Patience in Church Dogmatics II/1

It is useful to begin by recalling some influential patristic treatises, written by a trio of North African authors – Tertullian, Cyprian and Augustine – that Barth consulted when crafting his own remarks.Footnote ⁴ Creatively combining biblical cues and Stoic ruminations, these treatises articulated meanings of patience manifested in much contemporary discourse: patience as the capacity to respond to adversity with equanimity and integrity; patience as a determination to continue doing what's needful in difficult circumstances; patience as a disposition which helps one to wait, and perhaps suffer, in purposeful and sometimes transformative ways.Footnote ⁵ Patience, in other words, understood as a human quality, exhibited by those who persevere amidst difficult circumstances. However, these patristic expositions must not be read simply as instances of ethical or pastoral counsel. A profound theological point is always presupposed: human exercises of patience and, a fortiori, human activity as such, have as their condition of possibility God's exercise of patience. That is to say, God's equanimity, steadfastness and perseverance, articulated decisively in the person of Jesus Christ, despite the ongoing fact of sin, establishes the basis upon which human patience is imaginable and sets the standard against which a diverse array of human practices must be judged. Who can ‘be either wise or patient’, Cyprian asks, ‘who has neither known the wisdom nor the patience of God’?Footnote ⁶ It is only because of ‘the patience of our Lord as well as our Father’ and because Christ's ‘actions . . . are characterized by patience’, that we can ‘endure and persevere . . . that we may fulfil that which we have begun to be, and may receive that which we believe and hope for’.Footnote ⁷ Polemical concerns make Augustine's treatise a somewhat frustrating read, but it too frames human patience in terms of a divine precedent, with God being ‘patient without aught of passion’.Footnote ⁸ So it is that ‘the patience of the godly is from above, coming down from the Father of lights’: an unmerited ‘gift of God’.Footnote ⁹

Calvin's affection for Cyprian and Augustine perhaps prompted him to take up this line of reasoning. Certainly patience, cast as a commendable human disposition, is lauded in the Institutes: it counts among the beneficii Christi which might ‘enrich poor and needy men’ – that is, Christians who undergo the sometimes painful process of sanctification, and who suffer a providential ordering of events which often proves hard to stomach.Footnote ¹⁰ Less discernible in the Institutes, but evident at key points in commentaries on the Hebrew Bible, is Calvin's identification of the condition of possibility for human patience. The contention, continuous with the perspectives sketched by Tertullian, Cyprian and Augustine but inflected to serve Calvin's distinctive concerns, is delicately but firmly made: it is only because God endures our sinfulness, opting not to punish according to exacting standards of justice and preferring to relate to us mercifully, that those undergoing sanctification can persevere.Footnote ¹¹ Amandus Polanus, one of Calvin's most astute followers (and one of Barth's most significant scholastic forebears), puts it well: the ‘Patientia Dei’ is God's ‘most benign will, by which He so controls His anger, that He either bears sinning creatures long and puts off punishment . . . or He does not pour forth all His anger in one moment upon them, lest they should be reduced to naught’.Footnote ¹² Those who disregard and violate God's sovereign rule do not immediately suffer the penalty that they deserve; they have an opportunity to play some role in the ‘theater of God's glory’.Footnote ¹³ And the elect, whom God favours especially, are given stretches of graced time and space in which they might follow the direction of the Spirit who unites them to the person of Christ and assures them of the Father's kindness and care. In both cases, the word patience underscores a characteristic of God's wise governance of history: mercy towards sinners, exercised in such a way that human activity has integrity, distinction and consequence.

These remarks, I hurry to add, are not preparatory to the underwhelming claim that Barth rehearses the best insights of the ‘tradition’. Certainly there is continuity. Like his patristic predecessors, Barth conceives patience in terms of God's providential concern to support human freedom, the exercise of which can and should involve practices of patience. Like Calvin, Barth's theocentric orientation connects with ventures of great exegetical subtlety, and a keen sense that God's patience is a gracious act which human beings in no sense deserve. However, to a degree not found in the earlier authors, Barth shows scant interest in promoting patience as a desirable human disposition, conceived in light of a divine analogate. He envisages it in strictly theological terms, and elaborates its meaning in a decidedly original manner. Patience, conceived as a defining aspect of God's providential governance of history, is underwritten by Christ's perfect enactment of the mission that the Father petitions him to undertake. And it is because of Christ's obedience, implicit throughout his life and enacted, terribly, in his suffering and death, that God is well pleased to open time and space for human action, expectant of human decisions to discern, embrace and purposefully respond to God's direction. On this reckoning, one can do rather more than dispatch, once again, the (annoyingly persistent) worry that Barth's emphasis on divine sovereignty has a crudely deterministic doctrine of providence as a necessary corollary. The truth is more interesting. Barth supposes that the patient God of Jesus Christ establishes a context in which human beings participate in a truly covenantal relationship. What God waits for is the moment at which human beings reward God's patience, making good on the justified and sanctified existences that God, in Christ, has elected us to have.

It is useful to elaborate this claim gradually, beginning with some reflections on Barth's treatment of God's perfections and then offering a more nuanced analysis.

As indicated, Barth's reflections on patience – in German, Geduld – are found towards the end of Church Dogmatics II/1. Already in this part-volume, Barth has identified the conditions by which God makes Godself known, connecting claims about God's ‘encroachment’ upon human beings' cognitive processes with an account of the unio cum Christo as the means by which we are drawn into the sphere of God's self-knowing. Barth has also provided a striking statement about God's being. It is not enough for a theologian to assert the fact of God's existence. That alone, in fact, could scuttle theological discourse before it has a chance to launch, engendering little more than a ‘devout silence’ or ‘rapturous mumbling’ (II/1, p. 336 rev./378). Nor does it suffice to supply a formal account of the trinitarian life – say, by way of an analysis of divine processions and missions. The theologian stands under a more challenging and far-reaching obligation: advancing statements about God's identity which summarise, in interesting and conceptually precise ways, the broad arc of the biblical witness to God's action. So it is, then, that in §28 Barth identifies God as ‘the one who loves in freedom’. God loves, because God ‘seeks and creates fellowship between Himself and us’ (II/1, p. 273/307). God's covenant with Israel anticipates God's relationship with humankind as such; the incarnation of the Word declares God's love to be so intense, so extreme, that God will do whatever proves necessary to bring God's children into right relationship with God. ‘“God is”,’ Barth memorably writes, ‘means “God loves.” Whatever else we may have to understand and acknowledge in relation to the divine being, it will always have to be a definition of this being . . . as the One who loves’ (II/1, p. 283/318). Without doubt, the theologian must never forget that God relates to us freely. God's decision to be pro nobis has God's sovereign good-pleasure as its presupposition. But even this point serves to underscore God's love. Remarks about divine freedom are tied to a vivid sense of how God uses that freedom: in service of God's love for humankind.

The all-important nuances of Barth's doctrine of God emerge when §28 is read as a programmatic statement which is gradually substantiated by expositions of God's perfections in §§29, 30 and 31.Footnote ¹⁴ Paragraphs 30 and 31, in particular, show Barth giving texture to his identity-description of God in coherent, complex and appropriate ways: coherent, in that the meanings of love and freedom are connected and elaborated through a clutch of auxiliary concepts; complex, because these auxiliary concepts relate to one another in an intricate but orderly manner; appropriate, since every statement that Barth tenders aims to bear witness to God's self-revelation in Jesus Christ.Footnote ¹⁵ Barth's decision to develop his doctrine of God with reference to divine ‘perfections’, as opposed to ‘attributes’, signals a further nuance. Whereas Calvin (and some of his followers) thought in terms of an ‘accommodated’ knowledge of God qua creator and redeemer, with the consequence that talk about God's immanent life was fringed by a potentially troublesome degree of obscurity, Barth supposes that God's self-revelation supports a more robust and more expansive knowledge of God as such.Footnote ¹⁶ How so? Simply, because God does not hold back when God gives Godself to be known.Footnote ¹⁷ Our cognitive capacities are seized in a thoroughgoing way, ‘objectively’ in Jesus Christ and ‘subjectively’ by the Holy Spirit; these capacities are then aligned with and rendered participant in the truthfulness of God's self-revelation. And this means that knowledge of God is neither qualified nor compromised by some manner of ‘quantitative limitation’ (II/1, p. 52/56). The ‘secondary objectivity’ of revelation, while differentiable from God's knowledge of Godself, is controlled and defined by the ‘primary objectivity’ of God's own self-knowing; and inherent to this ‘secondary objectivity’ is the liberation of human ‘views’ and ‘concepts’ to participate, with a significant degree of adequacy, in the divine reality itself. As such, granted the corrigibility of every theological statement and the manifest failure of theological discourse to do justice to the divine reality, the Christian's faithful apprehension of God's ultimate identity – a triune identity, orientated wholly towards the salvation of humankind through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ – has, in principle, a surety surpassing anything allowed by Calvin.

Barth's exposition of God's perfections can be read as an expansive, and highly detailed, application of this ambitious theological epistemology. None of God's perfections stand apart from the being and event that God is; each, in its own way, is illustrative of the being and event that God is. It is not only that talk of God as patient, wise and omnipotent is not comparable, for example, to my wearing mismatched socks, being sleep-deprived and feeling a bit nervous – these being fairly incidental aspects of my current condition. It is also the case that a theologian can do more than suppose that attributes qua perfections are only legitimately ‘predicated of the Divine Being in Scripture, or are visibly exercised by Him in His works of creation, providence, and redemption’.Footnote ¹⁸ Since revelation means self-revelation, the perfections that a theologian associates with God's economic activity feed directly into a description of God's immanent being. Indeed, in the final analysis, one must state that God just is God's perfections – multiple perfections which, in and of themselves, may particularly emphasise God's ‘freedom’ (§31) or God's ‘love’ (§30), yet which are themselves always constitutive of the ‘manifold simplicity of the divine nature’.Footnote ¹⁹ Or as Barth puts it: ‘the divine being as the One who loves in freedom is the divine being in the multiplicity, individuality and diversity of these perfections. He does not possess this wealth. He Himself is this wealth’ (II/1, p. 331/372). This wealth ‘overflows’ as God creates, sustains and protects God's fellowship with humankind. And it is a wealth which affords human beings the opportunity to know truly who God is.

Barth's account of patience has three layers of meaning. The first emphasises the graciousness of God's providential ruling. This ruling certainly entails all-encompassing sovereignty: absolutely nothing occurs, save for God's creative and sustaining action. Yet this action may not be conceived without due regard for the integrity and agency of creatures ontologically distinct from God. Within the context of God's sovereign governance, God grants many creatures – human beings particularly – a relative degree of agential power, thereby according those creatures the opportunity to respond to God's direction in free, grateful obedience. A dense but important passage captures the point nicely:

There's a fascinating hint here about God's trinitarian life as patient, which Barth later develops with reference to ‘nearness’ and ‘distance’ in the divine life – the idea being that God is patient with Godself, as each divine ‘person’ grants time and space for and to the others; the idea being that God's own life, as a matter of active relating, involves some kind of ‘letting-be’, such that each of God's Seinsweise allows for and sustains the distinctiveness of the others.Footnote ²⁰ Barth's principal concern at this juncture, however, is the way in which God relates to human beings. God does not begrudge us existence distinct from God. We're not passing fantasies, conjured up by a febrile divine imagination; we have a genuinely ‘independent life’ (II/1, p. 411/463). Further, God does not control history despotically, treating human beings as disposable pieces on a cosmic chessboard. On the contrary: God grants us the time and space needed to respond positively, freely and obediently to God's rule. God's will is certainly ‘great, strong, relentless, victorious’ – Barth hits the high notes of his Reformed heritage without fail. Yet those high notes do not exhaust his perspective, for God's will is also ‘gracious [and] merciful . . . it waits and lets human beings do as they wish’ (II/1, pp. 410–11/462). Thus it is that God loves. There is no attempt to strong-arm us into the covenant; there is no sense in which God's action is analogous to that of a puppeteer, whose control over her puppets is both absolute and thoroughgoing. Instead, God waits for us to recognise what God is doing and to respond accordingly, ‘opening’ history to such a degree that a human being's enacted decisions are genuinely consequential. The creature really can, in some sense, ‘do as it wishes’. Patience, then, helps Barth to describe how the loving God waits and what this God waits for: the moment at which human beings make free decisions to renounce sinful patterns of conduct and to participate, collectively and individually, lovingly and gratefully, in the covenant of grace. This ‘letting-be’ has nothing to do with disregard, much less disengagement; it has everything to do with God's solicitation of our free, joyful obedience.

With the second layer of meaning – God's merciful withholding of judgement – we move closer to previous thinkers. Tertullian, for instance, describes patience as God's willingness to ‘bear with [the] luxury, avarice, iniquity, [and] malignity’ of various ‘ungrateful nations’.Footnote ²¹ Calvin writes of God's longsuffering and forbearance, indicating that God ‘exercises moderation in inflicting punishment, because he is inclined to mercy’.Footnote ²² And Louis Berkhof, rather melodramatically, identifies God's ‘longsuffering’ and ‘slowness to anger’ as ‘that aspect of the goodness or love of God in virtue of which He bears with the froward and evil in spite of their long continued disobedience’.Footnote ²³ Barth continues the trend: he lauds God's merciful restraint, extended despite our acute hostility to grace. In a powerful excursus he references Genesis 4, which recounts the crime of fratricide, yet signals still more vividly that God does not punish murder with a deathly penalty; he also discusses Genesis 6–9, which tells of a punishing flood that discloses, albeit in a manner initially hard to perceive, God's determination to persist with the human project.Footnote ²⁴ ‘Does not the grace and mercy of God depend’, Barth asks, ‘upon the fact that there is also a patience of God, that He grants space to the sinful creature, thus giving Himself space further to speak and act with it?’ (II/1, p. 413/465). Only an affirmative answer can be given. And remarkably so! It would not be unreasonable for humans to suffer the consequences of wrongdoing, either by dint of God consigning us to oblivion on account of our wickedness or, perhaps worse, leaving us to our own devices.Footnote ²⁵ Yet there is no exacting application of (retributive) justice. God's patience is such that God responds to sinfulness with more time, more space and more opportunities for human beings to participate in the covenant of grace. Our sin doesn't even occasion a divine cautiousness – say, a restriction of freedom, subtly imposed to limit the damage that we might inflict on ourselves and on others, or a deft shift in providential strategy, designed to bring about a more opportune configuration of human affairs. Romans 5:20 is apposite: ‘where sin increased, grace abounded all the more’. God's patience is nothing other than the unstinting disbursement of mercy and grace. While it affords us opportunities for repentance, conversion and sanctification, it does not involve God ‘changing the rules of the game’; God persists with God's original creative design. This does not mean, of course, that God is permissive; much less that God disregards sin. It is rather that talk about divine patience provides Barth with a way to describe how God exercises mercy across the length and breadth of history. One might even say that God's patience is such that history has length and breadth, and has it in such a way that all human beings, saints and sinners alike, have the opportunity to respond to God's gracious direction.Footnote ²⁶

Patience's third layer of meaning connects the former two, while anticipating a claim which pervades Church Dogmatics III: a fulfilled covenant, underwritten, defined and overarched by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, constitutes the ‘internal’ basis of creation and supports discrete exercises of creaturely freedom.Footnote ²⁷ In terms of §30, this means that the most basic meaning of God's patience is nothing other than the concrete history of Jesus Christ. Through and in Christ, God secures the integrity of the created order; through and in Christ, we are assured of God's patience in the past, present and future.

On one level, God is patient with the continuing fact of human sin because God has decisively condemned, judged and overcome it on the cross. In view of Christ's suffering and death, God does not vacillate between condemnation and grace, between impatience with sin and a desire to extend a disappointing species ‘one more chance’. No: God is wholly patient, because the full force of God's rejection of sin has always-already been articulated – because, by way of the cross, God has always-already expressed a holy and just ‘impatience’ with wrongdoing. ‘That which we all deserved’, Barth writes, ‘has been suffered in our place and in Israel's place by the only righteous One, who achieved a perfect penitence . . . by not refusing to take upon Himself the genuine wrath and judgment of God’ (II/1, p. 420/472). Precisely because Christ has borne the weight of our hostility to God, God now endures our continuing unrighteousness. This ‘past’ event secures God's forbearance of sin in the here-and-now (and, in fact, in every here-and-now that we can conceive). To risk a string of colloquialisms: God's patience with us does not wear thin because, on the cross, God's patience has already run out, once and for all – and has done so in a way which assures us that God's patience is truly ongoing, truly provisionary of the time and space necessary for us to live into, and purposefully to inhabit, the covenant of grace.

On another level, Christ's free obedience is such that God now waits for us to do something other than sin. And God does not wait naively, plaintively hopeful that Christ's example might, in and of itself, stimulate imitative practices on the part of those who stand in awe of him. When Christ offers his whole being to God, living and dying in perfect accord with the will of the Father, he undertakes a representative act which has ontological consequence. He does not merely ‘stand in’ for humankind, before God; he transforms humankind's standing, before God, being the ‘true human’ who (re)defines, against sin, what it means to be human. In response, the Father looks kindly upon those who are ‘in Christ’ – that is, ultimately, everyone – giving us the time and space needed to conduct ourselves in a manner which recalls Christ's free obedience. Thus it is that God's ‘self-restraint in regard to the many is justified by the fact that in the midst of the many, in the person of the One whom He Himself has appointed Head of these many . . . that which He awaits has taken place and is fulfilled, the obedience which He demands from His creature has been rendered’ (II/1, p. 419/472). The Pauline juxtaposition of ‘one’ and ‘many’ is of crucial moment: it signals that the particular exercise of patience on Christ's part – a human exercise of patience, even as it is enabled and superintended by the presence of God in Christ – suffices to ‘satisfy’ God, to secure God's willingness to let God's creatures be, to wait for them to catch up with God's project of covenantal relating. Or as Barth puts it: ‘God can be patient because He is patient in His Word . . . He keeps time and space for us who have forfeited our existence in His sight and are unable to justify ourselves’ (II/1, p. 421/473, emphases in original). It is for this reason, once again, that God rightly waits for something other than sinfulness. God anticipates our inhabitation of and participation in a covenant of grace because the ‘pioneer of [our] salvation’ (Heb 2:10) has determined human nature in such a way that we can actually carry out the tasks accorded us, and can do so as good and faithful servants.Footnote ²⁸ God has ‘opened’ history in the sense that the fulfilment of the covenant, effected by Jesus Christ, will somehow be followed up by worthy human activity: our making good on the sacrifice of Christ's person; our honouring his work with grateful obedience, inside and outside the Christian community; our living into the resurrection, such that the Kingdom might become an always-more concrete reality.

Patience after Church Dogmatics II/1

While there are certainly references and allusions in later parts of the Dogmatics, Barth does not reprise his earlier remarks in an expansive way. Patience is not a category that Barth leans on, for example, during his explication of election, nor is it given a starring role in his theological anthropology, Christology or ecclesiology. Indeed, it wouldn't be unreasonable for an interpreter to deem the remarks of §30 less a materially significant move, more quirks of an expansive and creative dogmatic imagination. And if an interpreter were reluctant to think in terms of ‘quirks’? Well, she might argue that Barth had good reasons not to retain patience as a leading term in his dogmatic vocabulary after Church Dogmatics II/1 – say, because an emphasis on divine command in II/2, which was bound up with a range of ethical and political concerns, required that Geduld be pushed to the margins; or because Barth developed a doctrine of providence in which talk of God's ‘preserving’, ‘accompanying’ and ‘ruling’ rendered the concept surplus to requirements.

Reading later portions of the Dogmatics without regard to the concept of patience would, however, be a wasted opportunity. The rather modest deployment of the term in later paragraphs does not betoken dogmatic irrelevance. On the contrary: it is possible, and I think interpretatively beneficial, to view Barth's earlier remarks as a quiet dynamo, whirring under the surface of the text. Paying attention to this dynamo can prove advantageous, for it alerts readers to aspects of Barth's account of human agency which might otherwise go unnoticed. No doubt, to treat the remarks of §30 as a necessary antecedent for later contentions would constitute an interpretative mis-step: Barth's ‘moral ontology’ was up and running well in advance of Church Dogmatics II/1. My point is different: Barth's earlier comments provide a valuable interpretative leverage, enabling a more nuanced engagement with later paragraphs than might otherwise be possible.

Consider, for instance, the connection that Barth forges between creation and covenant in Church Dogmatics III/1: creation being the ‘external basis’ of the covenant and the covenant being the ‘internal basis’ of creation. Barth's remarks on patience seem subtly to underwrite this dogmatic pairing. From one angle, couched in the contention that ‘creation aims at (ziehlt auf) history’ (III/1, p. 59 rev./63), there is the repeated claim that God provided, and continues to provide, time and space to God's creatures. Creation, Barth contends, involves ‘the world as a space (Raum) for the human who is to be a participant in this grace . . . And the human as the being who, precisely in this space, is to become thankful for God's grace and should correspond to it’ (III/1, p. 67 rev./72). Indeed, to differing degrees, every human ‘acquires and has time; the time which God allots and lends . . . from the unsearchable riches of His eternity’ (III/1, p. 75/81). And, still more boldly, God ‘does not in any sense will to exclude man even from His juridical office, but . . . wills quite definitely that man should participate in it’ (III/1, p. 266/303). Each of these assertions meshes with remarks offered in §30. Given that God undertakes, patiently, a ‘seeking and creation of fellowship’ (II/1, pp. 278/312), the world is so ordered that human beings have the opportunity to discern, realise and to delight in a relationship with God. One can even read the exquisite exposition of Genesis 1:1–2:4a, which anchors Church Dogmatics III/1, as a finely grained account of divine patience in action. It is a slow-moving (but not ‘pedestrian’!) exegetical exercise which examines God's patience at the point at which prehistory becomes history proper; an analysis of scripture which demonstrates, in various ways, how God structures the mundane world, such that each creaturely ‘other’ might ‘do as it wishes’.

Yet we need to look at the matter from the perspective of the covenant, too. The reason that God's creation has its distinctive qualities is not merely for the purpose of preparing the world for Jesus Christ – ‘preparing’ understood in terms analogous to a crew of workers who organise the stage, fix the lights and adjust the scenery before the cast treads the boards.Footnote ²⁹ Embedded within the declaration that the covenant supplies ‘the material presupposition’ of creation is a rather more interesting claim – namely that God's creation has the character it has because God's elective will has been perfectly realised in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. On this reckoning, a theologian ought to read the repeated commands of Genesis 1 – ‘let there be light’ (Gen 1:3); ‘let the waters under the sky be gathered’ (Gen 1:9); ‘let us make humankind in our image’ (Gen 1:26); and so on – in view of Christ Jesus, whom ‘God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood . . . because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed’ (Rom 3:25). Christology is the basis for thinking about the covenant; a fulfilled covenant norms and directs reflection about the more far-reaching locus of creation. Put more ontically: Christ's concrete history, conceived as the sum of a coherent string of actions purposed to fulfil God's covenant, should be understood as the reason why God, qua creator, ‘lets be’ in such ways that human beings can act with genuine integrity and consequence. Christ's life, death and resurrection ensure that, while God's patience may wear thin, God's patience will never run out, and that sinners can expect to continue to live in freedom.

Matters become even more interesting when, in Church Dogmatics III/2, Barth refines his earlier account of God's ‘sustaining’ and ‘accompanying’ of human life to emphasise God's demand that human beings participate in the covenant of grace. The argument, in broad terms, is that the ‘now’ in which we exist is always being encompassed by, filled with and pressed towards the present and future fact of Christ's mediatorial work. God's patient provision of time and space includes Christ's urgent petition that each and every one of us should act, without delay, in a manner which honours the covenant of grace. God's patience, one must even say, awaits a dis-analogous response. We are not asked to do the impossible: correspond ourselves to the God who has time and space, and who gives time and space to us, by giving God time and space to act in freedom and obedience. Nor, for that matter, are we asked to exercise restraint or to take on the responsibility of incarnating God's patience. Our task is otherwise: to move towards and purposefully to inhabit the Kingdom which is the in-breaking gift of the patient God.

Reflections on the finite period of time ‘allotted’ to each human being in §47 make this point in an especially vivid way. Having argued that Christ's time ‘is the time which [God] took to Himself, thus granting it as a gift to the men of all time’ (III/2, p. 455/546) – a move which, once again, identifies the incarnation as the point of departure for thinking about creaturely time – Barth writes about the ‘now’ of human life as charged with the ‘promise of the true and genuine being in time actualized in this One’ (III/2, p. 519/626). This is not merely an assertion of the fact of christus praesens, embedded within an examination of time in its past, present and future modalities (a midrash, of sorts, on the final chapters of the Confessions). Artfully connecting earlier remarks on patience with the claim that Jesus Christ is the ‘true human’ – itself an implication of Barth's groundbreaking identification of Christ as ‘electing God’ and the ‘elected human’ – Barth envisages movement towards and a reintensified participation in the covenant of grace as a possibility inherent in every passing instant, every present moment and every possible future. More than a ‘possibility’, in fact: Christ insists that we live into the justified and sanctified roles which God assigns to us. A memorable claim in the second edition of Der Römerbrief – that, on ‘the threshold of my existence there appears, demanding admittance – the new man of the new world, the new man in Christ Jesus, justified and redeemed, alive and good, endowed with attributes that are not mine, have never been mine, and never will be mine’Footnote ³⁰ – is framed in terms of a sharp and constant summons: a sovereign personal encounter, with Christ, which obliges each person to discern and to play a role in the future towards which we are being moved.

Two proximate passages make this point beautifully:

An emphatic affirmation of the force of the present – an instant pregnant with the vital fact of God's charge to slough off the tired, ‘old’ human; a moment rich with the possibility of giving birth to the ‘new’; a prospect which would seem fantastic, were it not for God's transformative grace – characterises these passages. While God certainly supplies human beings with the time and space needed to develop and live into the covenant of grace, God's ‘accompanying’ and ‘sustaining’ of our lives is also a sharp provocation to act. Certainly God grants each of us the opportunity to respond to God in grateful, obedient and responsible freedom; certainly God is constantly allocating us more time and more space. Yet God also presses each of us to take up the task at hand. What ought we not to do? We ought not to keep God waiting; we ought not to try God's patience. What ought we to do? We ought to recognise the ‘importance of the Now’ (III/2, p. 532/642); we ought to move forwards to meet the coming Christ, for while the covenant is definitively fulfilled, by no means is it finished.

What does it mean to distinguish a ‘fulfilled’ from a ‘finished’ covenant? Answering this question is crucial, lest talk of divine patience as a solicitation of action devolve into the vapid counsel that one ‘live for the moment’ or ‘seize the day’ – slogans more suited to the advertising industry than faithful theological inquiry. Three final comments, then, are needed to round out this analysis.

First, a negative point: God's continuing patience does not permit us to envisage human life in terms of a series of second chances which, if discounted, might be recovered at a later date. Our time will not last forever; God allots to each a limited period in which to participate in the covenant of grace. These discrete stretches of ‘allotted time’, in and of themselves, certainly attest to God's gracious care. They mark human beings as creatures who are not divine and who are relieved of the burden of self-salvation. They also prevent an interminable series of sins and an increasing accumulation of guilt. Yet the time allotted to each of us signals, too, that Christian life ought to involve actions which bear positively upon the eventual ‘glorification by the eternal God of [a] natural and lawful this-sided, finite, and mortal being’ (III/2, p. 633/771). ‘Bear positively?’ One does need to be careful here. Barth obviously does not suppose that human ‘works’ contribute to the objective act of salvation. The reconciliation and redemption of every ‘this-sided, finite, and mortal being’ is the business of Christ alone. But inasmuch as every ‘this-sided, finite, and mortal existence’ is caught up in God's demand that we move towards the Christ who is always coming, everything that we do, in the context of God's covenantal scheme, or fail to do, in the context of God's covenantal scheme, has some effect on the person that God embraces after his or her death. That is to say: while God waits patiently and insistently for us, and while death means our passing into God's care, the use we make of the time we have been granted makes a difference to the human history that God beholds, post-temporally, ‘in all its merited shame but also its unmerited glory’ (III/3, pp. 633/731). If I repay God's patience, enacting some measure of obedience in correspondence to God's gracious demand, then the history that God eternally beholds might involve something better than ‘merited shame’. But if I continue to try God's patience, persistent in my slothful and stupid evasion of God's demand, then the history that God eternally beholds will be marked by nothing other than the monotony of sin, the tedium of my hostility to grace – even granted that my ‘merited shame’ will be overwhelmed, lovingly, should God so will it, by the reconciliation and redemption which Christ brings.

Second, there is determinate content to God's waiting: the coming future which is the person of Jesus Christ. Barth makes this point beautifully in §78 of the posthumous Christian Life. ‘God's kingdom’, he writes, ‘is his own . . . coming to meet man, to meet the whole of the reality distinct from himself. The second petition [of the Lord's Prayer] looks toward this special dynamic reality, to the coming of God's kingdom as the coming of God himself, to its breaking forth and breaking through and breaking into the place where those who pray the petition are, to encounter with them and therefore with all creation’ (Chr. Life, p. 236/404).Footnote ³¹ And in no sense is the Kingdom an abstract reality. It is itself the person of Christ, for ‘He is God acting concretely within human history. He is the One who calls those who know him to obedient willing and doing but who is and remains from all doing’ (Chr. Life, p. 252/436). The future, one might say, always bears the unsubstitutable name of God's second way of being – Jesus Christ – and cannot be understood aright if one trades in impersonal generalities. And Christ's coming, once again, is itself an imperative of such force that God petitions each disciple to do nothing other than ‘look and move forward to this Jesus’ (Chr. Life, p. 255/441), even as she prays, patiently and expectantly, ‘Thy Kingdom come’.

What ‘moving forward to this Jesus’ entails brings me to a third point: the patience of God requires nothing less than human beings actively gathering and purposefully building up the church. Barth advances this claim in remarkable fashion in the third section of §62, which considers ‘the time of the community’. Posing the question of what precisely Christians should do in the time before ‘the dawning of the eternal Sabbath of His second parousia’ (IV/1, p. 736/822), given the completeness of God's saving work, Barth writes:

Here, I think, one catches sight of one of a claim which might have received fascinating elucidation, had Barth written a doctrine of redemption. What is God waiting for, even as God moves towards us, in Christ, in the mode of Christ's futurity? God awaits the purposeful enactment of Christ's body. God petitions us to make good on God's patience; God is in fact holding history open, graciously persisting with the provision of time and space until the moment that, at long last, we enact the communal and individual identities which God asks us to realise.

Now the exact shape of the ‘earthly historical form’ that God awaits is not, of course, given to us to know – just as we do not know when God's ‘last word’ will be fully spoken (so Mark 13:32–7). Barth is wonderfully hard to pin down when it comes to concrete details about the form of the Christian community; his actualism is so thoroughgoing that his ecclesiology remains relatively (and, I think, aptly) light on detail. Clearly, though – and John Flett has emphasised this point to great effect – God's missional activity has a human complement.Footnote ³² So, when writing about ‘the time of God's patience and purpose’ in relation to the Parable of the Talents (Matt 25:14–30), Barth insists that it is the ‘business of the [Christian] community to recognize the character of this time, and therefore never to think that it has plenty of time in this time, but to “buy up” this time in relation to those who are “without” (Col 4:5; Eph 5:16)’ (III/2, p. 507/610). Barth is also blunt in saying that the church's correspondence to Christ is a task with political dimensions which oblige Christians to endorse, and even to incite, revolt against social disorder and unrighteousness. The petition ‘Thy Kingdom come’ requires, after all, that we are always ‘going to meet the coming kingdom of God . . . seeing and grasping the possibilities which are provisionally present or which offer themselves not for divine but for human righteousness and order’ (Chr. Life, p. 213/362).Footnote ³³ It is also fair to say that, for Barth, the political dimensions of Christian discipleship must be angled towards those who endure acute injustice and who hunger – yes, with righteous impatience – for a ‘new heaven and a new earth’ (Rev 21:1). Yet it can never be said that our response to Christ's future is assimilable to a predetermined ecclesiological or political programme. More basic is the fact that our covenantal relationship with God requires a resolute and cheerful uptake of a task, the character of which is keyed to God's gracious address. God holds history open; the challenge is for us to fill time and space in the right way, and in so doing to afford God the opportunity to finish, to speak God's ‘last word’.

Patience after Barth

Thus far, I've stuck close to the text of the Dogmatics. I initially offered a series of claims about a subsection of §30, parsing the meaning of patience in terms of God's creative and providential largesse, God's merciful withholding of judgement and the person and work of Jesus Christ. This analysis was then used to shed light on later claims in the Dogmatics. I argued, particularly, that Barth understands Christ's futurity to be the leading edge of the patience God extends towards human beings. And human beings are tasked, right now, purposefully to meet the Kingdom of God which Christ embodies and declares. It is not sufficient for a theologian merely to say that human beings are given time and space to correspond to God. Nor can she rest with the claim that the covenant of grace, which pivots around the concrete fact of Christ as ‘electing God’ and ‘elected human’, invites human beings to act, freely and obediently, in correspondence to God. God's patience, articulated in the covenant of grace which Christ fulfils, is a rather more urgent affair. It confronts every one of us as an in-breaking future, provocative of missional and political action. Human life – and, more specifically, Christian life – requires that we seize hold of Christ's coming, lest we be found untrustworthy servants.

Certainly there remain some significant interpretative avenues to be explored. Beyond developing these tentative ideas, one might extend the analysis into Barth's doctrine of providence (so Church Dogmatics III/3, §§48 and 49) or consider Barth's fascinating treatment of ‘sloth’ (so IV/2, §65.2). There is also the question of how the analysis proffered relates to perspectives favoured by scholars who, fairly soon after Barth's own time had drawn to a close, urged that his thinking about divine and creaturely time be subject to a significant eschatological corrective.Footnote ³⁴ However, forgoing an expansion of claims already offered, I want now to strike a constructive note. Specifically, I want to imagine how the forgoing reflections might provide dogmatic support for an understanding of sanctification which delights in the possibilities of change and transformation that God invites God's people to enact and endure. I aim to stretch Barth in a somewhat experimental manner, imagining what patience might mean for a theology inspired by, but in no way limited to, his insights.

Let's assume that some of what Barth says about human existence, at least on my reckoning, might be summarised as an anthropological modulation of Eberhard Jüngel's description of God as a ‘being in becoming’. And let's grant, straightaway, that ‘being in becoming’ plays out differently for God and human beings. Applied to God, the phrase identifies the eventful character of the divine being, both in terms of God's trinitarian relating and in terms of God's elective movement towards us. Applied to human beings, there is a different register of meaning: at issue here is the fact that human beings are being shaped, transformed and moved by the Spirit, in light of Christ's elective activity, with a view to Christ's futurity. This anthropological claim has as an intriguing corollary, albeit one that Barth struggled to articulate in a consistent manner: a rejection of the assumption that human life could ever be construed in ‘essentialistic’ terms – that is, modes of reflection which explicitly or implicitly discourage adventuresome modes of becoming, given that an individual is ‘fixed in place’ by his or her gender, sex, ethnicity, socio-economic standing, etc. Put a bit differently: if one attends to those aspects of the Dogmatics which I have highlighted, a sharp refutation of Calvin's claim that ‘each individual’ has a ‘kind of living assigned to him by the Lord as a sort of sentry post so that he may not heedlessly wander’ comes into view.Footnote ³⁵ Made in the image of the God who liberates us from sin and opens history in such ways that we can move novelly towards the Christ who always comes, neither restrictive versions of ‘essentialism’ nor pinched understandings of vocation are dogmatically viable. Something rather different is needed since, in light of Christ's futurity, concretised diversely by the activity of Christ's Spirit, human life is always-already being opened up for expansion, development and transformation – even, sometimes, for apparently avant-garde kinds of experimentation. As beings-in-becoming, then, we are asked by God to endure and enact an open-ended project of the self; we are asked to be patient with ourselves, and with others, as grace shapes us, reshapes us and moves us towards a future, the precise character of which cannot be foreknown. We are asked to make ourselves susceptible to and patient of change; we are asked to undergo and endorse transformations which we cannot anticipate in advance. For sure, there is something stable, something permanent, about human being. We are not awash in a sea of possibilities; we are not haplessly caught in the swell of changing circumstances. What remains constant, at the very least, is the simple fact that every one of us is elected for covenantal relationship with God. What defines us, deep down, is the fact that God ‘chose us in him before the foundation of the world’ and ‘destined us in love to be his sons [and daughters] through Jesus Christ’ (Eph 1:4 and 1:5). But election is only the beginning of the story, and the same Lord into whose body we are incorporated petitions us to move into the future over which he presides.

Kathryn Tanner and Kristine Culp have recently gestured towards a claim of this kind: Tanner, in talking about the ‘unusual plasticity of human lives, absent of any predetermined specification of nature’ in Christ the Key; Culp, in talking about ‘vulnerability’ as ‘the situation in which persons and communities may receive and bear the glory of God’.Footnote ³⁶ The work of Tanner and Culp, further, intersects with theological insights proffered by a number of gay, lesbian and queer theologians who reflect on the ‘mobility’ of the self – the fact that, to borrow from Gerard Loughlin, a theological iteration of queerness presses us ‘to outwit identity’, especially when identity is predicated on restrictively essentialist assumptions.Footnote ³⁷ Thus a fascinating passage in the late Marcella Althaus-Reid's unsettling (and sometimes baffling) text, The Queer God, which combines Félix Guattari's idea of ‘transversality’, the Augustinian motif of the ‘unquiet heart’, contemporary reflections on border-crossing, and frank eroticism:

Barth would probably have little sympathy for Althaus-Reid's pioneering work, even granted that he showed a willingness to revise his views about gender, sex and sexuality towards the end of his life.Footnote ³⁹ But there is a possible point of connection which allows us to imagine a constructive theology inspired by Barth and alert to the insights of a new generation of liberation theologians. Patience, as I am framing it, affords one the opportunity to connect Barth's theological anthropology, a Reformed view of sanctification, and queer reflections on the open-ended dynamism of the self. It is a term which, if stretched ambitiously, might even help us to emphasise how the complex, shifting reality of human sexuality could, by the grace of God, bear witness to the eschatological transformations that God graciously effects; how the passion, eccentricity, purposeful turbulence and subversive disregard for that which is deemed ‘normal’ in personal and social struggles for sexual liberation provide clues to the type of transformation to which all human beings are called. Why not? Why not imagine a theology, funded by Barth and queer thinkers, which conceives of the sanctification of the individual in light of the strange world of human sexuality, which finds anticipations of the Kingdom – ‘secular parables of the truth’, if you will – among those communities that are constantly ‘dying’ to the oppressively familiar and ‘rising’ towards something quite unexpected?Footnote ⁴⁰ Is this not one aspect of a future towards which theological reflection may be being called – a future which purposefully but quietly ignores the distinction between ‘systematic’ and ‘liberationist’ theology in favour of a style of reflection which interweaves the insights of classical thinkers with contemporary voices, especially those long-ignored or marginalised by the mainstream church?

We may not, of course, forget that our lives are grounded in the fact of God's gracious election. Election in fact ensures that the sometimes-messy process of sanctification has as its uncomplicated basis the fact of God's grace. But we also must not forget, to borrow from one of Barth's early works, that each human being ‘has really been put on his feet in order to walk’.Footnote ⁴¹ And this walking requires that we patiently discern, attend to and explore the territory of the strange new world into which we are led; it requires that we be patient with ourselves, and with others, as we undergo the transformative event of sanctification.Footnote ⁴² And it requires, last but not least, that we not keep God waiting. Living towards and into the resurrection that is our future, we must now hasten towards the Kingdom that is always coming. To give Barth the last word: