Barth’s concern in his treatment on election is that election should be good news – gospel – or, what Barth calls is another place, ‘joyous news’. Thus does Barth begin his chapter on election in II/2: ‘The doctrine of election is the sum of the Gospel because of all words that can be said or heard it is the best; that God elects man; that God is for man too the One who loves in freedom … Its function is to bear basic testimony to eternal, free and unchanging grace as the beginning of all the ways and works of God’. Here Barth is following Calvin – and, according to Muller, the Reformed tradition more generally at least up until 1650 – who repeatedly stressed that we look to Christ as the assurance of our election. Here Calvin is as adamant as Barth. Where Calvin – and the Reformed tradition – is silent, however, is in how the question of reprobation – the shadow side of election – also relates to Christ. Holmes has suggested that the weakness in Calvin’s account of predestination is not that election is separate from Christ (which, as I have just said, it is not), but that ‘the doctrine of reprobation is detached, Christless and hidden in the unsearchable purposes of God. As such it bears no comparison with the doctrine of election, but remains something less than a Christian doctrine’. Holmes goes on to suggest that Calvin’s shortcoming is not that he reserved an equal stature – a double decree – to God’s ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ in election, but that he has ‘almost no room for the doctrine of reprobation in his account’; ‘the “No” does not really enter his thinking’, thus leading to an asymmetry between the two decrees and so, as Holmes suggests, ‘fails to be gospel’. This contrasts with Barth’s christological theology of reprobation. Holmes helpfully summarises Barth’s position thus:

In willing to be gracious in the particular way God in fact wills to be gracious, the Incarnation of the Divine Son, there is both a ‘Yes’ and a ‘No’, election and reprobation. God elects for humanity life, salvation, forgiveness, hope; for himself he elects death, perdition, even, as the Creed has said, hell. This self-reprobation of God is indeed the primary referent of the doctrine of election, in that God’s determination of himself is formally if not materially more basic than his determination of the creature, and so is considered first by Barth. In the eternal election of grace, which is to say in Jesus Christ, God surrenders his own impassibility, embraces the darkness that he was without – and indeed impervious to – until he willed that it should be otherwise … The apostle put it more succinctly: “He became sin for us.” This is the full content of the divine judgement, of the ‘No’ that is spoken over the evil of the world and of human beings. God elects for himself the consequences of that ‘No’, in saying ‘Yes’ to, that is, in electing, us. That is the whole content of the double decree, the whole content of the ‘Yes’ and the ‘No’ that God pronounces as one word, the whole content the election of grace.

Concerned that his own tradition had at this point replaced Jesus Christ with a decretum absolutum (as there is no Wikipedia reference to the absolutum it must not exist), Barth asked, ‘Is it a fact that there is no other basis of election outside Jesus Christ? Must the doctrine as such be related to this basis and this basis only?’ Because of Jesus Christ, Barth was able to speak of God’s ‘No’ as gospel also.

On the actuality of predestination, Gockel questions how useful Barth’s grammar regarding predestination as a present event is. He suggests that God’s ‘eternally preceding’ decision is ‘the mystery of all historical events’ and that it does not have to imply an ongoingness of the decision itself within history, given God’s predestining election of Jesus Christ. Gockel helpfully suggests that ‘a less actualistic view of predestination could more clearly emphasise the significance of the historical appearance of Jesus Christ and thus dispel the impression that Barth tears apart the “eternal content” and the “temporal form” of election’ (p. 185).

Gockel turns to critically consider the consequences of Barth’s doctrine of election. He identifies six key areas: (1) epistemological implications, (2) the concrete determination of predestination, (3) the issue of double predestination, (4) the actuality of predestination, (5) the question of universal election and universal salvation, and (6) the relation between Israel and the Christian church. I will focus here on (2), (3), (4) and (5).

Regarding the second area, while Barth never intended to drive a wedge between the economy and being of God, Gockel sides with McCormack over against Molnar that this very inconsistency arises within Barth’s own formulation of his doctrine of election: ‘The assumption of a divine will preceding the predestination puts into doubt whether the gracious choice really belongs to God’s “own eternal essence”’ (p. 179). The issue fundamentally concerns whether or not the works of God ad extra (election) are the free overflow of the works of God ad intra (as Molnar suggests) or whether the one eternal will of God is identical with Jesus Christ. Molnar’s reading of Barth’s proposal that God has one being, and that that one being subsists simultaneously in two different forms – the second dependent on the first – which are not separate but rather are a unity-in-distinction and distinction-in-unity, could have been more attended to by Gockel than he does (pp. 179–80).

On the question of double predestination, Gockel rehearses Barth’s conviction that we must speak of Jesus Christ not only in reference to the positive side of election but also in reference to the other side of God’s decree – reprobation. Here, as we shall see below, Barth sets himself apart from the tradition (or at least extends the tradition) and declares that both election and reprobation happen in Jesus Christ. Barth’s doctrine of reprobation is as christological as his doctrine of election. He contends that the God who elected fellowship with humanity also elected our rejection. In electing our rejection, however, ‘He made it his own. He bore it and suffered it with all its most bitter consequences’. Thus in the self-reprobation of Godself in Jesus Christ – the Man justified and the ‘Judge judged in our place’ – humanity recognises not only God’s final ‘Yes’ but also its own reprobation. This self-giving is God’s free choice and entails God’s self-determination and the determination of humanity through a ‘wonderful exchange’ in Jesus Christ. ‘To believe in God’s predestination’, Gockel concludes, ‘means by definition to believe in the non-reprobation of humankind’ (p. 181). As Barth notes, ‘in God’s eternal purpose’ it is not humanity but ‘God Himself who is rejected in His Son’. God’s self-giving in Jesus Christ consists in the fact that he is rejected in our place: ‘Predestination means that from all eternity God has determined upon man’s acquittal at His own cost’. Gockel then raises the question and apparent conflict concerning whether the claim that the Son of God instead of the Son of Man suffered God’s wrath contrasts with Barth’s earlier claim that ‘the elected human being Jesus is the target or “offering” of God’s wrath’. He notes Barth’s own awareness of and answer to this in II/1: ‘Only God Himself could bear God’s wrath. Only God’s mercy was capable of bearing the kind of suffering to which the creature existing in opposition to God is subject. Only God’s mercy could be touched by this suffering in such a way that it knew how to make it its own suffering. And only God’s mercy was strong enough not to perish in this suffering’ (p. 183). As if hell – that is, something of creation – could exhaust the awful shame and scandal of sin.

In his fifth chapter, entitled ‘Barth’s Christological Revolution’, Gockel turns briefly to Barth’s lectures of 1936 (given at two Reformed seminaries in Hungary) and 1937 (Barth’s Gifford Lectures on the Scots Confession given at the University of Aberdeen), and more substantially to Barth’s Church Dogmatics II/2, where Barth developed his most radical proposal, modifying for a second time his doctrine of election. In the christological revision undertaken in II/2, election no longer refers to the two-fold possibility of faith and unbelief but to the double determination of individual human beings and God’s own being. Barth’s priority: that God sees every human being and also himself in Christ.

Here, Gockel is on the more traversed ground of Barth’s notion that Jesus Christ is both God’s elect himself and the foundation of humanity’s election. Gockel argues that it was not until the 1936 lectures that Barth’s christological revisioning of the doctrine of election first appears; that what happened for and to humanity at Golgotha and was revealed at Easter – though it happened in time – is our eternal election. It is also here that Barth identifies the one will of God in double predestination with Jesus Christ, that is, with God’s own being. ‘Jesus Christ not only reveals but also constitutes God’s gracious choice as the self-determination to be God for His people and the determination of humankind to be the people of God’ (p. 169). As Barth contends, God’s gracious choice is the divine decision made in Jesus Christ, the speculum electionis. It is in and through Jesus Christ that God has actualised his eternal covenant with humanity, God’s eternal election of himself to communion with humanity, and humanity to communion with God. Here Barth distinguishes himself from the disposition in some camps of the Reformed tradition of an insistence on the inscrutableness and invisibility of the divine decrees. In Jesus Christ – the electing God and the elected Man – God’s purposes in election are made manifest to all. Christ is, in Barth’s words, ‘the first and last word to men of the faithfulness of God’ in election. Jesus Christ, therefore, is not merely the channel of God’s one decree, but its source. And he is not merely the one who elects, but he is also the one who elects himself to be the modus operandi by which others are elected.

Barth’s revision of the Reformed doctrine of election is developed further in his so-called Göttingen Dogmatics where he punctuates the teleological ordering of election and reprobation. The real purpose of God’s predestinating act is always election – not rejection – even in rejection. While the reprobation is real as the shadow side of election, it is never God’s final word. God’s final word is Jesus Christ and in him every promise of God finds its ‘Yes’ (2 Cor 1:18–20). ‘Rejection does not take place for its own sake but in revelation of the righteousness of God in order that God’s mercy might be manifested in his election, and in order that in it all, though in this irreversible order, God himself might be known and praised’. In other words, God’s judgement is never divorced from God’s grace and can never be recognised apart from ‘the cross, the judgment, the condemnation in which we stand’; the way of predestination therefore leads us ‘by way of condemnation – indeed, by the way of hell itself – to salvation and life’. We will return to this below in our discussion of Barth’s Church Dogmatics II/2.

Gockel concludes his discussion of Barth’s Göttingen work by surmising that Barth’s doctrine of election ‘becomes more actualistic and less speculative, while still not christocentric’. Also ‘Barth stops short of eschatological universalism, and his consistent emphasis on God’s freedom as well as the assertion that “all are at every moment under the divine Either–Or” should be taken seriously’ (p. 155).

The picture that Gockel paints is that in both the Römerbrief and the Göttingen Dogmatics, Barth has developed a ‘Schleiermacherian reconstruction’ of the doctrine of election by means of the idea of a single divine decree towards life. Although Schleiermacher understands the Creator-creature relationship differently to Barth, they both hold that the single divine decree is to be understood in the context of the historical decision between faith and unbelief. For both of them (at this point), the doctrine of election remains fundamentally theocentric and universal, with a focus on the graced-initiative of the divine act which involves a teleological movement in time from reprobation to election, the former serving the latter, and the latter qualifying the former. Above all, the focus for both theologians is on ‘the predestining God’ rather than ‘individual predestined human beings’ (p. 157). Given this, it is surprising that Gockel introduces his argument with the announcement that it is ‘precisely the anthropocentric outlook of traditional views’ which motivated not only Barth’s but also Schleiermacher’s ‘search for a new approach’ to election (p. 12).

In his Der Römerbrief, Barth raises two objections against the Augustinian formulation, which he regards as ‘a “mythologizing” construction’ (p. 108). First, Barth rejects the notion that predestination can be explained in terms of cause and effect. While the human act of faith happens within a familiar historical context, its origin always lies with God: ‘The act of faith does not occur when a human being has recognized God but when God has recognized a human being’ (p. 108). Barth’s point: ‘God wants to be known through God’. Secondly, Barth discards the attribution of election and reprobation to ‘predetermined quantities of individual persons, since this neglects that God’s eternal predestination is related to humankind as a whole and is not a one-time event but occurs time and again in history when a human being is addressed by God’s Word’ (p. 109). The driving issue here for Barth, as in his whole doctrine of election, is the divine freedom.

For Barth, the key verse for understanding Romans, and Christian theology in general, is 11:32, ‘God enclosed everyone in disobedience, in order to show mercy on everyone’. This verse affirms that the content of God’s predestination is God’s unconditional mercy. More radically, Barth contends that Paul’s claim suggests a modification – though not a rejection – of the notion of double predestination. Double predestination does not require rejection so long as we are clear that it refers to a movement, to the ‘teleology by which God’s salvific act is directed, namely, from reprobation to election’ (p. 113). For Barth, reprobation is never the goal. ‘God’s Yes shines even into the last depth of His No, precisely because the latter is so radical, because it is the divine No’. Reprobation exists therefore ‘only as the shadow of the light of election’.

Gockel contends that there is a distinct echo of Schleiermacher’s doctrine of election in Barth’s own early revision of the doctrine. In Der Römerbrief, Barth accentuates the dialectical unity of God’s decree: ‘God’s reprobation (of the elect) and God’s election (of the reprobate) are “unintuitably one and the same in God”’ (p. 118). Gockel identifies two central aspects concerning the relation between reprobation and election for Barth. First, the possibility of reprobation is overcome eternally in God. Adam’s old world really is surpassed by Christ’s new world. Second, the individual outcome of the two-fold possibility of unbelief and belief is not determined by God before time but rather, in the freedom of God, is the event in which God addresses the creature in time. The content or purpose of such an address is qualified by the ‘turn from reprobation to election’ in God, which expresses the one eternal will of God for humanity. Any duality here of judgement and grace is the duality of God’s unified action, an action which affects all human beings alike, and is determined by God’s redemptive will revealed in Christ’s death and resurrection. The church and the world, therefore, ‘stand under the same promise and the same judgment [which] makes it impossible to conceive them as two separate groups of persons’ (p. 125). Even as early as his Romans commentary, Barth maintained a hopeful universalism grounded in the freedom and love of God leading to the priority of election over reprobation: ‘reprobation has been overcome and absorbed by election’. Christ’s work ‘entails the hope that the duality between faith and history does not preclude the possibility of an eventual restoration of humankind and a return “into the unity with God, which is now and here completely lost”’ (p. 130). Barth’s emphasis here is that the original unity of God and humanity (a notion abandoned in the Göttingen lectures) is not superseded by judgement. Judgement, rather, is practical, leading to a re-union of human and divine righteousness.

Gockel observes that the relationship of the historical appearance of Jesus Christ to the determination of God’s will remains unclear in Barth’s theology, and his emphasis on the original unity leads to similar problems to Schleiermacher’s notion of absolute dependence. Furthermore, when Barth ‘asserts that God’s will is revealed in Jesus Christ who personifies God’s universal faithfulness and righteousness, it remains unclear how the eternal history between God and humankind is related to the history of Jesus Christ’ (p. 131).

‘That God may have mercy upon all’: A Review of Barth and Schleiermacher on the Doctrine of Election: A Systematic-Theological Comparison. By Matthias Gockel. Pp. viii+229. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. ISBN 978 0 19 920322 2. £45.

As promised not so recently, my next few posts will be dedicated to reviewing Gockel’s book, Barth and Schleiermacher on the Doctrine of Election. Because my review is rather lengthy (and because some wise guy thinks that the ideal post should be quite short ), I will break it up into 10 posts. I hope that most who started the ride will still be holding on at the end.

Karl Barth’s vituperative criticisms of Friedrich Schleiermacher are no secret, and no short mileage has been made by theologians on the apparent division between the two. In Matthias Gockel’s latest offering (a revised version of his 2002 doctoral dissertation completed at Princeton under Barth scholar Bruce McCormack) he joins Robert Sherman and others in enriching, with renewed sophistication, our understanding of the relationship between Barth and Schleiermacher, challenging traditional evaluations that ‘liberal theology’ and ‘dialectical theology’ stand in irreconcilable opposition.

Rather than attempt to cover a multi-dimensional canvas with broad strokes, Gockel restricts his inquiry to an incisive and cogent comparison of the development of the doctrine of election in the two thinkers. Without proposing any theory of historical dependence, Gockel contends that the divergence between these two commanding Reformed theologians does not stem from irreconcilable starting points but rather from the indispensability of God’s grace. Gockel convincingly argues that ‘Barth’s theology is not just a repudiation of Schleiermacher but an expansion of his predecessor’s work in a new framework’ (13). He also shows us that while the Swiss theologian’s evaluation of ‘the father of modern theology’ is ‘sometimes negative, sometimes positive and often ambiguous’ (p. 9) Barth was not always a reliable interpreter of his own thought, nor always consistent in his criticisms of others.

Gockel’s thesis is that the doctrine of election in Barth’s early theology bears a close resemblance to Schleiermacher’s own theo-centric position. Barth’s theology however, from 1936 onwards, undergoes a radical christological revisioning of the earlier position. Gockel begins his survey and assessment of Schleiermacher by turning to Schleiermacher’s revision of the doctrine in his 1819 essay, ‘On the Doctrine of Election’. Gockel helpfully, albeit briefly, situates Schleiermacher’s early contribution on election in the context of the ecclesiastical union between the Lutheran and Reformed churches in Prussia in 1817. Central to the preceding union were the debates over the Lord’s Supper and the doctrine of election. The crucial point over the latter concerned ‘the indispensability of divine grace for … conversion and the question whether human beings can accept or resist God’s grace by their own free choice’ (p. 18). Schleiermacher’s most creative contribution to the discussion was his notion of an undivided and unconditional ‘single divine will and decree which effects [both] faith and unbelief’ (p. 26). He argues that the older paradigm of a two-fold divine will of election and reprobation is ‘as meaningless as the question why God made human beings in the way they were made’ (p. 29). The elect, Schleiermacher contends, are those who are ‘regenerated and begin their religious self-development’ (p. 30). While the remainder of persons are for now spiritually dead and ‘not yet members of the kingdom of God’ (p. 34) they are included in God’s love and so ‘they never loose the ability to be revived’ (p. 30). Gockel notes that the notion of the single decree ‘emphasises the unity of the divine attributes and helps to clarify key issues not only in the debate over election but also in the doctrine of God’ (p. 34).

Schleiermacher’s revision of the doctrine of election, articulated in the 1819 essay, is more fully developed in his Der christliche Glaube (1821–22) within the bounds of a single divine decree of universal predestination to salvation in Christ, and systematically located in ecclesiology. Gockel notes that the starting-point of the discussion of election, for Schleiermacher, is the ‘dilemma that arises from the simultaneous existence of believers and non-believers, on the one hand, and the benevolent divine will towards all human beings in Christ’s redemptive work, on the other hand’ (p. 101). Schleiermacher’s response is to insist that the ‘divine will is identical with the work of redemption in and through the person of Christ’ (p. 100).

Schleiermacher rejects any idea of two separate foreordained groups of persons – a double-predestination – and the notion that one group might be eternally excluded from the benefits of Christ’s work. Such ideas, he maintains, betray the general character of redemption and the universal mission of the church. God has one will, and that will is identical with who God is, and what God does in Jesus Christ. Humanity – believers and unbelievers alike – are the object of God’s predestinating will of salvation in Christ. Despite the temporary reprobation of some, ‘God sees all human beings, not only the believers, in Christ’ (p. 102). In light of this reality, the church is called to live, order its life after, and bear universal witness to, the divine decision.

Gockel concludes his examination of Schleiermacher by noting that despite Schleiermacher’s christologically-motivated affirmation of general redemption and rejection of eternal reprobation, his overall construction remains theocentric: ‘it is grounded in the belief in God the almighty creator, even though ecclesiology is its context and christology its background’ (p. 103).