{"title":"Human Being","authors":"Paulo Jones","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199689781.013.25","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199689781.013.25","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter analyses Barth’s thinking about the human being in the second edition of Romans and in multiple volumes of the Church Dogmatics. It does so under the headings of ‘encounter’, ‘election’, ‘freedom’, and ‘community’. Its principal objective is to demonstrate that Barth’s emphatic affirmation of God’s priority and sovereignty is not exclusive, but rather the presupposition, of an expansive and nuanced account of human being and action. Close attention is paid to Barth’s vivid sense that human action enriches the covenant of grace—a covenant fulfilled by Christ’s saving work, and held temporally and spatially ‘open’ for the Spirit-led action of human beings.","PeriodicalId":269615,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Karl Barth","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122868842","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ethics","authors":"G. Mckenny","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199689781.013.31","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199689781.013.31","url":null,"abstract":"Karl Barth’s theological ethics is a version of divine command ethics. Its distinctiveness is rooted in its identification of the command of God with the Word of God. The same Word of God that declares to us what God does for us in Jesus Christ (Gospel) also claims us as those for whom God acts, summoning, directing, and empowering us to confirm in our conduct what we are by virtue of God’s conduct towards us (Law). This chapter examines the relationship between theological ethics and other kinds of ethics, what is involved in the claim that the Word of God is also the command of God, how the command of God claims us (general ethics) and what specifically it requires of us (special ethics), and how it exhibits continuity despite its character as an event. Brief comparisons of Barth’s ethics with contemporary eudaemonistic ethics and ethics of witness are made throughout the chapter.","PeriodicalId":269615,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Karl Barth","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121780120","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Barth and Roman Catholic Theology","authors":"P. Molnar","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199689781.013.43","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199689781.013.43","url":null,"abstract":"Taking Barth’s doctrines of revelation and the Trinity as a starting point, this chapter places Barth’s thought primarily in conversation with Walter Kasper. It considers Kasper’s work as an attempt to integrate insights drawn from Barth and Karl Rahner, while placing their views within the wider context of post-Vatican II Roman Catholic theology, as well as the thinking of Hans Urs von Balthasar. By focusing on the different attitudes of Barth and Kasper to the analogia entis (analogy of being), the chapter proposes that the primary issue related to ecumenical unity that emerges concerns whether, and to what extent, contemporary theologians are willing to allow Jesus Christ himself to stand as the first and the final Word in all theological reflection.","PeriodicalId":269615,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Karl Barth","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126327641","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sin and Evil","authors":"Günter Thomas","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199689781.013.23","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199689781.013.23","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter reconstructs the context and argument of Karl Barth’s innovative account of human sin and evil. For a proper understanding of the shifts in Barth’s treatment of these core themes, some ‘default positions’ are briefly sketched. The chapter next describes the implications that attend a transference of the doctrine of sin from anthropology to Christology. This shift is not only epistemic, changing the basis on which sin is recognized and understood. It is also a significant conceptual move, with sin described as a specific posture towards the grace of God, manifest in Christ. The chapter also shows how Karl Barth resists the temptation to reduce the existence of evil to a manageable deficiency of creation, while avoiding any dramatization of the experience of evil. Barth construes evil (nothingness, das Nichtige) in light of God’s creation as an election, with nothingness being that which is rejected in the divine act of creation. Rejecting a personification of evil (i.e., the devil), Barth nonetheless emphasizes the agency of evil as that against which the sovereign God battles.","PeriodicalId":269615,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Karl Barth","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126224809","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Creation","authors":"David Clough","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199689781.013.22","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199689781.013.22","url":null,"abstract":"Barth’s doctrine of creation is stated comprehensively in the four books and over two thousand pages of the third volume of Church Dogmatics, encompassing the relationship between creation and covenant (CD III/1), theological anthropology (CD III/2), themes in the relationship of creator to creature—providence, the lordship of God, nothingness, and the angels—(CD III/3), and the ethical topics which Barth treats under the doctrine of creation (CD III/4). This chapter reviews the breadth of his doctrine of creation, emphasizing in particular the Christocentric focus that Barth maintains, and notes key criticisms that have been raised in relation to the anthropocentric structure of his doctrine of creation, his identification of sexual differentiation as the image of God, and his account of evil as nothingness.","PeriodicalId":269615,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Karl Barth","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126415465","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Christian Life","authors":"Joseph L. Mangina","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199689781.013.26","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199689781.013.26","url":null,"abstract":"Standing in a relation of both continuity and discontinuity with modernist Protestantism, Barth offers a vision of the Christian life that is radically Christocentric, eschatological, and morally engaged. The subject of the Christian life for Barth is the whole person, the embodied self not excluding emotions and affections. To be a Christian is to live a life marked by prayer, joy, and love of both God and neighbour. Like John the Baptist in Matthias Grünewald’s ‘Crucifixion’, the Christian is called to bear witness to the divine mercy in Jesus Christ. We see this vision played out in Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation, which shows how the stories of Christians unfold within God’s story. Barth’s late lectures on ethics, titled The Christian Life, portray Christian existence as invocation using the Lord’s Prayer as model. This ethic is marked by a ‘great passion’ that nevertheless takes shape in the midst of the quotidian and the secular.","PeriodicalId":269615,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Karl Barth","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124781772","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Eschatology","authors":"J. Mcdowell","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199689781.013.30","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199689781.013.30","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter traces the key themes in Barth’s eschatological discourse through an exploration of his later dogmatic writings. It begins with the recognition that reading Barth’s eschatology faces a number of difficulties, and moves on to articulate his work on the doctrine by way of four themes: Jesus Christ as our hope; Jesus Christ as the gift of divine presence and human fulfilment; the shape and nature of the time between Easter and the consummation; and the eschatological ethics of the doctrine of reconciliation. It is maintained that eschatological assertions function in three main ways in Barth’s dogmatics. First, they depict the consummating telos of God’s work in Christ, anticipating God’s being all in all; second, they offer a hermeneutic lens that sheds light on other dogmatic claims; and third, they ground the crucial business that hope engages in as corresponding work.","PeriodicalId":269615,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Karl Barth","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115533169","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Church","authors":"P. Nimmo","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199689781.013.28","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199689781.013.28","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter exposits and analyses the central contours of Barth’s mature doctrine of the church, in which the church is innovatively characterized by a twofold ec-centricity—a double decentring of its life and work. In a first section, it considers Barth’s radical understanding of the being of the church in relation to Jesus Christ and the Spirit, and the way in which the church has its originating centre outwith itself, in its being from God. In a second section, it attends to the creative way in which Barth conceives of the church as a divine event, and thereby relativizes the church as human institution. In a third section, it focuses on the significance and content of the human activity of the church, and the provocative way in which Barth locates the ultimate purpose of the church outwith itself, in its being for the world. In a fourth section, the chapter explores in outline some of the critical responses to Barth’s groundbreaking doctrine of the church. Finally, by way of conclusion, the chapter considers the relationship of Barth’s ecclesiology to ecumenical conversation.","PeriodicalId":269615,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Karl Barth","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126357678","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}