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Church Dogmatics (Study Edition) #11
Karl Barth: Die Kirchliche Dogmatik. Studienausgabe: Band 11: II.2 34/35: Gottes Gnadenwahl II
Karl Barth (1886-1968) studierte Theologie in Bern, Berlin, Tubingen, Marburg und war von 1909 bis 1921 Pfarrer in Genf und Safenwil. Mit seiner Auslegung des Romerbriefes (1919, 1922) begann eine neue Epoche der evangelischen Theologie. Dieses radikale Buch trug ihm einen Ruf als Honorarprofessor nach Gottingen ein, spater wurde er Ordinarius in Munster und Bonn. Er war Mitherausgeber von Zwischen den Zeiten (1923-1933), der Zeitschrift der Dialektischen Theologie. Karl Barth war der Autor der Barmer Theologischen Erklarung und Kopf des Widerstands gegen die Gleichschaltung der Kirchen durch den Nationalsozialismus. 1935 wurde Barth von der Bonner Universitat wegen Verweigerung des bedingungslosen Fuhrereids entlassen. Er bekam sofort eine Professur in Basel, blieb aber mit der Bekennenden Kirche in enger Verbindung. Sein Hauptwerk, Die Kirchliche Dogmatik, ist die bedeutendste systematisch-theologische Leistung des 20. Jahrhunderts.
- GenresTheology
370 pages, Paperback
First published December 31, 1988
11 people want to read
About the author
Karl Barth
457 books263 followersProtestant 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.
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.
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March 21, 2024
Paragraph 34 was 2-3 stars, paragraph 35 was 10 stars.
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March 25, 2021Don't start with this one.
June 28, 2024
THE FOURTH VOLUME (OF 14) OF THE SWISS THEOLOGIAN’S MASTERWORK
Karl Barth (1886-1968) was a Swiss Reformed theologian, who was (arguably) the greatest Protestant theologian of the twentieth century.
[NOTE: page numbers below refer to the 806-page hardcover edition.]
He wrote in the Preface of this 1942 book, “In the Preface to the first half-volume of my ‘Church Dogmatics’ I made some observations on the plan of the work as a whole…. That was almost ten years ago… A year later we were plunged into the Third Reich and the German Church-conflict… By the very nature of things I have not been able to devote the last ten years solely to dogmatics, as was my intention in 1932. Yet dogmatics has been ever with me, giving me a constant awareness of what should be my central and basic theme as a thinker… A good deal has been said about the size both of the work as a whole and also of each of its constituent parts. It may be conceded that the Bible itself can put things more concisely. But if dogmatics is to serve its purpose, then I cannot see how either I myself, or any contemporaries known to me, can properly estimate the more concise statements of the Bible except in penetrating expositions which will necessarily demand both time and space.”
He states, “God is the God of the eternal election of His grace. In the light of this election the whole of the Gospel is light. Yes is said here, and all the promises of God are Yea and Amen… Whatever problems of contradictions we may encounter elsewhere, they all cease to be such, they become the very opposite, when we see them in their connection with the real truth which we must receive and proclaim here. On the other hand, if it is the shadow which really predominates, if we must still fear, or if we can only half rejoice and half fear, if we have no truth at all to receive or proclaim but only the neutral elucidation of a neutral subject, then it is quite certain that we can never again receive or proclaim as such the Gospel previously declared. In this sphere, too, the shadow will necessarily predominate.” (§32, 1; pg. 14)
He observes, “But now we must maintain… the other side of the matter: that when the mystery of God in election comes into the life of the creature… it is really grace and loving-kindness and favor which visits the creature. When this happens, God is in fact saying Yes to it… It is, therefore, a Yes which is unconditional in its certainty, preceding all self-determination and outlasting any change in self-determination on the part of the creature. It is the foreordination under which the creature must always live… By the divine election of grace… it is removed from this sphere or unrest. And the mystery of this election means for the creature that it is set at rest… When God says Yes to the creature, He does say Yes; without any if or but, without any afterthought or reservation, not temporarily but definitely, with a fidelity that is not partial or temporal, but total and eternal. Once the election has taken place, there is no further question as to the validity or non-validity of this Yes. There is no further anxiety…” (§32, 1; pg. 31)
He explains, “Thus the divine election does indeed determine and ordain the plenitude of the private relationships between God and every individual. What they may or may not be is decided in God’s election. That is not to say, however, that God’s election as such is identical with the determination of these private relationships as already made… It cannot be questioned that the election of God does determine all men; whether it is meaningful or possible to understand each man as such as already either ‘elected’ or ‘rejected,’ i.e., in the light of this determination… To be determined by God’s election is … really the final mystery of every human life. But this does not mean that the mystery as such derives from the ‘determining’ in the sense that every human life has already received the determination corresponding to it… it does not follow that it is for the individual a character already imparted to him… from the very first… It is still the activity of the free love of God… it concerns and determines every man. But it does so without necessitating that he should be elected or rejected immediately and in advance… the divine election of grace is an activity of God which has a definite goal and limit. Its direct and proper object is not individuals generally, but one individual… It is only in that one man that a human determination corresponds to the divine determining.” (§32, 2; pg. 43)
He continues, “if we feel bound always to base the doctrine of election upon the self-revelation of God according to the witness of Scripture, then we have answered positively the question of the basis of the doctrine and the standpoint which we ought to take up in relation to it… then the necessity of the doctrine has been decided once and for all. We are not free either to give ourselves to this matter or not to give ourselves to it, either to take seriously the knowledge of divine predestination or not to take it seriously… we need feel no shame at the witness of the Reformed Church, in which from the outset this doctrine has played so outstanding a role… [But] In face of the whole history… of the doctrine, a corrective has been inserted and a standard brought to light. It is the name of Jesus Christ which… forms the focus at which the two decisive beams of the truth forced upon us converge and unite: on the one hand the electing God and on the other elected man.” (§32, 2; pg. 59)
He observes, “the Infralapsarian view … [has] a certain mitigation in the fact that this decree is not the first and primary decree… not the absolute decree of God in respect of the divine reality of the universe and man… The Supralapsarians so exalted the sovereignty of God above everything else that they did not sufficiently appreciate the danger of trying to solve the problem of evil and to rationalize the irrational by making it a constituent element in the divine world-order and therefore a necessity, a part of nature… We are not in any position to dismiss the 17th century problem as superfluous, or to abandon the problem to merely capricious solution… To know that at a pinch both standpoints could be accepted on the basis then adopted does not help us to learn from this tract of history. We are fully convinced that on that basis both standpoints were in their way necessary.” (§33, 1; pg. 136-139)
He says, “If the teachers of predestination were right when they spoke always of a duality, of election and reprobation, or predestination to salvation or perdition, to life or death, then we may say already that in the election of Jesus Christ which is the eternal will of God, God has ascribed to man the former, election, salvation and life; and to Himself He has ascribed the latter, reprobation, perdition and death… The risk and threat is the portion which the Son of God, i.e., God Himself, has chosen for His own… But when God of His own will raised up man to be a covenant-member with Himself… He did it with a being which was not merely affected by evil but actually mastered by it… Man was tempted by evil. Man became guilty of evil… What can it have meant for God to commit Himself to such a creature?... man stands on the frontier of that which is impossible, of what which is excluded, of that which is contradictory to the will of God. In so far as he can and should live by the Word of God, participation in this contradiction is impossible for him… What a risk God ran when He willed to take up the cause of created man even in his original righteousness, when He … ordained Himself to solidarity with him!” (§33, 2; pg. 163-164)
He asks, “How can God ordain the overflowing of His glory, how can He choose the creature man as witness to this glory, without also willing and choosing its shadow, without conceding to and creating for that shadow… an existence as something yielding and defeated, without including the existence of that shadow in His decree? Without evil as ‘permitted’ in this sense there can be no universe or man… It should be perfectly clear, however, that the overflowing and the shadow are the will of God at a completely different level and in a completely different sense… Even in His permitting of man’s liability to temptation and fall, even in His permitting of evil, this is always what God wills. The divine willing of evil has, then, no proper or autonomous basis in God… God wills evil only because He wills not to keep to Himself the light of His glory but to let it shine outside Himself, because He wills to ordain man the witness of this glory. There is nothing in God … to which either evil or the doer of evil can appeal, as though evil were divinely created, as though evil too had in God a divine origin and counterpart…” (§33, 2; pg. 170)
He contends, “Israel as such and as a whole is not obedient but disobedient to its election. What happens is that Israel’s promised Messiah comes and in accordance with His election is delivered up by Israel and crucified for Israel. What happens further is that in His resurrection from the dead He is established as the promised One and believed on by many even of the Gentiles. What does not happen, however, is that Israel as such and as a whole puts its faith in Him. What happens, on the contrary, is that it resists its election at the very moment when the promise given with it passes into fulfillment. Israel refuses to join in the confession of the Church, refuses to enter upon its service in the one elected community of God…” (§34, 2; pg. 208)
He continues, “The Church form of the community stands in the same relation to its Israelite form as the resurrection of Jesus to His crucifixion, as God’s mercy to God’s judgment. But this means that the Church is older than its calling and gathering from among Jews and Gentiles which begins with … Pentecost… it has already lived a hidden life in Israel… Nor can Israel’s obduracy do anything to alter the fact that His Church exists in its midst from the beginning...” (§34, 2; pg. 211-212) Later, he adds, “the Church… waits for Israel’s conversion. But it has to precede Israel with the confession of faith required from it as from Israel and offered to Israel as to it, and therefore with the confession of the unity of the community of God.” (§34, 3, pg. 240)
He acknowledges, “the elect and the rejected, in spite of the greatest dissimilarities, can see that in many respects they are only too similar… As it is the election and calling God who distinguishes between them, the only possible distinction is that in which He alone is always the One who maintains His faithfulness towards both and for the benefit of both. It is quite impossible that anyone should escape either his responsibility to Him or God’s responsibility for him and therefore in some sense be excluded from His election and grace. Assuredly God is no respecter of persons. If He is present to His elect… It does not in any sense mean that He is not, in another way, with the rejected also. And if God hides His face from the rejected, He does not on that account cease to be their last and true refuge… And where He still strikes, He has not yet cast aside.” (§35, 2, pg. 354) Later, he adds, “It is because the elect is that the rejected is also. Only the elect knows the rejected. He cannot know himself as such, or his election, without at the same time knowing the rejected.” (§35, 4; pg. 451)
For anyone seriously studying Christian theology, this series—while requiring a substantial investment of time—is virtually “must reading.”
Karl Barth (1886-1968) was a Swiss Reformed theologian, who was (arguably) the greatest Protestant theologian of the twentieth century.
[NOTE: page numbers below refer to the 806-page hardcover edition.]
He wrote in the Preface of this 1942 book, “In the Preface to the first half-volume of my ‘Church Dogmatics’ I made some observations on the plan of the work as a whole…. That was almost ten years ago… A year later we were plunged into the Third Reich and the German Church-conflict… By the very nature of things I have not been able to devote the last ten years solely to dogmatics, as was my intention in 1932. Yet dogmatics has been ever with me, giving me a constant awareness of what should be my central and basic theme as a thinker… A good deal has been said about the size both of the work as a whole and also of each of its constituent parts. It may be conceded that the Bible itself can put things more concisely. But if dogmatics is to serve its purpose, then I cannot see how either I myself, or any contemporaries known to me, can properly estimate the more concise statements of the Bible except in penetrating expositions which will necessarily demand both time and space.”
He states, “God is the God of the eternal election of His grace. In the light of this election the whole of the Gospel is light. Yes is said here, and all the promises of God are Yea and Amen… Whatever problems of contradictions we may encounter elsewhere, they all cease to be such, they become the very opposite, when we see them in their connection with the real truth which we must receive and proclaim here. On the other hand, if it is the shadow which really predominates, if we must still fear, or if we can only half rejoice and half fear, if we have no truth at all to receive or proclaim but only the neutral elucidation of a neutral subject, then it is quite certain that we can never again receive or proclaim as such the Gospel previously declared. In this sphere, too, the shadow will necessarily predominate.” (§32, 1; pg. 14)
He observes, “But now we must maintain… the other side of the matter: that when the mystery of God in election comes into the life of the creature… it is really grace and loving-kindness and favor which visits the creature. When this happens, God is in fact saying Yes to it… It is, therefore, a Yes which is unconditional in its certainty, preceding all self-determination and outlasting any change in self-determination on the part of the creature. It is the foreordination under which the creature must always live… By the divine election of grace… it is removed from this sphere or unrest. And the mystery of this election means for the creature that it is set at rest… When God says Yes to the creature, He does say Yes; without any if or but, without any afterthought or reservation, not temporarily but definitely, with a fidelity that is not partial or temporal, but total and eternal. Once the election has taken place, there is no further question as to the validity or non-validity of this Yes. There is no further anxiety…” (§32, 1; pg. 31)
He explains, “Thus the divine election does indeed determine and ordain the plenitude of the private relationships between God and every individual. What they may or may not be is decided in God’s election. That is not to say, however, that God’s election as such is identical with the determination of these private relationships as already made… It cannot be questioned that the election of God does determine all men; whether it is meaningful or possible to understand each man as such as already either ‘elected’ or ‘rejected,’ i.e., in the light of this determination… To be determined by God’s election is … really the final mystery of every human life. But this does not mean that the mystery as such derives from the ‘determining’ in the sense that every human life has already received the determination corresponding to it… it does not follow that it is for the individual a character already imparted to him… from the very first… It is still the activity of the free love of God… it concerns and determines every man. But it does so without necessitating that he should be elected or rejected immediately and in advance… the divine election of grace is an activity of God which has a definite goal and limit. Its direct and proper object is not individuals generally, but one individual… It is only in that one man that a human determination corresponds to the divine determining.” (§32, 2; pg. 43)
He continues, “if we feel bound always to base the doctrine of election upon the self-revelation of God according to the witness of Scripture, then we have answered positively the question of the basis of the doctrine and the standpoint which we ought to take up in relation to it… then the necessity of the doctrine has been decided once and for all. We are not free either to give ourselves to this matter or not to give ourselves to it, either to take seriously the knowledge of divine predestination or not to take it seriously… we need feel no shame at the witness of the Reformed Church, in which from the outset this doctrine has played so outstanding a role… [But] In face of the whole history… of the doctrine, a corrective has been inserted and a standard brought to light. It is the name of Jesus Christ which… forms the focus at which the two decisive beams of the truth forced upon us converge and unite: on the one hand the electing God and on the other elected man.” (§32, 2; pg. 59)
He observes, “the Infralapsarian view … [has] a certain mitigation in the fact that this decree is not the first and primary decree… not the absolute decree of God in respect of the divine reality of the universe and man… The Supralapsarians so exalted the sovereignty of God above everything else that they did not sufficiently appreciate the danger of trying to solve the problem of evil and to rationalize the irrational by making it a constituent element in the divine world-order and therefore a necessity, a part of nature… We are not in any position to dismiss the 17th century problem as superfluous, or to abandon the problem to merely capricious solution… To know that at a pinch both standpoints could be accepted on the basis then adopted does not help us to learn from this tract of history. We are fully convinced that on that basis both standpoints were in their way necessary.” (§33, 1; pg. 136-139)
He says, “If the teachers of predestination were right when they spoke always of a duality, of election and reprobation, or predestination to salvation or perdition, to life or death, then we may say already that in the election of Jesus Christ which is the eternal will of God, God has ascribed to man the former, election, salvation and life; and to Himself He has ascribed the latter, reprobation, perdition and death… The risk and threat is the portion which the Son of God, i.e., God Himself, has chosen for His own… But when God of His own will raised up man to be a covenant-member with Himself… He did it with a being which was not merely affected by evil but actually mastered by it… Man was tempted by evil. Man became guilty of evil… What can it have meant for God to commit Himself to such a creature?... man stands on the frontier of that which is impossible, of what which is excluded, of that which is contradictory to the will of God. In so far as he can and should live by the Word of God, participation in this contradiction is impossible for him… What a risk God ran when He willed to take up the cause of created man even in his original righteousness, when He … ordained Himself to solidarity with him!” (§33, 2; pg. 163-164)
He asks, “How can God ordain the overflowing of His glory, how can He choose the creature man as witness to this glory, without also willing and choosing its shadow, without conceding to and creating for that shadow… an existence as something yielding and defeated, without including the existence of that shadow in His decree? Without evil as ‘permitted’ in this sense there can be no universe or man… It should be perfectly clear, however, that the overflowing and the shadow are the will of God at a completely different level and in a completely different sense… Even in His permitting of man’s liability to temptation and fall, even in His permitting of evil, this is always what God wills. The divine willing of evil has, then, no proper or autonomous basis in God… God wills evil only because He wills not to keep to Himself the light of His glory but to let it shine outside Himself, because He wills to ordain man the witness of this glory. There is nothing in God … to which either evil or the doer of evil can appeal, as though evil were divinely created, as though evil too had in God a divine origin and counterpart…” (§33, 2; pg. 170)
He contends, “Israel as such and as a whole is not obedient but disobedient to its election. What happens is that Israel’s promised Messiah comes and in accordance with His election is delivered up by Israel and crucified for Israel. What happens further is that in His resurrection from the dead He is established as the promised One and believed on by many even of the Gentiles. What does not happen, however, is that Israel as such and as a whole puts its faith in Him. What happens, on the contrary, is that it resists its election at the very moment when the promise given with it passes into fulfillment. Israel refuses to join in the confession of the Church, refuses to enter upon its service in the one elected community of God…” (§34, 2; pg. 208)
He continues, “The Church form of the community stands in the same relation to its Israelite form as the resurrection of Jesus to His crucifixion, as God’s mercy to God’s judgment. But this means that the Church is older than its calling and gathering from among Jews and Gentiles which begins with … Pentecost… it has already lived a hidden life in Israel… Nor can Israel’s obduracy do anything to alter the fact that His Church exists in its midst from the beginning...” (§34, 2; pg. 211-212) Later, he adds, “the Church… waits for Israel’s conversion. But it has to precede Israel with the confession of faith required from it as from Israel and offered to Israel as to it, and therefore with the confession of the unity of the community of God.” (§34, 3, pg. 240)
He acknowledges, “the elect and the rejected, in spite of the greatest dissimilarities, can see that in many respects they are only too similar… As it is the election and calling God who distinguishes between them, the only possible distinction is that in which He alone is always the One who maintains His faithfulness towards both and for the benefit of both. It is quite impossible that anyone should escape either his responsibility to Him or God’s responsibility for him and therefore in some sense be excluded from His election and grace. Assuredly God is no respecter of persons. If He is present to His elect… It does not in any sense mean that He is not, in another way, with the rejected also. And if God hides His face from the rejected, He does not on that account cease to be their last and true refuge… And where He still strikes, He has not yet cast aside.” (§35, 2, pg. 354) Later, he adds, “It is because the elect is that the rejected is also. Only the elect knows the rejected. He cannot know himself as such, or his election, without at the same time knowing the rejected.” (§35, 4; pg. 451)
For anyone seriously studying Christian theology, this series—while requiring a substantial investment of time—is virtually “must reading.”
July 31, 2015
Magisterial.
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