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Theology is ethics: how Karl Barth sees the good life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2011

Andy Alexis-Baker
Andy Alexis-Baker*
Affiliation:
Department of Theology, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI 53233, USAandy.alexis-baker@marquette.edu
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Abstract

Since Immanuel Kant, moral reasoning has been divorced from classical theology and reinscribed onto self-contained individuals. Shorn of theological particularities, modern ethics tries to identify behaviours to which every right-thinking person can assent. A basic premise of classical moral philosophy, however, was that if we know who we are and what our telos is, then we can have a good idea of how we ought to act. In his christology, Barth reappropriates this classical view of ethics and situates it christologically. Because Jesus’ human nature finds its being and telos in his divinity, Barth found an ethical pattern in the anhypostasis-enhypostasis doctrine. Restoring people to their proper place as creatures rather than Kantian demi-gods, Jesus shows us what it means to be truly human by being obedient to the Father. We cannot divinise individuals or the church, but the church exists enhypostatically. This anhypostatic-enhypostatic christological pattern orders our activities, making worship the first task of ethics. In prayer and in Sabbath keeping, Jesus shows us his utter dependence on God through supplication and rest. In these acts of worship, Christians act as they were created to act. We respond obediently to our Creator. But we also find an orientation towards other people in christology. Love of enemies has everything to do with the content and shape of God's command. It is involved in the telos of human life in being Christ-like.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 64 , Issue 4 , November 2011, pp. 425 - 438
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2011

Since Immanuel Kant, moral reasoning has been divorced from classical theology and reinscribed onto self-contained individuals. Shorn of theological particularities, modern ethics tries to identify behaviours to which every right-thinking person can assent.Footnote 1 The basic principles of moral life do not depend on divine commands, which cannot be known and whose authority must be questioned.Footnote 2 Nor do ethical axioms hinge on experiences, which are too specific to yield a universally acknowledged moral law. Even the classical good beatitudo is too idiosyncratic to guide morality since it produces conflicting desires within the human subject and between people. Kant therefore insisted that only a sense of duty to obey a universally accessible law can reasonably undergird the moral life. Thus he tried to prove that the categorical imperative – ‘I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law’Footnote 3 – provides such a foundation. Provided that a person proceeds methodically by asking ‘can you will that your maxim become a universal law?’Footnote 4 he has no need for any ‘foreign influence’ to his autonomous reason.Footnote 5

Stripped of divisive theological content, Kant believed that human reason alone would fashion a peaceful world from the ashes of religious and tribal conflicts.Footnote 6 In this regard, his ‘procedural conception of ethics’Footnote 7 suited the eighteenth-century bureaucratic regimes because they claimed to save people from a natural ‘war of every one against every one’.Footnote 8 Consequently, the upper echelons of the Prussian state bureaucracy enthusiastically received Kant's moral teaching, which makes the bureaucrat the epitome of human perfection. This is why Alasdair MacIntyre has claimed that ‘anyone educated into the Kantian notion of duty will, so far, have been educated into an easy conformism with authority’.Footnote 9 Ironically, Kant's attempted escape from external authority leaves people vulnerable to subtle powers and authoritarian regimes whose imperatives we obey mechanistically.

It is within this ‘age of the Kantian man, or Kantian man-God’Footnote 10 that Karl Barth began his theological career. He saw firsthand how Kant's ethics formed Christians who would crumble before the state's war machines. All of his former theology professors had ‘identified themselves before the world with the war policy’ of the German state during the First World War, which caused Barth to question what he had learnt from them. His world ‘shaken to the foundations’,Footnote 11 Barth set out to show that ‘dogmatics itself must be ethics and that ethics can be only dogmatics’.Footnote 12 Since theology expounds how God's word in Jesus Christ establishes all that we know and do, ethics must be thoroughly theological. Conversely, since theology ‘incurs the grave suspicion of being no more than an idle intellectual frivolity’ if it does not entail a way of life, theology must be ethical.Footnote 13

Barth's theological ethics rediscovered that Jesus is normative for the entirety of our lives, for how we reason and how we live. In Christ an ontological shift occurs so that Jesus’ followers exist in a moral space which Jesus defines and constitutes. Barth's retrieval of the christological doctrine of anhypostasia-enhypostasia shows us what being human means because Jesus defines how to live the good life in this world.

Moral space and ontology

In Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor argues that there is an ‘essential link between identity and a kind of orientation. To know who you are is to be oriented in moral space, a space in which questions arise about what is good or bad, what is worth doing and what is not’.Footnote 14 For Barth, this ‘moral space’ is the kingdom of God. Inhabiting this space entails asking more than the question ‘What are you doing?’ but in and with that: ‘What are you?’Footnote 15 Freed from the contingent nature of beliefs and character, the Kantian individual acts according to the dictates of impersonal reason: he is god-like, or in Iris Murdoch's words, ‘his proper name is Lucifer’.Footnote 16 Inhabiting God's kingdom, however, entails an identity shift in which a person becomes part of a people who hear Jesus’ command. Indeed, Jesus is the moral space within which those who hear his voice move:

Jesus Christ is God's command to open our eyes and to realize that this place is all around us, that we are already in this kingdom, that we have no alternative but to adjust ourselves to it, that we have our being and continuance here and nowhere else.Footnote 17

Jesus’ life, death and resurrection thus define human being as a creature who hears and obeys God's word. Jesus provides a moral geographical space within which creaturely existence finds its meaning and telos. As Barth puts it:

In the history of Jesus, we have to do with the reality which underlies and precedes all other reality as the first and eternal Word of God, that in this history we have actually to do with the ground and sphere, the atmosphere of the being of every man, whether they lived thousands of years before or after Jesus.Footnote 18

While many theologians begin with a predetermined theory of being, Barth claims that ‘God is an instance outside every genus. God is, therefore, absolutely unique.’Footnote 19 Nothing outside of God can account for God's singular existence; therefore only God can account for everything. Finite and mortal, all creatures have a cause and do not intrinsically need to exist; we only have being in relation to God. This is similar to Aquinas who claimed that Deus non est in aliquo genere,Footnote 20 and that God is self-subsistent being while God gives everything else being as a gift.Footnote 21 This classical way of talking about ontology has profound effects for how Barth speaks about christology and the moral life.

Christology

Barth begins his massive treatment of christology by using the prodigal son story to shape how he describes christology and the moral life. Barth thus titles a section of Church Dogmatics IV/1, ‘The Way of the Son into the Far County’. Christ's descent from majesty into humility corresponds to the Son obeying the Father. Jesus is only divine as the obedient Son; God obedient to God. Although this is a peculiar thing to say about God, as far back as Aquinas obedience was a habit not of an authoritarian relationship but of friendship (amicitia). Friends ‘have the same likes and dislikes’Footnote 22 and will the same thing. Friendship involves obedience to people who are equal insofar as they share the same nature. Obedience, derived from the Latin ob plus audire, essentially means ‘hearing’.Footnote 23 Thus for Barth, Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God, came into the far country as a truly human being, which simply means that Jesus heard the Father and obeyed. That is the purpose for which human beings were created.

Having thus defined the incarnation as divine obedience, Barth's important recovery of an anhypostatic-enhypostatic interpretation of Chalcedonian christology becomes clearer. Bruce McCormack argues that Barth's 1924 discovery of the anhypostatic-enhypostatic doctrine in his Göttingen lectures replaced the Römerbrief's eternity/time dialectic as ‘the central parable’ for expressing the incarnation.Footnote 24 Thereafter, we might very well read Barth's entire theological programme as turning to the incarnation's centrality in these terms.Footnote 25

The term anhypostasia denies that Jesus’ human nature subsists in itself, and enhypostasia asserts that Jesus’ humanity subsists within the divine hypostasis.

The humanity of Christ, although it is body and soul, and an individual, is nothing subsistent or real in itself. Thus it did not exist prior to its union with the Logos. It has no independent existence alongside or apart from him. . . . The human nature of Christ has no personhood of its own. It is anhypostatos – the formula in which the description culminates. Or, more positively, it is enhypostatos. It has personhood, subsistence, reality, only in its union with the Logos of God.Footnote 26

The anhypostasis-enhypostasis doctrine allows Barth to talk about revelation without compromising either Jesus’ divine or human natures. Since Jesus’ human nature does not derive from human potential but is entirely God's initiative – ‘human nature possesses no capacity for becoming the human nature of Jesus Christ’Footnote 27 – the anhypostasia controverts the notion that God adopted a man with a pre-established identity.Footnote 28 That is, Jesus is more than a prestigious human being to whom God gave a special task. To affirm that he was ‘conceived by the Holy Spirit’ is to also affirm he has always been the Son of God.Footnote 29 Thus Barth argues from the anhypostasia teaching to the virgin birth to show how God disrupts human history and interrupts the march of sinful disobedience. Enclosed within divine nature, Jesus’ human nature finds its home and telos. The doctrine of anhypostasia is Barth's way of arguing that salvation is utterly gratuitous.

At the same time, Barth uses the enhypostasia to show that Jesus Christ's humanity is not a general substance.Footnote 30 The Son of God became a particular man, who experienced the normal conditions of creaturely finitude (including fallenness). Jesus is not a tertium quid, but a human who had natural instincts, needs and passions, as well as ‘every human capacity and every human weakness . . . alienation from God, the curse and burden and mortality, the character as flesh, to which human essence has fallen victim, and from which it cannot escape of itself’.Footnote 31 For Barth, Jesus is completely human. Yet, the Son of God became a specific man and exists as a human only as he exists as God. So Barth claims that his humanity can only properly be described as ‘the humanity of God’.Footnote 32 The Gospel narratives point to Jesus’ unique existence. Thus Jesus is ontologically distinct from other human beings even though his human essence is common to all people.Footnote 33 Because Jesus’ humanity is fully subject to his divine nature, his human obedience overcomes sin and brings home to God that which would otherwise continue the profligate life in the far country.

Christology, moral space and ontology

A basic premise of classical moral philosophy was that if we know who we are and what our telos is, then we can have a good idea of how we ought to act. Thus Plato and Aristotle taught we must know what people are to understand the good life. Of course, ‘human-nature-as-it-happens-to-be’ often clashes with ‘human-nature-as-it-could-be-if-it-realized-its telos’.Footnote 34 For Aristotle, the science of ethics helps people to transition from the one state to the other. As Alasdair MacIntyre describes it:

Ethics therefore in this view presupposes some account of potentiality and act, some account of the essence of man as a rational animal and above all some account of the human telos. The precepts which enjoin the various virtues and prohibit the vices which are their counterparts instruct us how to move from potentiality to act, how to realize our true nature and to reach our true end. To defy them will be to be frustrated and incomplete, to fail to achieve that good of rational happiness which it is peculiarly ours as a species to pursue.Footnote 35

In his christology, Barth reappropriates this view of the ethical task and situates it christologically:Footnote 36

As we will, we are; and what we do, we are. It is not as if man first exists and then acts. He exists in that he acts. The question whether and how far he acts rightly is the question whether and how far he exists rightly. And so it is no more and no less than the problem of man's existence which theology or dogmatics makes its own when it raises the ethical question or rather recognizes and treats it as its most characteristic problem.Footnote 37

In his lectures on ethics in 1928/9 Barth claims: ‘We have simply to understand what life is and we shall also understand what is commanded us.’Footnote 38 Jesus shows us ‘what life is’ and as such shows us what a properly ‘natural theology’ involves:

It is with the whole man in what is almost exclusively his ‘natural’ existence in the narrower sense, his physical existence, his existence as it is determined by the external form and force of the cosmos to which he belongs. . . . He is delivered from every torment and embarrassment and he can breathe again. He can be a man again – a whole man in this elemental sense. His existence as a creature in the natural cosmos is normalized. We must not ignore or expunge the phrase – as a creature in the natural cosmos. It is as such that he is radically blessed by the miracles of Jesus.Footnote 39

Jesus restores people to their proper place as creatures, and in doing so precludes people from seeing themselves as the ‘Kantian man-god’.Footnote 40 Against Kant, Barth states:

In an abstract, subjective selfhood, apart from Jesus Christ, we none of us exist as those who move and are obedient to God, and therefore we cannot really know ourselves as such. It is only in this One that we genuinely exist ourselves as men like this, as Christians. A true knowledge of ourselves as such, and therefore of our Christian actuality, stands or falls for all of us with our knowledge of Jesus Christ. In Him we are hidden from ourselves. Only in Him can we be revealed.Footnote 41

The incarnation, therefore, shows us what it means to be truly human. Jesus’ life, death and resurrection – accomplished on humanity's behalf – objectively establish and define human being. Jesus’ faithful obedience, which fulfils the covenant of grace, establishes and defines humanity as a life of faithful obedience. ‘Obedience is the purpose and goal of hearing. Our return to obedience is indeed the aim of free grace.’Footnote 42 Therefore our being, which only has existence in Christ, does not obey an internal law of conscience or reason, but obeys God's command. The ‘moral space’ within which we all move is the obedient Son of God. A key question then becomes whether this command remains external or creates a habitus in the believer which becomes his or her own.

Doxological ethics: anhypostatic-enhypostatic christology and moral life

In an analogous way, our lives also follow the anhypostatic-enhypostatic christological pattern. Yet we have cautiously to articulate this ‘pattern’ so that we do not reduce it to another ‘revelation’ of latent human potential which Barth used this classical doctrine to rule out. For example, Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt understood Barth's anhypostatic-enhypostatic christology to mean Christ's humanity is not so much the concrete particular of an individual man but the genus of the human species. Marquardt interpreted Barth's hypostatic union doctrine as teaching that humanity is collectively divinised. Barth, Marquardt thought, ‘expands and completes the christological anhypostasis (the anhypostasis of Jesus Christ's human nature) through an anthropological enhypostasis: the enhypostasis of the humanitas, of the collective “human species” in the person of the incarnate Word’.Footnote 43 Marquardt sees Barth as moving beyond the ecclesial community to a wider world where Christ's claims are relativised:

Barth, however, has always pushed beyond this collectivity as understood merely ecclesiologically. From the beginning, for Barth, the Adam-Christ typology in Romans 5 was an occasion for an overall interpretation of the human species’ history which surpasses the ecclesiastical way of thinking.Footnote 44

John Howard Yoder criticised Marquardt's methodology, which argues deductively from ‘first principles’ in order to ‘reach “beyond” to some other “mainstream” that would somehow be “out there”’.Footnote 45 Instead, Yoder argues that Barth's theology means that ‘the principle of coherence of the church's self-understanding is narrative rather than deductive’.Footnote 46

This is what Karl Barth meant . . . where he spoke of the life of the church as ‘liturgical.’ By this Barth clearly did not mean a concentration on rites. He meant that because the meaning of Jesus was known within the categories of ordinary historical reality, he must be re-known, re-presented, on through time in a celebratory recounting that ties the particularity of his history to the particularity of ours, without trusting to the ‘bridge’ of some mediating generalizations about the nature of things.Footnote 47

Those who confess Jesus as Lord ‘are willing to live within the limits of the story of their faith’ and are ‘unembarrassed about the fact that its confession is not ultimately subject to irresistible verification (or falsification) from outside its own system’.Footnote 48 Marquardt, Yoder charged, started from a christology abstracted from Jesus’ particular story that the political community of confessing Christians embody and then used that ‘christology’ to underwrite a supposedly wider ‘socialist politics’.Footnote 49 This is exactly what Barth's theological project works against. In affirming an anhypostatic-enhypostatic christology, Barth did not claim that Jesus assumed a general collective human nature which shows us our own latent potential for new politics.

Yoder did not mean to deny that Barth legitimately connects Christian life with an anhypostatic-enhypostatic christological pattern. For Barth ‘theology is ethics’ and theological teaching tells us something about how we are to live. First, the anhypostatic-enhypostatic doctrine defines humans as creatures whom God's grace enlivens: we are those who move within a grace-filled moral space. The priority of grace means that we do not build God's kingdom; God's kingdom has come to us and we go out to meet it. We are the ‘first-fruits’ of that kingdom and have our being only in Christ. After a long discourse on the hypostatic union and anhypostatia-enhypostatia, Barth states:

When we say Jesus Christ we say Jesus Christ and His own – those who are co-elected by Him as the Son of God and in Him as the Son of Man. We say Jesus Christ and His community, Jesus Christ as the Head of His body, Jesus Christ in both His heavenly and also His earthly-historical form of existence. His existence takes both the one form and the other. . . . The relationship between these two forms of His existence is not so much comparable as indirectly identical to the relationship between Himself as the eternal Son of God and His being as man. . . . [This community] does not exist in independence of Him.Footnote 50

Barth explicitly connects our own existence to an anhypostatic-enhypostatic pattern. ‘The community of Jesus Christ can be that which the human nature of its Lord and Head is.’Footnote 51 That is all the church can be. In Chalcedonian fashion, it cannot merge its nature with Christ's divinity, ‘becoming the subject where He is only the predicate’.Footnote 52 Instead, the church exists enhypostatically because it finds its existence ordered with the Son of Man under the Son of God. The church (or the individuals within it) does not become divine anymore than Christ's humanity did (per Chalcedon). We are those who act as subjects of Christ's lordship.

Second, this anhypostatic-enhypostatic christological pattern orders our activities. Barth begins his ethical treatment in Church Dogmatics III/4 with acts of worship as ethical actions. Keeping the Sabbath, confession and prayer are the first ethical actions of this anhypostatic-enhypostatic pattern. For Barth the anhypostatic-enhypostatic pattern is epitomised in Jesus’ prayer at Gethsemane – ‘not as I will, but as you will’.Footnote 53 ‘The man Jesus is not a mere puppet moved this way and that by God. He is not a mere reed used by God as the instrument of His Word. The man Jesus prays. He speaks and acts.’Footnote 54 Prayer signals that human nature is subordinated to God. ‘To pray in the Christian sense means to renounce all illusions about ourselves, and openly to admit to ourselves our utter need.’Footnote 55 For Barth, prayer is an eschatological act which acknowledges that the kingdom is present:

Prayer is the actualization of our eschatological reality that is possible here and now. . . . Christian prayer must say finally: ‘Not my will but thy will be done.’ . . . From this ethical standpoint our conduct must conform to the measure of our being truly related to God as we are when we truly pray. Prayer is the primal and basic form of human action in which man looks and reaches beyond his reality as a creature and as a sinner saved by grace in which he acts entheos, i.e., as one who belongs to God, who has his home, his father's house, with God.Footnote 56

Yoder claims that Barth's ethic is ‘doxological’, by which he means that ‘not only does the church proclaim God as worthy, as sovereign, but also as victor’.Footnote 57 The Christian life of obedience witnesses to the relationship between God and creature. We are drawn up into God's promise so that our hope is not in vain.Footnote 58 We act entheos, Barth says, which is again anhypostatic-enhypostatic language.

In Barth's theological ethics, the Sabbath command has an anhypostatic-enhypostatic pattern in which we recognise our complete dependence upon God in what he calls a ‘renouncing faith’. Thus Barth begins Church Dogmatics III/4 by discussing the Sabbath command. Keeping the Sabbath points us away from our own will and achievements and reminds us of who we are. It limits our capacity to work.Footnote 59 Thus the Sabbath command calls us to trust in God's faithfulness and commit ourselves to living within the limits of Jesus’ particular story.

In the doxological actions of prayer, Sabbath-keeping and confession, Christians act as they were created to act. In these actions Christians find their telos and realise their true selves in Christ: Human beings respond to their Creator. We learn that our lives are not our own but God's. Barth claims that our duties to God are not the same as our duties to our neighbour. Thus we cannot claim that social action is the sum of Christian life or collapse faith, worship or theology into ethics. What God above all wills for human beings is worship, thanksgiving and petition. Jesus is the model.

Yet, our converted lives are orientated not only towards God, but also towards other people: ‘The biblical individual is not selfishly wrapped up in his own concerns.’Footnote 60 In living this other-centred life, Christians follow Jesus. In the divine election, God elects to be ‘for’ us. The ethical import of God being for us is that God enters into active human life, which is capable of responding through God's call and command. God creates a covenant in which we must do our part. Colin Gunton succinctly summarised this point: ‘Election is not empty, but to something. For the Augustinian tradition it tended to be to a particular destiny in heaven or hell.’ But for Barth, ‘Election is to a particular way of life.’Footnote 61 This way of life has a ‘formed and contoured reference’ and will take a definite shape. Barth points to a general shape that God's command takes: ‘It is always the form, or shape, or garment of grace. . . . It is always a concealed repetition of the reality of grace and the promise of grace.’Footnote 62 This grace flows out of God's love, ‘which could not equally wear other garments’. God's command ‘has teleological power. . . . The aim of the grace actualized and revealed in God's covenant with people, is to restore the person to the divine likeness and therefore to fellowship with God in eternal life’. The end of human life is conformity into Christ's likeness. This determines our future and the content of the command. In an important passage Barth examines Matthew 5:

The well-known passage at the close of Mt. 5 shows us almost word for word what we have to say about the teleological character of grace. In it the τελειότης of the heavenly Father (the τελειότης of grace) is revealed in the fact that God vouchsafes rain and sunshine to all men, and therefore loves even God's enemies. This shows that the peculiarity of those who know and receive God's grace, in contrast to what the publicans do, must and will consist (ἔσεσθε) in the fact that they, too, love their enemies, and are therefore τέλειοι like their Father in heaven.Footnote 63

Love of enemies has everything to do with the content and shape of God's command. It is involved in the telos of human life in being Christ-like. ‘God's action is that God is gracious, and the person in their action is committed to correspondence to this action.’Footnote 64 This is the telos of the good life in Barth's theology. As God was in the world in Jesus Christ, so too God's people are to be in this world: as a sign of their Creator, Reconciler and Redeemer; a people who hear and obey God's gracious commands.

Conclusion

Since Kant, modern Christian thought has often given itself over to moral reasoning which has been divorced from classical theology. The solitary, sovereign individual simply asks whether her reason for action can become a universal law, and if so it is permissible, if not she should refrain. Applying this procedure methodically, the entire societal structures have been changed, which Kant mistakenly thought would usher in a new world of peace and prosperity. The moral space within which this Kantian demi-god moves is his or her autonomous will. It is her will which imposes order on the world, her reasoning which gives the logical laws that govern Kantian rationalism. God may exist, but God doesn't matter much for ethical reasoning. Jesus is not normative for a Kantian.

Karl Barth burst onto the theological scene in the early twentieth century and challenged this Kantian basis for Christian social ethics. While his older professors were busy propitiating the Gospel in the face of mechanistic and brutal regimes of terror, Barth discovered that theology is not a private matter, but is itself an ethic. Divorced from its theological framework, moral reasoning based on Jesus is confined to a tiny corner in the moral space of the Kantian individual. Jesus is not Lord in such circumstances, nor is he normative.

Barth's discovery of classical christological doctrines allowed him to talk about Christian moral reasoning within a Chalcedonian christology. On this basis his theology helped Christians to see that asking who Jesus is entails knowing who they are. Once Christians know they are Christians – that is, people who have begun to live in the grace and love of God's kingdom – then they can figure how to act. Thus Barth discovered a christologically centred account of every person's telos in Christ. The good life cannot be lived apart from Jesus.

Footnotes

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References

1 Thus modern ethics requires some idea of right thinking, that is, it requires an orthodoxy which it presupposes but cannot name. Since it is unable to name this orthodoxy, it therefore cannot be accountable for its dogmatic status.

2 Kant claimed that ‘the concept of a supernatural intervention into our moral though deficient faculty . . . is a transcendent concept, merely an idea of whose reality no experience can assure us’. Kant, Immanuel, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, tr. Wood, Allen and Di Giovanni, George (New York: CUP, 1998), p. 183Google Scholar.

3 Kant, Immanuel, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, tr. Gregor, Mary J. (New York: CUP, 1998), p. 15Google Scholar. Also: ‘Act that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle in a giving of universal law.’ Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Practical Reason, tr. Gregor, Mary J. (New York: CUP, 1997), p. 28Google Scholar. Kant formulated the principle another way as well: ‘So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.’ See Kant, Groundwork, p. 38.

4 See Kant, Groundwork, pp. 15–16: ‘I do not, therefore, need any penetrating acuteness to see what I have to do in order that my volition be morally good. Inexperienced in the course of the world, incapable of being prepared for whatever might come to pass in it, I ask myself only: can you will that your maxim become a universal law?’

5 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, p. 30.

6 Wars were fought over political territory and modern state-making but were also partly grounded in Catholic–Protestant conflicts carried over from the early Reformation. On this see Cavanaugh, William, ‘“A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House”: The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State’, Modern Theology 11/4 (1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Cavanaugh, William, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (New York: OUP, 2009), pp. 123–230CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Kant wrote his On Perpetual Peace to argue that nations could better maintain a world free from war by using his ethics. Kant, Immanuel, ‘Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’, in Political Writings, ed. Reiss, Hans (New York: CUP, 1991), pp. 93–130Google Scholar.

7 Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 85Google Scholar.

8 This notion of original war differs from Christian accounts of original sin in that it makes violence natural rather than sinful. See Manent, Pierre, An Intellectual History of Liberalism (Princeton: PUP, 1994), p. 24Google Scholar. For the quote see Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), p. 100Google Scholar.

9 MacIntyre, Alasdair, A Short History of Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1966), p. 198CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Murdoch, Iris, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 1970), p. 80Google Scholar.

11 Barth, Karl, The Theology of Schleiermacher, tr. Bromiley, Geoffrey (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1982), pp. 263–4Google Scholar.

12 Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/2, p. 795.

13 Ibid., p. 787.

14 Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 28.

15 Barth, Karl, Ethics, tr. Bromiley, Geoffrey (New York: Seabury Press, 1981), p. 176Google Scholar.

16 Murdoch, Sovereignty of Good, p. 80.

17 Barth, CD IV/1, p. 99.

18 Barth, CD IV/1, p. 53.

19 Barth, CD II/1, p. 447.

20 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1.3.5.

21 See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1.44.1. Deus est ipsum esse per se subsistens. . . . Relinquitur ergo quod omnia alia a Deo non sint suum esse, sed participant esse.

22 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 2-2.104.3. Aquinas did not write any longer treatise or section in his great work, Summa Theologiae, on friendship. Yet references abound throughout the Summa to friendship.

23 See McCabe, Herbert, God Matters (New York: Continuum, 2005), p. 228Google Scholar.

24 McCormack, Bruce, Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology (New York: OUP, 1995), p. 367Google Scholar.

25 See ibid., pp. 327–28, 360–67. See also Hauerwas, Stanley, With the Grain of the Universe (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2001), pp. 159–61Google Scholar.

26 Barth, Karl, The Göttingen Dogmatics, tr. Bromiley, Geoffrey, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991), p. 157Google Scholar. See also Barth, CD I/2, pp. 163–5; III/2, p. 70; IV/1, pp. 49–50, 91. Leron Shults claims that the anhypostasis-enhypostasis theory inadequately expresses the relationship between Jesus Christ's divine and human natures. Shults argues that this theory did not originate with Leontius of Byzantium, as Karl Barth and his followers claimed, or with any patristic theologian but is ‘an invention of Protestant Scholasticism’. See Shults, F. LeRon, ‘A Dubious Christological Formula: From Leontius of Byzantium to Karl Barth’, Theological Studies 57/3 (1999), p. 431CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Shults drew from Daley, Brian, ‘A Richer Union: Leontius of Byzantium and the Relationship of the Human and Divine in Christ’, Studia Patristica 24 (1993), pp. 239–65Google Scholar, which argued that Protestant theologian Freidrich Loofs misunderstood the prefix en in the term enhypostasia to mean ‘in’ but originally the en was juxtaposed with anhypostasia (non-hypostatic) so that the proper translation of enhypostasia would be ‘hypostatic’ or ‘having a concrete existence’. Uwe Lang and Matthias Gockel, however, have challenged this reading. Lang traces the teaching to John of Damascus (see John of Damascus, De fide orthodoxa 3.9). Matthias Gockel has shown that John of Damascus influenced a range of medieval theologians, particularly Thomas Aquinas, who cites John of Damascus and argues: Licet igitur humana natura sit individuum quoddam in genere substantiae, quia tamen non per se separatim existit, sed in quodam perfectiori, scilicet in persona Dei verbi, consequens est quod non habeat personalitatem propriam (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 3.2.2). John of Damascus and Aquinas inspired Protestant scholastics to take up the anhypostasis-enhypostasis teaching. Not only this, but Karl Barth himself cites not only Protestants concerning the enhypostasia, but also John of Damascus. See e.g. CD I/2, p. 163. Thus Shults’ argument is flawed.

27 Barth, CD I/2, p. 188.

28 Ibid., p. 149.

29 Ibid., pp. 185–202; IV/2, p. 90.

30 At the same time, however, Barth states that ‘In Jesus Christ it is not merely one man, but the humanum of all men, which is posited and exalted as such to unity with God.’ CD IV/2, p. 49.

31 Barth, CD IV/2, p. 74.

32 Ibid., p. 72.

33 Ibid., pp. 27–8.

34 This is Alasdair MacIntyre's wording. See MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd edn (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 53Google Scholar.

35 Ibid., p. 52.

36 Nigel Biggar has noted that there is ‘something basically eudaimonistic’ about Barth's ethics because we do not obey God's command out of deference to the arbitrary will of a pure power, but ‘out of regard for our own best good, which this gracious God alone truly understands’. See Biggar, Nigel, ‘Barth's Trinitarian Ethic’, in Webster, John (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth (New York: CUP, 2000), p. 215Google Scholar.

37 Barth, CD I/2, p. 793.

38 Barth, Ethics, p. 56.

39 Barth, CD IV/2, p. 222.

40 Murdoch, Sovereignty of Good, p. 80.

41 Barth, CD IV/2, p. 271.

42 Barth, CD II/2, p. 30.

43 Marquardt, Friedrich-Wilhelm, Theologie und Sozialismus: Das Beispiel Karl Barths (Munich: Kaiser, 1972), p. 267Google Scholar. All translations from Marquardt are my own: ‘Er steuert auf eine Erweiterung und Ergänzung der christologischen Anhypostasie (der Anhypostasie der menschlichen Natur Jesu Christi) durch eine anthropologische Enhypostasie zu: der Enhypostasie der humanitas, der kollektiven “Gattung Mensch” in der Person des fleischgewordenen Wortes.’

44 Ibid. ‘Barth hat aber über diese bloß ekklesiologisch gefaßte Kollektivität immer hinausgedrängt. Die Adam-Christus-Typologie in Röm 5 war für ihn von Anfang an Anlaß zu einer über die ekklesiologische Betrachtung hinausführenden gattungsgeschichtlichen Interpretation.’

45 Yoder, John Howard, ‘Why Ecclesiology is Social Ethics’, in Cartwright, Michael (ed.), The Royal Priesthood (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), p. 110Google Scholar. See also Yoder, ‘The Basis of Barth's Social Ethics’, in Karl Barth and the Problem of War and Other Essays (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2003), pp. 133–47, and Yoder, ‘Review of Karl Barth and Radical Politics’, Journal of Church and State 10 (1978), pp. 338–9. For a critical response to Yoder see Hunsinger's chapter ‘Karl Barth and the Politics of Sectarian Protestantism: A Dialogue with John Howard Yoder’, in Hunsinger, George, Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), pp. 114–28Google Scholar.

46 Yoder, ‘Why Ecclesiology is Social Ethics’, p. 110.

47 Ibid.

48 Ibid., p. 113.

49 Stanley Hauerwas has also written about the dangers of starting from such an abstract christology. See Hauerwas, Stanley, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), pp. 72–6Google Scholar.

50 Barth, CD IV/2, p. 59.

51 Ibid., p. 60.

52 Ibid.

53 Barth, CD IV/1, p. 295.

54 Barth, CD II/2, p. 178.

55 Barth, CD III/3, p. 267.

56 Barth, Ethics, pp. 472–3.

57 Yoder, ‘Why Ecclesiology is Social Ethics’, p. 123.

58 See Barth, Ethics, pp. 474–5.

59 Ibid., pp. 53–4.

60 Barth, CD IV/2, p. 565.

61 Gunton, Colin, ‘The Triune God and the Freedom of the Creature’, in Sykes, Stephen (ed.), Karl Barth: Centenary Essays (New York: CUP, 1989), p. 51Google Scholar; italics in the original.

62 Barth, CD II/2, p. 563

63 Ibid., p. 567.

64 Ibid., p. 576.