Dr. John C. McDowell

Meldrum Lecturer in Systematic Theology

New College

University of Edinburgh

In King Lear’s fateful opening scene the flattery-seeking monarch puts the question of how much he is loved to his favoured daughter, Cordelia. Refusing to associate herself with the treachery of her elder sisters, Cordelia, replies with "nothing". The tragic train of events is set on its way as the spectator puzzles at Lear’s subsequent explosive outburst, appearing almost as a childish tantrum (after all he is king) and bravado, to his famous assertion, "Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again".

In a sense Lear’s words were unfulfilled. Something did come from nothing: not a ‘thing’ in the sense that physical objects are things, as such, but a dramatic and consequential shaping of the available possibilities for agency.

The ‘something’ from ‘nothing’ theme arises in the context of several critiques of Barth’s account of evil and sin in the context of §50 of III.3, ‘Gott und das Nichtige’, as noted above. How can death, hell, and the tragic come from nothing? Von Balthasar, for example, claims that Barth’s tone "veritably thrums with a hymnic certainty of eventual victory" (Balthasar, 1972, 354). And surely this optimistic mood should then be viewed as a move, as are all optimisms, to secure sight into that which is not obviously open for inspection (i.e., the future). Hence, von Balthasar continues, Barth has "gone a bit too far to the light" (Balthasar, 1972, 358).

Reading Barth too unqualifiedly in this way, however, misses something highly significant, something (rather than nothing) that lends a certain tragic texture to his reflections on the complex and difficult, but suggestive, theological microcosm of §50. These reflections on evil constitute notable steps that enable one to read volume IV, and particularly the fragments of what would have been IV.4, as, in some sense, its detailing and dramatised expression.

Composed in the aftermath of the physical, diplomatic and psychological ruins of post-war Europe CD III will nevertheless disappoint anyone expecting Barth’s commentary on, or even explicit theological response to, the cultural landscape. Frequently critics despair of the ‘buffoonery’ and irresponsibility of one whose mention of the Jews is primarily that of the Gotteskranken, whose theological account of women a patriarchal hangover, and his delving into politics (especially those of the Cold War) laughably uninformed and arbitrary. Furthermore, recalled is the fact that Barth’s response to 1914 was to ask questions of his Liberal teachers’ theology. Has the theologian who claimed to hold the bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other extended his arms to their full span thus preventing their meeting?

Suggestive of something more culturally significant is Pattison’s general observation that "concern with the void" is regarded by "a considerable body of opinion" as having been a product of the general angst-ridden Stimmung and therefore quickly dismissable (too quickly dismissable in an any genealogical critique) as being "somewhat passé". Indeed, what CD III represents is a very different style of post-war explosion from that of the 1922 edition of Der Römerbrief. Speculation on the different impacts of the two Zeitgeisten on the Barths of 1922 and 1945 (CD, III.1) is tempting, particularly since the latter Barth had, through bitter experience and the way he came to read the scriptures, come to expect less of people and movements. 1917’s Red-Revolution had affected him deeply. It is somewhat simplistic to complain, then, as Horton does, that Barth was not as good a prophet to the post-WWII age of anxiety as he was to the age of over-confidence which preceded it. A certain christomorphicity of theological memory had taught him to hope, both theologically undermining the basis of this anxiety and therefore creating the very different mood from that of 1922. So in 1948 he declares:

The cultural impact on the Barth of 1947 is most clearly displayed in his discourse of das Nichtige, suggesting a dialogue (an admiringly critical one) with Heidegger and Sartre (CD, III.3, 334). Pattison attempts to identify the function of this language as being to "harmonize faith in the goodness and omnipotence of God and a vision of the world as fallen." This use of the melodic, ‘harmonise’, is very interesting. Despite Barth’s best intentions, Pattison regards him as characterisable by metaphors of euphonics.

Since systematising involves a constructiveness that is insufficiently attentive to the resistant particularities and complexities that attend our explorations into the way things are, MacKinnon’s "proper respect for the irreducibility of the tragic" is utilised to inhibit "ambitious metaphysical construction" (MacKinnon, 1974, 145). "It is a lesson to be learned from tragedy that there is no solution to the problem of evil." (MacKinnon, 1968, 104; cf. Paul Ricoeur, 1967, 165)

For the theodicy-task, evil is a ‘problem’ for theorising to solve. Ears are trained to hear that the seemingly discordant notes actually offer their own contribution to the overarching form and structure of the melody, a general perspective that frequently prevents speculation on how specific instances, and/or what has recently been generally named ‘horrendous evils’ (one should add ‘pointless’), make their contribution. In such, particularly in the ‘greater good’ theses, discussions of evil’s place in the world tend to utilise language of ‘justification’ and ‘necessity’.

Barth denies the possibility of constructing (the engineering metaphor is apt) a ‘theodicy’ in this sense. That type of apologetic is not open to the professor who persistently maintained that apologetics could not be a rationally performed task separable from dogmatic description. He saw apologetics, as performed by ‘natural theology’, as seeking to construct a ‘Being’ (or Ultimate ‘Thing’) from the fragments of our misplaced reasoning from first principles (foundations), a Being that can be no-God.

Here is where Barth is frequently misunderstood, and Schulweis’ comment on "theodicy [as] … a symptom of man’s enslavement to moral and logical criteria and norms irrelevant to the conduct of the divinely unique One", could accentuate common suspicion of Barthian anti-intellectualism and irrationalism. Rather, the task Barth believes himself able to perform in honesty is something Christ-ianly contexted in a way that informs that we otherwise create distorted images, and even idols, and mistake them for the living God. Barth was famously fond not only of Kant’s critique of metaphysics but also Feuerbach’s critique of religion.

Something similar permeates his discussions in §50 with regard to evil- and sin-talk. They, then, cannot be abstracted from their proper theological grammar without serious distortion of meaning (see, e.g., CD, III.3, 350f., 365f.), even suggesting something is wrong with appeals to "commonsense notions of evil". Similarly, discourse of ‘goodness’ and ‘omnipotence’ (a theistic ‘muscle-word’) cannot be contextually divorced when theologically referential in the classic definition of the ‘problem of evil.

In proceeding to rigorously ‘examine’ or give a "report", if such a static metaphor may be used, the nature of sin theologically (or rather christologically, or better still, trinitarianly) Barth may provide a description that overlaps with, and can even draw from, certain themes of theodicy-projects analogically (CD, III.3, 295). Exploring the nature of sin and evil, that which is declared to be a problem before God (and not God a problem before it), may well lead to certain clarifications of the sorts of ways in which it is appropriate and inappropriate to speak of God’s and creations relations to evil. Hick, however, demonstrates a failure to understand the fact that this is very different from systematically "strain[ing] after completeness and compactness" concerning evil (CD, III.3, 295), and that done non-theologically, when he claims that Barth’s das Nichtige discourse is "an infringement of his ban upon speculative theorizing, and from outside that thought world" (Hick, 1977, 135f.).

To return to the musicology metaphor, it would appear more appropriate to argue that Barth’s theo-composition, when themes of sin, evil and suffering are heard, allows for the discordant notes to be heard after a fashion (but it is the nature of this ‘after a fashion’ that is highly controversial), and yet these are notes that are themselves, while not simply reducible into the melody, drawn upon symphonically to complexify the piece.

To shift the sense in focus of the metaphor, it is not that Barth objects to the use of words to describe evil, but that theodicists’ pseudo-scientific grammar has vaulted over the limitations created by theological speech so that now only theological babbling may be heard.

Divine Conflict: The Evilness of Evil

When MacKinnon claims that Paul "writes not as if he would provide a solution, but rather as if he would lay the texture of a problem bare" he displays something of his own theological manner (MacKinnon, 1968, 156). It is in this laying bare, or for Barth in the provision of a report, that the exposure of the tragic particularities and unsystematisable ambiguities prevent MacKinnon from vocalising easy talk of "a synthesis in which reconciliation" is achieved.

Barth’s own complaints against theodicy-projects, as he perceived and knew them, are contentful also. The focus is similarly on the manner of resolution, or at least toleration, of the relation between "Creator, creature and their co-existence, and the intrusion upon them of the undeniable reality of nothingness" (CD, III.3, 365). Barth is trinitarianly compelled to develop a doctrine of God as being-for-creation in such a way that the ‘humanity of God’ entails that the event of the cross is not a moment of pathos, something episodic against which MacKinnon also complains, within an otherwise impassible Godhead (MacKinnon, 1987, 232). Instead, in Barth’s post-WWII sense of the self-determined ‘humanity of God’, this cross, in the light of the Risen One, is precisely where God is most identifiable as being God (and where sin is displayed) as an-involved-being-for-the-other, something which kenotic language of ‘giving-up’ cannot fully do justice to. Or, as MacKinnon puts it, kenosis "is not strange or alien to His being" (MacKinnon, 1987, 235), but rather, he continues in incarnationally revising the sense of divine omnipotence, God’s "supreme assertion in the setting of a deeply estranged world" (MacKinnon, 1987, 155).

Barth’s move is less the simplistic claim that theodicy, by being in its very nature formed-reflection, trivialises suffering and more a theological complaint that its precise manner of understanding the place of evil in the world is domesticating. Hence it is the intolerability of das Nichtige that is §50’s main concern, something which theodicy is in danger of losing. §50 opens, for instance, with the striking statement that "There is opposition and resistance to God’s world-dominion" (CD, III.3, 289). Consequently, Barth rejects theodicies in which evil and sin are worked into the whole system (either dualistically as necessary antitheses, or monistically in order to contribute to the good), and therein entail that these become necessary and/or even good (CD, IV.1, 374-87). Specifically he rejects Schopenhauerian pessimism (CD, III.1, 335ff.); and anti-dualistic differentiations between das Nichtige and creation’s Schattenseitte (see CD, III.3, 296ff.). Moreover, he hesitates to discuss demonology in view of the temptation to fit Satan into a legitimate and proper place within creation. These various perspectives subtly conceal "genuine nothingness" and fabricate

It is the radicalness and ruthlessness of das Nichtige, or in Ruether’s words "the evilness of evil", that Barth wants to assert and refuse any possible domestication and justification of (Ruether, 1968-9, 6; cf. CD, III.3, 299). This Barth tends to emphasise in three main ways: by utilising conflictual metaphors; by acknowledging it as atopos with regard to both Creator and creature; and, by conceiving its threateningness.

Bounded Conflict

Given the kind of talk of God as free-to-love, whose electing and creating for purposes of covenant fellowship in grace, and whose participation in the life of his creature culminated in the cross, that which Barth had already exposed the christological grammar to even before II.2, it is unsurprising that Winston can comment that for Barth "To know the real God is to know Him as the adversary of evil." (Winston, 1959, 55; cf. CD, III.3, 290) Das Nichtige, then, is portrayed as "an alien factor" (CD, III.3, 289), "a real enemy" and "adversary with whom no compromise is possible" (CD, III.3, 301, 302). As antithetical and abhorrent to God (and thereby "the totality of the created world", CD, III.3, 302), therefore, it is inappropriate to speak of a causalitas mali in Deo.

This conflict had its origin ‘before’ (understood logically rather than simply temporally) creation, with the separation of creation and nothingness, and preservation of the former "from being overthrown by the greater force of nothingness" (CD, III.3, 290). Creation is preserved from falling into "total peril", or the ultimate consequences of being able "to overwhelm and destroy the creature" (destroy absolutely, it must be added for comprehension) (CD, III.3, 290). The de-creativeness of das Nichtige is always bounded, and therefore theo-dramatically limited in its scope, by God’s creativeness and, indeed, redemptive re-creativeness (IV.3 a is good exploration of the nature of the ongoing drama of the risen Christ with the multiple manifestations of das Nichtige).

A Good Grammar of Creatureliness

According to von Balthasar, the dying sinless Jesus

Important in this conflictual account, then, is that theologically God’s creating is wholly beneficent to creatures, and the result of that creating is wholly good (CD, III.3, 302), something which Barth found so striking in Mozart’s thematics of creation’s praising of its Creator (CD, III.3, 298f.). However radical evil may be, Ricoeur narrates, it cannot be as primordial [or original] as goodness", and therein becomes "scandalous at the same time it becomes historical."

For Barth, any aetiology of das Nichtige requires a ‘protection’ of the grammar of creaturely dignity, by insisting that it cannot be sought in "in the non-divinity of the creature" (CD, III.3, 349). Possibly alluding to Nietzsche’s talk of Christianity as ‘life-denying’ and his own philosophy as ‘a yea-saying’, Barth speaks of his intention to be "loyal to the earth" by being true to humanity’s permanent belonging-to-the-world and opposing both human conflicting with temporality’s flux and any attempt to escape the proper limitations of creaturehood of one’s life-span’s definite temporal allottedness, which is ended by death (CD, III.2, 6). Temporality is even attributable to humanity’s eternal life (CD, III.2, 521). So Kerr regards Barth as "celebrating our finitude". Createdness, that declared ‘good’ by the Creator, is life’s proper framework: "we are not in an empty or alien place" (CD, III.3, 48). And those words are significantly written at a time when Europe is facing rebuilding after the horrors of Auschwitz and the war’s ravaging of the continent.

Thus, as created, humanity has no right (sin is closed off from human being), reason (what has been created is good), or freedom (freedom is the creature’s-freedom-for-God) to sin. This is the theological sense of the comment, contextually unreadable as a paternal rendering of God-creature relations, "The creature is not its own. It is the creature and possession of God", and not "capable of sin" (CD, III.3, 359, 356). Consequently, as explicated earlier in II.2, there is no divine fore-ordination or equipment of humanity to sin, but rather to blessedness and eternal life (CD, II.2, 170, 171; cf. III.1, 263f.).

The conflict, then, is not only with God but also with creatures. Sin is "detrimental", and harmful to the extent of disturbing, injuring and destroying "the creature and its nature" (CD, III.3, 310). Barth speaks of it as a "denaturalizing" and "self-alienation" (Barth, 1981, 213).

It is this oppositional/conflictual perspective that facilitates the use of negativity-language – das Nichtige (nothingness), negativity, a substance-less antithesis (CD, III.3, 302), and "ontological impossibility" (CD, III.2, 146), unmögliche Möglichkeit (impossible possibility) (CD, III.2; III.3, 351); "the absurd (irrational) possibility of the absurd (irrational)" (CD, III.3, 178), an "inherent contradiction" (CD, III.3, 351); a possibility passed over and rejected as a legitimate reality by God. In other words, as das Nichtige it has no autonomous being like that of creatures. Rather its quasi-reality is received in a relation of negation or privation of the ‘good’, a description approving of Augustine’s post-Plotinian Malum est privatio boni (CD, III.3, 318), and is therefore the nullity that is only parasitical on, and not in any way identifiable with, the good that is ‘reality’ (or ‘being’) (CD, II.2, 170f.).

The Gate-Crasher

As that to which God gives "an absolute and uncompromising No" das Nichtige is the "uninvited" enemy, an unwanted intruder into created life (CD, III.3, 292, 310).

But, what is the nature of this ‘uninvitation’? According to Hick there are grounds for suspecting that Barth, in a sense, made nothingness logically necessary for his scheme of creation and redemption (see Hick, 1977, 138). Barth, in his way of opposing any Manichaean style dualism, grounds das Nichtige in God’s activity of election and creation, albeit in the qualified sense that God does not elect or create it (CD, III.3, 351f.). Moreover, in a discussion of Gen. 1:2 he appears to equate das Nichtige with the chaos from which God’s creating was separated (CD, III.3, 352).

Hick tentatively claims that Barth maintains the O felix culpa in the sense that evil ‘exists’ in order "to make possible the supreme good of redemption" (Hick, 1977, 139). Barth does unwittingly appear to imply sin’s inevitability in creation, for instance, when he declares that

This suggests that, in a very real sense, then, the responsibility for das Nichtige lies with God. Fiddes, for example, argues that the notion of

To fully address this question one would need not only to explore Barth’s treatment of divine omniscience, and its relation to creaturely agency, but also his dialectical talk of the nature of eternal temporality as a simultaneity inclusive of a successiveness (see McDowell, 2000a, ch. 5). At least it can be recognised, theologically, that for Barth it is creation, and not evil, that exists as the presupposition of, or in order to make possible, redemption. Moreover, Barth’s theology does not appear to be a ‘problem-oriented approach’ (i.e., postulating the incarnate history as a response to sin), although this statement must be qualified by noting that he never abstractly discusses the question of an incarnation in a sinless world since creation is sinful, and therefore the incarnation is always placed within that context in a manner reminiscent of Rev. 13:8 (CD, II.2, 122; IV.1, 36). So he speaks of the world’s reconciliation, resolved in eternity and fulfilled on Calvary (CD, IV.2, 314). Hence, the Incarnate’s conflict with sinfulness cannot, without some copious qualification, merely be the temporal playing out of the exclusion of das Nichtige in creation.

It is vital to note, then, that Barth does not suggest that because das Nichtige is that for which God, as Creator, is somehow responsible for bringing into its own "improper way" that sin is therefore necessary, in any theo-logical sense (CD, III.3, 351). In this discourse, and indeed perhaps more surprising given the types of readings popular of Augustine’s (‘free will’!) ‘theodicy’, Barth moves to prevent the question of the primordial unde malum being directed towards the creature. Sin cannot be conceived as a possibility of humanity’s created nature since that would imply that it is grounded in the will of God as a means to the end of human nature (see CD., III.3, 292).

The Is-ness of the Inessential and Insubstantial

In a somewhat curious statement, however, Barth declares that "It ‘is’ because and as so long as God is against it" (CD, III.3, 353). Is Hick right that to suggest that das Nichtige is not be nothingness but something, in other words, it would be an aspect of the ‘good’ and not that which God has declared to be creation’s enemy?

On the contrary, by giving das Nichtige its ‘is-ness’ as that which is rejected, the opus Dei alienum (understood only in the light of the opus Dei proprium) declares what it is that is not good, that is not part of his creative intention, and denies it the divine right of becoming something. It deprives it of the status of the ‘is-ness’, of "autonomous existence independent of God or willed by Him like that of His creature", of creative intentionality (CD, III.3, 353).

This is what gives to das Nichtige "its ontic peculiarity. It is evil" (CD, III.3, 353; cf. 354). It is the "perverse and perverting" antithesis whose relationship to creation is ‘actual’ but absolutely negative, offering only menace, "damage and destruction", corruption and death, so that it must never be expressed in terms of synthesis (CD, III.3, 354, 310). It can never contribute anything to the goodness of creation. Hence "To sin", Jenson argues, "is to achieve precisely … nothing." (cf. Barth, 1981, 214)

Only the most theologically insensitive and philistine of commentaries could then charge Barth with a denial (logical, contrary to his intentionality) of the threat of das Nichtige from his naming of it, making it "a mere semblance" (CD, III.3, 353). As his treatment of the cross, for example, suggests, he certainly does not intend (practice another matter) to minimise sin’s demonic energy, as Wingren, Berkouwer, and others imply (see CD, IV.3, 177).

The functioning of the linguistic crafting of axiologically rich negativity-talk cannot permit such a reading, however one prescribes nothingness language (usually contemplated in the context of the thing-ness) as ‘logically’ operating. It may be not-being, but it is certainly not non-being, although its disruptiveness leads precisely toward the annihilation of the beingness of being; something but not some thing, although it attempts to have its own kind of existence (see Wolterstorff, 1996, 587). Since, then, "God takes it into account", "is concerned with it" and treats it "seriously" it "is surely not nothing or non-existent" but

The sense of privatio, defined as "the attempt to defraud God of His honour and right and at the same time rob the creature of its salvation and right" (CD, III.3, 353f.), the parasitic disruptiveness of the Good, contributes further to the disabling of the striving for explanation (see MacKinnon, 1979, 193). This refusal is what an exasperated, and uncomprehending Hick calls a "leaving the problem hanging in the air, without presuming to settle it", although Winston unfortunately implies too much of the contrary when unqualifiedly claiming that "Barth attempts to resolve, or at least alleviate, the obvious contradiction between God’s sovereign goodness and the existence of evil." (Hick, 1977, 143; Winston, 55) Barth recognises the "absurdity" of evil, and therefore deposes philosophical drives for conceptual systematisation in theodicy-projects, in a way not unlike how Ricoeur and MacKinnon view the iconoclastic interrogative subversion by the tragic. Barth declares: nothingness "is altogether inexplicable" because it "is absolutely without norm or standard."

Instead, he communicates the irrational factuality of what MacKinnon names the "surd element in the universe" (MacKinnon, 1995, 109). It is worth registering that this arguably could be conducive towards a MacKinnon-like "phenomenology of moral evil",

Midgley similarly argues that needed is some kind of analysis of the "immediate sources of evil in human affairs", rather than an aetiology and theodicy defensive of God’s beneficent existence. "[W]e have to grasp how its patterns are continuous … with ones which appear in our own lives and in the lives of those around us." (in Webster, 1998, 65)

As IV.4’s posthumously published fragments indicate this descriptiveness operates by way of focusing one’s prayerful attentions on the sources of evil in human affairs (distinguishable from some cosmological sourcing) and acting against them in a christo-structuration of human agency. Barth, as with MacKinnon in his agnostic preference for paradox over synthesis, in view of the mystery of the paradox of the existence of evil alongside the sovereignty of God in the world, refuses to attempt to justify God. Rather God justifies himself in the event of encounter. Barth contents himself instead with content-ing evil under the scaffold of God’s ‘unwilling’ and its christic having-been-overcome. The question of the reason for God’s ‘permission’ of the existence of that absurd opposition is left an unresolved mystery expressible in paradoxical terms. But ‘permission’ is certainly a category that Barth was not averse to drawing on (CD, III.3, 367). And, indeed, it is a category that could support Ricoeur’s perceiving a residual nod to the ancient tragic experience of the "tragic god" in the Edenic narratives (Ricoeur, 1967, 311; cf. 327).

Being Irresponsibly Responsible, Or Being Unable to Not Dispose of Sin

In a statement concerning the stealing of the blessedness of being by sin, Barth is suggesting a highly significant ‘nevertheless’ in his discourse about what it means for sin to lack the ‘right’ to exist. The creature, he emphasises, cannot be exonerated from all responsibility for its existence, presence and activity. On the contrary, the threat of das Nichtige has to become inexcusably and inexplicably acted out as sin, as human acts, for evil to be spoken of as a pervasive actuality or factuality (see CD, III.3, 310). While the intrusion of das Nichtige is ontologically unfounded, it can be referred to only in the bizarre acts of agents so that while it is an extremely foolish and irrational act,

Here Barth seems to have learned not only from Augustine, but perhaps also from Kant, the latter arguing that there is no conceivable ground from which the moral evil in us could have come – yet it is a universal feature of our experience of human agency.

The sense of Barth’s ‘enfleshing’ of das Nichtige here in his treatment of sin is that it is too voluntaristically conceived, "a moralizing narrowness" of "personal act and guilt …, refusal of the gratitude … [one] owes to God", one’s

Here Barth has announced several themes more fully elaborated in IV: sin as the enemy, and that sin best named as the evil action of pride (IV.1), the evil inaction of sloth (IV.2), and falsehood (IV.3). There is a suggestion here that Barth negates the distorting social and systemic context of sin, one’s own frequently unconscious complicitous collusion with it, and its complex re-modulation of the fluid structures of the self, and therein the erotics of that self. It would, for instance, take some nifty manoeuvring to remove the sin of ‘pride’ from its active grammatical sense, as several feminist critics demonstrate.

Highfield defends Barth because of the latter’s "zeal to avoid any tragic interpretation of sin in which sin is viewed as a fate which we have to endure rather than something we do freely and knowingly."

Being Lorded Over, Or Being Predisposed to Sin

However, maintaining an exclusively voluntarist account would seem odd for one whose early engagement in socialist praxis impacted on his reading of the bible. Hence Highfield’s comment is misleading, and not merely because he misunderstands the complex interplay of themes of agency and fate in both Greek and Shakespearean tragic dramas. Perhaps recognising this is to take a theology of sinning out of the constrictive environment of simple blame-seeking, and instead renovate the phenomenology of moral evil that MacKinnon has called for, with an ethics of compassion and hopefulness.

Webster is more accurate when arguing that Barth recognises the meandering of his sin-talk towards "the vicinity of Pelagius", and consequently complements it

Webster is right to point to "a remarkable section on ‘the Lordless Powers’ released by the human person in alienation from him- or herself." Yet, this tone has already been set in III.3 when Barth announces that sinners "have become the victims and servants of nothingness, sharing its nature and producing and extending it" (CD, III.3, 306; cf. 352). Hence, "nothingness is not exhausted in sin" but "is also something under which we suffer in a connexion with sin which is sometimes palpable but sometimes we can only sense and sometimes is closely hidden" (CD, III.3, 310).

An exploration of these themes makes possible a markedly different account, one more sensitive to the factors that tragically shape our being founded in this hamartiosphere. It is to give sense to, in other words, a comment like Ricoeur’s that "sin pervades all registers of life", or Farley’s that "sin modifies the very structures of the self [and] distorts our temporality, our biological aggressiveness, and our passions for reality and the interhuman." (Ricoeur, 1967, 246f.; Farley, 1980, 127) Even the Adamic myth, according to Ricoeur, suggests through its anguine antagonist a certain thereness-of-evil anterior to, and even regulative of, subsequent peccability (Ricoeur, 1967, 257f.). It is the tragedy of the story’s contexting of the mysterious motivation of the voluntary sinful act, Farley continues, that is suppressed by any "theology of sin" that "interprets the origin of sin as a sheer act of will", although this voluntarism does insightfully recognise

Demonic Legion

Webster interestingly implies that Barth’s post-Augustianian account "of evil as ultimately privatio" masks this emphasis on sinning, and the need for "description, informing us of what is the case, by naming and delineating what it is that sinners do." (Webster, 1998, 71f.) In one sense, this is misleading since it suggests that opponents of the privatio boni, claiming it is "underestimating evil", often miss the controlled point it attempts to make in metaphysical terms. After all, when commenting on Augustine, Barth claims that

But, perhaps in another sense, there is an important point being made by these critics. Horne speaks for many when he declares that privatio

Perceiving evil as privatio boni, then, according to Horne, would constitute "a failure … of the imagination" "to come to grips with the realities of experience" (Horne, 1996, 52). Similarly, although somewhat overstating his case, MacKinnon sweepingly declares that "it only has to stated clearly, and worked out in terms of concrete examples, to be shown to be totally inadequate as an analysis either of moral or physical evil" (MacKinnon, 1969, 44).

Rather than critique it for its ‘philosophical’ Sitz im Leben, however, it would be better to argue that resources for evil-discourse need to be extraordinarily rich and wide-ranging, and cannot be limited to what is, at the very least, abstract and formal configurations of metaphors. Even to speak of ‘evil’ and ‘sin’ is to continue abstractly by overtaxing these terms by the multiplicity of the realities which they denote in the configurations and foundedness in evil and sin.

If nothing else, the suspicion worth noting is that the mistake of commentators on §50 consists in not noticing that he too multiply elaborates on this theme elsewhere, especially in his more consciously dramatic sections. Indeed, he even speaks of "provisionally" defining the disruption "nothingness" (CD, III.3, 289). Barth, in other words, as the important section on ‘The Lordless Powers’ demonstrates, has not frozen his metaphors into any single, or abstract way of describing and even begins to describe the multiple visages of das Nichtige in positive senses (see Horne, 1996, 106). Even Augustine, Horne is forced to recognise, "had more to say on the subject" (Horne, 1996, 43). Nevertheless, and this is vital for a sense of what Barth is doing, the ‘saying’ is only in order to delineate his vision of what Christians, whose hope is christomorphic, should be setting their faces against in order to follow God’s rejecting of das Nichtige. The cross militates against an idealistically anaemic view of humanity’s place within a world corrupted by das Nichtige. Barth’s is, as Webster rightly argues, "an ethical account of wickedness".

The fitting stance for the Creature is then not to ask whether God meets our accreditation requirements for a god worthy of recognition as such, but to accept the proffered privilege of enlistment in the cause of the healing of the nations. This is to speak with MacKinnon, of a sympathising

No place can be unhoped for. Even the "lordless powers’" "cannot be ontologically godless forces" (Barth, 1981, 215).