The correspondence motif in Barth's theology of invocation

Although there is little space to develop this idea sufficiently here, it is important to realise that one of the most significant achievements in Barth's theology of invocation, as it unfolds in The Christian Life, is the link it makes between the practice of prayer and the correspondence (Entsprechung) of divine and human agency.Footnote ¹⁷ Invocation, Barth writes, ‘corresponds and is analogous to his divine act’.Footnote ¹⁸ Webster, for example, argues that by making the invocation of God the controlling category of the ethics of reconciliation, the motif of correspondence is expressed with ‘greater force’.Footnote ¹⁹ The success of this article's defence of the agential relation in the baptism fragment therefore stands or falls on the extent to which ‘correspondence’ can be considered sufficiently participative. Because the term is used by Barth in a technical way, it is critical to pause briefly to see what type of work the concept does in other areas of Barth's theology.

For Barth, the highest statement which can be made about human agency is that it corresponds to divine agency. Gott spricht is met with der Mensch entspricht (to use Jüngel's axiom) and ‘the work of his eucharistia correspond[s] to the charis of God’ (to use Barth's).Footnote ²⁰ This is the realisation of the identity God intends for us all. The motif of correspondence is not new to the ethics of reconciliation, however. The term is beloved by Barth to prevent any severing of God's being from God's act and does much of the conceptual heavy-lifting in his actualistic theology of revelation: hence the divine self-correspondence.Footnote ²¹ Correspondence is also prominent in Barth's christological lexicon to describe the uniquely realised concurrence of the divine and the human which takes place in the most agentially complex of all, Jesus Christ; and, since our humanity is ontologically constituted in relation to Christ's, the correspondence between God and humanity represented in Jesus Christ provides the promise that we may in some analogical way also correspond to divine agency.Footnote ²² Further, the structuring of ethics around the familiar three acts of God (creation, reconciliation and redemption) suggests that the very notion of ethics takes place in correspondence to the movement of God's own being.

However, in the ethical fragment, and in distinction from other areas of the Church Dogmatics, Barth's analysis does not rest with the rather bare contention that divine agency and human agency correspond. What is attempted here is to provide something more complex; that is, to provide a way of answering the question of how the promise of the divine–human correspondence is concretely actualised. Barth writes: ‘What we want is not just a formally clear concept, but also one that is filled out materially, one that tells us what is the conversion that is according to God's will, what is the decision to which man is summoned by it.’Footnote ²³ Thus, for Barth, the divine–human correspondence of agency is expressed most fully in practice, in the particular practice of invocation. The term ‘correspondence’, we must not forget, is exactly the term that was used by Barth to describe both the inner-trinitarian relations and the unique and mysterious correspondence of Christ's fully divine and fully human agency.

Given the important dogmatic work that the motif of correspondence has already done at these crucial points in the Church Dogmatics, to employ that same term to describe what is going on agentially in the act of invocation is a bold and revealing move indeed. In an analogous way, then, to the complex agential make-up of Christ's own agency, invocation also is to be understood as complexly fully divine and fully human. Put differently, if the concept is participative enough to describe the union of the divine and human in the person of Christ and dominate Barth's technical christological discussions then it is surely sufficiently participative to describe the relation of human to divine agency in the act of invocation.

The mystery of the divine and human correspondence is actualised in the humble act of calling upon God. This excludes, therefore, the possibility of sole-causality, in either agential direction: invocation implies, pace someone like Feuerbach, the agency of two acting subjects.Footnote ²⁴ Yet the mystery of invocation is ever more complex. There is always a pneumatological movement in and through the pray-er that muddies the allocation of agency along clear and bifurcated lines. It is not merely that there are divine actions and human actions, that God acts then we act, that we act then God acts. Barth's understanding of double agency excludes this type of agential bipolarism. The issue turns, then, on how these two acting subjects (non-competitively) occupy this shared invocational space.

This invocational correspondence is consequently more radical than much of that which preceded the ethical fragment. In his reflections on the concursus, Barth implies that ‘God “concurs” with the creature, but the creature does not “concur” with God’.Footnote ²⁵ Moreover, God's ‘causare consists, and consists only, in the fact that He bends (einordnet) their activity to the execution of His own will which is His will of grace, subordinating their operations to the specific operation which constitutes the history of the covenant of grace’.Footnote ²⁶ The question-begging language of ‘bending’ is far surpassed in the ethics of reconciliation. What emerges here is not merely a confession of the boundedness of human agency by God's concursive grace, which precedes, accompanies, and follows (§§49.1–3) every aspect of ethical existence, however seamless this might be, but a much stronger sense of agential reciprocity. Human agency corresponds to divine agency, which precedes and grounds all action, and divine agency corresponds to human agency.Footnote ²⁷

The mysterious event of the divine–human correspondence can be described through the familiar (Chalcedonian-like) asymmetrical framework of ‘differentiated unity’, or otherness and relation, which runs throughout the Church Dogmatics. Here as elsewhere Barth has no intention of relaxing his unflinching commitment to the critical distinction between the divine agent and the human agent who encounter each other ‘without confusion’ – even and especially in the almost audacious intimacy of prayer. They are

The non-competitive grammar of invocation proceeds on the very basis of the radical distinction between divine and human agency. Accordingly, we invoke ‘directly from below’ as children of God for that which the Father alone can bring about, vertically from above.Footnote ²⁹ A clear distinction is drawn between the infancy of the pray-er and the paternity of God, between the asker and the giver, between the Creator and the creature, in short: between divine agency and human agency. There is absolutely no commingling or confusing of agencies in this relation and both retain their distinctive integrity. Any confusion would render invocation something more or less than a genuinely human action. And as a genuinely human action, invocation is necessarily curbed ‘within the painful limits’ of the ethical agent's humanity.Footnote ³⁰ This is the ‘without confusion’ aspect of Barth's Chalcedonianism. However, following the Chalcedonian logic through, his argument should be grasped dialectically: at the very same time invocation has to do with the distinction between divine and human agency and also with the union of God and humanity. And this is the ‘without division’ aspect of Chalcedon, which tells the other side of the correspondence story.

The strong agential distinction therefore is qualified by a comparably strong affirmation of the agential union. Barth's entire theology of prayer moves constantly and dialectically back and forth between the union and distinction of divine and human agency. The dialectic takes shape as follows:

The language of correspondence and analogy ‘guards the difference between God and humanity’ whilst emphasising ‘as strongly as possible their partnership’, so Jüngel concludes.Footnote ³² It is precisely through the strong affirmation of the radical distinction and vast incomparability of divine and human agency that, on the one hand, Barth can prevent making God just another thing of the historical process and, on the other, affirm the union of agencies in the most remarkably intimate and non-competitive terms. Invocation does not refer to two separate actions, one creaturely, the other divine, but rather to one utterly simple and singular act: a human act which is enveloped so totally and fully by God's concursive grace that it is at once genuinely divine and distinctively human. And, for Barth, all this is rooted in the work of the Holy Spirit. He writes: ‘In the Holy Spirit God comes together with these people in such a way that for the ongoing distinction there arises fellowship, a common life, between him and them and them and him.’Footnote ³³

The model of invocation not only expresses divine and human agency as both unmixed in their distinction and yet inseparable in their unity but also depicts the careful ordering of this agential correspondence. Invocation is the constant and radical reassigning of priority to divine agency and the remaking of human agency by its reordering into a new type of subject. This order flows irreversibly from Creator to creature and from Father to child. Thus, the invocation of God is the ‘invocation of the self-acting Subject-Father’.Footnote ³⁴ Any disordering or reversing of this agential order, however, is the quintessence of sin: the hopeless drive to mount hegemony over against God and the fall from right relations into the disorderliness of relations-gone-wrong.Footnote ³⁵ Since the agential order is irreversible, the ethical agent does not, strictly speaking, possess the possibility to pray but rather is ‘empowered for this, and obligated to it’ by a prior movement of grace.Footnote ³⁶ Prayer has its beginnings, in other words, in Christ's priestly work, as James Torrance has aptly described; in fact, for Barth, Christ is the very embodiment of prayer.Footnote ³⁷

Baptism as invocation

Having gained some purchase on this particular aspect of Barth's rich theology of invocation, the task of applying this conceptuality to the baptism fragment can begin. There is strong evidence documented to suggest that, as in his theology of invocation, Barth had no intention of separating divine and human agency in his baptismal theology in the ways for which he is often criticised. In 1967 Barth relayed to Hans Küng that he intended to ‘view Spirit baptism and water baptism as . . . neatly related and distinguished’ but crucially never separated.Footnote ³⁸ A more precise rereading of the baptismal fragment is therefore in order and precision can be gained by reading the baptism fragment contextually, that is, in the context of the wider vision of the reconciliation ethics.Footnote ³⁹

Neglecting to read the fragment contextually (in this case in the context of invocation) contributes to the type of interpretative difficulties mentioned above. The wager of the present argument is that the idea that Barth's mature baptismal theology betrays certain agentially externalising characteristics is unsustainable once the full implications of the invocational context are upheld. It is nearly always overlooked that the very section which would have preceded Barth's theology of baptism (§75) would have been the unveiling of his theology of invocation (in §74), had, that is, his vision for the ethics of the doctrine of reconciliation been fully realised. The part-volume would have begun with the introductory section on invocation (§74) and with Barth's confident articulation of the correspondence of divine and human agency. Thereafter, Barth's theology of baptism, his (incomplete) exposition of the petitions of the Lord's Prayer, and his (unwritten) theology of the Lord's Supper, would have formed the major divisions of the ethics of reconciliation and together would have provided an expansive and intricate vision of the Christian life. Each subsequent paragraph of the ethics of reconciliation would have been ordered around the concept of invocation. Barth writes:

In the ethics of reconciliation, then, Barth makes a structural decision to bring the sacraments under the ‘controlling concept’ of invocation.Footnote ⁴¹ As soon as Barth's baptismal theology is read as a stand-alone fragment of the Church Dogmatics, and extracted from its allocated space within the context of invocational correspondence, hermeneutical inaccuracies arise.

The importance of reading Barth's theology of baptism in the context of his theology of invocation does not end there. Barth's mature baptismal theology should not only be understood in the context of invocation but also precisely as invocation.Footnote ⁴² In the preface to CD IV/4, Barth acknowledges his gratitude to his son Markus' book on baptism, which he famously credits for changing his mind on the sacramental status of baptism.Footnote ⁴³ In Die Taufe – ein Sakrament?, Markus argues that in the New Testament baptism is invariably described as a human work of obedience and an answer to the saving work of God. He concludes with the curious but revealing suggestion that baptism is not a sacrament but instead should be understood in terms of ‘prayer’.Footnote ⁴⁴ This implies that, rather than simply rejecting the sacramental status of baptism and the Lord's Supper, prayer points the way for both Barths to a positive understanding of baptism. In the last few pages of the baptism fragment, immediately before he had planned to move into his exposition of the Lord's Prayer, Barth clarifies, then, what has been assumed throughout. ‘The final thing to be said is that the meaning of the act of baptism consists in prayer.’Footnote ⁴⁵ Baptism ‘is a calling (Anrufung) on the name of the Lord. It is not just accompanied by epiclesis; in itself and as such it is epiclesis.’Footnote ⁴⁶

What has been achieved in this curious appeal to the concept of invocation (epiclesis) should not go unnoticed. Barth's entire theology of baptism, which forms the final words of the published volumes of the Church Dogmatics, climaxes in an invocational interpretation of baptism. And on this basis, baptism is the very foundation and ‘model’ for all that follows in the Christian life of calling upon God (Ps 50:15).Footnote ⁴⁷ Baptism is prayer. This seemingly simple statement is shorthand for something much more complex and the remainder of this article attempts to flesh out some of the implications of this claim.

First, the emphasis on the prior divine act and the subsequent human response in Barth's mature theology of baptism clearly accords with the correct and irreversible order of agency which is articulated so carefully in his theology of invocation. ‘Where there is prayer, man's relationship to God is corrected and it is in order. Because and to the degree that baptism is prayer, the participants act in this order.’Footnote ⁴⁸ Within this ordering, absolute priority is accorded to divine agency (baptism in the Spirit) to which the human agent responds faithfully (baptism with water). This agential movement is characteristic of Barth's entire ethical project. Genuine human action, of which prayer is paradigmatic, is not (without conceding to Feuerbach) a self-initiated human venture. Instead, the prior actuality of divine grace is generative of genuine human action. Hence the section on baptism by the Holy Spirit is immediately followed by a discussion of human agency (water baptism). The auctor primarius in both prayer (Christ's priestly prayer) and baptism (divine action in Spirit baptism) is God. From the very foundation of the Christian life the radical grace of God disrupts any propensity to assign priority to human action and determines that for human action to be counted as good it must follow a prior divine act of grace. If the baptism fragment fails elsewhere, it surely succeeds in emphasising that the foundation of the Christian life is not a result of the Christian's ‘own free will and action, nor a matter of his own caprice’ but a humble response to a prior divine event.Footnote ⁴⁹

Second, and following this, baptism, like prayer, is properly and genuinely a human action. The ethics of reconciliation is an elaborate exploration of what may be called good human action. If Barth's mature theology of baptism achieves one thing, it is to affirm water baptism as nothing more and nothing less than good human action.Footnote ⁵⁰ Barth persistently maintains that baptism with water is human ‘work, action and conduct’,Footnote ⁵¹ ‘free and responsible human action’,Footnote ⁵² and is ‘true and genuine human action which responds to the divine act and word’.Footnote ⁵³ And human action, for Barth, can only be considered good as it takes place in faithful correspondence with divine action.

Therefore, third, baptism with water, if it is to be a properly human action, needs to be distinguished from divine action. Note, then, that the relation between divine and human agency is not without difference but this confession of agential difference should not be mistaken for the separation of divine and human agency. Since the church is ‘neither the author, dispenser, nor mediator of grace and its revelation’,Footnote ⁵⁴ baptism with water involves ‘God and man as two different partners’, infinitely and qualitatively distinguished from one another.Footnote ⁵⁵ On Barth's reading of the sacramental tradition, human action is ‘overshadowed and obscured’ by a divine act and therefore loses its integrity as a genuinely human action.Footnote ⁵⁶ This confuses divine and human agency, fudges the agential distinction, and envisions in water baptism some ‘immanent divine work’. Footnote ⁵⁷ Human action attempts to be something more than genuinely human action and in so doing falls into something less than human. Here ‘the meaning of baptism is to be sought and found in a divine action which is concealed in the administration by men and which makes use of it’.Footnote ⁵⁸ The danger, of course, is a soteriological synergism in which the human agent is seen to cooperate with divine grace in effecting salvation in ways which run against the grain of some of the basic dogmatic principles of the Church Dogmatics.Footnote ⁵⁹

This instinctive allergy to all things synergistic does not, however, rule out every form of divine–human cooperation, but rather founds and grounds a more precise grammar for articulating how it can be said that divine and human agency relate. The prior work of divine action is generative of nothing more and nothing less than genuine human action, an action which is entirely appropriate to the ethical agent. Webster is right, then, to argue that Barth's rejection of the sacramental status of baptism with water is made ‘for ethical reasons: the clear distinction between divine and human agency is not an invalidation of human action, but its liberation to be truly human, responsive to, and not absorbed within or instrumental to, an overruling act of God’.Footnote ⁶⁰ In other words, this strict distinction should not be construed negatively. It is for the demythologising of vaunted assessments of human potentiality and the re-establishing of a human action which genuinely befits ethical agency.

However, there are points in his mature theology of baptism at which Barth presses too far the model of human response to the prior act of divine grace. The ‘sacraments are nothing whatever but response’, Barth writes.Footnote ⁶¹ ‘The whole life of the Church from top to bottom is nothing but response to the Word of God.’Footnote ⁶² This would seem to generate an insufficiently participative grammar of agential relations. However, and this is the fourth point and where we will confront the difficulty of agential separation head on, just as in prayer, an invocational reading of baptism dialectically expresses both the responsive nature of human action as distinguished from a prior act of grace and at the moment of response the particular human action is set to correspond with divine action in the closest possible terms. Just as in invocation, here too: human action and divine action must be dialectically emphasised. As elsewhere in Barth's mature moral thought, where the agential distinction is emphasised the union of agencies should be presumed. Read in this way, and contrary to the queue of critics who argue otherwise, Barth's baptismal theology also asserts the union of divine and human agency: a dialectical union-in-distinction. It is this complex dialecticism which is sometimes missed by Barth's critics but can be held more concretely in view once baptism is understood as prayer. And, to follow Jüngel, the dialectic is best expressed and parsed through an appeal to the concept of ‘correspondence’ (Entsprechung), the central motif around which the divine–human relation is woven.Footnote ⁶³ Hence, the opening statement of the baptism fragment reads: ‘We ask concerning the origin, beginning and initiation of the faithfulness of man which replies and corresponds (entsprechenden) to the faithfulness of God.’Footnote ⁶⁴

Simply put, water baptism is a ‘human action which corresponds (entsprechende) to the divine action’.Footnote ⁶⁵ In order for the human action of water baptism to be counted as good human action, and therefore as prayer, it must take place in correspondence with divine agency. There is no going at it alone in any aspect of Barth's presentation of the Christian moral life. ‘How could [water] baptism . . . be a true answer if the action of God were not present . . . ?’, Barth asks.Footnote ⁶⁶ This dialectic is intrinsic to the rhythm of Barth's thought and had accompanied him throughout his mature theological ethics: to the prior divine act (which is always strictly divine and therefore requires no completion or repetition by human agency) there corresponds a human action. The petition that God hallows the divine name (§77), which is strictly a divine act, also ‘demands a movement analogous to that which we ask and expect from God’.Footnote ⁶⁷ The petition for the coming of the kingdom (§78), which is strictly a divine act, also implies a command for Christians to act in ‘correspondence . . . with God's kingdom and righteousness’.Footnote ⁶⁸ So too here, the act of baptism with the Holy Spirit (§75), which is strictly a divine act, also implies a corresponding human action in the form of baptism with water. Spirit baptism ‘does not exclude baptism with water, nor render it superfluous; rather, it makes it possible and demands it’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Within this context of correspondence, there is no space for agential rivalry and competition.

However, the complaints that water baptism ‘is so much the act of the human subject that it cannot be the act of God’,Footnote ⁷⁰ and that in ‘IV/4, Barth posits a stark choice between understanding these as divine or human acts, and . . . chooses the latter option’,Footnote ⁷¹ seem to be trapped in a highly competitive understanding of the divine–human relation. This type of binary reasoning mistakenly assumes that divine agency and human agency are the same kinds of agency and therefore able to compete for the same kind of space. Macken's statement that ‘any action must be clearly attributed either to one or the other’ represents a fundamental misunderstanding about the conditions of agential relations in the Church Dogmatics and compromises the non-competitive grammar of invocation.Footnote ⁷² These critiques might have bought too heavily into the problematic modern assumption that divine and human action are mutually exclusive, to cite Kathryn Tanner's important argument.Footnote ⁷³ It is precisely because divine agency and human agency are two qualitatively different kinds of agencies that they can relate without competition or conflict. Anchored in the concept of correspondence, which is expressed principally as prayer, Barth's mature ethics of reconciliation is an assault on this type of binary thinking. Water baptism is an agential event involving, then, both God and the human agent in a relationship of non-competitive correspondence. We come to God in prayer, Barth writes, ‘not, of course, in the work of a creaturely freedom, in competition with His sole sovereignty and activity, but in the freedom of friends, a freedom which He has specially given them’.Footnote ⁷⁴ All this is achieved through the work of the Holy Spirit. This helps to counter the assumption that the Spirit's work is over by the time the baptismal fragment turns to Wassertaufe. Barth's strong pneumatology (invocation, after all, is a pneumatological concept) determines that the movement of the indwelling Spirit within brings the ethical agent into participation with the prior work of divine agency.

This refusal to construe the relation competitively means that human agency can correspond to divine agency in the event of water baptism without worry. Thus, for Barth, the ‘crux of the correct answer to the question of the meaning of baptism lies in a strict correlation and a no less strict distinction between the human action as such and the divine action from which it springs, on whose basis it is possible, and towards which it moves’.Footnote ⁷⁵ It is in this invocational context that Barth begins his account of water baptism and this section is introduced with a catena of statements which should be taken as the hermeneutical key to all that follows:

More tellingly still, he insists that

This is exactly the conceptuality which had accompanied Barth for much of his life and had been pursued with particular precision in the late ethical sections, as much in the fragment on baptism as the drafts on invocation and the Lord's Prayer.