MICHAEL ALLEN
INTRODUCTION
In this chapter I will examine two ways in which Karl Barth’s doctrine of Christ prompts further theological exploration in significant and challenging directions. His doctrine of eternal generation is, in and of itself and strictly construed, especially uninteresting, which I would argue is not a bad thing.1 But the systemic manner in which he connects this doctrine to ancillary topics or themes is remarkable and well worth our attention. First, we will consider the ways in which Barth connects this doctrine to theologia, the exploration of God’s inner life and works. Second, we will examine the path by which Barth relates this doctrine to oikonomia, the scope and sequence of the Gospel of the triune God.
Before turning to those topical and thematic connections, however, two preliminary matters are worthy of attention. First, I should comment briefly on how this exploration relates to contemporary debates regarding Barth’s doctrines of election and of the Trinity. Second, I will briefly note the location of Christological material within the structures of dogmatic theology, noting its distributed nature and its interrelated connection to other key topics. Having considered those issues, we will be in a good position to reflect upon Barth’s contributions and promptings to contemporary reflection on the doctrine of eternal generation. My goal is not to offer exposition of Barth’s text so much as to note areas where his trajectory might lead, thus making good on my title: thinking after Barth about eternal generation.
PRELIMINARY MATTER 1: RELATIONSHIP TO THE DEBATE ON ELECTION AND THE TRINITY
How does my exploration relate to the suggestive account of evangelical historicism as developed in recent years by Bruce McCormack?2 His account has implications, of course, for the doctrine of eternal generation, and he has begun to gesture toward that significance with some specificity by riffing in a Barthian manner of appropriating the Thomistic claim that that “the [divine] processions contain the [divine] missions.”3 I do not have time to mount any case for or against McCormack’s proposal, but I should offer a couple of comments regarding its influence and its viability.
First, regarding its influence, I regularly observe that Barth interpretation often occurs in situations markedly different than Barth’s. They take his material claims and put them to unintended functional uses. For example, several American and Canadian students of Barth take him to be a beacon of a leftward-leaning version of evangelical theology, and he is viewed as an intellectual symbol of viability for a continuing evangelicalism shorn of its more mindless fundamentalisms. In my Presbyterian context, he has sometimes been taken to represent an orthodox but nonconfessional theology upon which this tradition might venture forward. Of course, it is worth noting that Barth was responding to a very different context than American fundamentalism or to a traditional Presbyterianism (based on, for example, confessing the Westminster standards). He was responding to Harnack and later to Bultmann and to what they represented, which was, above all else, the liberal theology of the European churches. It is ironic when a figure who fought to bring a confession-less church back toward orthodoxy becomes a symbol of a movement to dial down the confessional standards of a very different denominational setting.
Something similar is occurring with regard to Barth’s Christology and Trinitarian theology. For example, take this statement from Paul Dafydd Jones in his response to Paul Molnar regarding Barth’s theology of the logos asarkos:
Molnar’s mistake, then, is to suppose that Barth epitomizes what he presumes to be dogmatically needful in the present day, namely, “a clear and sharp distinction between the immanent and economic Trinity,” the corollary of which is an affirmation of the logos asarkos. This dogmatic claim inflates regulative claims about the independence and provenience of God to the point at which they distract from Barth’s own convictions about the divine being. The plain (and assuredly critical) fact of divine freedom tells only one part of the divine story. Barth’s focus is on what God does with God’s freedom. His suggestion is that the economic event of Christ ramifies in the time and space of God’s immanent life.4
Jones is right. Barth’s focus—his rhetorical passion—is to emphasize that God wills to be with us and not apart from us and, thus, can only be known as he makes himself known amongst us. Barth is a Christ-centered theologian, if ever there was one, and the driving argument of the Church Dogmatics hits its high points in affirming what Barth elsewhere calls the “humanity of God.” But Molnar is right: Barth affirms the logos asarkos, he speaks of the economy as “correlating” to (and not constituting) the inner life of God, and he locates the roots of God’s willed decision to elect the Christ-story as his own in God’s own inner loving freedom. Viewing the two together requires a contextual sensitivity, namely, Barth was responding in a time and to an intellectual milieu of cultural Christianity with a Christ-centered focus on the electing God. We do not live in such a time, at least not in the mainline religious traditions of North America. Our culturally compelling presuppositions about God are psychologistic and historicist, not anything driven by the categories of classical theism. While Barth contextually and rhetorically emphasized the economic focus of theology upon the Christ event (which Jones rightly attests), I can only imagine that his concern today would regard God’s freedom, transcendence, and holiness (which Molnar champions). So our thinking about Barth’s doctrine of God and any utility it might have for contemporary thinking needs to be mindful of changing contexts.
Second, regarding its viability as a historical and a systematic proposal, I wish to suggest a thesis directly regarding Barth interpretation: Barth overtly teaches a fundamentally traditional doctrine of the Trinity and extensively provides a doctrinal matrix within which that traditional doctrine might be radically retooled. If one looks at his overt Trinitarian claims in I/1 and even later in his occasional comments in his final years, he upholds a classic approach to the doctrine of eternal generation, specifically, and the eternal character of the triune God, broadly speaking. But attention to his historicized Christology—in particular, to the way he reconfigures the two states of Christ and moves away from operative use of the language of “natures”—suggests a line of reasoning that might well lead elsewhere. “Two roads diverged” in the corpus of Karl Barth—I think honesty compels that we acknowledge this reality.
I suggest we call an end to this focus upon the historical question and move instead to the dogmatic query. Is election an act of the divine will or an instance of divine self-constitution? Is God’s triune being an object or implicate of God’s free election of Jesus Christ? More specifically, can we speak of the antecedence of eternal generation to the Son’s faithful embrace of his Father’s sending? There remains a place for Barth studies as such, but the historical question is far less interesting and important than the theological question: which rubric better provides categories to keep us alert to the way Holy Scripture schools us regarding the character of the God of the gospel, evangelical historicism or reformed catholicity?
Paul Nimmo has mounted a provisional defense of McCormack’s Barth with respect to its constructive value. Against the charge that McCormack’s view of the doctrine of God leaves us with a hidden God behind the decree of election and, thus, the decree to be triune, Nimmo states,
One might note initially that it betrays a very substantialist mode of thinking, wherein substances are complete and definable in themselves above any historical action or relation. The corollary to this is that in order for there to be an action, there must be a subject. This might be intuitively satisfying (and perhaps even true) for contingent beings such as human agents; but to assume that it holds for God without further analysis is nothing less than anthropomorphic speculation without biblical foundation.5
The terminology of substance is beside the point here, inasmuch as it is an accidental reference to the doctrinal point made by McCormack’s detractors (likely few of whom, if any, would defend Aristotelian substance metaphysics as such). Ultimately Nimmo’s defense suggests that with respect to creatures a subject precedes action, while with respect to God a subject may not need to precede action.
Without employing the language of substance, we can restrict ourselves to fundamental doctrinal terminology and convey the point. The perfect God acts to make himself present to others. Presence necessarily implies (logically) prior perfection. One might scroll through the divine economy to trace acts that demonstrate this rhythm: creation ex nihilo, unilateral covenant initiation, and, of course, the incarnation of the preexistent Son. In fact, I think the logic of the gospel requires us to say the exact opposite of that which Nimmo suggests. It is only with respect to creatures that acts precede a stable subject, for ours is a pilgrim existence. But with respect to God, any action flows forth from God’s settled identity. Again, this is not the result of a substance metaphysics so much as it is simply an attempt to honor the logic of basic doctrines like the aseity of God, on the one hand, and creation ex nihilo, on the other hand.
All this is to say that my sympathies are with the classical rendering of Barth’s Christology and Trinitarian theology, though it will soon be seen that some of Barth’s most significant insights involve new or freshly rearticulated applications or implications of those classical teachings.6
PRELIMINARY MATTER 2: CHRISTOLOGY IN THE STRUCTURE OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY
A second preliminary observation warrants our attention. Christology—in particular, the doctrine of eternal generation—occurs at numerous locations in the Church Dogmatics. Having been addressed in volume I/1 as a part of the doctrine of “God the Son,” it reappears in I/2 with other christological material before surfacing yet again (at great length, both explicitly and implicitly) in volume IV/1 amidst the doctrine of reconciliation, specifically the section on “the way of the Son into the far country.”
John Webster addresses “the place of Christology in systematic theology” in a recent essay. He notes that “in much modern (and notably, but not exclusively, Protestant) systematic theology these matters have acquired a special prominence, because discrete teaching about the person and work of Christ has often annexed the fundamental role which earlier theologies more naturally recognized in teaching about the Trinity, and so has come to speak as the hallmark of the genuineness, purity and distinctiveness of Christian doctrine.”7 Webster notes this tendency but observes that the distinctiveness of the Christ cannot be glibly elided into the primacy of Christology, in as much as attesting the Christ requires a whole spate of categories already at work with which the Christ is identified (e.g., God, the human, the covenant). Thus Webster prompts us to begin further back and address God himself (theologia) and all things “relative to him as their origin and end” (oikonomia).8
Does this distinction and order not privilege the abstract? Does it not make the incarnation and the mission of the Son a secondary or accidental matter? Webster notes such concerns and offers three clarifying comments to this schematic of theology and economy as the subjects of this intellectual and spiritual discipline. First, although theology is primary and economy is secondary, the distinction is not a separation. In other words, “the pre-eminence of theology does not mean that economy is an accidental or inessential element of systematic theology.”9 He goes on: “A treatment of faith which did not proceed beyond the divine essence and triunity to the effects of God would be Christianly unthinkable. But these effects, including the incarnation of the Word, are just that: effects, only intelligible when their cause is grasped.”10 Second, while theology precedes economy materially, economy communicates or reveals theology. Further, “the outer works of God are his works, not some remote operation which is not proper to him, and this continuity of acting subject means that God’s economic acts elucidate his inner being, even though they do not exhaust it.”11 Third, this talk of the material order and the epistemological order need not be matched necessarily by the pedagogical order. In other words, one could begin with the economy, if one does so in a way that clarifies that the economy is secondary in the order of being. Pedagogy may be shaped by various needs of the time, place, and setting; the metaphysical primacy of God’s inner life, however, must be attested in one way or another.
Barth illustrates these principles in the architectonics of the Church Dogmatics. While he does cycle back to address the doctrine of God amidst his Christology, he has already reflected upon God’s inner life in CD I/1–2 and again in II/1. Still further, he locates election as an act of will rather than nature in II/2. One need not be convinced of the precise nature of his Christocentrism to appreciate the systemic application of his Christology consistently across the CD. I remain broadly unpersuaded that he has provided a coherent and viable way beyond natural theology and what he views as its two forms, Protestant liberalism and Roman Catholicism. And yet I marvel at the way in which he puts Christology to use by exploring how the Trinitarian relations of origin must be extended in the direction of relations of ongoing intra-Trinitarian communion and by showing how the mission of the incarnate Son corresponds to the eternal life of the Son. And how, in so doing, he continues to honor this distinction and ordered relation between theology and economy. It is to these connections that we now turn.
Theologia: THE OBEDIENCE OF THE ETERNAL SON
Barth had already begun with and dealt with God—yet theology continued to haunt the Church Dogmatics. Quite literally, the doctrine of God had been addressed in volume two, and yet there is no getting around the fact that volume four, addressing the doctrine of reconciliation, returns to theology. In speaking this way, I am not making the obvious judgment that Barth continues to speak on matters that concern religious issues or regard divine things, as the term “theology” is employed in North America, nor do I make the slightly more particularly Christian claim that Barth addresses matters of Christian principle, as the term “theology” would be put to use in Great Britain; rather, I use the term theology in its classic, scholastic sense (theologia) to refer specifically to affirmations of God’s own being (over against his relations to others). And I do so to note the startling reality that in this extended account of the incarnation, that central hub of God’s involvement with others (when another nature is assumed by the Second Person of the Trinity), theologia returns as a matter for our consideration.
Why this? Why here? Barth’s theological principles compel him to think theology whenever and wherever God reveals himself and, we might add, nowhere else. In this vein, Barth continues the Reformed tradition’s antispeculative, iconoclastic approach. He adds his own spin to it, of course, in the way he articulates its Scripture principle and in the distinctive Christocentrism that flavors his hermeneutical appropriation of that text.12 Such matters, however, are not my concern in this chapter. I do not want to consider where he draws theological matters from, but instead where he takes them to. In other words, it is worth highlighting the way in which God’s self-revelation in the incarnation and in the reconciling work of the incarnate Son is apparently an event (or a narrative cycle of such events) that tells us of God (his being in and of himself). So right in the vortex of his exposition of the gospel narrative—the nexus of divine economic activity—Barth turns back to theologia.
And Barth’s application of that methodological return to theology is also noteworthy. In Church Dogmatics IV/1, §59.1, he turns to the obedience of the Son to the Father in the Son’s incarnational life and death as well as his perfect life in the Godhead.13 This discussion occurs amidst chapter fourteen of the Church Dogmatics, on “Jesus Christ, the LORD as Servant,” in other words, on the humiliation of the Son. More specifically this paragraph focuses upon “the obedience of the Son of God,” to which later part-volumes will offer contrasting and paired reflections upon “the exaltation of the Son of Man” (§64) and “the glory of the mediator” (§69). It is followed in this chapter and part-volume by reflections upon pride (§60), justification (§61), the Spirit and the gathering of the community (§62), and the Spirit and faith (§63). But the most pertinent material for our purposes is specifically found in §59.1, amidst his exposition of the “way of the Son of God into the far country.”
What theologia is found in this reference to and rumination upon the incarnate Son’s trek into the wilderness? Some say that Barth historicizes Christology and, in so doing, the Godhead.14 And to the extent that he fails to do so consistently, we might press on further. For example, Bruce McCormack claims that §57, specifically its attention directed to the methodological or epistemological rule played by God’s self-disclosure as willed in the covenant of grace, “is significant for the treatment of the doctrine of the incarnation which will follow in §59.1 in that the door is closed firmly on the thought of the incarnation of a Logos understood along the lines of an abstract metaphysical subject.”15 Thus the economy is predicated of God, and, more strikingly, God is subject only of this economy and in no other way (though not only in this economy). In McCormack’s rendering, this will lead to an unease with a number of pieces of classical Christian divinity: divine impassibility and divine simplicity, for starters. His iconoclasm here stems not from a philosophical aversion to such ideas but from an exegetical and hermeneutical conviction that they fail to be coherently confessed of the one whom the gospel narrative names as the eternal Son.16 This one suffered—this one cannot be construed along the lines of simplicity—this one reveals the Father—and thus, the Godhead cannot be impassible or simple.17
As mentioned above (regarding the first preliminary matter), I will not be addressing this claim about genetic development within and beyond Barth. It is worth noting, however, that McCormack’s approach has been followed by or, perhaps we might say, paralleled by a number of significant figures doing constructive work downstream from volume four of the Church Dogmatics. Jüngel, Pannenberg, Moltmann, and Jenson each approach this kind of historicizing (albeit they tend to tilt either towards protology or eschatology). To each of them, one might respond in many ways, perhaps most pointedly by noting that in IV/1 Barth insistently uses the language of “correspondence” to speak of the link between theologia and oikonomia, a term that notes a distinction within a unity.18 The route of reading divine eternity in or within history may not fit Barth’s structural rhetoric here.
Another way might be pursued, however, which sought to honor Barth’s theological principle—that the incarnation reveals the Father and so our Christology must again return us to theologia—without discarding a classical Trinitarian theology and its (at least classically adjoined) complex of divine attributes.19 In another place Scott Swain and I have sought to make good on this sort of project.20 In that argument, we contend that “the obedience of the eternal Son in the economy of salvation is the proper mode whereby he enacts the undivided work of the Trinity ‘for us and our salvation.’ More fully, the obedience of the Son is the economic extension of his eternal generation to a Spirit-enabled, creaturely life of obedience unto death, and therefore the redemptive foundation for his bringing ‘many sons to glory’ (Heb. 2:10).”21
A number of objections can be raised to such an approach, arising from both classical and modern motivations. First, can the idea of the Son’s obedience, within the realm of theologia and not merely the incarnate oikonomia, be held alongside the conviction that the Godhead shares a single will? Second, would the Son’s obedience in any way render his omnipotence (as the Almighty) problematic? Third, does any attempt to affirm the eternal Son’s obedience within a classical Trinitarian theology not fall afoul of a wider problem, namely, the essentialism of a substance ontology? These questions would not exist, at least not in that form, for anyone taking Barth’s Christology into a historicizing trajectory. These queries necessarily arise, however, for someone who remains committed to the attributes and Trinitarian metaphysics of classical Christian divinity and who seeks to honor the epistemological rule of the incarnation—à la Barth.22
Oikonomia: THE FAITH OF THE INCARNATE SON
Barth’s doctrine of eternal generation, and his wider Christological approach, not only leads to a methodological return to theologia in considering the obedience of the eternal Son, but it also prompts further attention to the particularity of the Son’s economic course. Specifically, we will see that the eternal receptivity of the Son, who is marked by filiation, flows forth out of his divine fullness into an economy not only of incarnation but of a life of trust and obedience to his Father’s will.
As mentioned above, the obedience of the eternal Son extends the eternal generation of the Son into the economy. Thomas Aquinas taught that the missions contain the processions or, to put it otherwise, that the processions extend outward to the missions. Yet this axiom precedes even that high medieval distinction, for Cyril of Alexandria elaborated on the manner in which the eternal generation of the Son necessarily shaped the revelation bestowed by the Son in his gracious economy of making the Father known.23
Might we press further and suggest that eternal generation not only finds extension in the reality of the incarnation but also in the patterns of that incarnate life? Barth’s Christology prompts us to relate the humble and dependent manner of the LORDly servant to his eternally receptive character in the Godhead.
Ought we to go this route? Barth’s exegesis suggests that the New Testament—particularly the Pauline writings—do point toward this kind of economic specificity. Barth was well ahead of his time, as it were, in rendering the Pauline phraseology pistis christou in the manner of a subjective genitive (“Christ’s faith”) rather than an objective genitive (“faith in the Christ”).24 Whereas New Testament studies would come around to this translational and interpretive move only in the 1980s, Barth anticipated this move by decades.25 Owing to his efforts, theologians were talking about the faith of the Christ (at least in oblique ways) long before Richard Hays and others led the charge to rethink Pauline studies in the 1980s and 1990s.26 The notion had, by that point, already been mentioned or even discussed in the works of Gerhard Ebeling, Thomas Torrance, James Torrance, John Murray, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jon Sobrino, and the United Presbyterian Church of the United States of America’s “Confession of 1967.”27
Exegetical reflection upon those pistis christou phrases remains debated. I confess that I remain convinced by the more traditional rendering of them as objective genitives (“faith in Christ”), for specific syntactical and rhetorical reasons and not due to any dogmatic presuppositions that would render the subjective genitive questionable or problematic. Yet while I remain convinced by more traditional exegesis, it seems equally significant to note that Barth’s broader point may find surer footing on other biblical grounds.28 For example, the Epistle to the Hebrews addresses the incarnate life of the Messiah with greater pointedness than any of those Pauline texts (see Heb 2:10–3:6; 4:14–5:10). This may be a case of bad texts being employed to prompt a good doctrine, if the Christ’s faith is a significant facet of Christology that was rediscovered by questionable Pauline exegesis but finds better scriptural warrant in Hebrews and possibly the Gospels. Elsewhere I have explored the coherence of claims that the incarnate Son did exercise faith—anthropologically, covenantally, metaphysically—as well as the soteriological significance and ethical implications of such an attestation.29 In that initial study on The Christ’s Faith, I only hinted at the way in which the economic form of the Son’s earthly life as a life of “ec-centric” dependence mirrored or extended in a new way that intra-Trinitarian life of the eternally begotten Son. In a comparative dogmatic analysis of the place that the Christ’s faith might hold within the theological schemas of Thomas Aquinas, the federal theologians, and Karl Barth, I noted that each had their own way of sustaining “this axiomatic claim that the works ad extra reveal the life ad intra,” more specifically, that the “faith of the Christ would be construed by each of these dogmatic systems as the economic echo of eternal filiation which marks the Son in relation to his Father.”30 I noted that Aquinas uses the language of processions and missions, the federal theologians employ the doctrine of the covenant of redemption (pactum salutis), while Barth turns to the obedience of the Son of God and its relation to eternal generation at this axiomatic point.
I noted in that initial study that these three dogmatic systems each offered greater testimony of the immanent life of God than is currently on offer in many of the most notable approaches of the supposed Trinitarian renaissance of the last century. Each approach—Thomas, the federal tradition, and, yes, Barth—compels us to speak not only of the evangelical history of the triune God, but of the fullness of that God’s life from which that history receives its movement. And reflection upon the way in which the shape of that economy—specifically, the Son’s obedience of faith before his Father and ours—can inform our account of that immanent triune life. Thus, I pressed forward in a more recent article to explore this connection between oikonomia and theologia still further.31 In that account an attempt was made to note the widespread import of the Son’s receptivity or fidelity. Thus, “the earthly fidelity of Jesus is a distributed doctrine in as much as it manifests itself in every part of his earthly sojourn: the willingness of the eternal Son to assume human nature, the virgin birth, the patient apprenticeship of a Son being brought to perfection, the ministry, and, finally, the passion and bruising at the behest of his neighbors.”32 I also argued there, with Barth, that Christology must lead to a return to our doctrine of God. Thus, soteriology must be rooted in Christology, and I made the effort to “show that the Christological account flows forth from the eternal relations of the Trinity.” In so doing, a thesis was unpacked: “In the eternal life of the perfect God, the divine Son pleases the Father in the Spirit and, therefore, the divine Son trusts the Father by the Spirit’s power during his earthly pilgrimage.”33
Much of that argument proceeded by way of engaging the biblical exegesis, not of Karl Barth but of the early church fathers (especially Athanasius and Gregory of Nyssa), Thomas Aquinas, and some sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Reformed theologians (Bullinger, Ursinus, Polanus, Perkins, and Turretin play key roles in the argument). And more surely needs to be said than that which was expressed regarding the ways in which Spirit Christology’s attempts to construe the incarnate action of the Son must be further rooted in a Logos Christology, whereby the single subject acts according to his Spiritually graced human nature and his divine personhood and nature as the Word incarnate. Here Cyril of Alexandria could further enhance the argument, particularly by drawing on his anti-Nestorian polemic regarding the lived significance of the Son’s divine nature during his earthly sojourn.34 But all that patristic, medieval, and reformational conversation aside, it remains the case that Barth has prompted such attention. For this reason, Kevin Vanhoozer has spoken of a need to engage the doctrine of God in terms of a “post-Barthian Thomism.”35
CONCLUSION: TOWARD A REFORMED CATHOLIC CONFESSION OF ETERNAL GENERATION
This exploration has been brief and suggestive, noting ways Karl Barth’s theological ruminations prompt doctrinal development in matters regarding the life of God in himself as well as the economy of the gospel. While his doctrine of eternal generation is remarkably unremarkable in and of itself, his attempt to show its systematic vitality must be described as both vivid and provocative. I have tried to offer the briefest of descriptions of ways my own reflections on theologia and oikonomia have alike been stirred by his methodological and material concerns, even though I neither consider myself a Barthian nor wind up agreeing with many of his most central doctrinal moves.
Nonetheless, as a systematic and historical theologian, I must note with Vanhoozer that any Thomism or Augustinianism or Scotism or any other classical articulation of God’s character today will benefit from being reiterated in a “post-Barthian” fashion. For Barth’s central reminder and prompt is one deep at the core of biblical, patristic, and, yes, Reformed theology, namely, that all speculation must be tethered to and tested by God’s self-revelation, most centrally in the person and work of the incarnate Son. We do well, as we think about the classical doctrine of eternal generation, to think forward to its connections with the specific shape of the gospel economy as well as backward toward its wider theological significance in the immanent life of God. In both facets of Christological reflection, while Barth may not provide the answers, he does prompt the right questions.
1. For recent assessment of classic accounts by which one might make a judgment regarding the nature of Barth’s doctrine of eternal generation as compared to, say, that of various patristic or later medieval figures, see the following helpful studies: Keith Johnson, “Augustine, Eternal Generation, and Evangelical Trinitarianism,” TrinJ 32 (2011): 141–63; John Webster, “Eternal Generation,” in God Without Measure: Working Papers in Christian Doctrine, vol. 1, God and the Works of God (London: T&T Clark, 2016), 29–41.
2. There are precursors to much of McCormack’s argument in the German literature. For example, key elements can be found in this passage from Jüngel: “As the ‘sum of the Gospel’ and the ‘very essence of all good news’ God’s election of grace is the beginning of ‘all the ways and works of God.’ In his ways and works God sets himself in relation. In speaking of a beginning of these ways and works, we mean a relation of God to that which he is not. For God himself ‘has indeed no beginning.’ It is thus a question of the beginning of God’s opera ad extra [external works]. But as the beginning of all the ways and works of God, God’s election of grace is not only an opus Dei ad extra [external work of God] or, more precisely, an opus Dei ad extra externum [external work of God directed outwards]; it is at the same time an opus Dei ad extra internum [external work of God directed inwards]. For election as such is not only a decision made by God and in so far an election which also certainly concerns him; it is equally a decision which affects God himself ‘because originally God’s election of man is a predestination not merely of man but of Himself.’ If, then, the decision of the election of grace not only affects elect humanity but also at the same time affects God in a fundamental way, then it is dogmatically consistent to treat the doctrine of predestination as a part of the doctrine of God” (Eberhard Jüngel, God’s Being Is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology of Karl Barth, trans. John Webster [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001], 82–84).
3. Bruce L. McCormack, “Processions and Missions: A Point of Convergence between Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth,” in Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: An Unofficial Catholic-Protestant Dialogue, ed. Bruce L. McCormack and Thomas Joseph White (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 99–126. Thomas Aquinas distinguished between the acts of nature and of will in his account of the triune being of God. Bruce McCormack has made much of the Thomistic claim that the divine processions and divine missions are one act with two terms. This is true. But Thomas also says—elsewhere in his doctrine of God—that there is a distinction between God’s necessary, characteristic acts and his freely willed, creative acts (ST 1.41.2). McCormack has read one statement apart from its wider Trinitarian context. See further Matthew Levering, “Christ, the Trinity, and Predestination: McCormack and Aquinas,” in Trinity and Election in Contemporary Theology, ed. Michael T. Dempsey (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 244–73.
4. Paul Dafydd Jones, The Humanity of Christ: Christology in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (London: T&T Clark, 2008), 93.
5. Paul T. Nimmo, “Election and Evangelical Thinking: Challenges to Our Way of Conceiving the Doctrine of God,” in New Perspectives for Evangelical Theology: Engaging with God, Scripture, and the World, ed. Tom Greggs (London: Routledge, 2010), 36.
6. Evangelical historicism does present a particular approach to the doctrine of eternal generation, but in doing so it does not actually present a novelty. Centuries ago, Wilhelmus à Brakel reflected upon such an approach. In his analysis of eternal generation, he addressed a number of “evasive arguments,” the third of which was: “The second Person is called the Son because He agreed to assume the human nature in the Counsel of Peace, and for the accomplishing of the work of redemption was manifested in the flesh as the visible image of the invisible God” (Wilhelmus à Brakel, The Christian’s Reasonable Service, vol. 1, God, Man, and Christ, ed. Joel Beeke, trans. Bartel Elshout [Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage, 1992], 150).
7. John Webster, “Christology, Theology, Economy: The Place of Christology in Systematic Theology,” in God Without Measure, 44.
8. Ibid., 45–46, citing Aquinas, ST 1.1.7, ad. For further analysis of Thomas on this point, see Gilles Emery, “Theologia and Dispensatio: The Centrality of the Divine Missions in St. Thomas’s Trinitarian Theology,” The Thomist 74 (2010): 515–61.
9. Webster, “Christology, Theology, Economy,” 46.
10. Ibid., 48.
11. Ibid., 46.
12. See esp. Barth, CD IV/1, 177.
13. Barth, CD IV/1, 192–210.
14. Bruce L. McCormack, “Karl Barth’s Historicized Christology: Just How ‘Chalcedonian’ Is It?,” in Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 201–34.
15. Ibid., 219.
16. Barth, CD IV/1, 192.
17. Admittedly, McCormack continues to develop his constructive arguments (as well as the historical excurses that relate to them, at least with regard to figures beyond Barth and movements deeper in the tradition), and thus any judgments regarding his project remain provisional. Thus far the widest portrait he has sketched in a publicly accessible way is his series of Kantzer Lectures delivered at the Henry Center of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in 2011 (available online: http://henrycenter.tiu.edu/kantzer-lectures-in-revealed-theology/past-lectures-publications/bruce-mccormack/). For an assessment of his project to this point (noting some modifications that have already been undertaken regarding the notion of divine freedom), see Scott R. Swain, “Grace and Being: Bruce McCormack on the Gospel’s God,” in The God of the Gospel: Robert Jenson’s Trinitarian Theology (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2013), 208–27.
18. See, e.g., Barth, CD IV/1, 187; IV/2, 43–44. Paul Jones uses the language of the incarnate Christ’s election being “coincident” and “coordinate” with the inner life of the Trinity rather than being “constituted” by it, which appears to be a shrewd judgment of what is being implied with this terminology (The Humanity of Christ, 81n51).
19. It was Gregory of Nyssa, after all, who said that “obedience is part of his nature” (Against Eunomius, in NPNF2 5:122 [2.11]).
20. Scott Swain and Michael Allen, “The Obedience of the Eternal Son,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 15, no. 2 (April 2013): 114–34. See also Swain and Allen, “The Obedience of the Eternal Son: Catholic Trinitarianism and Reformed Christology,” in Christology, Ancient and Modern: Explorations in Constructive Dogmatics, ed. Oliver D. Crisp and Fred Sanders (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2013), 74–95. Some significant parallels can be seen in Bruce D. Marshall, “The Unity of the Triune God: Reviving an Ancient Question,” The Thomist 74 (2010): 1–32.
21. Swain and Allen, “The Obedience of the Eternal Son,” 117.
22. Significant concern has been raised in a thoughtful way by Thomas Joseph White in the essay “Intra-Trinitarian Obedience and Nicene-Chalcedonian Christology,” Nova et Vetera 6, no. 2 (2008): 377–402. Swain and Allen have attempted to address his concerns, however, in their essay.
23. See especially his Commentary on John 12:49–50. For analysis, see Matthew R. Crawford, Cyril of Alexandria’s Trinitarian Theology of Scripture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 20–21.
24. This phraseology occurs in the following Pauline texts: Rom 3:22, 26; Gal 2:16 (2x), 20; 3:22; Phil 3:9; Eph 3:12.
25. See, e.g., Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns, 6th ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 96; Barth, “Gospel and Law,” in Community, State, and Church: Three Essays, trans. G. Ronald Howe (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1960), 74. But note that Barth seems to render Phil 3:9, at least, with the relevant phrase as an objective genitive: Barth, The Epistle to the Philippians, 40th anniv. ed., trans. James W. Leitch (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 99–103.
26. The key work here is Richard B. Hays, The Faith of Jesus Christ: The Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1–4:11, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001).
27. Full bibliography can be found in Michael Allen, The Christ’s Faith: A Dogmatic Account (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 17–22.
28. For accounts that are more deferential to the exegetical claims of a few recent New Testament scholars (e.g., Richard Hays), see David Stubbs, “The Shape of Soteriology and the Pistis Christou Debate,” Scottish Journal of Theology 61, no. 2 (2008), 137–57; Douglas Harink, Paul among the Postliberals: Pauline Theology beyond Christendom and Modernity (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2003).
29. Allen, The Christ’s Faith.
30. Ibid., 180–81.
31. Michael Allen, “ ‘From the Time He Took the Form of a Servant’: The Christ’s Pilgrimage of Faith,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 16, no. 1 (2014): 4–24.
32. Ibid., 5.
33. Ibid., 6.
34. See Crawford, Cyril of Alexandria’s Trinitarian Theology of Scripture, 35–42.
35. See Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion, and Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), esp. pt. 2.