The joyful voice of the creature

In Church Dogmatics III/1, Barth discusses 'creation as justification'. Creation is good, really good, because it is good in God's sight. But why is that so? Barth is clear that we do not find the goodness, the rightness - the justification - of creation in our experience of the world, not even our good experience:

Created order has what we may call its brighter side. But its justification by its Creator and His self-disclosure is not bound up with this brighter side. It is not connected with the fact that the sun shines, that there are blossoms and fruits, pleasing shapes, colours and sounds, realities and groups of realities which preserve and foster life, purposeful relationships and order, intelligible and serviceable elements and powers, which enlighten the created mind of man, speak to his heart, and in some way correspond with his will for life and foster it.

This brighter side of creation is not enough to justify the creature, to render it really good. After all, we acknowledge in referring to a brighter side that there is a darker side, which might push us to exactly the opposite conclusion. But this not mean that the beauty and order of creation is meaningless. It simply means that its meaning can only be really understood, and placed on a secure foundation in our knowledge, in the light of God's revelation, the covenant brought to fulfillment in Jesus Christ:

An affirmative judgement on creation has its foundation and rightful place. The recognition of its direct and immanent goodness is demanded from the man whom the Creator in His revelation has confronted with Himself. 

Note that it is really the immanent goodness of creation which is to be recognised here. The beauty and order that we see in creation really do speak of its goodness in God's sight. Creation speaks goodness in itself, and thus witnesses to God's goodness all the time; this voice, however, is only heard and heard rightly when God is known in Christ, and the covenant is known as the meaning of creation. 

The joyful voice of the creature rings out where the self-revelation of God has been apprehended.

Quotes from CD III/1, 370-1.

Reader Response: Church Dogmatics ch III (4)

In support of his sixth point about Scripture, Barth offers some brief notes on two key Biblical passages, 2 Timothy 3:14-17 and 2 Peter 1:19-21.  Since these passages feature prominently in much discussion of the doctrine of Scripture, it seems worth pausing to see what Barth does with them.  Note that he is not here offering a full exposition, but a reading of these two important Scriptures in support of his theological conclusions.

First, Barth points out that both passages have to do primarily with the Old Testament, "but according to the fundamental meaning of the two authors in whom they are found, the expressions can and ought and must be applied to all the witnesses of revelation and therefore to the New Testament witness as well." (504) It is helpful to have this stated up front; I think many treatments of these verses (especially the 2 Timothy passage) make this move surreptitiously, or perhaps just presuppose it.  But there is actually an important theological move being made when we class the NT witness alongside the OT - we are claiming that they are both the same thing, united in being a witness to Christ.  It is because both these passages speak of the OT in terms of its witness to Christ that it is possible to make this move here.

When it comes to 2 Timothy 3:14-17, it is obviously striking to Barth that the text has both a backward and a forward reference.  Timothy is pointed back to his childhood acquaintance with the Scriptures and reminded of their formative influence on him.  But then he is encouraged to look ahead, to what the Scriptures are able to do in terms of completing his formation and giving him all he needs to serve in the church.  "Scripture was able and it will be able..." (504) - that corresponds to Barth's motif of recollection and expectation.  Timothy is to continue in the Scriptures, in recollection of what they have shown themselves to be for him, and in expectation that they will show this again.

In the centre of this recollection and expectation stands the crucial sentence: all Scripture is inspired (or breathed out) by God.  Barth understands this to mean that "all, that is the whole of Scripture is - literally: 'of the Spirit of God,', i.e., given and filled and ruled by the Spirit of God, and actively outbreathing and spreading abroad and making known the Spirit of God." (504)  Or, in other words, "...the Spirit of God is before and above and in Scripture..." (504).  This is quite obviously a broader understanding of what is implied by the word usually translated 'inspired'.  On the one hand, Barth does not want to get pulled into a debate about the nature of inspiration - he sees the statement as "an underlining and delimiting of the inaccessible mystery of the free grace in which the Spirit is present and active before and above and in the Bible", and therefore not as something that can be parsed as a precise doctrine.  On the other hand, he is unwilling to restrict this description of the relationship between God and Scripture to a particular point, as if it had only to do with the production of the texts that we have -  he sees it as describing also (and the word 'also' is important here) the ongoing relationship of the Spirit to the Bible.  It is on the basis of this ongoing work that Timothy can approach the Bible with expectation that it will again be to him what it has been in the past.

The treatment of 2 Peter 1:19-21 is much briefer, and essentially makes the same points: we are called to continue to be attentive to the prophetic witness because of its relationship to the Holy Spirit.  To my mind, Barth does not engage as much as I would like him to with the fact that these verses clearly do lay great stress on the Spirit's role in the production of Scripture, which seems to push back a little on his emphasis in his notes on 2 Timothy 3.  The other fundamental point made here is about the exposition of Scripture: we must "allow it to expound itself, or... to control and determine our exposition" (505).  This is because it comes from the Spirit and not men, and therefore is not open to our manipulation - and here, perhaps, we see the link again to Barth's emphasis on the ongoing presence of the Spirit in Holy Scripture.

"The decisive centre to which the two passages point is in both instances indicated by a reference to the Holy Spirit, and indeed in such a way that He is described as the real author of what is stated or written in Scripture." (505)  Barth wants to be clear that this does not mean that the human authors were not real authors - "there can be no question of ignoring their auctoritas and therefore their humanity" - but nevertheless "they speak in the place and under the commission of Him who sent them" (505).  For Barth, the theopneustia, the inspiration, of these authors consists precisely in this commission.  In their human freedom, they think and speak and write in obedience to their commission, and therefore under the lordship of God.  They function, then, as true witnesses.  This is not to be restricted to their writing, but describes their being in so far as they are commissioned witnesses to revelation.  "In what they have written they exist visibly and audibly before us in all their humanity, chosen and called as witnesses of revelation, claimed by God and obedient to God, true men, speaking in the name of the true God, because they have heard His voice as we cannot hear it, as we can hear it only through their voices." (505-6)

It is in recollection that in their voices the voice of God has been heard, and in expectation that this will be the case again, that the people of God are called to be the people of Holy Scripture.

Reader Response: Church Dogmatics ch III (3)

I mentioned that Barth initially makes six points as he begins to navigate the meaning of 'Scripture as the Word of God'.  The first we looked at in detail, but can perhaps summarise it as follows:

1. We are directed to the canon of writings which has been recognised by the church.  However, the canon does not derive its authority from the church, but from the object to which it bears witness (God's revelation); for this reason, whilst we are to hear and respect the church in its description of the canon, ultimately we can only regard this description as having limited and relative authority.  The real and absolute authority belongs to God himself. (473-481)

Briefly, the rest of the list is as follows:

2. When we talk about Scripture, we are talking about the Old and New Testaments, which find their unity in the object of their witness (namely, God's revelation). (481-485)  This section deals in the language of expectation and recollection which is so important to Barth's doctrine of Scripture, on which more below.  The main point here, though, is about the unity of the Scriptures, which corresponds to "the unity and holiness of God in his revelation" (482), a unity which can only be perceived when one is grasped by revelation, which is to say, by Jesus Christ.  Barth is therefore suspicious of any and all attempts to present a schematic or system to display this unity.  It will be seen in encounter with Christ or not at all.

3. The Bible itself establishes the doctrine of Holy Scripture by reference to the prophetic and apostolic office held by the original witnesses. (485-492). Scripture bears a general and implicit witness to its own authority by virtue of the fact that here and here only do we find witness to God's revelation (this is not quite a circular argument; it requires the self-witness of God by the Holy Spirit).  But it also explicitly speaks of its own authority by reference to "certain specific men" who "stand within the Bible" (486).  Passively, these men saw and heard God's revelation; actively they were commissioned to proclaim it (490).  In them - by virtue of their office, and not any human quality they possess - the circle of revelation is already opened up to include humanity.  I found this really helpful; I think in my tradition the prophets and apostles are played down in importance, with the Bible as a book played up instead.  But actually it is the prophets and apostles in their relation to revelation who make the Bible, literally.

4. Because the Bible includes within its sphere the prophets and apostles, there can be no getting at the content of revelation except in the form of their witness. (492-495). It is no use trying to extract some sort of kernel of pure revelation from the husk of the prophetic and apostolic witness.  Nor can we somehow directly access the history of revelation that stands behind this witness.  Because revelation is contingent and genuinely historical, not some general principle, we can only receive it in the historical form of this first witness, in their words.

5. These original witnesses, because of their office and role, are distinctly set apart from the rest of the church, and their witness is really Holy Scripture because it stands over against the whole church as an authoritative foundation. (495-502). It is of course true that Scripture is a set of human documents, with all the historical, cultural, and personal contingency which that implies.  In this sense, the Bible stands in continuity with all other human documents.  But if we read it only in this way, we miss its essential character as witness.  By virtue of this witness, Scripture "too can and must - not as though it were Jesus Christ, but in the same serious sense as Jesus Christ - be called the Word of God: the Word of God in the word of man, if we are going to put it accurately." (500)  Barth explicitly develops the Chalcedonian parallel here: the Bible, without ceasing to be wholly a human book, is also wholly a divine book, by virtue of the revelation to which it bears witness.  This means there can be no question of a series of sources of revelation, or of the possibility of placing the Bible alongside other church documents or preaching.  It stands over against and above all of them, as genuine holy.  Incidentally, Barth has things to say to those who want to oppose a 'living faith' in the church to a 'dead letter' in the Bible: in fact, the church only lives and thrives when it is wholly under the Word of God in Scripture.  "Death usually reigns in the church" when this is absent (502).

6. Because the authority of Holy Scripture is ultimately the authority of God's own revelation to which Scripture bears witness, we cannot claim any control over this authority, but can only live as those who have heard and expect to hear again God's Word in these texts. (502-506)  For Barth, this derives from the structure of Scripture itself, which is characterised by expectation and recollection (see 2 above).  It also derives from the freedom of God in revelation, and the nature of the texts as witness.  They can only point to revelation, testify to it; they cannot in and of themselves bring it about that revelation occurs in the present.  Therefore the whole of theology, and indeed the whole preaching and worship of the church, "circles around" the event of God's revelation, unable of itself to make this revelation present but always living in memory and expectation of it.  This, perhaps, is the life of faith.

That last point is alarming to many evangelicals, who want Barth to give a straight answer.  They hold up the Bible and ask: well, is it the Word of God or not?  All of this talk about revelation coming or not, circling around - how does that not just muddy the waters, diminish our confidence in Scripture?

I hope that the rest of the context here shows that Barth absolutely does want to pin us to the Bible, to secure for Scripture the place of unique authority, the one place where God is to be sought and found.  But I think Barth's return question to the anxious evangelical might be: why do you need to pin this down in this way?  Do you not trust God - the faithful God to whom that Bible in your hand bears witness?  Why do you need to be in possession of God's Word, rather than always receiving it?

I think there are lots of things going on here which cause the different perspectives - it would be good, for example, to work in the doctrine of illumination here and the role of the Spirit, and see if we couldn't show that in slightly different conceptual ways both Barth and the conservative evangelical want to safeguard the same things.  But I think there is a lot in Barth that we could helpfully learn from here.

Reader Response: Church Dogmatics ch III (2)

The next subsection carries the title 'Scripture as the Word of God', and opens with a helpful summary of where we've got to so far: "If what we hear in Scripture is witness, a human expression of God's revelation, then from what we have already said, what we hear in the witness itself is more than witness, what we hear in the human expression is more than a human expression.  What we hear is revelation, and therefore the very Word of God." (473)  How is this the case?  Well, put a pin in that question.  First of all, Barth wants to clarify and expand our understanding of Scripture as a witness, and he initially does so in a list of (I think) 6 points.  We'll only get to the first one today, but hopefully the others will move along a bit faster!

Point 1 clarifies that when we are talking about Holy Scripture, we are talking about the canon of books acknowledged in the church.  It is not for us as private individuals to go around making judgements about the scope and extent of the canon; rather, we receive and acknowledge the canon that our spiritual forebears have recognised.  Barth is at pains to point out, however, that this certainly does not mean that the church historically had the right to decide the canon.  The church cannot "give the Canon to itself." (473). It can only recognise that which is given it by God, and therefore all its decisions on this matter, whilst important, are nonetheless merely human and therefore to some extent provisional decisions.  We do well to listen to the judgement of the church in this matter, but we don't believe the Scripture because of the church's judgement.  "When we adopt the Canon of the Church, we do not say that the Church itself, but that the revelation which underlies and controls the Church, attests these witnesses and not others as the witnesses of revelation and therefore as canonical for the Church." (474)

For those unfamiliar with the Church Dogmatics, just to note that if you ever read it you'll find some in a normal typeface, and some sections in a much smaller font.  The main line of thought is presented in the larger and more accessible text, but the detailed argument, exegesis, and citations in the smaller text.  The small text parts of this section are largely historical.  Barth notes that "the establishment of the Canon has a long and complicated history." (473)  Certainly it was controversial in the early centuries, and became so again at the Reformation.  Against the Roman view that the authority of Scripture derived from the church - Barth notes that some Roman apologists even argued that Aesop's Fables would be Scripture if the church so declared (475) - the Reformers saw the role of the church as like the Samaritan woman of John 5, who merely directed those in the town to Jesus; the church directs people to the canon, but does not make the canon.  However, at the same time, the Reformers almost unanimously wanted to remove the Apocrypha from the canon, and some wanted to reopen the question further: Luther had serious doubts about various New Testament books (Hebrews, James, Jude, Revelation), and he was far from alone (476-7).

Barth notes helpfully that even where the question of the canon is not regarded as open, there can be - and perhaps almost always is - a functional 'canon within the canon', where greater stress is laid on one part of the Scriptures than another.  Perhaps the New Testament is privileged over the Old, or the Gospels over the Epistles (think of the treatment of the Gospel Book in liturgical churches).  It is useful to repeatedly ask "whether we do not neglect essential parts of the witness of revelation to the detriment of our knowledge of the Word of God" (478) even when the whole canon is formally acknowledged.

Nevertheless, for Barth the question of the canon must remain at least in principle open.  He considers that the attempts of Protestant Orthodoxy in the 17th Century to definitely close the question end up circling around to the old Roman answer: that the church has the authority to decide the canon.  For Barth this will not do.  Whilst there may be no question of the church - and certainly no question of any individual - actually changing the canon, to preserve the truth that its authority derives not from human pronouncements but from the Word of God to which it bears witness, the question must not be in principle closed.

What is Barth trying to do here, and why this disturbing conclusion?  I think here, as throughout volume I of the Church Dogmatics, Barth is trying to walk a narrow path of Reformed theology, with a deep and dangerous ditch on either side: to the one side, Roman Catholicism; to the other, Neo-Protestantism, what we might call liberal theology.  To say that the church defines the canon will lead us off to Rome; ultimate authority then shifts from the Word of God in Scripture to the church as an institution.  For Barth the great peril here is that the church ceases to listen to God, and becomes merely engaged in a conversation with itself.  On the other hand, the individual may decide the functional canon for themselves, or perhaps a group of individuals or congregations will do so.  This is Neo-Protestantism in the sense that it makes human beings the judge of what must be received as God's Word.  Whilst the one ditch is institutional, and the other feels very free and individualistic, they are basically the same error.  In both cases, authority derives from somewhere other than God.  That is why Barth has to leave the question open: to demonstrate that the only person who can close the question is God, just as the only person who can cause the witness of Scripture to decisively rule in the church and in the individual life is God himself.

Reader Response: Church Dogmatics ch III (1)

Just a reminder that we're in Church Dogmatics I/2, and numbers in brackets are page numbers.

The heading of the first section of the chapter is 'Scripture as a witness to divine revelation'.  For some, alarm bells will already be ringing - is this not what we've heard about Barth?  That he pries apart Scripture and revelation, such that the Bible is merely a witness to revelation rather than revelation itself?

Well, try to quiet the alarm bells briefly, and let's consider what it is that he means by this.  Essentially, it is a question of the appropriate hermeneutic to bring to Holy Scripture.

Firstly, let's put this section in context.  Barth reminds us that the purpose of theology is to ask whether the proclamation of the church corresponds to God's revelation, "or, concretely, the question of the agreement of this proclamation with Holy Scripture as the Word of God." (457)  The preceding sections have looked at God's revelation as the presupposition of both Scripture and proclamation - its objectivity in Jesus Christ, its subjective opening by the Holy Spirit - but this has already been drawn from the Scriptures.  That is to say, for Barth there is no getting behind Scripture to an idea of revelation that does not itself derive from Scripture.  The Bible is established as a sign that points beyond itself to "a superior authority confronting the proclamation of the Church" - and that authority is the Word of God.  The Bible "has attested to us the lordship of the triune God in the incarnate Word by the Holy Spirit."

So when Barth says that the Bible is a witness to divine revelation, he means first of all that the existence of the Bible points to the God who stands over and above the preaching of the church.  It is on this basis that theology can, and indeed must, continually ask the central question of church proclamation: does your preaching conform to Scripture?  Does it attest, therefore, the lordship of the triune God?

But there is an "undoubted limitation" introduced here in Barth's view of Scripture: "we distinguish the Bible as such from revelation.  A witness is not absolutely identical with that to which it witnesses." (463)  Now here we see a classic Barthian move, a piece of dialectical theology.  Because within a few lines of writing that we distinguish the Bible as such from revelation, he is able to write that "in this limitation the Bible is not distinguished from revelation.  It is simply revelation as it comes to us..."  What is going on here?  Essentially Barth is calling us to pay attention to the way in which the Bible is revelation to us.  It is a human word, multiple human words in fact, which attest to something beyond themselves.  The Bible is not revelation as it came once to the prophets and apostles; but as the word and witness of those prophets and apostles, the Bible is nonetheless revelation to us who were not there.

At this point I can sense the impatience. Why all this 'yes, and no'? Why not just be plain and unequivocal in declaring that the Bible is God's word?

I think there are a number of things going on here, although only one is really developed in this context. Briefly, I think Barth is seeking to safeguard the doctrine of Scripture against what we might call the Quranic error.  For Muslims, the Quran is eternal, timeless - and this causes some theological difficulty in describing its relationship to God.  In Christian theology, it is not the Bible but the Lord Jesus who is the eternal Word of God, and he is this because and as he is himself fully God.  So in a sense Barth's position is about the uniqueness of Christ.

A second point, again more my reflection than anything Barth explicitly discusses here, is that redemptive and revelatory history really matters for our view of God.  Barth does not want revelation so bound up in the pages of Scripture that it is no longer about what God has done and said in the history of the covenant, and especially in the Lord Jesus Christ.

But the main point he actually develops here is, as noted above, a hermeneutical one.  Because Scripture is a human word, Barth insists, it must be read as a human word, in all its historical and cultural specificity.  And yet, because it is witness, it must be read not as an enclosed artifact, but for the sake of the subject matter to which it bears witness.  Here he clearly has in view much of the critical, academic reading of Scripture, which wants to ask all sorts of questions about the prophet Isaiah, or the apostle Paul, and their times and circumstances, and even the nature of their faith - but does not want to ask or to be answered about the one thing Isaiah and Paul et al actually want to talk about, which is God in Christ.  Barth is making the point that because the Bible as a human word is a word of witness to God, we are not genuinely reading it as a human word unless we allow it to tell us about God.  Paying attention to the Bible means paying attention to the God of whom the Bible speaks.

For Barth this is not some special biblical hermeneutic.  It is just hermeneutics in general.  To listen to someone is to listen to what they are saying, and to allow what they are saying to take control.  We do not respect anyone if we receive what they are saying as material to think about their character or whatever but don't allow the subject of which they are speaking to have any impact upon us.  It is perhaps characteristic of us sinners that we typically hear "as though we know already, and can partly tell ourselves what we are to hear.  Our supposed listening is in fact a strange mixture of hearing and our own speaking, and in accordance with the usual rule it is most likely that our own speaking will be the really decisive event." (470).  It is only if we really pay attention to the subject that we can even partly escape this sinful hermeneutic, and that is equally true of any human word.

The unique thing that is brought by the biblical witness to this hermeneutic is not, then, that it requires a special way of reading.  Rather it is that it demands the attentive reading which is actually due to every human word - and unlike every other human word, it does not only demand or request our attention.  "God's revelation in the human word of Holy Scripture not only wants but can make itself said and heard." (471). In the Bible, human witnesses show themselves to have been utterly overcome by the subject matter; they do not in fact speak of themselves or their circumstances, but they only bear witness to God in Christ.  And in our reading of the Bible, this same 'gripping' can occur, when God himself causes us to see and hear his revelation in the words of the prophets and apostles.

This account will be developed further as we go.  But already I hope we are seeing, whatever we think of Barth's account in detail, something of the powerful expectation of encounter with God in the Scriptures.  That for me is the most exciting thing about his explication of this doctrine, and it has certainly shaped by own understanding and practice in beneficial ways.

Thoughts? Questions?

Reader Response: Church Dogmatics ch III (intro)

Some years back (checks number of years, slightly shocked to find that it's 6 years) I ran a couple of series of posts engaging in a bit more detail than I normally do with some big books.  I looked at Bonhoeffer's Ethics, and chapter VII of Barth's Church Dogmatics, the chapter which looks particularly at the doctrine of election.  I called the series 'Reader Response' to try to highlight that, although I would be attempting to explain what the 'big book' was actually saying, I was also going to include some of my own response to it, and thoughts about how it might inform church, theology, and Christian life today.

I'm going to try to resurrect that concept, albeit with significantly less time for reading at the moment than I had back in the day.  So whereas the previous series was a weekly effort, this one will be more irregular, and might sometimes end up looking at quite small chunks in each post.  We'll see how we go.

I'm going to be reading Church Dogmatics chapter III, which you'd find in volume I/2.  It is Barth's main treatment of the doctrine of Scripture.  Now, if conservative evangelicals know anything about Barth, it is that he is dangerously weak, if not actually heretical, on Scripture and its authority.  I think one of the things that gives this impression is the sheer size of Barth's treatment.  This chapter occupies nearly 300 pages, and is situated in an even larger discussion of the nature of revelation which takes up the whole of volumes I/1 and I/2.  There is a suspicion, I think, that anybody who needs to take this many pages to explain their view of Scripture is probably making things deliberately complex.  After all, doesn't it just boil down to the question of whether it's the Word of God or not?

Interestingly, for Barth that simply isn't the question, or even a question.  He takes it for granted that the dogmatic theologian, standing within and for the church, stands on the acknowledged reality of the word of God in Scripture.  To ask the apologetic question - is the Bible the word of God? - is to remove oneself from this position, if only hypothetically and for the purposes of discussion.  That isn't what Barth thinks he is doing.  For many contemporary evangelicals, the apologetic question is acute, and it is therefore hard to imagine a doctrine of Scripture that does not really engage with it.  But perhaps Barth can push us here to see things we wouldn't otherwise see.

For Barth the question is more 'how is the Bible the word of God?', boiling down into the practical question of what it looks like to live under the authority of the word of God in Scripture.  I hope that over the next few weeks we'll be able to see whether Barth's answers have anything to teach us.

A theology of self-service checkouts

Karl Barth said that 'in its basic form, humanity is fellow-humanity' (CD III/2, 285).  This claim is not difficult to defend from Scripture.  The creation narratives point out that it is not good for the man to be alone; human being, it seems, requires other human being in order to make it whole.  This is a point which goes well beyond the context of marriage, although that is a particular example of 'fellow-humanity'.  For Barth, of course, the primary evidence that humanity simply is fellow-humanity is derived from the Lord Jesus.  Christ came to be with us.  If real humanity is seen in Jesus, and only in Jesus, then what we see is humanity as being-with, humanity as fellow-humanity.

We see more than that.  If true humanity is seen in Jesus, then true humanity is being-with-in-service.  Christ's service of his people, his sacrificial love for them, was not something extra added to his humanity; it was a display of true humanity as that true humanity can only fully exist when energised by the presence of God.  Real humanity is not whole and entire to itself, but is oriented in service towards others.

Note that this is, for Barth, the 'basic form' of humanity.  We tend to think of the individual first, defining him or her within his or her own limits.  Only then do we look outward.  Being-with becomes something the human, complete in himself, does (or does not do); it is extrinsic.  This is doubly the case when it comes to being-with-in-service.  But this is not a true representation of humanity as we are taught to think of it in Jesus.  In actual fact, the self-complete human of our imagining is barely human at all; I said that we think of him or her within his or her own limits; but in fact in a crucial way this imaginary human - the human we like to think of ourselves as being - is free of limits.  He is whole and entire in himself.  He is a sphere which may come into contact with other spheres.  Whereas the true human is limited, and thus defined; he has shaped edges, and those shapes are contoured to the shapes of others.  Being-with is not a thing he chooses (or declines to choose); it is who and what he is.

Which brings me to self-service checkouts.  Self-service checkouts, and other self-service machines, are everywhere now.  It is very difficult to see a human being in my bank - the robot will deal with you.  Our local Sainsbury's has just taken out half it's old (manned) checkouts to replace them with more self-service machines.  Part of the motivation for the current rail strikes in the UK is apparently the threat that ticket office staff will be replaced with machine.

I confess, I make use of self-service checkouts.  They are quick and convenient (except when they aren't, because they go wrong, or the person in front of you in the queue doesn't understand the system).  But to a theological view of humanity, the self-service checkout is at the least an unfortunate development.  Anything that removes an element of being-with from our everyday tasks, usually in the name of efficiency, helps to conceal from me a central truth about myself: that I need other people, not merely to help me achieve my goals, but to be human.  The same sort of thing could be said about other trends in working life at the moment - the increase in remote working, for example.  Something important about being human, that sense of being-with-in-service is diminished.

Two arguments are usually advanced in favour of self-service checkouts.  The first is efficiency.  The business is viewed here as if it were a machine.  Why not cut out some unnecessary cogs?  Why not make the whole thing flow a bit faster?  But this assumes that the goal of human life is to get things done, and that anything that makes getting things done easier and quicker is therefore a good thing.  I can easily think just the same: anything that speeds up my weekly shop must be good.  But what if the snippet of conversation with a cashier is actually one of the most valuable things that can happen in the shop - more valuable than the goal-oriented act of shopping, because oriented towards another human being, a little slice of being-with that goes to the heart of our mutual humanity as created in the image of God?

The second argument is that this sort of automation removes low quality jobs, freeing people to do better things.  The idea is that we get rid of drudgery.  But I wonder whether this has a lot to do with our faulty perspective on service.  Sure, if we treat the shop like a big machine, and the people like parts of the machine, this might make sense.  But if they are actual human beings, whose basic existence is being-with-in-service, whose deepest reality is shaped by Jesus Christ as the one true Human, isn't there a huge dignity in serving in this way?  And doesn't the encounter at the checkout offer a brief opportunity for mutual service as you recognise one another's humanity?  I hope that if you're a Christian you always make some effort to chat with the cashier!

So anyway, I'm not proposing that we all be Luddites and resist every technological innovation in the sphere of work.  I'm just suggesting that we try to think Christianly about what these innovations do to us, in terms of our view of humanity.  Maybe sometimes that will mean resisting societal and technological change, but I suspect more often it will mean resisting the cramping effect on our own hearts and minds which these changes bring along, so that whatever is going on out there, I can still be an exhibit of real humanity, pointing to Christ the great Servant of his people.

The Bible preserves the church

The church is desperately fragile and vulnerable.  It could be destroyed at any time.  Karl Barth, dwelling on this theme in Church Dogmatics IV/2, reflects on the multiple threats to the church: from the outside, the threat of outright persecution and also the threat of just being ignored; from the inside, the threat of secularisation (where the church becomes alienated from its own basis in Christ) and sacralisation (where the church assimilates to the methods of the world and seeks to glorify itself).  Given it's vulnerability to the world and to its own sin, how is it that the church has not in fact disappeared?

The big answer that Barth gives is that the church is upheld.  But how is it upheld?  Barth's first answer is that the Bible has continued to speak within the church.  The Scriptures "have continually become a living voice and word, and have had and exercised power as such."  (673)  The Bible has, of course, often been submerged beneath church traditions, "or proclaimed only in liturgical sing-song", or contradicted by philosophy and ideology.  "But they have always been the same Scriptures and the community has never been able to discard them."  (674)

So what is it, then, that has upheld the church?  "A mere book then?"  No, says Barth.  The Bible is "a chorus of very different and independent but harmonious voices."  It is "an organism which in its many and varied texts is full of vitality within the community."  The Bible is "something which can speak and make itself heard in spite of all its maltreatment at the hands of the half-blind and arbitrary and officious."

Barth expects the Bible to speak afresh, again and again, recalling the church to itself.  As the chorus of voices which harmoniously witnesses to Christ, the Bible is able to call the church again and again to him.  This cannot be prevented by the church, even when with its traditions and speculations it wants to keep the Bible under control.  Neither, actually, can Christians manufacture this "by their own Bible-lectures and Bible-study or even by the Scripture principle".  Rather, "it is something that Scripture achieves of itself" - and for Barth, that points to the fact that Scripture is the sword of the Spirit (Eph 6:17), the word by which the Spirit works in the church and the world.

This does not mean, of course, that it is a matter of indifference whether churches maintain a reverence for Scripture, or whether they hold the Scripture principle, or whether they strive to keep the Bible central in their common life.  It is critical that the church do this.  But where it is done, the church is nevertheless dependent on the Bible as the Spirit wields that Bible, not its attitude to the Bible or its arrangements concerning the Bible.  "The preservation of the community takes place as it is upheld by this prophetic and apostolic word, or as it is led back as a hearing community to this word."

"And so we can only say to Christians who are troubled about the preservation of the community or the maintaining of its cause that they should discard all general and philosophico-historical considerations... and hear, and hear again, and continually hear this word, being confronted both as individual and united hearers by the fact that the community certainly cannot uphold itself, but that all the same it is fact upheld, being placed in the communion of saints as this continually takes place in the hearing of this word."  (674-5)

Hear, and hear again, and continually hear this word.

Hope, despite everything

I've copied below a long paragraph from Church Dogmatics IV/3, on the subject of hope.  The wider context is the doctrine of reconciliation as that relates to Christ's role specifically as Prophet and therefore the one who bears witness to himself and brings his people to faith in him (and incidentally, it seems to me that in comparison with the roles of Priest and King, this part of Christ's triple office is typically neglected; it gets a brief paragraph in Letham's Systematic Theology, for example, compared to chapters on the priestly and kingly roles).  The narrower context is the work of the Spirit in awakening the church and the individual Christian to hope.  And the immediate context is the three great challenges to hope: firstly, that the Christian finds him- or herself outnumbered and the message of Christ sidelined in the world; second, that the Christian is confronted continually by his or her own continuing sinfulness, which stands in contradiction of the great hope; and third, that the Christian still awaits Christ's judgement, and so cannot pronounce on the righteousness or the fruit of his or her labours.  This paragraph addresses the first challenge.  I've broken it up and added some commentary.  If you want to read the context, you'll find this paragraph on pages 917-919.

What is hope, and what does it mean for the Christian who, since Jesus Christ has not yet spoken His universal, generally perceptible and conclusive Word, finds himself in that dwindling and almost hopeless minority as His witness to the rest of the world?

Barth is clear that Christ has spoken, but he has not yet spoken in such a way that everyone will hear; that awaits the final coming of Christ.  In the meantime, how is the Christian who looks around the world and finds himself, as someone who has heard that word of Christ, in a minority to maintain his hope?  What does gospel hope mean for the Christian in a world where that hope seems to reach so few?

If the great Constantinian delusion is now being shattered, the question becomes the more insistent, though it has always been felt by perspicacious Christians.  What can a few Christians or a pathetic group like the Christian community really accomplish with their scattered witness to Jesus Christ?  What do these men really imagine or expect to accomplish in the great market, on the battle-field or in the great mad-house which human life always seems to be?  "Who hath believed our report?  and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?" (Is. 53:1).

'The great Constantinian delusion' is the dream of a church triumphant in this world; of the normalisation of Christian faith as the pattern of this age.  If it was being shattered when Barth was writing this in the 1950s, it is well and truly gone now.  Christendom is in the past.  And yet, even at the height of Christendom, when it seemed the world was, or would shortly become, wholly Christian, there were those 'perspicacious Christians' who saw that all was not well - the reformers of the church, who regularly saw themselves as in a minority even though they were surrounded by professing Christians.  The point that Barth is making is that the church is, generally speaking, small and weak - too small to compete in the marketplace of ideas, too weak to triumph on the ideological battlegrounds, too insignificant to make much of a difference to the madness of the world.  That this was also the experience of the prophets and apostles (as shown by Barth's quotation from Isaiah) may not make us feel much better.

And what are we to say concerning the countless multitudes who either ante or post Christum natum have had no opportunity to hear this witness?

Perhaps the most acute form of this problem: how is gospel hope to be maintained for the world when so many have never heard of him - and many of those came and passed before his nativity?

Hic Rhodus, hic salta!  The Christian is merely burying his head in the sand if he is not disturbed by these questions and does not find his whole ministry of witness challenged by them.  He buries it even more deeply if in order to escape them, forgetting that he can be a Christian at all only as a witness of Jesus Christ, he tries to retreat into his own faith and love or those of his fellow Christians.  Nor is there any sense in trying to leap over this barrier with the confident mien of a Christian world conqueror.

Three useless responses to the problem: firstly, to pretend that is isn't there, to ignore the questions - a useless response, and a damaging one, because it exposes the Christian's hope to ridicule; second, to retreat into pietism, of an individualistic or a communitarian sort - a response which denies the Christian's character as a witness, and which smacks more of self-interest and self-preservation than hope; and third, to continue to imagine a revived Constantinianism, perhaps in a very different form, in which the church triumphant will indeed be seen in this life, to be a world-changer, a history-maker - a response which perhaps appeals to self-confidence or youthful exuberance, but which I would guess is often actually founded on insecurity rather than gospel hope, and a sense that we have to do Christ's work for him.

The meaningful thing which he is permitted and commanded and liberated to do in face of it is as a Christian, and therefore unambiguously and unfalteringly, to hope, i.e., in face of what seems by human reckoning to be an unreachable majority to count upon it quite unconditionally that Jesus Christ has risen for each and every one of this majority too; that His Word as the Word of reconciliation enacted in Him is spoken for them as it is spoken personally and quite undeservedly for him; that in Him all were and are objectively intended and addressed whether or not they have heard or will hear it in the course of history and prior to its end and goal; that the same Holy Spirit who has been incomprehensibly strong enough to enlighten his own dark heart will perhaps one day find a little less trouble with them; and decisively that when the day of the coming of Jesus Christ in consummating revelation does at last dawn it will quite definitely be that day when, not he himself, but the One whom he expects as a Christian, will know how to reach them, so that the quick and the dead, those who came and went both ante and post Christum, will hear His voice, whatever its significance for them (Jn. 5:25).

The detail of this sentence will not, of course, be acceptable to those who are committed to the doctrine of limited atonement, which is a shame for them; but the thrust of it is I hope broadly appealing.  Christ has spoken his word; astonishingly, by the power of the Spirit that word has reached even me; there is nobody who is therefore beyond the reach of this word, even in the passage of time and history in which we see such a small minority receive it; at the end of history Christ will speak his word in such a way that all will hear his voice 'whatever its significance for them' - and the context of Barth's reference to John's Gospel makes it clear we cannot prejudge what that significance will be.  I am reminded of the scene in The Last Battle when everyone comes face to face with Aslan, to head off to his left or right.  There is no need for anxiety about the progress of Christ's word; indeed, anxiety is ruled out by gospel hope.

This is what Christian hope means before that insurmountable barrier.  This is what the Christian hopes for in face of the puzzle which it presents.  But the Christian has not merely to hope.  He has really to show that he is a man who is liberated and summoned, as to faith and love, so also to hope.  And if he really hopes as he can and should as a Christian, he will not let his hands fall and simply wait in idleness for what God will finally do, neglecting his witness to Christ.  On the contrary, strengthened and encouraged by the thought of what God will finally do, he will take up his ministry on this side of the frontier.  He will thus not allow himself to be disturbed by questions of minorities or majorities, of success or failure, of the more probable or more likely improbable progress of Christianity in the world.  As a witness of Jesus Christ, he will simply do - and no more is required, though this is indeed required - that which he can do to proclaim the Gospel in his own age and place and circle, doing it with humility and good temper, but also with the resoluteness which corresponds to the great certainty of his hope in Jesus Christ.

To hope in this Christian sense is not a passive thing; it is not like hoping a bus will come along, just sitting and waiting for an event beyond one's control.  Rather, it is living as one called to hope.  Knowing that God has taken care of the end result, knowing that there is reason for absolute confidence - the Christian will bear witness to Christ.  Whether in the minority or majority, whether strong or weak, he will just do what can do in the place he is put; and all he can do is live and speak as a witness.  The humility in which this is to be done springs from the fact that nothing ultimately depends on his work as a witness, but everything rests on the One to whom he bears witness.

Seeing by the Light

 Part of my holiday reading was Seeing by the Light by Ike Miller, subtitled Illumination in Augustine's and Barth's Readings of John.  This is the first book I've read in the Studies in Christian Doctrine and Scripture series, published in the UK by IVP under the Apollos imprint, but the aim of the series - to promote constructive contributions to systematic theology from an evangelical perspective through faithful Scriptural engagement and engagement with the tradition of the church - definitely appeals.  This particular book fits the vision perfectly, exploring the important theme of illumination - that is to say, how it comes about that certain people are enlightened, enabled to see the truth of the gospel.

Miller tackles his subject in three sections.  The first two look at Augustine and Barth respectively, and in particular the readings of John's Gospel in Augustine's sermons and Barth's lectures of 1925-6.  In both cases, Miller takes us first to the systematic/dogmatic statements of the theologian in question, to show us their general thoughts about illumination as a topic.  He then turns to their treatment of John's Gospel to see these principles worked out in exegetical practice.  For Barth, in particular, he highlights the contemporaneity between the lectures on John and the writing of the Gottingen Dogmatics.  We can be confident that 'theory' and 'practice' were being developed together.  Both historical sections of the book were fascinating, even if I did get a little bogged down in some of the discussion of Augustine reception.  I have always found Augustine pleasantly straightforward to read; books about Augustine less so!  But Miller helps us to navigate certain critical points around the influence of Neo-Platonism on Augustine's thought as it touches on the subject of illumination, clarifying especially that for Augustine light is not a faculty of human reason, but is a divine gift.  It will come as no surprise to the regular reader here that I was particularly interested in the section on Barth.  What comes across clearly here is that, whilst Barth does not devote much space to discussions of illumination within his dogmatic works, this is largely because he subsumes the topic under the heading of revelation.  This is not incidental; for Barth revelation has not occurred unless it has gone all the way, so to speak.

The third section of the book is devoted to turning these historical exercises into a constructive theological proposal.  Here Miller draws on the resources offered by Augustine and Barth, but is not afraid to supplement and correct them.  By offering first some Biblical Theology - an attempt to draw out the doctrine of illumination presented in John's Gospel (and Epistles) - he ensures that his work is not merely a reflection on past theological constructions, but a positive contribution to theology now.  The proposal proper is offered in two chapters, dealing with the theological nature of illumination and illumination as a human experience.  The latter in particular draws heavily and positively on Barth's Church Dogmatics II/1.

You'll need to get the book to see the full proposal, but here are a few things that I'm taking away from it.  Firstly, if we're going to treat the theme of illumination in a way which conforms linguistically and conceptually to Holy Scripture, we need to avoid making illumination merely an annexe of Pneumatology.  The 'Spirit as spotlight' version of illumination is not consonant with John's Gospel as a narrative of Christ entering the world as its light.  Second, we need to see the doctrine of illumination as what Miller calls 'an economy of light'.  Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are working in their distinctive but united ways to shed the divine light abroad in the world and in human hearts.  Third, we need to recognise that the experience of illumination is one which simply may not be explicable in human terms, because it is grounded firmly in God himself and his action.  That is to say, illumination is something that happens to human beings; it comes from without.  Fourth, it is helpful to see illumination in terms of participation.  The Spirit enables us to participate in Christ's own knowledge of the Father.

The topic of illumination is surely of critical importance, particularly in this cultural moment.  At a time when Christianity is very definitely a minority interest, and belief can no longer be taken for granted, it becomes more important than ever that believers be able to give an account of how they come to be believers.  This matters for us, in terms of having a secure basis in our faith; and it matters for our witness to the world.  So as I got to the end of the book, I wanted another couple of chapters.  I want to think about what the Biblical doctrine of illumination means for apologetics and evangelism; and I want to think a bit more about whether what is being proposed here is necessarily a version of fideism - and what that means for those who struggle in their faith.  But maybe that is all somewhat beyond the scope of this volume, and is stuff I will need to think through for myself.  When I do so, I think Miller will have provided me with plenty of theological fuel for my ponderings.

Thoughts about Barmen

The ransom

Reading John Owen's Death of Death and Karl Barth's treatment of the atonement in Church Dogmatics IV/1 somewhat concurrently is interesting.  The theological modes in which these two thoroughly Christ-centred theologians operate are very different, and that show in their conclusions.  I am particularly struck that Owen relies very heavily in his work on ransom imagery.  His book is polemical, aimed at promoting a theology of limited or definite atonement; his particular target is those who teach a 'general ransom'.  Owen's argument is long and detailed, but at the heart of it is the apparently inescapable conclusion that for whomever a ransom is paid, that person must in justice be set free; therefore, if a general ransom - a ransom for all - has been paid in the death of Christ, all must be saved.  Since he (rightly) regards universalism as obviously contrary to the witness of Holy Scripture, he considers that the general ransom is to be rejected by all who bow to Scripture's authority.

Barth frames his teaching entirely differently, focusing on legal imagery - "the Judge judged in our place".  He works this through thoroughly, and only at the very end of his treatment looks to other images.  He discusses priestly and cultic imagery at greatest length, corresponding to the more prominent place these images have in the NT - the book of Hebrews, for example, revolves entirely around this way of viewing the atonement.  Indeed, Barth suggests that this would have been just as good a way of structuring the whole of his treatment, except that it is more obscure to us than the legal imagery.  (He speculates that it may have been the primary mode of understanding the atonement in the earliest Christian communities).  He deals very briefly (in a single short paragraph) with military imagery and the concept of victory, but is unconvinced it would be helpful to develop this systematically even though a place must be preserved for it in our understanding of the atonement.  (So much for the suggestion, which I have regularly seen, that Barth prefers Christus Victor as a model of the atonement rather than penal substitution; this is simply unsustainable on any straightforward reading of the Dogmatics.)  And financial imagery - the ransom - gets a similarly brief review.  Barth acknowledges that the NT does "strangely enough" contain this image, but thinks that "this strand is relatively slender".  He considers that it would be difficult and unprofitable to use this as a framework for the whole doctrine of atonement.

Different approaches, very different conclusions.  I'm not going to dive into the rights and wrongs of either here (except to say the only way to begin to do that dive would be an overview of the relative strengths of the different images used in the NT, with their OT background, and not primarily a detailed exegesis of particular passages).  It just interests me that so much can rest on which set of NT images becomes the main interpretive lens of your engagement with doctrine.

The Judge Judged in our Place

People sometimes ask whether Barth believed in penal substitution, the doctrine which maintains that Christ endured on the cross the punishment which sinners deserve.  Since this doctrine has (rightly, in my view; those who deny it are typically unorthodox on other important points) become something of a shibboleth in evangelical circles, a lot rides on the answer.  Did Barth believe that Jesus bore the wrath of God deserved by sinners, in their place?  Did he believe that the death of Christ was a vicarious death, the righteous taking the punishment which the sinful deserved?

Isenheim Altarpiece

Well, the short answer is yes.  "My turning from God is followed by God's annihilating turning from me.  When it is resisted His love works itself out as death-dealing wrath.  If Jesus Christ has followed our way as sinners to the end to which it leads, in outer darkness, then we can say with that passage from the Old Testament [Isaiah 53] that He has suffered this punishment of ours."  (CD IV/1, 253)

But of course with Barth things are rarely quite so simple!  The yes has to be qualified with a 'but'.  In Barth's understanding, the element of punishment in the cross is not the central element.  It is true that the death which Christ endures is our death, the penalty for our sin.  It is true that "He has suffered what we ought to have suffered so that we do not have to suffer it, the destruction to which we have fallen victim by our guilt, the punishment which we deserve" - and you won't find a much clearer statement of penal substitution than that!  But the deeper thing, the more ultimate thing, is that "in the death and suffering of Jesus Christ it has come to pass that in His own person He has made an end of us as sinners and therefore of sin itself by going to death as the One who took our place as sinners."

For Barth there certainly is a transaction in the atonement - our sin vicariously borne by Christ - but the transaction rests on a more decisive thing - our being-as-sinners vicariously borne by Christ, and in his death borne all the way to destruction.  Atonement is about reconciliation.  What stands in the way of my relationship with a holy God?  Not merely my guilt, but my whole being as a person given over to sin and rebellion.  In Christ, that sinful person has been put to death, and therefore removed.  "One died for all, therefore all died" (2 Cor 5:14).

The action of God in the death of Christ is not to avoid the judgement and the necessary death of sinful man, but to carry out the sentence, fully and completely, but vicariously, in Jesus Christ.  The penal aspect of substitution rests on something deeper - if you like, an ontological substitution, a being in our place which, by walking the sinners road all the way to death and destruction, crowds the sinner out of his place and establishes space for a new creation by faith in the resurrected Jesus.

In our place

In Church Dogmatics IV/1, 240-243, Barth reflects on three directions in which we have to look when we acknowledge that Christ, in his death, took our place as sinners.

1.  Because Christ died in our place, we can and must know ourselves as sinners.  In fact, it is only in Christ that we can see this; if we say we are sinners on any other basis, we are judging by an arbitrary standard of good and evil, something we've invented ourselves.  By taking our place, Christ shows us what exactly our place is, and removes from us the possibility of trying to excuse our sin or understand ourselves in any other way than as those who stand under judgement.  Faith in Christ must therefore always involve confession of sin and repentance.

2.  Because Christ died in our place, we can and must know that our sin is taken from us.  It belongs now to him - not because he is a sinner, but because he has taken our sinful place from us.  "It is true that we are crowded out of our own place by Him in that He made our sin his own."  It remains 'our place' - we are the sinners - but he has taken responsibility for that sin, standing in our place.  Faith in Christ must therefore always mean assurance and confidence before God as the one who has reconciled and forgiven us (as the sinners we are) in Christ.

3.  Because Christ died in our place, we cannot stand in that place anymore.  "If Jesus Christ came and took our place as the Representative of our evil case, then there is nothing more that we can seek and do there even as evil-doers."  Our place as sinners being taken, we can no longer act as sinners.  Neither can we act as judges, as if judgement had not already been carried out.  "There is no 'way back'."

Dialectical Theology and the Mystery of God

"The best theological grammar available to describe [the divine reality] is dialectical and full of reversals."

Thus George Hunsinger, in his essay on Karl Barth's conception of eternity, to be found in the excellent Disruptive Grace, p 193.

But what does dialectical mean here?

Hunsinger is attempting to describe a central theological method deployed by Karl Barth to think about God.  We could perhaps describe it as 'back and forth theology'.  Back and forth theology looks one way, and then looks the other.  It may therefore appear to be full of contradictions; it might seem to continually double back on itself.  Take a quote out of context - take a 'back' without a 'forth' - and it may well seem outright heresy.  Sounds risky - so why pursue it?

For Barth, dialectical theology has to be pursued because there is no other way to give a reasonable account of the revelation of God which we see witnessed in Holy Scripture.  A cracking example is his treatment of the Christology of the canonical gospels (which he broadly equates with the so-called Alexandrian and Antiochene schools; possibly unhelpfully from the perspective of historical theology).  He looks from the synoptic perspective (that this man is the Son of God) to the Johannine perspective (that the Son of God is this man) and continually switches between them.  Neither perspective is possible to reconcile to the other fully in thought or concept, but both are necessary to do justice to the descriptive account of God's action in Christ which we see in the gospels.  So we have to be continually back and forth, back and forth; not balancing one against the other, nor trying to achieve a synthesis, but always mentally moving.  This is not because there is any actual division in Christ; it is simply because our conceptual systems cannot adequately capture the mystery.

The same is true in the doctrine of the Trinity.  Barth moves from the One to the Three and back.  "Since the reality of God's oneness and threeness cannot be reconciled in thought, a 'trinitarian dialectic' must be devised in which statements to the one side are continually 'counterbalanced' by statements to the other." (Hunsinger, 192, referencing CD I/1, 269).  The same method is at play in Barth's account of God's simplicity and his multiple perfections.  Taking both seriously as they are presented in Holy Scripture prevents us from attempting to close the conceptual system and describe God using only one term and not the other.

A word of caution: "Note that Barth does not think God's being is dialectical or antithetical in itself, only that our minds are incapable of grasping its unity through a single principle or system." (Hunsinger, 193).  Our essentially dialectical systems of thought do find their resolution, but it is not in a higher concept or a deeper system of thought; it is in the being of God himself.

I think this is important.  In much of the theological retrieval going on today - the attempt to recover the classical doctrine of God - I think genuine advantages of modern theology are being lost.  In classical theism, God is considered to be ineffable; but I think there is a danger that he is in fact very well understood in that system.  He is simply(!) the concept of ineffability.  That is to say, at some point in the essentially complete conceptual system, there is a need for a border, a conceptual ground which essentially belongs to the system - and to such a concept, everyone gives the name God.  Barth's dialectic points, I think, to the living God who is genuinely know-able, but not susceptible to conceptualisation, not a being we can capture in our ideas even if we can genuinely describe him as we follow his own self-description.

Barth thinks his method is essential because Scripture directs us that way.  I think he's right.  One of the difficulties I have with classical theism is the way in which it resolves the apparent tensions in the biblical witness by enforcing a conceptual one-sidedness - for example, we explain away all the biblical references to God's emotions by simply declaring them to be unreal; for they must be so, if we are to achieve a conceptual consistency with the idea of God's impassibility.  For Barth, we rather press on down both roads, taking seriously God's self-revelation in both ways - leaving, admittedly, a system of concepts which is open-ended in a way which is frustrating to us, but leaving the mystery of God's own being intact.  And note that whereas the classical system, by making much of God's self-revelation unreal, leaves us with mystery without true knowledge, Barth follows Scripture in claiming (on the grounds of revelation) real knowledge of God without transgressing the mystery.  What the Bible says about God is true, even if I cannot think it out into a whole system.

Back and forth theology is, to my mind, simply theology that is constrained by God's self-revelation in Christ, as witnessed in the Old and New Testaments.  That should be okay in anybody's book, right?

On denying God

In The Christian Life (p185ff.), Barth notes that there are three ways of being ignorant of God, all of which are to an extent wilful, incur guilt, and are bad.  However, "within the badness proper to all of them we can think and speak of the bad, the worse, and the worst."

The merely bad, "the most primitive form of the ignorance of God in the world", is theoretical atheism. This atheism has always existed - it is not a unique fruit of modernity, not is it essenitally related to the growth of scientific understanding.  It is, as the Psalmist notes, foolish.  For Barth, the interest of atheism lies in the fact that it brings into the open the world's denial of God, which is concealed in the other forms of its ignorance.  It is also interesting because in atheism we see that the world cannot state its denial of God with nearly so much seriousness as it would like.  "The atheistic negation applies to a "God" who, if he exists, must do so in the same way as the data of other human experience or the contents of other human reflections exist for people."  (Think of Dawkins: God is a scientific hypothesis or nothing).  But such a negation does not touch the true and living God, who "is not a 'datum' of ours.  He is his own 'datum'."  So much for atheism.

The worse form of ignorance of God is religion.  Religion is worse because it conceals what it is really about, masking the denial of God with a "positive substitute".  Religions may be theistic, or they may be avowedly secular (there is no reason why secular things should not be venerated, promoted, in a religious fashion); either way, they represent a denial of the true God.  "In all religions, even the highest ones, or what are usually called the spiritual ones, we simply have surrogates in whose invention, use, and enjoyment the world thinks it can help to safeguard itself against, and to offer satisfaction to, the present God who is not known to it."  Religion represents ignorance, not knowledge of God, because it is always an attempt to avoid his self-revelation.  Idolatry is the essence of religion.

The worst form of ignorance of God, however, is "the attempt of the world to exalt its own cause as God's or, conversely, to subject God's cause to its own, to make it serve it."  Barth calls this the "nostrification" of God.  Rather than deny God, as in atheism, or seek to serve and thus avoid him, as in religion, we can identify ourselves with him, and therefore him with us, so thoroughly that we can throw ourselves into life with absolute zeal, confident that whatever we will, God wills, and whatever we do, God does.  "When the world is really shrewd, as it is not in atheism or idolatry, it tries to help itself in this way over against God."  The world finds itself much more secure here, having, if you like, co-opted God.  Objectively, of course, God stills stands over against the world, but subjectively he is subsumed within it, the world-God.  And so he is safe.

I would only add to Barth's analysis, that the most terrible thing about the nostrification of God is that it is the most prevalent form of God-denial, of the unhallowing of God's holy name, to be found within the bounds of the church.  And for that, we can only repent.

The known and unknown God

As is relatively well known, for his whole life (at least from 1921) Karl Barth carried on a running battle with natural theology, most concisely expressed in his reply to Emil Brunner on the subject, published under the title "Nein!" - which is in itself fairly clear.  But what is the natural theology which Barth rejects, and what does it mean to reject it?  I've been enjoying reading the posthumously published work 'The Christian Life', in which Barth explores the Lord's Prayer; under the petition 'Hallowed be your name' he sheds a great deal of light on what he is saying.

First of all, Barth acknowledges that God's name is hallowed in the wider, non-human created sphere.  "It may well be that the universe in its movements (besouled or not?) - from those of the heavenly bodies to those of the red and white blood corpuscles in our veins, not to speak of the infinitesimal units out of which everything is constructed - hallows the name of God infinitely more seriously than everything that comes into consideration as hallowing of this name among and by men."  And Barth is clear that this glory of God in creation may be seen.  So whatever it is that Barth is rejecting under the title of natural theology, it is not the idea that God's glory shines in the heavens.

Within the human sphere - in the world at large - Barth says God "is indeed well known, and yet he is also unknown..."  He means that human nature, and each individual human being, is ordered towards God; this is true because God is the Creator of each person, and so (quoting Augustine) "his heart is restless until it finds its rest in Him".  So God is known, necessarily known.  But all the structures of worldly life betray the fact that God is unknown - humanity as a whole has perverted the relationship to God which goes with their creation, such that human beings per se do not know the God who is so well known to them.  It's a paradox, which Barth eventually boils down to the difference between the objective and the subjective: objectively, God is known, in that each person is oriented towards the true God; subjectively, God is not known, in that this God is not acknowledged, his name is not hallowed.

It's worth noting here that Barth is not talking about a generic idea of god which is known in the world.  No, it is "the one true and living God who is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" who is so well known in the world and yet totally unknown.  And humanity, and each human, stands guilty before God for not knowing what is so well known.  "Man, not God, is at fault if a subjective knowledge of God on man's side does not correspond to God's objective knowledge."  God continually hallows his name in the world, even where human beings deny his name.  "Is not his name holy in every blade of grass and every snowflake?  Apart from us and even in spite of us, it is holy in every breath we draw, in every thought we think..."

So here is the ambiguity.  Humanity as such stands in the position of knowing God and not knowing him.  It knows him because objectively his name is continually hallowed in the world around and in each human life.  It does not know him because it is wilfully blind, will not acknowledge him, and is therefore plunged into ignorance.  This is real ignorance for Barth; it is not that everyone really, deep down, knows God.  The muddle is deeper than that.  To the depths, the sinful human being does not know God, just as to the depths they are continually confronted with the knowledge of him.

Now here comes natural theology.  Sometimes God overcomes our blindness.  Sometimes in the world God's name is hallowed effectively, the knowledge of God shines through, even in the most avowedly non-Christian places.  Far from wishing to deny this in his battle against natural theology, Barth insists on it.  "God the Creator does not contradict the contradiction of his creature for nothing".  God hallows his name.  But here is the thing: we cannot make a theology of this.  We cannot take these brief flashes of insight and systematise them, as if they were the basis, or at least a possible basis, of an understanding of God.  It cannot be so.  The objective knowledge may be there - the real hallowing of God's name in creation - but is the subjective acknowledgement of God present?  Not as it should be.  Not as it must be.  For Barth, the problem with natural theology is not that we do not have an object for knowledge in creation; the problem is that we do not have a subject.  The known God (really known) does not meet with a knowing humanity (not really knowing, in the sense of acknowledging, hallowing).  And so natural theology is impossible.

"As we search for a knowledge of God in the world that is unequivocally achieved both objectively on God's side and subjectively on man's, as we look for a point where his name might be clearly and distinctly hallowed on both sides in and for the world, we can think only of the one Jesus Christ."  And so he has to be a starting point.

Barth on infant baptism

Karl Barth makes clear that the main problem with the Reformed case for infant baptism is that it fails to distinguish sufficiently between the people of Israel and the Church of Christ, and it does so because it fails to see that in Christ the history of Israel is fulfilled.  This fulfilment, far from kicking off a new era much like the old, but with the role of Israel now played by the Church, brings in the end of the ages.  It is an eschatological reality, not a merely historical one, which forms the foundation of the church.  And seeing this gives Barth the opportunity to make the following sarcastic comments about infant baptism, which I share for your delectation.  His conclusion is that many of the problems in the church in the West can be traced to the fact that so few can remember their baptism and therefore really see their identity as grounded in Christ himself in his death and resurrection.  I tend to agree.

Instead, [the Church] began to act as if it were a natural community continuing from generation to generation and bound by ties of kith and kin.  It identified itself (on the plea of what was later euphemistically described as "Christianisation") with a whole succession of genuinely natural communities, and finally with the whole of the West, which came to be thought of as the "Christian West".  The freedom of the Holy Spirit, the freedom of the divine election and calling, the freedom in which Christ awakens faith in Himself and in which the Christian Church alone can be constituted, was no longer respected...  It was thought to be known in advance who would become Christians, members of the Church and members of the body of Christ, i.e., all children who find themselves within the sphere of the Church and are born of ostensibly "Christian" parents.  Were not the male children of the Israelites circumcised on the eighth day and thus separated as participants in the covenant?  And are the children of Christians to be deprived of a privilege enjoyed in Israel?  So the argument ran, forgetting the tiny detail that now that the covenant has been fulfilled by Jesus Christ, it is no longer possible to foresee and arrange and anticipate the divine separation of participants.  With the generous inclusion of girls, all children born in a Christian environment were regarded as potential Christians, as though the Church were a natural and historical entity like Israel.  And since they could not be asked about their desire for baptism and required to make a profession of faith, they were baptised without making this question and therefore baptism a matter of personal responsibility commensurate with the freedom of the Holy Spirit.  They were made Christians by millions in their sleep and over their heads as it were...

CD III/2, 586

The old and the new and the church

We must first remember the general truth that when the New Testament speaks of Jesus Christ and His community it really speaks of the goal (and therefore of the origin and beginning) of all earthly things.  Jesus Christ and His community is not an additional promise given to men.  The existence and history of Israel with Yahweh was a promise.  The reality of Jesus Christ and His community does not continue this history.  It is not a further stage in actualisation of the divine will and plan and election which are the purpose of creation.  It concludes the process.  It is the complete fulfilment of the promise.  It is the goal and end of all the ways of God.  It is the eschatological reality.

Thus Karl Barth (in CD III/2, 301).  This passage takes place in a section examining the nature of humanity, and particularly the mystery of marriage, the meaning of which is revealed only through Christ.  (As an aside, it's hard, knowing what we know, to read Barth's profound and deeply moving treatment of marriage as a sign of the gospel.)  But I didn't particularly want to write about that; just to draw out one phrase.

The reality of Jesus Christ and His community does not continue this history.

This got me thinking about one of the things I struggle with in some Reformed thinking, which is the massive emphasis on continuity between the OT and the NT.  To me, it misses something which Barth grasps here.  The history of Israel is a prophetic history, a history which is fulfilled in Christ.  (Barth discusses the significance of the ongoing existence of historical Israel outside the church elsewhere).  But the church is not just another form of Israel, looking back just as Israel looked forward.  The church is an eschatological reality - indeed, "it is the eschatological reality".

This matters.  The change wrought by the presence of Christ is nothing short of the fulfilment of all God's purposes for the world.  All that remains is for the world to come to see this, and to enter in to the enjoyment of it (or not).  The discontinuity between Israel and the church is nothing less than the discontinuity between the old creation and the new.  The church is not just a community of people living in faith and hope and expectation, though of course it is that too; the church as its existence is founded in the reality of Jesus Christ is the new world.  Everything is accomplished, because Christ is not a prophet but the fulfilment of all prophecy - "someone in whom everything is not fulfilled would not be Jesus Christ".

I'd want to qualify that the church is only this eschatological reality indirectly, in its grounding in Christ and not in its own internal being.  That means the reality can be seen only by faith.  And yet the life of the church - and the church only has life in so far as its life is given by the Spirit through its union with Christ - is to stand for, to symbolise, to make visible to those given eyes to see, the eschatological reality that the old world has passed and away, and behold, everything is made new.

History doesn't just trot on.  The Incarnation wasn't a blip in an otherwise unaffected history.  The death of Christ was the end of the world.  The resurrection of Christ was the new creation.

Nothing's the same any more.

Karl Barth on Divine Simplicity

Karl Barth addresses divine simplicity as part of his teaching on the unity of God (CD II/1, 442ff.).  God is one.  That implies, on the one hand, his uniqueness; on the other, his simplicity.  But what does 'simplicity' mean for Barth - and what does it not mean?

That God is simple "signifies that in all that He is and does, He is wholly and undividedly Himself." (445)  God is not composite.  He is not composite in the three Persons of his existence, nor is he composite in his distinguishable attributes (or as Barth prefers to call them, his perfections).  God is never distant from himself, never in conflict with himself.  He is always all of himself in all his fullness.

The divine simplicity also implies divine lordship.  "Nothing can affect Him, or be far from Him, or contradict or withstand Him, because in Himself there is no separation, distance, contradiction or opposition." (445)  Being completely and unconditionally the Lord of himself, God is the Lord in all other relationships and situations.

So far, so classical.  Where does Barth differ from the tradition, if indeed he does?

In his brief sketch of the historical origins of the doctrine, Barth points out that the early church clarified its doctrine of divine simplicity as it grappled with the doctrines of the Trinity and the incarnation.  His complaint is that already in Augustine, and throughout the periods of Catholic and then Protestant Orthodoxy, the doctrine comes to be developed in "a purely logical and metaphysical" way (446), no longer anchored in the gospel.  This is problematic, because a purely logical and metaphysical doctrine of simplicity both points away from the Holy Trinity toward a generic theism, and "leads to an underlying nominalism or semi-nominalism in the doctrine of the attributes" (447) - that is to say, the wealth of perfections in God cannot be taken with full seriousness, even where the attempt is made to do this.

The issue here is whether the concept of simplicity is still flowing from revelation, or whether it has become detached and absolutised.  Whilst it is true and necessary to say that God is simple, "the assertion of the simplicity of God is not reversible in the sense that it could equally well be said that the simple is God." (449)  The mere idea of simplicity will not serve us well here.  "In Scripture, the utterly simple is 'simply' God Himself in the actuality, the superior might, the constancy, the obviousness, or even more simply, the factuality, in which He is present as God and deals as God with the creature, with man." (457)

Barth's critique is that the idea of simplicity has replaced the actually simple God.  Who and what, then, is God?  For Barth, the important thing is to resist every instinctive feeling for what God ought to be like, or what simplicity must imply, and to follow Scripture.  That leads him to ground his doctrine of simplicity in the fact that the prophets and apostles all heard this one God and found themselves called to obedience.  And in each case, it was the same God.  In all his words and works, he is found to be himself.  He is trustworthy.  "And He is not merely casually or accidentally trustworthy, so that He could also be untrustworthy.  On the contrary, He is trustworthy in His essence, in the inmost core of His being.  And this is His simplicity." (459)  Barth goes on to equate God's simplicity with his faithfulness.  When we say God is simple, we say that in all his multiple words and works he is the same God, wholly himself and the whole of himself in every act.  It is God's 'simple' faithfulness that warrants and draws forth our 'simple' faith. (460)

The key thing, for Barth, is that we get things in the right order: that we hear God's self-witness in Scripture and acknowledge that in every way he is always himself, and therefore that he is simple.  God himself will determine what his simplicity means, what it means for him to be wholly himself and the whole of himself in all his ways and works.  We don't get to decide on the basis of an analysis of the concept of simplicity what God can or can't do.  We can't use simplicity to go behind God's revelation.