Karl Barth and the Incarnation

Christology and the Humility of God

Darren O. Sumner, Darren Sumner

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780567667496
• eBook ISBN: 9780567655301
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

This work demonstrates the significance of Karl Barth's Christology by examining it in the context of his orientation toward the classical tradition - an orientation that was both critical and sympathetic. To compare this Christology with the doctrine's history, Sumner suggests first that the Chalcedonian portrait of the incarnation is conceputally vulnerable at a number of points. By recasting the doctrine in actualist terms - the history of Jesus' lived existence as God's fulfillment of His covenant with creatures, rather than a metaphysical uniting of natures - Barth is able to move beyond problems inherent in the tradition.
Despite a number of formal and material differences, however, Barth's position coheres with the intent of the ancient councils and ought to be judged as orthodox. Barth's great contribution to Christology is in the unapologetic affirmation of 'the humanity of God'.

1

The Identity Problem: Tensions in the
Christological Tradition

In order to gauge the significance of Barth’s constructive Christology to the history of dogmatic theology we must survey the various ways in which the Word of God has been related to His assumed humanity in the history of Christian thought. The broad pattern I wish to demonstrate is that, prior to the Council of Chalcedon (451), theologians writing about the incarnation generally favored a model of instrumentalism: the flesh is a tool in the hands of the Word, so that the subject of the life of Jesus Christ (the “person” or hypostasis of the union) is strictly divine. The christological controversies brought about an identifiable shift to a more compositional model: the person is the God-human, Jesus Christ, who exists by virtue of the union of the divine and human natures (or the divine Word and a human nature). Yet the instrumentalist impulse never disappeared altogether, so that even the view of mature Chalcedonianism¹ maintained a divine Logos as the subject behind the economy of the incarnation.

The events of the fourth through the seventh centuries were deeply formative for the church’s confession. The generations that followed Chalcedon saw a resurgence of pro-Cyriline sentiment in the East, resulting in Constantinople II’s broad condemnation of even non-Nestorian Antiochene theology in 553. This was to be followed by new controversies over the number of energies and wills in Christ (monenergism and monothelitism, respectively). Proponents of this so-called neo-Chalcedonian movement continued explicitly to identify the Word as the person of the union—lest His humanity be overly personalized, or it be inferred that the Son of God only came into existence when he was conceived of the Virgin Mary. But the vindication of Maximus the Confessor and dyothelitism at Constantinople III (680/81) showed that the more radical Cyrilines would not finally prevail. By the eighth century John of Damascus, summarizing the conciliar faith received from the first six ecumenical councils, favored heavily the language of hypostatic composition. “The very subsistence of God the Word was changed into the subsistence of the flesh,” he wrote, “and the subsistence of the Word, which was formerly simple, became compound.”² The acting subject of the union is thus no longer the Logos simpliciter but the Logos as He exists in the ontological complexity of divine-human unity—the man Jesus Christ.

These two models of impersonal instrumentality and personal composition are in continuity with one another and by no means mutually exclusive, as is demonstrated by the persistence of the language of instrument through the Middle Ages.³ My point is not to argue that the one supplanted the other, but that the consensus of Chalcedon signaled an important shift in how the person of Jesus was identified. Great improvements were here made upon the Christologies of the fourth century, to be certain. Yet, once a full human existence was reckoned to be indispensible to Christ’s metaphysical makeup, it became increasingly difficult for theologians to identify Jesus as “God the Son” without significant, material qualification in their Christologies. The development of Christology had involved a shift from regarding the Lord Jesus Christ as the Word of God making use of humanity to the Word of God joining humanity to Himself. The eternally simple, second person of the Trinity thereby became complex, in that He identified Himself not with the human Jesus (in an adoptionist sense) but fully as the God-human.

This move may seem basic, but it is also deeply complicating to the question of identity. For who, now, is Jesus Christ? Is he essentially divine and human? Or is he the simple Logos under the veil of flesh? What emerges from this period of doctrinal development is what I call the “identity problem”: a difficulty in identifying Jesus Christ immediately with the Word of God as one and the same subject, given what appear to be ontological differences between them. This problem underlies additional difficulties with regard to the incarnation. We will consider three of the most prominent of these issues: divine immutability, kenosis, and the Word’s impassibility on the cross. (Other issues could be identified, as well.) My suggestion is that each of these represents a tension within the conceptual structure of classical Christology, in each case reinforcing the identity problem in order to maintain an acceptable level of consistency.

I begin with a survey of the key period of doctrinal development, in order to illustrate this shift from instrumentalism to composition. Then, for each of the issues under consideration I will briefly consider its history, its theological determination and implications for the person and work of Christ, and finally its contribution to the identity problem. This will take us beyond the patristic and early medieval periods to consider a number of important Reformation and modern insights. Though we are concerned primarily with the theological implications of these issues, a bit of doctrinal history will help to understand not only why the church has reached such conclusions on the being of God in Christ, but also the alternative options that have been tested and rejected. This will provide an important background for our examination of Karl Barth’s Christology and the way in which his modern appropriation disentangles the traditional doctrine of the incarnation from such difficulties—rather than rejecting Chalcedonianism as unfit to the task, as much of modern critical theology has done.

Models of incarnation in the early church

One of the tradition’s greatest theological challenges has been the cogent description of how the eternal Word of God is properly to be related to the human person who is the subject of the New Testament narratives and the object of Christian devotion. Pro-Nicenes of the fourth century defended Jesus’ full divinity and equality with God the Father. Against the Arian party they argued that there was no “time when he was not”—that the one to whom the church witnesses, and who it worships, is the eternal Son of God. But just how it is that this one has also come to experience a human birth, life, and death—and all of these in such a way that He did not cease to be divine? A variety of options were suggested by those who have come to be identified with Antiochene or Alexandrian schools, with orthodoxy or heresy, and with approaches “from above” or “from below.”⁴ We may survey them only briefly before turning to consider the limits of the Chalcedonian solution.

On one end of the spectrum is the heresy of Docetism: the Word merely manifested in the form of a human person and was not truly human. The person “Jesus” is directly identical with the Word, but possesses only one nature; he is more akin to an angelic messenger than God present in flesh. Ebionitism is found on the other end of the spectrum, suggesting that Jesus is fully human but not actually a divine person. Again, he possesses only one nature. In both cases the basic question of how Jesus and God the Son are related is uncomplicated. These positions are not seriously countenanced by the ancient church, and so need not detain us. A third option also deemed heretical might be located at the exact center of this spectrum: Nestorianism affirmed the full divinity of Christ against the Ebionites and Arians, and his full humanity against the Docetists. But its solution to the problem of unity was to posit two subjects who are related to one another in an intimate, moral union—the divine Word drawing so near to the human that He effectively shares in Jesus’ life experiences. None of these three paradigms satisfied the church because each failed to engage the problem head-on, explaining away the affirmation that the human Jesus is the eternal Son of God.

Also on the spectrum, however, were paradigms that commended themselves to orthodoxy and that continue to dominate traditional Christologies. Two broad models of the incarnation held sway in these formative centuries—one largely giving way to the other after the controversies of the fifth century, though its influence continued in important ways. These represent the early church’s efforts to conceive of a satisfying answer to the question of the Word’s relation to humanity within a single-subject Christology—one Lord who is both vere Deus and vere homo.

Eusebius of Caesarea

Long before the threat of Arianism, the theological tradition in Alexandria was founded upon Jesus’ divinity as a basic priority. Origen had emphasized the divine Word of God as the real performative agent of the life of Jesus Christ. From the beginning of the fourth century we see the continuance of a moderate Origenism of various stripes, which included opposition to radical forms of Gnosticism, subordinationism, and monarchian modalism.⁵ In Jesus, one who is Himself God has come among creatures.

Eusebius of Caesarea suggests an instrumentalist model of the incarnation that is less nuanced than that of his more able peers, such as Athanasius. Following Origen, Eusebius suggested that the Word of God became incarnate in flesh in order to make His divine nature perceptible to human beings, assuming the mortal body “as a medium of intercourse with man.”⁶ The flesh was His inst...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1 The Identity Problem: Tensions in the Christological Tradition
• 2 Barth’s Response to Logos Christology
• 3 Reconciliation: The Positive Doctrine of Christ
• 4 The Question of “Chalcedonianism”
• 5 Barth’s Christology and the Challenge of the Incarnation
• Bibliography
• Index