GCS Class Barth and Rahner: Session 5
Barth on the Son of God
The material here comes from volume 4/1 of Barth’s Church Dogmatic, 179-204. In cutting it so that it’s of manageable length (and reducing odd bits to squarebracketed summaries), I’m destroying some of its powerful rhetorical effect. I would seriously recommend you to look at pp. 157-210 in the original book (or on line, within Oxford from —which has translations when KB goes into Latin or Greek, but doesn’t differentiate between small and large print). It gives you in short compass why the conventional Christian positions on God, Christ, and Salvation are as they are—and sets out more clearly than almost anything else I know why some ways of thinking we might (like early Christians!) be tempted to explore are claimed not in the end to do justice to the gospel narrative.
For the sessions I’ll have a shorter handout for discussion; but it would be good if you could cast your eyes over these four pages or so before you come.
The Christian theological tradition has always been in agreement that the statement “The Word was made flesh” is not to be thought of as describing an event which overtook Him, and therefore overtook God Himself, but rather a free divine activity, a sovereign act of divine lordship, an act of mercy which was necessary only by virtue of the will of God Himself. The statement cannot be reversed as though it indicated an appropriation and overpowering of the eternal Word by the flesh. God is always God even in His humiliation. The divine being does not suffer any change, any diminution, any transformation into something else, any admixture with something else, let alone any cessation. … He humbled Himself, but He did not do it by ceasing to be who He is. He went into a strange land, but even there, and especially there, He never became a stranger to Himself.
… But it is something very bold and profoundly astonishing to presume to say without reservation or subtraction that God was truly and altogether in Christ, to speak of His identity with this true man, which means this man who was born like all of us in time, who lived and thought and spoke, who could be tempted and suffer and die and who was in fact tempted, and suffered and died. … (T)his statement concerning God is so bold that we dare not make it unless we consider seriously in what sense we can do so. It must not contain any blasphemy, however involuntary or well-meant, or however pious. That it does do this is to this very day the complaint of Judaism and Islam against the Christian confession of the deity of Christ. It cannot be taken lightly.
Cur Deus homo[why God human] is the question we shall have to deal with in the second part of this section—the question concerning the necessity of the incarnation of the Word. But it presupposes that we have already answered the question concerning its possibility from the standpoint of God:Quo iure Deus homo[how is it that god became human].
[An alternative to be rejected]
The incarnation of the Word, the human being of God, His condescension, His way into the far country, His existence in theforma servi[note], is something which we can understand … by supposing that in it we have to do with with what is noetically and logically an absolute paradox, with what is ontically the fact of a cleft or rift or gulf in God Himself, between His being and essence in Himself and His activity and work as the Reconciler of the world created by Him. It therefore pleased Him in this latter … to be in discontinuity with Himself, to be against Himself, to set Himself in self-contradiction. …
But at this point what is meant to be supreme praise of God can in fact become supreme blasphemy. God gives Himself, but He does not give Himself away. He does not give up being God in becoming a creature, in becoming man. He does not cease to be God. He does not come into conflict with Himself. … If it were otherwise, if in it He set Himself in contradiction with Himself, how could He reconcile the world with Himself? … In the folly of such a contradiction to Himself He could obviously only confirm and strengthen us in the antithesis to Him in which we find ourselves. … We cannot, therefore, choose this alternative in understanding the possibility of His becoming flesh. Nor can we leave it open as a possibility with which we can seriously reckon and sometimes toy. We have to reject it. But it can be positively rejected only as it is firmly replaced by the other alternative (which is not really another, but the only possible one).
[2] We begin with the insight that God is “not a God of confusion, but of peace” ( 1 Cor. 1433). In Him there is no paradox, no antinomy, no division, no inconsistency, not even the possibility of it. … It is in full unity with Himself that He is also—and especially and above all—in Christ, that He becomes a creature, man, flesh, that He enters into our being in contradiction, that He takes upon Himself its consequences. If we think that this is impossible it is because our concept of God is too narrow, too arbitrary, too human—far too human. Who God is and what it is to be divine is something we have to learn where God has revealed Himself and His nature, the essence of the divine. And if He has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ as the God who does this, it is not for us to be wiser than He and to say that it is in contradiction with the divine essence. We have to be ready to be taught by Him that we have been too small and perverted in our thinking about Him within the framework of a false idea of God. It is not for us to speak of a contradiction and rift in the being of God, but to learn to correct our notions of the being of God, to reconstitute them in the light of the fact that He does this.
We have to think something after the following fashion. As God was in Christ, far from being against Himself, or at disunity with Himself,He has put into effect the freedom of His divine love, the love in which He is divinely free. He has therefore done and revealed that which corresponds to His divine nature. His immutability does not stand in the way of this. It must not be denied, but this possibility is included in His unalterable being. He is absolute, infinite, exalted, active, impassible, transcendent, but in all this He is the One who loves in freedom, the One who is free in His love, and therefore not His own prisoner. …
And no limit is set to His ability to do it by the contradiction of the creature against Him. It does not escape Him by turning to that which is not and losing itself in it, for, although He is not the Creator of that which is not, He is its sovereign Lord. It corresponds to and is grounded in His divine nature that in free grace He should be faithful to the unfaithful creature who has not deserved it and who would inevitably perish without it, …
… But we must dig deeper if we are to understand the free love of God established in the event of atonement. If the humility of Christ is not simply an attitude of the man Jesus of Nazareth, if it is the attitude of this man because, according to what takes place in the atonement made in this man (according to the revelation of God in Him), there is a humility grounded in the being of God, then something else is grounded in the being of God Himself. For, according to the New Testament, it is the case that the humility of this man is an act of obedience, not a capricious choice of lowliness, suffering and dying, not an autonomous decision this way, not an accidental swing of the pendulum in this direction, but a free choice made in recognition of an appointed order, in execution of a will which imposed itself authoritatively upon Him, which was intended to be obeyed. If, then, God is in Christ, if what the man Jesus does is God's own work, this aspect of the self-emptying and self-humbling of Jesus Christ as an act of obedience cannot be alien to God. But in this case we have to see here the other and inner side of the mystery of the divine nature of Christ and therefore of the nature of the one true God—that He Himself is also able and free to render obedience.
… But it is clear that once again, and this time in all seriousness, we are confronted with the mystery of the deity of Christ. Let us grant that this insight is right, that what the New Testament says about the obedience of Christ, on His way as a way of suffering, has its basis, even as a statement about the man Jesus, in His divine nature and therefore in God Himself. Does this make the mystery of His deity even more difficult and perhaps impenetrable? Or do we have in this insight the real key to an understanding of it, to the knowledge of it as an open secret?
We cannot conceal the fact that it is a difficult and even an elusive thing to speak of obedience which takes place in God Himself. Obedience implies … a superior and a junior and subordinate. Obedience as a possibility and actuality in God Himself seems at once to compromise the unity and then logically the equality of the divine being. … Subordinationism of every age and type has committed itself to this questionable path.
A second alternative which presents itself is as follows. … we must isolate this whole sphere [of the God who sends Christ] by stating that in it we have to do only with a kind of forecourt of the divine being, with a divine dispensation (economy) in favour of, and with respect to, the particular nature of the world, not therefore with the true and proper and nonworldly being of God. There is, then, a commanding and an obeying divine being, but in a true equality, only as worldly forms or appearances of true Godhead, and therefore only in the sphere of the improper being of Godhead. But that is the weakness of this explanation. For obviously we have to ask what is this worldly, and purely economic, and therefore improper being of the true God. If His economy of revelation and salvation is distinguished from His proper being as worldly, does it bring us into touch with God Himself or not? Has He Himself really taken up the cause of the world or not? Has He really made Himself worldly for the world's sake or not? Obviously, according to this theory, He has not done so. In fact He has only acted as though He had done so. But if He has not, how can there be on this theory any reconciliation of the world with God?
…
These two attempts at a solution were often made in the 2nd and 3rd centuries in relatively harmless, because inconsistent and ambiguous, forms. We find both of them in acknowledged teachers of the Church: a kind of Subordinationism in Tertullian, for example, and a kind of Modalism in Irenaeus. Both were finally rejected as unsatisfactory by the Early Church. In their developed form (in the doctrine of Paul of Samosata, on the one hand, and that of Sabellius on the other) they were recognised to be heretical, being condemned as errors in which we cannot do justice to the mystery of the deity of Christ.
… We can now see the error which is common to the subordinationist and the modalist presentation and solution of the problem. Both suffer from the fact that they try to evade the cross of Jesus Christ, i.e., the truth of the humiliation, the lowliness and the obedience of the one true God Himself as it became an event amongst us in JesusChrist as the subject of the reconciliation of the world with God. They evade it because they start from the assumption that it cannot be accepted as true. And they then err in their different ways as they try to escape the dilemma which they themselves have created, interpreting the obedient Christ either as some heavenly or earthly being distinct from God, or as a mere mode of appearance of the one true God. Both damage and indeed destroy the nerve of the New Testament knowledge of Christ. Both solve the christological mystery by juggling it away, and for that reason both show themselves to be quite useless.
Is it a fact that in relation to Jesus Christ we can speak of an obedience of the one true God Himself in His proper being? … it is plain that we not only can do so but have to do so, that we cannot avoid doing so either on the one side or on the other. We have not only not to deny but actually to affirm and understand as essential to the being of God the offensive fact that there is in God Himself an above and a below … that it belongs to the inner life of God that there should take place within it obedience.
We have to reckon with such an event even in the being and life of God Himself. It cannot be explained away either as an event in some higher or supreme creaturely sphere or as a mere appearance of God. Therefore we have to state firmly that, far from preventing this possibility, His divine unity consists in the fact that in Himself He is both One who is obeyed and Another who obeys.
… As we look at Jesus Christ we cannot avoid the astounding conclusion of a divine obedience. Therefore we have to draw the no less astounding deduction that in equal Godhead the one God is, in fact, the One and also Another, that He is indeed a First and a Second, One who rules and commands in majesty and One who obeys in humility. The one God is both the one and the other. And, we continue, He is the one and the other without any cleft or differentiation but in perfect unity and equality because in the same perfect unity and equality He is also a Third, the One who affirms the one and equal Godhead through and by and in the two modes of being, the One who makes possible and maintains His fellowship with Himself as the one and the other. In virtue of this third mode of being He is in the other two without division or contradiction, the whole God in each. But again in virtue of this third mode of being He is in neither for itself and apart from the other, but in each in its relationship to the other, and therefore, in fact, in the totality, the connexion, the interplay, the history of these relationships. And because all division and contradiction is excluded, there is also excluded any striving to identify the two modes of being, or any possibility of the one being absorbed by the other, or both in their common deity. God is God in these two modes of being which cannot be separated, which cannot be autonomous, but which cannot cease to be different. He is God in their concrete relationships the one to the other, in the history which takes place between them. He is God only in these relationships and therefore not in a Godhead which does not take part in this history, in the relationships of its modes of being, which is neutral towards them. This neutral Godhead, this pure and empty Godhead, and its claim to be true divinity, is the illusion of an abstract “monotheism” which usually fools men most successfully at the high-water mark of the development of heathen religions and mythologies and philosophies. The true and living God is the One whose Godhead consists in this history, who is in these three modes of being the One God, the Eternal, the Almighty, the Holy, the Merciful, the One who loves in His freedom and is free in His love.
… Up to this point we have refrained from using the concepts which dominate the New Testament and ecclesiastical dogma. Our first task has been to show what is their place and purpose in our present context. We can now introduce them. Jesus Christ is the Son of God who became man, who as such is One with God the Father, equal to Him in deity, by the Holy Spirit, in whom the Father affirms and loves Him and He the Father, in a mutual fellowship.
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