Karl Barth Society NEWSLETTER Number 42 SPRING 2011
Barth Society met in Atlanta, Georgia at the AAR October 29-30, 2010 and again in Atlanta at the SBL November 19-20, 2010
Our meeting in Atlanta in conjunction with the American Academy of Religion featured a Friday afternoon session from 4:00 P.M. to 6:30 P.M. and a Saturday morning session from 9:00 A.M. to 1 1 :30 A.M. The presenters for the Friday afternoon session were Amy Marga, Luther Theological Seminary, whose lecture was entitled: “Barth and Catholicism in the 1920s: How the Encounter Drove Him More Deeply into Reformation Theology^’’ and Arne Rasmusson, Umea University, Sweden, whose lecture was entitled: “Were Barth’s Politics in the 1930s Really Reactionary? Historians in Dispute’’. George Hunsinger, Princeton Theological Seminary, presided. The Saturday morning session, which for the first time was cosponsored with the Thomas F. Torrance Theological Fellowship, featured a Panel Discussion of George Hunsinger’ s book. The Eucharist and Ecumenism: Let us Keep the Feast (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). The panelists were: William G. Rusch, Former Director of the NCCC Commission on Faith and Order; Susan K. Wood, Marquette University; and Donald Dayton of Azusa Pacific University. George Hunsinger. Princeton Theological Seminary responded. Paul D. Molnar, St. John’s University, New York presided. Discussion followed.
Our meeting in Atlanta in conjunction with the Society of Biblical Literature featured a Friday afternoon session from 4:00 P.M. to 6:30 P.M. and a Saturday morning session from 9:00 A.M. to 11:30 A.M. The presenters for the Friday afternoon session were Wesley Hill, Durham University whose lecture was entitled: “Israel as the Church or Israel as Israel? Romans 9:1-5 in the Romerbrief and Church Dogmatics H/2” and D. Stephen Long, Marquette University whose lecture was entitled: “Barth and von Balthasar: Re-framing the Discussion”. George Hunsinger, Princeton Theological Seminary, presided. The Saturday morning session featured a Panel Discussion of George Hunsinger’s book. The Eucharist and Ecumenism: Let us Keep the Feast (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). The panelists were: Martha Moore-Keish, Columbia Theological
Seminary; Gerald Bray. Beeson Divinity School; and Susan Eastman, Duke University. George Hunsinger. Princeton Seminary responded. Paul D. Molnar, St. John’s University, New York presided.
The Sixth Annual Barth Conference will be held at Princeton Theological Seminary
June 19-21, 2011 This Conference is entitled:
“Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: An Unofficial Protestant-Catholic Dialogue”
This conference is cosponsored by The Center for Barth Studies at Princeton Theological Seminary
and The Karl Barth Society of North America.
For full Details and Resistration, the Conference website is: http ://www. ptsem . edu/barthconference Facebook Page: http://www.facebook.com/barthconference Email: barth.conference@ptsem.edu
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What follows are some summaries and some brief recaps of the lectures from both meetings in Atlanta.
“Barth and Catholicism in the 1920s: How the Encounter Drove Him More Deeply Into Reformation Theology"
Amy Marga
Luther Seminary, Saint Paul, Minnesota
Marga’ s lecture began by noting the unique relationship of Barth to Catholicism in the 1920s. Barth saw Roman Catholicism as trying to maintain God’s objectivity in opposition to psychologism. When, however, he wrote about the analogia entis in CD I/l relations between Barth and Roman Catholicism cooled. There was a perceptible shift in Barth’s attitude towards Roman Catholicism with Erich Przywara’s critique of dialectical theology in “God in us or above us?” Stimmen der Zeit, in 1923. Barth studied Thomas with Erik Petersen in 1923/24 and offered criticism of Thomas Aquinas. In 1927/28 Barth investigated Vatican 1 theology in the Munster Dogmatic cycle.
This interaction ted Barth to clarify Reformation con- cepts. Pryzwara saw Barth keeping God out of relation with the world; Barth thus focused on God’s self- revelation as the center of the Catholic critique of his view. Przywara’s visit to Barth’s Seminar in MUnster in 1929 led Barth to think that he was offering a rather optimistic view of creation and thus missing a key theological reality, namely, that our lived experience includes our rebellion against God. The Yes and No of God the reconciler was important to Barth and needed to be taken account of. Thus, Barth insisted that we needed to know God the Reconciler before we know God the Creator. Barth sought to retrieve a Reformation understanding of grace as actively working upon the human mind. There could be no potentia obedientialis for grace fi"om Barth’s perspective; nor could one argue that grace completes and perfects nature without opening the door to some sort of Pelagian set of views. Two lectures gave expression to Barth’s thinking during this time: Fate and Idea in Theology and The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life.
Marga then went on to discuss how for Barth there could be transformation of creaturely veils as we become participants in God’s self-revelation — God actively works on us to understand him precisely by overcoming our opposition to him. Barth deepened the uses of Luther’s theologia crucis and clarified the concept of the simul iustus et peccator offering a forensic view of justification by faith by maintaining the idea that we are all saint and all sinner all the time and that there could be no soteriological gradualism.
“Were Barth’s Politics in the 1930s Really Reactionary? Historians in Dispute”
Arne Rasmussen
Umea University, Sweden
Rasmusson began by noting that the above mentioned title was not the one he originally had in mind. His suggestion was: “Karl Barth’s theology as a site for historiographical conflict”. But he noted that George Hunsinger was not entirety satisfied with that because he didn’t think it was a catchy title. Though he did not disagree, Rasmusson noted the difference between European (specifically German) and American publishing houses indicating that German publishers do not try to sell books by using “catchy titles, attractive covers, readability, or cheap prices” because “Academics should be free from the influence of the market”; hence they sell to government funded libraries and to professors. Because libraries and professors in Sweden cannot afford these German books, their scholarship is largely oriented toward Anglo-Saxon work.
Rasmusson thinks it is important to keep the 1920s and 1930s together when speaking about Barth as a reactionary. In his book with its catchy title. The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York: Knopf, 2007), the American intellectual Mark Lilia gave a prominent place to Barth claiming that reacting against situations generally does not give rise to new ways of thinking about human problems. Barth’s Romans and Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption, however, were two works that did “set the Western argument over religion and politics in an entirely new direction”. Lilia recounts how Western thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes attempted to free the political world from God’s authority and the threat of religious passion by naturalizing religion and thus advancing the idea of “The great separation”. Lilia thinks German Protestant liberalism became a “third way” between traditional political theology and this kind of radical separation by offering a political theology “derived from human experience alone” that could become a basis “for a ‘new theological-political entente’”. This approach failed because it could neither create deep conviction nor explain why people still should call themselves Christian, given the fact that the modem world itself was already the “realization of Christianity”. The first World War effectively ended this theological-political type of project.
It is here that Barth and Rosenzweig make their appearance by shaping what Lilia calls an “antimodem and anti-humanistic rhetoric”. In his estimation Barth
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did this by basing his views on “an eschatological and radically transcendent conception of God” present in his Romans commentary that advanced a view of God that offered no rational basis for humans who had to decide for or against a completely incomprehensible God. Barth’s thinking thus left us with an anti-political picture of Christian action in which all politics is judged and relativized at the same time. Lilia claims that Barthian theology dominated German Protestant theology until 1933. Within Barth’s apocalyptic vision “the liberal distinction between freedom and tyranny became muddled”. In 1933 such discourse could be used both to support Nazism as well as to resist it. In Lilia’s reading, Rosenzweig’s Jewish eschatology led to Ernst Bloch’s “revolutionary and gnostic Marxism, while Barth resisted the Nazi government”. He thinks Barth never outgrew the eschatological form of his theology so that even the Barmen declaration could be seen as a “partisan political document that is in conflict with the anti-political view of the Romans Commentary”. All of this contributed to the end of liberalism.
Rasmusson notes that this kind of analysis is not new; in 1934 Reinhold Niebuhr attacked “Barthianism” in a very similar manner suggesting that Barth’s followers opened the door to the revival of creation orders, natural law, state absolutism and complacency to social justice.
Has something not gone wrong in this narrative? Barthianism leading to a revival of creation orders! Could Hirsch be seen as a Barthian? This, Rasmusson says, would be the ultimate insult. Hirsch was anti- Barthian already in the 1920s and Barth was just as critical of Hirsch, his colleague in Gottingen. Interestingly, it was Gogarten not Barth who was more important to the arguments advanced by Lilia and Niebuhr. There were key differences between Gogarten and Barth already from the 1920s. That would explain why they both saw the revolution in 1933 so differently.
In Rasmusson’s estimation, by trying to place Barth’s thinking into the stream of religion and politics in the Western world, Lilia distorted and missed the main thrust of Barth’s theology by offering his own argument “about the dangers of the inevitable religious passions”. Reading Lilia, Rasmusson says, makes one almost long for some good old fashioned German scholarship. The only problem is that such German scholarship ends up with similar conclusions to Lilia. Was Lilia right, even though he got most of the details about Barth’s thinking wrong?
For liberal Protestantism to experience a revival after the war and after Barth’s suggestions that liberalism and conservatism shared the same basis in the neo- Protestantism of the era of Hamack and Troeltsch and was represented by people like Schleiermacher and Richard Rothe, the history of the theology of the early
twentieth century would have to be re-written so as to be liberated from the “Confessing Church”. This re-writing was undertaken by the “Munich school” focusing on the now retired theologian Trutz Rendtorff and his successor Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, the late Falk Wagner, Klaus Tanner, and many others.
The story told by these scholars is similar to the story offered by Lilia only with details that are better in- formed. Rasmusson presents a detailed summary of how these scholars reached the conclusion that “In its critique of the Enlightenment, in the way it required a new start, and in its understanding of the authority of revelation, dialectical theology had, in fact, much in common with the German Christians”. Both National Socialism and the Confessing Church offered “absolute confessions that excluded Christian pluralism”. Rendtorff was not exclusively negative in his assessment and argued that the Confessing Church actually did create space for open dissent even though it did not offer direct political resistance. More sympathetic interpreters of Barth notice that Barth shifted to a more direct political theology sometime after 1935. Rasmusson notes that writing history is difficult because it deals with peoples’ interests and identities; debates about the origins of the United States are just as difficult because writing such history relates to the debate about what America is and should be. In a similar way the debate about the nature and role of the church during the Weimar republic and the Third Reich has a great deal to do with how one understands the role of the church and theology today both within and outside of Germany. One’s understanding of history affects one’s view of current realities. Indeed “current political and theological conceptions influence how history is written”. Rasmusson does not exempt his own discussion from this influence.
Rasmusson of course is not advocating the idea that writing history is arbitrary. He is simply indicating that historical facts can be interpreted in a number of different ways depending upon one’s interpretative focus. Hence he notes that a common rhetorical move is to claim earlier writers or one’s current opponents “are ideologically or theologically motivated” so that it can be claimed that the Munich school for instance, had turned away from a moralistic toward a historicist theology that is put into a wider non-theological historical and theoretical context. This was in fact how Rendtorff and Graf argued.
According to Rasmusson, Barth’s relationship to socialism was a contested issue for a long time. After 1989 the discussion focused on his relationship to liberal democracy. In his 1928/29 ethics lectures Barth dealt extensively with social and political issues and his tone was different from the Romans commentaries; he defended something like a modem liberal or social democratic constitutional state. In his sharp disagreement
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with Hirsch and Gogarten, Barth stressed that the concept of humanity was more basic than that of people or nation; in 1925 Barth even argued that “one should make the issues of volkisch, nationalism, anti-Semitism, and militarism into confessional issues”. Barth’s famous statement that he only wanted to pursue theology “as if nothing had happened” in 1933 was seen as his defense of an apolitical theology. But Rasmusson notes that this should not be taken to imply theological isolation or inactivity; rather it is an indication of Barth’s view of exactly how the church “should ideologically starve the state”. Barth was merely arguing that political life should consist in a “prudent reckoning with reality” and not a withdrawal from involvement. Barth does not want the elimination of politics but rather to show what makes it possible. Barth’s language of starving the state, Rasmusson notes, certainly was seen as highly subversive by the totalitarian Nazi state when they sought to remove him from his professorship in Bonn.
Seen in context, one must recall that many in 1933 saw this as a great turning point in history through which God was actually speaking to his people. In this context Barth was insisting that the church should ignore claims of a new beginning and a revelation of God and proceed “as if nothing had happened”. After the war, Barth wrote that if his summons had been followed by Christians then “they would have built up against National Socialism a political factor of the first order”. Hirsch took this statement by Barth to mean that his theology was apolitical, truly reactionary, unscientific, anti- Enlightenment, ahistorical, narrowly churchly and auth- oritarian. This is the reading of Rendtorff and Graf as well. They think Barth was advancing a view that isolated theology from what God is actually doing and from the concrete lives of human beings — God was speaking to them through “what is happening”. Yet it is exactly this view that Barth was attacking in that text, says Rasmusson, because Barth was insisting that there is no other revelation beside Jesus Christ as witnessed in Scripture. At a time when many thought the church needed to be reformed in light of the historical change that had taken place in 1933, Barth maintains that nothing has happened that should lead to these suggested changes in church structures, theology and confessions. Church reform should be determined from the Word of God and not by and from political changes. Barth says “no” both to the German Christians and by implication to National Socialism because these are impossible to reconcile with Christian faith. One must resist assimi- lation to state life but also to the accommodating changes suggested by the moderates. Barth was not arguing for passivity but for the fact that the church should actively gather together anew to the Word and by means of the Word. That was Barth’s true realism.
The same can be said of the Barmen declaration which Rasmusson notes even Lilia describes as a “deeply
political document”. Point by point it attacks the Nazi order. But it does not directly mention the Nazi policies against the Jews. Could this be a consequence of “doing theology as if nothing had happened?” In a famous lecture given December 5 1938, just after Kristallnacht, Barth argued for political resistance against the Nazi state since it was not a legitimate state. Because of its faithfulness to Jesus Christ, the Church must resist Nazism, Barth argued, because Nazism has combined a political experiment with a salvation doctrine. Indeed Christians must pray for the overthrow of this state.
Rasmusson thinks there is more continuity between the Barth of 1925, 1928, 1933 and 1938 than most others have granted. While one can discuss how to resist the National Socialist State, Barth believed it imperative to do so because of its totalitarian claims, its salvation doctrine and its anti-Semite policy. Barth was self- critical and did think he should have been more outspoken in the 1920s and in and after 1933. Nonetheless, in 1933 Barth did not appreciate what would happen, although in contrast to most others, he had a dark view of the future. When theologians today reflect on the relative lack of decisive resistance from the churches and theologians against the Nazi regime in 1933, they generally take for granted “a post- 1945 perspective”, with all that that implies. Barth’s theological legitimation of politics then is implicitly seen as directed to active resisters of the Nazis as if in 1933 and 1934 there was a strong ecclesial and political movement defending such active resistance.
Yet, Barth was not primarily directing himself to the few critics of the Nazi state. Rather he was opposing the great majority who defended die Wende using arguments similar to those used before by the religious socialists. One leading liberal critic, Martin Rade “took for granted the description of the Jews as a ‘problem’ that had to be dealt with in some way”. And Rasmusson noted that in his own country, Sweden, “race biology was at the time scientifically and politically supported by the whole political elite from conservatives to liberals and social democrats as well as by leaders of the Church of Sweden”. Barth wrote: “If the German Evangelical Church excludes Jewish-Christians, or treats them as of a lower grade, she ceases to be a Christian Church” {Theological Existence Today, 52). But he did not call on the church to offer direct political resistance on this point in 1933/34. The reason he did not make the “Jewish question” central was, according to Rasmusson, because he thought this issue was part of the wider issue concerning the independence of the church and theology. He refused to accept that any reality could have divine justification independent of the Word of God. Protest must oppose the fact that beside Scripture as the unique source of revelation the German Christians could also affirm a second source of revelation, namely, the German nation, its history and the contemporary political
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situation and thus betray themselves by believing in “another God”. This certainly did not diminish the importance of the “Jewish question”. In fact Barth’s direct opposition to the Aryan paragraph as state law in 1933 by way of commentary on the Bethel Confession was quite rare. That of course raises the question about why he did not follow that up in the Barmen confession.
Rasmusson concludes that Lilia, Rendtorff and Graf tended to claim that it was an historical accident that opposition to the Nazis came not from the liberals but from people like Barth. Martin Rade was a long time liberal critic of the Nazis even though he argued for a more accommodating attitude toward the Nazi state than did Barth. In a 1933 article Rade expressed the idea that it was meaningless to resist the New Beginning and instead called for participating in “the new building of the nation”. And since it was a revolution, violence and terror could be seen as legitimate. Indeed, even though he had been critical of anti-Semitism, he did not think one should resist the new laws against Jews. He accepted separate laws for the Jews as late as 1935, even though he personally supported Jews in different ways and helped them to flee Germany. Barth was openly critical of the lack of resistance offered in Die Christliche Welt and asked Rade why. Rade responded that “the journal was no church political body” and it’s “time for resistance had not yet come”. Graf thought Rade’s position was understandable in historical context.
After tracing the contrasting views of Rendtorff and Graf in relation to Barth showing how in each instance their understanding of the historical context shaped their views especially as this related to the thinking of Troeltsch, Rasmusson concludes that liberal Protestantism was indeed more national than it was churchly. In other words its church critique was largely a function of its nationalistic character. It saw the idea of the nation as the embodiment of the principle of freedom “and thus the unification of Germany as the realization of the Protestant Reformation”. Hirsch considered his theology to be in continuity with Hamack and Troeltsch. While their political judgments were different, Hirsch developed his view of the problems and suggested solutions in the manner of Troeltsch. He saw the revolution of 1933 as a continuation of the Enlighten- ment and his own theology as a “new constructive synthesis between Christianity and modernity”. Both Hirsch and Lilia saw Hobbes as the one who marked out the beginning of a new scientific understanding of politics. Rasmusson observes that Barth could respond to Lilia by noting that it would be odd to describe the great separation as a peace project, given that it inaugurated the bloodiest period in European history that culminated in the two World Wars.
Rasmusson was not without his own questions for Barth. First, Barth seemed to restrict his view of theology too
much to the sermon. The problem for Barth and Bonhoeffer was that “the church they presupposed in their respective theologies did not really exist”. The issue was not just bad theology. It concerned the fact that people had identified the reality of the church with the created order as in natural theology and claimed to see God in the historical process, thus making the church a function of the wider political order. To some extent then Barth defended an order of Christendom, a state church and thus the centrality of the sermon. Rasmusson sees Barth’s understanding of the state, treating it as part of the doctrine of reconciliation, as leading him into positions that seem “quite dogmatic, arbitrary, and undiscussable”. He believes Barth’s view of Christen- dom stands in tension with other parts of his ecclesiology and his theology in general. Rasmusson thinks that Barth’s emphasis on the kingdom and its identity with Jesus Christ as portrayed in the Barmen declaration implies that we should have a “post-Christendom theology and ecclesiology”. And he claims that is in fact the direction that Barth took after the war. This could lead to a better view of the church’s life in the world, he thinks. Rasmusson concludes that there are in fact more resources in Barth’s theology than in Grafs theology to deal with present challenges created by immigration and the new multi-cultural society that has developed in Europe because he thinks what is needed is not just the tolerance and good manners advocated by the liberals, but genuine hospitality. This is more difficult he claims within Grafs more individualistic and anti-dogmatic view of Christianity.
At the Saturday morning session George Hunsinger
offered some opening remarks about the purpose and scope of his book. The Eucharist and Ecumenism. This was followed by three responses along with a response to the presenters from George Hunsinger and an open question and answer session. What follows is a brief summary of some of the material offered at the session.
“Comments on The Eucharist and Ecumenisim"
William G. Rusch
Rusch began with two general comments on the book. First, in an era when ecumenism seems to be on the wane, it is good to see that a major work such as The Eucharist and Ecumenism is receiving wide attention in the academy as can be seen in the fact that Pro Ecclesia published a symposium on the book in vol. 9, no. 13, 2010 (247-84). This led Rusch to hope that churches which today seem more concerned with their own survival might once again see the importance of ecumenism and engage in discussing the important topics presented in this book not only at the academic level but at the popular level as well.
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Second, Rusch noted that one of the key purposes of the book was to present a carefully reasoned and tightly knit text that would offer a specific proposal for ecumenical advance among Reformed, Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholics and Lutherans with respect to the Eucharist without compromising Reformed essentials. The aim is for greater consensus on such matters as real presence, Eucharistic sacrifice, and Eucharistic ministry. Rusch noted that the ambitious nature of this undertaking could be seen by consulting the various summaries of Reformed-Roman Catholic dialogue in Walter Kasper’s important volume. Harvesting the Fruits: Aspects of Christian Faith in Ecumenical Dialogue (New York and London: Continuum, 2009).
As a Lutheran, Rusch offered two immediate obser- vations. First, although he was sympathetic to the suggestion and intention since it could foster closer Lutheran and Reformed consensus about the Lord’s Supper, it is difficult and perhaps impossible for someone outside the Reformed tradition to judge the feasibility of such a thesis for Reformed Christians. As examples of this difficulty, Rusch noted that the Reformed Church in America, and the United Church of Christ live in a relationship that includes Eucharistic sharing as approved in a document entitled A Formula of Agreement. In that formula it is noted that “while neither Lutheran nor Reformed profess to explain how Christ is present and received in the Supper, both churches affirm that Christ himself is the host at his table . . . and that Christ himself is fully present and received”. In another passage, the report of the European Lutheran-Reformed dialogue, the Leuenberg Agreement, is cited to indicate that the churches agree 1) Christ imparts himself in his body and blood in the Supper, 2) this cannot be separated from the act of eating and drinking, 3) in the supper the risen Christ imparts himself in body and blood and 4) with bread and wine, the risen Lord in the celebration of the Supper is present in their midst. Still, it is acknow- ledged that it has not been possible to reconcile the confessional formulations from the 16* century with a common language that could do justice to all the original insights, convictions and concerns of that time.
Rusch then went on to note that The Eucharist and Ecumenism recognizes the importance of the Lutheran- Reformed agreement, but grants that consensus is limited and that there are unresolved issues important to other ecumenical partners which center around the mode of bodily presence. Rusch thinks that The Eucharist and Ecumenism implies that its proposal would broaden the churches that could join it while reassuring those churches already committed to the agreement.
Rusch ’s second observation simply was that to address the serious and profound invitation offered in the book in fifteen to twenty minutes would be foolhardy. Thus he focused on Eucharistic ministry.
After noting his reasons for making this choice, among which, was his belief that church unity would not become a reality without much greater consensus on ministry, Rusch proceeded to note that the book recognized the critical nature of this issue by taking up the problem of defectus. This problem is treated in relation to five questions that have been answered differently by Reformed and Roman Catholic traditions. The book suggests that underlying Reformational and Roman Catholic disagreements are different theological imaginations which could enrich the other and offers a series of ecumenical admonitions to the high sacramental churches from a Reformed perspective.
The book carefully offers two ways forward regarding Eucharistic ministry: 1) that the Reformed accept the proposal of Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry that calls for the adoption of the threefold ministry of bishop, presbyter, and deacon, or proceed as the Anglicans and Lutherans have in the Provo agreement. Rusch thinks that such a suggestion for the Reformed is not un- realistic.
One reason for lack of church union has been the inability on the part of the Reformed to adopt this threefold pattern of ministry. This is acknowledged in the book. According to Rusch, this makes the section on ministry in the book one of the most “unpromising”. As a way to resolve this issue, Rusch turns to a “resource and methodology” not mentioned in the book in order to enhance “what is already its significant contributions”.
The resource is the fourteen volume published results of the Catholic-Lutheran dialogue in Germany which began unofficially in 1945 and still continues today; the last three of which are important here. These last volumes, Rusch noted, offer a very rich source of material not only for ongoing Lutheran and Catholic dialogue, but also for dialogue with the Reformed tradition. Rusch noted that there was no way he could summarize this work of more than 1 ,200 pages but that he would simply mention one final report related to ministry. The Der Abschliessender Bericht notes several key ideas that Rusch thinks could be helpful: 1) the biblical witness offers a multiplicity of forms regarding apostolicity and office that could encourage ecumenical dialogue; 2) historical studies demonstrate the complexity of the relationship between Presbyterial and Episcopal succession in the earliest church; 3) in understanding office, the practice of the office is as legitimate as the question of historical forms; 4) apologetic intentions influence how apostolic succession is understood. A new “repentant” definition of this concept in the life of the Church determined by the preaching of the gospel could be promoted; 5) pneumatology and justification should be seen as fundamental in determining the criteria to measure the apostolicity of a succession of office. These perspectives
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could perhaps lead beyond, without surrendering, the proposal of Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (1982).
Rusch concluded his comments with a brief discussion of how methodology could assist toward greater consensus on ministry. First, while differentiated theological consensus is important, it cannot eliminate the remaining barriers. It is here, Rusch argues, that the concept of differentiated participation can provide a way forward as he has presented this in his book. Ecumenical Reception: Its Challenge and Opportunity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007). Clearly, such a view must be based on differentiated consensus. But differentiated participation could lead divided churches to participate in a structure or office of the Church, e.g., the historic office of bishop or presbyter with “diverse interpretation, accentuation, and assessments of this office”. While there would be some agreement, there would remain levels of difference which would not call into question the level of agreement. Churches could take part in or adopt a polity without total consensus on the meaning of that structural model and that could increase the comfort level toward unity. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Episcopal Church already have agreed to participate in the historic office of bishop with such a differentiated consensus about the office. The proposal of The Eucharist and Ecumenism regarding Eucharistic ministry could possibly be strengthened by the use of the term and the concept of “differentiated participation” even though this is already hinted at in the text.
These suggestions are auxiliary to the major contributions of this work “whose author is owed a profound word of thanks by all those committed to the visible unity of Christ’s Church”.
After Susan Wood offered comments on The Eucharist and Ecumenism from a Roman Catholic perspective noting where there are some basic agreements as well as disagreements, Donald Dayton presented his response.
“A Response to George Hunsinger, The Eucharist and Ecumenism"
Donald W. Dayton
Dayton began by noting that he was honored when he was invited to respond to George Hunsinger’ s work but that after he read the book he wondered whether or not he should accept. He said he decided not to engage the book on its own terms but to offer an alternative perspective in a vigorous and provocative way.
After praising Hunsinger for his earlier works and for his theological sophistication and erudition and noting that his book on the Eucharist deserves the enthusiastic reviews it has gotten, Dayton noted that what first struck
him in the book was that the relevance of Barth for his work was largely dismissed. Hunsinger wanted to move beyond Barth and even against him on this topic preferring to correct Barth with the thinking of T. F. Torrance. Dayton observed that we are apparently discussing this book not because of the direct relevance of Barth but because the book was written by the President of the Barth Society. Next, Dayton said that he twice saw a comment in the book to the effect that “what to do about those churches rooted in the anabaptist traditions, including charismatics and Pentecostals, is beyond me” (111, 314). Dayton maintained that he had become increasingly convinced that these two comments are related because if we were to follow Barth we would find ourselves in the neighborhood of these neglected traditions. To make his case, Dayton said, we need to reinterpret both “ecumenism” and Barth. In order to accomplish this, Dayton said, he had to move outside the parameters of the book to respond to it properly.
After presenting his own massive involvement in the ecumenical movement over the last twenty five years, Dayton noted that he had become disenchanted with “ecumenism” as generally understood. This disen- chantment is due, Dayton said, to “an incorrigible ‘Eurocentrism’” of the ecumenical movement. In spite of European claims of concern for the third world and for those on the “margins” it remains the case, Dayton believes, that theologically and ecclesiologically it is “Eurocentric” and needs to embrace a more global perspective.
Dayton mentioned that when lecturing in Asia (Korea, Japan, China and Thailand) he frequently notes that embracing Christianity does not mean embracing “westernization, modernization, or the adoption of European culture”. In fact he said that for the first millennium of Christianity a majority of its adherents lived outside of Europe. One of the results of “Eurocentrism”, Dayton maintained, was that Christian (European and Western?) culture is pitted against Arabic Islam, and that obscures the extent to which Palestinians are often Christian and Iraq has had significant Christian communities largely driven underground or out of Iraq by the recent invasions. Eurocentrism also distorts the kinds of questions that are addressed as well. For instance in preparing to give a keynote address at Oberlin in 1957 celebrating 50 years of the Faith and Order movement in North America, he quickly concluded that the purpose of Oberlin was not to understand the Faith and Order movement theologically with a view toward global ecumenism; rather it was to transplant that movement to America as it was conceived in Europe. Oberlin was clearly Eurocentric since there was no theological analysis of the American context and the distinctive ecclesiologies to be found there. In Dayton’s estimation the complexity and depth of the differences evident in America were basically ignored or distorted.
With great detail Dayton presented the many different churches from various traditions that specifically developed with American roots; the Disciples of Christ, the Adventists, the holiness movement, the Salvation Army, the Church of the Nazarene and the Church of God, to name a few. And that does not include the more divergent Christian traditions such as the Mormon Church and the Jehovah Witnesses that have become global churches with American roots. Dayton noted that the four most rapidly growing traditions in Latin America are Pentecostalism, the Seventh Day
Adventists, the Mormons and the Jehovah Witnesses — all American bom churches.
This diversity Dayton argued cannot be handled within the classical categories of European ecumenism. Any approach to ecumenism that simply assumes the main partners are Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant simply misses the diversity of the American bora churches and then fails to address the situation realistically. As an example of the difficulty, Dayton noted that the joint declaration on Justification was irrelevant to the Latin American situation where the central discussion is between Catholics and Pentecostals whose soteriology is closer to the Council of Trent than to Luther.
Dayton noted that he once proposed to the Board of the NAAE that they discuss the doctrine of a “Constantinian fall of the church” as “church-dividing”; his suggestion was met “with blank looks (by academics and professional ecumenists!) until finally Lutheran and Catholic representatives asked whatever that might be”. They were surprised to find out that the term was a “regular feature” of the dialogue at Christ Messiah College without being given any formal attention.
The Baptists are the dominant form of American Protestantism and, like Pentecostals and others they aim to be NT Christians who skip over church history for immediate biblical justification of doctrine and church polity. The second largest Protestant tradition is that of Methodism. While this has been interpreted within the classical tradition, there is a more radical motif in Wesleyan thought that is closer to the Anabaptist tradition. These issues relate to the status of the Nicene Creed. When Wesley put together his “Sunday Service” for American Methodists, he chose the Apostles’ Creed rather than the Nicene Creed, perhaps because of his ambivalence to the fourth century. Dayton notes that George Hunsinger makes the Nicene Creed central for the future of ecumenical dialogue as do many today. Yet, the use of the Creed is almost unheard of in the American bora churches which tend to be biblicist and non-creedal preferring the Apostles’ Creed when such is used. Dayton contends that if we take seriously the American perspective we need to discuss whether or not there are real theological issues at stake in this disuse of the Nicene Creed.
According to Dayton, the American churches he mentioned also have different views of “apostolicity” than do the Europeans; some even prefer the recovery of a pre-trinitarian reading of the NT emphasizing the monotheistic focus of the religion “of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob”. This suggests that there are important questions here that need to be discussed and it seems that some European ecumenists now understand this. Dayton stressed that his focus on the American experience will help in the next stage of ecumenism because it developed as a result of the missionary movements of the 19'*’ century and thus can help unlock the puzzles of global Christianity. “Eurocentrism” is not only inadequate but blocks that next step. Dayton believes that The Eucharist and Ecumenism is rooted in the old paradigm by attempting to reinterpret the Reformed tradition in order to move toward Catholicism especially in an effort to heal the divisions of the Reformation, even though on its own terms it makes a magnificent contribution toward that goal. Dayton concluded this part of his paper with two case studies in support his thesis. One concerned “Oneness Pentecostalism” which Dayton claimed raised questions to traditional trinitarian thought because they speak in trinitarian formulae while rejecting the formal doctrine. The second concerned the function and role of sacraments. The Salvation Army and the Holiness Quakers for instance reject sacramental practice on principle, the former because they think service to the poor trumps ritual practice as the defining element in Christianity and the latter reacts against “programmed” worship and thinks that since all life is sacramental, it should not be localized in certain liturgies. Other denominations offer different views. In sum, only two traditions affirm in theory the traditional two sacraments of classical Protestantism: the Wesleyan Methodists and Free Methodists. Dayton offered his case study then in order to indicate some of the theological reasons that lie behind a great diversity of sacramental traditions. One could argue this diversity is possible because these traditions do not believe that grace is mediated through the sacraments but through experience and other “means of grace”. But Dayton wants to say that there are real theological questions here that cannot be ignored. Many discussions today that seem to divide the church on conservative/liberal lines actually may be dividing the church along the lines of ecclesial experience and differing theologies. If this is the case, Dayton suggests that the groups that George Hunsinger finds “beyond him” need to be at the table to avoid a foreshortened ecumenism.
With this in mind Dayton turns to Karl Barth’s reading of the sacraments for assistance in advancing his thesis that Barth’s view of the sacraments actually “leads us directly into this world of a wider ecumenism”. Convinced that Barth’s radicalism is often understated by those who tend to assimilate his views into classical discussions, Dayton argues that often the context within
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which Barth is placed shapes how one understands his thinking.
Finding Troeltsch a useful starting point for interpreting Barth, Dayton noted that the historiographical issues between them get to the heart of many issues and clarify the tensions between Barth and Bultmann. After
describing Troeltsch’s personal struggle attempting to understand exactly how Christianity can be considered “absolute”, Dayton claimed that he has always under- stood Barth in part as a response to this crisis experienced by Troeltsch. Barth’s task was to extract Christianity fi'om Western culture and give it an independent starting point that was not dependent on philosophy or European culture. While this may seem to be an astounding claim, Dayton believes that Barth’s use of the inherited categories of European theology to undermine the dependence of Christianity upon them, helps us understand his opposition to natural theology and the idea of a “point of contact” as well as his concerns to free theology from philosophy in his debate with Brunner. All of these would import cultural assumptions that might limit reception of Christianity in other contexts.
Following a brief survey of just how Barth’s thinking can be helpful in circumstances where Christianity was not part of the culture (socialist and East German situations for instance), Dayton pressed his thesis that in volume IV of the CD, Barth was quite inclusive of many traditions, including Protestantism, Catholicism, Methodism, Pietism and Orthodoxy. But he noted that most did not notice that he also incorporated key themes of the left wing traditions along with Anabaptism. Dayton mentioned that John Howard Yoder claimed, in a paper given at the Barth Society meeting at Elmhurst College, that Barth was on a “free church trajectory” as indicated by his pacifist tendency, his rejection of infant baptism and others features of his ecclesiology. Dayton prefers to see these themes within a larger synthesis so that he could follow Barth by neither confusing the kingdom of God with the Christian community nor by neglecting the issues of pacifism and infant baptism. This “synthesis” can be seen, according to Dayton, in CD IV/2 where Reformation themes are “benf’ to produce something that looks suspiciously like an Anabaptist ethic.
Turning directly to Barth on the sacraments, Dayton drew the following conclusions. The most important shift in Barth’s theology is to be found precisely in his understanding of the sacraments as influenced by his son’s book on Baptism in 1951. In that work Markus claimed that the word sacrament only applied to Christ in the NT and there was no concept of “sacraments” as developed in the Christian tradition. This pushed Barth to a more radicalized Christological concentration so that he came to argue that there is only one real intersection of the divine and human and that took place in the
Incarnation. In CD IV, Barth would argue that the Incarnation is entirely without parallel and this, according to Dayton, would cast doubt on any “Christological” or “Chalcedonian” analogy attempting to maintain divine and human aspects in both Scriptural interpretation and in interpreting the sacraments. Ironically, Dayton claims, Barth’s view of the three forms of God’s Word, namely, the Word revealed (Christ), written (Scripture) and proclaimed “may not be representative of the ‘mature’ Barth (or at least the ‘late’ Barth!)”. In CD IV, Scripture becomes even more radically a human witness to Christ, and sacraments become human responses to the grace of God in the Incarnation. This led Barth to include his treatment of Baptism (with the Spirit and with water) in his ethical section of the CD rather than in his sections on ecclesiology. Barth even acknowledged that his treatment of Baptism was neo-Zwinglian and that follows fi'om his emphasis on baptism as a human action. Indeed, according to Dayton, the more one shifts the emphasis from the gratuity of grace symbolized in infant baptism to human action, the more important it becomes that this action be considered and based on catechetical preparation. Infant baptism arises within a Constantinian vision while adult baptism more naturally fits into a non- Constantinian practice. And the Lord’s Supper is no longer a “dispensing of grace” or “means of grace” but “a celebration of the grace received in Christ — or perhaps a proclamation of grace and its meaning”. Consequently, Dayton notes, Barth rejects almost the entire Christian tradition on these issues and takes a “restorationist” position claiming the church had begun to go astray by the end of the first century.
What then is the status of the Lord’s Supper in Barth’s thought? This is not so easy to discern, Dayton says, partly because Barth himself never authorized the publication of his unfinished notes for volume IV. Dayton calls attention to the fact that all references in the CD are to the Lord’s Supper and not to the Eucharist. This suggests, he says, that Barth did not move toward the rhetoric preferred by the ecumenical movement. Barth seemed to be moving away from Catholicism, with its emphasis on the Mass, as well as from magisterial Reformation theology which saw sacraments as means of grace, with his more functional concept of ministry. Dayton cites a section in CD IV/3 of over 70 pages (830- 901) where Barth writes about ministry and notes that only the last three paragraphs mention baptism and the Lord’s Supper. From this he theorizes that for Barth the mission of the church for others takes precedence over the celebration of the Lord’s Supper.
Dayton concludes that Barth was clearly moving in a different direction than the emerging consensus of the ecumenical movement. And it is clear, Dayton notes, that Barth’s thinking about the sacraments has been largely dismissed. Yet in interviews about his work on
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the baptism fragment Barth indicated that he thought it might receive respectful reviews and then be placed on a shelf only to be understood a century later when it could be received. Who knows whether or not Barth was right? Dayton concludes by saying that only time will tell, but that he thinks “the final word has not yet been spoken”. Indeed, his question to George Hunsinger is this: can he “trust Barth to help him understand those traditions that are now ‘beyond him’ — and thus help lead us into a wider and more inclusive ecumenism?” For his part Barth seemed to move more to the Pentecostals in his emphasis on baptism with the Spirit; more toward the Baptists with his Zwinglian view of the sacrament; and more to the “Restorationists” with his move back to the first century while rejecting the classical tradition regarding the sacraments. These movements seemed to resonate with Barth’s commitment to subordinating sacramental issues to the centrality of mission.
George Hunsinger’s Response
George Hunsinger responded to all three presentations noting that he wanted to develop a principled and pragmatic approach to the Eucharist. It is a visionary work that calls for the Reformed church to make differentiated decisions all along the line.
He said that Bill Rusch thinks his proposal about bishops is unrealistic. He noted, however, that Calvin had no problem with bishops and that the Reformed church in Hungary and Poland has bishops. Hence there is no reason why other Reformed churches might not follow suit. In the United States, he noted that the Moderator of the Presbytery could fill this role. In Switzerland there is agreement on this issue as well. In the course of his response, Hunsinger noted that he was nominated to be part of the Reformed — Roman Catholic international dialogue from 201 1-2017.
In response to Susan Wood, Hunsinger said that he agreed with her that fine tuning of his proposals was necessary. And while he agreed with her that it was helpful to understand Christ’s sacrifice in terms of the first creation and new creation and that the one sacrifice is received in different modes, Hunsinger forcefully argued that we need to see Jesus Christ as the sole saving agent and not the principal saving agent in the Eucharist. Failure to agree on this, Hunsinger said, could be seen as church-dividing. Hunsinger ended his response to Susan Wood by asking whether or not the Roman Catholic church can accept the fact that the defectus applies to it.
Finally, in response to Donald Dayton, Hunsinger insisted that he was not dismissive of other traditions and hoped that someone like Don Dayton could show us exactly how to attain visible unity with the Anabaptists and Restorationists. Instead, he claimed, all we received was a picture of extreme diversity suggesting that if you
would become like us, that is, in becoming more sectarian, then Protestantism will be fine.
Hunsinger rejected the category “Eurocentrism” as tendentious. He said we should speak of world Christianity even though it is small in number. Donald Dayton’s paper powerfully depicts a picture of confusion in this movement; this makes ecumenical dialogue impossible, according to Hunsinger. Hunsinger cannot see how this can happen without the church holding to the Nicene Creed and to the Eucharist in particular. He said the Reformed cannot ignore the Roman Catholic Church which is the largest and oldest church and that they must take this into account along with the Eastern Orthodox Church. Hunsinger noted that the Reformed tradition was made up of less than 1% of Christians while there were 750 Reformed churches. In other words, the Protestant church is fissiparous; that is why they need bishops. Without bishops, Hunsinger maintained, there is no visible unity.
With respect to Barth, Hunsinger began by asking: will the real Barth please stand up? With respect to the move toward Troeltsch, Hunsinger noted that even for Troeltsch, the Eucharist helps us maintain unity. Finally, Hunsinger’s response to Dayton’s analysis of Barth on the sacraments was simply that what Dayton thinks is one of the most important moves in Barth, he thinks is one of the most unfortunate. Hunsinger noted that he lines up with T. F. Torrance, Alasdair Heron and Helmut Gollwitzer against Barth on his later view of the sacrament. Still, Hunsinger did add that he follows Barth’s thought forms but not his view of the sacrament. On that subject he moves beyond him.
“Israel as the Church or Israel as Israel? Romans 9:1-5 in the Romer- brief and Church Dogmatics 11/2"
Wesley Hill
Durham University
The prefaces to Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans highlight Barth’s desire for his commentary to be judged as a genuine piece of biblical interpretation. Likewise, in the preface to the second volume of his Church Dogmatics, Barth suggests that the viability of his reworking of the Reformed doctrine of election stands or falls on its strength as a reading of Scripture. Recent interpreters of Barth (e.g., M. K. Cunningham, P. McGlasson, J. Webster, R. Burnett, A. Paddison) have rightly attempted to take seriously Barth’s desire to be assessed as a biblical interpreter, and have begun efforts to engage his theological exegesis accordingly. Building on some of this (largely methodological) work and pressing beyond it to look at a specific textual test case, this paper: 1 ) sketched Barth’s reading of Romans 9: 1-5
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in The Epistle to the Romans; 2) compared the reading there to the later treatment of the same text in the CD II/2; and 3) suggested a model for understanding Barth’s exegetical efforts that avoids both dismissing him as little more than an “eisegete” as well as unqualifiedly praising him as a biblical interpreter. The concept of the “double agency” of biblical text and theological interpreter was offered as a heuristic model for plotting Barth’s widely differing readings of Romans 9: 1-5 on a spectrum from more “literal” to more “typological” or “allegorical” realizations of the semantic potential of the biblical text. In the Romans commentary, the agency of the interpreter was shown as threatening to overwhelm that of the text (with “Israel”’ becoming a cipher for “religious humanity” in the abstract), while in the Church Dogmatics the agency of the biblical text was shown to have more influence as Barth attempts to wrestle seriously with Paul’s references to Israel in their historical particularity.
“Barth and von Balthasar: Re- framing the Discussion”
D. Stephen Long
Marquette University
Long began his presentation with a story about an empty bottle of “Duck Rabbit Beer” on his office desk. When he looked at the duck-rabbit logo from one angle he saw a duck while from another angle, he saw a rabbit. His point was that he kept the bottle on his desk as a reminder of his reading of Barth’s theology. The student who gave him the bottle studied at Princeton and was deeply influenced by Bruce McCormack. Long noted that when he had read McCormack’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology he was impressed by his periodization of Barth’s thought but could not quite understand his innovative view of Barth’s doctrine of God until this student explained to him McCormack’s reading of CD II/2. After that he could no longer read Barth the same way he had done before. Whereas before he had seen a “duck”, now all he could see was a “rabbit”, even when he wanted to see the duck. This presentation was Long’s attempt to regain the vision of the duck.
Long then developed his reading of Barth from the perspective of Hans Urs von Balthasar, whose views originally encouraged him to envision the “duck” version of Barth’s theology. In that version Barth overcame nominalism by absorbing the eternal decree into the eternal divine hypostases. By situating election within the eternal relations of the Trinity, Barth was able to overcome any idea that election was arbitrary. “Election no longer stands behind the hypostases as an act of divine power separate from them.” The divine missions are not identical with the trinitarian processions, but
represent an analogous movement. Hence, election does not constitute who God is; rather the triune persons constitute election. As a Wesleyan theologian. Long said he was persuaded by this reading of Barth because it enabled him to avoid the less savory notion of the eternal decree and see Barth within the catholic fold as an ordinary theologian (as he himself stated) instead of as one who intended to be radically innovative.
Barth’s revision of the doctrine of election not only challenged traditional Reformed thinking but also challenged similar thinking in late Medieval Catholic theology that encouraged the idea of a deus absconditus. It is this that led to the problems of modem theology with the idea that the God of the economy might be different from the eternally triune God; in this “duck” reading, Barth’s theology is a challenge to modem theology and is meant to heal the kind of thinking that would envision God as one who might or might not be consistent with who God is in the economy.
The rabbit version of Barth presents Barth as a modem theologian who adopts a post-metaphysical philosophical perspective and then uses the doctrine of election to explain God’s being. In this schema Barth is seen to historicize and actualize Christ’s natures in order to be orthodox under the conditions of modernity. Long wonders how such a thesis ever could be squared with Barth’s emphatic statement that Revelation “is the condition that conditions all things without itself being conditioned” (CD I/l, 118). According to Long, McCormack’s correlation of election and the Trinity leads to a much more modem and revisionist doctrine of God. Revisionist in this sense does not refer to Barth’s theology but the revision of the traditional understanding of the Trinity. “God’s being is constituted by a primordial choice to incarnate the Son. God predestines God’s own being. Election constitutes God’s Triune hypostases.” Long noted that Paul Jones follows this thinking by claiming that God’s being is transformed by his historical actions.
The end result of this situation is that we have here two related but significantly different visions of God. Like the duck-rabbit example both use the same lines to create their vision. Both find Barth correlating Election, Christology and the doctrine of God. The duck version supposes that the trinitarian hypostases constitute election; the rabbit version supposes that election constitutes the trinitarian hypostases. They are nearly identical in shape but like the duck and rabbit, you cannot see both at the same time. Once you see one, you cannot see the other. Long says that he is not sure which one is the tme Barth. Is he a traditional theologian who reformed the Reformed and challenged manualist Thomism as Balthasar and many Catholic theologians imagined? Or is he a radical Reformed theologian who so situates election that he produces a major innovation
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that requires that all traditional theology now needs radical revision? In this paper Long argued for an understanding of Barth along the lines of Balthasar’s reading of him; that is, as an anti-nominalist theologian so that one can accept McCormack’s convincing historiographical account while also reading CD II/2 well.
Long did not wish to challenge the current view of the relationship between dialectic and analogy. But he did wish to suggest that historical analysis of Barth’s thought in itself cannot lead us to what matters most since he was not a historical theologian but a dogmatic one. He therefore sought to present Balthasar’s understanding of Barth as a way of re-framing the issues.
After recounting some of Balthasar’s personal interaction with Barth, Long noted that he thought Barth’s reorientation of the doctrine of God on God’s Personhood in II/ 1 radically shifted thinking about God away from Thomism (not from Thomas) in its radical separation of the treatise on the one God and on the triune God, along with a rigid separation between philosophy and theology common among the manualist neo-Thomists. He made a similar claim, according to Long, some forty years later in his Theologic.
In Theologic II (1985) Balthasar stresses that the only way one can know the immanent Trinity is through the economic Trinity. Only by sharing in God’s self- knowledge, then, can we know God. Balthasar thought he could accept this view without disallowing natural theology. Both in 1940 and again in 1985 Balthasar found in Barth an anti-nominalist argument against the idea that we can know God as a nuda essentia and thus as a deus absonditus because this approach ignored the Persons of the Trinity. Balthasar agreed with Barth that either we know God in his entirety as the triune God or not at all. Hence, both theologians believed that there is no God behind the God of revelation.
Balthasar saw a lingering nominalism in three traditions: 1) the manualist Thomists who believed God’s oneness could be known prior to and independent of knowing the Persons of the Trinity; 2) in the Calvinist idea of predestination with its “eternal decree” and 3) in Luther’s Christology which, in his view, posited a Deus absconditus behind the God revealed in and by Jesus Christ himself; this, Balthasar believed, one could never accept under any circumstances. Long proceeded to survey all three of these areas in order to make the point that Balthasar’s opposition to these types of thinking supported a reading of Barth as an anti-nominalist realist trinitarian theologian. If this was Protestant theology, then Balthasar wanted nothing to do with it. But this was not Barth’s Protestant theology and thus Balthasar thought there could perhaps be a “rapprochement” with this Protestantism.
Balthasar’s introduction to the theology of Barth was never meant to be just an introduction but an engagement with Barth from a Catholic perspective as encouraged by Pius XII. That meant that one should be wary of ecumenical engagement because one might be tempted to engage in “false irenicism” and also subvert the “rational and philosophical moment in theology”. If Balthasar, with DeLubac, could present an analogia ends that allowed for a proper role for nature within grace, then both theologians could perhaps address the concerns of Pius XII by maintaining a Christological center without undermining the philosophical or rational element of theology. Instead of revising the Catholic tradition, this would simply set it within a Christological context which takes its stance from Scripture and the Fathers.
Without going into all the details of Long’s very interesting presentation, what he established was that Balthasar found in Barth a theologian who did indeed uphold the ratio and thus the philosophical moment in theology. But, he asks, was this really Barth or a Barth reconstructed to suit Balathasar’s theological goals? Put another way, is Barth really an anti-nominalist theologian whose theology can be useful in constructing a Catholic and Protestant rapprochement?
In the rabbit version of Barth interpretation, Balthasar is often dismissed as a reliable guide to Barth because of his emphasis on the shift from dialectic to analogy. Barth’s thinking was analogical both before and after his work on Anselm and so Barth’s concerns were more epistemological than metaphysical and indeed he was primarily a post-metaphysical theologian. This reading then ignores Barth’s book on Anselm. In this reading history replaces substance and this leads to a more historical reading of Barth that stands over against Balthasar’s emphasis on the philosophical ratio he thought he found in Barth. Long suggests that perhaps this approach to reading Barth is mistaken and might cause us to see a rabbit and “neglect the obvious ‘duck’ before our eyes”. Could it be that Balthasar might have seen what is most important in Barth?
Balthasar saw in Barth’s theology a recovery of an ancient theme in Christianity that was lost in the Middle Ages and again at the Reformation, namely, that the God who reveals himself in Jesus Christ is no deus absconditus existing behind the deus revelatus who can somehow be known outside of and apart from Christ. Such a false deus absconditus Long noted could be seen as perhaps having become incarnate in a donkey as in a human being as Ockham once noted; indeed such a view could suggest an eternal decree outside of, and apart from the mission of Christ. Seeing how Barth actually re-ordered both Catholic and Protestant dogmatics will help to understand the significance of these points.
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According to Long, traditional Reformed Dogmatics first presented the notion of God and God’s existence and then God’s attributes. This followed Roman Catholic Scholastic tradition. A similar approach can be found in Thomas Aquinas. Long traced how the Reformed theologian Heppe attempted to avoid nominalism but actually re-introduced it in his consideration of God’s revealed and hidden will because he divided the doctrine of creation from the doctrine of the Trinity by means of his doctrine of the decrees of predestination. In effect this led to the subordination of Christ’s mission to the eternal decree so that it was thought that God’s decree came prior to “God’s economic act in Christ”. Put bluntly: “God elects the elect and damns the damned independent prior to their response or relation to Christ.” Long noted that Barth reversed the ordering offered by both Thomas Aquinas and by Heppe as early as his Gottingen Dogmatics by insisting that the doctrine of the Trinity must precede discussion of the attributes while the doctrine of election comes after the doctrine of God but before the doctrine of creation. Even here Barth is unhappy with the usual Protestant version of predestination which he would thoroughly reform in CD II/2. He rejected the idea that predestination refers to “certain people” who are either elected or rejected and wanted to press back to the true meaning of the doctrine. CD II/2 then is no radical break with what Barth was after in his earlier work in which he already departed from the traditional Reformed position on this subject.
Analyzing CD II/2 Long notes that there Barth claims that election is part of the doctrine of God because God’s election of “man” is first a predestination of himself Explaining this, Barth says that Jesus is not only the object of election, but the subject. Here Long contends one cannot help but envision the “rabbit” version of Barth’s doctrine of God noting that here McCormack finds the basis for radically revising “Christianity’s doctrine of God”. By claiming that Jesus’ human obedience is already joined to the one generated by the Father as the subject in this sense. Long claims that McCormack is compelled toward a radical revision of the doctrine of God: “Simplicity, impassibility, any
distinction between the economic and immanent Trinity or the potentia absoluta and ordinata and the logos asarkos must all be abandoned.” Noting that he could not see how this view avoids Aristotle’s idea that creation is eternal [because the Father is “already joined (on the level of his identity) to the human nature”]. Long wonders whether or not this is the way we should envision CD II/2.
Long then suggested that another way to interpret Barth is to see his thinking here more in continuity with what he says in CD II/l. God’s freedom then is seen as God’s freedom to love in an anti-nominalist sense. But this does not go as far as the view just described. Barth offers several major criticisms of nominalism: first.
attempts to understand the multiplicity of divine perfections while maintaining the divine simplicity. He rejects Ockham’s view of the divine perfections as “logical concepts” we attribute to God so that they do not actually describe God’s essence or who God really is. In this view they would describe the de deo uno and thus could be known by reason alone and in this way a God behind the God of revelation would be depicted. This is what Barth rejected by holding that the perfections actually describe who God is as the triune God on the basis of God’s revelation in Christ. Here Barth and Balthasar agree. Barth also claimed that the multiplicity of the divine perfections belong to the one simple essence of God. Barth did not discard God’s simplicity, but affirmed it. This was meant to be understood within his trinitarian affirmation that God is simultaneously God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit and not otherwise. With this in mind Long cites Barth to say that “the multiplicity, individuality and diversity of God’s perfections are rooted in His own being and not in His participation in the character of other beings” (CD II/l, 333). Hence God is these perfections and this would be the case even without creation. Long claims that in this analysis, Barth actually is espousing substantive meta- physical claims that imply it is wrong to suggest that here he is a “post-metaphysical” theologian.
The second criticism of nominalism relates to Barth’s view of God’s ‘‘‘'potentia absoluta” and God’s “potentia ordinata”. Even though Barth thought that Thomas was a “semi-nominalist”, he agreed with him that one could not abandon the distinction between these two concepts of divine power without disastrous results; without this distinction, the immanent Trinity would be collapsed into the economic Trinity. Nonetheless, Barth thought the distinction did become problematic when it was held that the potentia absoluta was an extraordinary power that assumed some “arbitrary power beside or behind a power of order which corresponds only accidentally to God’s real work” (CD II/l, 541). Barth criticized both the Nominalists and Luther for exploiting this distinction with the result that one could have a multiplicity of perfections that was not contained within the divine simplicity and this would open the door to an intolerable view of God as only “wholly other”. Here again Balthasar and Barth agree. Understood in this way the distinction becomes problematic. In light of God’s actual exercise of his freedom in Christ, Barth agreed with Thomas that this is a free action, but insisted that one could not ascribe some other capacity to God than the one that was revealed in his work ad extra and contradictory to it. In formulations derived from Anslem, Barth here argues that if this were to happen, we could not trust God’s Word.
Long went on to claim that if we divide Barth’s anti- nominalist arguments from his analysis in CD II/2, then we will not understand him very well. Thus, Long
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claims that when Barth says that God predestines himself, he is not tying God to creation in the manner depicted by McCormack. He is not denying a proper distinction between the potentia absoluta and potentia ordinata or between the immanent and the economic Trinity. Barth means to say that what he speaks to us in his Son is God’s potentia absoluta such that this can be trusted. Barth here reforms the Reformed and brings them back to the catholic fold by arguing that God is no tyrant and not arbitrary in relating with us, but that he wills to love us in freedom. But he does this while at the same time challenging any separation of the treatise on the one God from that of the triune God.
Long concluded his presentation noting that if one takes the “rabbit” vision of Barth as a revisionist who worked under the conditions of modernity, then Barth’s work will garner little attention beyond a narrow tradition of Reformed thinking committed to doing theology under the conditions of modernity. If, however, Barth was the classic theologian that Balthasar saw overcoming the errors of nominalism, then Barth’s theology will be of interest to those who do not believe that Kant’s critique of metaphysics “has now attained dogmatic status”. Long himself said he is not sure which version of Barth is the true one but that he is finding it increasingly less important to get the history of Barth’s thought right than to understand correctly his dogmatic thinking.
“Response to The Eucharist and Ecumenism: Let Us Keep the Feasf
Martha Moore-Kelsh
After expressing gratitude for being invited to respond to George Hunsinger’s work and noting that she was sympathetic to his proposals, Moore-Keish noted that in both spirit and substance, Hunsinger shows himself to be a faithful child of Reformed Protestantism. Since the lb* century, Reformed theologians have sought not some isolated sectarianism, but faithful renovation of the Christian church as a whole; the ecumenical impulse at the heart of this book is integral to Reformed identity.
Reformed Protestants also have (usually) recognized the limitations of every theological formulation, and have thus been open to ongoing reform of church doctrine and practice. At best. Reformed theologians have shied away from defensive protection of theological formulations of the past in favor of careful attention to what God’s Word and Spirit may be saying to the church today; such commitment to the constant need for reform is well displayed by this work.
In his proposal of “transelementation,” Hunsinger also displays his faithfulness to Reformed heritage. Drawing from early patristic sources and Eastern Orthodox Christian teaching, as well as Peter Martyr Vermigli,
Hunsinger proposes the following understanding of Christ’s real Eucharistic presence: “the bread itself [is] transformed by virtue of its sacramental union with, and participation in, Christ’s flesh” (40f). Transelementation maintains a clear difference between Christ’s risen and ascended body in heaven and the Eucharistic elements, affirming that these have “unity in distinction,” without either confusion or separation. Two motifs in Eucharistic theology that seem indispensable for a Reformed theo- logian: a clear distinction between Christ’s real, risen humanity and the sacramental presence of Christ in the supper are upheld here; and a profound reverence for the way in which Christ is truly present when we break the bread and share the cup. Reformed theologians want to push harder to name the way in which Christ’s presence is not restricted to the bread, but extends also to the gathered faithful; they also want to hear more about the Holy Spirit as the effective agent in this transformation. These, Moore-Keish noted, were intended as friendly amendments to Hunsinger’s substantial motion.
Some have wondered about how Hunsinger’s proposal is influenced by Barth, and indeed why we should discuss this work at the Barth Society. It seems, however, that there is a deeply Barthian thread throughout this book — his persistent concern to uphold Chalcedonian “distinction without separation” (e.g. in the relationship between Christ’s body in heaven and the real presence at the table; and the relationship between Christ’s unique sacrifice on the cross and the re-presentation of that sacrifice in the eucharist). Though his specific proposals lead Hunsinger to places where no Barthian has gone before, the Chalcedonian logic throughout shows his continuing indebtedness to Barth.
For the past six years, Moore-Keish noted that she was involved in the bilateral ecumenical dialogue between the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and four Reformed churches in the United States (the PCUSA, UCC, RCA, and CRC). They recently concluded their work on the eucharist, producing a document entitled “This Bread of Life,” which will be available in the next few months. Comparing this document with Hunsinger’s book prompts several comments and questions.
First, Hunsinger’s book has four sections: presence, sacrifice, ministry, and social ethics. By contrast, “This Bread of Life” adopted a five-part structure: epiclesis, anamnesis, sacrifice, presence, and discipleship. (They explicitly did not take up the issue of ordained ministry, recognizing that this is an enormous topic that will need to be addressed in future ecumenical dialogue.) They organized their report this way for a couple of reasons: to reflect major movements in actual liturgical practice (about which more later), and to identify areas in which there has been significant ecumenical scholarship and convergence in the past fifty years — namely, the role of the Holy Spirit and new interpretation of anamnesis.
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Hunsinger takes account of both of these themes in his work, but this difference in structure itself raises interesting questions; 1) does ecumenical progress require us to retain the classical 16* century categories of Eucharistic theology and reinterpret them, or is it better to recognize other categories on which we actually have substantial convergence {anamnesis, epiclesis)? 2) in particular, “This Bread of Life” begins with epiclesis, with recognition of the prominent role of the Holy Spirit; opening ecumenical discussions with pneumatology, rather than with the more Christologically oriented topics of presence and sacrifice could perhaps be more helpful.
Second, beyond comparing the structure of the two documents, one can notice both harmony and dissonance in reading their sections on presence and sacrifice.
With regard to “real presence,” Hunsinger asserts that an “irreducible minimum” toward ecumenical unity is that the relation of “this bread” to “my body” must be one of real predication (60) and this could be interpreted in various ways, but cannot be simply “symbolic.” He goes on to suggest that the relationship of bread and body may be understood as “symbolic realism” (62), recalling that in the early church, symbolic and real were not mutually exclusive. “Symbolic realism” permits both identity and difference, the dialectical relationship of two wholes in mutual indwelling. This then is the complex reality that “transelementation” tries to affirm (63). The body indwells the bread, but more importantly, the bread indwells the risen, transcendent body of Christ.
From a Roman Catholic point of view, it seems that transubstantiation and transelementation might co-exist as two different viewpoints on the mode of conversion, without being church dividing (71). Hunsinger even finds some hopeful signs in recent Vatican statements, and just last month Susan Wood, in her response to this book at another meeting of the Barth Society, affirmed that transelementation seemed compatible with a Roman Catholic account of the conversion of the Eucharistic elements.
Hunsinger then argues that transelementation, as described by Vermigli, is a position that Reformed Christians can and have affirmed. On this point, there is some disagreement with the final report of the ecumenical dialogue. The mode of presence remained a point of divergence between Roman Catholics and Reformed participants in the discussions. The report pointed out that in the early centuries of the church, there were two principal ways to describe how Christ nourishes believers in the eucharist. Some patristic theologians maintained that Christ is present through a conversion of the elements themselves, while others described Christ as mystically engrafting believers into his real presence. The Roman Catholic tradition developed and maintains a synthesis of these two
positions. The Protestant Reformers, however, principally followed the works of Augustine on Christ’s eucharistic presence, which stress the mystery of the Spirit’s engrafting believers more deeply into Christ’s real presence; while the Reformed tradition embraces Christ’s true presence, it also intends to distance itself from any idea of a “real” conversion of the elements themselves.
Reading this section of “This Bread of Life” alongside Hunsinger’ s proposal one wants to hear more from Hunsinger with regard to the Reformed resistance to the language of “conversion” of the elements. Is there something lost in the conversation, if we lose the distinctive Reformed emphasis on true presence that is not about a change in the elements themselves?
With regard to sacrifice, Hunsinger proposes that we might make ecumenical progress by focusing on the relationship between the cross and the eucharist as one of distinction-in-unity (the same kind of Chalcedonian logic he employed in his description of transelementation). That is, the celebration of the eucharist and the sacrifice of Christ on the cross are in some sense one, but without obscuring the once-for-all nature of Christ’s atoning work, so important to the 16* century Reformers. How then should we think of this unity in distinction? How are the cross and the eucharist related?
The answer: anamnesis, or the strong sense of remem- bering that characterized Jewish praying at the Passover, and that characterized early Christian praying at the table. Hunsinger points out that at Passover, the themes of remembering, substitution, and participation were all bound up together. “The past was ritually re-enacted in the present, even as the present was made to take part in the saving events of the past” (143). This same logic of anamnesis informed the early church’s remembrance of Jesus at the eucharist. “The Lamb who had died had become a living presence. His definitive sacrifice on the cross was re-actualized with each anamnesis. It was re- presented in sacramental form” (144).
This turn to anamnesis to reinterpret sacrifice is also well represented in the Reformed-Roman Catholic report. Together we are able to say, “we agree that remembering brings about a participation in Christ that encompasses past, present and future. Through our remembering, we realize not only Christ’s presence to us here and now, but our very fellowship in Christ. This common conviction should be kept together with the shared emphasis on the uniqueness of Christ’s sacrifice in which we participate. “As we remember, we enter into the ‘once and perpetual’ sacrifice that Christ has offered on our behalf Through this participation, we also ‘remember’ and believe that our fiiture is entirely bound up with what Christ has done and is doing now” (This Bread of Life, 61). This recovery of a fuller anamnesis represents a significant
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ecumenical advance of the past fifty years, and one is grateful to see it so prominently featured both in this book and in the document of ecumenical dialogue.
More than Hunsinger, however, the bilateral dialogue emphasized the Spirit as the effective agent in our remembering. This helps underline that it is not we alone who bring Christ to remembrance, but God’s Spirit working in and through us that enables our participation, as James Torrance stresses, in his work on worship. Though Hunsinger does discuss the epiclesis briefly in connection with the work of Max Thurian (158) and in his treatment of the “mode of consecration,” (87-91) there is relatively little attention paid to the Spirit’s agency as a whole. This revisits the point made earlier, in observing the difference in structure between this book and the report of the ecumenical dialogue: whereas they begin with affirmation of the Spirit’s role in their section on epiclesis, Hunsinger includes his discussion of the Spirit as (small) subheadings in broader discussions. More about why this was done might be helpful.
In Hunsinger’s exploration of Reformation critiques of the Mass as sacrifice, he discusses Zwingli, who famously insisted that the eucharist was in no way a sacrifice, but was a remembrance of the perfect sacrifice accomplished by Christ (96-100). Hunsinger shares the interpretation of most scholars that for Zwingli, “remembrance” was solely a “spiritual, or even mental event” (99). But in the ecumenical discussion. Reformed historical scholar John Riggs has suggested that Zwingli himself may have had a richer sense of anamnesis than previously acknowledged. Riggs notes that the Swiss historical theologian Gottfried Locher thinks that for Zwingli memoria does not just mean looking backward retrospectively but also implies an effective presence of the Lord’s suffering. If these scholars are right about this, then Zwingli may turn out to be a more helpful voice in ecumenical Eucharistic theology than most of us ever realized.
Finally, it should be noted that though there are many different forms of “liturgical theology,” they share the conviction that liturgical action is a primary source for doing theology — some have even called the liturgy “primary theology” itself Given that the eucharist is first and foremost a liturgical practice of living Christian churches, one is perplexed by the relative absence of attention to eucharistic practice in this book. Hunsinger gives us beautiful, careful interpretations of Calvin, Luther, Aquinas, Trent, and others, along with persuasive proposals about how we might make ecumenical progress in our interpretation of the eucharist. But there is little about how much convergence there has been in recent decades in the area of Eucharistic practice — including the recovery of the epiclesis among both Reformed and Roman Catholics, and the enriched attention to anamnesis as central to what we do when we
come to the table. These liturgical developments could support much of what Hunsinger proposes in these pages.
Yet in the final pages of the book, Hunsinger gives us a “Concluding unscientific personal postscript”, in which he describes with joy the Eucharistic worship at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco. He lifts up the worship life of this congregation as an example worthy of attention, presumably an embodiment of the kind of ecumenical convergence that he wants to see more broadly. Strikingly, however, these closing pages of the book are detached from what comes before. Why does he see this celebration of the eucharist as more adequate liturgical practice, presumably in keeping with his ecumenical proposal? He says, “not being a liturgical scholar myself, I think I am not entitled to much more than merely stating my preferences” (331). Moore-Keish ended by noting that it would be good to hear more from George Hunsinger about how and why such practices cohere with his proposals offered in the book.
For those who are committed to ecumenical dialogue, and particularly for those of us in the Reformed tradition who long for Eucharistic sharing with Christians from whom we are separated, this book is a great gift. No ecumenical dialogue on sacraments or church orders for the next generation will be able to proceed without carefully considering this book. May this contribution lead us closer to the day when all Christians will be able to sit together at Christ’s table and keep the feast.
“The Eucharist and Ecumenism, by George Hunsinger”
Susan Eastman
Eastman began by noting that this is a “lovely and important book”, not only for the theological precision and care with which Hunsinger elucidates the doctrinal positions of different traditions, but also, and of equal importance, for the spirit of charity that permeates it. At the beginning of the book, that spirit is set forth in a methodological distinction between “ecumenical theology” and both “enclave theology”, devoted to the defense of one’s own tradition, on the one hand, and “academic liberal theology” without creedal commitments, on the other. “Ecumenical theology,” by way of contrast, holds fast to the creeds, and to the theological commitments of its own tradition. But it also “will succeed only by a deeper conversion to Christ. Ecumenical theology, though properly grounded in a single tradition, looks for what is best in traditions not its own. It seeks not to defeat them but to respect and learn from them. It earns the right to speak only by listening, and it listens much more than it speaks” (2). Hunsinger models such “ecumenical theology” by addressing the
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book primarily to his own tradition, “the Reformed churches and through them to the wider oikumene . . . Ecumenical conversion begins at home” (313). Would that all theological discourse followed suit! One fundamental argument of The Eucharist and Ecumenism is that ecumenical dialogue, particularly at the points of difference, is first and foremost the opportunity for self- examination and a “deeper conversion to Christ.” In this respect, the book can only be profoundly hopeful.
Eastman then offered some more general observations and raised related questions for further discussion by following the structure of the book, and the trajectory of hope and caution limned by the chapter titles themselves: Part I, Real presence: controversies and a proposal; Part II, Eucharistic sacrifice: controversies and a proposal; Part III, Eucharist and Ministry: controversies and an impending impasse; and Part IV, Eucharist and social ethics. The proposals for articulating shared under- standings of fundamental aspects of the Eucharist suggest hope; the language of impasse suggests that the least tractable issues dividing our traditions have to do with different understandings of holy orders; and the language of ethics points hopefully towards another way in which the divided church discovers common ground through shared participation in Christ’s redemptive, active presence in the world.
It is no surprise that this book begins by taking its bearings from Karl Barth and concludes Part IV with a defense of Nicene Christianity. Throughout, the ecumenical appeal of this book is found in a theological and participatory ecclesiology, as the only ground for genuine unity. In Hunsinger’s words, “Ministry takes place within a christocentric ecclesiology of partici- pation” (219). The starting and ending point for all ecumenical dialogue, including conversation about the eucharist, is the centrality and primacy of Christ as the one who both constitutes and animates the church in all aspects of its life. Certainly, this is the only real, and the entirely sure, basis of our hope for unity.
Some comments were offered about Parts I and II, in which Hunsinger sets forth his ecumenical proposals regarding the eucharist itself. The real presence of Christ in the eucharist, and the Roman Catholic teaching that the eucharist is a sacrifice, are two sticking points in dialogue between Reformation and high sacramental (Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic) traditions. Seeking a position that will not be church-dividing, and that may be acceptable to his own Reformed tradition, Hunsinger makes two proposals. The first is the ancient idea of “transelementation” (metastoicheiosis), found in the Church fathers, in Vermigli, Bucer and Cranmer, and taught by the Eastern Orthodox. The common image for transelementation is that of an iron rod heated in a fire: there is a complete unity between the iron and the red heat of the fire, yet both remain distinct. This is likened
to a sacramental union, which in turn is analogous to (certainly not exactly like), the Incarnation in which Christ is both fully human and fully divine. There is, in other words, a koinonia, “a mutual indwelling between sign and reality” — ^the reality of Christ and the elements (the sign) — without either relinquishing their character- istics. This “mutual indwelling” is “a koinonia relation of inseparable unity, abiding distinction, and fundamental asymmetry” (77). Transformation occurs through the invocation of the Spirit at the epiclesis, and throughout Christ is the preeminent agent of transformation.
With respect to Paul’s theology, the terminology of metastoicheiosis is most intriguing. Paul uses the term, stoicheia, to denote “the weak and beggarly elements” to which his Gentile converts previously were enslaved (Gal 4:9)! It is difficult to determine definitively whether stoicheia denotes simply the basic building blocks of the cosmos — earth, air, fire, water — or whether it also signifies spiritual entities associated with those elements. But at the very least, Paul claims that the action of God in Christ has reoriented our relationship to the basic building blocks of the cosmos. He uses the image of union with Christ’s death to convey how radical the change is: “Far be it from me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom the cosmos has been crucified to me, and I to the cosmos” (Gal 6:14). The link between stoicheia and cosmos is explicit in Col 2:20: “with Christ you died to the stoicheia of the cosmos.”
In the daily life of the church, the concrete coordinates of this death are seen in a dramatic social transformation. That is, for Paul, dying to the cosmos means living in the new creation, in which there are neither circumcision nor uncircumcision (Gal 6:15). That is, the old social and religious divisions no longer obtain. Death to the stoicheia of the old cosmos means death to religious practices that divide the Christian community (Gal 4:10; Col 2:21-23). In light of this Pauline teaching, an understanding of the eucharist as metastoicheiosis has even more profound implications for both ecumenical conversion, and for the eucharist as the transformation of culture. What is the relationship between the elements of bread and wine and the elements of the cosmos? Or better, how does Christ’s presence in elements of the eucharist relate to his transformation of the elements of the cosmos, precisely through his full incarnation? Vicariously assuming all humanity, in all our differences, through incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection Christ re-orders the elements of the cosmos. Then the understanding of the eucharist as trans- elementation provides a very concrete picture of the church as a newly ordered social reality, also comprised of unity-in-distinction, and distinction-in-unity.
Hunsinger’s second proposal concerns the understanding of the eucharist as sacrifice. After reviewing the main
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theological stumbling blocks in this language for the Reformed tradition (the implication that Christ’s once- for-all sacrifice on the cross can be repeated; the idea that the eucharist itself is meritorious), Hunsinger proposes that the ancient Pauline metaphor of “Christ our Passover, sacrificed for us” (1 Cor 5:7), provides a way forward. Two aspects of this proposal seem particularly worthy of discussion. First, the Passover involved “a sacrifice, a sacred meal, and a deliverance” (141). The sacrifice, furthermore, enacts “the mysterious biblical pattern of exchange” — that is, the just for the unjust, the innocent for the guilty. And that exchange is precisely what leads to deliverance. The paschal meal then becomes the community’s on-going participation in — not repetition of — that sacrifice and deliverance (142). Similarly, in the eucharist the community participates in the sacrifice and deliverance effected by Christ. But secondly, therefore, the union between the singular, past event of the cross and the on-going present reality of sacrifice in the Eucharist is effected precisely by the living Christ who is present in the benefits of his passion, who in his priestly office offers himself to God on our behalf, and who also “functions vicariously as our human response to God,” thereby graciously effecting our “secondary and derivative participation” in Christ’s body and blood.
Noting that she is not a Barth scholar, Eastman indicated that she could hear Barth speaking clearly here. Christ is the subject of the verbs, the saving agent in the church’s action, who thereby creates us as acting subjects as well. It is Christ’s participation in the plight of sinful humanity, taking that humanity up into God, which makes the sacrament a means of grace, by effecting a gracious relationship of mutual participation between God and humanity. This expresses the reality of which Barth speaks when he says, “Because our sin and guilt are now in the heart of God, they are no longer exclusively ours. Because He bears them, the suffering and punishment from them are lifted from us, and our own suffering can be only a reminiscence of His” {CD 11/1,374).
As a Pauline scholar Eastman added that the image of Christ our Passover, sacrificed for us, is one of Paul’s few uses of the term, “sacrifice.” Interestingly, it is embedded in his exhortation to the Corinthian congregation, to expel the member who is sleeping with his step-mother (1 Cor 5:1-13). The immediate context for Paul’s reference to the Passover concerns the character of the community’s life together (1 Cor 5:6-8). There is here an extremely close connection between the celebration of the eucharist and the concrete realities of corporate life in the community of faith. While much can be explored here, Eastman suggested that Paul’s exhortation speaks directly to religious divisions in the church as well, with a call to sincerity and truth.
Further, the language of sacrifice invites us to consider “the saving significance of the death of Jesus” for Paul. Hunsinger’ s comments about the relationship between exchange, substitution and participation point in promising directions: “Just as the paschal sacrifice involved the theme of substitution, so the sacred meal involved that of participation. Whether in the Passover or the eucharist, there was no substitution without participation, and no participation without substitution” (142).
A reciprocal exchange generates and describes a reciprocal participation. Pauline scholars call this “interchange in Christ.” From another angle, we might say that Christ participates in humanity’s plight under condemnation for sin, “bearing its consequences [that is, the consequences of evil] himself in the Incarnation as it culminates in the cross in order to bear it away” (142). And this divine and human participation opens the door to our participation in Christ through the Spirit, precisely because there is no longer any condemnation. The key text here is Rom 8:1-4: “Therefore there is no condemna- tion for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” There is much more to be said about the union between justification and participation, in Paul’s thought. Hunsinger’s comments on the inseparable link between them contribute to that project.
We turn now from “proposals” to “impasse,” that is, to the topic of the eucharist and ministry. Both of Hunsinger’s proposals concerning the eucharist are theologically grounded in a shared Nicene commitment to the centrality and priority of the action of the Triune God. Because Christ is the causal agent in trans- elementation, and the self-offering priest in the eucharist as Passover, both proposals set forth a relativized role for the ordained clergy. Hence the question of the relationship of the priest to Christ, on the one hand, and to the gathered congregation, on the other hand, begins to press forward with increasing urgency. Hunsinger considers the eucharist and ministry in Part III. Importantly, even if all the churches could agree on a non-church dividing formulation of real presence and eucharist as sacrifice, divisions over ordained ministry would continue to hinder progress toward unity in practice.
Part III lays out five issues related to ordained ministry: who can ordain, who can be ordained, the nature of ordination (ontological and/or functional), and the offices and functions of ordained ministry (197). Again working
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from the foundation of Christ as the primary acting subject in the church’s ministry, such that “The church’s active participation in the ministry of Christ presupposes Christ’s active participation in the ministries of the church,” Hunsinger traces a way for mutual recognition of ordained ministries, if not full agreement concerning them, among Protestant traditions. But all of this is set against the backdrop of Vatican II’s Decree on Ecumenism (1964) and the subsequent statement Domine lesus, both of which regard non-Catholic churches as “ecclesial communities” with a defectus of the sacrament of orders. The one universal church “subsists” under the authority of the papacy, and all other churches derive their existence from it. As Hunsinger says, “The tendency of such ideas is not toward mutual learning, reciprocity, and conversion, but merely toward an impossible ‘return ecumenism’” (197).
At this point Eastman raised this question; how hopeful may we be now about this issue in ecumenical dialogue? The Eucharist and Ecumenism was published in 2008. Eastman noted that in 2009 her own Anglican tradition was taken aback by the Vatican’s unilateral establishment of an Apostolic Constitution, with a process for disaffected Anglican clergy and congrega- tions to come under the authority of the papacy. Anglican leaders, including Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, were not consulted in the plaiming, nor, apparently, was Cardinal Kasper, then head of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. Yet the process was presented as a step toward the re-unification of the church. Is this not a “return ecumenism”?
About a month later, in November 2009, Rowan Williams was invited by the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, to address a symposium celebrating the centenary of the birth of Cardinal Willebrands. At that time, he stated that, precisely because “it does not build in any formal recognition of existing ministries or units of oversight or methods of independent decision-making,” the Vatican’s proposal “does not break any fresh ecclesiological ground.” Perhaps more importantly, however, Williams issued a plea for ecumenical conversation based on “a genuinely theological doctrine of the Church,” which seeks in all its deliberations to explicate “how the nature and character and even polity of the Church are grounded in and shaped by the nature of God and of God's incarnation in history.” Put negatively, what this means is that when an ecclesial tradition considers any church practice (such as the matters of who may ordain, and who may be ordained) to be a nonnegotiable barrier to communion, that stance must be articulated specifically in relationship to God’s nature and Incarnation. This is precisely what The Eucharist and Ecumenism advances (perhaps Archbishop Williams read the book). The plea, by both Williams and Hunsinger, is for all traditions first
to examine their own polity and practices on this theological basis, asking whether the church-dividing positions which they hold are theologically central, or may in fact be areas in which non-divisive disagreement is possible. In Williams’ words, “The central question is whether and how we can properly tell the difference between ‘second order’ and ‘first order’ issues. When so very much agreement has been firmly established [in ecumenical dialogues] in first-order matters about the identity and mission of the Church, is it really justifiable to treat other issues as equally vital for its health and integrity?”
But that simply pushes the issues back to precisely the level of disagreement about what constitutes first-order, non-negotiable theological claims. According to one model of theology, what Eastman called the “tapestry model,” everything is so connected that if one strand is pulled, the whole thing unravels. For example, the emphatic opposition of the Eastern Orthodox and the Vatican to women’s ordination suggests such a view; it is tied in with a view of the priest as the icon of Christ, and of Christ’s maleness therefore as somehow essential to his humanity. Eastman agreed with Hunsinger when he pointed out that the argument faltered at that point. But it must be noted that the ordination of women may also be seen as a non-negotiable, first-order theological issue of church-dividing stature, precisely because it subverts Christ’s assumption of all humanity in the Incarnation, and the Spirit’s distribution of gifts to all baptized Christians. Very quickly the question becomes, “Who decides, and on what basis?”
Might not Hunsinger’ s persistent, patient (and Barthian) insistence on the centrality and primacy of God’s redemptive act in Christ, and on Christ as the agent of the church’s salvation and on-going life, re-orient these questions about what is essential and what may be considered a matter for disagreement without division? The image would not be of a tapestry of interwoven doctrinal positions derived from one another and mutually dependent, but rather of a circle (or sphere, if you will) with the action of the Triune God at the center, and all other disputed matters evaluated in relationship to that center. Each position, then, finds its proper place primarily in relationship to that center. This is what Hunsinger means when he limns a “Chalcedonian imagination” as both a supplement to and a correction for a Roman Catholic “sacramental imagination” and a Reformed “verbal imagination.” In the Chalcedonian imagination, “Ministry takes place within a christocentric ecclesiology of participation” (219).
One can appeal once again to Paul who wrote: “Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another? It is before his own master that each one stands or falls. . . If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord” ( Rom 14:4, 8). Of course, Paul here is not talking
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about disputed doctrinal positions, but about members of the community. The principle, however, is that each relates directly to the Lord, and thereby indirectly to the other. Might not this also describe the diversity of churches today? Again, Hunsinger’s comments about the value of liturgical practices in which both the priest and the people face east together presents a vivid picture of persons and churches with differing views finding their proper place in relationship to the crucified and risen Lord. In the words of Pope Benedict: “Looking at the priest has no importance. What matters is looking together at the Lord” (329).
Part IV of The Eucharist and Ecumenism concerns the eucharist and social ethics. The eucharist is presented as a countercultural sign of Christ’s transformation of culture. This is God’s fait accompli. It becomes visible when social, racial, economic and cultural barriers are broken down around the bread and wine. What about religious barriers? Ecumenical concerns recede curiously into the background in this chapter, yet surely they remain. To what degree is the absence of eucharistic sharing between traditions a failure to be countercultural, and acquiescence to a cultural status quo? In the actions of the churches, clearly there is a long way to go, and we won’t get there until the eschaton. So the Eucharist’s forward pointing witness to the eschatological feast of the Lamb is at the same time a witness to our present imperfection and incompleteness. This is not a bad thing. Only as such can it teach us truth-telling, over against the self-deception of thinking that we are complete in ourselves.
Nonetheless, Hunsinger describes three eschatological signs even in the present disunity; the cross-cultural worship of the “International Protestant Church of Zurich,” a communion service held in a segregated jail, and the “transition from eucharist to feeding the poor” at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco. The very concreteness and embodiment of these stories points to yet another sign of ecumenical hope. Sometimes the koinonia we seek is more evident on the ground, in particular places and challenges, than at the level of dialogue about doctrine. This does not gainsay the importance and necessity of the latter. It simply suggests that in the midst of the divisions, without Eucharistic sharing and across deeply opposing points of view, the church’s shared participation in Christ’s redemptive work in the world still may be a countercultural sign — perhaps most of all to the churches themselves.
Eastman concluded her remarks with an illustration of such countercultural hope from the Episcopal Church of Sudan. Last January she mentioned that she and her husband were privileged to spend time in southern Sudan, as guests of the Episcopal Diocese of Renk, which is on the border with northern Sudan. As she and
the bishop were going past the Catholic church in town, she asked about relations between the Sudanese Episcopal churches and the Sudanese Catholic churches. “Here in Renk we have a very positive relationship,” he said. And then he explained why: “It is because, during the war, when the northern army wanted to take over the Catholic school, all the Episcopal church leaders went to the school to stand with our Catholic brothers and sisters and oppose the occupation.” Of course, standing there in the Catholic compound as the soldiers wanted to come in, together facing the very real possibility of death, they could all have been killed. As it is, they witnessed to the eschatological reality that what unites us is far greater than what divides us.
What a happy reality that is!
''Response to Eucharist and Ecumenism, by George Hunsinger”
Gerald Bray
After expressing his appreciation for Hunsinger’s “ground-breaking book” Bray noted Hunsinger has tackled a subject fi'aught with pitfalls for the unwary, and has done so with a breadth of learning and a depth of insight that few can have matched. He has even been brave enough to suggest ways forward that might at least begin to overcome some of the traditional hurdles to ecumenical agreement, and although he admits that many of them are unlikely to be taken up in the foreseeable future, any step in the right direction is to be applauded. The divisions we have inherited took a long time to mature, and we must not expect them to be healed overnight, but where there is hope there is life.
Noting that both he and Hunsinger stand in the Reformed tradition, Bray also observed that he is an Anglican priest, but since the Supreme Governor of the Church of England is also a Presbyterian, he believes that they have a special ecumenical bond that transcends whatever difficulties there may be lower down the ecclesiastical scale. Bray also mentioned that his church is the only one to have been headed by women, not just in modem times, but since the Reformation. Indeed, the first of these women did not want the job and took the church back to Rome as fast as she could; an example repudiated by most of her successors.
Mention of that Bray concluded demonstrates something of the historical complexities that must be dealt with when discussing this subject. One of the things that stmck him most forcibly when reading Hunsinger’s book is that each of the dialogue partners in modem ecumenism comes at the subject from his or her own point of view. The Eastern Orthodox, according to Bray, are not really interested in it at all. They participate, to
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the extent that they do, as an exercise in self-defense which goes back at least to the Crusades. Ever since Bohemond’s army appeared at the gates of Constantinople, on its way to reconquer the Holy Land, the Eastern church has felt put upon, if not actually besieged, by the Christian West. Over the centuries it has discovered that the best way to deal with this is to engage in dialogue with these Latin barbarians, preferably on their own turf, so that they can carry on at home without further molestation.
For them, a situation in which Rome looks benignly on their theology and practices, and the Protestant churches recognize them as fellow-Christians, is about as good a scenario as it is likely to get. If the West wants to flatter Orthodoxy and look to it for guidance, that is fine with them, but it gives them no incentive to examine themselves very deeply, and still less to change in any profound way. After all, westerners have been attracted to the Eastern churches as they are, not as they would like them to be, and change is just as likely to reduce that attraction as it is to enhance it. In other words, the Orthodox have little to gain from ecumenical dialogue as we understand it, and we should not be surprised that those who are most interested in it are themselves converts like Timothy Ware and Elisabeth Behr-Siegel, or diaspora Russians like the late Anthony Bloom.
According to Bray, Rome, as Hunsinger very helpfully points out, has its own take on ecumenism that others would do well to notice. From its point of view, the different churches and ecclesial communities can be ranged on a sliding scale, with their own communion on 100 at the top and the rest graded according to the degree of conformity to that norm which they display. Thus, we might put the Orthodox churches somewhere in the region of 90-95, the Anglicans and Lutherans around 50, and the rest somewhere further down. The aim of ecumenism as they see it is to bring everyone up to where they are at 100, even if this requires a good deal of tact and diplomacy for it to succeed.
The Protestant churches on the whole see themselves as having different insights on a common truth that nobody does, or even can, fully grasp. Ecumenism is essential for wholeness and balance, and if this demands a certain amount of restructuring in the process, then well and good. The churches of the Reformation are free to order and reorder themselves as circumstances dictate, and it is among them that ecumenism has made its greatest strides so far. Unfortunately, it must also be admitted that denominational mergers are most likely to occur in an attempt to stave off decline, and that they seldom carry everyone with them — ^the end result is usually one fairly large but weak and decaying church, flanked by two small but active and committed denominations which see it as their duty to maintain the purity of the traditions that have been compromised in
the merger. It may not have to be like that, but it usually is, and it is Bray’s opinion that we must be honest enough to admit that well-meant attempts to achieve greater unity often have this result.
Given that reality, Bray recommended that we approach this subject, and Hunsinger’s proposals relating to it, with some caution. First, Hunsinger is concerned to ensure that the theological integrity of each community or tradition should be maintained, but that they should somehow be purged of church-dividing matters. On paper, this may be feasible, but could it ever be realized in practice? Bray said he doubts it because for many members of the different churches, preserving their theological integrity includes preserving the things that separate them from others — the power of the papacy being the most obvious, but by no means the only example of that. Bray noted that Hunsinger draws a clear distinction between what he calls “enclave” theology, which he defines as theology done by those who are primarily concerned to defend and protect their own distinctiveness, and “ecumenical” theology, which wants to find the common ground and build on it, even when that means reshaping a number of ideas and practices that are characteristic of particular groups.
Bray suggested that perhaps Hunsinger is being a bit unfair to the so-called “enclave” people, but the fact is that ecumenical theology, and the movement associated with it, in his opinion, has failed to capture the imagination of the wider Christian public and seems like an irrelevance to most people. Those who want to change church can do so, but most go to the one they go to and do not worry too much about what goes on elsewhere. What ecumenists see as the “scandal” of division does not make much of an impression at the local level, because most of the time it does not affect people directly. Bray noted that his own Church of England recently has come into full communion with the Danish Lutheran Church, but wonders about how many people care about that, or even know that it has happened. In Bray’s view it is only those with a special interest at stake, and they are few indeed.
With regard to the eucharist, Bray observed that Hunsinger admits that he is a Reformed theologian and that he treats the question from that perspective. What he wants to do is to show how the Reformed churches can move in a Catholic or Orthodox direction, and suggest ways in which they in turn can reciprocate. This is a typically Protestant approach, according to Bray. That does not make it wrong or bad, of course, but it does at least mean that we must see his proposals in that perspective. To be blunt, he thinks that if the Reformed churches can draw closer to the Orthodox, then they may become more acceptable to Rome as well. An unkind observer might say that this is a clever strategy based on the time-honored principle of defeating your
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enemy by drawing off his closest ally, but of course we are not so unkind, and so think of it as reaching one’s goal by what appears to be a slight detour that in the end turns out to be the shortest distance between two points.
Whether “transelementation” or metastoicheiosis, is the right or best way forward here is hard to say. The strategy is to rely on words from the Protestant Reformers which show that they held to a doctrine of the eucharist that is at least compatible with trans- elementation, and that because the Romans seem to think that this is an acceptable variant on tran- substantiation, achieve church unity in this way. Bray said he was surprised and delighted to discover from Hunsinger that Theophylact of Ochrid was known to the Reformers and even quoted favorably by them, but Hunsinger himself admits that this must not be taken too far. The Protestant Reformers loved to quote the Greek Fathers, most of whom had only been rediscovered in the preceding century, because the Greeks gave them ammunition in their struggle against Rome, which could not deny the antiquity or even the fundamental orthodoxy of such sources. Unfortunately, it also has to be said that since the Protestants and the Orthodox knew little of each other and had a common enemy to combat, the fundamental differences between them were hard to discern and could be papered over if necessary. According to Bray, we must remember that in 1941, Britain, France and the United States allied themselves with the Soviet Union to defeat the Axis powers, but that victory over them did not lead to harmonious relations. On the contrary, the Western victors soon united with the defeated states against their former Soviet ally, and the Orthodox (at least) are well aware that the same could easily happen in church affairs.
The Theophylact reference does however illustrate one important theme of Hunsinger’ s book, according to Bray, namely, that the controversies which broke out at different times in history were often not apparent to those who lived before that happened and managed to reconcile what later became irreconcilable opposites. Thus he reminds us that Luther did not think of the ubiquity of Christ’s glorified body in a way that would exclude its local presence in heaven, that Aquinas held to a spiritual interpretation of transubstantiation that avoided and even denied the extreme interpretations of later times and might make the doctrine more acceptable to Protestants, and so on. This may well be so Bray observed, but the trouble is that once a controversy breaks out, people take sides and it becomes much harder, if not impossible, to go back to an earlier stage, even if that is desirable. To take a well-known secular analogy, historians often look back on the harmonious Anglo-American world of the 1750s and wonder why it fell apart, but once it did, there could be no going back, despite Winston Churchill’s heroic efforts to do so.
Protestantism exists because in the sixteenth century a large number of Catholics revolted against their church. Just as George Washington and Benjamin Franklin were British subjects who went to war for the rights of Englishmen (as they saw them), so Martin Luther and John Calvin were sons of the Catholic Church who fought for its true values against authorities whom they accused of having perverted them. Bray notes that Hunsinger wonders whether they misunderstood the theology of the Mass (87) but while they may have exaggerated and distorted certain things in their own polemical interests, fundamental misunderstanding on their part is most improbable. How would they have convinced half of Europe to follow them if it could be shown that they were wrong? Nobody was out to destroy the unity of the church and many people desperately tried to patch things up again, so if there really were no substantial differences, it is hard to see how and why they failed to do so.
The danger of failing to recognize this can be seen, Bray thinks, in Hunsinger’s plea to the Reformed to recon- sider the eucharist as a Passover meal. The language of eucharistic sacrifice can be adapted to that, as indeed it was by such un-Roman people as the late B. B. Warfield. But whether this will ever bring us closer to Rome is more than doubtful. For a start, where is the “real presence of Christ” in the Passover meal? All talk of the re-enactment of the deliverance from slavery in Egypt, of the re-presentation of the sacrifice of the Passover lamb and so on, fails at this point. The exodus was an event, not a person, and so all talk of bodily presence is irrelevant to it. We can hold to the eucharist as a re-enactment of Christ’s sacrificial death and resurrection without dragging his body into it, if one can speak so irreverently; and that is what most Protestants appear to do.
The real problem, in Bray’s opinion, is not that Reformed Protestants have a different take on the eucharistic elements, but that they focus on Christ’s acts rather than on his body. This is what explains the comments made by some of them that we must claim his mediatorial work in heaven on our behalf This is not a re-enactment of his earthly sacrifice or a re-presentation of it, but an appropriation of something being done in heaven for our benefit. This appropriation can only be made by faith, of course, which is why the recipient must be aware of what he or she is doing for it to have any meaning. Consuming consecrated bread and wine cannot by itself make a difference to anyone, though Roman Catholic theories of transubstantiation would seem to imply that it. can.
On the question of the eucharistic celebrants and ministers, Bray said that he agrees with Hunsinger that this is an important practical question but not one of great theological significance. The New Testament
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never says who celebrated the eucharist in the early church, and Paul’s instructions to the Corinthians are remarkably vague on this point. As far as we can tell, there is no absolute reason why it cannot be done by any member of the church, though obviously questions of order come into this. Without getting caught up in that discussion, Bray maintained that he would only say that he thinks that far too much weight has been placed on this issue, and that churches defending a sola Scriptura approach to theological matters should point this out. In his view we should simply say that eucharistic celebra- tion is an extension of the ministry of the Word and should therefore probably be restricted to those authorized to perform that ministry (262), and that Scripture does not authorize either women or practicing homosexuals to exercise it. Bray admitted that that is controversial, but he wanted to record that those in the Anglican Communion who see themselves as Reformed would align themselves with the Roman Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox on this issue — though for very different reasons!
In conclusion, Bray noted that he greatly enjoyed reading Hunsinger’s stimulating book and hoped that it would provoke much reflection on the very important questions that it raises.
A response from George Hungsiner and a lively discussion followed these presentations.
Book Reviews
Christian Ethics as Witness: Barth ’s Ethics for a World at Risk. DAVID HADDORFF. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2010. 480pp. $54.00 Paperback.
David Haddorffs book is a solid offering that further strengthens the recognized reading of Barth as a moral theologian. For Barth, as Haddorff helpfully explains, talk of the God of the Gospel necessarily demands witness to his work of making all things new. Descri- ption of the character of human response to God’s covenantal achievement of a new humanity in Christ as witness, is germane to Haddorffs account: “If a ‘Christian ethics’ seeks to remain theological, it too rests upon God’s grace for its deliberations and actions in choosing what is ethically right” (7). Thus Haddorffs plea is that Christian ethics honor a particular starting point, namely God’s saving action and speech. That Haddorff be particularly concerned with articulation of the proper departure point for Christian ethics is not surprising, given that some of the more fashionable approaches to Christian ethics today privilege the church. The animating impulse of Haddorffs reading of Barth is simply that ethics be an undertaking whose antecedent is always God’s salutary engagement with the world in the life, cross, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Four main parts constitute Haddorffs text. In PART ONE, there is a discussion of “Ethics and Barth’s Witness: Theology and Practiced Here we see that for Barth Christian ethics or special ethics is action that is in harmony with God’s claim, decision, and judgment of the human in Christ. Such an account honors the need for alterity, namely “God as the divine Other as the basis for responsibility to the human other" (55). An ethics of responsibility is precisely the kind of ethics Barth gives us, not an ethics of laws, principles, virtues, of decision or character. Rather, Christian ethics involves beginning in the right place, that is, with the Gospel. Indeed, the Gospel contains law: it includes “what we must do for God,” which is precisely the imperative character of the indicative.
PART TWO of Haddorffs text, “Postmodemity and a World at Risk,” treats the reader to a wide-ranging and careful theologically motivated survey of contemporary social theory. The problem, Haddorff argues, is that, especially in the case of deconstructionist thinkers, persons “are unable to move beyond their socio-cultural contingency to reflect about themselves, others, society, moral truth, or normative ethics” (177). The problem that belies deconstruction, but not only deconstruction, is its inability and unwillingness to articulate a moral ontology. Without such, “there is no basic coherence between one’s moral identity and one’s orientation.” (190) The problem, in other words, is imprisonment by “immanent frameworks of power” (194). Although Haddorff is for the most part concerned with articulating ethics’ appropriate starting point, he does on occasion suggest, following Barth, that Christian ethics is beholden to the present tense, to God’s establishing of the good. There is a moral realism generated by the theological structure of things, a moral realism which emphasizes the ongoing work of Christ in evoking witness to his ways and works.
In PART THREE “Witness and Barth’s Ethics,” Christian ethics is described as an ethics of witness. So Haddorff: “Christian witness proclaims and demonstrates in practice that God has acted, is acting, and will act pro nobis.... Instead of standing only within the walls of the church, Christians look through these walls to the world, and in so doing, stand within the ‘environment of the man Jesus” (236). Accordingly, an ethics of witness is an ethics of participation, participation in Christ’s own self- witness. It is precisely Jesus’ self-witness that gives ''freedom and responsibility" to act upon the divine claim and command of grace (255). Here we see once again Haddorffs intention to push the agency question to the fore: Jesus and with him the Spirit are where an account of Christian ethics must always begin. Rather than beginning with the church, Haddorff argues that the promise of Barth’s account lies in his judgment that the church’s witness is generated by “God’s determinative gracious action, whereas for Hauerwas witness occurs
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with the human action of the Christian community ‘pointing to God’” (265). The point Haddorff makes with respect to Hauerwas is an important one. It reminds us of the fact that “the Yes of Christian witness primarily rests in God’s gracious action in Jesus Christ for the world, and not in the church’s practice or sacramental performance” (267).
Although such a heavy emphasis on God as the acting subject who makes ethics possible may suggest a lack of interest in the complex issues facing today’s pluralistic societies, Haddorff argues that the opposite is true. As Christians we ‘“have an obligation to seriously listen to the voice of others’” and so to “‘eavesdrop on the world at large’” {CD IV/3, 117; 303). This is because Christians, to say nothing of the church, do not have a monopoly on the good. A thoroughly theological theology such as Barth’s insists that when Christians seek to do the good, they do not jettison theological commitments. Accordingly, Barth’s attitude toward other starting points, other conceptions of the good is a remarkably comprehensive one. Theological exclusivism is not inimical, however, to the formulation of a “public ethics for a diverse and pluralistic society” (316). Instead, Barth’s ethics would have us work for the good of all whilst recognizing that the good has not only been definitively established in Christ but is yet being established by him. Christians are simply content to confess that Christian ethics in its core originates from the Word of God who elects to commandeer other words in the speaking of his Word. If such is the case, then, ethics cannot originate from the church (against Hauerwas) or be a mere addendum to what the civil community understands to be a proper course(s) of action.
In PART FOUR, “Christian Ethics as witness,” Haddorff argues forcefully that “God invites Christians to act as witnesses, giving them permission to act decisively, .purposively, and confidently today against powers that distort God’s name in the world, by seeking to ‘rise up and accept responsibility to the utmost of their power for the doing of a little righteousness’” {CL. 265; 367). Witness and not representation, witness and not imitation because Christian ethics takes ontology seriously: what is. Because Christian ethics has in faith encountered what is, the rule of God come in Christ, it can engage in action that corresponds to God’s actions so as to be empowered, for example, to engage in “limited efforts to reform existing economic systems” (409). The “limited” is important here as it helps us to recognize Barth’s aversion to ideological approaches to ethics. In what is the most trenchant section of Haddorff s text, he reminds us that what makes ideology toxic is that it possesses no resources for self-criticism. Whereas an ethics that rests in God’s action, recognizes, following Barth, that human efforts to do a little good are radically dependent upon “the better future actually becoming a reality” (439).
Indeed, the witness that Christian ethics offers to the world is that the powers of nothingness “are defeated in the ‘strange battle’ of Jesus Christ as ‘prophetic witness’” (445). Yes, Christians do indeed do a little righteousness. Yet the righteousness they do is dependent upon God’s doing in Christ. That doing is a doing which they ought to always follow after and that to which they must remain continually subservient.
Haddorff s text is to be commended for its careful reading of Barth. Haddorff reminds us that Barth never envisaged the ethical task as one that is somehow responsible for generating its own concerns. The language of witness assumes that there is always One who precedes, and who precedes as One who is and does the righteousness we are called to do. The environment of action matters. Moreover, Haddorff is conversant with tracts of literature on ethics and philosophy (both modern and “postmodern” in the case of the latter); that is helpful in reminding us that Barth’s proposals are certainly as radical now as they were in his own day. Indeed, the wide variety of secondary literature at Haddorff s command is testimony to the very “eavesdropping” that Barth commends. Namely, Christian ethics, precisely because of its character as witness, ought not to be circumspect in its hearing of what others are saying and doing and in acknowledging the best of what is being said and done. Christian ethics ought to recognize that God is always at work in his world, and savingly so. Hope, therefore, is possible. It is precisely hope that God’s action generates, hope that invites Christians to act against the principalities and powers that distort God’s name in the world.
When it comes to reservations regarding Haddorff s reading of Barth, there is one. That is, Haddorff emphasizes throughout the text, Christian ethics’ divine starting point. That is fine. But Christian ethics, inasmuch as it is an ethics of reconciliation, is equally invested in ethics’ middle and end point. Accordingly, there is precious little in Haddorff s account about the ongoing work of the Son in his kingly and prophetic work. Jesus Christ is not, I think, fully said in Haddorff s account to the degree that he is said in Barth. Barth is especially insistent in, for example, §69, that Christ is at work through Word and Spirit so as to perfect creaturely action such that it might be more nearly correspondent to his. Were Haddorffs text to have emphasized the importance of the resplendent presence of Christ, as does Barth, and his presence as One who ministers in Word and Spirit in such a way as to create ministers of his holy Gospel, his already impressive offering would be that much more strengthened.
To conclude, the notion that dogmatics includes ethics, that theology proper is also moral, is well-founded now in the best of Barth scholarship. What Haddorffs text does, is not only strengthen this basic insight, but also
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see how it continues to differentiate Barth and, at times, align him with a whole host of contemporary offerings, both from within and outside of the Christian tradition. Barth’s enduring contribution to ethics is not only the formulation of an ethics that emerges from the Word of God, but also an ethics that must be continually beholden to that very same Word.
Christopher R. J. Holmes
University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
Reconciled Humanity: Karl Barth In Dialogue. HANS VHJM MIKKELSEN. Grand Rapids and Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans, 2010. 280pp. $30.00 Paperback.
There are many different kinds of books these days on Barth: some are more “expos itional” and “analytical” in tone, whilst others are more constructive. Vium Mikkelsen’s recent effort is decidedly of the latter. It is indeed an unabashedly “constructive reading of Barth” (6). What renders it constructive is that Vium Mikkelsen employs others (for example, R. Girard) so as to better inhabit aspects of Barth’s thought that are sometimes only glossed or else deemed to be problematic. One of the underlying reasons for so doing, Vium Mikkelsen argues, is to deliver Barth from what he perceives to be, at times, a rather narrow reception of his thought. Other ways of practicing and doing theology are invoked by Vium Mikkelsen so as to help us see not only the strengths of Barth’s theology, but also its chief weakness, namely, an inability to appreciate that “God himself is changed due to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ” (6).
Vium Mikkelsen’s text is divided into three parts. Part 1: Revelation is more or less a reading of Barth that highlights the extent to which God’s revelation “includes the human being’s self- involvement within this revelation” (28). It is the subjective side of revelation that Vium Mikkelsen brings to the fore, in order to reflect upon the “status the human experience of revelation should have” (50). The upshot of such reflection is that “experience” is, for Barth, a category to be positively elaborated “as it expresses the actual impact and power that the Word of God has on the individual human being” (59). Knowledge of the triune God’s ways and works does not, in other words, land like a ‘thud’ upon the human but rather engenders participation. To participate in Christ is to be converted, to direct ourselves according to what is real.
Part II: The Humanity of the Creature rehearses material rather well trodden in Barth studies. Taking seriously the real man as the One through whom “the phenomenon of man should be interpreted,” Vium Mikkelsen argues, in conversation with M. Buber, that humanity truly understood is fellow humanity. To be human is, for
Barth, to be in relation, to gladly submit to and to live out of its determination by God to be his own covenant partner. Nothingness and its first fimit sin would, however, have us think and do otherwise. Nothingness destroys what is, “as it is the negative consequence of God’s election (the rejection that is included in an election)” (141). And so, the ethical consequence is that humans should not live as if nothingness has not been destroyed.
Part III: Christology and Atonement is the most constructive section of the book and, at times, the most unguarded in its judgments as to Barth’s shortcomings. Whether it be a discussion of the Chalcedonian pattern, the covenant, or the humanity of Jesus Christ, the basic criticism championed by Vium Mikkelsen is that God, for Barth, “did not really absorb the experience of Jesus Christ on the cross” (157). Stated differently, Barth’s account of God takes up far too inadequately the “unity of mutual interrelations between the three subjects of the Trinity,” with the result being that Barth is unable to depict the extent to which God freely and willingly allows himself to be transformed by the experiences of Jesus (158). This is of course a contestable reading. However, Vium Mikkelsen is not trying to deliberately provoke so much as to help the reader appreciate that Barth’s account of the trinity “as the one absolute subject’s three modes of being” has embraced a view of God which is unable to acknowledge “that God actually did change during the incarnation” (224). In arguing such, it is not as if Vium Mikkelsen is unaware of Barth’s account of the covenant. Quite the opposite: he offers in ch. 8 a responsible description of Barth’s Christologically determined doctrine of election: “The covenant is a covenant of grace rooted in God’s free election of grace” (177). However, where Vium Mikkelsen departs from Barth is in his development of the implications of Barth’s account as it concerns God’s being. That God freely lets himself be judged in Christ “by those who were to be judged by God,” entails “risk” on God’s side in such a way that an account of God’s self-sufficiency that does not include one of God’s suffering is ruled out (195, 184). The upshot is a Christology from below. Accordingly, “What happens in the life and death of Jesus caimot leave God unchanged. God cannot really be the same as before” (229).
The atonement, as the culmination of the incarnation, whilst it does not denote God overcoming a conflict in himself, does, however, imply that God is changed. In a reading of the atonement that takes seriously, although in my judgment not unproblematically, the ontic effects of the act of redemption, God’s being cannot then be said to remain unaltered. Vium Mikkelsen recognizes that he is going against Barth in arguing such. Nonetheless, Vium Mikkelsen thinks such a move to be a wise one insofar as Christological and atonement doctrine, on Barth’s reading, require one to move beyond Barth to take even
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more seriously than Barth does the self-willed change that accrues to God’s being as a result of God’s having in Jesus Christ taken on the experience of God’s absence on the cross, thereby absorbing it. Recognizing his indebtedness at this point to Pannenberg, Vium Mikkelsen avers that Barth’s doctrine of God and thus his Christology is beholden to Hegel, and so to a “perception of God... worked out within a paradigm of the sovereign subject and the self-consciousness of the subject” (256). What is required is a more “dynamic conception of God’s inner being” that accordingly has the resources to “take the suffering of Jesus Christ on the cross up into his own inner-trinitarian being” ( 257). Put differently, Barth’s account would be more edifying if he were not so shackled by a paradigm that prevents him from letting Jesus’ experience of God’s forsakenness be determinative for articulation of God’s being. “God” is, for Vium Mikkelsen, what we get as a result of the economy of salvation, not the condition. If this be so, then we ought not to be afraid of allowing for “real development” within God’s being (258). “Must the being of God then not also be influenced by the acts of God?” (259). In sum, Vium Mikkelsen moves beyond Barth in his account of Christology and Atonement (Part III) in order to offer a description of God’s being that is more relevant to God’s having become human in Jesus Christ. Vium Mikkelsen’s instincts with regard to bringing Barth into dialogue with thinkers with whom he is not always sought to have common ground — e.g., Girard — are helpful. Barth was never reticent when it came to “eavesdropping” on what others were saying so as to help the church and the individual Christian hear what is being said by the Scriptural witness to the triune God’s work and ways. Moreover, Vium Mikkelsen is to be applauded for a reading of Barth on the atonement that makes abundantly clear that Jesus’ death is not one that overcomes “internal obstacles within God” (139). The atonement is the first fhiit of God’s salutary judgment of sin and death in his Son, he who is not only the object but also the subject of judgment.
Vium Mikkelsen’s text suffers in what is its primary constructive move: to incorporate God’s experience of being human in Christ, of suffering and dying, into an account of the being of God. Vium Mikkelsen’s criticisms in this regard are not “new.” Others, too, have suggested that God’s history needs be determinative in ways other than Barth would allow for description of God’s being. Where I think Vium Mikkelsen errs is in not adequately differentiating the humanity and divinity of Jesus. To be sure, the Son of God does die a human death in the man Jesus. The Son of God is always the active agent in the uniting of humanity to his divinity in the person of Jesus Christ. Classical Reformed and Lutheran differences about the communicatio idiomatum lie, I think, behind Vium Mikkelsen’s objections. He wants, less so than does Barth, to admit of separation or change when it comes to articulation of the relationship
between the two natures in the one person of Christ. What happens to Jesus happens, for Vium Mikkelsen, to God. At this point, I think Vium Mikkelsen’s account suffers precisely because “God” and “the Son” become blurred. The New Testament knows only of a suffering Son and not a suffering “God.” To be sure, atonement is a triune act. However, Vium Mikkelsen seems to inadequately specify the work peculiar to each of the three persons in the act of atonement. That is, it is the Son — the second person — who willingly assumes the likeness of sinful flesh in order to be judged by and so to judge what is incompatible with his Father’s covenantal purposes for humanity.
Jungel’s language of “reiteration” is quite helpful in enabling us to see what are Barth’s intentions, in a way that lessens considerably the force of Vium Mikkelsen’s criticisms. Jiingel argues that Barth is in the business of articulating an ontology appropriate to the Gospel. What the Gospel gives us is not a God who is indifferent to his historical activity but rather a God whose covenantal activity is a faithful reiteration — in a radically new key — of who God eternally is in all of his glorious ontological self-sufficiency. Accordingly, God’s subjectivity, if you will, is more the “condition” of the economy of grace, and certainly not the result of it. God’s subjectivity takes place in the history of Israel consummated in Jesus in a way that teaches the hearer that what the triune God is doing there is entirely consistent with his eternal identity as Father, Son, and Spirit. Logical priority is thus assigned to God’s immanent identity, such that his immanent identity is what is freely enacted in conditions and among a people profoundly at odds with it. That the Son of God becomes human does not “change” God so much as demonstrate God’s freedom to be the One he eternally is — Father, Son, and Spirit — so as to achieve for creatures what he eternally wills and determines for them, namely covenant fellowship with himself
In sum, Vium Mikkelsen’s text, represents a constructive reading of Barth that draws different conclusions from Barth than most would concede Barth’s thought allows. Vium Mikkelsen reads Barth generally well, and is knowledgeable of wide tracts of secondary German language literature, of which English language readers of Barth are often unaware. This helps us to hear how Barth has been and is being heard on the European continent. My reservations toward Vium Mikkelsen’s text lie, basically, at an exegetical level. That is, following Barth, I do not think the Gospels and Paul view the act of redemption as constitutive for God’s being. Jesus Christ’s antecedent existence in the eternal Word, the eternal Son’s enactment of himself in the man Jesus as the man Jesus, and the Spirit of his Father whom he freely receives and breathes, resist description along the lines of their being changed by what they do for us and for our salvation. To be sure, the Son of God does do a new thing by becoming incarnate. However, the Son
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remains himself in becoming human. He enacts his identity in a way that faithfully reiterates who he always is, together with his Father and their Spirit, even unto suffering and death. His coming in the name of the One he calls Father in the power of the Spirit is his humiliation and concomitantly our exaltation. Jesus Christ’s experience of suffering and death does not change “God,” so much as point us to the radical freedom and power of the Son of God to be and to enact himself in obedience to his Father and in the power of the Spirit over and against all that is contrary to himself in a way that is radically consonant with himself
Christopher R. J. Holmes
University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
Karl Barth: God’s Word in Action. PAUL S. CHUNG. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2008. 504pp. $55.00. Paperback.
In this hefty volume, Paul S. Chung tackles one of the most intriguing and difficult issues in Barth studies: the relationship between Barth’s theological beliefs and Barth’s political convictions. Chung’s principal concern is to promote a distinctive “contextual-hermeneutical and historical-genetic” (24) approach to Barth’s theology. This approach is constantly attentive to the political contexts in which Barth wrote and in which Barth sought to intervene, yet eschews reductionistic modes of analysis. As such, while Chung argues that Barth’s theology never lacks for political significance, he supposes that the objective fact of God’s self-sufficient reality and self-disclosive activity — not an idiosyncratic set of political convictions, nor a contingent array of political circumstances — grounds and directs the Swiss theologian’s writing. Chung’s supplementary concern is to bring Barth’s (politicized) theology into conversation with contemporary reflection. To this end, the book includes discussions of gender, Israel, Barth’s
relationship with Luther, liberation theology, and religious pluralism.
The first five chapters of the book follow Barth’s career in the 1910s, 1920s, and early 1930s. Chung offers lengthy examinations of Barth’s theology and activism in Safenwil, the first and second editions of Der Romerbrief important occasional pieces (especially the Tambach lecture of 1919, “Der Christ in der Gesellschaft”), and work produced in Gottingen and Munster. Barth’s intellectual biography is often ably handled is these chapters, and Chung’s attention to the political import of Barth’s writing is very much welcome — not least because, the efforts of some inter- preters notwithstanding, much English-language scholar- ship continues to dissociate Barth’s dogmatics and Barth’s advocacy of democratic socialism. Chung’s basic interpretative stance, if I understand it correctly, entails a revision of the perspective advanced by Friedrich-
Wilhelm Marquardt in Theologie und Sozialismus: Das Beispiel Karl Barths (1972). On the one hand, Chung rejects the suggestion that Barth’s theology was generated and shaped by socialist convictions. Marquardt was right to connect Barth’s politics and Barth’s theology, but wrong in his assessment of their relationship; Barth consistently thought von Gott aus, not von Feuerbach und Marx aus. On the other hand, Chung retains a Marquardtian sensibility, and some of Marquardt’s key insights play a leading role in his analysis. For instance: Barth’s early writing “attempted to see the ‘left’ of socialism grounded in the ‘above’ of God” (69); the “new world in the Bible, the new world of God, implies the revolutionary overthrow of the existing bourgeois society” (111); Romans I advocates a divine revolution that is also a social critique and a “praxis of liberation” (146); and Romans II urges a “politics of protest against the existing social order” (212). Even the stabilization of Barth’s thought in the 1920s and early 1930s should be understood in terms of a politically oriented perspective. Barth’s interest in protestant scholasticism and, more concretely, his deepened grasp of the incarnation, relate to a theological perspective defined by its “radical, questioning character” (279) and its demand for political engagement and struggle.
Subsequent chapters deal mainly with the Church Dogmatics, albeit in a somewhat ad hoc way and, regrettably, with less attention to the context in which Barth wrote. After some useful remarks on Barth’s opposition to the “German Christians,” his rejection of Nazi ideology, and his response to Emil Brunner’s Natur und Gnade, chapter six considers Barth’s understanding of covenant, creation, the analogia fidei, and the all- encompassing activity of Jesus Christ. Chapter seven tackles the relatively neglected issue of Barth’s relationship to Martin Luther, focusing particularly on Barth’s appropriation of the enhypostasis! anhypostasis distinction, the theology of the cross, Jesus’ Jewishness, and the assumptio carnis. Chung’s appropriation of claims initially advanced by Friedrich-Wilhelm
Marquardt continues; like Marquardt, for instance, he discerns an elective affinity between Barth’s
understanding of the humanity of Christ and Feuerbach’s construal of the human species {Gattung). Chapter eight engages the difficult question of Barth’s understanding of Israel and Judaism, again with a Marquardtian twist: Chung contends that, for Barth, “the objectivity of God” means “a real revolution of all life-connections” (393). Chapter nine offers some general reflections on the relationship between Barth’s work, democratic socialism, and liberation theology. Finally, by way of conclusion and emphasizing Barth’s commitment to an open-ended, revisable dogmatics, Chung considers Barth’s possible contribution to discussions about religious pluralism.
Certainly, the political dimensions of Barth’s theology are an important area for research, and Chung’s book
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offers some useful observations. The analysis of the first edition of Der Romer brief \s particularly intriguing, as is Chung’s treatment of the Barth-Brunner debate; equally, the claim that Barth’s emphasis on God’s self-sufficient reality has as its complement a persistent “de-assuring of theology” (282) seems on-target. More generally, I am sympathetic to Chung’s willingness to engage Marquardf s instructive (but, admittedly, flawed) attempt to coordinate Barth’s dogmatics with his socialist convictions, while also looking towards the relevance of Barth for Christian theology today. It seems likely that scholarship that thinks with and beyond Barth will be increasingly important in the twenty-first century; it is to Chung’s credit that he combines close textual and historical analysis with a constructive agenda.
With that said, as a whole this book does not succeed. I would identify four particular problems. First, Chung’s analysis is sometimes patchy, digressive, and difficult to follow. While many chapters provide lengthy summaries of Barth’s writing, interwoven with some keen insights, they often sprawl and lack coherence. Chung’s handling of certain issues, moreover, strikes me as questionable. His treatment of “dialectic” and “analogy,” for instance, seems incomplete, and the consideration of Barth on gender does not convince. Second, the text suffers from the absence of an orderly exposition of the Church Dogmatics. Chung supposes, I think, that an analysis of Barth’s theology in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s provides the interpretative leverage needed to uncover the political dimensions of Barth’s later theology. This may well be a fair supposition. However, without the support of a rigorous examination of key themes and motifs in the Dogmatics, Chung’s remarks on the political dimensions of Barth’s magnum opus seem overly speculative; all too often, suggestive gestures appear in place of assured interpretative judgments. Third, I worry that Chung does not reckon with the political dimensions of Barth’s Christology. It does not seem sufficient, to my mind, to reprise and modestly to expand Marquardt’s claims about the assumptio humanum. More needful is an in-depth examination of Barth’s Christology — and, of course, Barth’s sophisticated appropriation of the munus triplex — as it as it relates to a politically vibrant theological anthropology and ecclesiology. Fourth and finally, Chung avoids one of the most difficult issues when it comes to understanding the political dimensions of Barth’s theology. To wit: how does one gauge the political import of a text like the Church Dogmatics when, for the most part, this text studiously avoids explicit political commentary? How does one make sense of a style of writing that, while committed to doing theology “as though nothing had happened” (Theologische Existenz Heute!), quickly impresses upon the reader the need for political action on behalf of the downcast and marginalized? To my knowledge, no author provides a satisfactory answer to questions such as these; indeed, the issue of Barth’s rhetoric and its
intended political effects remains under-investigated. Nonetheless, the issue is urgent, both for Barth studies and for an academy prone to drive a wedge between systematic and liberationist modes of theological reflection.
In sum, while I applaud Chung’s scholarly instincts and commend certain dimensions of his book, I found this work lacking in many respects. Those looking to appreciate the political dimensions of Barth’s theology for the first time will profit fi'om it, but those hoping for a substantial advance in scholarship may well come away disappointed.
Paul Dafydd Jones
University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA
The Editor wishes to thank Christopher Holmes and Paul Dafydd Jones for contributing these fine reviews to the Newsletter. We are all deeply in their debt.
Congratulations to Eric G. Flett of Eastern University on the publication of his book. Persons, Powers, And Pluralities'. Toward a Trinitarian Theology of Culture (Eugene Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 2011).
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