‘Kierkegaard insisted that “Christendom” rested on two lies: it domensticated Christianity to wordliness and then interpreted the absence of all persecution of the faith as progress. “The fact is,” he said, “that there is nothing to persecute”‘. (Walter Shenk, Write the Vision: The Church Renewed (Valley Forge: Trinity Press International, 1995), 17)
‘Half-Gospels have no dignity, and no future. Like the famous mule, they have neither pride of ancestry nor hope of posterity. We must make it clear that Christianity faces the world with terms, and does not simply suffuse it with a glow; that it crucifies the world, and does not merely consecrate it; that it recreates and does not just soothe or cheer it; that it is life from the dead, and not simply bracing for the weak or comfort for the sad.’ Peter T. Forsyth, The Church and the Sacraments (London: Independent Press, 1947), 18.
‘Ethics does not … teach us what we should do, but rather what we may do. It measures the scope of freedom. In the light of exemplary situations it reflects … upon the question of what it means to live in freedom and with the gift of forgiveness in the midst of all the entangling autonomisms, all the conflicts of values and constellations of interests, and all the actual circumstances of this aeon that seek to determine us. It shows us how the prodigal son lives after he has forsaken the servitude of the far country and after he has outgrown the virtuous legalism of the brother who remained at home.’ – Helmut Thielicke, The Freedom of the Christian Man: A Christian confrontation with the Secular Gods (trans. J. W. Doberstein; New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 157.
It’s been a day of gathering loose ends. I completed a draft of a short paper on Forsyth and Ibsen that I will read at the FEET conference in August. I have been transferring various scribbles made on scrap paper kept next to my pillow into a more user-friendly form. I have been reading Thielicke’s The Freedom of a Christian Man. His chapter on casuistry is great. Thielicke notes that one of the reasons for Protestantism’s emphatic rejection of casuistry is because of the evangelical doctrine of justification and its polemic against the law, or, more specifically, its anti-legalistic understanding of righteousness. The same ought to be said for Protestantism’s rejection of perfectionism. Certainly Forsyth was keen to divorce perfection from any idea of law keeping. Standing well within the Reformation tradition, Forsyth’s thinking here was in line with Romans 3:28, ‘For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law’.
What I haven’t done is tidy up a very messy desk … though that seems more like a Friday job anyway.
I’ve also been reflecting over recent days on the poem ‘Hound of Heaven’ by Francis Thompson (1859-1907), who was familiar to Forsyth. Indeed, Forsyth picked up the phrase in the title as one of his descriptions of grace. It reminds me of Vincent Donavan’s rich image of God as a lion who hunts us down, used in Christianity Rediscovered – one of my favourite books. For those unfamiliar with Thompson’s poem, you can read it all here. Here’s a bit as a taster though:
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbèd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat — and a voice beat
More instant than the Feet —
“All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.”
I have just discovered that the word ‘to search’ comes from a C14th old French word cerchier and from a Latin word, circare, which means ‘to go about, wander, traverse.’ It’s also the word from which we get our word for circus. It led me to think of how search engines serve (at least) 2 purposes: (i) help us to find something we are looking for, and (ii) send us on endless timewasting circare.
Relieved that God’s seeking of humanity is of the former sort, i.e. that he is the God who hunts us down, pounces on us, and clasps us to his breast, transforming us and setting us free in the process, I am equally revlieved to know that there is no epistemological bridge built by humanity to God. Using Luther’s image, the ladder of revelation only works in one direction – downwards. For Forsyth, the question is never one of whether we can know God, but rather whether we realise that our knowledge of him is not only personal, he captures us, but reciprocal – a function of his knowledge of us. Christianity is not about knowing God so much as it is about being known by him. Indeed, ‘revelation takes effect in us, not as an act of insight, but only as an experience of being redeemed.’
As Barth would put it, ‘God is known by God and by God alone.’ Or in Forsyth’s words, ‘the main thing, the unique thing, in religion is not a God Whom we know but a God Who knows us. Religion turns not on knowing but on being known. The knowledge in religion is not absolute knowledge but the knowledge that we are absolutely known, in the sense of being both destined, sought, and searched.’ It was Tom Torrance who reminded us that we can only know God in his self-objectification for us, not by seeking non-objective knowledge of him.
As Forsyth put it: ‘Herein is thought, not that we think God, but that He thought us.’
There is something better than seeking. It is being found … and that by the great search engine himself.
Over at Biblical Foundations, Andreas Kostenberger has a post on Adolf Schlatter as a model of biblical scholarship and theology. I reproduce it hear because Schlatter was an important influence on Forsyth. His book, The Theology of the Apostles, recently published by Baker, is a fantastic read and an excellent model of biblical theology. Too many of his perceptive insights have been ignored.
Adolf Schlatter: A Model of Scholarship
One of my scholarly and personal heroes is Adolf Schlatter. At a time when Adolf Harnack espoused his liberalism, and Rudolf Bultmann eclectically appropriated David Friedrich Strauss’s mythological approach and Martin Heidegger’s existentialism, Schlatter stood firm in his advocacy of a biblical-theological, salvation-historical reading of the Bible and a high view of Scripture.
In the foreword to The History of the Christ in 1920, Schlatter wrote, “The knowledge of Jesus is the foremost, indispensable centerpiece of New Testament theology.” This stands in marked contract to Rudolf Bultmann, who opened his famous two-volume New Testament Theology thus: “The message of Jesus is a presupposition for the theology of the New Testament rather than a part of that theology itself.”
In his approach to hermeneutics, Schlatter was ahead of his time and uttered timeless principles such as these:
It is the historical objective that should govern our conceptual work exclusively and completely, stretching our perceptive faculties to the limit. We turn away decisively from ourselves and our time to what was found in the men through whom the church came into being. Our main interest should be the thought as it was conceived by them and the truth that was valid for them. We want to see and obtain a thorough grasp of what happened historically and existed in another time. This is the internal disposition upon which the success of the work depends, the commitment which must consistently be renewed as the work proceeds. (History of the Christ, 18)
In a day when interpretation increasingly becomes an exercise in reader response, or when texts are said to have a life of their own apart from the intentions of the author who willed them into being, Schlatter’s hermeneutic of perception, that is, of perceive listening and apprehension of the words of another, speaks a powerful message. Much of the contemporary interpretive confusion arising from undue subjectivism could be avoided if Schlatter’s words were heeded.
Also timeless if Schlatter’s emphasis on Jesus as the center of the biblical message read as a whole. This conviction is fleshed out compellingly in his 2-volume New Testament Theology, entitled respectively, The History of the Christ and The Theology of the Apostles. It also underlies Schlatter’s final work, a devotional called Do We Know Jesus? which he wrote in his old age during the last year of his life.
In this his final work, the 85 year-old Schlatter penned the following words, just shortly before the outbreak of World War II:
Do we know Jesus? If we no longer know him, we no longer know ourselves. For in our ancestral line, he is at work with unrivaled power. Compared to him, what is a Hildebrand become one with his sword, or a Krimhild burning with passionate lust? The condition of our inner lives and of our national community proves that the things Jesus built into this world are both present and at work among us. This is not obscured even by the numerous antichrists among us. For precisely when they, with blazing wrath, seek to suppress any memory of Jesus, their thoughts and intentions are inevitably shaped by the One they combat as their enemy.
It is on account of this raw courage, and this power of prophetic insight, that Schlatter, though dead, still speaks to us today and challenges us to engage in a hermeneutic of perceptive insight and humble confidence, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith.
For material on Schlatter see his two-volume theology, The History of the Christ and The Theology of the Apostles (Baker, 1997 and 1998). See also his biblical theology presented in devotional form, Do We Know Jesus? Daily Insights for the Mind and Soul (Kregel, 2005); and “Schlatter Reception Then and Now: His New Testament Theology (Part 1),” Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 3/1 (Spring 1999): 40–51.
Ben Myers, over at Faith and Theology, has posted a great post by Kim Fabricus on preaching. Well worth checking out. On a related note, here’s a list of points that Forsyth makes about the authority over (or source of) the Bible.
1. There is something authoritative for the Bible itself.
2. It is not something which comes up to it from without like the scientific methods of the Higher Criticism. To make that supreme would be rationalism.
3. It is something which is in the Bible itself, provided by it, and provided nowhere else. We must go back to the Bible with modern scholarship to find what the Bible goes back to.
4. It is not truths extracted from the Bible and guaranteed by prophecy and miracle. That is the antiquated supernaturalism with its doctrinaire orthodoxy.
5. In a word, that is over the Bible which is over the Church and the Creeds. It is the Gospel of Grace, which produced Bible, Creed, and Church alike. And by the Gospel is meant primarily God’s act of pure Grace for men, and only secondarily the act of men witnessing it for God in a Bible or a Church.
6. The Gospel was an experienced fact, a free, living, preached Word long before it was a fixed and written Word – as was the case also with the prophets.
7. It is not enough to say the authority in the Bible is Christ unless you are clear whether you mean the character of Christ or His Gospel. All admit Christ’s character to be a product of God’s action; is the same true of Christ’s Gospel?
8. To apply the Gospel of Grace as the standard of the Bible is to go higher than the Higher Criticism. It is the highest. The Gospel is not merely the final test of the Bible, but its supreme source; and the Bible is its humble vassal to be treated in any way that best obeys and serves it. The security of the Gospel gives us our critical freedom.
9. The Bible is not merely a record of the revelation. It is part of it. It is more true that God’s great Word contains the Bible than that the Bible contains the Word. The Word in Christ needed exposition by the Bible. The Gospels find their only central interpretation in the Epistles.
10. The Bible is not so much a document as a sacrament. It is not primarily a voucher for the historian but a preacher for the soul. The Christ of the Gospels even is not a biographical
Christ, so much as a preached Christ. The Bible is not so much a record of Christ as a record and a part of the preaching about Christ, which was the work of the Spirit and the apostles. There is no real collision between the Christ of the Gospels and the Christ of the Epistles. The apostles, and especially Paul, moved by the heavenly Christ, form an essential part of Christ’s revelation of God’s grace.
11. It was a theological Gospel, though not authoritative as dogma but as living, personal revelation. The Christian experience must cast itself more or less in the forms of its historic origin, and not merely in those of human relations and affections. E.g., Christian sonship is not natural, or even spiritual, but evangelical; it is the sonship of adoption. So conversely with the Fatherhood of God.
12. This subordination of the Bible to the Gospel was the relation felt by Jesus Himself. He used His Bible for its Gospel, not for its information – as a means of grace, and not as a manual of Hebrew history. That is, He read His Bible as a whole. He commits us not to the whole Bible but to the Bible as a whole. The Bible is not a compendium of facts, historic or theological, but the channel of redeeming grace. Faith is something more than the historic sense dealing with documents. It is the moral and spiritual sense dealing with revelation as Redemption.
13. The appeal of the Bible is not to the faith of the individual but to that of the whole Church, which is the other great product of the Gospel. My dullness or disbelief does not affect the witness of the saints, classic or common, in every Church and age.
14. In the Church the Bible becomes more than a product of the Word. It is a producer of it in turn. It generates the faith that generated it. As the greatest of preachers it produces preachers. And it is at home only in a Church whose first duty to men is to preach.
15. The detachment of faith from the Bible and from its daily use marks both Romanism and the religiosity of the modern mind.
16. The disuse of the Bible by Christians is due to a vague sense of insecurity rising from critical work on it, and to the extravagant claims made for it which criticism prunes.
17. The Christian creed has really but one article, great with all the rest. It is the Gospel of God’s redeeming Grace in Christ. The charter of the Church is not the Bible, but Redemption. Those words of Christ are prime revelation to us, and of first obligation, which carry home to us the redeeming grace incarnate in His person and mission.
18. The Higher Criticism has been a great blessing, but it has gone too far alone, i.e., without final reference to the highest, the synthetic standard of the Bible – the Gospel of Grace. What we need, to give us the real historic contents of the Bible, is not a history of the Religion of Israel, but of Redemption – with all the light the Higher Criticism can shed on it, and much more that it cannot.
19. Christianity will not stand or fall by its attitude to its documents, but by its attitude to its Gospel and to the soul.
20. The Free Churches have yet to face the spiritual problem created for them by the collapse of an inerrant Bible and the failure of an authoritative Church. And the only key lies in the authority of that grace which called them into being as the true heirs of the Reformation, the trustees of the Evangelical tradition, and the chief witnesses of the Holy Spirit of our Redemption.
(Taken from PT Forsyth, The Church, the Gospel and Society (London: Independent Press, 1962): 67-70)
Here’s the results from the latest poll on Forsyth’s greatest influences. As I mentioned here, I would have loved to have added another 4-5 names but was limited to just 5. Anselm, Butler, Calvin, Nietzsche, Newman, Schopenhauer, Ritschl, Goethe, von Harnack, Ibsen, Kierkegaard, and Wagner woudl have all been worthy contenders. The inclusion of Hegel was as an anti-influence, i.e. someone Forsyth’s writings are engaging with all the time. The results were:
Luther (33%)
Goodwin (0%)
Hegel (22%)
Kant (33%)
Schleiermacher (11%)
Bit sad Goodwin got no votes. I think he deserved more than 0%, but that’s statistics for you.
I’m not sure that Forsyth had the World Cup in mind when he wrote ‘Justice may be satisfied with penalty: but the only satisfaction to holiness is holiness.’ But he might have had something at least similar when he asked in a 1913 sermon, ‘What is to protect us from that antisocial passion for sport and pleasure, for instance, which is breeding gamblers and bleeding citizenship, which throngs to football but cannot be dragged to vote?’ If he had only watched the Aussie game last night. Go Aussies!!! oi oi oi.
First, here’s what I’ve been reflecting on today. Two Forsyth quotes:
‘The supreme task for the last reality, if it be holy, is to assert and secure itself against the last challenge of it. It is to cope with moral evil, which is its absolute antithesis and mortal foe. If man can do that he is his own reality and his own God. If he cannot, his only footing is in the God who can – who indeed must, or He is not God.’ (PT Forsyth, The Principle of Authority, 185)
‘Faith can be confounded only if God fail.’ (PT Forsyth, The Principle of Authority, 350)
Next, the latest IJST is out and includes some promising articles:
‘Karl Barth’s Christology as a Resource for a Reformed Version of Kenoticism’, by Bruce Mccormack
‘Violence in Bloomsbury: A Theological Challenge’, by Oliver Davies
‘Accommodation to What? Univocity of Being, Pure Nature, and the Anthropology of St Irenaeus’, by Hans Boersma
‘The Trinity, Election and God’s Ontological Freedom: A Response to Kevin W. Hector’, by Paul Molnar
‘Actualism and Incarnation: The High Christology of Friedrich Schleiermacher’, by Kevin Hector
There’s also some interesting reviews, including one that I reproduce here by Peter Manley Scott on Kelly and Nelson’s book on Moral leadership in Bonheoffer.
Geoffrey B. Kelly and F. Burton Nelson, The Cost of Moral Leadership: The Spirituality of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003, xvii + 300pp.
What is to be done with Bonhoeffer’s literary legacy? In this excellent book, Kelly and Nelson give an emphatic answer: by his writings, Bonhoeffer is to be taken as a political theologian. By concentrating on his exercise of moral leadership, and his criticism of the leadership failures of others, Kelly and Nelson re-contextualize Bonhoeffer’s theology into the example of his life. In other words, Bonhoeffer is a political theologian with a difference: Kelly and Nelson narrate his efforts at responsible church leadership in a crisis situation by attending to the interaction between Bonhoeffer’s theological work and his free decisions. As Bonhoeffer noted in one of his last letters, it is example that gives words their power. Kelly and Nelson implicitly take this as a hermeneutical clue for their splendid presentation of Bonhoeffer: no abstracted theology, no thoughtless leadership but instead the highly intelligent work of being a disciple in a politically dangerous situation in which the truth of the gospel is at stake and responsible action is required; political theology in the service of Christ.
Furthermore, they make insightful suggestions about an additional recontextualization: how such an example of moral leadership might inform and criticise the moral leadership currently being practised by the Western churches. Thus an abiding subtext of the book is the failures in moral leadership in our present-day churches. Put positively, ‘It is not surprising that students of Bonhoeffer’s thought today see so many parallels in his challenges to the churches of Germany and their own churches’ efforts to promote peace, justice and liberation among the people they represent and among those who have no one to speak up for them’ (p. 148).
The organizing principle of the book is thematic rather than chronological. After an opening chapter that offers an account of Bonhoeffer’s life, the remaining chapters imaginatively explore aspects of Bonhoeffer’s spirituality. The commitment to justice or to peace, siding with the poor and the oppressed, following the way of the cross, living in church community: these are among the aspects discussed by Kelly and Nelson. The sources from which this presentation is drawn are mostly Bonhoeffer’s more theological writings; however, the two final chapters draw extensively on Bonhoeffer’s sermons and poems. Much of this discussion will be familiar to those who have read widely in Bonhoeffer and know the biography by Eberhard Bethge. Nonetheless, arranging the material thematically and concentrating on the matter of leadership does serve to highlight the convergence of discipleship and responsible action in Bonhoeffer’s life and thought. Additionally, we get a clearer sense of the resources – prayer, reading the Bible, community, family – on which Bonhoeffer himself drew. Through all this, there may also be a tendency to abstract Bonhoeffer a little from his context: the moral leadership of his contemporaries in the Confessing Church is not discussed in detail; when Bonhoeffer is compared to other Christian leaders, the ones selected are Romero and King. Martyrdom – to which I shall return – thereby emerges as an important theme. Moreover, there are some theological surprises: for example, Kelly and Nelson argue for the importance of the Spirit in Bonhoeffer’s theology. Indeed, it may be the case that attention to the path of discipleship allows a clearer view of the pneumatological dimension of Bonhoeffer’s work. Whether Bonhoeffer’s theology may be described as adequately trinitarian, and how some of his theological judgements might be altered if developed in a trinitarian direction, are questions worth pursuing, although they do not receive attention in this book. Nonetheless, this is a well-researched, creative, beautifully written, thought-provoking and moving presentation of Bonhoeffer as Christian radical.
I mentioned earlier that the organization of this book is thematic rather than chronological. There is one sense in which this is not true. That is, the book hinges upon an assessment of Bonhoeffer’s decision to participate in the assassination plots against Hitler. It is not quite clear when Bonhoeffer makes this decision but certainly by 1940 he is involved in working in support of the resistance movement in Germany. The nature of Bonhoeffer’s pacifism up to that point, and his change of heart regarding the absoluteness of his pacifism, are carefully documented in chapter 5. As it is this decision to enter into the conspiracy that lead to his arrest and execution, and also to an increasing distance from the Confessing Church, the issue of moral leadership is here presented in its most intensive form. Is it truly an exercise in moral leadership to make such a decision? Perhaps the determination to answer this question in the affirmative accounts for the boldness of the writing of this book. This apparent defence of Bonhoeffer’s decision, and therefore an acceptance of Bonhoeffer’s change of mind as moral development, is important for the case being made regarding Bonhoeffer’s relevance for us. As already noted, the authors wish to make a connection between Bonhoeffer’s moral leadership and the quality of moral leadership exercised today. To what extent, then, is Bonhoeffer’s example to be imitated? One move made by Kelly and Nelson is to relate his position to the current ‘war on terrorism’, specifically the attack on Afghanistan by the USA in 2001. In that Bonhoeffer appealed to the moral consideration of self-defence in defence of war, Kelly and Nelson appeal to the USA’s right of self-defence in the face of terrorist attack and thereby grant moral approval to the invasion of Afghanistan. (They also provide an excellent assessment of the moral basis of US actions at home and abroad; I am tempted to say that pp. 115–28 are a ‘must read’ for those concerned with Christian moral leadership today.)
Of course what must be persuasive here is the similarity of the Allies’ response to Nazi Germany in terms of self-defence with the US attack on Afghanistan (and, later, Iraq) in terms of self-defence. Are these two acts of self-defence comparable? On the second occasion, does self-defence require attack, or may it also support a different course of action? Was the attack by the US on Afghanistan truly motivated by a desire, of which Bonhoeffer would have approved, ‘to liberate the innocent from terror and death’ (p. 118)? To clinch their case, Kelly and Nelson quote Jean Bethke Elshtain: ‘If evil is permitted to grow, good goes into hiding.’ In its lack of precision and caution this strikes me as a very un-Bonhoefferean comment.
Moreover, almost any action could be justified in its light. After all, who apart from the depraved wants good to go into hiding? Moreover, we may ask why Bonhoeffer’s pacifism is now rescinded in favour of a critique based on the provisional defence of war? The analysis provides no answer. Yet for the comparison to work we need some account of how terrorist groups are like the Nazi state.
I have one further, related, misgiving. Can Bonhoeffer do no wrong? In this employment of Bonhoeffer as witness for all moral seasons, I fear that there is a subtle pressure to ‘instrumentalize’ his theology. By this means, the creativity of his theology is overstated also. This pressure can be seen in the theological as well as the ethical discussion. For example, Kelly and Nelson maintain that in his 1933 Christology lectures Bonhoeffer did not wish his students to get ‘bogged down in the heavy theological analyses of how the incarnation of the Word of God was possible’ (p. 38). Yet Bonhoeffer is also reported as maintaining the filioque as an important theological protocol against Nazi investment in the false construal of the orders of creation as predating the Word made flesh (p. 73). Is there not some inconsistency here: please do not worry about incarnation but, hey, we need to maintain the filioque! Moreover, are there not questions to be asked of the filioque itself: is there no other theological way of refusing the Nazification of the orders of creation and is the filioque still to be defended today?
That is, against instrumentalization, is it not at least plausible that his theology will need to be developed to engage issues such as the war on terrorism in a period of the West’s military and economic hegemony in a new, global context? Would not this be the only appropriate way to honour Bonhoeffer’s commitment to concretion in moral deliberation? Perhaps such development is what might be done with Bonhoeffer’s literary legacy. After the celebrations in 2006 to mark the centennial anniversary of Bonhoeffer’s birth would this not be a suitable issue to which Bonhoeffer scholarship might turn?
I just came across this great little devotional piece by my old theology professor in Australia. Read on…
– ‘The dignity, the very dignity of man himself is better assured if he were broken upon the maintenance of that holiness of God than if it were put aside arbitrarily, just to let him off with his life. This holy order is as essential to man’s greatness as it is to God’s; and that is why the holy satisfaction Christ made to God’s holiness is in the same act the glorifier of the new humanity. Any religion which leaves out of supreme count the judging holiness of God is making a great contribution to the degradation of man. We need a religion which decides the eternal destiny of man; and unless holiness were practically and adequately established – not merely recognised and eulogised, but established – there could be no real, deep, permanent change in the world or the sinner. The change in the treatment of us by eternal grace must rest on judgment taking effect. Man is not forgiven simply by forgetting and mending, by agreeing that no more is to be said about it. To make little of sin is to belittle the holiness of God; and from a reduced holiness no salvation could come, nor could human dignity remain.’ (P T Forsyth, The Work of Christ, 128-9)
‘Everything that enhances the native purity of man, that extenuates his sin, that diminishes his guilt, and sets over him but a kind father, really belittles his greatness. Man can only have huge guilt because capable of great things (Matt. vi. 23). It is a tremendous power to be capable of sin against God. It betokens, as nothing else but holiness can do, the greatness of the soul, and its place and its issues.’ (P T Forsyth, Missions in State and Church, 32)
Writing in 1918, Forsyth said, ‘I doubt if in all its history Anglicanism ever felt the same self-searching as it does now.’ (P.T. Forsyth, Congregationalism and Reunion: Two Lectures. London: Independent Press, 1952, 63). I’m not sure that Rowan Williams would agree, nor Forsyth anymore … The times they are a changin’ …
‘Nothing we experience can secure us on the rock of spiritual reality, or fix us on the last foundation of being, till we experience the Gospel as God’s utmost with man’s worst, the Gospel of Redemption by gracious judgment. We are saved hardly … True spirituality is not the highest stage of the blossoming world, but it is the world beaten, broken, and led captive. It stands not on the world’s development, but on a break with the world, the inroad of a new life in a new kind.’ (P.T. Forsyth, The Church, The Gospel and Society, 98-99)
The talks from the New Creation Teaching Ministry Summer School are now available to listen to or download online here. I know what I’ll be listening to for a few weeks now. Also, Don Carson has a review of 3 books on Scripture (by N.T. Wright, John Webster, and Peter Enns) available to read online here. It’s a lengthy article but well worth the read. And, of course, after yesterday’s game – GO AUSSIE! Bring on Brazil … (or is that just a little cocky!)
In this final post of this series, I simply want to make some concluding comments. Thanks for the feedback/thoughts I’ve received, particularly from Chris TerryNelson who looks after the Karl Barth Society website.
So here goes the final post in this series:
The long-lasting debate between Brunner and Barth, enmeshed in the broader and more fundamental issues of grace and nature, Gospel and law, and love and wrath, reveals that we are left with either an immanent-structural or a transcendent-relational understanding of what it means to be a human person. The choice, therefore, is between a rational-Unitarian or a Christological-Trinitarian understanding of human personhood. I consider that human personhood, both theologically and existentially, makes no sense apart from the Triune God in whose Image we are made.
With Brunner, I maintain that there is a moral element to the imago Dei, for since the Fall, as before, the imago lives in the demand of the Law. For although no-one has kept the Law (Rom. 3:23), God’s redemptive purposes remain unthwarted and unfrustrated (Jn. 3:16). However, there is no redemption outside Jesus Christ. In Him, every demand of the Law is met, and in Him the imago Dei is again a fulfilled reality. Barth was right to interpret Genesis 1:26 in terms of Christ. The imago Dei is the imago Christi (2 Cor. 4:4; Col. 1:15) and the imago Christi is an imago Dei mediated through the person of Christ. Barth states,
He was man as we are. His condition was no different from ours. He took our flesh, the nature of man as he comes from the fall … His sinlessness was not therefore His condition. It was the act of His being in which He defeated temptation in His condition which is ours, in the flesh … He emptied Himself … placing Himself in the series of men who rebelled against God in their delusion … In so doing, in His own person, He reversed the fall in their place and for their sake.
In Him, God draws near to fallen humanity freely offering the restoration of that relationship of obedience and service that is simultaneously the demand of the Law and the essence of the imago Dei. In Christ we are offered that which we can never achieve – the reversal of the Fall! The question of the imago Dei, therefore, can only be satisfactorily answered when it is brought into the theological arena of the doctrine of justification by faith (Phil. 3:9; cf. Rom. 3:22; 4:11; 9:30; 10:3, 10; 2 Cor. 5:21). Because of this righteousness, which has its origin in the righteous act of Christ, and comes to the believer as a gift (Rom. 5:17-19), those in Christ are justified. They become, always by grace, ‘new creatures’ (2 Cor. 5:17) and this ‘new man’ is one who is ‘after the image of him that created him’ (Col. 3:10). Hence, justification by faith and restoration of the imago are correlative terms. As T. F. Torrance affirms,
It is in Christ that we can really see that the original purpose of the works of God in creation is to reflect and image his glory … It is only in Jesus Christ, who is both the image and the reality of God, that we can think and speak of God in such a realist way that our human forms are not an empty shell but are filled from above with the Truth of God.
This means that the imago Dei is never an inherent possession, capacity or potentiality of the human creature but rather is always the gift of God through the Holy Spirit.
The issue revolves around the question of whether or not fallen humanity, dead in its sins, has a capacity for revelation and redemption; not in the material sense that we have anything other than our sinful and fallen life to bring to God, or indeed our rebellion and repeated attempts to put God to death – not, therefore, the capacity which the acorn has to become an oak, but rather, as Hart puts it, ‘the capacity which a gnarled and twisted piece of timber has to become – only through the creative fashioning skills of the woodworker or artist – something beautiful and pleasing to the eye’.
I consider that Barth, notwithstanding his strong denials, cannot, as long as he adheres to a doctrine of Incarnation or to the belief that God has revealed Himself to humans, avoid positing a point of contact in this second, carefully qualified, sense. The Holy Spirit may well be the ‘subjective possibility’ or ‘condition of revelation’; but He comes, as such, to fallen humanity who, while dead in their trespasses and sins, nonetheless are capable of being acted upon by Him in this redemptive and creative manner. This makes no claim for any inherent ability in the human creature to respond to God (it is the ‘Yes’ of the Man Jesus who vicariously responds for us). However, I consider that whatever Brunner thought of it, the distinction between a formal and a material imago Dei in fallen humanity, providing there is no split in the imago, is one which not only provides a very useful framework for discussion, but is something which Barth himself cannot ultimately avoid, although he never addresses it satisfactorily. And so the imago Dei in the human creature, although distorted, remains a ‘point of contact’ not because of our innate disposition but because of the Incarnation of the Word.
Humanity has certainly taken its inheritance, wished the Father dead, broken horizontal ties with sisters and brothers, and run away from home. But the imago Dei is not dead, however distorted, perverted and existentially, although never ontologically, uprooted from its Source. The imago Dei is a sinner. The imago Dei is a sinner. The imago Dei has robbed God. As Barth says, in the Fall, God is ‘deserted and denied by men; He suffers and is robbed. Sin is robbing God of what He is’. Also, as Brunner helpfully reminds us, ‘It is as a whole that a person commits sin; this is not due to some part of the personality. I am a sinner, not this or that aspect of my nature’. Sin, furthermore, has brought contradiction into the being of the human person: ‘not simply “something contradictory” in man, but … a contradiction of the whole man against the whole man, a division within man himself’.
Although sin is a devastating problem for humanity, and so for the creation (because humanity functions as creation’s priest), it is death that is the greatest dilemma. Yes, sin infects the human race. Yes, sin makes our goggles dirty so that we can’t see clearly, and yes, it makes our ears full of wax so that we can’t hear clearly, and even mishear, but death is humanity’s antithesis because it ‘makes clear the relationship of man to God – the negative, broken relationship under judgement’.
The divine warning to ‘the man’ was not, ‘for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely become a sinner’, but, ‘in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die’ (Gen. 2:17). Even if sin is forgiven, the forgiveness remains null and void apart from resurrection (1 Cor. 15:17). It is nothing short of resurrection from the dead, resurrection in the man Jesus and His own triumph over death, which restores the imago Dei into life, and that ever in Christ. This is the great ex nihilo which refuses to allow the human creature to be nothing more than a sinner. While sin leaves no part of human nature uncorrupted, the ex nihilo protects human nature from becoming inhuman nature. This is because the essential nature of being human remains under the determination of God, not of sin. The dignity of the human creature cannot be relinquished or destroyed, thanks to the presence of God through which human persons continue to witness to Him even in their ‘condition of darkness and estrangement from the Source of [their] life.’ Before the new creation is consummated, opposition remains, but grace wins – that grace which lays the axe at the root of the whole of human existence and slays us so that we might be made alive! Anderson reasons this is because ‘even the disorder of human being through sin does not destroy the covenant basis on which the human exists. Indeed, the covenant becomes even more explicit as the gracious provision by which human life is supported’.
The only validity and hope of the imago Dei’s ontological existence and telos lies in God. So we live, with veiled faces, in faith, hope and love, and in the process we experience what it means to be human. We live, here and now, in the completed work-in-progress of the Cross–Resurrection experiencing ourselves as accepted and whole. Ultimately, the concept of the imago Dei is an eschatological one. It is our God-given destiny, and as such the implications for our understanding of ethics, relationships, and the church, indeed all of life, are enormous.
In this 6th (and second last post) in this series, I will seek to outline what I consider to be the main…
Limitations in Brunner’s and Barth’s positions
Although I appreciate the rich contributions that Brunner and Barth make in our search into the nature of the imago Dei, I hesitate to embrace some of their assertions:
1. Brunner concedes that it is a ‘very difficult theological task’ to formulate the ‘distinction between the nature of man in accordance with Creation and as sinner, and the idea which this involves of the Fall of Man, without using the thought-form of an historical “Adam in Paradise” and of the Primitive State’. He and Barth deny the historical Fall, which does two things. First, it means that they don’t have to deal with the question of iustitia originalis. Brunner argues that this is an eschatological, rather than historical, concept. And second, it repudiates Pauline teaching about the first Adam, and so raises serious doubts about the historicity of the second Adam, while leaving the issues of creation and fall ‘without historical moorings’. In Romans 5:12–21 Paul contrasts the condemnation we receive through the Fall of the first Adam with the righteousness we receive through the obedience of the second Adam. If, however, the first Adam was merely figurative or symbolic, how can we be certain that the second Adam, to whom Paul refers in the same passage, is not also figurative or symbolic? If the first head never existed, what becomes of Paul’s argument? With Käsemann, I would want to affirm that,
Adam is for [Paul] a historic personage and not just the mythological personification of every human being. Typology fundamentally presupposes history. The world and history of the first Adam stand over against those of the last, and are overcome by the latter.
Barth is so committed to his position that one wonders if the Fall really makes any difference at all in the human creature’s ability to receive revelation from God. Because of his perspective on redemption as the sustaining and keeping work of God, the distinction between pre-Fall and post-Fall plays no role in his theology. There are strengths and weaknesses here. To deny Barth what he wants to affirm here would be to return to a concept of the creation independent of and preceding the ‘needy’ creature who must be kept against the threat of chaos. It would mean that the Fall comes to stand as an independent and unconnected incident in history. And further, it would highlight God’s reaction to sin over His faithfulness in spite of sin. However, I believe that Brunner and Barth can do no justice to the distinction between creation and sin at all, unless they first accept the idea of creation and the Fall in the historical sense of the terms. But they do not do so. This does not mean, however, that they do not take seriously the theological truth of the Fall, and so humanity’s present sinfulness. Quite the opposite! Furthermore, they both want to maintain that human beings today are not in the same state or condition they once were, but neither of them is very clear about how and when that changed.
So, far from being the first great tragedy in the Bible’s meta-narrative, the Fall becomes necessary, and evil is simply a transition in the dialectical process. The prodigal’s journey to the far country is ‘a necessary dialectical detour on the way home … We arrive at the synthesis by way of the antithesis’.
2. Brunner insists that the imago Dei in the formal sense has been retained despite human sinfulness: we still remain beings answerable to God, even when we give God the wrong answer. My concern here is that for Brunner the formal image has content: freedom, reason, conscience, and language. Is it then correct to say that this formal image has been completely retained? Has it been retained in its full integrity? Has not sin also affected this formal image, in the sense that human reason, conscience, and freedom have also been corrupted and perverted by sin?
Further, while Brunner, after Irenaeus, John of Damascus and Aquinas, tries to contend with the aspect of being both human and sinner simultaneously through his distinction of the formal and material image, and in as much as he goes further than the scholastic tradition by introducing categories of reason and responsibility in actual horizontal relationships, in effect he splits the imago Dei into two in an effort to counter the conclusion that the human creature is entirely the imago Dei or entirely a sinner simultaneously.
Barth on the other hand, though critical of Brunner’s split, seems to fall into the same trap. He wants to maintain that the imago Dei has been lost in the human creature to the extent that he/she is unable to hear and respond positively to divine revelation, while affirming that some semblance of the image remains in the male–female duality, and yet he wants to say that human beings are a copy of the prototype – Christ. Yet when he comes to describe the nature of the imago Christi, he splits Christ’s essence into a formal ‘inner sphere’ and a material ‘outer sphere’.
Barth’s anthropology, like many other aspects of his theology, is difficult to identify. On Barth’s basis, human beings have not lost the imago Dei because they have never possessed it. Barth begins with the Man Jesus. Only in communion with Jesus can people be made in the image of God. This is attractive because it seems to support the New Testament’s testimony. However, Barth goes further than the biblical testimony goes. Certainly, those in Christ are being renewed after the image of their Creator (Col. 3:10). However, we must also maintain that the primal couple were made in the imago Dei. God did not create them as neutral beings with only the capacity to be His image. This is the basis of the biblical idea of grace in Christ.
3. Barth correctly rejects natural theology. His negative criticism of the idea that human beings exist independently of their relation to God proceeds from a positive foundation: his Christology. According to Barth, we participate in Jesus’ humanity. He does not participate in ours. That is the important starting point. But if we read such passages as Philippians 2 and Hebrews 2, we see that the reverse is also maintained. Scripture speaks from the point of the actual fallen estate of humanity. It then speaks of the astounding fact that the Word became flesh among sinners. Barth, on the contrary, formulates his doctrine in the opposite direction. This is a limitation in his position. He says that we receive our nature wholly from Jesus because he wants to maintain that humanity’s nature is what it is primarily because of the grace-relation that it sustains with God through Christ. The essence of a human being is to be exclusively seen in the light of the a priori triumph of grace. And since the imago Dei is expressed in this relationship of grace in Christ, it cannot be destroyed.
4. Although both Brunner and Barth correctly identify the imago Dei with both vertical and horizontal koinonia and perichoresis, the structuring of their prospective arguments in terms of Buber’s ‘I-Thou’ is problematic. This is especially so for Brunner who does not begin with God’s intra-Trinitarian relations from eternity but with the creativity of the divine Word ad extra. The possibility of Unitarianism here means, for Brunner, that the intra-Trinitarian covenant relationships in which the imago Dei is created to participate, are in a sense foreign, even to God.
5. Brunner’s abandonment of theological realism leads not only to a conceptual vagueness about human nature, but also forces him to make some shocking statements. For example,
Without a certain measure of intellectual gifts it is impossible to be human. Without that mind which at its zenith is called genius, man cannot even understand the fact that he is man, and he cannot make decisions in the sense of personality. The mind, as we have already said, is the basis of being person. One does not need to have a great mind to be a person who truly believes and loves; but if one has no mind – as an idiot – one cannot even believe. The presupposition for the understanding of the Word of God is understanding in general, the understanding of words, in the general, purely human sense. What that poor creature which, in the extreme case, so far as we know, has not a spark of intelligence means in the Family of God, we do not know; we only know that it is inaccessible to the message of the Word of God, thus that in this life it cannot become a believer, because it cannot understand human speech. It is, however, more than probable that even the most vacant idiot can be approached in some way or another by real love, and thus is not without a glimmer of personal being. In spite of this, such cases are extreme instances, whose significance we cannot understand.
Here Brunner unequivocally disqualifies as persons those who lack the spiritual structure of self-conscious subjectivity – ‘personality’. Such ‘idiots’ are not called in this life to the fulfilment of personal being, to faith in God’s Word; for they are entirely without the responsible being presupposed by faith, without ‘calling’. On this view, faith gives particular content to the neutral structure of subjectivity. But then Brunner equivocates: ‘that poor creature which … so far as we know, has not a spark of intelligence’ belongs, supposedly, to ‘the Family of God’. Is not the ‘Family of God’ a community of persons? Do the boundaries of this community extend, for Brunner, beyond persons to nonpersonal creatures that are the objects of personal care and affection, for example, household pets, and does the ‘idiot’ belong to the ‘Family of God’ in this sense? Brunner professes not to know the meaning of the ‘idiot’ in the ‘Family of God’, and his agnosticism most likely indicates a reluctance to place the ‘idiot’ beyond ‘person’. This finds expression in the conclusion of this passage: ‘it is … more than probable that even the most vacant idiot … is not without a glimmer of personal being’. Does this ‘glimmer of personal being’ qualify the ‘idiot’ as person?
Brunner also excludes the very young from this structure of humanness: ‘The specifically human element in man is not there from the very outset – in the infant or even in the embryo, in the fertilized ovum – but it develops in connection with and in a certain parallel to bodily and psycho-physical development’.
This view of Brunner’s produces obvious theological and ethical problems not only concerning infants and people with intellectual disabilities, but also those in a coma and those suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. If the actual capacities of which Brunner speaks are the indispensable evidence of true humanness, and if humanness is the necessary condition of grace, then Barth’s criticism of Brunner’s works-righteousness is undoubtedly justified.
6. Any view of the imago Dei as purely relational, and therefore purely formal (i.e. the capacity for confrontation and encounter), is an inadequate reproduction of the biblical data. Surely the imago Dei is more than a mere capacity. Are not Satan and the demons also beings in encounter with each other and with God? And who can tell if a horse is much different? It seems to me that what is significant is not just the capacity for encounter but the way in which, and in Whom, we encounter God and others. While I agree that the possibility of an ‘I-Thou’ relationship with God and others forms part of our likeness to God, that likeness must surely show itself in concrete actions and attitudes, and not just in a formal similarity of capacity.
Strengths in Barth’s position
There are a number of strengths in Barth’s position that I will seek to outline here:
1. Barth’s understanding of the imago Dei is a nourishing corrective to an overemphasis on the structure of human beings, particularly on rationality or reason as the essential aspect of the imago Dei. He does not think of the imago Dei only as a noun but also as a verb. Human beings are to image God by the way they live and the heart of the imago Dei is love, love for God and for others.
2. Barth considers both that humanity is created in the imago Dei, and that humanity is created as ‘a copy and not an original; a reflection and not a prototype’ of Christ. To argue that human creatures in themselves could be the imago Dei would be, for Barth, to establish a ‘point of contact’ which he rejects exists apart from Christ. Not the formal, but only the material imago Dei – the iustitia originalis with which Adam was created can occupy the anthropological place of the ‘point of contact’ in the divine–human communication. And this place, from which sinful humanity is irrevocably alienated, belongs to Jesus Christ alone. Barth had already opened up this issue in 1932 in his epistemological Prolegomena to Church Dogmatics:
Man’s capacity for God, however it may be with his humanity and personality, has really been lost … The image of God in man … which constitutes the real point of contact for the Word of God, is the one awakened through Christ from real death to life and so “restored”, the newly-created rectitudo now real as man’s possibility for the Word of God. This point of contact is, therefore, not real outside faith but only in faith.
3. Barth argues that the image is reflected in man–woman (‘I–Thou’) relationships that are created as a sign of the hope of the coming Son of Man who is the imago Dei.
4. Barth considers the doctrine of the imago Dei not only in light of Christ, but also in the context of the whole doctrine of creation and redemption. This is because it is impossible to understand the predicament in which men and women find themselves apart from the work of God in Christ.
5. Barth criticises Brunner’s concept of a formal image as theologically limiting. Barth asks,
Is the revelation of God some kind of ‘matter’ to which man stands in some original relation because as man he has or even is the ‘form’ which enables him to take responsibility and make decisions in relation to various kinds of ‘matter’? Surely all his rationality, responsibility and ability to make decisions might yet go hand in hand with complete impotency as regards this ‘matter’! And this impotency might be the tribulation and affliction of those who, as far as human reason can see, possess neither reason, responsibility nor ability to make decisions: new-born children and idiots. Are they not children of Adam? Has Christ not died for them?
Here Barth questions any formal understanding of the imago which is not universally inclusive because it is only by surrendering its hidden revelational content that Brunner’s formal factor can perform its modest but legitimate service of indicating the universal being of sinful humanity. This will be discussed in subsequent posts.
So far this week I have been privileged to hear Kenneth Bailey (author of Poet and Peasant (Eerdmans), Through Peasants Eyes (Eerdmans), Jacob and the Prodigal (IVP), The Cross and the Prodigal (IVP), Finding the Lost: Cultural Keys to Luke 15 (Concordia), among others) lecture on 2 passages from Luke (7:36-50 and 4:16-31). It has been most worthwhile to hear this scholar of repute who has spent 40 years living and teaching NT in the Middle East unpack and shed some cultural light on some of these well-known passages. This post is merely to alert any who may be within reach of Broughty Ferry (just near Dundee) of this event’s happening. The details for the remainder of the week’s talks are as follows:
Where: St Mary’s Episcopal Church, Queen Street, Broughty Ferry, Scotland
Times: 7.30-8.30 pm
Wednesday 7 June – The wise and foolish builders (Isa. 28:14-18; Lk. 6:46-49)
Thursday 8 June – The good shepherd (Ps. 23; Jn 10)
Friday 9 June – The rich man and Lazarus (Lk. 16:19-31)
Saturday 10 June – The prodigal (Lk. 15:11-54)
Sunday 11 June – 11am service, St Mary’s Episcopal Church, Broughty Ferry
PS. As a father of a new born (who has been attending too), anyone that can get me out and keep me awake anytime after dinner is doing well.
In this post, I will seek to faithfully outline Barth’s position in the debate.
What does Barth say?
Because Barth insists that theology has fundamentally to do with God’s revelation rather than human ‘speculation’ or philosophy, his interpretation of the Fall is that our being has been so corrupted that it becomes impossible for us to discover anything about God through our own efforts. If we have any knowledge of God, it comes from God’s self-revelation to us.
Barth strongly repudiates Brunner’s splitting the imago Dei into formal and material categories, arguing that ultimately this makes grace unnecessary. Furthermore, he suspects that Brunner confuses the categories, slipping in a degree of material under the formal. He argues that doing this opens up the possibility, indeed the actuality, of knowledge of God obtained prior to and independently of Christ or the Spirit, thus endangering ‘the ultimate truth that must be guarded and defended in the Evangelical Church’. So the crucial issue is whether God’s work as Creator-Revealer is utterly negated by sin.
Barth admits that a formal imago Dei which is not destroyed by sin remains in humanity ‘even as a sinner man is man and not a tortoise’. But what, he asks, has this to do with any supposed capacity in the human creature for revelation or any natural receptivity for the divine Word, as long as it remains purely formal, and does not trespass into the sphere of the material? Barth says,
If a man had just been saved from drowning by a competent swimmer, would it not be very unsuitable if he proclaimed the fact that he was a man and not a lump of lead as his ‘capacity for being saved’? Unless he could claim to have helped the man who saved him by a few strokes or the like!
The issue here is that of creatio ex nihilo, which, for Barth, is about grace – ‘divine impatience, discontent, dissatisfaction’. To expound on this, he draws on what for him is the chief significance of the doctrine of the virgin conception. Mary’s words to the angel, ‘How will this be, since I do not know a man?’ (Lk. 1:34) constitute the question that all humanity faces in the vicarious and propitiatory work of Christ.
The speaking of creation into being from nothingness, the bringing forth of Israel from Sarah’s barren womb, the Word becoming flesh through the virgin conception, and the resurrection of life from the dead all show decisively God’s capacity to achieve His purposes in that which, by nature, or by its own efforts, has no capacity to realise the same ends. As Hart explains, for Barth it is simply a fact that:
Human beings, sinful and fallen, have no ‘capacity’ in and of themselves, for God, no natural predisposition to hear and receive his Word. Again, the Spirit of God must come and create (ex nihilo in this respect) precisely such a capacity. Faith is a gift of the very God towards whom it is directed. In this respect, the attempt to secure some ‘point of contact’ in humanity for God is parallel to the doctrine of the immaculate conception: it assumes that wherever God and humanity come into close contact there must be some prepared ground, some fertile soil, some openness to and aptitude for God’s purposes: as if Mary’s obedient response were the result of some inherent immunity to the sin which blights the rest of us, rather than a result of the working of God’s Spirit.
Barth wants to affirm not only humanity’s creatureliness, but also that God does not will evil. He does not will sin or the Fall. He emphatically rejects the notion that in creating the man and woman, God also created the possibility of the Fall, the possibility of them sinning, of choosing between good and evil, the possibility of the liberum arbitrium. The ‘probationary’ command to the primal couple in Genesis gives the human creature room in which to be free.
For Barth, everything turns on this: the freedom that is given to humanity is not freedom of choice between obedience and disobedience. Precisely that freedom is denied us. Freedom is not a neutral place between obedience and disobedience, between left and right, between good and evil. The command of Genesis is not a temptation to, or a testing of, the couple. When God gives human beings freedom He gives them freedom exclusively for the purpose of being truly obedient.
And yet, in the same connection Barth states that human beings, in this respect, are not invulnerable, and so sin, although unlawful, irrational and without ontological being, has become reality, horrible reality. The choice that human beings made was irrational, it was the impossible possibility of sin, it is the ‘absurd ability’ of the human creature to surrender to the influence of the ‘chaos-beast’ of Genesis 3. Hence, this impossibility is possible. This is the nature of the freedom. So the question is not whether God wills sin but whether He wills the freedom that can lead to sin. However, as Barth rightly maintains, sin, having no creative force, can never constitute a new person. The sinful human being still belongs to God, not to Satan, nor to themselves, or to anyone else. Therefore, the freedom to sin does not ever negate God’s ultimate will to partnership. So the freedom is genuine, but not complete freedom to reject any relationship with God. It is moral freedom rather than ontological freedom.
Rejecting the common definitions of the imago Dei within the categories of reason, personality, responsibility, or iustitia originalis, Barth, like Brunner, argues for a predominantly relational understanding, preserving the truth that the imago Dei and being wholly dependent on God for everything are intimately related. He says,
That God will create man in His image implies that it is not man but God who is first a living Person as One who knows and wills and speaks. It was as such that He was the Creator, that He revealed Himself and acted in commencing time. Thus the creature in its totality was allied to this living, divine Person, being wholly referred to it for its existence and essence, its survival and sustenance.
Truly, it is in God that we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28). Barth says,
The fact that we are created in the likeness of God means that God has determined us to bear witness to His existence in our existence. But it does not mean that we possess and discover an attribute within ourselves on the basis of which we are on a level with God. When the serpent insinuated this to the first man, Adam missed his true determination and fell into sin. Because, therefore, we do not find in ourselves anything which resembles God, we cannot apprehend Him by ourselves.
Picking up the plurality in Genesis 1:26–27 (cf. 5:12), Barth argues that the imago Dei can best be seen as the relational or social nature of human life as God created us. He treats Genesis 1:27 as a commentary on 1:26, arguing that ‘co-humanity is itself the imago as humanity under the determination of the divine Word’.
Barth refers to the ‘episode of the fall’ as ‘an arresting and disturbing intervention’ between human creatures and their creation, an intervention which is accompanied by God’s wrath and judgment, turning His blessing into a curse. Human creatures who do ‘not accomplish or merit either [God’s] creation or his blessing’ have brought this perversion upon themselves, and are in no position to endure or to reverse it. It becomes clear, therefore, that humanity’s only hope is in God, for they are still blessed ‘in spite of the fact that the blessing has been turned into a curse’. However, the human creature, as female and male, retains the imago Dei. The image is ‘not overthrown by the episode of the fall, but remains even in face of the total contradiction between it and the being of man’. The hope in this for Barth is that human beings will then have reason to look for Another human being who is different from us, ‘but who for this reason will be real man for [us], in the image and likeness of God male and female in his place and on his behalf, namely, Jesus Christ and His community’. The tragedy, of course, is that ‘no one understands, no one seeks for God. All have turned aside, together they have gone wrong; no one does good, not even one’ (Rom. 3:11–12). No-one looks for this other Man!
Like Brunner, Barth rejects that the imago Dei is to be found in intellect or reason. He totally rejects the statement by Polanus, a sixteenth-century Aristotelian, who, after Aquinas, stated that a human being is ‘a being gifted with reason’ (animal ratione praeditum). Previous theologians, Barth maintains, ‘have ignored the definitive explanation given by the [Bible] text itself’ in their pursuit of understanding the imago Dei. Referring to Genesis 1:27 and 5:1, Barth says,
Could anything be more obvious than to conclude from this clear indication that the image and likeness of the being created by God signifies existence in confrontation, i.e., in this confrontation, in the juxtaposition and conjunction of man and man which is that of male and female.
This confrontational relationship is, for Barth, the imago Dei precisely because this same confrontational relationship exists between God and human beings. God is a being who confronts us and enters into an ‘I–Thou’ relationship with us. The fact that the human creature was created with the capacity for a similar relationship horizontally means therefore that he/she has been created in the image and likeness of God.
Therefore, for Barth, between God and the human creature there is no analogy of being (analogia entis) but only an analogy of relation (analogia relationis). God created human beings for covenantal fellowship with Himself and for fellowship with others. However, this existence can only be known and experienced in Jesus Christ, the real Man, the Man for God, and God’s covenant partner.
It is only because Jesus Himself is the imago Dei, and not merely a creaturely expression of it, that we can comprehend that all humanity in history, and that sinful humanity, exists under this determination of God. As a sinner, the human being is ‘under the determination of the imago in an even more penetrating and excruciating way’. The full propitiating judgment of the Father that Jesus experienced in His own humanity during His Palestinian ministry and at the Cross reveals this clearly. Gethsemane and Golgotha expose the depth to which humanity has fallen. There we see that only God’s passion, at infinite cost to Himself, can overturn the desperate plight of depraved humanity and restore humanity to a relationship with Himself which is the only way human beings are able to be fully human. Yet Golgotha also reveals the dignity and worth of the human creature, ‘the immeasurable worth, the infinite value, that God puts upon man in the price he has chosen to pay in order to share with him His own divine Life and Love’.
What then of the image in the Fall? Like Brunner, in his later writings Barth denies that the image has been wholly lost in the Fall. And like Brunner, Barth does not recognise a historical Fall from a condition of rectitude to a state of corruption. They both argue that the doctrine of the loss of the imago Dei is ‘understandable and necessary’ against the backdrop of the Reformation’s insistence that human beings are rectitude animae (upright humanity) or status integritatis (in a state of integrity). But Barth says that there is no concept of this in Genesis 1, and hence there could be no loss of the imago Dei after the Fall.
In fact, in his later writings Barth insisted that the imago could not have been lost at the Fall because the human creature had never possessed it in the first place:
The biblical saga knows nothing of an original ideal man either in Gen. 1, Gen. 2 or elsewhere. Hence it is not surprising that neither in the rest of the Old Testament nor the New is there any trace of the abrogation of this ideal state, or of a partial or complete destruction of the imago Dei. What man does not possess he can neither bequeath nor forfeit. And on the other hand the divine intention at the creation of man, and the consequent promise and pledge given with it, cannot be lost or subjected to partial or complete destruction.
Barth goes so far as to say,
The history of God’s fellowship and intercourse with man is not abrogated with the fall as the actualization of man’s rejection of this relationship. On the contrary, it really begins with the fall. For although it involves for man a complete reversal of the divine intention and therefore shame and judgement, it is at this point that God acknowledges His intention, addressing man as a Thou and making him responsible as an I, and that men themselves must stand and fall together as I and Thou, as man and woman.
It is hard to know what Barth means here by ‘the Fall’, but it is clear that he would not allow for any fellowship between God and humanity in a state of integrity. Perhaps Barth understands the imago Dei not as an entity, quality or characteristic to be lost, but as a relationship-as-destiny. If so, then the Fall is the interruption of this destiny/relationship and there is no sense in which we can ever speak of an original “perfect state”, as if all was complete.
When it comes to the issue of the renewal of the imago Dei, Barth does not give us a clear answer. Sometimes he seems to say that the imago Dei is susceptible to renewal. For example, in commenting on Colossians 3:10, he says,
This passage is important because it shows that for Paul “our” participation in the divine likeness of Christ does not rest on our decision and action but on a transformation which has happened to us, on God’s decision concerning us and therefore on Jesus Christ Himself who is the quickening Spirit.
Later on in his Church Dogmatics, he says,
The sanctification of man, his conversion to God, is, like his justification, a transformation, a new determination, which has taken place de jure for the world and therefore for all men. De facto, however, it is not known by all men, just as justification has not de facto been grasped and acknowledged and known and confessed by all men, but only by those who are awakened to faith.
Here Barth is saying that certain people grasp and acknowledge their sanctification by faith, and hence are subjectively changed and transformed. So, on the basis of statements of this sort, it would seem that there is a possibility that the imago Dei can be progressively transformed and thus become more ‘after the image of its Creator’ (Col. 3:10). Yet, in terms of Barth’s definition of the imago Dei, we must conclude that it is not really capable of renewal because it is defined in purely formal terms: the ability to exist in confrontation with God and others, the capacity of hearing God and fellow human creatures as a ‘Thou’ and responding as an ‘I’. But if this capacity is an ineradicable aspect of the imago Dei, it is difficult to see how it can be subject to improvement, renewal, or transformation.
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