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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 September 2011
Since Immanuel Kant, moral reasoning has been divorced from classical theology and reinscribed onto self-contained individuals. Shorn of theological particularities, modern ethics tries to identify behaviours to which every right-thinking person can assent. A basic premise of classical moral philosophy, however, was that if we know who we are and what our telos is, then we can have a good idea of how we ought to act. In his christology, Barth reappropriates this classical view of ethics and situates it christologically. Because Jesus’ human nature finds its being and telos in his divinity, Barth found an ethical pattern in the anhypostasis-enhypostasis doctrine. Restoring people to their proper place as creatures rather than Kantian demi-gods, Jesus shows us what it means to be truly human by being obedient to the Father. We cannot divinise individuals or the church, but the church exists enhypostatically. This anhypostatic-enhypostatic christological pattern orders our activities, making worship the first task of ethics. In prayer and in Sabbath keeping, Jesus shows us his utter dependence on God through supplication and rest. In these acts of worship, Christians act as they were created to act. We respond obediently to our Creator. But we also find an orientation towards other people in christology. Love of enemies has everything to do with the content and shape of God's command. It is involved in the telos of human life in being Christ-like.
1 Thus modern ethics requires some idea of right thinking, that is, it requires an orthodoxy which it presupposes but cannot name. Since it is unable to name this orthodoxy, it therefore cannot be accountable for its dogmatic status.
2 Kant claimed that ‘the concept of a supernatural intervention into our moral though deficient faculty . . . is a transcendent concept, merely an idea of whose reality no experience can assure us’. Kant, Immanuel, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, tr. Wood, Allen and Di Giovanni, George (New York: CUP, 1998), p. 183Google Scholar.
3 Kant, Immanuel, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, tr. Gregor, Mary J. (New York: CUP, 1998), p. 15Google Scholar. Also: ‘Act that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle in a giving of universal law.’ Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Practical Reason, tr. Gregor, Mary J. (New York: CUP, 1997), p. 28Google Scholar. Kant formulated the principle another way as well: ‘So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.’ See Kant, Groundwork, p. 38.
4 See Kant, Groundwork, pp. 15–16: ‘I do not, therefore, need any penetrating acuteness to see what I have to do in order that my volition be morally good. Inexperienced in the course of the world, incapable of being prepared for whatever might come to pass in it, I ask myself only: can you will that your maxim become a universal law?’
5 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, p. 30.
6 Wars were fought over political territory and modern state-making but were also partly grounded in Catholic–Protestant conflicts carried over from the early Reformation. On this see Cavanaugh, William, ‘“A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House”: The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State’, Modern Theology 11/4 (1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Cavanaugh, William, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (New York: OUP, 2009), pp. 123–230CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Kant wrote his On Perpetual Peace to argue that nations could better maintain a world free from war by using his ethics. Kant, Immanuel, ‘Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’, in Political Writings, ed. Reiss, Hans (New York: CUP, 1991), pp. 93–130Google Scholar.
7 Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 85Google Scholar.
8 This notion of original war differs from Christian accounts of original sin in that it makes violence natural rather than sinful. See Manent, Pierre, An Intellectual History of Liberalism (Princeton: PUP, 1994), p. 24Google Scholar. For the quote see Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), p. 100Google Scholar.
9 MacIntyre, Alasdair, A Short History of Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1966), p. 198CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Murdoch, Iris, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 1970), p. 80Google Scholar.
11 Barth, Karl, The Theology of Schleiermacher, tr. Bromiley, Geoffrey (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1982), pp. 263–4Google Scholar.
12 Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/2, p. 795.
13 Ibid., p. 787.
14 Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 28.
15 Barth, Karl, Ethics, tr. Bromiley, Geoffrey (New York: Seabury Press, 1981), p. 176Google Scholar.
16 Murdoch, Sovereignty of Good, p. 80.
17 Barth, CD IV/1, p. 99.
18 Barth, CD IV/1, p. 53.
19 Barth, CD II/1, p. 447.
20 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1.3.5.
21 See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1.44.1. Deus est ipsum esse per se subsistens. . . . Relinquitur ergo quod omnia alia a Deo non sint suum esse, sed participant esse.
22 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 2-2.104.3. Aquinas did not write any longer treatise or section in his great work, Summa Theologiae, on friendship. Yet references abound throughout the Summa to friendship.
23 See McCabe, Herbert, God Matters (New York: Continuum, 2005), p. 228Google Scholar.
24 McCormack, Bruce, Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology (New York: OUP, 1995), p. 367Google Scholar.
25 See ibid., pp. 327–28, 360–67. See also Hauerwas, Stanley, With the Grain of the Universe (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2001), pp. 159–61Google Scholar.
26 Barth, Karl, The Göttingen Dogmatics, tr. Bromiley, Geoffrey, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991), p. 157Google Scholar. See also Barth, CD I/2, pp. 163–5; III/2, p. 70; IV/1, pp. 49–50, 91. Leron Shults claims that the anhypostasis-enhypostasis theory inadequately expresses the relationship between Jesus Christ's divine and human natures. Shults argues that this theory did not originate with Leontius of Byzantium, as Karl Barth and his followers claimed, or with any patristic theologian but is ‘an invention of Protestant Scholasticism’. See Shults, F. LeRon, ‘A Dubious Christological Formula: From Leontius of Byzantium to Karl Barth’, Theological Studies 57/3 (1999), p. 431CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Shults drew from Daley, Brian, ‘A Richer Union: Leontius of Byzantium and the Relationship of the Human and Divine in Christ’, Studia Patristica 24 (1993), pp. 239–65Google Scholar, which argued that Protestant theologian Freidrich Loofs misunderstood the prefix en in the term enhypostasia to mean ‘in’ but originally the en was juxtaposed with anhypostasia (non-hypostatic) so that the proper translation of enhypostasia would be ‘hypostatic’ or ‘having a concrete existence’. Uwe Lang and Matthias Gockel, however, have challenged this reading. Lang traces the teaching to John of Damascus (see John of Damascus, De fide orthodoxa 3.9). Matthias Gockel has shown that John of Damascus influenced a range of medieval theologians, particularly Thomas Aquinas, who cites John of Damascus and argues: Licet igitur humana natura sit individuum quoddam in genere substantiae, quia tamen non per se separatim existit, sed in quodam perfectiori, scilicet in persona Dei verbi, consequens est quod non habeat personalitatem propriam (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 3.2.2). John of Damascus and Aquinas inspired Protestant scholastics to take up the anhypostasis-enhypostasis teaching. Not only this, but Karl Barth himself cites not only Protestants concerning the enhypostasia, but also John of Damascus. See e.g. CD I/2, p. 163. Thus Shults’ argument is flawed.
27 Barth, CD I/2, p. 188.
28 Ibid., p. 149.
29 Ibid., pp. 185–202; IV/2, p. 90.
30 At the same time, however, Barth states that ‘In Jesus Christ it is not merely one man, but the humanum of all men, which is posited and exalted as such to unity with God.’ CD IV/2, p. 49.
31 Barth, CD IV/2, p. 74.
32 Ibid., p. 72.
33 Ibid., pp. 27–8.
34 This is Alasdair MacIntyre's wording. See MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd edn (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 53Google Scholar.
35 Ibid., p. 52.
36 Nigel Biggar has noted that there is ‘something basically eudaimonistic’ about Barth's ethics because we do not obey God's command out of deference to the arbitrary will of a pure power, but ‘out of regard for our own best good, which this gracious God alone truly understands’. See Biggar, Nigel, ‘Barth's Trinitarian Ethic’, in Webster, John (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth (New York: CUP, 2000), p. 215Google Scholar.
37 Barth, CD I/2, p. 793.
38 Barth, Ethics, p. 56.
39 Barth, CD IV/2, p. 222.
40 Murdoch, Sovereignty of Good, p. 80.
41 Barth, CD IV/2, p. 271.
42 Barth, CD II/2, p. 30.
43 Marquardt, Friedrich-Wilhelm, Theologie und Sozialismus: Das Beispiel Karl Barths (Munich: Kaiser, 1972), p. 267Google Scholar. All translations from Marquardt are my own: ‘Er steuert auf eine Erweiterung und Ergänzung der christologischen Anhypostasie (der Anhypostasie der menschlichen Natur Jesu Christi) durch eine anthropologische Enhypostasie zu: der Enhypostasie der humanitas, der kollektiven “Gattung Mensch” in der Person des fleischgewordenen Wortes.’
44 Ibid. ‘Barth hat aber über diese bloß ekklesiologisch gefaßte Kollektivität immer hinausgedrängt. Die Adam-Christus-Typologie in Röm 5 war für ihn von Anfang an Anlaß zu einer über die ekklesiologische Betrachtung hinausführenden gattungsgeschichtlichen Interpretation.’
45 Yoder, John Howard, ‘Why Ecclesiology is Social Ethics’, in Cartwright, Michael (ed.), The Royal Priesthood (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), p. 110Google Scholar. See also Yoder, ‘The Basis of Barth's Social Ethics’, in Karl Barth and the Problem of War and Other Essays (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2003), pp. 133–47, and Yoder, ‘Review of Karl Barth and Radical Politics’, Journal of Church and State 10 (1978), pp. 338–9. For a critical response to Yoder see Hunsinger's chapter ‘Karl Barth and the Politics of Sectarian Protestantism: A Dialogue with John Howard Yoder’, in Hunsinger, George, Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), pp. 114–28Google Scholar.
46 Yoder, ‘Why Ecclesiology is Social Ethics’, p. 110.
47 Ibid.
48 Ibid., p. 113.
49 Stanley Hauerwas has also written about the dangers of starting from such an abstract christology. See Hauerwas, Stanley, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), pp. 72–6Google Scholar.
50 Barth, CD IV/2, p. 59.
51 Ibid., p. 60.
52 Ibid.
53 Barth, CD IV/1, p. 295.
54 Barth, CD II/2, p. 178.
55 Barth, CD III/3, p. 267.
56 Barth, Ethics, pp. 472–3.
57 Yoder, ‘Why Ecclesiology is Social Ethics’, p. 123.
58 See Barth, Ethics, pp. 474–5.
59 Ibid., pp. 53–4.
60 Barth, CD IV/2, p. 565.
61 Gunton, Colin, ‘The Triune God and the Freedom of the Creature’, in Sykes, Stephen (ed.), Karl Barth: Centenary Essays (New York: CUP, 1989), p. 51Google Scholar; italics in the original.
62 Barth, CD II/2, p. 563
63 Ibid., p. 567.
64 Ibid., p. 576.