Being in Action

The Theological Shape of Barth's Ethical Vision

Paul T. Nimmo

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780567099198
• eBook ISBN: 9780567195418
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théologie chrétienne

This book investigates the way in which the 'actualistic ontology' - i.e., the fact that God and human agents are beings-in-act in a covenant relationship - that underlies the Church Dogmatics of Karl Barth affects his conception of ethical agency. It analyses this effect along three paths of inquiry: knowing what is right (the noetic dimension), doing what is right (the ontic dimension), and achieving what is right (the telic dimension). The first section of the book explores the discipline of theological ethics as Barth construes it, both in its theoretical status and in its actual practice. In the second section, the ontological import of ethical agency for Barth is considered in relation to the divine action and the divine command. The final section of the book examines the teleological purpose envisaged in this theological ethics in terms of participation, witness, and glorification.
At each stage of the book, the strong interconnectedness of theological ethics and actualistic ontology in the Church Dogmatics is drawn out. The resultant appreciation of the actualistic dimension which underlies the theological ethics of Karl Barth feeds into a fruitful engagement with a variety of critiques of Barth's conception of ethical agency. It is demonstrated that resources can be found within this actualistic ontology to answer some of the diverse criticisms, and that attempts to revise Barth's theological ethics at the margins would have catastrophic and irreversible consequences for his whole theological project.

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INTRODUCTION

It is not as if man first exists and then acts. – Barth¹

What should we do?

The fundamental question of theological ethics is one which taxes not only professional theologians and ethicists in occasional academic engagement, but all Christians in their daily walk of discipleship. It is not a question that is ever susceptible to an easy answer. Rather it inevitably brings in its wake a whole raft of other questions: How do we know what we should do? What does it mean when we do it? To what end do we do it? A simple ethical inquiry has the potential to escalate rapidly into a complete meta-ethical analysis, one which embraces the full range of Christian doctrines along with ancillary disciplines such as epistemology and ontology. This arduous, yet necessary, theological task is today all too often avoided, leading some-times to what appears to be a depressing superficiality in much contemporary ethical debate.

One theologian who was never averse to addressing himself to such difficult questions throughout his life was Karl Barth. As both a professional theologian and a Christian disciple, he wrestled with these issues and their consequences in dialogue not only with the text of the Bible and the tradition of the Church but also with the social, political, and ethical issues of his day. In this way, Barth’s engagement in Christian ethics was always theologically informed. For while Barth recognized that the theme of dogmatics was exclusively the Word of God, he nonetheless insisted that the theme of the Word of God itself was human existence – not only human being but also human action, and thus the human person considered as a being in action. As theological ethics was, for Barth, a matter of considering this human person as a being in action under the Word of God, so it inherently involved a particular theological ontology. More specifically, Barth operated with an actualistic ontology, in which, within the covenant of grace, the ethical agent as a being in action is called to corresponded to the Being in action of God. In other words, for Barth, there was a specific formal and material understanding of the context of all ethical action and of the human person who engaged in it.

This book is an attempt to discern the theological shape of Barth’s ethical vision as it embraces the ethical agent as a being in action situated within this particular, actualistic ontology. In its three parts, this book approaches Barth’s response to the fundamental question of theological ethics from three directions. First, it considers the noetic aspect of being in action: how does the ethical agent know what to do? Second, it examines the ontic aspect of being in action: what does it mean when she does it? And third, it explores the telic aspect of being in action: to what end does she do it?

As the actualistic dimensions of Barth’s ethical vision are progressively unfolded in the following chapters, so the power and the relevance of that vision are ever more fully discerned. It is the hope that through this book the resultant appreciation of the theological shape of his ethical vision will contribute towards greater insight into the shape of the Christian life and witness as Barth perceives it, in terms of both its daily performance and its theological significance. In this way, it is also to be hoped that the theological ethics of Barth will continue to offer a resource for thinking through contemporary ethical issues, both in the Church in particular and in society as a whole.

The remainder of this introduction addresses three tasks. First, this book is set briefly within the context of some of the more recent literature in the field of Barth’s ethics, and its own particular contribution to the field is outlined. Second, the concept of Barth’s ‘actualistic ontology’, which is central to this study of Barth’s theological ethics, is properly introduced. Finally, the road to be followed in the course of the remainder of this book is concisely previewed.

Current scholarship in the theological ethics of Karl Barth

In 1991, Nigel Biggar wrote that ‘The English-speaking world has not been generous with the attention it has paid to the ethical thought of Karl Barth’. ² Fifteen years later, it is more than doubtful that the same conclusion could be reached. Since that time, a number of excellent monographs have appeared which have been directly concerned with the theological ethics of Barth,³ while both general works and edited collections on the theology of Barth now routinely include a chapter on his ethics. ⁴

In contrast with much of the previous scholarship on the theological ethics of Barth, ⁵ many of these more recent works – while seldom devoid of critical engagement – have been broadly receptive to and affirming of Barth’s ethical writing. A significant impetus for this perceptible shift has been provided by a series of studies which considered in detail the theological ontology and corresponding theological anthropology that emerge in the theology of Karl Barth. ⁶ The result of such works was a recognition that while the theological ontology of Barth yields a very particular concept of the context of ethical agency, it is a context in which there is nonetheless created a clearly defined space for meaningful theological ethics and being in action.

This fresh understanding of the ontological particularity of Barth’s theology has led to an ongoing re-evaluation of the importance and validity of his theological ethics. Some of this research has focused primarily on Barth’s early work, ⁷ while research focused on the Church Dogmatics itself has tended to be selective either in its scope or in its perspective. ⁸ In recent literature on Karl Barth, however there has been little attention given to a more comprehensive systematic analysis of the relationship between ontology and ethics in the Church Dogmatics. That is, there have thus far been only sporadic attempts at an approach which incorporates in its analysis both theoretical and practical perspectives, not only the noetic but also the ontic and the telic dimensions of Barth’s ethical vision.⁹

It is the aim of this book to provide this kind of broad systematic study of the theological ethics of Karl Barth in the Church Dogmatics, and to demonstrate in its different parts the strong connection at each point between the ethical vision of Barth and his theological ontology. The present work thus not only analyses the way in which Barth answers the fundamental issues in theological ethics – by what knowledge, in what manner, and to what purpose an ethical agent acts – but also shows how his ethical vision cannot be effectively appreciated without an understanding of his underlying theological ontology. In particular, this book examines how the actualistic ontology with which Barth operates determines his understanding of ethical agency at these noetic, ontic, and telic levels, and demonstrates that many of the criticisms directed at Barth’s ethics lose much of their potency when the full implications of this ontology are delineated.

Actualistic ontology

In turning to examine what this book calls the ‘actualistic ontology’ with which Barth operates in the Church Dogmatics, it must immediately be cautioned that Barth never once uses the term. Indeed, there is no section at all in the Church Dogmatics wherein Barth explicitly sets out a theological ontology after the manner of a mediaeval scholastic theologian. As Alan Torrance notes, ‘The simple reason for this concerns Barth’s commitment to the distinction between theology and ontology and his refutation of any universal (pan) ontology which subsumes both God and humanity within the domain of its principles as theologically and methodologically indefensible’.¹⁰ Nevertheless, it is beyond doubt that Barth does write with a very particular ontology in view. As Eberhard Jüngel observes, ‘Barth’s Dogmatics makes ontological statements all the way through. But this dogmatics is not an ontology; at least not in the sense of a doctrine of being drawn up on the basis of a general ontological conception within which the being of God … would be treated in its place …Yet he does not shy away from making ontological statements’.¹¹ In these ontological statements, it becomes clear that Barth has a particular formal understanding of the contexts and the relationships and the actions within which the ethical agent lives and moves and has her being.

It is paramount to recognize first that the roots of any construal of a theological ontology lie for Barth not in metaphysical speculation, but in the revelation of the being of God in the Word of God. It is in accordance with the witness of Scripture, for Barth, that ‘We cannot understand the ethical question as the question of human existence as if it were posed in a vacuum … as if it were not first posed by the grace of God’.¹² Rather, Barth observes, Scripture makes manifest a ‘very definite order of being … when in its witness to God’s revelation it confronts and relates God and man, divine facts and human attitudes’.¹³ This reference to ‘a very definite order of being’ confirms that Barth is dealing from the outset of his theological ethics with a particular theological ontology. This particular ‘order of being’, writes Barth, is one ‘in which God is the Lord but in which man is God’s creature and servant’.¹⁴ The corresponding inseparability of theology and ethics and revelation indicates that throughout the Church Dogmatics Barth has a specific understanding of what Webster calls ‘moral ontology’ – ‘the objective order of the good and of the ways in which human persons ought to dispose themselves in relation to that order’.¹⁵

For Barth, the ‘moral ontology’ which Scripture reveals, the ‘very definite order of being’ mentioned above, is noetically and ontically grounded in Jesus Christ. Barth posits that the reality to which Scripture ultimately witnesses in the event of the revelation of God is Jesus Christ – ’a reality that is utterly simple, as simple as anything else in the world, as simple as only God is’.¹⁶ Indeed, Barth states, the revelation of God ‘does not differ from the person of Jesus Christ nor from the reconciliation accomplished in Him’.¹⁷ Hence the person of Jesus Christ, and therefore the identity of God, are to be understood in light of the event of the revelation of God: in this event, God acts to rev...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction
• Part One: Noetic Aspects of Being in Action
• Part Two: Ontic Aspects of Being in Action
• Part Three: Telic Aspects of Being in Action
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects
• eCopyright