The Claim of God

Karl Barth's Doctrine of Sanctification in His Earlier Theology

Worthington

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781498200295
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Through close readings of Karl Barth's theological work from 1916 to 1929 this book offers an exposition of Barth's doctrine of sanctification in his earlier theology--arguing that from his earliest writings after 1915 the doctrine of sanctification was one of the key theological components used in describing the encounter between God and man in a positive and concrete manner. This book both fills an important gap in Barthian scholarship and responds to the appeal by other recent interpreters of Barth's theology for a more balanced and careful exposition of his work. Throughout the course of this exposition the force of Eduard Thurnyesen's wonderfully insightful comments about Barth show themselves to be fruitfully borne out within his work from early on. That is, "Karl Barth's theological thinking was from the beginning directed to the life of man... the life of man, on the one side, and on the other the Word of God that meets this life, lays hold of it, and transforms it."

1

The Divine-Human Encounter

Introduction

The Doctrine of Reconciliation, to which Barth devoted over two thousand pages in his thirteen-volume Church Dogmatics, is introduced first under the heading “God with Us” as the “most general description of the whole complex of Christian understanding and doctrine.”1 Barth admitted that he was “very conscious of the great responsibility laid on the theologian at this centre of all Christian knowledge. To fail here is to fail everywhere. To be on the right track here makes it impossible to be completely mistaken in the whole.”2 Failure here is failure everywhere because it threatens to erode the central message of the gospel, namely, that there is a specific relationship between God and humanity. Failure here threatens to obscure both the name of God as Emmanuel (“God with Us”), and the implications this has for the existence and actions of human beings. For Barth, the doctrine of sanctification lies at the heart of that discussion of the divine-human relationship because fundamentally, for him, “sanctification” means the intimate relationship between God and humans. It is wholly concerned with the reality and distinctiveness of the divine-human relationship in correlation to the life of individual people.

Eduard Thurneysen, one of Barth’s closest friends from his Safenwil pastorate, once wrote that “because his concern was with this [Jesus Christ’s] message, . . . Karl Barth’s theological thinking was from the beginning directed to the life of man. The existence, the life of man, on the one side, and on the other the Word of God that meets this life, lays hold of it, and transforms it.”3 Even before Barth’s break with liberalism, he was a theologian concerned with struggling to get the divine-human relationship correct.4 It was partially his keen observation that the majority of his theological mentors must have misunderstood this relationship when they aligned themselves with Wilhelm II that caused him to search elsewhere for a secure theological foundation. It was also Barth’s desire to understand correctly the relationship between the Kingdom of God and the corresponding actions of humanity that caused him to distance himself from certain forms of the socialist movement. Barth sensed deep-seated deficiencies both dogmatically and ethically in the theology of his day.

In constructing a new theological foundation, Barth felt that he needed to say something new, something different from what had already been said, something “wholly other.”5 The pale theology dominating modern discussions, relegating God to passive activity in a thriving human culture was now exposed as a fraud in Barth’s eyes. In 1915, several years of struggle, discontent and development came to a head, and as Barth stated the question of the “living God” “came down on me like a ton of bricks.”6 What needed to happen was now clear to Barth. The old idols needed to be knocked down; modern theology had to be stripped of its lifeless content and Protestant Theology set back on the right path: God must be God and humanity must be humanity. Only then could anything real and true be said.

Was it the discovery that the theme of the Bible—contrary to the critical and orthodox exegesis, in which we had been brought up—definitely could not possibly be man’s religion and religious ethics—could not possibly be his own secret godliness, but—this was the rocher de bronze on which we first struck—the Godness of God, precisely God’s Godness, God’s own peculiar nature over against not only the natural, but also the spiritual cosmos, God’s absolutely unique existence, power and initiative above all in His relationship to man? We felt that it was in this way, and only in this way, that we could understand the Voice of the Old and New Testaments, and that it was from here, and only from here, that we could from now on be theologians and particularly preachers, ministri Verbi Divini.7

Barth’s earlier writings are extremely significant because they emerge from the fast-paced period when he had set himself to the task of clearing away what was being said in modern theology and restating what needed to be said in its place. As John Webster rightly noted this was a period of reinvention for Barth. It was a time when he began to rebuild “Christian theology from the ground up. . . . The process of reinvention involved Barth in a two-fold task of ground clearing and construction . . . Barth found himself having to say ‘no’ in order to create a space for the affirmations which he wished to make.”8 Barth’s lectures and writings from this early period are a tremendous force that catapulted him into the forefront of a theological coup. It was during this time that Barth began to drastically reshape the theological landscape of the world, changing the face of the Christian church’s dialogue.

During the period from 1916 through 1922, just before and slightly overlapping his appointment as Professor of Reformed Theology in Göttingen, Barth expressed the content of the Christian life in fellowship with God primarily by disabling false constructions of human piety or self-righteousness by emphasizing righteous human living grounded in and vividly portrayed in God’s own righteousness. This notion, which drastically shaped Barth’s doctrine of sanctification, was one of the key theological components for upholding and describing the divine-human relationship for Barth in which the gospel message was seen as the power that affirmed both God’s love and redemption of humankind, and humanity’s faithful life response. This chapter explores the notion of encounter in which Barth affirms that God has in fact drawn close to humanity in distinction over and against them, and in this way transforms their existence in freedom. This conception becomes the basis for Barth’s discussion of sanctification early on, and is explored in three important works: “The Righteousness of God” (1916), “The Christian’s Place in Society” (1919), and “The Problem of Ethics Today” (1922). As this chapter will show, Barth’s doctrine of sanctification was not only shaped by an intimate portrayal of the divine-human relationship, but was also inherently linked to his fundamental concerns at the time.

Several comments are required up front concerning Barth’s work during this period. First, these writings should not be treated as if they are pieces of systematic or dogmatic theology proper. There is a real danger in overly systematizing these earlier writings because of the congruencies that are noticeable with his later dogmatic works. Barth had been in the pastorate since 1909 and it was not until the fall of 1921 when he was appointed to the University of Göttingen that he began a somewhat more developed approach to his theological task. Therefore, these earlier writings are marked more by pastoral thrust and tone rather than dogmatic nuances. They are to be sure infused throughout with deep instinct and great passion, but anyone seeking tidy exposition of Christian doctrine will perhaps come away frustrated.

For example, in the years directly following Barth’s ‘break’ with Protestant liberalism he did not often refer distinctly to the term ‘sanctification,’ or ‘justification’ for that matter, to describe the impact of the work of reconciliation within human life. Rather, Barth frequently seems to press in on the reality of the encounter between God and humanity and the meaning this has for human life and living to describe that actuality. The point in this first chapter then is not to argue for a direct equivalency of terms, i.e. righteousness or encounter equals sanctification as such, but to explore themes related to the way in which Barth describes the relationship between the grace of God and the ‘living’ of the object of God’s attention, and thereby gaining insight into the way in which Barth discussed the divine-human relationship from the beginning. While many of his earlier writings might not expressly detail Barth’s use of the term ‘sanctification’ they do in fact lay down a framework or pattern of discussion which characterizes Barth’s concern about the life of those encountered by God beyond the mere forgivene...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Abbreviations
• 1. The Divine-Human Encounter
• 2. The Calvin Lectures
• 3. “The Theology of the Reformed Confessions”
• 4. The Resurrection of the Dead
• 5. Göttingen Dogmatics and “Rechtfertigung und Heiligung”
• Conclusion
• Bibliography