Karl Barth's Retrieval of Luther's Substantive Christology by Amy Ellen Marga

Jesus Christ and the Modern Sinner: Karl Barth's Retrieval of Luther's Substantive Christology Amy Ellen Marga Luther Seminary

Currents in Theology and Mission 34 no 4 Ag 2007, p 260-270
Despite Karl Barth*s lasting commitment to the Reformed tradition of John Calvin, it is the thought of Martin Luther that casts a long shadow over Barm's theology. As George Hunsinger points out. At certain vital points Barth follows Luther not only, broadly speaking, against Calvin and the Reformed tradition, but also against the main lines of the Lutheran tradition. There are points, in other words, where Barth actually retrieved Luther in order to stand with him not only against modernity, but also against the rest of the Reformation. (George Hunsinger. Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids. MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans. 2000). 282.) If we refocus the historical lens upon Barth and Luther, they can be seen to stand like bookends on the shelf of the modern age. with Luther standing at the beginning of what historians now call "early moder-nity," and Barth standing at its end.(W. Stacy Johnson, among others, has even suggested that Barth"s theology contains the seeds for postmodern theology. See his The Mystery of God: Karl Barth and the Postmodern Foundations of Theology (Louisville. KY: Westminster John Knox. 1997). Barth looked back for the sake of looking forward and in so doing engaged in intense study of Luther. Barth absorbed aspects of Luther's theology that allowed him to articulate Christian theology in deeper and more sophisticated ways over against modernity, which had through the course of the Enlightenment set the criteria for how we know what we know and thus how we articulate the sinner's relationship to Jesus Christ. As Hunsinger has noted. Barth "almost alone among modern theologians" granted "uncompromising precedence to the Reformation over modernity itself." He did not reject modernity, but he "refused to allow secular epistemologie s to set the terms for the validity of the gospel." (Hunsinger. Disruptive Grace. 293.) Barth"s mature Christology. seen in his Church Dogmatics, vol. IV. published in the early 1950s, has been a central channel into comparisons of his theology with that of Luther. Both Karin Bornkamm and Gerhard Ebeling have demonstrated that Luther and Barth share a Christocentrism in the best sense: clearly this was one thing Barth learned from Luther. Bornkamm has shown how Barth transformed Luther's conception of the offices of Christ as priest and king for the sake of forging a relationship
between Christology and soteriology. (Karin Bornkamm. "Die reformatorische
Lehre vom Amt Christi und ihre Umformung durch Karl Barths." in Luther und Barth. Veröffentlichung der Luther-Akademie Ratzeburg. Vol. 13. ed. Joachim Heubach (Erlangen: Martin-Luther-Verlag. 1989). 144. Currents in Theology and Mission 34 4 (August 200 )
Marga, Jesus Christ and the Modern Sinner 261). Ebeling traces the christological impulses that Barth took from Luther, even while Barth formed his own criticisms of the Reformer in the Church Dogmatics.( Gerhard Ebeling. Lutherstudien, vol. 3 (Tubingen: Mohr. 1985). 495-506.) But Barth had already begun retrieving aspects of Luther's Christology almost thirty years earlier. One example of this is a lecture that Barth gave in 1929 in Münster on theology and ethics titled "The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life." After a decade that included two lecture cycles in dogmatic theology and intense engagement with Roman Catholic theology. Barth dove into the works of Augustine, Calvin, and Luther. The result was a lecture on theology and ethics titled "The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life" that displays Barth's deepening understanding of Luther's Christology. In this essay I briefly present Luther's Christology from his 1535 Galatians commentary (Luther wrote this commentary in 1531. but it was not published until 1535.) and show how Barth reached back to retrieve this for his own theology despite the drastically different epistemological landscape of the two thinkers brought about by the Enlightenment. Barth reached over Enlightenment notions of rationality and morality to retrieve Luther's substantive Christology, and in so doing he left behind the psychological and historical interpretations of the person and work of Christ by thinkers such as Werner Elert and Karl Holl. Luther's theology provided Barth with the resources to pull Christology out of the grip of Enlightenment understandings of the individual as an autonomous agent and show that reconciliation of the human to God by God and through God alone need not be beholden to modern theories of rationality or morality. Martin Luther's Christology in the Galatians commentary The richness of Martin Luther's Christology
has provided scholars with a wide variety of angles from which to analyze it. Ebeling has tried to capture its expanse under the terminology of a "forensic-antithetical*'
Christology." Finnish scholars such as Tuomo Mannermaa have focused their attention on the aspect of deification in Luther's early work. (See. for example. Der im Glauben gegenwärtige Christus. Rechtfertigung und Vergottung (Hannover: Lutheran-Verlag-Haus. 1989). Bernhard Lohse. and in more detail Ian Siggins. have approached
Luther ' s Christology from a more inductive angle, ( See Bernhard Lohse, Martin Luther's Theology: Its Historical and Systematic Development (Minneapolis: Fortress. 1999). and Ian D. Kingston Siggins. Martin Luther's Doctrine of Christ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970). 10. See Lohse. Martin Luther's Theology, 220. notes 8. 9. 11. Luther's Small Catechism, in The Book of Concord, ed. Robert Kolb and Timothy Wengert (Minneapolis: Fortress. 2000), 355.Marga, Jesus Christ and the Modern Sinner 262)laying out the wide span of images that Luther employed, from his appropriation of motifs of Augustine and Bernard of Clairvaux to his borrowings from medieval piety and the New Testament.10 This variety, however, does not weaken two fundamental commitments visible in all aspects of Luther's Christology: his commitment to the Chalcedonian formula and his commitment to human salvation as the central function and purpose of Christ's person and work. These two commitments are summed up in the Small Catechism: "I believe that Jesus Christ, true God. begotten
of the Father in eternity, and also a true human being, born of the Virgin Mary, is my Lord. He has redeemed me, a lost and condemned human being.*'11 The first commitment, seen in the words "true God and true human being." points to the ancient christological dogma from the Council of Chalcedon in 451. which established that the one person of Christ is constituted by two natures, divine and human, unconfusedly. unchangeably, indivisibly. and inseparably. The second commitment is to soteriology. seen in the words "He has redeemed me, a lost and condemned human being." Luther rarely speaks of the person of Christ without referring
to his saving work on our behalf. The name Christ means reconciliation of the sinner to God; Christ is reconciliation. Luther's double commitment to the Chalcedonian formula and to the explicit salvific function of Christ has been called by Hunsinger a "substantive" Christology.12 Christ as very God and very human is the sole agent who initiates and fully completes
the reconciling action that takes place between God and the human. No other component or action is necessary in a substantive
Christology for reconciliation to be "real" for the human individual. An account of the substantive nature of Luther's Christology can be seen in his Galatians commentary, where he writes. For you do not yet have Christ even though you know that He is God and man. You truly have Him only when you believe that this altogether pure and innocent Person has been granted to you b\ the Father as your High Priest and Redeemer,
yes. as your slave. Putting offHis innocence
and holiness and putting on your sinful person. He bore your sin. death, and curse: He became a sacrifice and a curse for you. in order thus to set you free from the curse of the Law. (Luther's Works [hereafter LUT 26:288) When Christ steps before God in our place as the sinner to be punished, he not only initiates but also completes our being made righteous in God's eyes. There is no other process outside of Christ alone that initiates
and completes the justification of sinners. Neither the sanctification of the sinner nor the workings of the Holy Spirit in the Christian life functions the way that Christ's saving work does—a saving work that is embodied in Christ's very person. Christ's person embodies the precedence of God's grace over any "good works" of our own. Luther states. "Christ took the initiative. . . . He did not find a good will or a correct intellect in me. but He Himself took pity on me. ... By a mercy that preceded
my reason, will and intellect. He loved me ... so much that He gave Himself for me" (LU7 26:175). Reconciliation begins with Christ alone. And it is completed in Christ alone: ". . . victory over sin and death, salvation and eternal life . . . come ... by Jesus Christ alone"(p. 138). There is no gradual getting better or gradual transformation in the sinner.
Justification is not completed by a process of sanctification. It is this once-and-for-all sense of Christ's person and actions on our behalf that makes Luther's Christology a substantive Christology. His actions need no enhancement or outside aid and do not continue upon some gradual scale within the human being. What Christ began. Christ fully completes for us. The righteousness that comes to us through Christ's reconciling act is a righteousness
that brings with it its own new life. We are given a life that is not our own. for Christ's own righteousness acts upon us. takes us over. It decenters and destabilizes
the center of our own egos, for it is the righteousness of Christ's person and not of our own person. Luther claims. "I do indeed
live in the flesh, but I do not live on the basis of my own self (LW 26:170-71). When we live in Christ, we are no longer the one who controls this reality in our lives. The presence of the person of Christ 12. Hunsinger. Disruptive Grace. 284.
Marga Jesus Christ and the Modern Sinner 263 displaces ourselves as the center of our lives. We cannot scale this reality in our lives down to a size that we can grasp and thus control, for the righteousness of Christ does not become a quality that inheres within the human being (cf. LW 26:127). nor is it somehow infused into the human to give him or her a new identity as non-sinner. It is a reality that remains distinct from us and greater than ourselves. Indeed, the new life in Christ thrusts individuals into an existence of contradictions:
We are now saints while still being sinners. As Luther states, when we believe the good news that Christ died for us, we "are reckoned as righteous, even though sins, and great ones at that, still remain in us" (LW 26:234). Thus, although Christ starts and finishes our reconciliation with God, we, living in the here and now, do not shed our old sinful ways. We are not rid of our sin. Luther writes, These tu o things are diametrically opposed: that a Christian is righteous and beloved by God, and yet that he is a sinner at the same time. For God cannot deny His own nature. That is. He cannot avoid hating sin and sinners: and He does so by necessity, for otherwise He w ould be unjust and would love sin. (p. 235) This is the heart of Luther's classical doctrine
of the simul iustus et peccato?'. In this life, we live a life of opposites. of being a saint and sinner at the same time. God does not abandon us to the tension of saint and sinner, however. Christ's own presence to the reconciled sinner never ceases. It is an ongoing event. He is our 44'pillar of cloud by day and pillar of fire by night' [Ex. 13:21 ] to keep God from seeing our sin" (p. 232). In that Luther emphasized Christ as the mediator, he was able to express the work of Christ in both the past, what he did as mediator for us on the cross, as well as in the present, what Christ does for us today: The new life in Christ thrusts individuals into an existence of contradictions:
We are now saints while still being sinners. ''Christ Himself is the life that I now live" (p. 167). The mediator comes to us continually.
"Today Christ is still present to some," Luther states, "but to others He is still to come. To believers He is present and has come: to unbelievers He has not yet come" (p. 240). Thus, there is a clearly actualistic element in Luther's Christology that modern theology can draw upon. Christ does not remain in static. Aristotelian categories
but spans the divide between God and human, between past, present, and future,
between action and substance, between
saint and sinner. Luther's Christ is the One who comes, who is coming. The mechanism that binds the reconciled
sinner to Christ is faith. This is a core aspect of Luther's Christology in the Galatians
commentary. "Through faith, the human participates in this saving reality of Christ who is present in the Word. This faith is a union with Christ."13 Luther writes, ... these three things are joined together: faith. Christ and acceptance or imputation. Faith takes hold of Christ and has Him present, enclosing 13. Marc Lienhard. Martin Luthers christologisches Zeugnis (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 1973^ 217.
Marga Jesus Christ and the Modern Sinner 264 Him as the ring encloses the gem. And w hoever is found having this faith in the Christ who is grasped in the heart, him God accounts as righteous.
(LW 26:132) This faith is inseparably connected to Christ's personal presence to us and to the destabilized lives that we live as the simul iustus et peccator. Faith is the epistemologica!
underpinning of Luther's understanding
of the "I yet not I" in Christ. "The life I live. I live on the basis of faith," Luther states. "For the time of life that I am living I do indeed live in the flesh, but not on the basis of the flesh and according to the flesh, but in faith, on the basis of faith, and according to faith" (LW 26:170). But this inseparable connection to Christ's personal presence is not depicted as some kind of mystical union with Christ or "spiritual" faculty that then allows the believing human to make inspired statements
about God (LW 26:28-29:287). Although
Christ is present to us through faith, he still remains beyond the reach of natural human reason, in the "cloud of faith" (p. 287). Luther states, "how [Christ] is present —this is beyond our thought: for there is darkness" (p. 130). Thus, it is precisely the concept of faith that maintains the distinction
between Christ and the reconciled sinner.
It maintains the distance between Christ's mediating activities and the natural
activity of our human intellect, which, finally, are still under the control of sin. death, and the devil. As Marc Lienhard puts it. "Christ is a reality "pro nobis' and *in nobis' but he is and remains * extra nos."*14 Christ is in us and for us but remains
as a reality outside of us. And. because Christ remains outside of us. he is beyond our rational and moral control. Thus, faith cannot be understood to be identical with human reason. For Luther, faith is a "mode of cognition" that is not identical to human reason.15 Faith is not the natural human capacity to understand or to comprehend in the way it understands objects
around itself. Luther disputes the "Sophists" on this point, arguing that even though the "natural endowments" of human
reason are capable of mastering physical,
civic, and political matters, the intellect is in fact corrupt and inept in matters of the knowledge of God. A completely other form of "comprehending" is necessary in order for knowledge of God to arise in the human being. When we discuss faith. Luther states, "we are in an altogether different
world—a world that is outside reason"
(LW 26:234). Nonetheless, faith neither destroys reason
nor renders it impotent in its own sphere. Faith is essentially a different kind of rationality,
an "understanding" that moves beyond
reason: it has its source and function in a manner different from natural human reason. Karl Barth and the modern challenges to Christology The Enlightenment s turn to the subject. The period of the Enlightenment brought with it a sustained focus upon the human individual as an independent, rational, and moral agent. The intense scrutiny upon the workings of the human mind and the rise of science in the Enlightenment made it almost
impossible for twentieth-century theologians
to bring together in theological anthropology the incompatible opposites of the "I yet not I." the saint-sinner of Luther ' s theology, or even the Chalcedonian formula of Christ as very God and very man. and still be taken seriously. Further, theologians no longer could claim that hu-14. Lienhard. Martin Luthers chnsto-logisches Zeugnis. 290. 15. See Brian Gerrish. Grace and Reason (Oxford: Clarendon. 1962). 82.
Marga Jesus Christ and the Modern Sinner 265 man knowledge of God was a distinct but still true and valid "knowledge." for it does not arise from logical thinking, scientific experiment, and mathematical reasoning. "Faith" as a form of knowledge proved no match for the Enlightenment concept of human rationality. Indeed, the distinction that Luther made between faith and reason was possible because the concept of natural human rationality had not yet been elevated to the normative status that it was in the Enlightenment. Before the Enlightenment insistence that morality and rationality obey certain rules of logic and science, there was still room for Christ to be an ''effective Subject"' in the rational, moral agent.16 As the effective Subject in humans, Christ imputed his righteousness to us through faith. He was the reference point for rational
thinking and moral decision making in faith. In Luther's theology, Christ was the reference point for every "good work" that came from the human individual, and good w orks were understood as a consequence of the immediacy and activity of Christ within the believing sinner. This immediacy
and activity kept the human rational ego decentered. allowing it to be a moral subject only by virtue of the "I yet not I."' It did not stand on its own two feet. The Enlightenment transformation of the understanding of human rationality hustled Christ the effective Subject out of theories of knowledge. This can be seen clearly in the thought of Descartes. Although
the Christian tradition was no stranger to a sense of inwardness (Augustine
had already found a way to God through a flight inward), it was anchored in the human subject's connection to God—in Luther's case, to the effective and personal presence of Christ in faith. Descartes loosed the inwardness of the human subject from its divine mooring, making it no longer necessary for human reason to operate solely by virtue of reference to the divine presence.
He assigned a power—the power of "self-mastery'"—to human reason that excluded
any possibility of conceiving the human ego as decentered.1" Human reason was unified, and effective in and of itself: no other effective Subject operated within it. The "I yet not I" central to Luther's Christology was lost. Immanuel Kant took Descartes' understanding
of the autonomy of reason one step further, proposing that the very nature of "reason" meant that one behaves in an ethical manner as well.18 He pulled morality
into the orbit of the Enlightenment notion
of reason, endowing the human with an unprecedented sense of moral freedom. This autonomous morality was "accessible and accepted by every moral agent:"19 the human individual him- or herself, without any mediating presence from a divine subject,
had the capacity to act according to one's "good will." The moral nature of humans became rooted in autonomous reasoning,
thus excluding any need or possibility
that an external force or being could work upon the human to make one into a moral being. Charles Taylor has judged Kant " s moral theory to be "a powerful... .revolutionary force in modern civilization. [His idea] seems to offer a prospect of pure self-16. Bengt Hagglund. "Luthers Anthropologie."
in Leben und Werk Martin Luthers von 1526 to 1546. Festgabe zu seinem 500. Geburstag. Vol. 1 (Góttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 1983). 74. 17. Charles Taylor. Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1989). 147. 18. See Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (New York: Harper Torchbooks. Harper and Row. [1785] 1964). 19. Manfred Kuhn. Kant: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2001). 285.
Marga Jesus Christ and the Modern Sinner 266 activity, where my action is determined . . . ultimately by my own agency as a formula-tor of rational law."20 Natural reason itself is an instrument that formulates and sets moral principles: it alone obligates humans to do good works. It alone produces righteousness.
The philosophical consensus about human rationality and morality ushered in by Enlightenment thinkers such as Kant and Descartes was worlds apart from the early modern understanding of the human of Luther's era, where rationality reached its limit in relationship to the divine being and where morality was made possible b\ nothing other than the divine action. Lutheran theology and the "face" of Jesus Christ. While the Enlightenment granted a new autonomy to human reason, it could do so only by limiting reason to the sphere proper to it. namely, the sphere of history. "Reason" could no longer draw credible conclusions about anything that lay outside history and the logical sequence of events that make history. Speaking of Jesus as true God and true man became impossible. Credible speaking of Jesus Christ was restricted
to speaking of Jesus the man. Jesus the historical figure, the divinity of whom could be established only from what we know about his humanity "from below."21 Throughout the nineteenth century into the early twentieth, leading thinkers such as Elert promoted Christologies based solely on Christ's historical appearance, on the "face" of Christ. His physical presence— his 'face'—was the only reality of God that humans needed to see. In the life of Jesus as a purely historical figure, humans have the full, visible, complete face of God directly
and immediately before them. Jesus Christ did not reveal a God behind and beyond himself. His person and work were not considered revelation.22 Because modern Protestantism did not think in terms of the God outside history, the Christology of a Lutheran like Elert did not seek a Christ who mediated between humans and a God who was perceived as an ultimately unknowable metaphysical "Father."
The face and life of the historical Jesus was enough for natural human reason to discover and know God in God's fullness.
This kind of intense focus upon history, and the rather uncritical and naive trust in history and human reason that accompanied
it. was prevalent among Protestant
thinkers of Barth's da\. The substantive Christology of Luther lay buried deep in the layers of history, which makes the fact that Barth retrieved this aspect from Luther all the more remarkable. Barth' s retrieval of a substantive Christology.
Already in Barth's early theology from the decade of the 1920s, before he even considered writing the massive Church Dogmatics (first begun in 1932). he displayed
a keen interest in the theology of the Reformation, but he harbored doubts about the accuracy of his Lutheran contemporaries'
representation of Luther's theology.2"1 The Protestantism of the era. with its strong historicizing and psychologizing tenden-20. Taylor. Sources of the Self. 364. 21. Claude Welch, Protestant Thought in the nineteenth Centwy 1870-1914. vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale Universitt Press. 1985). 157. 22. Werner Elert. Die Lehre des Luthertums im Abriß (Munich: Beck. 1924). 29. For a similar Lutheran perspecm e. see Paul Althaus. "Theologie und Geschichte. Zur Auseinandersetzung mit der dialektischen Theologie." in Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie 1 (1923/24): 771. See also Barth's Unterricht in der christliche Religion, vol. 2 (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag Zurich. 1990). par. 15:22. for his references to Elert and Althaus. (Hereafter Unterricht) 23. Unterricht 15:23: 28:29-30.
Marga Jesus Christ and the Modern Sinner 26" cies evident in thinkers like Elert, was completely inadequate for truthful talk of the God of Jesus Christ. After the outbreak of World War I and the profoundly disturbing
involvement of leading Protestant theologians
in justifying the aggression of the German nation, Barth could no longer accept
a doctrine of revelation that read God's actions and intentions directly from the events of history. The Lutheran view that only the humanity of Jesus Christ was a positive and direct revelation of God on the surface of history became unacceptable to him.24 If Jesus Christ was the true Savior, God had to be at work in him. The historical
figure of Jesus of Nazareth needed to be part of something greater than himself. In his preparations for his seminal cycle on dogmatic theology, begun at the University
of Göttingen in 1924, Barth discovered
for himself the ancient Chalcedonian Christology by which Christ was truly God. truly human, unmixed, undivided, uncon-fused, and unseparated.25 What this discovery
did was allow Barth to move his theology beyond the historical, psychological ghetto of modern Christology and closer to that of Luther,26 closer to a substantive Christology
in which Christ's own person and work starts and completes our reconciliation with God.27 Precisely because humans come to know Jesus Christ as both God and man, his saving actions on our behalf are a real and effective reconciliation: That Jesus Christ is this one, the incarnated Logos God. is the absolute decisive presupposition
for his work... . One can not interpret the officium mediatorium, the completion of reconciliation
between God and the human, one will alw ays misinterpret it if one does not previously know who the mediator, who the completer is in this act, who the representative of this officium is. The work of Christ has its very particular character, its very particular qualification, its very particular gradient determined through that which is effective here, through the very union with God which Christ finds himself in.28 Contrary to his Lutheran contemporaries.
Barth established that Christ's work cannot be understood on the basis of the historical figure of Jesus alone. Knowing who Christ is and what Christ does comes only from knowing that he is united to the Father as very God and very human. "The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life." In 1929, five years after his first lectures in Göttingen, Barth pushed even more against psychologized, historicized Christology in a lecture he gave at a theological conference
in Elberfeld. Germany, titled "The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life." Using Luther. Barth demonstrated here how a substantive Christology of Jesus Christ the mediator functions as a critique of the Enlightenment
understanding of the human as a rational, moral agent. Barth's targets were soteriologies like that of Holl, whose emphasis on Christianity as a religion of ''conscience'' essentially canceled out any need for a substantive Christology. In an essay on Luther's doctrine of justification, Holl argued against the traditional
substantive Christology of Luther. To Holl. the contradiction between the holy God and the sinful human could not be solved by simply pointing to Christ's person
and work as the mediator between them.29 God meets the sinner with the in-24. Unterricht 15:22. 25. Unterricht 6:169. 193: 28:46. 26. Unterricht 6:169, 193: 28:46. 27. Unterricht 29:75. 28. Unterricht 29:75. See also Bruce McCormack's work on this aspect of Barth's dogmatics in his Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1995). 327ff. 29. Karl Holl. Die Rechtfertigungslehre in Luthers Vorlesung über den Römerbrief mit besonderer Rückblick auf die Frage der H eil s gewissheit in Kirchengeschichte. vol. 1: Luther (Tubingen: Mohr. 1921). 91-130.
Marga Jesus Christ and the Modern Sinner 268 tenti on to forgive and transform "the human
into his own image."3U Christ does not represent this intention and therefore does not function as a mediating "third thing" in the meeting of God and the sinner. God's intention can turn into actual forgiveness only when the human's own intentions and actions turn toward the good. Thus. God actually meets not the sinner but rather the human as moral agent who strives to fulfill the Law—as a doer of good works. Reconciliation
of God and the human is therefore not an event where the enmity between God and the sinner is resolved: it is merely a "meeting of good wills." God justifies the one who is already justified.31 The completion
of reconciliation depends, finally, upon the moral fiber of the autonomous individual.
The transformation of the individual
into the imago Dei may or may not take place: justification is the "foundation for a new life." but it is up to the individual to gradually get better.32 Such a moralistic soteriology rejects the central role of Christ as mediator between
God and the sinner. It has no need for a substantive Christology because "sin" is no longer perceived as a devastating ontological force. Sin is a misguided good will, but a good will nevertheless. The human rational agent remains rational and able to make moral decisions, even as a sinner, for rationality contains morality within itself. Sin is merely a discrepancy between rationality and morality whereby sinful actions occur when human moral intentions do not follow reason. To Barth, however, the rational and moral constitution of the autonomous individual
does not help us get better and better. Sin brings the rational, moral agent to his or her knees. Sin is about the rational, moral agent's own struggle against God: it is human resistance to grace, not a description
of intentions. The struggle against this enmity toward God is undertaken by Christ and Christ alone, the Reconciler Spirit. Using Luther's simul iustus et pec cat or. Barth expresses the externality of Christ's work upon us. The human will never cease to acknowledge and confess, in all seriousness, that one's having been justified is utterly not in oneself, and consequently not m one's human unbelief. Indeed, the Christian is simul peccator et Justus and the surmounting of this irreconcilable contradiction does not lie in the Christian .. . but is the action of the Word of God. the action of Christ, w ho is always the One who makes one out to be a sinner, in order to make one (though a sinner) into a righteous [hu]man." Not we but Christ conquers our "radical evil and hate" toward the living God.34 This retrieval of a substantive Christology
had implications for both human reason and human morality. Barth countered
the rationalism in contemporary theories
of justification using the terminology of reason itself. He argued that the only activity that humans can ever really know is our own. Human rationality, therefore, only perpetuates our enmity toward God. Our insistence upon our own limited, self-enclosed rationality, and on controlling everything through our reason, does not bring us knowledge of God's work in Christ. In "The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life" he writes that reason, "in its unbelief, in its stubbornness, in its meek self-righ-30. Holl. Die Rechtfertigungslehre. 99. 31. Holl. 97-98. 32. Holl. 98. 33. Holl. 31: Barth. -Der Heilige Geist und das christliche Leben."" in Karl-Barth-Gesamtausgabe.
Vorträge und kleinere Arbeiten 1925-1930. Ill (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag Zurich. 1994). 495. 34. Barth. "The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life."" trans. R. Birch Hoyle (Louisville. KY: Westminster/John Knox. 1993). 19.20.
Marga Jesus Christ and the Modern Sinner 269 teousness. in which it wishes to remain by itself . . . does not wish to hear of something
radically different from its own workings"
(pp. 19, 20). The exercise of reason does not bring us insight into God's activities:
"What we can make evident to ourselves
is always our own activity. Even when we set this under the prefix of grace, it still remains our own working*' (pp. 24-25). With these claims, Barth locates a '"blind spot" in human rationality that can be filled only by Christ, for it is Christ alone who mediates himself to us through a "continual
giving" of himself into faith, whose righteousness is "established as true in our flesh" (p. 29). In so doing. Barth reintroduces
Christ as the effective Subject, so significant to Luther's theology, into an understanding of the modern sinner in relation
to God. The rational agent is indeed subject, but a subject whose agency has limits in relation to God's reconciling activity.
It is "I yet not Γ* who comes to know God. Barth further buttresses his argument against the abilities of human reason before God by qualifying the ability oí faith as a mode of cognition, lest it too be swallowed up by the all-encompassing Enlightenment conceptions of reason. Even faith is "hidden
from itself (p. 30: emphasis added). Rational thought cannot not make "faith" into a living knowledge of God. This is the task of the Holy Spirit: "but the two things, the acknowledgement of this contradiction [sin] and the knowledge of its being surmounted,
are not our own business, but are the Holy Spirit's"(p. 31). Here. too. Barth does not allow the human "I" to take control
of one * s own faith. Faith is mediated to the human by God and cannot be swallowed
up by one's sense of self as agent. The destabilizing "I yet not I" remains central to the identity of the believing Christian.
Β arth reintroduces
Christ as the effective Subject, so significant to Luther's theology, into an understanding of the modern sinner. In his retrieval of a substantive Christology
Barth also challenged the Enlightenment
conception of a reasonable, autonomous morality, and destabilized the human as a moral agent. When Christ is understood as the sole effector of our reconciliation
to God, the individual "person must be left out of consideration" (p. 26: emphasis added). Although human individuals
are indeed agents of actions, any and every good work that we see as being "ours" is canceled out, and the "I yet not I" comes into effect. As Barth states, the work of Christ the Reconciler Spirit must be seen in its fundamental and immutable [unaußiebbar] restriction of ever} thing that is our o\\ η w ork. Wherever the action of humans in themselves, m w hate\ er pretense or form, is made into a condition
of the human's fellowship with God. there the Holy Spirit is forgotten, and there sin is committed in order to overcome sin. (p. 20) Where human morality, the human will or conscience, is seen as the way to mediate the relationship between the sinner and God. the two aspects of reconciliation that need to be held together—justification and sanctification—fall away from each other. Justification turns into a slow, gradual
Marga Jesus Christ and the Modern burner 2"0 process by which the sinner thinks he or she could become a nonsinner through the good works that he or she performs (p. 21). Reconciliation then becomes a matter of the "'divine gift and man's creative action combined in one*" (p. 22. quoting Augustine).
The "I yet not I" collapses into the willful human ego, and a substantive Christology
is dissolved. Barth was well aware of the implications
of his modern epistemologica! interpretation
of Luther's substantive Christology. When it is properly understood,
first, as being fully undertaken, begun,
and completed in Christ's person and work as the God-man, and further, as an event that is outside the control of our reasoning skills and moral abilities, the term "Christian" must take on a very particular
meaning. Supposing w e decide to side . .. w ith Luther . .. to proceed with caution when w e use the adjective
"Christian" and to use the word in a way quite other than is the vogue in our victorious modern Christendom. What. then, is meant by such phrases as "Christian" view of the universe. "Christian" morality. "Christian" art? What are "Christian" personalities. "Christian" families. "Christian" groups. "Christian" newspapers. "Christian" societies ... ? Who gives us permission
to us the adjective so profuselv? (pp. 37-38) Concluding remarks What Barth gained from Luther's substantive
Christology was a way to express the work of Christ upon the sinner that overcomes
the human drive to relate to God as beings who are autonomous, reasonable, and good-willed. Luther " s tight unification of Christ's person and work highlights that Christ's action as the God-man and mediator
is something that is started and finished in our lives by Christ alone. In that Luther closely connected the person and work of Christ with the creation of faith as a mode of cognition that is distinct from natural human reason, his Christology limits the capabilities of natural human reason to comprehend and therefore control what God's actions are toward us. To Barth, this meant that when it comes to the God-human relationship, human reason has a distinct blind spot. Taking this blind spot seriously means that Christians, especially Lutherans, maintain a healthy critical distance
to the process by which we weigh matters of moral weight using our everyday
reason and common sense. The "I yet not I" as the foundation for rational thinking
provides us with a critical check upon the way we go about trying to lead lives we would like to call Christian. Sustaining the faith that is beyond the reach of our control requires that Christ continually mediate himself to us as a Subject working within us. Finally, taking Barth's retrieval of Luther' s Christology seriously means bringing
to light the falsity that lies in the concept
of an autonomous "good will" that accompanies modem individuals* sense of self. Morality never arises out of ourselves,
and moral actions always have enfolded
within them some other hidden motive and external influence, whether it be economic, personal, idealistic, or practical.
It is clear in the theologies of both Barth and Luther that the only external factor that can actually make our good actions good is the divine influence, which comes from beyond our ability to rationalize
and control, which is mediated to us in the person of the crucified Christ who continually
works upon us as God's Reconciling
Spirit.
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