Barth on the hesitancy of Christian ethics

“Theological ethics should not in any way try to say directly what God’s command is. It should not make appeal to the truths supposed to lie in nature as creation of God, nor appeal to this, that, or the other text in the Bible. such ethics has to serve the Word of God, even as theology should. It must not anticipate that Word, nor may it obstruct that Word by setting up a human law. The particular thing incumbent upon such ethics is to take the Word of God as being God’s Word, and to point out the way whereby the relative necessities of our existence as creatures can become the Word of God’s revelation to us. This duty must be discharged by ethics in the light of what scripture proclaims. But it is not called upon to determine to what extent they are his, for this is solely the business of God’s Word. An ethics that thinks it can know and set forth the command of God, the Creator, plants itself upon the throne of God: it stops and poisons the wells and is more fraught with peril to the Christian life than all cinemas and dancing-saloons piled together.” (The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life, Louisville, 1993, 9–10.)

Hmmm.

What Barth is anxious to oppose here, and throughout this section of his lecture, is a view in which natural law is perspicuous. Such a view is connected to an understanding of the analogy of being to imply that we have a created capacity or feature of our constitution (some kind of substantive understanding of the image of God) that links us, in some way, to God. Barth sees this as undermining the absolute distinction between creature and Creator. Any knowledge we have of God through creation is not something there to be discovered, but a gift continually given by the Holy Spirit who animates creation, not simply as a predictable force, but as the personal presence of God himself.

I think this is, at one level, a really good point. We don’t know what creation means apart from God’s active revelation to us (and that means we don’t fully understand it apart from Christ). We’re kidding ourselves if we think that moral order can just be read-off creation without difficulty. The knowledge of its meaning and significance is a gift of grace that we should not “take for granted”.

That said, I’m not happy with Barth’s total hesitancy. For while it preserves against an overconfident natural moralism, it seems to deny the faithfulness of God. Barth’s parallel thinking in relation to Scripture helps us. Just as we might feel uncomfortable with the sense that we can’t depend on Scripture in the sense of “taking it for granted”, so we may, I think, feel uncomfortable with the sense that we can’t rely on the stability and meaningfulness of created moral order.

We ought, I think, to distinguish two senses of taking something for granted. On the one hand, we shouldn’t take either created moral order or scripture for granted in the sense that we shouldn’t forget that we are, in fact, talking about revelation, we are talking about a gift of knowledge that is not simply “native” to us. But on the other hand, there is a sense in which we should take both scripture and natural moral order for granted, in the sense that they have, in fact, been granted, and God is faithful to his gift. I am not sure Barth’s insistence that we should never imagine we can “know and set forth the command of God” is not in fact ultimately a failure to accept what God has in fact given.

Could someone who understands Barth better tell me why I’m wrong?

 

Ben Myers on Barth’s Doctrine of God

Ben Myers has a fascinating article entitled “Election, Trinity, and the History of Jesus”, in the new book Trinitarian Theology After Barth (ed. Habets and Tolliday, Princeton TMS, 2011). In it, he argues that Rowan Williams strikingly anticipated Bruce McCormack’s argument that Barth’s trinitarian thought in IV/1 is very different, and very much superior, to his thought in I/1. Interesting. Ben argues that central to Barth “second” doctrine of the Trinity is the idea that the history of Jesus is constitutive of the being of God, in that, from eternity, God elects to be the God of Jesus Christ, in the full sense of that idea: the God who opens up a space within himself to bring reconciliation. Ben shows that this is different from both any classical Logos Asarkos doctrine of God, as well as from Moltmann’s understanding of the crucified God, which still presupposes a “God” who subsequently gets crucified. Ben writes:

For Barth… God’s triunity is always already a cruciform triunity. God elects the death of Jesus as the shape of God’s own life. God ‘is not untrue to himself but true to himself in this condescension’ (IV/1, 185). The crucified Christ is the perfect–the beautiful and terrible–realization of what it means for God to be God. The wound of the cross is a real wound; but this wound is already at the heart of that eternal communion, that love which is always in motion between the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit. (p.132)

I found Ben’s article clear and compelling. I’m worried about one thing, though, which is drawn from David Bentley Hart’s criticism of Moltmann and Jenson: if the wound of the cross is eternally at the heart of God, how can the implication be avoided that evil is eternally necessary for God’s being?

The best of Ben Myers on Barth

Faith and Theology is coming up to almost 200 posts on Karl Barth over the years. Here is some of the best stuff from the back catalogue: a darn good introduction, I reckon.

George Hunsinger on Torrance and Barth

Kim Fabricius’ ten propositions on Barth

Ben on “Why I am not a universalist”

Barth’s doctrine of election

Church Dogmatics in a week

The best books on Karl Barth

…and the worst

Thanks Ben!

On Karl Barth and China

I once heard someone say that everything you hear about China is true somewhere, and nothing is true everywhere. In this respect, Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics is like China.

Karl Barth on God’s constancy

Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.

“God’s constancy—which is a better word than the suspiciously negative word ‘immutability’—is the constancy of his knowing, willing and acting and therefore of his person. It is the continuity, undivertability, and indefatigableness in which God both is Himself and also performs His work, maintaining it as such and continually making it His work. It is the self-assurance in which God moves in Himself and in all His works and in which He is rich in Himself and in all His works without either losing Himself or (for fear of this loss) having to petrify in Himself and renounce His movement and His riches. The constancy of God is not then the limit and boundary, the death of His life. For this very reason the right understanding of God’s constancy must not be limited to His presence with creation, as if God in Himself were after all naked ‘immutability’ and therefore in the last analysis death. On the contrary, it is in and by virtue of His constancy that God is alive in Himself and in all His works. The fact that He possesses selfhood and continuity itself makes Him the living One that He is, and is the basis and meaning of His power and might, the inner divine secret of the movement and wealth itself in which He is glorifious on His throne and in all the heights and depths of His creation.” (Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, II.1.31.2)