BOOK REVIEW:
Barth's Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth's Thought. By John Webster. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1998. 223 pp. ISBN 0802838588. 

In recent years there have been a number of excellent studies in the theology of Karl Barth. Bruce McCormack and George Hunsinger, to name but two in this country, have been in the forefront of the effort to make Barth available to a new generation of students. Their work has attempted to free Barth studies from the conventional readings of the past, or even misreadings, many of which have found it only too easy to caricature Barth as the theologian of crushing grace and diminished humanity. The renewal of interest in the theology of Karl Barth has been characterized by close attention to the historical development of his thought and even more, by close and careful readings of the Church Dogmatics and other texts that have only come to light more recently. The result has been not just a new admiration for the subtle beauty and dialectical power of Barth’s theological engines, but even more a growing appreciation for Barth’s re-description of theology as “the anthropology.” The God whose grace undermines all efforts at human self-invention, is, nevertheless, the God whose grace, far from corroding the stature of persons as moral actors, actually establishes it. 

It is one of the many virtues of John Webster’s book Barth’s Moral Theology that he is able to help us see the depth of Barth’s account of human freedom. Moreover, Webster’s book is itself a marvelous introduction to Barth’s theology, easily taking its place alongside other more formally dogmatic efforts. His thesis throughout is that Barth’s theology is inherently concerned with human action, not tacking ethical questions on to dogmatic loci, but tracing these questions back to their source in the being and activity of God’s triune life. From the very beginning Barth’s theology is moral theology: it has to do with that form of human action that corresponds to God’s saving activity in Jesus Christ. And conversely, God’s saving activity in Jesus Christ cannot be understood unless the grace it bestows is seen to call forth a particular form of human action. 

Webster’s book is a series of nine essays that traces the development of Barth’s interest in ethics from the Tambach lecture of 1919 (“The Christian’s Place in Society”) and his early efforts to interpret Calvin at Göttingen to his lectures on ethics at Münster (1928-29) to the unfolding volumes of the Church Dogmatics. Not surprisingly, an attentive reading of the latter work constitutes the bulk of Webster’s interpretive essays, with particular consideration given to Barth’s understanding of Original Sin (Ch. 4), of hope as the task of the church (Ch. 5), of the false freedom of limitless options and the true freedom in specificity (Ch. 6), of the prophetic work of Christ as “eloquent and radiant” (Ch. 7), and a study of Barth and Luther on passive and active faith. The last chapter offers a close reading of the way Eberhard Jüngel has attempted to make use of the insights of Barth and Luther in formulating his own theological anthropology. 

Webster, who is the Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford, argues that from his earliest days Barth was concerned with ethics as an essential part of the deposit of the Gospel. Even his early lectures on Calvin make clear that for this Reformer, unlike Luther, ethics is not a “second thought,” not a secondary matter dealing with horizontal relationships that must give way to the vertical. Luther’s failure to follow the grace of the justifying God into the realm of the horizontal was a deficiency Calvin remedied in bringing faith and life, dogmatics and ethics together. Later, Barth put the matter this way: “As dogmatics inquires concerning the action of God and its goodness, it must necessarily make thorough inquiry concerning active man and the goodness of his action. It has the problem of ethics in view from the very first, and it cannot legitimately lose sight of it” (Dogmatics III/4, p. 3). Just so does dogmatics describe, among other things, a moral field in the context of which moral agents and their actions become intelligible in the light of the particular history that takes place between God and humanity in Jesus Christ. 

But the relation between dogmatics and ethics is of a particular kind, and it parallels the relation between God and humanity in Jesus Christ. Webster sees what is perhaps the defining analogy here in the anhypostatic and enhypostatic humanity of the Son of God. Christ’s humanity, Barth thinks, is anhypostatic. That is to say, there is no way to a deeper understanding of that humanity through a knowledge of humanity in general, much less through the subjectivity of our own moral inwardness, or examination of conscience, or even through a sacramental humanity which the church might invoke. Here, Luther was right. We are beggars, justified by a grace quite beyond us, receiving our humanity as a gift. The whole of Barth’s radical rejection of modernity’s interest in self-realization, in the limitless self, is rooted in what he learned from Luther’s theologia crucis and is doctrinally secured in his insistence that Christ’s humanity has no independent existence apart from its union with the Word (i.e., it is anhypostatic). 

However, as Webster shows, that is only half of the problem. It is not enough simply to reject a self-invented humanity. What needs to be made clear is the way in which Christ’s humanity is enhypostatically real, that is, the way in which the humanity that is brought into being through this union describes and includes true humanity, free and exuberantly human. 

How this is actually worked out in Barth’s theology is described by Webster in a number of ways. In chapter 7 on the prophetic office of Christ (“‘Eloquent and Radiant’: the Prophetic Office of Christ and the Mission of the Church”) Webster makes clear that in the union between God and humanity in Christ our humanity is not nullified or crushed but given its subordinate, though altogether significant and effective role of a faithful human response to this word of grace. Webster comments: “The move Barth is making here at one and the same time relativizes and establishes the activity of Christian witness. Relativizes, because it asserts the entire adequacy of Jesus’ own self-declaration; ‘establishes,’ because the willed form of that self-declaration includes its echo in human declaration” (p. 144). 

Still, how is this echo-like, this corresponding activity free? Webster begins by noting that Barth does not try to develop a more sophisticated theoretical reading of what human freedom in general might imply. Rather, he turns to Holy Scripture and attempts a disciplined description of the “factual relationship” (Dogmatics III/3, p. 189) unfolded there between the free God and the creatures whose freedom he has established in Jesus Christ. In this respect, Barth’s notion of human freedom is not specifiable in advance of or apart from the salvation history wrought in Jesus Christ. To want such a notion in advance of that history would be to adopt a standpoint of neutrality which conflicts with Christian affirmation of God’s freedom. “What Barth offers, therefore, is not a better theory of God’s freedom but an example of sustained attention to the mysterious and utterly specific history of the covenant and to the partners in that covenant” (p. 106). 

However, what sustained attention to the covenant history reveals is that human freedom is quite other than what modern theories of freedom suggest. Human freedom, according to Barth, is something other than neutrality or indeterminateness. Rather, human freedom is definite, limited, located within a specific situation. The modern (and, indeed, not so modern) longing for a limitless and contextless freedom stands, Barth believes, in opposition to the covenant which underwrites true human freedom. The longing to be judge, to transcend all particulars, to occupy that neutral space which can even judge God’s dealing with us, that is the “foolish freedom” that, rather than liberating, only enslaves us further. It is “the foolish freedom of man to do or not to do according to his own inscrutable pleasure” (Dogmatics IV/3, p. 449). Such an abstraction leaves human beings with a sense of vertigo, condemning them to an ocean of limitless and, finally, meaningless alternatives. That is how modernity trivializes life. But the free person, Barth insists, has been delivered from just such an ocean of unlimited possibilities by being transferred in Jesus Christ “to the rock of the one necessity which as such is (the) only possibility” (Dogmatics IV/3, p. 665). Human freedom is characterized, then, by reference to something beyond itself and, to that extent, has always a limited or formed nature, a specificity in which we become truly ourselves as we correspond to what we have been made in Christ. Such limitation is not a diminution of the human but the most positive form of affirmation in that in such limitation God frees humanity to be truly human. As Barth notes: “Rather than tolerating our limitation with a sigh, we have every reason to take it seriously, to affirm it, to accept it, and to praise God for the fact that in it we are what we are and not something else” (Dogmatics IV/3, p. 568). 

Barth’s understanding of human freedom is, Webster freely admits, anti-modern. Human freedom is not something that is to be found in some inner subjectivity over against the harsh reality of nature. Rather, to be free, according to Barth, is to be rightly situated. It is not the abolition of all situation and context, the untrammeled, and finally imprisoning, pursuit of self. Rather, it is, as Webster concludes, to be situated “by the history of the covenant between the triune God and his human partners” (p. 123). That is the reality that precedes all our decisions and makes possible the true liberty of God’s children. 

As early as his Münster Ethics, Barth sought, according to Webster, a thoroughgoing revision both of the doctrine of God and of moral anthropology. 

At the heart of Barth’s quarrel with modernity (whether in philosophical or Christian dress) is that it falsely considers the transcendant freedom of God’s will to be essentially alien to the cause of humanity, and thereby commits itself to develop an anthropology in which the only safe haven against the insistent requirements of God is undetermined moral inwardness. Barth’s understanding of God as Word—communicative presence evoking moral response—and of human agency as truly itself when exercised in “the direction corresponding to God’s own order”, are not the least part of his legacy to Christian theology of moral knowledge, will and freedom (p. 64). 

Just so does God’s command mark out the path to human freedom, and the two great abstractions of modernity—of a God who exists only in sovereign isolation over against humanity or of a humanity that can only be free in Promethean rebellion against God—are revealed to be abstractions by the humanity of the triune God of Jesus Christ. 

One final note: Webster does not seem much impressed by virtue talk. He recognizes the ecclesiological dimension of Barth’s ethical sections but he does not think that the gospel can ever be absorbed by the church in such a way that it can simply become a “familiar feature of the ecclesial landscape” (p. 97). The Christian life in Barth’s theology is, Webster thinks, always an eccentric thing, a form of living in which we are ever referred beyond ourselves to Jesus Christ, who is our true center. It is the irreducible otherness of the gospel that makes it finally unavailable for ecclesial absorption into a community of virtue. The task of the church must be “to let itself be told again that it exists by virtue of another reality: perfect, complete, utterly sufficient, utterly itself: the reality of God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (p. 97). 

One might ask for more specifics about what this “eccentric” life looks like, something more, for example, than being referred to its “otherness.” And further, one might quibble with Webster’s interpretation of Barth’s understanding of the church or even with Barth’s understanding of theology as “explanation” (pp. 146-147), especially in view of the reductive possibilities that that term evokes today. Still, this book of essays admirably achieves its stated goal of indicating what Barth’s theology looks like from the inside, how his dogmatics and ethics coinhere, how his anthropology is developed out of his Christology and doctrine of God, and how his understanding of human freedom is to be distinguished from accounts of human self-realization. In listening attentively to Barth and to many of Barth’s critics, Webster has done the church a great service by teaching us to read against many of our expectations of what Christian theology ought to be like. “Part of what makes Barth so demanding of his readers,” Webster concludes at one point, “is the requirement that they keep alive their capacity for astonishment, for that overwhelmed sense that the gospel takes us to some very strange places. . .” (p. 81). Webster is a good guide who helps us see many of those strange places and who has not himself lost his capacity for astonishment. 

Thomas W. Currie, III
First Presbyterian Church, Kerrville, Texas 

PUBLISHED IN THE BULLETIN OF THE INSTITUTE FOR REFORMED THEOLOGY, SPRING/SUMMER 2001, VOL. 2, #2.