Karl Barth’s Theology of Divine Freedom
But then what about Karl Barth? What about this man who rejected the liberalism of his teachers (who included Harnack), and who is so often listed alongside Athanasius, Augustine, Luther, and Calvin as one of the greatest theologians of the Church? Barth is the one who almost single-handedly slew the utopian liberalism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries[1] – even if it has taken a long time to die. Was it not Barth who pointed many back to the Bible? For many scholars who saw themselves as evangelical, Barth was one of them, at least in spirit. As an example of this consider these two quotations from Bernard Ramm:
In a conference with Barth in my year at Basel (July 11, 1958), I asked him if he were orthodox in the sense that he wanted to keep loyal to the whole Christian tradition in theology. He said that if orthodoxy were so defined, he would not object to the classification.[2]
To repeat, Barth isn’t for every evangelical theologian. But for those who believe that the Enlightenment created problems for evangelical theology that never existed before, his theology is attractive.[3]
Ramm was clearly enamored of Barth, yet he was also concerned with the state of evangelical scholarship, as he perceived it.
My concern is that evangelicals have not come to a systematic method of interacting with modern knowledge…This…is evident in the fact that so much evangelical scholarship is piggy-backing on nonevangelical scholarship. It does not have an authentic scholarship of its own. But Barth’s paradigm has resulted in an authentic methodology.[4]
Whether one fully agrees with these words or not it is certainly the case that Barth’s influence upon evangelicalism has been important and is growing.[5] This can be witnessed by the fact that not a few leading evangelical scholars draw upon him in their various areas of study.[6]
When Barth is read on the doctrine of revelation he can sound both orthodox and profound:
In the life of God…things are so ordered and necessary that the work of God in His Word is the one supreme and true lordship in which He gives Himself to be known and is known.[7]
If we are already aware that Christology really is and must remain the life-centre of theology, of all theology, and if we are also aware that the correct interpretation of Christology, as presented even by the older orthodoxy, is to be found in the doctrine of the justification of the sinner by faith alone. For the point at issue is that it is not a good thing to operate in theology with a twofold truth. The point at issue is that in the doctrine of God, in the doctrine of the knowledge of God by Jesus Christ, we must think and speak and argue from the Word of God and not from elsewhere.[8]
This indeed sounds very good. But ought we to think again? Will following Barth take Bible-believing evangelicals into unrecognizable territory? We believe it will. There is no space here to do an in-depth analysis of Barth’s meaning. It will have to suffice us to draw out some of the major emphases in the German theologian’s teaching and then to see how evangelical he appears.
Barth’s thought is expansive and brilliant. It is not in our power to scope out his massive contribution. We shall confine ourselves to highlighting those areas where he voiced clear disagreements with conservative theologians of the past. These, we think, can be understood only once one has grasped the central pillar of his thought, which is the problem of how the immutability of God is comprehended within earthly categories, such as Incarnation and inscripturation.[9]
First, then, there is the insistence by Barth upon the absolute freedom of God. In the way Barth propounds it this “freedom” does away with the traditional understanding of the categories of omnipresence and immanence. This, in turn, affects the doctrine of Scripture as the Word of God. To cite Berkouwer:
In his view of Scripture, Barth takes exactly the same position today [i.e. 1952] that he did in 1926 when he first wrote on the Reformed doctrine of Scripture…The containment of the word of God – of the living and personal God – in a book, is quite impossible, he said…Thus Barth refuses strongly to speak of a direct identification between the Word of God and the Bible…
We need not be uncertain about the view of Barth; he is very clear in this respect. He opposes the inspiration of the Bible in the sense that the Word of God is contained in a book which lies before us on the table. Scripture is not to be identified with the Word of God; the Word of God is a miracle…The big mistake of the orthodox position is said to be this: the Lord is not allowed to speak now; his freedom is attacked; the mighty God is enclosed in a book.
According to Barth, we have in the Bible a fallible human witness of the original revelation of God in the flesh…[10]
To summarize, Barth equates the Word of God with God Himself – above all in the Person of Jesus Christ. To him it is a surd thing to believe that the Word who is God can be confined to a book. Berkouwer (at least in the early fifties) calls this, “The most striking attack of Barth on the orthodox doctrine of inspiration.”[11] As well as enclosing God inside the pages of a book, this would also, in effect, bind God within the constraints of (human) time, since the Bible itself is an historical document.
This shows plainly that there is a wide divide between Barth and conservative evangelicals. Barth’s insistence on God’s “freedom” forced him to disassociate God from the production of the Bible as His infallible Word to man. He viewed the evangelical position on Scripture – as, say, represented by B. B. Warfield – as entailing a docetic doctrine of the Word. Which is to say, those, like Warfield, who insist upon a strict identity between the Bible and the Word of God, default to a docetic view of Scripture since they, like the docetists[12] of the early church (who could never condone the humanity of Christ, and, thus totally emphasized the divinity of Christ), refer to the Scriptures as fully divine without giving due consideration to the human influence on its production and transmission.[13] And he has been followed closely in this regard by many of his devotees.[14] As McCormack puts it; “Human language has no capacity in and of itself to be the bearer of the Word of God. Nor does it acquire such a capacity through the inspiration of the prophets and apostles…the Word of God is God, and God cannot be made the predicate of anything creaturely.”[15]
Consequently, Barth has had to redefine doctrines so as to circumvent the central officiating role of Scripture in all theologizing, including the theology of the Word of God and the Divine attributes. This has meant for him an abandonment of the truth of propositional revelation,[16] and this, in turn, has led him to postulate a errant view of the mission of Christ as the “elect man,” leading him on to teach what sounds very like universalism.[17]
We believe that Barth’s major flaw is his rejection of propositional revelation; a move that allows him to teach the dialectic of the fallibility of man (and the words of Scripture) and the infallibility of God.[18] In its stead he has put ‘the genius of Barth’ as a replacement for ‘the genius of God’ in the Bible. What results from this are methodological options which will carry the theologian far adrift from traditional Reformation moorings, and he will end up sounding most un-evangelical.[19]
Positive Contributions?
Despite Barth being outside the evangelical camp[20] he does have some important things to say to us: things which ought to be given consideration when we are writing our own theologies. Here are the most noteworthy:
a. Barth insists that man cannot know God unless God chooses to be known.
b. He insists on identifying this God with the triune God of the Bible.
c. Although he goes further than seems warranted by the evidence, he rightly rejects the classical version of Natural Theology.
d. He gives a sober reminder to evangelical “biblicists” regarding the human dimension of Scripture.
e. He sees Christology as the lens through which we ought to view our humanness.
f. Finally, Barth’s concern that theology is for the Church is helpful in these times of individualism.
[1] Cf. Roger E. Olsen, The Story of Christian Theology, (Downers Grove: IVP, 1999), 577.
[2] Bernard Ramm, After Fundamentalism: The Future of Evangelical Theology, (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983), 12.
[3] Ramm, 39.
[4] Ramm, 27.
[5] Kurt Anders Richardson, Reading Karl Barth, 58
[6] As well as Ramm we could mention the significant impact of the work of G. C. Berkouwer’s Holy Scripture, and the ongoing effects of Donald Bloesch’s 7-volume Christian Foundations.
[7] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1:48, as cited by Richardson, Reading Karl Barth, 50.
[8] Ibid, 51-52.
[9] I came to this conclusion by studying the statements of Barth and his interpreters. I do not say that it is in any way new or novel. Indeed, Bruce McCormack, perhaps the foremost expert on Barth writing in English (so says Richardson), says something very similar in an essay on Barth’s understanding of the Bible: “The Being of Holy Scripture is in Becoming,” in Vincent Bacote, Laura C. Miguelez and Dennis L. Okholm, editors, Evangelicals & Scripture: Tradition, Authority and Hermeneutics, (Downers Grove: IVP, 2004), 74.
[10] G. C. Berkouwer, Modern Uncertainty and Christian Faith, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1953), 15-17.
[11] Ibid, 20.
[12] This identification was not meant to imply that orthodox “Biblicists” held to the sort of dualism between Divine-spiritual versus human-material that was characteristic of the docetic teachers such as the Gnostics. But it was meant to imply that in so stressing the divinity of the Bible these men were, whether they recognized it or not, representing Scripture in a way which predicated of it only an appearance (dokein) of a human book.
[13] So Berkouwer, who by the mid 1960’s had absorbed more of Barth, and thus became overly sensitive to this kind of criticism. See his Holy Scripture, trans. Jack Rogers, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), 17-18.
[14] For example, see Ramm, After Fundamentalism, 103, who says, “Evangelicals hedge the humanity of Scriptures by surrounding it with the divinity of Scripture.”
[15] McCormack, 69-70.
[16] Among those ‘evangelicals’ who have accepted this denial of propositional revelation are included such leading theologians as Bernard Ramm, (After Fundamentalism, 114), and Donald Bloesch. Bloesch’s opinion is worth citing in full:
“While we grant that in one sense the Bible is the revelation of God to man, this revelation is in the form of human witness and is, therefore, to a degree hidden from the sight and understanding…The bane of much modern evangelicalism is rationalism which presupposes that the Word of God is directly available to human reason. It is fashionable to refer to the biblical revelation as propositional, and in one sense this is true…The Bible is not directly the revelation of God but indirectly in that God’s Word comes to us through the mode of human instrumentality.” – Donald Bloesch, Essentials of Evangelical Theology, (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978), I.75-76.
[17] Ramm has a chapter on this in After Fundamentalism (viz. Ch. 15). He writes:
“Barth’s final word on universalism is in Church Dogmatics (IV/3). He writes that we have no right to counter the Scriptural message that there is a final separation of the saved and the lost. No matter how our theology pushes us in that direction, we must not capitulate. But, then on the next page, he returns to the idea expressed in his The Humanity of God: God might surprise us! His grace is always beyond our calculation. He may save all!” (167).
This revealing passage brings out the Barthian belief in God’s “freedom” in stark relief. Notwithstanding all his exegesis of the Biblical text, Barth can still ride roughshod over the propositions of Scripture when his thought requires. This removes him a long way from true orthodoxy.
Strangely, some of his more recent advocates (e.g. McCormack, Richardson) seem rather shy to discuss this aspect of their subject’s thought.
[18] Cf. Trevor Hart, Regarding Karl Barth, (Carlisle, UK: Paternoster Press, 1999), 36-40.
[19] At this point we must leave it. For a fine brief evaluation of Barth’s problematical theology see John Frame’s summarization of Van Til’s findings in John M. Frame, Cornelius Van Til: An Analysis of His Thought, (Phillipsburg: P&R, 1995), 364-365.
[20] This is certainly where Barth belongs and, despite the wishes of some besotted evangelicals, it is where he needs to be kept. This can be shown clearly to anyone who interacts with Cornelius Van Til’s, Christianity and Barthianism, (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1962). Van Til closes his searchant critique with these words: “Barth’s system has neutralized the true freedom of God. He has woven this true freedom into a pattern of identity with the freedom of man.” – Christianity and Barthianism, 490.
