Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics rather famously begins where Friedrich Schleiermacher's The Christian Faith concludes, with an account of the Trinity, in Barth's case presented through an intricate explication of the revelation of the Word of God.Footnote 1 Such is the audacity and force of this opening move that scholars have tended to base their evaluations of the entire Church Dogmatics on its treatment of revelation, finding in this subject the strengths and weaknesses of Barth's whole theological vision. In the hands of his sympathetic pupil, Eberhard Jüngel, this approach produces an appreciative and elegant distillation of Barth's understanding of revelation, God's Being is in Becoming.Footnote 2 But when the Lutheran scholar Gustaf Wingren reads the Church Dogmatics in this way, it leads to the critical and suspicious polemic of Theology in Conflict, in which he accuses Barth of diverting the whole task of Christian theology away from its proper focus, justification by faith alone, towards the unscriptural and therefore dubious notion of revelation.Footnote 3 The writings of Jüngel and Wingren have, in their turn, influenced further generations of scholars including, among others, Colin Gunton and Rowan Williams, whose basic approach to Barth is significantly shaped by which of these two early commentators they find most agreeable.Footnote 4 However, for all the differences of opinion between these early and later readers of Barth, they all share the same basic hermeneutical approach to the Church Dogmatics, what could be called reading ‘from the beginning’, that is to say through the lens of revelation.
It will be argued here that it is possible to read the Church Dogmatics in another direction, ‘from the end’, which proves to be a way of engaging with Barth's great work that yields some fresh and challenging insights into what is for many a familiar and predictable corner of twentieth-century theology. After briefly offering a justification for such an approach to Barth, this study will proceed to put it into practise by reading volumes I and II of the Church Dogmatics backwards. As this approach will demonstrate, reading Barth's theology from the beginning highlights God's word of revelation; reading from the end focuses on God's call to new life. Where reading from the beginning concentrates attention on Barth's christology, reading from the end emphasises his pneumatology. While the overview of the opening volumes of the Church Dogmatics presented here will be necessarily brief, it generates two important insights into Barth's trinitarianism that counter some long-standing criticisms of his work voiced by scholars like Jüngel and Wingren. The first is a greater sense of Barth's abiding concern for communion in both his treatment of God's economy with the world and his depiction of God's own being. The second is the recognition of Barth's careful balancing of christology and pneumatology, as reading his work backwards uncovers a hitherto unnoticed structural symmetry between the doctrine of election and the doctrine of revelation as Barth presents them in the Doctrine of God and the Doctrine of the Word of God.
The mandate to read Barth backwards
The method of reading the Church Dogmatics advocated here arose out of an exploration of Barth's pneumatology, an area of his theology that has garnered little critical acclaim: ‘notoriously, one of the least developed areas of his system’, according to Rowan Williams.Footnote 5 Even a cursory glance at the table of contents of the Church Dogmatics shows that Barth consistently deals with the Holy Spirit in the concluding sections of individual chapters and whole volumes of his work. However, upon closer examination, it becomes apparent that, far from belatedly introducing the Holy Spirit as an afterthought to the real business of christology, in these endings Barth frequently turns his readers around, effectively asking them to reconsider all that has gone before in the light of a final pneumatological flourish.Footnote 6 Consequently, Barth's conclusions play a far more significant role in the overall logic of his theology than their relative brevity would suggest.
While this observation on its own hints that beginning with Barth's conclusions might be a fruitful way of interpreting his theology, a clearer rationale is given by Barth himself, who suggests in his own reflections on his theology that his work can and should be read ‘from the end’. For example, in Church Dogmatics II/2 Barth orders his doctrine of election so as to begin with the election of Christ, before moving to discuss the election of the community and then the individual. However, in the midst of his wrestling with this doctrine he admits that this argument could be presented in the reverse order, beginning with the election of the individual and ending with the election of Jesus Christ, and even suggests that this order might be advisable.Footnote 7 Not only here, but in his discussion of ‘The Reality of God’ in volume II/1, Barth also alludes to the appropriateness of reading his theology ‘from the end’ when, in the introduction to this chapter, he writes this about the significance of glory, the concluding perfection of God:
In this doctrine we have to attain to the insight that God . . . is not only the Lord but the Lord of Glory and conversely, that all glory is the glory of God the Lord. . . . In taking as our point of departure the glory of God we touch on a concept the explanation and exposition of which will form the conclusion to our whole survey of this doctrine and therefore to the doctrine of the reality of God. We cannot well do other than begin at this point with the same concept.Footnote 8
One more example of Barth consciously writing his theology ‘from the end’ can be found in Church Dogmatics IV, The Doctrine of Reconciliation, in which the third completed part volume deliberately looks back to IV/1 and IV/2. According to Barth, it is only as Jesus Christ lives as ‘the True Witness’ that we can know anything of ‘the Lord as Servant’ or ‘the Servant as Lord’.Footnote 9
Reading The Doctrine of God ‘from the end’
Taking heed of Barth's commentary on his own work, his invitation to interpret his theology ‘from the end’ will be accepted and applied to the opening two volumes of the Church Dogmatics. Turning to the concluding pages of chapter 8, ‘The Command of God’, we find Barth concerned with a divine word, not the familiar word of revelation expounded in I/1, but the call of Jesus Christ to repent, a call which people are enabled to hear only as they receive the Holy Spirit. Here is Barth's description of this call and its consequences:
As Jesus Christ calls us and is heard by us He gives us His Holy Spirit in order that His own relationship to His Father may be repeated in us. . . . Those who live in this repetition live in the Holy Spirit. . . . And life in the faith irresistibly awakened and indestructibly granted by the call of Jesus Christ is as such life in the Holy Spirit.Footnote 10
Barth goes on to describe this life in the Holy Spirit as life in ‘the certainty of the resurrection and eternal life’.Footnote 11 It is therefore the resurrection that ensures the faith of the believer is irresistibly awakened and indestructibly granted. This call to the new life of faith, a life grounded on the resurrection of Jesus Christ, is the climax of ‘The Command of God’. At this point in Barth's argument, this call is understood christologically: it is the call of Jesus Christ to repent. However, reading back towards the start of II/2, to the ‘Election of God’, the same call can be heard, but spoken in a different voice: here, it is the call of the Holy Spirit to the rejected to rise to new life.
Reading ‘The Election of God’ from the end means beginning with Barth's account of the election of the individual.Footnote 12 Of critical importance to Barth's theology in this paragraph is the hope offered to sinful humanity through a ‘new possibility’ that breaks into the world to restore sinners to fellowship with God.Footnote 13 Barth describes the predicament of these rejected ones in the Leitsatz of §35 as those who are wilfully ‘isolated over against God’.Footnote 14 Thus estranged from God, the isolation suffered by the rejected is overcome only because ‘a new possibility appears in the sphere of the godless with the promise of their election’.Footnote 15 While Barth initially describes the content of this promise as Jesus Christ, in his later, fuller treatment of God's overcoming of humanity's sinful isolation, he makes it clear that the promise itself is the call of the Holy Spirit to the rejected.Footnote 16 In Barth's theology, the place of the rejected is only truly assumed by Jesus Christ, who suffered in his death the full consequences of humanity's desire to live apart from God. Primarily and properly, therefore, the new possibility is the Holy Spirit's calling to resurrection of the crucified Son, rejected on Golgotha. However, the plight of those isolated over and against God is just as hopeless as that of the crucified Jesus of Nazareth, and it is precisely here, where there is no hope for the sinner, where Barth sees ‘that the work of the Holy Spirit can intervene’ and restore the rejected to new life.Footnote 17 As Jesus Christ was called by the Spirit to resurrected life, so the Spirit expresses the same loving-kindness of God to the elect, calling them into what Barth describes as ‘the two-fold possibility of proclamation and faith’.Footnote 18
Having identified the calling of the Holy Spirit as the divine source of the life of the elect, Barth then examines the consequence of this call, the determination of election.Footnote 19 While Barth describes this determination primarily in terms of the believer's participation in the glory of God, he never forgets the pneumatological origins of this new life, suggesting that being one of the elect is in fact synonymous with being ‘awakened and blessed by the Spirit of God’.Footnote 20 Barth begins his account of the determination of election with the assertion that the aim of election is that believers ‘allow themselves to be loved by God’.Footnote 21 This opening of the self to God's love is in fact nothing less than a human sharing in the glory of God, which he describes here as ‘the overflowing of the inner perfection and joy of God’.Footnote 22 To be elect therefore means ‘to be the object of the love of God’, which is nothing other than ‘a participation in God's own blessedness’ for which one can only be grateful.Footnote 23 This is the goal or end of God's purposes in the election of the individual. However, for Barth, the determination of election does not describe a passive receiving of a part of God's glory, but rather an active participation in the self-glorification of God. As Barth explains, ‘the gracious good-pleasure of God is not merely achieved in [the elect] but through [them]’.Footnote 24 In this way, Barth understands God's electing grace not as an activity towards sinners, but as an activity that includes them.
Reading ‘from the end’ now points backwards from Barth's reflections on glory in ‘The Election of God’ into ‘The Reality of God’, where the most comprehensive treatment of the glory of God in the Church Dogmatics is to be found.Footnote 25 Here, Barth deals with glory as the concluding perfection of God, although, as already noted, he also regards this conclusion as in fact the beginning of his whole account of the reality of God. He introduces his treatment of God's glory with this definition:
God's glory is God Himself in the truth and capacity and act in which He makes Himself known as God. This truth and capacity and act are the triumph, the very core, of His freedom. And at its core it is freedom to love. For at the core of His being, and therefore in His glory, God is the One who seeks and finds fellowship, creating and maintaining and controlling it. He is in Himself, and therefore to everything outside of Himself, relationship, the basis and prototype of all relationship. In the fact that He is glorious He loves.Footnote 26
Through God's glory, therefore, God's self is made known not in the revelation of information, but in the manifestation of relationship and in the creation of fellowship.
Barth goes on to consider the creaturely response that God's self-glorification seeks and evokes. He names this glorificatio, which he defines as human participation in God's glory, and describes in specifically pneumatological terms:
If God is glorified through the creature, this is only because by the Holy Spirit the creature is baptised, and born again and called and gathered and enlightened and sanctified and kept close to Jesus Christ in true and genuine faith.Footnote 27
Note here the echoing of the pneumatology of the election of God: it is the Holy Spirit who calls individuals to participate in God's self-glorification. Glorificatio is simply the name Barth gives to the goal of God's electing purposes, that those rejected by God might be called to a new form of life in which they are loved by God and awakened to participate in God's glory, that ‘overflowing of the inner perfection and joy of God’.Footnote 28
Taking one more step towards the beginning of the Church Dogmatics leads to chapter 5, ‘The Knowledge of God’, in which Barth continues to develop those themes already encountered in volume II, while at the same time transposing them into a new key.Footnote 29 Read from the end, ‘The Knowledge of God’ can therefore be seen as a transitional chapter, between The Doctrine of God and The Doctrine of the Word of God, with the ideas of election and glorification giving way to the concepts of faith and revelation. As was the case in the conclusion of ‘The Command of God’, Barth draws his thoughts on ‘The Knowledge of God’ to a close with the same emphasis on the resurrection of Jesus Christ as the source of the life of the believer. However, where his focus in ‘The Command of God’ was on the believer's response to God's call to repent, in the closing pages of chapter 5 his concern is with the veracity of human knowledge of God. Here, Barth asserts that our knowledge of God can come only through faith, but faith, like every other human activity is subject to temptation. How then can sinful human beings attain true knowledge of God? It is in answering this question that Barth turns to the death and resurrection of Jesus, and finds in these events both the temptation that afflicts and the comfort that enlivens all human faith. In the crucifixion of Jesus he sees the judgement of the whole of humanity. The cross is for him that place where Jesus has ‘first and properly borne the temptation of God’.Footnote 30 Then, in the resurrection, Barth discerns the divine comfort that faith needs if it is to enable believers to truly know God, for it is by the resurrection that ‘[God] gives us faith again, awakening it from the dead, and making it living faith’.Footnote 31 In this way, Barth again sees the Son's relationship to the Father repeated in the lives of believers by the Holy Spirit, in the judgement and enlivening of their faith, and therefore their knowledge of God.
A second familiar theme that Barth continues to explore in chapter 5 is that of the believer's participation in God. Compared to the way Barth has understood participation in the later half of volume II, here too there is a modulation in his thinking, for he envisages the believer participating not in God's glory or blessedness, but in God's self-understanding. Again Barth's conclusion signals the importance of the resurrection for all knowledge of God, for only as Jesus has been raised from the dead is the possibility opened up for believers to have that faith which allows them to know the truth about God. As Barth explains: ‘we must not only believe in the risen Christ. We must believe with the risen Christ.’Footnote 32 But Barth goes further, arguing that knowledge of God is not simply a human knowing somehow shaped from without by God's action in Christ. Rather, the knowledge of God received in faith is nothing less than God's own self-understanding, the Son's Spirit-enabled knowledge of the Father, revealed in the world in Jesus Christ. It is only as believers are called to participate in this relationship, the relationship between the Father and the Son through the Holy Spirit that they can have any knowledge of God.Footnote 33
Reading The Doctrine of the Word of God ‘from the end’
Having read back through The Doctrine of God, this paper will conclude by briefly outlining how volume I of the Church Dogmatics might also be read ‘from the end’, paying particular attention to the two main features of Barth's theology already identified. As we have seen, reading volume II backwards has highlighted the importance of communion to Barth's thinking. Initially, this was seen in the conclusion to ‘The Command of God’, in which he describes how the call of Jesus Christ and his giving of the Holy Spirit enable the Son's relationship to the Father to be repeated in the lives of believers. The same emphasis on relationship was encountered in ‘The Election of God’: here, Barth explained how the Holy Spirit's calling to new life of the crucified Son is also a call to all those elect in Jesus Christ. According to Barth, to be elect is to be placed by the Holy Spirit in the same relationship to the Father as that of the Son, it is to find oneself loved by God and invited to participate in God's self-glorification. Barth elaborates further in ‘The Reality of God’ when he defines the believer's participation in God's glory in more detail, using the concept of glorificatio. This he portrays as a new form of life, given by the Holy Spirit that allows and enables those who were once rejected by God to live in the very fellowship of God.
The theme of communion is also found in Barth's Doctrine of the Word of God, particularly in the three concluding paragraphs of chapter 2, ‘The Revelation of God’, in which he considers the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In §12, ‘God the Holy Spirit’, Barth writes of how the Spirit adds a significant dimension to Jesus Christ's revelation of the Creator as Father, for the Spirit reveals to us that the Father of Jesus Christ is also our Father. Again, Barth notes that it is the Holy Spirit who enables believers to participate in the relationship between the Son and the Father. Here, he explains that this participation is realised through the word of prayer, for the Holy Spirit frees believers to pray as Jesus prayed, ‘Abba, Father’.Footnote 34 Following Paul, Barth understands this prayer as the cry of God's own Spirit in us, the Spirit of the Son and the Spirit of sonship.Footnote 35 For many, this emphasis on communion and relationship is an under-appreciated feature of the theology of the early volumes of the Church Dogmatics. It offers an alternative interpretation to those, like Wingren and Williams, who accuse Barth of being concerned with the idea of God's communication with humanity at the expense of a more relational understanding of God's being and God's economy with the world.
Turning now to the second feature, reading Barth backwards reveals a chiasmus that underpins the structure and theology of The Doctrine of God and The Doctrine of the Word of God. For in these volumes Barth construes God's economy with the world in two distinct ways, with each way consisting of two inter-related concepts, an address of God that sounds within creation and a corresponding determination in which humanity is coordinated towards the address. The first pairing of address and determination was observed in Barth's doctrine of election. In II/2, Barth identified the address of God to the world as the Holy Spirit's calling to new life of the rejected and crucified Son and, in the Son, all the elect. In the determination of election, Barth interpreted this new life as a human participation in God's self-glorification. Now, the second pairing of address and determination can be discerned in I/1: the Word of God that reveals God to sinful humanity, and the determination of faith. While in his discussion of election, the address of God comes from the Holy Spirit and the corresponding determination is centred on the elect Son, Jesus Christ, in his treatment of the Word of God Barth interprets the address christologically and the determination pneumatologically, so that faith is understood as the Spirit's enabling of believers to participate in the self-understanding of God, revealed in the Word, Jesus Christ.
For Barth, the ways in which God addresses the world are always wholly divine and independent of human effort. In the doctrine of election, the divine word spoken by the Holy Spirit to fallen humanity that summons them to resurrected life is solely and completely an act of God, one that neither requires nor invites any human collaboration: ‘It is not within the power of the elect to elect others, or to call others. They have not even called or elected themselves.’Footnote 36 As an address to those wilfully isolated over and against God, it is a call to those who possess neither virtue that makes them worthy to hear it, nor ability to cooperate in the resurrection which comes from it. As such, the Spirit's call to the rejected is a call of pure divine grace.Footnote 37 While this call does result in genuine human action, that is the witness of the elect to the whole world, Barth is adamant that this witness is in no way a creaturely repetition of the Spirit's call, only a hopeful, expectant and indeed ‘joyful’ response to it.Footnote 38 In contrast, the determination of election to which this call aims involves the participation of the elect in God's own being. As the rejected are called by the Spirit to new life in Jesus Christ, so their new identity derives from Jesus Christ: their whole being is determined by and for Him, and their lives are now directed towards him.Footnote 39
When Barth writes of the Word of God and the determination of faith in I/1, he draws the same distinction between a purely divine address, spoken into the world, and a corresponding coordination of sinful humanity towards that address. Barth is clear that revelation is God's self-understanding, expressed in the world through the Son and the Holy Spirit. There is nothing in humanity that fits people to hear, interpret or add to God's revelation: it is a divine word that can only be repeated in believers by the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit. However, through the determination of faith, a gift freely given by the Holy Spirit, the ears of a humanity deafened to God by sin are opened to hear that Word, and the voices of those who cannot, in their isolation from God, speak truly of God, are enabled to pray the words of God's beloved child: ‘Abba, Father’.
Through the gift of faith, the Holy Spirit creates a new relationship between God and the creature, a relationship that has a divine source but which includes believers and enables them to participate in God's own self-understanding. In §12, ‘God the Holy Spirit’, Barth identifies three dimensions in this relationship, describing each through careful exegesis of the New Testament witness to the work of the Holy Spirit. Taken together, these dimensions give a comprehensive picture of the Holy Spirit as God in us, God with us, and God through us.Footnote 40 In this way, Barth defines the determination of faith in a way which is remarkably similar to his depiction of the determination of election in chapter 8, in which he speaks of the elected Son, Jesus Christ, as God with us, in us and through us. In both the determination of faith and in the determination of election, Barth is attempting to describe a life that is utterly surrounded, conditioned, shaped and directed by God. Thus he can write: ‘the one elect is in any case elect in and with and by and for Jesus Christ. To this determination from Him and to Him everything which might otherwise be regarded as that one's natural and historical determination is subject.’Footnote 41
Reviewing Barth's theology
This article has outlined a way of reading the Church Dogmatics ‘from the end’. It began by justifying this approach with an appeal to both the rhetorical strategy of Barth's pneumatology, the way in which his reflections on the Holy Spirit frequently draw sections of his argument to a close, and also to the explicit commentary Barth occasionally provides on his own work. A backwards reading of The Doctrine of God was then offered that identified two important features of Barth's theology. These features were then traced back into volume I, particularly in relation to Barth's work on revelation and faith. If the approach to Barth advocated here is indeed appropriate to his work, then a more thorough backwards reading would no doubt yield further insights into the complexity and depth of the Church Dogmatics, however, even this briefest of considerations of the opening volumes of Barth's magnum opus leads to some instructive conclusions.
Reading ‘from the end’ highlights Barth's abiding concern with fellowship: both the communion of God's own being, the inner relationships of Father, Son and Spirit, and the overflow of this glory of God that seeks and creates fellowship with those who are isolated from God. In Barth's account of God's economic activity, this concern is reflected in the two addresses of God to the world, the call of the Spirit to new life and the Word of revelation, and the two corresponding determinations of election and faith. For Barth, these works of God ad extra are nothing less than the expression of the being of God in se, as seen in his understanding of God as not only the Lord, which is the emphasis of volume I, but also the Lord of Glory, described in volume II. This way of reading Barth also gives the reader an overview of the fundamentally Augustinian nature of the theology of the first two volumes of the Church Dogmatics. For here Barth writes of the love and the knowledge of God, of the believer's participation in both God's self-glorification and God's self-understanding, in ways that resonate with Augustine's coordination of these theological themes. Augustine's assertion, ‘it is quite certain that nothing can be loved unless it is known’, is one that can readily be applied to Barth's vision of God and humanity.Footnote 42 Finally, reading Barth backwards suggests that his rather wistful longing for ‘a theology predominantly and decisively of the Holy Spirit’ might, perhaps to his surprise, be satisfied in his own work, if his Church Dogmatics are read ‘from the end’ so that the call of the Holy Spirit may be clearly heard.Footnote 43
