Introduction
Our objective in this chapter is to complete our investigation of covenant and its relation to economic life in the theology of Karl Barth. According to Barth, Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of the covenant. The fulfilled covenant, Barth's Christology, is discussed under the heading of the doctrine of reconciliation in volume three of the Church Dogmatics. Before we investigate Barth's doctrine of reconciliation, we will need some introductory remarks that will enable us to grasp how the economic aspects of Barth's doctrine of reconciliation relate to and extend previous results. Then we will present an overview of Barth's doctrine of reconciliation, followed by a section filling out this overview with its relevant economic content in relation to reconciliation.
We obtained our previous results by virtue of the fact that covenant and creation are related. There are aspects of the covenant, however, that we did not discuss in the previous chapter. Our emphasis there was creation. But creation is not covenant, and our exegesis did not uncover the heart of the covenant, even though we exegeted the Genesis accounts Christologically. Here, however, we will penetrate to the heart of covenant which in its fulfilled form is the supreme act of fellowship by which God in Jesus Christ reconciled the world to himself. Since we will broaden and deepen our understanding of covenant, we will arrive at new results relating economic life and covenant. God's act in Jesus Christ is, for Barth, the center of all God's acts and their ethical human responses. Consequently, previous results, as well as our new ones, can find their final meaning only if they are correctly located in relationship to the reconciliation that occurred in Jesus Christ. We will position our past results in relation to Jesus Christ by showing how covenant and reconciliation are related, and within that context, how creation and reconciliation are related. This will enable us to see how the economic aspects of creation relate to Jesus Christ, which, when integrated with the economic aspects of reconciliation, will complete our study of how economic life is related to the covenant.
Relation of Reconciliation and Covenant
How are reconciliation and covenant related? In summary form Barth relates the two by saying that covenant is the presupposition of reconciliation, and that Jesus Christ the reconciler is the fulfillment of the covenant.(1) We must investigate what Barth means by this. We begin by inquiring into the nature of covenant itself. Previously, we have spoken of covenant as the personal fellowship that exists among people and with God as revealed in the history of the biblical revelation. This covenant occurs in two forms, the old covenant with Israel, and its new form in Jesus Christ. We will first discuss the covenant with Israel. The basis of the covenant with Israel is election, the free grace of God in that among all the nations of the earth he chose Israel to be his people, and Israel responded to God's choice. At its heart it means "I will be your God, and ye shall be my people."(2) Furthermore, the mutual choice signified mutual responsibilities and obligations between Yahweh and his people, and among the people themselves. The word covenant itself "denotes an element in a legal ritual in which two partners together accept a mutual obligation."(3) By virtue of the covenant, their relation to Yahweh, Israel became a people. As a people bound in covenant they exist before Yahweh and with one another through the covenant. All of their personal relations are expressions of covenant, with the result that their social relations, their cultus, and their writings, the law and the prophets, and their economic relationships, are expressions of the fundamental covenant relationship. Covenant was therefore the basis of Israel's national life, and it was through the covenant that Yahweh related to Israel. Furthermore, the covenant is to be understood as a dynamic history of on-going events. It was not a static reality. It existed only through grace, only when God spoke and his people responded. For this reason, there was never one specific form of the covenant, and further, it could be broken, endangered, virtually abrogated, renewed, and finally it could even change its form and become a new covenant as it did in Jesus Christ.
Our previous results were based upon the fact that covenant is internal to creation. Major portions of our exegesis of Genesis revolved around the old Israelitic covenant as the Genesis stories were written in that context. The use of the Old Testament did not, however, introduce anything alien in the new covenant of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the basis of the Old Testament revelation.(4) Everything that God intended for humanity as revealed in the Old Covenant with Israel, and here we are thinking of God's meeting humanity's physical needs through the creation of the external world, and giving people opportunity to serve one another and God in work, had its basis in the new covenant of Jesus Christ. When Barth says that covenant is the presupposition of reconciliation, he is referring to the Israelitic covenant as expressed in Israel's history. Our prior results had their basis in covenant. They emerged out of Barth's Christological exegesis and this exegesis involved aspects of the old covenant with Israel. If the old covenant is the presupposition of the new, then our former results regarding economic life as known through the old covenant must be preserved as the presupposition of whatever new results we may derive from Jesus Christ. Furthermore, these old results will be strengthened, confirmed and fulfilled, as the new covenant is the fulfillment of the old. Therefore, Barth will say:
What happens to this covenant [the old covenant] with the conclusion of this new and eternal covenant is rather--and the wider context of the passage points in this direction--that it is upheld, that is, lifted up to its true level, that it is given its proper form, and that far from being destroyed it is maintained and confirmed. There is no question of a dissolution but rather of a revelation of the real purpose and nature of the first covenant.(5)
In other words, our results relating covenant and creation, social historical life and economic life, must be preserved as the presupposition of whatever we learn in this chapter about Jesus Christ as the fulfillment of the covenant. We may inquire into this matter more specifically by discussing the direction of Israel's mission as revealed in the old covenant, and the change of form that occurred with the advent of the new covenant of reconciliation.
Universality of the Old Covenant
Although God had concluded the covenant with Israel alone, there were, within the Old Testament itself, indications that the covenant with Israel opened out into a covenant between God and the entire human race. The most concrete example of this wider covenant presented by Barth is the covenant between God and humanity presented in Gen. 9:1-17.(6) Barth calls this the Noachic covenant, it being God's promise never to destroy the earth as he had done in the flood. The Noachic covenant is, in Barth's view, a covenant of grace, in that God's promise does not depend upon human faithfulness, but upon God's mercy alone. As such, it is related to the specific covenant of Israel as an outer circle of God's grace which reflects and is based upon the inner circle of grace of Israel's historical covenant with Yahweh.(7) Since the covenant was intended for all, the Old Testament had no hesitation in allowing figures from outside Israel to come into its history as endowed by Yahweh with the highest authority and function. What is indicated here virtually emerges into the clear light of day in Israel's latter history where it is affirmed that Yahweh has called all the nations into the circle of his grace as known in Israel.(8) According to certain portions of the book of Isaiah, Israel, or perhaps a particular figure, is entrusted with the message of God's grace, and the role of mediator for the day when God's purposes for all the nations are fully revealed. The trajectory of the development of the Israelitic understanding of covenant, in Barth's view, points to Jesus Christ, who is the mediator of a new covenant which fulfills the old Israelitic covenant. In Jesus Christ the hope of the old covenant that God would act in behalf of all people is fulfilled, so that Jesus Christ is the mediator for the whole of humanity, first to the Jew and then the Gentile. In this sense Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of the covenant, and the covenant is the presupposition of reconciliation. Jesus Christ does not abrogate the expectations of the old covenant, but completes its hopes. We have already indicated this conclusion in our Christological exegesis of Genesis. Jesus Christ was seen to the be original inhabitant of Eden, and from him, as indicated by the great river, God's intended blessing flowed forth and filled the whole world. The universality implicit in Israel's covenant becomes apparent in Jesus Christ, and this includes the universal applicability of the results relating covenant and creation as discerned through the old covenant. Therefore, our previous results on economic and covenant life, in so far as they reflect God's revelation, apply to all nations, persons, and socioeconomic systems.
The New Form of the Covenant and the Validity of Past Results
We now come to a critical limitation of the old covenant, and the distinctive feature which gives the new covenant its characteristic form in relation to the old. The primary limitation of the old covenant in its original form was that the mercy and grace intended by Yahweh always seemed to be limited and matched by the apostacy and rebellion of his people.
The form in which it [the old covenant] was revealed and active in all the events from the exodus from Egypt to the destruction of Israel and Judah was such that in it the faithfulness and power of Yahweh seemed always to be matched and limited by the perpetually virulent and active disobedience and apostacy of the covenanted people.(9)
Our exegesis of Genesis indicated the possibility of this sin by the fact that chaos hung over creation as a threat that could be realized. That threat was realized, the relationship between Yahweh and Israel was constantly jeopardized, with the result that Israel suffered the results of her own apostacy. Specifically, we must recall at this point that one of the results of the broken covenant was economic oppression and devastation most clearly seen in the loss of the land in Exile. Nevertheless, God, in Barth's view, was faithful, both to himself and to his people. God, in Jesus Christ, restored the broken covenant by giving it a new form. The limitation of the old was overcome. By virtue of the new work in Jesus Christ, human sin and apostacy were set aside, forgiven, and a new relationship established in which God gives his people new hearts and minds. The essence of the new form of the covenant is forgiveness, and it effects a change so momentous that Barth describes it as the abolition of the old order and the establishment of a new. The new order, a new creation, differs from the old in that it is impervious to sin and death and it restores the hopes of the old.
As we have seen, the prophecy of it [the new covenant] does not mean to discredit or invalidate these others, or the covenant with Israel as such. It denies what had so far taken place on the basis of the presupposition to which those conclusions of the covenant point: the breaking of the covenant on the part of the people, and ensuing judgments on the part of God. But it does not deny the presupposition as such. It negates--or rather according to the prophecy God negates--the unfaithfulness of Israel, but not the faithfulness of God Himself, nor His covenant will in relation to His people.(10)
Our previous results followed from relating covenant to creation in the context of Barth's doctrine of creation. The saga of creation, when exegeted Christologically, described God's intent that all people be blessed with the economic bounty of Eden (2.7). Reconciliation fulfills this prior intent by dealing with the sin that led to the loss of Eden. In Jesus Christ God overcomes the sin and death that disrupted God's intentions for how the material world and its products are to be used within covenant relations. Therefore, Jesus Christ fulfills God's original hopes for creation, and those original hopes are the presupposition of the new covenant in Jesus Christ. This became particularly apparent in our exegesis of Genesis where Barth affirmed that Eden's hope could be affirmed only in light of Jesus Christ, and not within the limits of the old covenant as given in Israel. Therefore, our old results are confirmed and strengthened within this new covenant since the only real threat to those results was the reality of sin, and sin has been conquered in Jesus Christ. This follows from the fact that covenant is the presupposition of reconciliation, and reconciliation is the fulfillment of covenant.
Christological Validity of Past Results
We may now approach this matter from a somewhat different perspective. When we exegeted the Genesis accounts, we did so Christologically. This is due to the fact that God begets only the Son, so that creation is made through him and he is the basis of the covenant which itself forms the inner basis of creation. All of our previous results concerning the relationship between covenant and creation, and their relevance for the relationship between economics and covenant, had no validity unless they were ultimately and finally measured against God's revelation in Jesus Christ. Since our exegesis of Genesis was a Christological exegesis, it follows, virtually by definition, that none of our previous results could be at variance with the revelation in Jesus Christ. But this leads us to a question. In exegeting Genesis Christologically, did we discover anything of an independent significance, or could everything we learned there be found in Jesus Christ apart from a study of the creation accounts? In Barth's view, creation is not reconciliation. God's act in creation is distinct from his act in reconciliation. This follows from the fact that each mode is distinct and cannot be reduced to the others (1.1). Therefore, what we have learned in creation is not simply a reflection of what we learn in Jesus Christ.(11) Past results must be given an independent but related status as in the distinctiveness and relatedness of the inner triune life. Furthermore, since each mode cannot stand in isolation but requires the others (1.6), our past results are essential for understanding Jesus' reconciling work. They are, to use Barth's phrase, the "presupposition" of God's new work of reconciliation. Apart from their validity Jesus' reconciling work is left hanging in the air. This fact will become especially apparent when we consider what we could call "the economics of Jesus." It may appear that Jesus' economic proposals have little significance for contemporary economic existence. If, however, we maintain the integrity of our past results, and claim that Jesus can be understood only by preserving the integrity of these original results, then our understanding of how covenant relates to economic life will receive the widest possible scope. If we deny these previous results, then we have in effect separated creation from covenant, and this implies a split within the triune life and a move toward tri-theism. Barth considers this same matter from a somewhat different angle through a discussion of Marcion. Marcion carried the results of separating creation and covenant, or the Old Testament from the New, to their logical conclusions.(12) The result was a docetic Christ who never really takes flesh, and ultimately, becomes irrelevant to the ongoing affairs of life including its economic aspects. Marcion can be countered only if we keep creation and covenant together, each in the proper order, and never divorce an understanding of Jesus Christ from a study of God's work in creation. Therefore, we must not only extend and deepen previous results, but they must stand on their own feet and make their own contribution, and not simply be reflections or simple repetitions of what we could just as easily find in Jesus Christ alone. Our next step is to present an overview of Barth's doctrine of Reconciliation, followed by a section in which we begin to describe how our past results are relevant for obtaining the new results of this chapter.
Overview of Reconciliation(13)
Reconciliation is a history; it is the history of Jesus Christ. It is a divine and human history, the history of God's grace active in Jesus Christ, and Jesus' obedient human response. Within this two-fold history we shall discover what sorts of actions restore the covenant, and thereby redeem economic life which depends upon covenant (2.3). By contrast, we shall discover the nature of economic sin. Our exegesis of Genesis enabled us to see that economic deprivation is the result of sin, but we did not discover its nature since this is revealed only Christologically. Here we discover the way of restoring economic life, and by contrast, what sinful actions lead to the intensification of economic misery.
The reconciling history of Jesus Christ has a three-fold Christological form. The form, the theological/Christological structure, is secondary. The three-fold form emerges through theological reflection upon the primary reality which is the history of Jesus Christ as given in Scripture. Since the person of Jesus Christ is the primary reality, all Barth's Christological doctrines are worked out historically. The divine/human natures of Jesus Christ, for example, are not static essences, but the histories of God's acts in Jesus, and the history of Jesus' acts in obedience to God's work in him. In this chapter we will deal with the first two Christological forms, although we will now summarize the three forms before investigating the economic content of the first two.
Barth's three-fold Christology, the three-fold history of Jesus Christ, has its origin and basis in the nature of the God who reveals himself in Jesus Christ. The God of Jesus Christ is the one triune God. Within the divine life the Father generates eternally the Son in the community of love as Spirit. Corresponding to this inner triune fellowship God elects and seeks fellowship with his creatures. The depth of his fellowship is revealed in that he has eternally elected his creatures in Jesus Christ, and this eternal election is manifested in time by his entering into the human condition in the history of Jesus Christ. In taking flesh God remains God; it is his nature to humble himself and become a man, with the result that Jesus Christ is the unity of both a divine and a human history. Reconciliation is effected through this history, it requires God's initiative, and it also requires a human obedient response. Neither nature is denied by the other; both are involved and inviolate. By means of this divine/human history, reconciliation is effected in a three-fold form. It begins with an initial two-fold exchange, from above to below followed by below to above, which issues in a third horizontal movement, the actualization of the two-fold exchange in history. The first moment of the two-fold exchange is that God entered into the human condition. Barth discusses this moment in volume IV:1 of the Church Dogmatics under the title of "Jesus Christ, the Lord as Servant." Several ideas are brought together in this section of the Church Dogmatics. God humbled himself in Jesus Christ, took the form of a servant, suffered the humiliation of the cross, and through these actions justified and forgave sinful humanity. The relevant ideas here are the priestly work of Jesus Christ seen in his suffering the effects of human sin on the cross, justification as the forgiveness of God, sin revealed as pride in the face of the humility of Jesus Christ, and faith that apprehends the justifying priestly work of Jesus Christ. In the second moment of the two-fold exchange, God exalted humanity into fellowship with himself. Barth discusses this second act of God in volume IV:2 of the Church Dogmatics under the title "Jesus Christ, the Servant as Lord." God lifted up humanity into his fellowship in Jesus Christ, gave all people a kingly royal status, and sanctified the humanity he had justified. The relevant ideas here are the kingly work of Jesus Christ, especially as revealed in his resurrection, sanctification as the imparting of a new self, the sin of sloth as the resistance to becoming the new humanity revealed in Jesus Christ, and love that participates in the fellowship with God and others, made possible by God's exalting a renewed humanity into the fellowship of his presence. These two events, the movement from above to below, and from below to above, form the substance of Barth's doctrine of reconciliation; and together, they effect an exchange between the divine and human conditions. The root meaning of reconciliation, in Barth's view, is "to exchange." "In its literal and original sense the word apokatallassein ('to reconcile') means 'to exchange.' The reconstitution and renewal of the covenant between God and man consists in this exchange--the exinanitio, the abasement, of God, and the exaltatio, the exaltation of man."(14) The exchange occurs in that God exchanges the joy of the inner triune love for the humiliation and sin of human existence, and in so doing enables humanity to exchange its humiliation and sin for the joy of fellowship with the triune God. By means of these two acts as a divine/human history the covenant of personal fellowship and responsible love between God and humanity is restored and fulfilled.
God's two-fold reconciling act forms the basis of a third Christological aspect. The third form is the realization of this once and for all completed work in history. In the following chapter we will discuss how the two-fold history of Jesus Christ becomes relevant for the state and economic life. Since the third Christological aspect is concerned with how the first two-fold aspects go out into the world, we will leave elements of the third aspect to the discussion of the next chapter. We will now advance with the economic relevance of the first two Christological forms.
The Relevance of Old Results to New Results
We have affirmed the validity and integrity of our previous results in light of the fact that covenant is the presupposition of reconciliation and reconciliation the fulfillment of covenant. This in turn had its basis in the distinctiveness and relatedness of the inner-triune persons. We may now inquire more closely as to how old results are pertinent to the new ones we will derive in this chapter. This is an important question for us. Barth discussed economic life in the context of creation, especially in his treatment of the ethics of creation in volume four of the Church Dogmatics. As we study his doctrine of reconciliation, we will discover additional material of economic relevance. But Barth did not integrate the economic aspects of creation and covenant in a self-conscious theological fashion. We must do that in this chapter, and we may now begin to describe how we shall go about doing this. According to (2.5) the covenant requires an external basis, and that basis is the created world. The new covenant in Jesus Christ requires an external basis as well. Jesus Christ related not only to God and people, he also related to the material world as external basis. By (2.3), Jesus' relation to the material world expressed the nature of his history, his social history, understood as events of relatedness between Jesus, God, and other people. In this social history God encountered his people by humbling himself to take human form (the priestly work), and thereby exalted humanity into his presence (the kingly work). Each of these acts entailed relations to the material world, and these relations to creation express the nature of the covenant acts since each occurs in the context of social relations with God and among peoples (2.3). Succinctly, God's humbling himself as revealed in Jesus' obedience entailed renunciation of economic plenty, bodily suffering, and dispossession, while the exaltation of humanity entailed economic abundance, healing, and material largesse for those in need. Jesus Christ is the one who redeems economic life by restoring the covenant. In so far as economic life is redeemed through grace in Jesus Christ, it is restored through economic actions which express social historical acts whose direction corresponds to Jesus' reconciling work. Or, given that all technical economic activities, the utilization of the earth's resources and the distribution of its products among people, reflect social acts among nations, classes, and persons (2.3), economic life is restored when its technical aspect reflects the direction of Jesus' reconciling history. The direction of God's reconciliation was from above to below, from economic well-being and power to poverty and deprivation, followed by a move from below to above, the blessing of those in need with bodily well-being and material sufficiency. Similarly, in the human sphere, economic recovery occurs through social interactions among classes, nations, and persons in which material assets and power are shifted from the centers of plenty and might, from above to below, in favor of the powerless and destitute, from below to above. We may now investigate this matter more thoroughly by considering Jesus' priestly work.
Jesus' Priestly Work
The Humility of God
We have referred to Barth's first Christological aspect as a movement from above to below in which God the Lord became a servant for the sake of humanity. In taking flesh in Jesus Christ God humbles himself, and in his humility labors to restore and redeem the human lot. Barth refers to the event of God's humiliation as the "The Way of the Son of God into the Far Country."(15) God's purpose in sending his Son into this far country is to rescue and save his creatures. In doing this God joins his people in the misery and deprivation brought on by the onslaught of chaos and sin. God suffers the effects of this sin.
In the fact that God is gracious to man, all the limitations of man are God's limitations, all his weaknesses, and more, all his perversities are His. . . . In being gracious to man in Jesus Christ, He also goes into the far country, into the evil society of this being which is not God and against God. He does no shrink from him. He does not pass him by as did the priest and the Levite the man who had fallen among thieves. He does not leave him to his own devices. He makes his situation his own.(16)
When we speak of God's humbling himself and taking his place with sinful humanity, we must see this event in light of our previous results as necessary presuppositions. First, we may recall that according to the creation accounts God is the source of all wealth and material well-being. The formation of the world in three days, its abundant furnishing in the subsequent three days, the creation of Eden, its river that waters the world, the tree of life as God's presence sustaining all things, all speak of God's prodigious wealth as the source of all wealth and material well- being. Secondly, the creation sagas led us to the conclusion that Eden is no longer humanity's home, but rather, the result of sin is hard toil, economic loss, and physical deprivation. When God the Son journeys into the far country and takes the place of sinful humanity, he relinquishes the abundance that belongs to him as the source of all well-being, and accepts the economic deprivation and loss occasioned by human sin. This act on the part of God the Son in taking flesh is visible in Jesus' priestly ministry. Jesus' priestly ministry entailed suffering the consequences of sin, and one of sin's consequences is economic hardship and deprivation (2.7). This act is the first of those reconciling acts whereby God and humanity given in Jesus Christ take responsibility for economic affairs. It is not a matter of general description that God does this, that he is humble, and that God suffers in Jesus Christ as the man Jesus suffers physical deprivation and want. It has its basis in specific events. We will examine four of them--the humble obedience of the man Jesus, its connection with the suffering history of Israel, and finally, the events of temptation and crucifixion which Barth offers as the decisive events of Jesus' priestly ministry. We may say here, however, that the first act in restoring the economic aspects of the broken covenant is relinquishment, the surrendering of a privileged economic condition to join with those in need.
God's humility is concretely revealed in the obedience of the man Jesus. In contrast to the first Adam who ate of the tree and assumed the right to make his own decisions, the second and yet original Adam lived by the Word of God. He accepted God's judgments, and humbled himself in obedience. The New Testament does not affirm Jesus as one who "was furnished with sovereignty and authority and the plenitude of power, maintaining and executing his own will."(17) Rather, "this man wills only to be obedient--obedient to the will of the Father, which is to be done on earth for the redemption of man as it is done in heaven."(18) In his obedience Jesus revealed his own and God's humiliation, in that his obedience entailed entering into the worst of human conditions both socially and economically.(19) From this it follows that reconciliation in its economic aspects does not simply entail relinquishment in general, or material abandonment, but rather humility in the concrete way of obedience to the will of God. Reconciliation is the fulfillment of covenant. Covenant requires grace, the event of God's speaking and of human obedience. Without grace, reconciliation, and the laws or patterns of reconciling action, have no redemptive power. Therefore, reconciling acts entail relinquishment and the entering into the reality of human sin, and this done in relation to God out of obedience. That persons or nations may humble themselves may perhaps be seen empirically, but that it is done in obedience to God is known only in faith as a gift of the Spirit.
That God humbles himself, that the man Jesus is humble in obedience to God, has its basis in God's inner triune life. Within himself God is humble. His humility is an aspect of the inner dynamic triune life. There is, within the triune life, a first and a second, one who commands, and one who obeys.
As we look at Jesus Christ we cannot avoid the astounding conclusion of a divine obedience. Therefore we have to draw the no less astounding deduction that in equal Godhead the one God is, in fact the One and also Another, that He is indeed a First and a Second, One who rules and commands in majesty and One who obeys in humility. The one God is both the one and the other.(20)
This inner triune order does not diminish the equality of the three distinct modes of God's triune life, but rather, reveals their dynamic character. It is God's nature to humble himself, as God the Son is obedient to God the Father within the reality of the inner triune life. It is also God's nature to be the Lord, as God the Father is the one who rules within the triune life itself.(21) Since humility is an aspect of God's inner triune life, God does not deny his nature by humbling himself in Jesus Christ, but precisely in that act, he reveals and confirms his very being.(22) Furthermore, the act of humility and obedience itself has reality within the divine life as God the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is the love that binds the Father to the Son and an aspect of that love is not only the rule of the Father, but also active humility and active obedience, so that God is the history-making action of obedience and humility. Obedience and humility are not divorced from God, but active obedience and humility are God. They are the reality of the Holy Spirit who is the relation between Father and Son. Remembering that in every depth of himself God is three modes related by two issues, it follows that active humility and obedience exist in every depth of God. By contrast, both modalism and subordinationism posit an undifferentiated God above God, a God without humility, and a God, who, ad extra, would not submit himself to the humiliation of the cross. "Both suffer from the fact that they try to evade the cross of Jesus Christ, i.e., the truth of the humiliation, the lowliness and the obedience of the one true God Himself as it becomes an event amongst us in Jesus Christ as the subject of the reconciliation of the world with God."(23) Corresponding to the fact that there is no depth in God apart from humility, there is no realm outside God in which the way of redemption does not entail humility and obedience as concretely revealed in Jesus Christ. He is the basis of all reality outside God. Therefore, as revealed in him, humility and obedience are not only effective in restoring economic life, they are the only effective acts since there is no autonomous sphere in which other economic or political processes may restore the economic aspects of the broken covenant apart from him. We must now approach more closer to the concrete meaning of humiliation and obedience.
When God assumed flesh in Jesus Christ he did not assume just any flesh, he became Jewish flesh.(24) As such he is the fulfillment of the history of the relation between God and Israel. The Old Testament history of Israel is a history of rebellion against God and God's countering judgment. This leads to two consequences. First, when God the Son became incarnate in Jesus Christ he encountered the enmity of a people hostile to God and bore the consequences. "The Son of Man from heaven had to be the friend of publicans and sinners, and die between two thieves. He had to, because God was already the God who loved His enemies, who 'endured such contradiction of sinners against himself.' (Heb. 12:3)."(25) Secondly, the history of Israel as narrated in Scripture is a history of suffering, suffering due to its apostacy before God and God's resultant judgment. One aspect of Israel's suffering was Exile, the loss of the land, and economic hardship as prefigured in the expulsion from Eden (2.7). Jesus, as the fulfillment of Israel's history, bore God's wrath as well, and his suffering was the basis and fulfillment of Israel's suffering. We shall see that his suffering entailed physical hardship and the renunciation of land and possessions. Furthermore, in Barth's view, the history of Israel represents how the whole of humanity relates to God. Their history is a mirror for all human history.(26) Since Jesus' suffering was the basis and fulfillment of Israel's suffering under God's judgment, he bore the consequences of a sinful humanity at enmity with God, and bore God's countering judgment as well. Therefore, Barth will say:
The Holy One stands in the place and under the accusation of a sinner with other sinners. The glorious One is covered with shame. The One who lives for ever has fallen a prey to death. The Creator is subjected to and overcome by the onslaught of that which is not. In short, the Lord is a servant, a slave.(27)
Jesus' priestly work of bearing God's judgment was the first step in reconciling all people to God and thereby liberating humanity from the consequences of their sin. Since God's judgment on human sin included the loss of Eden, restoration of the covenant and redemption of economic life entails economic loss and deprivation. Therefore, we may reach the following conclusion. Economic life is restored when the one whose life was originally economically blessed (the original Adam), relinquished his privilege and for the sake of others suffered the economic deprivation brought on by sin. This act is a covenant act. It occurs in the context of social relations, it involves encounters between God and his people and among peoples, and it also involves certain types of relations with the material world. We may discover how Jesus' priestly work entailed material deprivation and bodily suffering by examining the two moments of Jesus' history that Barth feels are of particular relevance for his priestly work, that is, the temptations and crucifixion.(28)
The Temptations and Crucifixion
Introduction
The crucifixion and resurrection form the historical nerve of what Barth considers to be the priestly ministry of Jesus. Throughout his life, but supremely in his temptation and crucifixion, Jesus suffered God's righteous judgment against humanity. The events of temptation and crucifixion form a whole; what began in the desert is completed upon the cross.(29) In each, Jesus is tempted and subjected to the onslaught of the power of evil. We will discuss aspects of Barth's view of temptation and crucifixion. This will be followed by some general considerations drawn from Barth's understanding of Jesus' priestly work. As we proceed, the results established here will be confirmed in subsequent sections.
As we follow Barth's study of the temptation and crucifixion, we will obtain some results not directly envisioned by Barth. These results will follow directly from the substance of his thought and will be derived from three basic considerations. First, as we have said, all actions, including Jesus' reconciling acts, involve a relationship to nature as external basis, and in this relationship we will perceive how material assets are to be used in ways that effect reconciliation and economic restoration. With respect to Jesus' temptations and death, we must keep in mind as necessary presuppositions from Genesis the fact that God commanded all people to eat and to possess the earth (2.12), and that the productiveness of the earth and economic life in general depend upon God's active presence as given through the covenant. Finally, we will work out these considerations relevant to temptation and crucifixion in the context of Barth's development of Jesus' priestly ministry. Barth's excursus on Jesus' temptation and crucifixion occurs in a section entitled "The Judge Judged in our Place."(30) A number of ideas are discussed in this section, but chief among them is the view that Jesus judges rightly. In contrast to Adam, Jesus judges rightly between good and evil, and by contrast, Jesus' actions reveal sin as the rejection of Jesus and the way he has chosen. For Barth, sin is known only through the covenant, in contrast to the obedience of Jesus Christ. This idea emphasizes Jesus as Judge. Secondly, Jesus is judged in our place.(31) That is, he bears the consequences of sin. Jesus' sojourn in the desert, and supremely his suffering upon the cross, form the historical nerve of his bearing the effects of sin. In the desert the consequences of sin take a technical economic form; he experiences hunger and dispossession. In crucifixion, covenant comes to the fore; he is unjustly sentenced to death. With these ideas in mind we may safely extend Barth's exposition while remaining within the boundaries of his theological program. Our primary focus will be upon the first two temptations as they relate most directly to economic affairs.
The First Temptation
Jesus' temptation began immediately after his baptism. The Spirit led him into the desert to be tempted by the devil. The desert represents the chaos that hangs over creation. It is like the sea of the first creation story, or the land outside Eden in the second. It is the special habitation of demons. "On the old view the wilderness was a place which, like the sea, had a close affinity with the underworld, a place which belonged in a particular sense to demons."(32) Devoid of God's presence, the habitation of demons, its land does not sustain life; it is barren. As the one who stood in the place of sinners, Jesus bore God's judgment and entered the desert as the fulfillment of Adam's expulsion from Eden. There he was commanded to fast. In Barth's view, Jesus' fasting was voluntary. Jesus, as the Son of God, actually possessed the authority to turn the stones into bread. The devil's first temptation was that Jesus use his power to transform the stones into bread. Jesus refused, and Jesus denied himself the right to live.
What would it have meant if Jesus had yielded? He would have used the power of God which He undoubtedly had like a technical instrument placed at His disposal to save and maintain his own life. He would have stepped out of the series of sinners in which he placed Himself in His baptism in Jordan. Of His own will He would have abandoned the role of the one who fasts and repents for sinners.(33)
Furthermore, fasting represents the acceptance of the fact that the broken covenant results in physical want and death. Since Jesus bore the effect of sin in his priestly ministry, he hungered and fasted because hunger and want is a primary effect of sin in the economic sphere. "Fasting expresses man's knowledge of his unworthiness to live, his readiness to suffer the death which he had merited for his sins, and therefore the radical nature of his repentance."(34) Fasting is the voluntary acceptance of God's judgment. It is the acceptance of humanity's "unworthiness to live," and it proclaims God's judgment in expelling Adam from Eden as right and good. We will spell out some of the further implications of Jesus first temptation subsequently, but may now indicate the major conclusions. We will draw four conclusions. First, in the sphere of creation, God's command as given in each creation story was that his creatures eat and be satisfied (Gen. 1:29, 2:12, 16). Apart from sin, which does not occur within creation history, this command is valid. We do not, however, live in the time of creation; we live in the time of sin which began with the Fall. Jesus overcame sin by making it his own and suffering its consequences. This was the movement from above to below of Jesus' priestly work. As the true and original Adam, the man Jesus enjoyed God's privilege in Eden. By voluntarily fasting, he, though innocent, accepted the rightness of God's judgment of expulsion from Eden and accepted its consequences, hunger. According to Barth's reading of the temptation, Jesus accepted this bodily deprivation for the sake of sinful humanity. His sojourn in the desert and his fasting occurred in the context of covenant relations; it expressed God's determination to reconcile humanity to himself. The events in the desert were initiated by this concern, and directed toward this goal, and are themselves an element of God's Word of reconciliation for his people. It was the first step in overcoming sin and its consequences, and it entailed a relationship to material assets, a relation of deprivation and bodily suffering. From this it follows that the first step in overcoming the economic consequences of sin is for those who have the technical power and authority to secure the earth's abundance for their physical needs heed God's Word and forego that benefit for the sake of others. We are simply affirming here what we have already said with respect to God's humbling himself in his taking flesh. Now, however, we see concretely what this meant--the voluntary obedience of fasting, and the relinquishment of Eden's blessedness as seen in Jesus' being led by the Spirit into the desert.
Secondly, Jesus' resistance to temptation tells us something of the nature of sin. Barth discusses the sin of pride in connection with Jesus' priestly work as the refusal to follow in the way of Jesus' priestly humility. With respect to the first temptation, Jesus does not follow what could have been his own version of right and wrong, but accepts God's right over him, a right that countered his own very evident need for food. Had Jesus given in to the devil, he "would have refused to give Himself unreservedly to be the one great sinner who allows that God is in the right, to set His hopes for the redemption and maintenance of His life only on the Word of God, in the establishment of which He was engaged in this self- offering."(35) We may note, however, that Jesus' humility takes a specific form. Jesus' humility refers to his not using the material world for his own benefit. The devil's suggestion that Jesus eat merely repeated God's original commands for the use of the external world. Apart from continued Words of God, however, this original command becomes a law of nature, a fact of existence apart from the personal encounters of the covenant. A major thrust of Barth's theology, his purpose in distinguishing and relating creation and covenant, is to prevent natural law or natural theology from determining covenant relationships. He is willing for the observations of nature to inform what we have called the technical aspects of economic life, but not the covenant or social aspects (2.17). The covenant is at stake in Jesus' temptations in the desert. As exegeted by Barth, Jesus is acting for all people to restore the broken covenant. Had Jesus failed in his mission he would not have acted "for all other men and in their place, He would have left them in the lurch at the very moment when He had made their cause His own."(36) Although the main theme of the encounter in the desert is covenant, the form of Jesus' first temptation relates to the use of the natural world. Jesus is being tempted to satisfy his hunger. He is being tempted to transform a law of nature into a law of the covenant and thereby to worship a false god, the god of natural desire and want. The sin that gives this god its power is pride, the pride that refuses to live by the Word of God.(37) Had Jesus surrendered to this god he would, in Barth's words:
. . . have refused to live by the Word of God, in the establishment of which He was engaged in this self-offering. He would have refused to be willing to live only by this Word and promise of God, and therefore to continue to hunger. In so doing He would of course, only have done what in His place with His powers all other men would certainly have done. From the standpoint of all other men He would only have acted reasonably and rightly. "Rabbi eat" is what His disciples later said to Him (Jn. 4:31) quite reasonably and in all innocence. But then He would not have made it His meat "to do the will of him that sent him, and to finish his work." (Jn. 4:34).(38)
By refusing to give in to pride Jesus simultaneously refuses to allow the god of his natural desires to become a matter of the covenant. The sin of pride, in the context of Jesus' first temptation, is intimately connected with another sin, the lust for bodily comfort or ease as an autonomous power apart from God's Word. The related sin in the sphere of creation refers to objectifying bodily needs into a law of social relations apart from God's covenant. For lack of a better word, we may call this specific form of pride greed, or the lust for bodily ease. By greed we do not mean taking more than one's share, as if notions of equality apart from the Word should determine the matter, but rather, greed means living according to bodily needs apart from the Word of God. Or again, the lust for bodily ease is the sin of pride as it relates to the use of creation. In subsequent sections, specifically when we discuss several Barthian examples of human sin, we will be able concretely to relate the sin of pride in the sphere of the covenant to its concomitant sin of greed as relating to creation.
Thirdly, by entering in the desert and fasting, Jesus reveals not only the nature of humility and sin, but reveals the consequences of the sin as well. The events of the temptations are elements in Jesus priestly history of suffering in which he bore the sins of the human race. The form of his suffering indicates the consequences of sin, for his priestly suffering entailed suffering sin's consequences. A primary result of the sin of greed is economic deprivation as foreshadowed by the expulsion from Eden and here represented by Jesus' hunger in the desert. Jesus countered the consequence of this sin by his voluntary fasting. Already, in our study of Genesis, we reached the conclusion that the result of sin was economic deprivation. Here that result is Christologically, and therefore definitively, determined.
Finally, it is to be noted that the desire for food is presented in the temptation as an aspect of personal relationships. The dramatic persons are Jesus, God, and the devil, and the issue is how an element in creation (the stones) are to be utilized. The real struggle is, of course, among persons. The crucial personal aspect is that Jesus humbled himself in obedience to God. "He hungered in confidence in the promise of manna with which the same God had once fed the fathers in the wilderness after He had allowed them to hunger (Deut. 8:3). He willed to live only by that which the Word of God creates, and therefore as one of the sinners who have no hope apart from God, as the Head and King of this people."(39) In this way, the relationship to creation has its basis in a personal relationship, with humility and the possibility of pride characterizing the relationship as revealed in Jesus' priestly work. We must now consider the second temptation. Our treatment may be briefer as we have already indicated the general direction of our development.
The Second Temptation
In the second temptation Jesus was "taken up" (Luke 4:5), or, as in Matthew 4:8, he was taken to a "very high mountain." From this vantage point Jesus was able to see the world's kingdoms and the national territories that each controlled. He was told that he had only to bow down and worship the devil and these kingdoms would be his. In the sphere of creation (Gen. 1:28) God's command is to "fill the earth and subdue it," and similarly, in the second account God placed Adam in Eden (Gen. 2:15). Barth associated both references with Israel's occupancy of the land. The devil merely suggested what God had already commanded. By offering Jesus the world's kingdoms he also offered Jesus control of their national territories and their economic assets. This follows from (2.3) and (2.15) in that economic power is initiated and maintained by political power. He was being offered political power, and through that, land and economic power, and he was able to view these lands from his vantage point on the mountain. Just as Jesus possessed the power to turn stones into bread, he also held authority over the world's kingdoms. He was being offered something that already belonged to him, and by refusing the offer he continued in his priestly work of relinquishment. Barth does not indicate Jesus' lordship over the world's kingdoms at this point, although it is fundamental to his view of the state. In the following chapter we will show that the political order belongs to the covenant, and that Jesus as the lord of the covenant is the lord of the earth's kingdoms. We will also show that there is, for the time being, a "hiddenness" with respect to Jesus' authority over these kingdoms, and in that sense the world's kingdoms are under the devil's power. When the devil suggested that Jesus be given control of the world's kingdoms, he was in effect, returning to Jesus the opportunity to receive what was rightfully his, and the opportunity to transform the political order into a kingdom worthy of his lordship. The only stipulation was that he give the devil his due.
Why not set up a real kingdom of God on earth? an international order modelled on the insights of Christian humanitarianism, in which, of course, a liberal-orthodox, ecumenical, confessional Church might also find an appropriate place? Note that to do this He was not asked to renounce God or to go over to atheism. He had only to lift his hat to the usurper. . . . On this condition we can all succeed in the world, and Jesus most of all.(40)
Jesus rejected this suggestion, and thereby placed himself in the position of sinful humanity which has forfeited the right to gain any kingdom at all, or to enjoy the economic benefits of political power. We may again draw four conclusions. First, Jesus overcame sin and effected reconciliation by refusing to set up a kingdom based on the practical and realistic insight that evil must have its portion in the world's order. In light of the economic implications of political power, he refused to use his power to accumulate economic assets. We shall corroborate this event further when we describe Jesus' renunciation of material goods in the context of his kingly ministry. Ultimately the earth and its produce, the world and its kingdoms, belonged to Jesus as the Son of God. Reconciliation can occur when those who possess political power and own the economic assets voluntarily weaken, share, or relinquish their economic assets by denying themselves the political power necessary to secure and maintain those assets. Secondly, Jesus revealed the nature of sin as the lust for accumulation implemented by political means. Apart from covenant, the command of God the Creator to subdue the earth is elevated into a law of creation and turned into an official policy of economic acquisition through political means. In this way, the need for land as an apparent law of nature is converted into a law governing social history apart from the Word. Thirdly, and this is foreshadowed in the expulsion from Eden which represented Israel's loss of the land, the result of the sin of accumulation is dispossession. By refusing the earth's kingdoms, Jesus lost any right to their national territories, or any territory, and thereby indicated through his priestly sacrifice that the result of the lust for accumulation by some inevitably leads to the dispossession of others. Finally, we may note that, though important, the issue of the land does not occupy the center of the temptation story. That political power entails the use of productive facilities was given to us through our study of Genesis which emphasized the relationship to the material creation. Here again the real issue is personal relationships, the test of wills between Jesus and Satan, and Jesus' obedience to God as the only one worthy of his worship. In the context of Jesus' priestly ministry, however, Jesus' covenant relationship to God entailed his loss of the land and all other productive facilities, for these are secured by political means. Finally, we may, at this point, corroborate a previous conclusion to the effect that the control of the land and its resources is a crucial factor in social and economic relations (2.15). The fact that Jesus was taken up, that he could observe these respective kingdoms and their territories, and that he was being tempted to "set up a real Kingdom of God on earth,"(41) with an emphasis on the word "earth," indicate the importance of (2.15), and this will be further corroborated as we proceed. We may summarize these results by saying that redemption occurs in the economic order as bodily ease and accumulated assets are relinquished, or conversely, sin occurs when bodily ease and accumulation become the motivating power of economic and political affairs apart from the Word of God. The result of this sin in the economic sphere is hunger and dispossession.
The Third Temptation
We will only briefly note in passing Jesus' third temptation.(42) The devil, in the guise of a pious man, suggests to Jesus that he fling himself off the temple with the assurance that God will prevent his death. Jesus is being asked to reveal his unconditional trust in God, his absolute trust in God as one who could and would save him. In Barth's view, Jesus is being tempted to use the Word of God, or God himself, for his own purposes and glory. Specifically, this temptation relates to the use of ideologies, or religious justifications, to disguise and carry out a given course of action. According to the first two temptations the essence of sinful economic activity was pride manifested concretely in the from of the desire for bodily ease and economic accumulation. These twin desires are normally justified by various religious, mythical, or historical theories. That Jesus refused this third temptation indicates that these ideologies are, at bottom, the attempt to lend divine sanction to crass motives. We must now turn to Jesus' final and definitive temptation and priestly work, his temptation in the garden and his crucifixion.
The Crucifixion
Our treatment of the crucifixion may be brief. In our view its primary concern is the broken covenant, and matters of economic relevance recede into the background. We do wish, however, to note certain features of this event, and its connection with resurrection, which validate the theological importance of economic life from a Barthian perspective.
Jesus' crucifixion and death are the culmination of all of Jesus' temptations and suffering, not only in the desert, but throughout his life.(43) His bodily suffering and death validate the material aspect of his priestly work, and thereby affirm what we have already concluded with respect to that work. We wish, however, to make one additional comment on the economic significance of Jesus' crucifixion. Throughout his discussion of Jesus' priestly work Barth holds before us that it is God's work, the work of the Son incarnate in Jesus, and simultaneously the work of an obedient man.(44) As incarnate, God relates to an element in the physical world, he becomes bodily present in Jesus, he takes form and actually becomes flesh, and he does so concretely in a specific time and place. "It is not, therefore, merely that God rules in and over this human occurrence simply as Creator and Lord. He does this, but He does more. He gives Himself to be the humanly acting and suffering person in this occurrence."(45) This was the goal of his work, to liberate humanity from sin by making an end of it upon the cross. But the cross, in Barth's view, goes together with the resurrection as the one two-fold event by which God reconciles the world to himself and liberates it from sin and death. The resurrection reveals the exaltation of humanity into God's presence, and it involves humanity's physical restoration as given in a bodily resurrection. We will describe this in greater detail in the section on Jesus' kingly work. For now, however, we wish to make one observation. God's work of reconciliation, according to our perspective, involved an economic component. In reconciling humanity he took flesh, he related to an aspect of the physical world. His taking flesh in Jesus functioned in the context of covenant relations to renew the covenant, and to renew the bodily vitality which depends upon covenant. Economic life concerns the renewal of humanity's bodily existence (2.1), and the resurrection is the economic event par excellence. God related to an element in the physical world, incarnation, and he redeemed the physical world by doing so. This is particularly evident from Barth's presentations of the biblical evidence pertinent to God's reconciling work. His references are dense with passages which speak of God's liberating work as occurring through Jesus' flesh, his body, and his blood.(46) Therefore, the redeemed covenant not only involves social relations, God's passion in behalf of humanity addressed to humanity as a Word of grace, but the covenant, even its social aspects, requires an economic aspect for its redemption. This has its basis in the fact that the material world is the external basis of covenant, and this holds not only for God's original creation and covenant, but for the new covenant established in Jesus Christ. From a Barthian perspective, there can be no denigration of the bodily aspect of redemption, and therefore of economic life.
Some Conclusions
First, Jesus was the one true judge in that he acted rightly in obedience to God, and thereby revealed God's will, the nature of human obedience, and by contrast, human sin.(47) Since he is ontological foundation of all humanity, his actions reveal the nature of right action before God. From a Barthian point of view, Jesus reveals who we are and how we are related to one another and to God. If we are on the right track in our results, they indicate the way of reconciliation, and they indicate the nature of economic sin as a violation of the covenant. Specifically, we have concluded that reconciling action involves the relinquishment of luxury and possessions in obedience to the Word. Sin is the negation of these actions, and it leads to hunger and dispossession. That both reconciliation and sin take this form is, for Barth, revealed only in the covenant and known by faith. It is always possible to claim that a given economic system can be improved without any sacrifice on the part of those who control its economic resources, that its governing motives are not the drive for luxury and political control of economic affairs, or that these motives cause its economic misery. In faith, however, these conclusions cannot be accepted. From Barth's point of view, human beings do not know their sin, nor forgiveness apart from the Word received in faith.
Men preoccupied with themselves have no eyes to see this [sin] or categories to grasp it. They do not have these because they lack the will to see it and grasp it. Access to the knowledge that he is a sinner is lacking to man because he is a sinner. . . . All serious theology has tried to win its knowledge of sin from the Word of God and to base it on that Word.(48)
Secondly, Jesus' priestly work was to take the place of sinful humanity and bear the judgment of God, a judgment that resulted in death.(49) Since Jesus is the ontological foundation of the world, his crucifixion means the end of the world and the abolition of the old aeon. The death of Jesus Christ signified God's judgment on the world in that it revealed the world's true nature. It signified that evil does so rule the world, and that its rule is total, that God's only recourse was to abolish it in its entirety. There are no exceptions; all socioeconomic systems are powered by the sin of pride, manifested in the economic sphere as greed and the lust for accumulation, and the power of this sin is so pervasive that it can be redeemed only by the total abolition of the old order.
Judgment is judgment. Death is death. End is end. In the fulfillment of the self-humiliation of God, in the obedience of the Son, Jesus Christ has suffered judgment, death and end in our place, the Judge who Himself was judged, and who thereby has also judged. In His person, with him, judgment, death, and end have come to us ourselves once and for all.(50)
From a Barthian perspective, there can be no progress in economic affairs without the destruction of the old order and the formation of a new creation. We shall discuss the new creation in our section on Jesus' kingly work. Then, in the following chapter, we shall address how the abolition of the old aeon and the creation of the new age as revealed in Jesus' original history becomes and is a force for revolutionary change in the present era.
Ahab
With respect to Jesus' priestly work the dominant sin is pride. Barth discusses the sin of pride in the context of Jesus' priestly work in volume four of the Church Dogmatics in the section entitled "The Pride and Fall of Man." One of the primary examples of the sin of pride and its effects is the story of Naboth's vineyard.(51) Barth gives this as an example of what "happens when man establishes his own right and tries to enforce it as judge . . . "(52) We will discuss Barth's exegesis as its enables us to relate how pride, the desire for accumulation, dispossession, and death, are interrelated.
Ahab, king of Northern Israel from 876 to 855 B.C., desired the vineyard of a certain Naboth, one of his subjects. His aim was simply to extend or round off his territories. Initially, he seeks to obtain it legally. This, however, is impossible. Naboth claims that he cannot sell his land since to do so would violate the law of Yahweh. The law of Yahweh functioned to maintain the land in perpetuity to Naboth and his descendents, so that they may never be dispossessed and thereby forfeit God's promise that his people possess the land.
He will not surrender the portion of the Holy Land which he has inherited from his fathers. He cannot do so, as his answer tells us: "The Lord forbid it me, that I should give the inheritance of my fathers unto thee" (v. 3). It was by such a portion of the land--guaranteed by certain provisions of the Law--that the individual Israelite could participate with his forefathers and successors in the promise to the people.(53)
At this point we may recall our study of Genesis, and of the presence in Eden of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. According to Barth's exegesis this tree represents the law as the ethical form of Word of grace. Israel's presence in Eden depended upon her refusing to take this law into her own hands, and by continued obedience to this law she could remain in Eden and enjoy the blessedness of the land that God had given her. When it became clear to Ahab that God's law was opposed to his own law he became sick at heart, "'He laid him down upon his bed, and turned away his face, and would not eat.'"(54) At this point Ahab enters into temptation. Rather than humbling himself and confessing the fact that his heart's desire was to break the law and dispossess Naboth, he gives way to a foreign force and alien ideology. The power of this alien ideology is baal, the god of his wife Jezebel, whom he had married to maintain a political alliance. Baal, in Barth's view, is a nature god. He is the personification of the powers of the natural and human world in which the rights to the land, its people, and its resources are given to those with sufficient capital or political power. It is the "law of nature and therefore the law of might, a law which is established without reference to the judgment of God and therefore without grace or promise, a law in face of which there can be no divine or human appeal, which simply asserts and posits itself, the law of the one who actually rules as the stronger."(55) Jezebel rouses Ahab from his bed and tells him to make merry; she will assure the release of the land. A great feast is prepared. Jezebel enlists the aid of the elders of the people. At the feast Naboth is falsely accused of blasphemy and under the leadership of the elders and the compliance of the people he is stoned and leadership of the elders and with the compliance of the people he is stoned and his property is turned over to Ahab. In this way the King, the elders, and through them the people, participate in the sin against Naboth and God.
Ahab's root sin was his pride, his refusal to humble himself before God's law. This sin took place in the sphere of covenant, and it existed in relation to another desire, the desire to possess the property of others, to accumulate. The command to possess the land is a command of God the Creator, but only when related internally to covenant. In this example Ahab's desire to confiscate his neighbor's property violated the covenant and thereby led to the expected results, the dispossession of Naboth's progeny. There is, however, a new element in this story which we have not yet discussed. The desire to accumulate land and wealth leads not only to dispossession, it also leads to murder as well. Barth discusses this phenomenon in a number of contexts. In the context of the ethics of creation he connects war with the material accumulation, and specifically (and here we are reminded of Marx), he notes that "when interest-bearing capital rather than man is the object whose maintenance and increase are the meaning and goal of the political order that the mechanism is already set going which one day will send men to kill and be killed."(56) And in the ethics of reconciliation, volume IV:4, Barth reaches similar conclusions, that killing and war result from the worship of Mammon, where Mammon is understood as a demonic power controlling nations and persons.(57) In conclusion, Barth's discussion of Ahab verifies our previous results. With respect to Jesus' priestly ministry the dominant sin is pride, and it manifests itself in the economic sphere as the lust to accumulate, and politically as murder. This further corroborates (2.15), in that the conquest of the land and resources of others through political means is a primary human drive. Barth calls the animating power of this drive Mammon, and he ends his discussion of Ahab with the observation that Mammon possesses a "remarkable affinity" to baal, the "god of all natural theology."(58) In the final chapter we shall show that one of the governing principles of capitalism is its willingness to give capital free rein, which from a Barthian perspective, is simply the rule of baal or Mammon in the form of an economic ideology.
The Kingly Work of Jesus Christ
The Relation Between the Kingly and Priestly Works
Our objective in this section is to continue our study of responsible action in economic affairs by investigating aspects of Jesus' kingly ministry. In previous sections we discussed Christ's priestly ministry. The first moment in Jesus' priestly work occurred as God humbled himself and took form in the man Jesus. By humbling himself in Jesus Christ, God entered into fellowship with humanity, and by virtue of that fellowship, he exalted humanity into his presence. Barth discusses the kingly aspect of Jesus' work of reconciliation under the title of "The Exaltation of the Son of Man." The exaltation of humanity in Jesus Christ means that humanity, without being divinized, is brought into the presence of God. The action of God's humility and humanity's exaltation is one movement and one history, the specific history of Jesus Christ. In this movement, the two-fold work of Christ's priestly and kingly office are unified in the one history of Jesus Christ.(59) In Jesus' priestly work we emphasized how Christ bore the results of economic sin, and how his death signaled the end of economic existence as an element in the old aeon that has been abolished in Jesus Christ. In Jesus' kingly work, we shall emphasize the reality of the new age, the Kingdom of God, seen as the establishment of a new set of social and economic relationships lived out in the history of Jesus Christ. We will discuss the nature of these social and economic relationships with an emphasis on economic matters.
Christological Considerations
Barth's emphasis in his section on the kingly office is the exaltation of humanity. In this context Barth advances a number of Christological ideas relating the divine and human natures of Christ. We shall introduce several of these ideas, as they shed light on the economic aspects of the triune God who acts in the world. In this fashion we can theologically estimate the relevance of economic existence in relation to God--whether economic life is peripheral or essential to God's existence, and therefore whether it is important as a matter for theological investigation. We will consider elements of Barth's view of the incarnation in light of propositions (2.3) and (2.5), in which we stated that all covenant relations possess a material external base, and that all material objects, and the relations of persons to those objects, take place in the context of social history, and are initiated, sustained, or renewed by social historical actions. The incarnation has its basis in the work of the triune God. Within God, reflecting the eternal begetting of the Son, there is one who sends (the Father) and one who is sent (the Son). As sent, it is the Son, the second person of the Trinity, who becomes incarnate, and not the Father or the Spirit. The Son is that mode of God which takes form. The incarnation, however, is the work of the triune God; no mode of God exists apart from the others, so that God's action in Jesus Christ must be seen in conjunction with God's other acts as appropriated to Father and Spirit.(60) The incarnation of the Son in time has its prior basis in election,(61) the order being the eternal begetting of the Son within God, election as God's first external act, and then the incarnation in time. Election is a Word of address; it expresses God's choice of Jesus Christ and all people in him. This social act initiates God's taking flesh in Jesus Christ, and indicates that relations to nature are initiated by social acts. The taking of flesh in Jesus Christ, however, is not something that began and ended with Jesus' temporal history. God's eternal election of Jesus Christ not only included the Word of grace and fellowship as revealed temporally in Jesus' history, but it also included the eternal establishment of Jesus' bodily existence. Barth notes, for example, that Scripture speaks of the blood of Jesus, his body as slain, and his body as living bread, as eternally pre-existing in unity with God.(62) In other words, the Word that became incarnate in the man Jesus was not a fleshless Logos, but already from eternity involved a physical component. Furthermore, not only does the Son exist in this way, the Son exists only in unity with the man Jesus as flesh and blood in the whole of his history. That is, there is no abstract Son as one mode of God existing in eternity apart from the flesh, but the Son exists only in relation to the flesh.(63) From this it follows that God's first act outside himself is an economic act in that he eternally maintains the physical existence of the man Jesus. From this perspective we justify our original understanding of economic life as those actions revolving around the maintenance of bodily existence since God's economic acts began there. Temporally, God's first act was the creation of the external world, but the goal of this act, as well as its basis, was the bodily existence of the original Adam through whom the world was made. Even in eternity, therefore, the Word, the covenant event of personal encounter, is not without its indispensable, material, external basis, so that God exists and only exists as an economic being in that he eternally sustains the bodily being of the man Jesus. Whatever this means in its mystery, it does imply that God cannot be understood apart from economic life, or apart from addressing the foundations of economic life as they have their basis in God.
And the direct and practical significance of a knowledge of this grace is that we cannot have to do with God without at once, eo ipso, having to do also with his human essence (our own), with the flesh of His Son (and in him our own flesh). There is, therefore, no knowledge of God, no calling upon Him, no worship, no trust or hope, no obedience to His will, no single movement towards Him, which on any pretext or in any way can escape His humanity (and therefore our own), or in which the Father and the Spirit can be sought except in and by Him.(64)
Corresponding to the economic aspects of God's first act, God's three major acts, creation, reconciliation, and the final eschatological age possess an external material basis. Our interest at this point is reconciliation, the incarnation of the Son. It is beyond the scope of our inquiry to present the essential features of Barth's Christology. We will limit ourselves to one observation. In the event of God becoming flesh, the human nature of Jesus is created, sustained, and renewed, solely by grace. By this Barth does not simply mean that Jesus' human nature is sustained by grace in the way that God sustains all created realities. This is included, but in addition, God becomes the man Jesus Christ, he does not become other created realities. Furthermore, the man Jesus exists only as the human nature assumed by God, and graced to fulfill God's covenant. As determined by grace the man Jesus is sinless, he carries out the one history of reconciliation, he receives the exaltation given through God's humble presence in his flesh, and he exists in his human nature only as one who does this. He has no human existence prior to his being a man in those events of grace. We are describing what is known as "enhypostasis," the man Jesus exists by reconciling grace, and "anhypostasis," and only by that grace.(65) In short, the history of Jesus Christ, including his bodily existence, is created and sustained by God, and it functions bodily in God's covenant purposes as the indispensable external basis of God's covenant Word through which he addresses and saves his creatures. In this sense the incarnation is an economic act, it involves the sustaining of Jesus' bodily existence, and his body and God's relation to that body (incarnation), have their deepest significance in how they function in the social history of reconciliation. In conclusion, we may say that all God's actions have an external material basis, even in eternity.
The task of this chapter is to arrive at several conclusions on responsible action in economic affairs as revealed in Jesus Christ. We will arrive at two sets of results. Jesus Christ is both God and man. Barth understands this in terms of histories, one of God's grace, the other an obedient human response unified in the one concrete history of Jesus Christ as known in Scripture.(66) Corresponding to this two-fold divine and human history, we will discover how both God and the humanity revealed in Jesus Christ took responsibility for economic matters. In Barth's view, there is no autonomous revelation of God or the essence of humanity apart from Jesus Christ. Barth's Christocentrism not only includes God, but humanity as well. Therefore, although our results are fallible, their source, Jesus Christ, is the only norm for understanding the nature of responsible economic action both as it applies to God and to humanity. Furthermore, since Jesus' human history depended upon the history-making action of God's grace, responsible human action has its basis in God's action. How God acts in economic affairs is how humanity is called to act. The two sets of actions, human and divine, are analogous each in their distinctive spheres. This is reflected in Barth's belief that the one history of Jesus Christ is the action of both God and the man Jesus. Jesus' actions are God's actions, and conversely, God's initiating grace was followed by the obedient action of the man Jesus.(67) In this way the human and divine norms are found in Jesus Christ, and the human follows the divine in its own distinct sphere. Therefore, in so far as our results reflect God and humanity's responsible action in Jesus Christ, they are the basis, and the only basis (the Christocentrism), for responsible human action in economic affairs. With respect to Jesus' priestly work, we have already seen that his covenant work required the renunciation of material assets, and that it entailed physical suffering and death. We may now turn to Jesus' kingly work, which maintains the priestly denial of material assets, while effecting bodily restoration and the Sabbath blessedness of God's direct provision.
The Two-fold Aspect of the Kingly Ministry
We are now ready to assess the economic aspects of Jesus' kingly ministry. Barth's discussion of Jesus' kingly work finds its central expression in his section entitled "The Royal Man."(68) He proceeds in two steps, a negative critical step followed by a positive one. In the first critical section he sharply differentiates the Kingdom of God as known in Jesus Christ from all other orders. The purpose of this critical section is to preserve the positive section against any attempt to "render it innocuous or trivial."(69) In his second step, Barth presents the reality of the kingdom seen as the realization of a new set of economic and social relationships given by God to humanity in the person of Jesus Christ. The governing image that emerges from Barth's discussion of these new economic relationships is that of the seventh day of creation in which God invited his creatures to feast and fellowship with him before they had done any work or provided for their own livelihood. This image overlaps with Eden in that Eden conveys the sense of God's abundant blessing and prodigal largesse. Within the overall structure of Barth's thought, the critical and positive steps have their origin in the distinctiveness and unity of the triune relations. Corresponding to the distinction, the Kingdom as known in the Son cannot be reduced to creation as appropriated to the Father, and yet, given God's inner triune unity, the Kingdom is the fulfillment of God's hopes in creation and Jesus is Lord of all economic and social orders. We will proceed with Barth's first step, the critical stance.
The Critical Aspect
A primary result of our previous section on Jesus' priestly work was that the world's social and economic systems have so fallen under the power of sin that God abolished them in Jesus Christ. God's judgment on the old order, however, was for the sake of an entirely new order as manifested in Jesus' kingly ministry. The new order is the Kingdom of God, and it is an entirely new creation that does not depend upon the old order as abolished in God's judgment.(70) It does not exemplify the values of the old order, and thereby reveals a critical attitude with respect to the world's values and structures. This critical attitude manifests itself in a variety of ways. First, we may note, that Jesus appeared at the margins of the world. He came to the poor, those without success, wealth, or authority. "It is of a piece with this that--almost to the point of prejudice--He ignored all those who are high and mighty and wealthy in the world in favour of the weak and meek and lowly."(71) Jesus' appearance among the poor is coupled with his critical attitude toward wealth itself. According to Barth, this can be seen in "the declaration concerning Lazarus (Lk. 1:19f), who as a poor man is so devastatingly opposed to the rich man clothed in purple and fine linen and faring sumptiously every day. There should be no softening of the starkness with which wealth and poverty are there contrasted and estimated (as also in Jas. 5:1f.) even in the economic sense."(72) Barth further develops his ideas regarding Jesus' critical opposition to the orders of his day by using the term "passive conservatism," and by means of this term he describes the revolutionary nature of God's Kingdom. By "passive conservatism" Barth means, in one respect, that Jesus accepted the various social and economic orders as a matter of course, and did virtually nothing to change them. "Jesus was not in any sense a reformer championing new orders against the old ones, contesting the latter in order to replace them by the former . . . He did not represent or defend or champion any programme--whether political, economic, moral or religious, whether conservative or progressive."(73) He was not, however, passive and conservative with respect to these orders because they merited his approval. They did not merit his approval. His critique of their existence was so revolutionary he did not think they could be reformed, and therefore he never struggled to reform them, nor did he present any program for their improvement. Jesus remained passive in the face of the old order since it had no contribution to make in the formation of the new creation. Rather, he was already, in his deeds and actions, the manifestation of the new social and economic order. Not only did the Kingdom have little use for the old order, it inevitably broke out of and overcame the limitations and strictures of the old aeon. This manifested itself in occasional breaches of the old order, and in conflict between Jesus and representatives of the passing age. This was not a systematic conflict, as if Jesus had a plan to renew the old order, it was simply the fact that the new life manifested in Jesus was so incomparable to the old that Jesus' deeds and actions occasionally and inevitably broke the barriers that sustained the old order. These occasional breaches were signs of the Kingdom of God on earth, a Kingdom that revealed the limits and inadequacies of the old creation. Speaking of these old orders in their encounter with the Kingdom of God Barth remarks:
In this way God Himself is their limit and frontier. An alien light is thus shed on them by God Himself as on that which He has limited. This is how He Himself deals with them, not in principle, not in the execution of a programme, but for this reason in a way which is all the more revolutionary, as the One who breaks all bonds asunder, in new historical developments and situations each of which is for those who can see and hear--only a sign, but an unmistakeable sign, of His freedom and kingdom and over-ruling of history.(74)
We must now speak of these matters more concretely with respect to economic affairs.
One element of Jesus' passive conservatism with respect to economic life was that Jesus did not, in Barth's view, enter into direct or systematic conflict with the economic forms and obligations of his day. He accepted the prevailing economic system. Servants, masters, employers and employees, wages and interests, and even the fact that there will always be poverty (Mk. 14:7), were accepted as the given nature of things.(75) His acceptance of the economic order, however, "never amounted to more than a provisional and qualified respect (we might almost say toleration) in face of existing and accepted orders."(76) Jesus' respect was qualified, because he himself was superior to and free with respect to the economic order, and inevitably the freedom of the Kingdom of God led to what Barth considers to be breaches of the economic order.(77) To begin with, Jesus did not seem to feel it necessary to develop any insight into the ordinary workings of economic affairs. He speaks of a husbandman who sews on stony ground, servants who claim they are unprofitable, a king who frees a steward who has misappropriated funds, and an obviously successful farmer who is called a fool because he builds barns to secure his goods and happens to die before he can enjoy them. Furthermore, Jesus' casting the money-changers out of the temple indicates that Jesus does not "seem to have a proper understanding of trade and commerce . . . "(78) This apparent neglect in economic matters were signals which "give warning of the real threat and revolution which the kingdom of God and the man Jesus signify and involve in relation to this sphere, but they are signals which we ought not to overlook."(79) But Jesus' apparent indifference to normal economic affairs was the consequence of a positive and revolutionary attitude on Jesus' part--he relied directly upon the care of God to meet his bodily needs. At this point the reality of God's direct care on the seventh day becomes directly visible. Jesus' reliance upon God is strikingly revealed in the fact that he adopted, and called his disciples to adopt, a way of life that denied the fundamental presupposition of economic life. He did not own, and he commanded his disciples not to own, any possessions.
But above all we must take up again the question of His relationship to the economic order. It, too, was simply but radically called in question by the fact that neither He nor His disciples accepted its basic presupposition by taking any part in the acquisition or holding of any possessions. It is as if the declaration and irruption of the kingdom of God has swept away the ground from under us in this respect.(80)
Those who came to Jesus were told to sell everything and give to the poor that they might have treasures in heaven. Jesus expected God to care for them directly. The basis of Jesus passive conservatism was his radical trust in God, his complete freedom with respect to the old aeon which was passing away, and his expectation and actual realization of the new order in which God blessed his people directly. In this sense Jesus' passive conservatism was the continuation in another key, of his refusal to accumulate and of his reliance on God as revealed in his priestly work. With respect to Jesus' priestly work, we concluded that redemptive action in the economic sphere occurred through self-denial of bodily needs and relinquishment of material resources. That direction is continued in this critical first step of Jesus' kingly ministry, but here its positive nature emerges. Jesus relied on God, in the hope of receiving the blessing of his Kingdom. We will speak more concretely of that kingdom in the next section. Now, however, we must note a new element which we may include among our results. The Lord who relied on God and manifested his Kingdom did so in a specific place in the world. He lived and acted at the margin of the world, in behalf of the poor and dispossessed. It was there that he exercised his servanthood as Lord of his Kingdom. Therefore, we must not only say that effective economic action occurs when those who possess the world's resources (land and productive facilities) relinquish them, but also that this is done with specific people as beneficiaries--the poor and dispossessed, those who cannot and do not benefit from socioeconomic powers of the old aeon.
We may make one further observation concerning what Barth considers to be Jesus' violation of the orders which has relevance for our study. Jesus' most serious violation of the orders was his failure to keep properly the Sabbath. In Jesus' view the Sabbath is the day in which God brings forth the new life of the Kingdom, and this new life could not abide within the limits of the Sabbath laws. Specifically, he violated the Sabbath by healing on the Sabbath, and by failing to keep the strictures which prohibited the free access to food. "Above all, there is His attitude to the sabbath, which allowed His disciples to satisfy their hunger by plucking ears of corn (Mk. 2:23) and Himself to heal on the sabbath (Mk. 3:1f; Jn. 5:1f, 9:1f). The offence which He gave and the reproaches which He incurred at this point were particularly severe."(81) By insisting that people be fed and healed on the Sabbath, Jesus was affirming God's original intent for the Sabbath rest, that it be a day of fellowship and physical well-being in which humanity enjoys the benefits of God's labor on the previous six days. Returning to Barth's exegesis of Genesis we may note: "Rest, freedom, and joy were not just before him. He had no need to 'enter' into them. He could already proceed from them, or commence with them. They had already taken place. He had already sat at the divine wedding feast, and having eaten and drunk could now proceed to his daily work. The 'Lord's Day' was really his first day."(82) The image of Sabbath rest, the day of fellowship and feasting, characterize the positive element of Jesus' kingly work. We must now turn specifically to that work, which Barth presents as the second and decisive step of Jesus' kingly ministry.
Before presenting Barth's second step, we may pause briefly and indicate by an extended quotation why Barth feels the first critical step was necessary. In doing so we will also effectively sum up the foregoing in its critical aspect.
But we have not yet mentioned the decisive point at which the man Jesus is the image and reflection of God Himself . . . We have been forestalling the opinion that what we have to call the decisive point is something that can be attained and conceived and controlled by men, and incorporated into the scale of known relationships of magnitude and value. That is why we have first had to set Jesus against man and his cosmos as the poor man who if He blessed and befriended any blessed and befriended the poor and not the rich, the incomparable revolutionary who laid the axe at the root of the trees, who pitilessly exposed the darkness of human order in the cosmos, questioning it in a way which is quite beyond our capacity to answer. We do not know God at all if we do not known Him as the One who is absolutely opposed to our whole world which has fallen away from Him and is therefore self-estranged; as the judge of our world; as the One whose will is that it should be totally changed and renewed.(83)
The Positive Aspect
Jesus, in the whole of his words and deeds, realized the rule of God as his Kingdom upon earth.(84) The substance of his words and deeds was an unconstrained Yes to the human race. His negative and critical stance was only provisional; it was only for the sake of God's Yes that he came in conflict with the world around him. In affirming God's Yes to humanity he became present to people and entered into solidarity with them. He accepted their condition, the whole of it, into his own person. He was peculiarly touched by human misery. It affected him and he made it his own. "He was not only affected to the heart by the misery which surrounded Him--sympathy in the modern sense is far too feeble a word--but it went right into His heart, into Himself, so that it was now His misery."(85) Jesus responded to the sea of misery which surrounded him through his words and deeds. In terms of words he proclaimed the good news of God's salvation active in his person. The basic word of his message was the beatitudes,(86) above all, the beatitudes referring to those who were harried, oppressed, sick, poor, or lonely. He called these people blessed.(87) They were not blessed because of their miserable estate, never once is this misery accepted as the order of things, but they were blessed because Jesus Himself was in their midst and even now he was affecting their wretched condition. His words gave hope and courage, and his deeds, which Barth sees as following his words, were the actualization of the words. The deeds belie the suspicion that the words exist only upon some spiritual plane, but rather, they have effects in space and time as the actualization of his message. These deeds are his miracles.(88) They are the new aeon breaking the boundaries of the old, and ushering in the new redeemed reality of the Sabbath rest. Barth is particularly aware of the preponderant emphasis given to the physical aspect of Jesus' deeds.
It has often been said and rightly, that He has to do with the whole man. But we must say, rather more exactly that it is with the whole man in what is almost exclusively his "natural" existence in the narrower sense, his physical existence, his existence as it is determined by the external form and force of the cosmos to which he belongs. And it is determined in such a way that it means suffering. . . . His miraculous action to man is to bring him out of this shadow, to free him from prison, to remove the need and the pain of his cosmic determination. He unburdens man, He releases him. . . . He can come from the heart of the storm to dry land. He can eat and be more than satisfied. He can drink and he is given wine--good wine. He is delivered from every torment and embarrassment and he can breathe again. He can be a man again--a whole man in this elemental sense.(89)
In attending to the bodily needs of his people, Jesus is undeterred by whether or not they deserve it, or whether or not they are especially sinful. God was apparently indiscriminate, he gave to all who asked, there were no qualifications, and his mercy overflowed on all who came near. Not only did it overflow, it overflowed abundantly. There is the impression that the overflowing life of the new aeon manifested itself on an astounding scale.
The total impression made (and obviously meant to be made) by the majority of the records is plain: "They brought unto him all sick people that were taken with divers diseases and torments." (Mt. 4:24); "And great multitudes came unto him, having with them those that were lame, blind, dumb, maimed and many others, and cast them down at Jesus' feet" (Mt. 15:30); "He healed all that were sick (mantas tous kakos exontas), that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Esias the prophet, saying, He took our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses" (Mt. 8:17).(90)
The image is one of exuberant bounty that overflows on all who enter into his presence. Nor was Jesus deterred by calculations as to the size of the need, whether large or small, but the fact of any need was sufficient cause to meets its exigency. Jesus' miraculous feeding of the multitudes, for example, was not in response to their imminent starvation, but rather due to the fact that they were simply hungry and there was no food near at hand.(91) Since Jesus' deeds were the direct expressions of God's immediate care in the new aeon, they could not be duplicated or preserved within the structures of the old aeon as an ongoing institution. There was, therefore, no institution of these deeds, nor was there a consistent program for their continuance. In this context we may think of various economic alternatives, such as capitalism or socialism, whose aim is to better the physical lot of the human race. These programs were not offered. What was offered was the direct and personal care of God active in the words and deeds of Jesus. This does not mean there was not a direction of service. There was a direction of service, the Royal Man Jesus labored for the sick and destitute. But there was no program, in the sense that Jesus' meeting of humanity's bodily needs did not entail any engaged attention to conventional economic matters, such as land use, labor, and capital. In light of God's prodigal largesse, we are able positively to understand why Jesus insisted that his followers abandon themselves to the grace of God, and, economically speaking, renounce their possessions and give to the poor. "Those who came to him, those who went through the narrow gate were told: 'Sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven' (Mk. 10:21)."(92) The economic helplessness of Jesus and his followers was vindicated by the fact that God met their every need. Given that presupposition, the call to renounce their possessions becomes intelligible. Finally, in light of God's meeting every human need before His people had done any work, and thereby deserved any recompense, Barth once again points to the significance of Jesus' feeding and healing people on the Sabbath.
. . . we can only assume that what the tradition wishes to emphasize is that, although He did not always heal on the sabbath, He did so deliberately and gladly because His own coming meant that the seventh and last day, the great day of Yahweh, had dawned, and healing was the specific Word of God that He had come to accomplish on this day (in the name of God and in fulfillment of His own work). Thus He not only did not break the sabbath with this work but genuinely sanctified and kept it.(93)
In short, the coming of the Kingdom entailed direct care of humanity's bodily needs by means of Jesus' miraculous feedings and healings. In this way God's original aim for creation is effected and humanity redeemed.
The Aim of Economic Life
Jesus was immediately and directly concerned with people's bodily well-being. This concern has its prior basis in God's eternally maintaining Jesus' physical existence. Given that we understand economic life as the "creation, sustaining, and renewal of human bodily existence" (2.1), Jesus' feeding and healing people were economic acts. We may contrast Jesus' healing with God's work in creation. In creation, bodily existence is maintained by utilizing the earth's resources through work. No evil or chaos was envisioned in creation, and therefore no disease which required healing. The new covenant encounters evil and overcomes it, and therefore Jesus healed. In healing Jesus did not make systematic use of creation, in the sense of utilizing its resources through work. Jesus lived by grace, by God's Sabbath provision. This contrasts with God's six days of labor and Adam's work as a gardener. Barth does point out that Jesus "picked grain on the Sabbath," but this action was not work in the conventional sense. Nor did Jesus' actions directly reflect, at least according to Barth's presentation, the primary event that lay behind the Genesis sagas-- the entrance into and conquest of Canaan. Jesus made use of the earth's resources, but he did not own land, nor did he advocate its ownership. In fact, according to Barth, he advocated selling one's possessions and giving to the poor. Not only did Jesus ignore certain features from the Genesis accounts, he also did not affirm (and here we may think of his passive conservatism) many economic conventions such as ownership, capital exchanges, interests, and employers and employees. We must now make sense of this.
The aim of Jesus' work was reconciliation, and this is a matter of restoring the broken personal relationships of the covenant. Jesus Christ "worked" to restore humanity to God and to one another. That was the emphasis in reconciliation, and that is the emphasis of Barth's presentation. We have emphasized the economic aspects of Jesus' work, and therefore relations to objects have been central in our study. But Barth's study of the matter rightly emphasizes the relations among persons in terms of hearing, speaking, and acting in behalf of others. The relationship to the created order does not, as it does in creation, hold center stage, but rather, the relations of people to one another and to God. Nevertheless, one relationship to the created world does stand out, namely, that Jesus attended directly to people's physical needs. The attention to bodily needs to the virtual exclusion of other economic activities tells us something important. It tells us that the essential aim of economic actions is the sustaining and redeeming of bodily existence. There is no other final aim. From the creation sagas, the only other essential action in meeting this goal is the use of the land in labor. That cannot be denied by Jesus' reconciling work. Jesus' work does not deny previous results; the relation to the land is necessary since no mode occurs apart from others, or covenant does not exist apart from creation as an external basis. Jesus' work emphasizes the goal of economic life, bodily well-being. Therefore, aside from use of the land in work, no other economic activities can be viewed as absolute. Jesus did not deny the existence of these other activities, but he gave them no ultimate credence. In other words, such matters as norms of ownership, capital, interest, balance of payments, may be acceptable or useful, but they are not the primary goal of economic life. That goal is bodily well-being and Jesus attended to it. Furthermore, we may say that this goal cannot be met without attending directly to it. In other words, God's rule on earth as manifested in Jesus does not reveal the operation of inherent natural mechanisms which can assume the role of an ultimate goal since Jesus does not make use of such mechanisms. Since these mechanisms, such as for example, market forces, the "invisible hand" or laissez faire, the "rule of the proletariat" are bypassed, they are not sanctioned as having binding force in God's providential direction of economic life. In so far as economic life is restored in Jesus Christ, it will exemplify two elements. First, the use of the land in work, and secondly, it will not substitute secondary goals for the primary goal of meeting bodily needs. If, in a given historical context, it can be shown that a given economic policy, whether social control of production or laissez faire, will in fact meet people's physical needs, then such a course may be adopted. There is, however, no cosmic order assuring the automatic success of such programs.
Amos
Barth's doctrine of Jesus' kingly work has its correlate doctrine of human sin as sloth. Just as pride was the refusal to humble oneself as did the Lord who became a servant, sloth is the refusal to be exalted as did the servant who became Lord. God exalted humanity by becoming present to humanity, and in his rule over human affairs he brought his people into a new set of social and economic relations which exemplified his rule and their consequent exaltation. To refuse this gift of grace, to ignore Jesus' distinctive freedom and the social and economic demands of his presence, is sloth. Barth treats the sin of sloth in section sixty-five of the Church Dogmatics, and gives a number of biblical examples. One of his most prominent examples is relevant to our purposes, and that is his discussion of the prophet Amos.(94) We will follow Barth in his discussion of Amos, as it has affinities with our contemporary situation.
Amos began his ministry in about the middle of the eighth century B.C. At that time both the Northern and Southern Kingdoms of Israel were entering a time of economic prosperity. Since they had emancipated themselves from foreign control, a more complex and successful form of economic life rapidly flourished.
This relatively happy state of political affairs must be considered together (M. Noth, p. 189) with a certain high-water-mark in the development which had begun already in the time of David and Solomon--that of a civic life modelled on the customs of the Canaanites, and the corresponding civilization, the emergence of trade and commerce, the beginning of a monetary economy, and the consequent creation of distinctions between those who were economically, and then socially and politically, strong and those who were weak.(95)
Given the obvious advance in overall economic prosperity and political power, there was apparently no lack of prophets and priests of Yahweh who celebrated the new development as the expression of Yahweh's grace and favor. These prophets painted harmless pictures, as would, according to Barth, any acute contemporary or pragmatic historian. Virtually against Amos' will, God revealed Himself to Amos in a series of visions that penetrated to the very roots of Judah's true social conditions. The result was a devastating indictment of Judah's social and economic life as delivered by Amos in a series of oracles. On the surface it would appear that Amos' words were excessively severe, that the situation certainly had its good points and ameliorating facts. But, in Barth's view, Amos saw beyond the immediate facts and conditions--he saw reality at its core, in relation to God. "He is also given to see with the eyes of God, and he therefore sees to the bottom of things, and therefore gives them the name which they might not have, or generally have, in their external appearance, but which they have at root, in the light of the dominating factor in them, so that if they do not deserve the name according to human righteousness, they certainly do so according to the righteousness of God."(96) We must now ask, what did Amos see? How did he, at bottom, characterize Judah's national life, and what was its dominating factor, and its root?
Amos first saw the prosperity and luxury of the class who rode the crest of Judah's economic boom. He saw their accumulated possession, stone houses, pleasant vineyards, lavish furnishings, winter and summer houses, their sumptuous meals, their vines, songs, and ointments, their women reclined at meal like fat cows in their pastures.(97) Then Amos saw another class, but he says very little about them. His energy is concentrated on how they reached their dismal state. It was not because of their laziness, or the unavoidable workings of an impersonal and external economic system. It was because they were oppressed.
What is the reverse side of all this prosperity and success? What is the foundation of this proud and ambitious structure? A righteous man is sold as a slave because he cannot redeem a debt, and a poor man for the value of a pair of shoes (2:6). They drink the wine which they have purchased with fines on defaulting tenants and they stretch themselves upon pawned clothes (2:8). The innocent are harassed (5:12), the weak oppressed, and the needy crushed (for which the fine ladies of 4:1 are rather curiously blamed). The sick are pushed to the wall and their head is rolled in the dust (2:7).(98)
What is the cause of this? Why are the rich and powerful allowed to perpetrate these wretched abuses? We now come closer to the decisive characteristic of Amos' message. The reason this wretched injustice is allowed to continue is that there is no law in Israel to protect the weak and powerless.(99) There is the traditional seat of judgment at the city gate. This law, however, has been turned into an instrument of oppression. Justice is perverted, bribes taken, those who speak the truth are hated, and eventually, the prudent, out of fear, avoid the truth all together. Nor does religion play any redemptive role in this process; in fact, it allies itself with the injustice and inhumanity of the status quo. "The truth was that the whole inhumanity and injustice of Samarian society allied itself, not with a worship of gods or idols, but quite decorously with the worship of Yahweh; that it was concealed and legitimated by this worship; . . . "(100) Amos insists that this is not true worship of Yahweh. In the name of Yahweh he cries out that true worship is the hatred of evil, that the love of God is to exercise justice and mercy in one's social and economic relationships. It entails justice in the gates. Justice in this context does not, according to Barth, mean adherence to an impersonal external law of fairness, but rather, active concern and responsible action for the oppressed as reflected in the direction of service given in Jesus' ministry. This concern was not exercised, and therein lay Israel's sin as sloth. Yahweh and Yahweh alone was left to exercise justice. "Thus Yahweh alone was left as the Friend and Champion and Helper and just Judge of the weak and poor who had suffered through this development--no, through the inhumanity of man to man. It was with His commission and in His name that Amos appeared in Samaria: 'The Lord hath sworn by the excellency of Jacob (and therefore by Himself), Surely I will never forget any of their works'(8:7)."(101) In Yahweh's name Amos spoke to Israel, calling her to repentance and a renewed life. His words were ignored. He was branded as a trouble-maker by the religious hierarchy, and communications were sent by the high priest to the king demanding that he be expelled. "These were the communications of an ecclesiastic (not a heathen ecclesiastic, but a representative of the Church of Yahweh) who obviously regarded it as self- evident the union not only of throne and altar (the alter of Yahweh) but also of mammon and altar."(102) Finally, and here we arrive at Amos' definitive message, what is the judgment of God upon this obviously successful nation? The judgment of God is the doom of the nation. It is a message of destruction. Though Amos pleaded with God for Judah's survival, he was compelled to prophecy her doom. One of many such prophecies is: "'Behold the eyes of the Lord God are upon the sinful kingdom, and I will destroy it from off the face the earth. . . . All the sinners of the people shall die by the sword, which say The evil shall not overtake nor prevent us'"(103) According to Barth, Yahweh maintained the covenant with Judah by "placing the inhumanity of man under His merciless denunciation and the judgment which remorselessly engulfs it."(104) The prophecy of Amos proved to be accurate, shortly thereafter, the Northern Kingdom disappeared from history.
Some Conclusions
We may draw several conclusions from Barth's portrayal of Amos' ministry. First, Barth discusses Amos' ministry in the context of Jesus' kingly work as an example of the sin of sloth. In contrast to Jesus who labored for the welfare of the weak and powerless, the foundation of Sumaria's economic prosperity was its exploitation of the poor. In the sphere of the covenant this sin is sloth, the failure to hear and respond to the cry of those in need, and worse, to make use of their powerlessness. This sin of sloth as a covenant event among peoples manifests itself in the technical sphere as the utilization of the labor and assets of others as the means to enhanced accumulation and luxury. That is, economic exploitation is the correlate sin of sloth in the sphere of creation. And further, this sin is realized through lawlessness. According to Barth, and this will become relevant when we discuss both church and state law, a primary way in which nations may act responsibly for their citizens is through law. Amos excoriated Northern Israel in that she had no law to protect the poor, or else that law was effectively ignored. In the final chapter, we shall describe a certain form of lawlessness, one intimately connected with profits and their pursuit.
Secondly, in reference to Amos' prophetic ministry, we may notice that he was aware of many factors, but that the most important datum was the existence of economic misery, its causes as seen in broken covenant relations, and the existence or non-existence of laws seeking to protect the oppressed. Regardless of the size, scope, and glitter of an economic system's advances and achievements, if it creates and perpetuates an oppressed and impoverished class, this fact is of primary and decisive significance. This follows Christologically from the fact that God made his appearance among the impoverished, and therefore considers their condition most acutely. Unlike the official, cultic leaders who made a "self- evident union" between "mammon and altar,"(105) and thereby evaluated matters from the perspective of Sumaria's evident economic success, Amos took another tack. He chose to ignore Israel's commercial success in that Yahweh's justice was not swayed by Israel's economic achievements, but by the condition of the dispossessed. A social historical analysis of a given economic situation must begin there. For this reason, we shall address the matter of poverty in the Third World, rather than choosing to celebrate the West's apparent economic success.
Reflections on Jesus' Kingly Work
We may now integrate what we have learned in Genesis with the primary results of this section, as well as aspects of Jesus' priestly work. According to Barth's presentation of both his kingly and priestly work, Jesus did not own land, nor did he utilize the earth's resources through work in the conventional sense. He relied upon God's grace, and attended directly to people's bodily needs. In the sphere of creation, bodily needs are met through work and the utilization of the earth's resources. This cannot be denied by Jesus' reconciling work. God's work in creation is the presupposition of his work in reconciliation; no mode can exist or be known apart from the other (1.6). The commands of creation, that humanity subdue the land and eat of its produces, however, were addressed to the whole of the human race (2.12). No division into social groupings was envisioned, although these commands have their inner covenant basis in Israel's entrance into and use of the land. In the sphere of creation these commands still hold. All people are to have access to the earth's resources and to work. Nevertheless, this technical aspect of economic life has its basis in social history, it can be carried out effectively only by God's grace and through right relations among nations, classes, and persons. This has not happened. Pride and sloth, greed, acquisitiveness, exploitation, and lawlessness, characterize human social relations and lead to dispossession, hunger, and want. Only by restoring the covenant can economic life be restored. This entails reconciliation among peoples, classes, and nations. When this reconciliation occurs in the economic sphere, the use of the earth and the transformation of its resources by labor will occur in transformed social historical contexts whose direction of transformation is given in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ the Lord became a servant, and as servant he served as Lord. The direction of Jesus' work in the economic sense was from wealth to poverty, that the poor may become rich. The social context of the new economic situation will reflect and express that social history. For example, the fact that Israel lived in Canaan, worked its lands, and distributed its resources, expressed a prior social history: that she was once powerless and marginated, that she once labored for others, that by grace she confronted the Egyptians and escaped from bondage, that she conquered Canaan, divided its resources, and defended it against her enemies. This social history reflects a transformation from weak to strong, and from dispossessed to possessors, from working for others to working for oneself; her economic existence and labor in the land reflects that social history. That is, economic life can be renewed when land and labor function in and express transformed social contexts. The direction of the transformation will entail a transfer of assets from strong to weak, from rich to poor, and it will entail labor in behalf of the powerless, rather than onerous labor by the powerless in behalf of the strong.
Further, it is to be remembered that the direction of service and the restoration of economic life can occur only by grace. We are not presenting a general theory of social and economic transformation (1.4).(106) Apart from grace the commands of God the Creator and those of God the Reconciler can scarcely be brought together. On the one hand we have the command to subdue the earth, on the other the command to relinquish it. These commands refer to different spheres; the first indicates God's desire that all have land and work, and the second to the first step in effecting economic renewal by reconciling antagonistic peoples. Yet they belong together by grace; they both exist as moments in the one history of the covenant, the history of the election in which creation, reconciliation, and redemption are the primary events. By grace this one history comes to life, and the relations among the varied actions and commands reach their required order. At that point it can be seen how God's gift of land and labor to all may be found through reconciled covenant relations among all peoples. In grace the direction of service found in Jesus Christ will occur. Apart from grace, however, this cannot be known or realized, just as it is impossible apart from grace to glimpse the mystery of the triune God who is yet one.
Finally, we may recall that the history of Jesus Christ is a two-fold history. It reveals that God attends to humanity's physical needs, and secondly, in obedience to him, the man Jesus worked to restore human life in all its aspects. In the following chapter we will show that the two- fold history of Jesus Christ is the history through which God and humanity work to redeem the world. Therefore, whatever we learn here is the basis and norm for all redemptive economic activity, first by God's grace, and then in obedience, through human action.
The Resurrection
We have yet to discuss one important aspect of Jesus' history, and that is his resurrection from the dead. In the resurrection the meaning and significance of the person and work of Jesus Christ became apparent. In the resurrection the disciples perceived Jesus as one in whom God was palpably present and active. Prior to the resurrection God was active in Jesus, and Jesus was active in effecting reconciliation, but Jesus' work as the work of God was partially concealed. With the resurrection, however, Jesus was seen as he truly was, the One sent by God to effect the reconciliation of the world.(107) Therefore, whatever occurred in the resurrection is, from Barth's view, of crucial import for understanding the whole of Jesus' life, including his priestly and kingly work.
The event of the resurrection not only enables us to look backward and assess the deeper significance of Jesus' priestly and kingly work, it also is the event in which the transition is made from the finite history of Jesus Christ to all other histories. Barth ends each of the sections on Jesus' priestly and kingly ministry with a discussion of the resurrection and the resurrection forms the bridge between Jesus life and work and all other times.(108) In terms of Jesus' prior life his resurrection is indissolubly connected with his crucifixion, and his death and resurrection become the consummation of his life's work. Looking forward from Jesus' time, Barth relates the resurrection to subsequent history by means of his doctrine of Jesus' three-fold parousia, the resurrection being the first of the three forms of Christ's presence. We will discuss Jesus' three-fold parousia in the initial section of the following chapter. For now, however, we wish to assess Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection as it determines the deeper meaning of Jesus' kingly and priestly work.
Crucifixion and Resurrection--The Center of History
God's first act outside himself was his choice of Jesus Christ, not an abstract Jesus Christ, but Jesus in the whole of his history beginning with his birth and ending with the resurrection and ascension. This is the time of all times, eternal time, time before, with, and after all other times.(109) The priority of this time was historically manifested and proclaimed in the resurrection.(110) Jesus was then seen in his glory, as the Son of the Father, and in that capacity as the mediator and basis of all God's acts. Since God acts only in all three modes at once, this time is not isolated from the time of creation or redemption; it belongs with them as their origin, basis, and goal.(111) Corresponding to the Father's hiddenness, it is the secret basis of creation as reflected in the covenant's being the internal basis of creation. Corresponding to the Spirit's work of revealing God as known in the Son, Jesus' finite time will be fully revealed in the final eschaton as known in the second coming. The finite time of Jesus' life is also the basis of the time between creation and eschaton. It is the time of the covenant, and by means of Jesus in the fullness of his history, God works to overcome the sin that encounters the covenant in this middle period between creation and eschaton. Since the resurrection is the revelation of the meaning of Jesus' life, and since the time of Jesus is the basis of all times, we must at this point assess its structure, especially in relation to crucifixion, as these two events, crucifixion and resurrection, are the two basic events of Jesus' life, and therefore, the two primary events which structure all other histories.
Both the crucifixion and the resurrection were, in Barth's view, historical bodily events. Both events were moments in the one history of the one person Jesus Christ.(112) This one history, however, was broken radically by the event of Jesus' death. The death of Jesus meant that the man Jesus did not, for three days, exist. His coming to life required a new creation out of nothing.(113) That Jesus came to life means that God recreated him as the one who lived before. He arose as that one person, body and soul in their unity. Coming to life meant not only the resurrection of his personality, but the coming to life of his body as well. It was a corporeal resurrection.(114) In the two-fold unity of body and soul he addressed his disciples, he spoke with them, ate and drank with them, and they were able physically to put their hands in his wounds. The two-fold event, crucifixion and resurrection, forms the nucleus, the critical turning point, of Jesus' history and through him the history of God with all humanity.(115) Barth states that "the positive connexion between the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ consists in the fact that these two acts of God with and after one another are the two basic events of the one history of God with a sinful and corrupt world, his history with us as perverted and lost creatures."(116) The fact that the man Jesus did not exist for three days implies that the old world completely ended. There is a complete discontinuity at this point. The old world, all of it, the entire person, society in all its relationships, actually ends. It became non-existent because its ontological foundation, Jesus Christ, became non- existent. In resurrection a new world was created which exemplified God's original intent for the old order. God's intent was life, and this appeared in resurrection as eternal life in that the resurrected Jesus had forever overcome the onslaught of sin and death. That Jesus physically arose from the dead implies that God's hopes for life include bodily well- being, and given the presupposition of his work in creation, this validates those economic activities that sustain life. This further implies that our inquiry into the economic aspects of Jesus priestly and kingly work as relating to physical existence was a necessary and legitimate inquiry. The fact that the new creation exemplifies God's hopes for the old implies a continuity between the old and new creation. Christologically, the continuity resides in the fact that the one who arose from the dead was the one who was crucified. But the continuity is not a possibility of the created order. The non-existence of Jesus could not give rise to his existence. The "continuity" has its basis in God's act, in that God recreated Jesus as the one who had lived before. Jesus Christ is the history through which God acts in the world, and given that crucifixion and resurrection are the basic events of God's action in Christ, we can say that the old world is passing away, a new is being born. Barth possess an absolutely revolutionary conception of how God acts in history. Nothing is sacred, everything may be cleared away; nothing is impossible, the new may come to life. We cannot expect a restoration economic life without the ending of the old order and the beginning of the new.(117)
Resurrection and the Priestly Work
In our discussion of Jesus' priestly ministry we have already noted that Jesus bore God's judgment and the consequences of human sin in his death on the cross. Barth describes the resurrection as God's verdict on Jesus' priestly work of suffering.(118) By raising Jesus from the dead, God proclaimed that Jesus' priestly work had effectively dealt with sin. Had the power of sin remained in effect, Jesus would not have been raised from the dead since death is the consequence of sin. As it was, Jesus was raised bodily from the dead, he became alive, historically present, and alive eternally. Jesus became eternally alive in that he was present to all subsequent history, he had overcome death forever and was no longer vulnerable to the onslaught of sin and death.(119) Several consequences follow from this. With respect to covenant, Jesus priestly work resulted in humanity's being justified before God. In the crucifixion God's verdict was a No to human sin, but in the resurrection he said Yes by raising Jesus and through him all people into his fellowship with all sins forgiven.
Justification definitely means the sentence executed and revealed in Jesus Christ and His death and resurrection, the No and the Yes by which God vindicates Himself in relation to covenant-breaking man, with which He converts him to Himself and therefore reconciles him with Himself. He does it by the destruction of the old and the creation of a new man.(120)
The restoration of broken fellowship, however, entails the restoration of economic life as well since economic life depends upon covenant. We have already concluded that the goal of all economic activities is the well- being of bodily life as the necessary external basis of the covenant. When God granted eternal life to Jesus by virtue of a physical resurrection, he not only entered into renewed fellowship with humanity through the risen Jesus who became the mediator between God and all people, but he also made eternal life in the bodily sense available to all people as a gift in Jesus Christ.(121) By raising Jesus bodily from the dead, God's verdict was a Yes to the economic aspects of Jesus' priestly work. The resurrection is the definitive statement that Jesus' actions did indeed restore human existence in the physical sphere. From this it follows that results we have obtained, in so far as they reflect Jesus' priestly work with respect to economic matters, are those actions which lead to bodily well-being. In this way, the deepest significance of Jesus' priestly actions are revealed, he restored the broken covenant, and with it redeemed the goal of economic life, the physical well-being of all people.
Resurrection and the Kingly Work
In discussing the resurrection in relation to Jesus' priestly work, Barth does not dwell at any length on the nature of eternal life as renewed social and economic relationships. That discussion properly belongs to Jesus' kingly ministry, and Barth discusses the matter in that context. Although all people were exalted by virtue of God's humble presence in Jesus Christ, the resurrection is the definitive revelation of humanity's exaltation. In the resurrection Jesus revealed the risen life of all people with God as renewed and redeemed social and economic relationships. The emphasis was life, eternal life as restored existence beyond the reach of sin and chaos. The word "life" in this context means life in all its dimensions--restored personal relationships, and physical well-being.(122) Barth feels it particularly important to guard against any spiritualizing of the resurrection, as if it were only concerned with matters of religious meaning, and not with the liberation of the whole of human existence both body and soul.
The power of the resurrection of Jesus Christ may be known by the fact that it snatches man upwards. But again we must make a careful differentiation. The higher level to which it snatches him is not the dubious height of an abstractly spiritual life, of pure inwardness. It is a matter of man's life in the totality, of man as the soul of his body, and therefore of the outward life, with all its distinctive elements and functions, in which he is related to other cosmic creatures, and not merely of rational and spiritual life which seems to differentiate him from them. It is a matter of his life including, and not excluding, its vegetative components.(123)
By raising Jesus physically from the dead, God performed an economic act, in that he renewed and sustained Jesus physically, and thereby ratified and validated all of Jesus' prior acts as the one who sustained and recreated bodily existence. The fact that Jesus ate and drank with his disciples in the resurrection is, unfortunately, not emphasized by Barth in the context of Jesus' kingly ministry. Jesus' eating and drinking with his disciples is, of course, the messianic banquet as realized on the final eschatological day and this is discussed by Barth in Church Dogmatics, III:2 under the title "Jesus, Lord of Time."(124) The overall direction of Barth's presentation is, however, consonant with what needs to be our primary result--that the resurrection was the definitive expression of the Sabbath rest as the meaning and goal of Jesus' prior ministry.(125) This follows from the fact that the Sabbath rest is the time of fellowship between God and humanity, and Barth emphasizes the resurrection as the time in which God in Jesus became palpably present to the disciples.(126) And secondly, Barth's emphasis on the resurrection as an event of physical liberation implies that the physical goal of the Sabbath rest, bodily well-being, was fulfilled in the resurrection.(127) In short, the resurrection was the revelation of eternal life, understood as physical and social existence beyond the power of sin and chaos, and as such, it entailed humanity's exaltation into the Sabbath rest as the meaning and goal of Jesus' prior history. In light of the economic aspects of the resurrection, and particularly the vision of the Messianic banquet and the Sabbath rest, we can now see why God in the beginning created a world of economic abundance, why he labored in Israel's history to provide a land of milk and honey and to protect her from her enemies, why Jesus fed people and healed their bodies, and why God will sit at table with his friends in the age to come.
Final Propositions from Chapter Three
3.1 Previous results from Barth's doctrine of creation are the necessary presupposition for God's work in reconciliation. God's intent for creation is fulfilled in Jesus Christ through restoring the covenant as the inner basis of creation. This proposition has its partial basis in (1.6) and (2.2).
3.2 In the economic sphere, reconciliation involves the use of material objects in the context of a transformed social history whose direction and basis is Jesus Christ. This proposition has its partial basis in (1.2), (2.3)
3.3 God is economic in himself in that the Father eternally generates the Son, and the Son is not a fleshless Logos, but "pre-exists" in a physical sense as well. All God's actions ad extra, in creation, incarnation, and redemption involve a physical component. This proposition has its partial basis in (1.6) and (2.5).
3.4 The first and downward movement by which economic life is restored is the obedience of faith in which bodily ease and accumulated assets are relinquished for the sake of others. Conversely, sin occurs when bodily ease and accumulation become the motivating power of economic and political affairs apart from the Word of God. The refusal to hear the Word of God is pride, and its results in the economic sphere are starvation, dispossession, and murder. This proposition has its partial basis in (1.1) in that God's humility exists within the triune life, and is reflected ad extra (1.4). Also, (2.7).
3.5 The use of land and work, and the attention to physical needs, has a direction of service. With respect to Jesus' kingly work, it is from the strong to the weak, from wealthy to poor. This is the second and upward movement in restoring economic life and its correlate sin is sloth. In economic affairs, it appears as the disregard and use of the poor and weak for economic ends, and a failure to protect the poor through law. This proposition has its partial basis in (1.1) in that the inner-triune love of the Father for the Son is expressed ad extra (1.4) in humanity's exaltation. Also, (2.7).
3.6 In assessing a given socioeconomic situation, the starting point is the condition of its marginal peoples. The relevant realities are the land, the transformation of its produce by labor, and how this flow of products functions in a direction of service among nations, classes, and people as given in (3.4) and (3.5).
3.7 The aim of economic life is the preservation and restoration of bodily well-being, and this includes the use of the land through work. All other economic priorities are secondary. There is no cosmic order which guarantees that the pursuit of other objectives will assure the primary objective of meeting physical needs. This proposition follows from (3.3) and the fact that the primary external basis of covenant is bodily existence. This proposition relates to (2.14).
3.8 The crucifixion and resurrection are the center of history, the passing of the old, the creation of new redeemed life. It reveals God's righteous judgement, and that the economic corruption due to greed, acquisitiveness, exploitation, and lawlessness is total and complete. The old ends in its totality. The new is brought to life, seen as the Sabbath rest of God's material provision, and in renewed social relations whose direction of service is given in Jesus Christ. God's judgment and pardon, the true depth of sin, and the power of the resurrection, are known only in faith. This proposition follows from (1.1) and (1.4), reflecting the unity and distinctiveness of the triune God.
3.9 The conclusion of (2.15), referring to the social control of the land and its resources, is fortified by our investigation of the economic aspects of reconciliation.
Endnotes to Chapter Three
1. Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV:1, parts two (pp. 22-66) and three (pp. 67-78), of section 57.
2. Ibid., p. 22, and the excursus pp. 22-34. 3. Ibid., p. 22.
4. This, of course, has its basis in the fact that Jesus Christ is the basis of all history excepting the "history" of human sin (1.2). The distinctiveness of the history of Jesus Christ with respect to the Old Testament, and his being its basis and fulfillment is found in the section of the Church Dogmatics, I:2, pp. 70-101, entitled "The Time of Expectation." Note the initial comments pp. 70-71. See also II:2, the excursus pp. 354409; III: 1, pp. 3-41, on creation sagas' being understood Christologically; and IV:1, pp. 22-78, on Jesus Christ's being the presupposition and fulfillment of the covenant, specifically the Old Testament covenant and its revelation.
5. Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV:1, p. 32. 6. Ibid., pp. 26-7.
7. Ibid., p. 27.
8. Ibid., pp. 28-31. This will be discussed in greater detail in chapter four where we describe the centrality of Israel and the church with respect to the nations.
9. Ibid., p. 32. 10. Ibid., p. 34.
11. In Church Dogmatics, I:2, pp. 871-4, Barth observes that reconciliation is the biblical center, but not a center in such a way as to reduce creation and eschatology to mere appendages of reconciliation.
12. See Barth's discussion, pp. 334-8, of Church Dogmatics, III:1, and the conclusions of page 338.
13. See Barth's overview, Church Dogmatics, IV:1, pp. 79-154, and especially part 4, pp. 128-154.
14. Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV:2, p. 21.
15. Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV:1, pp. 157-211.
16. Ibid., pp. 158-9. See also Church Dogmatics, III:3, pp. 354-360 where Barth speaks of God's making evil or nothingness his own affair, and suffering its consequences.
17. Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV:1, pp. 163-4. 18. Ibid., p. 164.
19. Ibid., excursus pp. 164-166. 20. Ibid., p. 202. 21. Ibid.
22. Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV:1, p. 158-9, 177. Throughout this discussion we have been speaking of God's taking flesh, and Barth speaks this way as well. Precisely speaking, it is the Son, the second mode, which becomes incarnate in obedience to the Father. Note comments, IV:2, 43-4.
23. Barth, Church Dogmatics, pp. 199-200.
24. Ibid., pp. 166-75, for Barth's presentation of the ideas of this paragraph.
25. Ibid., p. 172.
26. Ibid., pp. 171-2. We will discuss this matter in greater detail in chapter four.
27. Ibid., p. 176. 28. Ibid., excursus pp. 259-73.
29. Ibid., the excursus pp. 259-73, and especially the comments p. 264, for the relationship between temptation and crucifixion.
30. Ibid., pp. 211-283.
31. Ibid., pp. 231-35, 235-44, 244-256, and 256-59, for four points which we have condensed to two.
32. Ibid., p. 260. 33. Ibid., p. 261. 34. Ibid., p. 260.
35. Ibid., p. 261. 36. Ibid., p. 262.
37. See also Barth, Church Dogmatics, III:2, pp. 67-68, where Barth points out that Jesus' reply to the devil referring to the Word of God implies that physical existence can even be sustained by the Word apart from food.
38. Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV:1, pp. 261-2. 39. Ibid., p. 262.
40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., pp. 262-4.
43. Ibid., pp. 264, 272.
44. Ibid., point 3, pp. 244-256, and Barth's initial points pp. 244-5.
45. Ibid., p. 246. 46. Ibid., the excursi, pp. 252, 255-6.
47. Ibid., pp. 231-5, 256-9.
48. Ibid., p. 360-61. See also, Church Dogmatics, IV:1, pp. 138-142, 358-413; IV:2, pp. 378-403; IV:3, first half, pp. 368-371, where Barth presents the reasons for his Christological understanding of sin.
49. Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV:1, 244-256.
50. Ibid., p. 296. We shall show at the end of this chapter that Barth understands crucifixion and resurrection as the center of history, and that it entails the total abolition of the old aeon and the formation of a new age. The distinctiveness and relatedness between the old and new creations has its basis in the distinctiveness and relatedness of the inner-triune modes of God, (1.1) and (1.5).
51. Ibid., excursus, pp. 453-8. 52. Ibid., p. 453.
53. Ibid., p. 456. 54. Ibid., p. 456. 55. Ibid.
56. Barth, Church Dogmatics, III:4, p. 459. See also p. 451 where he connects war with material acquisition.
57. Barth, The Christian Life, pp. 222-224.
58. Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV:1, p. 458.
59. Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV:2, the opening section, pp. 3-29, where Barth relates the second moment of reconciliation to the first.
60. Ibid., pp. 45-46. 61. Ibid., p. 31.
62. Ibid., excursus pp. 33-34, and I:2, p. 50.
63. Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV:2, pp. 32-36, 64, 100-2; see excursus pp. 52-3 of IV:1, and comments pp. 64-66. Part of Barth's motive in adopting this position, aside from the Scriptural evidence, is that he never wants to divorce form and content in revelation, and therefore, form and content must go together in eternity as well as in time.
64. Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV:2, p. 101.
65. Ibid., the discussion pp. 88-104, and comments p. 91.
66. Ibid., pp. 44-72, passim, for these ideas.
67. Ibid., p. 44, the four points here, and especially discussions of points two and three, pp. 50-60, 60-104.
68. Ibid., pp. 154-264. 69. Ibid., p. 179.
70. Ibid., p. 37, 45-47; IV:3 first half, pp. 225-6. This idea is also expressed in enhypostasis and anhypostasis, the history of Jesus occurs through and only through grace, grace always being understood as a Word creating new things.
71. Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV:2, p. 168. 72. Ibid., p. 169.
73. Ibid., p. 171. See point 3, pp. 171-3, and the excursus pp. 173-179. Barth does not believe that the church should offer a program for social and economic improvement. We shall present further evidence for this in the following chapter.
74. Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV:2, p. 173. 75. Ibid., p. 174.
76. Ibid., p. 175. 77. Ibid., p. 176. 78. Ibid. 79. Ibid.
80. Ibid., pp. 177-8. 81. Ibid., p. 175.
82. Barth, Church Dogmatics, III:1, p. 228.
83. Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV:2, pp. 180-1. Marquardt describes Barth's understanding of the critical aspect of Jesus' ministry in his section entitled "The critique of the bourgeois God by means of the revolutionary God." (pp. 293-297, especially, pp. 295-6.) Marquardt emphasizes Barth's understanding of the revolutionary character of Jesus' work, and his concern for the poor, and these ideas do contain within them the power to oppose the bourgeois order.
84. See Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV:2, pp. 166-7, and the following four points, pp. 167, 168, 171, 180, where Barth discusses the identity of Jesus' history with that of the work of God on earth.
85. Ibid., p. 184. See also, III:2, p. 211.
86. Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV:2, p. 188. 87. Ibid., p. 191.
88. Ibid., pp. 209-211; III:3, pp. 128-130.
89. Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV:2, p. 222. 90. Ibid.
91. Ibid., p. 221. 92. Ibid., p. 178. 93. Ibid., p. 226.
94. Ibid., pp. 445-52. 95. Ibid., p. 448. 96. Ibid.
97. Ibid., p. 449. 98. Ibid. 99. Ibid., p. 450. 100. Ibid.
101. Ibid. 102. Ibid., pp. 450-51. 103. Ibid., p. 446.
104. Ibid., p. 452. 105. Ibid., pp. 450-1. 106. Ibid., pp. 547-8.
107. See Barth's comments, Church Dogmatics, IV:1, pp. 301-4; IV:2, pp. 132-154 passim; III:2, pp. 441-463, and especially the comments pp. 448, 455, 462.
108. Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV:1, part three of section 59, pp. 283-349; IV: 2, part four of section 64, pp. 264-377.
109. Gerald Butler defines a political theology as one in which "political-social reality or an aspect thereof assumes a hermaneutical role--as ether a norm or a focus . . . " (Gerald Butler, Karl Barth and Political Theology [Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1973)], p. iii, also, p. 233.) Butler claims, and we agree with him, that Barth's theology is not a political theology. Furthermore, in Butler's view, Marquardt interprets Barth's theology as being a political theology (pp. iv, 113, 160-3, 232). (See also the article by Butler. "Karl Barth and Political Theology," Scottish Journal of Theology, 27 [1974]: 441-458.) On the whole, we agree with Butler's assessment of Marquardt. In certain places, Marquardt indicates that Barth's socialism was not the adoption of an ideology, but rather, held loosely on practical grounds. In other places, he claims that Barth's thought should be understood as left-radicalism, which could make free use of Marxism, democratic socialism, liberalism, or even conservatism (pp. 15, 333). Or, Marquardt will say, that "political prognosis directs Barth's dogmatics. Why that can be so, can only be known when one discovers the socialism in the theology of Karl Barth." (Hunsinger, Radical Politics, p. 69.) The telling characteristic of Marquardt's work on Karl Barth, however, is that he interprets central Barthian doctrines as having been derived from his socialist political experience and directed toward that experience. (See Marquardt's conclusion to that effect, p. 333.) In other words, Barth's theology, and this is a thesis of Marquardt's, helps to establish an "organic connection between the bible and the newspaper." (Hunsinger, Radical Politics, p. 47.) In chapter four we shall show that Barth understands the state and political activity as belonging to the outer sphere of the nations. This outer sphere is general history, the history of human sin. Socialism belongs to this outer sphere. If Barth's theology came from and was directed toward this general history, if it mediated between the Bible and the newspaper, this would imply that Barth sees general history and the history of Jesus Christ in an interactive relationship in which each one comes from and goes to the other. This is not possible. The basis of Barth's theology is Scripture which by grace mediates the unique history of Jesus Christ. The history of Jesus Christ is the primal history. Jesus Christ does not exist in dialectical relation to any other reality. Barth's theology is not a political theology in Butler's sense of the term. He was certainly influenced by socialism, socialist themes appear in his theology. This is evident. But the aim of his theology, and this is obvious throughout the Church Dogmatics, is to listen to Scripture in the hope of hearing the Word Jesus Christ. The church, in obedience to the Word, may provisionally espouse a particular movement, but the Word cannot be determined by that movement. In Barth's words:
The Christian community both can and should espouse the cause of this or that branch of social progress or even socialism in the form most helpful at a specific time and place and in a specific situation. But its decisive words cannot consist in the proclamation of social progress or socialism. It can consist only in the proclamation of the revolution of God against 'all ungodliness and unrighteousness of man' (Rom. 1:18), i.e. in the proclamation of His kingdom as it has already come and comes. (Barth, Church Dogmatics, III:4, p. 545.)
Schellong makes our point when he insists, against Marquardt, that Barth advocated a free theology, and that Barth's "rejection of bourgeois theology is not the affirmation of a proletarian theology, but rather the demand for a free theology." (Hunsinger, Radical Politics, p. 143.) Schellong does recognize that Marquardt is accurate in seeing socialist themes in Barth's thought. (p. 147. Also see comments to that effect by John Deschner. John Deschner, "Karl Barth as Political Activist", Union Seminary Quarterly Review, 28 No. 1 [Fall, 1972: pp. 53-66], pp. 61-62.) The logic, however, is from above to below. Barth does not employ socialism to interpret God, but God is social in himself, and therefore the bearer of true socialism against and for human society. Gollwitzer expresses our position as follows:
From this identification of God's kingdom with true socialism he [Barth] was not to stray, not at this point, and, I would like to assert, never. That God's socialism always infinitely surpasses whatever we men can create as socialism was something he already knew, just as he also knew, however, that this does not exclude, but includes, our struggling for a revolutionary transformation of the present ungodly social order into one which better corresponds to God's socialism. Such a socialism he considered possible, because the gospel--this he learned from the Blumhardts--is aimed toward bodily, worldly realization. (Hunsinger, Radical Politics, pp. 79-80. See Dannemann, Theologie und Politik, pp. 208-9, for similar conclusions)
In other words, the Word itself, the history of Jesus Christ, has a social character. Depending upon the Word, this may imply an affirmation of socialism in specific circumstances. The social character of the Word does not, however, imply a general affirmation of socialism or either practical or theoretical grounds. The Word may deny a human socialism in certain situations. Barth expressed the matter at one point as follows: "Let me tell you this: Once I was a religious socialist. I discarded it because I believed I saw that religious socialism failed to take as serious and profound view of man's misery and of the help for him, as do the Holy Scriptures." (Karl Barth, God in Action, trans. E. G. Homrighausen and Karl Ernst, [Long Island, N.Y.: Round Table Press, 1963], p. 125.) In light of the foregoing, we are not going to theoretically endorse socialism, or any other ideology. We are, however, going to attend to the concreteness of the Word, and this may have socialist implications.
110. Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV:1, pp. 313-319; IV:2, pp. 269-74, 299-300, 307-310; IV:3, first half, pp. 274-316. Note also the section "God's Time and our Time, pp. 45-69 of I:2, and comments, pp. 52-3. Above all, note the section, "Jesus, Lord of Time," pp. 437-510 of III:2. Here Barth begins with a discussion of the resurrection, and then, pp. 455-510, Barth discusses how Jesus' time is God's first and eternal time, present to all times, pp. 467-77, before all times, 477-485, and the future of all time, 485-511. See especially the introductory points, 455-466. Implicit in these discussions of Jesus' time being the basis of all God's revelatory acts is the idea that this time of revelation is of limited duration. Note especially, IV:1, p. 318; III:2, pp. 440, 463. This is Barth's way of avoiding the idea of continuing revelation. There is one revelation of finite length, and all other acts of God are repetitions, or reflections of that one finite revelation and not continued revelation.
111. Marquardt, in his section entitled "The Extra-Calvinism and the Structure of Natural Theology," relates Barth's extra-Calvinism to natural theology (pp. 248-57). By extra-Calvinism, it is meant that the Subject of the incarnation is fully God, and therefore the Lord of creation as well as the Son in reconciliation. Since the Son is Lord of nature as well as grace, he acts and works throughout the world. Marquardt draws attention to Barth's section of the Church Dogmatics entitled "The light of Life" (IV:3, first half, pp. 38-165). In this section Barth describes Jesus' words in the world beyond the church and Scripture. In Marquardt's view, Barth's motive in utilizing this concept was to bring together nature and grace, God and society, and church and culture. Marquardt associates extra-Calvinism with a form of natural theology, which is, of course Christologically established. (Is this not a contradiction in terms?) This implies, and this is Marquardt's view, that Barth backed away from some of his earlier polemical statements on natural theology which arose in the thick of the German Church Conflict (pp. 263-264.) Barth's Extra-calvinism as introduced in IV:3, first half, is not a retraction. Barth's doctrine of creation, volume three of the Church Dogmatics, had its basis in Jesus Christ. If Jesus Christ is not the basis of creation, then creation has a ground in God other than the Word, which implies a depth in God apart from the Word. Creation has its basis in the Word since the Father eternally begets the Son and begets only the Son (1.2). The whole of our results pertinent to Barth's doctrine of creation, the basis of his exegesis of Genesis, has its basis in that fact. Nothing new was developed in this respect in the section on "The Light of Life." Therefore, within that section itself, Barth will comment: "It will be seen that, in order to perceive that we really have to reckon with such true words from without, we have no need to appeal either for basis or content to the sorry hypothesis of a so-called 'natural theology' (i.e., a knowledge of God given in and with the natural force of reason or to be attained in it exercise.)" (Church Dogmatics, IV:3, first half, p. 117.) But then Marquardt points out that this "natural" theology adopted by Barth requires a new form, one that isn't based on formal and abstract information regarding a highest being (p. 264), which in effect is to say that the natural theology adopted by Barth is not really "natural." There is no doubt, however, that Jesus' work ex muros ecclesia, implies a form of togetherness for theology and secular disciplines, church and world, God and society, and in this respect Marquardt is on the right track. (See Hunsinger, Radical Politics, pp. 127-133, for Diem's discussion of Marquardt on Extra-Calvinism. I agree with Diem who rejects Marquardt's position.)
112. See especially Barth's five points relating crucifixion and resurrection, Church Dogmatics, IV:1, 297-8 of IV:1; note especially his discussion of points four and five, pp. 333-48. Also IV:1, pp. 144-7; IV:2, pp. 143-45; IV:3, first half, pp. 287-93.
113. See especially Barth's brief excursus p. 301 of Church Dogmatics, IV:1; also IV:3, first half, pp. 310-11.
114. Barth, Church Dogmatics, I:2, p. 50, 114, 117; II:1, p. 510; III:2, pp. 327, 448, 451; IV:1, pp. 341, 352, 653, 664; IV:2, p. 143; IV:3, first half, pp. 311-12.
115. This is Barth's central affirmation in point 3, pp. 309-333, of IV:1. See also I:2, pp. 106-7; III:1, pp. 28, 33; IV:1, p. 557; In IV:3, first half, pp. 274-307, the emphasis is on the resurrection as the revelation of the one whose life, death, and resurrection totally alters all people in all times and places. See also, IV:3, second half, pp. 711-14.
116. Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV:1, p. 310.
117. Dannemann gives impressive evidence from the Church Dogmatics that Barth understood reconciliation as absolutely revolutionary and summarizes his conclusions in these words: "Reconciliation is the transformation of the situation of men and the world, and to be sure their revolutionary, radical, total, and universal transformation." (Theologie und Politik p. 152) We agree with this. The transformation of the world effected in Jesus Christ is total, and it means the transformation of society to its very roots. Similarly, Paul Lehmann presents a "little list" which characterizes Barth's theology as a theology of permanent revolution. (Paul Lehmann, "Karl Barth, Theologian of Permanent Revolution," Union Seminary Quarterly Review 28 No.1 [Fall, 1972, pp. 67-82], p. 79.) This "little list" is correct, and it implies God's revolution as an event of grace. (The word "permanent" may be inappropriate since grace is never permanent.) In reply, Herzog asks what Lehmann means by revolution, a hard bloody one, or a softer one? (Frederick Herzog, "In Reply," Union Seminary Quarterly Review 28 No.1 [Fall, 1972, pp. 83-84], p. 83.) This is an important question. From a Barthian perspective, the word "revolution" is given content by grace. It cannot be defined apart from the Word, and therefore, when Lehmann speaks of revolution, he cannot claim any direct identification of God's revolution with any given image of revolution. (Dannemann recognizes this when he says that God's revolution cannot be identified with any human revolution, Theologie und Politik, p. 158). When God speaks, the foundations of both church and state will be judged and transformed, and this can be dimly seen and known in faith. But not every transformation of the social order is God speaking, and further, certain apparently non-revolutionary movements and events may well be God speaking. Markus Barth makes our point when he criticizes Marquardt for taking an ill-defined concept of revolution drawn from socialist or revolutionary thought, and then making it the content of Barth's concept of a revolutionary God. "Even if it would make good sense to call God the arch-revolutionary and his kingdom the true revolution for the benefit of all the world, Marquardt has not yet shown to what change 'revolution' is subjected once it is taken into Yahweh's and Jesus Christ's hands." (Markus Barth, "Current Discussion on the Political Character of Karl Barth's Theology," Footnotes to a Theology, ed. and introduction by H. Martin Rumscheidt, [The Corporation for the Publication of Academic Studies in Canada, 1974], pp. 93-4.)
118. Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV:1, "The Verdict of the Father," pp. 283-357, and especially the comments on p. 309.
119. Ibid., points two and three, pp. 304-333, noting the summary conclusions pp. 309, 332-3.
120. Ibid., p. 96. 121. Ibid., p. 352.
122. Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV:2, pp. 310-18. 123. Ibid., p. 316.
124. Barth, Church Dogmatics, III:2, p. 502.
125. James Brown has carried out an investigation of Barth's doctrine of the Sabbath as found in the Church Dogmatics. According to Brown, the Sabbath Day of creation belongs to the time of Jesus Christ and it was revealed in the resurrection. In Brown's words, "The eternal Sabbath dawns in the first Easter. It is perfected in the consummation of creation; 'in a glory which is no longer particular and transitory, but universal and permanent, embracing the whole of creation both in heaven and earth' (C.D. III:2, p. 490)." (The Rev. Dr. James Brown, "Karl Barth's Doctrine of the Sabbath" Scottish Journal of Theology, Vol. 19 [1966: pp. 409-425], p. 425.) Such a conclusion is important for us. According to Barth's exegesis of the first creation account, the Sabbath rest included God's economic blessing. Therefore, the Kingdom as it comes from the resurrection of Jesus Christ brings the fullness of God's original provision.
126. Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV:1, pp. 301-4; IV:2, pp. 133-5.
127. Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV:2, pp. 314-316. Note the excursus p. 145, where Barth connects the resurrection meals with Jesus' eating and drinking with his disciples in his earthly ministry.
The Rev. Robert J. Sanders, Ph.D.
1986
An Egregious Theological Failure
Anglicanism and Justification - Introduction to Anglicanism
Barth - Reconciliation and Economic Life Chapter Three
Barth's Creation and Economic Life Chapter Two
Barth's Doctrine of the Trinity - Chapter One
Capitalism and Paganism--An Intimate Connection
Creation, Science, and the New World Order
Introduction to Anglican Theology - Anglicanism and the Prayer Book
Introduction to Anglicanism - Anglicanism and Justification
Introduction to the Theological Essays
John Jewel and the Roman Church
Karl Barth, the German Christians, and ECUSA - Introduction
Mathematics, Science, and the Love of God
One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Some Reflections On Evil and the Existence of God
The Historical Jesus and the Spirit
