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2 Unity of Atonement and Liberation in Barth’s CD CD II/1 “The Mercy and Righteousness of God” The day I revisited the Sewa Ashram in Delhi, the ministry I had helped Ton Snellaert initiate a decade earlier, a young mother and her two small children also arrived. With her husband languishing in an Indian prison, her family’s vulnerability and desperation had grown. Lacking food, shelter, and medical care, illness soon threatened their lives. Her malnourished, two-year-old son lost his hearing because infections burst his eardrums. Her own health had deteriorated rapidly after giving birth to a daughter one month earlier, probably on the street or in a city park. With nowhere else to turn, a friend told her of the Sewa Ashram, which aids those in dire need. As they made the hour-long journey across the city, though, her strength completely failed and she died in a crowded bus. Her body arrived with her two small children. I spent several hours caring for her infant daughter, watching this beautiful child who would never know her mother. She was healthy because she had been nursed on the nutrients that her mother had also needed to survive. Her mother died giving life to her child. That day, I realized that I will never meet anyone more important than this little girl. The mother’s sacrifice reveals the child’s immeasurable, intrinsic worth. In the same way, God’s sacrificial action in Christ unmasks the helplessness of all, even the most able, and reveals the profound value of each, even the most helpless. On the cross, God’s righteous mercy enfolds us and calls us to extend mercy to others. Chapter 1 used Hegel’s philosophical system to engage Barth’s thought on Hegel’s terms. My discussion now moves from Hegel’s philosophy to Barth’s theology. I will continue to employ the categories extracted from Hegel’s system as a “third-order”1 analytical framework for examining Barth’s thought, 61 but I will do so now on Barth’s own terms and only in an effort to clarify the structure of his thought. As I allowed Hegel’s philosophy to guide my discussion in the last chapter toward the formation of human identity and normative social practice, I now shift my focus to the unity of atonement for sin and liberation from unjust suffering, which I regard as intrinsic to Barth’s view of the cross in “The Mercy and Righteousness of God.”2 My decision to use Hegel’s categories (externality, internality, particularity, universality) within an exposition of Barth’s theology requires a few words of explanation. Although comparing these two towering figures would be a fruitful exercise in itself, something deeper is at stake. In the last chapter, we observed that Hegel uses these categories to depict a movement from transcendence to immanence. Initially, the human community views God as existing separately from itself. Eventually, though, the community attains absolute knowing by viewing God as constituted by its own social practices. Hegel uses externality, internality, particularity, and universality in order to describe this transition and to propose a new conception of how God relates to sociopolitical life. I now extract these categories from Hegel’s thought in order to diagram an alternate understanding of this relation: the union of atonement for sin and liberation from unjust suffering through Christ’s cross. My account entails a close reading of CD II/1, “The Mercy and Righteousness of God,”3 as well as a partial rearrangement of Barth’s presentation for the sake of clarity. I chart Barth’s discussion in this critical portion of the Church Dogmatics according to the formal structure analyzed in chapter one in order to underscore his interrelation of Hegel’s categories (Barth’s first, formal move). God’s externality frames Barth’s discussion of God’s mercy and righteousness. An affirmation of particularity may be found in his description of Jesus Christ’s exclusively unique person and work. Universality marks humanity’s condition of sin and suffering. I then consider innocent suffering and natural evils in Barth’s thought. Finally, internality appears through suffering’s location within God’s heart and through the connection between Christ’s suffering and our own. The internality of reconciliation leads 1. I regard my use of the Hegelian categories as consistent with Barth’s view of how philosophy should be used by theology. See Hans W. Frei, Types of Christian Theology, ed...

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