Speaking freely

And the Rock Cried Out

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Frost) — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 01:35:00 +0000

Jeremiah 23:23-29

הַאֱלֹהֵ֧י מִקָּרֹ֛ב אָ֖נִי נְאֻם־יְהוָ֑ה וְלֹ֥א אֱלֹהֵ֖י מֵרָחֹֽק׃
אִם־יִסָּתֵ֨ר אִ֧ישׁ בַּמִּסְתָּרִ֛ים וַאֲנִ֥י לֹֽא־אֶרְאֶ֖נּוּ נְאֻם־יְהוָ֑ה הֲל֨וֹא אֶת־הַשָּׁמַ֧יִם וְאֶת־הָאָ֛רֶץ אֲנִ֥י מָלֵ֖א נְאֻם־יְהוָֽה׃
שָׁמַ֗עְתִּי אֵ֤ת אֲשֶׁר־אָֽמְרוּ֙ הַנְּבִאִ֔ים הַֽנִּבְּאִ֥ים בִּשְׁמִ֛י שֶׁ֖קֶר לֵאמֹ֑ר חָלַ֖מְתִּי חָלָֽמְתִּי׃
עַד־מָתַ֗י הֲיֵ֛שׁ בְּלֵ֥ב הַנְּבִאִ֖ים נִבְּאֵ֣י הַשָּׁ֑קֶר וּנְבִיאֵ֖י תַּרְמִ֥ת לִבָּֽם׃
הַחֹשְׁבִ֗ים לְהַשְׁכִּ֤יחַ אֶת־עַמִּי֙ שְׁמִ֔י בַּחֲל֣וֹמֹתָ֔ם אֲשֶׁ֥ר יְסַפְּר֖וּ אִ֣ישׁ לְרֵעֵ֑הוּ כַּאֲשֶׁ֨ר שָׁכְח֧וּ אֲבוֹתָ֛ם אֶת־שְׁמִ֖י בַּבָּֽעַל׃
הַנָּבִ֞יא אֲשֶׁר־אִתּ֤וֹ חֲלוֹם֙ יְסַפֵּ֣ר חֲל֔וֹם וַאֲשֶׁ֤ר דְּבָרִי֙ אִתּ֔וֹ יְדַבֵּ֥ר דְּבָרִ֖י אֱמֶ֑ת מַה־לַתֶּ֥בֶן אֶת־הַבָּ֖ר נְאֻם־יְהוָֽה׃
הֲל֨וֹא כֹ֧ה דְבָרִ֛י כָּאֵ֖שׁ נְאֻם־יְהוָ֑ה וּכְפַטִּ֖ישׁ יְפֹ֥צֵֽץ סָֽלַע׃ ס

The Lord says: “Am I some new local god, a god of this place but not of distant places?”
The Lord says: “Can anyone secret themselves away in a hidden place, such that I cannot see them?”
The Lord says: “Do I not fill the heavens and the earth?”
The Lord says: “I have heard what they say, the prophets who prophesy in my name, speaking deception and saying ‘I dreamed a dream!’ How long will the prophets who prophesy deception—who prophesy the treachery of their own minds—invent plans in their minds to make my people forget my name for their dreams, which each person tells to their neighbor? That is how it was when their parents forgot my name for Ba’al. Let the prophet with a dream tell their dream—and let whoever has my word speak my word of truth, truthfully. After threshing, compare the pile of chaff with the pile of grain.”
The Lord says: “In this way, is my word not like fire? And like a hammer that breaks open the rocky refuge?”

The word “prophet” is from the Greek, pro-fēmi, to speak for someone else. The Hebrew nebi’ is just as much “spokesman,” and the prophets weren’t about what you and I sometimes have come to think “prophecy” means when it comes to predicting the future.

The question is, who are you speaking for? Who are you really speaking for? Whose words are coming out of your mouth? Whole lot of people out there are claiming to tell you what God has in mind, what God wants, what God says, and want you to believe them and pass along the message to all of your neighbors. And they don’t think the Lord is about to do anything to make clear what the deal actually is.

There’s a passage in Revelation, that book the collectors of the New Testament canon didn’t know what to do with but the Evangelical fundamentalists all think they do, which has been spiritualized as “and the rock cried out, ‘no hiding place!’,” because it’s the day of wrath, and the Lord is the avenger of innocent blood, and a whole lot of those who spilled that blood are looking to the cliffs and caves of the Judean hill country to hide them, because that is where the people have always hidden, where God has kept them safe from marauding outsiders—and often as not marauding insiders.

And it’s not going to work out any better for them than for these so-called prophets of Jeremiah’s day, who have preached good news to the wealthy and powerful, guaranteeing peace from their enemies and God looking the other way as they oppress women, children, and minorities in the land and extort from the poor and needy all that they have to live on, lying in the name of the Lord and so betraying both God and their own people.

All of their larger and more powerful neighbors want to deal in such ways with them, and God is about to allow it. The exile didn’t empty out the lands of Israel and Judah; their enemies took into captivity their ruling classes, the wealthy and powerful, the kings, the priests, the institutional prophets, decapitating the state and leaving the people of the land to go on living in it, a righteous remnant. The chaff sifted from the grain, and two piles made.

And God went with them into exile, God surely did, for the Lord is not god alone of this place in the hill country, of this or that sanctuary, in Samaria or Jerusalem or any other place, but god of places far off, too, and God’s people are not shed like they shed innocent blood. But God also remained in this place, with the flock of these sheep whose shepherds are receiving that fate.

And it’s not about to be grand and happy days for that remnant in the land, either, since they will be ruled by enemies foreign rather than domestic, but the Lord has a promise for them, too.

Someday the Lord will cause to grow from the stump of these nations of Israel and Judah what the histories and minor prophets all tell us does not tend naturally to grow from any nation, including those of God’s people: a ruler who will deal justly, and who will create a real peace based on that justice. Someday the land will have justice for those who are oppressed today, and judgment for those doing the oppression, and innocent blood will no longer be shed, and people will no longer be separated from their families and homes and lands because of the fantasies and lies of the powerful.

Development of KD I.2 (from Busch, Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts)

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Frost) — Mon, 12 Jul 2021 17:04:00 +0000

The second part of the prolegomena started in the winter term of 1933–34, a semester which, in the wake of the publication of Theologicshe Existenz heute! that summer, began for Barth with the Abschied from Zwischen den Zeiten.

per Busch, 234:

"Meanwhile, a busy semester was well under way. In it Barth gave the beginning of the second part of his prolegomena as lectures.

In fact, he began 'as though nothing had happened' with a compact outline of the doctrine of the doctrine of the 'incarnation of the Word', taking up the subtle problems of the christology of the ancient church and beginning with a section on 'God's Freedom for Man'. Indirectly, of course, all this was unmistakably topical. For example, Barth defined the incarnation (on which there was such strong stress in Lutheranism) as an act of God's freedom, and God's freedom as a freedom 'for us', which was not totally and utterly arbitrary. He first spoke of reality and only then of the 'possibility' of revelation (which is therefore not already given by nature). He declared in a later section that 'revelation is not a predicate of history, but history is a predicate of revelation', [I.2 64, ET 58] and finally stressed that the Old and New Testaments belong indissolubly together because they are related to the one revelation."

It would continue in summer 1934 (245), around the production of the Barmen Declaration, and that winter term would begin with the publication of the Barmen Declaration, as well as Barth's negative response to Brunner's attempt to plead his innocence from the accusations of the Abschied in Natur und Gnade.

As the Confessing Church then fell apart in trying to earn state recognition—and banish Barth to that end—Barth determined that he could only swear the loyalty oath to the Führer—now required as a condition of his employment at Bonn—quatenus, i.e. insofar as it cohered with his responsibilities as a Christian. This being unsatisfactory, his courses were suspended, the students then refused to have them continued under substitutes, and by the end of 1934 Barth had been dismissed.

The spring would be devoted to fighting this rejection and his total loss of support by the Confessing Church and state church leadership. Barth would lecture and preach and give Bible studies in various places throughout the spring of 1935, even as in March he was banned from speaking in public in Germany and so forced to take his opportunities elsewhere. In June, his dismissal from Bonn for cause was replaced with a fine—and then he was dismissed again, purely for being a political opponent of the Nazis and as such ineligible for all civil service under article 4 of the 1933 Berufsbeamtengesetz. (You know, the paragraph after the one banning all non-Aryans.)

Basel immediately appointed him to full professorship, where his teaching of the material of I.2 would continue in the winter semester of 1935–36. (267) As we know from McCormack, it would be in the following term, summer 1936, that Barth would hear Maury's lecture "Election et Foi," (Busch, 278) and that Barth would continue teaching this material in the winter term of 1936–37 in which he would also go on a lecture tour of Hungary and present the initial public version of his adaptation of the Maury insights. (278–79)

The Gifford Lectures of 1937 and 1938 (10 each, consecutive years) bracketed the final preparation in the summer of 1937 of the finished form of I.2, and Barth's preparations for the courses that would begin II.1. (282–285)

The Chalcedonian Definition (451), from the Greek text in consultation with the Latin

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Frost) — Wed, 07 Jul 2021 16:59:00 +0000

Therefore, following the holy Fathers, we harmoniously teach everyone to confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ:

that he is simultaneously perfect in deity and perfect in humanity;
that he is simultaneously truly God and truly human, composed of a reasoning self and a body;
that he is the same essential stuff as the Father concerning his deity and the same essential stuff as us concerning his humanity, "like us concerning everything except sin" (Heb 4:15);
that he was produced, concerning his deity on the one hand, by the Father before the eons, and concerning his humanity on the other, by Mary, the virgin and God-bearer, in the last days for us and for our salvation:
one and the same Christ, Son, and Lord, unique, originating from/equipped with two natures which must be recognized without blending, without alteration, without division, and without separation—the difference between the natures being by no means transcended by their unification, but instead what is peculiar to each nature being preserved and concurring in one personal character and one substantial reality, not being apportioned or allocated to two personal characters but one and the same Son and unique God, Word, and Lord Jesus Christ;

just as the prophets taught about him from the beginning, and as the same Lord Jesus Christ himself taught us, and as the symbol [the Nicene creed] was handed down to us by the Fathers.

Barth's Mature Exposition of John 1 as the Election of Jesus Christ

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Frost) — Thu, 17 Sep 2020 20:10:00 +0000

Instead of just disputing scholarship that appears to be predicated on a misunderstanding of Barth's words, I seem to be at my best when I posit alternative translations. So since it appears that the real dispute isn't over section 32 on Barth's doctrine of election as such, but over section 33 in which it is connected to Jesus—and how that happens, and what it necessarily entails—that's what I was working on when I started this post a while back. And I really don't want to wind up charging into the election-and-theontology debate shouting "Leeeroy Jenkins!" in the name of saying plainly what Barth says here, and not what the traditionalists say ... so I tend to leave it alone. But there's something here, and it should be seen and heard and understood!

The thing about this section, which I love, is how absolutely consistent it shows Barth can be, now that his doctrine of election has a shape that fits what his theology had already been. This is not Barth with a radically new Christology, after the developments between 1936 and 1941. This is Barth freed of all restrictions that had been imposed on his theology by a doctrine of election that had traditionally been about limiting the scope of the human application of who God is in Jesus Christ for us. The Maury lecture and the resulting Debrecen reformulation in 1936 were Barth realizing that he no longer had to wrestle with accommodating his theology to the traditional forms of the predestinarian debates. And this material in particular, the key development of the 1941 published version in II.2, is why it all holds together. This is Barth setting forth purest gospel!

Of particular interest here is election as it relates to what is outside of or external to God, and the mistaken idea that Jesus Christ is dependent for his humanity on the creature having been created, which would prevent Jesus Christ, in and as his humanity, from being the eternal Son of God. (See Hunsinger.) But if we're following Barth, then we must believe with scripture that it is Jesus Christ, and no other—absolutely not an eternal Son abstracted from him, as though the article of faith were that there was a Son before Jesus—who is, and who is God, not next to and outside of God but precisely in, with, and as God, before the creature ever was. If we claim Chalcedonianism here, of all places, then we do not ever get to draw lines between the humanity and divinity of the eternal Son of God, much less impose separations of any distance between them. The dvine-human one is one, and is the eternal Son who was before the creature was created, the original of Adam's humanity in his own.

Which of course matters because this is how Barth escapes all of the mistaken naturalisms by which we imagine humanity determining its own fate, and being the source of requirements and limitations upon God's ability to enact God's saving will. (See infralapsarianism.) God's free choice here protects God's free choice in salvation. Election, as Barth comprehensively and critically reconceives it, frees soteriology from us and our demand that it be choice among humans, choice for some of us and against others, as opposed to what it is in Christ: choice for humanity as God's creature, and against humanity in every and all of its fallen self-determinations.

This is therefore not a validation of Christianity, but an invalidation of most of its traditional theologies, particularly the soteriologies that have come to be dominant. And that shouldn't be a problem, because there is no conciliar, ecumenically-defined orthodoxy on the question of soteriology. If preponderance were the qualification, after all, Arius would be normative! Barth engages in this thorough critique of the tradition in order to ensure that Trinitarian orthodoxy points us not away from God's enacted grace, toward some God who could and should be purified from it into negative freedom from us, but precisely, only, and always to the grace of God in God's primordial and inviolable positive freedom for us, which in and as Jesus Christ from all eternity stands in no dependency on or conceivable limitation by us. We were, after all, made by him, and not he from us.

And so, the text: quite a bit of section 33.1, translated from the German, with pagination marked, broken up for readability as usual, retaining Barth's original emphatics in bold italics.

[KD II.2, S. 101; CD II.2, p. 94]
§ 33: THE ELECTION OF JESUS CHRIST

Gracious choice is the eternal beginning of all of the ways and works of God in Jesus Christ, in whom God determines Godself for sinful humanity and sinful humanity for Godself in free grace, and therefore takes the reproof of humanity, with all its consequences, upon Godself and elects humanity to participation in God's own majesty.

1. JESUS CHRIST, THE ELECTING AND ELECTED ONE

¶ The person of Jesus Christ stands between God and humanity, himself God and himself human, and so acts as an intermediary between them both. In him, God reveals Godself to humanity. In him, humanity recognizes God. In him, God stands before humanity and humanity stands before God, as is the eternal will of God, and as is the eternal determination of humanity according to the will of God. In him, God's plan for humanity is set out, God's judgment on humanity is carried out, God's deliverance of humanity is worked out, God's gift to humanity is present in its fullness, and God's claim over and promise about humanity is pronounced. In him, God has joined Godself to humanity. And so humanity exists for his sake: humanity is created, with the world, from Jesus Christ and to him, as the showplace for the history of God with humanity and the history of humanity with God. As the being and nature of God is his being and nature, so the being and nature of humanity is primordially his being and nature. And nothing that is would be, except from him, through him, and to him. |

Jesus Christ is God's Word, in the truth of which everything is resolved, the truth of which cannot be surpassed or restricted by any other word. He is God's resolution, behind which there is none earlier, above which there is none higher, and besides which [neben dem] there is none other, so much so that all other resolutions can only serve the implementation of this one. He is God's beginning, before which there is no other except for [außer] the beginning God has in Godself, so that no one and nothing, except for [außer] Godself, comes from anywhere else or can look back on some other beginning. He is God's choice, before, without, and besides which [neben der] God has made no other choices, so that no one and nothing is chosen and intended by God before, without, and besides [neben] him. It is exactly he who is the choice (and therefore also the beginning, the resolution, the Word) of the free grace of God. For it is the free grace of God that God elects this: to be human in Jesus himself, [S. 102] to mediate and to join [p. 95] Godself to humanity in him. |

He, Jesus Christ, is the free grace of God, in the event of this grace not merely remainining identical with God's inner, eternal being and nature, but being powerful in God's outward [nach außen, "ad extra"] ways and works. That is exactly why there is no choice, no beginning and resolution, no Word of God, before, above, next to [neben], or outside of [außer] him. Free grace is the exclusive basis and sense of all of the outward [nach außen, "ad extra"] ways and works of God. What "outside" [außen] could these ways and works deserve, necessitate, or give rise to? There is no "outside" [außen] that is not first of all intended and posited as such by Godself in the presupposition of all of God's ways and works. There is no "outside" [außen] that does not as such have its basis and sense in God's gracious choice. But exactly Jesus Christ himself is God's gracious choice, and consequently is God's Word, resolution, and beginning in that absolutely and totally comprehensive way, encompassing the individuality of all other words, resolutions, and beginnings.

¶ We illustrate these propositions with a brief exegesis of the passage John 1:1–2: ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος. οὗτος ἦν ἐν ἀρχῇ πρὸς τὸν θεόν.

¶ Following its syntax, the [first] clause is to be emphasized as "In the beginning was the Word." Of course, it also says what was in the beginning, namely that in the beginning, the Word was, and not anything else. But it says that in the form of a statement about the Word: it was in the beginning, it did not come only later, it did not only come along as one moment among others in the universe of the world created by and different from God. |

But it was also not just the first and oldest part in the development of this universe; it was not merely (as Philo said about his logos) πρεσβύτατος τῶν γένεσιν εἰληφότων, "eldest of the generations of sensible things" (De migrationi Abrahami, I.5). So also, what Proverbs 8:22 says of the divine wisdom, "The Lord made me, the firstling of God's rule, as the beginning of God's works, long ago," is surely not to be understood that way; the continuation in 8:23 explicitly states "from eternity was I formed, from the very beginning, before the origin of the world." So also Colossians 1:15, πρωτότοκος τῆς κτίσεως, "firstborn of the creation," is not to be understood that way, for its continuation states ὅτι ἐν αὐτῷ ἐκτίσθη τὰ πάντα, "that everything was created by him," whereby the "firstborn" is obviously also moved out from [aus ... heraus] the rank of created realities. |

But surely in these passages, and so also with the Johannine ἐν ἀρχῇ (or the ἀπ' ἀρχῆς of 1 John 1:1), it is said that exactly the Word as such—existing before and over all created realities, standing entirely outside [außerhalb] of all of their ranks, preceding all becoming and all time, who like God, and therefore as it was entirely correctly construed in the 4th century, "at no time was not"—that exactly this Word was also in and with the beginning of all of those things, which as created by God are different from God: that there is therefore no time in this domain which is not included in its eternity, no space which does not have its origin in its "omnipresence" and which is not therefore bounded by it, no possibility of sidestepping or escaping from it. But where is there an "in the beginning" of its being, in this sense, outside of and besides [außer und neben] the being of God?

¶ The second clause says, in answer to that: "And the Word was with God." The emphasis here undoubtedly falls on the last two words, and so this sentence also forms a statement about the Word. It says that no one outside of and besides [außer und neben] God was actually "in the beginning" in that sense. But the Word was precisely not [S. 103] outside of and next to [außer und neben] God. Πρὸς θεόν does not mean "towards God," somewhat in the sense of the famous Augustinian ad te me creasti, "you have created me for yourself," and it also does not mean "in association with God" (Theodor Zahn). Both [p. 96] could indeed also be said of a being that was not "in the beginning" in that sense, and could strictly speaking only be said of any such other being. But if this second clause does not contradict the first, if instead it illustrates it, then πρός must be understood without any nuance as: the one who could be "in the beginning," who was with God, who—because it is proper to God, because they exist in the manner of Godself—is beyond the created reality. It is because the Word was "with God" in this sense that it could be "in the beginning," and exactly by being with God that it was in the beginning. But how could it be "with God" in this sense? What does it mean to say "proper to God" or "existing in the manner of Godself"?

¶ The third clause—whose subject we again have to recognize as "the Word," following the procedure of the previous two—says, in answer to that, "And God was the Word." The sentence therefore says: the Word was itself God; it partook entirely, itself, of the divine kind and being. It in no way follows from the omission of the article before θεός that only an inauthentic divinity should be attributed to the Word. The process is rather more simply that the kind and the being of a second "he," namely that of the logos, is called by the kind and the being of the first, namely, identified with the "he" of God; that precisely the divinity of the ὁ θεός is ascribed to the ὁ λόγος. In so doing, we presuppose first of all that, due to the definite article, "the Word" should actually be designated as "he" in the same sense as "the God." |

That this presupposition is correct arises in a compelling fashion from its consequences. If it is correct, then the exegesis of the 4th century, with its doctrine of the homoousion, the unity of nature and being to be understood of the divine persons, prosopa, or hypostases, should also be basically on the right track here. The conceptual advance achieved with the third clause is then this: that the reason the Word can be "with God," that like God it can be "in the beginning," is because as a person (the Son!) it participates together with the person of "God" (the Father!), in its own way, in the same dignity and perfection of the one divine nature and being. We must admit that, when read through the eyes of so-called "orthodoxy," the verse in any case makes sense internally, with each of its words understandable in its own place.

¶ But what, or who, is "the Word" whose predicates are signaled in John 1:1? As is well-known, the concept comes back only one other time in the prologue of John (1:14), and is never used again in this sense in the rest of the gospel of John. It evidently only has the character of a placeholder in the entire exposition, a temporary designation of the place where, afterwards, something entirely different—or rather, someone wholly other—is to become visible. And so it stands, also, in the only place in the rest of the New Testament where the concept appears in the exact same usage from John 1:1, unambiguously: Revelation 19:13, where it says of the rider on the white steed that one of the ornamental bands on his head bears his name, which name no one other than he himself knows (i.e. understands); and this legible name, which is only understandable to him, this ideogram, which can only be deciphered by him, says: ὁ λόγος τοῦ θεοῦ. But the concept here is therefore representative, standing in place of and temporarily concealing the other, authentic concept that the rider on the white steed has of himself, which so to speak subsists and comes to expression in his existence. This relationship is quite clear in John 1:1: ὁ λόγος is unmistakably substituted for Jesus. It is his place that is to be marked off, cleared out, and secured, as it were, by means of the predicates given to the logos. He, Jesus, is in the beginning, is with God, is himself God in kind. That is what is secured by John 1:1. But why is it done with precisely the instrument of this concept? | [S. 104]

When we pose this question historico-genetically, we obviously stand before a vast ocean of possibilities, extending from the logos of Philo to the personal, semi-personal, and impersonal essential divine natures of Mandaean theory. Within that ocean, it will likely always be a waste of effort to seek after the lost droplet, i.e. after the "source" of the Fourth Evangelist, because we know neither in what specific form the Evangelist adopted this quite commonplace and ambiguous term, nor to what transformation [p. 97] he subjected it—nor, ultimately, do we even know with any certainty whether he adopted it from anywhere at all. What is certain, is that he did not wish to bestow upon Jesus the honor of being invested with the title of the logos; instead, he bestows upon this concept the honor of being used, a few lines later, as a predicate of Jesus. He has provided exactly no other exegesis of this concept, except for [außer] what is carried out with this predication. |

We can only say this: by carrying out this exegesis, he has excluded from consideration for this text all of those meanings of the concept, possible in themselves, according to which it would essentially and primarily designate the principle of a theory of knowledge, or of a metaphysical account of the world. For even if in John 1:3 (and 1:10) a cosmogenic function is undoubtedly ascribed to the logos, there can be no doubt that the Evangelist did not take up the concept for the sake of this meaning; instead, in 1:3 and 1:10 he recollects this meaning in order to underscore and illustrate what was said in 1:1–2. He passes beyond that point without constructing something on that basis. Brushing past the substance of this concept, he makes rapid strides towards his own goal: the Word was the bearer of life (1:4), which life was the light of humanity in its perennially-contended struggle with the darkness (1:5, 9); this Word has become flesh (1:14); it is the μονογενῆς θεός, the "unique," "sui generis God," who is located in the bosom of the Father and who has made known to us as such the unknown God (1:18). |

To the extent that, apart from the fact that it just is Jesus, the Johannine logos can be generally defined: it is the principle, the basis internal to Godself, for revelation, the self-communication of God to humanity. The author of the Fourth Gospel found exactly that in Jesus: the life that was the light, God's revelation; the saying, the speech, the communication in which God makes Godself known to us—but not these things as now a second outside of and next to [außer und neben] God, but rather in this one as such Godself: not only the revelation of God, therefore, but in the revelation its principle, its basis internal to Godself, and for that reason exactly the perfect, absolute revelation of God. It was in order to signify this that the Evangelist spoke of the logos—wherever he got the concept from, and whatever other resonances it might have had for him. |

We can be satisfied with the translation "the Word." A grammatically masculine noun like "the Saying" might better prefigure the content of John 1:2, as takes place in the Greek text. Goethe's Faust notoriously thought it "impossible to rate 'the Word' so highly," and that it should be "translated differently": "… I see at once the fact / and confidently write: 'In the beginning was the act!'" But immediately after that is confidently written, the devil appears! The word, or the saying, is the unremarkable but proper form in which one person communicates themselves to any other. Even God communicates Godself to humanity using the word. But because it is the Word of God, it is not just any word, but the Word, the Word of all words, and that is why it does not need reason, sense, force, and the like to be conferred upon it; instead it has all of that in itself precisely as the Word: as the divine self-communication, going from person to person, linking God and humanity. |

Notice: the Evangelist presupposes that the Word is there, is given, is spoken. The fact that it is so does not need to be substantiated, and is not developed from any source. The threefold ἦν in John 1:1 has more that just axiomatic force. It points to an eternal and to a [S. 105] temporal event taking place: to an eternal event in the form of time, and to a temporal event with the content of eternity. That is exactly why there is so little weight resting on the threefold ὁ λόγος, and why it makes so little sense to settle on this or that meaning of this concept which can be substantiated elsewhere. As an idiogram, it can be left standing there like the quite legible but not understandable inscription on the ornamental band of the rider of Revelation 19, as the 'x' variable whose value will only emerge once the equation has been solved. John 1:19 begins to solve this equation, but the Johannine prologue sets it up, giving the unknown its place in relationship to the known figures: to God, to the world, to humanity, to the witnesses (John the Baptist!), to the believers. John 1:1 is the beginning [p. 98] of this setup: there, where God is, namely in the beginning, is the Word; that is why it must be proper to God, and therefore it must itself be God in kind. Nothing more or less than Godself requires that God's Word be there. But it is there, and so God is with it there, Godself. Thus far, John 1:1.

¶ The continuation states: "This one was in the beginning with God." It is completely unconvincing to say that these words should just be a summing up of John 1:1, which is not in need of any such summing up, nor is it evident that such would be completed in 1:2. And because the third clause of 1:1 is the illustration of both of the first two, we also cannot properly accept (with Theodor Zahn) the idea that the repetition of these two first clauses in 1:2 should be for its part an illustration of that third. Instead, Adolf Schlatter should be heard out: the οὗτος is not to be understood as pointing backwards, but rather as pointing forwards. The phrase οὗτος ἦν returns again in the prologue, namely at the climax of the most important rendering of the witness of the Baptizer in 1:15–16: "It was this one of whom I said, one comes after me who was there before me, since he was the first one before me. For from his fullness we have all received grace for grace's sake." |

The entire remaining content of the prologue proves clearly enough that the Evangelist takes exactly this testimonial attitude of the Baptizer for his own, that he has identified himself directly with that testimony. This is made visible for the first time in 1:2 in foreshadowing anticipation. Even he, the Evangelist (himself also a "John"), points: οὗτος ἦν, "this one was." And it is exactly this pointing in 1:2 that characterizes John 1:1 as determining that location: he points at the one who actually fills the space bounded off by the logos concept. The clause therefore says: this one, he, the one who has as little need to be identified as a person as he has to be referred to as ὁ θεός, the one whom we all know, because he is the Word that has come to us all—he was in the beginning with God; Jesus was. That is why we can reckon with the spoken nature of the Word, which exists in the beginning and is proper to God, with that more-than-axiomatic certainty; that is why nothing is projected into eternity in so doing: eternity has indeed become time, which is to say that the eternal has indeed become something temporal, that exactly what is divine has indeed become a human name. The discussion is about this name. |

John 1:2 therefore belongs to the third clause of 1:1, which exactly so is not repeated. In connection with John 1:1, 1:2 says, retrospectively: this one, Jesus, is the Word that is privy to the divine being, this one was in the beginning, because as himself the divine Word, this one legitimately belongs to God. And it says, prospectively: the Word is privy to the divine being, for this one, Jesus, was the one who was in the beginning with God, because he legitimately belongs to God. With his pointing, with his οὗτος ἦν, the Evangelist equally answers both of the questions: "who was, himself a divine being, in the beginning with God?" and "is there any validity to the claim that someone, themselves a divine being, was in the beginning with God?" The answer to both questions is: "this one, Jesus, it was him." The mention of this name (which at this point only takes place by way of allusion) is simultaneously hypothesis and proof in view of what really is in the beginning with God. By necessarily understanding John 1:2 as a reference to the name and to the person of Jesus, the interpretation of the third [S. 106] clause of 1:1 becomes compelling, according to which two distinct persons are to be identified with respect to their divine being: the Word, which participates in the same θεότης, "divinity," (but exactly that Word which is this one, οὗτος) has stepped in next to the one who there was designated as ὁ θεός, "God."

¶ The αὐτοῦ in John 1:3 and 1:10 then points to him, to this one, where it says that τὰ πάντα, "everything," that the κόσμος, "the world," came into being through him, and that out of everything that came into being, nothing did so without him. And here the unique arrangement of John 1:1–2 culminates in a consideration that is also customary elsewhere in the New Testament witness. We read in Colossians 1:17 that the Son of God—not in abstracto, but in concreto: Jesus Christ, exactly the one who is the head of his body, the community—"is before all things," that "everything has its continued existence in him." It was indeed [p. 99] (the concept of choice is completely clear here!) the good pleasure of the "entire fullness (of divinity)" to take shape, to take up residence, in him (κατοικῆσαι … σωματικῶς, Col. 1:19; 2:9). On that basis, 2 Corinthians 4:4, Colossians 1:15, and Hebrews 1:3 are exclusively to be understood in this way: he is the image of God, the reflection of God's majesty, the character of God's being, and exactly so "before all things" the mystery of God, "in whom all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden" (Col. 2:2–3), the mystery hidden from all eternity in God the Creator of all things (Eph. 3:9). |

That is exactly why he is now also categorically and exclusively "the firstborn of the entire creation" (Col. 1:15), and is confirmed as such—"so that he should have precedence in everything"—by the fact that he is also the "firstling from the dead" (1 Cor 15:20; Col. 1:18). That is exactly why he is the κεφαλή, the head, of every origin and every force (Col. 2:10), so that the revelation and reconciliation that happen in him can only involve an ἀνακεφαλαιοῦσθαι, a recapitulation, of the whole, of the heavens and the earth (Eph. 1:10). That is exactly why he is the one "who fulfills everything in every way" (Eph. 1:23), so that his temporal appearance and action must necessarily be called "the fullness of time" (Gal. 4:4; Eph. 1:10). |

If in Hebrews 1:2 (in analogy to John 1:3, 10) it is said about him that he, whom God instated as the heir of all things, should be exactly the one through whom God had also made the world—and in Hebrews 1:3, that exactly he bears (φερῶν) all things through his powerful word—and in Colossians 1:16, "In him has everything that is in heaven and on the earth been created, what is visible and what is invisible … it has all been created by him and towards him"—it is therefore only the making explicit of his being as the being of God understood in God's original, first, fundamental turning towards the creature.

¶ If that applies, then we are summoned to recognize God's Word, resolution, and choice at the beginning of all things, and therefore also at the beginning of our own existence and thought, and so also at the foundation of our faith in God's ways and works, in the name and in the person of Jesus Christ. Or, conversely, we are summoned exactly in this person to recognize the Word, resolution, and choice of God at its beginning. We are summoned, exactly in him, to recognize the authority to which, in view of the goal and origin of all things, we definitively and absolutely have to adhere, not merely like we must cling to God, but as adherence to Godself, since it is exactly Godself, in all God's ways and works, who absolutely willed to bear this name and therefore really did bear it: the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of this Father, the Holy Spirit of this Father and this Son. |

There being no ἕτερον ὄνομα … ἐν ὧ δεῖ σωθῆναι ἡμᾶς, no "other name … in which it is necessary for us to be saved," given to humanity under heaven, something even more comprehensive has been decided: that in the name of Jesus, the knees of everyone in heaven, on earth, and under the earth shall bend (Phil. 2:10). If that applies, then our thought and speech about God's actions can take its beginning in no higher place than exactly here: in this name. We would not correctly think and speak about God if, in so doing, we did not think of God as of the "first and last" on the basis of the fact that from all eternity God elected to bear this name. Jesus Christ is God's eternal Word, God's eternal resolution, God's eternal beginning with respect to everything that really is, outside of [außer] God.

[S. 107]

¶ We have to understand God's Word, resolution, and beginning with respect to all reality distinct from God as God's choice. With that we say that every act of God, "inward" as well as "outward," is based on God's freedom, in God's decision—and indeed, in its happening in time, that the action of God is based on God's eternal decision which constitutes and rules time. God chooses. This is what absolutely precedes all other existence and events. We are obviously referred here, both by the subject and by the predicate, [p. 100] beyond time, beyond the context of the created world and its history, into the space where God is with Godself, in the space of God's free good pleasure and will, which is to say: exactly in God's eternity, from which the world and time and all of their contents were made, are governed, and therefore receive their defined purpose.

¶ The natural temptation—and we have already seen the kind of role it played in the history of the doctrine of predestination—is to imagine this space as empty and undefined, as it were, and to imagine God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the terms of any subject (albeit equipped with the highest divine attributes), which can choose, and actually does choose, and is only distinct from other choosing subjects by the fact that God is absolutely free in God's choice, that God owes accountability to no other being for the type and orientation of God's choice, and that God must be recognized as the subject who chooses absolutely justly. From which it follows that God's choice is an absolutely unconditioned one, or conditioned exclusively by this subject for itself and as such, and that its actual choice is therefore to be understood as a decretum absolutum, an unconditional pronouncement. But this exact construct—as extremely effective as it has been in the history of the doctrine of predestination—is actually likely to be a temptation which, as such, we have to recognize and protect against. |

We must first of all ask all those who advocate for it this question: in view of God's entire outward [nach außen, "ad extra"] behavior and existence, in God's relation to the creature created by God, might there perhaps still be something higher and more authentic in God than just God's choice? Must we say that God, in being the counterpart to God's creature and thereby in God's relationship to everything that is outside of [außer] God, simply is God exactly in the fact that from all eternity God chose, that God made a decision, one way or another, for the existence and essence of the creature (with everything that constitutes this essence)? If so, then how is God's choice to be distinguished from God's Word and resolution in the beginning? Must we not then say that God's choice consists exactly in this Word and resolution in the beginning, and conversely, that God's Word and resolution in the beginning is God's choice, God's free, subjective self-determination: the primordial act of God's lordship over all things, independent of every external [äußeren] necessity, condition, and determination? |

If, in that, we agree [S. 108] with the advocates of that construction, then we would certainly have to ask them whether we are also in agreement that God's Word and resolution in the beginning consists in God adopting and bearing the name Jesus Christ, that this name itself is God's Word and resolution in the beginning? But if that applies, then how could we evade the absolutely momentous proposition that exactly this is itself God's choice in its origin, in its authentic truth and power which is decisive for everything else: God has determined Godself, from all eternity, in free and non-contingent self-determination, to be the bearer of this name? What could God's choice be, if not this? What choice could precede this choice, in which God has chosen Godself [p. 101] for this purpose: to have the Word, which is Jesus, in the beginning of all things with Godself? |

By what decretum absolutum, covertly or openly, could this decretum concretum [n.b.: the CD mistakenly repeats absolutum here] be exaggerated and problematized? Where, then, does the notion of an absolute decree in any way persist? Faced with even the choice in which God has decided Godself for the existence and quality of existence of the creature, as an absolute and independent choice: how could it be understood other than as in that choice in which God (obviously first of all!) decided Godself for Godself, i.e. for this, God's situatedness, for this, God's existence under this name, God's existence in Jesus Christ?

¶ God's choice is primordially and authentically God's decision for it to be the way John 1:1–2 describes: that the Word—the Word that is this one, that is called Jesus—really is in the beginning, with God, the same as Godself and one with God in divinity. But for exactly that reason, it is a per se gracious choice. It is quite truly not self-explanatory that this is the case. God would not be God, would indeed not be free, if this had to be the case. "What are humans, that you remember them, and human children, that you adopt them?" (Ps. 8:5) The eternal God does not owe it to humanity to be, in Godself, the God to whom it is essential to bear that name. That God is this God in actual fact, is grace. It is not something humanity has earned; it can only be given to them. And the fact that God is gracious, that in adopting this name God gives Godself to humanity, which they have not earned, precisely that is God's choice, God's free decision. It is God's gracious choice. God has disposed Godself, situated Godself, in free determination; without any obligation to do so, God has made Godself obligated to humanity, by willing to accept what according to John 1:1–2 is true. The fact that it is true, is grace. The fact that God willed to accept it, is grace.

¶ In the beginning, before this time and space of ours, before the creation and therefore before there was a reality different from God as the object of God's love, before it could be the showplace for the actions of God's freedom, God anticipated this in Godself (in the power of God's love and [S. 109] freedom, of God's knowledge and will), determined this already as the goal and the sense of God's entire conduct with the world that was not yet: that in God's Son God would be gracious to humanity, that God would join Godself to them. It was in the beginning the choice of the Father, to make this covenant with humanity true by giving God's Son for them, in order to become human Godself to carry out God's grace. It was in the beginning the choice of the Son, to be obedient to grace and therefore to give himself and become human, so that covenant would thereby have its reality. It was in the beginning the resolution of the Holy Spirit that the unity of God, the unity of the Father and the Son, should not be impaired by this covenant with humanity, much less ruptured; on the contrary, it was the resolution of the Holy Spirit that the unity of God should become so much more majestic, that the deity of God, the divinity of God's freedom and God's love, should be confirmed and prove itself [p. 102] precisely in this giving of the Father and in the Father's self-giving of the Son. This choice was in the beginning. And as subject and object of this choice, Jesus Christ was at the beginning. He was not at the beginning of God: God has indeed no beginning. But he was at the beginning of all things, at the beginning of all conduct of God with the reality different from God. Jesus Christ was God's choice with respect to this reality. He was the choice of the grace of God turned toward humanity. He was the choice of the covenant of God with humanity.

The Supralapsarian Being of the Mediator

This means that, for Barth, Jesus Christ is not a tertium quid, the interface between God and humanity as though alien to both in their combination into some third thing. For Barth, the person and work of the mediator (who is not a Trinitarian person, so that this is really a locus of the indivisible opera Trinitatis ad extra and not anything special to the Son as vs the Father or Spirit) require that he be fully both, that their natures are his, original to him, by nature.

Nor, for his possession of human nature, can Jesus Christ be relegated to humanity as though he did not equally and totally and properly possess the divine nature. There are four Chalcedonian adjectives, and while they demand of us that we neither confuse nor change humanity and God into one another in our Christologies, they also and adamantly insist that we not divide or separate this one, who is inextricably and totally both, as though humanity and God were or could conceivably be antithetical to one another. As Barth puts it, his reality simply is the demonstration of his possibility as such, and he is this not as a compromise, but because this is what God positively and eternally wills.

Eternity is therefore as proper and genuine to Jesus Christ as temporality. His place is no less with and in and as God, before there was a creature, than it is with and among us as a human being in the world—unless we are to deny John 1, as Barth insists God does not. And this is why we can confidently say that our place is also eternally with God, who has eternally chosen to be with us and so as a result of choosing in free grace to be Jesus Christ in eternity has created us along with all that is. This is a necessary article of faith; we must say this, rather than seeking to divide God from ourselves, and so denying God's turning toward us and falsifying God's actions for us and the whole creation.

All of this talk of externality to God, of what is "outside" and actions that are "outward" toward that (ad extra), does not in any way imply that God has chosen to be outside of and without us. For Barth, God is God without us, that is, in no dependency on our being to be God, but does not as God ever will again to be without the creature. God is not, will not ever again be, without us as God was before creation. In this passage, Barth has indeed placed Jesus Christ outside of this reality which is external to God—but not as though God were ever involved in choice against it. The only thing there is outside of and next to God, is God's creature. The only thing there is outside of and next to the creature, is God its Creator. Jesus is not a second and separate reality external to God, in being external to the order of created being; he is internal to God, and not without his humanity.

This name, Jesus Christ, is therefore for Barth not merely the name of his flesh, or a name that only applies to the span of that mortal life in the middle of world history—as though there were or could be any other name for the eternal Son and Word of God before and after it. This name tells us of the one who was, in the beginning, before we were, and of the exact same one who will come again at the end, and so of the one who is God, who is the eternal character and nature and being of God, at all points in between.

Why? Because this one is God's free and gracious positive will and choice, for which God is free in total power, and from which God cannot be limited by any temporal realities. This one and no other is the character of God's use of power, the shape we should see in every other action of God, and the fundamental rubric necessary for us as Christians to grasp God's free grace. (And of course it is, because our Christian ancestors made a decision very early on to destroy as much of the knowledge of the people of God whose scriptures these are, the Jewish and Judean people whom as Paul says God knew first and so first chose to be conformed to this image. The same people of God to whom Jesus belonged, of and for whom he was before we were ever in the picture. The same people who wrote even the New Testament texts we canonized against them. We made it impossible for ourselves, and anyone we indoctrinated, to recognize the God many of his own people recognized in Jesus Christ because they had long and intimately known this God.)

The alternative we have crafted across our traditions, to abstract God's character away from God's self-revelation, attributes to God's power an arbitrary will, a nature void of positive and constant character, free fundamentally in negation, which we could then fill with our prejudices against one another and our created nature as a whole. And that's not God's nature; that's the nature of the Fall, and of our evil—especially of our evil as Christians, not just as humans. We are, as Barth said in his critique of religion, no more likely to be faithful because of our religion, because of our theologies, than anyone outside of it and of them. Christianity is not proof against idolatry; to craft idols in place of God you have to first claim to believe in this God, and then screw it up.

Concrete Omnipotence in Jesus Christ: Apokatastasis in light of Paul's faith in Romans 11

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Frost) — Sat, 05 Oct 2019 13:19:00 +0000

So I've handled this bit before, but not in the kind of depth it deserves. Or maybe it's just that there's always more to it when you're reading Barth's dogmatics.

In this post I will be looking at one large paragraph, spanning roughly three pages in both the German and the English of Barth's dogmatics: from S. 323 to 325 in KD II.2, and p. 294 to 296 in CD II.2. And it appears in a massive excursus on Romans 11, about which I would rather you hear someone like Mark Nanos on the root-and-branches metaphor Paul uses, than ever give credence to Calvin. But we're talking about Barth, so we're going to run into problems.

We're in section 34, on the election of the community, which means we've already had both halves of the nutshell of Barth's mature doctrine of election: (1) in section 32, the comprehensive tradition-critical redefinition of the entire locus, and (2) in section 33, the comprehensive grounding of that entirely-redefined locus in Jesus Christ as both the self-electing eternal God and the eternally elect human, in the beginning with God before creation as he will be in redemption at the eschaton, and at all points in between.

Having thus critically established the core of the doctrine as intentionally and absolutely having nothing to do with any idea of the direct election or reprobation of individuals and groups of humanity, Barth has moved on to application. And that application carries out a wrestling with and decisive rejection of supersessionism ... even if it still happens in fundamentally supersessionist terms.

Fighting with One Hand Tied Behind his Back

Barth's doctrine of election is decisively shaped not only by the Maury lecture in 1936, but also by the fact that fascist white-supremacist ethnonationalism had taken over both Germany and the church in it—just as it has done in the United States today. Theologische Existenz heute!, Barth's call to the church that there was still time to act like the church, and not like the fucking Nazis, happened already in 1933, as did his Abschied from the dialectical theology circle, particularly in response to Gogarten's nationalism. Barth's vehement rejection of Brunner's natural-order reading of Calvin happened, for the same basic reasons, in 1934, in which year he also posted his Barmen Declaration to Hitler personally. His ouster from Bonn for failing to support the Führer happened in 1935. And Barth had already been fighting the abuse of Christian theology and exegesis for such political purposes for longer than he had been a professor at that point. But of course, this doesn't mean his opinions about Judaism were any good, or that he had been fighting for the benefit of Jewish people and Judaism.

The problem is that the intrinsic authenticity to Christianity of a supersessionist reading of Paul against Judaism cannot be denied. (Note: not to scripture, not to Paul, but to Christianity. This is our failure, our original sin, we own it.) For Barth it appears that this Christian reading of Paul is intrinsic to Paul's texts, and so he does not seem to believe he can escape it. We today should reject any such reading as an external imposition. Standing in the wake of the "New Perspective" of the 70s and 80s (tainted as it was by supersessionist caricature) and of the rise of an entire field of authentically Jewish New Testament work, we have reason to understand Paul and his communities as existing wholly within the context of plural Hellenistic Judaisms, and long predating the existence of Christianity and its construction of "Judaism" in polar and polemical opposition. But Barth ... has no such information. Barth, unfortunately, knows no such thing about Paul and his communities.

And so Barth is stuck hoisting us on our own petards, engaging in tu quoque not because our hypocrisy proves supersessionism wrong, but because ours is exactly the kind of unbelief and falsehood to which it applies in those we have called "rejected by God." Because if there is any truth to the logic of supersessionism—and in Jesus Christ there is not—the outcomes of God's judgment upon unbelief come to all of us, and the walls of the church will not keep it out. The reality of judgment and condemnation may be temporal rather than eternal in scope, and not actually entail any form of soteriological abandonment, but regardless, if we're gung ho to apply judgment and condemnation, Barth is going to show us that we are its objects.

A Valid Point Regardless

And of course we can do better today, and we must, in a whole host of ways—but when it comes to the question of "the doctrine of the apokatastasis," as it appears in this context, Barth's foundation of tradition-critical redefinition has already taken all of the steam out of the question of who is elect. The eternal self-election of God for humanity in Jesus Christ does not entail a decision for any group, or even for those who believe—much less therefore against any group, or against those who disbelieve. However the situation looks to us, whoever appears to be elect or reprobate on the basis of how they appear to relate to God, the truth is not even that "God knows who are God's own"—because the creature is God's own. The truth is that God doesn't respect our unbelief, and doesn't limit God's use of power toward us as though any of us could make ourselves ineligible (let alone eligible) for what God eternally wills for God's total creature.

And so to the paragraph in question, retranslated and broken up for better readability:

In Romans 11:23 we hear that with the knocking-off of those holy twigs from the holy trunk—which, as the character of the existence of the synagogue shows, is principally and for the present a bitter actuality—a final divine decision has not come down, a divine definition of the relationship between Israel and the church has not yet taken place; that we in the church should indeed not perceive in this event the revelation of the goal and end of the will of God with Israel. |

Mind you, that is the nasty way things look in the present (foretold by everything that has happened in the history of Israel from time immemorial, and has been expressly construed by Moses and the prophets). Here, the holy root of Israel, their Messiah as the authentic object of their election, and with him the people of those who believe in him: many of the heathen, and few of the people Israel, who as exceptions nevertheless appear to confirm the rule that this people as such is not, at bottom, the people of the election of God, and therefore has no positive share in God's compassion. There, the majority of Israel, which was only elect and only served for this purpose, to expose the divine compassion in its freedom over against all human willing and working and all claims arising therefrom—and which has henceforth been discharged from service. However, this present situation has by no means the character of unalterability. |

Already in 11:20-22 it was said that we should not form a false impression of the permanence of our own status in the church. It is by believing that we stand there. But it is by fearing God that we believe. And it is by clinging to God's benevolence while renouncing all other support that we fear God. Were we to surrender this grip, we would no longer stand, and then a change on the part of the church, namely a decisive shift toward evil, would become possible and real. Christians who lose this grip must and would be "cut off" from Jesus Christ as the existence and basis for the life of the church, just as those Jewish people were from the sense and basis of the election of Israel. |

And it is indeed curious, after 11:20–22, that the shift toward evil on the part of the church must actually, concretely take place exactly when Christians consider themselves superior to, for example, the unfaithful Jewish people, when they presume to think as though the situation between themselves and the Jewish people had become unalterable, that it had once and for all been decided in their favor and to the disadvantage of the Jewish people. Whoever thinks they can put themselves in the church on the ground of that sort of decisiveness will be enraged by the free decisive power of the divine compassion, and thereby step out into what, apart from the church, is a bottomless abyss. They do no longer cling to God's benevolence. They therefore no longer fear God. They therefore no longer believe. They can also, therefore, no longer stand: for they have thereby ceased to stand precisely in the church. With such presumptive decisiveness, they have already secretly abandoned the church, and sooner or later it will become obvious that this has happened. |

That is what the just-added heathen Christians ought to keep in mind. They would stand to lose everything if they succumbed to the delusion of that unalterability of the present situation, if they wanted to set themselves up against the synagogue on the ground of that revolutionary, extremely dangerous decisiveness. Absolutely nothing, and no situation, within the created world is truly unalterable, as long as time endures. Only the fidelity and constancy of the eternal God, who is its Creator and Lord, is truly unalterable. To stand on solid ground, the church clings to God and to absolutely nothing else! |

But that is exactly why the church must also be and remain open-minded, receptive to every alteration and innovation still to be carried out by this God in the world of God's creation, in the implementation of God's will in time. The simultaneously cautionary and comforting basic truth which stands over every present situation is that God has not stopped being in charge, but instead has it at God's free disposal to dictate again and otherwise. And it is that which stands as the bond of peace even over the unholy dichotomy between church and synagogue, as the reservation about the authentic Israel assembled from Jewish and heathen people in the church, but also as the promise about the Israel of the synagogue, which has become inauthentic. The exact same God who has cut off can also graft in. God has actually cut off original twigs of the holy trunk, and grafted in wildlings in their place. This corresponds to the present situation between church and synagogue. But God can also graft in again what God has already cut off. |

That is the promise which stands even over the synagogue. Before God its unbelief is not an eternal, but rather a temporally limited fact, however definitive it may be intended, give itself to be seen, and appear from the perspective of the church. How could unbelief be or produce an eternal fact? That is denied to it by its very nature. Will we not have to say that unbelief is, exactly so, the temporally-limited fact κατ' ἐξοχήν, par excellence, which the eternal God necessarily overlooks, having its end in view, even if that has been concealed from all human eyes? As with unbelief itself, the eternal God as such cannot cease to negate every last persistence in unbelief. And that is why now even the belief in this eternal God cannot cease to reckon with the end of such wicked persistence, and therefore with an alteration toward the good, where humanly considered we think we see an insurmountable inertia on the part of wickedness. |

That is why Paul reckoned with the fact that even the already cut-off twigs could be grafted in again. Paul had in view what had happened to the wildlings, how inconceivable—but it really happened—that heathens came from the darkness to the light and became partakers of the nourishment that flows through the holy root of Israel, how suddenly and obviously they became authentic objects of the authentic election of Israel. It is by the power of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead that that really and obviously happened. In the face of this instruction, it is now impossible for Paul to believe in the inertia of the unbelief of the Jewish people, and therefore in the decisiveness of the divine decision that has come down according to this side. |

Because the matter cannot be put to rest with their unbelief, those who appear to have been dropped from the authentic election of Israel will again be gathered to the elect Israel, and the final basis on which the authenticity of the election of Israel as Israel might be doubted, will be removed. Indeed, we note that Paul does not base this prospect for the future of the entire Israel on some optimistic opinion about the Israelite people presently in question, but rather by reference to the omnipotence of God: "God has the power to graft them in again." But again, there is no occasion to take this reference to the omnipotence of God in Paul, as in the other witnesses of the Old and New Testaments, as appealing to or relying upon the infinite potentiality of the divine being in general, as supporting itself on the haphazard and arbitrary postulate that with God, ultimately anything and everything must be possible. The assertion of an eventual redemption of anyone and everyone, known by the name of the doctrine of the "apokatastasis," tends to draw its motivation and power from an optimistic assessment of humanity in connection with just such a postulate of the infinite potentiality of the divine being. Paul does not derive his statement from there, which is why he also does not arrive at this assertion. |

Paul speaks on the one hand about the truly lost people whom he has in view in the synagogue, and whom since Romans 10 Paul really has not attempted to interpret optimistically, and on the other, about the concrete omnipotence of God who in Jesus Christ has seen to and stood up for humanity, the omnipotence of God which has become obvious in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, is present in the miracle of the faith of the church, and awaits its conclusive unveiling in the coming-again of Jesus Christ. The thought of the future of this people and of the omnipotence of this God therefore is here and remains in what follows a thought of faith, a concrete thought of hope, in which humanity is not overestimated, and neither is the freedom of God too closely confined. But the idea has power and certainty precisely in this concreteness, in which it may and must be thought and expressed. Exactly in view of the connection of this God to this people, we cannot overrate God's abilities, we cannot disregard the superiority of this God and thereby the promise that stands over this people, we cannot despair of humanity, and we therefore cannot believe in some power of the inertia of human unbelief. We can never believe in unbelief; we can always only believe in the future faith of those who do not presently believe.

And you can see that the question here comes down, not even to an inclusivity of "them" into "us"—as though we were a primary object of election in any way, shape, or form—but to the power of God as used according to the will of God.

Faith in the Concrete Will of God, without Abstraction

Now, we habitually talk about "universalism" as a possibility available to God, and then proceed to argue about whether God legitimately can achieve this possibility, or whether God wills something else more, which would prevent its achievement when God becomes internally conflicted. And within that framework, the question of possibility has been lampshaded, such that even if one were to admit that God could, hypothetically, the reality is asserted to be such that God cannot, actually.

In infralapsarian terms, which are the only terms in which such a conversation works, that asserted practical impossibility is why the discussion becomes about God's two wills: the antecedent eternal will, in which alone we are allowed to imagine universal salvation; and the consequent will, for which God settles in face of the insurmountable human reality. Why? Because God values God's holiness more, or some other such garbage in which holiness and love, freedom and grace, are fundamentally opposed and so divide the economy from God's aseity.

And Barth rejects the entire conversation, having long since comprehensively rejected infralapsarianism. What we see here in this text is therefore not a rejection of a total soteriological hope, but of the abstractions on which a specific interpretation of that hope is grounded, and the human realities they make way for instead.

The teaching of the church that goes by the name of "apokatastasis" fundamentally believes something different than Paul does, when it comes to the power of the omnipotent God—as does the alternative teaching of double predestination, which Barth has already decisively rejected. For Barth, as for Paul, it is Jesus Christ who is the power of God, and the will of God successfully enacted before and without us. And so if we are going to ask what the will of God is, what God will do with God's power when it comes to humanity and its falsehood, the answer is not to be found in bracketing Jesus as though there were a prior will of God which determined the matter before and without him, much less in describing the matter as being determined after and without him by reference to our choices.

But if we abstract that positively chosen character away from God's power, if we abstract away God's freely chosen and self-revealed will, why then God might do anything at all! As Barth has already said in II.1, God is the only standard for God's omnipotence, because God's power is totally sufficient to God's will, neither needing nor being restricted by anything else. What God wills, God does, and therefore anything God wills is possible and shall be actual. And nothing God does not will can be forced upon God. What is "impossible"—which is to say, the absurd unreality the creature has actualized for itself using negation and the positing of what God does not will—is properly considered to be impossible because God does not will it, and so it should not be. But it then has no bearing on what is possible for God, or what God wills. God need give it no credence in going about doing God's will, any more than Barth needed to give the Nazis credence in going about doing theology and preaching. Proceeding "as though it were not," in Barth's terms, is the opposite of a surrender to the situation. It is a refusal to surrender the will of God in Christ to any concept of a will that has to be determined by reference to what is opposed.

The Power of the Actual Will of God in Christ, without Abstraction

It is that will in which we believe, and not in what opposes it. And so for Barth it is Paul's assertion—that God has the power to graft all those cut off back into the one root of Israel's election—that must be kept as the claim about God's power. And as a claim about God's power it has to be kept in context with what has happened to necessitate it: the fact that outsiders who have no business with this God have been included by God as equals with God's first people, whose election they therefore share. If we ignore that bit, if we make it about God's power without accepting the logic behind God's actual use of it, we are inevitably tempted to put ourselves in place of Christ as that logic. To make Jesus into a choice for us and against them. But when we do that, we have voided the certainty behind Paul's claim about God's power. It ceases to be a promise, as Paul and Barth understand it, and becomes instead an open question in denial of the gospel: sure, God could do that, God has the power to do it, but does God want to?

And as Barth says, that way lies evil. That way lies a fall out of the church and into the abyss. When we do that, we replace faith with optimism, belief in God with belief in self, grace with merit. We put these things in place of Jesus Christ as the logic of God's power, the character of God's being, which then becomes a haphazard omnipotence, something without a plan, its action only the arbitrary imposition of a will without a character. Of such a will we could only say what it might do, what is possible to an omnipotent being, and not what it will do. Out of such an abstractly omnipotent being we could only construct a hope for salvation based on optimism, and not on God's definite, constant, and eternal character.

And if we said that such an abstractly omnipotent being were for us, for the world, for the whole creation? Why, then, how could we avoid the redemption of anything and everything, anyone and everyone? And if we said that such an abstractly omnipotent being were for itself? Why, then, of course only those who were really also for that being in the approved ways would pass muster.

Barth says neither. Barth rejects both. Barth, with Paul, speaks of a truly lost people—Israel then, and the church today, one and the same, together—and then stops talking about that people as though their unbelief determined anything at all. The answer to "can they be saved" and "does God will to save them" is the same: yes. And if that is so, then nothing in this world can possibly interfere in God's planned and accomplished reality of salvation, however things may appear in any present moment. There is therefore no need for a theology like the one we call "apokatastasis," as though we had to hope in an indefinite, abstract power of God and use the conditions of our reality to determine what it would decide to do about us.

And that is Barth's objection in this passage: that we have expanded the scope of God's possible actions by voiding the nature of God's character, and so replaced hope in what we know God wills to do, in an absolutely unbounded scope for the creature, with hope in human self-determination and our ability to become what God wants and so merit (which is to say, make possible) salvation.

The question is never "apokatastasis or damnation," for Barth. It is the reality of God's actual concrete will for the creature, and so all people, in Jesus Christ as demonstrated in history—or the abstractions we make up by voiding that specificity and replacing it with hope in ourselves, and hope for others conditioned on becoming like us.

God Wants You (and Your Neighbor, but Especially the Poor) to Survive, and Thrive: Luke 12:13-21, Proper 13C

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Frost) — Fri, 09 Aug 2019 13:05:00 +0000

This was my sermon for Aug 4, 2019, at Luther Memorial Church in Madison, WI, and since they recorded it, you can also hear me preach it here: (church page) (direct link)

The Holy Gospel according to Luke, the twelfth chapter:
(Glory to You, O Lord)

Someone in the crowd said to Jesus, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.” But he said to him, “Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?” And he said to them, “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.”

Then he told them a parable: “The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ Then he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”

The Gospel of the Lord
(Praise to You, O Christ)

Now, my training for preaching was to pull out what God is doing in the passage, to give you the gospel as opposed to the law, and then to give you only such law as can be funded by the grace of God evident in the passage. These texts … make that really hard. The dominant emotion in them is lament at the fact that we can't guarantee that anything we do will either count as progress, or continue beyond us—plus a side order of Schadenfreude at the wealthy, whose inability to guarantee the passing on of their profits might just be the way God wants it.

But since this gospel comes around every three years, I've heard it preached on more than a few times in my life, and I'm assuming so have most of you. And in most of the translations I can get my hands on, it looks basically like the NRSV text I've just read to you. Which is to say, there's the suggestion that the rich man in the parable is a farmer. That his land, the acreage of land he personally owns—the dirt, which as a rich man he absolutely does not work himself!—directly produced crops which, when faced with their surprising abundance, he sought to properly and prudently store for the future. And then there's the suggestion that God comes to take his life for being greedy.

And that's not what I found in the Greek, which surprised me. Usually I'd walk you through the couple of subtle nuances that were necessary to what I found worth preaching on, but this morning I'm going to give you a completely different translation for comparison, instead:

"And someone from the crowd said to Jesus, "Teacher! tell my brother to share the inheritance with me!" And he said to him, "Dude, who appointed me judge or administrator over you?" And he said to them, "Don't you see, you have to protect yourselves against every desire to grab for a larger share, because a person's life is not benefited by possessions, when they are excess."

He told them a parable, saying "A wealthy person's territory prospered, and they were going over the matter, running the numbers, saying, 'What should I do? I don't have a place to collect my profits.' And they said, 'I will do this: I will demolish my storage areas and build bigger ones, and collect all of my grain and my goods there, and say to myself, "Self, you have many goods stored up for many years. Take it easy, eat, drink, enjoy yourself."' But God said to them, 'Fool! On this night your life is being asked of you. The things you have prepared—whose will they be?' That's how it is for someone who has stored up wealth for their own benefit, but not for God."

Now, I grew up in the West End of the Pocono Mountains in Northeastern Pennsylvania, with my father the pastor of what was once a thriving farm community. Do you know what the children of an owner-operator farmer inherit? Mostly the same as the meek: the earth. The dirt. The buildings on it, and a little equipment, all of which breaks down and has to be maintained. Oh, yeah: and the debt, which makes them eventually have to sell off the earth, parcel by parcel. Debt is the one inescapable reality of farming. And it wasn't radically different in Jesus' time. Farmers have basically always been at the mercy of people with money, because farming is an activity that depends on a whole lot of things going right—and they rarely all ever do.

The farmer is never rich. Farmers store up grain, after the harvest, mostly until it can be sold, and a little in order to use, with a certain amount stored for the future so that they can be sure of being able to plant next year's crop and grow more. Absurdly large yields one year are unlikely, and needing to build more grain storage around harvest time is not only an extra expense, but not a guarantee of future prosperity. Right now, in the wake of the horrible early spring flooding, they're saying that this year's wheat crop in the Great Plains is going to be unprecedentedly large. Which is one bright spot in an otherwise very bad agricultural situation this year. But how long do you think any resulting prosperity will last?

And the answer is: it will last a lot longer in the hands of the rich man, who is the character in this parable, and who gathers his profits from the good harvests of the entire region, which Jesus said was quite productive. The grace of God must have been abundant for the farmers, too, therefore—but only the rich man is storing excess trade goods so that he may live comfortably for many years to come.

Jesus doesn't comment about the rich man doing anything particularly unjust in order to artificially increase this windfall. Jesus does not show us this rich man as an obvious sinner, greedily cheating people out of the fruit of their labor. Everything is relative. The law codes in scripture are exercises trying to take what is normal in their societies, and impose on that the limits of divine justice as they understand it, in order to restrict the excesses their authors recognize in those times and places. And so it is here: Jesus wants more economic justice than this, we know he does, and Luke always dials that up—but the rich man in the parable is treated as normal. In fact, we can probably assume that, like all of Jesus' audience and Jesus himself, the rich man in the parable is a pious Hellenistic Jew, as faithfully religious in all the normal ways as they and you are, so that when God appears to him, it is not the visit of an unrecognized supernatural power.

But that makes the parable a different question altogether: what do you do with unexpected good fortune? And the answer is not that the rich man in the parable did something especially wrong, but that he did something foolish, in being rich and storing up all of this excess for the future. "The most useless of useless things," as the Teacher in Ecclesiastes says, "completely useless." And not just because, as the Psalmist says, no amount of profit from this good fortune would have saved him from dying. Nor is this a story about God coming to deliver some form of poetic justice for the rich man being selfish. It could easily have been more poetic, if that were the message, for the rich man simply to have died, with nobody warning him, and to get the verdict in Sheol!

No; instead, God comes to this rich man and says: "you have done a foolish thing with my grace, because you already had plenty with which to eat, drink, and relax for the rest of your life. Which it turns out isn't going to be that much longer!" God comes to the rich man, Godself, while he is still alive, to tell him that tonight is the night he is going to die. Which is bad news, obviously, but God didn't have to deliver it personally, or at all. This too is grace! Usually God sends prophets in such cases. And usually the prophets aren't too happy about it, particularly as working-class people from rural communities. But all the same, God's message is: "you have received grace, and you chose to do that with it? Do better." Which is to say: benefit the poor. Use your excess to do justice to those the world deprives.

And obviously the man in the parable doesn't have a lot of time—though there's a lot you can get done in an afternoon if you've got the motivation. But the parable isn't told for the sake of the character depicted in it. A rich man has already died, perhaps unexpectedly, and now one of his younger sons is here, maybe even with the eldest son and heir in tow, saying to Jesus, "Teacher! Tell my brother to share the inheritance with me!" Their father has died, and all of the arrangements for support in the family have shifted. Younger children may be doted upon, but they will not then be the ones in the position of authority, and may not be able to count on that kind of support going forward. The eldest brother will have taken on all of the obligations in the family, but his good graces are going to be different than his father's were. He has received grace, and is making choices as to what to do with it, now that it is his.

And so it is not to the impetuous younger brother alone that Jesus says what he says, but to them both:

"Hold up. I am not about to use my authority to dive into your family monetary arrangements, as though I were an estate lawyer. So pay attention. You need a defense, you need to protect yourselves, against every kind of overreaching, any greed, any claiming a larger share than you are entitled to, any possibility of defrauding one another, and all pursuits of advantage over one another. Because you having excess does not serve life."

So this is not a parable condemning subsistence. It's not about the balance in your checking and savings accounts. It's not about whatever you may prudently be doing to sock away temporary gains so that you'll be able to survive retirement. Those systems also have problems! They still participate in the inequality of the world we have made for one another. We still live surrounded by abject poverty, in a system that doles out benefit and harm along clearly racist and ableist lines. But this parable isn't about those normal realities of our fallen world, by which we hope to survive while others don't.

God wants you to survive, and thrive. God wants you to have enough, and we live in a world where even at seven billion inhabitants, there could easily be enough. God especially wants those at the bottom of our sinfully-imposed economic hierarchies to have enough, to be able to survive and thrive. And since this is not a parable about the question of whether the rich can be saved, we should also say that God loves the rich man—but does not have any interest in rich people ever staying rich. It is, at the very least, foolish, and a failure to serve life, that we have set things up so that wealth is created at the top by extracting value from everyone below. Life, as Jesus says to these brothers and the crowd, is not served by possessions when they are that ridiculously abundant for only a few.

God wants you all to survive, and thrive, and excess can and should be used to help your neighbor do that. God created the world so that the creature might live. Life should be abundant, life in an excess that has nothing to do with profitability. Life that does not rage against its finitude by seeking advantage, by cheating one another, but which accepts its limitations and works for the common good, which is the survival and thriving of every individual. Life that seeks in its time to do good, because the grace of God provides.

And obviously that's not the way it works out, most of the time. But you can trust the grace of God, even if you can't always trust your brothers and sisters. And that's the larger message of the instruction Jesus is giving when he's interrupted here, and delivers this parable: Things are going to go wrong in the world, but God is not absent, God values your lives, and God will provide for you in times of trouble. And so we should do likewise, for one another.

Readings for the 8th Sunday after Pentecost, RCL year C

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Frost) — Wed, 31 Jul 2019 13:07:00 +0000

Preaching this Sunday, so obviously I took it upon myself to do the text work. A text well-translated is always a good beginning!

Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12–14, 2:18–23:

"The most useless of useless things!" says the one who gathers the assembly, "the most useless of useless things. Everything is useless!"

"I, who gather the assembly, was king over Israel in Jerusalem. I assigned myself the task of prudently studying and exploring everything that is done under the heavens. It is a nasty business with which God has busied the children of humanity. I considered all of the activity which is done under the sun, and see: it is all useless, herding (or eating) the wind."

"And I hated all of the hard work at which I had labored under the sun, since I must leave it for the person who will come after me—and who knows if they will be prudent or foolish? Yet they will have control over all of the hard work at which I have labored and grown prudent—and that is also useless. So I turned myself to despair over all of the hard work at which I have labored under the sun, because a person may labor with prudence and knowledge and skill, but they will leave their portion to someone who did not labor for it—and that is also useless, and extremely unpleasant. What befalls a person for all of their labor and for the intention of their heart for which they toil under the sun? All their days are a painful and frustrating business, and their nights are restless, too—and even this is useless."

Psalm 49:1–12:

Listen to this, all you peoples;
give me your ears, all who live in the present age,

Children of humanity, heirs of men,
rich and poor, together:

My mouth will speak wisdom,
and the meditation of my heart, understanding.

I will give my ear to a parable
and expound my riddle on the lyre.

What cause have I to fear in evil days,
when injustice dogs my heels and surrounds me?

Those who rely on valor
and trust in abundant wealth are boastful.

But none of them can redeem their siblings;
they cannot bribe God with the value of their lives.

For the redemption of their lives is costly,
and they will always have too little to pay for it,

Even if their lives continued indefinitely,
without seeing the pit.

For they see that the wise die, just as the fool and the brute also perish;
they leave their goods behind for others.

Graves are their everlasting homes, their dwelling places from age to age,
having called their lands by their own names.

Humanity does not have splendor that abides;
they are like the cattle that perish.

Colossians 3:1–11:

If then you have been raised with Christ, you should all seek what is above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God; intend what is above and not what is on the ground, for you have all died and your life has been securely concealed with Christ by God; when God makes Christ known, who is your life, then you also will be made known with him in glory.

Mortify [the parts of your body that are on the ground?]—unchastity, uncleanliness, emotional responses to misfortune, unworthy longing for what you cannot have, and the pursuit of advantage which is the service of idols—through which things comes the wrath of God upon the children of unpersuasion, in which ways you all also walked when you lived among them; you must now get all of that out of your mouths—wrath, appetite, wickedness, blasphemy, disgraceful language. Do not lie to one another; you have divested yourselves of that old personality with its practices, and have invested in the new, being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator, in a place where there is no Hellene or Judean, circumcision or foreskin, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free, but Christ is everything in every way.

Luke 12:13–21:

And someone from the crowd said to Jesus, "Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me." And he said to him, "Dude, who appointed me judge or administrator over you?" And he said to them, "Don't you see, you have to protect yourselves against every desire to grab for a larger share, because a person's life does not come from possessions—not even when they are abundant."

He told them a parable, saying "A wealthy person's territory prospered, and they were going over the matter, running the numbers, saying, 'What should I do? I don't have a place to collect my profits.' And they said, 'I will do this: I will demolish my storage areas and build bigger ones, and collect all of my grain and my goods there, and say to myself, "Self, you have many goods stored up for many years. Take it easy, eat, drink, enjoy yourself."' But God said to them, 'Fool! On this night your life is being asked of you. The things you have prepared—whose will they be?' That's how it is for someone who has stored up wealth for their own benefit, but not for God."

Section 5.2: The Word of God as God's Speech (Karl Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik I.1, 136-48)

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Frost) — Fri, 26 Apr 2019 19:52:00 +0000

Section 5 in Church Dogmatics I.1 is where we shift from Barth's exposition of the forms of the Word to answering the question of what—or, more to the point, who—it is. And it begins with a massive and somewhat cranky excursus in which Barth lays out the reception of the Münster prolegomena, and the arguments that have for all intents and purposes forced his hand in what he considers its second edition here. I've already handled a commonly-adduced piece of that argument when it recurs later, and maybe I'll get around to doing the full context for it, from this opening excursus, some other time. I've got Gogarten's review essay, but not Przywara's, and let me tell you, rise-of-fascism-era Gogarten is the worst sort of Lutheran.

Once that's out of the way, however, that first subsection ends with a large-print paragraph that sets up the action of the subsequent three subsections worth of work, and Barth dives right into it. So in reworking this translation from its initial posting, I've tacked that on to the front because it's basically a second section thesis, or at least a proper opening paragraph to the argument.

[Note: this translation was originally posted in a very rough form, just to get it out there. Going back over it, there have been a few doozies that have since been corrected, to the extent that I grasp the original text. Of course, it is my considered opinion that the official English of the Bromiley 2nd ed. of I.1 has more than its share of doozies, even as there are problems with the more literalist Thomson 1st ed. I don't intend to keep tinkering with this version here, but I will still happily take corrections if anyone has them to suggest—particularly if they make the text more easily readable! Accessibility in accurate and idiomatic representation is my primary goal.]

Section 5: "The Nature of the Word of God"

Thesis: "In all three of its forms, the Word of God is God's spoken address to people. It therefore happens, holds true, and takes effect in God's actions upon people. As such, however, it takes place in God's way, differently from all other events—i.e., it happens in the mystery of God."
Overview: In order to successfully remove anthropology from any presumptively normative role in dogmatics, Barth shifted from the existential and phenomenological approach he used at Münster, centered in the church that does theology, to an approach centered in the Word of God as the external norm and essence of the church's speech about God. Having discussed its forms as they apply to us, Barth now turns to the thing that takes these shapes. Because we cannot access it directly, we have to walk back from the "what" of those forms through the "how" by which the Word of God comes to be real for us in them. That "how" must be taken seriously as spoken address to humanity, and not as though that were an alien and limiting form. We are not given direct communication from God, as though imparted from spirit to spirit. We are given instead concrete revelation of God which takes particular forms external to us. We are presented with real speech, and a real speaker—God in person, Jesus Christ—who freely and graciously chooses and uses language to particular ends and requires of us hearing, understanding, and obedience. Nor is it mere words in lieu of actions, self-expression separable from personal impact on the world. What God says is what God makes real—and not only then and there in history, as though the past could be divorced from the present. We stand in the same relation to God: claimed by the power of this one who speaks to us as our Lord, and judged in the insufficiency of our response. Yet in these forms—proclamation, scripture, and revelation—the Word of God for us is hidden sub contrario specie. We must rather point beyond them to the God whom we can only receive in faith, as a function of grace and not nature.
5.1: "Asking after the Being of the Word of God"
5.2: "The Word of God as God's Speech"
5.3: "God's Speech as God's Action"
5.4: "God's Speech as the Mystery of God"

We have spoken of the forms of the Word of God. "Form" is obviously always the form of a being. But can we also speak of a being of the Word of God? Can we give an answer to the next question that pops up, which is popular, but also not uncommon in the mouth of theologians: "What, then, is the Word of God?" |

Asking after the being of the Word of God, we find ourselves faced with the same difficulty in which we will find ourselves much later on in dogmatics, when we ask after the being of God in general. God and God's Word are not given to us in a manner that gives us their natural and historical dimensions. We can never ascertain what God is, and what God's Word is, by looking back and so anticipating it; God must always tell us that again, Godself, and always in new ways. But there is no human knowing to which this divine telling would correspond, no lore that matches its tale. In God's telling, it amounts to an encounter and communion between God's being and that of humanity, but not to an integration of this being into human knowledge. It can only amount, again and again, to a new divine telling. In this divine telling, it is only by the "God with us!" that the recognition of God and God's Word is realized, at all. We could therefore only—namely, in faith in the Word of God—say who God is. God is the one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And so we could only—namely, in view of the reality of the church, in whose space we are thinking—say which one the Word of God is, which we remember and expect here. We remember and expect it as the one Word of God: proclamation, scripture, and revelation. |

But of course, knowing about who God is in faith, we now also can and must say how God is; how, on the basis of the doctrine of the Trinity, there is a doctrine of the characteristics in which the being of God that is hidden from us—which cannot be predicted or repeated by any human word and therefore cannot be adequately recounted in any human words—is revealed. And in the same way therefore, knowing about which one the Word of God is, namely knowing about its three forms, we can say how and in what set of stipulations it is this Word, the Word of God, that is spoken to us in these three forms. |

Therefore we can indeed say what the Word of God is, but we must say it indirectly. We must remember the forms in which it is real for us, and must learn how it is from these, its forms. This "how" is the achievable human reflection of the unattainable divine "what." Our discussion here should be about this reflection.

THE WORD OF GOD AS GOD'S SPEECH

Church proclamation is speech. Even holy scripture is speech. But revelation itself and as such is also speech. We have no cause for not taking the concept "Word of God" literally, first and foremost, if we adhere to the Word of God in the three forms in which it is actually heard in the church, and if we do not think beyond the church about things that God could have willed and done, but which in any case God has simply never done in the church, and which God therefore also has not willed. |

"God's Word" means that God speaks. "Speaks" is not a symbol, a signifier and description chosen by humanity on the basis of their own judgment about the greater or lesser robustness of its symbolism, to represent something that is completely different in itself, a state of affairs that is completely alien to the sense of this proposition. Instead, whatever else is true, this proposition corresponds to the possibility that God has definitely chosen and realized in God's church. And it certainly does so in human inadequacy, in the brokenness in which human propositions are solely capable of corresponding to the being of the Word of God. We are not turning human intellectual possibility into an absolute. |

We very well might have the personal opinion that, had God still spoken, but not so "intellectualistically" (of all things), it could be more beautiful and better, and that it would be more appropriate to God if "God's Word" could equally well mean all sorts of other things besides the fact that "God speaks." But is our personal opinion, based on some philosophy, then so important? If perhaps it is not, then let us simply adhere to the fact that in the form in which the church knows God's Word—the one and only form that necessarily, because magisterially, in any way concerns us—"God's Word" means "God speaks," and not think beyond it. Everything else that is to be said about it must be understood as exegesis of this proposition, and not as qualification or negation of it. |

We will have to understand God's speech as also God's action, and God's action as also God's mystery. But as only God's action is really God's mystery (and not any other mystery), so also only God's speech is really God's action (and not any other action). As exegetically necessary as they are, the concepts of action and mystery cannot therefore point us away from the concept of speech; instead, precisely as exegeses, they can only point back to it, over and over again, as to the original text. If they are faithful exegeses, then of course, like the original text itself, they do not say less in their own ways than all of what is to be said here; they do not say less than the one and total thing that is to be said. |

Therefore what the Word of God is can very well also be said, without risk, with the concepts of action and mystery. Particularly so when the intention—by contrast with Faust searching for the right symbol—is not some translation of the logos different from the concept of speech, but instead an explanation of that translation by the concept of speech, which is the only one possible. Let us begin by trying to understand the text itself, in this its sole possible translation, without exegesis. What does it mean for the concept of the Word of God, when "Word of God" means "God speaks" in a way that is both primordial and cannot be superseded?

1. First and foremost, it implies the spirituality of the Word of God, the intellectual and spiritual [geistig] quality understood in distinction from the natural quality, from corporeality, from everything that happens physically. We hasten to add that there is also no Word of God without physical event. That should already remind us of the solidarity by which preaching and sacrament belong together. It should remind us of the textual character of holy scripture. Last and highest, it should remind us of the corporeality of the human Jesus Christ. But none of that justifies us in saying that the Word of God is just as intellectual and spiritual as it is natural and corporeal, and in the same sense. |

There is here an over and under, a prior and posterior, in all forms of the Word of God, which in its total relativity is nonetheless not to be obscured or inverted. The Word of God is also natural and corporeal, because without that it would not be the Word of God directed to us people as spiritual and natural beings, really coming to us as we really are. That is why the sacrament must stand close beside preaching, and why preaching itself is also a physical event. That is why the letter of scripture is anything other than a pudendum and negligendum, an object of shame and neglect. Indeed, that is why the church is called the body of Christ (though exactly there its subordinate relation is clearly demonstrated). |

The Word of God is also natural and corporeal, because in the creaturely sphere in which it comes to us people as Word, there is nothing that is intellectual and spiritual without being natural and corporeal. But the fact that the Word of God itself is not only bound to the spiritual, but also to the corporeal character of the creature should not prevent us from seeing that it is in no way neutrally over or in both, much less primarily and preferentially natural.

On this point we should not be puzzled by the brand-new realism and anti-spiritualism going around today [late-1920s, early-1930s]. That "embodiment is the end of the ways of God"—this oft-quoted remark by Friedrich Christoph Oetinger—was a good, if also exaggerated, expression of a very necessary opposition to the transiently-natural spirit of the Enlightenment, but not suited for dogmatic formulation. |

Erich Przywara once charged me with fixating so remarkably upon the two words, "Word" and "Spirit," that I thereby reveal a "concealed spiritualism" ("Eschatologismus," Stimmen der Zeit 117 (1929), p. 231f.), and so a finally intramundane quality to my ostensibly so transcendental God-concept, whereas [he contended that] God is not bound to one created domain more than the other, but is free over against both. But if that is so, then it must be asked: with no detriment to God's freedom, has not God already, in the creation, bound Godself differently—in a greater and closer way—to spirit than to nature? According to the uniform anthropology of the Bible, which truly should not be called into question, is not humanity to be considered first and foremost with regard to the invisible livingness breathed into them by God? Is it coincidental that speaking about God is commanded in the Bible, a hundred times over, but the making of images of God is forbidden and made taboo in just so many words? Do the words "Word" and "Spirit" just so happen to play this particular role in the Old and New Testaments, even with respect to God? And could words from the other created domain be used just as well in place of logos and pneuma in the doctrine of the Trinity? |

We do well if we let the New Testament word about the bodily resurrection of Christ, and the other about the resurrection of our own bodies, be said to us again in a completely different way than it was for the majority of our immediate predecessors. We do well if we let ourselves be reminded of an equally long-neglected truth of the New Testament by the favorite doctrine of Eastern Orthodoxy: that the eschatological redemption also comprehensively encompasses in itself the kosmos, the world, and the ktisis, the creation. But we would not do well if we wanted to overlook the fact that, while humanity in the Old and New Testaments is addressed as a natural being, it is addressed precisely as this distinct natural being, distinguished by spirit. We could also simply say that humanity just is addressed, that this and not any natural event is the way that humanity is haunted by God; that even in a natural event it is always the speech of God by which we are visited. |

Even while fully acknowledging the realistic concern—and while we should not claim more than this—it is impossible not to claim a certain relative "canonization of the spirit over against nature" (Przywara).

The Word of God is primarily a spiritual event, and then and in such manner—in, for the sake of, and with no detriment to this, its intellectual and spiritual quality—also a corporeal and natural event. That above all is what is intended when, corresponding to the forms in which we hear it, we call the Word of God the speech of God. Speech is the form in which reason communicates itself to reason, and person to person, even as the speech of God. And certainly speech is the form in which the divine reason communicates itself to human reason, and the divine person to human people. Before us stands the total incomprehensibility of this event. But reason to reason, person to person, is principally the analogue of the event in the intellectual and spiritual sphere of creation, and not in the natural and corporeal sphere. We should not avoid a term that is so taboo today: the Word of God is a rational, and not an irrational, event.

The recollection of ostensibly "deeper" anthropological layers of being beyond the rational depends on a philosophical construct and a philosophical value judgment about which the philosophers must come to an agreement among themselves. We have nothing to say about it except that, according to what we in the church know about it, the encounter of God and humanity takes place primarily, preferentially, and characteristically in this sphere, the sphere of ratio, of reason, however more or less "deep" this may lie according to philosophical judgment. |

"… the king about whom the Psalm speaks here, though indeed he has his reign on earth, still therefore rules spiritually and in a heavenly way, which—although we do not see his reign as we see what is worldly—nevertheless we hear. Yes, but how? "Out of the mouths of young children and infants you have prepared a force." And the reign of Christ is a reign that is heard, not seen. Our eyes, then, do not direct us and take us to the place where we find and get to know Christ; instead, our ears must do that." (Martin Luther, Sermon on Psalm 8, "Herr, unser Herrscher," Merseburg Dom, 6 August 1545, WA 51:11.25–32) "As when you see a preacher and hear them preaching the Word of God, through which at the command of Christ they proclaim repentance and the forgiveness of sins, you see there no plow or furrow; instead you see and hear that the preacher takes only the languages and the Word …. So also, when we see the holy sacrament extend … deliverance and liberation from sin and death, so that you, too, should no longer be kept imprisoned in the devil's reign, you do not see, but only hear, what is provided and bestowed upon you by the Word with the language of the preacher." (ibid., WA 51:12.9–19)

Speaking stands in correlation to hearing, understanding, and obeying. However much these concepts might be problematized by the fact that we are dealing with God's speaking and the hearing, understanding, and obeying that are its correlates—it is faith that hears and understands the speech of God, and obeys it—we will not be permitted to leave the level of these concepts of speaking, hearing, understanding, and obeying until we do not wish to situate ourselves anywhere other than where the Word of God is heard.

That is why, whatever else it may be, Rudolf Otto's idea of "the holy" (Das Heilige: Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen, Breslau: Trewendt & Granier, 1917) is definitely not to be understood as the Word of God: because "the holy" is the numinous, and the numinous is the irrational, but the irrational is something that can no longer be distinguished from a force of nature elevated into an absolute—and that distinction is the principal one on which everything depends in understanding the concept of the Word of God.

The Word of God also has the force of nature, but first and foremost and decisively it has the plain intellectual and spiritual force of truth. — What we say here about the Word of God is not something that applies in equal measure to every word. We cannot say about any other word that it decisively has the force of truth. For every other word, its physical existence means its limitation, the boundary at which it betrays the powerlessness of its intellectual and spiritual quality. Any other word soon finds itself missing more of the truth, doing without more of reality, and thereby surely lacking both truth and reality. For every other word, the unsure pendulum-swing between a desperately-seized-upon idealism and an equally-desperately-seized-upon realism is characteristic. The natural quality and the intellectual and spiritual quality of any other word are indeed those of fallen humanity. Only in God's Word do we find the normal ordering of the intellectual and spiritual, and the natural. But we do find it in God's Word, and we should not be tempted to flatten out or invert that ordering by the deviations of a human intellectual and spiritual quality that seeks to flee what is natural. |

This is why, as regards the language of theology and the worship service, we must be clear about what it means when we appropriate naturalistic concepts. Looking at the language of the Bible itself, we can already see that it is fundamentally impossible to forbid speaking about life, light, fire, wellspring, current, and storm, about breakthroughs, shakings, overpowerings, and experiences. But we must then remember that throughout the Bible, if we observe carefully, this happens in that well-defined subordination, and therefore consider that when we speak naturalistically, we do not describe the Word of God in its primary sense. When we speak about it in this way, we name something it surely also is, but which it surely is not to begin with. |

We will then have to consider how easy it is here, in the role of listener and that of speaker, to stop a slide into the domain of nature—where there is no longer speech and response, recognition and decision, but only movement, pressure, and impact; where it is no longer a matter of truth, but only of reality. It is always also about that, which is why naturalism cannot be banished from theological language. However, that is neither primarily nor authentically what the Word of God is about. And as soon as that becomes the only thing that matters in what we say, then according to human judgment, according to what we know about the Word of God through the Word of God itself, the service of God in theology and proclamation is over with. Knowledge about the primary spirituality of the Word of God will urge us to concentrate on the intellectual and spiritual domain, and to use discretion when entering the natural domain.

2. "God's Word" means that God speaks. In a second sense, that implies its personality. God's Word is not a thing, to be described, but it is also not a concept, to be defined. It is neither a state of affairs, nor an idea. It is not "a"—not even the highest—"truth." It is the truth, by being the speaking person of God, Dei loquentis persona. It is not an objective reality. It is the objective reality, by being the subjective reality, namely the subjective reality of God. God's Word means: the speaking God. Indeed, God's Word is not merely the formal possibility, but rather the fulfilled reality, of divine speech. It always has a well-defined objective content. God always speaks a concretissimum, something most concrete, but this divine concretissimum can neither be predicted nor repeated as such. What God speaks is never and nowhere known and true in abstraction from Godself. It becomes known and true through and in the fact that God says it, Godself; that God is present in person, in and with what is said by God.

"It is not enough to have the gift, unless the giver is also present, as Moses demanded in Exod. 33:15: 'If you will not go before us yourself, do not lead us up out of this place,' etc" (Luther, Lectures on Romans, 1515–1516, WA 56:308). "For one departs from the living God as long as one departs from God's Word, which is alive and enlivens everything, and is ultimately Godself" (Luther, Lectures on Hebrews, 1517–18, WA 57III:148). The Word of Christ is, according to another of Luther's statements, the mouth of Christ: "That it therefore evermore goes out of Christ's mouth, from one mouth to another, and nevertheless remains Christ's mouth" (Luther, Sermon for Pentecost on John 14:23–31, Cruciger's Summer Postil 1544, WA 21:469).

It was the third form of the Word of God, which grounds and supports everything else, that we sought to pin down in the concept of revelation. It was this that, in the analysis of the concepts of proclamation and scripture, compelled us to remain consistently mindful of this objection. It is not by understanding the Word of God merely as proclamation and scripture, but rather exactly by understanding it in proclamation and scripture as God's revelation, that we must understand the Word of God in that identity with Godself. God's revelation is Jesus Christ, God's Son.

"God's Son," in the language of the doctrine of the Trinity, is not different from "God's Word." When John 1:1 reads ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεὸν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος. οὗτος ἦν ἐν ἀρχῇ πρὸς τὸν θεόν, if the οὗτος—which certainly was also initially supplemented with λόγος—were not at the same time pointing, in its emphatic usage, across what follows to the personal name Ἰησοῦς Χριστός first mentioned in 1:18, then the fourth clause there would be a meaningless repetition of the second. The logos, in the prologue of this gospel, should be established as identical with the bearer of this name. And in Rev. 19:12–13 the returning Christ, the rider on the white steed, is described as the bearer of a tiara ἔχων ὄνομα γεγραμμένον ὃ οὐδεὶς οἶδεν εἰ μὴ αὐτός, "having a name written on it which no one but he knows," i.e. the literal wording of which is clear to anyone who sees it, but the sense of that wording—the being to whom this name points—only he himself knows. Καὶ κέκληται τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ, "and his name is called" (the literal wording of this name is): ὁ λόγος τοῦ θεοῦ. Here also, therefore, what the Word of God is cannot be said directly. It is the name of the revelation, i.e. the name of the Revealer. He is the Word of God. Solely from him are we to learn, i.e. solely from him will it be learned, what the Word of God is. From our perspective we can only say how it is, i.e. how he is.

The equation "God's Word is God's Son" makes it radically impossible to be doctrinaire in understanding the Word of God. In this equation, but also only in it, is a real and effective barrier erected against what was made of proclamation according to the Roman Catholic conceptualization, and of holy scripture according to the theory of late older Protestant theology: a robust Summa of revealed sentences, like the articles of a legal source text, to be assembled into a system. The system, in holy scripture and in proclamation, can only be revelation, i.e. can only be Jesus Christ. And certainly the converse of the statement is also valid: God's Son is God's Word. Therefore God reveals Godself in sentences, through the medium of language and in fact human language: each and every time, this word spoken by the prophets and apostles, this word proclaimed in the church, becomes God's Word. The personal quality of the Word of God is therefore in no way to be played off against its verbal quality and its intellectual and spiritual quality. It is not the case that this second determination under which we must understand the Word of God should now imply its irrationality, and thus outweigh the first determination under which we must understand it.

So, obviously, thinks Paul Tillich, in whose work (Religiöse Verwirklichung, Berlin: Furche-Verlag, 1930, 49) we find the following, somewhat naïve polemic: "But it is entirely false to put the word as a symbol for the self-mediation of transcendent being on a level with the word as a physical medium of the self-perception and self-mediation of human intellect, and in this way to mix up the Word of God and the scriptural or preached word. It is comparatively simple (!) to point out in response to this that, for Christian theology, Jesus Christ is the Word, not his words but his being, which comes to expression just as well in his words as it also does in his action and his suffering." |

To this it must be said: for one thing, we cannot separate the words, the action and suffering, and the being of Jesus Christ from one another in such a way as the words, action, and suffering would merely be "expressions" of his being, as though his being stood behind the words, the action, and the suffering, so to speak. The being of this person is identical with his speech, action, and suffering. But this being of Christ is also not now directly present to us in any way; instead, it must become present to us, and it can only become present to us indirectly, namely: through holy scripture, first of all, and then also the church, proclaiming the Word. If the being of Christ becomes present to us, then that happens in such a way that it equates itself with the "word as a physical medium of the self-perception and self-mediation of human intellect," in such a way that the scriptural word and the preached word therefore become the Word of God. "For where my Word is, there, too, am I" (Luther, Sermon for the 20th Sunday after Trinity, 1544, on Matt. 22, WA 52:509). "God had no other option to distribute Christ in the world; God had to fashion him into words and thus to spread him and bear him to everyone. Otherwise, if Christ were for himself alone, remaining unknown to us, then he would have died for himself alone. But because the Word bears Christ to us, it bears to us the one who has overcome death, sin, and the Devil" (Sermon for Judica Sunday (5th Lent), 1525, on John 8:46–59, WA 17II:234).

The personalization of the concept of the Word of God, which we cannot evade in remembering the fact that Jesus Christ is the Word of God, does not imply the negation of its verbal quality. But it does imply (and absolutely entails) the recognition of its personhood in distinction from all concepts of it being a thing or a subject matter, even when and to the extent that it is word, scriptural word, and preached word. To be a person does not just mean being a subject in the logical sense; it also also means being a free subject in the ethical sense: free also over against the particular limitations that accord with their individuality as such, having the fact and manner of their own being at their disposal, as much in terms of its characteristic form as in terms of its living development, but also being able to choose new possibilities for the fact and manner of their being. |

If we visualize for ourselves what that means, it will not occur to us to see an anthropomorphism in this personalization of the concept of the Word of God. What is problematic is not whether God is a person, but instead whether we are. Or will we find some one human among us, whom we could with total seriousness call a "person" in the sense of this concept? But God is really a person, really a free subject. And just as surely as we stand before God's incomprehensibility, because we cannot think this thought through to the end, so surely may we not refuse, hearing God's Word, to think the beginning of this thought and so to recognize God as a person precisely in God's Word. |

We thereby say: it is not just any thing, not a θεῖον, some divinity, which comes to us in God's Word, but Godself. Precisely in God's Word is God a person. Which then concretely implies: God is the lord of the verbal quality of God's Word. God is not bound to it; instead, it is bound to God. God therefore has the verbal quality of holy scripture freely at God's disposal. God can use it, or not use it, and can use it literally or otherwise. God can choose new verbal qualities beyond the literal meaning of holy scripture. What holy scripture proclaims as God's Word can always be proclaimed again as God's Word in novel textuality, so long as it is God who speaks in these literal words, Godself. |

Once again: the personal quality of the Word of God implies, not the negation of its verbal quality, but instead the absolutely effective barrier against the human systematization of the verbal quality of the Word of God, or more specifically, against helping oneself to its literal sense in order to found and construct some human system. It would not be the faithfulness of God, but rather God's unfaithfulness towards us, were God to allow us to make such use of God's Word. That would imply that God had allowed us to gain power over God's Word, to put it into operation in our own enterprises, and to close ourselves off against God, to our doom. God's faithfulness towards God's church consists in God making use of God's freedom to come to us, Godself, in God's Word, and in maintaining the freedom to do this again and again.

3. "God's Word" means that God speaks. In a third sense, that must imply what I might call the intentionality of the Word of God. One could even say: its relationality, or its goal-orientatedness, its character as an address. Not in its form as proclamation, nor as holy scripture, nor as revelation, do we know the Word of God as an entity existing for itself, much less as one capable of existing only for itself. We know it in no other way than as a word directed to us, that addresses us. |

Now, of course, it is not at all self-evident that this is the case. That it is the case is not something that can be deduced from the general concept of speech. It is the case, but it could also be otherwise. The eternal generation of the Son or the logos is of course the expression of the love, the will-not-to-be-alone, of God, even in the inner-Trinitarian life of God. But it does not follow directly that God could not be God without addressing us. Without a doubt, we only understand the love of God for humanity or, in the first place, for any reality different from Godself, when we understand it as free love, not owed, not based on any need. God would be no less God, had God made no world and no people. The existence of the world, and our existence, is not somehow essentially necessary to God, not even as the object of God's love. It is precisely the eternal generation of the Son by the Father, first and foremost, that says God is certainly not alone, even without the world and us; God's love has its object in Godself. And so we cannot say that our existence, as the existence of the addressee of the Word of God, is somehow constitutive of the concept of the Word. It could be no less what it is, even without us. God could be enough for God's love even by Godself, for God is already an object, Godself, and truly the object worthy of God's love. God did not need to speak to us; what God says in God's own place with Godself, from eternity to eternity, could really be said just as well, if not better, without our being in the picture, as speech that for us would eternally be silence. |

Only when we are clear about this can we appreciate what it means that God created the world and us—not in a way that makes it necessary for God, but actually; that God's love applies to us—not in a way that makes it necessary for God, but actually; and that God's Word is spoken to us—not in a way that makes it necessary for God, but actually. What encounters us in proclamation, in the Bible, and in revelation is therefore an intentionality that is freely actual and not essentially necessary to God. We correctly appreciate its reality only when we understand it as the reality of the love of God, who does not need us and nevertheless does not will to be without us, who nevertheless has directed God's intention toward us.

In this context it really is appropriate and necessary to keep in front of us what God certainly did not really do, but could have done, because what God really did do is only understandable in this contrast. — However, precisely from this perspective it becomes apparent just how dubious it is to situate the doctrine of the Word of God within the framework of an anthropology. The freedom of the divine intention towards humanity could only then be asserted afterwards, while actually being denied by the basic approach.

Therefore: the hearing human as the object of the intention of the speaking God is indeed included in the concept of the Word of God as a factual, but not an essential, necessity. Humanity is not "co-located" in it in the way that Schleiermacher's God is [[in our self-awareness, per Glaubenslehre section 30.1]] in the feeling of absolute dependence. (Unlike what I astonishingly claimed in ChD, section 7.5, S. 111.) The fact that humanity is actually and necessarily co-located with God in the Word, is a fact of God's free grace. — If in this sense we intend to recognize an "intentionality" of the Word of God, its relation to us, as its third characteristic feature, and now ask further after the content of this intention, after what this relationship, this goal-orientation of the Word of God means for our understanding of it, we must recall that its content is, wherever and whenever God speaks to people, a concretissimum; that each and every time God speaks to any person, God has something quite specific to say in address to them, and them alone. |

We are therefore in no case to regard and represent the real content of the speech of God, or the real will of the speaking person of God, as a general truth. As readers of scripture, and as hearers and bearers of the proclamation, we certainly can and must labor with humanly-conceived generic filler materials, ostensibly repeating or anticipating what God has said or will say to this or that specific person. Otherwise we cannot recollect, either for ourselves or for others, the Word of God that came once and will one day come again. We can do that in words of our own coining, or in citations of scripture. But then we will always have to bear in mind that these filler materials are our own work, not to be confused with the concrete fullness of the Word of God itself, which we commemorate and await, but to which they only point. |

What God has said is always wholly other, and what God will say will always be wholly other—completely different from what we can say, and must say, to ourselves and to others, about its content. It is not just the preached word, heard as the Word of God, but even the scriptural word, through which God speaks to us, that really becomes completely different in crossing over from the mouth of God into our ears and into our own mouths. It becomes the Word of God recalled and expected by us in faith. As such, the Word that was spoken and will be spoken again by God confronts it freshly in strict sovereignty. But even in this strict sovereignty, in which its real content remains inconceivable to us from our perspective, that intentionality is inherent; it is the Word that addresses us, is oriented toward us, and to that extent is determined, not by us but by God, as the Word specifically aimed at us. |

When we state the following findings in view of this, its intentionality, in view of the fact that it is addressed to us, we anticipate nothing of its real content; we only note the perspectives under which we have to pay attention to its real content:

a) The Word of God as directed toward us is firstly such a word as we do not, and cannot under any circumstances, say to ourselves. Perhaps as such we could and can even say every human word, even the human word of proclamation, even that of the Bible, to ourselves. The encounter with the human word as such is never genuine, indelible encounter, and it cannot be. The encounter with the Word of God is genuine and indelible—that is, encounter that does not resolve into community. The Word of God always says to us something new, which we have otherwise never heard from anyone. It is the boulder of a "you" that never turns into an "I," cast here into our path. This otherness, which nevertheless is related to us, which nevertheless is made comprehensible to us, but made comprehensible precisely as otherness, characterizes it fundamentally and comprehensively as God's Word, as the word of the Lord, in comparison with which all other words, however profound and novel and engaging they may be, just are not the words of the Lord. Whatever God may say to us, will in any case be said to us as the word of the Lord.

b) As such a word of the Lord directed toward us, the Word of God is secondly the Word that intends and impacts us in our existence. No human word has the competence required to intend us in our existence, and no human word has the power to impact us in our existence. The only word that is likely to intend us in our existence, and which can impact us in our existence, is the sort of word that would question us, and answer us, the way death can as the end of our existence. But death is silent. It asks nothing, and answers nothing. Death is indeed just the end, not anything really located outside of and over our existence, from which our existence could be intended and impacted. The Word of God is the word of the Lord because it comes from this external and superior location from which not even death, were it capable of speech, would speak to us. The Word of God is concerned about us in a way no human word as such can be concerned, and in a way in which death is not concerned, because it is the word of our Creator, the word of the one who marks out both our existence and the end of our existence, from whose perspective our existence is affirmed and negated, because everything came to be and is maintained precisely by this Word, and would not be without it. We belong to the one who is heard here. Whatever this one might say, it will in any case be said in this relationship of the Creator to their creature.

c) As the word of our Creator, directed toward us, the Word of God is thirdly the Word that obviously has become and is necessary as the renewal of that primordial relationship between us and God. The fact that God speaks to us, that God reveals Godself to us, which is to say that God turns toward us in an entirely new way, that as one unknown God has made Godself known—after nevertheless having created us, and in spite of the fact that we belong to God—this fact must on the one hand imply a critique of the reality of the relationship that exists between God and us, and on the other hand, a declaration that God will, for God's part, in spite of and with this critique, uphold the relationship and secure it anew. These could not be the content of a human word. Only the Creator of this relationship can validate and renew it when it is disrupted or destroyed. Only God can pronounce the sentence and give the assurance and assert the claim which are all equally situated in the concept of revelation. Under this third aspect of its intentionality the Word of God is the word of reconciliation, i.e. the word of the Reconciler, the word of God who sets up a second creation, re-establishing God's covenant with us in justice and grace. Whatever God may say to us, it will in any case also be said in this renewed relationship.

d) But exactly as that word of reconciliation directed toward us, the Word of God is fourthly and finally the Word through which God announces Godself to humanity, i.e. through which God promises Godself as the content of the future of humanity, as the one who comes to meet humanity on its path through time as the end of all time, as the hidden Lord of all times. God's presence through the Word is exactly God's presence as the coming one, coming to fulfill and consummate the relationship that was founded between God and us in creation, and renewed and validated in reconciliation. Again, this final word cannot be a human word. Human words are never final words, never assurances of a certain and definitive coming of the other. This is proper to God's Word, and only to God's Word, which exactly as word is also the full and genuine presence of the one who speaks it. God's Word is the word of our Redeemer, i.e. of the Lord who will be Lord just as God was Lord and is Lord, who in God's relationship with us eternally keeps faith with Godself and thereby also with us. Just so is God really and righly the Lord, and the Lord of all lords. And whatever God may ever say to us, it will in any case always also be said in this last, culminating, eschatological relationship.

Once again: what God says, each and every time, remains God's mystery, which is revealed in the event of God's real speech. The concrete fulfillment of what God has said, each and every time, to humanity is and remains really God's affair. We can only—but we also must—adhere to the fact that when God spoke it was, and when God speaks it will be, the word of the Lord, the word of our Creator, our Reconciler, our Redeemer. By understanding it as intended for us, as addressed to us, we are urged in any case to keep our human thought and speech about the Word of God open in these four directions, and to be ready and watchful under these four perspectives.

Working With the Field, not Against its Scholars

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Frost) — Fri, 05 Apr 2019 15:32:00 +0000

There's a very basic pathology in the academy, when you deal with scholars in terms of their work and not as the human beings they genuinely are, wherein you grapple with their ideas, in their texts, under their names, and start to think of it as a contest. And when you disagree very strongly, whether over small points in an environment of otherwise shared assumptions, or even fundamentally at the level of metaphysics, but you can't get out of each others' ways, it can start to feel like a war.

I have very distinct opinions, both presently and in wide-ranging development across the last decade of my studies, about the standing conflict of that very sort—sometimes labeled as "traditionalism" vs "revisionism" by those who think they have the better historic interpretation of what Barth must have meant—which goes under the names of McCormack, Hunsinger, and Molnar. I have come to deal very intently with all three of them in terms of their work, and with students of the former two who have helped me to remember them vicariously as the human beings and professional educators they are. I have no wish to claim equality with any of them, but very clearly as senior scholars—two who belong to and have constructively shaped my field, and one who has had an outsize impact largely as an interloping spoiler who does not adhere to our conventions—they are "in my way" in a fashion that will not see them move. As were the scholars before them, for them, when they were me.

And so there is a very great risk that, in dealing with their work in the course of doing my own, I will fall into this trap of seeing them as "sides" and choosing one. And it is a trap, and doing so will not endear me in any useful way to either of them. (And if it did, I should be worried. I have been a soldier in church wars before.)

I owe so much of my training to postliberalism, particularly of the Lindbeck–Frei variety (I'm extremely skeptical of the Yoder–Hauerwas variety!), even as I keep running as far left through and away from it as possible. I came into that from an upbringing in Braaten–Jenson Lutheran theology, we have always been negotiating our confessional identity, and so (second only to the now-late John Webster writing about primary sources) Dr. Hunsinger's work just made sense to my ecumenical left-Lutheran brain, raised as I was among so-called "evangelical catholics."

And frankly, I've had such a long, rough entrée into Dr. McCormack's very different work that there was no guarantee I would wind up where I am now with respect to it. It was only my field exams that finally clarified for me how the development represented by his work is the only one I can properly supplement with what I have come to see and know myself. I am obliged, from my own long study, to claim that traditionalism will never get us closer to Barth's own broadly ecumenically tradition-critical, and so comprehensively revisionist, dogmatics.

And of course our attempts at being more consistent than perhaps Barth's 35-year development across the KD has left his texts, still require that we be consistent with respect to those texts. But in that effort, I just don't feel like there's any winning in taking sides between the two pillars of American Barth scholarship in its current incarnation, particularly if I want a career in this field (and if one is even possible in this economy).

I have what I believe are meaningful disagreements with both Dr. Hunsinger and Dr. McCormack in terms of their bodies of work, and I believe that they are resolvable—even if that resolution does not mean they will necessarily agree with me. Nor do I feel, from the words of those who think this is (and who benefit from it being) a war, that there is any benefit to ceding territory to so-called "traditionalism" as an interpretation of Barth—though I understand and am heartened by Dr. McCormack's consistent willingness to make concessions where a given representative of a tradition knows their stuff. He is an exemplary colleague and teacher, from all accounts. As, I understand, is Dr. Hunsinger, even if his later work (particularly in the wake of Dr. Molnar's polemics) is far less giving in terms of what he perceives as the other side. (I could, indeed, wish that Dr. McCormack had not made certain concessions, either!)

I have had certain textual critiques of things written by both Dr. Hunsinger and Dr. McCormack sitting around on deck for a long time, as necessary student exercises it has always been impolitic to present in public. And every time I try to write such a post, it starts out like this ... but worse. So it was time to stake out a position I could reference that was not simply a falling into the trap and volunteering to go to war. It may be hoped that I can handle their works in public more in this light than in that false one, which does no justice to any of us.

Barth Rolls His Own

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Frost) — Mon, 11 Mar 2019 18:22:00 +0000

I mean, he smoked a pipe, which obviates the whole rolling thing, but that's not really what I'm talking about.

No, this is my answer to the perennial question, "Is Barth a universalist?"

Whenever you may be reading this later, at the moment I'm in the middle of a series on what I'm calling "Barth's soteriology in a nutshell," from section 57.1 in KD IV.1. And I've also handled Barth's teaching regarding apokatastasis reasonably exhaustively. But still the question gets asked, "Is Barth as universalist?" and I find I don't have a ready-reference answer I can just hand people.

And so the very short answer is: "Barth 'rolls his own' universalism." Because the real question you should be asking, instead of trying to use Barth on the terms of an outside argument in which he rejects both sides, is "What does Barth do instead of either universalism or damnation?" Barth doesn't play games on other people's terms in his dogmatics. He doesn't take sides in existing interpretive binaries. Instead, he notes the problem, wipes the players off the map, and attempts to deal with the terrain over which they are fighting instead of the conflict they use to define it.

So I'm going to lay down a bunch of markers, here, in order to handle the major facets of the question. But this is an opinion piece, not a journal article, so I'm not going to take the rather large amount of extra time required to rigorously source these claims for you. (If I did, this would never actually get written.) I've been reading Barth while chasing graduate degrees and writing on this blog for roughly 10 years now, and what you're getting here is my best synthetic grasp of the issue as of the first quarter of 2019.

The So-Called "Afterlife"

Barth doesn't believe in an afterlife, which means in his terms that you don't get to go on living some form of your life between death and resurrection. The resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come, which we are promised and confess, do not require that our lives go on after death. In fact, resurrection requires that we be dead. Our lives are finite, by nature, each part of the creature living within its providential limitations, being born in its time and dying in its time. But just as God holds every part of the creature in being by God's constant will and memory, God will not forget us after we have died. God is our Nachher, to whom we go just as from whom we came. God is all there is beyond the border of our existence. And God is faithful to the promise—which in no way guarantees any theological propositions we might make about it.

Heaven and hell as binary locations in the afterlife are also denied. Heaven exists, but it is a realm of creation just like the earth is. It fully shares our time, and does not participate in God's eternity any more than we do. In point of fact, for Barth it is clear that the kingdom of the heavens has become fully solidary with God as its Lord, in all the ways the kingdom of the earth is not. The angels serve, as we do not. They are the responsible creature in partnership with its Creator, living out of the covenant of grace, as we should also be. And God is not more properly located in the heavens than on earth, for there is no place in the entire creature that is not proper for its Lord and Creator to be at any and all times, in the divine omnipresence.

"Hell" does not, for Barth, refer to a place that exists. It particularly does not refer to a place that exists in the divine will! We are to disbelieve in hell. The only will in which it exists, is ours. The only reality it has, is in the negation of God's will by which we have made hells for one another here on earth. They will be destroyed, as will every pretense of world order we have crafted for ourselves (and attributed to God) as the fallen creature. The creature will not. The creature will be redeemed.

Judgment and Condemnation, but no Damnation

Barth does not stint God's judgment, either—which means he takes it more seriously than basically anyone arguing for the damnation of only some, as though there could possibly be an escape from judgment and condemnation for any part of the fallen creature.

But you have to understand that for Barth, judgment (and generally therefore condemnation) is just the natural result of every event in which God and the creature meet. Judgment takes place incidental to every event of God's self-revelation to us, every event of the divine presence with us. We do not compare well to God, particularly as the fallen creature! The image of God in us, for Barth, is our correspondence to God, our reflection of God so to speak, and its status can be read off of how we respond to God. But since we're not even aware of most (if not all) of those events, let's just say God knows exactly what our situation is, better than we do when we imagine there are tests we can pass in this matter.

The most searching judgment and scathing condemnation God has for us, in Barth's terms, is Jesus Christ. He is God's recognition that we are completely and totally useless. That we have so twisted ourselves away from anything God could want of us, that the only answer is for God to become human and be what God wants of us, Godself, instead. But this is the perfect example of the fact that, for Barth, judgment is therefore always incidental to an event of God's grace, God's eternal being for us in gracious action. Judgment is not, for Barth, an event and an end in itself.

Not even in the third and final form of the parousia, which Barth calls the "coming in judgment," will it be such a thing—for the final coming in judgment is properly the coming of the Redeemer. The final judgment does not stand between us and that grace; that ultimate grace, like all others but moreso, will therefore meet us with the force of terminal judgment and condemnation even as it brings God's absolute and final perfection of our being—because it is not the perfection of our being in the world. It is the perfect being of the creature, and indeed the total creature, which we can only receive as a gift, and which comes to us in such fundamental difference from how we have made ourselves after the Fall that it will be the end of our worlds.

Atonement Isn't For What You Think

Barth rejects apokatastasis, this much is clear. Most objections to universalism in Barth scholarship imagine that this means redemption is indeterminate, since Barth will not guarantee an end state of reconciliation. But the whole point of Barth's rejection of apokatastasis is that reconciliation is not the mechanism by which we get to redemption. Reconciliation is not a teleological process, but one that will simply end at the coming of the Redeemer. Reconciliation and redemption are separate spheres of sovereign, free, and loving divine action, each independently predicated upon election, just as creation also is.

The history of the covenant of grace in the sphere of reconciliation is as totally disconnected from the future of the redeemed creature by the eschaton as it also is from the history of the creature's origin by the Fall. The eschaton correlates to the Fall just as redemption correlates to creation beyond them at either end. But nothing correlates to world history. And that is because the only proper correlation in our context is that of the creature to its Creator in responsible partnership—but "our" time is instead "lost," defined by the freely willed negation of that correlation, as though freedom in the face of infinite possibility meant the right to divest ourselves of responsibility. (Adam and Eve, the first Libertarians, and the basis for our projection of the idea that God should be for Godself and against all others.) Eritis sicut dii scientes bonum et malum, said the serpent, and unlike Jesus we held equality with God as a thing to be seized for ourselves. And so world history is fundamentally broken. It is not responsive to God, and God is not responsible for (or to) it. World history is neither the right nor the divinely-ordered being of the creature, but only its graciously permitted ongoing existence in this state, which is how Barth defines the grace of providence.

And so it is that, for Barth, reconciliation comes to be the process in between creation and redemption, but not the process of getting us from one end to the other. The finite and fallible creature, even in the responsible relationship of partnership with God that is its nature (and the only thing Barth means by "covenant"), would always have required forgiveness and correction. Ontological "perfection" is not a thing that applies to created being; our perfection is to be what we were made to be, in that relationship, freely and lovingly willing and working in correspondence with the will and work of the free and loving God. (As, I have said, is already true for our fellow creatures in the kingdom of the heavens.)

For Barth, reconciliation is nothing other than the will and work of God in the face of our being otherwise than is our nature in that covenant relationship. It is our sentencing and parole, our treatment and rehabilitation, in the face of the judgment and condemnation already discussed. In it, God works each and every one of us around, at all times, towards realizing that nature in our lives, and so towards faithful responsibility in every relationship in which we shall ever be involved. Which is to say: reconciliation is the prerequisite for the possibility of ethics in the first place. But ethics, for Barth, is not based on the idea that salvation remains an open future possibility, to be met or missed. Salvation has already and decisively happened, has been determined for humanity and the total creature from all eternity—regardless of the fact that, in the Fall, we have totally missed and forfeited it along with our created nature and being.

Reconciliation is the gracious demonstration that we only live by grace, which is for Barth the only true moral fact. It is not the process by which we qualify for grace, as though that were a thing. It does not lead to salvation; reconciliation is the result and extension of the already-accomplished and total reality of salvation in Jesus Christ. We are objects of grace, for Barth, not subjects over against it. Our only true obligation is to correpond to the shape of this grace in gratitude. As Luther said, wir sind Bettler, das ist wahr—but God does not treat us the way we treat beggars, much less create the systems behind such devastating poverty, and that's the point. For Barth, reconciliation is God seeking to change our ways to be more like God's, every minute of every day, pious and generally jingoistic belief in fallen "order" be damned.

The Total Human Scope of Election and Everything After

And why does all this work? Because for Barth God is Jesus Christ without remainder, and in and as Jesus from all eternity God is not here to pick out which parts of the fallen world God likes better. It's not about approval. It's not about rejection. And it's certainly not about some idea that God must be true to God's virtues of abstract perfection over against God's will to save!

For Barth, God only has one eternal decree, and that is God's election to be God for us, and not merely God in Godself. Which is to say that God eternally decides to be Jesus Christ—and not only in the person of the Son. It is therefore not some other in God who decides secondarily to be Jesus, and that only in part; Jesus Christ is for all intents and purposes the nature and character of the triune God, the single and constant will shared by all three persons, the Word of God inseparable from Godself. There is no eternal Son behind the back of Jesus, much less an independent eternal Father who is other than he is towards us. The Son may be the Word of the Father in an inner-Trinitarian sense, but we do not get to retreat from the economy to distinctions between the persons, who are inseparable in their outward action. Jesus Christ is the one Word of God, the freely and eternally chosen normative reality, from whom and through whom and to whom are all of God's ways and works. That's election, for Barth.

And we must understand that it is God in Godself who decides this for Godself—but that we are not therefore left with any difference, any contrast, between God as God is in Godself and God as God is for us. This distinction must be made, because it sets the direction of all action irreversibly from God to us—but it is only made in order to be sublated, transcended, abolished, because there is no difference between God in Godself and God for us. God is Jesus Christ in Godself, from all eternity, and not only in the time of his flesh in our history. God may be revealed in that flesh in a hiddenness sub contrario specie, but it is no less God who reveals Godself, and it is nothing less, or other, than Godself whom God reveals to us by being fully and genuinely present there—as not only the Word of God, but the same God who speaks it, Dei loquentis persona.

And so, for Barth, our history does not run from beginning to end, as a process by which salvation may or may not be determined for any individual or group by close of business. The true telos of our time, its goal and fulfillment, is in the center of history, eternally determined for us, without us. The apocalyptic closure of world history at the eschaton is not its perfection, but a match to the catastrophic closure we brought to creation history in the Fall. The presence of Jesus Christ in the middle of history does not make him merely another in the ongoing sequence of events that we believe we understand as the nature of our time. He is not an attempted intervention, the success of which remains to be seen depending on what we do. In him, all time is fulfilled; in him, all humans have their being, no matter how long before or after his time we may understand ourselves to live.

And what that means for salvation is: that rather than there being groups of the elect and rejected at an individual level, it is God alone—in and as Jesus Christ himself—who is elect for and rejected by us, by God's own free and loving choice. There are no "reprobate." Election as an internal outward work (opus internum ad extra) precedes creation as the first of God's external outward works (opera externa ad extra). It does not constitute a decision among creatures, but a decision for creation, for the redemption of the creature in the end, and for the reconciliation of the creature in its relationship with God throughout the history in between.

And so we humans living in the world after the Fall, in our wholly artificial societies crafted on the basis of our free negation of God's positive will, may appear to be elect to the extent that we demonstrate some form of religious piety, or we may appear to be rejected (to those same people) because our rejection of God may not take on that appearance of piety. But even genuine faith, when found in us, does not distinguish us before God, because it is not found in us as though prior to the reconciling work of God. We do not awaken to genuine faith and responsibility, and the repentance they must occasion with respect to our participation in world orders, on our own. And so that faith cannot be regarded as saving us, as though it were a qualification; it is a product of our already-accomplished salvation.

So: Is it a Universalism?

Election has total human scope, in a positive single determination of God for us, regardless of our plural human self-determinations in response. Creation has total positive scope as well, not being the origin of a conflict to be decided or a binary to be split later. Reconciliation has the same kind of total human scope as election: a positive, single determination of Godself for and with us, but especially for and with those our pious orders exclude. The church is subject to greater judgment because a relationship with God demands that we be responsible. We are all being awakened to take that burden on in every relationship, and to extend God's grace to one another as God extends it to us. That awakening doesn't respect boundaries of human-defined groups. And redemption is not therefore indeterminate either, awaiting some outcome of history and human behavior to be decided. Redemption, like all the rest of God's works, is a total positive determination of God for us, and will come in the revelation of the already-determined total positive scope of us for and with God.

What would you call it? You can disagree with me about the details, but as extremely novel (and as thoroughly critical) as it is relative to the traditional range of soteriologies, this is definitionally a kind of universalism if we're characterizing it in terms of the human scope that receives a positive outcome. It isn't a validation of any of our definitions of what "human scope" means in terms of our fallen worlds, but it covers that regardless. Whoever you are, you will not be left out. You are not being left out. You have not been left out. You do not need to opt in. God is for and with you, and judges you as in need of grace. That grace is not in short supply, and it is not for some as opposed to others.

If you want to prove to me that Barth believes God damns to hell, or annihilates, the ball is in your court, but you have to prove it affirmatively. Barth doesn't do anything just because the tradition prefers it. The tradition is the place we go to diagnose larger problems, for Barth, not an unquestionable theological authority. It is our peer, and the source of the proclamation that we are called to question in dogmatics as a critical science.

Respecting African Christianities more than Colonialist Theologies

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Frost) — Tue, 05 Mar 2019 13:52:00 +0000

This was a Twitter rant, and it's a bit past time, but I look at my comments from the middle of the UMC GC—when it was still possible for their representatives, collectively, to choose life and not hatred—and it's clear some clarification needs to stand next to them here on the blog. It's very easy to slide into problematic negative claims about the non-US bodies in the UMC when faced with white culture-conservative American claims that they represent an external source of orthodoxy. So here's a contextualization of that aspect of the previous post on the UMC 2019 GC and its choice of oppression and violence here in the US. And until the situation changes, support your local churches that continue the fight.

For some time now I've been torn about how to address Christian theology done in the African context that quite clearly comes from the European and American colonial contexts.

And obviously the UMC gender and sexuality fight brings that problem front and center.

It is said of us that we clearly do not respect African (and other global, non-white) voices, for if we did, we would respect the fact that this is their theology. And frankly, generations down the road from their colonization in most cases (if with frequent refreshing), it is now authentically that. But at the level of respecting theological positions, the fact that Anglo-Dutch Protestant social-orders moralism comes out of an African mouth doesn't improve what it is.

I will never respect that theology, regardless of where it's been imposed and echoed back from.

There are very old culturally African Christianities. But the examples I can come up with are all Eastern, as in the Coptic and Ethiopian Orthodox traditions. The ability of an African religious community to reproduce some form of post-Reformation Protestant Orthodoxy is over a millennium more recent!

And none of these Christianities in Africa are indigenous religions. Because of the African extent of the Roman Empire, you have Christianities spreading in Africa in and after the 2nd century, just as the diaspora resulted in communities of Judaisms there—and once Christianity ceased to be a Judaism, it got much worse.

The faith of African communities in the Patristic era remains linked to the faith of their European norming communities. We may "rediscover" the African origins of certain Patristic figures, but they are influential as figures that represent the faith to those contexts. (All your Patristic faves are problematic.) The Patristic figures we have from Africa that have been normative influences on Christian theology in its development have done so, not as representative members of local cultures, but instead as Hellenized or Latinized—and so "civilized"—people of the northern colonized areas of the continent.

And their contexts, in that colonized north of Africa, do not survive—indeed, they have been erased more thoroughly than in the European context. Mediterranean Africa is colonized again and again, and we should not be surprised that it is Muslim where it had been Christian with pockets of Judaism in the formative period of our theological development. It is the gulf coast, from "upper" Egypt south through the Horn, where early Christianities in Africa survive and thrive in developmental histories all their own. But these historical churches aren't the ones we're dealing with in the UMC context. That's sub-Saharan Africa, and it was colonized by the West much later.

(And of course none of this is my story, and I'm clearly going to get it wrong in places, but I'm trying to stick to what is my history as it intersects these places. I will happily be corrected.)

Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa—the region in which it is dominant today—is a product of Modern missionary colonialism. And it exists in a wide variety of forms! Which is what happens when multiple nations and multiple religious ventures all want a piece of the continent. And, of course, the map of Christianity in Africa continues to change, because over generations it has ceased merely to be the object of external Christian imperial forces. It is now a mission field for a wide variety of African churches, just as the US remains a mission field for American churches.

And Christian Africa increasingly rediscovers its histories. African Christian scholars do work that takes control of the narrative and of scriptural interpretation for their contexts, and in ways that also draw upon resources excluded or subverted by their colonizers. If you want me to respect authentic African Christianities, point to those.

But of course, that's not what American cultural conservatives want. That's not the voice of these churches voting against what they have been told is a perverse and elitist American agenda—by the people whose perverse and elitist agenda colonized them generations ago! It is sock-puppetry to point me to culturally differentiated but theologically uniform representatives of a historically Anglo-European denominational body in its American-led incarnation, and call them authentic African voices I should respect when they agree with you. And in the UMC, as in every other overwhelmingly-white US church body of my acquaintance, that is the only time African Christianities appear as a normative model for how the American church should proceed: when they reproduce American cultural conservatisms.

Is that nonetheless the theology of these churches? We should not take the hierarchy's word for it.

Does it exert normative force in their contexts? Certainly.

Should it? That's an open question, and conservative efforts to foreclose it are made in bad faith.

African Christianity is a vastly plural context, just as in the American context. I have every intention of respecting its complexity, breadth, and depth, particularly where it is unique in difference from the theologies we have imposed there. That is not what happened at the UMC General Conference.

If you want to see the influence of African churches in their own rights, participating in dialogue with other global churches including from Europe and the US, and making valued substantive contributions, look to the World Council of Churches for a better model. And of course, even that oldest of Western European ecumenical endeavors, which has come so remarkably far since its origins as a gathering of colonizers, has farther still to go. But at least they realize that, as it is also in the US in the wake of slavery and Reconstruction, the reality of churches of African descent is far greater than what can be seen among the member churches of historically white-dominated denominations. Independence makes a difference, and is basically out of frame in the UMC in both contexts.

Choose Life, that your Victims may Live in your Place

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Frost) — Tue, 26 Feb 2019 14:56:00 +0000

A decade ago this coming summer, my church went through what the UMC is going through right now, at this 2019 special session of their General Conference. And perhaps ironically, for this moment in history, we went through it at the same gathering in which we approved our full communion agreement with the UMC! The 2009 ELCA Churchwide Assembly took place as the culmination of many years of study, preparation, discussion, and motions from the congregational and synodical levels to commit our churchwide representative assembly to find some more or less decisive place to stand as the whole church.

And we did, rather more decisively: with a 2/3 supermajority, our highest representative assembly approved the prepared social ethics statement, "Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust," as well as the ministry recommendations that went with it. Which is to say that—coming out of decades of fearmongering and oppression and widespread support for the hegemony of white supremacy and its concomitantly racialized and culturally-imposed descriptions of what sex and gender roles would be deemed valid in this extremely white church body—we committed ourselves to taking the smallest possible of steps forward into a future for our church that did not harm its members quite so violently in quite the same ways as before.

And then we watched as the reactionary factions that had been terrorizing my fellow seminarians for years with threats to expose and exclude them for any step out of line began to tear at everything that bound our church together, seeking to use institutional homophobia and hatred as though it were theological orthodoxy, and claims to theological orthodoxy as though they carried the right to take large congregational and even synodical chunks of the church with them in destroying the ELCA on their way out. Those who felt they could not stay in a church that affirmed HS:GT, and its expanded realization of our claim of the vocation of all the baptized, felt entitled to found their new church by theft, and upon our corpse if necessary. And those who did stay, felt they had every right to undermine the church's decision from within.

And that was never going to have been the surprising part of the story, in a culture that so fervently still believes that the Modern colonial invention and imposition of a gender "binary" predicated on intersectionally dividing masculinity and femininity across a further hierarchy of race and class is a God-given scriptural and doctrinal necessity.

And so, having long had a window into the UMC process toward this point in the form of my maternal grandfather, for whom this hatred is an article of faith, and whose upbringing was in American colonial Wesleyan mission, furthering the cultural-conformity aspect of our genocide of indigenous tribal peoples in the Great Plains, I can't say I'm surprised at how the 2019 GC is going. Disappointed, but not really surprised. The UMC has for a very long time been reliant upon Evangelical colonial missions as reservoirs in support of its reactionary cultural agendas. Beat enough other places into submission, bend enough other cultures to your will with money and other resources, and keep them tied firmly into your governance structures, and eventually you, too, can claim their support against so-called decadent cultural decline when things aren't going your way at home. Empire has always worked that way.

And if the UMC will not give justice to those it regards as its subjects, if it seeks still tighter restrictions to conform the body of Christ to a Western colonial image designed to maintain the oppression of gender and sex and race and class all together, perhaps as a body it will not face the violence inflicted upon my church body when we chose differently. But it will only do so by embracing and extending that violence, by continuing to claim itself as a safe home for that violence and its perpetrators, not its victims.

The UMC could still become one church. But it has been two in fact for so long, that the moment today is really about which one it will embrace.

"If That's So, What's Left for Us?": Barth's Nutshell Soteriology, part 10

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Frost) — Fri, 22 Feb 2019 14:19:00 +0000

OK, so the last post was absurdly long, important though it was to get through. I'm prety sure from here on out I can go for shorter, punchier posts, even if it means the series runs longer as a whole and things get divided up more. And the last post also contained a recap of the series so far, at the top, so you can pick and choose what you want to read from that while knowing where the posts fit in the larger argument.

But of course, that was from God's side. The way Barth's text works out, he's about to give us a different recap of the larger argument in the text for this post. Barth is about to recap the points he's made from our perspective, from the point of view of the false belief we have in ourselves, which he has sought so thoroughly to destroy. Because of course he has no intention of tearing us down without building us back up the right way—but we need to sit with the reality.

Who are we? What is left for us if all of this is the case? More to the point: how should we rightly define ourselves as "with God," since the Fall is such a total and all-obscuring catastrophe? Hasn't the point been that we are against God, precisely in the ways we've sought to redefine and subordinate God as with and for us?

This seventh and final point of Barth's outline manages to break into three at major paragraph divisions neatly enough that I can actually do them in three separate posts. So what you're getting today is that question, in the first third of that seventh point, to which the second third will be the answer, followed in the third by Barth linking the whole thing back up with how he started the section.

And of course, the fact that this is the seventh of seven points doesn't mean Barth has finished articulating the material here in section 57.1 in CD IV.1—but by the time we're done with this point, we'll be 2/3 of the way through, at least by the page count in my translation document. (The sixth point, in the last post, was apparently long enough that we crossed the halfway point in the middle of it.)

Paragraphs 20 and 21

As usual, text in bold italics is Barth's original emphasis from the German. There's a page break included from the German, but for the English we're just in the middle of p. 14, and either way you can check up on my translation in the official versions. Paragraph breaks ending in "|" are artificial, because Barth doesn't tend to break paragraphs very often at all when he gets going. And while the in-text numbering in the middle graf here is Barth's, I've turned it into an obvious list with links back, and highlighted the numbering for the sake of easier following. But regardless of markup, the text is all still Barth's.

7[a]. Precisely from that perspective it can and must now become understandable that the "God with us" also includes in itself in all seriousness a "we with God": that we ourselves are thereby included here in our being, life, and action.

At first glance, we don't imagine we can see that—for who are we? We hear:
(1) that we are very much the sort whose history is incorporated in the history of the actions of God;

and (2) that we are given a share in exactly the event that forms the center and apex of all divine action;

and (3) that just so we are party to the grace in which God really turns salvation to humanity;

and (4) that as such we are those God has determined for exactly that from eternity—

but that now, regrettably, (5) as such, we are those who have refused God's salvation, and thereby have denied their own determination, and thereby have twisted and ruined their being, life, and action, hopelessly compromised; we are those who therefore as participants in that event must find themselves disqualified and pushed aside, who for their part no longer come into consideration—

and now, beyond that and in a sense concluding it, (6) that as such we are those into whose place someone entirely different has now stepped, who lives, suffers, and acts for them; who for them makes good what they have made evil; who is himself their salvation—for them, but properly without them and even against them.

This is who we are. |

What remains for us? If we are like that, if that is how it stands regarding us, where are we left? To what extent is the history of the action of God, precisely in this its apex and center, also our own history? Aren't we now historyless, made into mere objects, relegated to a strange responsibilitylessness, shoved into the position of mere spectators? Isn't our being now just [S. 14] lifeless and idle, or in any case, precisely as our life and action hasn't it become meaningless? "God with us"—that piece might under these circumstances appear to be broadly understandable. But how should it include in itself a "we with God" under these circumstances? And if it does not include any such thing in itself, how then should it also really be understandable for us as "God with us"?

The Objection from Our Desire for Ultimate Relevance

This is simultaneously the standard objection to "universalism" as negating the presumed necessary role of ethics in determining fate, and the dominant objection to Barth's doctrine of creation by readers of III.1 for the same reason: the idea that world history has to have a point, that our open-ended existence has to be for something, and that this "something" is the achievement (or not) of the goal of salvation-history.

And so if you think Barth has only just now taken all of that away from you, you should go back to the beginning of the previous volume, and have the feeling there too—not to mention back even further in II.2, II.1, and even I.2. (You can read my Judas series for insights on that.) This has been the basso continuo of Barth's mature doctrine of election, even where it wasn't yet fully realized, and everything else has been improvised over the top of it. God, in Christ, who is the already-accomplished salvation of humanity and the total creature—for us, but properly without us and even against us.

And not vice versa! Not "properly without us and even against us—and only then (and selectively) for us," which is the overwhelmingly traditional error. God's positive freedom is basic, and proper to God's will, which is also fundamentally and finally positive. God's negative freedom only exists as the liberation of that positive freedom from any constraints which might limit it in God's accomplishment of God's will. God's negation of us only exists for the same reason: in support of God's positive will for us and not in exception from it—as though negation were ever proper to God, instead of being a thing we introduced into the world. God negates only our negation, and not what we are. God is not for us only in the midst of negation; instead, God is against us and our negation only in the midst of eternal and overwhelming grace.

Ah, but without our negation, without das Nichtige as that free choice of ours, that most basic foundation of the history of our worlds, what are we? Our desire for ultimate relevance is a desire to grant negation the same kind of status as God's positive will has by nature. If we have been taken so thoroughly out of the game—if God has so thoroughly respected our forfeit from salvation-history that God has quite simply done it all for us, Godself—then what point is there to our existence? Why is the creature, at all?

In our hubris, we aren't interested in the idea that what we've done is actually a forfeit. We claim, over and over again, to still be playing the game—and playing to win, on our terms. But there is no such game on our terms. We don't get to steal the game from God and remake it into a contest against one another.

So yes, Barth is right: we have been relegated to the status of mere objects, without history, without responsibility, spectators—if only we were actually watching what was happening! If only we would turn, and see, and really live! But as it stands we are lifeless, idle, meaningless ... and not because God has taken away our life, activity, and meaning. No, all of that is still available to us, waiting for us to take it up again. That is the point of the action of reconciliation. Jesus Christ has done it, and so may we, now that "victory" and even the game itself are no longer functional, yet-to-be-determined realities for us.

The "God with us" at the center of the Christian message holds out to us a "we with God" that is so completely different from our hubris that we cannot see it until we learn the truth of our reality. That is the radical thing at the heart of Barth's ethics. And it is the still greater thing God has for us, conveyed as the meaning of the great reality of God graciously for and with us from all eternity.

And in the second part of this seventh point, Barth will frame our appropriate answer to that reality, positively.

Following "Nevertheless" with "That's Why": Barth's Nutshell Soteriology, part 9

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Frost) — Fri, 15 Feb 2019 15:34:00 +0000

As there was with the fifth of Barth's seven points, there's a lot more text to the sixth than we've been handling at once. But this time at least Barth has broken it up into three paragraphs already. And as usual I've still broken those up into smaller units where appropriate (with "|") for easier reading. But as it works out, commentary is going to folllow the text divided roughly in half, because I don't have much special to say about the second major paragraph by itself.

I'd like to leave contextualizing arguments as short as possible up here at the top of the post, so we can get into the text without wasting too much time. But of course, we're 9 posts into this series (10 if you count the intro), and I don't want the thread to be lost, so here's a refresher in list form:

Barth's section 57 thesis, that God takes up our cause, leads it to its goals, and shows off how cool God is;
Faith, love, hope, and the covenant fulfilled in the work of reconciliation as the center of the Christian message;
The scope of "God with us" as about humanity and not group belonging, because God is most basically for them;
The Isaianic sign of "Immanu-el" and Matthew's belief in its reversal in Jesus Christ, from ruin to salvation;
Barth's first point, which is that the living God's being is action, creating one common history with ours;
Barth's second point, that this being-in-act is eternally and singularly particular in Jesus Christ;
Barth's third point, that the singular particularity of that gracious being-in-act is God's eternal saving will;
Barth's fourth point, that humanity and salvation are determined for one another as a first thing from all eternity;
Barth's fifth point, that beyond having no claim on that grace, we forfeited even our created being in the Fall;

... and now Barth's sixth point, which is that God's saving will is already fully accomplished by Godself—as I have been saying, "for us, without us." That it has been done in this way—in, as, and because of the decision to be Jesus Christ—not by a God who might also will otherwise, and not out of some respect for the humanity we imagine ourselves to be by nature in our fallen state, but as the way the Creator loves the creature precisely in the predicament it has gotten itself into.

In the translation sections, text in bold italics is Barth's original emphasis from the German, and page breaks from the German [S.] and English [p.] are included so you can check up on my translation in the official versions.

Paragraph 17

6. But if the Christian "God with us" now nevertheless and in spite of that speaks not of a failure, but of the carrying out of the saving will of God in that event, then—as inconceivable as what is conceived here may be—it means by that anything but the obscure paradox of an arbitrarily-imposed act of the divine omnipotence of grace. We stand here before the determination of that event, in which its uniqueness among all other acts of God unequivocally comes to light in the fact that it makes visible an absolutely unique being, behavior, and action of God. "God with us" here means more than God over and near us, in front of and behind us, more than God's divine being in what is otherwise for God the most intimately effected and characteristic relation to our human being. "God with us" here in the center of the Christian message means, in view of the event about which it speaks, that God has made Godself the executor of God's saving will. It means that God has, in God's own person—at God's own cost, but also in God's own superior initiative—become the inconceivable "nevertheless!" and "in spite of that!" of this event, but thereby also its clear, well-founded, and legitimate, its true, holy, and just "that's why!" It means that God has become human, in order as such—but in divine sovereignty—to take up our cause. |

What happens in this work of inconceivable compassion is therefore certainly God's free disposition, but it is no arbitrary "turning a blind eye," or "keeping the option open," and it is also not an artificial bridging, pasting-up, or obfuscation of the breakage, rift, and abyss between God and us, for which we are guilty. Instead it is a genuine closure. God closes it by Godself: God becomes and is the person in whom the peace is a matter of fact. Exactly where we fail and break down by insulting and infuriating God, making ourselves impossible before God and thereby neglecting our own determination, treading our dignity underfoot, losing our right, forfeiting our salvation and thereby hopelessly compromising our creaturely existence—is exactly where God steps onto the stage as this human person. |

Because God is God, God is capable of being not only God but also this human person. Because God is God, it is necessary that God be a completely different person than all of us other humans: doing what all of us leave undone, and leaving undone what all of us do. Because God is God, God acts in full legal authority, in place of all of us, [S. 12] for the benefit of all of us, by being this other person who is so entirely different. Because God is God, God has and exercises the power, as this person, to suffer the consequences of our violation—the anger and penalty that must affect us—for all of us, and so to do enough with respect to us, Godself. |

And again, because God is God, God also has and exercises the power, as this human person in the place of all of us, to be God's own partner, who in free [p. 13] obedience does justice to the determination of humanity for salvation that we have all contradicted, and so also does enough—i.e., does what is positively sufficient—for us. That is the absolutely unique being, behavior, and action of God that is meant by the "God with us" in the center of the Christian message. It means the peace that God has founded between Godself and all of us, in this human person, Godself.

There is Logic and We Aren't It

Barth is trying to say here that God's saving grace, God's free and loving choice from all eternity, is not arbitrary. But the force of that hardly comes across in contemporary English. Willkür in German is not simply "chosen at random," "willed without sufficient reason," but also "forcibly imposed upon others in an unjustified manner." Particularly so when we believe that there is a more reasonable and justifiable choice which would garner at least some level of consent from those affected by it.

Of course, the true absurdity for Barth is the idea that salvation should derive from the consent of the saved, and that God should be obliged by some moral constraint to respect the autonomy of a human freedom so obviously twisted into self- (and other-)destructive paths. Salvation is the will and act of a single and autonomous sovereign toward and upon that over which the sovereign has every right: its creature. Even were our freedom not so twisted inward upon itself and against our created being, God would not be obligated to regard it as anything other than properly subordinate to God's own freedom.

Ah, but that's where we get the problem: this idea that God's will for us is willkürlich, that God's action is therefore an arbitrary imposition upon our being. We tend to work from this mistaken concept of God as a power without a definite character, and for such a power there can be no intrinsic justification for its actions. Such a power may technically be sovereign—may have an acknowledged right to do whatever it wants—but that doesn't make it good. The morality of such an ambiguous power must be understood in terms of extrinsic rationales, a morality therefore imposed upon it from without—because it might be true to say that whatever such a being may choose is self-definitionally "good," but then why should you believe in it for yourself?

Out of such an ambiguity, we who have chosen to believe in this power might call it good, and others might call it evil, might reject it—and we might therefore develop some idea that God's power is not therefore good to all, that God's will is not therefore good for all, but only for some and against others. For us, in other words, and against any who do not so choose and believe in its goodness for them.

And this is an easy trap to fall into, bullshit though it certainly is, when we conceive of our religion as faith in the cosmic creator who only saves morally just believers. After all, if God only uses God's power in a way that makes sense on the basis of human choices, then we have a rational (to us) warrant for God's actions. Then we imagine that they are not actually arbitrary, even as sovereign impositions, because we have imposed our standard of judgment as the basis for God's sovereign decision.

But for Barth, it is important to remember that we were not, when all of this was decided. God was when we were not—and God was in fact Jesus Christ when we were not. There was no time when he was not. This sovereign power has a character intrinsic to itself, a character determined by itself and for itself, positively, in total priority over the existence of anything at all other than God against which God might hypothetically define Godself negatively. This intrinsic and self-defined character is what we were made to correspond to, and we have fallen out of that necessary correspondence to God's free and positive character. Salvation therefore does not correspond to our fallen being, but calls us back to what we were made to be in responsibility to God's freely chosen character—which is to be God for us, and which means that we are to be for God and one another in reflection of that fundamental grace of the divine being.

Now, that's at least notionally taken care of the random and insufficiently-warranted aspects of "arbitrary," because God's freely chosen positive character is sufficient explanation for God's actions consistent with that character. But it doesn't cover the forcibly-imposed aspect. No; for that we have to remember that this saving will is also not first and foremost exercised over against us by one who is not subject to it. After all, we are not the object of election, about whom the decision would therefore be made in our own terms. Salvation is determined for us, without us, and it is so determined because of the one who is both fully God and fully human. It is so determined for us by God who is entirely subject to our reality by God's own free and loving choice. This one, Jesus Christ, is the subject who decides, as well as the object for whom it is decided; we are just the beneficiaries of that decision, and of the character of God that is eternally decided in it. He is the "that's why," the darum of a salvation that from our perspective comes "nevertheless" and "in spite of" us.

And so it is not arbitrary, but logically consistent. And so it is not a tyrannical imposition (as our will is when it seeks to stand over against God), but a loving and self-sacrificial choice by which God makes Godself—and by extension us, forensically even before the action of reconciliation—holy.

We have Wounded, and God Heals

And this is the other half of the problem: when we look at salvation as a question of God deciding which putative "afterlife" to stick us into on the basis of our individual merits, with some potentially mitigating Jesus-discount we can ask for if we know about it, but with most of the question being decided in our terms, we have missed the reality of this gaping wound God is healing. And for Barth, seeing that reality is they key.

This is not about punishing wayward children, much less inventing one exemplary child who can, arbitrarily, be punished so severely that everyone else gets off. This is not about what we deserve. It is not about punishment and reward—as though there were anything to be rewarded! It is not about blame—as though that could be shifted around. As though there were not one entirely fallen creature, but many separately and more or less fallen individuals and groups. (As though that very idea were not proof of the fall of the total creature!)

We should not lose sight of the prophetic reality, we should not imagine away God's demands that we who are beneficiaries of this grace should become and be responsible to it and one another—and that we are responsible for the harm we do to one another. But that is subordinate to this reality, not superior to it and determining the logic of its application. What God sees is a gaping wound. God sees God's creature, which God loves, horrifically mauled by its own hand. And we have posited, in support of our wounding of our fellow creatures, that God wades into the problem and pulls at the tear, rips it wider, in order that the eschatological reality may be a creature fully sundered from itself. In order that there may be a "heaven" that corresponds perfectly and equivalently to the hell of negation, reserved for those whose "virtue" consists in tearing out exactly the right parts of the creature and condemning them.

But God chooses otherwise. As Barth says, "Because God is God, it is necessary that God be a completely different person than all of us other humans: doing what all of us leave undone, and leaving undone what all of us do." There is no justice in the breach, no value to the line of the wound, that it should be continued indefinitely. God closes it. And God does so all by Godself, because we won't. There is no question of later validation of the rift; no option to tear us apart later, held open by the God who only temporarily binds us up. There is nothing temporary about the closure of this wound in Jesus. It is not provisional, but providential.

Of course, there is a cost to the Fall. There is a cost to sin and evil. It has profound consequences! The creature's self-inflicted wound is fatal, and in Jesus God suffers that in our place. But of course, the creature was already mortal; it was made to die. Barth's doctrine of creation has not left us with death as a special penalty; it's part of our original design. Fatal wounds are not a consequence of the Fall! No; when Barth says we have forfeited even our created being, he means it: we're out of the game. The substitution here is total: the entire team is off the field, taking the piss, playing some other game it has invented for itself, while God plays out the real game with Godself, alone. Jesus is us, in every way that matters, and we don't get to rush back onto the pitch and claim some right to finish the game ourselves.

And so the wound is healed. The rift is closed. The abyss no longer yawns—no matter that the world still looks like it does. Peace has been decisively concluded in our name, using a right we no longer have claim to but which is still meaningfully ours because it represents a grace dedicated to us by God. Our war is over, no matter how much sabotage our troops continue to wreak in pursuit of victory as we imagine it.

Paragraphs 18 and 19

We recognize the seriousness and the force of the divine saving will in that it is neither too little nor too much for God to found this peace between Godself and us by condescending to do this—by the Creator not scorning it, but on the contrary seeking, defending, and leading God's own honor to victory in becoming Godself a creature, human just like us, in order as such to suffer what must be suffered and to do what must be done for our salvation. And moreover, we recognize what from our side is twisted and tainted—what is our sacrilege, and our predicament—in that (because God does nothing unnecessary) obviously only this most extreme intervention of Godself as human in the place of all of us is enough to make good what has here been made evil. So overcast is our situation that God must enter and occupy it Godself for it to become bright. In recognition of the Christian "God with us," therefore, the situation will not go away without the most profound astonishment over the majesty of the divine grace, and without the most profound horror over our own adversity.

But the decisive thing about this, God's action, has not yet been said when we understand the intervention of God for us in God's incarnation as the founder of peace between God and us. What God makes, enacts, and reveals by becoming human for all of us humans is far more than the restoration of the way things were before, the status quo ante; it is far more than the elimination of the disaster caused by our violation, and the reinstatement of our standing relative to the promise and expectation of the salvation determined for us. God, who made Godself the instrument of God's own saving will, is obviously more than this instrument. And by founding that peace by means of Godself, God obviously gives us more than this peace, i.e. more than a restitutio ad integrum, more therefore than that our created being, and this as our opportunity for salvation, is preserved and secured for us by God. Instead, precisely by making Godself the instrument of God's own saving will with respect to us, this will reaches its goal at the same time we do. What is at first [S. 13] only God's gracious response to our offense, God's gracious help in our adversity, as sufficiently great and wonderful as that is, is nevertheless—by God being here the response and the help, Godself—at the same time God's participation in our being, life, and action, and thereby obviously our participation in God's, and is therefore nothing more or less than the coming of salvation itself: the presence of the eschaton in its total fullness. |

The human person in whom God steps onto the stage for us, Godself, suffers and acts for us as our surrogate, closes the abyss between God and us in our name and for our benefit—this person is not merely the confirmation and guarantee of our salvation; because he is God, he is salvation himself, our salvation. He is not merely the deliverer of our being, but as such the giver and himself the gift of its fulfillment, [p. 14] and so the goal and end of the way of God—and precisely by being the founder of peace and the deliverer! When this great thing happens, something still greater happens. That great thing is included in the "God with us" of the Christian message, insofar as it speaks of God's intervention and incarnation for us—but in this great thing, what is still greater, even the greatest thing, is also included.

We Should Still be Horrified by Ourselves

If we only knew, we would see the common reaction to universalisms as therefore what Barth calls "the most profound astonishment over the majesty of the divine grace, and ... the most profound horror over our own adversity." Of course, "universalism" is not the word for what Barth is doing—but neither is he doing the opposite of it. ("Ich lehre sie nicht, aber auch nicht nicht.") Barth is quite simply doing something comprehensively different in place of soteriologies that seek only to transform the consequences and not also the entire imagined ordo salutis from its roots.

The question should never be "do people who do bad things still get rewarded?" It isn't "will everyone be rewarded, or only the just?" That's not what salvation is, that is nothing even remotely close to the actual calculus as Barth describes it. The logic of grace and the logic of reward are two entirely different things. A reward would only come after our performance, but grace has always already come before it. Grace conditions performance; it isn't based on it.

We should be horrified by sin and evil—and the worlds we have shaped using them. Of course, our horror is usually misdirected by structures that seek to blame sin and evil on the parts of the creature that don't fit neatly into our manufactured and false orders of the world. If the other horrifies you in this way, you're the problem. The question is not how they can be saved, but how we can, who have done this to the world in the name of so-called orders and moralities we have posited in place of God. That is our sacrilege, and our predicament, as Barth calls it.

We should be horrified by the adversity we suffer, and the adversity we inflict. We should be confused at the idea that salvation should come in such conflict with what we imagine is the moral order of the universe. The inconceivable should boggle the mind! But we should also recognize why it is inconceivable to us, and the more basically inconceivable reality of what we have done to the world as the free creature out of correspondence with its Creator. Salvation is a reminder, in this way, that things do not in fact work the way we have pressed them into service using our own wills. God does not support our pretense of order, and we've been at it so long that the reality of the situation does not make sense to us.

But in the face of this astonishment, we must not choose to double down on the bet we've made on our own freedom against God's. When "the presence of the eschaton in its total fullness" is instead "nothing more or less than the coming of salvation itself," without respect to how we've attempted to condition it—when that eschaton is not us, but Jesus Christ in our place—we need to face up to the reality of the peace that has been concluded on our behalf. The war we have waged is over, and because it was an illegitimate war, there are no "sides" to declare for or against.

And there is here yet another reason Barth opposes apokatastasis, as he understands it, as the image of salvation.

"What God makes, enacts, and reveals by becoming human for all of us humans is far more than the restoration of the way things were before, the status quo ante ... [M]ore than a restitutio ad integrum, more therefore than that our created being, and this as our opportunity for salvation, is preserved and secured for us by God."

This idea, which the tradition has so often used to signify the end as a return to the beginning, is for Barth something that is worked out in the middle, over and over again, offered to us as a gift so that we may use it. The gift of our created being, which we had forfeited, is not the same as its coming future fufillment and consummation. Reconciliation is not redemption! It is not aimed at achieving redemption. The act of redemption, in its own separate sphere, will be enough for that all by itself. Reconciliation is aimed at something else entirely: our life.

In the wake of this reality, the question is not "who can be saved," but "what do we do next?" When we finally come to recognize that we have been delivered, not from the hands of our enemies, but from ourselves because we had become the enemy—and that others have been delivered from us, right along with us—the question is how we are to use our created being correctly, in responsibility to and before God, as an extension of God's grace.

And that, in the seventh point, will be the "greater thing" that is included in the "great thing" proclaimed to us in Jesus Christ as God with us: the corresponding (and otherwise impossible) reality of "we with God."

Compassionate Disrespect for our Freedom as Theodicy: Barth's Nutshell Soteriology, part 8

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Frost) — Wed, 06 Feb 2019 01:06:00 +0000

OK, so if the paragraphs we've had up 'til now have been large, this one's a doozy, taking roughly twice as long to cover all of Barth's fifth point. (This sort of length is going to become the rule for the next two points as well.) As usual it's been broken up artificially (with "|") for easier reading, but we're also going to handle it in three pieces (a, b, c) so that the commentary is closer to the text it's about. And for the sake of your time, I'm not going to frontload contextualizing arguments about it.

Text in bold italics is Barth's original emphasis from the German, and page breaks from the German [S.] and English [p.] are included so you can check up on my translation in the official versions.

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5. But we must again continue: "God with us" in the sense of the Christian message means: God with us people, who have forfeited the salvation determined for us—indeed who, subject to the ultimate and highest danger, have also forfeited our created being. The course of the path that leads from that beginning in God to that goal of humanity with God, as this path comes into view in this particular event, is no straight line, but rather a radically and even hopelessly broken line—were God not in play as our hope. |

Indeed, that is the situation of humanity in this event: it stands somewhere completely different from where humanity must stand according to what God has intended for it. Humanity does not behave like the partner that God has given Godself as the beneficiary of God's saving grace. Humanity has set itself in opposition to its determination for salvation. It has turned its back toward the salvation that is actually coming to it. Instead of the fulfillment of its being in participation in the being of God by God's gift, humanity intends and seeks something else, a salvation to be discovered in the scope of its created being and to be effected by humanity itself. Humanity has the idea that it can and should fulfill itself. It has become its own eschaton. |

It is this humanity—the humanity that has made itself impossible precisely with respect to the saving grace of God—with whom God has to do in that particular event, salvation-history. And now it is precisely that humanity which has thereby also become impossible in its created being as human, which has lost the ground from under its feet, lost its reason for being. |

What is the point of humanity before God, since it has shown itself to be completely and utterly incompetent, useless, and unsuited for the purpose for which God created it, having switched itself off in this matter? What [p. 11] is the point of its being, its being human, after humanity has negated its goal, in so doing also its beginning, and therefore its meaning, and now stands opposite God in this negation? By scorning the dignity with which God has outfitted it, [S. 10] humanity has obviously also come to scorn the right bestowed upon and ascribed to it as God's creature. Again: in the saving event God is dealing with precisely this humanity, as the lost son drawn into foreign lands, into adversity, who now exists in adversity. And the rift will form, it will become obvious that between God and humanity there stands this inadequacy of the partner, precisely in this dead spot in their relationship. |

The Hopelessly Broken Line of History

OK, so here we're talking about the path from creation to redemption, from the origin of our created being to its eschatological fulfillment in perfection with God. Those endpoints, as we now know after the last two points, are secure in Jesus Christ. But of course, we're in the doctrine of the middle between them. So the question to be answered is, how does reconciliation relate to creation and redemption?

There are, broadly speaking, two approaches to this question: continuity and discontinuity. But that second approach had basically been ruled out, particularly in an age where scriptural apocalyptic was so out of favor that even the prophets couldn't get a hearing. And the people who did make use of scriptural apocalyptic still presumed that world history stands in continuity with creation and eschatology—they just used it to hype up the consequences of failing out of the historical process, as seen in terms of failing to conform to their societal expectations.

Barth, however, has chosen the path of radical discontinuity between creation-history and the history of the covenant of grace after the Fall. The act of creation is finished on the seventh day. God's action produces no conflict, sources nothing evil, requires no resolution through the historical process. Evil, though actual in history, is not real, does not exist, in the same sense that the creature is and does—the creature whose technically impossible will and accomplishment such negation of God's will is! There is no dialectic between evil and good for which synthesis is in any way conceivable as God's will. Providence is therefore to be understood as a negative, permissive grace that preserves the creature in being, not one which maintains any sense of order—as though there were any, as though that were what God wanted and not merely what we want in our constant remaking of the cosmos after our own image, chiseling away what we deem to be superfluous material.

God does not compromise with us in this. God does not respect our choice by holding us in being instead of releasing us to nonexistence for it. That isn't the threat under which we stand, the danger we have brought upon ourselves, Jonathan Edwards notwithstanding. The forfeit is ours, the action of the creature in believing it can choose something else in the wake of creation, in believing that the image and likeness of God entitles it to reach out and choose in the same sovereign way that God did, and not in responsibility to that sovereign choice of its creator. God does not uphold that choice by holding us in being. Instead, God upholds God's own consistent will for us as the beginning of all of God's ways and works. And so, in the time after the Fall, God who redeems the creature reconciles its worlds because they are hopelessly broken.

As such, God is our hope, from beyond all historical possibility. Our only hope, and only so. The question of Barth's text here, the colloquial German "was soll das," "what is the point of humanity," what is it good for, is nothing we can find in the worlds we have made for ourselves and against one another. We can make infinitely many possible "oughts" out of what remains of our "is," but God's intention for us comes to us from beyond all of them. And it comes to get us out of this adversity, even if we haven't realized that's what the situation is yet. It comes as grace to the prodigal—but that is to say, it comes as generosity to one accustomed to frivolous spending.

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Were it necessary—if one did not think of the saving event as the center and apex of their relationship, if one regarded it abstractly as the relationship between Creator and creature—one could overlook this. Certainly, one could also take this opposition very seriously, but in any case one could think of it as a surmountable opposition—and there are good reasons to do so. It involves, as such, no breakage, no rift, no two-way exchange of hostility, no divine judgment and punishment and no human adversity. However, all of that is impossible to overlook in the saving event intended by the "God with us." To the contrary: as saving event, as the fulfillment of the gracious will of God, as the restoration of God's right and of ours, the peculiarity of this event is constituted by the fact that it can only (really only!) be conceived of in the form of a "nevertheless!" and "in spite of that!"—which is also to say that it is perennially inconceivable. |

If humanity has forfeited its salvation, what is there in this event that is conceivable except the inconceivable: that it is given to humanity nevertheless? If thereby humanity has also gambled away even its created being, what is conceivable there but something else inconceivable: that it shall not be lost in spite of that? Is it not the case that grace only now, in light of the opposition that is here overt, and which it here overcomes, becomes recognizable as grace—namely as free grace, as sheer, pure compassion, as factum purum, which can only have its basis in itself, in the fact that it is posited by God? Who, then, knows what grace is before they have seen it at work here? It is grace for humanity in the place where it could only be against them because before God they are sinners, completely and utterly, and by being for them it is actually always the accuser and judge against them, revealing humanity as unable to do enough for God or for themselves. |

Victims of Grace, Condemned to Salvation

Barth is somewhat well-known for saying that dogmatics could in principle begin anywhere, in any locus, and be structured in any way—as long as Christ is the center, of course. And I've taken this as such a hypothetical.

You could, if there were a compelling reason to, ignore Barth's structural claim about reconciliation in this section. Not that he recommends doing so—but nothing bad will happen if you do, because God does not respond to our self-endangerment by reinforcing it, siding against us as we have sided agianst God. So you could step back from the sphere of reconciliation, even from Jesus Christ himself, and God's grace would be the same in relation to us. You could stand in the doctrine of creation and still come to the same description of the reality between us and God—as long as you understand that both perspectives are describing the same reality. (Which is why Barth's doctrine of creation is so unorthodox!)

But of course, there have been many attempts to begin dogmatics in the doctrine of creation—and many resulting naturalistic assumptions about the Creator on the basis of fallen arrangements of reality for which God is not primarily responsible. It is harder to see the properly theological reality we must describe if we start somewhere other than Jesus, somewhere other than consciously in the middle of the world gone horribly wrong. It becomes easier to forget why dogmatics must be a critical science over against the tradition in pursuit of its truth.

There are, as Barth says here, good reasons to take the opposition between humanity and God as something that can be overcome. That is how God treats it! But that treatment does not give us any reason not to take the Fall seriously. The disease is no less fatal for the fact that there is a cure, the fact that it is being applied to us without waiting for our consent, and the fact that God's will for us is health! Indeed, our only hope comes from the fact that God treats us as deliriously ill patients and not as beings of sound mind for whom rational consent is possible and therefore binding upon the physician. That God acts for us in the place where that action can only be against the state in which God finds us.

For Barth, the grace of God always comes to us with a side of judgment for, and condemnation of, the state in which it finds us. But that judgment and condemnation is visible in precisely the utter lack of respect God has for our freedom in this fallen state. It is grace because it doesn't ask for payment up front. It is grace because it comes, as Barth says, "nevertheless," and "in spite of" the conditions to which we have subjected ourselves and one another. And as grace it conditions us toward responsibility to the one who provides it. (Which is to say that the costs of grace are always on the back end, not the front—but it always has them.) And that's a long road, and few ever reach the end of it while they live. We are lucky even to be awakened to its reality, and to the repentance required to confess our situation as recipients of that grace.

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Let us take another look back: God's grace, precisely in its character as sheer, pure compassion, as pure "nevertheless" and "in spite of that," reveals how it stands with the humanity to which it is apportioned, which is to be gauged precisely in terms of that grace. It is grace, and not either some autonomous reflection of humanity or some abstract "law," which discloses—and indeed incontrovertibly—the fact that humanity has forfeited its salvation, and has thereby mortally endangered its creaturely being: its sin and its corresponding adversity. From the deliverance that happens here, it can be inferred from what and out of what humanity is here delivered: from the factum purum of the salvation that befalls humanity without and contrary to [S. 11] what they have earned, the recognition [p. 12] of the factum brutum, that humanity for its part dares to oppose God. |

Precisely because that factum purum of the divine compassion is involved in the "God with us" in the center of the Christian message, we should not misjudge ourselves, but rather recognize without reservation that, with those for whom God is according to this message, we are those who for our part have nothing to bring before God but the confession of this factum brutum: "Father, I have sinned."

Responding to the Engendering Deed

This is the theodicy of Barth's soteriology, the vindication of God not only because God is not to blame for the creature's abuse of its freedom, but also because in the face of that abuse God does not perpetuate it, much less exacerbate it.

And once again, the thematic reversal of the classical law/gospel dialectic appears: law is merely a form of the gospel, which is to say that there is no obligation which is not the implication of God's grace upon us for our lives in its wake. That grace frees and enables us, because our freedom is what God desires. As Barth said in his Frankfurt ethics lecture after the war, "Immanuel Kant says that obligation implies ability: you can because you ought! Christian ethics says that permission implies ability: you can because you may!"

It is only as recipients of this care, subject to this treatment, that we begin to understand the reality in which we live, and the structures of sin that condition our lives—and that God desires from us not a conformity to the most historically normative of those structures, but rather a confession of our subjection to them—of "our fault, our own fault, our own most grievous fault," in the words of the penitential rite.

Of course, the tradition doesn't disagree—but for Barth, this repentance has nothing to do with enabling God's grace. We do it as already recipients of that grace, because it enables something in us. Our deliverance is for the sake of ethics—but before we get to that in the seventh point, we have a sixth point in which Barth describes God's motivation and action in the face of this reality still more profoundly.

Salvation Determined for Humanity and Humanity Determined for Salvation: Barth's Nutshell Soteriology, part 7

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Frost) — Mon, 04 Feb 2019 17:35:00 +0000

OK. So in the last post, we covered the third of Barth's seven points, and the justification for calling this a soteriology instead of just a theology of the divine-human relationship. Which should only be surprising to anyone for whom it seems reasonable to imagine that salvation could be optional to the divine-human relationship ... yes, I know, that's a lot of y'all.

But the point of Barth's doctrine of God, within it his mature doctrine of election, and stretching right down the line through all three spheres of the economy of God's outward actions, is to rule out that seemingly reasonable interpretation of God and humanity as in any way naturally distant from one another, standing in any kind of opposition to one another that God could conceivably be obliged to respect. And so here, in his doctrine of reconciliation, Barth means to make clear the patent absurdity of that presumption about our situation, the genuinely disturbing reality of what we have done to ourselves and one another, and the graciously and singularly positive free and loving response of God to the creature's predicament from all eternity.

Unlike in standard Reformed theology, therefore, there are no eternal divine decrees to order. There is only Jesus Christ. Which is to say that Barth has ruled out any notion that the Fall might change God's eternal will, along with any notion of God having to account for it in some imagined concrete predetermination of world history. In a system built entirely on freedom and responsibility, in which we as individuals and in our groups are not in any way concretely predetermined or otherwise controlled, Barth has left us no historical goals, and no waypoints to them, for us to hit or miss to our benefit or detriment—only partnership with God in God's grace, the eternal will of God for us.

In his doctrine of election, Barth has already done away with the underlying presupposition of any arrangement of those so-called decrees, which is that the world shows us that some are different from others in a soteriologically meaningful sense, which we can map (with whatever complexity) onto election and rejection. He has done away, as Luther had been trying to, with the very idea of human merit, and therefore with divine approval as the soteriological sine qua non—and he has done it by eliminating, as Luther could not, the idea of election as partiality. The only elect human is Jesus Christ, and he is the electing God for us.

And so here, in section 57.1 of CD IV.1, Barth has been developing for us a soteriology in which abject human failure is the basic presupposition of God's accomplishment of salvation for us, without us, in Jesus Christ. The Fall in Barth's theology is a total cosmic catastrophe, and the massa perditionis is not differentiated by either the appearance or the reality of human acceptance or rejection. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy than ~~Mos Eisley spaceport~~ world history after the Fall, and our pretenses to order, morality, and faith do not set us apart within it.

And if in the previous point we saw Barth relate the saving grace of God to the grace of creation, providence, and God's governance of the world, here in this fourth point Barth is about to double down on the priority of salvation, in every sense, over creation. Humanity—"us," "them," it doesn't matter—is determined for salvation because salvation has been determined for them before they ever were, and remains so in the eternal faithfulness of God to Godself. We are God's gift to Godself, and it is God's gift to us.

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Another large single paragraph, as with the third point, and as usual broken up artificially (with "|") for easier reading. Text in bold italics is Barth's original emphasis from the German, and page breaks from the German [S.] and English [p.] are included so you can check up on my translation in the official versions.

4. But specifically from this perspective we must seek more sharply to discern the contours of that special event. "God with us" in the sense of the Christian message means: God with humanity, God with people, for whom salvation as such is intended and determined by the fact that as people they were created, and are preserved and governed, by God. Not as though entitlement to it belonged to their created being, nor as though they somehow had a unique claim to it. God has no obligation to allow us to participate in God's divine being. That general grace of being is, as such, large enough, and the matter could perfectly well have rested there for us. |

But where there is neither divine obligation nor human claim, the will, the plan, the promise of God is all the more powerful. It reaches out beyond God's will and God's works as Creator, or rather: it forges on ahead of them. It must therefore be distinguished from them, and indeed, distinguished precisely as a first thing, which precedes them. The determination of salvation for humanity and of humanity for salvation is God's primordial and basic will, the sense and basis of God's creative will. God does not therefore first will and work the existence of the world and of humanity, in order then also to determine them for salvation. Instead, God creates, preserves, and governs humanity for this purpose, with this aim and this intention from the beginning: that there should be a being different from God, determined for salvation, for perfect being, and for participation in God's own being, because God as the one who loves in freedom has decided to exercise saving grace—and to give [p. 10] this saving grace of God's an object, and to give Godself a partner as its recipient. |

Far from all contingency or chance, and precisely as saving event, "God with us" means the revelation and confirmation of the most original relationship between God and humanity, namely the relationship eternally determined by Godself in freedom before there was a created being. That is the further thing to be said to characterize the event so indicated. By the fact that humanity is and is human—and not because God owes it to them, not on the strength of any structure or capability of their own being, and [S. 9] so really quite unpretentiously—it is as such destined by God for salvation; that eschaton is predetermined for it by God. |

What happens between God and humanity in that special event, salvation history, is thus also fulfillment insofar as God receives God's due in them—namely, what God eternally wants with humanity. This happens as the eternal righteousness of God's grace becomes effective and evident, not only in and with the divine right, but also that right which God has freely conferred upon and assigned to humanity by deciding such things about them. It therefore belongs to the character of that event, as well as to its particularity, that along with their goal it also makes evident the ground and beginning of all things: the honor of God, which is the honor of God's free love; and right along with it the dignity of humanity, profoundly inferior to the honor of God but eternally constituted by it: the dignity, not truly its own, with which God willed to outfit humanity.

The Proper Handling of God's Negative Freedom

The major thrust of this fourth point, since Barth had already positively established most of this material, is the negative freedom of God, that "without us" that I keep stressing in subordination to the "for us." And it's hard to get more obvious about that, than by putting the "for us" in pretemporal eternity.

And of course, the assertion that Barth has done any such thing is a contentious one in the field today. I mean, a textually obvious one, but it clashes with the dictates of certain confessional systems, Protestant as well as Catholic, in which the negative freedom of God has priority over God's positive freedom. So instead, God's being in eternity is posited as free over against God's logically subsequent actions, in order to uphold a separation of God from us—functionally placing God in quarantine in order not to be contaminated by our contingency, by our need and our problems.

But again, it should be textually obvious that Barth says God is primarily free for these gracious actions over against us as their objects—even if, as with anything in a corpus this large, you have to go looking for it, and not just for parts of it to be reassembled out of order. Like scripture, Barth's dogmatics have a wax nose, and it's important not to reshape its face to match ours!

In this context, Barth has indeed said that we are afforded an opportunity for salvation, one crafted for us and genuinely given to us by God—but not as though it were a mere offer, with its reality contingent on us taking God up on that opportunity! If it were, the opportunity would really have been presented to us in vain; the only one who takes God up on God's offer is God. But God takes the opportunity for us. That was the previous point.

And so our "entitlement to being in perfection in participation in the divine being," which Barth articulated there, is here asserted against us because we have no entitlement to it as creatures. No part of the creature has a claim upon salvation, and God has no obligation to give it. This is the negative freedom of God, God's freedom from us. The nature of grace is that we take what we're given! We have no choice in the matter. If God did not want to share God's life with us, if God did not will for there to be one common history between us, with our histories inextricably joined (Barth's first point), what could we say?

And if we truly believed that the negative freedom of God took precedence, that God were by nature against us and then only selectively for us, what could we say? This is how we get that "logical ordering of decrees" problem, and why even the solution of putting the grace of God in Jesus Christ before the Fall (i.e. supralapsarianism) doesn't solve it. As long as the most basic eternal divine decree is not Jesus Christ, but some idea of the godhead above and apart from him, God's fidelity to Godself will always lead us to believe against God's fidelity to us, and so lead us to a God in whom we cannot trust. It will lead us to faith in the need to qualify for grace, faith in some subset of human actions, and so faith in culturally normative ethics—which is to say, faith in ourselves, faith in structures of the fallen world that we have stamped God's name on in big letters, and so faith against one another.

Humility in the Face of God's Positive Freedom

But Barth does not leave us with this, at any point. That misreading, which calls our hope into question, is not Barth's, in whose text the negative remains subordinate to the positive. The negative freedom of God is the answer, not to whether God is for and with us, or under what conditions, but rather how we are to understand ourselves relative to the incontrovertibly basic reality of God's positive and loving freedom in action.

Whatever God chose to give us, we would have to say was enough, in itself, just as in the dayēnu of the Passover haggadah. "Had God only done X for us, and not Y, it would have been enough." We have no rights, as created beings, that do not come from the granting power of the Creator, who is also our Redeemer. But of course God has done more! The same Creator is the Redeemer, and also the Reconciler. And not as though God had to be cajoled, reluctantly, into each new event of grace! That even more that God has done, and every future event of its existence surplus to requirement, is not basically a next thing every time. Nor is it the last thing, appearing proleptically, as though only by the end of time could it be true in such fullness. It is the first thing, that Redeemer who will come again at the end is the Creator of all things, and is the will, plan, and promise of God from all eternity. And that is the basis of the rights that Barth says we genuinely do have, the dignity with which God has in fact chosen to clothe us.

And this is so because God's being-in-action is not a being in many separate, independently considerable actions, in which God's will may vary, just as for Barth there are not many eternal divine decrees, abut whose priority we may argue. Instead, God's being is only and basically a being in this one action, and so and to that end all other realities of God's gracious presence in our history, as long as it may run (Barth's second point). Salvation, Barth tells us, is baked in, determined for us and we for it, regardless of how we miss and forfeit that determination in our absurd and harmful fallen existence.

And since Barth has now solidly handled both the positive (third point) and negative (fourth point) freedoms of God in eternally willing and providing salvation, that's where we're headed in Barth's fifth point: the human catastrophe, now properly understood to be a secondary reality.

Finally Defining "Salvation": Barth's Nutshell Soteriology, part 6

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Frost) — Fri, 18 Jan 2019 18:56:00 +0000

Seventh post, third of seven points in what I'm calling a soteriology, and Barth has finally gotten around to using the word Heil in the main text. It appeared in the excursus on "Immanuel" already, and we've had heilsam, "salutory" (which is, shall we say, more figurative), but now Barth finally gets to talking about salvation (Heil) and salvation-history (Heilsgeschichte), God's saving grace (Heilsgnade) and saving act (Heilstat).

And so here we also get to a major bone of contention I have with the official translation. Bromiley manages to translate Heil by itself as "salvation" just fine—but every time it's combined with another word, he turns Heils- into "redemptive," making those last three terms into "a redemptive history," "the redemptive grace of God," and "this one, particular, redemptive act of God."

But you see, Barth already has a separate word for redemption: Erlösung. And it would be one thing if these words were mere nuanced synonyms of one another, as Bromiley clearly takes them to be. But they're not! For Barth, redemption is an entirely separate sphere of divine activity, built on the basis of election in its own right, independent of reconciliation, involving the consummation and fulfillment of creaturely being in an eschatological sense which is reserved to it in difference from the doctrine of reconciliation.

Now, as we're going to see, that action is not excluded from the domain of Heil as salvation in an overarching sense—but to so confuse the two terms is to seriously impede efforts to grasp Barth's meaning, and so the nuances of both his soteriology and his eschatology, by readers of the English translation alone.

While this is going to be a post dealing with some of those structural questions, as Barth's third point the major premise is this: God's being-in-act as "God with us" in one mutual history (point 1), which is being in and for this one particular action in Jesus Christ (point 2), is being in the gracious provision of salvation to the total creature, who cannot in any way do, elect, or aspire to it for themselves.

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Just one gigantic paragraph for this third point, here in section 57.1 of CD IV.1, and as usual I've artificially broken it up into smaller units (ending in "|") for enhanced readability. Words in bold italics represent Barth's original emphasis from the German, and pagination for both the German [S.] and English [p.] official versions has been included for reference.

I don't always remember to say it, but if you have the means, I do encourage you to check my translations and get into the game for yourself. It's the same thing I'm doing relative to Bromiley, and it's a basic practice of scholarship which receives far less respect than it deserves. What I represent to you is the meaning I have found in Barth's German text, but as with the Bible, interpretation is highly context-dependent, and the more eyes we can put on a problem, the more likely we are to solve it well.

[S. 7] 3. However, the particularity of this event—looking first of all at what it signifies—consists in the fact that it involves the salvation of humanity; that there the general history common to God and humanity, to God and the entire creature, becomes in its center and apex salvation-history. Salvation is more than being. Salvation is fulfillment, namely the highest, sufficient, final, and impossible-to-lose fulfillment of being. For the created being as such, salvation is not its own being, but rather its future, perfect being. The created being as such requires salvation, but it also lacks and does without it; it can only look forward to it. In this respect salvation is its eschaton. |

Salvation, fulfillment, perfect being—which is what the created being does not have in itself—these refer to a being that participates in the being of God, from whom it comes and to whom it goes. This is not a deified being, but instead a being that is hidden in God—an eternal being in this secondary sense, at a remove from that of Godself. Since, for the created being as such, salvation is not its own, salvation can only come to it—and because it consists in participation in the being of God, it can only come to the created being from God. |

This coming of salvation is—using the word in its narrower and most proper sense—the grace of God. In the wider sense, we already also understand the creation, preservation, and governing of the world and of humanity as grace. If that is something for the created being that is not its own—and it is—then the fact that it exists, that the creature is and is not not, can only come to it, and can only come to it from God as the one who originally and truly exists. And that is exactly how created being is still afforded the opportunity for salvation: its entitlement to being in perfection in participation in the divine being. |

However, the "God with us" in the center [p. 9] of the Christian message does not have this general grace in mind; it has in mind God's saving grace—which, in view of the subject matter, constitutes the particularity of the event to which it refers, and highlights this event in the center of the history of the togetherness of God and humanity. This saving grace is not only God's creating, preserving, and governing of created being, not only the creation of an opportunity for salvation, but the fact that it really comes to them, which is to say, that God gives it to them, Godself. God gives to them what can only be given, and can only be given by God. And God really does give it to them: Accept what is mine: accept this final, highest, unsurpassable thing, it shall be yours! Certainly that is what it is about, what makes the action of God described by "God with us" singular and unique, and so also what constitutes the impact described by the "God with us" in our own history, in the history of human existence, life, and action—which makes singular and unique the entire circle of God in which we find ourselves according to the center of the Christian message. |

There also remains for us the general creating, providing, and governing grace of God. Once again: this is certainly grace. Of course, that will [S. 8] surely only become recognizable to us when we recognize God and ourselves in the inner and special circle of God's will and work, in the light of this single and unique saving act. Surely only from this perspective can and will that general grace of being, and the opportunity given us thereby, also become the object of genuine gratitude, the source of serious obligation. But here it is a matter of that opportunity not having been presented to us in vain; the opportunity is taken, and indeed taken by God. Here it is precisely a matter of God's saving grace and, to that extent, of what is more and greater than that opportunity.

Salvation as the Eschatological Gift ... of our Defeat

So the first thing we're talking about here is what Jesus Christ means, what sense (Sinn) it makes that this event (and so the being of God) is determined in exactly this way. Not what its significance is, how it is important, which would be Bedeutung as a meaning-word, but rather what it signifies as something that points beyond itself.

And what it signifies is, simply, human salvation. God makes this history with us, which is exemplified in Jesus Christ and has him (and so our reconciliation with God and one another) as its goal, and right at that very point in the middle of world history this constant intervention of God finds its character—or rather, we find its interpretive key, which does not invalidate any of its other manifestations—as salvation-history.

And here we do find ourselves talking about something that is analogous to redemption in the reserved eschatological sense: the future perfect being of the creature. If you read Barth's Münster and Bonn ethics courses (published in translation quite simply as Ethics), you will see that this concept predates the Church Dogmatics. In that earlier context, within the ethics of redemption, Barth uses our future perfect being as the basis for his concept of the human conscience, a sort of proleptic anticipation of a form of existence we cannot attain to for ourselves within history. And there too, it is pure eschatological gift, coming from beyond our history. It is, as Barth says here, a thing we lack, a thing to which we do not naturally have access. For it to be our conscience, we must place our trust and hope in God from whom it comes, which means the end of our fallen historical attempts at determining moral knowledge for ourselves on the basis of the worlds we have crafted against one another.

But when Barth says here that "in this respect salvation is [the] eschaton [of created being]," while he means that it stands for us beyond our historical futures, out of our reach, in that separate sphere of God's activity, we should understand that it is in this sense also the end of our historical being. That in Jesus Christ our histories after the Fall are at an end, even as they continue subject to divine condemnation and reconciling intervention just as they always have. That "God with us" means God taking away the power of our fallen history-making, and doing so not just from Jesus' lifetime forward, but eternally, at every point.

The reality of God with humanity in Jesus Christ, in his very person as fully both, and as himself the subject as well as the object of the act of election and every other economic action thereby: Barth has called this the "superior" reality that stands over against (gegenüber) our own. When we get to the end of CD IV.3.1, he will talk about it in the context of human disobedience as the superior reality that limits our own.

And so to say that God's being for us in Jesus Christ means the salvation of humanity is not to say that it comes to anyone as a reward, or that it comes to us with any approval as its recipients. Barth wants to be especially clear from the very beginning of his doctrine of reconciliation that human salvation comes precisely as the eternal defeat of the self-organizing creature and the world orders it has manufactured using the evil of negation. It is a pure gift, a product of God's gracious positive will to be for us, and it comes to us in the negative freedom by which God refuses to be limited in its giving.

Salvation, Barth tells us here, is God freely and actually giving this gift to us, and in so doing telling us that we are not what we have imagined ourselves to be. We stand, not in the independent histories we have tried to craft for ourselves and one another, but inescapably in this inner circle of God's action and being. And yes, Barth says God wants us to accept this gift—but that acceptance is not a contingency set up to determine whether or not the gift is really given to any given individual. Our acceptance, which God truly does want, is the key to our awakening to responsibility, our beginning to take up—however haltingly and with whatever failures and reversals over time—the work that is ours as God's partner. Salvation is the achievement by God that makes ethics possible for us precisely in the defeat of our hubris, from which point and to which end God intervenes in our history.

Everything Else is this Same Saving Grace of God

As a Lutheran, and the kind who routinely gets branded an "antinomian" for rejecting the framework of the so-called "third use of the law," I have a bit of a vested interest in what Barth does here. Particularly in how much it subverts the more traditional framework of law-first-then-gospel, and so of grace as an optional remediation of law as the basic reality of God's will.

Now, Barth's gospel-and-law inversion of the Lutheran dialectic is fairly widely known, so you should already be somewhat aware of Barth as establishing "law as a form of the gospel" and therefore the grace of God as the normative context in which our legitimate obligations arise.

But in the world in which we live, you could hardly help but be more aware of the prevalence of the opposite view: of theologies in which creation is the basic act of God and maintenance of created order—as obviously manifested in the historically dominant cultures of European white people, who are imagined to have largely retained their connection and proximity to the origin of all things—is God's basic desire. Imperial Roman Catholicism had its day spreading this belief through colonization, and the last several centuries of the franchise have belonged overwhelmingly to imperial Anglo-Dutch Reformed theology, though nobody is truly free of the problem. Those of us whose denominations tend towards inwardly-focused enclaves still use this theology on one another, and the rest of the world, as the definition of the line between inside and outside. All of which belongs to the Fall, not God's act of creation! And exactly this structural sin is the foundation of the American Evangelical obsession with the inerrant literal truth of their interpretation of Genesis 1–3, as a support for their entire colonial worldview and its mission to subordinate all others. This is the essence of what Barth calls das Nichtige. Evil—and the kind of pervasive, structural evil that tells you that deviation from the patterns of their domination is the "real" sin. (The real command of God is entirely different!)

In his doctrine of creation, Barth has already rejected any such idea that creation is God's basic work, and refused to set it up as a validation of orders-theologies in which we make up canonical sets of cultural obligations (justified by whatever threads of scriptural appropriation we can assert) and call them created goods to which obedience is due. We do not get to redemption by successfully navigating the problems of so-called disorder in our societies—nor is that the work of reconciliation as a mediation of some imagined path from creation to redemption, which we must therefore traverse successfully to be saved.

Instead, for Barth, as he asserts here, the general grace of creation, providence, and God's governance of the creature must be seen in light of this central and highest grace in Jesus Christ. The world as we observe it, and the ways we would like to make it all make sense, have no privilege here. We do not get to usurp God's gracious action as the origin of all that is, and bend it to the support of our fallen actions—especially not the violence with which we seek to impose and maintain what we call order. Jesus Christ simply means salvation for humanity, and indeed for the total creature—and this is therefore what creation means. This saving grace, and not what we call order, is what providence means. This saving act and its overruling of our fallen worlds is what God's governance means. Every general grace of God's action—and for Barth all of God's actions are to be understood as grace—has to do with us only and precisely through this fundamental and most specifically saving grace of God.

You exist at all as the pure grace of the God whose salvation is already accomplished for you. Your existence, as a product of God's grace, is not subject to your moral performance, nor is your salvation. You are, as Barth says in his redefinition of the doctrine of providence, upheld in being by God's constant will, upheld over the nonexistence out of which you were made not because God thinks you are particularly worthy, and not as a threat against your meandering into unworthiness, but precisely as a "negative" grace over against your participation in structural evil. This is God's response to the Fall! And so God is constantly reconciling you toward your right being as God's creature because all of this is grounded in the fulfillment of your being—a fulfillment of the act of creation that is so absolutely and finally sufficient for you that it cannot possibly be lost through your action. This is a grace that comes to you, not an achievement you have to reach.

This is who God is, and this is that in which God glories. And so God has taken up the opportunity to save, and as people who recognize that salvation we have the opportunity for gratitude that takes the shape of that grace. Freed by God, that is our obligation in the world, our work that responds to God correctly: extending grace in loving freedom because it is the beginning and end of all things.

God's Being IS Action, and is Being in this ONE Action: Barth's Nutshell Soteriology, part 5

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Frost) — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 18:21:00 +0000

Well, it took us five posts to get to the first of Barth's seven points, which was that "God with us" describes God's being-in-act, and that the being of God is in the very particular act of forging one common history out of the fallen creaturely separation of our worlds from God's willed creation. That, in other words, "God with us" really means that God is inescapably with us, because God so wills, in the fullness of God's freedom and loving.

And now in the sixth post (counting the intro) we've got the second of those seven points, which starts off with recap of the first and changes the emphasis. (Which is classic Barth, the lecturer and preacher. Never say a cool thing once when you can say it several times over, stressing different parts each time.)

Today, the point is that God's being-in-act, in this very particular act, is absolutely and singularly so.

Paragraphs 12 and 13

Two more full paragraphs today, but like last time they're all there is to this point. As usual, paragraph divisions with "|" are artificial, for reading ease, and emphasis in bold italics is original to Barth's German text. Page marking for the English [p.] has been included for comparison to the official version, but this text all appears on S. 6 of the German, so there's no interstitial page marking for that today.

2. However, we have now said—and that this is what the Christian message has in mind—that it is a matter of one event, one act of God. The entire being and life of God is an action: in God's eternity and in the time of the world, in Godself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and in God's relationship to humanity and in God's entire creature. But what God does, in Godself and as creator and ruler of humanity—which aims at a single, particular act—has in that act its center and its meaning. And everything that God wills also already has its basis and origin in what is revealed as God's will in this one action. |

It is therefore not merely one among others of God's works as creator and ruler. As such, of course, it can and must also be understood in line with the general will and work of God. But in the middle of this outer circle it forms an inner circle. While willing and working all things, here the one God wills and works a particular thing—not something else next to them, but rather this particular thing as that for the sake of which God also wills and works everything else. As one among others this one is simultaneously the telos, the goal, of every [p. 8] divine action: the eternal action in which God is God in Godself and in the history of God's actions in the world created by God. This is what is intended by that "God with us."

And so, turning its gaze also upon us people, that "God with us" does not merely have the existence of humanity in general in mind as the creaturely object of the will and work of its Lord. It has that in mind, too; it contains that implication: that the being, life, and action of humanity indeed also is and remains simply its history in relation to the being, life, and action of its creator, just as can also be said about every other creature. But it is more than that: just as surely as, in God's being, life, and action as creator, God wills and works one particular thing in the midst of and above and beyond the general, so surely does God's entire action have its center and apex in one singular act. |

Within and outside of the general history which humanity, like all creatures, is permitted to have in common with the existing, living, and acting God, this act of God and what corresponds to it in humanity's own being, life, and action stands out as a qualified history, as its own peculiar history. And if the "God with us" in the center of the Christian message has that unifying reality between God and humanity in mind, it therefore intends by that a specific togetherness of the two: by no means always and everywhere, but rather in a determined scope, singular and unique for all times and places, in an event without equal, happening hic et nunc, here and now.

Christocentrism, not Christomonism

So let's be clear, as Barth is trying to be clear here: God does lots of things, throughout history! God is the Creator, as well as the Reconciler—and as the Reconciler, God has acted long before, and continued acting long after, the relatively brief historical lifespan of Jesus of Nazareth. Christ is not the sole datum we have about God's will and work.

But if we collect all of those other points of data, and notionally chart them, Barth is saying there's a pattern to the distribution. That these acts of God in history do not simply appear in an historical sequence, one after another; that priority among them does not follow from their appearance in that history, or from their local contexts as historical events. If we chart all of these events of God's will and work, Barth holds that we will find an integrity to the set of them, generally, a thematic unity. But we will also find that set of data points is structured in a specific way, that its general unity points toward a central subset of points that are not merely exemplary, but serve as the goal toward which the entire action of God, in all its parts, moves.

And that goal of God's action is not to be found by looking to the end of human history—as though the eschaton were the telos of God's being and action as "God with us." Barth is telling us that the telos of God's action is not redemption, but reconciliation itself. That God's act of reconciliation is an end in itself, "the center and apex" of "God's entire action," and not a means to some other goal. That what God wants is found not at the end, but in the center, of history. And so if all of God's being is an action, then it is that central action, that being-with-us that we see in Jesus Christ, which is the structuring principle and essence of all of God's historical interventions for our sake, before and after, as we have seen them witnessed in scripture. That Jesus Christ is not the only relevant revelation of God, as if there could be a conflict between God's actions, but rather the quintessential revelation of God, the beating heart, mind, and strength of God we are to understand in all other actions. That what matters is how God reveals Godself at work in him, and that he is not something unique in himself as opposed to the general run of God's will and works.

This, after all, is the point of Barth's mature doctrine of election as the beginning of all those ways and works of God, which ways and works Barth has structured into creation, reconciliation, and redemption as three separate and not historically-consequent spheres of sovereign divine action for us, without us.

Uniting Time and Eternity, and God's Inward and Outward Relationships

So last time I mentioned the so-called "immanent Trinity" and "economic Trinity," in order to tell you that Barth has no such division. And I tied together election and creation as foundations of Barth's doctrine of reconciliation—its two lungs, in JP2's phrase from Ut Unum Sint, because it hurts to breathe with one of them collapsed—in order to orient the existential contingency of being in the proper direction, from God down to us and only so. And I wrapped it all up in Barth's assertion that there is only the one sphere, God's sphere of action, in which we find ourselves, and not two separate and distinct spheres as though we had comparable autonomy.

Now, this matters, because historically we want to make some weird and self-serving sphere separations between God and humanity, and set conditions on what God has to do just to be able to interact with the world in what we imagine is the sphere of our sovereignty. We imagine the finite and the infinite to be necessarily incompatible, as opposed to merely incommensurable, and ponder the capability of the finite to receive the infinite—whether it can (Lutherans), or cannot (Reformed), reasonably contain God, and what transformations may be required for that capacity—rather than the capability of God for us as Creator and so Lord of the creature.

And in making this separation between "our" sphere and God's, we also tend to align with it that imagined separation between God's immanent Trinitarian being and God's economic actions. So we make immanence in God's own separate sphere a protection of God's freedom ... "protecting" it from the very loving use of God's freedom that God decisively chooses in Jesus Christ. Saving God from having any decided character, much less the character God has evidently chosen for Godself in God's actions in history. Just Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and everything else is optional. Nothing else is truly revelation of God's being.

But Barth won't have it:

"The entire being and life of God is an action: in God's eternity and in the time of the world, in Godself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and in God's relationship to humanity and in God's entire creature."

And Barth made the same move last time, in the first of his seven points:

"God is what God is, and so how God is, by being 'with us'; all the power and truth of God's being 'with us' is the power and the truth of God's incomparable existence, the divine being that is characteristically God's and God's alone. But God is by living both in eternity in Godself, and also as Creator in the time of the world God created: through and in Godself, and likewise then also over and in this world, and thus now, according to the center of the Christian message, 'with us' humans. And God is who God is, and lives as what God is, by doing what God does."

God is not preferentially out there in God's own separate sphere, without us. Indeed, as Barth said in III.1, in creation God wills never to be without us again! Nor, in God's own native eternity (which we do not share as the temporal creature), is the being of God somehow not action, much less not this same specific chosen action. "God with us" is the living power and truth of God's being, simpliciter, whether considered in eternity or in history, relative to Godself in the intrapersonal Trinitarian relationships or in God's relationship to the creature and we parts of it. Reconciliation as an entire—and indeed the central—sphere of God's action carries with it this message of God's absolute commitment of Godself, without remainder.

Not a Validation of Our History

It's important to remember that, for Barth, human history is not salvation history. The fact that God intervenes in our history does not mark it out as privileged; it marks it out as defective.

But even more than that: the action Barth calls reconciliation, that norms this sphere, doesn't even have us as its primary goal! It includes humanity, Barth says, but as in his doctrine of creation, Barth demands that we see ourselves as only parts of the total creature, obligated as much to just relationships with the non-human life around us as with our fellow humans and with God. That we understand our God-given limitations, and live within them in the relationships that make the creature whole and right. That is the relationship reconciliation aims to restore in us, as in all of our fellow creatures.

We already had Barth reminding us that "God with us" isn't about human groups, isn't a privilege of the church, isn't something that excludes outsiders, but is rather something that is for us in exactly the same way as it is for every other human being, presumptions of faith and knowledge notwithstanding. But having gotten us to back out of our worldviews far enough to see God relating to humanity as a whole, Barth isn't done yet:

"the being, life, and action of humanity indeed also is and remains simply its history in relation to the being, life, and action of its creator, just as can also be said about every other creature.

The ecology of Barth's dogmatics is more than just oft-neglected; it has been presumed not to exist! Barth is casually assumed to be anthropocentric—and we mean by that anthropomonistic, just as we commonly treat the word "Christocentric." But Barth isn't interested in setting humanity over against the rest of the creature, in all the ways "man and the lower animals" had become a deeply racist trope for the Enlightenment as a signifier of the superiority of the "civilization" and "moral refinement" possible to white people. Barth is taking away our imagined privilege, the view of humanity as the apex of creaturely being.

The common history God wills so to forge with us in Jesus Christ, as the signal revelation of the total will and intention of God's action in all of history, is a history the total creature shares with its Creator, and therefore a history of God's reconciling care not just for all those parts of humanity we despise in our sin, but also all those parts of everything else that exists which we choose to abuse and destroy in our irresponsible history of willed separation from God.

Reconciliation is a validation of the total creature, of creation as the first outworking of election and the scope of the history of the covenant of grace to which we are called to account. And it includes us, but it is not about us. It seeks the end of our histories of irresponsible destruction—but not the end of created life.

And it does not take place as any sort of generic blessing of human history, or the history of the worlds we have crafted in our own twisted images. "God with us" surely means that God is present in our histories, but that presence is not approval. It is not simply God's will to be with us as we are, however we happen to be. The unifying reality between God and us is a man we abused and killed, as we do so many others. A man God raised, and glorified, and in so doing glorified Godself over us and for our sake. A human being whom God chose to be, fully, not for the sake of our condemnation but in order to make things right by welding the history of the total creature inextricably to God's own. One, single reality, there and then and so also here and now, and at every other point.

And that's where we'll be going in the next post, covering the third of Barth's seven points.

God's Being in Action, Willing and Forging a Common History Between Us: Barth's Nutshell Soteriology, part 4

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Frost) — Mon, 14 Jan 2019 21:24:00 +0000

The long holiday hiatus is over, I've gotten the normal housework mostly back under my fingers, and so it's back to work!

Best of all, we have finally reached the first of Barth's seven points. (Huzzah!) Yes, I know, 5 posts in we're at the first point. It's Barth, and he's overturning a lot of expectations, whaddya want?

And this post is going to get into some contentious territory regarding God's being and action—or as other people like to frame it, the immanent and the economic Trinity. But the important thing to remember is that Barth has no such divide—and here of all places we're going to see that as he talks about God and God's action. For Barth, it's important to remember that God is the one who stands behind God's actions, in God's own eternal being—but God does not ever stand any distance away from them. (Or from us.)

Description of God's actions is description of God in action, and description of God's being cannot therefore be description of God's inaction—as though there were such a thing in any sense beyond that of hypothetical alternative histories against which God chose decisively in this, the only actual history. Such histories of divine inaction are as unknowable as Barth is about to say the inactive God would be in them—and God is not more free in that purely hypothetical inaction than in God's actual and active commitment to the creature in Jesus Christ from all eternity.

So if, over the last several posts, it has seemed like I'm siding solidly with McCormack about God's being-in-action, it's because he's right; there can be no other reading of this section of text in particular.

Were we to grant anything to McCormack's opponents regarding the earlier material of the CD, we would have to say (as McCormack does) that by this point in his mature dogmatics Barth is engaged in retractatio over against that material. Regardless, by the time we get to section 57.1 at the beginning of CD IV, there is no longer a seam in Barth's thought through which daylight might shine—no matter how we squint and turn our heads—between the economic activity of God and the immanent being of the God whose free and loving activity it is. And that's the key to this first point.

Paragraphs 10 and 11

Two very large paragraphs today, but they're all there is to this first point, so we'll hit them together. As usual, paragraph divisions with "|" are artificial, for reading ease, and emphasis in bold italics is original to Barth's German text. Page markers for the German [S.] and English [p.] have been included for comparison to official versions.

1. Let us stipulate that the "God with us" in the center of the Christian message is the description of an act of God, or better: of God in this, God's action. It is a report and thus not a finding of fact made on the basis of some general study or deliberation. "God with us"—which is to say, what these three words denote—is not the object of a general empiricism or theory, and is thus not a situation, but rather an event. |

Of course, God is, and is essentially [S. 5] original and actual, such that everything else that is can only have its being through God, only in relation to God, only as coming from and going to God, in a manner completely incomparable with God's being. But also: God is what God is, and so how God is, by being "with us"; all the power and truth of God's being "with us" is the power and the truth of God's incomparable existence, the divine being that is characteristically God's and God's alone. But God is by living both in eternity in Godself, and also as Creator in the time of the world God created: through and in Godself, and likewise then also over and in this world, and thus now, according to the center of the Christian message, "with us" humans. And God is who God is, and lives as what God is, by doing what God does. |

How would the god be recognized whose being was unknown, opaque, or indifferent? How would one recognize the god whose being could not be discovered to be true and powerful in its life, and its life in its action? One knows about God [p. 7]—no matter how distantly and meagerly—what witnesses to God's actions, and only that. And one says about God what one can—no matter how inadequately—as a reporter of God's actions, and only that! "God with us" in the sense of the center of the Christian message is the witness and report about God's life and actions as the existing one.

However, if it matters to us that God is with us—and the message of the Christian community reckons that it does actually matter to us humans—then that entails the fact that, in our entirely different manner—incomparable to the being of God, but genuinely based on the divine being, life, and action—we humans also are, and that we also are by living in our time, and that we live by doing, performing ourselves in our actions. |

If this claim that God is with us is a report about God's being, life, and action with us, then what is reported inherently stands in a relationship to our own being, life, and action. A report concerning ourselves is thus also included in that report concerning God. We cannot then take notice of it, more or less marvel at it, and finally ignore it as the report of an event in some other circle in which we do not find ourselves. On the contrary, it serves us notice of the fact that we find ourselves in God's circle. The way it matters to us, therefore, is that it reports to us about a history that God wills to have in common with us, and so about a point of impact in our own history—indeed, because our history is through God, from God, and to God precisely in the actuality in which it is our own history. It is precisely with our own being, life, and action that the divine being, life, and act happens, and by the divine taking pace, that our own takes place. |

That is, described in the simplest way, the unifying reality between God and us humans: that God does not will to be God without us; that on the contrary God created us in order to have God's incomparable being, life, and action together with us and therefore together with our being, life, and action; that God's history [S. 6] should not be only God's own, and our history should not be only our own; that God lets them both happen as one common history. That is the particular thing that the Christian message has to say at its center.

The Origin of Our (Incommensurable and Subordinate) Being

If I have a tendency to harp on about the importance of standing Barth's mature doctrine of creation alongside McCormack's view of his doctrine of election, today's passage should help illustrate why that matters. And so the key word here, in German, is ursprünglich, "original." Barth's reference to God as the Ursprung, the source and origin of all being, dates all the way back to the first edition of the Romans commentary. And of course Barth does not idly theorize about the Ursprung as though it were a thing—and only then about God as that thing. Instead, he treats God, in God's self-revealed and living character as an agent—indeed as the only truly free agent—as that origin of all other being.

Any time we talk about the being of God and the being of the creature, we have a longstanding and traditionally-reinforced tendency to frame the being of God relative to our being, which we claim to understand better. And what is for me most regrettable about the election and Trinitarian ontology debate (which has just been eating massive chunks of the field's clock for the last couple of decades) is that we've stopped the conversation just before Barth reveals the solution to the problem. Without turning that next page, so to speak, we're debating the problem as though the solution could instead be had by going over the first two volumes of the Church Dogmatics obsessively, and only flipping from there to the back of the book, as it were, for answers written in Barth's doctrine of reconciliation.

However, Barth's doctrine of reconciliation, as one of three special outworkings of his doctrine of election, is dependent also upon what he worked out in the prior such outworking: his critically innovative doctrine of creation. In the metaphor called to mind by the recent Catholic–Orthodox dialogues, trying to understand Barth's doctrine of reconciliation with only election and not also creation is like trying to breathe with only one lung. As Barth starts off his explanation of this point:

Gott ist freilich und das wesentlich ursprünglich, eigentlich: so, daß Alles, was sonst ist, seinem Sein völlig unvergleichlich, nur durch ihn, nur im Verhältnis zu ihm, nur von ihm her und zu ihm hin sein kann.

LIT: "Of course, God is, and that essentially originally, actually: so that all that otherwise is—its being wholly incomparable—can only be through God, only in relation to God, only from God and to God."

And this is always the problem, for Barth, with the analogia entis: even carefully preserved as a strict analogy and not a relationship of dependency, it leans on the fact that we can think of both ourselves and God as beings. And so it is a way of saying that the difference between those beings is negotiable in our understanding. We can call God "wholly other"—but it doesn't prevent us from working constructively with theontology and so thinking of God as a being like our own. Different, but within the context of a likeness.

But we do so having gotten the relationship backwards. It only flows one way! As Barth puts it here, God is not wholly other. If we get our perspective fixed up correctly, we are. In the terms basic to CD III.1, there are only two things in existence: God, and the non-God creature. God, and what is different from God. In the words of this passage today: Gott, und Alles, was sonst ist. And so it is a crucial article of faith that everything that is otherwise than God is, doesn't simply happen to exist alongside God, but exists purely as God's creature, as the product of God's sovereign action as the outworking of God's free and loving choice.

We exist, which is to say there is anything at all other than God alone, because in Barth's terms, God made space for us as life that is other than God—and because God graciously and faithfully holds that space open and with it, holds us in existence, permitting our free action and actively reconciling us in the hope that we will become what we are made to be in the first place: God's responsible partner in action. God acts upon us in the hope that our freedom will become loving and responsible, taking on in that way the image of God. This, and not the ideas of older Reformed orthodoxy, is what Barth means by "covenant." Our being is "wholly incomparable" with God's own—but our being-in-action is supposed to correspond to God's being-in-action, and that's the central truth of God's action for us in Jesus Christ.

And so we can work the analogy the other way, which is to say, in the only direction in which the relationship actually flows: we can say that what is true of God is also supposed to be true of us, in our incommensurable and subordinate being. That what is true of our origin, in its real and active character, is that to which our being in the world is supposed to correspond. Of course, this is not to be understood as though we shared in the attributes of God's being, in what are classically termed God's "perfections" in that backward analogy from our imperfect being upward to God's—but even there, Barth has completely rewritten the doctrine so it flows in the correct direction and only so.

Barth boiled that "perfections" discourse down to six contrasting pairs of interrelated terms: as perfections of love the binaries of grace and holiness, compassion and justice, and patience and wisdom; and as perfections of freedom the binaries of unity and omnipresence, reliability and omnipotence, and eternity and majesty. That freedom is the freedom by which God is for us as the one who loves. And if, as scripture tells us, we are to "be perfect as God is perfect," it is not by making our freedom out to be like unto God's own, but rather by making the virtues of our love correspond to the perfections of God's own in our use of the freedom we do have. This is the prophetic demand, and the basis of justice, in the conformity of our action with God's own.

Not Being vs Action, but God's Will and Purpose

Earlier drafts of this post treated the election and Trinitarian ontology debate as though intervention in it could be the primary context for this passage's impact. However, what I have written above by way of introduction will have to do for that, because the point Barth is making cannot be bent backwards into that obsession over how to reconcile the first two volumes without breaking it.

If we belabor ontology in distinction from agency, we will reject the basic point Barth is making, which is that God is and has a will and purpose we can and ought to know in Jesus Christ. As Paul says to the Philippians:

"Intend among yourselves what God also intended in Christ Jesus who, already existing in the form of God, did not hold equality with God as a thing to be seized for himself. Instead, he absented himself, taking the form of a servant and coming to be in human likeness. Having found himself a role as a human, he lowered himself, becoming obedient even to the point of death—and death by crucifixion. Consequently God elevated him, and gave him the name that is above every name." (Phil. 2:5–9)

And this is not irrelevant for Barth, for whom the idea that we should know God other than in Jesus, and indeed in opposition to what God revealed of Godself in and as Jesus, is a fundamental denial of God's self-revelation in favor of basically making things up on our own. (Particularly when it happens as an appropriation of the logos or "second person of the Trinity" as though that were something we had recourse to with a character other than God's self-revelation in Jesus Christ!)

What we are to know of God, for Barth, is not God's being as opposed to God's actions, but rather God's will and purpose, the intention that grounds and drives God's actions. And we are to have that same intention! Barth says that "God with us" is a matter of God's being, life, and action—a being we do not know except as alive, and a life we do not know except as revealed in God's actions—but it matters to us because our being, life, and action is to correspond to God's own, and to be authentic in the ways God's is relative to God's intention. And it makes that difference precisely as an intervention from outside in which God our origin has taken up human being, life, and action and lived them fully and authentically.

But we need to be clear about the substance of that intention for us, particularly over against the plethora of penal theories in which God hates us and is looking for some excuse to destroy us. We must also know that, as a reality that is supposed to condition our own, this intervention does so because God has willed not just to share God's life with us, to come down and do something for us and in our place, but also to share our life with us in the fullness of God's presence. It's not just an impact from outside, in the there-and-then of Jesus' life in that narrow range of points of human history on this planet. God wills and so makes with us one common history, God's eternal life together with ours in the fullness of our history because that is what God has always wanted, and not to remain separated with God in God's sphere and we in ours. We are in God's sphere because there is nothing else, nowhere else to be, for God's creature in God's eternal election.

What is incommensurable, as George Lindbeck understood in his ecumenical and interreligious theorizing about doctrine, is not therefore incompatible, much less directly or necessarily opposed. Our being and God's being cannot be compared, but neither can they therefore be kept apart by any ontological strictures. Nothing truly divides us but our fallen will—and that is only an obstacle to us, not to God. There is no danger of the truly incommensurable ever being compromised in any way by association, no matter how intimate.

In this relationship, even to the point of life as a human being, and painful ignominious death as that human being, God remains God in the fullness of God's freedom and love. Incommensurability means never having to empty parts of yourself out to be able to fit inside a human life. And the intimacy of God's chosen association with human life, and so with us and all others, means that we need have no fear of theologies that embrace the fullness of our humanity as appropriate before God. As Barth says, "our history is through God, from God, and to God precisely in the actuality in which it is our own history. It is precisely with our own being, life, and action that the divine being, life, and act happens, and by the divine taking pace, that our own takes place."

"Immanuel" is a Mixed Blessing: Barth's Nutshell Soteriology, part 3

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Frost) — Mon, 24 Dec 2018 14:43:00 +0000

... in which we learn that the gospel is not always "good news." At least, that it is rarely so for the people in power, particularly those in power over God's people—even and especially when that people rules themselves. Because "Immanuel" means accountability.

But it also means, for the people in affliction, God's solidarity with them, under the same affliction.

Fitting that this excursus should be the text I land on before Christmas.

In describing the meaning of "God with us" and wrenching it away from the hubris by which we assert God as therefore automatically in our favor, on our side, Barth now turns to the prophet Isaiah and the ground his use of the name "Immanuel" finds in the gospel according to Matthew.

It's a longer excursus than the material that I've been handling—a short intro, one massive paragraph, and then two more normal-sized—but I don't really want to parse it out into multiple posts and thereby drag out what is really a single point that it serves in Barth's text. So instead I'm going to break it up within this post, and comment on it piecemeal. As before, paragraph divisions with "|" are artificial, for reading ease, and bold italics represent Barth's original emphasis in the German text.

Not Abandonment, but Gracious Negation

To that end, it may be instructive to call to mind the fact that this "God with us" is the translation of the noteworthy name Immanuel, which appears three times in Isaiah 7:14, 8:8, and 8:10, thence to find its "fulfillment" according to Matthew 1:21f in the name of Jesus.

The three Isaianic references each seem associated with independently transmitted sayings. From the redaction of the book of Isaiah, all three belong to that noteworthy time in which Assyria attained to a position of great power, and then began to intrude upon Syria and Palestine [cf. Martin Noth, Geschichte Israels (Göttingen: V&R, 1950), III.1, §20]—a process which the prophets, principally Isaiah, construed as a reversal in God's relationship to God's people, contrary to the whole political and religious tradition of Israel: not as God's break with them, but rather as the inbreaking of God's judgment upon their unfaithfulness, as the transition from the "yes" to the "no" of God's grace. |

The nice thing about this excursus, for me, is that Barth really does treat the historical context used by the gospels as having already had its own fulfillment in its own time. It suffices for the meaning of Isaiah as a text to talk about the context of its events. Barth really does put "fulfillment" in the Matthean sense in quotes, which Bromiley did not carry over; the Matthean use of this Isaianic material is simultaneously a reference connecting his present to this past, and a modification of its meaning that relies on that earlier meaning without erasing it.

Now, we know Barth is not a professional exegete. His work, particularly on the OT, is not normally something I can recommend as sensitive to the demands of the guild and in any way valid as a reference for current scholarship. And at least part of that is, quite simply, that his sources at their best are still deeply culturally conservative Eurocentric progressivists writing the history of religion leading up to its apex in their version of Christendom. Skepticism in the face of that only gets you so far if you don't have viable alternatives to work from.

But Martin Noth and Gerhard von Rad, in the wake of WW2, had begun to attempt such an alternative to rampant supersessionism in OT scholarship. And to some extent it was a picking up of work done by Julius Wellhausen in the last quarter of the previous century. Funny story: Wellhausen's principal mode of reception most places was that followers of his work were subjected to heresy trials. Which, y'know, just endears him to my Seminex-trained heart. (Wellhausen retired his first post as a professor because "despite all caution on my own part I make my hearers unfit for their office"—which is to say, historical-critical scholarship made his students ask inconvenient questions instead of professing "orthodoxy". That's not always well-received in seminarians!) Form- and tradition-historical scholarship, taking the people and their history behind the texts seriously in their representation in those texts, beats the hell out of more historically normative Christian approaches to our scriptural inheritance.

And in the wake of Barth's treatment of Genesis in CD III.1, and his "saga" hermeneutic, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised—but I am pleased at how not embarassing the excursus we have ahead of us is. It's not cutting-edge scholarship today by any means, but it's still rare enough methodologically (because of fundamentalism) that if I saw this sort of approach in a student paper I would be thrilled.

Methodological commentary aside, Barth says a very important thing here: that the faithful interpretation of these historical events of the Assyrian conquest and its precursors, as measured by scriptural preservation, is that God does not abandon God's people when they fail, no matter how miserably they fail. But the relationship does change, and for the people interpreting these times it was an epochal shift measured over against the hagiography of the Davidic monarchy and the unified kingdom. It's still a massive contradiction between the remembered norms of virtuous divinely-approved kingship, depicted in the Deuteronomistic History, and the normal realities of politics in the region, but the scriptural authors/redactors and their communities interpret that shift as a change in God's response, and go seeking the change in their actions that accounts for the realities of conquest and exile.

Historical Analysis of the Isaianic Situation

The final shape of this unfaithfulness is the refusal of the Jerusalemite king Ahaz—in the face of kings Rezin of Damascus and Pekah of Samaria who, biased by their own fantasies, want to compel him to join an alliance against Assyria—to put his confidence in Yahweh and therefore to show courage and resist. Against this, Isaiah serves notice (in 7:14ff) of the divine sign, at once promise and threat, sign of grace and of judgment: a child will now be conceived, and will one day be born. |

The old controversy concerning whether to understand the designation of its mother as a "young woman" or as a "virgin" does not clarify the sense of the matter. What is important in the sense of the text is that after its birth, and so in less than a year's time—since God will have delivered God's people from their endangerment by Rezin and Pekah, and the people will once again be glad of the goodness of God—this child will be given the name Immanuel. That is one side of the sign. But now the other side: before the child can yet distinguish between good and evil, and so not many years later, it will have to be fed milk and honey, the meal of nomads—for genuine doom, namely the Assyrian catastrophe, will have broken in, and Immanuel will be there, but in this way: there in the wilderness, under the wrath of God. |

Isaiah 8:6–8 says the same in this matter (in the sense of this other side of the sign of Immanuel): "Whereas this people scorned the soft-running [S. 4] water of Shiloach; whereas they lost heart in the face of Rezin and the son of Remaliah; therefore behold: the Lord allows the strong and deep water of the torrent (of the Euphrates) to rise up over them. It will rise over all its channels and overstep all its banks and pour into Judah, it will inundate and overflow right up to the neck, and its outspread wings will fill the expanse of your lands—Immanuel!" |

By contrast, Isaiah 8:9-10 is already looking again in the opposite direction, even beyond the temporarily overpoweringly ascendant Assyria (which might perhaps not necessarily be grounds for denying authorship of the reference to Isaiah himself): "Clamor, you people, and be afraid! Listen up, all the distant places of the earth! Prepare yourselves and be afraid, yes, prepare yourselves and be afraid! Plan a plan—it will break down in pieces! Decide a decision—it will not stand! For: Immanuel!"

So Ahaz is faced with some bad choices. His neighbors want him to ally with them against newly-powerful Assyria. In the end, he instead allies himself with Assyria as a client state. And if one of the critiques of Noth's tradition-historical approach is that it treats God and the faith of the people as irrelevant in the face of mere historical forces, ... well, this is an event in which the ruler of that people is treating God and the faith as irrelevant in the face of some serious military and geopolitical calculus, because he doesn't believe they can win. That is, for all intents and purposes, the message we're intended to take away, even if the reality was more complicated: the people, and their ruler in particular, failed to trust in God, and so history happened.

And the prophet declares the divine response to this reality: God will not cease to be with you; in fact, God's being-with-you will be a sign in the name of a child to be born, the sign of the coming generation's plight: a reminder that through whatever happens because the nation made its choices, God is with you. Not granting you success in your plans, to be sure! Indeed, frustrating your plans—because, as the people whose very existence in the world is supposed to be constituted by faith in God, you have chosen to imagine yourselves as just one nation among others, on your own in a region with much bigger forces available to them than you have to work with on your own. Which frustrates the hell out of God!

And so, as Barth says, this is a twofold sign. God will get them out of their immediate problem—but not out of the long-term consequences. God will give them victory over their neighbors, for now—but their land will soon be occupied by the power in whom they put their trust. They will soon be displaced from the land of their ancestors. And no plan of theirs, no decision, will suffice to get them out of that situation—because God is with them.

This is a favorite usage for Barth, this concept of Immanuel-as-obstacle, in the face of the geopolitical horrors of his lifetime and the solutions determined by Christendom to conceptualize and deal with them. It becomes a key facet of his ethics in general, after WW2, to say that our first obligation is faith, which means that we must be the people genuinely conditioned by that faith, and not simply a people that gives lip-service to it while trusting in ourselves and subordinating God to our plans. The whole point of the scriptural demand that we "count the cost" is that we should be driven to faith by our need and our lack in face of it—and not to shrewd compromises that will get us what we want at any price. Because we will pay the price!

Barth's Interpetation of the Isaianic Usage

Who is "Immanuel"? Hardly an historical figure of that time. Perhaps [p. 6] a traditional designation, or one selected by the prophet, for the expected savior-king of the end-time, to whom at this point a kind of pre-existence would be attributed. Perhaps the personifying designation of how the Judahite remnant of Israel understood its God and therefore itself, or according to the prophet, how they ought to have. Perhaps both at the same time?! Certainly a peculiar key to the perennial mystery of the history of this people, on good days and bad, under the blessing and under the punishing hand of God. "God with us" is true when the people have peace, and also true when the enemy occupies and lays waste to their land. It remains true both in and in spite of everything, even the most overpowering movements of world history, because and insofar as in all of them the gracious behavior of God is represented to God's people. Whoever or whatever may be intended, concretely, by these references, they make clear that Immanuel is the epitome of the recognition in which, in all of God's works and instructions, the God of Israel is made evident as the God who is not without God's people, and who does not work and act without them, but rather who is, works, and acts with them as their God and thus as their hope.

As good a time as any to remember that the authors and communities of scripture do not imagine God to be distant and uninvolved by nature. Indeed, when God seems to be distant and uninvolved, it is a pathology to be diagnosed, and not a virtue! "Why are you being like this, God, and what can we do to fix it?" is a persistent refrain. And behaving as though God were distant and uninvolved is a human pathology to be diagnosed, as demonstrated with Ahaz.

So "Immanuel" is not an exception to the rule. "God with us" is not a surprise. Or at any rate, it's not supposed to be. If Israel and Judah have historically been persnickety about where they wished to encounter the presence of God, as we are still today, there was no sense that the pretense of God's absence at any other time and in any other place was anything but false. This prophetic concrescence of "Immanuel" as one of us, as belonging to the people, was unusual in its mode of signification, but ought to have been perfectly normal as a reminder of what it signified.

As I attempted to hint at above, the birth of a child as a sign—in a time when children being born was a constant—likely did not signify one specific child, any more than I think there were two specific individual children named Lo-ammi and Lo-ruhamah just because that's what the prophetic text of Hosea says. It is instead the sign of the coming generation's plight, mapped onto an intimately familiar timetable.

It seems hardly likely, in such a context, that "Immanuel" should be the messianic name. As Isaiah says, Immanu-el and his brother, Maher-shalal-hash-baz, exist as omens (8:18). They are not the deliverer; the omens point from the situation and its causes to faith in the one who is, YHWH, which is the only solution to the problem. But when Barth abandons the attempt to identify the signifier more precisely, his conclusion is therefore the correct one: what it signifies is the point. "God with us" as an unchanging omen to the people in the face of catastrophically changing circumstances is the declaration that while the people may sometimes pretend to be without their God, God is never without God's people, and the economy of God's being-in-action is as such their (and of course our) only hope. And it is in fact a positive hope, as the text of Isaiah goes on to illustrate in ways we habitually attribute to the figure of Immanuel even though his role as a signifier is over by that point.

Of course, we do that because of the text in which this name and context gets referenced and modified for the hope of another people (I mean, really the same people, at a different time, and stll very much not us) occupied by another outside and militarily-superior power because of political alliances. (And we wouldn't be wrong to see Herod as Rezin and Pekah allied with Assyria, in a twist on Isaiah's time.) But we also do that because, as Christians, we're traditionally really bad at allowing not only that Judaism is legitimate and that prophetic texts have their proper meanings without us, but also that the gospels are not supersessionist texts and do not justify us in replacing meanings on which they depend. (After all, do you know how many copies of Isaiah have been found from the period? Very popular literature!)

Jesus as the Reversal of the Reversal

When Matthew 1:21f recalls this noteworthy name, a unique act of God comes into view, the last and conclusive act of this God—obviously understood as the goal and recapitulation of all of the acts of the God of Israel. But this one act, the birth and naming of Jesus, has that in common with the events in the days of King Ahaz: again a reversal occurs in the relationship of God to God's people—the great reversal in the sense of the evangelist, in whose view what had happened previous to it was only a monumental prelude—except that this is now the equally unexpected turn from ruin to salvation, from a judgment lasting for many centuries to a new and now definitive pardon. And the Immanuel sign of old also has in common with the name of Jesus now, albeit in the opposite direction, that this one is also a sign with a double character for two groups: a sign "for the fall and for the rising of many in Israel" (Luke 2:34), a sign simultaneously of the greatest God-ordained affliction (as in Isaiah 8:6-8), and of the greatest God-ordained preservation and deliverance (as in Isaiah 8:9-10). For and in both validly Immanuel, "God with us", and now also (ίνα πληρωθῇ τὸ ῥηθὲν ύπὸ κυρίου διὰ τοῦ προφήτου λέγοντος, "in order to fulfill the saying spoken by the Lord through the prophet," Matthew 1:22) Jesus, Yehoshua, "God helps."

So obviously "Immanuel" and "Yehoshua" are different names. And I've heard it said more than once that, for all intents and purposes, Mary disobeyed the angel by calling her baby something else. But what Barth does here in interpretation of Matthew's use of Isaiah makes sense of why "God helps" is a valid interpretation of "God with us" for this new time. To call this one Immanuel, and mean by that the attribution of the saving action of God promised through the prophet in the wake of the Assyrian captivity and its devastation, means that in the face of yet another captivity and occupation God's promises hold true.

And of course, unlike the prophetic children whose names are omens, we are shown this real and singular human being, being and doing God's faithfulness (and ours) in person. His name does not simply exist to score a rhetorical point. He is not the signifier for a generation's experience of the consequences of their leaders' actions. He is the free, authoritative, powerful agent of God's grace for the people, no longer simply enduring with them what they have caused for themselves, or endorsing and limiting their punishment such that it accords with what God considers just, but pardoning and delivering the people from that alien work by doing (and being) God's proper work.

Now, we have to also consider that, whatever access the authors and communities of the canonical gospel texts had to primary sources that predate it, they were composing their narratives in the wake of the first Jewish War, in the wake of the fall of Jerusalem and then finally Masada to the Roman legions in the early 70s, in the period between that and the permanent garrisoning of what had been the temple mount as the city of Hadrian and his patron deity, Aelia Capitolina, and the suppression of the resulting Bar Kokhba revolt in the 130s.

So the gospel texts are not records of a new and glorious period of history inaugurated by the life of Jesus. This reversal of the reversal, this shifting of God's relationship with the people back from judgment and ruin to pardon and rescue, did not in fact produce the unmixed blessings of Isaiah's future promises. The gospel authors and their communities know this, after 70, even if they don't know how bad it will get. They do not attempt to tell a different story, either—but the gospels are records of the double character Barth alludes to in ways that the troubles interpreted by the prophetic texts were not.

If the whole people suffered in the Assyrian and Babylonian catastrophes (even if the whole people did not in fact get carted off into captivity, which is an important dynamic to remember, particularly for the gospels but even for trito-Isaiah), the promise was not that the whole people would be uncritically restored to the status quo ante from which the problems resulted. And if a second Maccabean revolt is hinted at as the subtext of messianic royal priesthood, there is a lampshade on it as this version of the people's hope for restoration is negated. There will not be a restored ruling class. The Magnificat is the character of this new deliverance, a deliverance which holds true even in diaspora, a deliverance that becomes the replacement of that hope for a restored national autonomy.

This reversal of the sign of Immanuel still upholds its truth: God with us, even in affliction. God, and God alone, over us as our just Lord. God, no longer understood to be inflicting punishment on a people for the sins of its leaders, but freeing and enabling them for action in the world. God, as Barth will say, limiting our evil and not letting us have the final word even as at the same time we are repaired and freed so that our good can be the reflection of God's own good.

The sign of Immanuel, reversed and so fulfilled, in Jesus Christ alone without depending on us. No longer a sign of what will happen to our generation, but a sign of what God is and does for all generations.

May we go forth and act in ways that correspond to it.

A blessed nativity to you all!

"God With Us" because God For Those Outside: Barth's Nutshell Soteriology, part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Frost) — Fri, 21 Dec 2018 11:16:00 +0000

In the last post in the series, I covered a lot of structural issues—both for CD IV as a whole, and for the problematic presuppositions of ordering the economy of God's actions relative to our history after the Fall. And towards the end of that post, I laid out that overarching economic structure as follows:

It is God's actions which are utterly consistent, and for Barth that is so because each of the three spheres of the economy—creation, reconciliation, and redemption—are separate and distinct outward implementations of the one, divinely self-determining internal work of God towards us: election to be God-for-us and so, in our time, to be God-with-us.

Now, the title of section 57.1 is already "God With Us," so we were obviously going to get here pretty quickly. And it's nice that Barth has managed a certain level of granularity in terms of idea coverage, so that today we can hit a nice tight unit of text that deals directly—and pretty thoroughly—with what that phrase should mean at the surface level.

Obviously the theme of "Immanuel" is much larger—and we're going to have at least part of an excursus on scriptural foundations in the next post, depending on how it breaks up. But the first thing to get out of the way, for Barth as it should usefully be for us, is how the scope of "God with us" is not about us. It's not a statement of God's solidarity with my group before yours, let alone against that other group over there. (Hence the image for today's post, entitled "Gott mit Uns," which is part of a 1920 portfolio by George Grosz using macabre satire to attack nationalist pretense. We need such things still today.)

Instead, "God with us" is a declaration that seeks to redefine who we understand ourselves to be, and to generate in us a fundamental human solidarity.

Paragraphs 3–5

A couple of small bracketing paragraphs and one massive middle one, today. Again, paragraph divisions with "|" are artificial, for reading ease, and emphasis in bold italics is original to Barth's German text. Page markers for the German [S.] and English [p.] have been included for comparison to official versions.

To begin with, we attempt to recast this Christian center in a first and most general approximation. The heading "God with us" is to be understood as the broadest prospectus regarding the entire complex of Christian knowledge and teaching that lies before us now.

The Christian message, in that center, is a communal declaration of certain people, namely those gathered in the Christian community. It includes in itself a self-declaration, a declaration about the peculiar existence of these people in their time and situation. And it is essential to the message that it do so. Nevertheless, it only includes this in itself. And it is just as essential to the message that it merely includes this in itself—for it is primarily a declaration about God: that God is the one who, as God, is with them. |

Only with them? Only with those who venture this declaration as recipients and bearers of the Christian message, as members of the Christian community must? With them, insofar as they are those who already know that it is so: "God with us!" They venture this declaration on the strength of the fact that they were allowed to become recipients of the message and always wish to become so anew. It was originally worded, "God with y'all!" "God with you and you!" They are what they are by hearing this again and again. |

But now, as recipients, they are indeed also bearers of the message. It therefore does not now apply only to them. They now venture the declaration: that God is the one who, as God, is with them, in the midst of people who do not yet know that. They now direct it to these people. They now therefore want to include, rather than exclude, them with their "us." Now it should show them, these other people, precisely what they do not yet know, but are allowed to and [S. 3] should also know. What? Something about themselves, about their peculiar existence in their time and situation? Sure, that too! It is certainly important that they get to know that the declaration is about them. But surely it is most important of all that they get to know how it is with God: that God is precisely the one who, as God, is also with them. For even that is about them. |

Therefore "God with us" as the kernel of the Christian message, as the decisive communal declaration of the Christian community, can indeed be interpreted as: "God with us humans!"—but in marked distinction: with us [p. 5] people who know that, but also have ever and again to learn it ourselves; and, as the word of our report to all others, therefore: also with "us" other people, who must learn it as new information, because we did not yet know it, though we are allowed to know it. In this movement from a narrower to a wider communality, the declaration "God with us" is the center of the Christian message—and always such that it is primarily a declaration about God, and then and on that basis a declaration about us people ourselves.

We will have to inspect in more detail what we have thus sketched in the roughest strokes, in order to understand it correctly from this preliminary groundwork.

Christian Claims about God Include Humanity

... and if we're being totally theologically honest, they also necessarily include the priority and legitimacy of Judaism. And if our claims about ourselves have any merit relative to the legitimacy of Judaism, then we don't have a leg to stand on to deny the legitimacy of Islam, because we of all people should know it's the kind of thing God does (and that humanity does in response, which is among the earliest reminders in the Qur'an). God, alone, may be our God, but God is not our God alone, and does not will to be. And of course, none of that de facto legitimates just any of our religious expressions as responses to the fact that God has called us—because God has not called any of us because of us. God has called us all to faith, and promised grace for failure as we walk before God.

(Which is why all of us need some form of critical dogmatics as searching theological self-evaluation. But we can't pretend that need is greater elsewhere than in our own house—or that "critical dogmatics" entails or justifies any critique of other religions.)

I'm well aware that Barth was abjectly shitty at fighting the antisemitism of his context. But however badly, with maybe only half his ass, he was doing it. If you don't believe me, you should have another look at the structure of his doctrine of election in II.2, and how the election of the community works in section 34. That's the material being referenced here, just over a decade later. Barth was still more abjectly shitty about Islam, but to say he is a creature of his time is to say we may, can, and must do better—and Barth gives us theological structures that enable that, in spite of the fact that he lacks any historical consciousness of the religious other that could get him beyond Reformation polemics when filling them in.

Barth is practically uninterested in defining mission as "converting the heathen"—not least because he's done away with any logic of history by which there is a compulsion to get it done by the eschaton. However, he's also done away with the opposite idea, namely that the time for conversion has come and gone, and we should abandon outsiders to their fate. (If you want detail, there's the massive excursus that takes up most of section 69.1 in IV.3.1, in which Barth narrates a history of mission relative to his reimagining of the prophetic role in the munus triplex.) Barth is invested neither in the empire project nor in the enclave project.

For Barth, our (only) legitimate mission is witness to the message, in word and deed. And the message about God, with which we have been entrusted, is not a message about one who is remote and unaffected. It is not a message about an ontological ideal. Only such a message could be otherwise than Barth describes here, because only then would its object, source, and content not involve humanity in any way. But no; our message about God, which was transmitted to us by others whose message it also was, does in fact include us. It is not a word about us, primarily, but as a word about this God it is a word that includes us, just as it still includes all those to whom it was entrusted before us: all those whose stories scripture speaks and echoes, and all those who have made those stories and this God their own in any time and place.

But Barth insists that we do not successfully have to appropriate this message for ourselves, or adhere to it over any term, to still be those about whom it speaks when it says that God is with us. The message is not authentically "God is with us, so join us!" The message is "God is with you, all of you," and so the message to us necessarily involves our being told "God is for them, all of them." We were the "you," we were "them," when this message was first for us, and it has not changed in character just because we have now become "us" in our self-awareness and acceptance of this message. It remains more for "you" and "them" than for "us," who have to implement rigorous self-critique in order for our theologies not to domesticate this message from gift into property.

The Listening and the Teaching Church

Way, way back at the end of CD I.2, when Barth defined his norm and method, he did it (ableist language and all) in terms of what had been for him a long-term consistent emphasis on Christian speech relative to the Word of God. So it was the hearing church, and what it hears, and the teaching church, and what it teaches, under the presupposition that this ought to be a constant internal cycle, receptive of the tradition but also critical and diagnostic in nature. "The gate that is also a gateway," Barth calls it, and vice versa, in the sense that a properly functioning dogmatics presents a check on Christian speech, to make sure that we know what it should be—a bar to speech that is supposed to be turned aside, every time, because we are supposed to pass through the way it guards.

And obviously he's doing that, here, but in this transition from recipient to bearer of the message, Barth is also calling back to this twofold nature of one and the same body. It is not the teaching church and the listening world! It is the recipient church that bears the message, and that must bear it as much to itself again as to anyone else. And for Barth it is not therefore that the church is the recipient of the message, but instead that the recipients of the message are constituted as church simply by coming to know what it says. Recipients of the message are not constituted in some relation to the church; there is no third party here, no special human existence of the mediator except as that one who came before and will come again.

The touchstone of the listening and the teaching church has become here the receiving and the bearing humanity. And with it, the unspoken term has gone from "doctrine" to "message." And the only distinction between fellow humanity here is not between inside and outside, but simply between those who already know, and those who do not yet know. And not some fact of culture, or way of life, or even some particular theological datum, but only this: "God is with you."

And small wonder, then, that this is the doctrinal locus in which Barth will frame the parousia, not as the eschatological return after an extended absence, but primarily and positively as the reality of the resurrection and the gift of the Holy Spirit such that God is in fact with us, continually! Reconciliation is the reality of revelation, and revelation has never ceased because it is the reality of God being present to us. And revelation is real precisely in reconciliation because, every time it happens, as Barth articulated long since in I.1, section 5, every time God is present to us, we are compared to what we should be, our response is compared to what it should be, and we do not in fact correspond to the image of God. And God's response, in every such event of judgment, is to go on working our active reconciliation. To go on subjecting us to grace, because even as we have two wills God does not.

This is the message. It is God's will to be graciously present to and with us. This, and not the binary of our acceptance and rejection of God, is the reality. This is the truth of election in Jesus Christ, for all time forwards and backwards. We know already, from Barth's doctrine of election in II.2, that no human rejection of God makes any difference to this fact. No level of human acceptance, either, really. No level of positive or negative relationship with the church, certainly! As though there were any apostasy that could measure up to the Fall for severity—since the Fall in its human totality is the presupposition of reconciliation in Jesus Christ.

And so it remains to specify the doctrine—to specify "God with us"—in these terms. But first, before we get to the first of Barth's seven points, a bit of scripture!

Faith, Love, Hope, and their Object, Source, and Content: Barth's Nutshell Soteriology, part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Frost) — Wed, 19 Dec 2018 15:02:00 +0000

In the introductory post for this series, I handled the thesis Barth gives for the entirety of section 57 in CD IV.1.

For as much as people like to call Barth's dogmatics "Christocentric," in this first subsection we're going to get a master class in what that means, exactly—both in the sense that there is a center, and that Jesus Christ is it.

But in a more immediate sense, in these first two full paragraphs, Barth wants to make clear that the center of the Christian message does not point to Jesus Christ in any separable distinction from the full eternal being of God whom he is and reveals in the flesh.

Whole-Volume Structure Sidebar: Of course I'm not covering the entire 78-page section in this series; it's going to be enough if I can manage to get through the 20-ish pages of 57.1 at a rate of roughly two paragraphs at a time. And, fortunately enough, this first subsection does a fair job at covering the entire content of the section thesis—and the overarching material of the entire volume!

Sections 57.2 and .3 then link back to Barth's doctrine of creation for the context of "the history of the covenant of grace" after the Fall, and structure the general action of reconciliation as a distinct sphere of God's action relative to the covenant and the time of world history as Barth has already articulated them.

If, with the rest of section 57, you then also read section 58 as the survey of the doctrine as a whole, you will have a solid grasp of everything Barth will lay out in detail across the remaining 15 sections of CD IV in their threefold repetition of a fivefold pattern: (1) the truth of what God has done in Christ, (2) the fact of our fallen situation, (3) the action of God on that situation, (4) its shaping of us toward ideal community, and (5) the nature of our proper action as a consequence.

This pattern is iterated for (A) God's justification of us (IV.1), (B) God's sanctification of us (IV.2), and (C) God's mediation of that accomplished reality to us (IV.3). And that threefold iteration is also Barth's interpretation of the munus triplex, such that the kingly and priestly roles are reciprocal halves of the one sovereign action, and the prophetic role is a secondary reality.

OK, enlightening as I hope that sidebar was, let's get on with the real text for today! Paragraph divisions that end with "|" are artificial, for the sake of easier reading, and original emphasis is reproduced in bold italics.

Section 57, part 1: GOD WITH US

We enter the area of Christian knowledge in which we get to deal with the center of the message received by and entrusted to the Christian community, and thus also with the center of church dogmatics. That means: with the middle of its object, of its source, and of its contents. It has also a circumference, bounded by the doctrine of creation and the doctrine of the "last things," of redemption and consummation. However, the covenant fulfilled in the work of reconciliation is its center. From here, from this perspective, we also must and can see a boundary. But we only see it from here. Distorted or deficient recognition here would imply the same distortion or deficit in the whole: the breakdown or eclipse of the message, of the confession, of dogmatics as such. From here everything is clear, true, and salutary—or else it is not so at all, anywhere. This implies the greatest responsibility for the undertaking that now stands before us.

It would be both possible and correct to describe the covenant fulfilled in the work of reconciliation as the center of the object of Christian faith, the source of Christian love, and the content of Christian hope. But the faith, love, and hope of the Christian community, and of the Christians gathered in it, live out of the message received by them and entrusted to them, and not the other way around. |

If we wanted to foreground faith, love, and hope here, we would also have to speak emphatically about their object, their source, [S. 2] and their content, which is in no way immanent in them, and is also not reducible to them—for the Christian faith is faith in, Christian love is love through, and Christian hope is hope upon [p. 4] God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. There is, at any rate, something prior, alien, and other beyond faith, love, and hope, which meets them; it is God whom they meet, from whom they are, whom they can only grasp but not comprehend, not exhaust. Not even the message from which the faith, love, and hope live can do that; thus neither can the confession with which the community responds to the message; nor yet can the dogmatics in which they are accountable for the message, their response, and ultimately for their faith, their love, and their hope as such. |

If we wanted to start from faith, love, and hope, we would therefore also have to refer back to that free, superior counterpart in whom they have their basis. And to speak about them in view of this one would then be to say that at their center we have to do with the covenant fulfilled in the work of reconciliation, and that they are certain or uncertain, powerful or impotent, authentic or inauthentic in their orientation toward it.

Not Equal, but Definitely Opposite

God is our Gegenüber, our "counterpart," our opposite number, the one with whom we are face-to-face in faith, love, and hope when they are truly what they should be. So we don't get to define faith as such, love as such, or hope as such, much less posit contents for them, because the object of faith, the source of love, and the content of hope is properly only God.

And while we cannot do without the definition of this God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, naming the persons of the Trinity and holding them together in some reasonably orthodox version of their interrelations does not illustrate this God's character in any effective way. Yes, this God stands beyond us, over against us, is wholly other than we are, is more and greater than we can fully comprehend—but this God also meets us, and is the God whom our faith, love, and hope likewise meet, in comprehensible and characteristic action for us.

The Christian message, of which Barth intends to illustrate the center here, is not about the mere being of God, much less about a being that could be eternally at a distance from its own doing for us in history. There is no insulation from this interactivity. There will be none implemented going forward. The difference already implemented between Creator and creature, superior and inferior (I'd say "subordinate," but we're not in fact, much as we should be), the eternal and the temporal, is not such that it can be threatened by any level of interaction between the two, much less by the fact that God has made us to correspond to Godself and has embedded Godself fully in human being in Jesus Christ. The distinction is not a matter of hierarchy, or any other form of order that could be subverted. It cannot therefore be protected by enforcing a separation between what is ostensibly so ordered; it is an inescapable fact of ontological difference. God is not threatened by our being, because God is something else, "prior, alien, and other," not something more or less.

(And even that "alien" being is not really diametrically opposed to our being. Barth's problem with the analogia entis, as with all other forms of correlation theology, is not that the alterity between God and humanity prevents any connections being made between them. The problem is that every time we try, we draw those lines from our being up to God's, making claims about God's being that are dependent upon abstraction and extrapolation from our own! The relationship cannot be reversed like that; even if we did not pervasively lie to ourselves about what we are and how we ought to be, it is our being that is to be defined using analogy and correlation, not God's. God's being is autonomous, self-defining, and certain, and must be known from its available data; our being is not certain, and cannot be truly known from its available data, because it is defective—and even if it could, our being is not autonomously self-defining. It just imagines it ought to be!)

And this God with whom we stand face-to-face in faith, love, and hope is our Creator; that is definitely one act of this God, and one we have traditionally used as definitive for God's character—but that isn't the centrally relevant action for the Christian message.

The Covenant (Already) Fulfilled

Very often, the doctrine of reconciliation is handled as part of an ordo salutis, a procedural order by which the salvation of individuals and groups among humanity is determined through the course of their actions in world history as it proceeds toward its end, at which point the final determination will be made. Barth tried such a thing once, in his first dogmatics lectures at Göttingen—and then he abandoned it, never to look back.

When, in the mature dogmatics, Barth says that "the covenant fulfilled in the work of reconciliation" is the center of the Christian message, the center or middle (Mitte) of its object, source, and contents (i.e. God), and therefore ought to be the center of dogmatics, he does not in any way mean that the uncertain future of the uncertain course of human history after the Fall is a matter of central concern for us. Barth doesn't care how history works out; he's written a theology in which he doesn't have to.

The work of reconciliation is not, principally, our work. It only becomes our work as we learn to be what we are as the creature, which is God's responsible partner, and—secondarily to God's action—become participants in its further course. And had you read the parts of section 41 in CD III.1 on the covenant of grace as the nature of the creature, you might start to reach the conclusion that exactly that event is the fulfillment of the covenant. That reconciliation is not intended to accomplish anything further, beyond our restoration to the responsible creaturely being in the world that is, itself, the definition of the covenant as our nature.

But if our action were to be considered essential to the fulfillment of the covenant, and so to the success of reconciliation, then we, and not solely God, would have a place at the center—not just of dogmatics, but of the gospel itself! We would therefore claim a place at the center of, and as in some way component to, the object, source, and content of our faith, love, and hope as Christians.

Which, after all, is what every law-first-then-gospel, mercy-only-for-the-deserving piety already insists upon when it makes salvation contingent upon our moral behavior. And which is exactly what Barth means when he says that distortions we introduce here will twist the whole of theology fatally out of true. That the messge, and dogmatics itself, will break down and be eclipsed—because we will have set ourselves in front of its object and sole source of light.

Obviously, there is only one possible solution to this dilemma: the fulfillment of the covenant in Jesus Christ, who just as in election was both subject and object of a decisive act of God for us, without us. But equally obviously, we're not there yet in these first two paragraphs. (And, all the way down the line in the seventh and final point, Barth will get around to a "we with God" as contained within this message and so as proper to our faith, love, and hope—but such a thing is only reachable in a kind of second naïveté, once we have been thoroughly disabused of our present hubris.)

A Spatial Metaphor for Structural Priorities

We've seen Barth use a center and circumference metaphor before. And there is here, as in that text, a sense that what is not central is therefore metaphorically peripheral—which could potentially lead us to prioritize reconciliation over creation and redemption. And I'm not entirely sure that's wrong—but I do think there are a number of bad ways to go about it.

Principal among the bad ways to go about prioritizing reconciliation over creation and redemption is to declare it the indispensable process by which we get from the one to the other. Barth has already rejected that in his doctrine of creation, and we can note that in the appalled surprise of his critics, Lutheran as well as Reformed, when they read III.1. Of course, there's a case to be made that he had long since rejected it in his work at Münster, but nobody had seen more than the prolegomena to that dogmatics, or knew that it existed, at the time.

The key problem with making reconciliation the linchpin of salvation history, in a through-historical sense, is that once again it comes to hinge on our questionable fulfillment of the covenant. But the other major problem with this approach is that it collapses the actions of creation and redemption into mere endpoints of the history of our world. The circle of our self-concern becomes the only sphere of divine activity. And Barth won't allow that!

The difference in this center-and-circumference model is that, for Barth, this is emphatically a three-ring circus—and God is the only performer we need to watch. The spheres of creation and redemption are not merely the edges of the sphere of reconciliation, as though it were the place and they were the outskirts. They set its limits. And they do so as spheres in which God is the only agent, relative to this sphere in which our agencies as Creator and creature interact and conflict. And it is that conflict, between Fall and eschaton, to which they set a limit—not the being of the creature itself.

Barth says we can only see this boundary from the center—and by and large the through-historical view proves him right because it does not treat the Fall as a boundary in every way as violently eschatological to what came before as the eschaton will be as its opposite bracket. We imagine, instead, our continuity with the origin of our being, and indeed the continuity of our "civilized" worlds with what we read back from them into the text as the order of creation itself.

But we are not the continuity. Nor are we the center. We are what has destroyed the responsible correspondence of the creature, in its worlds, to its Creator. We are that against which this boundary is set, that the history of our falsehood might not go on forever. It is God's actions which are utterly consistent, and for Barth that is so because each of the three spheres of the economy—creation, reconciliation, and redemption—are separate and distinct outward implementations of the one, divinely self-determining internal work of God towards us: election to be God-for-us and so, in our time, to be God-with-us.

And so we do not know God as Creator or Redeemer in contradistinction to how we know God as Reconciler. The imaginaries by which we have traditionally posited a radically different behavior of God in protology and eschatology, to which Jesus Christ is the exception, are catastrophic failures at the knowledge of God. Or at least, they are in Barth's eyes! We only correctly see and understand these spheres, and the God who acts in them, when we know with certainty the God who has acted in this one, and how.

(Which is where we're headed, at least eventually, in this series.)

Barth's Soteriology, in a Nutshell: Section 57.1, Intro

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Frost) — Mon, 17 Dec 2018 13:58:00 +0000

So I've been bouncing around a bit, mostly in CD IV, and given the soteriological themes of the last two posts it seems like a good time to start a series on what I think of as Barth's soteriology in a nutshell.

It's the first part-section of CD IV.1, and in it Barth expounds upon "God with us" in Jesus Christ as the center of the Christian message in 7 points. (Which also basically outlines the topic for the whole of CD IV. No little thing!)

And it's absurdly long to think of in blog posts. If the recent post I did on apokatastasis should have been a 3-part series broken up, well, it's rather deceptive to think of section 57.1 as just a 7-part articulation of the center of the Christian message. It is heavily recursive. So this 7-point outline winds up covering 19 pages in the English, and sneaks onto the top part of 22 in the German, by the time Barth is ready to move on to "real" exposition.

As always with Barth "concise" is relative. "See the World's Largest Nutshell," and all that. Which means this is me setting out on an indefinitely long series, because manageable chunks and attempting to respect your attention span.

And as usual, it's also a comprehensive retranslation. (Shakes fist at Bromiley's choices, again.) If we're really going to talk about this passage as Barth's soteriology, we need to be clear that Heil and Heils-something-or-other are not "redemption" and "redemptive." (That's Erlösung!) They're "salvation" and "saving."

This and other missed tricks in your copy of the Church Dogmatics can be found by comparison to my version as presented here. Equivalent pagination for English (p.) and German (S.) will be included throughout, but I'm not copying in the German or official English text; this is all going to be long enough as-is, and the point is commentary.

Section Thesis

As with every section of the Church Dogmatics, section 57 in IV.1 starts with a thesis statement which sets out its total argument in one place.

Section 57: THE WORK OF GOD THE RECONCILER

The object, source, and content of the message heard and proclaimed by the Christian community is, in its center, the free act of the faithfulness of God, in which act God (1) makes the lost cause of humanity, which disavowed God as its Creator and thereby plunged itself as God's creature into ruin, God's own cause in Jesus Christ; (2) brings about its objectives; and particularly thereby (3) asserts and displays God's own honor in the world.

God Wins Where We Cannot

So the original language of the thesis statement doesn't have numbering in it. It's just one long sentence, which works better in a language that has a functioning system of noun cases ... unlike English, which just has a system of punctuation, and more rigid syntax. Providing some means of explicit parsing is a necessary service of the translator. The numbering wasn't strictly essential, but it's a bonus.

So there are three things Barth says happen in this one "free act of the faithfulness of God" that is the center—and Barth will later also say the apex, the pinnacle—of the Christian message. First off, God takes up our Sache, the Sache of humanity, which is described as "lost."

Now, this word in German I habitually translate as "subject matter," or "material concern," and the adjective form sachliche generally as "materially relevant" or just "relevant." So for example, Sachkritik is a matter of analyzing a text and interpreting it in terms of its primary material/author-and-audience-relevant concern, and relating all else to that.

Here the context is a bit different, but we are still talking about the concern most materially relevant to us, as human beings. And God takes this up as something which is already a "lost cause," which means it's a concern we still definitely have—but have no hope of bringing to a successful end.

And for Barth it's very important to recognize that we are lost, and hopelessly so if our hope is in ourselves, in the present time. We do not just need a little help. We cannot just do what is in us. "Perdition" in this sense is not a future state, but the nature of the world we have crafted for ourselves after the Fall. This is expressed as early as the beginning of section 3.1 in CD I.1, and remains consistent throughout Barth's development.

And why? Because if this concern God has taken up is really our relevant existential concern, we've actively undermined every capacity we might once have had for its success. We have renounced, disavowed, disowned, etc., our origin in God and God as our origin. And because of that, we are going bad the way food goes bad. Spoilage, decay, rot, blight, ruin. And not as though it were some sort of gradual decline! We have lunged headlong into this state, plunged ourselves into it. We are not just fallen; we are falling. This is Barth's language, run through a thesaurus. In short, it means that this is still absolutely our concern, but we've got nothing on it anymore, and it's our own fault.

Cultural Privilege is the Opposite of Soteriological Privilege

Now, part of the problem with the Fall, and the fact that we have structured our worlds using negation of both God and one another, is that we may well take our existentially relevant concern, our Sache, to be something else than God does in reconciliation. God isn't remotely guaranteed to be giving us what we want, here. And the claim that God is giving us what we should want is obviously ripe for abuse—because we love telling other people that they should want what we tell them to. (We love standing in the place of God!)

This doesn't make the claim less true—it just means we have to be careful about how we interpret it. Particularly from within the culturally privileged positions of historically dominant groups, which is a problem for Barth as much as for me! And while Barth does not engage in what, for us today, is properly an analysis of cultural and societal privilege, he does routinely engage in polemic against the church and its missionary hubris in deciding that it has possession of a reality it can then arbitrarily mediate to those outside. The church has no soteriological privilege! The language of the thesis here leaves no such escape from the general situation of fallen humanity, no hierarchy of subjection to the Fall, nor will Barth build one in later.

(In fact, as dominant-culture privileged white folks, Barth and I are better off listening to the existential concerns of the marginalized in our societies, the way Jesus and the prophets demand, because even if their concerns are not exactly the same as God's, God is concerned with justice to and for them. Theirs are concerns we can trust that God takes up and leads to success against us! Unfortunately, brother Karl was rather bad at that, even if as a thorough critical theologian he remains usable when we do better at it. Still, it's a reasonable extension of his thesis here, and better than our usual hubris.)

The human Sache is not here defined, and we are probably better off leaving it that way. Were I to call this concern "salvation," or use some other related term, I wouldn't really have done better than leaving it a cipher for the moment, pointing forward in our quest for what God wills and so has done. This is particularly true if what I use to fill in that cipher points to an imagined future existence beyond ours, and away from our real present existence and the demands of ethics within it.

That present existence is always going to be closer, for Barth, to the reality of our "lost cause." The eschatological future is something he takes entirely out of our hands; we cannot work towards it any more than away from it. It will be a a gift, from beyond any possible human future. Redemption is not an outcome of reconciliation, nor does it depend on there being one! But the state of the world at any given point, and so the quality of life for the creature and its living into its partnership with God—these are things we routinely work against, destructively, and they are also things that with God's reconciling help we can instead work towards, constructively.

We have a historical hope, not just an eschatological one—but in both cases, particularly from our privileged positions in the worlds we have arranged for ourselves after the Fall, they are hopes in Jesus Christ against ourselves. (And it is as such that they are hope for others, who have no reason to hope in the outcomes of our worlds!) When we awaken to these hopes, to which end God is working, we do not awaken to "conversion" as the official translation will put it in section 66.4; we awaken to repentance, to Umkehr as the correction of our verkehrte situation.

Summing Up

So: in this one free act of divine faithfulness, God not only takes up this "lost cause," this concern of ours, but then also leads it to its goals in all the ways we cannot, and in the process shows off how cool God is. It is the glory of God to do this, a task that our Creator is honored not only to take up but to complete for us, without us.

This is, as the section title claims, the work of God, the Reconciler. (Who, remember, is not one of the three persons; this one God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is, as all three together and in interacting ways, outwardly our Reconciler just as also our Creator and our Redeemer.)

The Disorder of the World and God's Plan of Salvation

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Frost) — Wed, 12 Dec 2018 14:52:00 +0000

Yesterday there was a bit of a back-and-forth in my Twitter feed regarding present vs. future eschatology, the "already" and the "not yet," complacency and false hope, what our moral obligations are and how they change depending on where we stake our claim in this matter.

I had already been reading CD IV.3.1, early in section 69, where Barth does his little history of Christian concepts of mission, and then I remembered that I had this earlier piece by Barth in my back pocket, as it were, unifying the two concerns. And this is material that helps to shape CD IV.

So here is the opening speech Barth gave to the first major post-WW2 gathering of the ecumenical community—really, the first meeting of the World Council of Churches, because this was where "Faith and Order" and "Life and Work" merged to form it in the first place.

And it's a doozy! This was not a speech that the Americans and their allies, who had attempted to set the tone for this conference, were interested in hearing. The title matches the conference theme, but that theme—in English materials as "Man's Disorder and God's Design," which unlike Die Unordnung der Welt und Gottes Heilsplan really plays up the orders-theology hubris of its planners—was supposed to be used to align the ecumenically-assembled churches in support of the Cold War policies of the political and military West. Barth was having none of that, because it's simply not a valid mission of the church—and besides which, every "new world order" we propose is just another world disorder, however differently we manage to stack the benefits for one side and against another.

God's plan of salvation is something else, and isn't waiting on us to work it out. God is, instead, waiting on us to accept that God has in fact done the work, and that our proper work is quite different in response to it.

The Disorder of the World and God's Plan of Salvation
by Karl Barth
August 23, 1948

An address to the First Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam
Translated by Matthew A. Frost

"As we approach our main theme, let us look back on preparatory materials whose skillful organization deserves our sincere thanks, and whose various and in every case instructive findings deserve our earnest respect.

In this opening speech, my task cannot be to develop my own outline of this theme, any more than it can involve preempting discussion of any of the battery of questions put to us. Instead, allow me to make some remarks upon the whole, as they have impressed themselves upon me through my study of the preparatory materials. The circle whose contents have already occupied our four sections, and will newly engage them in these days, has an edge and a center. It is up to you whether you wish to understand as peripheral, or as central, the remarks I would like to make to you now. I will assure you, at any rate, that they are my way of taking up the responsibility we have collectively assumed here.

Beginning with Faith and not Fear

'The Disorder of the World—and God's Plan of Salvation.' Right away, I should like to direct your attention to whether, in its entirety and in all of its several aspects, we ought not regard and deal with this theme from back to front. It is said that we should seek first after the kingdom of God and God's righteousness, so that all those things of which we have need in view of the disorder of the world may then be added unto us. Why would, or why should, we not take this sequence seriously? God's 'plan of salvation' is above, but the disorder of the world—and so also our concepts of its foundations, as well as our proposals and plans to oppose it—is all below. |

If it happens at all, the nature of this whole complex (including with it the nature of our own churches!) only becomes visible and tractable from up there, only from the perspective of God's plan of salvation downward—whereas there is no prospect or path upwards to God's plan of salvation from the perspective of the disorder of the world, or from the Christian analyses and hypotheses we devote to it. We should not wish to begin down there in any of our sections: not with the unity and disunity of our churches; not with the virtues and vices of Modern humanity; not with the nightmare scenario of a culture oriented solely [S. 4] around technology and intent solely on production; not with the confrontation of a godless West with a godless East; not with the looming threat of the atom bomb; and absolutely not with the few deliberations and interventions with which we all intend to deal with this doom. |

On the one hand, there are too many notes of painstakingly repressed concern and anxiety in the material presented to us—and on the other, too many notes of the all-too-pleasant delusion that we do not need the warning we wish to give. They are symptoms of the fact that the question is not indifferent to being asked in the right way, which leads from above to below. In the face of purely scientific and technical problems and solutions, we are certainly right to want to put our Modern siblings on guard against forgetting (1) that they are themselves part of the evil they believe they can overcome in this way; (2) that they are not the judge, but rather the accused; and (3) that human existence has no meaning without faith in a transcendent truth, justice, and love that humanity does not itself create, and by which it can only be bound. But with the log in our own eye, how will these three points work out? How shall we be able to help these our siblings, when we want to engage in and resolve ourselves upon a positivistic mindset that certainly has nothing to do with the Christian realism that is commanded of us?

At this point a further question arises: are we not also obliged to understand, on that basis, that by 'God's plan of salvation' it really is God's plan, which is to say God's kingdom already come, already victorious, already established in all majesty; that it is really our Lord Jesus Christ, who has already taken away the power of sin, death, the devil, and hell, and brought honor to the rights of God and of humanity in his own person? That by 'God's plan of salvation' we are therefore in no way to understand the existence of the church in the world, its task over against the disorder of the world, its outer and inner activity as the agent of a better human life, and finally the success of this, its work in the Christianization of the entirety of humanity, and in connection with it the manufacture of a structured peace and legal system encompassing our entire planet? That 'God's plan of salvation' is therefore in no way to be understood as something like a Christian 'Marshall Plan'? |

We have been tempted, by the use of the Biblical image of the church as the body of Christ, toward the definitely non-Biblical expression that in the church we are dealing with an extension of the incarnation of the Word of God. If that were the case, then obviously the lordship of Jesus Christ at the right hand of the Father and thus the workings of divine providence would to a certain extent have devolved to the direction and administration of Christendom. Suffering humanity would have to expect its salvation from us, from our sharp-sighted discernment of world history, from the agendas, actions, and triumphs to be hoped for, in any future, from the church as the embodiment and representative of Jesus Christ and thus of God! We then effortlessly assume the position of having to act [S. 5] as though our beloved God had died, as though there were not in any case a wisdom, justice, and good, a will and plan of God's own, high above our entire Christian ecclesiastical existence—as though instead, all of that were fulfilled in the form of our perspectives, insights, and prospects, in the form of our Christian attempts to do justice to God and our neighbor. |

No wonder, then, that it makes us so nervous—that we really are quite terrified, just like Peter when he looked upon the storm and the waves into which he instantly began to sink—when we must look upon the disorder of the world. We can have it be otherwise. The definition of the church as the body of Christ is good. But the body of Christ really consists of such people as have, each in their own situations and ways, placed their entire hope and confidence exclusively upon Christ himself: on his unique work of reconciliation on the cross; on his resurrection as the sign of a new eon, already begun in him; on his Holy Spirit, through which he comforts his troubled community and also directs and corrects the world in completely different and vastly better ways than we have at our disposal; and finally, on his coming again in majesty, in which the majestic redemption of the total creature that takes place in him will be revealed. The body of Christ lives exclusively out of, through, and toward this one who is indeed entirely present to it, but who as its Lord is also entirely superior to it. |

I confess to being shocked by the reality that, in the entirety of the material presented to us, there are occasional rhetorical and theoretical reminders of this realization but, let us say, no practical applications to speak of. God's providence, God's already-arrived kingdom, the already-accomplished reconciliation of the world, the Holy Spirit (whose thoughts are higher than our thoughts!), the coming again of Jesus Christ in majesty, and ultimately the person, decree, work, promise, and victory of the triune God as such—it is as if they were all somewhere outside the scope of our consideration as we prepared to discuss the theme, 'The Disorder of the World and God's Plan of Salvation.' |

If, as we hope, everything is to work out successfully during these days, must we not in this sense start anew at every point? We are not (yet) ashamed of the gospel! Otherwise, God forbid, we would have to become ashamed of ourselves!

Spiritual Freedom and Unity, not Human and Partisan Pretense

I do not wish to diminish the earnestness and the goodwill and the hopes with which we have come together here, but rather to set them on their proper foundation, when I say that, right on this first day of our consultation, we ought to let go entirely of the pretense that our concern here must be concern for the church and for the world. Encumbered by this idea, we would achieve nothing; we would only be able to increase the disorder in both church and world. For in the end it is just this frightful, godless, laughable opinion—as though humanity were Atlas, who was ordered to support the weight of the expanse of the heavens—that is the root and ground of all human disorder. |

What we can and should achieve during these days is simply this: we can give our churches and the world a demonstration—hopefully, [S. 6] a 'demonstration of the Spirit and of power' (1 Cor. 2:4)—showing what it is like when a thousand Christians from every land and people, language and confession assemble together to form a single community in the present time and situation, to which the words apply that they have all so often heard, and have themselves preached, each in their own places and in their own ways: 'Commit your way to the Lord and hope in God, for the Lord shall see it through.' (Ps. 37:5) Should we not work to that end? Are we not children of God? Why then would we not work to that end, and therefore make demonstration of the freedom that is now laid upon us as a community of Jesus Christ?

Allow me to articulate, in a few examples, what kind of spiritual disposition I have in mind when I speak about this freedom.

Freedom for Community, However Imperfect

In our first section we are concerned with the confessional divisions among our churches and our hope for any form of their consolidation. The matter now comes down to an attitude of spiritual freedom which consists in us, in all of our interests, concerns, and desires—the confessional right along with the ecumenical—easing up a little and asking ourselves what that One thinks, and wants of us, whose name serves as the focal point of all of our confessions, and who alone has the right and the power to call us together and to consolidate us into his holy and universal church. Let us be clear: if we do not listen to him, then our confessional principles as well as our ecumenical principles are empty, insipid, secular forms, about which both dispute and agreement are equally fruitless. |

However, we may listen to him. We may admit the simple fact of the matter: that in his work and word he is our Lord, and that we with our Christian ideas are not his lords. We do not know what will come of it if we listen to him. We do not know how our confessional and ecumenical presentations will hold up when subjected to the assay-furnace by his word. Nor should we wish to know this in advance. But we should know that it can only be beneficial to our concerns, our selves, and our churches, to place them and ourselves in the fire of this testing.

I cannot remain entirely silent about a serious difficulty that we have caused ourselves in this matter. We are here in transition between a no-longer-entirely-extant division and a not-yet-properly-achieved union of our churches. It was not yet possible, in the state in which we presently find ourselves, that we here should celebrate a common eucharist. Perhaps that will remain impossible for a long time. We could have made that visible had we not celebrated the eucharist here at all. Yet the fact that we are going to celebrate separate eucharists here did not allow us to make that visible. We are permitted here, with heavy but good conscience, to be an imperfect community of the one Lord. There can, however, be no blessing and no promise on that score should we now rebuff with one hand what we still want to welcome with the other. We must now seek to gain and assert this freedom for the one Lord Jesus Christ in spite of these separate eucharists.

[S. 7] Might this freedom then also imply that the sighing or exasperation over the refusals we have received from the churches of Rome and Moscow should take up as little space as possible in the negotiations of our first section? Why should we not simply recognize in these rejections the powerful hand of God over us? Perhaps they are a sign, by which God wills to take from us every illusion that we here could construct a tower whose point would reach to the heavens. Perhaps God uses them to show us how meager our light has been thus far, since it obviously has not yet been able to shine even over into these other areas that are ostensibly also Christian. Perhaps God uses them to protect us from conversation partners with whom we here cannot come together to be a community even in an imperfect way—since, if for different reasons, they do not want to fulfill the movement of all churches toward Jesus Christ, without which Christians of different backgrounds and kinds cannot talk with each other or listen to each other, much less come together. And perhaps God has used those rejections to put us in a very good place, since Rome and Moscow seem to be united, of all things, in not wanting to know about us. I suggest that what we want to do is thank and praise God, who is pleased to stand in the way of our plans in such a significant way!

Freedom for Witness, not Administration

And now in our second section, the question of the mission of the church in the proclamation of the gospel concerns us—a good and necessary question! How could it leave us alone? Indeed, there are so many people who have never before heard the news about the gracious work of God that happened in Jesus Christ, or who have forgotten again—and who perhaps have forgotten about it because our churches have never correctly aligned themselves with it. |

It takes so much prayer and so much work to ensure that our witness is not just any pious, moral gossip, but instead really the gospel of Jesus Christ. And it is such a high art to become as absolutely simple and direct in our approach to this witness as this message requires. However, the only thing that can help us in this matter is an attitude of spiritual freedom and joy, which depends on our concern being for the already-victorious cause of our Lord and not for shepherding any of our causes toward victory. |

Strangely, I see something like a dark cloud of grief hovering over the material presented to us here. It seems to arise from the fact that too many are still of the opinion that we Christian laypeople and clergy must focus on what indeed only God can accomplish, and wills to accomplish entirely on God's own, namely: that people really come to faith, and really do so through the gospel. Let us step out from under this mournful shadow! We must be God's witnesses. God has not called us to be God's lawyers, engineers, managers, statisticians, and directors of operations. We are therefore not charged with tending to such activities in God's service. |

How did we actually come to the fantastical opinion [S. 8] that secularism and godlessness are inventions of our time, that there had once been a majestic Christian Middle Ages with a universal Christian faith, and that it was now our job to reproduce this incredible state of affairs in a new form? How did we arrive at the peevish thought of basing our evangelistic relation to Modern humanity on communicating about their wicked principles in spreadsheet form? As though we were permitted to consider the people of today's world in any other way than from the perspective that Christ also died for them—and was raised as their divine sibling and redeemer, too! |

How have we now come to the point of espousing as a matter of course the phrase first coined by a German National Socialist: that we today live in an 'unchristian' and even 'post-Christian' era—in order then to calculate how best one might drive evangelization and mission in our day through meditation on this presupposition? As though we had never heard anything about the demarcation of our time by the resurrection and return of Jesus Christ! 'Post-Christian era'? Nonsense! But something else might very well come into question: what counter-argument could we really have, should it please God now to continue God's work and lead it to its goal not through a further numerical increase, but instead and conversely through an energetic numerical decrease of so-called Christianity? |

It seems to me that there is no other question for us in this domain than how to free ourselves from all quantitative thought, from all statistics, from all reckoning with visible success, from all striving after a global Christian empire; and then, how we could shape our witness into testimony about the sovereignty of the compassion of God, from which alone we can indeed all live—and so into a witness to which the Holy Spirit will not deny its approval.

Freedom for Announcement, not Achievement

Finally, in our third and fourth sections, we are confronted by the problems of societal and international disorder, and of the Christian position to take with respect to them. How should they not sting us? How should we be allowed to evade them? But here, too, I ask to be allowed to make the case for confronting these problems in no other way than in the attitude of spiritual freedom: in the posture in which we depend upon God alone, and in no way upon people—and so at last upon ourselves—or upon the virtue of any kind of Christian undertaking. |

In this respect, too, the disorder of the world is today not smaller, but also not larger, than it has ever been. In the midst of this disorder it is the prophetic mission of the church—the mission of its political watchdogs and societal 'good Samaritans'—to announce God's kingdom as the kingdom of justice and peace. We cannot content ourselves with the way the church of earlier times carried out this mission. According to the knowledge given us, let us see to doing it better in our time! Everything here comes down to two points:

[S. 9] First, the kingdom we announce to the world must be the kingdom of God, and not the domain of any of the ideas and principles we hold to be good. Let our 'yes' and our 'no' to the action of society and of states be the 'yes' or 'no' of the gospel, and not the 'yes' or 'no' of any law! We can bind ourselves to nothing but obedience to the concrete commands of the living, present Lord Jesus Christ. We therefore do not have to ponder any Christian marching routes; instead, we have to practice concrete obedience to this living Lord. Otherwise, the possibility that what we think we are obliged to announce to the world under the authority of the Word of God could simply be used as an agenda like any other, and—who knows?—the agenda of a particular party, class, and nation becomes inevitable. |

Shouldn't we be surprised that the entire sphere of problems encompassing property, the ownership and rental of real estate, capital, interest, and money in general is not even touched in the third and fourth volumes of our preparatory material, much less discussed and dealt with? Especially this area, which in the New Testament is emphatically framed under the alternative: 'God or Mammon'! Perhaps something of the sort was intended by the venerable fathers of the Moscow Synod, or their political advisors, who have so unkindly accused us of being an 'anti-democratic' entity in root and branch. Is the matter without even the tiniest particle of truth? |

I'm afraid that when it comes to confronting communism, on that basis we will be no worse than the majority of our other Western contemporaries, but also no better. But I mention this point only to direct your attention to this claim: we must be very certain that, in carrying out our prophetic task, we are really announcing God's kingdom, and not—however earnestly—any other kingdom. Otherwise, we shouldn't be surprised if our ever-so-well-intentioned advice does not receive the consideration we think it deserves.

And second, we will have to consider that we can only announce God's kingdom. By holding the offices of political watchdog and societal 'good Samaritan,' we await the unmovable city that God will build, and we therefore do not wait on some future state—whether of liberal or authoritarian character—to be established with Christian assistance. This world passes away. We have an unparalleled revolutionary hope to proclaim to it, but we have no system of societal or political principles to offer this world that as such would illustrate the content of this hope. There is no such system; there are only Christian decisions as demonstrations and signs of this hope—for God is this hope, completely by Godself, alone. |

That we are awake to such Christian decisions in the midst of a wicked world, that we are willing and ready for them: this is what is required of us. It will not be we who transform this wicked world into a good one. God has not relinquished to us God's dominion over it. Its deliverance, which already happened, was not our work. And so also [S. 10] the revelation of its deliverance, still outstanding—the new heavens and the new earth—will not be our work, but God's. In the midst of the political and societal disorder of the world, all that is required of us is that we be God's witnesses, the disciples and servants of Jesus. We're going to have our hands full just trying to be that. 'It is enough for the disciple to be like their master, and for the servant to be like their lord.' (Mt. 10:25)

Closing

I am at the end, and in view of the preparatory material I must assume that what I have said is not representative of your opinions. Perhaps, nevertheless, you have noticed that I do not really wish to distance myself from any effort that has been addressed to our theme, or from any that might be. I have not wished to tear down, but to build up. I have not wished to scatter, but to gather. I have not wished to say 'no,' but rather, 'yes.' But following my insight I have only been able to say it in the form that recollects for me the Word that the church as the community of Jesus Christ must always hear as principally directed to itself: 'Decide on a plan, and nothing will come of it; for Immanuel is here!' (Is. 8:10) In my understanding, we need to approach our work with a very confident, but also very sincere, 'Lord, have mercy on us!'"

Scratch translation done by me, on the basis of the text found in Amsterdamer Fragen und Antworten, Theol. Ex. h. NF 15 (München: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1949), 3–10. Emphasis in bold italics is original to that published version, as a representation of the increased letter spacing used for emphatic orthography there. Titles have been added by me, as have paragraph breaks marked with "|", to improve readability in this format.

I did later find a prior—and basically antagonistic—English publication of this text, in the December 8, 1948, issue of Christian Century, which at that time was a theopolitically conservative mouthpiece in favor of American missionary-colonial dominance of the post-WW2 world. They ran Barth's address under the title, "No Christian Marshall Plan," as though political opposition were his intent—and it appeared months after they had already run pieces attacking Barth for said opposition, particularly the response by Reinhold Niebuhr, "We Are Men and Not God," which appears together with it in the same volume of Theologische Existenz heute from which the present translation is derived.

Mistakes in the present translation are mine, obviously, but at least I'd like to think I've done better than that version!

What Is Barth Really Against, When He Opposes Apokatastasis?

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Frost) — Mon, 03 Dec 2018 16:19:00 +0000

OK, massive critical translation post ahead. This has been in the queue for ages.

So when people talk about Barth and universalism, inevitably there's going to be a reference to CD IV.3.1, 477–78. Supposedly, those pages contain Barth's knock-down punch against soteriological universalism in any form ever in life.

Which is a lie.

What they do contain, instead, is the go-to citation for any discussion of apokatastasis, even though it needs to be kept in context with all the others. (Follow that link to understand more of what I'm on about here.)

As a critical exegete, I deal with prooftexting all the time. This may be a different field, but it's the same problem when it comes to "Barth and universalism." Better still, in this case I get to tell you that not only does the larger context not support that argument, but also the passage doesn't even say that!

(And it's been poorly translated, to boot, contributing to the confusion. Bromiley may have been a good editor, but his translations needed more accountability to the text. Seriously, some days I get so frustrated with CD IV that I want to nuke it from orbit and start over. He's done us a great service in that the translation exists, but subtle yet profoundly meaningful errors abound. Traduttore, traditore, as always. We can only try to do better.)

Strap in, it's a bumpy ride.

We've got ourselves a text in three paragraphs, so I'm going to take them one at a time.

Introduction: The Eschatological Threat—To Be Resolved Elsewhere

Ein letztes Wort über die Drohung darf nicht fehlen, unter der die verkehrte menschliche Situation ja auch in ihrer Begrenzung durch die ihr überlegene und ihr gegenüber kräftige Wirklichkeit Gottes und des Menschen so gewiß steht, als diese von unten her fortwährend auch noch durch des Menschen Lüge unheimlich greifbar mitbestimmt ist. Ist damit zu rechnen oder nicht zu rechnen, daß jene Drohung endlich und zuletzt doch nicht zur Ausführung kommen, jenes Schwert doch nicht fallen, des Menschen Verdammung doch nicht ausgesprochen, der kranke Mensch, auch der kranke Christ doch nicht sterben, nicht verloren gehen, vielmehr: aus dem Tode erweckt und gerettet werden und leben möchte? Die Frage gehört in die Eschatologie und soll hier nur noch mit zwei abgrenzenden Bemerkungen berührt werden. (KD IV.3.1, 549–50)

Frost: "We should not forget to say one last word about the threat under which the errant human situation, as this is constantly (and via human falsehood, disturbingly) concretely codetermined from below, does indeed stand in its limitation by the reality of God and of humanity—a reality which is both superior to and stronger than the human situation. Are we to expect that threat to eventually and finally not be carried out? That the sword will not fall, that the condemnation of humanity will not be spoken, that the sick person—even the sick Christian—will not die, not be lost? That instead they will be brought back and rescued from death, and might live? Are we to expect this, or not? The question belongs to eschatology, and shall only be touched on here with two delimiting remarks."

There are subtleties here that Bromiley's official English translation does not properly handle. For comparison, with critical notes added:

Bromiley: "A final word is demanded concerning the threat under which the perverted(2) human situation stands, in spite of(5) its limitation by the powerful and superior reality of God and man(1), to the extent that from below it is also continually determined by the falsehood of man in a sinister(3) but very palpable manner(4). Can we count upon it or not that this threat will not finally be executed, that the sword will not fall, that man's condemnation will not be pronounced, that the sick man and even the sick Christian will not die and be lost rather than(6) be raised and delivered from the dead and live? This question belongs to eschatology, but two delimitations may be apposite(7) in this context." (CD IV.3.1, 477)

Of course we correct the mid-century English abuse of "man" as generic, since Mensch denotes neither sex nor gender.
The adjective "perverted" inevitably tastes of condemning unspecified sexual deviance. Although that is one common colloquial usage for verkehrt, let's pretend we've surpassed Augustine and the obsessions of his contemporaries, shall we? It's clearly not the context of this entire section on human falsehood and its condemnation! Barth isn't taking jabs at anyone, or any group, for difference from putatively normative cultural practices here—much less for violating specifically sexual cultural norms. It is humanity, all of it, entirely, no exceptions, that is in this verkehrte situation.

And all we've got, in the adjective verkehrt, is a general assertion that the situation is somehow wrong, that things in it are misarranged—and not even in a specific direction. It's not even "backwards," which would be umgekehrt or verkehrt herum. What it is, instead, is more like "twisted," if we need a physical analogy—or, if we don't, simply characterized by error.
Ah, but apparently it's not just "perverted," it's also "sinister." And, fair play, again, this is one of the (many!) colloquial uses of unheimlich. But if we're not implicitly condemning sexual deviants here, we're also not implicitly singling out left-handed ones—or, more to the point, attributing malice.

Unheimlich is the same word Einstein used for what we translate as "spooky action at a distance," and that we use in describing computer animation that is almost lifelike as falling into the "uncanny valley." It says there's something weird about our contribution, in a context otherwise marked by verisimilitude. It says that if you look at what should be the norm of the situation (which, remember, is Jesus Christ!), we have done something not only wrong in fact, but visibly and disturbingly incongruous. We made it creepy.
"determined by the falsehood of man in a sinister but very palpable manner"? First of all, this is not the order of those modifiers! Parsing syntax correctly matters. And I don't see "sehr greifbar" anywhere, much less "aber" or "sondern" or even "doch sehr greifbar." I see "greifbar mitbestimmt ist," "is concretely codetermined"—and yes, "tangibly" or "palpably" would work for greifbar, but are we really talking about physically putting your hand on something here? No, we're talking about concrete actuality as opposed to mere hypothetical possibility.

And, notice, mitbestimmt, "codetermined," not merely determined by human falsehood alone. Backing up to "fortwährend" gives us "constantly" or "continually" codetermined, and "von unten her" gives us "from below," and Bromiley got those just fine—but they tell us that this is the ongoing human contribution to a situation implicitly also codetermined from above, which his translation does not. And that leaves us with the modifying phrase "auch noch durch des Menschen Lüge unheimlich," and here we see why parsing German syntax matters. The situation is not only constantly concretely codetermined from below; to keep Bromiley's phrasing, it is "codetermined by human falsehood in a concrete yet also disturbing manner."
"in spite of its limitation"? Do you see "trotz" or "dennoch"? Neither do I. The human situation, so codetermined, does indeed stand under this threat—but precisely in its limitation, "ja auch in ihrer Begrenzung" by the superior and stronger reality of God and humanity, not in spite of it. That reality itself imposes the threat—which is what this passage is talking about—over against our situation, to which we have made disturbingly false contributions that cause the situation to be characterized by error.

If the threat were imposed in spite of the limitation of our situation by God's reality, the threat would pertain to an unreal condition from which God had restrained us, but for which we would be punished nonetheless. And because the threat is indeed imposed in that limitation, we should think more about our situation being threatened, not our being itself.
"die and be lost rather than be raised and delivered"? Barth has given us a sentence filled with examples, headed with the framework "should we reckon with the fact that ... or not?" The first four of these are framed internally with "doch nicht," indicating that we have been given to expect otherwise, and that these things not happening would be contradictory. The implied answers are: we should in fact expect this threat, the sword of judgment, our condemnation, and our death from this illness because we are lost to it. And then there's "vielmehr:" and something contrary. "Should we expect that all of these things will not happen, and that instead we will be rescued from death and live?"

But Bromiley rides roughshod over the discourse marker. Instead of positing the last element as alternative to all four that precede it, he posits the single preceding element as including it and peferential over it. In other words, where Bromiley says "shall we not expect to face the eschata instead of being saved from death?" Barth says "shall we expect to live on rather than face the eschata?" Were living on to be the less likely possibility in the context of the question, Barth would have used könnte, not möchte; the question as framed presupposes that being allowed to live on is the preferential option—and then that this preference is itself dubious.
"but two delimitations may be apposite in this context"? There's no "but." And for that matter, there's no "apposite." Barth does say that the long, multipart question he's just asked belongs to eschatology, and Bromiley does correctly get that this means its answer doesn't belong here. But Barth doesn't then say, "but I have two things to say that might still be appropriate and relevant here." Barth says "it belongs somewhere else, and so I'm going to bracket it off (abgrenzen) from this context with two remarks, which are all I'm going to say about it here."

Barth asks his reader whether they should be able to count on something or not, when the thing in each case is framed as a counterfactual negative, suggesting that it is the opposite of what the speaker has been asserting. "The human sitution stands under this threat because we have gotten things horribly wrong. Should we expect it to end up otherwise?" It's important to note that the threat, which as emphasized in the text is the subject here, is in each case an aspect of the end of the world, and the alternative is its continuation.

And this last word about the threat is not yet a word about the doctrine of redemption, which belongs to the next major volume and not to CD IV. In telling us that this question belongs to eschatology, Barth is telling us that the real answer, too, belongs to that next volume and not to this one. What he has to say about it, this "one last word about the threat that should not be missed" in the context of the doctrine of reconciliation, is instead about a misconception of the work of reconciliation as teleological and headed toward a total positive conversion of humanity away from sin and failure. About reconciliation as goal-oriented, and involving the necessary continuation of world history until that goal is reached. Which is what Barth understands by and opposes as apokatastasis, his tweaking of which is the substance of the two following remarks:

First Remark: The World Goes On out of Pure Grace, not Need

Zum Ersten: es könnte sich, wenn dem so sein sollte, wahrhaftig erst recht nur um das Unerwartete der Gnade und ihrer Offenbarung handeln, mit dem man gewiß nicht rechnen, auf das man nur eben als auf ein nicht-verdientes, unbegreifliches Überströmen der Bedeutung, Auswirkung und Tragweite der Wirklichkeit Gottes und des Menschen in Jesus Christus hoffen kann. Gott ist dem Menschen, der die Wahrheit dieser Wirklichkeit dauernd in Unwahrheit verwandeln will, wie keine jener vorläufigen Manifestationen, so erst recht keine ewige Geduld und also Errettung schuldig. Man müßte jenen üblen Versuch und seine eigene Beteiligung daran in Abrede stellen oder verharmlosen, wenn man es sich erlauben wollte, im Blick auf sich selbst wie auf andere oder gar auf alle Menschen die Notwendigkeit einer Kassierung jener Drohung zu postulieren und in diesem Sinn eine «Apokatastasis» oder «Allversöhnung» als das Ziel und Ende aller Dinge in Aussicht zu nehmen und zu behaupten. Es gibt in dieser Sache nichts, auch unter Berufung auf das Kreuz und die Auferstehung Jesu Christi gar nichts zu postulieren! Man soll auch in Gedanken und Sätzen theologisch einleuchtendster Konsequenz nicht an sich reißen wollen, was nur als freie Gabe geschenkt und empfangen werden kann. (KD IV.3.1, 550)

Frost: "For one thing: were that to be the case, it could in fact only truly involve the unexpectedness of grace and its revelation—with which we really cannot reckon, and for which we can only hope as for an umerited, unfathomable overflowing of the meaning, effect, and scope of the reality of God and of humanity in Jesus Christ. God does not in fact owe eternal patience, and therefore deliverance, to the humanity that constantly wishes to change the truth of this reality into untruth—just as God did not owe humanity any of those temporary manifestations. If, in consideration of ourselves or others or even all of humanity, we wanted to allow ourselves to postulate the necessity of the cashiering of that threat, and in this sense to take and assert the prospect of an "apokatastasis" or "total reconciliation" as the goal and end of all things, we would have to deny or downplay that evil effort and our own participation in it. On this matter, there's no "there" there, nothing at all to postulate even with reference to the cross and the resurrection of Jesus Christ! Even in thoughts and sentences of the most brilliant theological consistency, we should not wish to seize upon what can only be given and received as free gift."

And again, for critical comparison, Bromiley's translation:

Bromiley: "First, if this is not the case(1), it can only be a matter of the unexpected work of grace and its revelation on which we cannot count but for which we can only hope(2) as an undeserved and inconceivable overflowing of the significance, operation and outreach of the reality of God and man in Jesus Christ. To the man who persistently tries to change the truth into untruth(3), God does not owe eternal patience and therefore deliverance any more than He does those provisional manifestations(4). We should be denying or disarming that evil attempt and our own participation in it if, in relation to ourselves or others or all men, we were to permit ourselves to postulate a withdrawal of that threat and in this sense to expect or maintain an apokatastasis or universal reconciliation as the goal and end of all things. (5) No such postulate can be made even though we appeal to the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Even though theological consistency might seem to lead our thoughts and utterances most clearly in this direction(6), we must not arrogate to ourselves that which can be given and received only as a free gift." (CD IV.3.1, 477)

He's done better here than above, to be sure. My complaints are softer-edged this time:

"if this is not the case": We had Bromiley adding his own negative emphases to the text above, too. And this corresponds to objection 6 there. So Bromiley asks "shall we not expect to face the eschata instead of being saved from death," and then follows it up with "if we should not expect that, …." Barth, on the other hand, has asked, "shall we expect to live on rather than face the eschata," and follows it up with "if we should expect that, …." So it works out, but the double negative is superfluous—and as individual negatives, misleading.
"on which we cannot count but for which we can only hope": Okay, I don't so much want to complain about Bromiley here, as comment on "mit (etw.) rechnen" as the figure dominating this discussion, and its relation to hoffen.

I have a tendency to go for "reckon with" as a direct cognate, though I also used "are we to expect" where Bromiley used "can we count upon" earlier. But the larger set of implications this figure lives in, as used in contemporary German, is about what we can reliably assume to be the case for the future. Things with which we can "reckon" in this sense are guideposts for our navigation of an otherwise uncertain future. I have certain problems with Barth saying "hope" here, as though hope were more remote and less reliable than legitimate expectation. And I don't think this is a representative usage of "hope" in Barth's work, just a very inconvenient infelicity.

But tweaking Bromiley slightly anyways: while Barth's German is comma-happy and filled with placeholders that get expanded in their own separate clauses, and we can profitably rearrange his sentences to put things in line most of the time, sometimes the breaks should be upheld and even emphasized. And as my translation shows, I think this is one such case.
"To the man who persistently tries to change the truth into untruth ...": Well, that's a nice reference to Paul in Romans, but it loses quite a bit of what Barth is trying to get across in this text. Barth is not comparing abstract truth and falsehood. "Die Wahrheit dieser Wirklichkeit," the truth of this reality, is the truth of the superior and stronger reality of God and humanity (Jesus Christ) as it stands opposed to the human situation characterized by disturbingly-induced error.

And we don't "persistently try," for that matter. Barth only says that we enduringly want, "dauernd ... will" to change the truth of this superior and stronger reality of God and humanity into falsehood. To falsify this reality, presumably in favor of the human situation we have shaped for ourselves in disturbingly erroneous ways. To convert God into the perfecter, not merely the providently gracious supporter, of our world after the Fall.
"... God does not owe eternal patience and therefore deliverance any more than He does those provisional manifestations": OK, this is just a bear of a sentence. The correct parsing for the whole thing is based on the figure schuldig sein [jdm.] [etw.], such that God does not owe (is not "guilty of" = liable for) any (keine) of the named things to humanity, who parenthetically has done what I just talked about above.

The bear of it, at least for me, and the thing Bromiley has left ambiguous, is the function of "those provisional manifestations." In a double-accusative figure, are they another direct object, or another indirect object? Searching reveals that Barth handled "vorläufigen Manifestationen" relative to Christ in some significant depth earlier; they're events of revelation. They are therefore other acts of divine self-giving to humanity, which humanity also does not deserve, and to which God was also not obliged. It helps the reader, especially who may not have handled that earlier locus, if this is made clear instead of left ambiguous. Flipping the sentence around into SVO also helps.
OK, this note is floating because Bromiley just didn't translate the more colloquial part of the following sentence. "Es gibt in dieser Sache nichts," Barth says, before he then says "No such postulate can be made even though we appeal to the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ." Which is to say, emphatically, that there is nothing there, nothing to work from, that this speculative matter has no foundation. There's simply no "there" there. And then he says that the cross and resurrection also don't provide any basis for this speculation about historical teleology.
"Even though theological consistency might seem to lead our thoughts and utterances most clearly in this direction": That's just not what Barth says. And this is another problem with Bromiley's translation when it gets caught up in the standard arguments about Barth and universalism.

We have habitually used this passage to excuse the idea that Barth's assertion (1) that God elects all of humanity in Jesus Christ, regardless of human response, and corresponding assertion (2) that God has reconciled (objectively, in Christ) and is actively reconciling (subjectively, in the Spirit) all of humanity regardless of their response, do not compel us to any claim (3) that the scope of redemption should be similarly total regardless of human response to God's gracious action and will. And we've done it on the dubious notion that Barth is inviting us to assume that he will be theologically inconsistent—and happily so!—when he gets to the next major economic sphere.

Which is crap. Barth is not saying that you aren't allowed to use his own statements to draw logical conclusions, in negation of things he has said earlier that point in this direction! That's a self-defeating interpretation.

It is certainly true that Barth is at all points comparing his developing dogmatics—and the tradition—critically against the standard of revelation in the indirectness of its availability to us. But in CD IV it is most clearly true that Barth relies heavily on everything he's already done to this point! Whatever critical nuances he adds, this is the logical ... I don't want to say "endpoint," because there was supposed to be an entire further volume on redemption, but it's all been building up to (and beyond) this point.

Barth is saying that systems of ideas and propositions that might seem profoundly illuminating in their thoroughgoing support for historical teleology do not amount to a reason to expect it. And if you'd been paying attention this whole time, you'd have noticed that Barth undermines the conclusions of such systems every chance he gets. Barth has been fighting the idea of historical teleology from the very beginning, because it is inconsistent with what he finds in the Word of God. You cannot logically draw historical teleology as a conclusion from Barth's doctrine of election, or his doctrine of creation, or his doctrine of reconciliation, without having made many, many mistakes along the way!

But the broader point here is that no systematic theology can prove conclusions it draws on the basis of their logical consistency in the terms of its system. Intrasystematic validity proves nothing; many valid arguments are in fact unsound. And expectations of historical teleology rest on premises corrupted by human falsehood, which is the entire problem with theological naturalism: it makes for things that look valid to us, but are fundamentally unsound because they're based on falsehoods we have crafted. No appeal that relies on such foundations, even if it seeks to unite them with the proper standard of the cross and resurrection of Christ, will be granted on its merits—because it has none. We made it up!

Now, how is this part usually read? As the basis for a "hopeful universalism" and nothing more. As the basis for the idea that Barth is telling us we may hope, remotely, for a thing that we may not reasonably expect because it is highly unlikely.

What is Barth saying instead? That we may hope for a grace that we have no right to expect on the basis of merit. That we may hope for a grace that we are not allowed to reduce to a principle. That we may hope for a sovereign act of God, but we may not treat it like a procedural mechanism—much less one ordered to the perfection of the fallen world as we have concretely codetermined it by our constant and disturbing falsehood.

We are not owed an escape from the consequences of our actions. We are not owed patience in the face of our failure. We are not owed, we have no claim upon, any action of God, any self-revelation of God, anything at all, other than the fulfillment of that threat, the falling of the sword of judgment, our condemnation and death from this illness because we are lost to it. Barth has spent most of this part-volume making sure we know that! Making sure we know just how screwed we are as humans, by our own most grievous fault.

And so when it comes to the doctrine of apokatastasis, the eschatological restoration, Barth's argument here is that we have no right to treat it "as the goal and end of all things," and particularly as the logically necessary outcome of the process of reconciliation. We have no right to treat God as on the hook for this outcome, to imagine God as obligated to do the work to get us all to that desired state before history can be allowed to end, so that we won't have to face the condemnation we so richly deserve.

What is nowhere in view here is the question of soteriological scope. There is no question here of whether God will get all or only some to that desired end state. There is no allowance made that some will get there even if others do not. The objection is not to a total-scope doctrine of reconciliation, much less a total-scope doctrine of redemption. Barth's objection here is to our hubris in treating the total scope of reconciliation as leading inexorably to our getting away with the Fall, and our lives lived in confirmation of it, and our worlds manufactured in destruction of our neighbors. Barth's objection is to any idea that reconciliation is ordered to the benefit of our evil, to any form of compromise with it.

And how did we make this mistake? By assuming that every time Barth says "apokatastasis," we can substitute "universalism" as though it were a simple claim of total scope, rather than something Barth associates with a very particular mechanism: historical teleology. Total eventual reconciliation as a goal of history in its continuation, and therefore a necessity binding upon God in order to bring the eschaton. Worse, in Barth's terms, total eventual reconciliation as the sine qua non of total redemption, on the externally imported and contradictory assertion that Barth must hold damnation open for those who are not finally reconciled. It's garbage, just like combining naturalism and the cross.

What Barth is saying as the first bracketing remark here is: do not expect teleology; hope for gift. And do not posit merit, because we've got none.

On to the second remark!

Second Remark: We Should Remain Open To A Greater Gift Than This

Zum Anderen: Es gibt kein Recht, es sich zu verbieten oder verboten sein zu lassen, sich dafür offen zu halten, daß in der Wirklichkeit Gottes und des Menschen in Jesus Christus immer noch mehr, als wir erwarten dürfen und also auch das höchst Unerwartete der Beseitigung jener letzten Drohung, daß in der Wahrheit dieser Wirklichkeit auch die überschwängliche Verheißung der endlichen Errettung aller Menschen enthalten sein möchte. Noch deutlicher gesagt: es gibt kein Recht und keinen Grund, sich dafür nicht offen zu halten. Weist die überlegene, die verkehrte menschliche Situation jetzt schon so kräftig begrenzende Wirklichkeit, lassen wir ihre Wahrheit auch nur einen Augenblick unverfälscht gelten, nicht eindeutig in die Richtung des Werkes einer in der Tat ewigen göttlichen Geduld und Errettung und also einer «Apokatastasis» oder «Allversöhnung»? Verbietet sie uns bestimmt, damit zu rechnen, als ob wir einen Anspruch darauf hätten, als ob das nicht in seiner letzten höchsten Gestalt das Werk Gottes wäre, auf das der Mensch keinen Anspruch hat noch erheben kann, so gebietet sie uns doch wohl noch bestimmter, eben darauf – wie wir es ja schon diesseits dieser letzten Möglichkeit mit Grund tun dürfen – zu hoffen, darum zu beten: in aller Zurückhaltung, aber auch in aller Bestimmtheit darauf zu hoffen und darum zu beten, daß Allem, was für das Gegenteil sprechen und definitiv sprechen könnte, zum Trotz «die Guttaten des Herrn noch nicht aus sein möchten», daß er, entsprechend dem, daß «sein Erbarmen jeden Morgen neu ist», «nicht auf ewig verstoßen» werde (Klagel. 3, 22 f., 31). (KD IV.3.1, 550–51)

Now, this time I don't have any long enumerated list of complaints to register against Bromiley's translation. (And just as well; I'm exhausted and so are you.) So I'm going to give it to you first:

Bromiley: "Secondly, there is no good reason why we should forbid ourselves, or be forbidden, openness to the possibility that in the reality of God and man in Jesus Christ there is contained much more than we might expect and therefore the supremely unexpected withdrawal of that final threat, i.e., that in the truth of this reality there might be contained the super-abundant promise of the final deliverance of all men. To be more explicit, there is no good reason why we should not be open to this possibility. If for a moment we accept the unfalsified truth of the reality which even now so forcefully limits the perverted human situation, does it not point plainly in the direction of the work of a truly eternal divine patience and deliverance and therefore of an apokatastasis or universal reconciliation? If we are certainly forbidden to count on this as though we had a claim to it, as though it were not supremely the work of God to which man can have no possible claim, we are surely commanded the more definitely to hope and pray for it as we may do already on this side of this final possibility, i.e., to hope and pray cautiously and yet distinctly that, in spite of everything which may seem quite conclusively to proclaim the opposite, His compassion should not fail, and that in accordance with His mercy which is "new every morning" He "will not cast off for ever" (La. 3:22f., 31)." (CD IV.3.1, 477–78)

What Bromiley has done here is essentially the German text with vaseline on the lens: a fuzzier, softer-edged version but not especially distorted in any one spot. So let's just clean off the lens a bit:

Frost: "For another: there is no justification for forbidding ourselves, or allowing ourselves to be forbidden, from holding open the possibility that in the reality of God and of humanity in Jesus Christ there is always even more than we might expect, and therefore also that highest unexpectedness of the elimination of that final threat; that in the truth of this reality, the exuberant promise of the eventual deliverance of all humanity might also be included. Said more clearly: there is no justification and no basis for not holding this possibility open. If for even a moment we allow its truth to apply undistorted, does not the superior reality, which has already so powerfully limited the perverse human situation, clearly point in the direction of the work of an actually eternal divine patience and deliverance, and therefore an "apokatastasis" or "total reconciliation"? If we are decisively forbidden from reckoning with that as though we had any claim upon it, as though it were not in its final and highest form the work of God, upon which humanity neither has nor can make a claim, so we are still more decisively bidden to hope and to pray for exactly that—as we may indeed already justifiably do on this side of that final possibility: with all self-restraint but also with all determination to hope upon and to pray for this: that, in spite of everything that could speak, and speak definitively, for the opposite reality, "the good deeds of the Lord might not yet be over"; that, in accordance with the fact that "God's mercy is new every morning," God will "not repudiate eternally" (Lamentations 3:22–23, 31)."

So: what does the text say?

Remember that this is about the threat under which our human situation before God after the Fall stands by comparison with the situation as it is (and ought to be for us) in Jesus Christ. Barth has not, in the previous paragraph, explicitly ruled out our expectation of what he here tells us we may, can, and must hope for. The question here is not about historical teleology. It is about whether that superior reality, in which our judgment is constituted by our difference from it, only contains the expected threat of sentencing and not also something vastly greater.

Certainly historical teleology is not that vastly greater thing for which we may hope. But if you've been reading along from IV.1, you know that Barth insists that in Jesus Christ there is vastly more! In Jesus Christ there is the fullness of God for us, of God with us, and so also of us with God in ways that form the basis for reconciliation as a once-for-all and constantly-upon-each restoration of our creaturely capacity toward our nature as God's responsible partner in action.

And this is the massive disservice done by "Barth and universalism" readings of this passage at the end of IV.3.1 that completely skip over IV.3.2 and all of the material of The Christian Life that was the original context for Barth's doctrine of baptism in IV.4. You aren't supposed to get from here to redemption!

This is not the end of CD IV; this is the midpoint of the third part-volume, in which Barth covers the third of three tasks of the doctrine of reconciliation, which is that the thing accomplished in Christ (and fully covered in IV.1 and .2) now applies to us. The two halves of this third part-volume handle two halves of a dialectic, and this passage therefore concludes the negative half of a task that now proceeds to the positive—which is not conditioned by that negativity and in fact overcomes it! As claimed at the beginning of this part-volume,

"The third problem of the doctrine of reconciliation is therefore simply prescribed for us and submitted to us by the fact that reconciliation also makes itself known when it happens. We look forward for a moment to the whole of the new chapter now opening up: the justification and sanctification of humanity includes, in itself, the vocation of humanity (as, by the way, the arrogance and laziness of humanity include, in themselves, its falsehood!). The assembly and establishment of the community include, in themselves, its mission. The faith and life of the Christian include, in themselves, the Christian hope." (KD IV.3.1, 8–9; cf. CD IV.3.1, 10)

We are in, and really at the end of, that parenthetical about human arrogance, laziness, and falsehood. We are not to expect a jump from there to redemption; we are to look forward to the things Barth has packed into IV.3.2: the vocation of humanity, the mission of the community, and the hope of the Christian, as the products of reconciliation over against our falsehood.

So in that light, what does the text say? Nobody is allowed to prohibit us, not even we ourselves, from hoping in Christ beyond our falsehood and the threat of destruction it has earned us. If we are indeed pointed in the direction of a total eventual reconciliation, a restoration of all things, here in this context and not leaping beyond it to eschatology, then while we may not treat it "as the goal and end of all things," or claim it as though we and our worlds had a right to it as our confirmation instead of our condemnation, that very specific forbidding leaves us bidden to hope and to pray—and for Barth that means, particularly in the coming volume, to work!—for the grace of the free and loving God who in this action has become the founder of our peace in Jesus Christ, and whose work in this action of reconciliation is an affirmation of our created being in all the ways our falsehood is a repudiation of it.

Reconciliation does not point beyond itself to redemption. That is a separate discussion of hope. Reconciliation points from the "God with us" to the "we with God" that is included in its accomplishment for us, without us. And because it does so, it gives us a hope this side of the eschaton. A hope to be desired and prayed for and worked towards because we already see, in Christ, that our falsehood and its determination of our situation are limited in their scope. We see, in the cross and resurrection, not that we are destined for perfection along a historical path, but that instead by the grace of God we have not been allowed to give our destructive will the final word.

We see that it is not God's patience and deliverance that are temporary, limited in the face of eternal judgment, but exactly the opposite: that God's patient deliverance is eternal, is fundamentally God's will, in ways that give us hope for life in this world beyond our falsehood and failure. Whatever will be true at the eschaton—which will not wait for our perfection, and which will involve our condemnation along a line that doesn't divide these people from those, but divides each of us right down the middle as simultaneously elected and rejecting—here and now in history we see that the work of God is Jesus Christ for us, and not some abstract eternal source of arbitrary decrees prior to and limiting his effectiveness.