Commanding Grace Excerpt: Studies in Karl Barth's Ethics

Commanding Grace

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Commanding GraceStudies in Karl Barth’s Ethics

Edited by

Daniel L. Migliore

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Grand Rapids, Michigan / Cambridge, U.K.

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© 2010 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

All rights reserved

Published 2010 by

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

2140 Oak Industrial Drive N.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49505 /

P.O. Box 163, Cambridge CB3 9PU U.K.

Printed in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Commanding grace: studies in Karl Barth’s ethics / edited by Daniel L. Migliore.

p. cm.

Chiefly proceedings of a conference held June 22-25, 2008,

at Princeton Theological Seminary.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-8028-6570-0 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Barth, Karl, 1886-1968. 2. Christian ethics — Reformed authors.

I. Migliore, Daniel L., 1935-

BJ1251. C693 2010

241.092 — dc22

2010016206

www.eerdmans.com

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Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Abbreviations viii

Contributors ix

1. Commanding Grace: Karl Barth’s Theological Ethics 1

Daniel L. Migliore

2. Karl Barth’s Ethics Revisited 26

Nigel Biggar

3. The Spirit and the Letter: Protestant Thomismand Nigel Biggar’s “Karl Barth’s Ethics Revisited” 50

Eric Gregory

4. Karl Barth and Just War:A Conversation with Roman Catholicism 60

William Werpehowski

5. Barth and Werpehowski on War, Presumption,and Exception 83

John R. Bowlin

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6. Barth and Democracy:Political Witness without Ideology 96

David Haddorff

7. Karl Barth and the Varieties of Democracy:A Response to David Haddorff's “Barth and Democracy:Political Witness without Ideology” 122

Todd V. Cioffi

8. Crime, Punishment, and Atonement:Karl Barth on the Death of Christ 136

Timothy Gorringe

9. For Us and for Our Salvation:A Response to Timothy Gorringe 162

Katherine Sonderegger

10. Barth and the Economy of Grace 176

Kathryn Tanner

11. Karl Barth on the Economy:In Dialogue with Kathryn Tanner 198

Christopher R. J. Holmes

12. Barth and the Christian as Ethical Agent:An Ontological Study of the Shape of Christian Ethics 216

Paul T. Nimmo

13. Karl Barth’s Conception(s) of Human andDivine Freedom(s) 239

Jesse Couenhoven

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Acknowledgments

Most of the essays in this volume were presented as lectures at theThird Annual Karl Barth Conference held June 22-25, 2008, at PrincetonTheological Seminary. I want to express my thanks to the Karl BarthCenter at Princeton for sponsoring this event; to Princeton Seminaryfor hosting it; to all the lecturers and their respondents for their stimu-lating leadership; and to the many conference attendees whose com-ments and questions sparked lively discussions during our days to-gether. A special word of thanks is reserved for Matthew Puffer, myresearch assistant at the time and now a Ph.D. student at the Universityof Virginia, who provided indispensable help with every aspect of myeditorial responsibilities. Thanks also to Dr. Clifford Anderson, Cura-tor of Special Collections at the Princeton Seminary Libraries; to AmyEhlin, Conference Coordinator; and to Christopher Terry-Nelson andTravis McMaken, student assistants for the conference. Finally, I amgrateful to Tom Raabe and all the skilled staff of Eerdmans for theircareful editorial work, and most especially to Bill Eerdmans and JonPott, editors extraordinaire, for their encouragement and support. Idedicate this book to Eberhard Busch, who has contributed so much toBarth studies over the past half century, not least in emphasizing theinseparability of theology and ethics in Barth’s writings and practice.

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Abbreviations

CD Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1–IV/4. Edited by G. W. Bromileyand T. F. Torrance. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1936-75.

CL Karl Barth, The Christian Life: Church Dogmatics IV/4, Lecture Frag-ments. Translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley. Grand Rapids:Eerdmans, 1981.

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Contributors

Nigel Biggar

Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral TheologyUniversity of OxfordOxford, United Kingdom

John R. Bowlin

Ruth and Rimmer DeVries Associate Professor of ReformedTheology and Public Life

Princeton Theological SeminaryPrinceton, New Jersey

Todd V. Cioffi

Assistant Professor of Congregational and Ministry StudiesCalvin CollegeGrand Rapids, Michigan

Jesse Couenhoven

Assistant Professor of Moral TheologyVillanova UniversityVillanova, Pennsylvania

Timothy Gorringe

St. Luke’s Professor of Theological StudiesUniversity of ExeterExeter, United Kingdom

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Eric Gregory

Professor of ReligionPrinceton UniversityPrinceton, New Jersey

David Haddorff

Associate Professor of Theology and Religious StudiesSt. John’s UniversityStaten Island, New York

Christopher R. J. Holmes

Senior Lecturer in TheologyUniversity of OtagoDunedin, New Zealand

Daniel L. Migliore

Emeritus Professor of Systematic TheologyPrinceton Theological SeminaryPrinceton, New Jersey

Paul T. Nimmo

Meldrum Lecturer in TheologyNew CollegeUniversity of EdinburghEdinburgh, United Kingdom

Katherine Sonderegger

Professor of TheologyVirginia Theological SeminaryAlexandria, Virginia

Kathryn Tanner

Dorothy Grant Maclear Professor of TheologyUniversity of ChicagoChicago, Illinois

William Werpehowski

Professor of Christian Ethics andDirector of the Center for Peace and Justice EducationVillanova UniversityVillanova, Pennsylvania

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Contributors

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2. Karl Barth’s Ethics Revisited

Nigel Biggar

I have long admired Karl Barth, but I have never quite been a devotee.From the early 1980s when I was a doctoral student until the publica-tion of my book on Barth’s ethics in the early 1990s,1 I was a disciple. Isat at his feet and dwelt in his thought world, because I wanted to learnwhat a vision of moral life might look like that takes the living realityof God seriously, that assumes unequivocally that God wears the faceof Jesus, and whose theological structuring is systematic rather thanhaphazard. Much of what I learned there I have carried with me eversince. Yet even before I had finished my book, I was aware that its inter-pretation of Barth’s ethics had at certain important points become areconstruction; it is clearer to me now than it was then that this recon-struction was more expressive of where I thought Barth should havegone than of where he actually went.

It is now over fifteen years since The Hastening That Waits was pub-lished, and since then I have written only two pieces on Barth, one acontribution to John Webster’s Cambridge Companion, the other a chap-ter in a book on the natural law theory of Germain Grisez and JohnFinnis. Since the mid-1990s I have spent most of my time at the practi-cal end of ethics, writing about moral issues raised by the task of deal-ing with the past after civil conflict (especially in Northern Ireland), bythe invasions of Kosovo and Iraq, by proposals to make physician-assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia legal, and by the demands of

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1. Nigel Biggar, The Hastening That Waits: Karl Barth’s Ethics, Oxford Studies inTheological Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993, 1995).

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some political liberals that theology be banned from public discourse.Having spent most of the 1980s taking the measure of a comprehensive,systematic theological structuring of ethics, and thinking predomi-nantly from the top downward, I felt that it was time to approach theethical task from the opposite end, to get stuck into the messy com-plexity of practical issues, to attempt well-crafted judgments on them,and to track how and where Christian theology actually shapes thosejudgments. I also thought it was time to stop conversing only with fel-low theologians and to start expressing a Christian intelligence in awider public.

In the long term, however, my intention is to make the returnjourney. I intend to lift my eyes again from practical cases and to refo-cus on the moral import of believing in the God who wears the face ofJesus. For that reason in particular I welcome this opportunity to re-visit the ethics of Karl Barth for the first time in almost a decade. I wel-come the opportunity to take fresh stock of his comprehensivetheological-ethical system in the light of what I have learned (or think Ihave learned) from trying to bring a Christian theological intelligenceto bear on complex practical issues and awkward cases. And I welcomethe opportunity to consider what from Barth I would take forwardinto my own account of how belief in the Christian God should shapemoral vision.

My review of Barth’s ethics will touch on the following points.First its spiritual focus; then the basic terms in which it is articulated —namely, those of God’s commands; and third, its Trinitarian informa-tion. After that come comments on each of its three substantial dimen-sions: creation, reconciliation, and redemption (or, as I prefer to call it,sanctification). Finally, I will conclude with some methodological re-marks on the relationship of theology to philosophy and empiricaldata.

The Spiritual Heart of Moral Life

I begin with what, for want of a better expression, I will call “spiritual-ity,” by which I mean the relationship between God and human crea-tures. It is one of the salient features of Barth’s ethic that this lies at itsheart, and it is for that reason that I have always thought it very apt ofStephen Sykes to suggest that we view him not only as a “formidable

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Karl Barth’s Ethics Revisited

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Calvinist dogmatician,” but also as “a spiritual writer.”2 At the very be-ginning of all that we ought to do — and remaining basic to it — isprayer. The importance of this is that prayer is the basic condition ofhuman freedom and gladness — or what I call human “flourishing.”When the human being acknowledges God the Creator, Reconciler, andRedeemer in prayer, she is freed from the intolerable burden of copingwith her finitude by trying to shoulder divine responsibility; she is freedfrom guilt over past sins; and she is freed from anxiety about the future.In prayer to the triune God, the human being is freed to be a creaturewho has been graciously reconciled and who will be sanctified at theend. Through prayer she grows the virtues of humility, faith, gratitude,and hope, which enable her to flourish in the only way that a sinfulcreature can. Prayer is the first and the last thing that we should do. It isbasic to an ethic that takes God seriously as a living reality to whom hu-man beings can and should relate in a personal way. It is also basic to anethic that recognizes that, before we turn to the business of deliberatingabout how we should conduct ourselves in the world, there is the priortask of contemplating what kind of beings we are in the first place, andwhat is the context in which we are set. Prayer embodies and confirms atheological view of the agent’s self and of her location.

This feature of Barth’s ethics has always seemed to me one of itsgreatest virtues — and it still does. It endows thinking about moralmatters with an existential seriousness. The ethical task is not just —and not primarily — about our solving practical problems out there inthe world. It is first and foremost about coming to terms with a true,theological, and soteriological description of our own creaturely na-ture and sinful condition, and of our standing before a benevolent, for-giving, and saving God. It is about adopting a posture and a set of dis-positions appropriate to our nature and situation — on our knees,humble, grateful, hopeful, and glad.

Why Command Should Be Legislative before It Is Military

One way in which Barth seeks to keep the focus of ethics on the inter-personal relationship between God and the human individual — that

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Nigel Biggar

2. Stephen Sykes, ed., Karl Barth: Centenary Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 1989), p. 83.

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is, on the spiritual dimension — is to articulate it basically in terms ofGod’s commands. A command is distinguished from a precept or a lawby its interpersonal directness and by its definiteness: it is addressed byone person directly to another, and what it directs is concrete. In bothhis Münster-Bonn lectures of 1928-29 and his Church Dogmatics, Barthdevelops his ethics in chapters on the command of God generally, andthen on the commands of God the Creator, the Reconciler, and the Re-deemer specifically.

There is an ambiguity here, however. The word Barth uses is Gebot.While this is invariably translated into English as “command,” its mean-ing actually ranges from an ad hominem “command” to a general “pre-cept.”3 In CD II/2 (especially §38.2, “The Definiteness of the Divine Deci-sion”) Barth writes of God’s Gebot addressing individuals with absolutedefiniteness. The command of God, he tells us, is “the specially relevantindividual command for the decision which we have to make at this mo-ment and in this situation. . . . The Law of God . . . is not merely a generalrule but also a specific prescription and norm for each individualcase. . . . A command . . . is a claim addressed to man in such a way that itis given integrally, so that he cannot control its content or decide itsconcrete implication. . . . It does not need any interpretation, for even tothe smallest details it is self-interpreting [selbst interpretiert].”4 It is clear,then, that Barth is using Gebot here to refer to something very much likea military order, which is addressed by a commanding officer directly toa subordinate and is ideally unequivocal and definite.5

Elsewhere, however, Barth tells us that by “hearing” a commandof God he does not mean “direct and particular divine inspiration andguidance,”6 and that subordination to God’s Word does not mean that

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3. It is true that the usual German word for “command” as in military “order” isBefehl. Nevertheless, the semantic scope of Gebot can overlap with that of Befehl, meaninga “command” as in “to be at somebody’s command.” I owe Gerald McKenny thanks forprompting me to reflect on this verbal distinction.

4. CD II/2, pp. 662, 663, 665.5. I was alerted to the nature of military orders when, before the conference at

which this essay was originally delivered, I visited the American Civil War battlefield ofAntietam. There I learned that the commanding general of the Union forces, GeorgeMcLellan, failed to rout the Confederates under Robert E. Lee partly because the ordershe issued were equivocal, leaving room for different interpretations. However, even mili-tary orders will often leave some room for the recipient to use his discretion in carryingthem out. They will be definite, but not absolutely determined.

6. CD III/4, p. 15.

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we have “simply to abandon and forget our ideas, thoughts and convic-tions.”7 Further, in his exposition of the “special ethics” of the doc-trines of creation and reconciliation in CD III/4 and IV/4 (that is, the1959-60 lectures, “The Christian Life”), he himself offers an elaborate,systematic interpretation of the constant, general form of God’s com-manding. Here, then, Gebot looks much more like a general preceptthan a quasi-military command, and commanding a Gebot is more likepromulgating a law than issuing orders.8

There is, I think, a major problem with conceiving God’s com-mands in military rather than legislative terms: it implies that receivingor hearing a command of God takes the place of reflecting and reason-ing — that it is a substitute for ethics. The human creature is put in theposition of being less a moral agent than a servile subject, passively re-ceiving absolutely definite instructions, which leave nothing further tobe thought about. This does not imply a very dignified picture of humanbeing — nor, arguably, a very biblical one. It also connotes a correlativelydespotic picture of God. What is more, it postulates an event that barelyfinds a footing in the lived experience of faithful Christians. After all,when did you last hear an absolutely definite command of God?

It is true that the legislative and military kinds of divine commandscan be reconciled. Hearing a command of God in the military sense canbe construed as a moment of discerning an individual vocation within theterms set by ethical reflection and reasoning about the constant preceptsor laws that God has laid down in creation and in the incarnation. In-deed, this is how I construed it in the very first chapter of The HasteningThat Waits, which bears the indicative title “Ethics as an Aid to Hearing.”Nevertheless, this construal involves a considerable measure of recon-struction, resolving tensions within Barth that he himself did not quiteresolve, and pulling him in a direction that not all of him wants to go. Inhis recent book, David Clough is absolutely correct to say that my inter-pretation of Barth’s understanding of hearing God’s commands is “one-sided.” He is less correct, I think, to say that my one-sided reconstructiondeprives Barth’s “vigorous and provocative ethical thought . . . of manyof its most compelling qualities: the lion’s roar becomes muted and the

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Nigel Biggar

7. CD I/1, p. 718.8. That commanding can be legislative, and that Barth sometimes uses Gebot to

denote this, was first suggested to me by John Bowlin in his article “ContemporaryProtestant Thomism,” in Aquinas as Authority, ed. Paul van Geest, Harm Goris, and CarloLeget (Leuven: Peeters, 2002), pp. 235-51.

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lion tame.”9 On the one hand, such criticism gives me pause, since Iwould be loath to think that I do not take seriously the divinity of God,and the creatureliness and sinfulness of human beings. God being God,and humans being creatures and sinners, one should expect the formerto surprise, bewilder, wrong-foot, and amaze the latter. At least as far asChristians are concerned, the idea of a tame God is surely a contradic-tion in terms. On the other hand, there are different kinds of divine wild-ness, and I do not seek to tame them all. What I do seek to tame is the no-tion that God’s will is entirely unpredictable, that it cannot bearticulated in terms of principles or rules, that it cannot be reflectedupon and interpreted rationally, and that it expresses itself in such a waythat leaves no room for the responsible exercise of creaturely discretion.What I have no desire to tame is the stringency of the moral demand thatGod’s principled will may make, or the tremendous impact of his holypresence upon self-satisfied creatures, or the wonderful rashness of hislove when it reaches beyond the limits of what passes for prudence. Inpressing for an understanding of God’s commanding as primarily legis-lative and only secondarily military, and of his commands as general pre-cepts or laws before they are individual orders or vocations, I do notthink I offend against God’s divinity — because I do not see the theologi-cal need to include in that sovereign divinity the freedom to confoundevery human attempt to understand and interpret the divine will.

In sum, I have no quarrel to pick with the notion that God com-mands general precepts or laws, insofar as this gives a theological ac-count of the source of the moral order that we find in the nature ofthings. My quarrel is rather with the notion that we learn what is right(as distinct from what is our vocation) by hearing an absolutely defi-nite set of divine orders.

Trinitarian Ethics: Economic Rather Than Immanent

The question of how we come to know what is right — the question towhich “hearing a command of God” is, I think, the wrong answer — isan epistemological one. I move now from moral epistemology to thequestion of the structure of normative ethics.

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9. David Clough, Ethics in Crisis: Interpreting Barth’s Ethics, Barth Studies Series(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. 116.

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Commanding Grace Excerpt: Studies in Karl Barth's Ethics