God and Creatures in Barth’s Lectures on Ephesians, 1921–22
I
Over the course of his relatively brief but extraordinarily active tenure of the newly founded chair of Reformed theology in Göttingen from 1921 to 1925, Barth lectured in three areas of the theological curriculum: historical theology, dogmatics, and New Testament exegesis. The publication of a good number of the historical and dogmatic lectures in the Barth Gesamtausgabe over the last quarter century has made abundantly clear how formative the time in Göttingen proved to be, not only for the decade or so before the appearance of the first volume of the Church Dogmatics—during which Barth deepened, clarified, and refined the theological positions that he had begun to adopt in the middle of the Great War as he distanced himself from Herrmann and later liberal Protestantism—but also for his mature work in the three decades in Basel. His teaching in Reformed historical theology led him to acquaint himself more thoroughly with the confessional and theological writings of that tradition—the Heidelberg Catechism, the Reformed confessions, and the works of Calvin, Zwingli, and Schleiermacher1—and on that basis to take up a stance toward and formulate his own interpretation of the material in which he was obligated to provide instruction. He quickly identified what he took to be the marks of Reformed theology and Christian practice: astonishment before and responsibility to divine revelation as a present, entirely uncontainable occurrence; commitment to the Scripture principle and corresponding dedication to the task of biblical exegesis and exposition; an eschatological moralism in which divine majesty at one and the same time evokes and relativizes action in the world. In dogmatics, Barth’s Göttingen lectures were the beginning of what was to be a lifelong task of setting out a comprehensive account of Christian teaching in a quite different register from that of his teachers, one that required him to reconceive the objects, cognitive principles, and ends of dogmatics and to recast and reorder its various loci.2
Recognition of the importance of the Göttingen lectures in biblical exegesis has been quite slow, largely because of the unavailability of much of the material: although the lectures on 1 Corinthians 15 were published in 1924,3 and a revised version of those on Philippians, originally given in 1924 and then delivered in Münster, appeared in 1927,4 those on James and Ephesians have been published only recently,5 and those on 1 John, Colossians, and the Sermon on the Mount remain unpublished. Many of the standard accounts of Barth’s early work say little of his exegetical labors beyond The Epistle to the Romans, and a good deal of the literature on his hermeneutics and exegetical practice confines itself to Romans or to the Church Dogmatics, though there is increasing recognition of the importance of Barth’s study of and teaching about Paul in the decisive phase of his theological development.6 If the lectures on historical theology were, inter alia, exercises in ressourcement and critical retrieval of elements of the Reformed tradition, those on New Testament texts were exercises in commentarial exposition of Christian teaching, setting forth the content of Christian belief neither by free theologizing nor by topical, systematic anatomy but by the attempt to articulate what Barth took to be the matter indicated by the biblical text. This was undertaken on the basis of a conviction that theology is derivative from and governed by exegesis and directed toward exposition. Exegesis and exposition are necessary because they are the activities through which access to biblical instruction is constantly to be sought. As Barth states in a lecture on Calvin,
The relation to the Bible is a living one. The spring does not flow of itself. It has to be tapped. Its waters have to be drawn. The answer is not already there; we have to ask what it is. The Bible calls for objective study. What is in it is, of course, known already insofar as it is a matter of the relation about which we cannot ask without first knowing it, but because it is a matter of the form and order of this relation in time, we do not yet know what is in the Bible, and, as is unavoidable in time, we have to seek and find this by work. The Bible is thus opened and listened to with a readiness to receive what is not yet known, not for the purpose of finding again what is known already.7
Moreover, objectivity in theology—attentiveness to theology’s Sache in its otherness from the expectations of religious and theological subjectivity—requires constant and concentrated exercise of expectant, untrammeled exegetical intelligence. Barth continues: “This is what gives Calvin’s expository skill its first distinctive feature: its extraordinary objectivity. We can learn from Calvin what it means to stay close to the text, to focus with tense attention on what is actually there. Everything else derives from this. But it has to derive from this. If it does not, then the expounding is not real questioning and readiness to listen.”8
The lectures on Ephesians were delivered in Barth’s first semester in Göttingen, and he was much occupied with this New Testament text in the final period of his pastorate in Safenwil. In a letter to Eduard Thurneysen in March 1918, he reported that he had been studying the text with his confirmation candidates,9 and from May to September of the following year he delivered a series of sermons on the epistle.10 Later that same year he produced a translation and brief interpretation of Ephesians, which became the basis for an adult Bible study in the parish in the following spring. From this emerged a written text, consisting of a translation and notes on the letter, into which are interpolated summaries of the sermons that Barth had earlier delivered.11 The Göttingen lectures on Ephesians are the culmination of this extended engagement.
The lectures are especially valuable for the light they shed on one of Barth’s principal preoccupations in Göttingen (and, arguably, well beyond Göttingen in his mature theology of covenant), namely, the relation between God and creatures. Many of Barth’s concerns in that concentrated, vivid period of development turn on that relation: his understanding of history, his eschatology, his theology of the resurrection, his theology of revelation and its associated hermeneutics, his ethics, and his interpretation of the differing emphases of the Lutheran and Reformed wings of the Reformation. In accounts of Barth’s early theology, his way of articulating the relation of God and creatures is commonly designated “dialectical.” Though Barth himself makes quite frequent appeal to the term, it is probably best to use it sparingly in characterizing his work. Partly this is because the term has been used in rather different ways in some of the controversies in the reception of Barth’s writings; partly, again, because its deployment as an overarching interpretive category may inhibit close observation of the variety and scope of what Barth has to say about the relation of God and creatures in the various genres in which he was working.
In the lectures on Ephesians, we can observe Barth’s thinking about the matter firsthand. More particularly, we can see him trying to learn from this New Testament text how to think about God’s presence to and relation with creatures in rather less starkly oppositional terms than those to which he makes much appeal in the second edition of The Epistle to the Romans, completed just as he left Safenwil for Göttingen.
II
Barth’s exegesis of Ephesians presupposes, and occasionally makes explicit, an understanding of the relation between divine communication and the causality of its creaturely media. Though he does not bring to the exercise anything like a comprehensive theology of revelation and Scripture, he does have some working principles to which he turns on those occasions when, in the course of interpreting the text, he thinks himself required to give attention to its origin and its primary speaker.
In his final lecture on the prologue to Ephesians, Barth remarks on this “compendium of the fundamental Pauline framework”:
It offers a glimpse into the unprecedented revolution that must have occurred in the hearts and minds of this group of people in the first century and the impression it must have made upon them—upon both Paul and his readers, whom he considered capable of understanding such ideas! It is impossible on the basis of historical analysis to perceive the essentially imperceptible event that occurred here, or anywhere. . . . However, I hope that I have convinced you that it is possible to enter sympathetically with Paul and not only to see along with Paul but to think along with him at that point where the subject matter [Gegenstand], the incommensurable, Jesus Christ, speaks and becomes his own interpreter.12
Barth reads Ephesians as an apostolic text, whose origin lies in the attempt on the part of its author to indicate the wholly incommensurable reality and presence of God, and which is now the means whereby its readers are drawn before that reality and presence. The lectures on Ephesians antedate his engagement with the Reformed Scripture principle in lectures on the Reformed confessional writings,13 and he does not characterize the nature and function of the text by appeal to the theological categories deployed by that principle. Rather, he thinks of the text, in both its origin and its effect, as arising from and indicative of realities that may not be drawn within the regularities of history.
This does not mean that Barth is wholly indifferent to the literary properties of the text. As in the other Göttingen exegetical lectures, the text enjoys a good deal more prominence than it does in either of the first two editions of the Romans commentary (despite the fact that both editions are indeed intended to be commentaries). If in Romans the relation between what the text says and what Barth says that the text says is not always transparent, in Ephesians the governance of the text is much more direct and explicit. The text is not simply the occasion for the articulation of Barth’s theological convictions (prompted and informed by the text, perhaps, but not always demonstrably bound by and directed toward it). Rather, the text of Ephesians is that to which Barth attempts to direct his hearers’ attention and that whose course he seeks to follow. He does not devote a great deal of time to linguistic, grammatical, and stylistic matters or to a review of exegetical options; his attention is much more gripped by the matter of the text. Nevertheless, what he offers his hearers is not a set of theological variations on topics in Ephesians; it is, rather, theology in exegetical and expository mode.
Barth remains ambivalent, however, toward the value of historical investigation of the text and its provenance for coming to understand its matter. It is important not to attribute to Barth some principled indifference to history or an “antihistorical” attitude, either in reading biblical texts or more generally in historical theology.14 Barth does consider it necessary to devote some time at the beginning of the lecture series to questions of authorship and recipients, though he does not find such matters engaging, and he concludes his review of the phrase ἐν Ἐφέσῳ early on in the third lecture on a weary note: “I believe that I have discharged my duty by making you aware of all these possibilities, and I leave it to you to decide which of them is the least improbable.”15
Barth’s sense of the restricted applicability and fruitfulness of historical inquiry in biblical interpretation arises from what he takes to be the matter of the text and the communicative act of which the text forms an element. He considers that Ephesians sets before its readers a reality that exceeds historical intelligence, even as it presents itself in a textual form inextricable from (though not wholly exhausted by) historical processes of authorship and reception. Both the matter of the text and the way in which the textual indication of that matter comes into being point to the limits of historical description and explanation.
The matter to which exegetical intelligence is to be directed, on Barth’s account, is not simply the historical quantities of the religious lives, situation, or beliefs of its author and original recipients but an “eschatological” reality. If exegesis terminates on some interim reality, it has not run its full course. Lecturing on Ephesians 1:20 (“[God] raised him from the dead”) on February 16, 1922, for example, Barth notes that when the author speaks of resurrection, “he means an event . . . that is more nearly impossible and unhistorical than historical. He means the impossible event κατ’ ἐξοχήν . . . an event that takes place precisely at the boundary between what is possible and what is impossible, what is historical and what is unhistorical, time and eternity.”16 “Boundary” is an important term here: it is not that the matter of Ephesians is transcendent tout court but more that—in its difference from the temporal—that matter points beyond itself “in” time, though not as a contingent temporal happening but as the displacement of time, as time’s outer edge. What is given in Jesus Christ, Barth says,
is given in history, therefore not as something other than history, removed from history, in addition to history, removed from history—not as a Platonic idea, as popularly conceived. It is given as an idea in the fullest sense, that is, as the idea or conception of God, therefore as the origin of all origins, the inaccessible in the immediate, the wholly other in the human, the beyond in this life. But note: it is given as an event in history, as the other side of this world, as an event that is in history but not of it—not a mere object of history but history’s fundamental origin and absolute boundary. This boundary and origin are of a different order than anything that can be explained on the basis of history or examined within the established order of knowledge, even the most extraordinary and unprecedented event.17
Such is the incommensurability of the resurrection that it cannot be grasped through categories such as “miracle” or “vision,” which draw the resurrection within the domain of historical experience: “The reality that Paul describes here is not experienced the way we experience anything else. It would be far more faithful to Paul to say that we do not experience it at all.”18 Historical-critical research offers a negative testimony to this: precisely by advertising the contradictions in the biblical accounts of the resurrection, it reveals “just how improbable, implausible, and historically impossible the event is.”19 Similar attempts by Barth to discriminate the matter of the text from anything experientially or historically available and familiar recur throughout the lectures. What he finds himself struggling to articulate to his audience is, quite simply, nonpareil, that to which we cannot stand in any accustomed historical relation.
Something similar is found in the account of the authorship of Ephesians with which Barth opens the lecture series. Starting from the letter’s first word, Παῦλος, he gives a brief survey of the status quaestionis concerning Pauline authorship, concluding that though he himself “would defend the authenticity” of the letter, he does not “have any great interest in the question,” preferring to follow Bengel: Noli quaerere quis scripserit sed quid scriptum est.20 If Bengel is attractive to Barth, it is because to accord priority to quid scriptum est is to detach study of the Bible from inquiry into religious personality21 and instead to devote attention to the revelatory matter of which the Bible is sign and embassy.
There is, doubtless, a certain externality in this account of the relation of the matter of the Bible and its human authorship. The decisiveness with which Barth separates quis scripserit from quid scriptum est may suggest that the natural properties of the author (e.g., cultural setting; moral, spiritual, and intellectual gifts; virtues and experiences) are not sanctified or caused to serve the presentation of the res of the text but are little more than occasion for the acts of another agent, having no instrumental role. On the other hand, it may be that as he tries to dispose himself before the text, Barth is not eliminating or suspending the human author so much as characterizing the kind of human authorial activity that occurs in the sphere of (eschatological) reality in which Ephesians is caught up.
This, at least, is what Barth attempts in his account of the second word of Ephesians, ἀπόστολος:
The apostolic vocation splits the person, so to speak. He is an apostle not on the basis of anything he is in and of himself but on the basis of what he is not. A demand of a very different order is made on him, and a demand of a very different order directs him to his fellow human creatures. There is something exceptional and impossible about him, but it is not his genius, his experience, his unmediated knowledge, or anything that can be accounted for psychologically as greatness or character. What makes him an apostle is his mission, his instructions, and the service he is to offer, which are not, from a psychological point of view, even his own matter but the matter that has him and sends him.22
The apostle is defined by the demands laid upon him, by vocation rather than by inherent or even bestowed capacity.23 The being and act of the ἀπόστολος are wholly a function of Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ, both because the apostle is defined by reference to Jesus Christ as the substance of his vocation and because the apostle shares in the paradox of “Immanuel! God with us!”24 The incarnation is revelation sub contrario, in the coincidentia oppositorum of God and flesh; and “the existence of an ἀπόστολος is a repetition and variation of the same theme in a subordinate position, where it is possible to serve, to point, and to witness.”25
Again, reflecting on the phrase “by the will of God” (Eph. 1:1), Barth stresses that apostleship entails abandonment of human privilege and capacity. The divine will “necessarily includes negation in the form of renunciation. Paul renounces all natural protection.” The apostle is outside the “composite of well-ordered functions,” which we indicate by the term “society.” The apostle calls into question the human needs and concerns that cluster around “religion.” The apostle gives up “the shelter and protection that he was due by virtue of his human authority,” along with “self-honor.” In short, the apostle “negates himself.”26
The denials are forceful and resonant. Their positive intent is to draw attention to the objectivity of apostolic existence and work:
When [Paul] calls himself ἀπόστολος διὰ θελήματος θεοῦ and addresses his readers on this basis, it is not in order to draw attention to his personal attributes, not even his so-called religious personality, or to flaunt his experience or experiences, or to impress them with his knowledge. He has no reason to linger on these human factors, be they good or evil. His relationship to his readers is determined by his office. He has an objective message to convey, and on the basis of the phrase διὰ θελήματος θεοῦ he appeals to his hearers to receive it objectively.27
If there is a weakness here, it is that Barth’s eagerness to lift apostleship out of the realm of natural religious personality may inhibit him from speaking not only of the judgment of human nature and powers but also of their sanctification for divine service. In his eagerness to acknowledge the originality of God in relation to the biblical testimony, Barth may at times veer toward a kind of extrinsicism. Yet he also finds that Ephesians presses beyond the antithesis of the divine and the creaturely to speak of their association and of a strange but real human correlate to revelatory divine activity. To this we now turn.
III
In his exegesis and exposition in these lectures, Barth, we have seen, considers attention to the historical properties of the text to be necessary (in a relatively minimal way) but by no means sufficient for understanding of and intelligent participation in the communicative act of which the apostolic text forms an element. This view of the text and its setting and function in divine revelation is bound up with a set of wider convictions about God and God’s relation to creatures, convictions that Barth both takes to the text and finds confirmed by it. They are not given any systematic formulation in the lectures, but they are articulated at various points as he proceeds, sometimes in passing, sometimes more expansively.
As he reads Ephesians, Barth’s attention is frequently drawn to the way in which the letter resists any treatment of God as a correlate of human religious or moral culture. Even to speak of God as the object or cause of human knowing, experiencing, and acting is to reduce God to being one term in a pair, folding God into the created reality to which God is related and failing to acknowledge God’s entire incommensurability. Commenting, for example, on Ephesians 1:2 (“Grace be with you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ”), Barth stresses that grace and peace are wholly to be understood in terms of God rather than in terms of the subjectivities of believing recipients: “It is God we are dealing with here. . . . The realities about which [grace and peace] speak are hidden in God, and God himself guarantees that they are genuine realities.”28 God himself is
the incomprehensible Nevertheless! at the heart of both terms. . . . When Paul refers to God as the giver of grace and the source of our peace, he is not thinking about a conspicuous metaphysical object. When he calls God our “Father,” he is using the ultimate parable to express the inexpressible and unimaginable, namely, our origin. Our origin: we human creatures, although thoroughly human, are related to him, who is most wonderful, who is not and never will be simply a contingent object, who is unknown, who is holy, the Deus absconditus.29
As often in Barth’s early writings, the term “origin” here has a double resonance. In part—as we will see shortly—it indicates the singular character of God’s relation to creatures. But it is also a term that Barth uses to reach toward the idea that God is in himself ungrounded, a se. In the lectures, Barth has little to say about God’s inner life, perfection, and beatitude. Partly this is because he does not find textual prompts to talk about such matters. Partly, again, it may be because what Barth says about God in his writings from this period is still to some degree shaped by the liberal Protestant tradition of which it is sometimes the reverse image; having issued a denial that God is a correlate of human religious life, he does not go on to talk of God’s immanent being and acts. When he lectured on Ephesians, Barth had not yet immersed himself in the post-Reformation dogmatics of the inner divine nature and processions, which he was to discover at the prompting of Heinrich Heppe. Moreover, Barth’s acute awareness that a theological metaphysics of the divine essence may be a close cousin of idolatry increases his reluctance to make use of such categories in his exposition. For such reasons, rather than talking of God in se, Barth usually limits himself to statements about God’s relation to creatures, which draw attention to the sheer difference of the relata and so to the way in which that relation is unlike any contingent relation, most of all because it is devoid of the mutual presence and exchange that characterize the reciprocal life of creatures. God’s relation to creatures is “beyond all relations.”30
How is this singular relation to be described? A characteristic comment from Barth (he is considering the relation of divine purpose and human approbation in Eph. 1:5–6) runs:
An infinite qualitative distinction separates the action of the creator from that of the creature. However, this infinite distinction is precisely what unites the creature and the creator. God can bless man only as his creature; man can bless God only as his creator. The recognition of this infinite distinction is precisely what makes the blessing and the praise both meet and right. Recognition of God’s divinity establishes the divine Otherness, the “aliter”; and precisely by being established, it is sublated.31
It is important to note that Barth does not think that Ephesians presents either an unrelieved antithesis between or an easy coordination of God and creatures. Rather, as he reads the text, he finds that it compels attention to the acts in which God sets himself before creatures and creatures before himself, on the basis of which their respective natures and the character of their relation in some measure may be perceived.
Barth most commonly describes these acts in the idiom of revelation, understood as the divine act of indirect and interruptive communication, unforeseen and unassimilable, and as an event of manifestation rather than a condition of revealedness. Commenting on “the mystery of [God’s] will” in Ephesians 1:9, Barth remarks that the divine will cannot be the object of direct perception “on the basis of what is observable and concrete.”32 He continues: “Because our vision is occluded, an act of revelation is necessary. Every veil must be rent; all human reality must be upended. God must speak, and God must speak, if we are to understand his will.”33 Immediate knowledge of the will of God is “impossible, even unimaginable for us”; what is vouchsafed to creatures is an event in time, an “incomparable today” in which “time is split” and “the will of God meets us.”34 “The disiecta membra of this world-reality do have a unity. This is so because of God’s reality, God’s act, God’s revelation.”35 The term “revelation” condenses a range of Barth’s convictions about the inexhaustibility of God and his unavailability for apprehension on terms other than those in which he presents himself as well as about the instability of creaturely knowledge of God and the impossibility of detached observation or cognitive accumulation and possession.
It is, once again, important to recognize that Barth’s demarcations, vigorous and determined though they are, are intended not to deny God’s communicative presence but to specify its conditions and the manner of its occurrence. The spiritual blessings of which the apostle speaks in Ephesians 1:3 are not “the presence of God in the form of visible, direct immediacy, which is the domain of gods and idols”;36 they do not simply add to our store of experiential goods. Rather, as the Spirit’s blessings, they are “God’s unmediated presence for us, . . . God in his inapproachability, inaccessibility, and hiddenness. God, who cannot be known, surrounds, besieges, storms, and reorders the domain of my knowing.”37 Spiritual blessings are an event of divine giving, not a given commodity. Again, Barth resists conceptions of a causal relation between God and creatures, which he fears would reduce God to being the first of a series; God is, rather, “beyond the world, beyond all causality.”38 Or again, the relation established by God between himself and creatures must be differentiated from “domesticated piety, which regards living with God to be more important than living with God.”39 But none of this is intended to negate the relation of God and creatures: the fact that divine presence cannot be made a function of human self-presence “does not obliterate, neutralize, or obviate anything that is mine, positive or negative; but the relativity of all that is mine is clearly revealed, or to be precise, related to its origin, measured according to the standard by which all things are decided. . . . What I am, I am in relation to God.”40
The lectures on Ephesians are an early instance of the way in which, in his theological work in Göttingen, Barth often reaches toward an account of the relation of God and creatures that neither reduces God to a correlate of the human subject nor, by way of correction, simply segregates or opposes God and creatures. In effect, if not in intent, Barth offers a kerygmatically charged appropriation to the scholastic conception of a “mixed” relation between God and creatures—what might be termed an eschatological theological metaphysics of that relation. Properly understood, Barth notes in a comment on Ephesians 1:12, “ἔσχατον . . . refers not only to the last things but also to the first and most important thing in each moment.”41 At this very fertile stage in his development, observes Christopher Asprey,
Barth’s theology . . . proceeds from the conviction that human beings exist before God eschatologically. Human ontology is not a settled condition, a “nature” of any kind, but a response to the imposing presence of God, who summons me to live beyond myself. What defines this God most fundamentally is not his superiority over all other beings, nor his providential governance of history, but his encounter with human beings as their God. Both aspects are indispensable: God is not conceived in abstraction from his creation, yet he meets it in such commanding superiority that, just as importantly, it may not extract itself from him. This encounter is what is meant by revelation.42
A closely similar pattern of thought is evident in Barth’s christological remarks in the lectures. At the opening of the letter, the author speaks of himself as ἀπόστολος Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ; and “Jesus Christ”—a proper name set together with an office of universal scope—“means the unification of all that is inherently incompatible, the coincidentia oppositorum, and the complete riddle of Christology.”43 Incarnation does not mean peaceful coordination of divine and human natures: in Christ, opposites coincide but remain opposites (an early expression from Barth of the instinct behind the extra Calvinisticum, perhaps). Further, the reality that the name indicates does not present itself as a matter for calm contemplation. It is an assault: “the message of the incarnation is not proclaimed as an idea . . . ; rather, the word from the peaceful kingdom enters the world as a battle cry, as a declaration of war. Here, the δύναμις τοῦ θεοῦ speaks. Here, the One God demands an acknowledgment. . . . Here, the One God determines to rule as monarch, and all other demands with which life confronts us are called into question by him. Here, it is a matter of God’s decisive battle against idols.”44 The very humanity in which revelation takes form subverts any attempt to integrate it into an existing experience or scheme: “in order to . . . prevent us from turning it into a religious or philosophical truth, to impress upon us that the truth comes to us only in the eternal moment of knowledge, the concrete subject matter of this gospel and its most characteristic trait is a human face, the completely mysterious face of one who suffers, is rejected, and dies—the face of Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified.”45 Yet this is not a disavowal of God’s presence in Christ but an attempt to spell out its origin and its distinctive properties. “Ἐν Χριστῷ means Immanuel! God with us! Ἐν Χριστῷ God draws near in his self-revelation, while remaining distant, strange, and incomprehensible: the Deus absconditus. In Christ is thus the proximity of God, which always means eternity and never merely the temporal extension of what is palpable, comprehensible, or perceptible. Precisely because the proximity of God is ultimate reality, it can only be believed—and the belief itself is the wonder of its revelation.”46 Because in Christ divine revelation is asymptotic, it breaks the assumption, which Barth found to be deep-seated in the exegesis, dogmatics, and ethics of the liberal Protestant tradition, that the real is the historical-experiential.
God is beyond—not constituted by—all relations; nevertheless, he sets himself before creatures and brings them into relation to himself. In what ways does this relation take creaturely form?
Barth is markedly reluctant to say much about how objective relation to God coincides with creaturely subjectivity, because he is recoiling from theologies in which religious subjectivity enjoys priority. Commenting on “sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise” (Eph. 1:13), for example, he does not take the occasion to speak of the Spirit as the agent of the realization of divine benefits in the believer, and he emphasizes contingency rather than appropriation:
Humanity and everything human is questionable. What is not in question is the relation of humanity and everything human to God. The more we recognize humanity’s uncertainty, the more we recognize the certainty of man’s relation to God. Indeed, the reason human existence in and of itself is dubious is precisely because humanity is originally related to God. Everything that is contingent and temporal is relative. What is not relative is the actual relation to the Absolute. The more clearly we recognize this relation for what it is, the more clearly we understand the relativity of all things.”47
Because contingency is by far the most important attribute of creaturely relation to God, the creatures of divine grace are defined not by divinely given powers to act or dispositions or forms of life and experience but by reference to their origin in God, the counterpart to which is a lack of creaturely extension.
What, Barth asks in his lecture on Ephesians 1:7, does it mean that we “have” (ἔχομεν) redemption and other divine blessings? In considering this “having,” we are not to think that “our feet touch the familiar ground of human being, having, and doing, where we can catch our breath for a moment,” for here “our familiar human being, having, and doing are called into question from beyond.”48 Our having is not possession but rather the (unfinishable) process of coming to have, incessant reception. “We have what only God has, what we [can] have only in God, who unites time and eternity. In other words, we have what we must receive continuously from God in each present moment.”49 This triggers some critical remarks on the “Biblical Realism” of J. T. Beck; though Barth had learned from Beck’s unease with critical theology in the school of F. C. Baur and had made use of Beck’s work on Ephesians,50 he is troubled by the way in which Beck’s “realism” drifts into a noneschatological subjectivism. Beck’s concern to go beyond the extrinsicism of some Protestant theologies of justification and speak of the intrinsic reality of divine grace threatens to become “simply a form of naturalism.”51 “The Word of God does not become more real by being refashioned into human reality. We should be content with its own reality rather than trying to make it conform to ours.”52
An important corollary here is that the creature’s relation to God does not follow an ordered temporal course; it is not discursive but always at the beginning. The knowledge with which the apostle (in Eph. 1:15–23) asks that his recipients be blessed is—precisely as “the blessing of God”—“completely new each new moment,”53 a constantly renewed divine act of giving, such that “we must return continually to the source and origin. This origin does not exist in the world or within time,” and so “the human creature must repeatedly call upon God as God.”54 As often in his earlier (and sometimes in his later) writing, Barth makes much of the idea of newness in order to emphasize that life in relation to God is not an amplification of natural being in time, for God’s action is punctiliar, not durative. “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.”55 “If we regard [God’s] name, kingdom, and will as no more than the evolution, extension, or continuation of what already exists—then obviously we do not know what we are saying when we say ‘God.’”56 Relation to God is marked above all not by the accumulation and enjoyment of spiritual goods but by prayer for fresh acts of grace: “A new day has dawned. Yesterday’s discovery must be sought anew today.”57
Similar patterns of thought recur throughout Barth’s comments on Christian existence in the course of the lectures. Early on, he considers the apostle’s designation of his recipients as τοῖς ἁγίοις τοῖς οὖσιν . . . καὶ πιστοῖς ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ (Eph. 1:1). Neither holiness nor faithfulness may on Barth’s reckoning be understood as modifications of human subjectivity in time: “Ἅγιος signifies a place, object, or person, which, although situated in the known world, belongs not to this world but to the rule of God’s power and splendor”;58 it thus indicates “a negation, a cordoning off, the imposition of a blockade, an attack that creates a void, like the crater formed from an exploding shell.”59 Moreover, both its cause and its effects are unavailable for direct perception. “The one who makes them holy . . . does not appear as such, occupying time and space. . . . There is no way to directly identify the state of holiness as such! Holiness that is conspicuous, tangible, or perceptible (humanly speaking) is not holiness.”60 And so Barth once again counters what he regards as a deleterious historical stability by insisting on the interruptive, occasional character of God’s relation to the creature and the irregularity of its creaturely complement. “Holiness,” he writes,
is a relationship with God. This relationship is established by God. It is never simply a given. It is never a finished event. For the human creature, it will always remain a quest and goal; but as free grace, it becomes more than a quest and goal. It exists wonderfully, moment by moment, on the basis of God’s eternal election; and absolutely no law could possibly be at work, above or apart from God’s beneplacitum, diverting the course of this election. To call a person holy is to say that God eternally disturbs him and fills him with joy, that God has laid his hand upon the creature. The creature is attacked and wounded where he is most vital, in his subjectivity, his existence. Existentially, he is no longer his own. He himself no longer lives. He resembles an off-centered wheel, which no longer revolves around its own center.61
Moreover, the action and presence of God are entirely invisible and generate no creaturely form: “all we can see is the creature, living in sin and death.”62 Yet, crucially for Barth, the absence of historical form or visibility betokens not divine absence but simply the mode of God’s relation to the creature: “unlike all gods and idols, he draws near while maintaining his infinite distance.”63 Because of this, malgré tout, we may say that there is a human reality of holiness, that “in Christ, the human creature is sanctified.”64 Such holiness is real not as an “experience” or “condition”65 but because of its divine basis, which Barth describes as “the human creature’s eternal relation to God, the relation in which the person is eternal and will become what he certainly never was and becomes what he eternally is: God’s possession, instrument, servant, and child. This relation is real only because it begins where everything comes to an end, in the life that comes from death.”66
Similarly, reflecting on the description of the recipients of the letter as πιστοῖς, Barth steers away from any correlation of God and creatures. “The idea of polarity, equipoise, or balance between divine and human action is absent from Paul’s thought; wherever ‘faith’ is spoken of in such a fashion, it leads to simplistic and false dogmatics.”67 Barth admits that πιστοῖς does in some way refer “to a truly subjective human state,”68 but the concession is immediately qualified:
Faith is the action of the new person in me, the person I am not, the new person whose identity within me is the source of the greatest possible honor. Faith is a fundamental and eternal event that is beyond all temporal processes. Faith is God’s work in us. It takes place in us, to be sure; it is not some invisible metaphysical reality, independent of our recognition of God’s mercy, enclosed in his holiness. But it takes place only as God’s work, as the eternal moment hidden within the temporal moment; it is one with what occurs in us.69
IV
It would be relatively easy to judge Barth’s lectures, both in what they say about divine revelation and its apostolic media and in their presentation of Christian existence in relation to God, as often trapped by the malign contrast: aut gloria Dei aut gloria hominis. Such an opposition is not Barth’s intention: the lectures (along with those on Calvin from the following semester) are in part a struggle to articulate a relation between the “vertical” and the “horizontal” that is neither antithesis nor synthesis. So intense is Barth’s concern to draw attention to the nongiven, nonrepresentable character of God’s presence that he allows himself to say rather little about the human forms and acts by which divine revelation and saving action are communicated and received and about the ways in which they shape and order human life and activity—beyond some highly charged descriptions of the dislocation that they engender. Together with Barth’s instinctive occasionalism and his insistent rhetoric, this intensity runs the risk of denying what, after many qualifications, he is trying to affirm. In the Church Dogmatics, Barth will leave this difficulty behind in his long descriptions of God’s economic acts and the human moral history that they evoke and sustain. Here, however, his principal concern is to refuse to think of God and creatures as reciprocal, commensurable terms; yet in so doing, he sometimes appears to subvert not only commensurability but all relation.
What Barth is reaching toward in his exegesis and exposition is an understanding of God and creatures in which, because God is perfect, simple, and uncompounded, God’s relation to creatures is not constitutive of his being. The protest against any settled forms of creaturely relation to God are directed against the idea that God is merely one res alongside another. To issue the protest, Barth often appeals to one or another element of the theology of divine grace; but grace is identified primarily with divine freedom rather than with the communication of goods or with an ever-fresh act of divine giving rather than with its creaturely effects. An account of the matter less concerned to voice dissent might make its appeal to divine goodness—to the beneficence that flows from God’s fullness of life and that enacts his purpose to cause, sustain, and bless creaturely life in its integrity and continuity. Yet there is a reminder in what Barth struggled to articulate to his audience almost a century ago: only when we have come to know that God is beyond all relations may we understand and enact the relation to him in which we have been caused to stand.