During the first year of his appointment to a chair of Reformed theology in Göttingen (1921/22), Karl Barth delivered a series of thirteen lectures on Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians—six before the break for Christmas and the New Year, seven after it. On the manuscript of his last lecture before Christmas, Barth has written in pencil the words Klage: zu langsam (“Complaint: too slow!”).1 A student evidently has objected that, almost halfway through a lecture series supposedly devoted to the whole of the Pauline letter, Barth has gotten no further than Ephesians 1:4. The tempo does increase somewhat in the six lectures that followed the New Year, which take Barth and his audience to the end of the first chapter; a final lecture conducts a rapid survey of Ephesians 2–6. This is, then, essentially an exposition of the first chapter of Ephesians. The pace is slow not because Barth incorporates a mass of exegetical or historical detail but because time and space are needed for him to achieve his fundamental aim, which is to defamiliarize the time-honored Pauline vocabulary. In his comments on the letter’s opening in verses 1–3, familiar terms such as “apostle” and “will of God,” “saints” and “faithful,” “grace” and “peace” are dismantled and re-created in a form that emphasizes their orientation away from human religious conviction and experience as conventionally understood toward a God who is always other than our imaginings of him. In using such words, we do not know what we are saying. Paradoxically, it is in the disillusioning awareness of that not-knowing that a true knowledge of God and of ourselves in relation to God may be and must be attained.
At about the time of the student’s complaint, Barth’s commentary on Romans appeared in its definitive second edition, dated 1922 but actually published shortly before Christmas 1921.2 Here the first edition is comprehensively rewritten, but Barth retained his original preface so that the work still opens with a resounding contrast between a historical understanding of Paul as a child of his time who addressed his contemporaries and a theological interpretation that unfolds the significance of what he said for the present.3 The historical-critical method of modern biblical scholarship has its place, no doubt, but the theological interpreter must have quite other priorities. While Barth defends himself against the charge that he is an “enemy of historical criticism” in the preface to the new edition,4 there is virtually no overlap between his Romans commentary and other contemporary commentaries on the same text. The difference is in part the product of different institutional settings. Barth wrote both editions of his Romans commentary as a minister of the Swiss Reformed Church, not in a university context. While he has a theologically educated readership in view, Barth’s prioritizing of the Paul who speaks to us today over the Paul who addressed his own contemporaries reflects an ecclesial setting in which the Bible is the primary basis for preaching and instruction. By the time the book was published, however, Barth had left his Swiss parish and reentered the world of the German university. The question is whether and how far Barth’s interpretative practice will adapt to the new setting. Will he interpret Ephesians along the same lines as Romans, or has he moved on? Will he continue to distance himself from the “historical” orientation that he believes determines and limits modern biblical scholarship?
Barth devotes around half of his first lecture (delivered on November 10, 1921) to the question of the authorship of Ephesians, prompted to do so by the epistle’s very first word: “Paul” (Eph. 1:1).5 The text presents itself as the work of Paul. But was he really its author, or did a later disciple compose it in Paul’s name after the apostle’s death? At the outset Barth makes it clear that this issue is for him a venture into alien territory, that of “historical-critical biblical scholarship,” which he claims (with some exaggeration) has devoted more time and energy to the authorship question raised by the text’s first word than to all its other words put together.6 While making no claim to originality, Barth summarizes competently the claim that the close relationship of Ephesians to Colossians on the one hand and the absence of characteristic Pauline themes such as the parousia on the other make Pauline authorship improbable.7 Barth finds this claim unconvincing on empirical grounds: we know from our own experience that a single author may draw extensively from an earlier work in composing a later one and that differences of style and subject matter may be very considerable over the course of an author’s career. Overall, there is insufficient reason to conclude that the author of this text was not Paul, and Barth is gratified to find that current scholarly opinion has backed away somewhat from Heinrich J. Holtzmann’s confident denial of Pauline authorship thirty years earlier.8
The authorship issue is a staple feature of New Testament introduction (Einleitung), the scholarly genre in which one seeks to establish the basic historical facts about a text—who wrote it, when, where, and why—before proceeding to exegesis proper. The second such issue, again discussed by Barth, is that of the addressees of Ephesians.9 According to the fourth-century codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus as originally written, Paul’s letter was addressed “to the saints who are also faithful in Christ Jesus” (Eph. 1:1). Although these manuscripts entitle this text “To the Ephesians” (Pros Ephesious), there was no reference to the Ephesian church within the text itself until the words “at Ephesus” were inserted by later editors: “to the saints who are at Ephesus, also faithful in Christ Jesus.” A further complication is that Marcion’s edition of Paul’s Letters entitles this text “To the Laodiceans,” a title probably suggested by the reference in Colossians 4:16 to a letter exchange between Colossae and Laodicea. Tertullian accuses Marcion of falsifying only the title of this work and not the text itself, and the words “at Ephesus” were therefore absent from Tertullian’s text of Paul as well as Marcion’s.10 The evidence might suggest that a general Pauline or post-Pauline letter was originally addressed “to the saints who are also faithful in Christ Jesus” without any reference to Ephesus; that the title “To the Ephesians” was attached when this text was incorporated into the earliest Pauline letter collection; that Marcion substituted the title “To the Laodiceans” under the influence of Colossians 4:16; and that the words “in Ephesus” were later interpolated into the text itself. That the letter originally lacked any specific connection to Ephesus is confirmed by the fact that the author has heard about his addressees’ faith in the Lord Jesus but does not know them in person (Eph. 1:15). According to Acts, Paul had spent two whole years in Ephesus (Acts 19:10; cf. 1 Cor. 15:32; 16:8).
Like father, like son. Barth’s presentation of these critical issues is indebted to his father Fritz, whose Einleitung in das Neue Testament includes a seven-page discussion of the authorship and addressees of Ephesians.11 Two new posthumous editions of this work were published in 1921, and Karl Barth recommends that his students consult it alongside that of Adolf Jülicher for further discussion of the authorship question.12 For both Barths, Pauline authorship of Ephesians is put into question neither by the relationship to Colossians nor by distinctive linguistic features or theological emphases. In Ephesians as in Colossians, says Fritz, “it is the aging Paul who speaks, not in the lively polemical manner of the Hauptbriefen but as an isolated individual meditating on ideas that span the entire world,” and who “knows how to find new language for new ideas.”13 For Karl likewise, “Ephesians is the product of the elderly Paul.”14 Fritz views Ephesians as a circular letter, and for Karl too this seems the “least improbable” solution, even if it is not entirely satisfactory.15
Yet this convergence between the two theological generations masks a profound difference. At the close of his foreword, Fritz Barth expresses the hope that his moderately conservative approach to New Testament scholarly issues “may, in these wild and confused times, help to establish the reader on the eternal foundation!”16 In contrast, his son emphasizes that he has little interest in such matters, that he engages with them only “to fulfill all righteousness” given his new academic context, and that we are to observe the rule (which Barth ascribes to Bengel) Noli quaerere quis scripserit sed quid scriptum est (“Do not ask about who wrote but about what is written”).17 Excessive focus on introductory questions about who wrote to whom is said to be characteristic of “the era, probably still not concluded, of so-called historical-critical biblical scholarship.”18 Dissatisfied with the debate about the addressees of Ephesians in spite of his partial agreement with his father, Barth winds up his presentation in harshly polemical vein: “In the light of such achievements, antiquarian theology has no occasion to congratulate itself so effusively on the reliability of its ‘method’—to say nothing of its conclusions.”19
Why this sharp opposition between quis scripserit (the historical question) and quid scriptum est (the theological question)? The obvious but superficial answer is that Barth is reacting against the “liberal theology” of which he had once been a devotee and that he opposes “historical criticism” only insofar as it is pressed into the service of a Schleiermacherian theology of “religious experience” or fails to engage with the question of God. Yet Barth’s version of the history/theology divide remains puzzling, all the more so as it remained essentially intact throughout his long career and continues to be influential among some advocates of a “theological interpretation of Scripture.” In the case of a New Testament letter, the relationship between author and addressees is an explicit feature of the text itself, establishing at the outset the communicative situation presupposed in the letter as a whole. It is not clear why this aspect of the text should be so emphatically downgraded or why those who attempt to engage with it should be caricatured as mere antiquarians using unreliable methods to reach uncertain answers to unimportant questions.
Barth’s radical subordination of quis-type questions is the negative corollary of his hermeneutical commitment to a “contemporaneity” (Gleichzeitigkeit) with Paul that would enable us to hear Jesus Christ bearing witness to himself in and through the words of his apostle. Thus the object (quid or Gegenstand) of the apostolic testimony becomes its speaking subject.20 The communicative event that occurs between Paul (or “Paul”) and his stated addressees is eclipsed by a communicative event between the risen Christ and ourselves; the Pauline text is transposed into direct address to later readers of the sixteenth or twentieth or twenty-first century. Can we and should we so easily efface the first-century textual artifact and its explicit communicative context? We might imagine a question to that effect posed by the elder Barth to his remarkable son. First-century historical roots may be theologically significant precisely as such. Indeed, the younger Barth’s decision to discuss the standard introductory issues at all—in spite of all the rhetorical self-distancing from them—may suggest that he too is aware of their potential significance.
II
The concern that Paul’s text should again be heard as contemporary address is as clear in the Ephesians lectures as in the Romans commentary, published in its second edition as the lectures were under way. As one would expect, there is considerable overlap in Barth’s readings of the two Pauline texts. As in every letter in the Pauline corpus, the identification of the sender and the recipients is followed by a theological variation on traditional greeting formulas: “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ” (Eph. 1:2). Barth’s discussion of the “peace” here referred to echoes the treatment of Romans 5:1 in his commentary: “Therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”21 In both cases Barth insists that this is a peace that follows a war: not a state of mind but a Friedensschluss, a peace agreement in which the divine victory over the rebellious human being is acknowledged.22 (Barth’s original German readers or hearers may have sensed an allusion here to the Peace Treaty or Friedensvertrag of Versailles, ratified just two years earlier, in which the dawning of peace was accompanied by the trauma of defeat and loss.) In both cases Barth rejects the claim that the peace in question is a “feeling” (Gefühl) or experience in which the heart is strangely warmed; in reality, this peace is the recognition of the gulf that divides, yet paradoxically unites, the holy creator and the sinful creature. The antipietist polemic is on both occasions reinforced, somewhat tendentiously, by the same quotation from Calvin, who states that the peace of God is “opposed to all intoxicated security of the flesh.”23 In a pair of almost identical sentences, Barth twice insists that the person who has peace with God is characterized as one who waits in hope, as if with empty hands, rather than possessing through faith.24 In the commentary, this point is motivated by the Pauline ἔχομεν, “we have,” which might be taken to imply a state of secure possession until subjected to Barth’s deconstructive dialectic. Later in the Ephesians lectures this concern will resurface again in connection with Ephesians 1:7, where the problematic ἔχομεν refers now to “redemption through [Christ’s] blood” rather than “peace with God.” What we have is what we hope for.25
More significant than these similarities between the Romans commentary and the Ephesians lectures is the shift in the relation of the interpreter to the scriptural text. The Barth of the commentary finds in Paul’s text the basis for an extended series of polemical meditations on themes evoked by the text. There is little attempt to substantiate these meditations by backward reference to the text or by appeal to other related texts: the phrase cited at the start of a comment (in this case, “we have peace with God”) is a point of departure, and the return to the text occurs only as Barth moves on to the following phrase (here “through our Lord Jesus Christ”).26 Although larger blocks of text are cited, the commentary is focused almost exclusively on smaller units—from single sentences down to single words. There is little or no attempt to analyze the structure of a Pauline argument, for the focus is not on the Pauline text as such but on the divine reality to which it bears witness. The aim is, as Barth states in his second preface, that the text itself should become “transparent,” a medium that enables us to view the divine reality that lies beyond it only insofar as it becomes invisible.27 The very purpose of this commentary, then, is to erase the text in its relative solidity as an artifact—or rather to show how, in view of its relation to its unique object, it solicits its own erasure. It is in line with this extraordinarily bold hermeneutical claim that Barth can eliminate the distinction between himself as interpreter and Paul as author: the interpreter gripped by the text’s subject matter can “almost forget” that he is not its author.28
In the Ephesians lectures, this hermeneutic of textual self-effacement has receded. The free theological meditations of the commentary are still present in the lectures, but they are accompanied by a quite different interpretative practice, absent from the commentary: in a word, by exegesis. The difference is signaled not only by the use of the Greek text but also by the fact that it is frequently cited within Barth’s comments on particular words or phrases. The movement is no longer away from the text but around it. Barth’s Ephesians is not transparent; it bears witness, but it does not make itself invisible any more than Matthias Grünewald’s John the Baptist does as he gestures toward the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world—a figure in whom Barth already sees an icon of the biblical witness.29
In the practice of exegesis it is assumed that small-scale interpretative decisions are integral to the attempt to articulate the theological substance of a text; and this is an assumption that the Barth of the Ephesians lectures now appears to accept. Thus, according to the Pauline author, God “chose us in [Christ] before the foundation of the world that we should be holy and blameless before him” (Eph. 1:4), and God also “foreordained us for adoption through Jesus Christ” (Eph. 1:5). Between the two parallel statements stands the phrase “in love” (ἐν ἀγάπῃ). Does this phrase point back to what precedes it? In that case God chose us to be holy and blameless before him in love. This love presumably would be our own, viewed as the comprehensive context of the holy and blameless life that God intends for us.30 Or should “in love” be connected to what follows? Was it “in love” that God “foreordained us for adoption through Jesus Christ”? Such a love would then be the divine love that motivates adoption through Jesus Christ. Which is it? The translators are divided on this matter. The King James Version’s “that we should be holy and without blame before him in love” is reproduced in the Revised Version with a modest emendation only of “blame” to “blemish.” The Revised Standard Version goes the other way: God chose us to be “holy and blameless before him” and “destined us in love to be his sons through Jesus Christ.” If these revisers had followed the Greek word order, the text would have read, “in love destining us,” and it was perhaps the slight awkwardness of this wording that led the next generation of revisers to revert to the King James Version for the New Revised Standard Version reading: “just as he chose us in Christ to be holy and blameless before him in love.” In one sense, this is a decision of minor importance. Both readings make good theological sense, and one might decide that both are equally valid. In another sense, an exegetical decision such as this is anything but trivial. If the text is to have its intended effect as an act of communication, appropriate construal of its words, phrases, and sentences is important—not least, as Augustine pointed out, for the lector preparing to read a scriptural passage in a liturgical setting.31 In reflecting on what it might mean to be holy and blameless before God, we need to know whether the phrase “in love” does or does not serve as an interpretive key to that holy and blameless way of life.
Modern editors of the Greek New Testament face the same problem as translators. The ancient manuscripts on which they rely generally lack punctuation and even spaces between words. In the great fourth-century uncial Codex Sinaiticus, to which Barth refers briefly in his second lecture,32 the relevant passage is formatted as follows:
ΚΑΘΩCEΞΕΛΕΞΑΤΟ
ΗΜΑCΕΝΑΥΤΩΠΡΟ
ΚΑΤΑΒΟΛΗCΚΟCΜΟΥ
ΕΙΝΑΙΗΜΑCΑΓΙΟΥC
ΚΑΙΑΜΩΜΟΥCΚΑ
ΤΕΝΩΠΙΟΝΑΥΤΟΥ
ΕΝΑΓΑΠΗΠΡΟΟΡΙ
CΑCΗΜΑCΕΙCΥΙΟ
ΘΕCΙΑΝΔΙΑΙΥΧΥΕΙC
ΑΥΤΟΝ . . .33
In presenting the Greek New Testament to modern readers, editors make use of supplementary aids to comprehension such as lowercase letters, word division, punctuation, and verse enumeration. The present exegetical issue hangs on where the editor places the comma. In Eberhard Nestle’s popular Novum Testamentum Graece, used by Barth,34 the first two editions punctuate the key words as follows:
. . . εἶναι ἡμᾶς ἁγίους καὶ ἀμώμους κατενώπιον αὐτοῦ ἐν ἀγάπῃ, προορίσας ἡμᾶς εἰς υἱοθεσίαν . . .
. . . that we should be holy and blameless before him in love, foreordaining us for adoption . . .35
In the third edition, however, dating from 1901, Nestle has changed his mind about how the passage is to be punctuated:
. . . εἶναι ἡμᾶς ἁγίους καὶ ἀμώμους κατενώπιον αὐτοῦ, ἐν ἀγάπῃ προορίσας ἡμᾶς εἰς υἱοθεσίαν . . .
. . . that we should be holy and blameless before him, in love foreordaining us for adoption . . .
Barth agrees with the more recent editions of the Nestle text that “in love” refers to the God who foreordains and opens a new sense-unit: ἐν ἀγάπῃ προορίσας ἡμᾶς . . .36 He considers that the link between “holy and blameless” and “in love” would be highly unusual and that a reference to divine rather than human love is more in keeping with the emphasis of the passage as a whole. This enables him to make the theological point that will prove so significant for the Church Dogmatics, namely, that the God who predestines is as such also the God who loves. What is hermeneutically significant, however, is the simple fact that Barth discusses the alternative exegetical option. If the Pauline statement is taken to read, “that we should be holy and blameless before him in love,” supporting evidence might be found in Romans 8:28, where “those who love God” are also “those who are called according to his purpose,” so that, as Barth puts it, “human creature’s love for God” is viewed as “the correlate of divine election.”37 A parallel from the immediate context in Ephesians 1 may also be found in the retrospective ἐν-clause in verse 8, where it is said that God made his grace to abound for us “in all wisdom and understanding.” According to Barth, that phrase cannot point ahead to verse 9, “making known to us the mystery of his will.”38 Arguing an exegetical point on the basis of analogies in the immediate context or in related texts is, of course, standard exegetical practice, which can also be adapted—as here—to serious exegetical options with which one disagrees. Barth’s discussion of this point displays exegetical competence rather than any special insight. What is noteworthy is that he here accepts the traditional assumption that interpretation must begin by establishing what the text does and does not say. At points such as this, Barth does not proclaim that the theological interpreter of Scripture must rise above the pedantries and minutiae of normal exegetical practice in order to engage a theme that lies beyond the words of the text. We cannot have the theme apart from the words, and we cannot have the words without grammar and syntax.
III
After the initial greeting, Ephesians opens with a doxology: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms in Christ, as he chose us in him . . .” (Eph. 1:3–4). The spiritual blessings are further elaborated in a single long sentence extending to verse 14; they include foreordination, adoption, grace, redemption, forgiveness, revelation, sealing, promise, and the Holy Spirit. Such listing of benefits for which God is to be blessed or praised is characteristic of the New Testament’s doxologies: “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has visited and redeemed his people . . .” (Luke 1:68; cf. 2 Cor. 1:3–4; 1 Pet. 1:3–5). The syntax of the Ephesian doxology is uniquely tortuous, however, as illustrated by the opening words of each verse in the KJV rendering:
4according as he hath chosen . . . , 5having predestinated us . . . , 6to the praise . . . , 7in whom we have redemption . . . , 8wherein he hath abounded . . . , 9having made known . . . 10that in the dispensation . . . , 11in whom also . . . , 12that we should . . . , 13in whom ye also . . . 14which is the earnest . . .
A similar effect is created by Luther’s German translation, to which Barth here refers.39
According to Barth, a translation that preserves the structure of this labyrinthine sentence serves only to make it incomprehensible. A key is needed, and Barth takes up the suggestion of Martin Dibelius’s commentary on the shorter Pauline Epistles (1913) that such a key is to be found in the recurrent use of the formula “in Christ” or “in whom” (= “in him”).40 God has blessed us in Christ. That is to say:
4In him he chose us, before the foundation of the world was laid . . .
7In him we have redemption through his blood . . .
11In him we have also become heirs . . .
13In him you also, who have heard the word of truth . . .
Thus the movement of thought is from Jesus Christ as our election (vv. 4–6) to Jesus Christ as our liberation (vv. 7–10) to Jesus Christ as our hope (vv. 11–12) to Jesus Christ as our sealing (vv. 13–14).41
This concern to analyze the structure of a section of text is again a standard feature of normal exegetical practice, one that is almost entirely absent from the Romans commentary. Also noteworthy here is Barth’s explicit dependence on a contemporary exegete. Dibelius was twice cited earlier as a representative of the “so-called historical-critical biblical scholarship,” the “antiquarian theology” that prides itself on its “methods” and “conclusions” while generating only uncertainties and hypotheses.42 Some scholars are sure that Paul did not write Ephesians; others believe that he did; others still remain undecided. Various unsatisfactory theories have been proposed to explain the probable absence of the words “to Ephesus” in Ephesians 1:2. Dibelius, who denies Pauline authorship, argues that the usage of key terms such as σῶμα and μυστήριον differs between Ephesians and Colossians.43 On the issue of the addressees, Dibelius suggests that ἐν ’Εφέσῳ is a later addition suggested by 2 Timothy 4:12: “Tychicus I sent to Ephesus” (cf. Eph. 6:21).44 As we have seen, Barth reports these views while distancing himself from them and from the scholarly tradition that (he thinks) grossly exaggerates their significance. So Barth is dismissive of Dibelius and his kind when the letter’s author and addressees are under discussion yet is appreciative of—indeed, grateful for—the exegete’s insights into the text’s structure. Whether Barth is justified in drawing this distinction between historical and exegetical issues is another matter. What is more significant is the tacit acknowledgment that contemporary biblical scholarship is not exclusively antiquarian or historical or critical in orientation. It is also and above all concerned to make a difficult text readable by analyzing structure, syntax, semantics, and everything else pertaining to what was once called “grammatical” interpretation.45 The term “historical criticism” does not adequately represent the modern interpretative tradition and its exegetical practice.46
In this case, as in others, Barth’s theological interpretation arises from his grammatical exegesis. Having clarified the structure of the complex Ephesian doxology, he returns to the fact that in its ancient Greek rather than modern German form it remains a single sentence. Corresponding to its singularity is the single divine act of which it speaks. According to Barth, the many diverse components that make up the sentence are all concerned to articulate a single comprehensive truth, a kerygma rather than a set of dogmatic loci.47 That recurrent “in him” calls us to listen for the one Word in the many words, the divine address that reminds us that we stand before God and are claimed by God—the God revealed in Christ as Immanuel, God with us, but as such the Deus absconditus who cannot be reduced to our conceptualizations or experiences, even if these seem to be supported by the language of Scripture. Election and predestination, adoption and redemption refer us not to a set of carefully coordinated doctrines, each with its own place within a grand narrative of salvation, but to the existential reality that our life in its totality is subject to the divine address in its origin, its unfolding, and its destiny. In hermeneutical terms, the Pauline text speaks truly of God by speaking indirectly. We cannot dispense with the many words that point to the one Word, but neither can we simply identify the transcendent divine address with its apostolic testimony.
IV
It is not clear from the Romans commentary that Barth is able to practice exegesis and theology simultaneously. Given that he uses the commentary to construct a theology, it is difficult to see the text-based theological meditations of that work as in any sense exegesis. In contrast, the Ephesians lectures show some signs of rapprochement with conventional exegetical practice, and it is worth reflecting further on the relation between the exegesis and the lectures’ radically theological orientation. More successfully perhaps than in the Romans commentary, Barth is able to show that key theological commitments have been read out of the Pauline text and not simply imposed on it.
As already noted, Barth is hypersensitive to the possible implications of the Pauline ἔχομεν. We “have” peace with God; we “have” redemption only as those who hope for peace and redemption (cf. Rom. 5:1; Eph. 1:7). Contrary to all pietisms, we have only insofar as we acknowledge that we do not have. Yet the whole first chapter of Ephesians might seem to refute this willfully paradoxical claim. The introductory doxology seeks to evoke in its hearers or readers a sense of the immeasurable abundance of the spiritual riches bestowed on them. The response that it intends is not sober recognition of disillusioning truth but enthusiastic participation in its own song of praise. For its intended hearers or readers, this overly long and loosely constructed sentence is precisely the vehicle that transports them into the heavenly realms of which the text speaks. From where they stand, there is no dialectical countering of the divine giving by a divine withholding.
Or so it might seem. Barth, however, reads the text as something other than an expression of pietistic fervor. He notes how, after introducing himself and identifying his addressees, Paul converts into a prayer the greetings formulas that conventionally open Greek or Jewish letters: “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ” (Eph. 1:2).48 The prayer is followed by the doxological celebration of spiritual riches freely bestowed, yet the fact that the doxology is preceded by prayer remains significant. Grace has indeed been freely bestowed, yet Paul prays that grace may still be bestowed. One does not pray for what one already securely possesses. Grace and peace must come to us; they are not simply there. The doxology itself does not merely articulate something that its readers already experience; rather, it is a reminder of what they know but are always liable to forget.
If it seems exegetically implausible to read the imposing doxology in the light of the conventional Pauline greeting, Barth can point to the more extensive prayer with which the first chapter of Ephesians closes (1:15–23).49 Here God is asked to bestow what he has already bestowed according to the doxology. God has poured out upon us “the riches of his grace . . . in all wisdom and understanding” (1:7–8); he has “made known to us the mystery of his will” (1:9). Yet Paul can also pray for his addressees as though they still lacked that revelatory wisdom, understanding, and knowledge, asking that God “may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him” (1:17) and that “the eyes of your heart may be enlightened so that you may know what is the hope of his calling and what are the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints” (1:18). Paul does not pray that readers who already know may progress to a still higher grade of knowledge. He asks not that open eyes be opened still wider but that sight be given to the blind. The addressees know but do not yet know. They have been filled yet stand before God with empty hands. In Barth’s words, “Any truth that is not new does not qualify as God’s truth. Likewise, when redemption ceases to be an object of hope and becomes something we possess or consume, it is no longer redemption. . . . Yesterday’s discovery must be sought anew today.”50
This dialectic of having and not-having is characteristic of Barth’s early theology. It remains prominent in the first volume of the Church Dogmatics, and its echoes are also perceptible throughout the theology of Rudolf Bultmann, whom Barth so strongly influenced in spite of the later distance between them.51 Yet the dialectic is not simply Barth’s own invention. It has a genuinely Pauline basis, not least in the creative tension between the doxology and the prayer that constitutes Ephesians 1—the chapter to which Barth devotes twelve of his thirteen lectures on this letter. It is his overarching theological concerns that enable him to see and to exploit this fundamental feature of the Pauline text. There is nothing that corresponds to this in Dibelius’s commentary, which provides a more sustained exegetical discussion than Barth’s lectures but lacks his drive toward the one Word beyond the many words of the text. Students attending the lectures would have needed to supplement what they learned from Barth with the exegetical wisdom to be found in a commentary such as Dibelius’s if they were to become competent interpreters of the scriptural text and not just ardent disciples of their soon-to-be-famous teacher. Barth cannot justly claim that his theocentric reading is an adequate substitute for the conventional commentary, in which attention to nuance and context is itself a tribute to the text’s enduring theological value. Yet his theocentrism can issue in startling exegetical insights that both illuminate the text and disclose its potential to reshape its readers’ world.
V
In the prayer of Ephesians 1:15–19, Paul asks for his readers the capacity to comprehend the divine gift that is theirs and the divine power that has made it possible. In the following verses, the basis for the divine power exercised on their behalf is disclosed: the resurrection of Jesus. Thus, Barth suggests, verses 20–21 answer the implied question of verses 18–19.52 Indeed, all the diverse soteriological terms employed in this chapter find their origin and rationale in the event in which God raised Jesus from the dead and made him sit at his right hand. As 1 Corinthians 15 confirms, it is this singular divine action that constitutes das Wesen des Christentums, the essence of Christianity53—and not, for example, the noneschatological core of Jesus’s teaching as argued by Harnack in his celebrated book of two decades earlier.54 In Harnack’s account of Christian faith, Pauline christological and eschatological convictions play only a subordinate role. For Barth, what mattered most to the apostle should matter most to us.
Jesus’s resurrection, says Barth, is an “unhistorical” event that lies on the boundary between time and eternity: unhistorical but nevertheless an event that may be described as an eternal event so long as we understand eternity as God’s presence within time.55 Indeed, this is a bodily event, for life in time is embodied life, and the resurrection of Jesus is the disclosure of the truth of that embodied life: that it is subject to the divine word of judgment and grace, that in Jesus God draws near to us as the holy one, the creator whose relation to his creatures entails his transcendence.56 If an interpretation along these lines is utterly inadequate (as it is), it is because the resurrection as the definitive act of God cannot be grasped by any of our normal criteria of intelligibility. Paul prays that his readers will have their eyes opened to the transcendent divine power that raised Jesus from the dead because they have no existing capacity to grasp such an event. If the prayer is answered and eyes are indeed opened, the new knowledge will be articulated in negations as much as in affirmations. Here too knowing for Barth is a not-knowing aware of itself as such. A “historical” resurrection would be an event understood within some prior category rather than an event sui generis. Whether appeal is made to supernatural causation or to visionary experiences, the divine act is deprived of its mystery. One side of the well-known debate may insist, on the basis primarily of the Gospels’ story of the empty tomb, that the resurrection involves the miraculous reanimation of Jesus’s corpse. On the other side, the earlier testimony of 1 Corinthians 15 is said to suggest that resurrection faith originated in ecstatic visions of the risen Lord. For Barth, the entire debate is wasted effort that strives in vain to make the invisible visible and to dispel the divine mystery.57 The less that can be said about the historical basis of resurrection faith, the better. If modern historical research has brought to light the problematic, fragmentary, and contradictory nature of the New Testament’s testimony to Jesus’s resurrection, that is something for which we must be grateful.58 Human language necessarily fails at this point, and that very failure should be viewed as negative testimony to the transcendence of the divine act.
In this disconcerting reference to modern biblical scholarship in its most iconoclastic vein, Barth may have in mind the work of his slightly older contemporary Rudolf Bultmann, whose appointment to a chair in Marburg in the 1921–22 academic year coincided with Barth’s own arrival in Göttingen. Both appointments were occasioned by important and controversial publications: in Barth’s case the Romans commentary in its first edition, in Bultmann’s The History of the Synoptic Tradition. Completed in 1919, Bultmann’s first major work was published in April 1921, predating by a few months the second edition of Barth’s commentary, published in December of that year as the Ephesians lectures were under way.59 Barth delivered the lecture devoted to Ephesians 1:20–23 and the resurrection on February 16, 1922. Just two days later, on February 18, he traveled to Marburg to discuss the newly published commentary with Bultmann and his students. 60 Bultmann’s lengthy and favorable review of Barth’s commentary is well known.61 Less well known is Barth’s appreciation of Bultmann’s work on the Synoptic tradition, at least in its general orientation.62 This work may have been uppermost in his mind when he commended radical historical study of the Gospel resurrection narratives shortly before his Marburg visit. According to Bultmann, all the Gospels’ Easter stories are belated attempts to make the incomprehensible comprehensible and the incredible credible.63 Even the earliest of them, the Markan story of the empty tomb, is a secondary supplement to the Passion Narrative, which is out of step with its literary context and rendered internally inconsistent through the insertion of the reunion-in-Galilee motif (Mark 16:7; cf. 14:28). Easter stories in later Gospels are said to be apologetic legends that seek to validate the resurrection kerygma by narrating appearances of the risen Lord. It is analysis of this kind, supported by acute exegetical observation, for which Barth thinks we should be “grateful”—laying special emphasis on the word dankbar in his lecture manuscript. Precisely in the failure of their apologetic strategies, these narratives bear witness to an event beyond the reach of narrative or any other means of bringing the unknown into the sphere of the known.
As evidenced in the Ephesians lectures of 1921–22, Barth’s relation to the traditions and conventions of biblical scholarship is complex. As we have seen, Barth distances himself from what he (wrongly) regards as extraneous historical questions about author and addressees, yet he devotes significant parts of the earlier lectures to discussing them (I). He works with the Greek text and has internalized the exegete’s awareness that small-scale issues of syntax and sense can have major interpretative consequences (II). Equally characteristic of the exegete are Barth’s concern to analyze the structure of larger units of text and the willingness to engage with and learn from other exegetes in doing so (III). While theological preoccupations are everywhere to the fore, Barth makes serious and successful attempts to show their grounding within the scriptural text (IV). Barth’s radical Paulinism leads him to make unexpected common cause with a scholar already regarded by many as an archenemy of historic Christianity (V). Nearly a century after they were delivered, and from whatever perspective one comes to them, these lectures on Ephesians retain their power to disconcert.