingen University in Germany. He sent word to Thurneysen and expressed both his astonishment and desire to go at once and “inspect the damage.”126 Even though the administration at Göttingen had based their offer on only the first edition, Römerbrief had demonstrated in Barth the deep involvement and concern with the Scriptures they desired.127 One year later, having taken the position, the University in Münster awarded that young professor a Doctor of Theology degree “on account of ‘essential contributions

124. Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 66, 76. 125. Busch, 26. 126. Barth and Thurneysen, 56. 127. Busch, 123.

34 to the deepening of the formulation of religious and theological questions.’”128

At the point of transition from Safenwil to Göttingen in 1921 the new professor had been married to his wife Nelly Hoffmann (1893-1976) for eight years. He commented early in the marriage that it was a great relief to have someone with whom to share the demands of ministry. Yet Nelly was reportedly harsh and arbitrary. Karl’s marriage became for him a chasm of loneliness in the 1920s.129 Despite the groundbreaking work he had produced for conferences, not to mention Römerbrief, Barth felt his days in Safenwil as a pastor had been a failure.130 The move to Göttingen was a tremendous opportunity — opportunity alone being the deciding factor131 — but he was ill prepared and ill received. Barth’s theological work in the pastorate had been focused on his immediate context; it drew upon and related to the theological issues he had encountered in liberalism, socialism, and war policy. Göttingen demanded study and lectures far beyond Barth’s depth.132 Writing to Thurneysen, Barth lamented: “I have to find my way through the fog like a poor mule, still hampered above all by a lack of academic agility, an inadequate knowledge of Latin and the most appalling memory.”133

He struggled, often all night, to research and write for the next day’s lecture, and not

128. Barth and Thurneysen, 60-61. 129. Selinger, 6. 130. Busch, 64. 131. Bowden, 44. Carl Trueman, “Calvin, Barth, and Reformed Theology: Historical Prolegomena,” in Calvin, Barth, and Reformed Theology, Paternoster Theological Monographs (Colorado Springs, CO: Paternoster, 2008), 15-20 develops the case that Barth’s dialogue with historical Reformed theology was the result of the circumstances he faced in Göttingen as a young professor on a Lutheran faculty. In his liberal education he had not dealt with the dogmatics. The courses Barth taught, with Heinrich Heppe’s Reformed Dogmatics as a text, taught him – and formed the backbone of his approach for the future. See also Matthias Freudenberg, Karl Barth und die reformierte Theologie: Die Ausseinandersetzung mit Calvin, Zwingli und den reformierten Bekenntnisschriften während seiner Göttinger Lehrtätigkeit (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1997); and John Webster, Barth's Earlier Theology: Four Studies (New York: T&T Clark, 2005) for close study of Barth’s tenure in Göttingen. 132. Godsey, 28. 15. 133. Busch, 127-128.

35 always successfully. He felt small among his colleagues, and they did not let him forget that feeling by posting his lessons on the bottom of the schedule board alongside those of the harmonium teacher.134 This time in Barth’s life proved difficult and sometimes depressing.

Nevertheless Barth forged ahead. His discovery of the Bible had opened up new theological territory. More and more he was called upon from every quarter to expand and defend that territory.135 His early days in Göttingen were given, in part, to a foundational study of the Heidelberg Catechism136 in an effort to fill out his treatment of

Reformed theology. Most of the work, however, was exegetical. Barth branded his work as ‘theological exegesis’ in connection with a newly forming approach called ‘dialectic’ theology.

In the early nineteenth century German philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel (1770-

1831) ushered the long utilized dialectic method onto the center stage of philosophical discourse, describing the process wherein two propositions (thesis and antithesis) are resolved into one (synthesis).137 He conceived of an experiential relationship between the knower (the subject) and what is known (the object) that is fundamentally held together by the mediation of the Spirit. God, for Hegel, described the coherence of subject, object, and the experience of knowing. The Dialectical School challenged Hegel’s notions both of God as the object of knowledge and Spirit as mediator of the process of synthesis.

Instead, it asserted that God is the infinite subject – the antithesis of human experience

134. Busch, 133; cf. Godsey, 30. 135. Webster, “Introducing Barth,” 4. 136. “Heidelberg Catechism” 3rd ed. (1563) in Phillip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, vol. 3, 6th ed. (New York: Harper and Brothers). 137. Cp. Barth, “The Christian’s Place in Society” in The Word of God and the Word of Man, 272- 327.

36 and the reference point that renders all human knowledge negative.138 Such a challenge was made specifically in the wake of the First World War. The socio-political transformation that saw the German Empire —specifically the leadership of the German

Church — disintegrate left a vacuum into which the dialectical school was pulled. Barth and his contemporaries attempted to modify and strengthen the doctrines of experiential faith they had inherited from Ritschl and Herrmann. “They reinterpreted the experience of difference, for Herrmann anchored in the individual consciousness, as a comprehensive crisis in the religious sense. … Only the independence of the religious, as expressed in the opposition of authentic ‘faith’ to culturally transformed ‘religion,’ was still capable of saving the uniqueness of the religious.”139 By emphasizing the sovereign capacity of God to confront humankind, and do so in such a way as to not depend on the leadership or content of German state-church, it would be possible maintain the faith.

The way of dialectic for Karl Barth is well captured by the experience of revelation he shared with the Apostle Paul: a radical change of beliefs after being knocked to the ground by the incomprehensible voice of God.140 Dialectic theology was committed to but not exhausted by the concept of God as ‘wholly other,’ as is often emphasized. It holds that concept in tenuous balance with the human impulse to comprehend. Barth described the task of dialectic in his 1922 address ‘The Word of God and the Task of Ministry’: “As ministers we ought to speak of God. We are human, however, and so cannot speak of God. We ought therefore to recognize both our

138. Burnett ed. The Westminster Handbook to Karl Barth, 51, Kindle; Anthony Kenny, A Brief History of Western Philosophy (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), 277. 139. Dietrich Korsch, “Dialectical Theology” in Betz, 4:35. 140. Alister McGrath, “Barth on Jesus Christ, Theology and the Church,” in Reckoning with Barth: Essays in Commemoration of the Centenary of Karl Barth’s Birth, ed. Nigel Biggar (London: Mowbray, 1988), 29-30. See also CD I/1, 306.

37 obligation and our inability and by that very recognition give God the glory. This is our perplexity.”141 He went on to describe the intersection between the human question and the divine answer — an answer that God utters in Scripture. To his students in Göttingen,

Barth described the nature of the dialectic as conversation:

True dialectic means letting the other really speak. At times, of course, the dialogue will break off, but only at times. A victory is not on the agenda, and there will be no peace, only a significant silence when both sides have had their say. One side advances a solution to the problem but the other then poses it in a new way and more work is demanded. The true and invincible partner who finds a home in my thinking keeps on speaking. I cannot escape this other. I cannot stop his mouth. I do not want to be alone. I want him to speak. I want him to speak to me as a true and invincible other. The aim is a purification of what I think and speak about God by what God thinks and speaks.142

God alone reveals himself.143 He is not the material result of religious culture nor can he be fully contained in it, but rather in the faith he produces.144 Thus, whenever God’s revelation from above occurs, it is not comfortable or intelligible but a crisis that undercuts human knowledge.145 The nature of the crisis encounter allows for no positive report on the part of the recipient but can only be captured vaguely in terms that are paradoxical and undefined.146 That is to say, God cannot be forced to serve humankind.147

Dialectic is not a method of explanation as much as a caution and re-orientation.

It is not a new system by which to do theology but a restructuring of the nature of the theological task. The dialectical theologian does not provide the answer for which she

141. Barth, “The Word of God and the Task of Ministry”, in The Word of God and the Word of Man, 186. Barth broke with Schleiermacher in this address claiming that Schleiermacher did not hold to what men like Luther, Calvin, Paul and others did: making men to serve God (196). 142. Karl Barth, The Göttingen Dogmatics: Instruction in the Christian Religion, vol. 1. ed. Hannelotte Reiffen, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1991), 310n16. 143. Barth, “The Word of God and the Task of Ministry,” 202-203; emphasis modified. 144. Dietrich Korsch, 4:35. 145. Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 10. 146. See CD II/1, 634. 147. Barth, “The Word of God and the Task of Ministry,” 196.

38 searches but frustratingly halts, claiming ‘it cannot be known’148 — that is, the revelation of God is “never something that can be immediately read off empirical reality.”149 At its best, dialectical theology gives a fleeting glance at the indicators of God’s program by demonstrating the tension between creation and death, and between sin and forgiveness.150 It describes the results of a developing and deepening conversation with

God’s Word as personified by Jesus Christ. A person must stand between affirmation and denial as an imperfect witness to an incomprehensible truth — a truth originated and controlled only by God’s Word.151 Barth explained: “Our discovery of the Christ in Jesus of Nazareth is authorized by the fact that every manifestation of the faithfulness of God points and bears witness to what we have actually encountered in Jesus. The hidden authority of the Law and the Prophets is the Christ who meets us in Jesus.”152 The

Christian faith in post-war Germany, despite having its administrative superstructure reduced to shambles, was on solid footing in the mystery of God’s declaration. That mystery is brought to a point in God’s Word, namely, the One in whom creation and death, sin and forgiveness meet, the One who bled to death on a cross but lives forever more.153

The foundation set in the years of Safenwil and Göttingen did not shift for the rest of Barth’s career. It would be a mistake, even an insult, to say that Barth made no modifications to his theology from this point onward. At the core of his dialectic theology is the notion that God is in sole possession of truth. Human beings, as the Apostle Paul

148. Barth, “The Word of God and the Task of Ministry,” 211; cf. Schwöbel, 17. 149. Daniel L. Migliore, “Karl Barth’s First Lectures in Dogmatics: Instruction in the Christian Religion,” in Barth, The Göttingen Dogmatics,” xxx. Here is perhaps the most precise departure from Ritschl and Harnack in relation to how I have characterized them above. 150. Barth, “The Word of God and the Task of Ministry,” 207 151. Casalis, 125. 152. Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 96. 153. Barth, “The Word of God and the Task of Ministry,” 216.

39 pointed out, merely see through a glass darkly (1 Cor. 13:13). Barth’s theological foundation, then, rested not on human discovery or construction, but what God will reveal. It is, by nature, open to modification.154 Dialectic theology lives in ambiguity.

Barth’s un-shifting theological foundation is reflected, ironically, in the dynamic, self- correcting, contextual, free, and conversational nature of his work.155 He acknowledged this change in relation to his foundation in The Christian Century:

Then let me say first of all that my thinking in any event remains at one point the same as ever. It is unchanged in this, that not so-called ‘religion’ as its object, its source, and its criterion, but rather, as far as it can be my intention, the Word of God. The Word of God which has established, preserved, and sustained the Christian church, her theology, her preaching, and her mission. The Word of God which in the Holy Scriptures speaks to man — to the men of all times, countries, circumstances, and states of life. The Word of God which is the mystery of God in his relation to man and not, as the term ‘religion’ seems to imply, the mystery of man in his relation to God. In this respect my American readers must find me completely unchanged and will continue to find me inexorably unchanged, I hope, to my life’s end.156

The Swiss professor’s unceasing efforts to modify his position signaled his desire to subtract philosophical and anthropological elements from the theological equation. To an increasing degree his dialectic was the instrument with which he sought to complete the excision of historical relativism from the Gospel in order to let the Word of God speak for Himself.157 What did begin to develop firmly in Göttingen, as will be expanded upon in chapter two, was Barth’s sense that any attempt at dogmatics must be thoroughly

154. Busch, 375. 155. Cp. Barth, Final Testimonies, 34, 57; Busch, 129, 280, 463; Casalis, 87; and Godsey, 12-13. Barth’s conversational teaching and learning style was a key element in his literary output. He reacted and responded to conversation partners both literary and vocal. In this way he called himself liberal. 156. Barth, How I Changed My Mind, 37. 157. Schwöbel, 18, notes that Barth had identified historical relativism as “a form of appearance of the Gospel alongside others” in his 1909 article “Modern Theology and Work for the Kingdom of God.” It was in dialectic theology, and later dogmatic, that Barth developed the tools to expose and address the problem in a significant way.

40 undergirded by praise of the master.158

The Foundation of Dogmatics

Unlike his contemporaries in the dialectical or ‘Word of God’ theological school of the mid 1920s,159 Barth became increasingly influenced by Patristic and Reformation orthodoxy. In 1925, through a wide reading of classical texts, now with the cherished assistance of Charlotte von Kirschbaum (1899-1975),160 Barth redoubled his efforts to remove himself from the “wreckage of theological liberalism, whether in apologetic, anthropological, or existential form.”161 It was also in 1925 that he welcomed a move from Göttingen to the University in Münster. More and more, Barth took up the

Scriptural dogmas as his reference point from which to critically assess not only the

Fathers but also Schleiermacher (again) and his own dialectical school.162 Barth moved away from each. In 1927 after some debate with the faculty at Münster over the title of his theological lectures, the Swiss professor released his reworked Göttingen Dogmatics as The Doctrine of the Word of God, Prolegomena to a Christian Dogmatics. St.

Andrews professor John Webster describes the move as a period in which Barth distanced himself from his theological neighbours and attempted to “rid himself of

158. John Webster, Karl Barth, 2nd ed. (New York: Continuum, 2004), 40. See Barth, The Göttingen Dogmatics, 4. 159. Webster, “Introducing Barth,” 4, names Emil Brunner, Friedrich Gogarten, and Rudolf Bultmann as principal figures. 160. Barth’s relationship with Charlotte von Kirschbaum receives little attention in most biographical works. He was closer to her than to his wife. This produced tension with his family, friends, and associates. See Selinger (8n24 above); Busch, 186-187; Renate Köbler In the Shadow of Karl Barth: Charlotte von Kirschbaum. trans. Keith Crim (Louisville, KY: Westminster Press, 1989); and Katherine Sonderegger, “Barth and Feminism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, 258-259. The Barth family grave in Hörnli Cemetery on the Rhine in Basel, Switzerland includes Kirschbaum who died the year before Nelly Barth. 161. Webster, “Introducing Barth,” 5. 162. Busch, 154; John Brown in Casalis, 24-25; see also Karl Barth, Credo, 183. Credo was originally published in 1935.

41 vestiges of his theological inheritance… [articulating] a theological identity formed out of biblical and dogmatic habits of thought with rigorous consistency and with a certain exclusiveness.”163

The move was provoked by two factors. The first was the Swiss professor’s early detection of a repugnant nationalism in the German churches.164 Barth gradually began to connect his notion that liberal Christianity was stuck in theological swamp with a growing awareness of the practical threat of the National Socialists. For Barth there was no gulf between doctrine and ethics. His great distress at the theological connection to the crisis of the Second World War came out sharply in late 1934 when, from Rome, he penned his sharp No! to Emil Brunner’s ‘point of contact’ natural theology.165 Brunner gave balance to human knowledge and responsibility in a way that recognized some measure of human reason, referring to it as an organ of perception created by God for the reception of his self-communication.166 In a work with singular focus upon this issue, the

Zürich theologian developed a more specific understanding of the human capacity to receive the Word of God. He claimed that the formal image of God was not utterly destroyed by sin. If God intends to meet with human beings on a personal level, Brunner reasoned, he must be able to communicate with them.167

The point of contact is the formal imago Dei, which not even the sinner has lost,

163. Webster, “Introducing Barth,” 5; see also McCormack, Critically Realistic, 369, 416-419; and Schwöbel, 31. 164. Busch, 189. McCormack, Critically Realistic, 412, highlights Barth’s concern that he did not give enough heed to the rise of the National Socialists early on. 165. Schwöbel, 25-26. Two points help understand Barth’s outburst to Brunner: 1922’s ‘Fate and Idea in Theology’ article where Barth argued against “prior capacity of the human logos to apprehend reality” and 1927’s Christian Dogmatics where he mounted a “polemic against a theology that claims to grasp God.” In 1934 Brunner took the hard edge of an accumulating theology. 166. Emil Brunner, Man in Revolt: A Christian Anthropology, trans. Olive Wyon (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1947), 103. 167. Emil Brunner, “Nature and Grace,” in Natural Theology: Comprising "Nature and Grace" by Professor Dr. Emil Brunner and the reply "No!"by Dr. Karl Barth, trans. Peter Fraenkel (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2002), 32.

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the fact that man is man, the humanitas in the two meanings defined above: capacity for words and responsibility. Not even sin has done away with the fact that man is receptive of words, that he and he alone is receptive of the Word of God. But this receptivity must not be understood in the material sense. This receptivity says nothing as to his acceptance or rejection of the Word of God. It is purely the formal responsibility of his being addressed.168

From Brunners perspective, Barth had proposed something like a blank slate for the human being where the platform for salvation was made wholly by the Divine action.169

From Barths perspective, however, his skilled colleague was too eager to draw terms of peace between theological truth and the rising threat of German nationalism by proposing some natural capacity in humankind for understanding God. Acceptance of natural theology, for Barth, was untenable: If you really reject natural theology you do not stare at the serpent, with the result that it stares back at you, hypnotizes you, and is ultimately certain to bite you, but you hit it and kill it as soon as you see it!170

It was the second factor that Barth himself considered more representative of his new position as a dogmatic theologian.171 A brief sketch will suffice here and be followed up in much more detail in the second chapter below. Barth began to study St. Anselm (ca.

1033-1109) as early as 1920 while still in Safenwil.172 He gave more attention to the

Canterbury theologian in a 1926 seminar in Münster where he reported that the concept of ‘wholly other’ he had emphasized in his early dialectical efforts was being replaced

168. Brunner, “Nature and Grace,” 31. See also in Brunner, Man in Revolt, 94-98, 513, 537-540; Our Faith, trans. John W. Rilling (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), 5-6; The Christian Doctrine of God, vol. 1 of Dogmatics, trans. Olive Wyon (London: Lutterworth Press, 1946), 75-76. Brunner was “pleasantly surprised to note [in 1945’s CD III/1, 224f.] that Karl Barth himself now speaks of an ‘analogia relationis,’ which constitutes that ‘imago Dei’ which has not been affected by the Fall.” The Christian Doctrine of God, 176n1. 169. Karl Barth, “No! Answer to Emil Brunner (1935)” in Green, 154; Paul Jewett, Emil Brunner: An Introduction to the Man and His Thought (Chicago, InterVarsity Press, 1961), 13. 170. Barth, “No! Answer to Emil Brunner,” 155. 171. Barth, How I Changed My Mind, 43. 172. Barth and Thurneysen, 55.

43 with an emphasis on the person of Jesus Christ as the center of theology.173 It was in his new teaching post at Bonn in 1931, however, that Barth published the work describing

Anselm’s revolutionary influence. Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum marked for Barth the substantial break with modern epistemological presuppositions.174 Instead of basing faith on the rational capabilities of humankind, Anselm had reversed the process. “Faith itself is necessarily ordered towards knowledge. [But] we cannot have faith in God if God is not the cause of truth in the process of thought. If faith is the love of God, then this love necessarily includes knowledge.”175 God is the impenetrable source of all knowledge about himself; he cannot be apprehended by any organized effort of human reason. God provides a revelatory encounter that creates faith in the recipient. Faith seeks understanding instead of remaining a static experience devoid of content.176 And yet neither the experience nor the understanding can generate anything other than conformity to the object of faith. “It is not in mastering the object but in being mastered by it. … [It] depends upon divine decision, and therefore upon grace.”177

The first two parts of the initial volume of Church Dogmatics, published in 1932 and 1938 respectively, made application of Anselm’s understanding to Barth’s greater theological program. Barth understood that faith and statements of faith (credo or dogma) are connected. It is important, first, to understand the connection between God’s self- disclosure and faith. Faith, for Barth, is not the result of an individual’s efforts to convince himself of certain historical or theological claims.178 Rather, faith is given by

173. Busch, 169, 173. 174. Karl Barth, Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum, 2nd ed., trans. Ian W. Robertson (Richmond, VA: John Knox, 1960); Casalis, 97. 175. Schwöbel, 28; emphasis added. 176. Aung, 27n80. 177. McCormack, Critically Realistic, 430; see also Busch, 205-206, 211-214. 178. CD I/1, 199.

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God’s Word — it is the creation of light whereby God allows himself to be known and demonstrates himself as Lord.179 Faith results from the act and power of Christ to reveal what is completely unknowable to human beings and thereby change them completely.180

Theological exegesis, therefore, begins with the presupposition of God’s activity: “The reader of the Old and New Testaments remembers that in this book the Church has up to now heard God’s Word … [and] this reader or investigator reads in the expectation that he himself will also for his time hear God’s Word.”181 Dogmas of the Church, those positive statements about specific beliefs found in the Nicene Creed for example, are the material product of God’s act to disclose himself. Scripture is a narration of the self- disclosure of God to human witnesses. Human witnesses come to knowledge about God through that self-disclosure and are thus enabled to exegete what they have witnessed in order to produce dogma.

The specific dogma of Trinity, for instance, is the product of this exegesis by the

Church only because it was disclosed and guided by the actual Trinity. Theological exegesis is bound to the canon of Scripture but, as the dogma of Trinity illustrates, involves interplay between the old words on the page and the fresh human witness to the reality of God — all in the context of the Church. In this way, Barth can say that dogma interprets Scripture just as Scripture interprets dogma.182 No disconnect develops between revelation and dogma in the environment of faith and prayer because human

179. CD I/1, 239-243, 306-307. 180. CD I/1, 247. 181. Barth, Credo, 177. 182. CD I/1, 308-312. Barth advances the dialectical approach here. “It is not religious experience per se (of whatever variety) that opens access to the specifically Christian. The Bible does not possess its special status as Word of God, however, simply as a document in the history of religion in the context of historical phenomena. Nor should it, however, be simply regarded as legally authoritative from a theological perspective, but it should show itself to be so in the fact that God actually speaks through the Word of the Bible itself.” Dietrich Korsch, “Dialectical Theology,” 4:35-36.

45 beings have no other task than to ‘open the door’ at which Christ knocks. Human participation and comprehension, in other words, are not prerequisites but outcomes of

God-given faith.183 Moreover, comprehension is a journey towards the discovery of grace located precisely in Jesus Christ,184 ‘in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell bodily among us.’185

In Church Dogmatics II/2 (1942) the Swiss theologian employed theological exegesis by using Scripture to criticize the reformation doctrine of election.186 He reconstructed the entire traditional doctrine of predestination so as to explain the concrete revelation of Jesus Christ. In Jesus consists both the rejection and election of all mankind

— that is, the judgment of sin unto death and the miraculous salvation unto eternal life. In

Christ, similarly, lives the God who sanctifies and the human being who is sanctified.

The entire, accomplished Good News of God’s gracious covenant with humankind resides in the revealed person of Christ.187 Barth’s effort once again to start at the beginning was not merely an idiosyncrasy or even a method, but a theological statement in itself. Everything starts at the beginning: at God’s being in Trinity and God’s being with us in Christ Jesus. Eberhard Jüngel concludes that “the direction now taken by

Barth’s thought is manifested in the structure of the monumental Church Dogmatics.”188

183. Jean Bosc in Casalis, 49-50. 184. Barth, Final Testimonies, 29; see also Barth, “The Need and Promise of Christian Preaching” in The Word of God and the Word of Man, 97-135. 185. An amalgam of Col. 2:9 and John 1:14 that expresses ‘God with us.’ 186. Brown in Casalis, 25. 187. Jüngel, 44-45. 188. Jüngel, 43.

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Karl Barth the Activist

The Difficult Thirties

In 1932 it would have been difficult to claim that Barth’s venture into Church

Dogmatics was providential. Yet it is recognized that despite his often abrasive political activism, Barth’s dogmatic theology appeared at just the right time. Only one year after publishing the first part-volume of Dogmatics, Karl requested and was denied a divorce from his wife Nelly.189 One year after that he drafted the ‘Barmen Declaration,’190 which was likely the most significant and substantial document of Christian resistance to

Hitler’s Nazis to be produced before World War II. On the one hand, Barth had dramatically alienated himself from friends like Emil Brunner. On the other hand, he had formed a dynamic association with ‘Confessing Church’ organizer Martin Niemöller

(1892-1984).191 In the winter of 1932/3 one hundred and ten concerned students approached Professor Barth in Bonn and asked him to provide a homiletics course in response to the weakening leadership of the church. Both the students and their professor were worried about the insidious Nazi propaganda machine and all of the ‘benefits’ it seemed to be inflicting on wavering church leadership.192 In the months following

Barth’s triumph in Barmen, the National Council of Brethren elected Nazi sympathizer

Bishop August Marahrens (1875-1950) as their leader, effectively dismissing Barth and his insistence on the first commandment. After refusing to give the required salute to

189. Selinger, 8. 190. ET: Karl Barth, “The Barmen Declaration (1934),” in Green, 148-150; see also John H. Leith, ed. Creeds of the Churches: A Reader in Christian Doctrine, from the Bible to the Present, 3rd ed. (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1982), 517-522; and Karl Barth, "On the Barmen Declaration: How Scripture Continually Saves the Church," in George Hunsinger, ed., Thy Word is Truth: Barth on Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2012), 223-232. 191. Busch, 248, 255. 192. Hancock, 38-39, 74.

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Hitler, Barth was further stultified by having his position in Bonn and his right to public speech in Germany revoked. Although Barth had changed in the years since Safenwil, his resolve to speak the truth whether or not he was liked remained firmly intact. In that vein he assured Niemöller that their cause was not based on success but on God.193

Barth’s theological pilgrimage had brought him to the conviction that only one

Word is the source of truth for humankind — and it was not the idol the National

Socialists had set up in the German Church.194 Barth often spoke publicly in opposition to

Hitler, disregarding the threats of the Gestapo by sometimes doing so inside German borders.195 In 1937 at the Gifford Lectures196 in Aberdeen, Scotland, for example, Barth set out the stakes in no uncertain terms: “We could only choose either to obey this

Government by disobeying God or to obey God by disobeying this Government.”197 Two years later he traced the German error back to Martin Luther and called “Hitler’s National

Socialism… the wicked expression of the extraordinary political stupidity, confusion and helplessness of the German people.”198 In letters, lectures, sermons, and radio broadcasts he advocated for the proper treatment and theology of the Jewish people. “Whoever is, in

193. Busch, 255-262. 194. See Karl Barth, Theological Existence To-Day! A Plea for Theological Freedom, trans. R. Birch Hoyle (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1933). ‘German nationalism’ was eventually typified in Adolf Hitler. 195. Busch, 266. 196. “In his 1885 will the jurist Adam Lord Gifford, convinced that true, felt knowledge of God when acted upon generated human well-being and progress, bequeathed £80,000 to the four Scottish universities (Universities of Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Glasgow, and St. Andrews) for the establishment of a series of lectures dealing with the topic of natural religion. In dealing with their particular area of interest and expertise, lecturers are to discuss natural theology as a science, that is, ‘without reference to or reliance upon any supposed special exceptional or so-called miraculous revelation.’ The lectures began in 1888 and, with the exception of the years during World War II, 1942-1945, have been delivered continuously since that time.” “The History of the Gifford Lectures,” http://www.giffordlectures.org (accessed November 10, 2014). 197. Karl Barth, The Knowledge of God and the Service of God According to the Teaching of the Reformation: Recalling the Scottish Confession of 1560, The Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Aberdeen in 1937 and 1938, trans. J. L. M. Haire and Ian Henderson (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938), 230. 198. Karl Barth, “First Letter to the French Protestants” (1939), in A Letter to Great Britain From Switzerland, Christian News-Letter Books 11 (London: The Sheldon Press, 1941), 36.

48 principle, an enemy of Jews,” Barth claimed, “is, in principle, an enemy of Jesus Christ.

Anti-Semitism is sin against the Holy Spirit.”199 The Barth family welcomed Jewish and other non-Aryan people into their Basel home after being exiled from Germany.200 It was during this time the Swiss professor was appointed leader of a relief organization for

German scholars by the Basel government.201 Karl was later haunted by the fact that he had written to Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) in London and implored him to come out of hiding and return to face the crisis; he felt as if he had sent the young pastor to his death.202 At the age of fifty-five the Swiss professor took up the uniform and rifle as a guardsman for homeland. In the summer of 1942 he sent a photograph of himself in uniform to Bishop Bell of Chichester with the inscription, “Resist the evil with all means.”203 For all of Barth’s resistance, he felt that the best contribution he could make was theological: “Our resistance to Hitler will be built on a really sure foundation only when we resist him unequivocally in the name of a peculiarly Christian truth.”204 Like

Römerbrief two decades earlier, much of Barth’s early Church Dogmatics was written in the heat of war and the rubble of reconstruction.

A Testing Ground

The testing ground for Barths dogmatic theology was nothing less than Nazi

Germany. He may have been hard-edged in his approach but Barth was convinced he

199. Karl Barth, Eine Schweizer Stimme 1938-1945, 3rd ed. (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 1985,) 90 quoted in Jehle, 61. (A Swiss Voice) 200. Busch, 271-273, 290, 314-318. 201. Jehle, 57. 202. Busch, 233. 203. Jehle, 69. 204. Karl Barth, “A Letter to Great Britain from Switzerland” (1941) in A Letter to Great Britain From Switzerland, 17; cf. Barth, How I Changed My Mind, 56.

49 understood the deep connections between the current crisis and the faulty presuppositions of Neo-Protestantism.205 His efforts in the Barmen Declaration and the Confessing

Church movement proved divisive, to be sure, but the nature of the critique of Barths position in the 1930s changed after 1945. The Swiss professors dramatic and personal discovery of the Word of God in World War I enabled him to speak the No and Yes of that Word in the darkest days of World War II. Schwöbel notes that this,

is the reason why Barth consistently and annoyingly connects natural theology with the failure of the church in Germany to perceive the true character of Hitlers totalitarian regime, to recognize it for what it was and to act upon such a recognition. Underlying the political perversity is a theological perversity. Barths understanding of theology as grounded in the self-revelation of the triune God has political implications. In the time leading up to the Second World War Barth protested against conflating the things of the world and the things of God, because there is only one world since there is only one Word of God: Jesus Christ.206

Tübingen ecclesiastical historian Klaus Scholder (1930-1985) concludes that Barth’s theology was unique in its ability to identify and respond to an emergency that left others powerless.207 The decade leading to World War II was not an easy one for Karl Barth. He felt his life had the explosive effect of driving people away and that his work attracted only a slim few. Yet it was Barth’s voice, emboldened by the dogmatic theology which later formed his monumental Church Dogmatics, that reached the depth required to

205. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, “Karl Barth” in Creative Minds in Contemporary Theology, ed. Philip E. Hughes (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1969), 30. According to Barth ‘neo-Protestantism’ is a phrase coined by Ernst Troeltsch (Die Bedeutung des Protestantismus für die Entstehung der modernen Welt, Historische Zeitschrift, Bd. 97, H. 1 [1906]: 1-66) that describes a disposition taken up in the period of Christian history following the early nineteenth-century Enlightenment (CD IV/1, 383). Barth used it to describe the modern liberal tradition. 206. Schwöbel, 33. 207. Klaus Scholder, The Churches and the Third Reich, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), 1:51, 1:143; Hancock, 76.

50 undercut an ideology that held nations captive and the pitch clear enough to call for their release.

Summary

Karl Barth never stopped working. On the very night of his death on December 9,

1968, he left the draft of a lecture he was composing in the middle of a sentence. His life ended before his work did. It was not that he ran out of years, but that he was always starting again from the beginning. This chapter has traced Barth’s story up to the point where he began Church Dogmatics. It has identified the many influences and events that brought Barth to his essential position as a dogmatic theologian. At the end of World War

I Barth chose to scrap the first edition of his commentary Römerbrief and write an almost completely new one that more accurately described his position. He did the same thing in

1927 with his first serious attempt at the prolegomenon to dogmatic theology. But in

1932 Barth had finally set the foundation for the rest of his work. To be sure, this foundation rested upon discoveries he had made back in even his earliest years under his father’s tutelage in Berne. Over the course of decades Karl Barth’s thought twisted and turned, drawing from Kant, Schleiermacher, Herrmann, Otto, Blumhardt, Kierkegaard,

Calvin, Anselm, and others. Though many shaped his thought, the essence of Church

Dogmatics was not in these human voices. Barth’s discovery, or what he would say discovered him, was the voice of God through the Bible. Barth’s story is critically important to his theology because it describes the story of encounter with the Word of

God. His method and his theology are rooted in the self-disclosure of God who creates an experience of faith and knowledge in the human being through revelation. Barth encountered God’s revelation in only one person: Jesus Christ. If there is any basis to

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Karl Barth’s work it is God who is known in Jesus Christ — in the words of his son, ‘Mr.

Essential.’ We now turn to Barth’s specific appraisal of and departure from liberalism as he founded his mature theology.

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CHAPTER TWO: DOGMATIC METHOD

Its surprising that for a man who wrote roughly nine thousand pages in his principal work, Swiss theologian Karl Barth was also known for his concise and incisive retorts. Once, it is claimed, he responded to a question about the sum of his work by quoting the pithy first lines of the Sunday school song ‘Jesus Loves Me.’ A story is told also about how, after a lengthy, convoluted, and intense discussion between two students about the professor’s method, Barth intoned that what he thought he did was simply

“listen to what Scripture is saying and tell you what I hear.”1 Even after incredibly detailed expositions of this method in Church Dogmatics and other places, it is still accurate to say that the dogmatic method is listening to the Word of God, joyfully and meticulously reporting what has been heard, and continually calling others to listen to it too.

Barth grew up in the nineteenth-century liberal Protestant tradition. After entering the ministry in Safenwil, Switzerland and facing the challenges of the pulpit and hospital bed, he found himself questioning the human-centered nature of that tradition. Historical analyses have revealed the complexities of Barth’s theological pilgrimage but it is not overly simplistic to say that his departure from and opposition to liberal Christianity was galvanized by the World Wars. Adolf Harnack’s support of Kaiser Wilhelm II in 19142 and Adolf Hitler’s violent rise to power after 1933 were instrumental to Barth’s mounting antagonism towards the dominant theological tradition. In his estimation liberal theology had produced the environment in which conflicts of this nature could and did occur.

1. Richard C. Johnston, “The Legacy of Karl Barth,” in Reflection 66, no. 4 (May 1968), 4, quoted in Steven Sykes, ed., Karl Barth: Studies of His Theological Method (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 55. “A free theologian starts steadily and happily with the Bible.” Barth, The Humanity of God, 90. 2. Busch, 95 fig. 26.

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Barth took special exception to the philosophical systems of German philosopher

Immanuel Kant and preacher Friedrich Schleiermacher. To be sure, Barth engaged these men (Harnack included) with respectful criticism. While he certainly did not put them in the same category as Hitler, he did not fail to recognize the long ranging consequences of their thinking for the German people. A searching critique of nineteenth-century anthropology in particular provoked Barth to make his departure from the liberal tradition.

Dogmatic theology, for Barth, finds its source in God’s revelation prior to human initiative. This fundamental aspect of dogmatics was given focus and support by a study of St. Anselm’s eleventh-century work Proslogion (ca. 1079). Barth found in Anselm that if God is to be apprehended properly, he must inhabit the position beyond which nothing greater can be thought. If in fact this is an accurate way of understanding God, then it follows that it is greater for God to reveal the truth about himself than be accessible to or the product of a natural human intellect. God is the source of all human ability to know about him precisely because he is, in reality, prior to any thoughts about him. Barth came to celebrate these critical understandings that took shape for him during his study of Anselm.

In contrast to the enlightened philosophical systems of the nineteenth century that locate the substance of theology in human feeling or cultural expression, Barth’s dogmatics develop their material content using God’s act to reveal himself as the starting point. His method effectively reverses the order of the theological task. He saw this not as a new development so much as a recovery of the priorities expressed by the Reformers centuries before modern man dared to think for himself. Human ability, in Barth’s thinking, is made possible by the existence and action of God; he creates faith in himself

54 by the revelation of his own name that is heard not derived. The very first task of any human dogmatic enterprise is obedient listening — or in religious terms: prayer.

This chapter seeks to develop dogmatic theology under the theme of ‘things I overheard while praying,’3 in order to demonstrate that Barth’s notion of a method for dogmatic theology has more to do with disposition than content. It will identify the elements of philosophical and theological thought in Immanuel Kant, Friedrich

Schleiermacher, and Ludwig Feuerbach that in Barth’s judgment relied too heavily on human capacity. It will then demonstrate how, through his work with Anselm’s texts,

Barth shored up his position in contrast to modernist-liberal theology. He placed his emphasis on the priority of the Word of God and made obedient listening the primary task of the theologian. Finally, the chapter will establish how Barth appropriated this prayerful starting point into his Church Dogmatics.

The Departure from Liberalism as a Human-Centered Endeavor

Philosophy of Eighteenth-Century, ‘Modern’ Man

“It was not for nothing,” Barth noted in his survey of the eighteenth century, “that one of the favourite figures in the literature of the time was Robinson Crusoe, the man thrown completely upon his own resources, who in spite of this and for this very reason was able to take care of himself so triumphantly.”4 In Barth’s estimation, enlightened

3. I have played on the title of comedic actor Alan Alda’s book: Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself (New York: Random House, 2007). 4. Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Its Background & History, trans. Brian Cozens and John Bowden (London: SCM Press, 1972), 74. Cp. Hugo: “The modern ideal finds its prototype in art and its method in science. It is through science that we shall realize that sublime vision of poets: social beauty. We shall rebuild Eden in terms of A + B.” Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, trans. Norman Denny (New York: Penguin, 2012), 1047 (5.1.20; originally published in 1862).

55 humanity was well represented by Daniel Defoe’s famous character who, when faced with the harsh realities of the natural world, was not broken or even humbled but instead made himself its rightful master.5 Humanity in the ‘modern’ age imposed structure with the tools of science, culture, industry, and art firmly in hand.6 As discoveries were made, challenges overcome, and successes multiplied, the eighteenth-century individual became convinced that he was in wonderful concord with the order God had built into the world.7

Thus, it was only after Crusoe formed his defenses and secured his resources that he expressed faith. Likewise, eighteenth-century European society’s faith was contingent upon the God it extrapolated from the grandeur of its accomplishments. Barth identified this attitude in the eighteenth century as inner absolutism:

He assumed it to be self-evident that in taking himself to account, and himself answering the account, then acting in obedience to it he was also showing the existence of God, justifying and guaranteeing anew his relationship with God and thereby affirming that his own existence was possible. He believed — even in this inmost place we find him prey to a strange vicious circle — that by virtue of the reality of his own existence he could vouch for God and in so doing for the possible existence of God.8

Eighteenth-century technical mastery of the world, in the Swiss theologian’s appraisal, had placed God at the disposal of humanity.

An ability to undertake successfully those tasks necessary to improve material conditions became closely associated with morality. Progress itself verified that human beings possess moral knowledge and the moral knowledge verified the need for progress.

The Swiss theologian observed this vicious circle in the revolutionary formation of the

French and American states. In both instances the people claimed a self-evident sense of

5. Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 37, 39. 6. Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 55-58. 7. Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 75. 8. Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 76.

56 rights and acted upon them to form the state. Concomitantly, the state was evidence and guarantor of what was self-evident to the individual. Barth’s critique of this thinking, later developed theologically in Church Dogmatics, is that the state that is formed through revolution merely turns the oppressed into tyrants themselves.9 It is not, then, the issue of basic rights that lies at the heart of the dilemma for the dogmatic theologian but the issue of self. Morality and progress came to be inextricably enmeshed so that even the leading Christians of the day, rationalists and Pietists both, “applied to traditional

Christianity a particular… systematic principle that in all circumstances Christianity must serve to improve life.”10

In this era humankind became convinced of its ability to apprehend and confirm

God’s will as it related to the goal of modern progress. An enthusiastic compromise was struck, for example, following the Thirty Years War (1618–1648). In the quest for liberty from the strict orthodoxies and devastating conflicts, personal insight was employed that allowed Christian brothers to abrogate second-level theological distinctions in favor of tolerance.11 Human capacity for moral knowledge paved the road for progress. Reason

9. Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 49-53; see also Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 479; and Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2006 [based on the 1790, 7th ed. text]), 67-68, 84. Barth would seem to agree in principle with Burke’s assessment that the Assembly that replaced the monarchy in the French Revolution was not progressive or triumphal but tyrannical, pompous, and abhorrent in their actions. In this vein Barth would take issue with American Baptist theologian Augustus Hopkins Strong, “State and Church in 1492 and in 1892,” in Christ in Creation and Ethical Monism, 223, and his optimism about the general characteristics of revolution: “How evident it is that the Renaissance, the new birth of the human intellect, and the Reformation, the new birth of the human conscience, needed to be followed by the Revolution, the new birth of the human will!” 10. Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 99. See also Paul Molnar, “‘Thy Word is Truth’: The Role of Faith in Reading Scripture Theologically with Karl Barth,” Scottish Journal of Theology 63, no. 1 (February, 2010): 74; and Sabine Roehr, A Primer on German Enlightenment: With a Translation of Karl Leonhard Reinhold’s The Fundamental Concepts and Principles of Ethics (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1995), 21. Roehr claims that the optimistic connection between intellectual progress and morality waned at the end of the eighteenth century. 11. Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 150-151; cf. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, trans. Geoffrey Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1991), 1:81-82.

57 could be used in concert with revelation but also became its judge when revelation proved inferior or opposed to the faculties of moral humanity. History itself became a malleable raw material capable of being turned and shaped to undergird the notion that

God had been providentially forming order from chaos. It could also be used to demonstrate the great opportunity and responsibility available to ‘modern man.’ Christian dogma, equally, was put in service of the state so that its content was dictated by its usefulness as a moralizing agent.12 In a manner most salient to the essence of his dogmatic method, Barth summarizes the dismissal of God’s prerogative in light of human moral progress thus:

The doctrine of a word of God coming to man with an external authority and of a testimony of the Holy Spirit which comes to meet it with an inward force can no longer be understood, since authority and force are manifestly most immoral concepts, and since the doctrine says precisely the opposite to what man himself thinks: that everything depends on one becoming ones own authority, ones own force, with the support of God. Therefore this doctrine can no longer be used.13

In a general sense, people in the eighteenth century came to inhabit a position of authority that they had not possessed before. Progress in fields as diverse as astronomy and economics served as evidence that humankind was indeed living up to its God-ordained potential. Certainly, it was thought, the same intellect that could understand the solar system could be brought to bear on the texts of the historian and theologian. This was an age when humankind became its own measure. It was precisely these overarching themes from the eighteenth century that came to be expressed in liberal Christianity in the century to follow.14

12. Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 170. 13. Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 106-107; emphasis added. “And unbelief is always man’s faith in himself.” CD I/2, 314. 14. The ‘Age of Reason’ herein described is also referred to as the ‘Age of Enlightenment’ in France and ‘Aufklärung,’ in Germany. It describes an intellectual movement in the seventeenth and

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It is important to stress a few key points that give balance and perspective to the survey at this juncture. What is in view here is Karl Barth’s appraisal of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He understood the related but divergent tasks of the historian and theologian. So while it is fair to say that his critique of history provided the data on which he based his point of departure, it is also essential to understand that Barth engaged the thinkers of these centuries with the assumption that their motives were honorable, thinking was serious, and contributions were valuable. Barth’s theology contained and was built upon an ongoing dialogue with those in other times and contexts; “I do not follow the rule” he commented, “‘speak nothing but good of the dead’ simply because the theologians of that time are not dead. ‘In Him they all have life,’ in the greatness and within the limitations in which they once lived.”15 The Swiss professor’s departure from the modernist-liberal tradition was not based upon better reasoning, and so he could not condemn the thinking of his forerunners. Another key point is that the modernist-liberal era is not reducible into a brief list of comprehensive theses. “There is no single ‘rational’ philosophy in the German Enlightenment. The meaning of the term ‘reason’ itself varied from one thinker to the next and over time.”16 Logical techniques and moral principles were pressed into service by believers in God even more often than by those who were eighteenth centuries that challenged individuals to have the courage to think for themselves (Sapere Aude! Dare to know) without the guidance of authorities — to use one’s freedom and argue one’s position. See Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question; ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in Kant: Political Writings, 2nd ed., Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, ed. Hans S. Reiss, trans. Hugh B. Nisbet (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 54-55. French and German enlightenment were very different, the former witnessing bloody political revolution the latter a tightening of national, political bonds. See Koppel S. Pinson, Modern Germany: Its History and Civilization, 2nd ed. (Prospect, IL: Waveland Press, 1989), 25. 15. Karl Barth, The Humanity of God, 32-33; emphasis added. This quotation underscores a significant and enduring feature of Barth’s dialectical method. cf. Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 23, 27-28. Barth almost demands that the thinkers of the past be treated with respect. 16. Thomas Ahnert, Religion and the Origins of the German Enlightenment: Faith and the Reform of Learning in the Thought of Christian Thomasius (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2006), 122. Anhert notes that many of those involved in the Enlightenment in the first decades of the eighteenth century did not consider reason itself to be strong enough to be used in arguments involving faith.

59 not. Barth identified a general trend in the modernist-liberal era that had less to do with thinking and more to do with disposition. As will be shown below, he took issue with the trends in that particular era because of what he believed were the serious consequences they produced.

Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant lived his whole life in Königsberg, Prussia. He never married and he fathered no children. He tended to his affairs with watch-like precision. As a student he began by studying theology but soon transferred to the faculty of physics. Later, as a lecturer, he held a number of posts, and after turning down a chair in poetry, settled as a professor of logic and metaphysics. “The history of his life is the history of his ideas.”17

Barth took specific note of Immanuel Kant’s critiques chiefly because of their epochal effect, namely, morality as the basis for religion.18 Kant argued for an inherent

(or a priori) human knowledge based on his notion of how the mind forms meaning about the world. “That the objects of sensible intuition must conform to the formal conditions of sensibility which lie a priori in the mind is evident,” he claimed, “because

17. Kenny, 252. 18. John Macken, The Autonomy Theme in the Church Dogmatics, 3-20, argues that the autonomy Barth had in mind to rebut in Church Dogmatics was not strictly that of Kant but of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814). For Macken, Kant’s “idea of autonomy is not absolute self-determination, but self-determination according to the rational and moral being which is given to man and which contains in itself the rational and moral law” (10). This stands over and against Fichte’s notion that the human Ego, or absolute subject, posits itself and everything outside of itself (12). Fichte, moreover, is the initial link in the chain of Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzche (20-21). Daniel J. Price, Karl Barth’s Anthropology in Light of Modern Thought (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2002),, 122-123, 142-143, points out that Barth had in common with Kant the view that humans are practical, ethical creatures and understood not merely by natural phenomena. He parted ways with Kant in his assertion of Jesus Christ as the revealer of humanity over and against a categorical imperative. I submit that Kant posed more of a threat to Barth because he was, in fact, closer to Barth’s own position. Fichte blatantly substituted man for God where Kant’s logic ended up in the same place having taken more subtle steps. Kant maintained a shadowy God as a posited figurehead to shepherd the immoral masses. See 62n32 below.

60 otherwise they would not be objects for us.”19 A knowing mind is capable of receiving data from the senses and organizing that data into certain categories based on pre-existing pure, subjective forms that it possesses.20 That is to say that it possesses certain unlearned

‘measures’ by which to understand incoming information. “There are two pure forms of sensible intuition, serving as principles of a priori knowledge, namely, space and time.”21

By way of illustration: a raft floating down the river does not produce the understanding that it is longer than it is wide or that it has changed position merely because it exists. Dimension and change are not understood simply because they have been perceived. Rather, the mind is able to organize what it perceives on the river into concepts based on a pre-existing ability to measure dimension (in space) and change (in time). In a process Kant called ‘transcendental deduction,’22 the real phenomena of the world are organized into concepts that the mind is able to understand.23 He explained that the “understanding has rules which I must presuppose as being in me prior to the objects being given to me, and therefore as being a priori. They find expression in a priori concepts to which all objects of experience necessarily conform, and with which they must agree.”24 “Through the senses, objects are given to us; through understanding, they are thinkable. The structure of our senses determines the content of our experience; the

19. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), 124. 20. Robert D. Shofner, Anselm Revisited: A Study of the Role of the Ontological Argument in the Writings of Karl Barth and Charles Hartshorne (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974), 14. 21. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 67. 22. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 121. 23. Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 274. 24. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 23. An object complementary to its concept is always necessary, however. “All concepts, and with them all principles, even such as are possible a priori, relate to empirical intuitions, that is, to the data for a possible experience. Apart from this relation they have no objective validity” (259).

61 constitution of our understanding determines its structure.”25 In other words, sensing human beings do not understand the thing they sense, they understand the thing their minds have concluded about that thing given the categories and patterns used to measure that thing.

Kant’s philosophy, thus, put some areas of knowledge strictly out of bounds.

Scientific and mathematical pursuits were feasible because the mind possesses an adequate organizational capacity with which to form reliable conclusions26 about the objects belonging to those fields. The knowledge of God, by contrast, is not possible because “we have not the slightest ground to assume in an absolute manner (to suppose in itself) the object of this idea.”27 The human mind possesses neither the sensory equipment nor the internal measures necessary to receive and interpret what exists in that category.

“It cannot know these noumena through any of the categories… it must therefore think of them only under the title of an unknown something.”28 In other words: “we can know that such a realm is, but not what it is.”29 The Königsberg philosopher’s solution to the impossibility of the supposition of God was to look to what is possible for the rational human being. By using the principles of transcendental deduction, Kant proposed that reason alone, unencumbered by empirical data, could establish an a priori, objective, and universal moral law.30 The law that results from this process of moral reasoning is thus:

25. Kenny, 254; emphasis added. 26. Kenny, 253, 255. Kant’s terminology here is ‘synthetic judgments’ by which he defined a type of conclusion that is dependent upon “a priori forms of sense-experience, rather than properties of things in themselves.” 27. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 559. 28. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 273. 29. Shofner, 15; emphasis original. Barth represented this duality in his treatment of the body, which is available to sensation and study, and the soul, which is not. See CD III/2, 326; and Marc Cortez, Embodied Souls, Ensouled Bodies: An Exercise in Christological Anthropology and Its for the Mind/Body Debate (London: T & T Clark, 2008), 83-84. 30. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. and trans. Allen W. Wood

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“Make the highest good possible in the world your own final end!”31 Although accurate, this dictum is too abstract for the human beings who are characteristically experiential; they require love in addition to law. “Since human capacity does not suffice for bringing about happiness in the world proportionate to worthiness to be happy,” Kant asserted, “an omnipotent moral Being must be postulated as ruler of the world, under whose care this

[balance] occurs. That is, morality leads inevitably to religion.”32 Moreover,

Natural religion, as morality (in its relation to the freedom of the agent) united with the concept of that which can make actual its final end (with the concept of God as moral Creator of the world), and referred to a continuance of man which is suited to this end in its completeness (to immortality), is the pure practical idea of reason which, despite its inexhaustible fruitfulness, presupposes so very little capacity for theoretical reason that one can convince every man of it sufficiently for practical purposes and can at least require of all men as a duty that which is its effect. This religion possesses the prime essential of the true church, namely, the qualification for universality, so far as one understands by that a validity for everyone.33

Kant’s solution was revolutionary in the purest sense of the word:

Moral obligation rests solely on the autonomy of reason. The existence of God is no longer the basis for moral obligation. On the contrary, the postulates of the immortality of the soul and the existence of God represent the result of ethical reasoning. Faith is only possible as pure rational faith, as the result of a moral attitude. Consequently, this God is described as a moral ruler of the world,

(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 44-45. 31. Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960), 7. 32. Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, 7; cp. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 526- 527, where, from a practical point of view, a supreme being can be postulated on the basis of absolutely necessary moral laws. Barth described it thus: “The proof of God is ever to be adduced as a demonstration of the presupposition that is assumed in deciding to accept the commandment of the inscrutable Law- giver.... It must be brought forward as a moral proof of God.” Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 277; Cp. Feuerbach: “Religion is that conception of the nature of the world and of man which is essential to, i.e., identical with, a man’s nature. But man does not stand above this his necessary conception; on the contrary, it stands above him; it animates, determines, governs him.” Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957), 20. 33. Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, 145. Relevant to the discussion of Barth’s conception of servanthood, Kant’s next line reads: “To spread it, in this sense, as a world religion, and to maintain it, there is needed no doubt, a body of servants (ministerium) of the invisible church, but not officials (officiales).”

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whose commands equal the human duties.34

Kant resolved the impossibility of perceiving God by reversing the fundamental direction of religious knowledge and placing it squarely on the shoulders of moral humanity.

Barth’s attitude towards Kant was not entirely negative. In a very basic way Kant realized and defined the qualitative difference between God and creation that Barth championed in second edition of Römerbrief.35 He also realized, again only very basically, the possibility and necessity of human correspondence with God.36 In his treatment of the Königsberg philosopher in Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth

Century, Barth found the barest foundation of his own theological principle using Kant’s

‘biblical theologian.’ Kant suggested that distinct from the philosopher, the biblical theologian proves God’s existence “by means of the fact that he spoke in the Bible.”37 He did not dismiss the biblical theologian or the revelation upon which his study is based. In fact, Kant seemed to wait for a final revelation to top up what remains after reason has reached its limit.38 In the Swiss theologian’s reading, Kant had carved out a distinct task and methodology for the philosopher who uses a priori knowledge of moral duty within the strict limits of reason to speak of God. The philosopher’s task is well defined and cannot move beyond its limits. It cannot admit any source into consideration that does not correspond to the established critical capacities of the human mind.39 Moreover, it leaves

34. Roehr, 83-84. 35. Bruce L. McCormack, “The Unheard Message of Karl Barth,” Word & World 14, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 61; CD II/1, 464-465. In a lengthy excursus Barth argues that Kant’s contrast between the limited perception of humankind and the eternal, unbounded existence of God is a result of a philosophical error. An older theology misunderstood eternity and time as parallels instead of the results of God’s free choice to love. This is why we see Kant as only very basically understanding the infinite qualitative difference that Barth worked to clarify throughout his career. See also Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 10. 36. CD I/1, 193. Barth’s fairly positive assessment here, in the context of the relationship between God and man, is balanced by his recognition that Kant grounded the relationship in human capability. 37. Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 312. 38. Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 309. 39. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 22-23, 259, 272-273.

64 no element of doctrine unexamined or unrefined in light of its analysis, including the text of Scripture and the person of Christ.40 To what extent Kant’s graciousness to the biblical theologian was genuine is up for debate. Barth noted that Kant’s historical circumstances would not have allowed him to completely dispense with established religion even if he had wanted to.41 On the surface at least, some element of conciliation exists between the moral philosopher and the biblical theologian — if never the twain shall meet.

Despite his concessions to the biblical theologian, it is clear that the Königsberg philosopher was strongly in favor of religion based on morality. Barth was sure that he had located the simplification and dissolution of eighteenth-century dogmatics into a compendium of moral wisdom and a “doctrine of ethical principles on a general anthropological basis.”42 His conciliatory tone changed in 1940’s Church Dogmatics II/1 wherein he offered three rebuttals to Kant’s anthropocentric philosophy that are particularly relevant to this study of the dogmatic method. First, regarding Kant’s treatment of ‘hiddenness of God,’ Barth made clear that his own doctrine had nothing whatever to do with the Kantian and Platonic conception of hiddenness derived from the sphere of human rationality. God’s hiddenness, he asserted, is “the first word of the knowledge of God instituted by God himself”43 and cannot be derived from human reason. Second, and with strong connection to a principle developed in his study of

40. Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 284, 286. 41. Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 311. 42. CD I/2, 785. 43. CD II/1, 183. “God makes Godself an object apprehensible to human thought. An object? Exactly so. Since only phenomena — that is, objects that appear in time and space — are susceptible to human apprehension, God commandeers and ‘hides’ in creaturely media when revealing Godself to human beings. This ‘veiling’ or ‘concealment’ allows God to ‘unveil’ Godself, while not annulling the regular processes of human cognition. The upshot is that Barth overcomes and maintains the ‘problem of the divine subjectivity in revelation’, assuring the reality of God’s self-revelation while simultaneously chastening the tendency of theological liberalism to gauge God’s being and action according to human standards.” Paul Dafydd Jones, The Humanity of Christ: Christology in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (New York: T&T Clark, 2008), 21, see also 204; and McCormack, Critically Realistic, 208, 249.

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Anselm’s Proslogion, Barth contested Kant’s intolerable doctrine that God is a particular supreme idea alongside other supreme ideas and “subordinate to the crowning idea of reason.”44 Reason cannot presume to evaluate the revelation of God by some means that it contains. God is not a particular instance within a class but, as shown below, that beyond which nothing greater can be comprehended. In his third rebuttal, and the most poignant to this essay, Barth pinpointed the issue of sinful disposition in the assertion of humankind’s rational capabilities:

We can say man in the loudest tones. We can ground our statements about man on the most profound metaphysical premises. But this does not mean that we say God. By this very act we perhaps again and more emphatically say man in distinction and opposition to God. In fact with this exaggeration we really say sinful man. Sinful man — according to Gods revelation — is man exalting himself, and thinking that by his own efforts he can realise and assert the being of God. Kant speaks forcefully of God. But when he defines God as the necessary postulate of the limit and goal of pure reason, and the equally necessary presupposition of the law-giver and guarantor of practical reason, what else does he do but powerfully speak again and strictly about man?45

Kant’s anthropocentric philosophy is not just an innocent exercise in reasonable morality but borders upon sinful exaltation of someone other than God. It is upon this evaluation of self-assertion — of what he identifies as sin itself — that Barth departs from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.

Friedrich Schleiermacher

In his “Concluding Unscientific Postscript on Schleiermacher” Barth wrote:

There was once a time, so I must begin, in my youthful occupation with theology — when after first having worked through Immanuel Kants Critique of Practical

44. CD II/1, 310-311. 45. CD II/1, 269-270; cf. Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 300. Kant feared the autonomy of God, according to Barth, because it “might make us all incapable of any use of our reason.”

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Reason several times and (only then, but equally intensive) his Critique of Pure Reason — I knew how to swear no higher than by the man, Daniel Ernst Friedrich Schleiermacher.46

Barth had what can only be described as a love-hate relationship with Schleiermacher. As early as 1923, in Göttingen, the Swiss professor began to lecture on the nineteenth- century theological giant, impressing upon his students the tremendous importance of listening to what Schleiermacher had said. He, like no other, Barth stressed, had shaped the Protestant Christian milieu in which they lived.47 A decade later in Bonn, Barth extended to the nineteenth-century church father what appears to be a genuine, if biting, benefit of the doubt: if in fact he did destroy the central premise of Reformation — even all Christian — theology, it must not have been what he intended.48 How did such a capable and prominent Christian figure challenge the faith’s central premise and raise the ire of Karl Barth?

According to Barth, Schleiermacher was a committed preacher. His first priority was the ethic of practical life.49 He lived in the shadow of enlightened German clergy who believed that “the function of religion… was to help man rather than God,… [the worship of whom] could be justified only if it induced man to obey authority and at the same time assume the full weight of their responsibilities as members of a Christian

46. Karl Barth, The Theology of Schleiermacher: Lectures at Göttingen, Winter Semester of 1923/24. ed. Deitrich Ritschl, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1982), 261. 47. Barth, The Theology of Schleiermacher, xiii. “At every state of his life, in all the branches of his life’s work, [Schleiermacher] had something positive to say” (272). 48. Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 473; Schleiermacher was, nevertheless, a Christian theologian doing what he thought best (428-429); cf. Barth, The Theology of Schleiermacher, 277. This is undoubtedly linked to Barth’s question in Göttingen as to whether he had even understood enough to ask the right questions. The respect that Barth shows to Schleiermacher in the midst of strong, and perhaps somewhat theatrically employed, criticism is puzzling. Did Barth hope to be afforded the same courtesy? See James O. Duke and Robert F. Streetman, eds., Barth and Schleiermacher: Beyond the Impasse? (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), 65, where Hans Frei suggests that Barth was looking for a common context in which he and Schleiermacher lived and wrote. 49. Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 436-437.

67 society.”50 In his zeal to make what he said from the pulpit understandable and applicable, he left it and began speaking to his audience in modern tones.51

Schleiermacher, aware of the inherent dangers,52 tried to establish a common point of reference, or “superior position, from which he [could] understand both parties and be the just advocate of both.”53 Crossing the ditch that separated biblical theology from philosophy, he appropriated Kant’s principle of human autonomy for use in Christian theology. He agreed with Kant that some intelligible category must be inherently available to the individual whereby she could perceive the truth of Christianity.54 This category, or interpretive measure, he characterized as ‘religious feeling:’ the “immediate presence of whole undivided personal existence.”55 In other words, religious feeling is the raw, real-time data of human self-consciousness. Through the mutually conditioning feelings of freedom and dependence the individual comes to know the feeling of absolute dependence and a sense of receptivity from a source outside oneself.56 Religious feeling is neither an idea in itself nor a set of objective circumstances to be experienced; “it does not rest upon any particular modification of human nature but upon the absolutely general nature of man.”57 That is, religious feeling is the subjective apprehension of absolute dependence on another that rises from within an individual’s inherent and properly developed self-conscious perception. Thus, to (correctly) become conscious of

50. Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich, eds., The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 113. 51. Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 442. “As a man I speak to you…. it is pure necessity of my nature; it is a divine call.” Schleiermacher, Speeches, 3. 52. Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 431. 53. Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 442. 54. Richard R. Niebuhr, Schleiermacher on Christ and Religion: A New Introduction, Scribner Studies in Contemporary Theology (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964), 143. See also Pannenberg, 2:307, on the connection between Kant and Schleiermacher. 55. Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, ed. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1963), 1:7 (§3.2). 56. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith 1:16 (§4.3). 57. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith 1:134 (§33.3); emphasis added.

68 the feeling is to become conscious of God.58 Put another way, “the consciousness of God is included in this direct self-consciousness.”59

Consequently, religious feeling is the interpretive measure of the texts and doctrines of Scripture, which are merely expressions of the same kind of religious feeling by those of another era.60 Schleiermacher knew “the concept of kerygma, but naturally a kerygma that only depicts and does not bring, that only states or expresses and does not declare. Truth does not come in the spoken Word; it comes in speaking feeling.”61

Historical or propositional truths belonging to theology exist only as they are simultaneously realized (or co-posited) as a function of deep, pious self-awareness.62 God is the expression of feeling when it is felt and therefore shaped and understood by the human being.

Schleiermacher appropriated Kantian transcendental deduction through the lens of his Pietist-Moravian heritage.63 His emphasis on feeling as piety allowed him to establish peace with modernity. For Schleiermacher scientific data about the world did not pose a challenge to true religion. He drew upon a notion made popular in Germany by Philipp

58. Niebuhr, 184-185. 59. Barth, The Theology of Schleiermacher, 216. 60. Niebuhr, 149. Cf. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 2:593-596 (§128.2-3; §129.1-2) Note the striking similarity in Paul M. van Buren, The Secular Meaning of the Gospel: Based on an Analysis of its Language (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1963), 153-155. 61. Barth, The Theology of Schleiermacher, 210; emphasis original. Cf. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 1:76-79 (§17). 62. Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 454. Cf. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 1:125-126 (§30.1). 63. Peter Vogt, “Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorff,” in The Pietist Theologians, ed. Carl Lindberg (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 213, 220, notes that Zinzendorff anticipated Schleiermacher in his description of the awareness and dependence of created beings and established the way for Schleiermacher’s notion of religious dependence. Schleiermacher himself was raised in the Moravian Church but largely rejected the doctrinal content of Moravian piety while maintaining its experiential and communal orientation. Thus he eventually considered himself a Herrnhuter “of a higher order.” See also Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann, Karl Barth-Rudolf Bultmann letters, 1922-1966, trans. and ed. Bernd Jaspert, and Geoffrey William Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1981), 107. Barth called himself Zinzendorffian for his insistence on organizing every cateogry of theology under the objective figure of Christ.

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Jacob Spener’s seventeenth-century text Pia Desideria that true religious faith is not the product of coherent systematic theology but the experience of conviction.64 The influence of Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf, spiritual grandchild of Spener and leader of the multi-denominational Herrnhut, is palpable when Schleiermacher says,

Instruction in religion, meaning that piety itself is teachable, is absurd and unmeaning. Our opinions and doctrines we can indeed communicate, if we have words and our hearers have the comprehending, imagining power of the understanding. But we know very well that those things are only the shadow of our religious emotions, and if our pupils do not share our emotions, even though they do understand the thought, they have no possession that can truly repay their toil.65

Knowledge about religion, by itself, is dry and dead and cannot be used to concoct authentic faith.66 Religion rightfully inhabits the domain of pious living. “Faith is not the accepting of ideas or propositions as true, rather it is the living relation between God and humanity and that relation is primarily internal as well as external.”67 Moreover, the subjective feeling of absolute dependence guarantees that the concept of God will not succumb to the inevitable corruption characteristic to arbitrary, objective forms of

64. Philipp Jacob Spener, Pia Desideria, Seminar Editions, ed. and trans. Theodore G. Tappert (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1964), 27-28, 46, 50, 104. See also Richard L. Gawthrop, Pietism and the Making of Eighteenth-Century Prussia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 164. Spener’s fellow Pietist August H. Francke established the protocols of the University of Halle around a deep commitment to the individual’s “born-again experience” of God. He intended to provide the “instruments for the rebirth of society” based on an experiential metaphysic of “all-encompassing moral principles” (152). Barth was critical of the Pietists and drew a straight line from them to German Protestantism under Kant and Schleiermacher. See also Ernest Boyer, "Schleiermacher, Shaftesbury, and the German Enlightenment" Harvard Theological Review 96, no. 2 (April 1, 2003): 198-199. Boyer argues that Schleiermacher’s use of the term Gefühl (feeling) drew upon Johann J. Spalding and of The Earl of Shaftesbury’s notion of social, theological feeling which intentionally differed from the individualistic connotation that the Pietists had emphasized. See also Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation, 27-30, 156-157, 659; and Herrmann, The Communion of the Christian with God, 72-73, 190-191, 348, for critiques of the individualistic and even mystical experience of conversion. 65. Schleiermacher, Speeches, 122; cf. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 2:591-592 (§128.1). 66. Schleiermacher, Speeches, 46-48. 67. Jeffrey C Pugh, The Anselmic Shift: Christology and Method in Karl Barth’s Theology, American University Studies 7, Theology vol. 68 (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1990), 6; cf. CD I/1, 38. Cp. Harnack, What is Christianity? 184-185, on systematic propositions in contrast with faith.

70 communication.68 In sum, the conscious capacity for religious experience is the inherent measure by which human beings can apprehend, understand, and generate faith in God.

“There is hardly any doubt,” Barth said, reflecting in 1957, “that the distinctive beginnings of 19th-century theology coincide with the publication of Schleiermacher’s book On Religion, Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers in 1799.”69 The book dictated the terms of peace between ‘modern man’ and antiquated faith by placing them in completely different spheres. Barth called it a shattering distortion of orthodoxy.70 Schleiermacher,

determined on no account to interpret Christianity in such a way that his interpreted statements can come into conflict with the methods and principles of the philosophy and the historical and scientific research of his time. Christianity is interpreted in such a way that it acquires room by this way of interpretation, that it acquires room in the kind of thinking which is assumed to be authoritative by Schleiermachers contemporaries, without causing any friction.71

The nineteenth-century preacher had essentially made Kant’s distinction between theologian and philosopher an operational reality. Philosophy and science no longer impinge upon or offend religion because authentic religious faith is not contingent upon the results they produce.72 Kant had asserted that God is not accessible to human senses because those senses are not capable of applying measure to his being. For him, the only suitable measure is morality; only in morality can God be sensed and understood.

Schleiermacher de-systematized that conception of morality by emphasizing individual piety and eliminating static imperatives. “His contention was that persons must look neither to metaphysics nor to morality for the essence of religion, but to something that

68. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 1:17-18 (§4.4) 69. Barth, The Humanity of God, 12. 70. Barth, The Theology of Schleiermacher, 259. 71. Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 445-446. 72. See Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 1:3-4 (§2.1-2); 1:121 (§28.2); 1:137 (§34.3).

71 encompasses them both.”73 Religious feeling is a type of measure but it gives one deeper and more immediate access to the Infinite. It provides a ‘knowing’ that is not about God but is God. Conversely, “anything beyond this, any effort to penetrate into the nature and substance of things is no longer religion, but seeks to be a science of some sort.”74

Science and feeling do not conflict for Schleiermacher because they do not rely on the same source of data and are not directed towards the same object.

Barth’s difficulty with Schleiermacher is essentially twofold. First, he allowed the concern for relevancy to govern his theology. Second, and as a result of the first, he failed to give God’s revelation priority of place. Schleiermacher and his contemporaries, with gazes fixed on the world around them, made “confrontation with the contemporary age

[their] decisive and primary concern.”75 Despite his great effort to contextualize,

Schleiermacher’s version of the faith gained little currency among the masses. Theology became so accessible —so natural — that it offered the world no contrast and no answers.76 The more faith was shaped to conform to the intellectual and moral standard of the day, the more its real power and relevance for humankind was stripped away.77

‘What about miracle — what about prophecy and inspiration?’ Barth wondered. Is the transcendence of God some annoying concept that can be brushed away? Has the

Reformation nothing to say about the power of the Spirit to bring about faith?78 Though

Barth could find Christ in Schleiermacher, he was at most the realization of God-

73. Pugh, 6. Cf. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith 1:111-112 (§26) Morals belong to the science of doctrine and inhabit the domain of knowing and doing rather than feeling which is the source of those domains. 1:124 (§29.2) Morals may develop alongside a system of doctrine, however. 74. Schleiermacher, Speeches, 49. 75. Barth, The Humanity of God, 18-19; emphasis original. “The triumph of natural theology in the Church, described as the absorbing and domestication of revelation, is very clearly the process of making the Gospel respectable.” CD II/1, 141. 76. Barth, The Theology of Schleiermacher, 171-172. 77. Barth, The Humanity of God, 23-24; Barth, The Theology of Schleiermacher, 176. 78. Barth, The Theology of Schleiermacher, 242-243.

72 consciousness at “an incomparably greater quantity of that which we see in… the self- assertion of our own Christianity.”79 He was hardly proclaimed Lord and Schleiermacher was hardly his servant.80 In the end Barth could not accept these terms.

The End(s) of Modernist-liberal Theology: Feuerbach and National Socialism

If it is not already clear, the reason that Barth was critical of eighteenth and nineteenth-century theology was because it gave priority to human beings as the ground of the Christian faith. In Kant and Schleiermacher he recognized the tendency not only to ascribe to an ability to understand God to humankind but a nascent independence from — and even mastery over — him. Barth’s focused more upon the disposition of self- sufficiency than the material theological or philosophical content. That is to say that it was not necessarily the theological details themselves that alarmed him but the emerging picture of Adam’s sin: you will know good and evil, you will be just like God.81

The German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach82 (1804-1872), in Barth’s estimation, identified the conclusions of mid-nineteenth century modernist-liberal theological thinking with boldness and precision. He argued that God was merely the “epitome of all

79. Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 471. See Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 1:131-132 (§32.1); 2:377-379 (§93.1-2). Barth could not find Christ in the pen of Kant (287). See also Barth, The Theology of Schleiermacher, 47; Barth, The Humanity of God, 30; Pugh, 11; and James O. Duke and Robert F. Streetman, eds., 67. According to Frei, Barth knew that Jesus was indispensible and not merely secondary, to Schleiermacher. His motivation was apologetic and not mystical — Jesus was defined the way he was in order to serve Schleiermacher’s mediating theology. 80. Barth, The Theology of Schleiermacher, 176; Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 446. 81. Paraphrase of Genesis 3:5. Eritis sicut Deus. 82. See Schwarz, 27-30. Feuerbach attended lectures in Berlin under Schleiermacher and Hegel and earned his doctorate in 1828 at Erlangen University in his native Bavaria. He was never able to secure a teaching position due to his liberal ideas and scathing critiques concerning the nature of God and subjective religion. His publication of The Essence of Christianity in 1841 and the 1848/49 Lectures on the Essence of Religion in Heidelberg had a great effect on Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) and cemented Feuerbach’s anthropological vision of religion and optimism for social progress.

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[human] realities or perfections… a compendious summary devised for the benefit of the limited individual, an epitome of the generic human qualities distributed among men, in the self-realization of the species in the course of world history.”83 In other words, God is a projection of everything human beings thought best about themselves and “theology is nothing else than an unconscious, esoteric pathology, anthropology, and psychology.”84

Moreover, Feuerbach asserted: “the understanding alone enjoys all things without itself being enjoyed; it is the self-enjoying, self-sufficing existence — the absolute subject….

To think is to be God.”85 For Barth, in a world where truth had been exchanged for a lie, the anti-theologian saw more clearly than the theologian. Feuerbach’s criticisms of faith were shockingly relevant to Barth and called for his attention and active response.

Even more shocking for the Swiss theologian, however, was the declaration of

World War I. He witnessed in the 1914 declaration of war by Kaiser Wilhelm II and his retinue of German intellectuals the ends and the end of nineteenth-century theology.86

“Barth regarded this action as a sign of the ethical failure of the liberal theological tradition, for its proponents’ nationalistic commitment was so confused that it could find an untroubled self-righteousness in the prospect of an unjustified war.”87 But the First

World War only lit the fuse, so to speak, of Barth’s commitment to separate from the modernist-liberal tradition. The Second World War, and the events surrounding the Nazi

83. Karl Barth, “Introductory Essay,” in Feuerbach, xvi; see also 14. Cf. Hans J. Hahn, German Thought and Culture: From the Holy Roman Empire to the Present Day (New York: Manchester University Press, 1995), 184-187. Christendom is its own negation. 84. Feuerbach, 89. Cp. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 1:25-26 (§5, p.s.). Those who have no experience of piety will make God out to be merely an anthropomorphic representation. 85. Feuerbach, 40; emphasis added. God is merely the end product of the self-conscious thinker; but in practical reality “is essentially an object of religion, not philosophy – of feeling, not of the intellect – of the heart’s necessity, not of the mind’s freedom….” (186). At the end of either thought or feeling, man creates and is his own god. 86. Barth, The Humanity of God, 13. 87. James O. Duke and Robert F. Streetman, eds., 19-20. See also 21n31. John Thiel counters Wilfried Härle’s position that it is not possible to pinpoint Barth’s break with liberal theology. In light of Barth’s own reflection on WWI it seems clear.

74 party, intensified the problem for Barth. He saw a direct relationship between the deficiencies in modernist-liberal tradition and the German Church’s acceptance of Adolf

Hitler. Natural theology, or that way of approaching the theological task that promotes the sufficiency and priority of humankind in apprehending God, led the German Church to accept Hitler as “God-sent.”88 Or, put another way, nineteenth-century theology had a spellbinding effect and caused those involved to “bet on the wrong horse in regard to national socialism.”89 Where Feuerbach had identified the logical conclusion of liberal theology, Adolf Hitler found the practical end. Barth’s dogmatic theology — his new beginning from this end — was a concerted effort to correct the self-sufficient disposition of the modernist-liberal tradition. Church Dogmatics put God first.

Reestablishing the Priority of God in Dogmatic Theology

Barth’s Discovery of Anselm as His ‘Vital Key’

For some time the accepted paradigm pertaining to Barth’s theological development was that offered by Catholic scholar Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988).

He suggested that in the early 1930s Barth made a decisive split from the dialectical approach to theology and adopted the dogmatic approach. Right at the fault line of the split was his study of Anselm’s Proslogion and the great dictum “fides quaerens

88. CD II/1, 173-174. See also Jaroslav Pelikan, Credo: Historical and Theological Guide to Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 223, who notes that the Barmen Declaration’s “response to a twentieth-century revival both of polytheism and of Caesar-worship” offered substance to the response of Third World societies facing similar oppression. For an interesting stereoscopic perspective on the Nazi threat to the church in Germany from another influential church leader see William M. King, "Prelude to the German Church Struggle: Otto Dibelius and The Century of the Church," Journal Of Church and State 24, no. 1 (December 1, 1982): 53- 71. 89. Barth, The Humanity of God, 28.

75 intellectum” (faith seeking understanding). Barth reflected later in his career that his largely overlooked 1931 work Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum was indeed instrumental to his methodological shift. Five years prior to the publication of the first half-volume of Church Dogmatics in 1932, the Swiss professor had produced a prolegomena to dogmatics that he considered, after criticisms were leveled to the same effect, too dependent upon existential starting points. That is, he felt it still relied too heavily on the anthropological starting places of modernist-liberal theology. Having found and mined Anselm, Barth came to possess the resources and confidence on which to build a dogmatic theology that gave appropriate priority to God’s Word. In the preface to the second edition (1958) to Anselm: Fides Quarens Intellectum, Barth commended von Balthasar for his keen perception.90

Several scholars have challenged the notion that Barth’s work in Anselm accurately locates his theological turning point, despite it having Barth’s own imprimatur.

In his celebrated volume Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology,

Princeton Theological Seminary’s Bruce L. McCormack outlines a debate surrounding von Balthasar’s position and the significance of Anselm. He notes that in their critical investigations both Ingrid Spieckermann, Superintendent of the Evangelical Lutheran

Church of Hanover, and Michael Beintker, professor of Reformed theology at the

University of Münster, questioned von Balthasar’s paradigm on the grounds that many of the general notions and methods used by Barth in his Church Dogmatics can be found in the works predating it.91 Where von Balthasar had located a decisive turning point

90. Karl Barth, Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum, 2nd ed., trans. Ian W. Robertson (Richmond, VA: John Knox, 1960), 11. (Hereafter referred to as Anselm). 91. This thinking is reflected in the section above that treats Barth’s criticism of Schleiermacher in Göttingen in 1923, Bonn in 1933, and then as found in The Humanity of God in 1957. Barth was critical of

76 between the dialectical and ‘analogical’ method in Barth’s theology in about 1931,92 genetic analysis of the texts indicate that the dialectical method persisted well beyond

1932. Conversely, the analogia fidei, which von Balthasar thought to be a new phenomenon, was present at least as early as 1927 in Barth’s abortive Christian

Dogmatics. According to Spieckermann and Beintker’s studies, Barth’s shift was one of emphasis93 — a methodological revision and a clarification of the categories94 that does not warrant the significance attributed by von Balthasar. Barth’s dramatic departure from pre-1931 presuppositions and methodology, understood by von Balthasar and confirmed by the Swiss theologian himself, they claimed, has been overemphasized and is not evident in the text.

In light of these apt observations, McCormack has suggested an alternative perspective on Barth’s departure from dialectical theology: it was political.95 Barth said,

Schleiermacher in Göttingen for the same basic reasons as he was when he published Church Dogmatics I/1 in 1932. 92. McCormack, Critically Realistic, 2. McCormack’s introduction describes the contention represented in these paragraphs. Cp. Hans Urs von Balthasar, 93. Balthasar’s phrasing regarding the shift, which seems to render his critic’s suggestions moot, is: “gradual process… ending in about 1930.” 93. McCormack, Critically Realistic, 13. See also Schofner, 33n136. T. F. Torrance also understood the shift to be one of emphasis. 94. McCormack, Critically Realistic, 10, reports that Barth’s shift, in their view was a “revision of method based upon a clear distinction between the ‘ontic’ and the ‘noetic’ rationality of the object of theology (and the priority of the former over the latter).” 95. See also Rodney Holder, The Heavens Declare: Natural Theology and the Legacy of Karl Barth (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2012), 30-35; James Barr, Biblical Faith and Natural Theology, The Gifford Lectures for 1991, Delivered in the University of Edinburgh (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 10, argues that the political situation in Germany was a vital catalyst (and perhaps excuse) for Barth but not the fundamental cause of his position against natural theology. Timothy Stanley, “Returning Barth to Anselm,” Modern Theology 24, no. 3 (July, 2008): 430, argues that McCormack’s political argument does not take into account the subtle but substantial ontological starting points developed by Barth in Anselm. I tend to agree. Following his discussion see Stephen Wigley, “The von Balthasar Thesis: A Re-Examination of von Balthasar’s Study of Barth in the Light of Bruce McCormack,” Scottish Journal of Theology 56, no. 3 (2003): 345-359; Wigley, Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar, 39-44; Michael Beintker, Die Dialektik in der “dialektischen Theologie” Karl Barths: Studien zur Entwicklung der Barthschen Theologie und zur Vorgeschichte der “Kirchlichen Dogmatik”, Beiträge zur Evangelischen Theologie; Bd. 101 (München: C. Kaiser, 1987); Eberhard Jüngel, Karl Barth: A Theological Legacy, first American ed. (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1986), 42; Ingrid Spieckermann, Gotteserkenntnis: ein Beitrag zur Grundfage der Neuen Theologie Karl Barths (München: Chr. Kaiser, 1985); Graham Ward, Barth, Derrida, and the Language of Theology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 101f.; and

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The real document of this farewell is, in truth, not the much-read brochure Nein! directed against Brunner in 1934, but rather the book about the evidence for God of Anselm of Canterbury which appeared in 1931. in these years I had to learn that Christian doctrine, if it is to merit its name and if it is to build up the Christian Church in the world as she must needs be built up, has to be exclusively and conclusively the doctrine of Jesus Christ — of Jesus Christ as the living Word of God spoken to us men.96

According to McCormack, Barth’s incarnational Christology had already been established in 1924, the same year Barth discovered Heinrich Heppe’s (1820-1879)97 dogmatics.98 If any year was revolutionary it was that one. The stress put on Anselm and the “exaggeration of the distance between the two versions of the prolegomena was therefore a function of Barth’s desire to distance himself publically from the other dialectical theologians”99 and especially Friedrich Gogarten who had affirmed the notion that “the law of God is identical with the law of the German people.”100 In other words, the identification of Anselm as a turning point in Barth’s career is more appropriate when applied to his political rather than his theological mechanics. If the book stands for

Barth’s position, it stands specifically over and against those whom Barth felt

Merold Westphal, Transcendance and Self-Transcendance: On God and the Soul (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004), 145f. 96. Karl Barth, How I Changed My Mind, 43; Balthasar, 93, draws upon another resource for Barth’s assessment of his own ‘Anselmic shift:’ Karl Barth, “Parergon,” Evangelische Theologie (1948): 272. 97. Lowell H. Zuck, “Heinrich Heppe : A Melanchthonian Liberal in the Nineteenth-Century German Reformed Church,” Church History 51, no. 4 (December 1, 1982): 419-433. Heppe earned a doctorate from Marburg University in 1844 making him the youngest person in Germany to hold the degree at the time. During his tenure at the same he was active in both the academy and the church wherein he held together speculative and pietistic streams. “Though something of a confessionalist who defended his notion of the old Protestant church against modern rationalism, [Heppe] was at the same time a consistent advocate of nineteenth-century German philosophical-theological, liberal unionism” (432) and made way for the latter in Marburg. 98. Heinrich Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2 of Schriften zur reformirten Theologie: Die Dogmatik der evangelisch-reformirten Kirche (Elberfeld, 1861); (ET: trans. G. T. Thomson [Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1978]). See McCormack, Critically Realistic, 21-23, 334-335. 422; Arnold Come, An Introduction to Barth's Dogmatics for Preachers, The Preacher's Library (London: SCM Press, 1963), 50-52. Come identified the same progression and emphasis on Heppe as McCormack. From his perspective the question of progression does not seem as pointed. Barth’s references to Heppe in Church Dogmatics are far less frequent than to Anselm, incidentally. See 34n131 above. 99. McCormack, Critically Realistic, 447. 100. McCormack, Critically Realistic, 420, 414.

78 compromised his effective Christian witness.101 In McCormack’s assessment, Anselm came to be hailed as indicative of the split Barth had made with the dialectical school only in retrospect.

Whether or not he actually made the decisive turn in the content of his theology at this time, it is clear that in Barth’s mind what he established in his study of Anselm was of critical importance to his role as an active theologian. Anselm provided him with the footing upon which to “exorcise the final traces of religious anthropocentrism from his dogmatic proposals.”102 In that work he found confirmation of, and confidence in, his theological position in relation to the early signs of conflict in Germany. Anselm provided

Barth with the theological resources and motivation with which to constructively (and vigorously) engage the same series of problems that he had criticized in the early days of his career.103 The work provides those who study the Swiss theologian with an accessible focal point by which to understand his insistence that God is prior to all knowledge and faith.104

Barth’s Interpretation of Anselm as a Key to Dogmatics

Barth’s use of Anselm as his ‘vital key’ rests upon Anselm’s notion of God as

‘something beyond which nothing greater can be conceived’ (aliquid quo maius nihil cogitari potest). Indeed, this is what Barth considered Anselm’s name for God, strictly

101. Dorrien, 102. 102. Scofner, 33. 103. Scofner, 25, taking his cues from T. F. Torrance, suggests a helpful way of dealing with von Balthasar’s paradigm by saying that the dialectic/dogmatic shift is well captured by Barth’s transformation from critical to constructive theologian. 104. See Webster, Karl Barth, 51.

79 classifying it as a revelation and not a derivation.105 That is to say that the name comes from God himself — and describes a limit or a prohibition. It is a warning that whatever

God is, God is not to be conceived in the same manner as “one person forming a concept of another person; rather it is as a creature standing before his Creator.”106 Anselm’s definition is not the same as his critic Gaunilo’s suggestion that God is maius omnibus

([that which is] greatest of all). Though similar, that definition implies that God can be conceived of on the basis human ideas of greatness.107 Anselm’s formulation is itself void of content and quickly shuns human capability. From the beginning, the foundational premise of the argument agrees with its logical end: if God is properly God, then he must supply his own name to the creatures contingent upon him for their existence. “God is the one who manifests himself in the command not to imagine a greater than he.”108 Self- sufficiency, that most basic impulse of sinful humanity to be like God, is arrested at the outset.109 At its root, this defines the departure Barth wished to make from the modernist- liberal tradition.

God’s prohibitive name, as formulated by Anselm, makes logical sense in the mind of the one who hears it. The sentence definition clearly communicates the suggestion that if something is properly thought of as ‘God,’ then it always possesses the characteristics that allow it to inhabit the position beyond which nothing greater can be conceived. Reasonably, if a conception of something greater than the current conception

105. Barth, Anselm, 100. Quod vere sit Deus (that God truly exists) is the first assertion of the Anselm’s proof. Et quidem credimus (but we believe) describes the human role perception of this fundamental and prior truth (102). Anselm hopes to know that God exists ‘as we believe’ (intelligam quia es sicut credimus) (101). 106. Barth, Anselm, 77. 107. Cp. CD II/1, 188. See also Feuerbach, 17, 38. Feuerbach went on to argue that God begins when all abstractions about nature cease because God is the function of self-consciousness which by which humans free themselves from the hardships of reality (98). 108. Barth, Anselm, 107. 109. Barth, Anselm, 88-89.

80 of God could be formulated, then that conception would be what properly describes God.

Anselm’s definition, then, does not provide a detailed description of God’s attributes but establishes a logical position, or working conception, of what the term ‘God’ describes.

God’s name as a logical, sentence definition, as far as its words register meaning, is accessible to both the believer and the non-believer. If this definition of God makes logical sense to the non-believer, it can be said to exist in the intellectual or noetic domain as a thought. But it has already been shown that the logic of the statement itself must lead to the greater of any two possible conceptions. That greater conception is being-in-reality. Indeed, existing in re (in reality) is greater than existing only in intellectu (in the intellect). Moreover, existing in both spheres is greater than existing in only one. If the initial logic of the definition is accepted as true, the only conclusion must be that God exists in reality and in the intellect (the ontic and noetic domains). “Thus as

God he cannot exist in knowledge as the one who merely exists in knowledge.… God’s existence et in intellectu et in re is concluded from the fact that a God who exists in solo intellectu has been proved impossible.”110

Building upon his proof in the second chapter of Proslogion, described above,

Anselm sets out in the third chapter to demonstrate God’s nature as necessary. If God automatically inhabits the greater of any two possible conceptions, as has been shown, then God cannot be thought of as not existing. Existence is greater than non-existence and existence without dependence on anything for that existence is, likewise, greater than its alternative. If the initial, logical definition of God is accepted, then it is impossible for

God not to exist because existence is greater than non-existence. In other words, God must be necessary or ‘of himself’ (a se). “Hence, the existence of God, precisely because

110. Barth, Anselm, 128.

81 it is that conception which cannot not exist, becomes the condition upon which we can credibly attribute existence to all other existing things.”111 If he is in fact qualitatively greater in this respect, Barth stresses, then the knowledge of his existence is also not contingent upon anything but himself. It is not possible to derive his existence from understanding that has a finite or contingent (i.e., human) nature.112 In the end, Barth concludes from chapters two and three of Proslogion that God exists both in the intellect and in reality, and that he alone is the source of all other things that exist and know about him.

Of key importance to Barth as a dogmatic theologian is not the existence of God itself, but Anselm’s conclusion that God must reveal himself. In his assessment, the

‘ontological argument’ is anything but a proof of God’s existence from common human knowledge.113 Rather, the end of the argument is the same as its opening assertion: for

God to be God, he must speak his own name. Anselm is intentionally circuitous: he moves from faith to faith.114 The conclusion,

as such is not proved. On the contrary, it stands, like the general statement of Proslogion 2, God exists, as an article of faith by itself. What happens in the Proof and its variants is that sometimes this article of faith is strictly proved, at

111. Stanley, 424. 112. See Schofner, 229. Charles Hartshorne discusses God as “one who is both absolute and relative… who is both necessary and contingent.” Could this refer to the servant Christ in Barth’s theology? 113. Barth, Anselm, 171; see also M. J. Charlesworth, trans., St. Anselm’s Proslogion with a Reply on Behalf of the Fool by Gaunilo and the Author’s Reply to Gaunilo (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), 40-46. Charlesworth rejected Barth’s assertion that Anselm was writing without appeal to natural theological knowledge. He claims that Anselm was, as was common to his time and theological milieu, developing an argument for the existence of God that had neither faith nor revelation as a starting point but what was common to unbelievers so that no scripture was needed. 114. Barth, Anselm, 143-144, 155; cp. Feuerbach, 198-203. If God is ‘that beyond which nothing greater can be conceived’ — a being external and above a human conception — then he must act upon and be sensible to humans from without in order to be known. “But God is not seen, not heard, not perceived by the senses,” (200) according to Feuerbach. This poses a contradiction to the ontological argument, which concludes that God exists in the intellect and reality, and suggests a “special existence [which] can only be proved in a special manner. This faith is therefore only then a true and living one when special effects, immediate appearances of God, [and] miracles, are believed in” (203). Here Barth understands Feuerbach’s comments about faith well, even if he did not agree that belief occurs only as a product of imagination.

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other times its opposite is strictly excluded by the Proof, that is by the interpretation of the revealed Name and Nature of God.115

Anselm’s foundational premise, process of discovery, and ultimate conclusion are each contingent upon and intensely concerned with the self-disclosure of God.

The Creator as such is absolutely the quo maius cogitari nequit for the creature as such. Should the creature fail to hear this Name of God and the prohibition it contains then that can only mean that he has not yet understood the Creator as such nor himself as creature. It is in faith that he understands him and himself within this relation and so hears his Name and the prohibition against conceiving anything greater than him.116

God’s name given to the creature establishes that God is God and the creature is not; his gift provides both the content and the disposition by which any knowledge of Creator and creature is possible.117 Any exercise involving logical proof (probare) that takes place in

Anselm’s argument is best understood as joyful and vigorous seeking based upon a premise supplied by God. 118 That premise is known on the basis of revelation and faith; in the grace and ability that God supplies a believer can arrive at a faithful understanding.119 “Prior to any desire or ability to find theological answers is the question of dedication on the part of the theologian himself. … A theology that is grounded on the obedience of faith will be a positive theology.”120

As far as Barth is concerned, theology can be apologetic only in so far as it respects the principle of God’s prior self-revelation revealed to faith. His insistence on

115. Barth, Anselm, 150. A ‘proof’ is the exercise of logical procedures on the given premise(s) that produces coherence and not a conclusion that demonstrates concrete assuredness. The proof is contingent upon faith and is therefore not proof in the sense often employed by apologists. 116. Barth, Anselm, 153; cf. 54. 117. Barth, Anselm, 169, 77; See also John McTavish, “Theology on One’s Knees: Karl Barth’s Proofs of the Existence of God,” Theology Today 66 (2010): 496. Barth would later describe human creatureliness and mortality as a sign of God’s ruling presence: see CD III/2, 226f. 118. Barth, Anselm, 16, 20n3. Hence, ‘faith seeking understanding’ (fides quaerens intellectum) or ‘I believe that I may know’ (credo ut intelligam); see also Augustine Sermon 43 7, 9. 119. Barth, Anselm, 37-39. 120. Barth, Anselm, 34.

83 this in Anselm indicates a sharp turn from assumptions of modernist-liberal theology:

Anselm has nothing to do with Descartes and Kant!121 Faith seeking understanding is

“not compatible with an insolent ‘I know better’ … but comes about by reflection on the

Credo that has already been spoken and affirmed.”122 No analogue exists in humankind by which to posit God or create faith.123 Everything is contingent upon God as source.

Those who take up an insolent attitude, according to Barth’s reading of Anselm, are fools who deny what is impossible to deny. ‘Miracle of foolishness,’ he exclaimed, that the contingent creature could describe or deny her Creator’s necessary existence!124 Actually, it is a miracle. The statement is not made merely for effect but captures the crux of the argument: everything depends on the action of God. A fool is one who has not transferred the logical, potential identity of God contained in his prohibitive name into actuality precisely because he cannot. In other words, he can understand the idea as an idea but its reality is beyond his grasp because he has not been saved by the miracle of grace.

Insolence and foolishness are results, just as faith is, of God’s freedom whether or not to reveal himself. Without the grace of God that creates faith, and faith as the basis of truth, the conclusion of the fool will be always be false.125 The one who says ‘I know better’ is

121. Barth, Anselm, 139, 171. 122. Barth, Anselm, 27. Barth was indeed opposed to the underlying attitude he found in Kant’s analytic: “Pure understanding… is a unity self-subsistent, self-sufficient, and not to be increased by any additions from without.” Critique of Pure Reason, 102; emphasis added. Kant redoubled this argument in Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals by arguing that the individual can ascertain, through transcendental reasoning, an objective and universal moral law based on duty and then legislate to him or herself autonomously on the basis of that law (52, 58); see also Dale Jacquette, Pathways in Philosophy: An Introductory Guide with Readings (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 306-308. 123. See Herrmann, The Communion of the Christian with God, 216. Barth’s former teacher adduced a plethora of texts from Luther in his forceful argument that true faith “is simply unattainable by any human power. No insight, however deep, can found it; no will, however strong, can build it.” Barth did not place the same stock as Herrmann in the notion of moral experience, and he came to invest creedal formulations with more authority than his teacher, but his commitment to the priority of God’s act of revelation for any human knowledge certainly hearkens back to his days under the Marburg professor. 124. Barth, Anselm, 163. 125. Barth, Anselm, 159-161; cf. CD II/1, 129, 135f. “And in this modesty includes the realization

84 perfectly postured to be completely wrong. Theology that is apologetic must respect the self-revelation of God as it applies in both a positive and negative direction.

The apologetic (or evangelistic) task of the theology, then, is to live in grace through prayer. Anselm, Barth observes, thanked God for being among those enabled by grace to perform this task.126 He was privileged joyfully and obediently to seek God’s self-revealed beauty among those who had not yet been enabled to shed their insolence.

His effort occurred strictly in that space between faith and understanding or assent and awareness.127 The content of his apologetic was the content of his theological discovery.

It is with this only that he engaged the fool. In Barth’s understanding of Anselm, “all [the

Christian theologian] has to do is lead his opponent along his own path and thus be able to give him the answers to the questions that even he himself is asking.”128

[He] is in no position to serve the world with something other than that with which he himself is served. Not only because he quite honestly has nothing else to offer or because he knows no other proof than the one that convinces him, but also because he knows himself to be responsible to the world and dares not offer it anything less than the best. And for that reason Anselm knows just one question, one language and one task of theology.129

The Christian theologian, therefore, does not enter into the world’s debate chamber but invites the world to come with him into the closet of prayer.

Anselm thinks and proves in prayer. Anselm speaks about God while speaking to him. The knowledge which the proof that in God’s light we are shown to be darkness, in God’s judgment we are exposed as liars, and that we shall think and speak the truth always against ourselves.” CD I/2, 884. 126. Barth, Anselm, 105; cf. CD I/1, 30. “‘I believe’ means ‘I trust.’ No more must I dream of trusting myself, I no longer require to justify myself, to excuse myself, to attempt to save and preserve myself. This most profound effort of man to trust himself, to see himself as in the right, has become pointless. I believe – not in myself – I believe in God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.” Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, trans. G. T. Thomson (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 18. 127. Shofner, 51. Voelkel, 18-19, notes that Barth’s teacher Herrmann saw the apologetic task of theology as derived from faith and not to be done on the defensive. Barth’s only quarrel with Herrmann, in his view, was for the priority of revelation by God’s Word over ‘having faith’ as that which shapes theological investigation (49). Cf. Herrmann, Systematic Theology, 84. 128. Barth, Anselm, 66. 129. Barth, Anselm, 68-69.

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seeks to expound and impart is the knowledge that is peculiar to faith, knowledge of what is believed from what is believed. It is — and this is why it has to be sought in prayer — a knowledge that must be bestowed upon man.130

For both the believer and the non-believer the content of theology is what is overheard while praying. Because God’s act remains the vital core of this apologetic, there is reason for an excited hope that the effective “word that preaches Christ” might issue from it.131

In all of this, dogmatics is prayer overheard.

Self-sufficiency is shunned by the act of prayer. Barth’s dogmatic method, built on this principle and given precise definition in his study of Anselm, departs from the self-assertion that he identified in the modernist-liberal tradition. To be sure, Barth does not despise the proper functioning of the intellect, something that was given as a gift to humankind. Rather, prayer frees, aligns, and enables the intellect for its God-appointed task. In a later work on prayer Barth worded it well:

Our participation in the work of God is the action that consists in giving our allegiance to this work. It is a great thing to preach, to believe, and to fulfill our small obedience to Gods commandments. But in all these forms of obedience and faith it is prayer that puts us in rapport with God and permits us to collaborate with him.132

Indeed, this is the prayer that begins with ‘Thy will be done.’ Dogmatics is properly understood as a kind of prayer that applies intellect to the established authority of the

Church’s articles of faith. Human intellect is guided and limited by God’s truth as it is found in the Holy Scriptures and revealed Credo of the Church.133 Prayer is the method

130. Barth, Anselm, 101, 102; emphasis added. 131. Barth, Anselm, 107, 71. 132. “This prayer is at once an act of humility and an act of triumph. Such an act is required of us because we are given the power to perform it.” Karl Barth, Prayer, 2nd ed., ed. Don E. Sailers, trans. Sara F. Terrien (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1985), 41. 133. Barth, Anselm, 41; cp. Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, 152-153, where the philosopher’s opposition to the suppression of reason by church officials “in hierarchical splendor as spiritual officers clothed with external power,” led him to exhort that, “in the revealed doctrines of Christianity… one cannot by any means start with unconditioned belief in revealed propositions (in

86 by which the theologian can navigate and coordinate the articles of faith in obedience —

“not mastering the object but being mastered by it.”134 The reason that Anselm became key, therefore, to Barth’s dogmatic method in theology is not only because he identified the style of working from and within the authority of the Credo but because this style conformed to his deepest belief about God. If God is God, he cannot be mastered. The self that masters God, by whatever method it has chosen, has not arrived at God but an idol. As Feuerbach said, that self only arrives at its-self. If dogmatic theology is ever going to say anything theo-logical, it must begin with God.

Towards Barth’s Dogmatic Task and Method

Barth was serious about appropriating this fundamental methodology in Church

Dogmatics. First and foremost he understood that if God is God according to Anselm’s terms, even the best human thinking about him is inadequate. Only God can offer what is necessary in order for his creatures to comprehend him. The misunderstanding that lies at the basis of all human sin is that the creature can achieve some vantage point or possess some inherent capability by which to understand God.

The fact that we are created in the likeness of God means that God has determined us to bear witness to His existence in our existence. But it does not mean that we possess and discover an attribute within ourselves on the basis of which we are on a level with God. When the serpent insinuated this to the first man, Adam missed his true determination and fell into sin.135

themselves hidden from reason) and then let the knowledge of erudition follow after…. If this, in turn, is to be prevented from happening, recognition and respect must be accorded, in Christian dogmatic, to universal human reason as the supremely commanding principle in a natural religion.” It would seem that both Kant and Barth understood the servant nature of truth. Kant felt, however, that it be best maintained in the exercise of one thinking for herself. 134. Barth, Anselm, 55; cf. 170-171; CD I/1, 196 on the “impotence of disobedience.” 135. CD II/1, 188. “We are unable to achieve through our own natural powers and capacities the cognitive union with God which true knowledge of him requires.” Thomas F. Torrance, Karl Barth:

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Misunderstanding is immediately transferred to the sin of mastery. “We are masters of what we can apprehend. Viewing and conceiving certainty mean encompassing, and we are superior to, and spiritually masters of, what we can encompass.”136 The natural theology espoused by Kant, Schleiermacher, and many others, contests the sovereignty of

God by making him measurable by humankind.137 How can the Christian enterprise be at all effective, Barth asked, when its basic drives correspond to the fundamental premise of sin: the ability to be strong and wise apart from God? Who will be changed if the Church knows of no change to be made?138 Barth’s dogmatics narrowed in on the issue by forcing the question: how is God Lord? “Without revelation man does not know that there is a Lord, that he, man, has a Lord, and that God is the Lord.”139 In the self- revelation of God the ability or mastery assumed by humankind is undercut and the true lordship of God is revealed. Only in the miraculous revelation of the Word of God to humankind is God known as Lord and Creator. Only he, as original subject and primary power, has the power to make faith a reality.140 Barth’s dogmatics, more than a style or method of doing theology, is recognition of God as Lord in this way.

Biblical and Evangelical Theologian (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1990), 143 quoted in Holder, 18. See also CD I/1, 164; CD III/2, 75, 151-152, 178; and 83n122 above. 136. CD II/1, 188; cf. CD III/2, 22. 137. CD II/1, 163. Pugh, 134. Barth’s assessed Catholic theologian Erich Przywara’s doctrine of analogia entis (analogy of being) as similarly autonomous in nature (CD I/1, xiii). “It seemed to Barth that Pryzwara’s analogy of being represented a Catholic encroachment on the freedom and sovereignty of God.” Wigley, Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar, 9; see also, Hans Urs von Balthasar, 49-51. 138. CD II/1, 146. Quoting Luther: “For this reason we must note that if we do not uphold the Gospel with its own strength, but rather with our own resources, all will be lost, so that no matter how well we defend it, it will crumble to pieces.” CD I/1, 31. See also, Martin Luther, “To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Respecting the Reformation of the Christian Estate, 1520,” trans. Charles M. Jacobs in The Christian in Society I, ed. James Atkinson, vol. 44 of Luther’s Works: American Edition. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966.), 125, 213-214. Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1991), 265-266, in 1907, asked a similar question of the ‘Christian capitalism’ in the United States. How can the Church hope to foster change when it blindly perpetuates a system that embodies the very nature of sin: to know and achieve for oneself above all other concerns? 139. CD. I/1, 306. See also Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, 26. 140. CD I/1, 247.

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In order to honor this primary concern, Barth constructed his dogmatics to be independent of established principles and systematization.141 Theology resides fully in the domain of the Church. As a scientific endeavor, theology examines and tests the content of the proclamation the Church makes about the Word of God it has received. It cannot, therefore, be bound to the axioms and methods of regular scientific pursuit and must “absolutely subordinate and if necessary sacrifice all concern for what is called science elsewhere.”142 Christian theology, as Barth said of Anselm, works in obedience to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Its primary task is not strictly critical but “in obedience dogmatics itself has to dare to take the step from hearing to speaking.”143

Dogmatics constantly maintains the lordship of God and compels the Church to pray and preach: to hear and then to speak that which God has revealed. As far as it tests the content of the Church’s proclamation, it does so under subjection to the authorities that

God has established. That is to say, that the method of preaching about the proclamation conforms to the form in which it has been given. Dogmatics must always maintain the disposition of being open to the impress of God.144 It cannot form a system because

141. Cp. Herrmann, The Communion of the Christian with God, 42. 142. CD I/1, 8; cp. 55 and CD III/2, 24. Cortez, Embodied Souls, Ensouled Bodies, 47, argues that Barth’s “methodological Christocentrism… cannot be interpreted as necessitating the theological isolationism with which Barth is often associated.” Barth’s use of Christ as the departure point of theological knowledge does not indicate, “that his theology is, therefore, methodologically isolated from other disciplines.” He balances this by noting that Barth ultimately understood the “scientific approach, though valuable in its own right, is incapable of seeing beyond the phenomena of humanity to the nature of true humanity” (58). John C. McDowell, "Theology as Conversational Event: Karl Barth, the Ending of "Dialogue" and the Beginning of "Conversation," Modern Theology 19, no. 4 (October 2003): 494, similarly argues that, “all kinds of ‘extra-ecclesial’ claims and facts can become witnesses to the Gospel, and can be perceived as such in the light of a christological hermeneutic.” See also, Bruce Marshall, Christology in Conflict: The Identity of a Saviour in Rahner and Barth (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 148f.; and Ronald F. Thiemann, Constructing a Public Theology: The Church in a Pluralistic Culture (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press 1991), 84. In a similar vein, see 94n3 below for Wolfhart Panneberg’s criticism of Barth’s concept of revelation. 143. CD I/2, 854. 144. CD I/2, 865. A sentiment reminiscent of Barth’s remark at the 1922 pastor’s conference in Schulpforta, “Under no circumstances and in no sense ought we to desire to be creatores Creatoris. Ours is not to give birth to God but to give testimony of him.” Barth, “The Need of Christian Preaching,” in The

89 systems are either built on a priori principles or manipulated into a truth that is under human control afterwards.

Rightly understood, it is the material principle of dogmatics itself which destroys at its root the very notion of a dogmatic system. Where there is no longer a secure platform for thinking and speaking, there is likewise no system. In dogmatics, laying the foundation means recollection that the foundation is already laid, and expectation that it will continually be laid.145

As often as dogmatics navigates the content of the Church’s proclamation, it does so provisionally, “only for the needs of the next day.”146 Even when the task is performed with peak efficiency, it forms only a suggestion and not a command.147 This subordination of human knowledge to the Word and Holy Scripture is precisely where the Church derives and guarantees its authority.148 The task of dogmatics, and the method it employs to accomplish the task, must always be occupied with quieting the murmur of humanity so that the clear voice of the Lord can speak.

Barth was consumed with this task and disposition in his dogmatic theology. To say that he argues for it would be inaccurate — he asserts it, for thousands of pages.149

Even when he sets out to treat the dogmatic method with specific focus, his attention constantly returns to the main principle that every point the dogmatician makes is accountable to the authority of the Scripture as the authority of God. “Scripture with this content must always become again and again the thing we started with.”150 “Barth,” in

Word of God and the Word of Man, 131. 145. CD I/2, 868; cf. CD I/2, 483; and CD IV/3.1, 375. 146. CD I/1, 79; cf. Pannenberg, 1:16, who, drawing on Barth, argues that provisional interpretation of Scripture and formation of doctrine prevents any one authority from controlling truth. 147. CD I/2, 859; cf. CD I/1, 79. 148. CD I/2, 586-587, 620-621; see also, McTavish, 490. For Barth the miracle of the Scripture is that it has, as prone to human error as God has left it, formed the living Church around its witness (cp. CD III/3, 204). If this is the nature of God’s working, then submission and the posture of weakness are not detrimental to the cause of the faith. 149. Webster, Karl Barth, 50-53. 150. CD I/1, 108. Expressed with urgency nearly a decade earlier in “The Doctrinal Task of the Reformed Churches,” in The Word of God and the Word of Man, 241.

90 the words of one of his earliest interpreters and critics, Catholic theologian Hans Urs von

Balthasar, “focuses on the Word, fully and exclusively, that its full splendor may radiate out to the reader.”151 Dogmatics, as far as it is “the examination, criticism, and correction of the proclamation to which the teaching Church addresses itself on the basis of Holy

Scripture” is driven back to the task of biblical exegesis.152

Dogmatics stands under the authority of Holy Scriptures and can, as far as it obedient, coordinate the loci that arise from the Scriptures. Theologians may step beyond their roles as biblical exegetes to form a contemporary and contextualized proclamation of the truth of Jesus Christ as witnessed in Scripture. In this way they are obedient to that

Credo which God has seen fit to establish for his Church. Their method, as was seen in

Anselm, is to understand the articles of faith in relationship to one another but to avoid constructing a system with an axiomatic and controlling center.153

In this way Barth puts the theologian in the position of having to claim that the dogmatics he writes is subject to, and the result of, a new divine initiative, a decision of the Word of God himself. He must claim, and clearly seek to make good his claim by constant reference to the Scriptures, that in his work the Word of God is itself newly challenging the Churchs proclamation. Preoccupation with mere creeds and dogmas is not a substituted for this living, open relationship to the Word of God.154

The theological method is no more complex than listening to the Scripture afresh on each and every occasion. It is guided by the loci or articles of faith that contain some expression of God’s revelation in a particular context.155 Barth often organized his fresh hearing of the Scripture (and the Word of God through and in it) around the Apostles’

151. von Balthasar, 26. The word ‘Word’ refers specifically to Scripture here. 152. CD I/2, 821-823. See also Karl Barth, Karl Barth’s Table Talks, ed. John D. Godsey (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1963), 38. 153. CD I/2, 873, 880. See also Barth, Anselm, 55, 66-67, 170; Molnar, 73. 154. S. W Sykes, ed., Karl Barth: Studies of His Theological Method (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 34. 155. See 34n131 above.

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Creed. He engaged with the thinking of nearly one thousand theologians and philosophers in his Church Dogmatics.156 Nevertheless, he insisted that as much as the content available to the Church can guide and enlighten, it can never be given cause to eclipse the Word to which it testifies.

Dogmatics is the listening and speaking; it is a symphony,157 a “work of celebration… which tries to put into words what happens when we are caught up in and transformed by a movement, by a living, speaking event and gift.”158 Barth often did it with many words but he could also do it with few. As his students did in the story mentioned at the opening of this chapter, we give Barth the final words about his dogmatic method: “There is no utterly necessary, no absolutely prescribed method of

Christian dogmatics — that is, the road we have to take in detail is left to the best knowledge and conscience of the man engaged in the manner.”159 “We simply confess the mystery which underlies it, and we merely repeat the statement that dogmatics is only possible as an act of faith, when we point to prayer as the attitude without which there can be no dogmatic work.”160

156. CD V/1, 185. Cf. Barth, The Humanity of God, 94. 157. Come, 67. Cp. von Balthasar, 28. 158. Webster, Karl Barth, 53. 159. Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, 14. 160. CD I/1, 23; emphasis added. Barth opened his first class on dogmatics in Göttingen with the same prayer Thomas Aquinas used at the head of Summa Theologica and warned his students that the danger and distress of the theological task cried out for prayer. Both theologians would no doubt agree with the words of their Alexandrian forbearer: “I am sure no human power or language can explain, unless as prostrate supplicants we pray to the Word, and Wisdom, and Righteousness Himself, who is the only- begotten Son of God, and who, pouring Himself by His graces into our senses, may deign to illuminate what is dark, to lay open what is concealed, and to reveal what is secret.” Origen De Principiis 2.9.4 (ANF 4:291).

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Summary

Karl Barth’s dogmatic method is an intentional departure from the modernist- liberal epistemological tradition. He took issue with Immanuel Kant’s notion that religious knowledge is inherent to human beings. Kant did not deny the existence of God but was convinced that no knowledge of him was possible without the internal measures possessed by human beings. Among others in the age of enlightenment, Kant sought to shift the foundation of theology from its basis upon a supernatural source to that of natural moral sense that exists a priori in the individual human being. In doing so, he effectively placed the task of theology (and himself, consequently) outside the realm historical Christian confessions, the Holy Scriptures, and the revelation of Jesus Christ.

Though a committed preacher, Barth saw that Friedrich Schleiermacher had appropriated Kant’s principle of inherent human ability into his theology. Schleiermacher advocated for a universal God-consciousness of ‘religious feeling’ that, being inherent and available to all humanity, provided a true knowledge of God. His largely apologetic effort held sway over Protestant theology for more than a century. In Barth’s estimation,

Schleiermacher drastically compromised the poignancy of the Christian message for the world. The basic temptation to be like God lay in what both Kant and Schleiermacher achieved in terms of natural and Christian philosophy.

Barth was sharply reminded of the consequences of this sinful disposition when he witnessed his own theological allies subtly succumbing to anthropocentric theology during the ominous rise of National Socialism in Germany. His Church Dogmatics was politically and theologically motivated and presented his charge that theological truth can only be revealed by the source of that truth. His dogmatic theology found strong and

93 precise foundation in his work on St. Anselm. With Anselm in hand Barth uttered a strong caution that only God can reveal God and that the first job of the theologian is to listen and obey his authority. Moreover, dogmatic method does not rely upon or employ any a priori ability or universally available religious feeling. It is not structured upon any system but reflects a continually renewed experience of God’s revelation organized by the Church’s existing authoritative categories. In all of it, God as the content of theology can only be known as God in the disposition of humble prayer.

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CHAPTER THREE: KENOTIC CHRIST

A story is told in which Professor Barth woke a dozing student, calling on him give answer to the current question. Surprised and disoriented, the student said Jesus! only to find that despite his slumber, he was exactly correct. Perhaps this story lies behind Rick Wadholms informal summation of the Church Dogmatics: The answer is

Jesus. What was the question?1 If in fact his suggestion has any merit, this chapter may be set in the wrong place — for only after we have treated the dogmatic method are we addressing what informs it: the acts and disposition of Christ.

For Barth, the particular fact, or event, of Jesus Christ informs the method and results of theological investigation. As we have seen, the Swiss professor rejected the tendency to systematize based on a priori principles. Dogmatics is not the deduction of specific truths from general ones but inductive in nature.2 That is, it is grounded in and springs from the specific work and person of Jesus Christ.3 Dogmatics must be

1. Rick Wadholm, “Barth and Jesus,” I Heart Barth Blog, entry posted February 24, 2013, https://iheartbarth.wordpress.com/2013/02/24/barth-and-jesus (accessed February 16, 2015). Wadholm is a pastor and instructs in Old Testament studies at Providence Theological Seminary. He is used here for illustrative purposes only. 2. CD II/1, 602. See Price, 103. 3. According to Pannenberg, 1:45-47, 51-52, 118, 242-244, Barth’s treatment of the human perception of natural and special revelation (outside of Christ) as rebellion is inaccurate. It is not pride or rebellion asserting itself but a growing and progressing experience of God in the world. The variety of revelations, both in form and content, given over the course of history serve to make God known to all people. The problem is not God’s revelation itself but its elevation as an infallible source held only by those in authority. While Barth located the problems surrounding the notion of infallible scriptures, Pannenberg claimed that he still only offered another general truth claim with his ‘Word of God’ theology and never really thought inductively. Moreover, “appeal to the Word of God excludes any form of legitimation” (Macken, 92). Pannenberg left room for scientific observation and rational argumentation based on his assertion against Barth that God is free to demonstrate himself outside of the confession of faith (52). Barth felt that natural sciences as exact science provided valuable information but fell down when they inevitably began constructing worldviews (CD III/2, 23-25). Pannenberg may not have put appropriate emphasis on the real bias against God, even in the noble scientist. Those who witness miracles, like the Pharisees in John 9, make every excuse not to see God at work.

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Christology and only Christology at its centre.4 But this center is not to be discovered and refined into an interpretive key. We cannot make it the centre of a system5 or a principle that we can control.6 Rather, dogmatics as Christology is the observation and description of Gods self-revelation, and therefore His work and dealings with us [that establishes] Jesus Christ as the positive relation which has now been once for all effected between God and man: Gods gracious lordship over men.7 In other words, the acts of

Jesus Christ, insofar as they generate the content of Christology, reveal the simple, principal truth that God is Lord of humankind.

Gods reconciliation of himself with humankind is his freedom to be who he is — the two cannot be separated. The notion of darkness and peril used to describe humanitys sin is the consequence of its rejection of God as Lord. Yet that is who he is, and, who he cannot fail to be. To speak of God as one who loves is to recognize the motivation for that loving disposition as lodged in Gods core identity. His love [however] is not merely a disposition but an act, an active measure in relation to it.8 Gods free decision to love his creatures in Jesus Christ is the commitment to and practical establishment of himself as their Lord. Jesus human life, therefore, was the positive expression of Gods identity.

At every point his actions were governed by this goal. In this way he was the act of Gods

4. CD I/2, 872; cf. CD IV/1, 18. 5. CD I/2, 872. 6. CD I/2, 877. See Marc Cortez, “What Does it Mean to Call Karl Barth a ‘Christocentric’ Theologian?” Scottish Journal of Theology 60, no. 1 (May 2007): 127-143; see especially 137. 7. CD I/2, 871; emphasis added. “The fundamental flaw characterizing both liberals and the more conservative salvation-history school in interpreting revelation was their failure to be radically and consistently christocentric in viewing all of history in the light of Jesus Christ.” David L. Mueller, Foundation of Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Reconciliation: Jesus Christ Crucified and Risen, Toronto Studies in Theology 54 (Queenston, ON: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), 228. 8. CD IV/1, 71.

96 atonement. In one event Jesus demonstrated both Gods disposition of love towards humankind and the proper disposition of humankind towards God, thereby expressing in both directions the foundational truth that God is Lord.9

In a very important way, dogmatics is Christology not merely in its reflection on the acts of Jesus Christ but also in its reflection of his disposition. My main argument is that for Barth dogmatics is kenotic in execution: it specifically reflects the servant- character of Christ identified in Philippians 2:6 as having not regarded equality with God as something to be exploited.10 Christs particular acts of obedience, as witnessed in

Scripture, are what form both the content and character of Barths dogmatics. In this sense, the Swiss theologians Christology is a response to and departure from the autonomy of the Enlightenment. Having found a foothold for this departure in his study of Anselm, I suggest in this chapter that Barth gave priority to the Christ who did not seek equality with God because that particular depiction of Christ is the embodiment of

Anselms starting point: confession of God as that beyond which no greater thing can be conceived. That is, Jesus life was the actualized confirmation of Gods ontological priority and the means through which it can be accessed.

Toward that point, this chapter will look specifically at Barths Christology in two main sections: 1) as an act that 2) reveals a disposition. The first section works towards

Barths vision of perfect covenant partnership by examining Christ as the unveiling of

God, the God for and with us, and the revealer of true humanity. These particular points

9. “In this name two worlds meet and go apart, two planes intersect, the one known and the other unknown.” Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 29. 10. NRSV.

97 underscore the content of Barths doctrine of reconciliation as the establishment Gods lordship and provide a context from which to look specifically at kenotic character. The second section, then, will develop the disposition of Christ as a correlate of Anselms first principle for theological investigation. It will look specifically at Barths reading of the

Garden of Gethsemane together with his understanding of servant as Lord and lowliness as proper to Gods nature. So, having given the answer, we turn now to the questions.

Act

Jesus As the Unveiling of God

Römerbrief, the Pastor of Safenwil’s ‘theological bombshell,’ earned its strong billing because of its insistence upon God’s prerogative to set the agenda for revelation.

“Faith,” Barth asserted, “grips reason by the throat and strangles the beast… by holding on to God’s word and by accounting it right.”11 His point, and his point of departure in

1921, as we have seen, was that the anthropological starting points inherent to the liberal tradition12 were insufficient for the gravity of the theological task.

The truth, in fact, can never be self-evident, because it is a matter neither of historical nor of psychological experience. Therefore it is not accessible to our perception: it can neither be dug out of what is unconsciously within us, nor apprehended by devout contemplation, nor made known by the manipulation of occult psychic powers. These exercises, indeed, render it the more inaccessible. It can neither be taught nor handed down by tradition, nor is it a subject of research. Were it capable of such treatment, it would be universally significant, it would not be the righteousness of God for the whole world, salvation for all men. Faith is conversion: it is the radically new disposition of the man who stands naked before

11. Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 144. 12. Some of Barth’s direct critiques of liberalism in The Epistle to the Romans can be located on 367, 370, 479. He is also skeptical of biblicists (439) and those who glory in a religion of the cohesive society/state (462).

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God and has been wholly impoverished that he may procure the one pearl of great price. Faith in Jesus is to feel and comprehend the unheard of love-less love of God, to do the ever scandalous and outrageous will of God, to call upon God in His incomprehensibility and hiddenness.13

Though the details were modified and adapted throughout his career, Barth’s arch-theme was established in these lines. God must reveal himself, and by virtue of his self- revelation in Jesus Christ, create the unique condition whereby he can be received in faith.

Critical to Barth’s thought at this juncture was his depiction of God as ‘hidden’ and ‘inaccessible.’ In his mind, any notion of penetrating God’s hiddenness misses the point entirely. In fact, the illusion that God can be known directly is exactly the deception of sin. “Deceit runs its full course, because men do not perceive that the necessity of independent human action is what should not be in the presence of God.”14 Put another way, if God is in any way worthy of his title, then he cannot be on equal footing with his creatures. For this reason God’s revelation in Jesus Christ is a warning. His life and death mark out clearly the separation of God and humanity;15 in the form of a slave who was crucified, he offers the utter contrast to, and so condemns, “every claim to genius and every human heroic… possibility.”16 In the same moment and by the same means, however, Christ is both God’s answer to the problem of separation and, so in, the revelation of his gracious character. “In Jesus God is known to be the unknown God.

[His] creative word… calls men out of the chaos of independent personality…. [I]t raises

13. Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 98-99; cf. CD I/1, 194. 14. Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 253; emphasis added. 15. Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 100-101. 16. Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 97.

99 the sinner from his depth and dethrones the righteous from his height.”17 Jesus, therefore, is the revelation of God from which the call for a new disposition in human character issues.

More than a decade after Römerbrief’s second edition, Barth opened the Church

Dogmatics from a similar starting place. Knowledge of God takes place in the dialectic of giving and receiving. Any talk about God must be based in what God has given. “He it is through whose faithfulness the corresponding faithfulness of His partner is awakened and takes place.”18 In other words, dogmatics is made possible both by the source material given and in the act of giving whereby God acknowledges and activates the receiver. All of this is accomplished in the giving of Jesus Christ. “To the extent that dogmatics… measures talk about God in Jesus Christ, in the event of the divine action corresponding to the promise given to the Church, it is possible for it to be knowledge of the truth.”19

Because the giver creates the possibility for the receiver, the truth that is received

“guarantees that divine certainty cannot become human security.”20 Instead, the very character of the giving demands a surrender and obedience. This takes place only in the context of the Church, as the community created by the giving of Jesus Christ.21 The

Church is that entity which hears God’s call in Christ; it neither supplies the content nor sets the standard but receives in obedience. “This obedience to the call of Christ is faith.”22

17. Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 114. 18. Barth, The Humanity of God, 48. A quote from 1956 confirming Barth’s early position. 19. CD I/1, 12. 20. CD I/1, 12. 21. Cf. Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, 92. 22. CD I/1, 17. “In faith, the particular relation and union which God has established on earth between Himself and His people actually attains its goal on the man-ward side. Therefore everything which goes to make up the Christian attitude is really grounded in faith and is a form or work of faith.” CD III/3, 246.

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Faith, then, is the disposition of reception necessary to and created by the spoken

Word of God. One of Karl Barth’s most substantial (and provocative) contributions to twentieth-century theology was his understanding of the Word of God. For him, God’s

Word is not strictly the item, or media, in which revelation is contained. Rather, the

Scriptures and preaching are both creaturely media “about God in which and through which God speaks about Himself”23 – “indistinguishable from God’s direct speech and hence from God Himself.”24 Barth constructed his doctrine of the Word of God in this matter in order to emphasize the priority and authority of God.

Gods Word means that God speaks Gods Word is not a thing to be described nor a term to be defined. It is neither a matter nor an idea. It is not a truth, not even the very highest truth. It is the truth as it is Gods speaking person. Understanding the Word of God not as proclamation and Scripture alone but as Gods revelation in proclamation and Scripture, we must understand it in its identity with God Himself. Gods revelation is Jesus Christ, the Son of God.25

God’s giving of himself generates Scripture and in a similar way creates faith.26 God himself has confronted humanity on its own plane and in its own time by speaking his

Word as Jesus Christ.27 More than this, he has rejected the possibility of being named or defined in any other way than that which he determines for himself.28 The witnesses to

God’s Word wrote down what they saw, heard, and touched29 — they encountered God’s self-definition and were changed as a result. A biblical witness’s authority, therefore, derives solely “in the fact that he claims no authority for himself, that his witness

23. CD I/1, 95; cf. 109, 115. 24. CD I/1, 305. 25. CD I/1, 136, 137; emphasis original. 26. “Revelation comes vertically from heaven.” CD I/1, 329. 27. CD I/1, 118, 133. 28. CD I/1, 307. 29. See 1 John 1:1, 3-4. CD I/2, 21, describes it as “nothing but the stammering, inadequate expression of their initial and basic awareness.”

101 amounts to letting that other itself be its own authority.”30 “To have experience of God’s

Word is to yield to its supremacy.”31

Therein, for Barth, is the critical role of the Word of God to create faith. “Faith is man’s answer to [God’s] historical existence and nature and action of God.”32 It presents itself as a possibility only if the One in whom faith must be placed is actually revealed.

When God exercises his prerogative to speak, he reveals who he is: something beyond the inherent knowledge of human beings.33 Moreover, he calls for an “understanding, a personal involvement, an acceptance, an assent, an approval, a making present of remote times, an obedience, a decision, a holding before the mystery … [and] a basing of man’s whole life on this mystery that is beyond himself.”34 Because God gives definition to himself in his Word, he also gives definition to human beings, allowing them to know and be who they really are35 by setting aside impotent disobedience36 and conforming to

God. In this way faith makes the individual “capable of corresponding in his own decision to the decision God has made about him.”37 God creates faith because he offers himself, or, the key information to which faith is the correct response. Put the other way around, by calling for the attitude of faith in response to God’s Word, God’s Word creates the circumstance for which faith is possible and necessary.38 In sum, “to acquire a

30. CD I/1, 112. I have quoted Barth directly here because of the subtle reflection of the language of Philippians 2:6 in reference to the character of the Apostles. Bernard Ramm, After Fundamentalism: The Future of Evangelical Theology (San Francisco: Harper & Row Publishers, 1983), 103, notes the similarity between Barth and English theologian L. D. Thornton in their understanding of the connection between the humiliation of the Son of God and the earthy, humiliated character of the Holy Scriptures. 31. CD I/1, 206. 32. Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, 28. 33. CD I/1, 223. Barth identifies the Trinity as the wellspring of revelation precisely because it is beyond the imagination of the witnesses (303-304). 34. CD I/1, 219; emphasis added. Cf. 201. 35. CD I/1, 198; cf. 240. 36. CD I/1, 196. 37. CD I/1, 240. 38. This may explain the somewhat difficult phrase: “Faith… is the making possible of knowledge

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Lord is to acquire what man does in God when he receives His revelation.”39

Barth’s subsequent use of the dialectic of veiling and unveiling added a significant layer to his doctrine of the Word of God. It is particularly important because it forms the context in which Barth could describe the servant-Christ’s revelation of God the Lord and go on to render his doctrine of reconciliation as covenant partnership.

“What is beyond dispute is that the lordship of God discernible in the biblical revelation consists in… His permanent freedom to unveil Himself or to veil Himself.”40 As we have seen, God’s giving of himself creates faith in the one who receives it. Revelation can be the source of knowledge about God because it is his speech about himself. It is of no small significance, then, that Barth’s initial discussion of veiling and unveiling is embedded in his larger treatment of the triune God.41 God speaks as one who is triune.

His tri-unity is an impenetrable mystery in and of itself and must, for that reason, be self- defined. No one could or would discuss such a doctrine unless something in the text of

Scripture led one to it. Scripture is characteristically trinitarian precisely because it reflects the actions and effects of the triune God.42 Put the other way around, revelation describes the Trinity as act: God’s history among human beings as, “unveiling, veiling and impartation… or Easter, Good Friday and Pentecost, or Son, Father and Spirit.”43

As the unveiling of God, the Son is the manifestation of God “in the form of something He Himself is not.”44 He demonstrates God’s freedom to be who he is and define himself as such. In each episode and across every genre, revelation is the giving of

of God’s Word that takes place in the actual knowledge of it.” CD I/1, 228. 39. CD I/1, 306. 40. CD I/1, 324. 41. CD I/1, §8. 42. CD I/1, 296, 312. 43. CD I/1, 332. 44. CD I/1, 316.

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God’s self in which he produces a form and takes a step towards creation.45 Insofar as he takes this step, it “means something new in God, a self-distinction of God from

Himself.”46 (Again, God’s Word reflects in act what Trinity is in being.) In the days of

Moses, according the Barth’s exegesis, Yahweh was hidden in darkness upon Mount

Sinai; he was unknowable except in the speaking of his own name.47 “In the covenant with this people – ‘I will be their God and they shall be my people’ (Jer. 31:33) — the name of God is actualized… everything takes place that does take place through the name of Yahweh.”48 God chose to define himself in a covenant of deliverance with Israel and hence in the form of an action and in the terms of himself alongside another.

This actualization found its principal expression, Barth taught, when Jesus of

Nazareth opened his prayer by uttering ‘Father in heaven’ and affirming ‘Thy will be done.’ By manifesting a response to God’s name, the Son’s life demonstrated the triune

God’s freedom to be triune — that is, the “freedom to be unlike Himself” in this particular way.49 Also significant to this line of thinking is that God unveiled himself specifically in the act of servanthood. Jesus’ words and works hallowed the Father.

Everything he did pointed away from himself and towards to the name of the veiled God.

Yet it was offensive to his onlookers precisely because it contradicted their perspective:

Jesus was altogether ‘unlike’ their definition of God. The same perspective that led Aaron and the Israelites to worship a golden calf is the one that led Jews and Romans to despise the crucified Jesus. Namely, the one informed on all sides by “modern cultural

45. Cf. CD I/2, 10. “The event of revelation as described for us in Scripture has everywhere a natural, bodily, outward and visible component.” CD II/1, 265. 46. CD I/1, 316. 47. CD I/1, 317. 48. CD I/1, 318. 49. CD I/1, 320. See also CD I/2, 90. Jesus was Israel (humankind) in the form that it was not.

104 awareness.”50 Christ represented exactly what sin-blind eyes had always failed to see.51

God’s lordship, Barth argued, is expressed in his absolute freedom to determine and define who he is. Even as the Son who is obedient, he is Lord.52

God With Us as God For Us

Barth brought full expression to his understanding of Gods freedom and being by underlining the activity of God with us and God for us. This is well indicated in a small exegetical note immediately following the discussion of veiling and unveiling noted above. In the comprehensive formula of Paul in 2 Cor. 5:19: God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, one should not lay such stress on was that its connection with the verb reconciling is overlooked. This reconciling action of God is the being of God in Christ, but it is this reconciling action that is the being.53 Recall that

Barth identified Gods unveiling with the event of Easter. For him metaphysical categories of being are better transposed into the key of action. Any talk about veiling and unveiling, hiddenness and manifestation must be bound to the real acts of Christ with us and for us. To be sure, Gods determinations are located deep inside his hiddenness.

Yet his grace shines through despite rebellion and he will not let His hiddenness be the

50. CD I/1, 251. The golden calf, like the characterizations of God by “Modernist Protestantism,” is the well-intentioned reflection of the familiar God, distinct neither from Church proclamation nor “modern cultural awareness.” See also CD I/1, 92-93. “What is involved in Messianic expectation is not an intensifying but a sheer transcending of present political experience” (99). See also CD IV/2, 387, on Peter’s human rebuke of Jesus’ divine suffering. 51. CD I/1, 319-320. 52. CD I/1, 318; cf. CD I/2, 33. 53. CD I/1, 323; emphasis original. I have translated the Greek and tried to reflect the word order that helps make Barth’s point. Translations are ‘in single quotations.’

105 last word — that makes it all the more impossible for man in his rebellion to retain the last word. It must be so because there must be Christmas, because reconciliation must take place in the event of Gods real lordship.54 As a way of transitioning into the theme of this section, we will first turn to how Barth modified his dialectic of veiling and unveiling in the second part of the doctrine of the Word of God (1938).

To know God is to have met his presence and activity in his Son.55 In this way we understand God unveiled in the life of Jesus Christ. At the same time, however, Jesus is also the veiling of God so that God can be perceived.

Jesus Christ can reveal God because He is visible to us men as a man. His actual entry into this visibility signifies, let us remember, the entry of the eternal Word of God into veiling, into kenosis and passion. But this very veiling, kenosis and passion of the Logos, has to take place in order that it may lead to His unveiling and exaltation and so to the completion of revelation. Gods revelation without this veiling or in the form of an unknown being from another world would not be revelation but our death.56

So, on the one hand, Gods free decision to be who he is not in the Son means the truth of God is exposed in contrast to human perspective. On the other hand, and at the same time, God has decided to hide himself behind Christs humiliation (and in that sense, also, be what he is not) so that he may be known in a form familiar to man.57 This dialectic of veiling and unveiling, therefore, indicates both an obstacle and an overcoming, a holding apart and a coming together. Both instances are motivated by

Gods desire to be for us and realized in Gods action to be with us. As such, God the Son is true man: a servant,

54. CD I/2, 92. 55. CD I/2, 19. 56. CD I/2, 36; emphasis removed. 57. CD I/2, 38.

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equal to us as a creature, as a human individual, but also equal to us in the state and condition into which our disobedience has brought us. And in being what we are He is Gods Word. Thus as one of us, yet the one of us who is Himself Gods Word in person, He represents God to us and He represents us to God. In this way He is Gods revelation to us and our reconciliation to God.58

Why can God accomplish these things in being who he is not? Ironically, because it is who he has always been. According to Barth, we will never understand how God condescends. Nevertheless, the Scriptures witness of a triune God reveals that in His one nature [He] is not solitary but different in His modes of existence because He is the

Father who has an only-begotten Son, therefore the fact that he can be free for others, that

He can be free for a reality different from Himself, is eternally grounded within God

Himself.59 He can be with us in Jesus Christ because he has been for us from eternity.

Barth brought greater depth to this understanding as he dealt with being, act, and love in the first part of his Doctrine of God (1940). As we have already seen in the doctrine of the Word of God, anything that can be said about Gods being must be said in reference to his reconciling action. This action was carried out in the person and work of

Jesus Christ, who, as Gods Word spoken to human witnesses, generated the forms of

Gods Word. But what does all of this indicate about the essence of God? For Barth, peering into Gods essence is a task fraught with difficulty. He began in a familiar place:

58. CD I/2, 151. George Hunsinger, “Karl Barth’s Christology: It’s Basic Chalcedonian Character,” in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, 134, 138, and Hans Vium Mikkelson, Reconciled Humanity: Karl Barth in Dialogue (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2010), 148-150, argue that the Chalcedonian pattern joining very God and very man in the person of Jesus Christ honors both Alexandrian and Antiochian christologies while stressing the enhypostasis wherein the eternal logos produces and sustains the dependent but genuine human nature. 59. CD I/2, 34. Cf. CD III/2, 218-220, where Barth uses the term analogia relationis to explains the relationship of God and his people as the correlative of God’s being as Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

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God is who He is in His works.60 That is to say, Gods actions have provided human witnesses access to his being. A careful distinction must be made, however, about the priority of being over action: God would still be who he is even without the actions he has taken. If he is God, he is so in the sense that his works are contingent upon who he wills to be, and not the other way around. God is complete in himself and chooses to act in a way that reflects who he is — but always in that order. This becomes especially important when talking about Gods very essence as love. At any rate, Gods actions are the only means by which God gives us Himself to see.61 We see him in the form of

Jesus Christ.62 The biblical account of his historical life contains the specific, concrete event of Gods revelation. It was not any event, not events in general but an event that took place once and for all, and an accomplished fact.63 It alone reflects exactly the fullness and the limit of who God is.64

60. CD II/1, 260. 61. CD II/1, 261. 62. Cf. CD I/2, 163-165, 188; CD III/2, 70, 148; and CD IV/2, 49, 65-66, 91. “In all of this we are again describing the enyhypostasis or anhypostasis” (91). “He, the divine Subject carries and determines the divine essence, and not conversely. It is not really an accident, then that we are not told that the Godhead, the divine nature, the divine essence became flesh (Jn. 1:14)…. This is done by the divine Subject in and with His divine essence, by the One who exists and is and is actual, God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and therefore in specie God the Son. It is only as this happens, in the act of this Subject, that there takes place this union of divine and human essence…. Only the Son of God counts, He who adds human essence to His divine essence, thus giving it existence and uniting both in Himself” (65-66). See Andy Alexis-Baker, “Theology is Ethics: How Karl Barth Sees the Good Life,” Scottish Journal of Theology 64, no. 4 (November 2011): 429-430. 63. CD II/1, 263, 262. Cp. Brunner’s similar treatment of this theme: Emil Brunner, The Mediator: A Study of the Central Doctrine of the Christian Faith, trans. Olive Wyon (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1947), 29-39, 209-212; Truth as Encounter, 2nd ed., trans. David Cairns (London: SCM Press, 1964), 90; Our Faith, 65; The Christian Doctrine of Creation and Redemption, vol. 2 of Dogmatics, trans. Olive Wyon (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1979). 9. 64. Ramm, 110, explains that to Barth the efforts of historical critics to reconstruct the scene of any particular Biblical account are valuable only as a preliminary step. “Only Holy Scripture, as it stands, without reconstruction, is the primal witness to revelation.” This perspective of Barth’s explains what was behind his answer to Carl F. H. Henry, [Confessions of a Theologian: An Autobiography (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1986), 210-211] in 1962 at George Washington University. Henry asked about the possibility of a news report on the day of the resurrection. The tired Swiss professor’s terse response about the distinction between Christianity today and yesterday (about which he later apologized) meant to Henry that the

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Barths hope in this very focused discussion of Gods being as act was that God never be turned into an abstraction. For this reason he argued that Gods transcendence must be kept in strict balance with his immanence.65 The divine being must be allowed to transcend both spirit and nature, yet also to overlap and comprehend both, as attested in His revelation according to the testimony of the Holy Scripture.66 God must not be found in any other place or by any other method than the one he has supplied. On the one hand, he cannot be deduced from philosophical tenets. If established by logic, he becomes nothing more than an abstraction. As such, he is neither person nor love except by some human criteria he is forced to meet.67 On the other hand, if he is construed as contingent upon his earthly acts, then a similar abstraction takes place: his essence becomes defined entirely as the response he makes to the human problem of sin. In other words, he is who he is based solely on the circumstances of his act to reconcile and not his own original freedom. In neither case, Barth concludes, can this abstraction be called

historical “Jesus… appeared only to believers and not to the world. Barth correlated the reality of the resurrection only with personal faith.” He is only partly correct. Jesus both appeared and was resurrected in the actual, historical sense, However, Barth would insist that only those who receive the Word of God spoken in Scripture, as it is spoken in Scripture, and thus demonstrate the obedience created by God’s spoken Word, can apprehend him. God creates faith by His spoken Word and must do so because any news report on the events of God’s action would be, by virtue of the human disposition, changed to exclude the possibility of miracle. “ ‘Historical’ knowledge in this impartiality is never a simple and self-evident matter, because none of us is really impartial.” CD IV/2, 150. See George Hunsinger, “Postcritical Scriptural Interpretation: Rudolf Smend on Karl Barth,” in Thy Word is Truth: Barth on Scripture, 29-48, for an excellent essay on Barth’s perspective on historical criticism toward this point. See also Carl F. H. Henry, “Barth’s Turnabout from the Biblical Norm,” Christianity Today 7, no. 7 (January 1963): 28; “Chaos in European Theology: The Deterioration of Barth’s Defenses” Christianity Today 9, no.1 (October 1964): 15-19; “The Dilemma of Facing Karl Barth.” Christianity Today 7, no. 7 (January 1963): 27-28; “The Pale Ghost of Barth.” Christianity Today 15, no. 10 (February 1971): 40-43. 65. CD II/1, 264. 66. CD II/1, 266. 67. See Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, 38. The famous ‘five proofs’ lead only to “allegedly supreme beings.” The Bible, on the other hand, “speaks of a God who proves himself on every hand.” See also CD III/2, 6-12. God cannot be made the made to correspond to a particular cosmology but must be known as he is: the maker of covenant. His covenant is the “end and meaning of creation” (12).

109 the God who is God.68 Abstraction must give way to personhood. God is a person — an

I who knows about Himself, who Himself wills, Himself disposes and distinguishes, and in this very act of His omnipotence is wholly self-sufficient.69 Everything said about him can be said because he has said it about himself. Gods being, therefore, is neither a transcendent metaphysical abstraction nor the result of a set of immanent circumstances.

Personhood is a vitally significant concept for Barth because it is only a person who loves. In his works as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the triune God has given us his name and thus his being in person.70

As it is revealed to us as the definition of that which confronts us in His revelation, this name definitely has this primary and decisive thing to say to us in all its constituents — that God is He who, without having to do so, seeks and creates fellowship between Himself and us. He does not have to do it, because in Himself without us, and therefore without this, He has that which He seeks and creates between Himself and us. It implies so to speak an overflow of His essence that He turns to us.71

In himself, God is fellowship; God is means God loves.72 Human persons are possible, therefore, only because God is a person, and, as such, a person who loves.

Creation was not a novel decision, therefore, but the will of God to be himself and to be so in this particular creative mode. Put another way, humanitys very existence is based on the overflow of Gods being. Gods perfect fellowship of love is complete in his triune self and not dependent upon the creation of a partner; his I does not require a human

68. CD II/1, 267. 69. CD II/1, 268. On personalist idealism/the personalist school see Borden Parker Bowne, Personalism, The N. W. Harris Lectures for 1907 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1908). Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Crisis, Irony, and Postmodernity 1950-2005 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 27, includes the third-generation personalist critiques of neo-orthodoxy and the Barthian movement. 70. CD II/1, 268. 71. CD II/1, 273. 72. CD II/1, 283.

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Thou. Despite this, he has created a partner as the overflow of his triune partnership.

The human partner, and the partnership s/he inhabits, is only possible because God is fundamentally a person who loves.

For this reason reconciliation parallels creation. Both are the same undertaking with reference to the being of God. In both, the work of God derives solely from who

God is: the one who chooses to be in fellowship with us. From all eternity God elected and determined that He Himself would become man for us men. From all eternity He determined that men would be those for whom He is God: His fellow-men.73

Reconciliation as an act of God made manifest in the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ was not a contingency plan and did not require God to update his fundamental disposition.74 God has not left Gods beneficent intention in such peril that

73. CD IV/1, 45. “God’s almighty power is demonstrated only inasmuch as all the operations of that power are determined by his eternal nature itself. In doing this he is entirely free, and in this freedom he is entirely himself.” Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1985), 76. Moltmann is not as distinct from Barth as he seems when he criticizes Barth’s notion of liberty in God to remain satisfied without creation (82). “God loves the world,” Moltmann claimed in almost verbatim agreement with Barth, “with the very same love which he eternally is” (85). Barth made mention of a freedom in God to choose to create in order to stress 1) that he did in fact choose to create (i.e. he directs his freedom towards us as a person who has decided to be in fellowship) and 2) that God is under no compulsion to save or create, therefore his loving character is eternal and not determined by any agenda but his own. “God’s freedom is essentially not a freedom from, but a freedom to and for…. God is free for man, free to coexist with man and, as the Lord of the covenant, to participate in his history.” Barth, The Humanity of God, 72; emphasis original. 74. According to Bruce McCormack, “Grace and Being: The Role of God’s Gracious Election in Karl Barth’s Theological Ontology” in Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008), 183-200, Barth’s significant recasting of the traditional doctrine of election did not allow for a logos asarkos eternally above and distanced from the incarnate Son who performed a very specific, historical salvific task. Everything about God is made known in the man Jesus who is elected (189-191). With the specific purpose of being for us in mind, McCormack suggests that God’s eternal decision to elect humankind is logically prior to and does not derive from the eternal Trinitarian relationship but informs it. (193-194). He suggests that Barth may not have been prepared to address this logical inconsistency in his Dogmatics because he had already developed his doctrine of the triune God in volumes antecedent to his treatment of election (195). Paul Molnar, "Can Jesus' Divinity be Recognized as 'Definitive, Authentic and Essential' if it is Grounded in Election? Just how far did the later Barth Historicize Christology?" Neue Zeitschrift Für Systematische Theologie Und Religionsphilosophie 52, no. 1 (2010): 40-81, counters by claiming that Barth did see a separation between Jesus’ humanity and divinity and left room for an eternal Son who brought a specific actualization of a preceding decision (48- 49). The relationship between the Son and the Father is witnessed in economy but flows from an eternal

111 it could be thwarted by the wavering will and vagaries of sinful human beings, but has created the actual reality of a completed partnership in which human persons can then participate.75 Barth insisted that, God loves because He loves; because this act is His being, His essence and His nature. He loves without and before realizing these purposes.76

To understand God, we must now say that He wills to be ours, and He wills that we should be His. He wills to belong to us and He wills that we should belong to Him. He does not will to be without us, and He does not will that we should be without Him. He wills certainly to be God and He does not will that we should be God. But He does not will to be God for Himself nor as God to be alone with Himself. He wills as God to be for us and with us who are not God.77

In sum, Christ is the temporal manifestation of Gods eternal being as love. Moreover, his specific person and work is the means through which, by virtue of being the Son of the Father, it is possible to know and participate in God. In other words, Jesus demonstrates at once Gods being for us by God being with us. triune identity (51). Furthermore, Molnar argues that God is not beholden to his immanent being so as to be forced to create or reconcile (53). God remains superior to his works and though he is exclusively known through them, his work of incarnation does not logically dictate his eternal being (59). Jesus is obedient because obedience is an eternal disposition. McCormack is wise to point out that what confuses the issue is the human concept of time when it comes to understanding essence and the act to be and that the two are not separated for God (McCormack, 195). Molnar is equally wise to see that what informs McCormack’s position may be an overemphasis on Barth’s insistence on knowing God through the acts of Jesus (73). Molnar, it seems, parses Barth’s very careful notion of God being free from and therefore free for us more accurately. “It is precisely because God is and remains independently free that his self-determination to be God for us, and then his actions ad extra on our behalf, have divine weight and determination in the first instance. Barth does not play off God’s independence against his self-determination to be for us; rather, he sees the one as the expression of the other.” Paul Molnar, “The Trinity, Election, and God’s Ontological Freedom: A Response to Kevin W. Hector,” in Trinity and Election in Contemporary Theology, ed. Michael T. Dempsey (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2011), 59. See also Jones, The Humanity of Christ: Christology in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, 65-66, 80-82, 131f. 75. Jeannine Michele Graham, Representation and Substitution in the Atonement Theologies of Dorothee Sölle, John Macquarrie, and Karl Barth (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 201. 76. CD II/1, 279; emphasis added. “By the perception of grace at the end of the ways of God we have been led to the perception of grace at their beginning, as the presupposition of all His ways.” CD IV/1, 44. Paul Dafydd Jones, “Barth and Anselm: God, Christ and the Atonement,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 12, no. 3 (July 2010): 260-61. In a parallel reading of Anselm and Barth, Jones claims a similar notion in Anselm’s doctrine God: God has made a decision about who he will be for human beings prior to the human need. In that way he can share himself in Christ. This lessens the severity of the demanding medieval picture of God. 77. CD II/1, 274; emphasis added.

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The Revelation of Humanity

As we have just seen, Barth described God as the One who wills as God to be for us and with us who are not God. Revelation, creation, and reconciliation are all the overflow of the eternal fact that God is God.78 He has chosen to establish fellowship with humankind because in his essence he is a person who loves. The fellowship inherent to

His essence as triune God is the ground and basis of his fellowship with humankind. In order to understand this fellowship of God and humankind more fully, and in good

Barthian fashion, we must realize also that God is the One who wills as God to be for us and with us who are not God.79 Jesus Christ, as we have seen, is the actual revelation that God is for us the embodiment of the divine will to save.80 His humanity is as much God as it is with us, not merely [by] the repetition and reflection of His divinity, or of Gods controlling will [but] the repetition and reflection of God Himself, no more and no less. It is the image of God, the imago Dei.81

At the same time, however, Christs revelation really and finally separates God and man by bringing them together. For by bringing them together it informs man about

God and about himself, it reveals God as the Lord and characterizes man as a creature, as a sinner, as [the] one devoted to death82 who wants to explain and excuse and justify

78. Cf. CD III/1, 369. 79. CD II/1, 274; emphasis added to the same citation in different places in order to stress two parts of the same idea. This is what I mean by ‘good Barthian fashion.’ 80. CD III/2, 147. 81. CD III/2, 219. 82. CD I/2, 29; emphasis added.

113 himself, to be in the right against God.83 Consider the two possibilities available to humans as they evaluate their own condition. The first is that they possess the necessary faculties and resources with which to accurately assess themselves and God. A clear reading of the cosmos is possible and, by it, a thorough self-understanding may be devised. The other possibility is that some impediment exists that prevents human beings from knowing the truth. If the first possibility is the case, then there is no need question human ability. If the second possibility is true, however, then whatever self- understanding is produced is necessarily inaccurate. Except the problem is bigger than that. If the self-understanding is incorrect, then, by virtue of it being incorrect, it does not account for anything like an impediment and cannot possibly determine that it is incorrect. It goes on being incorrect and cannot produce what is correct and thus expose its error by contrast.84 Theologically, the circumstance can be expressed thus: how can someone who is sinful possibly know it? For Barth, unless some assessment is made of the potential impact of human depravity on religious thought, we cannot assess the rectitude of our thinking.85 An accurate anthropology hinges on the Word of God to provide the definition of human nature in contrast to its misunderstanding — or, sight to the blind.

For this reason the starting points of a proper human self-understanding are

83. CD IV/1, 258. 84. “Error, indeed, is never set forth in its naked deformity, lest, being thus exposed, it should at once be detected. But it is craftily decked out in an attractive dress, so as, by its outward form, to make it appear to the inexperienced (ridiculous as the expression may seem) more true than the truth.” Irenaeus Against Heresies 1.Preface. 2 (ANF 1:315). 85. Ramm, After Fundamentalism, 18; cf. Price, 125-127. “He does not think there is anything the matter with him because one of the things that is the matter with him is that does not think that there is anything the matter with him therefore we have to help him realize that, the fact that he does not think there is anything the matter with him is one of the things that is the matter with him.” R. D. Laing. Knots, vol. 7 of Selected Works of R. D. Laing (Routledge, 2012), 5 (http://www.mylibrary.com?ID=332440>); originally published in 1969 by noted Scottish psychiatrist Ronald Laing (1927 – 1989).

114 fellowship and the rejection of self-sufficiency. We know of man — only of man, but of man from the Word of God — that his being on earth and under heaven is wholly determined and created in order that God should speak with him and that he should hear and answer.86 The ground and basis of human creation is Gods will for fellowship. Yet his Word is foreign to human ears. It clashes with human understanding and contains something that is disturbing and unwelcome. The revelation of God does not show us man as we wish to see him, in the wholeness of his created being, but in its perversion and corruption.87 By its very utterance Gods Word indicates that there is another; it calls for fellowship where there is autonomy and humility where there is pride.88 It uncomfortably contradicts our error and prevents us from understanding ourselves89 by our own criteria. Moreover, it did so in concrete form. Time and again Jesus Christ spoke this discomforting word as he made his way to a criminals death. He undercut the

Pharisees in their rigid execution of the law by lifting up the sinner and taking the hand of the sick.90 He shocked his disciples by offering to wash their feet and predicting his own death. He repulsed the philosophers for whom his cross was nothing but foolish weakness.91 Gods Word in the flesh consisted and consists in the fact that He is wholly the Fellow-man of us His fellows; wholly the Neighbour of us His Neighbours.92

The humanity of Jesus consists in His being for man. From the fact that this example is binding in humanity generally there follows the broad definition that

86. CD III/2, 17. 87. CD III/2, 26. 88. “As man, as the creature of God, he is able and ordained to render assistance to his fellow-man and to receive it from him.” CD III/2, 262. 89. CD III/2, 30. 90. CD III/2, 210, 42. 91. CD III/2, 240-241. Barth mentions Goethe and Nietzsche especially in this regard. 92. CD IV/2, 432; cf. CD IV/1, 240.

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humanity absolutely, the humanity of each and every man, consists in the determination of mans being as a being with others, or rather with the other man. It is not as he is for himself but with others, not in loneliness but in fellowship, that he is genuinely human, that he achieves true humanity, that he corresponds to his determination to be Gods covenant partner, that he is the being for which the man Jesus is, and therefore real man.93

Everything about Jesus life was self-giving and in that way it provided the contrast needed to identify sin and pinpoint true humanity.

Christ demonstrated what is proper to human nature by being what humans are not and in so doing also expressed the essence of God. There one fundamental truth: God is God. It cannot be otherwise. The root of human sin is, simply but devastatingly, the negation of this truth. It is expressed in the assertion of human beings to take the place of

God for themselves —to be like God, knowing good and evil.94 Human negation of the fundamental truth does not alter or destroy it, but merely asserts the negation as a truth when it is not.95 God is God becomes God is not God, and by consequence, those who are not God act as though they are. The human negation treats what is exactly wrong as right and as the basis for human life chooses the inhumanity of isolation. If I choose myself in my isolation from other men, Barth reasoned, eo ipso I enter the sphere of the

93. CD III/2, 243. 94. “You may act as if you were God, you may with ease take his righteousness under your own management. This is certainly pride.” Barth, “The Righteousness of God,” in The Word of God and the Word of Man, 17, (1916). 95. “Outside the sphere of God’s will there can be only the pure, negative nothing to which we are already referred. … Again, of course, there is the desire to escape. But there is no goal where this desire can be realized.” CD II/1, 556, 557. See Wolf Krötkek, Sin and Nothingness in the Theology of Karl Barth. ed. and trans. P. G. Ziegler and C. M. Bammel, Studies in Reformed Theology and History, New Series 10 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Theological Seminary, 2005). Adam J. Johnson, God's Being in Reconciliation: The Theological Basis of the Unity and Diversity of the Atonement in the Theology of Karl Barth (London: T & T Clark, 2012), 148-150, aptly points out that the one negation results in sin that is multiform in a practical sense because of the variety of specific divine attributes/actions that can be perverted.

116 even more terrible isolation in which God can no longer be my God.96 Jesus Christs life negated the negation.97 He did not try to be God after the fashion of humans, but made it clear that the knowledge of good and evil with the possession of which man wished to become like God[,] only [causes them] to fall into misery and to become alien to the grace of God.98 For we are not God. Indeed we are not. But God is man.99 As a man, he utterly redefined what it meant to be human by relying on his fellows and being relied upon by them. Christ served where humanity consumed; Christ did not seek equality with

God where they demanded it.100 He did not offer them the God they envisioned — the one they expected to strike his abuser or lead an army against Rome — but negated their error by giving them what in their eyes was not God.101

At the same time, and in the same person, he expressed Gods very essence: a person who loves. “The fact that from all eternity God pitied and received man, the grounding of the fellow-humanity of Jesus in the eternal covenant executed in time in His being for man, rests on the freedom of God in which there is nothing arbitrary or accidental but in which God is true to Himself.”102 A negation of a negation produces a positive balance. In other words, Jesus lowly disposition only registered as peculiar to

96. CD IV/2, 442. 97. CD IV/1, 142-143, 256-257. 98. CD II/1, 130; cf. CD IV/1, 220, 231-235. For a contrasting perspective on sin see Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1960); The Nature and Destiny of Man, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1955); and Bruce A. Milne, “The Idea of Sin in Twentieth-Century Theology,” Tyndale Bulletin 26 (January 1975): 3-33. 99. CD II/1, 151. 100.“He thus enters on His lordship by becoming the slave of God and man.” CD III/2, 311. Tom Greggs, Theology Against Religion: Constructive Dialogues with Bonhoeffer and Barth (New York: T & T Clark, 2011), 123, describes exactly Barth’s position, it seems, when he draws his own conclusion that a ‘soteriology against religion’ is found in Jesus Christ’s demonstration of real humanity by not seeking to make an idol of himself. 101. See especially the excursus of CD IV/2, §64.3.2 (166-192) with regard to Christ’s revolutionary life. 102. CD III/2, 218.

117 his fellows because their concept of God was exactly incorrect.103 God is always God in the way he is, even when — especially when — he appeared in the unexpected form of

not God in Christ.104 All his actions, no matter how they may be perceived, correspond to the fundamental truth that he is God. What is right for him is right for humankind.105

Divinity and humanity can coincide in Christ because all of his activity is Gods love.106

In Christ, therefore, we know God and we know ourselves; he reveals divinity and humanity.

Perfect Covenant Partnership

At its core, Barths understanding of Jesus Christs work can be summed thus:

God becomes man in order that man may — not become God, but come to God.107 The

Swiss theologians response to the problem of sin is well captured by Albert Einsteins keen insight: we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking that created them.108

Humanitys claim or effort to become God is the problem of sin; its difficulty identifying

103. Cf. CD II/1, 157. 104. CD IV/1, 186. 105. CD III/2, 32; cf. CD IV/1, 19. 106. CD III/2, 207. 107. CD IV/2, 106; emphasis added. Cp. CD I/1, 458; Athanasius: “For He was made man that we might be made God; and He manifested Himself by a body that we might receive the idea of the unseen Father; and He endured the insolence of men that we might inherit immortality.” Incarnation of the Word 54.3 (NPNF2 4:65); similarly: Ireneaus Against Heresies 5. Preface (ANF 1:526); Clement of Alexandria Exhortation to the Heathen 1 (ANF 2:174); Origen Against Celsus 3.28 (ANF 4:475); Hippolytus The Refutation of all Heresies 10.30 (ANF 5:153); Basil of Caesarea On the Spirit 9.23 (NPNF2 8:16); Gregory of Nazianzus Orations 30.14 (NPNF2 7:315); Theophilus To Autolycus 3.27 (ANF 2:105), denies that God has made humankind immortal and thus God and asserts, rather, that God supplied everlasting life as a response to sin; Augustine On the Psalms 50.2 (NPNF1 8:178) distinguishes between the substance of God in Christ and his act to adopt his co-heirs and thus make them ‘gods;’ Thomas Aquinas Opuscula 57.1-4 (quoted in Catechism of the Catholic Church (1995), §460), refers also to ‘gods’ when he says Christ gave share in the divine nature. 108. This saying attributed to the famous physicist is likely a paraphrase. See Michael Amrine, “‘The Real Problem is in the Hearts of Men;’ Professor Einstein says a new type of thinking is needed to meet the challenge of the atomic bomb.” New York Times Magazine, June 23, 1946, SM4.

118 the true God lays this bare. The solution must, therefore, involve them becoming who they are.

In so far as He was and is and will be very man, the conversion of man to God took place in Him, the turning and therefore the reconciliation of all men, the fulfillment of the covenant. And in the light of Jesus Christ the man who is still not free in relation to limitation and suffering, who is still not exalted, who is still lowly (lowly, as it were, in abstracto), can be understood only as false man — just as in the light of Jesus Christ the empty loveless gods which are incapable of condescension and self-humiliation can be understood only as false gods.109

Human beings become who they are when God is God and they are not. They find both of these truths expressed in Jesus Christ, the perfect covenant partner.

In order to take what is really a small, final step to covenant partnership only a brief summary of the ground we have covered thus far is necessary namely, Gods unveiling, his essential being, his being for us and with us, and finally his revelation of true human nature in Jesus Christ. Barth described Gods essence as a person who gives

— a person who, in himself, is for us in fellowship. The very creation of humankind is a free act of Gods will to be who he is alongside a human partner. Toward this end, he unveiled his name and character in his determination to have fellowship with Israel in the words of the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel: I will be your God, and ye shall be my people.110 In this declaration God set out the basic terms of existence. He expressed that he was for us by reaching out and being with us. Where God kept up his terms, however, the people failed to keep theirs. Ye shall be my people, wrote Barth of Gods perspective on the second covenant-clause, means that it is proper to you and required of you in your being, life and activity to correspond to the fact that in My being, life and

109. CD IV/1, 132. 110. CD IV/1, 22.

119 activity for I am your God.111 Gods self-offering has been consistently rejected in the failure of human beings to recognise God as God, and his will as a will of love.112

Human beings transgressed their proper status and role as people by trying to imagine and construct a man in himself, and to regard his destiny to give thanks to God as something which is his own power, a matter of his own freedom of choice [when] [t]he real freedom of man is decided by the fact that God is his God.113 Then spoke forth the eternal Word of God in the form and flesh of a man. In Christ, the weakness and godlessness and sin and enmity of the world are shown to be a lie.114 The Son of God among his fellows acted in a way that completely baffled them. He was for them when they were against each other and even when they were against him.115 In Jesus was witnessed the very essence of God: to give to others and not to take — to live for them and with them instead of in greed and insolation. Obedience and thanksgiving permeated his life.116

In all of this he expressed the fellowship inherent to human existence. What is more, by this very expression he confessed that God is right.117 Jesus accepted the original terms of Gods covenant; with his tangible demonstration of obedience he affirmed that man is the friend of God and not His enemy. Representing all others in

Himself, [Jesus] is the human partner of God in this new covenant — He in the

111. CD IV/1, 42. 112. CD IV/1, 73. 113. CD IV/1, 43. 114. CD IV/1, 76, 502. 115. CD IV/1, 72. 116. CD IV/1, 35, 41. 117. CD IV/1, 15, 306-311; cf. Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 144; and CD III/3, 261.

120 authenticity, validity and force of His suffering and dying.118 Thus, for Barth, Gods grace consists in the fact that He causes the promise and command of the covenant: I will be your God and ye shall be my people, to become historical event in the person of

Jesus Christ.119

As very God and very man He is the concrete reality and actuality of the divine command and the divine promise, the content of the will of God which exists prior to its fulfillment, the basis of the whole project and actualization of creation and the whole process of divine providence from which all created being and becoming derives. Certainly the sin of man contradicts this first and eternal Word of God. But in the first and eternal Word of God the sin of man is already met, refuted and removed from all eternity.120

Dogmatics — what can and ought to be said about God and his people — is Christology.

Disposition

If the preceding section could be likened to the thick and, admittedly, overlapping strokes of a painted landscape, the section to follow sketches the fine details that give definition to Jesus Christs disposition. What has become clear is that in the broad strokes of Gods act to reconcile himself with his people, he has acted in a way that contradicts human expectation. He has revealed himself as someone he is not; in Christ his purposes are carried out through strange and scandalous reversal.121 This section draws out that reversal in Barths characterization of Christ as obedient servant. Moreover, it suggests that if dogmatics is Christology, then it finds not only its content in the life of Christ but its access in his character. The kenotic Christ is the exemplar of the theologian.

118. CD IV/1, 251. 119. CD IV/1, 67; cf. CD I/2, 168. 120. CD IV/1, 48. 121. CD IV/1, 239.

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A Life of Obedience: From Desert to Garden

Christs disposition of obedience to the will of the Father found no greater expression, perhaps, than in his agonizing prayer yet not my will, but yours be done in the Garden of Gethsemane.122 As the archetype of prayer, his willing submission to the

Father is the innermost centre of the covenant between God and man which is the meaning and inner basis of creation.123 Jesus disposition in Gethsemane, to be sure, is the theme of even his most routine moments. It reflects, for instance, the prayer with which he taught his disciples to pray. Most notably, the Garden of Gethsemane correlates the end of Jesus ministry to the Desert of Temptation124 at the beginning. We will look at

Barths treatments of both scenes in an effort to bring definition to Jesus as servant.

At bottom, Jesus was tempted to do one thing in desert: claim that God is wrong.

In each of the three instances of temptation Jesus was offered a tangible solution by which to meet his immediate needs. In the first instance it took the form of bread. He was offered exactly that thing which negates his purpose for being in the desert. Fasting, according to Barth, expresses mans knowledge of his unworthiness to live, his readiness to suffer the death which he has merited for his sins.125 Had Jesus eaten the bread, he would have contradicted Gods judgment of human sin by subverting his own mission.

By refusing to suffer the fast in the first moments of his ministry, he would also have

122. Mk. 14:32-42; Mt. 26:36-46; Lk. 22:39-46; (Pericope 202). 123. CD III/4, 93. 124. Mk. 1:12-13; Mt. 4:1-11; Lk. 4:1-13; (Pericopes 23-24). Barth follows the order described by Luke. 125. CD IV/1, 260.

122 been refusing to go the cross and give Himself unreservedly to be the one great sinner who allows that God is in the right.126 The second temptation was similar if not more direct. Jesus was offered immediate rule over all the kingdoms of the world. The very offer suggests that the world is fine as it is. It establishes not God but his usurper as lord and confirms the latter as the standard bearer for human conduct. In this scenario Jesus

had only to bow the knee discreetly and privately127 in order to exchange true reconciliation with God for a kingdom of personal glory. In other words, the temptation is to affirm the status quo: that God is not trustworthy in his judgments and thus not really

God. The third temptation was perhaps the most innocuous precisely because it suggested an action of supreme, unconditional, blind, absolute, total confidence in God.128 Throw yourself off the great height, Jesus was dared, and see that God will save you. Yet Jesus rejected the suggestion, not because he failed to trust God but because he trusted Gods will also to determine the time and place of its execution. What would have led Him to

[leap] here would have been His own will to make use of God in His own favour129 in

the manner and style of a human hero for His own advantage and glory.130 In each instance the tangible and reasonable temptation contains within it the most perfect kind of self-glorification, in which God is in fact most completely impressed into the service of man.131 Jesus expressed solidarity with God the Fathers plan, judgment, and timing in

126. CD IV/1, 260. 127. CD IV/1, 262. 128. CD IV/1, 263. 129. CD IV/1, 263 130. CD I/2, 157. 131. CD IV/1, 263-264; cp. 272: Satan “Himself [sic] is impressed into the service of the will of God as fulfilled in the suffering and death of Jesus.”

123 his resistance of the desert temptations.132

In the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus faced a similar but heightened form of the same temptation. The tempter did indeed return at the decisive moment. To be sure, Jesus had witnessed and confronted the kingdom of darkness all throughout his ministry. It was in Gethsemane, however, that he came face to face with the crushing reality of death that was to meet him around the next corner. Only a stones throw away his disciples laid easy with sleep. Jesus trembled. Alone and without his fellows he recognized real temptation and the quite terrible venture of obedience133 before him. The slumbering men, representative to Barth of all humanity, rested comfortably in their false knowledge of good and evil and the assertion of their rights over God. Human beings in this mode, as the sleeping disciples illustrate, do not even perceive temptation much less offer it resistance. Thus they become instruments of the power of temptation and the tempter; who could act in relation to Jesus only in the service of the will and dominion of

Satan.134 Jesuss hope was that they should see what he sees God ruling over and in and through it, and that they should do what He does, calling upon this God.135 Yet only

Jesus remained awake. Critical to Barths understanding here is the fact that Jesus really did pray to protect himself against temptation. He does not stand in contrast to the sleeping disciples because, unlike them, he could summon the resolve to face the crushing weight before him. Rather, he stands in contrast because he knew he could not;

132. See also CD III/2, 338f. for Barth’s argument that in the obedience through temptation Jesus demonstrated the unity of his soul and body. 133. Jones, The Humanity of Christ in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, 46. 229. Over and against Schleiermacher’s calm God-consciousness in Jesus. 134. CD IV/1, 266. 135. CD IV/1, 267.

124 in that moment calling on God [was] the only way to meet and defeat136 the temptation to slumber. Jesus ability to affirm Gods will was the result not of his strength but his weakness. It was not a matter of independent will power but the power of dependence found in the posture of prayer.

Through his act of prayer Jesus was indeed strengthened to this end. Yet it is only after the strengthening which comes to Jesus that we hear of his agony ([Lk. 22] v.44), of the sweat which fell to the earth like great drops of blood.137 Why, Barth wondered, does the severity of Jesus prayer increase after he is strengthened? His answer is significant. As much as Jesus recognized the pain that faced him, and was buttressed against the temptation it posed, he was more concerned with the fact that what faced him in the judgment of God unto death was to be carried out by will and instruments of Satan.

The great strain of Jesus prayer was not that he might escape death but due rather to the coming concealment of the lordship of God under the lordship of evil and evil men.138 In the shadow of his own death Jesus was concerned about the glory of God. Yet despite being a completely reasonable, completely holy motivation (not unlike the third temptation) Jesus conclusion was not my will, but your will be done.

He only prays. He does not demand. He does not advance any claims. He does not lay upon God any conditions. He does not reserve His future obedience. He does not abandon His status as a penitent. He does not cease to allow that God is in the right, even against Himself. He does not try to anticipate His justification by Him in any form, or to determine it Himself. He does not think of trying to be the judge of His own cause and in Gods cause. He prays only as a child to the Father, knowing that He can and should pray, that His need is known to the Father, is on the heart of the Father, but knowing also that the Father disposes what is possible

136. CD IV/1, 267. 137. CD IV/1, 268; emphasis added. 138. CD IV/1, 269.

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and will therefore be, and that what He allows to be will be the only thing that is possible and right.139

It is not death only, therefore, that is the sum and limit of Jesus life, but that his death was an act of complete and confident submission to the will of his Father. Moreover, in his death he expresses not only Gods historical extension of fellowship to humankind but also the fellowship inherent to God — the remarkable historical complement to the eternal decision taken in God Himself.140

Obedient Servant as Lord

The episode in Gethsemane serves to isolate and enhance Christs obedience to

God the Father. It predicts the acts of Good Fridays passion by its vivid account of Jesus disposition and decision expressed in passion the night before. In the way that it holds together disposition and act it demonstrates that what is accomplished is done so only through obedience. More precisely, it is accomplished through the relationship of dependence maintained between the Father and the Son. Divine sonship, Barth claims, must be understood in terms of Jesus calling on his Father. He is divine insofar as he is the Son to the Father. What is more, to become children of God by the means Christ provides is to follow him in the obedience of calling on the Father.141 As a first principle,

139. CD IV/1, 270. See also Alexis-Baker, 435n53, and CD IV/1, 295, on Jesus’ submission in relation to he anhypostasis-enhypostasis pairing. 140. CD IV/1, 238-239. 141. CD I/1, 458. John Webster, Barth’s Ethics of Reconciliation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 37-38, 55, 71, draws out the ethical/salvific themes of Christ’s obedience. The barriers and limitations modeled in the relationship of the Son to the Father define and create freedom for moral agents. See also Jesse Couenhoven, “Karl Barth’s Conception(s) of Human and Divine Freedom(s),” in Commanding Grace: Studies in Karl Barth’s Ethics, ed. Daniel L. Migliore (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2010), 239-255.

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Jesus of Nazareth is understood rather as the Servant of the Lord who proclaims and does the will of His heavenly Father.142 Yet the New Testament witnesses again and again attest to the unity of the Father and Son. From this Barth finds it is impossible to conclude that Jesus was merely a symbol or a divinization.143 Jesus is Lord — this is how we think we must understand the New Testament statement in concert with the ancient Church — because He has it from God whom He calls His Father to be the Lord, because with this Father of His, as the Son of this Father, as the eternal Fathers only child, He is the Lord.144

It was important for Barth not to allow his intense focus on the historical relationship of Son and Father to shift from the firm foundation of monotheism.

Accordingly, he was careful to handle the early churchs characterization of the Trinity as

persons so as not to give the impression that he was a tri-theist (or a di-theist as the case may be). As a result, he adopted the terminology of modes (or ways) of being in

God.145 On the one hand, any incorrect move to overemphasize persons or

personalities, plural, could suggest a plurality in God and corrupt the notion of perfect unity. On the other hand, Barth desired in no way to underemphasize the personhood of the triune God and construe the divine He, or rather Thou in any respect an It.146

Ironically, his intention in shifting the focus away from the term persons was intended to preserve and bring into the focus Gods being as person. For him mode highlights what

142. CD I/1, 399. 143. CD I/1, 402. 144. CD I/1, 406; emphasis original. 145. CD I/1, 355. 146. CD I/1, 351.

127 is fundamental to Gods being in act — namely, the giving of himself in and for fellowship. As a guiding concept it serves to underscore both giving and fellowship, in the episode of Gethsemane as a prime example, without the distraction the Father and

Sons independent personalities may pose to the reader. That is to say, it provides a way of defining the economic Trinity against the immanent Trinity. What is central, and still ultimately and vitally derived from the historical event of Christs prayer, is that Gods

unity is neither singularity nor isolation147 but the opposite. Moreover, Jesus disposition of obedience, humility, or any number of descriptors corresponding to his passionate prayer, is not the function of his unique personality but the concretization of

Gods unity of fellowship. The episode itself communicates above all the way God is as a person.148 Divine sonship and the notion of Jesus as Lord of humanity are not threatened by lowliness, submission, or need but in fact found in them as God brings his majesty to bear on the human predicament.149 This insight led Barth to declare in his 1956 address to the Swiss Reformed Ministers in Aarau:

Gods deity is thus no prison in which He can exist only in and for Himself. It is rather His freedom to be in and for Himself but also with and for us, to assert but

147. CD I/1, 354. 148. Robert E. Willis, The Ethics of Karl Barth (Leiden: Brill, 1971), 238-239, is critical of Barth’s Trinitarian anthropology at this point. If the defining characteristic of human nature is the relationship of one with another, or ‘I-Thou,’ then in his estimation Barth’s use of ‘modes’ of the Trinity is too impersonal and contradicts the Father-Son relationship as an analogy of the human-human and God- human relationship. By stressing the ‘modes of being’ within the one person of God to emphasize unity, Barth has diminished the cogency of his argument for a perfect relationship between the subjective centers of the Father and Son. Willis’ parsing of Barth’s doctrine of the Trinity is insightful on this point but may have characterized the ‘modes’ as impersonal to a greater degree than Barth intended. The modes of God’s being reflect personality precisely because they are at the same time practically unified persons. As an analogy the ‘I-Thou’ relationship of Father and Son is supposed to demonstrate to humans a dissolving of separation not its maintenance. Johnson, God's Being in Reconciliation, 74-78, lays stress on the idea that the persons of the Trinity known in the work of Christ are always set on a trajectory of oneness. This does not eliminate persons in relation but creates the only context in which relation is not impersonal. See also Cortez, “What Does it Mean to Call Karl Barth a ‘Christocentric’ Theologian?” 139. 149. Cf. CD IV/2, 150-151.

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also to sacrifice Himself, to be wholly exalted but also completely humble, not only almighty but also almighty mercy, not only Lord but also servant, not only judge but also Himself the judged, not only mans eternal king but also his brother in time. And all that without the slightest forfeiting His deity! All that, rather, in the highest proof and proclamation of His deity! ... It is when we look at Jesus Christ that we know decisively that Gods deity does not exclude, but includes His humanity. How could Gods deity exclude His humanity, since it is Gods freedom for love and thus His capacity to be not only in the heights but also in the depths, not only great but also small, not only in and for Himself but also with another distinct from Him, and to offer Himself to him?150

Lowliness Proper to God’s Nature

That an obedient servant is indeed Lord suggests further the remarkable and counterintuitive conclusion that lowliness is proper to the nature of God. The fundamental mistake in all erroneous thinking of man about himself is that he tries to equate himself with God and therefore to proceed on the assumption that he can regard himself as the presupposition of his own being.151 We want to be as God is, we want to be God.152 Yet this assertion, according to Barth, asserts nothing. It neither reaches forward to a possibility nor describes the current state of affairs. At worst, it dismisses

God entirely at best, it creates the illusion of a duality wherein God and humanity stand eye to eye, God doing his part and humans doing theirs.153 If it does recognize God, it destroys his eternal Yes to humanity. That is, it fails to recognize that the underlying foundation of human existence is a relationship of inequality. Or expressed positively, that fellowship with God takes place in the terms outlined in the covenant: I will be their

150. Barth, The Humanity of God, 49; cf. CD I/2, 92. 151. CD III/2, 151; emphasis added. 152. CD IV/1, 418. 153. See Gen. 4:1.

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God and they will be my people. It cannot be any other way than this. The human reach for godhood and independence is like the scientists attempt to make something colder than absolute zero. It can be imagined as a possibility because of the nature of incremental counting but can never actually be attained because of the fundamental laws of the physical universe. Likewise, human beings cannot be as God is simply because

God is. Gods Yes to fellowship, and thus creation of human beings, is a result of the fact that God is and, as such, is God. When he says No to the human incursion upon his identity, he is actually asserting the only real possibility available to them.154 In this way, his No is the way he says Yes in the context of a problem.

Christs life and death form the intersection of Gods Yes and No.

He pronounced the Yes and No with differing emphases. He took to His own heart very differently in Jesus Christ the infinite hope of the creature and its infinite peril. He is mighty in different ways in its power and weakness. In both cases the creature is subject to His power. In both directions His will is accomplished. In the person of Jesus Christ God has not definitively, let alone eternally, but only transiently shared the pain of creation. It is an act of providential care which He performs when He surrenders His own Son to the lowliness and misery of creaturely existence. He sees the hopeless peril of the created world which He has snatched from nothingness but which is still so near to nothingness. He sees its weakness and the power of temptation. And yet in this created world He wills to manifest His own glory. The man who forms its focal point must confirm and fulfill His will. He must stand firm and secure with Him in the face of nothingness. He must say Yes with Him, and because of this he must also say No with Him, and therefore truly stand in covenant with Him. In order that this No should be spoken by man in his weakness and frailty as it was spoken by the Creator from all eternity, God Himself willed to become a man, to make His own the weakness and frailty of man, to suffer an die as man, and in this self-offering to secure the frontier between His creation and the ruin which threatens it from the abyss. God is gracious to man. He has appointed him to stand firm on this frontier, to say No in covenant with Him to what He has not willed

154. “The wrath of God is purposeful, not purposeless and meaningless and unlimited.” CD IV/1, 537.

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but negated.155

Jesus Christ was the perfect confession that God is God. As a human being he affirmed the eternal truth expressed in the covenant by accepting the deadly consequences of its transgression. That is, specifically, he affirmed that God is right in the assertion of his own identity when he passes judgment on those who deny it. In the act of going to the cross, Barth wrote in his 1927 commentary on Philippians, Christ made real his eternal disposition as one who does not demand his rights over and against God. He accepted humiliation of his own volition. The infinite qualitative difference between Christ and every other man lies indeed in this, that in every humiliation which he suffers it is absolutely necessary that he himself should assent and confirm that he is willing to submit to that humiliation.156 Yet, Jesus is not only the perfect covenant partner as a human being who accepts the wrath of Gods No. He is also the One who freely comes and bears the No as God on earth. He is both covenant partners exercising both roles by doing the same thing! In the same event he demonstrates the rejection of human self- sufficiency by accepting Gods No and the true self-sufficiency of God to overcome his human usurpers by the declaration and reestablishment therein of his eternal Yes!157

God chooses to define himself in the humility of Christ. Over and against every

155. CD III/1, 383-384. 156. Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Philippians, 6th German ed., trans. James W. Leitch (London: SCM Press, 1952), 64-65. 157. “It corresponds to and is grounded in His divine nature that in free grace He should be faithful to the unfaithful creature…. that He should maintain His covenant in relation to sinful man (not surrendering His deity, for how could that help? but giving up and sacrificing Himself), and in that way supremely asserting Himself and His deity.” CD IV/1, 187. See also CD IV/1, 552-556. Graham, 227-228, makes the point that atonement is not merely a return to the status quo but liberation. She seems to drive at the idea that although atonement/reconciliation expresses the original thrust of God’s triune interrelation and creative love, it is also delivers a sense of newness and finality to the human story.

131 common or grotesque158 attempt of men and women to exercise lordship stands one crucified in the flesh.

The truth of the one God as opposed to all the divinities invented by men is seen in Jesus Christ in the fact that He is free not only to be exalted but also to be lowly, not only to be remote but also to be near, not only to be God in Himself in His majesty but also to be God outside Himself as this One who is infinitely less than God, yet in this One who is infinitely less than God to be God Himself in His majesty, as the One who is near to be remote, in His lowliness to be truly exalted.159

Moreover,

We do not say [Jesus Christ] casts off His Godhead but (as the One who loves in His sovereign freedom) activates and proves it by the fact that He gives Himself to the limitation and suffering of the human creature, that He, the Lord, becomes a servant, that as distinct from all false gods He humbles Himself and again, that in Jesus Christ man, without any forfeiture or restriction of His humanity, in the power of His deity and therefore in the power of and thanks to the humiliation of God, is the man who is freed from His limitation and suffering, not divinized man, but man sovereign and set at the side of God, in short, man exalted by God. The humiliation, therefore, is the humiliation of God, the exaltation the exaltation of man: the humiliation of God to supreme glory, as the activation and demonstration of His divine being; and the exaltation of man as the work of Gods grace which consists in the restoration of his true humanity.160

Lowliness is foreign to God only by human accounting. The concept of obedience and giving up equality with God chafes human sensibilities. Even the very suggestion that one needs to be saved is repugnant. Christ appears as offensive precisely because he disrupts delusions of grandeur and the illusion of independence.161 Nevertheless, in the context of a real need for reconciliation, the humility of Christ activates and proves his divinity.

Kenosis or the self-emptying of the Son of God, described by Paul in

158. See CD IV/1, 432-433. 159. CD IV/1, 417. 160. CD IV/1, 134; cf. 192. 161. CD IV/1, 259.

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Philippians 2:7, confirms that lowliness is proper to Gods nature.162 The Son of God did abandon equality with God but rather demonstrated that the form of a servant is not contradictory to it.163 The text is quite clear, in Barths appraisal, that what Jesus did not do was prey after164 equality with God, grasping like a thief to his loot, bound by it like someone bound by his possession.165 Barth was critical of German jurist and publicist

Christian Thomasius (1655-1728) attempt to explain the historical form of Jesus when the latter claimed that, in the incarnation He ceased to be actually God, in order to become conscious of Himself as God with the developing self-consciousness of Jesus, undergoing an evolution in His identity.166 This explanation was an honest but ultimately flawed attempt to deal with seventeenth-century Lutheran metaphysical speculation about the precise nature and timeline of the Sons exercise of divine power in the flesh.167 Barth was unsatisfied with the polarizing tendency of Thomasius modern

162. Cf. Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich, eds., Theological Dictionary of the New Testament: Abridged in One Volume, trans. and abridged by Geoffrey Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1985), 427. “kenóõ.‘To make empty’… This can hardly mean that Christ negated himself, nor is it suggested that he aspires beyond his existing state. The point, then, is that Christ does not selfishly exploit his divine form but lays it aside to take the form of a servant. … He remains himself, but changes his mode of being (cf. 2 Cor. 8:9).” 163. “From now on he is equal with God in the obscurity of the form of a servant.” Barth, The Epistle to the Philippians, 62. 164. CD III/2, 311. See Pannenberg, 2: 230, 320, 434 on his specific, and similar, notion of kenosis as it applies to revelation and reconciliation. 165. CD IV/1, 180. 166. CD IV/1, 182. 167. CD IV/1, 181. See Darren O. Sumner, “The Twofold Life of the Word: Karl Barth’s Critical Reception of the Extra Calvinisticum,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 15, no. 1 (January 2013): 52, 54-55. The Son neither puts aside his divinity for a time in the kenosis, as Lutheran dogmatics suspected, nor is he separated from a divinity that stands behind the man Jesus, as the Reformed extra Calvinistcum had it. Jesus Christ is at one time divine in his humiliated flesh as the one who actualizes God’s gracious being. Christopher R. J. Holmes, “The Person and Work of Christ Revisited: in Conversation with Karl Barth,” Anglican Theological Review 95, no.1 (2013): 37-55, is correct in his caution against the possibility of going too far with the argument against Alexandrian Christology or extra Calvinisticum and allowing the divine Son or the divine tri-unity to be contingent upon or exhausted by temporal identity/events.

133 kenotics. For the Swiss theologian there was no pressing need to draw boundaries or construct schedules in order to explain conflicting forms of God and servant. In fact, as we have seen, Barth was apt to say that when read through the context of being as person, Gods giving of himself in flesh is the best expression of the eternal will for fellowship. McCormack is on track in his contention that, for Barth, Christs journey of obedience and lowliness provides resources for taking up the language of kenosis in a more positive [and] thoroughly Reformed way.168 That is, the Sons emptying is a practical matter the absence of a demand for equality observed in his acts and disposition of obedience. This provides a better definition than one encased in metaphysical terminology because it is the one revealed by God in the praying man of

Gethsemane.169

In Karl Barths mind obedience is never a bad word. In fact, it was the term he used to characterize the relationships of the triune God within himself.

We have not only not to deny but actually to affirm and understand as essential to the being of God the offensive fact that there is in God Himself an above and a below, a prius and a posterius, a superiority and a subordination. And our present concern is with what is apparently the most offensive fact of all, that there is a

168. Bruce L. McCormack, “Karl Barth’s Christology as a Resource for a Reformed Version of Kenoticism,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 8, no. 3 (July 2006): 248. 169. “For Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of the covenant concluded by God with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; and it is the reality of this covenant not the idea of any covenant which is the basis, the meaning and goal of creation, that is, of everything that is real in distinction from God.” Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, 76. Hans Boersma, “Alexandrian or Antiochian? A Dilemma in Barth’s Christology,” Westminster Theological Journal 52 (1990): 263-280, argues that God “can change into the opposite of himself without ceasing to be God” (274). Moreover, the strict Antiochian/Alexandrian paradigm too quickly turns the Son into an abstraction. Ontological categories must be exchanged for the action of reconciliation in order to fully appreciate Barth’s conception of Christ who is together exalted Son and humiliated flesh for the sake of God’s eternal will (279-280). Adam Neder, Participation in Christ: An Entry into Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009) concurs, claiming Barth’s Christology is “not the outworking of a commitment to a pre-conceived actualistic ontology” (61) but is found in the event of Jesus Christ. Cf. Jones, The Humanity of Christ in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, 28-29.

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below, a posterius, a subordination, that it belongs to the inner life of God that there should take place within it obedience. His divine unity consists in the fact that in Himself He is both One who is obeyed and Another who obeys. 170

What stands behind the offense at this notion is Gods prerogative to define himself.

Traditional philosophical conceptions of God provide terminology and logical abstractions that reduce him to pure and empty Godhead.171 The same motivation that lies behind these conceptions is that which scoffs at Christ; death on a cross is as foolish as inequality in the Godhead. Yet for Barth both are clearly spelled out in the way God has given himself to be known in revelation. The deity is manifest in the greatest possible humility. The key to divine nature is to be found precisely where it is thought to be impossible Christs obedience unto death, the atonement.172 Humility and obedience, even within the Trinity itself, do not indicate a deprivation or a lack. Instead, they confirm and reinforce the unity of God. Barths sentiment in Philippians expresses poetically what he was driving at almost thirty years later in Church Dogmatics: To the extent which two lovers, for example, really belong to each other, they can also give

170. CD IV/1, 200-201. See Paul D. Molnar, “The Obedience of the Son in the Theology of Karl Barth and of Thomas F. Torrance,” Scottish Journal of Theology 67, no. 1 (February 2014): 50-69. Molnar adduces T. F. Torrance in another instance of his argument against the tendency “of reading elements of the economy back into the immanent Trinity” (65). Torrance identified Barth’s description of superiority and subordination in the immanent Trinity as contradicting his early rejection of hierarchical thinking (61n18). Though Barth understood the incarnation to be a new event undertaken in time to express God’s eternal decision to be ‘for us,’ Torrance charged that Barth “inadvertently introduces a logical necessity into the discussion which leads him to think that the Father needs to fulfill his superiority, the Son needs to fulfill his subordination and God’s actions for us can be described as a logical continuation of his inner history” (66). Instead of framing Christ’s obedience in terms of a hierarchical inter-Trinitarian relationship, Barth would have eliminated subsequent problems but not substance in teaching, “that obedience is something he freely undertakes in his mission as the incarnate reconciler and redeemer (64; emphasis added).” See also Scott Swain and Michael Allen, “The Obedience of the Eternal Son,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 15, no. 2 (April 2013): 114-143. 171. CD IV/1, 203. 172. John Thompson, Christ in Perspective: Christological Perspectives in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1979), 59.

135 themselves freely, without fear of losing themselves.173 Everything about the Sons kenotic obedience reinforces Gods character not to be autonomous but to share, not to be isolated but to give in fellowship, and not to be a rival but a friend. In the mode of

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit obedience is not a duty, it is the joyful expression of joyful and eternal reality. God does not cease to be who he is when he is described as above and below, but rather God is true to himself. What is more, he is who he is for us precisely in his mode as person.174 Human creation is only possible if God himself is giving. Human community is only cohesive if its Creator is unified. Human faith is only faith, finally, if it reflects the humble obedience of the one who is humble and obedient.175 God has not responded to a human problem and thus become defined by it. Christ did not decide to be obedient as an emergency measure but sought to be among human beings exactly as God is in himself and thereby acknowledge what Gods will has always been. In sum, the kenotic Christ demonstrated that lowliness is proper to Gods nature.

173. Barth, The Epistle to the Philippians, 62. Jones, The Humanity of Christ: Christology in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, 98, argues that the notion of ‘other,’ especially with regards to the man Jesus, demonstrates the lack of autonomy by risking its possibility. Christ is the true covenant partner but exhibits God’s own risk. “The extremity of God’s grace is such that God jeopardizes the peace of God’s own life, binding the Son’s identity not simply to the ‘form’ of the incarnation (the word taking flesh) but to the autonomous decisions and history of the human that God assumes.” 174. CD IV/1, 202-205. Cf. Bruce L. McCormack, “Why Should Theology be Christocentric? Christology and Metaphysics in Paul Tillich and Karl Barth,” Wesleyan Theological Journal 45, no. 1 (March 2010): 74-77, is consistent by finding the obedience of the Son in his eternal procession and eternal mission as grounded in election. As he deals with Barth on this specific issue of obedience in the immanent Trinity his assertion is well taken that God’s essence as triune person and electing God are eternally contemporary. 175. CD IV/1, 635.

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Summary: The Kenotic Christ as Exemplar of Dogmatic Method

Barths emphasis on Gods prerogative to speak his Word in Jesus Christ and thus define himself undergirds his entire understanding of Christian Dogmatics. God speaks his Word and in the speaking creates both the possibility and the necessity of faith. Faith is the only way in which one can receive Gods truth because Gods reality stands over and against autonomous human understanding. Though it is unlikely the Swiss professor discovered this in his work on St. Anselm in 1931, it is certain that the medieval theologians Proslogion provided Barth with what he considered a rich resource and stable base from which to launch into his defining work. In Barths reading of Anselm,

God is prior to both human existence and understanding. Faith, therefore, is necessary in order to understand; credere is the presupposition of intelligere.176 Moreover, God shatters every syllogism.177 He stands at the beginning of the theological task; he is not concluded at the end.

Anselms first principle for faith that seeks understanding is that Gods name is negation a name that negates human priority and establishes the authority of God.

This name of God conceives God only in the sphere in which he can be conceived, not in altitudine sua, but with great hesitation and reserve by conceiving the manner in which he is not to be conceived. He is not to be conceived in such a way this possibility is ruled out by the revelation-faith relationship to him that anything greater than him could be imagined or even imagined as conceivable. In the way of any thinker who has a hankering in this direction, the revealed Name of the Lord his Name is quo maius cogitari

176. Barth, Anselm, 24. 177. Barth, Anselm, 29.

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nequit stands as effective deterrent.178

The starting place for the dogmatic task is in Gods revelation of his own name: that beyond which nothing greater can be conceived. While it is clear and probably unnecessary to build a case supporting Barths approval for Anselms concept of faith, I want to suggest a half-step further: the kenotic Christ in Barths theology is the correlate of Anselms quo maius cogitari nequit.179

The Son of Gods living mission was to reveal God by living in obedience to the

Father. Nowhere, Barth wrote of Jesus obedience, is the recognition of the divine

Sonship more explicit than in the Gospel of John, yet it is this Gospel which causes Jesus to say expressly: The Father is greater than I.180 Paul wrote of the same Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave. For Barth, the only way to know God is through Jesus Christ, not only in the acts themselves, but also in his

178. Barth, Anselm, 83. 179. Gordon Watson, “A Study in St. Anselm’s Soteriology and Karl Barth’s Theological Method,” Scottish Journal of Theology 42, no. 4 (March 1990), describes Anselm’s soteriological self- understanding in a way similar to what I suggest about Barth. “St. Anselm’s definition of the revealed name of God as ‘that than which nothing greater can be conceived’ corresponds to his understanding of the relationship and differences between the divine and creaturely truths and rightnesses established by the voluntary condescension of the Son of God and his obedience as a Man. The revealed name of God, expressing as it does the inconceivability of his non-existence as distinct from the conceivable non- existence of creaturely things, opens up precisely the same discrepancy which is presupposed by the voluntary condescension of the Son of God, who as man fulfills the creatures’ debt or obligation to the truth since it is impossible to conceive the Supreme Truth as obliged to anyone” (503). Watson is critical of what he sees as Barth’s rejection of Anselm’s conception of the concrete, historical act of obedience in Jesus’ death, which “originates from his will and is freely chosen by him” (509). Instead, he understands Barth as having taking the stress off of Jesus’ willing obedience and collapsing it into the prior decision of God to be compassionate and forgive outside of Jesus’ human response. I have attempted to demonstrate that for Barth Jesus’ was entirely the willing and obedient covenant partner, as expressed in the struggle of Gethsemane, and, consequently, that his human obedience corresponds to the Anselmic notion of restoring Supreme Truth. On top of this, the Son is the eternal obedient mode of the Godhead that undergirds God’s eternal disposition and decision towards humankind. Because Jesus’ historical act is the actualization of Trinitarian love, his obedience is still “dependent upon God’s free initiative” (502). 180. CD IV/1, 164.

138 revelation of the name of God as his covenant partner. Jesus unveiled and actualized the name of God by being his obedient covenant partner. He affirmed Gods right, over and against human effort, to define himself as the God of the covenant. Jesus offered the first step in fellowship with God precisely by taking up the posture of obedience unto death.

Above this, Jesus self-emptying was an act of eternal obedience for the very purpose of fellowship and unity. If we know of God and we know about God it is because He has given revelation and reconciliation specifically in the kenotic Christ.

For Barth, to be a human person is not simply to produce oneself in a process of self-shaping, but rather to discover oneself within an ordered reality which is governed by

Gods dealing with creation in Jesus Christ.181 I contend that dogmatics is Christology not only in its reflection on the actions of Jesus Christ but also in the reflection of his disposition. As it investigates the witness to Christs life the dogmatic effort comes up against problems that are surprising and insurmountable. The doctrine of the triune God and the two natures of Christ have eluded and continue to elude precise definition. Both involve a unity and fellowship that cannot be fully grasped by human reason and when we find them indicated in the character and actions of Jesus Christ they offend us. If they were easily managed, or put away from our attention entirely, however, we would not be dealing with a God worthy of being God. Anselms first point asks us to put aside self- shaping and embrace the ordered governance of God. Expressed positively and perhaps slightly in an apologetic mode, he asks: can we agree that if we are going to talk about

God, we ought to consider him as One we cannot reach with our own understanding?

Should he not be the One who transcends us because he is the One to whom we are

181. Webster, Barth’s Ethics of Reconciliation, 224.

139 fundamentally unequal? Quo maius cogitari nequit is designed to exclude just this conceivability of the non-existence or imperfection of God which lurks in the background of every ontic conception of God to exclude it with the radicalism and force of the

Creators own injunction to the creature do not be like God and likewise to establish knowledge of the truth of the existence and perfection of God.182 Christ affirms this attitude and speaks this name of God with his life; this is precisely the ordered reality he puts before us. As God he establishes Gods own self-definition and our access to it precisely by not preying after equality with God.183

182. Barth, Anselm, 89; I have translated and emphasized non eritis sicut Deus. 183. Paul Chung, "On Karl Barth in Interreligious Studies and Cross-Cultural Perspective," Studies In Interreligious Dialogue 18, no. 2 (January 2008): 222, connects our theme of kenotic dogmatics to interreligious relationship. “Barth is not convinced of the absoluteness of Christianity over other religions but is concerned rather to lead the Christian church to self-criticism with a humble attitude and radical openness toward religious outsiders.”

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CONCLUSION

After studying and writing about Barth for the past two years, I find myself today in complete agreement with Yale theologian Hans Frei’s astute observation from more than forty years ago:

I think all of you who have found yourself not simply studying Barth but then finding his thought congenial will have noticed how difficult it is not to fall into the same language patterns as Barth, to use the same vocabulary, sometimes even the same kind of syntax; and you will have noticed that it sounds terribly awkward and secondhand when it comes from people other than Karl Barth himself.184

My journey with Karl Barth has been an exciting, challenging, and even deeply emotional one. It is somewhat embarrassing to admit that the Swiss theologian only really fell into my lap as a major topic of study because of a random book sale, an unexpected gift, and the misunderstanding of an email. Yet what I have found in Barth is a resonance with the core of my theological self. In fact, on several occasions while reading his works

I exclaimed to myself and to my wife that Barth had used my idea from an adult Bible class I taught years before while in the pastorate. Indeed, that is the reason I made special mention in the first chapter of the stories of Karl’s son Markus. As a boy Markus attempted to pass off John Calvin’s doctrine of predestination as his own and cleverly defined God to his theologian father as ‘Mr. Essential.’ It came home to me through these stories that in some way my particular thinking has come, without a doubt, from living in the household of faith and overhearing the distant but powerful voice of Karl Barth resounded through it. Like Frei, however, I am aware that my own voice is indeed only a garbled echo of the original shout.

184. Hans W. Frei, “Scripture as Realistic Narrative: Karl Barth as Critic of Historical Criticism,” in Thy Word is Truth, 49. (Originally a lecture from 1974).

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Barth, I am convinced, would be rather displeased if that is where it ended. I have argued herein that the Swiss theologian’s efforts to give shape and content to a dogmatics for the Church was not for the sake of hearing his own voice but of overhearing God’s spoken Word. Dogmatics is the task of listening to Jesus Christ. It is a humble task, filled with fear and trembling, precisely because the very core of its substance is what is overheard in Jesus’ own trembling prayer: ‘not my will, but yours be done.’ Chapter one narrated Karl Barth’s personal journey toward the time and place in which he felt confident that he had overheard God’s Word sufficiently to establish his Church

Dogmatics. Chapter two picked up on that journey in terms of specific responses to the voices and influences from which Barth departed. It characterized his basic methodological approach to dogmatics as the receptive posture of prayer. The third and final chapter gave shape to the Swiss theologian’s integrated doctrines of revelation and reconciliation by looking at God’s acts and disposition in Christ. In it I suggested that dogmatics is Christological specifically as it reflects the content and character of the kenotic obedient servant Christ.

In the end, when I connect Anselm’s prohibitive name for God with Barth’s kenotic Christ, perhaps all I have really done is blazed a long path to the wise opening words of the Proverbs (1:7a): ‘the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.’ If in fact I have, I consider myself in good company for having a lot to say about what I have heard in the clear and present voice of the Bible.

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Looking ahead to studies of a higher nature, I am certain Barth’s dictum ‘staring again at the beginning’ will take on a whole new meaning. There is more work to do. It was only in the very last stages of revision in which I encountered Australian professor

Gordon Watson’s work on Barth and Anselm. I am afraid that I did not give him the meticulous reading he deserves and have given only cursory notation to his argument.

Due to issues of space, I have also not incorporated Andy Alexis-Baker’s reflections on obedience to the extent I would have liked. At a late stage in reading I was at the same time glad and a little upset because he seemed to be making my argument back to me. It is also the case that I collapsed Barth’s monumental doctrine of election into my brief comments on creation. Certainly a proper treatment of Barth’s election is called for but it would have demanded focus and pages that I could not give it here.

As, I am sure, a lot of first masters’ theses do, this project began as a rather bombastic and unrefined notion. I wanted to characterize Barth as a binary (in the sense of computer code) theologian not in direct reference to what many feel is a binary relationship of Father and Son, but binary in the sense of contrast between God as ‘1’ and the nothingness of sin as ‘0.’ It is unclear whether this particular concept has any potential. Nevertheless, I find Barth to be a tremendous resource, similar to C. S. Lewis, for explaining the doctrine of sin to people separated from the sacrificial system by continents and millennia. I am intrigued at the possibility of using Barth together with

Anselm to communicate theological truths to the creative/computational side of the post- modern, ‘Apple’ generation. I also suspect that buried deep in that investigation is a line connecting Immanuel Kant through the neo-Kantians to Einstein that relates to, among other things, Barth’s notions of simple but profound ideas and the juxtaposition of reality

143 and nothingness.185

Hearing Karl Barth’s voice spoken in English, something I did not know was available until only just before writing the third chapter, is what pushed me over the hump to get this project finished. As tempting as it is to close with a quote from those

English lectures at Princeton, I think what captures my sentiment more fully is a line from editors Geoffrey Bromiley and Thomas Torrance in the preface to the last volume of

Church Dogmatics, published after Barth’s death in 1968. I have taken the liberty to emphasize their point.

It is in the Church Dogmatics above all that we must look for the grandeur of this humble servant of Jesus Christ, for the work he was given to accomplish in it will endure to bless the world for many centuries to come (CD IV/4, vi).

185. McCormack, Critically Realistic, 43, mentions Kant’s dictum “Thoughts without content are empty, institutions without concepts are blind” (Critique of Pure Reason, 93) in connection with Marburg liberalism. Albert Einstein (1879-1955) was probably reshaping Kant’s phrase when he wrote in a letter to philosopher Eric Gutkind, “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” It would be interesting to study Einstein’s relationship to Kant and to Marburg philosopher Herrmann Cohen’s concept of consciousness and God. See McCormack, 45, 29; see also Joseph M. Bochenski, Contemporary European Philosophy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1952), 91-93. The line between Barth and Einstein, in light of this study, would also be interesting to trace.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Works of Karl Barth

——. Action in Waiting. Translated by the Society of Brothers. Rifton, NY: Plough Publishing House, 1969.

——. Against the Stream; Shorter Post-War Writings, 1946-52. London: SCM Press, 1954.

——. Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum. 2nd ed. Translated by Ian W. Robertson. Richmond, VA: John Knox, 1960.

——. Call for God. Translated by A. T. Mackay. New York: Harper & Row, 1967.

——. Christ and Adam: Man and Humanity in Romans 5. Scottish Journal of Theology Occasional Papers No. 5. Translated by T. A. Smail. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1956.

——. The Christian Churches and Living Reality. Translated by Elkan Allan. London: Hutchinson & Co., 1946.

——. “The Christian Hope.” Episcopal Church News (April 6, 1952).

——. Christmas. Translated by Bernhard Citron. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1959.

——. Church Dogmatics. Edited by G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance. Translated by G. W. Bromiley, et. al. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2004. (1932-1967)

——. Church and State. Translated by G. R. Howe. London: SCM Press, 1939.

——. The Church and the Political Problem of Our Day. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1939.

——. The Church and the War. Translated by Antonia H. Froendt. New York: MacMillan, 1944.

——. Community, State and Church. Translated by A. M. Hall, G. R. Howe and Stanley Godman. Garden City: Doubleday/Anchor, 1960.

——. Credo. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1962. (1935)

——. Deliverance to the Captives. Harper Ministers Paperback Library. Translated by Marguerite Wieser. New York: Harper & Row, 1961.

——. Dogmatics in Outline. Translated by G.T. Thomson. New York: Harper & Row, 1959.

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——. The Epistle to the Philippians. Translated by James W. Leitch. London: SCM Press, 1952.

——. The Epistle to the Romans. Translated by Edwin C. Hoskyns. London: Oxford University Press, 1957. (1933)

——. Evangelical Theology: An Introduction. Translated by Grover Foley. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963.

——. “An Exegetical Study of Matthew 28:16-20.” In The Theology of the Christian Mission. 55-71. Edited by G. H. Anderson. Translated by Thomas Wieser. New York: McGraw Hill, 1961.

——. The Faith of the Church. Translated by Gabriel Vahanian. New York: Meridan Books, 1958.

——. Final Testimonies. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977.

——. The German Church Conflict. Translated by P. T. A. Parker. Richmond, VA: John Knox, 1965.

——. The Germans and Ourselves. Translated by R. G. Smith. London: Nisbet, 1945.

——. The Great Promise. Translated by Hans Freund. New York: Philosophical Library, 1963.

——. God, Grace and Gospel. Translated by J. Strathearn McNab. Edinburg: Oliver and Boyd, 1959.

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