Transcript
This afternoon, we're privileged to have Professor William Werpehowsky. Professor Werpehowsky is a professor at Villanova. He went to Princeton years ago and has his Ph.D. from Yale and has written a number of articles on political ethics and is some essays on Barth and is working on a book, which will be called Social Justice, Social Selves on Theological Anthropology and Political Ethics. We're happy to hear from Professor Werpehowsky, who will speak on biblical narratives in the ethics
of Karl Barth. Thank you, Professor West. I'm privileged to be here to receive such a fine invitation. And I'm struck with an especially great thankfulness as I look out over the audience and see so many people from whom I've learned, colleagues, teachers, students. So it is in gratitude that I bring this to all of you today. I would hope that it had been better. Nevertheless, I will begin. In remembering Karl Barth and in renewing our commitment
to learn from him, we would do well not to overlook the lovely simplicity with which he sometimes expressed himself. Sometimes. A well-known example of this can be found in Church Dogmatic's Volume 4-2, where he acknowledges indebtedness to Abel Burkhardt, his first teacher of theology. Burkhardt's collection of children's hymns was the medium of instruction. And of the songs, Barth wrote, what made an indelible impression on me was the homely naturalness with which these very modest
compositions spoke of the events of Christmas, Palm Sunday, Good Friday, Easter, the Ascension, and Pentecost as things which might take place any day in Basel or its environs like any other important happenings. History? Doctrine? Dogma? Myth? No. But things actually taking place so that we could see and hear and lay up in our hearts. For as these songs were sung in the everyday language, we were then beginning to hear and speak. And as we joined in
singing, we took our mother's hand, as it were, and went to the stall at Bethlehem, to the streets of Jerusalem, where, greeted by children of a similar age, the Savior made His entry, and to the dark hill of Golgotha, and as the sun rose to the garden of Joseph. It was all present without needing to be made present. Barth's touching tribute appears at the conclusion of an argument proposing, first, that the manifold activities of the Christian
life tacitly presuppose that the Savior whom we remember in these activities is Himself in action now, today, and here. Secondly, that this action of Jesus Christ is of a peace with a history of His life, death, and resurrection as attested in the New Testament. These theological proposals are complex, and they are relevant to the themes of this essay. But we must not run past Barth's simple witness to Burkhardt's wise simplicity. We find the same simplicity, as
well as perhaps a distant reflection of Barth's early instruction in one of his later addresses on Christian ethics. God became, was, and is a human being. And it happened that God, as this one, was not a success, but had to suffer and died as a condemned criminal on the gallows. And it happened, further, that this man who was God was raised from the dead. But thereby, it happened that everyone in Him and all men by Him
were exalted to the glory of God. The conclusion of this history consists in this, that it will happen. It will be revealed for all and to all that our guilt and need is taken away by the person of this man, and that we are called in the person of this one to the glory of God. That is the history between God and man, the history of Jesus Christ, God's covenant and mercy. And it is to this
history that Christian ethics is related. In the Bible, Barth adds, we find the indispensable documents by which we may call to remembrance that history of Jesus Christ. There we find also an account of the condition of life created among us by the grace of God. In what follows, I will try to deepen, extend, and particularize this summary statement of Christian ethics in its relation to that particular history described biblically. The dialectical complexity of Barth's own elaboration,
which I intend to follow and evaluate, should not have us lose sight of the basic theological commitment underlying the form and content of the text we've already considered. It is a commitment simply to follow that very particular God who precedes and authorizes and encompasses all of our talk about God. Barth's interest in the history of God and Jesus Christ properly warrants our interest in the category of narrative. For narrative is a literary category appropriate to the
task of depicting that history in its biblical witness. The history in question is taken to be that of an agent. The identity of that agent is fittingly depicted in a narrative that may characterize God through the pattern description of God's action and passion as found within the movement of biblical plot. It is clear from Barth's account of God's being as a being in act, volume 2-1 of the Church Dogmatics, and of the being of Jesus
Christ as constituted by his action that a kind of narrative interpretation is at work in his theology. Yet it is important to refine our understanding of the way this sort of interpretation is secured, at least implicitly, through Barth's method of theological justification. Otherwise, we may overlook particular uses to which narrative interpretation is put in Barth's work, along with giving identity descriptions of God. Barth justifies theological positions without reference to a universal ground of rationality outside the
internal logic of Christian faith. He seeks to show how they contribute to a maximally coherent system of belief following a critical process of testing and revision. More specifically, his task begins from accepting the actuality of some form of theological knowledge. And then he proceeds to an argument showing how that knowledge is possible in its correspondence to the being of God. The theological necessity of any claim is established by tracing back from it to an understanding of
how its content refers to that gracious being. In this way, for Barth, the integrity of divine revelation as God's self-interpretation is preserved. As Eberhard Jungel puts it, God's self-interpretation is interpretation as correspondence. As God's own interpreter, God corresponds to God's own being. Thus, the highest and last statement which can be made about the being of God is God corresponds to God's self. Let me provide an illustration of this approach. A central claim of Barth's
theological anthropology, as we already know by way of anticipation from Professor Velker's essay, is that in its creaturely determination as God's covenant partner, humanity is co-humanity. This means that creaturely human being is as it ought to be when I and thou stand with one another in a glad mutuality of assistance. The proposal is fully comprehended and warranted for Barth when it becomes clear that human beings created as male and female, I and thou, in their
nature correspond to the being of the triune God who from all eternity decided to enact the covenant of reconciliation. The former claim about humanity, that it's constituted as I and thou, corresponds to the latter claim about the God who is taken to be in relation, essentially, as I and thou in trinitarian relation. As such, that God wills a covenant with us. And this covenant will, for us in turn, is the original of the creaturely covenants we
are to live in our own sphere. So what you have here, as you have in all of Barth's theology, as you have in all of this quest of faith for understanding, is the promise that that search may yield a particular recognition. We may come upon the grateful recognition that our words about God are really, as Barth puts it, at home in the word of God and that our search holds promise of fulfillment. Barth's narrative interpretation of
biblical materials does offer a helpful example of how, perhaps, to construe the canon as a whole. That is by our ability to follow the story of God in our relation to Israel and Jesus Christ. It also focuses attention away from philosophical anthropology as theological foundation and toward the centrality of God's agency within biblical narrative and Christian community. And for these insights concerning the usefulness of narrative interpretation, I'm especially grateful to Professor Thiemann, presently at Haverford College
and next year to be joining the folks at Harvard. But Barth's narrative interpretation also fittingly communicates the way in which God's being in act is a history of a certain sort. When he discusses history, Barth says, the history of a being begins, continues, and is completed when something other than itself and transcending its own nature encounters it, approaches it, and determines its being in the nature proper to it so that it is compelled and enabled to
transcend itself in response and in relation to this new factor. The feature of temporal self-transcendence in differentiated relation is found paradigmatically in the being of God, the one who loves in freedom, ad intra and ad extra. The eternal God is preeminently one who becomes. The father begets, the son is begotten, the spirit proceeds. Here is before and after. Here is God again and yet again. And here I am indebted to the work of Professors Gunton
and Jensen and Jungel. The basis of the rational necessity with which we can assert the history of God's life with us in Jesus Christ and of our life as history with God is that these histories correspond to that triune history. Once again, God corresponds to God's self. Now, the literary category of narrative emphasizes the interaction of circumstance and character, incident and identity in an ordered chronological sequence. Because of that emphasis, a narrative reading of scripture is
appropriately employed to display the temporal interaction of the approach with a transcending God in relation to human actors in self-transcending response. As a tool, then, that may preserve the correspondence of this interaction and a correspondence with the very being of God, the category properly serves the form and purpose of Barth's theological argumentation. Paul Recruer writes, the art of narrating, as well as the corresponding art of following a story, require that we are able to extract
a configuration from a succession. On the basis of the proceeding, it makes sense to say that the general configuration of meaning that Barth may extract in his reading of biblical narrative, and especially of the gospel narratives of the story of Jesus Christ, will be eminently historical, in Barth's sense. At least two implications follow concerning the relation between Barth's use of biblical narrative and his theological ethics. First, biblical narrative is used to show how the God who
transcends us in Jesus Christ remains free from us, so that our corresponding self-transcendence in relation may be a genuinely revolutionary discipleship. Secondly, biblical narrative depicts the way in which the God who relates to us in Jesus Christ remains in and as the basis of his transcendence free for us. Our corresponding response may therefore be a discipleship that is genuinely faithful service. With respect to the first implication, the implication of God's freedom apart from us for
a revolutionary discipleship, consider Barth's treatment of the revolutionary character of the royal man, Jesus Christ. As a man who exists analogously to the mode of existence of God, Jesus is not only the one who is ignored and forgotten and despised and discounted by humanity, nor is he merely the one who in fellowship and conformity with this God, who is poor in the world, is also poor, acknowledging those who are in different ways poor humanity as this
world counts poverty. As the one known in biblical depiction, Jesus corresponds to the being of a God in the display of a remarkable freedom in relation to the orders of life and value current in the world about him. This freedom is unclassifiable from the standpoint of these orders. So Barth says, he had need of none of these orders in the sense of an absolute authority which was vitally necessary for him and which he could prescribe and
defend as vitally necessary for others because it was an absolute authority. On the other hand, he had no need consistently to break any of them, to try to overthrow them altogether, to work for their replacement or amendment. He could live in these orders. He simply revealed the limit and frontier of all these things, the freedom of the kingdom of God. Inevitably then, he clashed with these orders in the interpretation commonly placed on them in the world
in which he lives. Barth defends the validity of this count in a startling excursus which illustrates Jesus' royal freedom in gospel narratives. He describes on the one hand the passive conservatism in Jesus, his clear acceptance of the temple as his father's house, his respect for the order of the family, his honoring of the law. In his relation to economic and political arrangements, there is no direct and principled repudiation. On the other hand, the biblical narratives about
Jesus show no trace of any consistent recognition in principle. His acceptance was of one who stood superior to them in the freedom of the kingdom of God. So he witnesses to a reality higher than the temple, and he sets himself and his family of followers over against his conventional family. There is the assault on the law in his attitude toward the Sabbath. His parables strikingly challenge existing economic relationships, and his stance toward the state includes a
clear vision of how its authority is severely limited and relativized. From this juxtaposition of seemingly conflicting patterns of acceptance and challenge, Barth derives a configuration of meaning. The juxtaposition both conceals and reveals the indissoluble antithesis of God's kingdom to all human kingdoms. Along with the denial that here there may be no neutral compatibility between the old and the new. Indeed, Jesus's most radical assault on the old is established by his, and these are Barth's words, ignoring
and transcending of it, and by the alien presence with which he confronted it in its own sphere. Thus, in the economic and political areas we find in Jesus's life and teachings, a questioning of the very presuppositions which is all the more powerful in its lack of any direct aggressiveness. In his and his followers accepting of the insecurity of this possession, and in the rejection of violence, we find the incommensurable factor which reflects how it is that
the world is concretely violated by God. In the excursus, Barth seeks to show how Jesus's freedom from us in correspondence with the freedom of God is depicted in the biblical stories themselves. He warns that if we do not know Jesus as this revolutionary, then what we would know instead, as he puts it, in a mild or wild transcendence is only ourselves. Thus, the pressing concern to protect theology from anthropology finds expression even here in the reading
of biblical narratives. More important for our purposes is the way in which this account illuminates one side of Barth's understanding of discipleship. Inasmuch as the disciple is a witness to Jesus and the radically new thing that Jesus brings, his or herself denial must reflect the break with the orders of the world and their false dominion. The world which sighs under these powers must hear and receive and rejoice that their lordship is broken. But this declaration cannot
be made by the existence of those who are merely free inwardly. If the message is to be given, the world must see and hear at least an indication or sign of what has taken place. In short, the break made by God in Jesus must become history. No particular or general principle set over against the lordless powers can intervene between the one calling and the disciple called or between the one called and the world which may hear.
Any such principle jeopardizes the freedom which must not be bound by the world, even and especially as the world remains the basis by which its negation is apprehended. That would confuse the break, which must ignore and transcend worldly orders, with one that may still validate the world through its relative overcoming. The commanding of Jesus, as found in the gospel accounts, does nevertheless proceed along certain clear lines which are always relevant. In the case of worldly possessions,
worldly honor, the use of violent force, the authority of family, and the structures of the world of piety, the disciple may be commanded to act in ways that, again, do not so much reverse as ignore the presuppositions of these spheres. Not merely to support a more egalitarian form of attachment to possessions, but in a freedom from possession, which may still be expressed egalitarianly. Not just in a nonviolent approach to the relationship between friend and foe, but
in witness to the invalidation of that relationship, which may still be expressed nonviolently. Not in a form of service which may win honor among men and women, but in the ignoring and transcending of these canons of honor, which hardly overrules the disciples' proper service. In these and other ways, too, the disciple may follow in freedom. Now, this statement of Jesus' radical freedom for Barth can never be the first or the last word to be said. The
first and last word is that Jesus with God, and now we move to the second implication I noted earlier, is for humanity in love and faithfulness. Jesus' freedom from us, including the freedom to say no to us, is finally secondary to and based upon the yes. Here, the biblical stories depict the yes in Jesus' being the deliverer of joy and comfort, the compassionate servant of human need. Jesus casts the light of the kingdom with its promise
of release from the ills that burden suffering humanity. In his reading of the stories of Jesus' miracles, Barth proposed that the aim of these acts is to help the sufferer to live again as a creature. In this help, we find manifestations of the kingdom drawn near. Barth develops the full ethical ramifications of God's yes through a narrative interpretation of biblical texts. This interpretation serves at least three purposes. First, he will give an account of what he
calls the basis of biblical ethics. Secondly, he will argue for a vision of the meaning of the obedience of the Christian disciple. Thirdly, he will account for the spheres of God's activity in the world as they pertain to certain moral issues. I will discuss the first two tasks briefly and then turn to a special instance of the third. First, concerning the basis of biblical ethics. That basis for Barth is the order and pattern of indicative and
imperative illustrated in Deuteronomy 6:20, and following. When your son asks you in time to come, what is the meaning of the testimonies and statutes and the ordinances which the Lord our God has commanded you? Then you shall say to your son, we were Pharaoh slaves in Egypt, and the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand, and the Lord showed signs and wonders great and gracious against Egypt and against Pharaoh and all his
household before our eyes. And he brought us out from there, that he might bring us in and give us the land which he swore to give to our fathers. And the Lord commanded us to do all these statutes, to fear the Lord our God for our good always, that God might preserve us alive as at this day. And it will be righteousness for us if we are careful to do all this commitment before the Lord our
God as he has commanded us. This text and others like it for Barth stand as the answer to the question of the legitimacy of the divine claim. God's command is legitimated, warranted, by the story of what God has done for humanity. The command, therefore, is never abstract. It is never preliminary or subsequent to the grace of God. It is always, as he puts it, the form or shape or garment of grace. The reality and promise of
grace, then, are captured in narrative shape. Moving to the second purpose, which Barth's narrative interpretation concerning God's being for us involves. Christian obedience, then, is a matter of witnessing appropriately to the story of what God has done for us. Since that action amounts to a liberation and loosing, the divine command always has the form of a permission to be one who belongs to Jesus Christ as a covenant partner. One may belong to and share in the
history of the covenant of grace which Jesus enacts, a history to which the interest of the whole Bible in both its parts is indissolubly directed. Obedience, then, cannot consist in mere conformity to general rules or principles as such, for it is just in the course of this history that there arises the commanding and forbidding. If we are to understand this, we may as little think of abstracting from this story as from the person of the God
who commands. On the contrary, we must continually keep before us and therefore understand the person in the history and the history in the person. In fact, it is crucial to see that the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount do not set out any general law negatively or positively. They only delimit the definite sphere of God's action. Barth interprets, and here you have a narrative interpretation of the giving of the commandments, he interprets the giving
of the commandments and the preaching of the sermon as moments in a larger story that opposes the notion that here we have general commands and prohibitions given to us here and now. The revealing of the commandments reveal, above all, a certain sort of God and a certain sort of people. God will command and forbid within the framework of the commandments, but we make a mistake if we confuse the framework with a picture of commanding and forbidding
itself. The picture is governed by Israel's success or failure in heeding the voice of the angel, referred to in Exodus 23:20, the angel sent by God whom the people must heed in their history with God. The pattern of framework and picture of delimitation of sphere and lived history corresponds to the New Testament depiction of the Sermon on the Mount and its aftermath. Here also, a definite history is disclosed in condensation. It is the history of the
kingdom of the new humanity. The Sermon on the Mount proclaims the consummation of the covenant of grace and therefore the telos of the law and the 10 commandments. Here also, the framework must not be confused with the picture. For the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, as Barth reads the text, and the new life it inspires is distinguished from the proclamation itself. Yet that life will always involve a series of events that repeat and confirm the event
proclaimed in the Sermon. Now, we may take this reading as controversial, but if we're going to challenge it, we at least have to understand what Barth is up to in giving this reading. Barth is trying to show that these prescriptions have a place in the biblical depiction of the covenant of grace, which shows how obedience is not frozen in these prescriptions as such. Rather, they display a view of obedience, which is historically concrete and bound to
that depiction, as discovered in the stories of Abraham, Peter, the centurion at Capernaum, and so forth. At the same time, obedience is not to be frozen in these stories either. While the commands given there by God must be seen as concerning us directly, becoming also God's command to us, they must also be the commands of Jesus Christ as he speaks to us, calling us in the particular situation of obedience determined by his word. Now, that situation
is no mere application or translation of these stories to the right situation of our choosing, according to Barth. For we have to realize that the command of Jesus given us itself creates the situation and all the conditions of the situation in which we have to obey. In obedience, we are not about to leap. We are already leaping. And here, I think Barth is trying to offer a biblically-informed carlin to an understanding of practical wisdom, prudence,
phronesis. We could talk more about that perhaps later. We are concretely and currently implicated in the history of God in Christ. Because Jesus lives, we may confirm and renew, but never copy the biblically-storied commands. Because Jesus lives, the life and death and victory of Jesus Christ, as attested in the New Testament, takes place today and will again take place tomorrow in the course of which he is the living Jesus Christ, and in which we now,
today, and here are invited to participate with supreme realism. The discipleship which correlates with this view of obedience includes faithful service of the neighbor. As ones who can only look where they see God looking, Christians are called to concern themselves with human beings beloved of God. The Christian may offer the assistance by which suffering people may be more able to live as creatures again. But that help, as it stands in continuity with God the Creator, will
also bear the marks of that break, that break with the orders of the world. The human creature may be served, that is, apart from validating the norms of mammon, worldly honor, a violent force, and so forth. This help, by which we may provide for the other a measure of creaturely freedom, is decisively a witness to the kingdom as it ignores and transcends these norms for the sake of the other. Now, moving to the third purpose. The
history of God and Christ may also be more specifically described in reference to particular moral problems. Barth will describe the spheres in which God's activity for us always takes place. This horizontal dimension of the divine command establishes a constancy and continuity which persists in all the differentiation of individual cases. Special ethics amounts to a commentary on the history of relationship between God and persons. And it's not surprising that Barth will turn to biblical narratives in his
attempt to offer this commentary. What may be surprising is that he doesn't do it that often. But when he discusses the ethics of suicide, he does. Perhaps deeper insight into both the character and possibilities of Barth's ethics will repay careful scrutiny of this particular discussion. Barth's treatment of suicide specifies his more general position concerning the respect owed human life. Our freedom for life is a freedom to treat it as a benefit and loan given by God.
While not a second God, it remains good and worthwhile because it is the one great opportunity of meeting God and rejoicing in God's praise. The birth of Christ in which God has taken life to himself stands as the great revelation of the respect owed to life in correspondence, again, with God's valuing of it. So besides treating life with astonishment, humility, and awe, one must simply will to live in response to God's showing us this favor. Accordingly,
indifferent, willful, or wanton destruction of life, including one's own, is met with an unqualified no. In the case of suicide or self-murder, Barth focuses especially on the kind of act in which self-destruction in the face of affliction represents an exercise of sovereignty of the self over itself. In this act, one stands before oneself as a judge, ruling that one's life is too obvious a failure or too intolerable a burden, are all too dishonorable, and
therefore fit for extinction. The will to judge oneself in this way is based on a tragically mistaken supposition. As afflicted and assaulted, the would-be suicide finds God hidden from one as one's own God. One is thus tempted to see oneself as sovereign in light of this dreadful void, and conceives continued life as a compulsion, a necessity conforming to some law of virtue or individual responsibility or social responsibility. Suicide is that last and supreme act of
sovereignty to liberate oneself from the necessity of living. It is an act which will not be stayed by the counter-force of these laws. But to will life before God is to will that we are permitted to live. The despair that anticipates and accompanies self-judgment is possible and necessary only if we must live. They are necessary only if we are charged to help ourselves, if pressure is extended from some quarter to take life into our
own hands, to be our own masters, to make something significant of ourselves, to justify, sanctify, save, and glorify ourselves, and to have to recognize at some point and in some way that we cannot really succeed in doing this. The supposition is false. God is gracious, and we may live by the fact that it is the gracious God who justifies, sanctifies, and glorifies. These activities are not required of us. All there is for us to do is
receive and acknowledge that grace. This word is the one light that may shine in the darkness of affliction. It contains the corrective that undercuts the impatient revolt against supposed necessity. The gracious God would speak the word that there is for us inexhaustible, illimitable, and unfailing forgiveness, help, and hope. The biblical correlate for this theological analysis can be found in the three great cases of suicide discovered in the Bible. In Saul, the first king of Israel,
Ahitophel, David's turncoat advisor, and above all in Judas, we find figures who stand deeply in the shadow of the biblical narrative. They are depicted as judged for sinning against the free grace of God. Saul wishes to be a king in the manner of the world. Ahitophel, in going over to Absalom, reveals his foolishness in not recognizing David as God's elect. Judas, an apostle and disciple chosen by Jesus, reserves for himself terms of obedience. For
these three, in their effort to be sovereign, in face of the fidelity and mercy of God, suicide is their logical end. But this resistance is resisted and defeated by the mercy of God, Barth says, in the death and resurrection. In his will as judged to be judged in our place, and in the vindication of his life and work by the one he called Abba, we find the basis for a love that has overcome even this. Hence,
suicide is, to use Barth's words again, rejected and impossible. Now that summary I've given captures the terse and synthetic manner in which Barth actually will draw a general conclusion from particular and very different biblical narratives. And so in that respect, I think it is a fair depiction. He does that sort of thing. But it's unfair to the extent that we don't really see the movement of his interpretation. So I'd like to give you a sense of
that by focusing for a little while on the stories of Saul and Judas and Barth's reading of those stories. According to 1 Samuel 8:5, the elders of Israel come together and say to Samuel, the last of the judges, appoint for us a king to govern us like all the nations. The Lord tells Samuel to grant the request, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being over them. The Israelites appear dissatisfied
with the lordship of God and the leaders appointed by God. They would expect security from another source of authority and power. Yet the character of the narrative makes clear, as Barth seasoned, that God will give them up to their king with the intention that the king remain a servant called to and subordinate to God. The double-sided character emerges clearly in the surprising election of Saul, who comes from the smallest of the families of the smallest
of the tribes of Israel. Hardly a political juggernaut. Saul is told by Samuel that God has appointed him prince, not king, over Israel, whatever the people may call him. In his encounter with the prophets and his falling into ecstasy, both promised to him by Samuel as a sign and confirmation of God's favor, Saul is, in effect, counted as still belonging to the order of the prophet. In the fact that he cannot be found when the people
seek him and that Yahweh must lead them to him, we have, again, a nagging reminder that Israel is and is not getting what it wants. It may get its lord, but only as the lord's servant. Saul fails in the latter commission. The story in 1 Samuel recounts a pair of sins by which Saul's kingship is lost. In advance of war with the Philistines and fearing his people would leave him, given Samuel's delay in coming to the
host, Saul takes the prerogative of offering the sacrifice. Samuel's subsequent rebuke indicates for Barth that in this act, Saul simply sets before the people the false image upon which the people had fed in their perverted demand for a king. He sought to lead the people in their relationship to God rather than waiting for God to direct and lead. The second fault, and these are both very minor faults by one reading Barth would say, consists in not
fulfilling God's command totally to destroy the Amalekites. Samuel spares King Agag along with a better cattle. Again, Samuel fears the people and wishes to please them. In these rather small compromises with the way of other kings and nations and gods, Saul gives his lordship precedence over his service and servant status. His fear governs his actions, but this binds him to a worldly law that cannot support him. Quite the contrary, the fear and its aftermath remain the
basis for all his other wickedness culminating in the suicide. Saul, as Barth reads the story, refuses to stand faithfully before God, however mild the refusal. He finds himself under the compulsion to live in the light or in the darkness of a rule of self-justification. As that rule convicts him, so he is free to convict himself. Poignantly, his suicide continues to reflect his fear, though now in terms of the ignominy that the approach of the Philistines
promises him after their final victory. He would kill himself lest these uncircumcised come and thrust me through and make support of me. Saul thus dies well, but as a man who would be king. Judas is genuinely one of the 12 and is perhaps distinguished in belonging to the tribe of Judah, the seat of David. Barth sees him as guilty, like Saul, of a minimum. He leaves the high priest to Jesus at a time and in a
place suitable for avoiding a ruckus. He just delivers Jesus into their hands, a delivery which continues after his own onto the cross. Barth takes the Johannine account of the anointing at Bethany to provide the clue to Judas' fault. Mary's act of complete and extravagant devotion is rejected by Judas, who reserves for himself the right to decide how to obey and follow. In Matthew's version, it is not Judas, but the disciples who complain of the extravagance. They
say, well, the text reads, they were indignant, saying, why this waste? Relating this latter scene to the disciples' collective uncertainty about which of them would hand Jesus over in the accounts of the Last Supper indicates for Barth that the situation between Jesus and Judas is only a heightened form of the situation between Jesus and all other people, including and especially the people who would follow him. That situation of reservation on the part of the disciple is
confirmed in the narrative of the price paid for Jesus and its Old Testament parallel. Get this. 30 pieces of silver is the wage paid to Zechariah, the prophet who had sought to protect the flock of sheep doomed to slaughter at the hands of wicked shepherds. But Zechariah becomes impatient with the sheep and they detested him. So he is given this wage and the relation is severed. The Lord commands Zechariah to cast the wage into the treasury
of the temple, seeing it as the lordly price at which I was paid off by them. Now, Judas takes the place of the prophet and the situation is reversed. By Barth's reading, payment is made not for protecting sheep who would be slaughtered, but for handing over the shepherd for slaughter. Judas is one of the flock withdrawing himself from the shepherd, counting his care as suspect. Judas, for Barth, does what God's people always do, buy God off
in exchange for a measure of independence. So Judas is handed back in the 30 pieces of silver what he, as the representative of God's people, dares to offer God in place of what is really owed. Judas does repent of his handing over when he finds that Jesus, an innocent, is condemned and handed over to Pilate. But the penitence is dependent on himself, on his own work, as it is also in league with the world into which
Jesus is delivered. By Barth's reading, the same reservation which leads him to hand Jesus over, the same failure of surrender to the point of glorifying the way of the cross also forecloses making full restitution for the deed. Judas can only see to the matter himself as the high priests tell him. He can only act on his own in accord with what he bargained for. His hanging himself discloses that Judas has no future as a disciple. The
life of discipleship can only continue in following the crucified Jesus raised from the dead. As before, and now in his suicide, Judas acts as his own judge, taking to himself the final judgment of his act as if thereby order would be restored. But the departure taken at Bethany does not restore order. The reserve of Judas in Matthew is illumined in the text perhaps by the juxtaposition of his flight to the high priests with the inauguration of
Jesus's passion as a mission unto death on behalf of sinners and indeed on behalf of the very poor about whom the disciples worry. In the narrative, the turning to the high priests is linked to the querulous turning from the way of the cross in suffering solidarity with sin and misery. Judas's reserve takes him to his own tree, as Barth says, and the despair he would destroy along with himself is based on his sense of having lost
the race he set for himself. We know little of what exactly that race involved. It might be viewed as the effort to force Jesus's hand, to have him display his power in a fashion that would get the real revolution of the Messiah going. But we are not told, and Barth does not speculate. Yet in the text's silence, the sense of disrelation of Judas's way to Jesus's way is heightened. The sense of disrelation is also communicated in
the negative correspondence of Jesus and Judas as isolated penitents. Barth's reading of the Gethsemane narratives develops the way in which Jesus's prayer to Abba reflects the understanding that the dreadful thing approaching him was the coming concealment of the lordship of God under the lordship of evil. Jesus prays that, directed by God's providence, the facts might speak a different language from that which they are about to speak, that in their end and consequence, they should not be
against him, just as he had decided for God and not against God in the wilderness. Note that Jesus only prays. Barth's sense of contrast with Judas is reflected in the very language he uses to describe what Jesus does and does not do. He says he does not demand. He does not advance any claims. He does not lay upon God any conditions. He does not reserve his future obedience. He does not abandon his status as a penitent.
He does not cease to allow that God is in the right even against himself. He does not try to anticipate his justification by him in any form or determine it to himself. He says with increasing conviction, thy will be done. In light of the contrast then, disciples of Jesus may be able to see both how they are delivered up to the world in and with the crucified and risen Lord and how they, as those for whom
Jesus was delivered up, would hold and reserve their devotion. They may see the affliction which the first delivery can involve, bearing as it does the dignity of the cross in their witness of good news to the suffering. They may see the suicidal logic of reservation and they may learn that they too would be suicides. They may pray to God in their affliction and they may give themselves in works of love to those who believe that they
must live, uncovering by their revolutionary fellowship a piece of a different picture. Serving them in their need, they may recall that such also is their need. As suicide is rejected, a testimony to its rejection may be given in word and deed, a testimony that must become history in the love that stands surety for the neighbor and in the joy that overtakes sorrow without extinguishing it. They may see that they cannot take their own lives because they
are always already called to have given them away. The resurrection of Jesus Christ, which for Barth discloses the meaning of the answer given to Jesus' prayer in Gethsemane, gives them permission to do so. From this rendition of Barth's interpretation of biblical narrative, we can see that he tries, in Professor Lindbeck's words, to show how the scriptural world is able to absorb the universe, how it supplies the interpretive framework within which believers live their lives and understand
reality. The task of Christian ethics is to argue from what that world depicts, the history of God, two conclusions about the spheres of God's activity relevant to the Christian's activity. However successful or unsuccessful Barth executes this task, it does relate in interesting and important ways to current work being done in Christian ethics. And so in conclusion, let me try to evaluate Barth's ethical vision in terms of some of this work. My concluding remarks will take the
form of four theses with commentary. First, because it is based on the history of the God gracious to us in Jesus Christ, Barth's Christian ethic is an ethic of virtue. I have argued elsewhere that Barth's ethic of divine command is not liable to the charge of intuitionism or occasionalism. On the contrary, Barth can well account for the way in which the hearer of the divine command is shaped in and by a history within which character can
grow and develop. Stanley Hauerwas was one Christian ethicist making the wrongful charge, and happily he seems no longer bound to it. In his recent work, in fact, Hauerwas adopts a position toward the status of moral rules and the basis of biblical ethics that is remarkably akin to Barth's own. Hauerwas would or should share with Barth the notion that we know who we are only when we place ourselves within God's story, or the idea that to learn
to be God's creature is to learn to be at home in God's world. The placing and learning of which Hauerwas speaks includes the development of virtues, attitudes, and dispositions enabling the disciple to correspond in his or her pattern of action to God's own. Barth's biblical interpretation concerning moral questions can be seen to impart a sense of these moral skills and perspectives. One comes to learn of penitence when contrasting the narrative expressions of same in Judas and
Jesus. One learns something more of the joy one is permitted to live by in its contrast with the fear of Saul or the reserve of Judas. So one may learn these things and become a person faithful and grateful to God, and one may do that because of the gift of God's self-manifestation and the faithfulness God displays across our lives. Since, however, the history of the gracious God is also a history of divine sovereignty in the
one who laid the axe at the root of the trees, one must not conclude that the disciple's history with God is an easy continuity. On the contrary, the disciple for Barth lives simul justus et pacator, always only, to use Barth's terminology, falling out with oneself. The falling out is with the old one who may be lifted up out of identifications with the orders of life judged by God. The disciple shares these identifications with non-Christians, and
the work of Christian ethics must include a loving witness to the world and to one another as Christians of the new freedom that stands for us over against the current spheres of politics, economics, recognition, family, and so forth. While Hauerwas may be correct in his claim that the primary task of the Christian community is to maintain its particular identity, he may need the reminder posed by Barth that the community is free to be itself in active
witness to and for the world of suffering creation. He might recall Barth's arguments, derived in part from the narratives of Jesus, that the world of piety also stands judged as the pious world with its continual need to publicize itself, even in its radical contrast to liberal individualism. Repeatedly and merely falling out with oneself in the Christian community and for suffering creation through prayer and righteous action in the world, the Christian disciple may be, on Barth's terms,
virtuous. Secondly, because it is based on the history of the sovereign God present to us in Jesus Christ, Barth's Christian ethic is a theocentric ethic. In his remarkable and relentless attack on anthropocentrism in Christian theology and ethics, James Gustafson laments that religion and God have been put in the service of human needs. This implies the denial of God as God as the powers and ordering that sustain and bear down upon us. A theocentric ethic must reverse
this tendency, especially for Gustafson, through a focus on finite humanity in its continuity with the natural world, which God also sustains and limits. Karl Barth's ethics, Gustafson says, are as theocentric as any in this century. Yet Barth too, for Gustafson, remains anthropocentric in his conviction that the commands of God are primarily in the service of the needs of humanity. What Gustafson rejects, in part, is Barth's ordering of all of the acts of God to covenant partnership
with humanity in Jesus Christ. But these acts correspond to the being of God, not to us and our needs. And in Jesus Christ, we discover a thoroughgoing no to any effort to use God as an instrument of our needs. That effort only yields reflection of ourselves. There may be great value in Gustafson's theological plea to relativize humanity's importance and possibility in light of its connection with the natural world. But for Barth, the change in human life
accomplished by God overcomes the dichotomy between anthropocentrism and theocentrism upon which Gustafson relies. Barth's ethic becomes so theocentric as to rule out as impossible theological attention to human needs, except as they are measured and transfigured in the light of God. Third thesis. For Barth, God's sovereign freedom apart from us is the external basis of God's freedom for us. Thus, Barth's ethic of virtue can never be identified with the theological ethic of idea. In the essay, Fate
and Idea in Theology, to which Professor Thiemann referred last night, Barth questions the adequacy of what he calls theological idealism. That view involves the self-reflection of spirit over against nature. It seeks to direct us to a God who exists in genuine transcendence, who is the presupposition of all that is given, objective, and conditioned. If this theology is to be adequate, it must allow that its criterion of truth is a possibility specific to God and not
to us. Moreover, the transcendence to which it points must never be just the self-transcendence of our created and fallen spirits. The condition of the possibility of knowledge of God belongs to God alone. There is a hint, a hint, of a problematic theology of idea in Stanley Hauerwas's ethic of virtue. While his uses of biblical narrative often yield rich theological insight, he often will forgo these uses in favor of a general category of narrative that expresses
the particular, historical, and social bases of human existence. The story of the Christian community is correlated with this category, and then set over against the dominant and destructive vision of liberalism, with its suspicion of tradition and its praise of the individual. These different uses of different senses of narrative sometimes emerge in the consideration of a single issue. So, in his treatments of suicide, Hauerwas will, on the one hand, refer to a biblically-derived understanding of life
as a divine gift, beginning where Barth does. Then he proceeds to an account of the way suicides reflect and prepare for the erosion of trust necessary to sustain any community life. Poignantly, he notes how suicides may point to a community's abandonment of its members. It may also undermine trust, because our will to live must include the recognition of our need and obligation to be counted on and trusted in by others in our communities, even in the
midst of suffering. Finally, Hauerwas sets the claims of the second approach over against the community-eroding forces of liberalism, with its stress on an ideal of autonomy that only deceives and isolates. These last two moves seem to derive theological claims from the framework of a general philosophical anthropology and or from the dialectical negation of contemporary cultural expressions of meaning and value. In short, they seem to engage some theological traditions of Protestant liberalism and or the Barth
of the Romans commentary. To overcome the dangers of a theology of idea, the gracious God must be understood to be sovereign, free apart from us and our dialectical positings of transcendence. Following this understanding, Christian ethics may still have to say much of what Hauerwas says, but it may say it differently, as it may also say some more and better things. It may be better able to address the depth of affliction that overcomes people, Christian and otherwise.
It may be able to say good things for liberal culture in the name of the kingdom and its promise that one may live. Four theses. For Barth, God's triune freedom for us is the internal basis of God's sovereignty apart from us. Hence, Barth's theocentric ethic can never be a theological ethic of fate. In Fate and Idea, Barth also expresses a hesitation towards this kind of theology. The theology which would seek God in a fate that befalls
human beings inwardly and outwardly, subjectively and objectively, something which becomes all too powerful for them and takes them prisoner, setting them in absolute dependence. This God must represent the one reality present in all other reality, hidden but not entirely hidden there. Characteristically, he worries because this approach makes God accessible apart from God, as the performer of God's work. It is important for Barth, as he puts it, that the word come to us. God distinguishes himself from
fate by the fact that he is not so much there as rather that he comes. Now, there is a hint, maybe more than a hint, but there's a hint of a theology of fate in Gustafson's theocentric ethic. It does involve a correlation between a phenomenology of religious consciousness and the order of nature. The powers of God are given or made manifest to the pious consciousness in experiences of relations in that order, including its human dimensions. Gustafson
repudiates the idea of divine revelation because it seems to suggest we can speak of God in say, apart from our construals of God, as acting like a person. In addition, he questions construals of God as personal agent, since they seem to jeopardize theocentricity. But Barth's theology of revelation challenges the distinction between our construals of divinity and divinity in itself. It warrants, in fact, a construal of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, so that God may
be, in God's very self, possible for or capable of revelation, as Professor Thiemann elaborated last night. The interpretation of God as triune is both construal and an expression of God's self-construal, depicted biblically. In arguing from actuality to possibility in God, Barth shows how the doctrine of the Trinity should prevent the being of God being understood as a human construction, and hence, as a servant of human needs. The resurrection promise is delivered for us by one
who was able to do so apart from us, who was already ours in advance. This makes ethics all the more theocentric, and it leads Barth to ask the theologian of fate, wouldn't it perhaps be better for this God to be called simply nature? The most important issue between Gustafson and Barth is not the moral status of the natural order, nor anthropocentricity, nor Gustafson's charge that Barth's Christological reading of scripture is too simple and neat. Those are
important, but not most important. Most important is the issue whether God can be understood as an agent who graciously comes to us with the good news of resurrection promise. Without that possibility, a theocentric ethic is left with Gustafson's conviction that God does not guarantee human good. While the powers of God can offer the afflicted opportunities for movement out of despair, they do not always. The powers of God for Gustafson may make life an unbearable burden. In
such cases, one must consent to one's own or another's suicide, and one must make room for enmity toward God. One has to consent to the reality that the powers that bring life into being do not always sustain it, but can lead to its untimely and tragic destruction, period. It is fair to say, then, that Karl Barth's ethical thought stands as an alternative to two major proposals in Christian ethics made in this decade. The same question posed
from different sides of Barth's dialectical view of God's historical being may be asked of Hauerwas and Gustafson. It is whether their work makes way for the grace of the self-revealing God in Jesus Christ. The counter questions that can be asked of Barth are several. In what sense is God an agent? How can a doctrine of revelation be defended? How are covenantal ethics related to the structures of nature? Is resurrection, finally, an exceedingly anthropocentric and indefensible
notion? What is the proper relation between church and world? How illuminating is an approach to suffering and tragedy that speaks of suicide as already rejected? How workable and coherent is an ethic based on correspondence to the being of God depicted in scripture? These are complex and important questions. They require careful theological and philosophical analysis. But we must not forget that they may be counter questions to a question that remains wise in its simplicity. It is a
question about the possibility of the good of redemption delivered to us unexacted by the prevenient God. Those of us who would work on the question and the counter questions would continue to profit from reading Barth in all of his dialectical richness and power. But we should also read well the simple words. The words praising Abel Burkhardt. The words of the first article of the Barman Confession. The words of tribute to Mozart, which we'll hear tonight. Or
maybe the words with which I will close. God is free grace. And therefore, because free grace is a joyous thing, the proclamation for which God commands the prophets and the apostles, the proclamation of the Christian church, is gospel, joyous news. Thank you. ... Thank you, Dr. Werpehowski. We'll take a five minute break to give you a chance to stretch, and then we'll come back for the response and discussion.