John Mc Dowell, 5-4-96

In View of the Coming Dawn, Christian Hope's Provisional Revolt against the 'Lordless Powers': Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics IV The Doctrine of Reconciliation 4 Fragment, and The Christian Life.

Deteriorating health prevented Barth from beginning the volume V on redemption; and as his own end drew near his labours over IV.4 grinded to a halt, averting both its revision and completion. Nevertheless, the two fragments (that which he did revise and publish as IV.4 Fragment, and the lecture fragments within The Christian Life) do provide a wealth of material on his eschatological perspective of human activity in relation to the divine, and also to the status and significance of evil (or rather 'sin'). They therein, more than any other part of the CD, raise a fundamental question as to the accuracy of many raucously expressed critically negative readings of Barth, readings which fundamentally produce conflicting accounts of the Barthian comedy than the one here being dramatically performed with tragic undertones.

The argument to be advanced in this paper is that Barth's understanding of human freedom and identity, and the activity resulting from that, opens up avenues through which to access his treatment of sin. Noetically, sin is perceived/known from within an eschatological framework along the lines by which, ironically and tragically, 'constructivist' modernity has sought to locate human identity and activity. This eschatological dimension ontically reorganises true human identity and activity in the particular person of Jesus Christ, and this has to be realised personally through the identity forming work of the Holy Spirit in each particular human. A theology of critique and its corresponding activity in rebellion against the cultural and political norms of any given society is the inevitable result of this eschatology, one which may be located within theological ethics.

A. Introduction - the paucity of scholarly discussion of Barthian ethics as a reflection of certain readings of 'Barth's denial of human freedom'

On a preliminary reading this part volume, whose task is "Christian-communal critical self-description of the community's language" of ethics, one might be startled by the change of atmosphere with the emphasis being placed on the role and action of humanity in her proper response to God. However, a more sustained engagement with the whole welter of material composing the CD should lead rather to the conclusion that this theme was one underlying the main movement throughout. For, as Webster notes, Barth's dogmatics claim to be ethical dogmatics. That this theme is now being performed in its own right in these fragments indicates that to fail to hear it earlier in the CD is an indication of one's tone-deafness to the complexity of the notes of this immense piece.

Given the prominence of this theme Webster is astonished that "He has, however, rarely been taken at his word on the matter", with scant attention being paid to the ethical sections of the Church Dogmatics. If more attention were paid to this element then perhaps also the poverty of study on Barth's understanding of sin/evil would be richly abrogated, given the fact that it would be acknowledged that Barth does not theologically express the divine at the expense of the creaturely.

Identification of three reasons for this paucity of study in the area of ethics has been made by Biggar. First, the slowness of translation; second, the immensity of the content; and finally, and more importantly theologically, Biggar argues that many felt that there was a continuation thematically of Barth's early 'dialectical' period, when the stress on divine judgment seemed such as to devalue human activity and ethical reflection upon it, thereby making uncritical obeisance the only possible human response to God's will.

[Perhaps similar reasons as these may be reworked as providing the background to the scant treatment that sin and evil in Barth have received - particularly given the reading of Barth in terms of a denial of contingency in general. How could sin/evil retain a place in such a scheme? The connection exists, then between freedom and creaturely 'space' over against the Creator in some sense and the existence of sin/evil, so that denial of the former robs the latter of its status (even if one were to deduce the necessity of sin/evil from a teleologically ordered framework the conclusion would still remain that this 'education' is for the creation of the identities of free creatures. Only a deterministic framework struggles to hold the two together).]

Certain possibilities may consequently be suggested as to the nature of these ethics within Barth's dogmatics as a whole. Firstly, perhaps there may be understood to be the location of a theological/methodological problem in Barth's identification of the divine-human relationship. Barth would be unsuccessfully attempting to hold together that which, by the nature of his theological principles, cannot be held together. Such a critique could be levelled at Barth by certain pre-Barth 'libertarian' modernist thinkers, in some sense along deistic lines. Secondly, Macken regards IV.4 as indicating a significant shift in Barth's thinking which emerges "out of decades of struggle in which the affirmation of human and creaturely reality gradually won ground without contradicting the absolute claim of the divine subject."

Thirdly, it is possible that Barth's ethics are, materially speaking, wholly unsatisfactory in identifying 'proper' human activity before the divine will. The queue of critics all voicing these lines in various ways is extensive. Summarising such critiques Webster declares that "It is as if the logic of Barth's thought, and especially the intensity of his adherence to certain understandings of the ontologically constitutive character of God's action in and as Jesus Christ, make serious consideration of human action superfluous, even, perhaps, a trespass on the sovereignty of grace." If such a story were justified, eschatology - in its role in the present - should then function for Barth as a justification of human passivity - all has been overcome in Christ and he is carrying this victory to its conclusion in the time which he has permitted evil to exist. One could acknowledge that the prominence of the themes of 'victory', 'triumph', etc. which characterise Barth's eschatological perspective, as lending weight to such an interpretation, for perhaps it is precisely that pressing of the grammar of the positive outcome in conflict into the service of his vision of God's future in Christ which has led to the prominence of 'christomonistic' assessments of Barth. As to why there still exists sin (it would be foolish to deny that Barth considered sin to be a force in this 'time') the response would be to indicate that in Barth's use of the paradoxical terms 'impossible possibility', 'unreal reality', etc. he did not know. Such a framework, then, would merely raise the age-old questions, and rather than providing any type of insight, would actually accentuate the problem with nonsense.

[Although it is beyond the limited scope of this paper, it is worth noting that part of the difficulty with such interpretations of Barth's thought is the failure to understand Barth's eschatology, and therein the Creator-creature relation, in terms of the dialectics for which he achieved fame in his earlier years. It would make an interesting study to assess the impact of von Balthasar's thesis on readings of Barth's theology. From a theological point of view, one is able to say that von Balthasar's supposed discovery of a turn from dialectic to analogy in the composition of the Church Dogmatics negated Barth's commentators' further research into the continuing significance of dialectics in Barth's later years.]

Fourthly, there exists the possibility that Barth's critics in this area have missed an important element in Barth's thought, and thereby misinterpreted both his intentions and the resultant theological ethics - that Barth has "kept a firm eye on human persons as agents right from the beginning of his dogmatic argument", and that "questions concerning human action were by no means peripheral to Barth's dogmatic thought, but very close to its heart." Flowing from this assessment, Webster provides an instructive summary of his thesis in relation to the pre-IV.4 volumes. This enables him to powerfully argue that "one of the most serious obstacles to the reception of Barth's magnum opus is an inadequate grasp of the fact that the Church Dogmatics is a work of moral theology as well as systematics ..., a moral ontology - an extensive account of the situation in which human agents act."

B. Eschatology and Evil: far from a Love Duet

Evil, or rather 'sin', plays a prominent part in the development of Barth's ethics, for it is with an eye to this state of affairs in the present that Barth's treatment of ethics takes on its distinctive shape - dispelling the naively uncritical assumption that evil plays little or no part in Barth's theology. It is here that one can perceive the move that Barth makes when pairing evil and eschatology - Barth's particular treatment of evil within discussion of the clause, in the Lord's Prayer, 'Thy Kingdom Come', i.e., within an eschatological rubric, is itself here highly significant and suggestive. It is not as an eschatological denial of sin's power, nor as providing an escapist mask on the Barthian stage (as with the Shakespearean fool in As You Like It whose jovial and rather superficial approach to life contrasts sharply with the pessimistic melancholy of Jacques) through mere story-telling (see CL 236). Rather eschatological discourse assumes a critical function in the present, and performs the lines of a divinely inspired move into the future which incorporates both personal and social liberating patterns.

Barth short-circuits the logic of the grace-freedom antithesis by calling into question some of the most cherished and respected principles of modernity and replacing them with a radically anti-modern ontology (although he does not merely repristinate pre-modern theology, as if the Enlightenment had never occurred). He does not 'answer' the kinds of critique developed by Kant and others; instead, he undermines their authority by undertaking to describe with unparalleled intellectual breadth and depth the very things which the critiques disallow. He does this from a twofold perspective: firstly, the true eschatological humanity in Christ of absolute dependence upon and obedience to God and our response to that event, and secondly, the sinners' tragic unleashing of 'the lordless powers'.

B.II. The Central Soloist Develops the Choral Theme: The Eschatological Humanity of Jesus Christ in its Particularity as the Recreation of Humanity

Barth is profoundly perturbed by one of modernity's primary images of the human person: that of the self as a centre of judgment, creating value by its acts of allegiance or choice, organising the moral world around its consciousness of itself as the ethical fundamentum.

Central to Barth's decentering the subject of the ethical construction, whether it be in terms of universalising casuistry or particularist voluntarist constructivism, is his recentering it in the divine command. Barth's theological ethics are disciplined by 'realistically' and ecstatically, reflecting on God's good prior command issued to his covenant-partner (CL 32) - that good human action is essentially obedience, after one's hearing, to that good command (CL 4).

Barth orients the subsequent discussion by drawing a map of the moral field, delineating the space in which the true human moral agent exists and acts. This is done especially through the central concept of the covenant and its particular, unique and uninterchangeable story in Jesus Christ (CL 12), and therefore not through the imposition of an alien concept of the God-human relations (IV.4, 20; CL 4f.; 5; 9). It is the central motif around which the divine-human relations are woven, the covenant in its fulfilment in Jesus Christ from the human as well as the divine side (see, e.g., IV.4, 21; 60; CL 10 movements 'from' and 'to' God, Alpha and Omega; 74), the universally relevant (IV.4, 21) elected eschatological man in whom all are elected. In doing this, in the stead of all as their Representative and Saviour, the change "from unfaithfulness to faithfulness" (IV.4, 13; 31; 22f.) which took place in his history took place for all (see e.g., IV.21). [Barth emphasises, therefore, that obedience is lost and recreated, and consequently is does not derive from a human capacity which precedes Christ]

-- This concept is that by which the proper human ethical activity is determined and shaped. In Christ is humanity's hearing of the divine command.

Barth's understanding of human identity, and therefore consequently both human freedom and the human relationship to God, is not an abstract concept to be filled-out in a vacuum, but one determined' and filled, since "in Christ he is constituted as man by God" (CL 105; see 3, 21; IV.4, 147, 148). Special ethics for Barth, then, must resist the temptation to become legalistic and casuistic ethics, but to point to the "uncontrollable content" of that divine-human encounter (CL 5). Barth thereby secures a fundamental direction to Christian anthropology, one in which "all are what they are or are not in a circle around him [Jesus Christ]" (CL 20). The grounding of humanity in Jesus Christ's fulfilment of the covenant disallows the absolute autonomy of human acts, since those acts have their substance in so far as they mysteriously co-inhere in God's own act in Jesus Christ (this is the 'unity' motif in Barth's "Chalcedonian pattern" of understanding divine-human relations). The Word becomes, in human lives, the determinative feature, "by putting itself at the head of all the active and speaking factors" (CL 176).

-- This concept of covenant is here introduced to emphasise mutuality and reciprocity between the divine-human relations with humanity as the active "covenant-partner of God" (e.g., CL 20). Human activity is moulded, or rather 're-moulded', into the cast of obedience. This is why Barth emphasises the event of God's command and human hearing.

The unity of God and human agency is a differentiated unity which disallows the complete absorption of the human agent into God - God and humanity are not to be confused, both as a safeguard of the priority of grace against over-emphasising human activity (contra anthropomonism, CL 3) and also as a protection of the reality of responsible human agency (CL 28; contra theo/christomonism, 3). "God and man are two subjects in genuine encounter" (an asymmetrical encounter), "inseparably bound to one another, even in their absolute "qualitative and definitive distinction" and difference, unexchangeability and inequality, unable thereby to be compared, confused or intermingled (CL 27f.). There is a specific and irreversible ordering of their relationship, with God as the elector and giver and humanity the follower and recipient (CL 29). In that order of priority, the human partner is by no means otiose, but "an active, not an inactive, recipient" (CL 29). Barth, therefore, sketches an understanding of the grace of the commanding God in which human action is not a superfluous appendix to the work of God (CL 4 freedom for good action is both demanded and granted). Nor is it a struggle to somehow establish or guarantee our standing before God, born of hubris and maintaining itself in anxiety. Rather, it is "the work of his eucharistia corresponding to the charis of God shown to him" (CL 31), flowing from free action in the "refreshment rest" of the "sabbath" (cf. IV.2, 594).

This concern for the activity of a reconciled and free humanity is the concern of Barth's restructuring of the Lutheran treatment of gospel and law (CL 35ff.). The command is the gracious command; yet it remains a command, an imperative (see e.g., CL 37, 42 on God's demand of obedience from humanity). "Ultimately, then, the issue is anthropological: Barth seeks to underscore a conviction that the human person under grace remains an agent. ... From this vantage-point, then, those who find in Barth some kind of monism are rather wide of the mark."

-- Simultaneously, the incarnate history of Christ, as the action of God on our behalf (see e.g., CL 13), indicates that the God who acts is gracious (e.g., CL 16) as "man's [loving and, in that love, electing] Father and Brother" (CL 15; see IV.4, 58f.) and friend (CL 16), working for humanity's benefit (CL 15; see IV.4, 58f.). In arguing thus, Barth removes the modernist critiques of divine authoritarianism from the scene of his ethics, and therefore the 'need' for an anthropological centring of ethics in iconoclastic rebellion is denied 'breathing space'.

God is named and particularised in Jesus (CL 13 - the question of God is exclusively answered in Jesus Christ, solidly, exhaustively and definitively, authentically and validly for all people of all times and places, which is not a human postulate; see also 14; 16). "God commands as he, Jesus Christ, commands" (CL 13); there can be no command of God behind or ahead of Jesus Christ. He is not, therefore,

This means that, for Barth, God's command cannot be understood as an abstract imperative, but only in the context of the history of Jesus Christ (IV.4, 146) as "a definitely shaped and qualified action" (CL 15). Barth strips the notion of 'command' of any connotations which might detract from the sheer gratuitousness and goodness of the one who commands - this graciousness is further reinforced by talk of God's constancy and faithfulness so that the gracious Yes, which does include within itself a No, can never be withdrawn (CL 5; 17f.; 28). This is why Barth re-reads the order of the relationship between gospel and law (CL 35). Or again, talk of God's judgment is not talk of divine hostility, but of the establishment of righteousness in which humanity can flourish (CL 17).

-- Not only this, but we may agree with Webster that "'divine sovereignty' or 'omnipotence' are misunderstood and applied [in Barth's thought] if their logic is thought to exclude the responsible life of God's fellow-workers" through some a priori approach to this language's use in Barth. Critics of Barth who want to identify the problem of human responsibility as lying within the use of such language (e.g., Biggar, Hastening, 5) have seriously and incomprehensibly missed the import of his critique of the 'classical' Reformed doctrine of the eternal decrees in which Barth perceives God 'sovereignty' and 'omnipotence' in non-tyrannical terms (see CL 105f.). "It is not that God's act on and in man makes of him a cog set in motion thereby", but rather that he wills and fashions a

Even if one grants that humanity, conceived of as Jesus Christ, has a place for activity within Barth's scheme the door, as yet, remains open for the rude incursion of a 'christological' monism. Reflections on human integrity over against the divine with special reference to covenantal theology in Barth, when combined with the recognition of the particularity and difference between Christ and each particular human being, would be a fruitful exercise. However, to fully inculcate this reading of Barth another theme is needed, which in the its own distinctive way is necessary to this reading - eschatological becoming.

B.III. The Soloists Begin to Sing in Earnest: the Particularity of the Eschatological becoming.

Moltmann attempts to describe in Theology of Hope a defect in Barth's eschatology, a reflection followed by Gunton's reading of Barth's 'past-orientated' theology with attention being drawn to the poverty of Barthian pneumatology.

Certainly the "totality of salvation, the full justification, sanctification and vocation of man [has been] brought about in Jesus Christ" (IV.4, 34), "the world already reconciled" (CL 163), the "completed divine act" of the banishing of "conflict out of the world", which does not need to be repeated or continued; the kingdom's having come in Jesus Christ (IV.4, 76; 86; 206; 234); God already haven spoken "with the dawn of the end-time" (CL 76). Judgment has been fulfilled (IV.4, 78ff.), the future wrath of God (Mt. 3:7) has become present, the "new creature" (IV.4, 38) has come in the old's having passed away (IV.4, 159).

Nevertheless, Biggar, in a sense, rightly argues that "Although it is true ... that Barth recognizes the formative impact of the past upon the present, there is no doubt that his emphasis [?!] falls heavily upon the openness of the present to the future". As Barth himself declares "God's Word no more swallows up man than eschatology does history" (CL 176, my emphasis).

The above must be predicated of the true humanity of Christ. For the world, however, this - albeit past in the sense that this is what the Christian community moves from - is what it moves towards as its future (IV.4, 78; CL 164; IV.4, 89 'teleology'; IV.4, 38; 99 'Forward' dimension; CL 78f. look upward and ahead). The kingdom, although present "calls for and presses for continuation and completion" in the Spirit, who was poured out at Pentecost but also an event which has taken place repeatedly since (IV.4, 76; see 89; CL 255), a parousia which has not yet reached its goal (CL 9).

Christ will then be manifested at the end in an "absolute future", a "temporal future" (IV.4, 89f.). We will then not know partially but will be 'face to face' (IV.4, 40; 199) in this "definitive revelation" (IV.4, 89; 101; 197; 199; CL 255) when God will be 'all in all' (IV.4, 74); and all will use the vocative 'Father' in the harmony of universal invocation (CL 70; see 101). "[W]e look for the dawn of the beautiful morning light which is not the old morning that recurs each day" (CL 235), when God's kingdom - which is God himself (CL 236; 244) - will come definitively and absolutely (CL 236), when God's overcoming and defeat of the present's division will be manifested before all (CL 177), when "God is exalted as the legitimate King and almighty Lord of the human world which belongs to him" (CL 236; see 237), and restores peace on earth (CL 237). But the human "has not yet apprehended this" (CL 9; IV.4, 199) because "our knowledge is achieved as a pilgrim theology in the light of grace and not of glory" which "does not yet match the knowledge with which God knows himself and us", and, therefore, "can only be inadequate" (CL 9; see the kingdom's defying expression, and Barth's attack on Lohmeyer's 'idea'/systematisation of the kingdom, 237ff.).

-- So Barth can draw upon, what is now a truism, the paradox of the 'already' and 'not yet' distinction. The present stands in the middle between the 'is' and the 'will be' (CL 164), "in our time between the times" (IV.4, 89), a time of absurd vacillation between or simul of knowledge and ignorance of God, the twilight between light and darkness (CL 164). "The New Testament offers us no explicit explanation of the double riddle of the unmistakable fact of this highly distinctive sense of time" (CL 254), although indications of lines for an answer involve, for Barth, the distinction in unity between Easter and Pentecost (CL 255f.).

-- Barth, consequently, articulates this theme of becoming through particular discourse on Jesus Christ's history as being "once in time the origin and commencement of the reorientation and refashioning of the life of a specific man liberated therein" (IV.4, 23, my emphasis). The Christian life is a true beginning, never complete or definitive, developing as God's work, yet moving toward a goal that comes to meet it, so that the power of the life to come is that of the new life here (IV.4, 38ff.). In this baptism is the first step, as an asking and praying which is ventured in hope in Jesus Christ, "a constitutive action which makes a beginning and which is a model for all that follows" (IV.4, 213; see 78; 89f.). Thus Barth speaks of Christians as the "pilgrim people of God who pray for the coming of the Kingdom of God (Mt. 6:9f.) , and who do so in the "expectation and promise that the promise will be fulfilled, that God's work will infallibly demonstrate its power in their lives" (IV.4, 74).

The Spirit, as "God's own power to open himself to certain people and vice versa, to join himself directly to them and them to him" (CL 91), is the power not merely to repent once but to continuously tread to the end the way which begins with repentance, in spite of weakness, with the freshness of the first day (IV.4, 100; 40 impelled and directed by the Holy Spirit; dynamic event of encounter continue to take place (CL 89f.; IV.4, 40; 139 and 199 daily renewal; CL 94). "[S]in still crouches at the door, and he has a desire for it (Gen. 4:7), or, more strongly, it still dwells in him (Rom. 7:17, 20)" (CL 41; see also 3; 86; 92; 94; 201f.; 202ff.; 204); "The Holy Spirit is the forward" (CL 256; see 255f.).

And so Barth can say, in Luther's words, that Christians have never become but are always becoming" (CL 78; see also IV.4, 197). Their life is hidden in Christ and therefore they can only cling to the promise and walk by faith and not by sight, passing only through the various places to lodge (IV.4, 197f.). In other words, humanity has to enter God's covenantal dealings, in and with Jesus Christ on her behalf, on her side, to "actualise" (IV.4, 13f.) the partnership in this history and express it in corresponding word and deed (CL 85) - this actualisation in praise pleases God even though his self-sufficiency does not need it (CL 106). Moral formation is always in front of the moral agent, and never simply behind as something given, possessed, realised or accomplished finally (see III.4, 389f.), always in the process of acquiring it in the course of her life through the transformative directing of the Spirit (IV.4, 26-9; 34) in the direct impartation of Jesus Christ (IV.4, 32; 147; 158) who is thereby contemporaneous in his living presence (IV.4, 207, a factor drawn upon heavily by Colwell in refutation of the charge of attributing to Barth a universal salvation, see IV.4, 23ff.).

-- Christian hope moves from the event of Easter, via Pentecost, to the parousia (IV.4, 89), with the living Jesus Christ as its object and content and meaning (IV.4, 195-8; CL 249), as the eschaton of the revealed reality of reconciliation (IV.4, 195; CL 270f.). And because it does so Christians can be confident, assured (IV.4, 29) and certain, cheerful and joyous, in their hopeful steps of grasping the promise rather than in being anxious about the future (IV.4, 89; 150f.; 197f.; 200; 209f.; 77 also lively and tense), even though the baptised are "very conscious that it will all be a dark and cloudy future. They know the hazards of the way they will tread. They realise that they are no match for them" (IV.4, 209). Hope for the Christian in relation to Christ and in relation to the witness to the world, one could say, for Barth, moves between optimistic and pessimistic illusions (CL 99), renewing itself in the face of disenchantment by the fact that it differentiates itself from all else that people wait and hope for (IV.4, 197; see CL 99; differentiation of hope from utopianism).

-- The Christian waits for the kingdom's coming. But yet her living and dynamic hope, "continually affirmed and exercised" (IV.4, 197), and in its constant and secret renewal never permitted by Christ to become static (IV.4, 197), entails that she also hastens towards it, chasing after it and praying for it (IV.4, 40; 196; 197f.; 208) confidently in her petition 'Thy kingdom come' (CL 263). "On the basis of their baptism they have freedom only to stride forward in the direction of the Lord who comes" (IV.4, 199), and this is done in the prayer which professes dependence upon God and relinquishes the desire to control him (IV.4, 207ff.). One could say that hope is what gives momentum to the Christian activity in spite of all difficulties.

This time between is the space given for gratitude, hope, prayer and responsibility for human righteousness which will be imperfect, fragile and highly problematical righteousness (CL 265), in the provisional and partial fulfilments (IV.4, 196; CL 264) of a "kingdom-like" action (CL 26) [divine righteousness cannot be a human affair]. In the place allotted in the divine teleology (i.e., a place is assigned to it in the planning and execution of the work of God's free grace), this hope will be a working not only with an eye on their own future ["This, too, would be treachery against their hope" (IV.4, 199)], but also in co-responsibility to fellow-humanity in a proleptic and prophetic ministry of witness (IV.4, 199f.). Nevertheless, it is the obedience of those whom God has freed, and operates only in correspondence to God's kingdom (CL 266), "Having this final, true and eternal goal before his eyes, so long as he lives here and now he has before him goals which are penultimate and improper in relation to this, yet illuminating in their own way as pointers to it" (IV.4, 40).

-- Barth refuses to speak of the Christian life as necessarily a continuation or progress which corresponds to the beginning, but speaks rather of its continual newness and even of continual rebeginnings (IV.4, 38f.; CL 236). Does the prominence of such language of novelty lends fuel to the fires of Bonhoeffer's critique of Barth's actualism, more recently propounded in terms of Barth's occasionalist ecclesiology by O'Grady? Is Barth is in danger of dissolving the history of the Christian life into an extension of disconnected moments, of radical discontinuity which would fail to make sense of the individual's history, as told in and through memory, and the process of the formation of personal identity?

However, Barth is here firing at the target of the notion of liberal progress in the formation of personal identity - that there is a necessary causal and natural or inherent teleological connection between one's present state of affairs and the future. Thus for Barth, to speak with Jüngel, eschatology is the "interruption of the continuity of life", or as Barth himself terms it, "the rude incursion of his kingdom" (CL 16), and the "intervention of God" (CL 246). [For all the, one would argue, misdirected rhetoric against Rahner this is also the intention of Moltmann (see The Future of Creation).] Barth does argue, albeit sin constantly prevents the smooth march of progress, that the Christian life can and may be lived as an ongoing life in time, a life-history rather than a single moment even though they have no security against the daily threat of evil ways of interruption and even cessation (CL 94). It is one in which there will be further progress consisting in further responses to the Word of God accepted in baptism, hence in mere repetitions and variations of the grasping and exercising of their hope (IV.4, 198; 203).

[Biggar points out that there is in Barth a version of theological voluntarism which inclines him to appreciate the propriety of rational deliberation, analysis, and criticism in regard to moral issues; one which can give more than an indication for direction and guidance (CL 7), by theoretical means, in self-governing from moment to moment by pointing "to that event between God and man, to its uncontrollable content" (CL 5) - although that event and its content cannot be made theoretically captive (III.4, 16; CL 6, 34). Further, as Werpehowski rightly points out that Barth's project of conceptual redescription is not in the business of producing the particular concreteness that a novel is able to. Finally, the command of God does not, for Barth, communicate itself to us in a vacuum or directly and immediately in a form of solipsic monologue, but through the medium of scripture and the church, e.g., through interpretation of scripture, preaching, fraternal counsel and liturgical rites - "Barth is not an ethical Spiritualist". There is also the medium of the indifferent and the 'godless'.]

B.IV. Humanity's Song 'Te Deum': The Activity of Human Response in Absolute Dependence upon God through the Themes of Baptism and Invocation.

-- Earlier the point was made that for Barth human activity is the necessary consequence of prior divine activity in grace, thereby purging God of notions of omnicausal, immutable, etc. and humanity of the suspicion of being his marionettes (CL 102). [Barth makes a similar point with respect to the involvement in the Christian community as not involving a loss of personal identity and individuality (IV.4, 149; see 38).]

It covenantally corresponds to the liberating divine activity in a "concursus" (CL 103) which is a consequence of the operation of the free and overflowing grace (CL 103; 30) of One who is not a prisoner of lofty isolation, condemned to work alone (CL 103). This is far from self-evident but is rather the incomprehensible "mystery and miracle" (IV.3) of the extraordinary covenant of grace which provokes surprise and amazement among those who recognise this event (CL 89).

Barth sharply differentiates baptism with the Spirit and baptism with water, for in doing so he retains the asymmetrical covenantal theological theme of the prior activity of divine grace in its reconciliatory (and redemptory) performance, and the following after in response to this of the human activity. Baptism with the Spirit refers to the 'objective' ground of the Christian life in the decisive act of God in changing and renewing our human nature in Jesus Christ, doing more than "simply touching him from without" by altering his inner being (IV.4, 4). In the baptism with the Spirit Jesus Christ imparts himself as the Brother of each, thereby ceasing to be a self-enclosed man; God speaking for himself (CL 46); the goal of which being our personal response by way of obedient service in this new beginning of life (IV.4, 36ff.), freely given chosen faithfulness (IV.4, 6).

Thus this event does not destroy humanity's own determination, for "they are not engulfed and covered as by a divine landslide or swept away as by a divine flood" (IV.4, 163); nor does this "entail the paralysing dismissal of the human mind, knowledge and will" (IV.4, 28). But it rather sets this determination on the path to fulfilment (IV.4, 4;. "active life of human subjects" IV.4, 163; forced obedience is not true obedience IV.4, 163; 203 no slavery; 204) and takes them "seriously as God's partners" in dialogue, dealings and encounter (IV.4, 163; no talk of divine ' omnicausality'; similarly 22f.), as independent creatures of God who are set on their own feet, addressed and treated as adults (IV.4, 22f.).

The act of water baptism refers to the 'subjective' aspect of humanity's conversion to God (IV.4, 138; 145) and initiation into the Christian life, performed publicly and bindingly in the Church (IV.4, 130), in response to the faithfulness of God (see IV.4, 128ff. for Barth's recommendation of several elements of Zwingli's baptismal teaching). As a result of this teaching Barth holds that there may well be some evaluation and appraisal of the seriousness and sincerity of the candidate (IV.4, 153).

-- This active response is one which is demanded and required by God in his grace (IV.4, 27; 29; 35f.; 42). [In fact this 'internalisation' of Christ's work hic et nunc in the Spirit (e.g., IV.4, 163) is the very aim of the divine speech and activity in itself, of Christ's work illic et tunc (IV.4, 29).]

-- The form of the response is one of voluntary decision and freedom (see e.g., IV.4, 1-3; 27), a "spontaneous response to the divine change effected for them and in their favour in the history of Jesus Christ and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit" (IV.4, 163). And this is a freedom/liberation granted by God's own freedom (IV.4, 27).

This treatment indicates a non-competitive understanding of the grace-freedom relationship (also, see earlier on Barth's highlighting of the non-oppressive nature of God's love), that - as with Kant - there can be no ethics which are not 'self-governing' in submission to an external authority (IV.4, 154). For Barth if the change that comes upon humanity is merely external to us then it could be characterised as "Christomonism" and therefore artificial (IV.4, 17; 19). "All anthropology and soteriology are thus swallowed up in Christology. ... Indeed, a true Christocentricity will strictly forbid us to do so" (IV.4, 19). "There must be a change which comes over this man himself ..., and by his own resolve, thinks and acts and conducts himself otherwise than before" in which grace is no longer remains alien and external to her (IV.4, 18), in which "the founding of the Christian life is an event in genuine intercourse between God and man as two different partners" (IV.4, 19; "friend" IV.4, 4, 13; and "covenant-partner" IV.4, 4; 154 written on their hearts by the Spirit).

Therefore, Barth stresses the element of decision in baptism. As humanity's response to the divine change it is undertaken in a free decision and asking by the candidate [(IV.4, 43; 132; CL 59; 73); Jesus' submission to baptism as an expression of his readiness to submit in obedience to God and the mission contained therein, giving him the glory (IV.4, 58; 65); Barth even goes as far as to declare that "To put it provisionally and generally, the fact that the choice, will and action of the participants are at issue in the baptismal act constitutes the meaning of baptism" (IV.4, 135; similarly, 138, 153). "Baptism is already conversion", therefore, in the sense that the candidate expresses her engagement "in leaving an old path and entering upon a new" (IV.4, 135 "Before and After"; see also 137f., 145)]. This decision is the first step of the Christian life and model of all those to follow (IV.4, 132f., "a first and exemplary answer which commits them to the future"; 133 no guarantees of the future but in God).

-- The content of the free response is one of obedience, to "cleave to Christ" (IV.4, 150f.), liberated to run to God (IV.4, 29; see 154). For Barth, moral freedom is consent to the necessary character of the moral order of God: it is 'situated freedom'.

Barth argues that the Christian life, and its foundation in baptism, cannot be the situation of Hercules at the cross-roads (i.e., a choice between two ways or possibilities which are both equally open, IV.4, 162). Now the Christian prefers the way of Jesus Christ's obedience and justifying God (IV.4, 57f. 'repentance') in Christ to the 'old way' of self-justification now closed to her (IV.4, 162; 202; 69 - baptism's telos not immanent or a step in the dark but in the transcendent triune God is its basis and hope; see also, 99f.). Even in this there is a correspondence, because humanity's becoming free to be faithful to God as grounded in the freedom of God's being faithful to her as uniquely represented and enacted in the history of Jesus Christ (IV.4, 13; 27; 159).

This response, which raises the problem of ethics (see IV.4, 35), is one "thankfully acknowledged, recognised and confessed by Christians" (IV.4, 13; see also IV.4, 161; CL 59) through a life of discipleship (IV.4, 147) and service in humanity's "life-act". The sincere and grateful Yes of man to God's grace "cannot remain merely contemplative, speculative or meditative, nor can it be merely verbal; it must become at once the Yes of a grateful work" in active obedience, an energetic setting out to work (IV.4, 161). In this there is the active willing of a most earnest desire to overcome ambiguity and leave behind the threat of the Yes-No, faith-unbelief, vacillation (IV.4., 43), not only being based upon Christ the vicarious one but also modelling itself upon Christ as exemplar (CL 63; 64; 85; 129), and therefore an action in and for the world.

Thus Barth opposes the possibility that knowledge of God may be construed in terms that "could remain theoretical or idle, if its fulfilment did not follow immediately, at once" (IV.4, 138). That is why the divine command remains a command even when it is recognised that it is a gracious command - "in the cleansing and renewal which have taken place in Jesus Christ and which are applied to him by the Holy Spirit, he finds he is categorically summoned to leave it ... he has to confess that this way can no longer be his way, that he knows it is forbidden and closed to him" (IV.4, 137).

This activity is focused in Barth's understanding of 'invocation' (Anrufung Gottes) as "the general key" which specifies the shape of the "situated freedom" of the Christian life and indicates the asymmetry of covenantal dealings but also of the "painful limits of their humanity and the misuse of freedom" (see CL 38 - Repentance, decision, freedom, faith, thanksgiving, and faithfulness are all rejected - despite their necessity in the description of the Christian character; 102). Invocation is the controlling element of the Christian life (CL 43; 45 totally determined by Christ's history, and modelled on it{CL 65ff.}), " the humble and resolute, the frightened and joyful invocation of the gracious God in gratitude, praise, and above all petition [petition as the clinging to God in absolute dependence in petitionary prayer, "crying to God for his further free gifts" (CL 88)]. In the sphere of the covenant, this is the normal action corresponding to the fulfilment of the covenant in Jesus Christ", that for which humanity is empowered by grace (CL 42; 43; see CL 41). It is the use of the familiar vocative of 'Father!' in its address (CL 51ff.; 70ff.).

In tying together prayer (following the Lord's Prayer) and ethics, Barth explores a moral ontology and a moral anthropology in which dependence is not diminishment and resolute action is not self-assertion. Webster argues that his insistent style may lead us to miss the delicacy of his thought here (something which F. W. Graf does). Both the 'unity-in-distinction' motif and the careful delineation of the relation of law and gospel, as well as the rubric of invocation of God, are easily misunderstood if, with a slight tilt of the balance, one or other affirmation - the priority of God or the reality of the human agent - is allowed gain the upper hand. Reading Barth, here as elsewhere, demands stringent attention to the range and subtlety of his dialectic.

This new beginning of life and its invocation to "our Father" in petitionary prayer is made on behalf of fellow humanity. our Father (CL 95). "The invocation of God is as such a supremely social matter, publicly social, not to say political and even cosmic." Consequently, Barth has much to say about Christians' attitude to the 'world'.

B.V. Teaching God's Song to the Tragic Operatics: Christianity's Moving Against the Stream (CL 187) by Rebelling against the Present Aeon's 'Lordless Powers'.

-- In Jesus Christ is revealed our sin and ineptitude before God (CL 24; see IV.4, 13), that our situation is not one of weakness, sickness or fate but rather responsibly committed sin (CL 149).

-- Although this dark theme cannot be made a central tenet of Christian thought and speech for Barth, and certainly cannot have a stronger emphasis than the knowledge of God (CL 216), he has to speak of this problem (CL 216). For even though it is an absurd element it cannot be overlooked or denied, comprehended or explained but has to be recognised as a brute fact (CL 148; 216). In doing so Barth admits the "difficulty of finding clear and suitable names and concepts with which to denote them properly and describe them vividly" (CL 216). They are only a pseudo-objective reality which has no being of its own, although "The devil would like to be sovereign Lord of the world, but he is not" (CL 127), but only exists through what it negates (CL 127). This is particularly so given Christ's overcoming and defeat of them, the outworking of God's prior election of humanity in Christ and rejection of the disorder (see CL 93; 149; 153; 235; IV.4, 159). Thus, Barth argues that the world is basically dedemonised already in Jesus Christ and will be one day fully so (CL 218). One must speak only of the shocking survival of darkness even when it is overcome by light for there is only one possibility open, that is to call God 'Father' (CL 94; IV.4, 22; 154). It is the "absurd possibility of the negation of what basically or meaningfully be negated, even if the ignorance is equally perverted, dangerous and powerless against the opposing knowledge of God" (CL 146), the "impossible possibility" of unbelief and rejection of God (IV.4, 22). These alienated forces of disorder, and the 'autonomous' humanity which has unwittingly released them, cannot escape from God as if there were a dualism of "ontologically godless forces" - they are at God's disposal and he can make use of them according to his will (CL 215; for humanity see CL 18; 26 humanity is not determined by her unbelief and disobedience and therefore is not released from responsibility before God; 214 on 'godlessness'; 234; IV.4, 22; 36; 142; 198). Hence Barth has to speak of them "only in consciously mythological terms" (CL 216), arguing that the New Testament's magical view of the world and the demonic powers operative within was more realistic than the rational/scientific world-view of modernity (CL 217f.).

-- Barth understands evil or at least its basis in the fall very much in personal, or rather anthropological, terms. Humanity completely refuses, contradicts and resists God (CL 93). The world is still alien to grace in its open and neutral relationship to God, existing in a situation of ambiguity, division and ambivalence - God is both objectively known and subjectively unknown in rejection (CL 120; 122f. no natural theology, i.e., corresponding subjective knowledge to the perfect objective knowledge of the Creator). The situation is little helped by the Church's guilt entailing the limitation, opaqueness and even perversion of its ministry (CL 120). Even so, there is no excuse because of God's making himself known (CL 120), and therefore guilt is accrued by living in that ambivalence (CL 117; 121; 122; 211).

-- Humanity may have nothing more than a pseudo-godlessness, but "Nevertheless, even this has catastrophic consequences" (CL 214; see IV.4, 142). It is this sin which has led to the misery of the unleashed 'lordless forces'. "The attempt at human self-justification and self-sanctification" are "the very root of all evil and mischief" (IV.4, 159), humanity's 'fall' is "the true basis of the disorder" and self-imposed misery (CL 18; 234) for in alienation from God comes self-alienation: "the denaturalizing of the humanity and fellow humanity" (CL 213; also 212: "In and with the sin of Adam, who wanted to be as God, there is already enclosed the sin of Cain, the murder of his brother [cf. Gen. 3:5; 4:8]. ... Where all are against God, the hand of each can only be against that of others [cf. Zech. 14:13].").

The sinner seeks an identity in abstraction from, and opposition to, God's good order. Such is the deceit of sin that the sinner believes opposing God to be the path to self-mastery; but "in no case does this result in him becoming the lord and master of the possibilities of his own life" (CL 214). For, this state of sin in the drive for self-mastery has an extremely tragic dimension (one which Barth himself never drew out with reference to this literary genre). This is so in a twofold sense: firstly, sin cannot enable one to escape the lordship of God, that very thing which sin attempts to do; and secondly tragically transposes her into the sphere of the unleashing of the uncontrollable demonic powers, thereby further demolishing the "myth and illusion of the person who thinks and claims that he has come of age and is now sovereign and autonomous. The more he thinks this the more he is overtaken by the opposite. He ceases to be the free lord and master he could and should have been in the sphere of God's lordship if, instead of fleeing from God, he had oriented himself to him" (CL 214 - "their football and prisoner" and "the illusion of his lordship and mastery over them"; 217; 228). This last sentence indicates a third sense of the tragic dimension of sin - that being the lord and master of one's life is achieved exactly by the smooth path which autonomy rejects as it stumbles and falls laboriously in constructing its own path in the opposite direction (this is laboured more above and therefore shall not be dwelt upon at this point in the discussion).

The sinner finds herself in the same trap as Goethe's sorcerer's apprentice: surrounded by "spirits with a life and activity of their own, lordless, indwelling forces" (CL 214), finding that "parallel to the history of his emancipation from God there runs that of the emancipation of the history of the overpowering of his own possibilities of life from himself: the history of the overpowering of his desires, aspirations, and will by the power, the superpower, of his ability" (CL 214). These unleashed and autonomous forces "are not just the supports but the motors of society" (CL 216). For his examples, Barth turns to the worlds of politics, finance, and ideology, and - not without a trace of comedy - to the worlds of fashion, sport, and transport. The machinery of state may cease to serve and may instead become a "lordless force" (CL 221). Money may cease to serve and instead may control human economic exchange, and become "an absolutist demon, and man himself can only be its football and slave. Mammon ... is no reality, and yet it is one - and what a reality!" (CL 224). And so what sinners have fashioned somehow comes to slip from their grasp, assuming a wilful and necessary life of its own. This is "The bondage of the will!" (CL 232) and "the suffering that man causes himself and has to endure under their lordship" (CL 234).

-- Christians also suffer in this time in a further sense. They suffer the passion of the unfulfilled desire to see God's name be hallowed, his righteousness be done, and his kingdom come on earth, because hic et nunc God is so well known and yet also so unknown to the world, the church, and above all themselves (CL 111). They suffer because they are unable to come to terms with this intolerable present situation, with the status quo, and cannot be reconciled to it in any way (see CL 165) or sink into hopeless silence or hysterical cries of distress which throws us back onto our own resources (CL 167). "In this midway place he can only be on the road as a pilgrim", not settling down or tarrying here (CL 187), but will make an 'unmistakable protest' ('unappeasable disquiet'). The act of God in the cross of Christ "stands in our way, forbidding us to come to terms and be content with the desecration of God's name in our present", for therein we are enabled to see the event of the overcoming of desecration (CL 165). Not only this, but in positing this critical sign in Jesus Christ God "also reveals to us a new thing, permitting and commanding us to look up and see beyond this determination of our present to its conquest and removal", thereby giving our critique and protest an eschatological motivation (CL 166), promising that he will take up the cause of hallowing God's name. Their lives cannot be unaffected by the petition, but must be stamped and shaped by looking to this coming day of Jesus Christ. This present dedemonisation is that in which Christians are involved with their petition that God will bring his self-declaration to its goal with the manifestation of his light that destroys all darkness (CL 111), that he will hallow his name (CL 158f.), that he will cause his righteousness to appear and dwell on a new earth (CL 205), that his kingdom will come by unmasking and overcoming and ultimately abolishing all the absolutisms of the lordless powers (CL 219).

Barth argues that we cannot pray for it if it is not in some sense before us, in our vision as Christians (CL 161). Jesus Christ is the morning without evening, "dispersing the darkness, removing any relation of light to it, establishing the sole sovereignty of light, of the knowledge of God, and with it a new era, a new form of the world without division, obscurity, or vacillation" (CL 163), which needs no supplementation. This is the eschatological vision which determines Christians' attitude to the present state of things (CL 168f.). "Coming from Good Friday and Easter Day, the Christian world knows what it is talking about when it prays to God for the hallowing of his mane. It is praying for the taking place of the unique and definitive divine act which it knows to have taken place already in Jesus Christ" (CL 163). And in so praying Christians set up a prophetic sign of the limit that God has set for this ambivalence (CL 235), recognising how the river of unrighteousness and lordlessness is halted by the unshakeable dam of the divine order (CL 233).

Herein we are oriented and thereby move towards the future of God, our goal in the Alpha and Omega (CL 166), to look to its future fulfilment (CL 167; see 163). The patient wait for the coming of God's kingdom is also an impatient one which cannot be idle (CL 169; 246), for "The law of prayer is the law of action" (CL 168; 234), liberation for action. This is what Barth emphases under the theme of 'rebellion'. "[T]hings cannot be left as they are. ... The name of God cries out to be sanctified, to be known and confessed as such, to be known and not unknown as his name" (CL 158; different type of revolt from others CL 207).

It is imperative to note the limitations of human revolt [If we were given even a part of the divine work then God would become superfluous because a part would be pressed into the whole (CL 170)]. This is indicated by the use of the petition 'Thy kingdom come' (CL 234). Prayer for the coming of the kingdom presupposes that the kingdom is not within the horizon of possibilities realised through human action as continuation or completion of them (see CL 171; 240ff.). It is rather "the great new thing on the margin - yet outside and not inside the margin of the great horizon of all the perceptions and conceptions of us people who are people of disorder" (CL 237).

Human revolt, in the person's 'de-absolutised' role as agent, takes it rise in God's decisive act, in what MacKinnon calls "God's own revolt against the world He made". In ethical terms, this means that prayer for the coming of God's kingdom encloses human work within the prior work of God. This ministry of witness is not to usurp the divine activity but rather to run parallel to it (CL 175; 169 analogous; 171; 201ff.). We are not Christian Hercules who are able to repeat and anticipate God's victory, but rather can serve only as a mirror (CL 181). This is done in continually new steps and will never be more than a feeble and not a perfect work. There can be change, albeit not total this side of the eschaton (CL 179). All are interim "little steps" (CL 172), provisional and relative (CL 180f.; 194). Nevertheless, the Christian is commanded and empowered by the Word "not to flow with the stream, but swim against it in following the Word's lead and accepting its discipline" (CL 187; 194 - this swim can be a lonely business and itself courageously risks paying a price), and in this the church is a counter-movement (CL 193; 212 Christians are simultaneously guilty for the plight but also born counter-revolutionaries).

Thus, "The overthrow of the regime cannot be an affair of our action. ... But to rise up in rebellion against the regime ... is something that is humanly possible, that we can do so" (CL 174; 181). Alongside prayer to God to establish his Kingdom, there is also a properly human struggle for a properly "human, ["little righteousness, CL 265] not divine righteousness" (CL 264; see 266). "[T]hey act in accordance with their prayer as people who are responsible for the rule of righteousness, that is, for the preservation and renewal, the deepening and extending, of the divinely ordained human safeguards of human rights, human freedom, and human peace on earth" (CL 205). Christian revolt against the "lordship of demons" (CL 270) is simply the grace-given courage to identify and act within those spheres of life where we need not suffer (CL 211), and, cheerfully and in good conscience, to leave the rest to God. But, as with the refusal of sacramental status to baptism with water, so here: the apparent restriction of the mediatory scope of human action is intended to be praise of that action as truly human, and not quasi-divine, freeing it to do what is proper for it to do (CL 265). Or again, the action of those who invoke the kingdom is "kingdom-like" (CL 266).

Webster correctly argues that the monist, or christomonist, charge levelled at Barth rests on a misreading. Barth is not claiming that God in Christ is 'the reality' in an exclusive sense, in a way which amounts to an ontological disenfranchisement of all other 'realities'. The reality of Jesus Christ as the self-positing God includes within itself all other realities, and it is in him and from him that they have their inalienable substance. Barth's apparent ontological exclusivism is in fact an inclusivism: solus Christus embraces and does not suspend or absorb the world of creatures and their actions. Barth creates the space for the activity of a humanity in its proper locale of the relationship of childlike obedience to the divine Father. This leads Webster to argue that "the freedom of the divine action is fully coherent with, and inseparable from, what he says of the active life of humanity in correspondence to God."

And in this childlike obedience the question of unease with and revolt against the present becomes a reality. Humanity is empowered by the Christ-event and the vision of the eschatological future. Thus, for Barth, eschatological discourse functions primarily as a stimulant of active hope in the present, providing a critique and measure. However, a question arises at this point. Does Barth not retain too strong an element of 'prediction' in this vision, one which enables him to abstract it from the contingencies of history (even the contingencies of Jesus Christ's history) in speaking of victory in a universalised sense? This is a recurrent question, and one which feeds into the whole ethos of Barth's dogmatic presentation. This abstraction from the pain of Gethsemane links with the critique levelled by Hauerwas on the abstraction of Barth's ethics, and one on his lack of christological specificity.