‘We cannot assess Barth as theologian without assessing Barth as biblical interpreter.’Footnote 1 Karl Barth's status as perhaps the previous century's premier Protestant theologian is rarely questioned; many recent studies have argued that Barth should be taken seriously as an interpreter of the Bible, not merely a theologian projecting his own dogmas on the text.Footnote 2 Few studies, however, have traced the development of Barth's theology through his biblical interpretation.Footnote 3 This article seeks to contribute to Barth studies by following the development of Barth's christology through his exegesis of Romans 5:12–21 in the first edition of the Romans commentary and Barth's later essay Christ and Adam Footnote 4 – specifically how he understands the function of Christ's particularity in relation to his universal soteriological significance. By looking at Barth's theological development through his exegesis of Paul's text, we have a benchmark by which both to trace Barth's development and to critique it: does Barth do justice to both the particular and universal aspects of the text's christology? In this way, I intend to take seriously Barth's recurring assertion that his project succeeded or failed by how well it functioned as biblical interpretation.Footnote 5 As we will see, the early Barth was unable to allow Christ's particularity to have any soteriological function, and was thus compelled to downplay Christ's particularity and instead emphasise his universality as the only aspect of soteriological value. By contrast, the later Barth grounded Christ's universality precisely in his particularity; that is, the Christ-event only had universal soteriological consequence because it was the action of a particular, historical Jesus. Yet, despite any problems we might have with Barth's interpretations, both works display Barth as an interpreter seeking to grapple with one of the central issues of the biblical text, and of soteriology in general: the relation of the one to the many.
Why Romans 5:12–21?
Romans 5:12–21 displays the figures of Christ and Adam as individuals who have decisive universal consequences for humanity. Paul repeatedly describes Christ or Adam as ‘the one’ or calls them by their specific name – and in one instance he calls Jesus ‘the one man Jesus Christ’ (5:15). Adam is ‘the one man’ through whom sin entered the world; moreover, he is a ‘type of the coming one’ (5:14). This ‘coming one’ is the ‘one man Jesus Christ’ who is identified as God's gift. Both are specific, particular individuals. But these two individuals are defined further by their effects on humanity: Adam's sin results in all humanity's sin, leading to death for ‘all’. Conversely, God's grace in Christ leads to righteousness and life for ‘all’. Adam and Christ ‘do things that affect the destiny of all. Their deeds have universal significance and consequences’, as both ‘universally define the πάντες or the πολλοί’.Footnote 6 The action of the one determines the fate of all; with both it is a matter of the one and the many.
Consequently, interpreters must do justice to both Christ's particularity and universal effects on humanity.Footnote 7 My argument is that in Romans 5:12–21, as in the rest of the letter, Paul understands Jesus as having what Hans Frei has called an ‘unsubstitutable singular identity’: Jesus is a concrete, particular, historical individual.Footnote 8 Because the focus here is the progression of Barth's insight into the importance of Christ's particularity – tracing the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of these interpretations in relation to Barth's theological development – Romans 5:12–21 is the best-suited passage. This will allow us to follow Barth's development in a concrete manner – the interpretation of a text – rather than abstractly positing changes and advances in Barth's thought.
But why these two interpretations? The first edition of Romans (1919) is all-but-forgotten, due partially to its unavailability in English but also because many scholars treat it as a historical curiosity in the shadow of the epochal second edition.Footnote 9 Yet the first edition stands at an important moment in Barth's thought: during his break with liberalism, a time of rapid change in his theology. With regard to the topic at hand, the two editions contain differences in emphasis, not entirely in result. Barth's christology in the second edition of Romans ends with the same problem as the first edition. Christ and Adam (1952) also remains a largely untapped text. In relation to the Church Dogmatics, Christ and Adam is generally disregarded in discussions of the later Barth's theology. But in addition to its being Barth's lengthiest interpretation of Romans 5:12–21, it also sets forth many of the major themes of Barth's later theology. Thus, besides taking into account a very wide time-span in the development of Barth's thought, a focus on these interpretations will allow us to pay attention to two of Barth's works which are often passed over and yet are worthy of our consideration.
Romans 5:12–21 in the first edition of the Römerbrief (1919)
For the Barth of 1919,Footnote 10 Romans 5:12–21 sets forth the ‘universal background’ of ‘world redemption’.Footnote 11 Barth argues that Romans 5:12–21 paints world-history (Weltgeschichte) as a course from Adam to Christ – the ‘most comprehensive world realities’ under which all humans are comprehended.Footnote 12 Every ‘thread in the intertwined fabric … of world-history’ has its origin and destination in Adam or Christ.Footnote 13 Barth quickly explains that Adam and Christ only appear to be parallel: in reality, Christ is infinitely stronger than Adam.Footnote 14 Barth thus prepares readers for his interpretation of the passage by setting the focus on the universality of Christ – Christ as the greater ‘world reality’.
5:12–14
Verses 12–14 portray the entrance of death in Adam against which the ‘schöpferische Prozess des Lebens’ breaks out in Christ.Footnote 15 Barth gives a brief explanation of the key terms ‘Death’, ‘Sin’ and ‘World’ to aid the interpretation of these theologically complicated verses and explicate what Paul meant by saying ‘sin entered into the world, and through sin death …’
Taking his cue from 5:14 and 1 Corinthians 15:26, Barth declares Death ‘the last enemy’ who oppresses the creation as its ‘Herrscher’.Footnote 16 But death's foundation is sin; and God is not responsible for sin, because ‘through one man sin obtained entrance’. Sin precedes death, and Barth believes sin is ‘das Selbständigseinwollen des Menschen Gott gegenüber’.Footnote 17 This autonomy causes humanity to lose its relation of ‘immediacy of being’ with God.Footnote 18 And in this empty space, sin allows death to reign. Sin is thus a foreign blight, unnatural to the essence of humanity, poisoning and separating humans from God.Footnote 19 Importantly, the human will decides for this autonomy. The causal nexus of sin and death which is assumed in Paul's text, but never clarified, is explained as follows: ‘With the loss of immediacy, life has become transitory’.Footnote 20 ‘The sting of death is sin’ because the operation of sin creates space for a different ruler, death, which ‘must reign’ because ‘we so willed it’.Footnote 21
The surprise, however, is that all this came ‘through one man’ – and on this point Barth makes two distinctions which are essential for understanding his interpretation: Historie and Geschichte, and diesseitig and jenseitig. The breakthrough of sin in Adam into the world is not a historical (historisch) event. Barth states that the ‘“historische Adam” als solcher ist so belanglos, so unwichtig wie der “historische Jesus” als solcher!’.Footnote 22 What are important are the ‘universal, comprehensive, other-side (jenseitig) turnings in heaven … which have taken place behind the solitary historical event (historische Ereignis)’.Footnote 23 Thus, the distinction is between history as we perceive it (Historie) in our dimension (diesseitig), and history as it is related to the actions of God (Geschichte) in the spiritual dimension (jenseitig).Footnote 24 The point is not that the historisch event has no significance, or that the geschichtlich event is not real: the historisch event has its meaning in its geschichtlich counterpart. Furthermore, the distinction between diesseitig and jenseitig is not between God and humanity, for humanity also has a jenseitig dimension, which is its spiritual (geistig) attribute, while the emotional (seelisch) side correlates to diesseitig.Footnote 25 Consequently, in Romans1 Barth differentiates between this-worldly phenomena and other-worldly noumena, and he is compelled to understand Jesus as important exclusively in his relation to the ‘noumenal’ – his significance in eternity – and not his phenomenal, temporal self, though the two are in an ineinander relationship.
Accordingly, Adam's sin is understood as the breakthrough of sin from jenseitig into diesseitig: ‘his disobedience first breached the dam which held back the dammed up flood of hidden perversity’.Footnote 26 Sin is a matter of a ‘Voraussetzung allen Geschehens’ which occurs in Adam, the ‘Verkörperung der Einheit des Geschlechts’.Footnote 27 Verse 12d confirms for Barth that death came to all ‘because likewise all sinned’. Barth translates ἐφ᾿ ᾧ as ‘weil auch’ to indicate that the connection between sin and death is the same for humanity as for Adam: ‘The one sin of humanity, which has become historical with him’, finds repetition and variation throughout history after Adam in the rest of humanity, which merely follows in Adam's footsteps.Footnote 28 The verb ἥμαρτον, then, refers both to individual historische manifestations of sin in diesseitig, but more as perpetual geschichtlich participation in Adam's original jenseitig turning, because Adam embodies humanity.Footnote 29
Barth's distinctions between jenseitig/diesseitig and Geschichte/Historie allow him to explain the ultimate, unperceivable significance of what are otherwise mundane events – and therefore, the relationship between time and eternity.Footnote 30 Barth does not deny the historicity of these major world events; rather, he is straightforwardly able to affirm their ‘historicity’. The catch is in understanding what ‘historical’ and ‘unhistorical’ mean: unhistorical Geschichte is different from unhistorical Historie. A form of the dualisms inherent in these distinctions can be found in Paul. For example, Paul understands ‘this age’ to be the place in which the emergence of new creation takes place in Christ, intersecting the old creation, but remaining empirically unverifiable. Accordingly, any sort of old/new creation and this age/age-to-come dichotomy could provide a conceptual rationale for Barth's distinctions, which supply theoretical space to construe the theological implications of his exegesis. The neo-Kantian overtones to Barth's distinctions do not automatically mean they are distorting elements.
These distinctions do, however, result in an ‘extremely thin’ christology.Footnote 31 This is the case both to the extent that Barth has little to say specifically about Jesus, but also that the historical (historisch), concrete Jesus matters little soteriologically. Jesus is described as a ‘world-reality’ or a ‘thread’ of Weltgeschichte – that is, he remains more an abstract concept than a particular human. The implications of Barth's distinctions here suggest that the phenomenal Jesus becomes, in effect, the place where noumenal reconciliation occurs. Grace, then, is equated with noumena rather than both noumena and phenomena, and any incarnational theology of Christ's particularity is drained of much of its significance. Yet Barth does not push the logic of his distinctions this far in Romans1, and this remains a potential rather than actual danger. But what can be seen here, as in Romans2, is that Jesus functions as a sort of cipher for the transcendent metaphysical reality of reconciliation and eternity. Barth is forced consequently to downplay the particularity of the text's christology.
Thus, verse 12 details the ‘world-process’ which opposes salvation. Barth believes that an ‘obvious objection’ to this picture will put its significance in sharper relief, and verses 13–14 provide such a function by asking about those ‘epochs of history’ during which men could not have ‘sinned in the likeness of the transgression of Adam’, against a clearly defined law – are they still liable to death? Barth answers ‘Yes’: their sin only has less significance when considered ‘historisch-psychologisch’, or in its diesseitig significance.Footnote 32 ‘God takes all men equally seriously. The responsibility for the decision of humanity against God is objectively present even there where subjectively and psychologically it may be approaching nothing.’Footnote 33 The objective supervenes on the subjective, as jenseitig supervenes on diesseitig. Adam's historical sinning was the manifestation of the other-side Fall; consequently, human sinning, ignorant or not, is the manifestation of jenseitig sin.Footnote 34
For Barth, in understanding Adam as the τύπος τοῦ μέλλοντος, it is important to explain the worldwide consequences of Adam to gain perspective on the effects of Christ's work: ‘Das Geheimnis Adams ist das Geheimnis des Messias’.Footnote 35 Both are the points in which the jenseitig breaks into the diesseitig, and the power of each is universal in scope. Both are objective realities, in which humanity is comprehended; but Adam is a ‘caricature’ – or, positively, the ‘prophecy’ – of Christ, who is the ‘archetype, the true and pure purpose of God’.Footnote 36 Importantly, Barth states: ‘Here as there, the human, individual, psychological, historical is nothing but the place of entrance of the objective cosmic power which stands behind it.’Footnote 37 The individual Jesus is the entranceway to a greater transcendent salvific reality.
5:15–17
As will be the case in Christ and Adam, 5:15–17 proves that the parallelism between Adam and Christ is not a true parallel. The parallel presents the unstoppable movement from one to the other, and the unmitigated eradication of the one. Barth translates 5:15a as, ‘But the Fall is not as powerful as grace!’ Hence, Barth sets the contrast between grace and Fall, not sin in the abstract, as Paul is contrasting the result of Adam's action with God's gift of Christ. God's grace restores humanity in Christ to the immediacy lost in Adam; in Christ, humanity is freed from its fate in Adam.
Verse 16 similarly stresses the banality of the logic of the ‘Weltvorgang’ of Adam: sin, judgement, death. This world-process is mechanical, one of ‘Ursachen und Folgen’.Footnote 38 God, however, is ‘geistreicher’ than the mechanical process: God's will and act in Christ is the ‘schöpferische Allmacht’ controlled by no external force which undoes the dark machinations of sin.Footnote 39 Notably, Barth translates πολλῶν παραπτωμάτων with ‘unzähligen Fällen’, thus relating all sinning back to Adam's primal sin. This reinforces the understanding of ἥμαρτον in verse 12 as including individual sins within Adam's Fall, because the former is a subset of the latter.
The bondage and liberation of the will is the emphasis of verse 17. In Adam, the human will is ‘no will’ because it is enslaved by death. In Christ, ‘life is the result of an actual acquittal of men’ by which the will is freed to be will.Footnote 40 The will, nevertheless, is emancipated to make a choice: to ‘rebel anew’ or to receive God's grace and return to a relationship of immediacy with God. Ultimately there are ‘two possibilities’: ‘realization of his [man’s] excellent vocation (herrlichen Bestimmung) or return to slavery’.Footnote 41 Barth's introduction of the will is his attempt to grapple with the relationship of οἱ λαμβάνοντες to οἱ πολλοί and πάντες – and therefore the question of universalism.Footnote 42 Through his employment of the ‘will’, Barth could avoid simply endorsing the text's ostensible universalism by making a strict identification between the two; but since reconciliation sets the will free and to remain free, the will must choose God, Barth asks – ‘where is the will which would not really want that?’Footnote 43 Thus, the will allows Barth to avoid endorsing universalism by allowing human decision to matter in salvation, but his qualifications have the effect of overriding such a distinction.
An important aspect of Barth's soteriology in Romans1 is mentioned in verse 17: the ‘organic development’ of the kingdom of God. Barth states, ‘There is life, which is founded and now organically develops.’Footnote 44 This concept ‘signified the universal character of the Kingdom’.Footnote 45 So, Barth contends, ‘Es gibt keine erlösten Menschen ohne eine erlöste Welt’.Footnote 46 Furthermore, ‘organic’ is in contrast to ‘mechanic’ – humans play no role in the development of the Kingdom. As Michael Beintker states, ‘The book is stamped by a process eschatology which clearly maintains no direct continuity between the Kingdom of God and the world but knows of a history of God which breaks through secretly out of the history of the death of this world’.Footnote 47 This breakthrough is what occurs in Christ.Footnote 48
5:18–19
Closing the digression of verses 13–17, verses 18–19 place us ‘before the inner essence (innere Wesen) of world-history which appears in Adam and Christ’, referring to the penetrating of the jenseitig into the diesseitig.Footnote 49 Barth essentially uses verses 18–19 to summarise what has gone before. Each line of human history has a verdict: for those in Adam, death; for those in Christ, righteousness and life. An act stands at the beginning of both lines: Adam's disobedient act and Christ's obedient righteous act.Footnote 50
Barth's interpretation of καθίστημι in verse 19 is significant, because it demonstrates that in Romans1 any distinction between a ‘transformative’ or ‘forensic’ justification is trivial: in Adam or Christ all are ‘declared’, ‘set forth’ and in a very real sense are either sinful or righteous. Barth translates καθίστημι with the verb ‘werden’ (become).Footnote 51 To be in Christ is to be declared to be in Christ – and to be in Christ!Footnote 52 More unusual is Barth's use of the past tense ‘wurden’ for both occurrences of καθίστημι, of which the first in verse 18 is past tense (κατεστάθησαν) but the second is future (κατασταθήσονται).Footnote 53 The future tense is not a real future, but a logical future: humanity enjoys, in the present, the gift of righteousness in Christ, participation in reality which breaks into the world in Christ. Barth could defend this interpretation by looking back no further than 5:1 and 9, and thus his use of ‘wurden’ – while not rigidly sticking to the text – states what Barth believes the passage means.
5:20–21
Barth poses a striking question as the introduction to verses 20–1: ‘But how in this context is the question of morality to be put and answered?’Footnote 54 Any moralist reading his interpretation of Paul could be disgruntled by all of the ‘“unreal” talk of worlds’ and ‘powers’, but not of ethical possibilities or realities. The uncertainty of the actual relation of these so-called realities to reality should force one to the question of morality – and thus, the law.Footnote 55
Barth's peculiar response to these concerns is verses 20–1. Barth declares that ‘Welterlösung’ is based on ‘Weltversöhnung’, not on abstract morality.Footnote 56 The law is of no importance when ‘separated from the actual wrestling of the forces’. But Barth goes further in labelling the law a ‘Begleiterscheinung des Bösen’ which signifies to humanity their distance from God.Footnote 57 Barth understands the purpose of the law almost solely from 3:20: the law produces knowledge of sin. Consequently, the law stands on the side of sin and is only a ‘secondary factor in the divine economy’.Footnote 58 To focus on the question of morality would be to act as if nothing had happened in Christ.
Summary
In the first edition of the Römerbrief, Barth interprets Romans 5:12–21 as portraying the movement of ‘world-history’ from Adam to Christ. Barth is exegetically and theologically forced to de-emphasise the particularity of Christ because of his distinctions between jenseitig/diesseitig and Historie/Geschichte, whereby the diesseitig, historisch Jesus is merely the place where jenseitig, geschichtlich reconciliation occurs. The particularity of Christ functions as an ideological or ideal symbol for the reality of salvation. His particularity cannot be excised, but neither can it hold any soteriological worth. Consequently, Barth is fully able to realise the universal christology in the text, but not the particularity, the stress Paul places on ‘the one’.
Romans 5:12–21 in Christ and Adam (1952)
Christ and AdamFootnote 59 was taken from material originally written for CD III/2, on anthropology, which is significant because it shows the purpose for which Barth was returning to Romans 5.Footnote 60 Barth is now able to argue for what was previously impossible: the soteriological importance of a particular, historical Jesus Christ, whose redemptive death and resurrection are important as unqualified historical events. Barth realises both the particular and universal aspects of the text's christology by grounding Jesus’ universal soteriological significance in his particular being and action in time. The unity of humanity in Adam and Christ is not a unity in a transcendent reality but in temporal events which have imperceptible meaning. Thus, Barth's thesis: ‘Here the new point is that the special anthropology of Jesus Christ – the one man for all men, all men in the one man – constitutes the secret of “Adam” also, and so is the norm of all anthropology.’Footnote 61
Barth's interpretation
Before turning to 5:12–21, Barth discusses the relation of divinity/humanity and universality/particularity in Jesus. For Barth, Paul clearly sees Christ belonging to both man and God but also being distinguished from both.Footnote 62 Furthermore, Jesus is an individual but he is not ‘exhausted’ in his individuality. Rather, the ‘very existence of this individual is identical with a divine righteous decision which potentially includes an indefinite multitude of other men’.Footnote 63 This ‘decision’ is election.Footnote 64 Jesus’ universal significance is thus grounded in his particularity of being the one true man, in accordance with this decision in election. Accordingly, Barth could argue the following: ‘The ontological determination of humanity is grounded in the fact that one man among all others is the man Jesus’.Footnote 65 Barth's move in making Jesus ‘both the electing God and elected man in One’Footnote 66 means that ‘there exists no independent relationship between God and creation apart from Jesus Christ’.Footnote 67 Additionally, Barth re-emphasised the incarnation through an ‘anhypostatic-enhypostatic model of Christology’.Footnote 68 This allowed Barth to locate the time-eternity dialectic in christology and lose his former ‘eschatological reservation’ without losing the ‘critical distance between God and humankind’.Footnote 69 Thus, Barth could affirm the soteriological necessity of Jesus as a particular being fully in time.Footnote 70 Jesus’ universal soteriological significance is grounded in his particularity, as Christ's particularity is ineluctably linked to the eternal decision by Jesus to be the ‘Real Man’ for all of humanity. Now we must see how this is worked out exegetically.
5:12
Barth describes 5:12 as a ‘heading’ which explains humanity's past ‘negative relationship’ vis-à-vis Christ's saving power. From the Adam–humanity relationship we can discern the basic structure of the Christ–humanity relationship, though the relationships are the opposite of each other; Adam can only be understood in the light of Christ and not vice versa.Footnote 71
Since Adam is the τύπος τοῦ μέλλοντος, he is a ‘secondary anthropological truth and ordering principle’: Adam only ‘prefigures’ the ‘essential and original nature’ found in Christ.Footnote 72 Consequently, our past in Adam described in verse 12 is derivative of our present and future in Christ. As in the Römerbrief, Adam indicts all humanity in his sin and death.Footnote 73 But our relationship to Adam has no individual significance or meaning; rather, it is constituted by the fact that it serves as an ‘indirect witness to the reality of Jesus Christ’, because to know Adam is to know the Adam for whom Christ died. Thus: ‘The relationship that existed between Adam and us is, according to v. 12, the relationship that exists originally and essentially between Christ and us.’Footnote 74 While verse 12 does not contain the parallel itself, setting up the parallel allows Barth to make his next move.
5:18–19, 21
Barth next skips to the verses which actually contain the parallel, to explicate the structure of Paul's parallel by discussing its formal and material aspects.
Formally, verses 18–19 show the structural relationship of humanity in Adam and Christ as the same, since it is a matter of one and many in both cases. Adam and Christ as individuals ‘inaugurate, represent, and reveal’ the nature and destiny of all men after them.Footnote 75 The actions of the one – not a force breaking in behind the one – are determinative of the fate of the many, as Barth is now able to ground the universal fully in the particular. Materially, however, verses 18–19 demonstrate that one side has an ‘essential priority and an inner superiority’, which more accurately depicts true humanity.Footnote 76 Because Adam's sin counts less than Christ's righteousness, humanity's relationship to Adam is less significant. Clearly ‘the formal identity itself depends upon the greatest possible material disparity’.Footnote 77 To understand the formal commonality we must understand the material differences, in that Adam is simply the ‘type’ of Christ. Accordingly, Adamic humanity is true humanity only insofar as it reflects Christ.Footnote 78 Verse 21 is dubbed a ‘summary of the whole’.
The whole argument ‘turns on this provisional character of Adam and of our human nature in its relation to him’.Footnote 79 With Adam, it is a matter of man against God; but with Christ, it is God for and with man. In verses 15–17 we see that the sin and death which come from Adam are ‘only the dark shadows of the grace and life we find in Christ’.Footnote 80
5:15–17
These verses stress further the material imbalance of the formal parallel. Though Paul's method is not Barth's – Paul explains the disparity and then sees the formal comparison as a corollary – Barth believes it better to take it the other way around.Footnote 81
Verse 15a explains that ‘grace is not to be measured by sin’, with 15b providing rationale: simply put, the grace of Jesus Christ is God's grace which overcomes human sin. This is the ultimate ground of the material disparity.Footnote 82 Verse 16a shows that ‘the result of grace is not to be measured by the result of sin’, with 16b–17 giving justification through two Adam–Christ contrasts. The introductory contrast emphasises that the one's sinning precipitates judgement leading to condemnation; but grace entered into this condemnation to effect justification. The place where sin claims humanity is precisely where ‘grace makes its first contact’.Footnote 83
For Barth the ‘key to the relationship of the two sides’ is the phrase πολλῷ μᾶλλον, which performs two functions. First, it connects two things, confirming both as under the ‘same ordering principle’.Footnote 84 Barth's major move here is justifying his understanding of πολλῷ μᾶλλον by recourse to its use in 5:9–10. In 5:9–10, the first side is reconciliation through Christ's death and the second side, which is ‘how much more’, is redemption in Christ's resurrection. The common ordering principle is the ‘one work of Christ’.Footnote 85 Barth claims that because ‘there is a valid and recognizable connection’ between Christ's death and resurrection, the same must be true of the Christ–Adam parallel.Footnote 86 Paul does not work from Adam to Christ; rather, he works from Christ to Adam, because Christ has personally ‘invaded the world of Adam and claimed it for Himself’.Footnote 87 The parallel of 5:15–17 can be made only because Christ has created the identification by entering into world history.
Second, by definition, πολλῷ μᾶλλον says that one side is ‘all the more’. Thus, we can see the truth in Christ ‘all the more’ because there actually is truth in Adam.Footnote 88 Barth returns to 5:9–10, which grounds the certainty of the resurrection in Christ's death, noting that the effectiveness of Christ's death is unverifiable.Footnote 89 The reconciling event remains shrouded in mystery, and the logical processes of the world of Adam run unabated. The resurrection displays that Christ's death brought reconciliation ‘amidst the darkness of the mystery of sin’.Footnote 90 This light shining into our dark past displays that our salvation has an ‘eternally unshakable foundation’.Footnote 91 Therefore, our present reconciliation and future hope are ‘sure and certain’ πολλῷ μᾶλλον in the ‘same light's direct and unreflected blaze’.Footnote 92 The dead man in Adam is the one who lives by the overflowing of God's grace in Jesus Christ.Footnote 93
5:13–14, 20
These verses weigh ‘the disparity between Adam and Christ in its relation to the Law’, to bring final clarity to the relation.Footnote 94 The law is the ‘most decisive proof’ of Adam's subordination to Christ because, in the law, God confronts Israel as he did Adam.Footnote 95 Importantly: ‘the story of Adam is the history of Israel contracted into the life story of a single man’.Footnote 96 Israel is the recapitulation of Adam, and thus becomes the revelation of man's sin in the likeness of the transgression of Adam. In contrast to Romans1, where Israel is usually ‘converted into metaphor or parable’ for the church, here Israel is understood as a particular historical group of people.Footnote 97 This is significant, because a historical particular Israel is now the matrix within which a historical particular Jesus exists: Israel's particularity complements and reinforces Christ's particularity.
Israel is in a special covenant-relation with God, but as recipients of his revelation, they are the locus of sinning: ‘Here only the ἐλλόγειν takes place’.Footnote 98 But as verse 12 attests, ‘all have sinned’, as sin was present before the law, and consequently judgement and condemnation encompass all.Footnote 99 With regards to 5:13b, Barth argues that humanity is ignorant of their broken relation with God; they do not escape God's inescapable wrath but avoid knowledge of it.Footnote 100 Accordingly, the sins of those inside and outside of Israel are ‘the same, and yet not the same’, because only in Israel is man confronted by God.Footnote 101 Israel, then, as the recipient of the law, becomes the place where ‘sin abounded’ but ‘grace became even greater’. But what does this mean? Barth has three answers.
First, though Israel was unfaithful, Jesus has come from Israel. Israel is ‘awakened to new life’ by God's act in Christ, the ‘new shoot’.Footnote 102 As a Jew, a historical particular being, Jesus alone lived under the law perfectly, in covenant with God, taking it upon himself to be a substitute for his people.Footnote 103 This cannot be overemphasised, because it demonstrates that the life and work of the particular human Jesus Christ are the ultimate ground of the salvation which extends to humanity. Yet Jesus could not be fathered by a Jewish man because he ‘could only be God's Son and as such had to be engrafted into Israel from the outside as the beginning of the new, true Israel of God’.Footnote 104 Jesus’ life in historical Israel is the result of a divine decision. Second, Israel's rejection of Jesus served an instrumental purpose: ‘Christ had to be condemned as a sinner and had to die’ for grace to abound. Third, the super-abounding of grace results in the abolishing of Jew–Gentile distinctions.Footnote 105 This is so because God's covenant was ‘secretly’ always a covenant with all humanity, a fact revealed through the Holy Spirit.Footnote 106
Barth ends his exposition with the following conclusion: ‘Jesus Christ is the secret truth about the essential nature of man, and even sinful man is still essentially related to Him. That is what we have learned from Rom. 5:12–21.’Footnote 107 From 5:1–11, Christ is seen as a ‘sharply-defined individual’ and only as such does he become representative of all men.Footnote 108 5:12–21 describes the universal truth in Christ, because all human nature is objectively conditioned by Christ as his work objectively alters the destiny of all men. Accordingly, 5:12–21 grounds and makes possible 5:1–11, which applies to all humans ‘whether they know it or not’ because what ‘is Christian is secretly but fundamentally identical with what is universally human’.Footnote 109 This is the revolutionary claim of 5:12–21. Jesus Christ is the true man – a particular, historical being – who enters into the world to change the course of history. This is an act in which all humans are implicated, but moreover, a person in whom all people find true humanity.
Summary
In Christ and Adam, the doctrines of incarnation and election allowed Barth to stress the importance of the historical particularity of Jesus and ground his universal soteriological significance in that particularity. The incarnation makes Christ a particular being within human history and election makes Jesus’ particularity ontologically determinative for all humanity. Consequently, Barth is able to realise both aspects of the text's christological potential by subordinating anthropology to christology, and thus revising his understanding of the relationship of the ‘one’ and the ‘many’. As Henry puts it, ‘In the concreteness of Jesus Christ, the transcendent God meets the world of humanity in space and time, and the actual historical existence of Jesus Christ takes on an importance not to be found’ in Barth's earlier work.Footnote 110
Theological developments and textual emphases
These two interpretations by Barth of Romans 5:12–21 are markedly different realisations of the text – and specifically of the christology therein. What changed and why? I have already noted certain theological developments which occurred between 1919 and 1952 and yielded new exegetical insights. Yet, as with any interpreter, Barth is also reading the text differently, finding new resonances and emphases, favouring different aspects of the text. In these different emphases we can see that Barth's exegetical moves are not arbitrary but theologically influenced, thus demonstrating the reflexive nature of theology and exegesis in Barth's interpretation. While theology might, to some extent, be forcing Barth's exegetical hand, Barth is nevertheless arguing for his theological positions by interpreting the text. The two interpretations of Paul's text differ most in their construals of the Adam–Christ parallel.
In the Römerbrief, Barth focuses on the parallel and contrast of Adam and Christ as the points where two different ‘world-processes’ enter. Similarity is stressed. Accordingly, 5:12 details the outbreak of sin and death in Adam – the world-process which opposes salvation. 5:14b sets Adam and Christ in relation, and 15–17 elaborates that Christ is (materially) infinitely greater than Adam. Verses 12 and 18–19 contain the main thrust of the passage, then, as they set Christ and Adam as counterparts where the jenseitig breaks into the diesseitig. Verses 13–17 are essentially a digression, and verses 20–1 are relegated to questions of morality.
In Christ and Adam, by contrast, Barth focuses on the anthropological primacy of Christ and the historical location of Christ in Israel. Adam's subordination is stressed. Thus, 5:12 establishes humanity's past in Adam, which is derivative of the present as Adam is derivative of Christ. Notably, Barth skips to 5:18–19 and 21, which show that Christ and Adam formally are the same but materially Christ has an ‘essential priority and inner superiority’. Verses 5:15–17 really add nothing new but rather expand on the thought developed in 5:18–19: Adam is subordinate to and dependent on Christ. Accordingly, verses 15–17 are bracketed until after verses 12, 18–19 and 21. Finally, verses 13–14 and 20 take on a new, greater significance: the law proves both Adam's subordination to Christ and emphasises Christ's historical particularity in Israel.
Therefore, in both interpretations, verses 18–19 are exegetically given prominence for determining the meaning of the passage, but in both these verses are used and set in context differently. For example, in the Römerbrief verses 18–19 are read in tandem with verse 12, whereas in Christ and Adam, verses 18–19 are understood from the anthropological subordination implied in verse 14. Each verse in the Römerbrief is interpreted to prove that Christ and Adam are related – and effectively equal – as the progenitors of humanity. Their difference exists in the realities that they represent. In Christ and Adam, however, Barth's interpretation is structured to emphasise that Adam himself is subordinate to and dependent on Christ. Consequently, Barth's interpretations, influenced as they are by his theological development (as with any interpreter), are readings of the text with different emphases.
Conclusion
Romans 5:12–21 portrays the drama of Fall and Redemption as a story which revolves around two particular individuals: Christ and Adam. Accordingly, the passage is arranged so that the universal consequence is ineluctably linked to the individual. In his interpretations of Romans 5:12–21, Karl Barth had two deeply divergent ways of understanding how the universal related to the particular.
At the time of Romans1, because of the influence of neo-Kantian philosophy, Barth made important distinctions between, essentially, diesseitig phenomena and jenseitig noumena. This compelled Barth to understand Jesus’ soteriological significance as a ‘spiritual’ reality; consequently, Jesus’ particular, historical being mattered little, except as the entryway of a soteriological reality which ultimately stands behind his particularity. But while Barth could not and did not want to excise Christ's particularity from the text, because of the ineinander relationship of time and eternity, he necessarily de-emphasised the stress on ‘the one’ that the text places on Jesus.
In Christ and Adam, however, Barth not only stressed Christ's particularity but indeed grounded Christ's universal soteriological significance in his particularity. This shift in interpretation resulted from his developed understanding of the incarnation and election, such that Christ's particularity was no longer seen as problematic and his decision to be the elect ‘Real Man’ was the ontological determination of all humanity. That is, his eternal decision to be a particular being who dies and is raised in time is what achieves salvation for humanity. The universal consequence is grounded in a particular being and action. Accordingly, Barth was fully able to realise both Christ's particularity and his universal soteriological significance in his interpretation.
By tracing the development of Barth's christology through his exegesis of Romans 5:12–21, I have examined only one aspect of Barth's christology, but one which displays many of the contours of Barth's overall christology. Yet, with regard to the development of Barth's thought, this article has been restricted to explaining, for example, Barth's neo-Kantian distinctions or his later doctrine of election and how these developments affected his interpretation of the christology of Romans 5:12–21. Furthermore, I have briefly noted Barth's different exegetical-textual emphases in his readings of Romans 5:12–21, thus demonstrating how exegesis and theology were intertwined for Barth – nevertheless also noting that, in the case of the christology of Romans 5:12–21, Barth worked from theology to text and back to theology. Left unexamined is how and where (and occasionally, if) Barth's theological development is engendered by his reading of scripture. Barth claimed that the fundamental circumstance that shifted his thought from the first edition of Romans to the second was ‘the continued study of Paul himself’.Footnote 111 Furthermore, Barth stated that he was driven to ‘reconstruction’ on the doctrine of election because he ‘let the Bible itself speak’ to him.Footnote 112 Greater attention to the reflexive relation of exegesis and theology in Barth necessitates study not only of his theology through his exegesis, as has been done here, but also of how Barth proceeded from exegesis to theology. Karl Barth was a theologian, but only because he was an interpreter of the Bible.
