Barth understands theological ethics as a discipline in service to the divine command and the human obedience called forth by it. Ethics is “an attempt to answer theoretically the question of what may be called goodhumanaction,” finding “both this question and its answer in God’s Word” (ChrL, 3r [1]). As a discipline subservient to God’s Word, ethics can at most “help humanity on to ethical reflection and action, to the finding, studying, honoring, and Deo bene volente, the keeping of the commandments.” In pursuing its task, ethics must take care, lest “human speech... crowd out or replace the divine” (ChrL, 7R [8]). Moreover, ethics will refuse even to ask the question “What should humansdo?” as such a question evades theparticularityof the divine command: “God in his command... tells one very concretely what one is to do or not do here and now in these or those particular circumstances,” and offers “ever new and living and specific direction” (ChrL, 33 [50], cf. 4–5). Theological ethics also will refuse to sit in the seat of judgment and render a verdict on an individual’s obedience or disobedience (ChrL, 34 [51]). Rather, ethics aids humans in the “conversion from disobedience to obedience in relation to the divine commanding,” by “offering instructions: teaching the art of asking that question [“What should Ido?”] relevantly and looking forward openly, attentively, and willingly to the answer that God alone can and does give” (ChrL, 7 [8–9] and 34Rr[51]).12In all this Barth bears witness
to the priorityof God’s being-in-the-act-of-reconciliation and humanity’s consequent being-reconciled, attending especially to theparticularityof this reconciliation.
This is to say being reconciledprecedes and founds the action corresponding to this commanding word of reconciliation, and that the command is particular to each reconciled human even as all humans are reconciled. As God the reconciler is the “living
God,” the command of God the reconciler is a “dynamicreality” (ChrL, 33r [49]). An ethics of reconciliation, then, “can and should indicate that always and everywhere there has been and will be that event” that determines humans as reconciled to God ———————————
12. [Ethik kann also nicht selbst Weisung, sondern nur Unterweisung geben: Unterricht in der Kunst.... (Again,Deo bene volente.)]
(ChrL, 34 [51]).13 Although Webster does not do justice to Barth’s emphasis on the
radical particularity of the command, he does grasp its nature as a dynamic reality that precedes and determines “good” human action. Thus, Webster highlights that “[Barth’s] answer to the question: what shall the Christian do? is rooted in an answer to a prior question: what is moral reality?” and that Barth’s Church Dogmaticsis “amongst other things, a moral ontology—an extensive account of the situation in which human agents act” (Reconciliation, 214 and 1). Furthermore, Webster helps readers understand that because Barth sees that “Jesus Christ is reality,” that “reality, what really is, is constituted by Jesus’ history—constituted as a history reconciled to God” (Moral, 84), Barth can only understand theological ethics as “essentially an assertion that good human action is action which is most in accord with the way the world is constituted in Jesus Christ” (Reconciliation, 219). With this recognition of the relation between ethics and reality—human act and human being—we see the framework within which Barth constructs his doctrine ofbeingChristian. Unless one understands Barth’s conception of reality, one will not understand his instruction in the art of asking, that is, invocation.14
Barth names reality with one word:covenant.
Covenant describes the dynamic relationship between God and humanity. Reconciliation [Versöhnung] is the heart, but not the whole, of this reality.15Barth holds
reconciliation to be the “center of all Christian knowledge,” so that “[t]o fail here is to fail everywhere” and “[t]o be on the right track here makes it impossible to be completely mistaken” (CD IV/1, ix). Yet, “[t]he knowledge of God and humanity disclosed in Jesus Christ... is not simple, nor indefinitely multiple, but triple,” as ———————————
13. NB, “will be.” It must be remembered that reconciliation stands within a single event that is a “series of events,”viz, creation-reconciliation-redemption.
14. Jüngel describes Barth’s ethics of reconciliation as “instruction in prayer” (TE, 164).
15. Eberhard Busch relates that Barth “wondered for a while whether he would not do better to call the doctrine [of reconciliation] ‘the doctrine of the covenant’, but kept to the traditional title, although he interpreted it in the sense of the other” (Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts, 377). This perhaps indicates Barth’s awareness that while reconciliation can only be interpreted adequately in terms of the covenant, the covenant cannot be reduced to reconciliation.
“[k]nowledge of the one, total God and the one, total humanity.... it is differentiated and
structured” (ChrL, 7Rr [9]). Given this triune reality of human beingin relation to the triune God, theological ethics must also be triply differentiated and structured. It must attend to 1) humanity as a creature in relation to God the creator; 2) humanity as needy sinner and participant in the grace of God the reconciler; and 3) humanity as child and future heir of God the redeemer (ChrL, 7 [9]). Therefore, in our examination of the reconciling God, reconciled humanity, and invocation as the human action corresponding to reconciliation, we must remember that reconciliation does not say everything that can and must be said about God’s establishment of the covenant and the human participation in this reality.
With this caution, the true centrality of the doctrine and ethics of reconciliation becomes clear. Creation and redemption, though integral, are the periphery of the covenant. Using one of his favorite metaphors, Barth describes reconciliation as the center of the covenant with creation and redemption forming its circumference, arguing that “the center establishes the circumference and not the reverse.” Barth depicts salvation, being-in-covenant, as a triptych with reconciliation as the central panel, for in it we are dealing with “the center, the source of all the reality and revelation of God and humanity—Jesus Christ, who is not only the ontic but also the noetic basis of the whole of Christian truth and the Christian message” (ChrL, 9 [12]).16 Given the
centrality of reconciliation in the covenant, any interpretation of Barth’s thought that relegates the ethics of reconciliation, that is, the Christian’s being-in-act, to mere marginalia will be a misinterpretation. For, although “the history of Jesus Christ” (that is, “the history of this covenant”) “embraces and integrates into itself that of every other human,” this history is “a covenantthat God not only established between himself and humanity, but in which humanity was called and impelled to play our own free and active part in it” (ChrL, 74Rr [117]). Yes, Barth describes covenant history as “completed fellowship [vollkommenen... Gemeinschaft]” between God and humanity, but ———————————
16. Again, “[t]here is no center without a circumference, no second article of the Creed without the first and the third.”
Barth glosses vollkommenen as “not only unilaterally upheld but mutually established,” and stresses that this vollkommenen Gemeinschaft calls forth corresponding (indeed, participating!) human action, becoming a command that “the existence of special creatures called Christians may and can and should become possible and actual” (ChrL, 11R* [15] and 76R[121]). Barth thus challenges his readers to hold together the
perfecttense of Jesus Christ’s reconciling action without allowing it to efface the ongoing
and active fellowship between God and humanity.17The existence and activity of
Christians stands in an asymmetrical relationship with the divine being and act, but by no means does this subordination make it incidental to the covenant and salvation.
I.C. Salvation: Fulfillment of the Eternal Covenant (the Basis of Salvation)