Dissident Dispatches

by Andrew Fraser

  Colin Gunton observes “that the doctrine of the divinity of Christ is more important for Augustine than that of the humanity”. For that reason, Augustine failed to provide a satisfactory “account of the divinity of Christ” thereby turning the Christian Trinity into “some merely rational triad”. In the end, Augustine conceives the incarnation as the logical corollary of faith in the truth of eternal things. We have “faith in things done in time for our sakes, and are purified by it”. Before we can “come to sight and truth succeeds to faith, eternity” must “likewise succeed to mortality”. The “Son of God came in order to become Son of man and to capture our faith and draw it to himself, and by means of it to lead us on to his truth”. Gunton believes that Augustine’s inability to maintain “a firm hold on the material humanity of the Son” causes his doctrine of the Trinity to “float off into abstraction from the concrete history of salvation”.350

  Pro-Nicene theology generally might have guarded against that danger (and still could) by paying more attention to biblical passages such as 1 John 5:6–8 and John 19: 30–34 which speak of the trinity of Spirit, water, and blood incarnate in the historical Jesus. To give him due, of course, Gregory did advert to the “three who bear witness, the Spirit, water, and the blood”.351 Unfortunately, he was unsure just what to make of that particular triad. Augustine, by contrast, was so obsessed with the need to purify himself by climbing “aboard the wood” that he blinded himself to the incarnational significance of the so-called “Johannine comma,” the extra words allegedly added to the Latin version of 1 John 5:7–8. Even when citing 1 John 5:8 directly, Augustine replaces Spirit/water/blood with a disembodied abstraction of his own making: “the mind itself and its knowledge, which is its offspring and its word about itself, and love as the third element, and these three are one”.352

  Conclusion

  John Milbank is right to suggest that Augustine subverted the Indo-European understanding of the sacred triad. But that subversion was not accomplished through the substitution of a highly intellectualized conception of “government by the other through time” for the Indo-European ideal of “self-government in space”.353 Rather, Augustine’s doctrine of the Trinity enfeebled Christendom in both time and space by privileging the faith of “those who pray” over that of both “those who fight” and “those who work”. Small wonder, then, that Augustine was canonized in 1303. His other-worldly asceticism helped to legitimize the eleventh-century Papal Revolution which formally separated spiritual from temporal authority thereby laying the groundwork for “the disenchantment of the world” over the past millennium.354

  3: Divine Humility and Theological Hubris

  Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Reconciliation and the Collapse of Christian Nationhood

  Introduction

  Alain de Benoist, a prominent French New Right philosopher, speaks for many neo-pagan, English-speaking white nationalists when he condemns the universalistic ethos of contemporary Christianity. In his view, the essential message of Christian teaching is that all “nations should only form one ‘humanity’ in Christ, and the Church of Christ should become the universal Church”. Cosmopolitan Christianity treats the collective attachment of particular peoples to their own kith and kin as a merely social construct, an often-dangerous form of idolatry in which man comes to identify the Volksgeist of his own ethno-nation with the Holy Spirit. Accordingly, mainstream Christianity is an ally of the transnational corporate state in a concerted campaign to do “away with people’s right to arrange their lives by following, on the level of faith and the level of values, their own paths”. 355

  Benoist’s thesis may be off the mark on at least one level: historic Christianity once nurtured a rich diversity of national cultures in Europe.356 But it is difficult to deny that contemporary churches (whether Protestant or Catholic, evangelical or mainline, liberal or fundamentalist) have established the “idea of a generic man, an abstract ‘universal’ man” as the foundation principle of Christian ethics.357 That ubiquitous parish-level Christian humanism receives its highest theological expression in Karl Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation. A nutshell edition of Barth’s massive, twelve volume work on Church Dogmatics can be rendered as follows: The crucified Christ is risen; therefore, “the whole world is reconciled to God”.358

  According to Barth, the creator God of the Old Testament, in a free and sovereign act of grace, chose to reveal himself to humanity at large in the creaturely form of the man Jesus. The Word became flesh. But the Son of God Jesus Christ did not abandon his divine nature when He humbled Himself in obedience to God the Father. On the contrary, the crucifixion, death and resurrection of the man Jesus provide the perfect outward expression of God’s inner life. The “emptying and humbling [kenosis] of the One who exists in the divine form of the divine likeness” does not stand in contradiction with the unity of the triune God. Barth posited a dialectical relationship between God and man in which God reveals himself wholly while remaining wholly hidden behind the fleshly veil of the incarnate Messiah. God shows His love for creation by condescending to travel into the “far country,” where He lives among His enemies until He descends into suffering and death. “As God He was humbled to take our place, and as man He is exalted on our behalf…In Him humanity is exalted humanity, just as Godhead is humiliated Godhead”.359

  In the bodily resurrection of Jesus, God the Father signals His “gracious and almighty approval of the Son’s representing of the human race”. Indeed, the resurrection represents the eternal “participation of the whole of mankind in the person and work of the one man Jesus as the Son of God”. God’s wrath upon man, the “penultimate no…expressed in the cross, is properly seen to belong to his ultimate yes.” For only in Christ is man both rejected and exalted.360 Barth recognizes, of course, that “we cannot expect that all men will be in a position to know and give an account of Him and therefore of their true and actual being as it is hidden and enclosed and laid up for them in Him. But by faith Christians know and can declare what it is that belongs to them and all other men in Jesus Christ”. Conversely, when man, wittingly or unwittingly, rejects the gracious gift of God’s love he perverts his own nature and radically compromises his destiny by abusing, disturbing, and destroying “the possibilities of his creaturely being”.361

  Barth’s “inclusive Christology” marks a substantial departure from orthodox Reformed Protestantism.362 In his view, the cross/resurrection event was a sovereign act of grace “in which the Son of God assumes flesh in the widest possible sense,” embracing “the life story of every person, indeed the entire sweep of human history”.363 Unlike Reformers such as Calvin who distinguished between the elect recipients of divine grace and unregenerate sinners damned to perdition, Barth preaches a “purified supralapsarianism” which holds out the hope of universal salvation at the Last Judgement. His concept of grace is both sovereign and universal, hinging “on the idea that Christ is both the electing God and the elected man”. This means “that Christ, and he alone, is the rejected man”. This does not mean that the guilt of man goes unpunished. Rather, “the punishment for the sin of man must be placed upon Jesus Christ as the God-man”. Because the wrath of God expends itself completely upon Christ the sins of all other men are forgiven. Barth knows “of no men and no class of men who are permanently rejected of God”. Even “those who oppose Christ cannot finally escape their own election in Christ”. In Barth’s theology, Christian universalism is inscribed for all eternity in the incarnate Word of God.364

  Interpreting Barth

  A more striking contrast with neo-pagan particularism can scarcely be imagined. Given Barth’s high standing among evangelical and mainline Protestants one might suppose, therefore, that he represents the authentic, neo-orthodox voice of Christian theology.365 But one should avoid leaping to the conclusion that Barth was a theological conservative. There are those who deny that his rendition of Christian faith has a solid foundation in either Scripture or church traditions. Further c
omplicating matters is that fact that Barth was a life-long socialist famous for his opposition to German nationalism under the Third Reich and who remained a leftist fellow-traveller during the darkest days of the Cold War. At the same time, having graced the cover of Time magazine in 1962, Barth clearly enjoyed privileged access to the corporate media in the USA.366 In fact, his universalistic doctrine of reconciliation might be said to have become the putatively Christian core creed at the heart of official multiculturalism over the past half-century. Under his influence, Protestant churches joined with transnational corporate capital and cultural Marxism in a neo-communist campaign to open the borders of white, Western nations (and only white, Western nations) to the free circulation of the global multitude.367

  But it is no easy matter to pigeon-hole either Barth’s theology or the liberal Protestantism with which he broke during the First World War. Liberal Protestantism in Germany was a reaction to Enlightenment scepticism. The claim of Scripture to provide Christians with irrefutable, inerrant, and objective knowledge of God was rejected by those who exalted the rationalist ideals of autonomy and freedom. Many believers retreated into the subjective realm of religious experience, seeking to experience the divine in their own life. The result was a quest for the historical Jesus. No longer was Christianity about abstract doctrines; it became a religion in which loyalty to Jesus became the key to understanding the deepest longings of the human heart. But, by focusing on the subject, liberal theology allowed sceptics such as Ludwig Feuerbach to portray the religious quest for experience, value, and personal meaning as nothing more than “man himself, projecting his finite existence on the screen of eternity”. Barth recognized not only that Feuerbach had exposed “the suicidal logic at work in neo-Protestantism” but that this central weakness of liberal Protestantism “also represented an opportunity” to restore the objective foundations of theology.368

  Barth was prepared to live with the scholarly results of the “higher criticism” of Scriptures. He made no effort to refute historical, form, and source critics pointing to errors, inaccuracies, and contradictions in the Bible. Rather, he insisted that Scripture was witness to the fact of revelation; it is not itself, however, a direct revelation of God.369 Barth’s Christocentric theology rested upon three presuppositions distilled from the New Testament witness370 :

  1. Jesus Christ is the acting subject of the reconciliation of the world with God; and

  2. the atonement is an event in the world; and

  3. the subject of the act of atonement” is “identical with the existence of the humiliated and lowly and obedient man Jesus of Nazareth.

  On that dogmatic foundation, Barth erected an effective and influential theological defence against liberal Protestantism. But many orthodox Reformers remained convinced that Barth had conceded too much ground to the higher criticism, thereby compromising the integrity of the faith. One of the most prominent of such critics was the Dutch-born American, Cornelius Van Til.

  Van Til’s Critique

  Van Til believed that Barth wanted to retain his standing as a Reformed Protestant but only on condition that “he be allowed to purify and radicalize” the theology of the Reformers “in terms of his Christological principle”. By conceiving Jesus Christ as the Christ-Event, Barth makes grace “the all-overarching and all-unifying attribute of God. Accordingly, there can be no such thing as a wrath of God that is not borne by God himself in Christ for all men”. Barth was convinced that the Reformers “did not fathom the triumph of grace in Christ”. Van Til retorted that by insisting on the universality of grace, Barth “has lost its sovereign character”.371

  Indeed, Van Til insisted that Barth never managed to escape the Feuerbachian swamp of subjective irrationalism: “The grace of Barth’s theology is the grace of a Christ who is himself nothing more than a projection of man himself”. For Barth, it was axiomatic that if “God was truly and wholly present in Christ,’ God becomes “wholly identical with this rejected man”. Man’s true essence is found in his election in Christ. The eternal triumph of election “means, centrally and determinatively, the a priori divine decision of the election of all in the election of Christ”. Van Til concludes, therefore, that the universality of grace implies “the ontological impossibility of sin”.372

  Given Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation, God’s mercy cannot be nullified. Even the worst of sinners or those men to whom Christ is unknown have been reconciled to God. Barth claims that “man’s only true freedom, his only true being is found in the relation of God’s grace through Christ”. There is an eternal “oneness of essence” between God and all men, past, present, and future. On this view, “man did not exist and sin against the known law of God at the beginning of history”. Sin is merely “the concrete form of nothingness” which “disturbs created nature”. Barth rejected the Reformed doctrine of original sin as an abstraction “centred in the idea of direct revelation of God to man in history, with Adam as the first historical representative of mankind”. In fact, Barth denied in principle the possibility of direct revelation in history. Not even the Bible was recognized as “an instrument of divine impartation” much less as “the highest ‘Truth’”. The Bible becomes “the Word of God only when we recognize its human imperfection”. Of necessity, the universality of grace entails “the denial of direct revelation. If the revelation of God in history were to be identified with any fact of history, then this revelation would, ipso facto, be the possession of some men and not all”.373

  Barth’s problem then is to seek “for objectivity in Christ without believing in the Bible as identical with his word telling of himself”.374 His doctrine of reconciliation therefore treats the Christ-Event as a matter of history, as something which “happened in this way, in the space and time which are those of all men”. But while the revelation of Christ comes into history, it cannot be identified with anything in history. The passion, crucifixion, and death of this one Jew is distinguished “from all the other occurrences in time and space with which the passion of Jesus Christ is otherwise similar in every respect”. The resurrection is the singular moment when the actuality of God is revealed in history. Its truth, however, in no way depends upon “independent human judgement, invention, or intuition”. That event was “the verdict of God radically altering the human situation”. Barth frankly acknowledges, however, that “[t]here is no proof, and there obviously cannot and ought not to be any proof, for the fact that this history did take place”.375 The revelation of the risen Christ must remain “wholly hidden in history even when wholly revealed there”.376

  Revelation can never be a “history” understood in accordance with the methodology of modern historical scholarship. “If God had bound himself to a direct revelation in history, given to some men only, then he could speak no word of Yes to all men everywhere”.377 In other words, revelation is a fact in history but history is not a vehicle for revelation. For this reason, Barth vehemently denounced all forms of natural theology as idolatry. Likewise, Barth and his followers dismissed Van Til’s critique as a futile effort to restore the Bible to its traditional place as the “paper pope” of orthodox Reformed theology.

  Political Theology

  At least part of the reason Van Til’s dogged critique failed to convince fellow theologians378 is simply that he never grasped the underlying point and purpose of Barth’s inclusive Christology. Barth’s work spanned the entire academic spectrum of “exegetical, historical, systematic, and practical theology” but in essence he was engaged in political theology. To fully understand his doctrine of reconciliation, one must remember that Barth became “one of the foremost Christian opponents of nationalist and anti-Semitic ideology as it affected Protestant theology from the First World War through to the Nazi era and beyond the Second World War”. Barth’s political theology began from the presuppositions that “the God of Israel revealed in Jesus Christ” not the idea of nation or nationalism is “the sole foundation of any talk of who one’s friends and enemie
s really are”.379

  The First World War precipitated the radical Christological turn in Barth’s thought. From that time on, he routinely contrasted “the new world of God” with the present world. Jesus Christ had brought a “revolution” and “liberation from all dependency structures”. Patriotism was displaced in Barth’s declaration that Heaven was the true Heimat or homeland of all Christians.380 Barth regarded nationalism, no less than the liberal Protestantism obsession with subjective religious experience, as “a disease, a sickness, a basic deformation of the human creature”.381 He set himself in permanent opposition to the idea that nations are an order of creation. He regarded the political manipulation of such ideas as a dangerous form of “mutual boasting”. Barth’s campaign to deconstruct nationalism was of a piece with his efforts to demythologize natural theology. Accordingly, he contended that the “command of God ‘requires loyalty’ to one’s own nation ‘but not illusions’ as to its eternity”. While the nation can legitimately call upon our loyalty, it must never become more than “a framework for [our] action as obedient action”. The primary allegiance of every Christian must be to the Word of God.382