Christ Crucified in a Suffering World

The Unity of Atonement and Liberation

Nathan D. Hieb

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781451465716
• eBook ISBN:
  9781451469820
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

What is the connection between Christian doctrine and concrete social action? This question marks the often unarticulated divide between systematic theology and liberation theology, each often emphasizing one primarily or formally over the other. Examining the work of Karl Barth, T. F. Torrance, and Jon Sobrino, here Nathan Hieb contests this bifurcation, specifically around the nodal points of the crucifixion, or the doctrine of atonement, and the context of suffering. This book is an innovative study that bridges the boundaries of method, doctrine, and praxis, creating a strong theological and action-oriented relationship between systematic and liberation theology.

2

Unity of Atonement and Liberation in Barth’s CD II/1

“The Mercy and Righteousness of God”

The day I revisited the Sewa Ashram in Delhi, the ministry I had helped Ton Snellaert initiate a decade earlier, a young mother and her two small children also arrived. With her husband languishing in an Indian prison, her family’s vulnerability and desperation had grown. Lacking food, shelter, and medical care, illness soon threatened their lives. Her malnourished, two-year-old son lost his hearing because infections burst his eardrums. Her own health had deteriorated rapidly after giving birth to a daughter one month earlier, probably on the street or in a city park. With nowhere else to turn, a friend told her of the Sewa Ashram, which aids those in dire need. As they made the hour-long journey across the city, though, her strength completely failed and she died in a crowded bus. Her body arrived with her two small children.

I spent several hours caring for her infant daughter, watching this beautiful child who would never know her mother. She was healthy because she had been nursed on the nutrients that her mother had also needed to survive. Her mother died giving life to her child. That day, I realized that I will never meet anyone more important than this little girl. The mother’s sacrifice reveals the child’s immeasurable, intrinsic worth. In the same way, God’s sacrificial action in Christ unmasks the helplessness of all, even the most able, and reveals the profound value of each, even the most helpless. On the cross, God’s righteous mercy enfolds us and calls us to extend mercy to others.

Chapter 1 used Hegel’s philosophical system to engage Barth’s thought on Hegel’s terms. My discussion now moves from Hegel’s philosophy to Barth’s theology. I will continue to employ the categories extracted from Hegel’s system as a “third-order”^[1] analytical framework for examining Barth’s thought, but I will do so now on Barth’s own terms and only in an effort to clarify the structure of his thought. As I allowed Hegel’s philosophy to guide my discussion in the last chapter toward the formation of human identity and normative social practice, I now shift my focus to the unity of atonement for sin and liberation from unjust suffering, which I regard as intrinsic to Barth’s view of the cross in “The Mercy and Righteousness of God.”^[2]

My decision to use Hegel’s categories (externality, internality, particularity, universality) within an exposition of Barth’s theology requires a few words of explanation. Although comparing these two towering figures would be a fruitful exercise in itself, something deeper is at stake. In the last chapter, we observed that Hegel uses these categories to depict a movement from transcendence to immanence. Initially, the human community views God as existing separately from itself. Eventually, though, the community attains absolute knowing by viewing God as constituted by its own social practices. Hegel uses externality, internality, particularity, and universality in order to describe this transition and to propose a new conception of how God relates to sociopolitical life. I now extract these categories from Hegel’s thought in order to diagram an alternate understanding of this relation: the union of atonement for sin and liberation from unjust suffering through Christ’s cross.

My account entails a close reading of CD II/1, “The Mercy and Righteousness of God,”^[3] as well as a partial rearrangement of Barth’s presentation for the sake of clarity. I chart Barth’s discussion in this critical portion of the Church Dogmatics according to the formal structure analyzed in chapter one in order to underscore his interrelation of Hegel’s categories (Barth’s first, formal move). God’s externality frames Barth’s discussion of God’s mercy and righteousness. An affirmation of particularity may be found in his description of Jesus Christ’s exclusively unique person and work. Universality marks humanity’s condition of sin and suffering. I then consider innocent suffering and natural evils in Barth’s thought. Finally, internality appears through suffering’s location within God’s heart and through the connection between Christ’s suffering and our own. The internality of reconciliation leads to clear ethical implications for human life (Barth’s second move in its direct mode).

I then argue that Barth successfully relates each Hegelian category to the cross’s eternal, spiritual aspect as well as to its temporal, material aspect (the indirect mode of Barth’s second move). This signals a significant difference from T. F. Torrance, for whom externality and particularity formally relate to transcendent claims regarding God’s otherness, and from Jon Sobrino, for whom internality and universality refer to immanent sociopolitical realities within the human community. By interrelating the Hegelian categories (the first move), drawing clear ethical implications from God’s reconciling action in Christ (direct mode of the second move), and presenting the dual dimensionality of the categories (indirect mode of the second move), Barth interweaves atonement and liberation in his theology of the cross in CD II/1, “The Mercy and Righteousness of God.” I close this chapter by discussing the unity of atonement and liberation with special attention to internality and universality. The remainder of this volume traces the unity of atonement and liberation throughout Barth’s final and most complete treatment of the theology of the cross.^[4]

Externality—God’s Mercy and Righteousness

For Hegel, externality refers to the belief of the human community that God exists as an “other” beyond and outside of itself. In chapter one, I noted Barth’s clear affirmation of God’s aseity. Barth claims that God, external to humanity and completely free and self-sufficient in Godself,^[5] is both merciful and righteous. These two “perfections” uniquely refer to the inseparable oneness of God, indivisible in Godself.

Yet because of our cognitive limitations, we may only approach the divine simplicity through separate angles of analysis. For this reason, Barth’s discussion of the mercy and righteousness of God in Church Dogmatics II/1 follows his description of God’s grace and holiness and precedes his account of God’s patience and wisdom within the context of his treatment of God’s being in act as expressed in God’s love and freedom. Throughout these passages, Barth seeks to provide a continual and creative redescription of God’s unitary nature that manifests oneness in “real plenitude”^[6] and therefore through various perfections shares a relation of unity and distinction. These perfections do not exist in tension, as though they are at some level contradictory or irreconcilable, nor is their exposition a matter of adding one perfection to another in sequential steps leading to a greater sum. Rather, Barth regards his account of God’s mercy and righteousness as an exercise in restating “what has already been said”^[7] from a new angle and in light of a different facet of the history of God’s interaction with God’s people. As we will see, Barth implicitly interweaves a clear affirmation of God’s externality throughout his discussion of God’s mercy, God’s righteousness, and the relation of unity they share.

God’s Mercy

Barth begins his discussion of God’s mercy by describing the unity of mercy, love, and grace. In the Bible we see that mercy is “at the very centre of the concept of divine love and its specific determination as grace”^[8] and that “divine love bears necessarily the character of mercy.”^[9] Barth employs the terms love, grace, and mercy almost interchangeably, though with minor variation, there...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• G. W. F. Hegel and the Analysis of Theological Models
• Unity of Atonement and Liberation in Barth’s CD II/1
• Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Atonement
• The Church’s Prophetic Vocation in the World
• The Affliction and Liberation of the Christian
• Conclusion: The Unity of Atonement and Liberation
• Bibliography
• Index of Authors
• Index of Subjects