The Humanity of Christ

The Significance of the Anhypostasis and Enhypostasis in Karl Barth's Christology

Haley

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781532614163
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

This work is a critical analysis of Karl Barth's unique adoption of the concepts anhypostasis and enhypostasis to explain Christ's human nature in union with the Logos, which becomes the ontological foundation that Barth uses to explain Jesus Christ as very God and very man. The significance of these concepts in Barth's Christology first emerges in the Gottingen Dogmatics and is then more fully developed throughout the Church Dogmatics. Barth's unique coupling together of anhypostasis and enhypostasis provides the ontological grounding, flexibility, and precision that so uniquely characterizes his Christology. As such, Barth expresses the Word became flesh as the revelation of God that flows out of the coalescence of Christ's human nature with his divine nature as the mediation of reconciliation. This ontological dynamic provides the impetus for Barth's critique of Chalcedon's static definition of the union of divine and human natures in Christ from which Barth transitions to an active definition of these two natures. Not only does anhypostasis and enhypostasis explain the dynamic union between the divine and human natures in Christ, but also the dynamic union between Jesus Christ and his Church, which reaches its apex in the reconciliation of humanity with God, in Christ. The ontological foundation of anhypostasis and enhypostasis in Christ's union with his Church explains the importance of the royal man in understanding genuine human nature, the exaltation of human nature, and the sanctification of human nature.

1

Anhypostasis and Enhypostasis

Historical Formulation and Interpretation

Introduction

In his Church Dogmatics Karl Barth relentlessly develops and interprets the person of Jesus Christ as the necessary subject and object of divine revelation whose fingerprints touch upon every nuance of sacred Scripture.28 For Barth, Jesus Christ is the central figure and focus of the Word of God manifested in time and space as the Word became flesh.29 Barth explains that:

This fulfilled time which is identical with Jesus Christ, this absolute event in relation to which every event is not yet event or has ceased to be so, this “It is finished,” this Deus dixit for which there are no analogies, is the revelation attested to in the Bible. To understand the Bible from beginning to end, from verse to verse, is to understand how everything in it relates to this as its invisible-visible centre.30

Grounded in the reality of the Word became flesh Barth expresses Jesus Christ as the absolute center of God’s revelation of himself whose advent marks the fullness of God’s free grace bestowed upon humanity,31 and in whose person manifests the confluence of “very God and very man.”32 That being said, any honest investigation into Karl Barth’s ontological and theological development of Jesus Christ as the God-man must recognize Barth’s insistence that the human nature of Christ exists in absolute union with his divine nature. One in fact can argue that Barth understands the ontological essence of Jesus Christ as he understands the ontological essence of the triune God; that is, just as the Son exists in perfect union with the Father and the Holy Spirit as one God, so too the divine nature of Christ exists in perfect union with his human nature as one person.33 In this way both ontological formulations of (1) the Triune God and (2) the person of Jesus Christ manifest perfect union together with perfect distinctiveness in their being.34

Given this ontological presupposition Barth works out his understanding of the fundamental/biblical truth undergirding the essence of Jesus Christ, which he encapsulates in the statement the Word became flesh.35 In this event—eternal God in the second person of the Trinity reveals in this world true God by taking upon himself the nature of true humanity. And in this event, in the eternal Word taking upon himself the nature of created humanity, Barth could not conceive ontologically the person of Jesus Christ in whose being separates (in any sense) true God from true humanity.36 Whatever argument one makes with respect to Barth’s understanding of Jesus Christ as the God-man, that argument must grant that Barth worked within a christological system that understands Jesus Christ as one person who perfectly unites in his being the natures of true God and true humanity—given his understanding of Christ’s human nature as true humanity.

Throughout his Church Dogmatics and development of the person who is Jesus Christ, Barth moves deliberately (one may even say cautiously) as he considers the objectives of Church Dogmatics as an investigational study within the context of Biblical exegesis, historical church councils, and the works of theologians whose influence lay heavy upon orthodox Christology.37 In view of Barth’s approach to dogmatics, one of the critical questions we raise with respect to Barth’s understanding of the human nature of Christ is how he interprets the historical/theological development of Christ’s human nature as evidenced by his adoption of the dual formula anhypostasis and enhypostasis.38 For Barth, this dual formulation was historically validated as a legitimate theological expression of how the person of Christ embodies both divine and human natures ontologically. This is not an insignificant point of theological reference because it enabled Barth to cite this formula as both historical and authoritative support for his own ontological development of the God-man. That is, Barth cites the use of anhypostasis and enhypostasis by earlier dogmaticians to argue how the human nature of Christ comes into union with the divine nature of the Logos. Barth explains that:

The earlier dogmaticians tried even more explicitly to distinguish from every other kind of unity, and in that way to characterize, the uniqueness of the unity of the Word and human nature . . . But from the utter uniqueness of this unity follows the statement that God and Man are so related in Jesus Christ, that He exists as Man so far and only so far as He exists as God, i.e. in the mode of existence of the eternal Word of God. What we therefore express is a doctrine unanimously sponsored by early theology in its entirety, that of the anhypostasis and enhypostasis of the human nature of Christ. Anhypostasis asserts the negative . . . Apart from the divine mode of being whose existence it acquires it has none of its own; Enhypostasis asserts the positive. In virtue of the εγενετο, i.e., in virtue of the assumptio, the human nature acquires existence (subsistence) in the existence of God, meaning in the mode of being (hypostasis, “person”) of the word.39

The genesis of Barth’s appropriation of anhypostasis and enhypostasis is found in the Göttingen Dogmatics where Barth provides an early glimpse into his understanding of the term anhypostatos, which he uses negatively to express the human nature of Christ having no reality in itself, and the enhypostatos, which he uses positively to express the human nature of Christ as having real subsistence in its union with the Logos.40 We note also in the Göttingen Dogmatics that Barth primarily treats anhypostasis and enhypostasis as two independent concepts in describing the human nature of Christ in its ontological union with God the Son.

Nevertheless—and this is where the emphasis falls—this individual that incorporates human nature has never existed anywhere as such. The humanity of Christ, although it is body and soul, and an individual, is nothing subsistent or real in itself. Thus it did not exist prior to its union with the Logos. It has no independent existence alongside or apart from him . . . This idea, the idea of humanity, and this individual who incorporates it, cannot for a single moment be abstracted from their assumption into the person of the Logos....

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Anhypostasis and Enhypostasis
• Chapter 2: Karl Barth’s Interpretive Construal of Anhypostasis and Enhypostasis
• Chapter 3: Anhypostasis and Enhypostasis
• Chapter 4: Anhypostasis and Enhypostasis
• Chapter 5: Barth’s Christological Method in View of Chalcedon
• Chapter 6: Beyond Chalcedon
• Conclusion
• Bibliography