Crisp on Barth's denial of universalism

Crisp claims that ‘if one reads CD II/2 with attention to what Barth actually writes about election. . . one will end up with a doctrine that is either a form of necessary universalism. . . or incoherent. . . . He either did not allow the implications of his doctrine of election to fully work through into the rest of his theology, or he rhetorically overstated his doctrine of election.’Footnote ⁴ In order to assess the justification for these claims, we first need to understand what Crisp means by ‘universalism’ and, specifically, ‘necessary universalism’. According to Crisp, universalism ‘connotes any species of Christian doctrine concerning the scope of human salvation that yields the conclusion that all human beings will be saved’.Footnote ⁵ He then adds a modal qualification to this definition. He differentiates between a contingent universalism which claims ‘all human beings will be saved’ and a necessary universalism which claims ‘all human beings must be saved’. The former allows for ‘possible worlds in which some human beings are not saved’, since ‘it is not the case that God had to save all human beings’.Footnote ⁶ Crisp rightly recognises that both forms of universalism are compatible with the doctrine of God's aseity. Contrary to what many theologians – including, ostensibly, Barth – have said, the claim that universalism is a necessary truth does not conflict with divine freedom. It might be the case that ‘God is essentially such that. . . he must bring about the salvation of all humanity’.Footnote ⁷

Keeping these distinctions in mind, we can turn now to the logical problem that Crisp claims to expose in Barth. I will restate the argument from his 2003 essay, though I condense some propositions and elide other less controversial steps in the argument. The syllogism then goes something like this:

1. 1. Christ is the elect one and the reprobate one (i.e., election and reprobation directly pertain only to Christ);Footnote ⁸

2. 2. all human agents are elect only in the derivative sense of having a saving relation to Christ;

3. 3. the saving relation to Christ is constituted by Christ's work of atonement;

4. 4. Christ's death is sufficient and efficient to atone for the sin of all human agents; therefore,

5. 5. all human agents are necessarily (and derivatively) elect in Christ, the elect one, by virtue of his universally efficient atonement.Footnote ⁹

By and large, this argument correctly reproduces at least some of Barth's theological convictions, and I will not challenge Crisp's logic directly. Two things are worth noting. First, Barth's doctrine of election is not an abstract decretum absolutum willed by God. It is a conceptual explication of what occurred in the reconciling history of Jesus Christ's life, death and resurrection. Election is a historical event. Insofar as Barth understands it as a decision in pretemporal eternity, it is a decision made by God strictly in anticipation of the event that took place at Golgotha. In other words, what God elects in eternity is precisely this history. Second, what occurred in this history, according to Barth, is not merely the possibility of reconciliation but its actuality. There is no act, divine or human, needed to consummate the redemptive work accomplished already in Christ – neither an ecclesial act of sacramental mediation nor an individual act of faithful acknowledgement.

Crisp is right to see a necessity at work in Barth's theology.Footnote ¹⁰ Barth's denial of universalism does not mean he retracts his clearly stated conviction that ‘the concern [of the godless] can not be to suffer the execution [Ausführung] of this threat, to suffer the eternal damnation which corresponds to their godlessness’, for this is ‘the very goal which is unreachable by the godless, because it has already been taken away by the eternally decreed offering of the Son of God to suffer in place of the godless, and can not any longer be their goal’.Footnote ¹¹ After the death and resurrection of Jesus, the threat of rejection and condemnation is an empty threat. This much is quite true. But Crisp identifies the wrong kind of necessity. To clarify Barth's position, we are aided by a statement that Jüngel makes with respect to the question of necessity in the field of christology, but which is also relevant to our topic.Footnote ¹² He says that ‘this “must” [Muß] is more than the must of a modal necessity [Notwendigkeit]’. It is not ‘some earthly necessity’ that we see in the life-history of Jesus, but rather it is the ‘eschatological must (δεῖ)’.Footnote ¹³

For our purposes, I take it that this distinction between ‘earthly necessity’ and ‘eschatological necessity’ is a way of identifying the unique nature of God's saving action in Christ. We can specify this uniqueness as the paradoxical unity of necessity and contingency. In his contribution to the debate over trinity and election, Kevin Hector makes the claim that ‘there is a sense in which humanity is contingently necessary to God’.Footnote ¹⁴ The concept of ‘contingent necessity’ has purchase outside of that particular debate. In fact, it is a key aspect of Barth's thinking throughout the Church Dogmatics, especially in the fourth volume. I will argue here that the divinely necessary event of the world's reconciliation includes a double contingency: the contingency of Christ's history as the actualisation of salvation and the contingency of each person's own history as the apostolic witness to this salvation. Modal logic is incapable of adequately understanding the paradoxical and historical character of Barth's account of salvation. I will address the contingency of Christ briefly before turning in more detail to the contingency of Christian witness.

Divine freedom and transcendent necessity

The mature dogmatic theology of Barth in CD II/2 and following is a minefield for the analytic theologian. I am tempted to say, a rather Hegelian minefield, but it is not merely Hegel's influence that makes its presence felt. One sees traces – and sometimes much more than traces – of many different continental thinkers, including inter alia Kierkegaard, Heidegger and, of course, Rudolf Bultmann. All that is simply to say, when it comes to parsing Barth's later theology of reconciliation, the analytic thinker is wading into highly unfriendly waters. Any attempt to corral Barth's thought into tidy logical categories is bound to be a fruitless exercise. That is nowhere more the case than with the topic of universal salvation, which forms a point of intersection for his doctrinal reflections on Christ and election.

We begin by observing that Barth's doctrine of election understands God's decision to be contingent not only in the sense of being a particular act of God, but also because it has a determinate historical location. Election is identifiable with the historical event of Jesus Christ, an event that is ‘concrete, limited in time and space, singular and unique. It is. . . a “contingent fact of history”, to use the phrase of Lessing’.Footnote ¹⁵ At the same time, this contingent decision is also necessary. God can only will what God in fact does. One cannot understand Barth's doctrine of divine freedom without attending to what he calls ‘the inner necessity of the freedom of God’. God does not have ‘a sovereign liberum arbitrium’ which makes it possible for God to will things arbitrarily, as if God's decision is a choice of one option among many. He goes on to say that ‘we do not have to do with one of the throws in a game of chance which takes place in the divine being, but with the foundation-rock of a divine decision’.Footnote ¹⁶ Barth wants to exclude from theology the notion that the will of God is a libertarian free will such that God is wholly undetermined and capable of choosing any possibility. He argues instead that God is wholly self-determined. God necessarily is what God has done. The actuality of God's decision in Christ determines what is possible for God. All other contingent possibilities are eternally excluded as unreal possibilities which are, in fact, impossible.

At the same time, Barth is keen to avoid the opposite error. The necessity that Barth posits is a necessity within divine freedom – that is, a necessity within the singularity of the divine decision. This does not mean that God could have acted otherwise, as if there were other real possibilities. What it means, by contrast, is that the necessity of a certain occurrence taking place is not immanent to (or grounded in) the occurrence itself. Recall Barth's discussion of the analogia fidei in CD II/1. In his dispute with the Lutheran dogmatician Johannes Andreas Quenstedt, Barth strictly differentiates between an analogia attributionis extrinsecae – in which the analogy between the creature and God ‘is proper to the creature only externally in the existence and form of its relationship. . . to God’ – and an analogia attributionis intrinsecae which makes the analogous properties internal to both God and the creature.Footnote ¹⁷ Barth's point with the analogia fidei is that the analogy which comes to exist between human knowledge and divine self-knowledge is one which God alone makes possible. It is always an extrinsic relation. Nothing native to human speech itself can make analogous God-talk possible. If such an analogy occurs, it can only be due to a contingent act of divine grace. It is in this sense that Barth rejects necessity in other areas of his theology. Even where he speaks of the contingent act of grace as necessary – since God precludes all other possibilities from the start – it does not become the ‘bad necessity’ that he elsewhere rejects as mechanical in nature. He thus opposes speaking of God's merciful treatment of sinners like ‘a mechanism which functions, as it were, independently of his free ruling and disposing’, because this would involve a ‘necessity immanent to its occurrence’.Footnote ¹⁸ The claim is not that God might treat sinners unmercifully but only that, when and where God acts mercifully, it is solely an act of divine grace and not an act conditioned by anything in the sinner. That God treats humanity mercifully is necessary because God has sovereignly determined Godself to be a merciful God. It is, we might say, a transcendent necessity, rather than an immanent necessity.Footnote ¹⁹ The terms ‘immanent necessity’ and ‘transcendent necessity’ correspond to Jüngel's ‘earthly necessity’ and ‘eschatological necessity’.

The distinction between a transcendent-extrinsic necessity and an immanent-intrinsic necessity helps to make sense of Barth's well-known statement against universalism, namely that God ‘does not owe us eternal patience’.Footnote ²⁰ His rejection of apokatastasis is an attack on the notion of an immanently necessary universalism, i.e. the notion that God owes us salvation. He rejects the view that there is something about humanity which could constrain God's decision. We might call this ‘immanent (or bad) universalism’ as opposed to a ‘transcendent (or good) universalism’. Barth's consistent reference to Origen supports this observation. In his conversation with members of Princeton Theological Seminary in 1962, for example, Barth begins his response to the question of universal salvation by defining the idea in terms of Origen's soteriology: ‘[By] universal salvation, I understand, what Origen has told people, in the end all will be good, all will be saved, even the Devil is coming home. . . . And if we proclaim, well, we are all saved, we all will end in a pleasant way, then we take away God's freedom to do it.’Footnote ²¹ The problem with (Origen’s) universalism is that it ‘take[s] away God's freedom’; it is an external determination regarding what God is able to do. This does not, however, preclude God from freely actualising the salvation of all people in the history of Jesus Christ. Universalism in this sense would be a contingent necessity rooted in God's free and eternal self-determination.

Divine self-revelation and existential participation

Thus far we have seen that Barth is not at all opposed to speaking of necessity with respect to God throughout his mature dogmatic theology. But this necessity occurs in a contingent historical event and is inseparable from this contingency. It is the necessity not of immanent logic but of transcendent, eschatological action.

We turn now to the subjective, human corollary of Barth's account of necessity and contingency in the Christ-event. If the relation between transcendent and immanent necessity concerns the ontological basis for universal salvation (namely that the reconciled being of humanity is established by God's act in Christ), then the concern here is with the epistemological relation of human beings to this christological event. With regard to the former, Barth recognises that contingent particularity is internal to the event of salvation itself; with regard to the latter, we will see that Barth recognises that a certain particularity is internal to a theologically responsible thinking and speaking about salvation. Transcendent or eschatological necessity is operative in both cases: in the former, it means that God determines Godself for this particular historical person from Nazareth; in the latter, it means that God discloses Godself to those particular historical persons who live as faithful witnesses of the crucified Nazarene. The problem with universalism is not that it infringes upon divine freedom – since, as we have seen, there is a good Barthian way of avoiding that problem – but rather that it presupposes a mistaken notion of theological speech.

It is well-known that Barth's theology is inimical to universal axioms and general statements. Throughout his dogmatics, and not only in his rejection of apokatastasis, Barth opposes any attempt to turn the self-revelation of God into a systematic principle from which general truths may be derived.Footnote ²² His understanding of theological speech has its basis in his understanding of the Christ-event itself. The contingent, transcendent necessity discussed above with reference to Christ has significant implications for human speech which would seek faithfully to correspond to this reconciling event. This becomes especially clear in a key passage from the ‘Judge judged in our place’ (§59):

Discussions of Barth's universalism do not usually reference this passage, but it has enormous implications for correctly understanding his position. Notice that he differentiates between being ‘necessary in principle’ and being ‘divinely necessary’. The former is something that people can ‘count on’; it is a timeless and universal idea from which we can consistently and permanently deduce other ideas. The latter is not the necessity of a principle but rather the necessity of a contingent divine decision. It is marked by a ‘concrete determination’, by a divine action in the particular history of Jesus Christ. There is nothing timeless about this occurrence. It is the ‘event in which salvation is given to us’, and as an event it never becomes a stable given within the world. The divinely necessary event took place in a contingent occurrence and – crucially, for our concerns – it continually meets us here and now in a contingent way. As revelation [Offenbarung], it cannot become something revealed [Offenbartheit].Footnote ²⁴

Theology, according to Barth, does not speak of an idea, substance or object, but rather of a history, that is to say, an event. But this is not just one history or event among others, because it ‘never ceases to be event’.Footnote ²⁵ Theology is concerned with a divine history, the event of God. As such, it is invisible apart from the Holy Spirit's awakening gift of faith. This divine event is not ‘deducible’, meaning that it is not available for neutral and detached observation and examination, and thus it cannot be expressed in static propositions which purport to have universal validity. For this reason, in CD IV/3, Barth contrasts the prophetic witness of Jesus Christ which demands our active involvement with the sinful human attempt to set up a ‘worldview’ [Weltanschauung]. A religious worldview attempts to speak of God ‘from a certain distance’ and to state ‘that which is always and everywhere the same’; it is a doctrine that a person ‘deduces from the many things which one has seen or thinks one has seen’. Barth contrasts this with the word of divine grace which ‘speaks of a unique and highly particular event’.Footnote ²⁶ This event never becomes an objective datum of the past, since God is not past but always present in our midst. As a history, it has to be narrated; as a divine history, it can only be narrated by one who actively participates in it as an apostolic witness, that is, by one whose own history corresponds to the singular history of Christ. Theology is an integral part of this ongoing historical and contextual narration of the event of Jesus Christ. This means there is no theological statement that has timeless validity as a purely objective truth. To speak of God is simultaneously to speak of oneself in the active service of God.

Barth objects to what he calls ‘ecclesiastical-theological orthodoxy’ on the grounds that it tries to speak about God in a purely objective or non-participatory way, that is, in the manner of a worldview. After expressing appreciation for orthodoxy's ‘zeal, watchfulness and loyalty in relation to the content of the Christian witness’, Barth then offers the following correction:

The content of the faith – even in the most central creeds and confessions – becomes an ‘idol’ if it is not narrated or articulated in the existential context of the one who encounters this content in the addressing word of God. Theology is not the recitation and repetition of ostensibly objective propositional statements. On the contrary, theology is always and only a contingent, subjective act of personal liberation and faithful witness, a contextual and existential engagement with the event of Jesus Christ which meets us in the present moment. Without this inherently subjective character – in which the understanding of God is always a new self-understanding – theology is an ‘idle pursuit’. The content of Christian theology cannot be abstracted from the missionary vocation in which that content comes to expression again and again within a particular time and place.Footnote ²⁸

Election for the sake of witness: Barth's rejection of apokatastasis

We are now in a position properly to assess Barth's opposition to universalism. The distinction between necessity and contingency with which Crisp sets up his analysis of Barth places the conversation on the wrong footing. As we have seen, the necessity of reconciliation is doubly contingent in nature: on the one hand, it is a divinely willed decision concerning a historically contingent occurrence; and, on the other hand, this contingent event always confronts human beings in a contingent way which elicits our existential participation and proclamation. Necessity and contingency are paradoxically identical within Barth's covenant ontology. To emphasise one at the expense of the other is to miss the dialectical complexity of his theology. Crisp's interpretation, by contrast, rests on assumptions that Barth actively opposes under the name of a dead ‘orthodoxy’. We will never gain a proper understanding of Barth's position on universalism so long as we are trapped within the straitjacket of modal logic. His theology refuses to be constrained within those limits. For these reasons, even given a thoroughly necessary universalism – one which is, of course, transcendent in nature, and thus also in a paradoxical way contingent – Barth's refusal to teach universalism remains entirely valid. The basis for Barth's denial of universalism is found in the very nature of theological speech about God as missionary witness to the event of Jesus Christ. The problem of apokatastasis is therefore inseparable from the question of apostolicity.

It is no accident that the two main rejections of universalism in the Church Dogmatics appear in the context of Barth's account of mission, vocation and witness. They do not appear in the sections on christology, but instead in the sections which deal with the human response to and participation in the work of Christ. The oft-cited denial of apokatastasis in CD IV/3 appears at the very end of §70.3 on humanity's condemnation, following the description of Jesus Christ as the ‘true witness’ (§70.1) and preceding the account of humanity's vocation of witness (§71) and the presentation of the church as a community of witness (§72). It is not a coincidence that Barth's previously cited opposition to orthodoxy appears in §71.6 in the context of his account of the individual's personal liberation for vocation. Nor is it accidental that his discussion of Christ as true witness begins by rejecting any association of the truth with ‘an idea, principle, or system. . . . [It is not] a structure of correct insights, nor a doctrine, even though this be a correct doctrine of the being of God’.Footnote ²⁹ Moreover, his repudiation of all talk of worldviews in theology appears in his discussion of Jesus as the ultimate victor in §69. The rejection of universalism must be read within this wider context in CD IV/3 if one is not to misunderstand Barth's real concern.

The most significant rejection of universalism appears in CD II/2 in the section on ‘The Determination of the Elect’ (§35.3), a subsection within ‘The Election of the Individual’. Barth grounds his opposition to apokatastasis in light of a broader opposition to all ‘metaphysics of history’.Footnote ³⁰ A metaphysics of this kind sets external limits or requirements on God's grace. Taken in isolation, these statements about ‘the freedom of divine grace’ would seem to suggest that Barth's view is reducible to the emphasis on God's freedom to save or not to save certain individuals. This is the predominant interpretation of Barth's denial of universalism; it is the position one finds in Crisp.Footnote ³¹ Even if divine freedom were the concern, we already addressed that issue in the foregoing discussion of immanent and transcendent necessity. But a quick look at the wider context quickly reveals this to be a misreading. The section in question begins by stating that election ‘comes to fulfillment in one's calling [Berufung]’, and thus it is ‘an election to participation in the service of the community’.Footnote ³² Election includes not only one's objective being in Christ but also one's subjective agency as a witness and apostle.Footnote ³³ This does not mean that a person fulfils her election through service, as if election in its objectivity is a mere potentiality. But it does mean that any account of Barth's soteriology which restricts the focus to the objective status of human beings in relation to God is not simply insufficient; it is actually erroneous. This is the crucial failure of Crisp's articles on Barth. There is no mention of mission and witness as the telos of election. One cannot understand Barth's theology without attending to the essential role of human participation within the contingencies of history.

When we look at Barth's refusal to endorse universalism from the perspective of humanity's election-to-witness, we discover a very different reason for his reluctance. The paragraph regarding the ‘metaphysics of history’ begins by explaining how the apostolic witness of the elect individual takes place as the ‘ongoing [Fortgang] of the reconciling work of the living God in the world’.Footnote ³⁴ The continuation to which he refers here is not the fulfilment or extension of Christ's reconciling work in his death and resurrection, but rather the calling into existence of active witnesses within the world. Barth states that the election of each individual ‘resolves’ [beschlossen] and the calling of each individual ‘puts into effect’ [vollziehen] the ‘opening and expansion of the closed-in-itself circle of the election of Jesus Christ and his community in relation to the world’.Footnote ³⁵ In view here is the expansion not of the circle of salvation but of the circle of missionary witness. Barth makes this explicit when he says that ‘the circle of election means the circle of human beings who recognize and confess Jesus Christ within the world’.Footnote ³⁶ The work of Christ continues in the limited sense that more people come to recognise and confess their true being in him. The individual apostle is not called to save others – that has already been accomplished in Christ – but instead to proclaim this good news to them so that they too might hear God's call and join in the proclamation. It is this ‘subjective’ sense of election to which Barth refers when he says that ‘it is [God’s] concern what is to be the final extent of the circle’.Footnote ³⁷

The real problem with apokatastasis is that it confuses the objective and subjective aspects of election: it makes the subjective circle of elected witnesses necessarily identical with the objective circle of the elected world. It attempts to speak about each person's existential participation in the same way that theology speaks about humanity's ontological determination.Footnote ³⁸ Put another way, it fails to differentiate between the reconciling work of Jesus Christ and the awakening work of the Holy Spirit. Everyone is ‘in Christ’, but not everyone knows this truth or will participate in its promulgation. Apokatastasis, as Barth defines it, is the doctrine that every person will become an active witness, and it is this doctrine that sets up a ‘metaphysics of history’ for the basic reason that it runs roughshod over the historical contingencies related to each person's existential participation in the mission of God.Footnote ³⁹

In the final analysis, the problem Barth has with universalism is the same problem he has with ecclesiastical orthodoxy (or any other religious worldview). Both attempt to speak ahistorically about God and the world. Orthodoxy sets up dogmas and doctrines which purport to be timeless accounts of God that are permanently valid in themselves. Universalism sets up a timeless picture of the world which entirely overlooks the particularity of each person's calling to become an apostolic witness. Both forget that the object of theology is an event of revelation and reconciliation which is never finished in the past (Offenbartheit) but always happening again and again in the present (Offenbarung) in a way that encounters us in our particular histories and calls forth our active involvement. Both end up either disregarding the subjective and existential dimension of theology, or they end up collapsing the subjective into a timeless interpretation of what is objectively true. In doing so, however, these ‘objective truths’ become falsehoods and idols, according to Barth, for there is no appropriate description of the God–world relation which focuses exclusively on God’s relation to the world without taking into explicit consideration the diversity and contingency of God's relation to the world. No matter how faithful and accurate Christian universalism is – and it is accurate a thousand times over compared to any view that leaves salvation for anyone in doubt – it is unfaithful to the extent that it separates the objectivity of salvation from the subjectivity of vocation. In rejecting apokatastasis Barth leaves space open in history for each person to discover anew her or his calling to be an apostolic participant in Christ's mission. The rejection of apokatastasis is simultaneously the affirmation of apostolicity.