The Faith of the Church. Karl Barth
grace) capacity to know God and serve him.
Another evidence is furnished by the fact that Barth has treated ethics as part and parcel of his systematic theology, more exactly as the logical and Christological extreme point of his Church-centered dogmatic inquiry. Not only did this surprise everybody, but even more especially it caught unawares all those who had predicted that Barthianism and ethics would not mix. The inclusion of his ethical teaching within his theological teaching means for Barth nothing other than the exclusion of anthropological pessimism and cultural obscurantism, although it does not mean either one-sided optimism or unconditional surrender to automatic progress. This inclusion means that in the Christ-event God is God for man and that his faithfulness to his creation includes and grounds the possibility of human existence, not unlike the sun which shines on the just and on the unjust. Finally it means that a theologian’s responsibility with regard to the ethical problem does not represent some concession—in the form of an afterthought—to the necessities and predicament of life in this world, as if faith required a chasm between certain sacred aspirations of man and his more realistic appraisal of secular and corrupt realities. This amounts to saying that Barth’s view of man is not dichotomous. Nor is there for him a necessary antimony between that which is Christian and that which is not. The manner in which Barth exhibits this is itself very illuminating. In his Dogmatics, his first discussion of ethics occurs even before he has discussed anthropology. This points to two things. On the one hand, it implies that every kind of dichotomous view of the nature of man is based on the assumption of a golden age prior to the fall of Adam. Barth does not believe in any golden age. There was a sinner as soon as there was a man. On the other hand, this implies that the fundamental and only distinction is to be drawn between the Creator and the creature. Therefore, to say that there was a sinner as soon as there was a man means not to uphold a pessimistic view of man so much as to avoid all dichotomies such as Christian and non-Christian, the Church and the World, sacred and secular. In fact, Barth himself wrote in the forementioned article published in The Christian Century: “The abstract transcendent God, who does not take care of the real man (‘God is all, man is nothing!’), the abstract eschatological awaiting, without significance for the present, and the just as abstract Church, occupied only with this transcendent God, and separated from state and society by an abyss—all that existed, not in my head, but only in the heads of my readers and especially in the heads of those who have written reviews and even books about me.”
It was pointed out above that Barth’s creativity partly consists in his ability to disclose bold, new meaning in ancient doctrines, and in his boldness—or, rather, theological and existential humility—in sticking to these doctrines. A striking example of this is his discussion of the virgin birth.
In connection with this doctrine, first of all Barth distinguishes (a) the mystery of the incarnation from (b) the miracle of the virgin birth, which is “the sign of that mystery.” Once again, it is not surprising that he should start with the mystery of the incarnation and then only proceed to the miracle itself. This is in keeping with his theological method of speaking, for example, first of God’s reality and revelation and then secondly of the possibility of his presence in his creation and of his availability to cognition.
What this mystery means is that “it guarantees the efficacy of revelation.” That is to say, it is God who takes the initiative and seeks man—not the other way round. It is God who becomes man: the basic distinction between Creator and creature nevertheless is here maintained, and no confusion is effected between them. But in the mystery of the incarnation it is their unity or mutuality which is equally stressed, because it is God who becomes man. The reality of the former statement is, so to speak, confirmed and sealed by the latter. As W. H. Auden says, “the Unknown seeks the known,” and now God is no longer to be sought after.
But it is when we come to the second consideration, the miracle itself as sign of the mystery that Barth seems to lean too conspicuously towards orthodoxy (despite his warnings) and ultimately to deny his own premises, whereby the encounter between the Creator and the creature is initiated always by the Creator and is ever independent of the merit or demerit of the creature; whereby, through the Christ-event there is unity without confusion between them; and whereby the transcendence of the Creator upholds both the finiteness and transitory preeminence of the creature without ever implying contempt for him.
Barth puts this by saying that the action of the Holy Spirit means exclusion of human sin. Not that, he writes, “the sexual realm is the receptacle of sin. Such an interpretation, so characteristic of the Christian culture smacks of the cloister, the monks. Sexual asceticism is a pagan and not a biblical idea.” That is to say, here again, the precedence of God is established both in his distinction from and his unity with man. “God excludes man, the fallen sovereign. For it was he, Adam, who was called a sinner, although in the history of sin the woman played no little role, since she was the first who discussed theology! It is Adam, the glorious man and maker of history, who is deemed improper for God’s designs. God steps into the act in Adam’s place. Not that he becomes husband to the woman, but through the action of his Holy Spirit he renders Joseph useless” (italics ours). So far, to use Barth’s categories, it is as if he were saying that the virgin birth is to the mystery of the incarnation what the sign is to that which is signified; and in this sense the exclusion of man as only the exclusion of sin, and a sign that all depends on grace, might be accepted.
But that the exclusion of sin necessitates the exclusion of the male specifically, is a distortion of the relation between sign and that which is signified, especially as Barth adds that God is not to be regarded as husband to the woman. Indeed, on Barth’s own theory, only charismatically is there any concurrence between the sign and that which is signified: “the sign does not prove the thing signified, it communicates it. In other words, this miracle was not necessary for the incarnation. God could have chosen another process, even as Jesus could have done other miracles to signify the same Word. Hence the distinction between sign and the thing signified must be maintained” (italics ours). Our question is: Why, if Joseph is rendered useless, although God does not become husband to the woman, is not the miracle also rendered useless, since it is not necessary for the incarnation? The point is, in other words, that Barth does not sufficiently account for the charismatic character of the sign, namely that the sign is not to be confused with that which is signified, and that it may (on Barth’s own view) point to that which is signified whether it has or has not any aptitude of its own for this. To be sure, there is “the danger that, by eliminating the sign, we thereby eliminate the thing signified.” But Barth seems, on the other hand, to surrender the thing signified wholly to the sign, and to make the former dependent on the latter. One must wonder whether at this point there is not a tinge of opus operatum in Barth’s understanding of God’s grace. The tradition of the Reformation has always affirmed the relation between Creator and creature, or between the sign and that which is signified, in such a fashion as to reject explicitly every opus operatum, and the analogia entis (i.e. analogy of being between God and man) which this presupposes. It is therefore all the more strange that despite the existentially relevant illuminations of his theological interpretation, Barth should be compelled to uphold the exegetically defective traditional dogma of the virgin birth. From our vantage point, it appears that for Barth the miracle is to the Christ-event what the Garden of Eden is to the Fall, namely a golden age. Why does Barth reject one and seek refuge in another, especially since he implies that in their Eden Adam no less than Eve was discussing bad theology? The answer probably lies in his fear of natural theology.
Barth excised natural theology. He should now excise his fear of it and allow full expression of the motif of grace in which his theology has otherwise been so triumphant.
Finally, one of the pleasant tasks of a translator is to extend his gratefulness to those whose help has contributed to a richer and faithful rendering of the text. This was all the more difficult because Barth was expressing himself, not in his native German, but in French, which though grammatically correct is nevertheless idiomatically as Barthian as his Dogmatik. I am indebted to Mr. Robert Matthews for many suggestions at the stage of the first draft. I am more than indebted to my colleague Mr. Paul Ramsey, Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton: always available, his assistance