Justification and Justice in the Theology of Karl Barth

JUSTIFICATION AND JUSTICE IN THE THEOLOGY OF KARL BARTH I IN THE PREFACE to the first volume of his Church Dogmatics, Karl Barth declared: " I am firmly convinced that, especially in the broad field of politics, we cannot reach the clarifications which are necessary today, and on which theology might have a word to say, as indeed it ought to have, without first reaching the comprehensive clarifications in and about theology which are our present concern. I believe that it is expected of the Church and its theology ... that it should keep precisely to the rhythm of its own relevant concerns , and thus consider well what are the recil needs of the day by which its own program should be directed." 1 The passage is characteristic. Barth always seems to be " firmly convinced " of something or other, and especially about the wide-ranging significance of the task of theology. In addition, the text typically displays Barth's dialectical complexity-sometimes brilliantly subtle, sometimes maddeningly ambiguous, and almost always inviting a second (or third) look. On the one hand Barth is saying that theological clarification has a certain priority to clarifications in politics; on the other, he suggests that the Church and its theology must keep to its " own concerns " thus to consider those political and other needs by which the concerns are to be directed in the first place. To the question of the primacy of theological theory or political praxis, Barth here might fairly be read as asserting " both and 1 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/l, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1975), p. xvi. Further references to volumes of the Church Dogmatics, hereafter CD, will appear in the text. 628 624 WILLIAM WERPEHOWSKI neither." And that, as Robert Jenson has noted, would be a very Barthian thing to say.2 It is nevertheless instructive to see significant sections of Barth's Dogmatics as efforts to establish theological clarity for political action, given the former's conceptual priority. This claim of priority is ultimately grounded in a conviction about the prior reality of God's being-in-act for us in Jesus Christ. God's being precedes theological inquiry after this being, and the inquiry in its subsequence sets Christians along a path of thinking about God's praxis. God's praxis itself proceeds along this path, and our praxis, shaped by our theological acknowledgment of God's prevenience, shall conform to it.8 But since God's priority also means that the world's story has as its presupposition the history of Jesus Christ in his will to be for his sisters and brothers, there can be no doubt regarding the appropriateness and necessity of asking about the worldly political implications of theological inquiry after God.4 What powerfully comes forth from this vision for the purposes of political action is a methodological rejection of any combination of the knowability of God in Jesus Christ with God's knowability in nature, reason, or history. The significance of the first article of the Barmen Declaration for Barth lay in its expression of opposition within Germany to such an effort at combination, and beyond that to " the little hyphen as such and therefore [to] no more and no less than the condominion of natural theology in the Church" (CD, II/I: 175). The Church, in the words of that article, must not recognize as God's revelation " other events and powers, forms and truths, apart from and alongside" the one Word of God in Jesus Christ. So Barth's argument for the priority of theological inquiry itself includes an important negative criterion for Christian political thought and life, with a corresponding insistence that that thought and life be fully grounded in God's Word. 2 Robert Jenson, God After God (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), p. 151. BEberhard Jungel, The Doctrine of the Trinity: God's Being Is in Becoming (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976), p. xix. 4 Jenson, God After God, pp. 68-73. JUSTIFICATION AND JUSTICE IN BARTH 625 The criterion and the insistence remain important and effective today, standing against the temptations of Christians on both the left and the right to give some ideology or...