Karl Barth and Christian Ethics

Living in Truth

William Werpehowski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317109594
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théologie

This critical study of Karl Barth's Christian theological ethics discusses Barth's controversial and characteristically misunderstood ethics of divine command. The surprising relation of his 'divine command ethics' to contemporary 'narrative theology' and 'virtue ethics' and specific moral themes concerning bonds between parents and children, the nature of truth telling, and the meaning of Christian love of God and neighbor are all discussed. This book reveals Barth's richness, depth, and insight, and places his work in constructive connection with salient themes in both Catholic and Protestant ethics. Attentive to the fullness of Barth's Christological vision and to the purposes and limits of his reflections on the Christian life in pursuit of the good, William Werpehowski also advances conversations in Christian ethics about the nature of practical deliberation and decision, the orientation and dispositions that embody moral faithfulness, and the question and features of 'natural morality.'

PART ONE Divine Command, Narrative, and Ethics

Chapter 1 Divine Commands and Philosophical Dilemmas

DOI: 10.4324/9781315590912-1

Why ought we to obey the command of God? A Christian might say that we ought to obey the command because what God commands is good or right. But what makes God’s commands good or right? A classic response to this question is to pose another question in the form of a dilemma. The Platonic (or Socratic) version of the dilemma goes as follows: Does God command certain actions because they are good or right in themselves, or does their goodness or rightness consist simply in the fact that God commands them? If actions are good only by virtue of the fact that God commands them, then God’s command, since no reason is given for it, must be seen to be arbitrary, and obedience to it would seem to have no basis other than the acknowledgment that divine caprice is backed by divine constraining power. But if actions are good or right independently of God’s will, then it appears that there is some standard of goodness or rightness, independent of God’s will and commandment, to which God’s will and commandment must conform if they are to be called “good” or “right.”¹ Now perhaps the second horn of the dilemma is less problematic than the first for Christian ethical traditions; yet it does seem to be the case that many believers hold that what is normative for human behavior originates and is justified with reference to God’s will.²

¹ I am using Hugo Meynell’s formulation in “The Euthyphro Dilemma,” Aristotelian Society Supplemental Volume 46 (1972): 223–34. ² Ibid., p. 224.

In its Kantian version, the dilemma has to do with the problem of human autonomy. If we obey God’s command because we believe that it specifies what is right, then we are either 1) heteronomously assenting to an arbitrary will out of fear or some other prudential motive, or 2) autonomously assenting to a will which is deemed to be genuinely normative or moral in terms our own free and rational moral capacity. So we are able to understand Kant’s concerns when he says of Jesus Christ: “Even the Holy One of the Gospels must first be compared with our ideal of moral perfection before He is recognized as such.”³ But the same remark may also help us to understand how this dilemma haunts certain accounts of obedience to God; for many believers want to say both that they are not heteronomously assenting to the will of God, and that they are assenting to a form of revealed willing constituted by properties with which our “independent moral capacity” cannot itself and as such reckon. God’s revelation, according to this view, tells us something that we cannot tell ourselves.

³ Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Lewis White Beck (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), 29.

What I want to do in this chapter is make a case for the coherence of such a believer’s point of view, one which denies that the options posed by either or both of our dilemmas exhaust the possible responses to the question of obedience to the will or command of God. I develop my argument through an examination of Karl Barth’s ethics of divine command and his account of the knowability of God. My proposals concerning the latter account rely in part on the notion of the “open texture” of concepts. This idea will help us with the problem of preserving obedience to divine willings without conceding that the basis of our free obedience is a normative position which must be conceived to be independent of those willings themselves.

Election and Command

Consider first, by way of summary, the relevant features of Barth’s doctrines of election and divine command. From all eternity God has freely determined to turn to human beings, to be responsible to them, and to share covenant partnership with them. He has determined to do this in, through, and with the God-man Jesus Christ, who decisively accomplishes the work of reconciliation through his perfect obedience. The gift of God in Christ to human persons is nothing other than Himself, nothing other than God’s relating Himself to them. But given the goal of covenant partnership, there corresponds to God’s self-determination a “determination of the elect.” “The particular meaning and order of [the elect’s] being are based upon and will also be actualised and revealed in the fact that Jesus Christ is for him. As Jesus Christ is for him, the goal and content of his own life are foreordained. The purpose for which he is chosen is to be the kind of man for whom Jesus Christ is.”⁴

⁴ Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, ed. T.F. Torrance and G.W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1956–75), II/2, 410. Hereafter the Church Dogmatics will be cited by volume and page numbers only.

What does it mean to be such a person? She allows herself to be loved by God, so that thereupon she “may be joyful in time and eternity as the beloved of God, and as a partner in the covenant.” This is the blessedness of the elect. It cannot be merely a matter of “receiving, acceptance, and possession;” rather it puts persons actively in the service of God’s self-glorification through an “active participation in His love, His act, His work.” “It is not as an immanent but as a transitional blessedness … that [she] may receive and accept and possess it.” Concretely, service consists in gratitude for the self-offering of God. “God chooses [the elect] in order that his existence may become simply gratitude.” As “the response to a kindness which cannot be repeated or returned,” gratitude can “only be recognised and confirmed as such by an answer that corresponds to it and reflects it.”⁵ The earthly life of Christians is to be “a human life and history in which there occurs a visible representation of God’s life and history.”⁶ Insofar as participation in God’s love, act and work crucially includes witness—“to attest, represent and portray that which God really is and does”—the emphasis is on “the acknowledgment of the giver and the gift and the subordination of the recipient to the giver in accordance with the very nature of thanks”⁷ For Barth, then, imitatio dei stems from our determination to exist as grateful.

⁵ II/2, 412–13. ⁶ Robert Jenson, Alpha and Omega: A Study in the Theology of Karl Barth (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1963), 109. ⁷ II/1, 217.

The fact that God has determined persons to grateful partnership makes for a related and distinct problem from the perspective of the doctrine of election. “As election is ultimately the determination of man, the question arises as to the human self-determination which corresponds to this determination.”⁸ As free and responsible moral agents, persons are confronted with the question of the specific normative source and basis, the “law,” of their action. “That God has determined [one] for service clearly means that He claims him for Himself, and he is therefore asked whether he will satisfy this claim.”⁹ It is in this way that ethics becomes a task of the Doctrine of God. Now given the basis of God’s free and loving election of humanity in the God-man Jesus Christ, there can be no doubt about the nature of the solution to the “ethical question,” “the question as to the value which gives any action the claim to be the true expression of a mode of action, the fulfillment of a law.”¹⁰ The law of human life and action, proceeding from that basis, is the gracious will of God in Christ; therefore, we “cannot act as if we had to ask and decide of ourselves what the good is and how we can achieve it, as if we were free to make this or that answer as the one that appears to us to be right.”¹¹ This conclusion is not an argument for Christian obedience posed from outside the realm of Christian concepts; it is rather an inference from within that realm as Barth understands it, one which descriptively secures a fuller understanding of the logic of these concepts. Hence it is central to theological ethics that it retain what Barth calls its “offensiveness,” its refusal to submit to a general principle outside and independent of itself.

⁸ II/2, 510. ⁹ Ibid., 511. ¹⁰ Ibid., 513. ¹¹ Ibid., 518.

For the man who obediently hears the command of God is not in any position to consider why he must obey it. He is not in any position, therefore, from the vantage point of a higher principle to try to show either himself or others how this law of human volition and action is reached. He knows that the command of God is not founded on any other command, and cannot therefore be derived from any other, or measured by any other, or have its validity tested by any other. He knows that man cannot say this command to himself, but can only have it said to him.¹²

¹² Ibid., 522.

In fact, it is in the light of God’s original self-declaration to be for humanity that we may understand His sovereign authority. It is in and with His grace that God has proved really to be the Lord. God has maintained Himself as the Creator of persons who aims at their completion, the fulfillment of the divine determination that they be the “mirror and therefore the reflection” of God’s being. But He so maintains Himself by reconciling persons to Himself, leading them in spite of everything to their completion, which acquires the quality of redemption.¹³ God in Christ is humanity’s Lord and Master precisely to the extent that He is humanity’s Saviour, “the God in whom we may believe.” The man Jesus of Nazareth in his perfect obedience recognized that in God’s command “there is no question of an arbitrary and purposeless control which God can exercise just because He is God and therefore superior to man. On the contrary, what God wills from and for man stands or falls with, and is revealed and revealed only in, what the same God will do and has already done for us and in us.”¹⁴ In God’s grace we are shown that God will not be mocked. God’s claim has authority over persons because His grace removes the possibility of taking up any attitude of reserve toward Him through appeals to human freedom (for in becoming a human being God has claimed and perfected it), human weakness (because Jesus Christ, God incarnate, renders on our behalf the obedience divinely demanded), or the alleged human identity with the good (as God’s No to any such identity is in service of God’s gracious Yes, for us). Thus is the Gospel the power of the Law.

¹³ Ibid., 560. ¹⁴ Ibid., 562.

God claims humanity for obedience, rightly, in Jesus Christ. And humanity’s obedience to God, as the expression of its determination to its history of fellowship with God, must always be obedience to and conformity with Jesus Christ. He is the “concrete form of the teleological power of grace,” and therefore He is the criterion by which is measured all demands on our behavior. “The criterion by which all other demands are to be measured is whether they, too, proclaim indirectly the life and rule and victory of Jesus.”¹⁵ In “accepting God’s action as right,” persons understand their action as reflecting or analogically correlating with God’s own action.¹⁶ They lay aside all hostility, willfulness, and indifference to that action.¹⁷ Barth means to make a start at explaining the human side of the life of covenant partnership through this description of the way in which a Christian may place her own historical life-act at the disposal of God’s own historical life-act.

¹⁵ Ibid., 567–68. ¹⁶ Ibid., 575f. ¹⁷ Ibid., 582.

This summary demonstrates an important feature of Barth’s theological method. As I noted earlier, it is not his intention to present arguments for Christian obedience from some postulated neutral ground of rationality. Barth rather attempts to demonstrate the internal coherence of Christian beliefs through a process of arguing to postulated “unknown” points of doctrine from various presumed “fixed points” of doctrine, which points derive from reflection on Christian Scriptures, creeds, and traditions.¹⁸ Given that his theological task is primarily this sort of critical, holistic redescription,¹⁹ Barth would say that the particular shape that gratitude takes in one’s response to God’s grace and which constitutes one’s existence as covenant partner is not bound to any general (and just so “abstract”) rational rule that requires that one should repay or reciprocate or respond to gifts in this or that way. He characterizes the relationship of covenant partnership between God and persons as constituted by God’s gracious love, on the one hand, and by human existence in gratitude, on the other. When one confesses the truth that is Jesus Christ, one affirms the relationship in which one stands to Him which He has established. The behavioral expression of that affirmation is freely to live the life of a “grateful existent.”

¹⁸ Karl Barth, Anselm_ Fides Quaerens Intellectum (New York: World Publishing Company, 1962), 55. ¹⁹ See Hans W. Frei, “Eberhard Busch’s Biography of Karl Barth,” in Hans W. Frei, Types of Ch...