Barth’s Contradiction of Evangelical Theologies through the Gospel

Have you ever wondered what explaining the Gospel entails? Karl Barth wondered such things, and gave voice to what he thought was the best way to do such; explain the Gospel that is. Here is how he thinks we should do that:

[T]o explain the Gospel is to define and describe the nature, existence and activity of God as Creator, Reconciler and Redeemer, the grace, the covenant and the work of reconciliation with all that these include and in the living terms of the manifestation, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is to do all this, according to the measure of God’s Word, in the constantly changing forms of human consideration, thought and expression. It is to introduce this whole occurrence onto the human scene in a way in which it is not knowable but at least intelligible and perspicuous. It is to cause it to be told to men in human terms. The vital thing in so doing is that the whole content of the Gospel in all its elements and dimensions should be allowed to be its own principle of explanation, that under no pretext or title should alien principles of explanation in the form of metaphysical, anthropological, epistemological or religio-philosophical presuppositions be intruded upon it, that it should not be measured by any other standards of what it is possible than its own, that answers should not be given to any other questions than those raised by itself, that it should not be forced into any alien scheme but left as it is and understood and expounded as such. [Karl Barth, CD IV/3, p. 849 cited by John Webster, Barth’s Moral Theology, 146-47.]

So for Barth, the Gospel is not contingent on man or woman’s explanation; instead, we are contingent upon it, the Gospel, Jesus. For Barth, we don’t possess the Gospel, the Gospel possesses us; it gives itself to us, with its own categories of explanation. It is this reality that shapes Barth’s view of apologetics, analytical theology, etc. And it is probably this reality that Evangelical theology and Evangelicals find so repulsing about Barth; his approach counters the rationalist underbelly upon which Evangelical theologies, in general, rest. For Barth a proper Dogmatic order requires that God and knowledge of God in Christ precedes and contradicts our arguments for him.

 

Part 2. The Impasse, God’s Sovereignty & Human Responsibility: God’s Freedom for Himself as the Sustaining Freedom For Us, For Him

Addendum: This will be my last installment in this mini-series. If you are interested in finding out further how Barth might frame this issue then pick up John Webster’s book ‘Barth’s Moral Theology’ and give it a read.

This is the next installment in my ongoing series on God’s Sovereignty and Human Responsibility. As we all know this issue has embroiled us in, it seems, a never ending battle in-house amongst Christians. I want to suggest though that this ongoing battle could be elided, and should be, if we adopt a truly Trinitarian, and genuinely Christian methodology in attempting to engage such tenuous questions like these one’s (i.e. God’s Sovereignty & Human Freedom) give rise to. Such is the way that Karl Barth and John Webster provide for us; an approach that moves beyond the impasse that philosophical scholastic theology has given us, and onto a mode of theological discourse that truly gets us through the bog that so many of us have grown accustomed to. Indeed, it is this customization amongst the Western Christian to such categories and emphases, that I am afraid will keep some of you from seeing what Barth presents (through Webster) as the salvation from this unending abyss (e.g. the classic debate under consideration in these posts of mine) that it actually is. Nevertheless, we will move boldly forward and enter into the life giving waters that truly provides us an occasion to worship our God who is Sovereign, free, loving, gracious, and inclusive of us in his kind of life; indeed, it is his kind of life where human freedom/responsibility can finally flourish. Here is what Webster says that Barth says:

In concrete terms, this means that, for Barth, God’s freedom is his freedom as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. ‘God’s freedom is not merely a limited possibility or formal majesty and omnicompetence, that is to say empty, naked sovereignty.’ Rather, ‘God’s freedom is the freedom of the Father and the Son in the unity of the Spirit … God’s own freedom is trinitarian.’ Talk of God as free is, therefore, not talk about some quality of God’s life anterior to his trinitarian revealedness, nor is it a matter of making God’s name as Father, Son and Spirit into a cipher for abstract, absolute liberty. The ‘essence of God which is seen in His revealed name is His being and therefore His act as Father, Son and Holy Spirit’; and so God’s freedom is a predicate of his trinitarian being. Crucially, for Barth, it is as this triune God that God is free for us. Because God is Father, Son and Spirit, his sovereign freedom is neither abstract nor monadic, but ‘relational freedom’. And further, because God’s immanent trinitarian relatedness is not closed but self-giving in the majestic acts of the incarnation of the Son and the sending of the Spirit, it is a freedom which grounds and does not suppress the creature’s freedom. As the trinitarian God, God is ‘partner to himself’; and ‘this understanding of God as a partner in himself has serious consequences for the understanding of humanity as partner. That humanity is elected by this God in no way means humanity’s disqualification. Rather, humanity is elected by one who knows partnership intimately, and whose intention’ is to set humanity on its feet. [John Webster, Barth’s Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth’s Thought, 106-07.]

At the end of the day, and in summary, human freedom is what we were re-created for in Jesus Christ, for God. It is in this nexus of relationship, being brought into the intra-triune life of God that humanity has space to be human, and free; but as you probably are starting to see, a human freedom of the kind being described here is one that is limited and constrained from within God’s life. Thus, to try and conceive of a human freedom (and thus responsibility) from some sort of autonomous construct of human freedom that somehow has an abstracted ontology and life of its own apart from the freedom present, and only present, in God’s life, and for God’s life, within the divine union and communion represents a non-starter (at least for Christianly revealed discourse). If this is so, no wonder we have had the debate we have had for so long; Christians have unwittingly (and wittingly) been participating in philosophical diatribes and abstractions of which is contrary and antagonistic to the kind of apparatus and categories that God has provided for us to consider such things through, through His Self-revelation in His dearly beloved Son.

God’s Sovereignty and Human Freedom/Responsibility cannot be framed in competition with one another; as the classical debate does. This discussion cannot flow from an innate dualism, the kind made and sustained by human force. Instead, if we are going to have fruit going forward we will and must start where God does, in His own life in Christ for us by the Holy Spirit’s presencing work. There is no other kind of freedom apart from the kind that God has in His own life. If we are going to be truly free then we must participate in God’s life, and as we do, we will have the kind of orientation God has always intended for us in Christ, to be for Him and not against Him.

This post begs some questions. We will get to those in the next installment (which might be my last installment in this short series). We will, with Webster’s and Barth’s help, discuss the Holy Spirit’s role in providing the kind of relational context necessary in order for human freedom/responsibility to flower in the way it only can, in Christ.

Here are the other posts I have done in this series:

1

2

3

A Gap Post: On Human Freedom

This isn’t the “next post” I had in mind in my series on God’s sovereignty and Human responsibility; yet, the quote I am going to provide contributes to layering more depth of context in regard to the kind of modern conception of human freedom and thus responsibility that is counter to what I will be proposing as a genuinely Christian understanding in its stead. Like I just said this post will be a short quote provided by John Webster; he is quoting Charles Taylor, who is commenting on Hegel’s thought. Here is the quote, I bet this will resonate with you and your experience of how you might conceive of human freedom and/or how your neighbors do; here it is: “the

modern notion of subjectivity has spawned a number of conceptions of freedom which see it as something men win through to by setting aside obstacles or breaking loose from external impediments, ties, or entanglements. To be free is to be untrammelled, to depend in one’s action only on oneself. Moreover, this conception of freedom has not been a mere footnote, but one of the central ideas by which the modern notion of the subject has been defined, as is evident in the fact that freedom is one of the values most appealed to in modern times. At the very outset, the new identity as self-defining subject was won by breaking free of the larger matrix of a cosmic order and its claim.” [Charles Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society, p. 155 cited by John Webster, Barth’s Moral Theology, 122]

This rings true for me as I look out on the world, and even in my own life. There is this constant pursuit, it is the American dream, to be set free and delivered from shackles of financial bondage, to be master of my own universe, to construct an imaginary world of my own making that nobody else has any say in but me. Of note, even in this quote, and behind it, what is clear is that a modern conception of freedom is seeking to recreate a relational network where “I” am at the center, “I” am calling the shots; and this then is what it means to be free, over and against the other. It is interesting though, human freedom is always limited by other humans; even if we construct a world of our own (supposedly), it is still in a world amongst others, and thus we must construct our own worlds (where we think we are free) by way of negotiating that freedom in relation to the other people around us, who are trying to achieve this same kind of navel gazing freedom. So our freedom, no matter how hard we try is always delimited by someone else’s freedom; and so forth.

This helps set up context as we jump into a discussion on God’s Sovereignty and Human Responsibility/Freedom. Stay tuned for the next post where we will dive head first into some theological definitions and descriptions of what God’s Sovereignty and Human Freedom/Responsibility look like when thinking from a Christ conditioned, Christ centered orientation.

Introducing a Series on: God’s Sovereignty & Human Responsibility, Reframing the Divide

I think I am going to try and do (as time suffices) a series of posts on human
freedom, or more popularly known as ‘human responsibility’; which is usually placed in contrast with God’s sovereignty. It is this duality that has fueled debate in the Christian church about such things starting with Augustine and Pelagius (and John Cassian after that), and then again with Calvin and Pighius, and later and more contemporaneously with the whole classical Arminian and Calvinist debate. People who take Christian ideas seriously—and even those who don’t, really—this debate remains a central point of consternation to those of us who claim the name of Christ (even my describing this, using the language of ‘claim’ the name of Christ could be read a certain way because of this debate). Are we morally free, in ourselves (with the Holy Spirit’s help of course), to accept or reject Christ; do we have deliberative and autonomous power to make such a choice? Or does God irresistibly make the choice for us; thus rendering our subjectivity and individuality moot in light of God’s overpowering (sovereign) objectified life?

I think there is a better way to construe this issue; a way that sees the classical debate as a secondary issue, one that shouldn’t have the power to shape this issue the way that it does. Indeed, I think this starts at the wrong spot, so it ends us at the wrong spot; illustrated by the ongoing irretrievable debate, that hitherto seems to leave the whole lot of us in an abyss to deep to traverse. I think that this classical debate has been given too much shrift, as if it has adequate material categories to provide conceptual hangers strong enough to hang our theological hats on; that is, relative to the issue of ‘human freedom’.

Do we have ‘freedom’? That is the question. The answer, I think, when properly framed—in Christ, no doubt!—will be surprisingly profound, and re-foot this kind of classical debate, around such things, on the solid ground, the solid rock of Christ’s life. And since this is what the wise person does (i.e. builds their house on the rock of Christ’s life, and not the sandy land of man-ward ways cf. Mt 7), we will proceed thusly.

The way I will seek to provide trajectory toward answering this question will be to work through one little section of John Webster’s book Barth’s Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth’s Thought. I am going to try and explain this in a way that is accessible to folk who are not familiar with the lingo of theological code, but at the same time I will expect that you the reader will do due diligence in thinking deeply with me about this rather salient issue. Really, the answer to this is pretty simple; I think more simple than people usually want it to be.

What is a Genuinely Christian Conception of the Conscience?

Have you ever thought deeply or self-reflectively about what the human conscience is; what your conscience is? The Apostle Paul did, he wrote:

¹² For all who have sinned without the law will also perish without the law, and all who have sinned under the law will be judged by the law. ¹³ For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified. ¹⁴ For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. ¹⁵ They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them ¹⁶ on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus. ~Romans 2:12-16

And:

¹⁰ these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.¹¹ For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. ¹² Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. ¹³ And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual. ~I Corinthians 2:10-13

Usually when we think of conscience we think of it as some sort of autonomous inner light, a free floating island that serves as a self-governing, self-determined, deliberative ‘thing’ (Libertarian Free Agency) that we can appeal to as our objective (subjectively possessed) rudder that guides us through the complexities of our day to day lives. For Christians what I just described is usually qualified in a way that we have a Spirit guided or enabled conscience (which would be Semi-Pelagianism, theologically); nevertheless, it is still functionally understood as an autonomous thing with or without the Holy Spirit’s enablement.

Karl Barth, as narrated by John Webster, offers an alternative account of what the conscience is; his account, true to form, starts, principally, in Christ. Barth saw Christ as the external ground of conscience; this is in contrast to the usual and classical (and even ‘secular’) conception of conscience as something that is an internal and introspective possession of the human agent. For Barth, according to Webster, the moral self does not primarily have ‘self reference’, but a Christic reference that is given to us in his Self giveness for us.  John Webster tells us of Barth (at length),

[T]his refusal of moral and temporal self-referentiality provides the backcloth for one of the most significant and successful discussions in the Ethics, the treatment of conscience in paragraph 16. From the beginning of the discussion, Barth very deliberately sets himself against the assumption that conscience is a natural, self-evident reality requiring no more than immediate self-reflection in order to establish its operations. Quite the opposite: it is ‘this very astonishing knowledge’, something known not as a depth dimension of our moral lives but as ‘our human knowing of what … God alone can know as he who is good, as the giver of the command and the judge of its fulfilment’. For most of the moral traditions of modernity, philosophical and theological, conscience has been an authoritarian and autonomous faculty of self-governance, increasingly detached from rational consideration of moral order. Conscience functions as a kind of nucleus of personal agency around which orbit external realities, such as public conventions or social norms and roles. Those external realities constrain conscience only in so far as they provide material for the deliberations of conscience: like the moral freedom of which it is a core aspect, conscience is authentic in the measure in which it is undetermined by nation or society. For Barth, on the other hand, conscience is quite other than introspective personal moral existence. It takes its place alongside a cluster of other eschatological notions – child of God; fellowship with God the Redeemer; the presence and activity of the Holy Spirit – all of which locate the centre of moral agency outside of the self. To have a conscience is ‘to look and reach beyond the limits of our creatureliness’, ‘to have the Holy Spirit’, to participate ‘in the truth itself’. This means that, over against ‘the ethics of naturalistic or idealistic subjectivism’, Barth does not consider conscience ‘a subjective principle by means of which we can measure the possibilities of life in general and once and for all’. Nor is conscience to be thought of as a faculty, in the sense of a capacity for making judgements, which is ready for our consultation – ‘a principle that we can control, a general principle that we can seize and use at any time’. All such views are anthropologically deficient, in that they envisage the agent’s interior moral life as existing in at least relative isolation from the determining presence of God. For Barth, however, to hear conscience is not to listen to some deeper, non-reflective voice of our own, less caught up in the immediacy of desire and action. It is to listen to ‘our own voice’ as ‘God’s voice’.

Some care needs exercising in grasping Barth’s point here. In speaking of conscience as ‘our own voice’, he is not falling back into the position from which he wishes to escape…. For Barth … the call of conscience summons us to participate in God’s knowledge, literally con-scientia, co-knowledge with God, ‘strictly moment-by-moment co-knowledge. It is not ‘human self-consciousness’, but a co-knowledge in God which is always to be characterized by ‘non-giveness’ or ‘pure futurity’. In the event in which our knowledge becomes this co-knowledge, the distance between God and our awareness is not abolished but bridged. Conscience then, cannot be understood apart from the act of prayer, appeal to the coming of God the Redeemer. Shorn of this eschatological dimension, the notion of conscience could promote ideas of the availability of God’s will as an object for moral reflection…. Without this caveat, conscience threatens to become simply ‘mad autonomism’ or ‘deeschatologised consciousnesses. [John Webster, Barth’s Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth’s Thought, 59-60]

Pastoral Implication

This promotes all kinds of avenues of response. Of primary import, though, as we close, is to highlight the impact that this kind of ‘Christ-conditioned’ understanding of the conscience should have on the Christian’s spirituality. Barth wrote against and from a context that was shaped by the great modern theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, and others. It was this milieu which gave us theological liberalism, one of its primary hallmarks was that theology became an introspective exercise of the self turning in and finding the reality of God in a ‘feeling’. The effect was to produce a theology that was really anthropology, or a study of the self; a projection outward, only to immediately boomerang inward. Or, Barth’s thought could also be place in contrast to the kind of pietism constructed by Puritan theology (or even Augustine’s theology). Puritan theology, in almost all of its sectors, gave us a spirituality that required the self to look inward to see if they were one of the elect for whom Christ had died; they had to look at ‘their’ good works. All of this heritage has been bequeathed to us, the American Evangelical, and Christian, in general; we end up with a performative Christianity, and a self-centered ethics. And like Schleiermacher, we baptize our moral self determination in the name of Christ; but really this is only a projection of ourselves out onto a concept we know as God (Israel did this with the golden calf … remember?). So I think this hits home, doesn’t it?!

I think Barth is developing a Pauline understanding of conscience, one that is grounded in Christ, and one that we can participate in as we are united to Christ’s humanity (i.e. salvation) by the Holy Spirit. Conscience, a genuinely Christian conception of it, must be one that looks away from ourselves and to Christ.

Outside Of Us: A Tale of Scripture For Us

Lately, I have been referring to being a Scripture reader on my Facebook wall, and how it has totally blessed me to be a participant this way in God’s life in Christ; Scripture being the ordained ‘place’ wherein God invites us into his banqueting table at the right hand of his throne; Scripture finding its locus in the Triune speech of the Father, brought through and with the Spirit anointed humanity of Christ for us (pro nobis). I think something that really excites me about Scripture is that it is contingent on something ‘outside of us’ (extra nos), just as salvation is; and the ‘outside of us’ that Scripture is contingent upon for its point, purpose and meaning is of course, Jesus Christ! So Scripture, and this is what has really gotten me excited, even more recently, is framed from within the dogmatic category of salvation (soteriology), and this is framed within the dogmatic category of Jesus Christ (christology), and this is framed in the dogmatic category of God’s Life (‘Theology Proper’, Doctrine of God, Trinity); and thus the implication is that when we read Scripture (as Scripture reads us, Hebrews 4:12), we are actively participating in the Divine speech of God, and in his sacred act of relating to the world in his beloved Son by the Spirit’s locution. John Webster, offers some insight on how Bonhoeffer thought of this, and then Webster quotes Bonhoeffer in the following:

. . . More than anything else, it is listening or attention which is most important to Bonhoeffer, precisely because the self is not grounded in its own disposing of itself in the world, but grounded in the Word of Christ. Reading the Bible, as Bonhoeffer puts it in Life Together, is a matter of finding ourselves extra nos in the biblical history:

We are uprooted from our own existence and are taken back to the holy history of God on earth. There God has dealt with us, with our needs and our sins, by means of the divine wrath and grace. What is important is not that God is a spectator and participant in our life today, but that we are attentive listeners and participants in God’s action in the sacred story, the story of Christ on earth. God is with us today only as long as we are there.

Our salvation is ‘from outside ourselves’ (extra nos). I find salvation, not in my own life story, but only in the story of Jesus Christ . . . What we call our life, our troubles, and our guilt is by no means the whole of reality; our life, our need, our guilt, and our deliverance are there in the Scriptures.(John Webster, “Holy Scripture,” 83 citing Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Life Together,” 62.)

One of the more liberating realities about this whole construal is that if Scripture, like Bonhoeffer thought, and Webster thinks, is dogmatically placed in the category of ‘salvation’ (sanctification, more particularly) —and not in the philosophical category of epistemology, as classical Protestant Christianity has it placed [even today]— then the reality of Scripture cannot be contingent upon my defense of it and maintenance of it anymore than my salvation can. Both salvation and scripture then are contingent upon their reality and place in Christ’s life as the Self-revelation of God by the Spirit (scripture then is truly ‘outside of us’ in this way).

This takes a huge load off! For many years I was held captive by the idea that the historicity and truthfulness of Scripture was contingent upon Christians successfully defending its veracity, and insofar that the Christian (apologist) could not make a case (without a doubt) against its detractors; then my faith hang in those balances. What a relief to finally realize that if I am going to have Scripture, I have to have Jesus first (or he has me first, to be dogmatically correct). So Scripture does not come before Christ, but God in Christ comes before Scripture; as sure as God in Christ by the Spirit comes before creation. I hope this reassures you in your own engagement with Scripture, and maybe helps to provide you with some rest from the nagging sort of Christianity that you might have inherited from our Fundamentalist and classically Reformed parents.

Scripture & Creation: They have the same ultimate orientation, Christ.

John Webster provides a sketch of two principles — Karl Barth’s ‘scripture principle’ — that I think provides a healthy conception of how we ought to consider scripture’s dogmatic placement. The consequences of this have implications toward our hermeneutical theory (i.e. what we presuppose, theologically, when we are doing biblical exegesis and translation), ethics, and various other foci in regard to an ontology of scripture. Here is the first of the two principles that Webster provides for us:

[F]irst, “God can only be known through God.” Knowledge of God is God’s gift (“revelation”), borne to us through Holy Scripture, in such a way that to encounter Scripture is to stand before a witness to something that is not simply part of the immanent historical world. “The knowledge of God is not mediated but is only unmediated, that is, God is known through God himself. The expression for that immediacy, for the absolute facticity, for the paradox of revelation, is the Scripture principle, precisely by virtue of its offensiveness. This does not entail, Barth insisted, a simple identity between God’s Word and Scripture; any such suggestion would transform revelation as “sovereign act” into a material textual condition. What it does mean is that for Barth, Scripture hovers on the border between the historical life of the church and the transcendent reality of God — a point he had sought to communicate in Romans elsewhere, but which he only now was able to name in doctrinal terms…. [John Webster, Barth’s Lectures on the Gospel on John, in George Hunsinger, Thy Word Is Truth, 130-31.]

The primary implication of this is that Scripture is liberated from being the absolute source of God’s revelation (instead it is the relative source). Scripture through this lens is emphasized as the ordained witness by which God encounters us in his Self-Revelation, Jesus Christ. So Scripture, in this scheme, is hyper-important, but it takes on its proper orientation relative to the one to whom it gives way to, to its reality, Jesus Christ. We could extrapolate out from this, and get into Barth’s doctrine of creation as well; his doctrine of Scripture is corollary of his doctrine of creation — but we will have to address that at another time.

The bottom line here is: that Scripture is not something that we possess; instead Scripture possesses us by the Spirit as it invites us into encounter with the reality to whom it finds its un-relenting ground; Jesus Christ. He is the Lion of the tribe of Judah, Lamb of God slain before the foundation of the world. In other words, he can’t be tamed; he is Lord, and we are his servants (and brothers and sisters). He is the humbling of God, and the exaltation of humanity; and Scripture finds its starting point from that matrix and nowhere else. In other words, there really is no analogy for Scripture (except faith), because there is no analogy (from creation) for its starting point in the life of God in Christ.

I want to continue to reflect on this, and will in my next post (hopefully). I will also be giving the second principle on Barth’s scripture principle, as articulated by John Webster.

John Webster on the authority and morality of Scripture

Here is John Webster on the authority of scripture, and the moral requirement it involves as we engage it as God’s Word to us:

First, as divine speech and address, the text has authority. Though its genres are widely divergent (and though genre itself is not only a matter of textual form but also of readingstance), the Bible as a whole is address, the viva vox Dei which accosts us and requires attention. God’s address is interceptive; it does not leave the hearer in neutrality, or merely invite us to adopt a position vis-a-vis itself and entertain it as a possibility. It allows no safe havens; it judges. It is an ‘elemental interruption of the continuity of the world’.63 Christian theological doctrine about the authority of the Bible, and about the Bible’s status as ‘Holy Scripture’ has its roots here, in the bouleversement which God’s Word effects. Such doctrine is, crucially, not to be understood abstractly or formally, independent of the events of divine speech and the hearing which it evokes. The ‘authority’ of the Bible is not some textual quality per se, somehow inherent in this collection of pieces of inscribed discourse. Nor is it something which can be grasped as a purely formal relation between text and reader, or between text and teaching (as the quasi-legal language in which it is phrased can sometimes suggest). The authority of the Bible is real and functional; to speak of this authority is to articulate the relation between God as Word and the actions and dispositions of the church as the text is read. The text’s authority, its ‘holiness’ as ‘scripture’, is grounded in the fact that the text mediates divine speech in such a way as to command and establish reverence. [bouleversement=”upheaval”] [John Webster, “Hermeneutics in Modern Theology: Some Doctrinal Reflections,” Scottish Journal of Theology, 332-33]

This is good!

My ‘Theory of Revelation’ and Scripture

Here’s a video I did not too long ago; in it, I clarify my theory of revelation and subsequently how I approach an ontology of scripture.

The Problem of Sin and the Last Word, The Death of Death

I don’t know about you, but I grow weary of sin; I (we) face an ongoing battle every breath that we take. Whether it be perverse thoughts, dark deep secrets that plague the conscience, actions that result in destruction for you and all those related to you, systemic evil that permeates the very fabric of society (this is probably most insidious since we are conditioned by it in ways that give it a normalcy and thus societal and then personal acceptance); the Apostle can relate,

²³But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. ²⁴O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? Romans 7:23, 24

We battle on. But how do we know what we battle; how do we gauge the target, how do we even know that there is a target to hit? How do we realize that evil isn’t some just mysterious lurking principle ‘out there’ that ultimately is outside of me, and not something that actually implicates my very being to its deepest depths—even when I engage in the evil ‘out there’ occasionally or situationally? How do I know, even if I can index concrete and ongoing instantiations of evil ‘out there, that the evil is indeed me? And that this all encompassing wickedness and deprivation consumes my inner self, which organically shapes my outer self—since really ourselves (body/soul) are integrated wholes. In other words, I am sin to the depths, and the reason there is sin, evil, wickedness ‘out there’; it is mostly because it has a context ‘in here’, in me. But how can I say such things, how can I ground such assertions beyond some sort of psychological intuition? We know that we are blind when the impression of light intensifies our darkness; when Jesus acts the way he does, and did, we know we are indeed blind. We come to the realization that for all our good, for all our posturing toward ourselves; that the next to the last word is that we live in a state of No, or blindness to the fact that what we see the Apostle Paul giving voice to can only come when faced with the depth of our problem as we participate in the life of Christ. The One who took our No, our blindness, and indeed our sin unto himself ‘by becoming sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in him’ (II Cor. 5:21). As Calvin so perceptively knew, we only truly have knowledge of ourselves (and our abysmal state), when we first have knowledge of God through Christ, God the Redeemer.

It is this that John Webster masterfully elucidates as he engages Karl Barth’s vision of a christologically conditioned knowledge of sin in its most depth dimension. Let me quote Webster, who is commenting on Barth’s Church Dogmatics & Ethics, and the moral anthropology embedded therein:

[B]arth’s Christological determination of sin is not so much an attempt to dislocate ‘theological’ from ’empirical’ reality, as an argument born of a sense that human persons are characteristically self-deceived. Human life is a sphere in which fantasy operates, in which human persons are not able to see themselves as they truly are. The ‘man of sin’

thinks he sits on a high throne, but in reality he sits only on a child’s stool, cracking his little whip, pointing with frightful seriousness his little finger, while all the time nothing happens that really matters. He can only play the judge. He is only a dilettante, a blunderer, in his attempt to distinguish between good and evil, right and wrong, acting as though he really had the capacity to do it. He can only pretend to himself and others that he has the capacity and that there is any real significance in his judging. (CD IV/1, p. 446.)

This theme of concealment surfaces frequently in paragraph 60 (and elsewhere). Believing ourselves to see clearly, even allowing ourselves to suppose our sight to be sharper than that of our fellows, we are blind to the reality of our own selves. Barth acutely perceives that moral earnestness frequently rests upon clouded vision and lack of self-awareness and self-distrust. And so, once again, we return to the Christological basis for the treatment of human sin: ‘Compared with Him we stand there in all our corruption … The untruth in which we are men is disclosed … We are forced to see and know ourselves in the loathsomeness in which we find ourselves exposed and known.’

Human sinfulness, then, entails an ability to disentangle ourselves from our acts in such a way that they are no longer really ours. As Barth puts it in a passage in Church Dogmatics IV/2, we allow ourselves to believe that:

The sinful act is regrettable but external, incidental and isolated failure and defect; a misfortune, comparable to one of the passing sicknesses in which a healthy organism remains healthy and to which it shows itself to be more than equal. On this view, the individual — I myself — cannot really be affected by the evil action. I do not have any direct part in its loathsome and offensive character. In the last resort it has taken place in my absence. I myself am elsewhere and aloof from it. And from this neutral place which is my real home, I can survey and evaluate the evil that has happened to me in its involvement with other less evil and perhaps even good motives and elements; in its not absolutely harmful but to some extent positive effects; in its relationship to my other much less doubtful and perhaps even praiseworthy achievements; and especially in my relationship to what I see other men do or not do (a comparison in which I may not come out too badly); in short, in a relativity in which I am not really affected at bottom. I may acknowledge and regret that I have sinned, but I do not need to confess that I am a sinner.  (CD IV/2, p. 394)

These clarifications of the forms of human self-deception (which are by no means intended to underrate the ambiguity of the moral situation) are an important background to Barth’s treatment of original sin. His objection to some formulations of that doctrine is, at heart, that they are deficient in their account of positive evil. And his refusal of an independent locus peccati, his rejection of anything other than a Christologically determined account of sin, is directed by precisely the same concern. Far from averting attention from evil as fact, Christology is intended to furnish a means of clarifying our vision and dissolving our illusions about our own moral integrity. [John Webster, Barth’s Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth’s Thought, 69-70.]

The Apostle Paul concurs with this kind of assessment about the deleterious effects of sin upon a life that knows that it only knows its true state of affairs because of the One who finally has given the last word  to our No-being by his Yes to the Father for us—viz. a Yes that is given concrete form through his death, burial, and most importantly resurrection-ascension. The Apostle Paul, with his eyes wide open, as we noted earlier, gives a final sigh of relief when he writes:

 ²⁵I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin. Romans 7:25

The Apostle knew, that he knew sin, not ultimately because of the Law; but ultimately, because of Christ who penetrated deeper than the Law could on its own—viz. into the cavernous depths of the human soul which left to itself continues to look at evil and wickedness as if its ‘out there’, while all along failing to realize that they’ve never even seen sin and evil and wickedness in its most grotesque form; that’s because they’ve never presumed that maybe, just maybe the most insidious form of evil, in the end, dwells where they can’t peer, where they dare not, in themselves.