Church Dogmatics 2.2: The Doctrine of God

Church Dogmatics #2.2

by Karl Barth, Thomas F. Torrance, Geoffrey William Bromiley

Described by Pope Pius XII as the most important theologian since Thomas Aquinas, the Swiss pastor and theologian, Karl Barth, continues to be a major influence on students, scholars and preachers today. Barth s theology found its expression mainly through his closely reasoned fourteen-part magnum opus, Die Kirchliche Dogmatik. Having taken over 30 years to write, the Church Dogmatics is regarded as one of the most important theological works of all time, and represents the pinnacle of Barth s achievement as a theologian. T&T Clark International is now proud to be publishing the only complete English translation of the Church Dogmatics in paperback.

Genres: Theology

820 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1957

About the author

Protestant theologian Karl Barth, a Swiss, advocated a return to the principles of the Reformation and the teachings of the Bible; his published works include Church Dogmatics from 1932.

Critics hold Karl Barth among the most important Christian thinkers of the 20th century; Pope Pius XII described him as the most important since Saint Thomas Aquinas. Beginning with his experience as a pastor, he rejected his typical predominant liberal, especially German training of 19th century.

Instead, he embarked on a new path, initially called dialectical, due to its stress on the paradoxical nature of divine truth—for instance, God is both grace and judgment), but more accurately called a of the Word. Critics referred to this father of new orthodoxy, a pejorative term that he emphatically rejected. His thought emphasized the sovereignty of God, particularly through his innovative doctrine of election. His enormously influenced throughout Europe and America.

Reviews

[Cody Bivins-Starr · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easily one of the most important works of theology in the 20th century… or ever.

[Brad East · Rating 5 out of 5]

At long last. A masterpiece, whose reputation and influence are deserved. As ever in finishing part-volumes of the Dogmatics, I felt breathless by the end of the last page. Further up and further in.

[Jacob Aitken]

Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics II/2. Hendrickson Reprint.

I am not sure why I had read Karl Barth. I started sometime in 2012, finishing volumes I/1 and I/2. Around 2014 I read II/1, which covered the doctrine of God proper. I started on II/2, Barth’s volume on election, but I got bogged down with other concerns. I subsequently gave away my set. Last year I decided since I was over halfway finished with the volume, I should go ahead and finish it, so here we are.

I should go ahead and put one thing to rest. The question will likely arise: Do I agree with Barth? I think there is a deeper problem. Before I can agree or disagree with him, I would first have to understand him. I am not sure Barth is always coherent and that will be my biggest criticism of this volume.

The structure of this book, if little of its content, is quite simple. He begins with the doctrine of election proper, including helpful historical surveys. Important for Barth, and this is a point worth establishing, is election is illustrative of God’s freedom. Barth had many horrendous problems, but Arminianism was not one of them. From here he moves to his famous hinge that Jesus is the election of God. Following that, Barth gives a thorough, if confusing, discussion on Israel, ending with some thoughts for the church.

He begins well. Election should never be divorced from Israel. Unfortunately, what that means is not always clear, and when he should make it clear, he punts with language such as “Israel is God’s “yes and no.” I have no idea what that means. To be sure, Barth wants to connect election to God’s sovereign action in covenanting, but he never really develops that thought. The best one can take away from his discussion is the admirable, if undeveloped, claim that covenant keeps election from becoming abstract.

For Barth, Jesus is the electing will of God. A bold claim, but what does it mean? Athanasius said Jesus was the Subject of Election (Contra Arianos II. 75-77). God doesn’t literally take counsel with himself. For Athanasius, predestination is the decision at the beginning of all things. The election of Jesus Christ is the eternal choice and decision of God (Barth 115). Following upon the earlier comments of Athanasius, we return to the knowing and willing of God. If God knows all things, then he knows what he would will before he wills it. For all practical purposes, this makes knowing and willing the same in God. That is not a problem, per se. What Athanasius does, or at least his theology, is to replace the abstract willing with Jesus Christ. Jesus is the Father’s willing.

What does Barth do with this analysis? Not much. To be sure, predestination and election was never at the forefront in Athanasius’s theology. Barth had a chance to link Calvin with Athanasius on the doctrine of God in a way not done before, and he did not do it. He does give us a hint: Jesus is the elect Man.

Nonetheless, he does more towards a constructive case. “Our thesis is that God’s eternal will is the election of Jesus Christ” (146). This is not too far from Athanasius’s argument that Jesus is the will of the Father, Act-in-Being. By this thesis we avoid positing unknown quantities in God (e.g., who is elect and who damned?). If we don’t have Jesus as God’s decree, then we ultimately cannot know whether we are elect.

Thus, Barth anchors predestination in Christology (149). “The beginning of all things God’s eternal plan and decree was identical with what is disclosed to us in time as the revelation of God and the truth about all things” (156). In other words, knowledge of predestination must not be divorced from the revelation of God. The will of God is Jesus Christ, “and this will is known to us in the revelation of Jesus Christ. If we acknowledge this, if we seriously accept Jesus Christ as the content of this will, then we cannot seek any other will of God” (157). God gives himself as a person (“God sent forth his Son”).

This is the most important section in the book. He should have stopped writing here. To his credit, he does try to connect this with the doctrine of simplicity, noting that some harder models of simplicity, when coupled with a strong doctrine of fatalism, do give the impression of a mechanistic universe in which nothing can be changed by prayer.

In other words, if predestination is the divine act of will, and this act is the Son, then it cannot be an abstraction (181). Barth sees this abstraction as paving the way for deism (182), for after the decree the Godhead is inactive. Appeals to secondary causes do not help, since they are only outworkings of the decree, not new actions in history. And if predestination is tied to the being of God, as most strong forms of simplicity suggest, then God is now inactive. By contrast, God’s decree is a living decree (183). This can only work, however, if we identify it with the election of Jesus Christ (187).

Evaluation

It is not clear why so many became Barthians in the middle of the twentieth century, for Barth was not a good writer. He sometimes had good arguments, but I do not think the female pastors in the PCUSA are wrestling with him on election. By way of critique, I skipped the section on Israel. To his credit, Barth wrestled with God’s election of Israel. Nonetheless, Israel itself is largely irrelevant to Barth’s project. Secondly, while we can appreciate Athanasius’s claim that Jesus is the Being-in-Act of the Father, particularly the Father’s willing, it does seem that the language of Scripture has election has a willing of the Father with particular objects of that willing. On the other hand, his discussion of Athanasius is really good and warrants some further reflections.

There is some good news to this. It is unlikely that young people today will become Barthians any time soon. Barth’s works are very expensive and his prose is terrible.

[Nathan Casebolt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Karl Barth rounds out his exposition of the doctrine of God under two heads: the election of God and the command of God. In his first self-consciously significant break with John Calvin, Barth here unfolds his highly idiosyncratic doctrine of election.

In his view, although the Reformers did much to rescue the doctrine of sovereign election from a Roman Catholic neo-Pelagianism, they failed to recognize that election is more primal than an arbitrary selection of individuals for salvation and a corresponding rejection of others to damnation. Rather, Jesus Christ himself, the second person of the eternal triune Godhead, is the original and proper object of the Father's election. He is chosen before time to be the original Elect Man, and he also is chosen before time to be the original Rejected Man. As he bears the Father's rejection to damnation, so he receives the Father's redemptive election to salvation.

We have no part or parcel in this two-fold work accomplished on our behalf, and solely by the Father's good pleasure, before time and in time. Our role in salvation is either through repentant faith to embrace the Son's election as our own through his work on the cross, or to embrace his rejection as our own in a stubborn insistence on our individual sovereignty. In reality, this is an impossible and impotent choice since Christ has already borne that rejection fully; it is not ours to choose. This is a choice that leaves us in Satan's powerless shadow kingdom, a choice that leads nowhere but to the eternal destruction which awaits all that exists in the impossible unreality outside of Christ's dual role as Elected and Rejected Man.

Again, this is certainly an idiosyncratic view of election. To me, it seems to flirt with the edges of universalism. If we all in some sense exist in a state of election that we have only to accept in repentant humility or (impossibly) to reject in stubborn pride, could one argue that the very impossibility of choosing a rejection that Christ has already fully borne might ultimately lead to universal salvation? Barth himself refers frequently enough to the notion of eternal destruction that he seems still to be within the guardrails, but it would be helpful to get a better grasp of what he means when he speaks of eternal destruction. Perhaps he gets to that later in the series; this is, after all, a twelve-volume theology.

The second head, that of God's command, is concerned with Christian ethics. Here Barth helpfully grounds ethics in the acts of God himself. As God has met and meets us with boundless compassion through his son Jesus Christ, so too we are to meet with others on that same basis of boundless compassion regardless of their disposition toward us or toward God. Here again, though, Barth's idiosyncrasies surface in his insistence that revelation is inherently an historical act of God toward specific individuals in concrete and unrepeatable situations. Revelation can only be attested in the pages of Scripture, not repeated over and over again as general rules for us to interpret and apply in our situations by our own lights (i.e., no Scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation). The Bible, therefore, in passages such as the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount, does not constitute a rulebook for life so much as it indicates the outer boundaries within which our response to God's command, our execution of Christian ethics, must take place as we respond to that concrete command of God in our own specific historical circumstances.

I appreciate Barth's emphasis on constant and fervent prayer as the means by which, in communication with the Word of God through the Bible, we live in vigilant attendance on God's commands for us from day to day. The urge to prayer is both salutary and welcome. I am less clear on what exactly to do with this on a day-to-day basis, or how I'm supposed to distinguish God's command from my own baptized feelings. I'm not certain Barth manages to extricate himself from the charge he elsewhere lays against Pietism for being too mystical, since the decoupling of the command of God from the specific written commands of Scripture seems to leave the door ajar for the very mysticism Barth otherwise decries.

Still, there are a lot of tough nuts to crack in the question of how exactly to apply Scripture when so much of it has no obvious translation into a modern context (e.g., what to do with slaves captured in regional wars). Whether or not Barth's contribution to this conversation ultimately makes any sense in terms of daily Christian living, he raises good questions and provides thoughtful answers that certainly give the thoughtful reader much to chew on.

[Ben De Bono · Rating 5 out of 5]

The second half of Barth's Doctrine of God was nothing short of extraordinary. Even if the rest of the series is dreadful (which I certainly don't expect it to be) these last two volumes on their own are enough to make Church Dogmatics a masterpiece and one of the greatest theological works of all time.

In this volume Barth covers two main topics: election and ethics. I was especially excited to read his discussion of election. I've found myself dissatisfied by all sides in the Calvinist/Arminian debate. I'd read that Barth's take on the issue was a bit atypical and was eager to see what he had to say.

Suffice to say, he didn't disappoint! His critiques of both Calvinism and Arminianism were spot on. He charges Arminians with more or less doing away with the concept of election. While they retain the terminology, their understanding of election ultimately bears little resemblance to that found in Scripture. However, Calvinists aren't off the hook either. Barth's critique of their position is simple and brilliant. Calvinist's have, according to Barth, failed to properly consider the place of Christology in their view of election and the result is a warped doctrine.

To prove this point Barth examines Ephesians 1:4, "He chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him." It's a famous one on election and one that Calvinists have often viewed as irrefutable evidence for their position. The flaw in their argument is that they've ignored the critical phrase "in him."

Careful consideration of that phrase changes everything concerning election. When we view election through the lens of Christology, the need for Calvinism's non-biblical decrees disappears completely. We don't need to image some sort of decrees by which election took place before the beginning of the world. We're told how it took place: our election is in him. Jesus is electing God and electing man. Through his election he takes on the rejection due to humanity and makes it possible for humanity, through being in him, to no longer be rejected.

Barth's view of election goes well beyond individualism. He sees election as having three levels - Christ, the community (Israel and the Church), and finally the individual. This is another critique of the two sides in the debate. They've both focused almost entirely on the individual and neglected the other levels. It's a damning error.

As you can tell, I am completely enthralled by Barth's view of election. For me, it's a game changer and comes with the welcome feature of making both sides in a frustrating debate irrelevant. However, in fairness, I do need to acknowledge that Barth leaves himself open for some very serious criticism with his view. Barth has been accused of supporting a soft view of universalism. Although I don't think that's what he's doing (I'd need to study further to say for sure), I can see where the criticism has merit. It's an unfortunate state of affairs that has, likely, led to his view of election not being given the credence it deserves. Where his thoughts on the topic should have shook the foundations of evangelical and protestant dogma, it would seem that one, potential error has given evangelicals and protestants the excuse they need to ignore what he has to say.

I found Barth's view of ethics in this volume equally compelling and a great complement to Bonhoeffer's Ethics. It would be a fascinating study to place the two works side by side and see how they round each other out.

[Adam Gossman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a highly important volume of the dogmatics, containing both his view of Divine Election as well as a good treatment of Christian Ethics- among other things. All things Karl Barth are awesome.

[John Coatney · Rating 5 out of 5]

This volume deals primarily with Barth's discussion of the doctrine of election - easily the greatest difference in doctrine between Reformed and Orthodox theology and teaching. I rate it five stars not because I agree with what Barth writes, but because of the nuance, thorough complexity, and unique presentation with which he writes. It gets five stars because I enjoyed reading it.

[Jonathan Hatt · Rating 1 out of 5]

I’m a Westminster Theological Seminary student, so what do you expect from me?

[cindy]

Read §34 "The Election of the Community" for Modern Doctrine.

[Kyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

OK, I haven't read the whole thing, but at 800 pages, having read over a quarter (which the equivilant of a 400 page book with normal font) is saying something. Besides, I want to keep it on my bookshelf.



Having read substantial parts of 1/2, II/1, III/1,2, and now II/2 I would say this is hands down my favorite. Of course I've read enough Barth and Barth commentators by now that I'm begining to "get" his style and method of writing and doing theology.



It is true that his doctrine of election is nothing but revolutionary. It is very, very good. While I wish he would have spent more time addressing the issue of universalism, how he treats election is nothing short of spectacular. While not terribly surprised, I wish his doctrine would have trickled down to a more popular level. Knowing Jesus Christ as the electing God and the elected man is an incredibly hopeful approach to addressing the God/human question that takes both sin and grace seriously.

[Brett · Rating 5 out of 5]

What can you say, Barth's reworking of the Doctrine of Election is pure genius. There are plenty of tedious fine print sections (20-50 pgs) of exegesis and historical analysis, but the end result is well worth it.

[Stephen Morrison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well worth four months of intense reading! Barth brilliantly describes God's gracious election and claim of mankind, under the general heading of the doctrine of the Word of God. A very enjoyable and deeply moving work of theology.

[Anna Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good, but man alive, a thick swim.

[J.I. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best of the best. Theology in unity with the Church of all ages, in conversation with every important discussion, overcoming the confines of modernity. Must read for every theologian.