Karl Barth Society newsletter

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

9

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

10

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

11

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

12

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.

13

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

14

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.

15

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

16

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

17

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

18

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

19

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

20

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

21

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

22

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

23

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

24

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

25

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

26

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

27

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

28

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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