Karl Barth
A Self-Revealing Trinity
Barth (1886–1968) served for several years in pastoral ministry, first as vicar and then pastor. During this time he came to realize that his training in liberal Protestant theology had not prepared him well for preaching what his congregation needed to hear. Furthermore, the First World War effectively destroyed liberal theology’s seemingly facile cultural optimism. Faced with this situation, he turned to Paul’s Letter to the Romans and discovered there a new approach requiring that he stress the transcendent otherness of God. He came to see that divine revelation must include, without any other rational or cultural grounding, the condition for its being recognized.1 The 1919 edition, and especially the 1922 edition, of his publication, The Epistle to the Romans,2 launched a theological revolution. “Dialectical theology” became a term used to describe Barth’s and his followers’ theological stance developing out of this study.3 However, ten years or so after the appearance of the 1922 edition of Romans, in the preface to the first volume of his Church Dogmatics, namely, The Doctrine of the Word of God, part 1, Prolegomena to Church Dogmatics,4 Barth repudiated any impression he might have given that he wished to root his theology in philosophical existentialism or anything other than the Word of God heard in the Church. He writes in the preface with great determination that, come what may, he will be faithful to his understanding of his theological calling. His resulting monumental, multivolume Church Dogmatics, five overall volumes divided effectively into fourteen volumes including Index, has profoundly marked the further development of theology, and especially trinitarian theology, throughout the twentieth century. It remains an important point of reference now well into the twenty-first century.
As we turn to Barth we will want to note how he almost single-handedly, in the Protestant world and surely beyond, relaunches interest in the notion of God as triune. He began his definitive systematic theological reflection with Trinity, thus bringing Trinity to the fore in theology as Hegel had done in philosophy early on in the nineteenth century. As we shall see, Barth’s trinitarian thought resembles in structure that of Hegel when Barth sees Trinity as a movement of divine subjectivity reformulated in terms of divine self-revelation.
Barth on Trinity
With great passion Barth lays out his initial, more formal presentation of Trinity in volume 1 of his Church Dogmatics.5 Wolfhart Pannenberg summarizes the outline of that presentation as follows:
In CD, I/1, §§ 8–9, he [Barth] moves on from the concept of revelation to the doctrine of the Trinity, in §§ 10–12 he moves back from the revelatory work of the Father, Son, and Spirit to their eternal deity, then in §§ 13–15 (CD, I/2) he deals with the objective revelation of the triune God in the incarnation of the Son, and finally in §§ 16–18 he concludes with the subjective revelation of the triune God through the Holy Spirit.6
For a fuller view of Barth’s thought on Trinity we would need to complement and enrich Barth’s more monosubjectivally formulated opening understanding of Trinity in volume 1, especially part 1. Doing this would require longer reference to his further discussions, in the subsequent volumes of his Church Dogmatics, of various aspects of Trinity which he considers there in the context of his prolonged reflections on reconciliation and redemption.7 For present purposes, however, we will accept that, despite considerable discussion, there is a basic continuity8 along with development between what Barth says in volume 1, part 1, about Trinity and his further reflections in subsequent volumes. In these volumes he seems in his more concrete discussions to give greater stress to distinctions and relations among the three modes of being in and through which, as Barth will say of course already in volume 1, “God reveals Godself as Lord.”
This basic continuity will permit us, for present purposes, to get a fair taste of Barth’s trinitarian theology by focusing on what Barth says in §§ 8–9, Church Dogmatics, 1/1. We would need on another occasion to refer to texts found later on in Church Dogmatics in order to get a better sense of the way in which he has further enriched his trinitarian thought, especially in volumes 2 and 4.9 With regard to Barth’s trinitarian thought in the later volumes, we can by way of anticipation mention what we will note later on in chapter 8 below. That is, it has been said that the stress Pannenberg places on the distinctions and relationships among the three divine Persons would be inconceivable without Barth’s increased emphasis in volume 4 on the distinct ways in which God acts in God’s self-revelation.10
Many great thinkers condense the essence of their thought into several paragraphs or pages here and there in their longer writings. Barth has surely done this in volume 1, part 1, of his Church Dogmatics and, more specifically, in chapter 2 entitled “The Revelation of God, Part I: The Triune God,” §§ 8 and 9. So, as just mentioned, we will focus on these texts in which we can identify places where he spells out in concentrated fashion his trinitarian theology after a longer preliminary reflection in chapter 1 on “The Word of God as the Criterion of Dogmatics.”
Barth opens § 8, entitled “God in His Revelation” (295–347), with the following summary statement indicating where he will go with his argument in the three sections of this article as he lays out his initial presentation of Trinity: “God’s Word is God Himself in His revelation. For God reveals Himself as the Lord and according to Scripture this signifies for the concept of revelation that God Himself in unimpaired unity yet also in unimpaired distinction is Revealer, Revelation, and Revealedness” (295).11
In the first of this article’s three sections, “The Place of the Doctrine of the Trinity in Dogmatics” (295–304), Barth begins with reference to revelation, and to Scripture as witness of revelation, as unique and not to be put alongside other possible revelations. Scripture testifies to the revelation of God as Yahweh in the Old Testament and as Θεός or κύριος in the New Testament. For Barth, then, the triple question, which in the following phrase is expressed in condensed form, arises immediately: Who is this God, how does the revelation occur, and what is the result of the revelation? In his famous phrase, Barth answers, “God reveals Himself. He reveals Himself through Himself. He reveals Himself.” So God is identical with God’s act of revealing Godself and with that revealing’s effect. Already here Barth sees that we must “begin the doctrine of revelation with the doctrine of the triune God” (296). God is the self-revealing God whose revelation is received by people. Barth continues to work with these three questions which he intriguingly intertwines in a perichoretic interaction, though Barth does not quite use this word perichoretic in regard to them. The first question, who is God, cannot be answered fully without reference to God’s self-revealing and without further reference to what makes possible the reception of this revealing by those addressed in the act of revelation. And the second and third questions cannot be handled without referring to the first question as well as to each other. With reference again to the Scriptural witness, he concludes, “Thus to the same God who in unimpaired unity is the Revealer, the revelation and the revealedness, there is also ascribed in unimpaired differentiation within Himself this threefold mode of being” (299). Beginning, then, from the primordial reference to divine self-revelation, Barth puts the concrete doctrine of the Trinity at the beginning of his Church Dogmatics, and says that it conditions not just in an external fashion but from within, so to speak, all further theological reflection (303).
Barth further unpacks his understanding of the relationship among revelation, scripture, and the doctrine of the Trinity in the second of these three sections of article § 8, “The Root of the Doctrine of the Trinity” (304–33). At the end of this longer section and the beginning of the following section he makes a rather succinct and helpful summary (332–34) of what he has said over the course of this section. We will paraphrase at some length this summary, and supplement it with further points he makes earlier on in the section.
At the end of the second section Barth affirms straightforwardly that he has been looking at the root of the doctrine of the Trinity in the concrete revelation witnessed to in the Bible. He says, to pick up his colorful expression, revelation is the ground or soil out of which the doctrine of the Trinity has grown. Throughout this second section Barth has repeatedly affirmed that the basic statement, “God reveals Himself as the Lord,” has “a threefold meaning and yet a simple content” in the biblical texts and their witness. He found there “the three elements of unveiling, veiling and impartation, or form, freedom and historicity, or Easter, Good Friday and Pentecost, or Son, Father and Spirit.” He sees in these statements and this reading of them that he has said “the same thing three times in three indissolubly different ways,” and has rightly concluded “that revelation must indeed be understood as the root or ground of the doctrine of the Trinity” (332).
Barth more modestly asserts he has found “that the biblical doctrine of revelation is implicitly, and in some passages explicitly, a pointer to the doctrine of the Trinity” (333). So doctrine is not some externally imposed or arbitrarily developed position. Rather, it is Church exegesis in which it is necessary ever to refer back to the biblical texts. The doctrine of the Trinity stands, and here we are saying it perhaps slightly more bluntly than Barth does, as an answer in relation to the question of revelation as witnessed to by Scripture.
Barth opens the third of these three sections in § 8 succinctly: “In trying to analyse the biblical concept of revelation, we have arrived at the thesis that this analysis reduced to its simplest form, the threefold yet single lordship of God as Father, Son and Spirit, is the root of the doctrine of the Trinity” (334). Before proceeding on to the third section of § 8, however, it will be helpful to supplement our paraphrasing of and citing from Barth’s own summary of the second section with several points he makes, during the course of that section, concerning divine lordship.
Barth insists that he is not working with anything other than the concrete revelation witnessed to in and through Scripture. Revelation is God speaking as I to a Thou, “Dei loquentis persona” (304). God is the very speaking itself, so divine revelation is self-revelation in the strictest sense of this term. Barth summarizes all of this “in the statement that God reveals Himself as the Lord” (306). He reads the biblical phrase “kingdom of God” as God’s lordship, thus in effect identifying God’s being with God’s action and God’s rule. In this action and rule God is the ground without ground (307). In phrases which foresee his further reflection on God’s lordship, Barth writes, again with a threefold rhythm of expression: “To be Lord means being what God is in His revelation to man. To act as Lord means to act as God in His revelation acts on man. To acquire a Lord is to acquire what man does in God when he receives His revelation” (306). Barth identifies divine lordship with divine freedom and then spells out how this freedom is exercised as Father, Son, and Spirit, to use traditional dogmatic terminology.
In his consideration of divine lordship, Barth confirms that the doctrine of the Trinity is an analysis of revelation as witnessed to in Scripture, “the interpretation of revelation” (312). It is using other words to say what has been said of revelation in Scripture. Of particular importance, he says that “the question of revealer, revelation and being revealed corresponds to the logical and material order both of biblical revelation and also of the doctrine of the Trinity” (314). He then develops at length various aspects of God’s lordship as freedom, with special emphasis on the Christological moment, namely, the fact that God’s freedom is specifically manifested, and consequently his lordship as well, in his self-revelation in what he is not, namely, a human being. “This Sonship is God’s lordship in His revelation” (320). God exercises lordship as well in revealing Godself, in unveiling Godself as not being unveilable. The hidden God is the revealed God as hidden God (321). In revealing himself, God the Father reveals himself in the very fact that he does not take form as the Son. So “God’s fatherhood, too, is God’s lordship in His revelation” (324). And, third, God’s self-unveiling is an impartation to humans by God who cannot be unveiled. Here Barth argues against any form of historical understanding of divine self-revelation which would be subject to scientific, cultural, or other reasoned norms. He wishes even in the reception of divine self-revelation to assert and protect divine transcendence, yet the impartation of divine revelation occurs to certain people in very definite situations (326). Here Barth is speaking of God who “reveals Himself as the Spirit, not as any spirit, not as the basis of man’s spiritual life which we can discover and awaken, but as the Spirit of the Father and the Son.” In reference to John 4:24, he says that God’s being spirit “is also God’s lordship in His revelation” (332). In his grammatical analysis of revelation according to trinitarian categories, Barth moves from revelation as witnessed to by Scripture to the affirmation of God’s lordship understood as freedom on to the exercise of that freedom in self-revelation as the structured movement from hidden Father, revealer, to the Son who has taken the form of not-God, revelation, to the Spirit who is the revealedness of God in humans.
In the third and last of these sections of § 8, entitled “Vestigium Trinitatis” (333–47). Barth reiterates the single rootage of the doctrine of the Trinity in revelation witnessed to in Scripture.12 He rejects the more traditional usage of the expression “vestiges of the Trinity,” which refers to creaturely realities not taken up into and used by God in God’s divine self-revelation. He might accept considering the unveiling of God as the Son or Word as a vestige, but he wants at all costs to protect divine transcendence by resisting the possible identification of any other root of the Trinity or knowledge of it in creation as such. He shows a certain respect for ancient searches for such vestiges, recognizing that persons with good intentions noticed a certain aptness for various things and expressions to be appropriated as ways of speaking of the Trinity known through revelation (340). But the true vestiges of the Trinity are the forms “which God Himself in His revelation has assumed in our language, world, and humanity” (347). Barth accepts only one root, and not two, of the doctrine of the Trinity.
Barth treats directly of the immanent Trinity in § 9, “The Triunity of God.” He opens with the following initial summary: “The God who reveals Himself according to Scripture is One in three distinctive modes of being subsisting in their mutual relations: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is thus that He is the Lord, i.e., the Thou who meets man’s I and unites Himself to this I as the indissoluble Subject and thereby and therein reveals Himself to him as his God” (348). After this opening statement, Barth sketches out his thought on immanent Trinity in four sections. In the first section, entitled “Unity in Trinity” (348–53), he briefly reviews the history of trinitarian thought in the Church, with a focus on unity or, better, the oneness of God as subject of revelation.13 God is one in such a way that the triunity of God is “the basis of the Christian concept of the unity [oneness] of God” (348). In his effort to refute all possibilities of tritheism, Barth identifies the essence or being of God with God’s lordship. Given his previous remarks on divine lordship, he can now speak of the name of Father, Son, and Spirit as indicating God is one in threefold repetition, which repetition in turn is grounded in His Godhead. Continuing to stay close to Barth’s own wording, we can say God is God only in this repetition and “is the one God in each repetition” (350). For the moment Barth is using the word “repetition” to refer to the three divine persons as he rejects vehemently all notions of three individuals in God or of threeness of divine essence. For him the traditional use of divine persons does not refer to three personalities. There are not three divine I’s of which we speak but “thrice of the one divine I” (351). He ends this first section by stressing that revelation means God’s presence. And if this is the case, Christ and Spirit cannot be subordinate hypostases. “In the predicate and object of the concept revelation we must again have, and to no less a degree, the subject itself. Revelation and revealing must be equal to the revealer” (353). The oneness of God requires that Father, Son, and Spirit, respectively Revealer, Revelation, and Revealedness be equal. Otherwise the oneness of God would be identified only with Revealer, and Revelation and Revealedness would be impossible.
In bringing this review of the first section of § 9 to a close, we will do well to cite George Hunsinger’s listing of three different senses in which God is one for Barth: personal, ontological, and dominical.14 At first reading in Barth, these three senses do not seem evident though they can be found there at further reading. Hunsinger identifies personal divine oneness as the Scriptural insistence, according to Barth, on God as indissolubly Subject and divine Thou (348). He refers to ontological divine oneness when he recalls that Barth speaks of divine personality as belonging, to cite Barth, “to the one unique essence of God which the doctrine of the Trinity does not seek to triple but rather to recognize in its simplicity” (350). By dominical divine oneness Hunsinger means Barth’s reference to divine lordship. Hunsinger writes that God’s “essence is identical with his sovereignty and freedom.”15 He closes his remarks on this section of § 9 with the reminder that for Barth “the eternal God’s personal, ontological, and dominical oneness subsist in and through (and only in and through) his eternal threeness, never above it or behind it.”16
With the second of these four sections in § 9, bearing the sectional title “Trinity in Unity” (353–68), Barth turns more directly to the question of the threeness in God. More specifically, he raises the most difficult trinitarian question of the notion of the three, which are distinct in God, as persons. He rejects the idea that the oneness of God might indicate an understanding of one as indicating a simple singularity or some form of isolation. He then turns to the notion of person and affirms we use it simply because we have no better term with which to refer to the three who are irrevocably distinct in God and in whom God is one. Barth provides succinct and admirably clear analyses of various efforts throughout the history of Christian theology to come to terms with one or the other meaning of person as used in relation to the Trinity. He struggles with these various interpretations and notes approvingly Thomas Aquinas’s effort to understand the divine Persons in relational terms. However, he argues that his preferred term, “modes of being” (Seinsweise), serves him best in his effort to express the distinct threeness of the triune God in an era when person or personality has come to mean someone with an independent self-consciousness and will.17 Without, then, in any way embracing modalism since the distinctions will be affirmed not only in regard to the economic Trinity but as subsisting in the immanent Trinity itself, he summarizes his insight as follows:
The statement that God is One in three ways of being, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, means, therefore, that the one God, i.e., the one Lord, the one personal God, is what He is not just in one mode but—we appeal in support simply to the result of our analysis of the biblical concept of revelation—in the mode of the Father, in the mode of the Son, and in the mode of the Holy Ghost. (359)
At this point Barth acknowledges he cannot say too much about that which distinguishes each of the three divine modes of being in their subsistent distinctness. To say more, he will turn shortly to a consideration of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit first of all for each one in revelation as witnessed to in Scripture and, consequent thereupon, then primordially and by way of archetypal realization in the immanent Trinity (for example, 362, 366). For now, Barth insists that God “is God three times in different ways, so different that it is only in this threefold difference that He is God, so different that this difference, this being in these here modes of being, is absolutely essential to Him, so different, then, that this difference is irremovable” (360). The divine distinctions derive from their differing relationships to one another as indicated in revelation. For the present, Barth remains content with indicating the more formal relations among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as, respectively, Revealer, Revelation, and Revealedness or Being Revealed. He brings these three notions together with the general scriptural reference to begetter, begotten, and one arising from begetter and begotten. Revealer and Revelation are distinct in that the latter brings about something new. The third, Revealedness, is a result, namely, the “purpose of the revealer and … the goal of the revelation” (363). According to the Scriptural witness, for Barth God “possesses Himself as Father, i.e., pure Giver, as Son, i.e., Receiver and Giver, and as Spirit, i.e., pure Receiver” (364). With subsistent, related divine modes of being Barth feels he has provided a relatively better understanding than does person (367). Yet, when all is said and done, for Barth, “the mysterium trinitatis remains a mystery” (368). To bring his thought on the oneness and threeness of the triune God together, he takes up the notions of dialectic, perichōrēsis, and appropriation.18 He does this in the third section of § 9, entitled “Triunity” (Dreieinigkeit) (368–75), before he brings § 9 to a close with a final, fourth section, entitled “The Meaning of the Doctrine of the Trinity” (375–83). Given our overall interest in Idealism’s influence and impact on trinitarian thinking, we can review these two sections more briefly.
In the third section, Barth faces the difficulties many find in thinking through the notion of Trinity and states, straightforwardly, that thinking the oneness in three and the threeness in one must be done dialectically. This is about all we can do, given the mystery of the Trinity. In the immanent Trinity, the threeness in one occurs as what has classically been called perichōrēsis. He speaks of difference and fellowship among the divine modes of being, which modes are identical with the relations of origin. He then moves to consider the unity of the Father, Son, and Spirit ad extra. While distinguishing divine essence as such and God’s work, Barth says that God’s essence is his work as freely grounded in his essence. While God remains ultimately incomprehensible, there is no reason why God’s work should not be able to draw our attention to the incomprehensible distinctions in Godself. He speaks of an analogy “between the terms Father, Son, and Spirit along with other formulations of this triad in revelation on the one side, and on the other side the three divine modes of being which consist in the different relations of origin and in which we have come to know the truly incomprehensible eternal distinctions in God” (372). This is an analogy which respects and allows the ultimate incomprehensibility of God to remain. Barth makes an appeal to the notion of appropriation to help explain that the interrelationships among the divine modes of being in the immanent Trinity correspond to the involution and convolution, as he says, in God’s work. In all God’s work, it is God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who works. In this effort to understand God’s work, Barth says we can proceed by appropriation, a process in which an act or attribute is given to one particular divine mode of being, though it is God in all his modes of being who acts. Barth brings the notions of perichōrēsis and appropriation together by saying they are dialectically interrelated (375).
In the fourth and final section of § 9 concerning the meaning of the doctrine of the Trinity, Barth provides a wonderful overview of his presentation of the doctrine of the Trinity as the grammar of revelation as it is witnessed to in Scripture. He reminds us that for him the doctrine of the Trinity is a Church dogma spoken in a time and using words different from those of the earliest Church, during whose time the Scriptures were written or at least increasingly recognized as Scripture. The doctrine of the Trinity tells us who is the subject of revelation, namely, God. The self-revealing of God in being and speech and action is “the moments of His self-veiling or self-unveiling or self-impartation to men.” The Bible does not say that “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are equal in essence … nor does it say that God is only in this way … [these points] are the twofold content of the Church doctrine of the Trinity” (380–81). With this doctrine the Church rejects subordinationism, which would make of God a subject like us. The Church equally rejects modalism, which would imply that the divine distinctions are not real. There is nothing behind the three divine modes of being.
Barth goes on in § 10 to discuss in greater detail God as Father. He speaks first of God as creator, and then as eternal Father. In § 11 he speaks of God the Son, first referring to God as reconciler and then as the eternal Son. In § 12 he presents God the Holy Spirit, first under the rubric “God as Redeemer” and then as the eternal Spirit. In each of these, Barth moves from Revealer, Revelation, and Revealedness as seen in divine revelation, the economic Trinity, to the archetypal understanding of God as these three in the immanent Trinity, constituting it.
As we now look back over this admittedly partial but hopefully not unfair presentation of Karl Barth’s brilliant work on Trinity, we would perhaps be justifiably tempted to say that Barth relaunched twentieth-century interest in Trinity with some Idealist help. We begin to recognize a more direct and, as well, a more indirect or mediated influence and consequent impact of Idealist thought on Barth’s interpretation of revelation in trinitarian terms. To help us identify this influence, we can do no better than turn first of all to an important article by Wolfhart Pannenberg, “Die Subjektivität Gottes und die Trinitätslehre: Ein Beitrag zur Beziehung zwischen Karl Barth und der Philosophie Hegels.”19 Pannenberg brings to the fore several elements of Hegelian thought which he sees as reflecting various parallels between the thought of Barth and that of Hegel. As we shall note later on, in this article he draws attention to such parallels at least in part as a way of critiquing both Hegel and Barth. In helping understand Barth better, Pannenberg seems also to have created a space for his own trinitarian reflection.
Pannenberg opens his discussion on the relationship between Barth and Hegel with the acknowledgment that there is a growing consensus that Barth’s theology is a variation on modern themes of subjectivity and autonomy.20 After a review of various aspects of the development of Barth’s thought in the 1920s, Pannenberg draws attention to several content-wise parallels between Barth and Hegel in that thought from 1927 on, and especially from 1932 on. For instance, as Barth himself had mentioned, Hegel had almost single-handedly reintroduced the notion of the Trinity into philosophical and at least Protestant theological discussion. In his own passionate and inimitable way, Barth did this again for theology in the twentieth century. Indeed, Barth found in Trinity, and here especially immanent Trinity, a way to begin his theological reflection. But, in reaction to Hegel, he assured the independence of God who, as Father, stands in relation to the Son and not then in a necessary relation with the world as a condition for divine self-development. In both Hegel and Barth the notions of revelation and Trinity are closely linked, and are ultimately the same movement. Hegel speaks of the movement as one of divine self-development and Barth focuses more on the movement as one of divine self-revelation, though of course Hegel had spoken of both.21 Hegel and Barth both worked with and gave great emphasis to Anselm’s ontological proof for the existence of God.22 Despite these more material resemblances, Barth never ceased to recall the ambiguities tied to Hegel’s thought as, for Barth, ultimately finitizing Hegel’s supposed infinite movement of thought when Hegel tied it necessarily with finite human subjectivity, out of which it never escapes. Barth seems to have found in his encounter with Kierkegaard’s thought confirmation of his basic hesitancy before that of Hegel.23
Pannenberg then refers to Dorner, whom he sees as falling under the influence of Hegel but does not specifically mention Schelling. As Pannenberg brings out, Barth greatly appreciated Dorner especially for his insistence on the importance of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity and the way in which it permitted him to move beyond both Pietism and Rationalism.24 Also, Dorner insisted that human personality had its grounding in the Trinity, a theme dear to Barth. Pannenberg reminds us that Dorner had already spoken of divine modes of being, which phrasing Barth took over as his own. But surely we have in Dorner a theologian serving as mediator between not only Hegel’s thought but also that of the later Schelling, on the one hand, and that of Barth and those subsequently influenced by him, on the other. Idealist thought influenced Barth both more directly through his reading especially of Hegel and more indirectly through Dorner.
Following Pannenberg again, we see that he notes difficulties with the idea of establishing the divine I as already realized with God the Father. Among these difficulties, he points to the almost inevitable subordination of Son and Spirit when one begins in such a way. This was for Pannenberg a problem Dorner, but not Barth, had resolved by establishing the divine I as absolute personality resulting from the interaction of the three divine modes of being.25 As we have seen, for Barth the divine I of absolute personality expresses itself from the beginning in and as each of the three divine modes of being.
Among the further points Pannenberg makes in this dense, insightful article, we could mention his claim that Barth in fact does not so much work out his trinitarian thought on the basis of Scriptural exegesis but more on the basis of an analysis of the inner logic of the concept of revelation.26 As we will recall, Barth would of course respond that his very notion of revelation was, for him at least, witnessed to in Scripture. Pannenberg goes on to refer to Barth’s saying that God already in eternity is not without his other and is Godself insofar as he is with and in that other. Pannenberg then insightfully asks the rather astute question as to whether this is not at least in its structure the very understanding of subjectivity which Hegel worked out in the development of his understanding of Trinity out of the concept of the Spirit. Pannenberg goes on further to ask if even the form of this argument is not similar to that of Hegel. For, while we need to recognize real differences, both Hegel and Barth had, each in his own way, worked out the notion and structured movement of Trinity from and as one of divine self-revelation.27
With this remark by Pannenberg we have come to the essence, so to speak, of the resemblance between the thought of Barth and that especially but not only of Hegel. The structured movement of Barth’s thought on Trinity as a movement of subject, predicate, and object or Revealer, Revelation, and Revealedness parallels that of Hegel with his notions of “in itself,” “for itself,” and “in and for itself.” This is, according to Pannenberg, for both Hegel and Barth a self-objectivizing movement as divine self-revelation, though Hegel articulates this movement in a more radical formulation including creation as moment of divine self-revelation whereas for Barth that self-revelation occurs in Jesus Christ.28 We can complement what Pannenberg says by adding that, while for Hegel Trinity is a movement of spirit formulated in various ways appropriate to the various moments in his encyclopedic system, for Barth Trinity is a triply exercised movement of divine lordship. Spirit is, as we will recall, for Hegel an ultimately necessary movement of thought. Lordship for Barth is the free acting of the one divine personality in the three distinct divine modes of being. The movement Barth proposes then reflects the structure of that of Hegel. But the way in which he sees it developing reflects more the thought of Schelling as mediated through Dorner. For once Dorner and Barth have veered away from Hegel’s project of identifying God as a movement of conceptual thought in and through human thinking, there is a next, natural step. Within the overall Idealist framework constituting at least a partial context for Barth’s thought that next step is to think more, as Schelling did, in terms of will and decision. And this is precisely what Barth does at least indirectly to the extent that he identifies the essence or being of God with the acts of God within the Trinity and in further revelation through creation, reconciliation, and redemption.
Other authors have indicated additional resemblances in Barth’s trinitarian thought to aspects of the thought of Idealist thinkers, resemblances we could not always address more directly, given our focus on part 1 of the first volume of Barth’s Church Dogmatics. By way of example we might cite Samuel M. Powell, who draws attention to what he calls resonances between Barth’s thought and that of Hegel. He speaks of the “centrality and Christocentric character of revelation in Barth’s theology,”29 which resembles Hegel’s view of revelation. He also speaks of Barth’s presentation of “the dialectical relationship between Father and Son” in volume 4 of the Church Dogmatics. In this relationship God passes over into the negation of God without ceasing to be God. Then too, Ebehard Jüngel30 has, with regard to Barth’s trinitarian thought, written that God’s being is in becoming, a theme Hegel himself had in a systematic and determined way introduced into philosophical and theological reflection on God.31
Barth has, then, followed in the footsteps of Hegel. He has, like Hegel, thought Trinity without having, at least in principle, to identify a divine essence beyond or underlying what is for Hegel the moments constituting the movement of divine subjectivity or for Barth the modes in and through which absolute divine personality expresses itself. This one movement, whether in Hegel or Barth, permitted each of them to bring together and identify a number of theologoumena. Among them we can name trinitarian divine subjectivity or personality, divine self-revelation, and the kingdom of God. With respect to the kingdom of God, each of these thinkers identified it with what can be termed more loosely the being itself of God. In this Hegel set up and Barth reinforced a pattern and an approach toward understanding the kingdom or reign and realm of God serving as an alternative to the more ethically oriented Kantian understanding of the kingdom of God. These two alternatives, with the former more easily incorporating the latter, have conditioned and established the general parameters of further twentieth-century philosophical and theological reflection on the notion of the kingdom of God.
In evaluating the greatness of Hegel’s philosophy, Barth had written, “It is possible to bypass Fichte and Schelling, but it is as impossible to pass by Hegel as it is to pass by Kant.”32 Yet at least in regard to trinitarian thinking, Barth himself seems in his emphasis on divine freedom and divine modes of being to remind us as well of the continuing influence of the later Schelling on trinitarian thinking. In Barth we recognize at least the indirect influence of Schelling through that of Dorner. Indeed we notice family resemblances between Barth and several of his Idealist predecessors, and especially Hegel.33 In one way or another, through Barth those predecessors have continued to influence subsequent trinitarian thinking. We can do well to recall again Barth’s evaluation of Hegel as “a great problem and a great disappointment, but perhaps also a great promise.”34 We may indeed see Barth, with all his strengths and weakness, as fulfilling his own prophecy. In the various family resemblances Barth’s trinitarian thought shares with that of Hegel and Schelling; Barth in his own creative way shows something of the great promise of Hegel and indeed, even to some extent, Schelling.35