Thesis 1

Hunsinger's reading of Barth's doctrine of God is fundamentally incoherent.

Explanation

A. On the one hand, he says that ‘the Trinity is ontologically prior to and logically presupposed by the pre-temporal act of election’ (thesis 3). Talk of an ‘ontological priority’ must mean that being precedes act in precisely the same way it does on the human plane. The fact that Hunsinger stoutly maintains that being and act in God are ‘ontologically basic’ and equally ‘primordial’ (thesis 1) must not be allowed to obscure this point. For the ‘act’ which he has in mind, in saying the being and act are equally ‘primordial’, is not an ‘act’ in the ordinary sense of the word. For most of us, what counts as an ‘act’ consists in a free exercise of the will. For Hunsinger, by contrast, the word ‘act’ in the phrase ‘being-in-act’ refers to the sheer actuality of a being which is complete in itself; the fact that there is no unrealised potentiality in God's being as such – without respect to the existence of the world (thesis 9, c, fifth bullet point). God's being is, for him, ‘necessary’ being (thesis 3, d) which God can only ‘affirm’ (thesis 17). In any event, such a being precedes the contingent act in which God chooses to be God for us in Jesus Christ – which is why I say that, for him, being precedes act. Being precedes this act.

When thinking along these lines, Hunsinger's understanding of the being in act of the triune God stands in close proximity to Thomas’ understanding of God as actus purus. Like Thomas, Hunsinger makes necessary a distinction between the eternal processions (which belong to God's necessary being) and the eternal missions (a determination which God freely gives to himself). And, like Thomas, he makes it hard to understand how a God whose being is fully realised without respect to human beings can do anything. For surely a God who has no unrealised potentialities in himself, in his own being as such, could not move himself to do something new. And if he did, in fact, do something new, then surely there were unrealised potentialities in him after all.

B. On the other hand, Hunsinger holds that the act of self-determination which is election – an ‘act’ which he does think of in the ordinary sense – is a determination of God's being as Father, Son and Spirit. ‘In the inner-trinitarian decision of election, the act in which the Trinity has its being is determined in a new and special way’ (thesis 23).

C. It is precisely at this point, however, that Hunsinger's reading begins to lose coherence. For if the act of self-determination is indeed a determination of being – and the Son enjoyed another and different mode of being prior to this act of self-determination – then a determination of that prior mode of being would seem to entail change on the level of God's being (albeit a change that takes place in pre-temporal eternity). Such a change would occur when ‘The eternal Son becomes incarnandus . . .’ (thesis 5, c, second bullet point). Of course, such a change would render nonsensical any talk of necessary being, since a necessary being, by definition, cannot change. There are two ways of avoiding this problem. The first would be to treat the eternal act of self-determination spoken of by Barth as a determination simply to do something – not to be something. We could then describe the eternal Son qua Son in terms of his one and only (necessary) mode of being and his act of revelation as a mode of appearing. This is, in fact, what the ancients believed – and Hunsinger's goal of bringing Barth into close proximity to the Fathers would be better served by this move. But Hunsinger cannot be completely satisfied with this. For he knows all too well that it is one of Barth's principal concerns to say that God is God precisely in his self-revelation in time. Barth will not allow revelation to be treated in terms of a mode of appearing (which in his view would be a mere theophany). Still, this is the solution which is most compatible with Hunsinger's treatment of the divine being-in-act. The second way to avoid positing change in God as a consequence of his eternal self-determination would be to abandon all talk of ‘ontological priority’ where the relation of triunity to election is concerned (which is the move I make). If the Son had no ‘mode of being’ above and prior to the eternal act of self-determination, then the construal of that act of determination as a determination of being would not introduce change into God. For on this view, the act of self-determination would stand ‘at the beginning’ of God himself, with nothing prior to it. Seen in this light, one could continue to speak of a logical priority of Trinity over election but all further talk of an ontological priority would have to be surrendered. But, clearly, Hunsinger will have nothing to do with this second option, since it would mean a concession to my own point of view. Hunsinger finds himself then on the horns of a dilemma which he fails to resolve. The result is incoherence.

Thesis 2

The incoherence of Hunsinger's reading is only deepened by his attempt to use Jüngel's interpretation of Barth to invest his own reading with authority.

Explanation

A. Jüngel certainly does grant a logical priority to Trinity over election – but only a logical priority.Footnote ⁵ Talk of an ‘ontological priority’ of Trinity over election must inevitably result in an abstract, wholly metaphysical conception of the triune being of God which stands behind the event in which God chooses to be God ‘for us’ in Jesus Christ; a metaphysical being which, by definition, has no history since there can be history in God only where there is a purpose and a goal. Jüngel will have nothing to do with this. His goal throughout is to show how it is possible to think of God's being in the act of revelation in time as corresponding to his being-in-act in eternity. He accomplishes this by positing the existence in God of a twofold ‘historicality’: ‘the historicality of the being of God . . . reiterates itself in the historicality of revelation’.Footnote ⁶ What it means to speak of the eternal being of God in terms of ‘historicality’ is made clear when Jüngel says, ‘Decision does not belong to the being of God as something supplementary to this being; rather, as event, God's being is His own decision. “The fact that God's being is event, the event of God's act, necessarily . . . means that it is His own conscious, willed and executed decision.”’Footnote ⁷ And so, ‘God's being is constituted (konstituiert) through historicality’.Footnote ⁸ And if God's being is constituted through historicality, then there can be no higher or different state of being in God standing in back of what God is in election. That is why Jüngel can say, ‘we have to understand God's primal decision as an event in the being of God which differentiates the modes of God's being [as Father, Son and Holy Spirit]’.Footnote ⁹ Seen in this light, the ‘double structure’ spoken by Jüngel refers to the complete and perfect correspondence of the being of God as the subject of a historical life in time to his being in election. Again, there can be no question but that Jüngel understands triunity in God to have a logical precedence over election. In his view, God appears in the primal decision which inaugurates his primal and prevenient history as already triune. But the ‘already’ here is strictly logical. It is an answer to the question: what ought humans to think of first in their efforts to think about the eternal being of God responsibly? But talk of an ‘ontological priority’ of Trinity over election (à la Hunsinger) would immediately open up a metaphysical gap between God's essence and his will. It is precisely this gap which Jüngel sought to overcome in the debate with Gollwitzer which he carried out in this work. Jüngel's conclusion vis-à-vis Gollwitzer would surely have to be his conclusion vis-à-vis Hunsinger as well: ‘Gollwitzer's conception of God's being is . . . thoroughly in line with the classical concept of substance’.Footnote ¹⁰

B. Hunsinger's use of Jüngel's phrase ‘double structure’ has only the name in common with Jüngel's position. For Hunsinger, the ‘double structure’ of the eternal Son consists in a Logos asarkos/Logos ensarkos distinction which so abstracts the former from any relation to the man Jesus that any attempt to relate the latter to the former must finally end in defeat. ‘The Son is always hidden from us in his first mode of being (asarkos), but manifest to us in his second mode of being (ensarkos)’ (thesis 15). What we have before us here is the classical distinction of the immanent Trinity from the economic Trinity. The economy is said to ‘manifest’ the immanent Trinity but the degree of this manifestation is beyond knowing since the Logos asarkos remains ‘forever’ hidden from us (thesis 25, a).Footnote ¹¹

Hunsinger tries to rescue this situation by positing a simultaneity of the immanent and economic Trinities. ‘The one act in which the tri-personal God has his being . . . subsists in two modes at the same time. These modes represent God's primary and secondary objectivity. The one mode as immanent, the other is economic. The one is primordial; the other derivative. The one is self-existent; the other dependent on it’ (thesis 25). No doubt, it is the epistemological problem created by the metaphysical gap which he has opened up between the Son qua Son and the Logos incarnandus which leads Hunsinger to speak in this way. He is trying to overcome the consequences of that gap. But he cannot. For he holds that ‘The eternal Son qua Son . . . is not even incarnandus, because the Son as Son is properly defined without reference to his being incarnandus’ (thesis 5, b, fourth bullet point). And if that is the case, then there are two acts in pre-temporal eternity, not one. The first is a completely timeless act of self-affirmation which is said to be identical with the eternal generation of the Son and the eternal spiration of the Spirit and the second, an act of self-determination which founds time. The problem this creates is this: a ‘simultaneity’ of the being of God with moments in time can only be spoken of with respect to an eternal Son qua Son – not with respect to the Logos incarnandus. The reason for this has been well explained by Thomas. In his view, the ‘eternity’ of a timeless God stands in a relation of immediate presence to every moment in time; every moment is immediately present to God in an eternal Now which admits of no past or future – hence, ‘simultaneity’. But Barth's concept of eternity does admit of past and future, and it does so because of his belief that what happens in the incarnation is that God becomes the subject of a human life and as this subject suffers and dies. ‘Eternity’ conceived on this christological basis must embrace time; it must admit of past and future. But ‘eternity’ so defined can only be a predicate of the Logos incarnandus, not of an eternal Son qua Son in Hunsinger's sense. And this means, too, that the relation of the Logos incarnandus to the Logos incarnatus is not rightly described in terms of ‘simultaneity’. It would be better to speak of anticipation and fulfilment as events which define the being of God; first an eternal event which founds time and then a temporal event in which time is fulfilled.

C. Closely related to the preceding abortive effort to speak of the simultaneity of the modes of being of the Logos is Hunsinger's effort to give to Barth's claim that ‘Jesus Christ is the subject of election’ a stronger sense than that found in his more basic reading of this statement as a figure of speech (in his fifth thesis). The ‘stronger sense’, described in theses 6–8, finds its root in the claim that election, cross and final judgement are ‘three different forms of one and the same event’ (thesis 7). But such a claim only refers to the unity of God's works ad extra and says nothing at all with respect to the relation of his entirely abstract ‘eternal Son as such’ to these works. Hunsinger's basic conviction remains intact: ‘Strictly speaking, it is the eternal Son, not the Son incarnatus, nor even the Son incarnandus, who is the subject of this decision [i.e. election]’ (thesis 5, b, second bullet point). Once he has made this statement, there can be no ‘stronger sense’. At the end of the day, Barth's claim that ‘Jesus Christ is the subject of election’ is, in Hunsinger's hands, a figure of speech with no ontological significance whatsoever. It is a figure of speech and nothing more – as when we say ‘Queen Victoria was born in 1819’ (thesis 5, a).Footnote ¹²

Thesis 3

If there is a constant in all the phases of Barth's development, from his student days on through to the end of his life, it lay in his protest against the introduction of metaphysics into the domain of Christian theology.

A. Essential to Barth's anti-metaphysical outlook is the refusal to open up a metaphysical gap between the divine essence on the one hand and God's decision to be God in a redemptive relation with sinful humanity. Consider the following.

1. ‘Everything that God is, He is insofar as He is. He is essence. He essences (west) as Person. He is Father, Son, Spirit, from eternity to eternity. As soon as we abstract from the speaking Person who addresses us, who addresses us – even if only for a moment – transposing the Godhead into a general truth or idea which is not Person, we would no longer be thinking God.’Footnote ¹³ The divine Person of which Barth speaks in this passage is the ‘speaking Person’. There can be no abstracting from this person for he is what he is in the event of his address to us – and in no mode of existence abstracted from it. That is why Barth replaces the noun form Wesen (‘essence’) with the verbal form west (‘essences’). He wants to understand the divine ‘essence’ in terms of willed activity directed towards the human creature.

2. On the basis of the kind of move we saw in the previously cited passage, Barth can say ‘The relation of God to the human is not accidental; it is necessarily contained in and grounded in God's essence. . . . God would not be God if the relation to the human were not intrinsic to Him from the start.’Footnote ¹⁴ To some extent, Barth's reach here exceeds his grasp. He has yet to revise the doctrine of election which he put in place in his second Romans. And that means he has yet to ground the speaking activity of God in time in the eternal act of election. But here already he understands God's essence as constituted by means of an act in which God sets himself in relation to the human.

3. What is added to the train of thought set forth in the previous two points by Barth's revised doctrine of election in CD II/2 is the eternal ontological ground of the address of God in time. From this point on, Barth would speak of an act of self-determination – a word which has its provenance in German idealism.Footnote ¹⁵ That Barth did not make use of the verbal form of ‘essence’ in his mature thought does not mean that he has set aside the thought of a freely willed act of self-constitution. For once he makes the eternal act of self-determination that is election to be a determination of the divine essence, he has committed himself to the view that election makes essential to God that which is its content. This he clearly did in CD IV/1 at the latest.

4. The most significant body of material in this regard is to be found in CD IV/1, pp. 192–210 (in the English translation), where Barth treats the ‘inner moment of the mystery of Christ's deity’ as the mystery revealed to us that ‘for God it is just as natural to be lowly as to be high’.Footnote ¹⁶ The lowliness which is proper to God is then further explained in terms of ‘humility’ and ‘obedience’. ‘The humility in which He dwells and acts in Jesus Christ is not alien to Him, but proper to Him. His humility is a novum mysterium for us in whose favor he executes it when He makes use of His freedom for it . . . But for Him this humility is no novum mysterium . . . He is amongst us in humility, our God, God for us, as that which He is in Himself, in the most inward depth of His Godhead.’Footnote ¹⁷

Barth then continues on to the second point. ‘If the humility of Christ is not simply an attitude of the man Jesus, if it is the attitude of this man because . . . there is a humility grounded in the being of God, then something else is grounded in the being of God Himself. For, according to the New Testament, it is the case that the humility of this man is an act of obedience . . . If, then, God is in Christ, if what the man Jesus does is God's own work, this aspect of the self-emptying and self-humbling of Jesus Christ as an act of obedience cannot be alien to God. But in this case we have to see here the other and inner side of the mystery of the divine nature of Christ and therefore of the nature of the one true God – that He Himself is also able and free to render obedience.’Footnote ¹⁸

So far, then, Barth has said that both humility and obedience are ‘natural’ and ‘proper’ to God in the sense that God is ‘free’ for them. The difference between the two is the difference between an ‘attitude’ (a disposition or basic posture) and a freely willed activity which can only, in the nature of the case, be described as purposeful. But this leads to a further question.

‘Obedience as a possibility and actuality in God Himself seems at once to compromise the unity and then logically the equality of the divine being. Can the one God command and obey? Can the one God be above and below, the superior and the subordinate? If we speak of an obedience which takes place in God, do we not have to speak necessarily of two divine beings, and then of two beings who are not equally divine, the first and the commanding properly divine, the second and obeying only divine in an improper sense?’Footnote ¹⁹ Barth's answer to this question takes him on a brief detour through the tensions in early church consideration of the doctrine of the Trinity.

It belongs to his most brilliant insights that he recognised that subordinationism and modalism have a common root. Both are born from a refusal to see in the event of the cross ‘the truth of the humiliation, the lowliness and obedience of the one true God Himself’.Footnote ²⁰ In other words, both are committed to upholding an abstract concept of divine impassibility, but they do this in differing ways: subordinationism by treating the obedient Christ as a ‘heavenly or earthly being distinct from God’; modalism by treating the obedient Christ as a mere appearance of the one true God.Footnote ²¹ Barth's solution is to affirm that it is ‘essential’ (wesentlich) to the being of God ‘that there is in God Himself an above and a below, a prius and a posterius, a superiority and a subordination . . . that it belongs to the inner life of God that there should take place within it obedience’.

Taking a step back, we can say with confidence that Barth now believes that obedience is essential to God. That is to say: a willed activity whose purposive character can have to do only with the covenant of grace is essential to God. Now if this is the case, then Barth leaves us with only two remaining options. Either you say, ‘that which God is, He is necessarily’ – so that obedience is a necessary act (and with that affirmation, creation and redemption are made to be necessary to God). Or you say that divine ‘essence’ is an activity whose purpose is rooted in the divine freedom. The first is the route of a good many of the theological followers of Hegel. The second is my own option.

B. Given that Barth has closed the metaphysical gap between the divine essence and the divine will, the only priority of the Trinity over election which he makes room for is a logical priority. Talk of an ontological priority would reopen that gap.

Thesis 4

That Barth was committed in a principled way to keeping metaphysics out of the domain of Christian dogmatics did not prevent him from reading appreciatively those theologians for whom metaphysical conceptions were basic to their understandings of God and the human, seeking to identify the theological values which came to expression in their metaphysical thought forms, and translating those values into a non-metaphysical scheme. During the years of what we might think of as his ‘apprenticeship’ in dogmatic theology (stretching from the Göttingen Dogmatics to CD II/1), however, his effort to ‘hear the voice of the Church and the Bible’ absorbed his attention to such a degree that he had little time for the more constructive task of translation.Footnote ²² It was not until he developed his christologically grounded doctrine of election in CD II/2 that he was able to begin the work of elaborating a non-metaphysical theological ontology capable of providing the basis for that constructive work.

Thesis 5

In his 1951 work on Barth, Hans Urs von Balthasar spoke of a final shift in Barth's thinking around 1938. He described it in formal terms as a shift from a theology of the Word to a truly Christocentric theology. I have tried to describe the same shift in material terms as a move from a more nearly pneumatocentric theology which had as its focus the ‘here and now’ situation of the believer who is addressed by the Word to a theology which sought to ground all doctrinal reflection in the ‘there and then’ of Jesus Christ, in the divine humiliation and the human exaltation which took place in him. The timing of this shift is something that cannot be pinned down with precision. Already in CD II/1, intimations of the coming change are present. The explanation for this lies in the fact that Barth had begun to rethink his doctrine of election as a consequence of hearing a lecture on the subject by Pierre Maury at the 1936 celebration of the 400th anniversary of the Reformation of Geneva. But the shift was completed only in the writing of CD II/2, in which Barth made the astonishing claim that Jesus Christ is not only the object of election but also its subject (i.e. its author). This was not a claim made by Maury.Footnote ²³

Thesis 6

The meaning of the statement ‘Jesus Christ is the subject of election’ is disputed. The most minimal understanding of it is that the event in which the eternal Son affirms the will of his Father that he should become incarnate is, at the same time, the event in which he is made to be (by way of anticipation) Jesus Christ. Thus the man Jesus is present at the very beginning of all of God's works ad extra. But I think Barth wanted to say more than this. I think he wanted to overcome the metaphysical gap introduced into theology in the West by the Thomistic distinction between the eternal processions (by which the being of God is constituted) and the eternal missions (by which God sets himself in relation to human beings) by collapsing the processions and the missions into a single eternal event. The full implications of this move would, however, not be made clear until Barth had written his doctrine of reconciliation and directed his attention, specifically, to the problem of God's unchangeability in becoming incarnate.

Explanation

A. Barth's doctrine of the Trinity experienced a significant development between CD I/1 and CD IV/1. To be sure, the basic structure of Barth's earlier doctrine remained in place. There is in God but one subject in three ‘modes of being’.Footnote ²⁴ One subject: that means that ‘divine unity consists in the fact that in Himself He is both One who is obeyed and Another who obeys’.Footnote ²⁵ What has changed is that Barth no longer derives his doctrine of the Trinity from the logic of revelation (i.e. from the structure of the address of God to the believer) but from the history of Jesus Christ, the God-human who exists in the unity of humiliation and exaltation.Footnote ²⁶ ‘As we look at Jesus Christ we cannot avoid the astounding conclusion of a divine obedience. Therefore we have to draw the no less astounding conclusion that in equal Godhead the one God is, in fact, the One and also Another, that He is indeed a First and a Second, One who rules and commands in majesty and One who obeys in humility. The one God is both the one and the other. And, we continue, He is the one and the other without any cleft or differentiation but in perfect unity and equality because in the same perfect unity and equality He is also a Third, the One who affirms the one and equal Godhead through and by and in the two modes of being, the One who makes possible and maintains His fellowship with Himself as the one and the other. In virtue of this third mode of being, He is in the other two without division or contradiction, the whole God in each.’Footnote ²⁷ Two things are made clear in this passage. First, Barth is seeking, with his doctrine of the Trinity, to describe the ontological conditions in God for his self-revelation in time. That his self-revelation in time takes place in obedience must mean that obedience is not alien to the innermost being of God. But now notice: Barth has identified the differentiation of Father and Son with the ‘commanding’ and ‘obeying’ which takes place in election. In so doing, he has described the ontological conditions for the possibility of a correspondence of the history of the incarnate God to that which God is in eternity. There is no longer any room left here for an abstract doctrine of the Trinity. There is a triune being of God – only in the covenant of grace. Second, the unity of Father and Son is made to depend on the role played by the Spirit, in binding them together. It is not dependent upon subsistence in a Godhead which has been interpreted along the lines of a substance metaphysics.

B. Barth's later doctrine of the Trinity thus entails a collapse of the eternal processions into the eternal missions. That much is clearly seen in the following passage. ‘In humility as the Son who complies, He is the same as the Father is in majesty as the Father who disposes. He is the same in consequence (and obedience) as is the Father in origin. He is the same as the Son, i.e. as the self-posited God (the eternally begotten of the Father as the dogma has it) as is the Father as the self-positing God (the Father who eternally begets). Moreover, in His humility and compliance as Son, He has a supreme part in the majesty and disposing of the Father. The Father as the origin is never apart from Him as the consequence, the obedient One. The self-positing God is never apart from Him as the One who is posited as God by God. . . . The Father is not the Father and the Son is not the Son without a mutual affirmation and love in the Spirit.’Footnote ²⁸ In this passage, the command of the Father has been directly identified with the act of self-positing and the obedience of the Son has been directly identified with being posited. We would not be stretching a point if we said that the ‘command’ of the Father simply is the generation of the Son, the act in which God posits a mode of being in himself in which he can then ‘obey’ (and the act in which God posits in himself a third mode of being to secure the unity of the other two).

C. Read in the light of the doctrine of the Trinity which is implied by Barth's treatment of the incarnation, the statement ‘Jesus Christ is the subject of election’ means that Jesus Christ, the eternal Son, elects his own election by means of the same will by which the Father elects him and that this takes place in one and the same eternal event.Footnote ²⁹ By the same will: that means that the unity of the divine subject is not set aside by the ‘command’ and ‘obedience’ structure proper to the covenant of grace. What we have before us here is an eternal act of self-differentiation on the part of a single, unified subject. In one and the same event: that means that there is no temporal gap between ‘command’ and ‘obedience’. As the act of the one divine subject in differentiating himself into modes of being, ‘command’ and ‘obedience’ take place simultaneously. But then, that also means that the one generated by the Father is already ‘joined’ (on the level of his identity) to the human nature he would assume even as he responds in obedience. It is as joined to the human nature that he is the subject who obeys the command of the Father, i.e. as Jesus Christ. Therefore, there is no ‘eternal Son qua Son’, no abstract being of the Son in which he is not already Jesus Christ. The One who agrees with and affirms the will of the Father and who thereby makes himself the subject of election is Jesus Christ.

Thesis 7

Christology constitutes the theoretical basis for all other doctrinal constructs from CD II/2 to the end of Barth's life. But it was not until he had thoroughly ‘historicized’ his christology (beginning in IV/1) that he began to realise the critical potential of this epistemological starting-point. For if this new christology is now the epistemological basis for theology, then nothing may be said of God or the human which does not find its basis in this christology. Expressed another way: a doctrine of God built on the soil of this epistemological foundation may seek to find in God the ontological conditions for the possibility of this christology only. Anything beyond that is unwarranted speculation which takes place on a different basis – and is to be excluded. Seen in this light, there is much in Barth's earlier doctrine of God that can remain standing, much that can remain standing only if seen in a different light, and some things which need to be rejected.

Explanation

A. The following statements are very good indeed.

1. 1. ‘Actus purus is not sufficient as a description of God. To it there must be added at least “et singularis”’.Footnote ³⁰ God's being in act is a being in a ‘particular event’Footnote ³¹ in history; an event whose singularity consists in the fact that its basis is different from all other events. ‘No other being exists absolutely in its act. No other being is absolutely its own conscious, willed and executed decision.’Footnote ³² To speak of God as actus purus et singularis is to say that God has his being in the singularity of an event in history in which God simply is the mode of his self-revelation in time. That is why Barth can also say, ‘What God is as God, the divine individuality and characteristics, the essentia or “essence” of God, is something which we shall encounter at the place where God deals with us as Lord and Savior or not at all.’Footnote ³³ And ‘God is who He is in the act of revelation’.Footnote ³⁴

2. 2. ‘God is not in abstracto Father, Son and Holy Spirit. He is so with a definite purpose and reference’.Footnote ³⁵ Seen in context, the statement appears as a conclusion registered against the traditional ‘orthodox’ account of the relation between God's being in and for himself and God's being for us in his gracious act of election. According to the view held by ‘the Fathers and scholastics’, the view which was appropriated afresh by ‘the older Protestant orthodoxy . . . God is everything in the way of aseity, simplicity, immutability, infinity, etc., but He is not the living God, that is to say, He is not the God who lives in concrete decision. God lives in this sense only figuratively. It is not something that belongs to His proper and essential life, but only to His relation to the world. Basically, then, it may only be “ascribed” to Him, while it is believed that His true being and likewise His true Godhead are to be sought in the impassibility which is above and behind His living activity within the universe. . . . From the fact that God is the living God, that He is the living God inwardly as well as outwardly, a quality expressed and attested in concrete decision, they did not dare to deduce the further fact that God clearly does not exist otherwise, and that He does not will to be understood otherwise, than in the concreteness of life, in the determination of His will, which is as such a determination of His being. Strangely enough, they did not feel driven to make such a deduction even by their doctrine of the Trinity. They spoke of the three persons, of their inter-relationship, of the common work ad extra, without ever realising the implication of the fact that this triune being does not exist and cannot be known as a being which rests or moves purely within itself. God is not in abstracto Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the triune God. He is so with a definite purpose and reference . . .’Footnote ³⁶ Barth goes on to say that a triune being of God which rests or moves purely in itself has no existence. If it is ever appropriate to speak of a being of God ‘in and for Himself’, it is so only with this qualification: the being of God in and for himself is a being of the God of electing grace in and for himself. There is, in other words, a relationship of identity in both content and form between the immanent Trinity in protology and the economic Trinity in time.

3. 3. ‘There can be no Christian truth which does not, from the very first, contain within itself as its basis the fact that from and to all eternity God is the electing God. There can be no tenet of Christian doctrine which, if it is to be a Christian tenet, does not reflect both in form and content this divine electing. . . . There is no height or depth in which God can be God in any other way.’Footnote ³⁷

B. The following statements can be retained only if seen in a different light than that which surrounded their original articulation.

1. 1. ‘To its very depths God's Godhead consists in the fact that it is an event – not any event, not events in general, but the event of his action, in which we have a share in God's revelation.’Footnote ³⁸

2. 2. ‘What God is as God . . . the essentia or “essence” of God is something which we will encounter either at the place where God deals with us as Lord and Savior or not at all.’Footnote ³⁹

C. The following statements cannot be redeemed and should be rejected.

1. 1. ‘As manifest and eternally actual in the relationship of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, God is the one who already has and is His own being. Therefore this being does not need any origination and constitution.’Footnote ⁴⁰ This passage appears in the context of a treatment of God's ‘necessary existence’. In this context, Barth considers the teaching of Hermann Schell, a modern Catholic theologian whose reflections on Jerome's claim that God is causa sui led him to posit that God's aseity consists in self-realisation, self-constitution, and self-causation – ‘as though in a certain sense God arose out of Himself’. This conception Barth rejects, though the question must remain open as to whether his later christology would allow him to continue to do so. In any event, it is important to see just how ambivalent Barth already is at this early date. In spite of rejecting Schell's thesis, he thinks it important to find a way to honour Schell's ‘special concern’, namely to overcome ‘the scholastic equation of God with the unmoved Mover of Aristotle’.Footnote ⁴¹ And clearly, for Barth, the way to do this is to critically engage the medieval Catholic definition of God as the ens necessarium.

2. What Barth seeks to avoid here is the logical necessity which attaches itself to a concept – as occurs in the following statement whose source Barth does not identify: ‘It is an intrinsic impossibility that He should not be or should be other than He is.’Footnote ⁴² Over against this concept of ‘necessity’, Barth places the lived actuality of God. ‘Of God we can say only that in the actuality of His being He is its affirmation, that in the actuality of His being His non-being or His being other than He is, is ontologically and noetically excluded, that it becomes an absolute impossibility, i.e. an impossibility which has no possibility as its background. As distinct from what is meant by these terms [i.e. notwendig, necesse, necessarium, necessitas], there is no need as a result of which God has to be. But if God is, it is the effect of His freedom, which knows no necessity, no inevitability.’Footnote ⁴³ Barth comes very close here to the claim made by John Zizioulas that God is the being who is free not to exist but who chooses in fact to exist.Footnote ⁴⁴ Had he not surrounded these claims with a rejection of the idea that ‘God takes His origin from Himself’,Footnote ⁴⁵ had he allowed that this actuality of being expresses a freedom-in-decision, he would have arrived at the same concept of divine freedom as that found in Zizioulas. As it is, the statement with which we began must be rejected.

3. 2. ‘Jesus Christ has a beginning, but God has no beginning’.Footnote ⁴⁶

4. 3. ‘We know God's will apart from predestination only as the act in which, from all eternity and in all eternity, God affirms and confirms Himself.’Footnote ⁴⁷ Once Barth makes his later christology the epistemological basis for all that may be said of God, such an ‘apart from’ becomes a complete impossibility.

Thesis 8

The divine ‘decision’ that is election is not to be understood in analogy to decision-making on the human plane. In truth, the relation is exactly the opposite. Decision-making on the human plane is a pale reflection of the divine decision, since all human decisions only imperfectly express and realise the intentions that inform them. The divine decision, on the other hand, simply is the divine intentionality.

Explanation

A. Human decision-making is characterised by the following features. 1) Being precedes act on the human plane because humans must first receive their being from Another before acting. 2) Human decision-making involves deliberation; an attempt to think through the consequences of available alternatives before acting. The ‘before’ in this statement reflects the fact that human decision-making is temporally structured. And that consideration, again, leads us quite naturally to the conclusion that being must precede act on the human plane. 3) Human decision-making is fraught with peril. Humans cannot know either the alternatives available to them or the consequences which attend those alternatives perfectly. Nor can they know themselves so well that their true intentions are known or realised in any decision made.

B. The divine decision that is election differs from human decision-making at each of the foregoing points (taking them this time in the reverse order). 1) Traditional theism held that God knows all things in knowing himself; that he knows all ‘possibilities’ available to him ‘before’ acting. But if God truly knows all things, then he also knows, by an act of immediate intuition, what he will do and, therefore, what his ‘intention’ is. Self-knowing and intentional behaviour are one in him.Footnote ⁴⁸ In this way, the idea of counter-factual possibilities is rendered unreal (i.e. lacking in reality). 2) It follows that God does not deliberate in coming to a decision. Any attempt to temporalise the divine decision through the imposition of a ‘before and after’ structure is illegitimate. But that is precisely what happens whenever we think of God's being as ontologically anterior to the act of election. 3) God must therefore give himself being eternally in the act in which he sets himself in relation to Jesus Christ and, in him, to the world. There is thus no metaphysical gap between God's being and his acting.

Thesis 9

As a description of the being of God in the act of election, the freedom of God is a freedom for self-determination and, indeed, self-limitation and suffering for the sake of human beings. It is God's Lordship over all things, including his own being. In that God chooses to be God for us in Christ, he is giving himself the being he will have for all eternity.

Explanation

A. Such a conception of freedom includes more than the negations which the tradition typically associated with the concept of divine freedom. That God is free from external constraint or conditioning is certainly to be affirmed. That he is free as well from all internal lack or deficiency or need is also true. But God's freedom cannot be exhaustively described when reference is had only to such negations. Seen positively, God's freedom is the freedom of the love that God is to set itself in concrete relationship to that which is other than itself.

B. God's freedom does not consist, however, in a choice between alternatives. Such a conception, however venerable it may be, is far too anthropomorphic. It requires ‘time’ for deliberation in order to be meaningful. God's freedom, by contrast, is a freedom for time. It is not a freedom which presupposes time.

C. God's freedom is finally the freedom to exist – or not to exist. The opposite of the determination to be God in the covenant of grace is not a determination to be God in some other way; it is rather the absence of such a determination, which would mean choosing not to exist.

Thesis 10

If God is what he is in the eternal decision of election and not in a state or mode of existence that is above or prior to that decision, then the question ‘who is the Subject of this decision?’ constitutes a transgression of the boundaries set by the divine reality itself. For embedded in that question is another, namely ‘What would God have been, had He not made this decision?’ Such a question can only be answered on a basis other than the one provided by Barth's later christology. It is, inevitably, an exercise in natural theology.

Thesis 11

Where the logical relationship of election to triunity is concerned, the foregoing considerations would allow us to take either element as a starting point and to reflect on the other in its light. To take up election first has the considerable advantage of laying emphasis upon the decision in which God has his being. It is quite true that such an understanding leans in the direction of making the Father be the source of being of the other two members of the Godhead (the so-called monarchia of the Father). But such a conclusion was one also drawn by Basil of Caesaria. Certainly, it entails no departure from Nicene orthodoxy.

Explanation

The suspicion which seems to animate Hunsinger is that my understanding of the logical relationship of election to the divine triunity constitutes a violation of the credal formulation ‘begotten, not made’. Hence, Arianism would seem to be the worry. That what I have sketched here is not ‘Arian’ rests upon three considerations. First, the primary concern of Arius was to safeguard the impassibility of what he called the ‘high God’. I do not believe that impassibility is a biblical doctrine; hence, at the very least, our motivations are quite different. Second, I do not believe that there was when the Son was not. The generation of the Son and the bringing forth of the Spirit is the event of God's self-origination. There is nothing ‘before’ it. Third and most importantly, I do not make the Son to be a different subject than the Father. The act in which God constitutes himself as triune is an act of self-relating for the sake of self-giving. That this view comports nicely with Barth's basic structure – one subject in three modes of being – does not need to be said.