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The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life: The Theological Basis of Ethics
This rare volume provides a concise statement of the major ideas of one of the greatest Protestant thinkers of the twentieth century, Karl Barth. Divided into three parts, it presents Barth's lecture, "The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life." This work emphasizes Barth's focus on the Trinitarian character of God's self-revelation. Barth insists there is no way to get behind or beyond the fact that God is revealed to us in three distinct ways, yet with a unity that cannot be divided. He claims that we can finally look only to God's self-disclosure as the reliable basis for Christian ethics. The Library of Theological Ethics series focuses on what it means to think theologically and ethically. It presents a selection of important and otherwise unavailable texts in easily accessible form. Volumes in this series will enable sustained dialogue with predecessors though reflection on classic works in the field.
- GenresTheology
96 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 1993
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About the author
Karl Barth
463 books264 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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May 7, 2023
It’s All About Other People, Karl
Karl Barth was arguably the most important Christian theoiogian of the 20th century. A Calvinist who felt that Protestantism had been distorted into a pernicious civil religion, and that Catholicism remained bogged down in its own self-justification, Barth tried to recover the meaning of divine revelation in a world bent on using it for other than divine ends.
The Theological Basis of Ethics is an attempt to demonstrate that Christian theology has teeth, as it were, in that the revelation of a Trinitarian God has implications for how human beings are meant to act with each other. This has become a somewhat persistent theme in theological ethics even into the 21st century.
The details of Barth’s argument are dense and complex, largely because of his highly refined, one might say tortuous, view of what constitutes revelation. It is not this argument that concerns me here but the rather more general logic of the relationship between revelation and ethics. It is at this level that I believe Barth becomes incomprehensible.
The problem that all ethicists face is that they must ultimately recognise something as The Good against which to evaluate correct behaviour. Once The Good is specified, however implicitly or indirectly, behavioural implications are usually obvious. So this choice is pivotal for ethical discussion.
Theological ethicists, that is theologians who claim to ‘derive’ ethics from ‘revealed truths’ about God, don’t approve of what might be called liberal sentiment as the basis for ethics. For them the mores and feelings of society at large are inadequate guarantees of the appropriateness of ethical standards. For the theologians these are mere conventions with no absolute claim on our consciences, laws or attitudes.
Rather the theologian starts with what he calls revelation, that divinely provided insight which, however inarticulate, demands to be heard and acted upon. Revelation is a gift, a dandum rather than a datum, according to Barth. The core of this gift is contained in sacred scriptures, but the message it gives is constantly adapted to our present circumstances. Even the Bible is an interpretation of the Word of God mainly appropriate to times in which it was written. It is static only for those who would make an idol of the human word.
The problem is, of course, the distinction that Barth and other theologians make between revelation and conventional ethical wisdom. Barth quotes St. Augustine on revelation as not being “…as if we believed something new, but having remembered it we approve of what has been said.” Just how such familiar thought can be distinguished from conventional wisdom that floats about the community we live in is a mystery. Indeed, what is the revelation he talks about other than slowly evolving thoughts about the divine passed down in the cultural gossip we call tradition?
It is just as valid therefore to argue from liberal ethics to theology as the other way round. Our ideas of God are generated by our feelings about what is important and how people should act with each other. We deduce God from what we think we should be like. Barth’s catalysing issue, as it were, was the fact that many theologians and fellow-churchmen cheered Germany’s initiation and continued participation in WWI. But the proposition that Barth saw what was being done and rejected it precisely because he himself was re-stating liberal bourgeois values is not a trivial possibility. From this conventional viewpoint he was correcting the profound error of trying to deduce ethics from religion, precisely what his colleagues were doing.
Carl Jung wrote contemporaneously with Barth. There are two principles of Jungian psychology: First that the Unconscious is indistinguishable from Reality. Second that the Self, consisting of The Conscious and Unconscious Mind, is indistinguishable from God. I don’t think that Barth would have argued with these. Surprisingly they are not inconsistent with Barth’s neo-Calvinism of the “radical externality” of the Word of God.
The “voice of the Living God” is indeed present in what we experience around us, as Bonaventure most famously insisted, particularly in other people. Jung’s theory has the great advantage of being immensely simpler than Barth’s theology. And it has a much sharper and tighter ethical import: It is other people who must be respected as the divine voice lest our own selves become idolised. What more could theological ethics want or need to say?
Postscript: For more on the theology of Barth, see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Karl Barth was arguably the most important Christian theoiogian of the 20th century. A Calvinist who felt that Protestantism had been distorted into a pernicious civil religion, and that Catholicism remained bogged down in its own self-justification, Barth tried to recover the meaning of divine revelation in a world bent on using it for other than divine ends.
The Theological Basis of Ethics is an attempt to demonstrate that Christian theology has teeth, as it were, in that the revelation of a Trinitarian God has implications for how human beings are meant to act with each other. This has become a somewhat persistent theme in theological ethics even into the 21st century.
The details of Barth’s argument are dense and complex, largely because of his highly refined, one might say tortuous, view of what constitutes revelation. It is not this argument that concerns me here but the rather more general logic of the relationship between revelation and ethics. It is at this level that I believe Barth becomes incomprehensible.
The problem that all ethicists face is that they must ultimately recognise something as The Good against which to evaluate correct behaviour. Once The Good is specified, however implicitly or indirectly, behavioural implications are usually obvious. So this choice is pivotal for ethical discussion.
Theological ethicists, that is theologians who claim to ‘derive’ ethics from ‘revealed truths’ about God, don’t approve of what might be called liberal sentiment as the basis for ethics. For them the mores and feelings of society at large are inadequate guarantees of the appropriateness of ethical standards. For the theologians these are mere conventions with no absolute claim on our consciences, laws or attitudes.
Rather the theologian starts with what he calls revelation, that divinely provided insight which, however inarticulate, demands to be heard and acted upon. Revelation is a gift, a dandum rather than a datum, according to Barth. The core of this gift is contained in sacred scriptures, but the message it gives is constantly adapted to our present circumstances. Even the Bible is an interpretation of the Word of God mainly appropriate to times in which it was written. It is static only for those who would make an idol of the human word.
The problem is, of course, the distinction that Barth and other theologians make between revelation and conventional ethical wisdom. Barth quotes St. Augustine on revelation as not being “…as if we believed something new, but having remembered it we approve of what has been said.” Just how such familiar thought can be distinguished from conventional wisdom that floats about the community we live in is a mystery. Indeed, what is the revelation he talks about other than slowly evolving thoughts about the divine passed down in the cultural gossip we call tradition?
It is just as valid therefore to argue from liberal ethics to theology as the other way round. Our ideas of God are generated by our feelings about what is important and how people should act with each other. We deduce God from what we think we should be like. Barth’s catalysing issue, as it were, was the fact that many theologians and fellow-churchmen cheered Germany’s initiation and continued participation in WWI. But the proposition that Barth saw what was being done and rejected it precisely because he himself was re-stating liberal bourgeois values is not a trivial possibility. From this conventional viewpoint he was correcting the profound error of trying to deduce ethics from religion, precisely what his colleagues were doing.
Carl Jung wrote contemporaneously with Barth. There are two principles of Jungian psychology: First that the Unconscious is indistinguishable from Reality. Second that the Self, consisting of The Conscious and Unconscious Mind, is indistinguishable from God. I don’t think that Barth would have argued with these. Surprisingly they are not inconsistent with Barth’s neo-Calvinism of the “radical externality” of the Word of God.
The “voice of the Living God” is indeed present in what we experience around us, as Bonaventure most famously insisted, particularly in other people. Jung’s theory has the great advantage of being immensely simpler than Barth’s theology. And it has a much sharper and tighter ethical import: It is other people who must be respected as the divine voice lest our own selves become idolised. What more could theological ethics want or need to say?
Postscript: For more on the theology of Barth, see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
January 13, 2013
In October of 1929, German theologian Karl Barth gave a lecture called “The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life.” Interestingly, he was following a lecture that was given on the previous day by his brother, philosopher Heinrich Barth. Heinrich emphasized the continuity between the human spirit, national spirit, and romantic spirit and the divine spirit. Karl took a different perspective. Karl’s lecture is available in translation and print in The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life. Since it is the publication of one (admittedly lengthy) lecture, it is a relatively small volume. Nonetheless, it packs considerable punch.
In his lecture, Karl Barth quoted Augustine who wrote that experiencing divine revelation, “…is not as if we believed something new, but having remembered it we approve of what has been said.” (p. 4) Barth contends that this gives too much possible credit to a built-in divinity within humanity (a la Chopra and other eastern mystics) and not enough to reality that revelation depends upon God and upon humanity being “open upward” (quoting Erich Przywara—p. 5). Specifically, Barth stated that revelation is not a datum but a dandum (literally, something “to be given”). Revelation, like grace, is “…ever and in all relations God’s deed and act, taking place in this and that moment of time in which God wills to be gracious to us, and is gracious and makes his grace manifest.” (p. 5)
With this understood, Barth contends that the Christian life means, “It can be said and with confidence that this significance means that man as he is, in his creaturely existence as man and as an individual, is opened, prepared, and made fit by God for God.” (p.7) Obviously, the God-dependence may seem overstated to modern audiences and it did not receive universal approbation when he spoke in 1929, but this idea of God preparing, inspiring, and empowering the believer is an important corrective to the almost materialistic approach to “faith” in the modern world and the attempt to “earn” salvation or “be good” by oneself in the ancient world. So, how is humanity “opened” and “prepared?” “…it is purely and simply the office of the Holy Spirit to be continually opening our ears to enable us to receive the Creator’s word.” (p. 8)
In other words, “As the scriptural announcement of God’s revelation must be ever increasingly becoming the voice of the living God to us, seeing that God is continually saying to us what he said by the mouth of prophets and apostles once for all, so too the outer and inner constraints of our existence must be ever acquiring the character of divine indications, duties, and promises through the divine speech to us.” (p. 9) Of course, Barth contends that one reason we need to be so God-dependent in terms of living our lives is that an ethics where one believes God’s will is static may well end up planting itself upon the throne of God. Such arrogant “ethics,” says Barth, “Poisons the wells and is more fraught with peril to the Christian life than all cinemas and dancing saloons piled together.” (p. 10) When we, as humans, presume upon our determination of God’s revelation, Barth asks, “How should the creature spirit, poised upon itself, take in the Word of God in any other way than as a mere symbol of its own maxims, which may be, accordingly, realistic or idealistic, conservative or revolutionary?” (p. 10) In other words, when we are not open to the Holy Spirit to interpret the revelation afresh and help it become reality, we are in danger of codifying our ideas in an idolatrous imitation of God’s Word. Barth knows how easy it is to pervert God’s teachings if one isn’t humbly experiencing God’s presence continually (in that sense of openness to being changed).
Barth doesn’t want one to confuse one’s subjective knowledge (again, a product of the merely human spirit) with the external activity of God (the Holy Spirit) and reminds the reader that the Reformers (Luther and Calvin, especially) would refer to “alien” or “external” righteousness to avoid the idea that humans accomplish or attain the “good” on their own (p. 26). So, “…the office of the Holy Spirit must be, preeminently, a reproving, convicting office, not although, but indeed because, he is the Spirit of God the Reconciler.” (p. 27)
Here, Barth is saying that God has to correct and transform us before we can really have authentic relationship with God. And Barth wants to make sure that we know, “Sin, in itself, is obviously never at all this or that act, on which one could lay his finger; but it is solely resistance to God’s law, opposition to his gracious pronouncement of acquittal and guilt.” (p. 27) Sin is then the unbelief that keeps us from relationship, not individual acts of evil. Those individual acts stem from the unbelief (p. 28).
Barth goes on to remind the reader that even a given Christian assumption like “faith” is “trust” in the Eternal, depending upon God as other (p. 31). Yet, he admits that being reconciled to God “cuts against the grain of our existence all through, and is never at all to be comprehended or apprehended by our existence…” Rather, our faith and the reconciliation with God that it brings, “claims us” and requires our obedience (p. 32). That obedience, our deeds working out the relationship we have with God is termed “sanctification” in Barth’s theology (and in mine). Hence, Barth would contend that faith without our deeds would be “empty, devoid of content.” (p. 33) Faith demands action (p. 33).
Barth is practical enough to insist that Christians do not attain perfection in their sanctification process. “Indeed, we have always to continue in faith, but in penitence as well, in consciousness of our unbelief. This means, in other words, that we have to view our ‘imperfect’ obedience as put in God’s judgment and then, and to that degree, understand it as disobedience, as sin, even though in our imperfection we have carried it ever so high.” (p. 36) I did like his statement that “The Holy Spirit is absolutely and alone the umpire with reference to what is or is not Christian life.” (p. 37) This is something that one can build upon.
Finally, Barth establishes the idea that the Holy Spirit provides a future expectation. “He promises us something that is ultimate and future, something that is his characteristic purpose with us. It is a something that is ‘absolutely final:’ a future that is a starting point.” (p. 59) In the final part of his lecture, Barth emphasized that the believer has a future because the believer is already entwined in a relationship with God (p. 64). As a result, the Christian life is a life that is intended to be lived in hope and gratitude. “Gratitude, thankfulness, means emancipated obedience; delivered from the fear of God’s wrath; freed from the spasm of man’s wanting-to-make-it-all-right: freed, indeed, because finally bound; freed, because it is obedience cheerfully rendered, …” (p. 66). Even the ability to pray, in terms of expressing one’s feelings and needs to God, is founded in this idea of hope and gratitude (p. 67).
This little volume is a jewel, a time capsule showing a great theologian starting to grasp the central truth in his life and work. Everything in his life and theology is built upon the idea of grace. Grace means we are God-dependent. Either we respond positively to this grace and experience the liberating hope and joy or we respond hostilely to this grace and fail to find the “more” for which humans long.
In his lecture, Karl Barth quoted Augustine who wrote that experiencing divine revelation, “…is not as if we believed something new, but having remembered it we approve of what has been said.” (p. 4) Barth contends that this gives too much possible credit to a built-in divinity within humanity (a la Chopra and other eastern mystics) and not enough to reality that revelation depends upon God and upon humanity being “open upward” (quoting Erich Przywara—p. 5). Specifically, Barth stated that revelation is not a datum but a dandum (literally, something “to be given”). Revelation, like grace, is “…ever and in all relations God’s deed and act, taking place in this and that moment of time in which God wills to be gracious to us, and is gracious and makes his grace manifest.” (p. 5)
With this understood, Barth contends that the Christian life means, “It can be said and with confidence that this significance means that man as he is, in his creaturely existence as man and as an individual, is opened, prepared, and made fit by God for God.” (p.7) Obviously, the God-dependence may seem overstated to modern audiences and it did not receive universal approbation when he spoke in 1929, but this idea of God preparing, inspiring, and empowering the believer is an important corrective to the almost materialistic approach to “faith” in the modern world and the attempt to “earn” salvation or “be good” by oneself in the ancient world. So, how is humanity “opened” and “prepared?” “…it is purely and simply the office of the Holy Spirit to be continually opening our ears to enable us to receive the Creator’s word.” (p. 8)
In other words, “As the scriptural announcement of God’s revelation must be ever increasingly becoming the voice of the living God to us, seeing that God is continually saying to us what he said by the mouth of prophets and apostles once for all, so too the outer and inner constraints of our existence must be ever acquiring the character of divine indications, duties, and promises through the divine speech to us.” (p. 9) Of course, Barth contends that one reason we need to be so God-dependent in terms of living our lives is that an ethics where one believes God’s will is static may well end up planting itself upon the throne of God. Such arrogant “ethics,” says Barth, “Poisons the wells and is more fraught with peril to the Christian life than all cinemas and dancing saloons piled together.” (p. 10) When we, as humans, presume upon our determination of God’s revelation, Barth asks, “How should the creature spirit, poised upon itself, take in the Word of God in any other way than as a mere symbol of its own maxims, which may be, accordingly, realistic or idealistic, conservative or revolutionary?” (p. 10) In other words, when we are not open to the Holy Spirit to interpret the revelation afresh and help it become reality, we are in danger of codifying our ideas in an idolatrous imitation of God’s Word. Barth knows how easy it is to pervert God’s teachings if one isn’t humbly experiencing God’s presence continually (in that sense of openness to being changed).
Barth doesn’t want one to confuse one’s subjective knowledge (again, a product of the merely human spirit) with the external activity of God (the Holy Spirit) and reminds the reader that the Reformers (Luther and Calvin, especially) would refer to “alien” or “external” righteousness to avoid the idea that humans accomplish or attain the “good” on their own (p. 26). So, “…the office of the Holy Spirit must be, preeminently, a reproving, convicting office, not although, but indeed because, he is the Spirit of God the Reconciler.” (p. 27)
Here, Barth is saying that God has to correct and transform us before we can really have authentic relationship with God. And Barth wants to make sure that we know, “Sin, in itself, is obviously never at all this or that act, on which one could lay his finger; but it is solely resistance to God’s law, opposition to his gracious pronouncement of acquittal and guilt.” (p. 27) Sin is then the unbelief that keeps us from relationship, not individual acts of evil. Those individual acts stem from the unbelief (p. 28).
Barth goes on to remind the reader that even a given Christian assumption like “faith” is “trust” in the Eternal, depending upon God as other (p. 31). Yet, he admits that being reconciled to God “cuts against the grain of our existence all through, and is never at all to be comprehended or apprehended by our existence…” Rather, our faith and the reconciliation with God that it brings, “claims us” and requires our obedience (p. 32). That obedience, our deeds working out the relationship we have with God is termed “sanctification” in Barth’s theology (and in mine). Hence, Barth would contend that faith without our deeds would be “empty, devoid of content.” (p. 33) Faith demands action (p. 33).
Barth is practical enough to insist that Christians do not attain perfection in their sanctification process. “Indeed, we have always to continue in faith, but in penitence as well, in consciousness of our unbelief. This means, in other words, that we have to view our ‘imperfect’ obedience as put in God’s judgment and then, and to that degree, understand it as disobedience, as sin, even though in our imperfection we have carried it ever so high.” (p. 36) I did like his statement that “The Holy Spirit is absolutely and alone the umpire with reference to what is or is not Christian life.” (p. 37) This is something that one can build upon.
Finally, Barth establishes the idea that the Holy Spirit provides a future expectation. “He promises us something that is ultimate and future, something that is his characteristic purpose with us. It is a something that is ‘absolutely final:’ a future that is a starting point.” (p. 59) In the final part of his lecture, Barth emphasized that the believer has a future because the believer is already entwined in a relationship with God (p. 64). As a result, the Christian life is a life that is intended to be lived in hope and gratitude. “Gratitude, thankfulness, means emancipated obedience; delivered from the fear of God’s wrath; freed from the spasm of man’s wanting-to-make-it-all-right: freed, indeed, because finally bound; freed, because it is obedience cheerfully rendered, …” (p. 66). Even the ability to pray, in terms of expressing one’s feelings and needs to God, is founded in this idea of hope and gratitude (p. 67).
This little volume is a jewel, a time capsule showing a great theologian starting to grasp the central truth in his life and work. Everything in his life and theology is built upon the idea of grace. Grace means we are God-dependent. Either we respond positively to this grace and experience the liberating hope and joy or we respond hostilely to this grace and fail to find the “more” for which humans long.
June 27, 2017
My favourite part of this lecture was Barth's thoughts on grace. Like Zizek's reading of Calvinist theology, I feel Barth's emphasis on grace is one of the most important theological critiques of this false narrative pervasive in our dominant culture that claims hard work is largely responsible for the success of people, and poor people are 'unsuccessful' because they just don't try hard enough or are lazy (a form of Protestant ethic described by Max Weber). Barth insists in a radical way, we are only able to do anything close to resembling obedience to God by grace. It is the work of the Spirit, for which we can be grateful. No reason for self-congratulation here (even unconscious self-congratulation). Grace erodes all sorts of hierarchies we like to construct.
Barth works through countless Luther and Calvin references throughout, and the endnotes are really helpful in this book, with quotes from Luther, Calvin, and the Tridentine Council that provide really good context for Barth's points.
A new dimension for me was Barth's strong resistance to Augustinian theology that posits a continuity in the human spirit and Holy Spirit, compared to the radical externality of the Holy Spirit for Protestant thinkers. Barth makes a strong distinction between human spirit and the Holy Spirit, in deep resistance to the direction of German Idealism. I think this is interesting territory for comparison to Zizek (and Hegelian theology in general), which agrees on emphasizing an external Other, but appears to conflict with respect to his materialist framing of the Holy Spirit as egalitarian community.
Barth works through countless Luther and Calvin references throughout, and the endnotes are really helpful in this book, with quotes from Luther, Calvin, and the Tridentine Council that provide really good context for Barth's points.
A new dimension for me was Barth's strong resistance to Augustinian theology that posits a continuity in the human spirit and Holy Spirit, compared to the radical externality of the Holy Spirit for Protestant thinkers. Barth makes a strong distinction between human spirit and the Holy Spirit, in deep resistance to the direction of German Idealism. I think this is interesting territory for comparison to Zizek (and Hegelian theology in general), which agrees on emphasizing an external Other, but appears to conflict with respect to his materialist framing of the Holy Spirit as egalitarian community.
May 7, 2010
This work contains (divided into three parts) Barth’s lectures on the relationship of the Holy Spirit to the Christian life. He does this under the framework of Holy Spirit as Creator, Reconciler, and Redeemer. Under Holy Spirit as Creator his main thesis is that the image of God is the free work of God upon man through the Holy Spirit, and thus is not the possession of man apart from the creative act of God. The Christian Life is that life, which occurs after God’ s word has been revealed to man by the Holy Spirit.
Under Holy Spirit as Reconciler, his thesis is that the Holy Spirit strives against the spirit of man as the spirit of grace. Sin is man’s attempt to justify himself by works; that is, that man rejects God’s lordship and lives independent of faith. The Christian Life is man’s life in the Holy Spirit.
Under Holy Spirit as Redeemer, his thesis is that the Holy Spirit is present for man as the spirit of promise. The Holy Spirit reveals man’s finality and futurity—new creation. Thus, the Christian life is a life of Hope begotten by the Holy Spirit.
His definition of sin is a great one:
“And this is our rebellion: the fact that we want everything, all that is noble, helpful, and good, if so it must be; but not this thing, namely to allow ourselves to be made open, prepared and made fit for God by God. Grace is God’s sovereign realm. But our enmity toward God—which is to be seen in our hearty goodwill toward any self-discovered theory about God, or toward this or that religious, ethical view of the universe that is not excluded—the evil that we do: this precisely is our hostility toward Grace. Put in Luther’s vigorous speech, it is our enmity toward “him!”, “the passion against deity” (concupiscentia divinitatis), “we cannot abide diety.” (pp. 19-20)
Under Holy Spirit as Reconciler, his thesis is that the Holy Spirit strives against the spirit of man as the spirit of grace. Sin is man’s attempt to justify himself by works; that is, that man rejects God’s lordship and lives independent of faith. The Christian Life is man’s life in the Holy Spirit.
Under Holy Spirit as Redeemer, his thesis is that the Holy Spirit is present for man as the spirit of promise. The Holy Spirit reveals man’s finality and futurity—new creation. Thus, the Christian life is a life of Hope begotten by the Holy Spirit.
His definition of sin is a great one:
“And this is our rebellion: the fact that we want everything, all that is noble, helpful, and good, if so it must be; but not this thing, namely to allow ourselves to be made open, prepared and made fit for God by God. Grace is God’s sovereign realm. But our enmity toward God—which is to be seen in our hearty goodwill toward any self-discovered theory about God, or toward this or that religious, ethical view of the universe that is not excluded—the evil that we do: this precisely is our hostility toward Grace. Put in Luther’s vigorous speech, it is our enmity toward “him!”, “the passion against deity” (concupiscentia divinitatis), “we cannot abide diety.” (pp. 19-20)
August 12, 2011
This didn't grab me as much as some of Barth's smaller works. Perhaps it's because it's one of his earlier works (like Romans, I find it a bit hard to track.). Perhaps he's too deep in dialouge with Augustine, Luther, and Calvin (not that this is bad, but I perfer Barth's own voice). Perhaps I know too little about German idealist philosophy to pick up some it's subtlties (Although, I know enough to pick up the major contrasts between Christian idealist theologians and Barth's program.) Or perhaps it's just that Barth's pneumatology reads too much like Christology (or give him the benefit of the doubt: it's trinitarian!).
Still it's a nice insight into where he would later go with Church Dogmatics. Specifically, this is an earlier foray into theological ethics with theology serving as the foundation for ehtics (good!). It is also a strong look into the fuller doctrine of reconcilliation found in CD IV.
Still it's a nice insight into where he would later go with Church Dogmatics. Specifically, this is an earlier foray into theological ethics with theology serving as the foundation for ehtics (good!). It is also a strong look into the fuller doctrine of reconcilliation found in CD IV.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews