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Church
and World in Karl Barth and Joe R. Jones:
A Critical Exploration
by
Rakesh Peter Dass
[Mr. Peter Dass is Lutheran student from India, studying
in the M.Div. program at Yale Divinity School. This essay was written
in May 2006 for the Seminar in Political Theology in the spring semester
of 2006, taught by Joe R. Jones, then Visiting Professor of Theology.With
two degrees from Nagpur University, Mr. Peter Dass also received a Ph.D.
in International Business from American University of London. Used here
by permission. Copyright©Rakesh Peter Dass. Posted here 2/24/07.]
I. Introduction
This essay will examine the concept of the ‘church’ and ‘world’
in the theology of Karl Barth and Joe R. Jones.[1] It explores the theological
significance of the ecclesiology of Barth and Jones for the relationship
of the body of Christ with the world she lives in. Their doctrines of
ecclesiology are engaged to examine the relation between the Christian
community (the ‘church’) and those authorities (exousia)
which govern human ordering (the ‘world’). For both Barth
and Jones, these are not categories of disconnection and sequestered inertness
but distinction and differentiation, of engagement and involvement not
withdrawal and isolation. The church is called from within the world,
tasked to serve with and in it. No divorce is presumed
or suggested between the two, only distinction. Our primary sources will
be the Church Dogmatics, and Community, Church, and State
by Karl Barth,[2] and A Grammar of Christian Faith, and
On Being The Church in Tumultuous Times by Joe R. Jones.[3]
This essay reveals a non-assimilative appropriation of the secular language
to formulate true politics as theological politics. “Non-assimilative”
refers to the irreducible dialecticity between church and world cautioning
against confusing, mixing, or collapsing the two into each other—as
a transcendental Hegelian synthesis, or Kantian universalization, or Yoderian
‘Constantinianization of the church’.[4] “Appropriation”
refers to the Christian belief that the church, human ordering (politics)
and the relation between the two are given their existence and proper
meaning through the Word of God. It is the Word of God in the life, death,
and resurrection of Jesus Christ which defines and establishes—by
providing its guidelines and content—true politics, the true purpose
of human ordering in resonance with a theological understanding of human
telos. The divide between church and state then stands in dissonance
with Christian understanding of politics. Barth and Jones do theological
politics, not political theology, because they understand
the reality and practice of human ordering (politics) theologically rather
than interpreting secular politics theologically. Theological politics
redefines what ‘politics’ means, appropriating Greek philosophical
language to rightly relocate the philosophical dislocation of politics
from Christian communities.
Though Barth and Jones differ on crucial particulars (e.g., Barth’s
willingness to the use of force and violence to curb a greater evil—what
Hunsinger calls “practical pacifism”[5]—while Jones
refuses to endorse violence[6]), for both the kingdom of God in
Christ serves as the model and message which the church declares
for and to the world. As the church serves to most closely approximate
the kingdom of God in human history, it “must be the model and prototype
of the real State.”[7] In other words, the kingdom of God serves
as the model for the “real State.” The kingdom of God serves
as the fully actualized community of Christ which is modeled by the church
in human history. Hence, “[t]he kingdom of God is the coming of
a radically new form of social reality, of social relations,
of political relations.”[8]
Mirroring the progression of their individual yet parallel constructions,
this essay has four sections: (a) Barth on the Christian community in
the secular community; (b) Jones on the church in a dialectic
relationship with the world; (c) the kingdom of God in their respective
theology as the guiding principle for the relationship between ‘church’
and ‘state’; and, (d) inferences and consequences as a result
of this principle. It is important to be reminded that within their historical
and eschatological understanding of the two communities, they exist as
distinct communities only in chronoikos (i.e., world time)[9]
and not in the trans-historical kingdom of God.
II. Barth: The Two Communities
For Barth, there are two communities interrelated as concentric circles
whose common center is the Word of God.[10] The two are distinct because
the inner circle is closer to the Word of God, called into existence,
formed, sustained, and guided by it, while the outer circle does not know
about the Word of God and is not affected directly by it. The inner community
is the Christian community while the outer one is the secular community,
called into existence, formed, sustained, and guided by its own philosophies,
beliefs, motives, and desires. Neither of these communities is monolithic,
varying according to their contexts. These concentric circles correspond
to God’s history in creation: where the outer circle represents
the general history of creation and the inner circle “the history
of God with His elect people and the history of this people with its God”
from Abram. For Barth, this is the “special history and revelation
of salvation.”[11]
As they co-inhabit each other the Christian and secular community are
in the world and in each other. The Christian community is called from
the world though not of the world as its foundational and guiding
principles coalesce in the Word of God. On the other hand, the secular
community is based on its own internal principles. These principles stem
from human desires, which theologically understood, are self-interested
and corrupted. This corruption results from estranged desires which have
turned away from God. Without the revelation of the Word of God, this
corruption remains hidden. Hence, on its own, the secular community remains
in a state of perpetual confusion. It behaves in corruption without knowing
its condition. [12] This is the human confusion: confusio hominum,
the lower standpoint of history. God responds to human confusion in grace
through the Word of God in Jesus Christ who reveals the confusion and
overcomes it by providing the world with the knowledge of its purpose,
intention, and telos. Providentia Dei provides the world direction
and is the higher standpoint of history. Hence, for Barth, confusio
hominum is met by providentia Dei.[13] The sin of creation met by
God’s love in Christ.
The Christian community serves as the “earthly-historical form”
of Christ’s post-resurrection existence in the world.[14] It is
not the incarnation of Christ in the world, as if there were two incarnations,
or revelations, which shared equally of God. The Christian community merely
“corresponds” in flesh to God’s existence in flesh.
It does not replace, continue, or fulfill that existence. Hence, its glory
is not the same as the Son’s, neither does it sit at the right hand
of the Father like the Son in judgment, neither does it grant mercy and
forgiveness from sin, nor does it provide salvation. It exists only as
a predicate of Christ, because He exists, and does not exhaust His existence
on earth or in heaven for He is her Lord.[15] The Christian community
is not “alter Chrisus (sic), or a vicarius Christi,
or a corredemptrix, or a mediatrix omnium gratiarum.”[16]
It only declares these things in the name of Christ, who alone
is the agent of God’s action in and for the world.
Being for the world the Christian community is in the civil community.
But this closeness in not to be understood as mere influence, for both
communities do not approach the Word from equal starting points where
one gets closer than the other. Rather they originate at dialectic starting
points. Where the civil community is formed by its own philosophies and
natural-historical social union, the Christian community comes into being
from the civil community called by the Word of God. Such a calling entails
a new beginning in changed relationships with the world and other
humans where the old self and old habits are shed for the fellowship of
the Gospel. This transformation is represented in the act of
baptism which remembers the death and resurrection in Christ as the declaration
of an individual who decides to join the community of Christ and by virtue
of this action assume both its joys and demands. The Christian community
must not be equated with the civil community. However, this is not a distinction
of rank or superiority, for both communities are of sinners and in need
of God’s Word. Hence, the church does not claim the role of Redeemer
of the civil community as it itself remains in need for redemption and
salvation.
Being constituted by the most Holy God the Christian community finds itself
in contrast with the world and its ways. For in the knowledge of Christ
it comes to know the true condition of humanity, its fallenness, and need
for redemption. In the absence of this knowledge, human confusion reigns.
Within this condition of confusion, civil communities serve as voluntary
mutual associations which serve to balance individual interests and those
of different communities. The Christian community needs the civil community
to provide order and system for human ordering. The civil community achieves
this through “(a) legislation, which has to settle the legal system
which is to be binding on all; (b) the government and administration which
has to apply the legislation; [and] (c) the administration of justice
which has to deal with cases of doubtful or conflicting law and decide
on its applicability.”[17] The government then serves as the great
leveler within the civil community.
Sharing the same space and time with the civil community, the Christian
community recognizes, and even supports the civil government in its functions,
for “it knows that all men (non-Christians as well as Christians)
need to have ‘kings’.”[18] But it does not identify
itself with any ‘king’ as its model and foundational
principle is the kingdom of God, the heavenly polis on earth
(Phil 3.20) which declares God’s ordering of humans in love and
fellowship with Godself and each other (see Isa 11.1-11). In this sense,
the Christian community stands against all ‘kings’ declaring
their subservience to God and ensuring their faithfulness to the kingdom
of God. It ensures this faithfulness by declaring the Word of God to the
world in its acts and deeds, the celebration of its sacraments and life
in and for the world. In so doing it remembers that the kingdom
of God is the new creation, the new thing which was revealed
in Christ and hence that the kingdom of God is inseparably linked to the
culmination of time when Christ’s presence and love will be actualized
in its divine glory and fullness throughout eternity.[19]
In a sense the civil community aims to be modeled on the kingdom of God,
approximating the normative relationship of humans to God and creation.
Hence the civil community becomes effective, and even necessary, on earth
though remaining an “external, relative, and provisional embodiment”
of the kingdom of God.[20] Barth then leaves open the possibility that
even those civil communities which are not informed by God approximate
in some form the kingdom of God. This also means that all communities
which claim to be Christian may not necessarily be normatively Christian,
blurring the lines between their content and that of civil communities.
The concept of universal human rights has been an attempt to live where
the two communities overlap. But natural theology and humanism have been
mistaken attempts to relocate the Christian community on terms set by
the civil community.
As the Christian community is called, formed, guided, and sustained by
God, its foundations are Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit.[21] Where Jesus
Christ is the ground and Lord of the church, His Holy Spirit “calls,
gathers, enlightens and sanctifies all Christians on earth, keeping them
in the true and only faith in Jesus Christ.”[22] In other words,
it is the Holy Spirit which graces the knowledge and revelation of Jesus
as Christ and Lord of all. It is the Holy Spirit which sustains the community
of Christ in its fellowship with Him. For only in His Holy Spirit is Christ
fully revealed.[23] The Holy Spirit holds together the divine and the
human, the Creator and the created, and the eternal and the temporal.[24]
Fellowship with God is then not something to be earned by deeds or a lifestyle
or any action—however noble the cause may be. Neither can it be
achieved by participation in any social system or human generation. Rather,
by positing the Holy Spirit as the sole joiner between God and humanity,
reconciliation and oneness in God is purely and completely an unmerited
gift of grace.
The purpose of the Christian community is to declare and witness to Jesus
Christ and consequently the kingdom of God. It comes together to celebrate
and declare the Word of God. It celebrates Christ internally
in “faith, love, and hope”[25] through worship, liturgy, and
remembrance in the Sacraments of Baptism and Eucharist, sustained and
moved by the power of the Holy Spirit, the Revealer, Reconciler, and Counselor.
It declares what it celebrates internally because the Word of God was
given to all. The church is then its representative on earth for all
creation. It does this declaration through the proclamation of the
Word, the celebration of Sacraments, and the declaration of its Confessional
Creed.
III. Jones: the Church and the World[26]
For Jones, all knowledge of the world comes through God’s self-revelation
in Jesus Christ. His understanding of the world begins to takes shape
in his doctrine of creation. For him, God creates ad extra, “nondivine
actualities—called creatures—that are utterly other than God.”[27]
Creatures are distinct from God and dependent on God as the source of
their being. Further, far from being the sum of creation or the presence
of creation within God’s divine actuality, God and God’s
world are wholly different from each other yet inseparably interlinked
as the world is of God. God does not leave the world to its own
devices. Neither is the world a closed causal nexus outside of which God
exists.[28] Rather in Christ we are told that God creates the world for
fellowship with God where sin does not belong.
Pre-Fall God creates an ordered cosmos within which Adam and Eve are placed
in an ordered relationship with God, each other, and the world.[29] This
ordering does not refer to dominance (e.g., patriarchy) but to the relationship
of flourishing in which the cosmos is created. The order of creation
is then an order of relationship and flourishing in the love, presence,
and fellowship of God.[30] In Jones’s doctrine of creation
we find both the purpose of creation and its state of fallenness, known
to us through Christ. Hence the Christian construal of the world means
that the “world is created, preserved, and governed by God”
in an interactive history in which the world is redeemed back to God by
God.[31] We can then claim that the kingdom of God represents the culmination
of this sinful world in a transformation which will enable it to be in
the relation with God and within itself that God intends for it. The Christian
community which comes together as a response to Christ serves to live
its life under the knowledge and guidance of this kingdom. It is in this
sense that the kingdom of God impinges on the world through the church,
acting as a “lure”[32] which invites the world to a life of
fullness and telos in Christ. Through Christ we find that God
creates the world as ordered cosmos and relationality among creatures,
and acts as the Redeemer of the world at its loss of its God-intended
relationality.
Hence, for the Christian community, the “world” means three
things: “a. the world as cosmos of creatures created by God; b.
the world as any human culture/society; and c. the world as any human
culture/society infected and skewed by human sin.”[33] A “society/culture
is an interconnected system or matrix of relations and relationships”
which are “constructed by human beings and handed on in
traditions of discourses and practices.”[34] Where the
church is called into being by Christ, the world in its second sense as
society/culture is constructed by humans. This differentiates the two.
That society is constructed by human beings is not in itself to be considered
as sinful—for human ordering is a gift of God. However it is the
basis on which human societies are constructed which reveal their sinful
nature. For the relationality of flourishing for which humans
are made is replaced by desires constructed by erosic attractions.[35]
These attractions are given us by the world and the sin in which it exists
and hence are identified as corrupted desires—i.e., what René
Girard calls mimetic desire.[36] Hence, knowing the world is to know humans,
their original creation, their present state, and their redemption. It
is from this understanding of the world in its three dimensions that we
then proceed to know the community of Chris: the church.
For Jones the church consists of five (key) elements.[37] First, it is
a liberative and redemptive community of persons. It is a community
of persons. As a community the church is called as a space of fellowship.
In this regard, there can be no individual faith in Christ outside the
community of Christ.[38] The formation of faith, its sustenance, and growth
are all free gifts of the Spirit to the gathered people—this is
what the Pentecost represents.[39] But that it is a communion of persons
means that the church is in the world and made up of the world, for it
is a community which is called from the world. It then remains in the
world and is affected by the principalities and powers of the world which
construe the life of its members. But, empowered by the Word of God which
calls it into being it finds itself free and liberated to be a “new
social reality,” as an “authentic community
that human beings, as created spiritual beings, were summoned to realize
as their endowment of original grace.”[40] It is only as
this liberated community that it can be liberative to others.
If the church remains captive to the world for its construal it looses
its liberative character and potential.
Second, it is called into being by the Gospel of Jesus Christ through
the Holy Spirit. The church is not a human construct on human principles,
based on culture, language, nationality, or race, but is formed as a response
to God’s call to discipleship. This does not mean that it does not
exist in certain cultural, linguistic, national, or racial forms. Rather
the contextuality of the church remains subservient to the trans-social-communal
normativeness of the church (Rom 10.12-13). This normative nature is a
reminder which prevents the identification of Christ and His community
with a particular race, language, culture, or nation—among other
distinctions—to the exclusion of others. The normative church is
a church for all times and peoples because what God does in Christ is
for all times and all peoples. The empirical church is contextual and
time-bound. And the two need not be in opposition or a zero-sum relationship.
The ‘presiding model of the Gospel’ calls the church providing
it the content of its message, i.e., the redeeming work of the triune
God in Christ. Hence, as a “Messianic Community”[41]
it declares a way of life which is transformed by Christ and awaits its
fulfillment in the kingdom of God. The church is supported in this task
by the Holy Spirit of Christ, its Counselor and Accompanier. For the Holy
Spirit sent by God in Christ’s name teaches the church everything
and reminds it of Christ (Jn 14.26). The liberation of the Christian life
is then a gift of the Holy Spirit. Hence for Jones, “it is the Spirit
who moves, comprises, and empowers the church’s life in all its
richness and complexity” without which the church becomes “a
mere empirical institution or group.”[42]
Third, the church witnesses to the living Triune God in word and deed.
This is the central mission of the church. To witness the Triune God is
to witness the loving triune God. To witness God is to witness
Christ. The church then exists to witness God’s loving act in Christ.
But God’s loving act involves an object. The object of
the church’s witness is then the world. In this sense the church
exists in the world witnessing a wholly other God who chooses to be in
relationship with it. This witnessing is done in both word and deed. In
Christ God witnesses to Godself in both the proclamation of the kingdom
of God and God’s presence with humanity. In Christ God not only
reaches out to the world from beyond but spends time with it. The church
also then witnesses Christ to the world from within the world. It hears
the world and is affected by it—it is not opposed to “everything
in every human cultural/social world in particular or in principle.”[43]
But at all times the church speaks to the world remaining faithful to
Jesus Christ which calls it together. The proclamation of the church in
word and deed is then always a transformative proclamation.[44]
For the Gospel confronts the reality of a sinful world. This confrontation
cannot be avoided by the church, for none of its apologetic efforts can
remain kerygmatic if the kerygma itself is lost in translation. For the
Cross reminds us of the confrontation between the sinful world and God’s
purpose.
In this sense then, fourth, the church lives for the benefit of the
world. It does not exist for itself, for it continues to remind the
world of Christ, not as one human self-savior among others, but as the
very presence of the loving Creator God. It does this as it does not declare
a human mission but God’s mission, “God’s redemptive
mission for the world.”[45] Fifth, in doing all this, the church
witnesses to the glory of God. To witness to this glory is to
witness to God’s purpose and teleological destiny for the world.
As such the church is always an “eschatological community”
which looks forward to the time when God is “all in all” (1
Cor 15.28). Hence for Jones, “the church is always the pilgrim
church… on its way and into God’s future…over which
the risen Jesus Christ reigns and the Holy Spirit moves to redemptive
fulfillment.”[46]
When a community is all this, it can truly be identified as a community
of Christ. Being called “church” is not a recognition conferred
by the state, or humans, or any other social contract or action. The particularity
with which Jones identifies the normative components of a church require
of it conformity with Christ and origin in Christ. The life, death, and
resurrection of Jesus Christ stand before any community which claims to
be Christian. Christ calls the church and the church witnesses Christ.
One cannot be without the other. Hence, as a participant in God’s
transformative work in the world, the church relates to the world in transformative
proclamation.
IV. The Kingdom of God in Barth[47] and Jones
For Barth, the kingdom of God is the time when God will be “all
in all” (1 Cor 15.28).[48] For God to be “all in all”
means that creation’s fellowship with God is fulfilled. This fulfillment
refers to an unmitigated relationship between God and humanity. Christ
is the model which reveals this relationship and its actualization. Hence
we say in Christ the kingdom of God came, is present,
and will be realized.[49] To understand this, let us examine
Barth’s concept of time and eternity. Though his use of the word
“time” is ambiguous, time has three dimensions.
First, there is pre-time.[50] Here God is pre-temporal, before all time,
and “in Himself.”[51] In this “pure divine time”
God existed, positing “Himself as the living and loving God.”[52]
God self-posits as the Holy Trinity in economy; hence we know God as the
Triune God. This economic presence also reveals God loves God’s
creation. Eternity does not contain God, but rather is a predicate of
God’s being.[53] In this sense, God’s presence in the world
also does not contain God, but is a predicate of God’s being.[54]
God remains independent of the world, creating it ad extra as
the object of God’s love.[55] God then exists in pre-time as the
divine Triune God. “God is self-identical in being (ousia),
self-differentiated in modes of being (hypostasis), and self-unified
in eternal life (perichoresis).”[56] It is the unity of
the hypostases through their perichoresis in the one ousia that is the
Trinity independent of all God’s work.[57] In this pre-time God
determines everything, including time itself, [58] predestining all that
is to be in time.
Second, there is “supra-time,” or God’s “co-temporality”
or “in-temporality” with time.[59] Immediately we notice a
distinction: God’s eternal pre-temporality and the world-time determined
by God as pre-temporal. World-time means created time—the time within
creation—or chronoikos (chronos + oikos,
Gr.). Chronoikos has a beginning and an end. God’s eternal
time is then not to be confused or understood analogously as the completion
or negation of chronoikos, i.e., our time. Rather, God’s
eternity is before, with, and after time cautioning against a confusion
or identification with any single dimension, including pre-time, and embraces
“time on all sides.”[60] Based on Augustine’s concept
of God’s eternity as “persisting duration,”[61] Barth
observes that “God endures in His pure and perpetual duration as
we have our confused and fleeting duration.” In other words, “God’s
eternity accompanies” time in its three dimensions.[62] God’s
eternity exists parallel to time. Through the Incarnated Word God realizes
God’s love as supra-temporal and grants us unmitigated
fellowship.[63] This is the purpose and source of our existence. And hence
our telos: an unmitigated fellowship with God, for God’s
glory. Our telos is not a pre-lapsarian state because the eschatological
hope is in something beyond anything in chronoikos. Rather, in
fellowship with God’s eternity, time is engulfed and given eternity.
God re-creates time and heals its fleetingness, “the separation
of the past and the future from one another and from the present.”[64]
For Barth, sin “has a body …a concrete existence, a sphere
of influence, a basis of operation.” It exists in time and space
and hence is “always visible and historical.”[65] To be free
from sin is then to be freed from the body of sin—not the
sinful body in a Gnostic sense. The temporal nature of sin does not allow
creatures to be independent of sin. Rather, time is healed of its sinful
content by the grace and miracle of God in and through Christ.[66] For
God embraces time and sin within Godself and heals time of its sinful
content. But “time remains time,”[67] and “it does not
itself become God and therefore eternal.”[68] This healing takes
place in God’s post-temporal nature. Creation is not destroyed or
annihilated but transformed into a new creation where its sequentiality
of time and estrangement from God are removed. The kingdom of God is the
revelation of this healing.[69]
We can then say that the kingdom is both trans-historical yet does not
cease to be creation maintaining its “dispositional characteristics
and memory traces.”[70] The Scriptures then talk about the kingdom
of God on earth. This is not a spatial-temporal clause. Rather,
the fleeting and temporary nature of time is healed, its sinful estrangement
from God reconciled, and a new creation and new humanity formed which
exists in time eternally due to its fellowship with the eternal God. As
it is in Christ the kingdom of God had come, it is only in Christ
again that the kingdom of God will come and time will be healed
again. The kingdom of God cannot be separated from Christ. For not only
is He the proclaimer of the kingdom of God and manifests it, He is the
kingdom of God.[71]
The kingdom of God resides in God as post-temporal, Barth’s third
dimension of time. This is God’s presence after chronoikos.
In God’s post-temporality sinful time will not exist. “[C]reation
itself [including time] … will be no more in its present condition.”[72]
In Christ, the kingdom of God accompanies chronoikos but is hidden
from creation due to its continued self-estrangement and rejection of
God. The reconciliation in the parousia is then the end of chronoikos
and the beginning of our eternal time with God.[73] The fellowship of
God with humans reveals the love and fellowship which God establishes
with creation. It is to this fellowship that we return. And herein is
the eschatological Christian hope[74]: that we will return to fellowship
in the eternal God in a transformed time.[75] Understanding the content
(unmitigated relations between God and humanity and within creation) and
nature (trans-historical eternal time) of the kingdom of God, the church
then attempts to faithfully represent this kingdom to the world. In so
doing it calls the world into question and reveals the true state of State.
However, remembering that the kingdom of God is beyond chronoikos,
it does not confuse the State with the church, or both with the kingdom
of God.
For Jones, the kingdom of God constitutes a community of “love,
peace, and flourishing.”[76] It presents itself as the fulfillment
of God’s original spiritual endowment—which I have
identified as the relations for flourishing that God intends
for the cosmos. As such it presents itself as a yet to be fulfilled
hope. But in Christ we find the proclamation and enactment of the kingdom
of God actualized.[77] Hence for Jones, the church as a community called
by Christ represents God’s historic presence with humanity as it
embodies the trans-historical nature of the kingdom of God.[78] The kingdom
of God does not exist as a concept on its own separated from Jesus Christ.
Rather it is only through Christ that we come to know of the kingdom of
God. Hence, both are inseparably linked. Where Jones finds this exclusivity
of identification in the fact that the NT does not suggest the kingdom
of God “as a result of human actions,”[79] Barth finds it
in the complete identification of Christ with the kingdom as it is His
kingdom, with Him, and through Him.
Jones treats the kingdom of God as a result of the three-partite function
of Jesus Christ as Prophet, Priest, and Victor—here he follows Barth.
He does this by placing the content of Christ’s proclamation after
taking us through the works of Christ. Hence we find that the message
Christ declares is the kingdom of God, which serves both as the object
and the result of His ministry. As Jones notes, all three offices of Christ
are “work of reconciliation between God and humanity.”[80]
Hence, the kingdom of God serves as the fulfillment of God’s reconciliation
with humanity. But what does this reconciliation mean? It means a transformed
humanity. It means transformed relationships amidst humanity. Locating
the kingdom of God as the shalom which Israel seeks with God—that
state where God’s covenantal relationship with Israel will finally
be realized without the corruption of sin and estrangement—Jones
finds the kingdom of God as a “radically new form of social
reality” as the “fulfillment of human persons in an egalitarian
community of mutual love, respect, justice, and peace.”[81]
Despite what seems like a human social reality, the fulfillment
of human persons means the freedom of humans to finally be what they were
created to be. The kingdom presents the actualization of the original
spiritual endowment. It involves human persons without deifying
humanity. Hence, by presenting the kingdom as human yet trans-historical
Jones observes that what takes place is the transformation of
humanity into something it has lost. This can be interpreted as a return
to a pre-lapsarian state. However, if the trans-historic nature of the
kingdom is to be taken seriously, what Jones has in mind is not a pre-lapsarian
state—which is still a state in human history—but
a new creation. It seems Jones refers to a state of relations
as the kingdom of God. It is more than a physical place. It represents
ultimate redemption, that condition where humans will be fully reconciled
with God to live in God’s peace and presence. But, as sin still
holds sway, the church finds itself living between the times.[82]
Because human nature cannot achieve God’s shalom in its sinfulness.
Human history has been a testimony to corrupted desires which focus towards
the self and away from God, and despite the defeat of such sin in Christ,
humanity remains in the “conditional power of sin.”[83] Hence,
the kingdom of God “will be the fulfillment of human persons
in an egalitarian community of mutual love, respect, justice, and peace.”[84]
This may sound like a socialist system where power and desires are balanced.
However, the transformation of desires rejects any Marxist readings, the
concept of unmerited grace cautions against attempts at seeking justice
based on what is due-a la liberation theology, while the trans-historic
nature of the kingdom of God prevents confusing earthly systems of governance
or human attempts as the fulfillment and arrival of the kingdom of God.
For Jones there is double transformation: in chronoikos all world-systems
fall short of mutual love, respect, justice, and peace of the kingdom
of God and hence are in need of perpetual transformation; and, in eschatological
trans-historical kingdom both humanity (i.e., human nature) and creaturely
relations are transformed. The kingdom of God, for Jones, is then not
the pinnacle of human progress.
V. Relation Between the Christian Community/church and the Secular
Community/world: The Idea of Theological Politics
For Barth, the Christian and civil communities share two pairs of relationships:[85]
(a) dependence-freedom, and (b) strength-weakness. Within the first pair,
the Christian community recognizes it totally realizes its “environment.”
It is influenced by the language, culture, and habits of its context,
community, and surroundings. This makes it dependent on its environment
for any coherence when proclaiming its message. But it does not find its
speech bound by its environment because the Word of God it proclaims originates
“in the free omnipotent Word of the grace of God.”[86] Drawing
strength from its roots in the empowering work of the Holy Spirit, it
proclaims the message of hope, grace, and sin to the world. It exercises
its freedom of speech by telling the world about its state of fallenness
and path of reconciliation revealed in Christ. This is the true freedom
of speech.[87] But this freedom is not only of speech but also of
social organizing. The Word of God reveals that there is no distinct “political,
economic and cultural model” to which the Christian community is
called but that which is called, formed, guided, and sustained by the
Gospel.[88] The Christian community transcends all earthly-historical
communities owing its allegiance to no nation, culture, or society becoming
the one, catholic, “universal people” of God.[89]
Within the second pair of relationships, the Christian community remains
weak due to its dependence on its environment. Its allegiance to other
natural and historical unions competes with God in human confusion. The
empirical church collides with the normative, the true community of Christ
with the pretenders. This confusion results in the dismal state where
churches support their respective communities against other Christian
communities based on identities given them by the world. It is at such
moments of confusion that Christian community finds strength in the freedom
given by the Word of God. The normative church finds the strength to be
visible through the shroud of the empirical church.
But what does this strength mean? For Barth, one of the primary things
this strength means is to overcome what he incisively calls the “problem
of success.”[90] Abandoning utilitarian theologies, Barth suggests
that the Christian community does not proclaim the Gospel message contingent
on its efficacy but as first and foremost a witness. That the message
may lead to something does not constitute the proclamation of the Word.
This is then Barth’s critique of liberation theologies which tend
turn utilitarianism as a functional criterion for the proclamation of
the Word.[91] Instead of creating and preaching a causal relationship
between the kingdom of God and history, Barth sees the relationship as
an analogous one, where the former necessitates action by the Christian
community in history.[92] Hence, Barth presents a transformative and functional
relationship between Christian hope and action without turning it into
a contingent criterion for proclamation; because Christ chose to live
and die among us rather than deal with sin in abstract from a distance.[93]
The Christian community is always “for the world,” for “every
man.”[94]
The Barmen Declaration of the Confessing Church—drafted
by Barth, and issued in May 1934 when Adolf Hitler assumed full power
after the death of President Hindenburg—provides key insights into
the relation between the Christian and civil communities.[95] Barth “was
convinced that our political outlook ought to be dictated by our loyalty
to Jesus Christ.”[96] Hence Article I declared that in matters of
authority for the church, no other voice replaced the Word of God. This
meant opposing Hitler, criticizing the German churches which supported
him, and doing these even under fear of harm and death. Lest this sound
sectarian, Article II declared the inseparability of theology and politics
while Article III cautioned against any confusion or mixing of the two.
Consequently, Article IV rejected the conformity of the confessing church
to any world-system, while Article V interpreted Luther’s two-kingdoms
doctrine Christologically to affirm the conditional loyalty enjoyed by
the state. Barmen was a direct attack on German-Lutheran political theology
which blindly supported the ‘state’ (Hitler). Reasserting
the reason for this nonconformity, Article VI concludes all political
activity of the church is a witness to the world—to ensure the world
may fulfill its telos.
For Barth, there is no sectarian church which separates itself from the
world. Rather the church serves as a model for the State. But what does
this model entail? That the “Church must remain the Church.”[97]
It means the church continues to pray for the civil community, to study
the Word of God, and live according to this Word alone. In remaining the
church, it proclaims the love and fellowship of Christ and of humanity
to the world. It also means that the church “subordinates”
itself to civil community—for civil community is also a tool of
God—but far from being the king of blind subjection Luther
refers to, this subordination refers only to the “joint responsibility
in which Christians apply themselves to the same task with non-Christians
and submit themselves to the same rule.” [98] And what is this “same
task”? “[T]o provide ‘according to the measure of human
insight and human capacity’ for temporal law and temporal peace,
for an external, relative, and provisional humanization of man’s
existence.”[99] No civil community is internal, objective, and final
for the church. There is no (one) Christian politics. Though working hand
in hand as responsible members of its communities no nation, race, or
culture claims the loyalty of a Christian before Christ. Though working
with civil communities to maintain relatively peaceful and law-based
communities, she does not confuse any political system as the kingdom
of God (see also Barmen Thesis No. 5).[100]
Jones’s understanding of the relation between church and the world
can be cautiously summarized in two concepts: one, they share a penultimately
irreducible dialecticity; and two, the church exists for the world.
This dialectic refers to “the dynamic interaction and penultimately
irreducible tension between the church and the world.”[101]
That the church is in a dynamic interaction with the world means
the church is not a sectarian entity. Rather than being out of, disjointed
from, or above the world, the church is a witness and participant of God’s
“transforming and redeeming work” for the world.[102]
It provides itself as an alternative community of human relationships
in faithfulness to the kingdom of God. This reminds the church it must
not confuse earthly cultures or relations with the transformed humanity
in Christ. As part of the interaction with the world the church listens
to the world as it speaks to it.[103] However, it does not accept the
world as its master.
Its penultimately irreducible dialectic reminds the church what
it aims is not of human construction but through the transformative presence
of Christ. This means it does not oppose the systems of the world because
they are intrinsically opposable but because short of their transformation
in Christ cultural and social worlds are “skewed by human sin and
destructive of human flourishing.”[104] But the church lives for
the world in hope, in the kingdom of God as the teleological state of
relations to which the world is called and graced. Hence its “prophetic
opposition” to cultures and communities of the world are temporary
for in the kingdom of God such “oppositions” will be not needed.
The life of the church is not of negativity or abandonment, or resignation
and blind subservience to the ‘state’. As a liberated
community it is not imprisoned by the powers and principalities of
the world. As this liberated community the church becomes a liberative
community.
It is this freedom of the church allows us to understand how the church
relates to the world, i.e., for the world. The church is not
sectarian or disconnected from the world. Rather it acts for the benefit
of the world. How does the church do this? The answer can be found in
Jones’s doctrine of ecclesiology—more specifically, in his
formulation of the outreach practices of the church.[105] The outreach
practices of the church related to those practices which the church
undertakes vis-à-vis the world for the latter’s transformation.[106]
This does not mean the church itself does not need transformation. As
Jones reminds us, the church is itself an “earthen vessel,
ever in need of grace, renewal, and reform.”[107] However, because
of a mission defined by Missio Dei, its own fallenness does not
imprison it. As a community forgiven and liberated in Christ it proclaims
Christ even in its brokenness and incompleteness.
To proclaim Christ means to invite those who hear into a fellowship with
Christ, necessitating transformation in the believer. Hence,
Jones identifies evangelism as an outreach practice of the church.
To proclaim Christ also involves a contraposition to the powers and principalities
of the world. Understanding the sinful nature of the world and its destructive
relationships, Christ stands as a jarring note, and a challenge to those
powers of the world “that oppress, subjugate, and destroy human
life and well-being.”[108] Hence, the church finds itself in
prophetic roles as one who speaks truth to the powers that
be. This implies the “public identification”
and non-violent resistance of destructive powers.[109] As the
evangelical and prophetic proclamation of the church is for the transformation
of the world, that its proclamation is Christ-based and –centered
means that it proclaims in word and deed ‘works of agapic love’
which engage the powers of the world “with concrete works of
love that aim at justice and peace in the world” towards transformed
communities.[110] This transformative relation is never coercive. The
church does not use force or violence, on its own or through the state,
to spread its message.
Because the content of its proclamation is “justice and peace in
the world,” the church finds itself in a vocation of inhabiting
spaces across social communities. It is active not only when gathered
as church but in the social interactions of individual Christians: “into
the places of home and neighborhood, of economic work, of citizenship,
and of recreation.”[111] Being a Christian then does not negate
being a parent or child, a stock broker or a teacher, or an Indian or
an American. However, none of these identities claim absolute loyalty
before Christ. Alternatively understood, the agapic work of love which
a Christian embodies through Christ cuts across all human-social boundaries.
In this sense no one is excluded in principle from a Christian’s
love, fellowship, and care.
The church remains dedicated to the teleological destiny of the world,
i.e., creaturely reconciliation with Christ.[112] This destiny is the
kingdom of God. It cooperates with the world in approximating the peace
and fellowship revealed through Christ. Mindful of the sinful nature of
the world, it awaits its transformation. This transformation is eschatological
and historical. Without confusing or equating the two, the church is mindful
that the kingdom of God stands in judgment over all human attempts at
peace and fellowship. So it prophetically questions all human attempts
aiming not for their abolition but transformation. In calling for transformation,
it is not haughty, violent, or under the false assumption that civil authority
itself is intrinsically contrary to God’s will. It does not endorse
any nation or form of government or human ordering, but submits its role
in the world to Christ. The church seeks to submit both itself and the
world under Christ.[113]
VI. Conclusion
The Christian community is called to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ
which declares God’s purpose with the world: that we have been delivered
from “sure and certain destruction” to be free and not slaves,
to be able to love and not feel compelled to hate, and to live and die.[114]
The Gospel message is: we are free to love God and neighbor. In this sense,
God works for the world, and hence the Christian community is essentially
for the benefit of the world. The lower and higher standpoints
of history are combined together as God’s providence is a response
to and healing of human confusion.[115] The two standpoints of history
are not confused or collapsed into each other as the Christian community
sees them in a “two-fold view” because there is no harmony
between the two, “no possibility of understanding the one as the
basis of the other, or the other as grounded in it.”[116] This dialectic
is bridged only by a new thing: the unique person of Jesus Christ, where
God becomes human “altering the whole human situation and therefore
human history.”[117] Because God has provided hope for the world
in Jesus Christ, the Christian community “dares to hope for the
world with God and called by Christ to do so.[118]
Where the church is called into being by Christ, the world as society-culture
is constructed by humans. Due to their foundational differences there
remains an “irreducible tension between the church and world.”[119]
This is because the church comes about not for itself, but as a response
to the fallenness of the world, serving as the community which witnesses
to Christ by proclaiming His Gospel of redemption to the world. It does
this as His representative on earth, never replacing Christ or equating
itself with Him, but reminding the world of its intended state, its current
state, and its hope in Christ, hoping for its transformation in Christ.
The church points to the transformation revealed as the true humanity
in Christ.[120] The church is called to witness, remember, and
proclaim this reality. Hence Jones finds the church’s “witness
in word and deed to the living triune God” as its raison d’être.[121]
God is glorified in chronoikos through the life of obedience
of a creature who knows God. One transformed by the message of Christ
cannot but strive to live a life in obedience to the ethics of grace,
love, compassion, fellowship, and fullness of life which Jesus Christ
reveals. To unpack this ethic is beyond the limits of this essay but I
believe it is not too ambiguous. In essence, it presents itself as a nonviolent
transformative relationship of the community of Christ with (all) civil
communities in chronoikos, nurtured by grace, love, compassion,
fellowship, and a zeal for the fullness of life promised in Christ. Hence,
though the kingdom of God is not to be confused, conflated, or collapsed
into any earthly ‘kingdom,’ it demands a life obedient to
it. Because, when all is said and done, the church is for the
world.
Endnotes
[1]. The terms ‘Christian community,’ ‘church,’
and ‘community of Christ’ are interchangeable—‘church’
does not refer to denominational groups but a(ny) body of the followers
of Christ which is faithful to the lead of the life, death, and resurrection
of Jesus Christ at all times. The terms ‘secular community,’
‘civil community,’ ‘world,’ and ‘state’
are interchangeable.
[2]. Church Dogmatics, 13 volumes, G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance
(eds.), T & T Clark International, 2004, UK, unless mentioned otherwise;
abbreviated as CD employing roman numerals to designate volume
and part. Community, State, and Church: Three Essays, intro.
David Haddorff (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2004); abbreviated
as Community.
[3]. A Grammar of Christian Faith: Systematic Explorations in Christian
Life and Doctrine, 2 volumes, published by Rowman & Littlefield,
Lanham, Maryland, 2002; abbreviated as GCF. On Being the
Church of Jesus Christ in Tumultuous Times (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books,
Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2005); abbreviated as On Being the Church.
[4]. See John Howard Yoder, The Original Revolution: Essays on Christian
Pacifism (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1971), pp. 64-84; idem, The
Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel (Notre Dame, IN: University
of Notre Dame Press, 1984), pp. 74ff, 135-47.
[5]. George Hunsinger, Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of
Karl Barth (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company,
2000), p. 119.
[6]. E.g., see his discussion on evil & theodicy, GCF, pp.
272-86; especially pp. 79-86.
[7]. Barth, Community, p. 186.
[8]. Jones, GCF, p. 486; emphasis his.
[9]. A concept explained in section IV below.
[10]. Barth, Community, p. 46-47.
[11]. Barth, CD, IV.3.2, pp. 688-89.
[12]. See Barth, CD, IV.3.2, p. 695.
[13]. Barth, CD, IV.3.2, pp. 688ff.
[14]. Barth, CD, IV.2, p. 614.
[15]. Barth, CD, IV.3.2, p. 754.
[16]. Barth, CD, IV.3.2, p. 729.
[17]. Barth, Community, pp. 150-51.
[18]. Barth, Community, p. 154.
[19]. For the temporality of the kingdom of God refer to section IV below.
[20]. Barth, Community, p. 154.
[21]. Barth, CD, IV.3.2, p. 752.
[22]. Barth, CD, IV.3.2, p. 758.
[23]. E.g., see Mt 16.17; Jn 3.31-36, 4.24, 6.63, 14.26; Acts 2.4; Rom
8.14, 9.1. This reveals that the formation of the Christian community
happens neither by chance nor caprice. The Acts of the Apostles, then,
opens with the event of the Pentecost as the fulfillment of Christ’s
pre-ascension promise of a Counselor who would guide those who follow
Him till the telos of creation.
[24]. Barth, CD, IV.3.2, p. 761.
[25]. Barth, Community, p. 150.
[26]. Jones uses the words “church” and “world”
to identify the distinction between the community called together by Christ
and those (plural) constructed by humans, respectively. Further, he identifies
the multidimensional aspects of what constitutes “world” and
“cultures” in the church’s discourse; Jones, GCF,
pp. 47-50. See also below.
[27]. Jones, GCF, p. 252.
[28]. Jones, GCF, p. 273.
[29]. Jones, GCF, p. 272.
[30]. See also Jones, GCF, pp. 302-4.
[31]. Jones, GCF, pp. 272ff. See also Jones’s doctrine
of sin (pp.293ff) and discussion on theodicy and evil in the world as
a result of sin and the response of God (pp. 276-90).
[32]. Jones, GCF, p. 707.
[33]. Jones, GCF, pp. 47-48.
[34]. Jones, GCF, pp. 303-4; emphasis his.
[35]. Jones, GCF, pp. 308-12. Jones’s intention here is
not to empty the Christian understanding of human intentionality—i.e.,
the things which motivate humans to action—from erosic attractions.
Rather an appropriate way to understand Jones’s discussion on desire
vis-à-vis agapic love—which he identifies as the central
manifestation of Christian discipleship—is to see that in Christ
our attractive desires are transformed from a focus on the self to a focus
on God, and consequently on neighbours. (Hence, love for God is not collapsed
into love for neighbour or vice-versa. Rather, both remain dialectically
distinct and inseparable where love for God takes precedence over love
for neighbour for it is through Christ that we know what is neighborly
love, how to love & who is our neighbor to be loved.) In other words,
Christian agapic love is a passionate, intentional, and attractive love
where desires are freed from the mimetic corruptions of the world allowing
them to focus on God and neighbour. Hence, Christians find that—contra-Nygren—far
from being an unintentional, passionless, unattractive, and passive love,
the agapic love to which Christians are called is a joyous, intentional,
and proactive love which finds its own growth and fulfillment in loving
God and others. However, issues of efficacy of agapic love are not to
be collapsed into their performance nor is the Christian discipleship
of agapic love to be seen as a human attempt to correct human self-interest
as an attempt at self-salvation. Rather it is God in Christ who reveals
that love of God is not for us as a choice but the very reason of our
constitution. Then in loving God and neighbour we do not achieve or claim
anything but merely do what we were created to do. See Jones’s discussion
in GCF, pp. 574-87.
[36]. Jones, GCF, p. 319. See also Hunsinger, Disruptive
Grace, pp. 21-29 for a good discussion on Girard and Barth.
[37]. Jones, GCF, pp. 25-29, 593-95, 609-617. See also “Signs
of the Church’s Identity” in Jones, On Being the Church,
pp. 21-34.
[38]. See also “The Church as Ark of Salvation” in Jones,
On Being the Church, pp. 35-69.
[39]. See also Barth, CD, IV.2, pp. 614-15.
[40]. Jones, GCF, p. 609; emphasis his.
[41]. Jones, GCF, p. 612; emphasis his.
[42]. Jones, GCF, p. 613; emphasis his. The discernment of the
Holy Spirit is done within the community of Christ for that is the object
of the Holy Spirit. But the church does not exhaust or confine the movement
and action of the Spirit. For the gift of grace is for all. However, discernment
of the Holy Spirit outside the Gospel model must be cautiously examined,
for the Holy Spirit does not act on its own but in unity within the Triune
God. In other words, any action which is to be ascribed to the Holy Spirit
necessarily points towards God’s revelation in Christ and His salvific
work. For the Holy Spirit has been given us not to move us hither and
scattered, but to reconcile the world to God by revealing God’s
work in Christ.
[43]. Jones, GCF, p. 50.
[44]. Jones, GCF, p. 615. This transformative proclamation is
how, according to Jones, the church relates to
the state. We will return to this theme in our concluding section V below.
[45]. Jones, GCF, p. 616.
[46]. Jones, GCF, p. 617.
[47]. What follows is a repetition of my earlier work on the concept of
the kingdom of God and what it means as the Christian eschatological hope,
titled “Eschatology and the Kingdom of God: A Brief Essay on the
Theology of Karl Barth,” Yale Divinity School, Spring 2006; available
on request. See also Jones, GCF, pp. 435-42.
[48]. Barth, CD, II.1, p. 630.
[49]. Barth, CD, II.1, p. 606.
[50]. Barth, CD, II.1, p. 621. As Professor Jones has pointed
out to me the use of the word “time” here does not refer to
time created by God. For the “time” before created time and
time as we know it is to be differentiated. The phrase “pre-time”
must then be considered to refer to that condition of being in God which
‘precedes’ time. The same is true for the concept of God’s
post-temporality. Others have argued that there was never a time when
the world never was and God was alone. This does not conflict with Barth’s
idea of God’s pre- and post-temporality. For it is God who is before
and after time, not time before and after time. God’s presence both
before and after time does not negate the concept of time but differentiates
God’s presence (or “being”) from our temporal being.
See also n. 61 below.
[51]. Barth, CD, II.1, p. 621.
[52]. Barth, CD, II.1, pp. 305, 302.
[53]. Hunsinger, Disruptive Grace, p. 189.
[54]. As Hunsinger notes: ‘the distinction between God’s being
in and for itself and God’s being in relation to the world [is]
of great importance in understanding Barth’s conception of eternity’,
idib., p. 197. Jones also posits this crucial distinction in his discussion
on the distinction and relation between God’s essence and actuality,
in GCF, pp. 204-212.
[55]. It is the loving act of God which refers to God’s life and
being. For Barth, this love is manifested at two planes: the horizontal
and the vertical. In the horizontal, love first exists within the Triune
Godhead as the love shared by the Father and Son with the Holy Spirit
(CD, II.1, pp. 263, 622; see also Hunsinger, Disruptive Grace,
p. 191, n. 7). In the vertical, God does not wish to be in the abstract
but binding Godself to the world from Israel’s history is present
in the world in three unified modes of being. These two planes are distinct,
yet inseparably linked as the horizontal results in the vertical without
depending on it for its own presence.
[56]. Hunsinger, Disruptive Grace, p. 190.
[57]. Barth, CD, II.1, p. 608.
[58]. Barth, CD, II.1, p. 622.
[59]. Barth, CD, II.1, p. 623.
[60]. Barth, CD, II.1, p. 623.
[61]. Hunsinger, Disruptive Grace, p. 186-87; St. Augustine,
Confessions XI.x (12)-xviii (24), in St Augustine, Confessions,
trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 228-35.
See especially xiii (16), p. 230: It is not in time that you [God] precede
times…. In the sublimity of an eternity which is always in the present,
you are before all things past and transcend all things future….
Your ‘years’ neither go nor come. Ours come and go so that
all may come in succession. All your ‘years’ subsist in simultaneity,
because they do not change; those going away are not thrust out by those
coming in. But the years which are ours will not all be until all years
have ceased to be. Your ‘years’ are ‘one day’
(Ps. 89:4; 2 Pet. 3:8), and your ‘day’ is not any and every
day but Today, because your Today does not yield to a tomorrow, nor did
it follow on a yesterday. Your Today is eternity…. You created all
times and you exist before all times. Nor was there any time when time
did not exist.
[62]. Barth, CD, II.1, p. 623
[63]. Barth, CD, II.1, p. 624; emphasis mine.
[64]. Barth, CD II.1, p. 617.
[65]. Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, sixth ed., Edwin C. Hoskins
(trans.) (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 199.
[66]. Hunsinger, Disruptive Grace, p. 205.
[67]. Hunsinger, Disruptive Grace, p. 205.
[68]. Barth, CD, II.1, p. 609.
[69]. See also Barth, CD, II.1, p. 630.
[70]. I borrow this phrase from John Hick, Death and Eternal Life
(Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994), p. 279. His discussion
on the resurrection of the person is helpful in providing a model for
understanding God’s time. However, he fails to acknowledge the utter
distinction between chronoikos and God’s eternity. Hence, from a
humanistic perspective, his ‘salvation’ is an oneness with
the Ultimate Reality achieved by humans for humans. Jesus—like Buddha—is
the human who realizes a “perfect human relationship to God,”
or in the case Gautama, the Buddha, “to another aspect of Ultimate
Reality”; ibid., pp. 450-55, quoted from p. 455.
[71]. Barth, CD, II.1, p. 631.
[72]. Barth, CD, II.1, p. 629.
[73]. As God is (also) glorified in time through the life of obedience
of a creature who knows God, one transformed by the message of Christ
cannot but strive to live a life in obedience to the ethics of grace,
love, compassion, fellowship, and fullness of life which Jesus Christ
reveals—to unpack this ethic is beyond the limits of this essay
but I believe it is not too ambiguous an ethic either. For, in essence,
it presents itself as a nonviolent transformative relationship of the
community of Christ with (all) civil communities in chronoikos, nurtured
by grace, love, compassion, fellowship, and a zeal for the fullness of
life promised in Christ. Hence, though the kingdom of God is not to be
confused, conflated, or collapsed into any earthly ‘kingdom,’
it demands a life obedient to it. See also Joel Marcus, ‘Crucifixion
as Parodic Exaltation’ in Journal of Biblical Literature,
vol. 125, Spring 2006, p. 74, n. 7.
[74]. See also Eberhard Busch, The Great Passion: An Introduction
to Karl Barth’s Theology, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, eds.
Darrell L. Guder and Judith J. Guder (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans
Publishing Company, 2004), p. 282.
[75]. See also Barth, CD, II.1, p. 639.
[76]. Jones, GCF, pp. 327, 436-37.
[77]. Jones, GCF, pp. 435-40, 699-702.
[78]. Jones, GCF, pp. 708-9.
[79]. Jones, GCF, p. 436; emphasis his.
[80]. Jones, GCF, p. 435; emphasis his.
[81]. Jones, GCF, p. 436; emphasis his.
[82]. Jones, GCF, p. 704.
[83]. Jones, GCF, p. 704.
[84]. Jones, GCF, p. 701.
[85]. Barth, CD, IV.3.2, pp. 734-47.
[86]. Barth, CD, IV.3.2, p. 736.
[87]. How ironical then that liberal democratic communities which strive
of freedom of speech are the communities where the Christian communities
are the most afraid to speak, replacing the Word of God with other words.
[88]. Barth, CD, IV.3.2, p. 739.
[89]. Barth, CD, IV.3.2, p. 741.
[90]. Barth, CD, IV.3.2, p. 747.
[91]. Hunsinger, Disruptive Grace, p. 50.
[92]. Hunsinger, Disruptive Grace, pp. 56-57.
[93]. Hunsinger, Disruptive Grace, p. 59
[94]. Barth, CD, IV.3.2, pp 762-830; quoted from p. 762.
[95]. Timothy Gorringe, Karl Barth: Against Hegemony (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 120-23; see also Hunsinger, Disruptive
Grace, pp. 77ff.
[96]. Hunsinger, Disruptive Grace, p. 79.
[97]. Barth, Community, p. 157.
[98]. Barth, Community, p. 159.
[99]. Barth, Community, p. 161; emphasis mine.
[100]. Barth, Community, p. 161.
[101]. Jones, GCF, p. 648; emphasis his.
[102]. Jones, GCF, p. 651.
[103]. Jones, GCF, p. 653.
[104]. Jones, GCF, p. 651.
[105]. For the discussion which follows, refer to Jones, GCF,
pp. 621-34.
[106]. See Jones, GCF, p. 621.
[107]. Jones, GCF, p. 595; emphasis his. See also GCF,
p. 49 and 2 Corinthians 4.7. As a community formed from the world it suffers
the sin of the world, ever in need of grace and forgiveness, and hence
itself in need of perpetual reformation.
[108]. Jones, GCF, p. 630; emphasis his.
[109]. Jones, GCF, p. 631; emphasis his.
[110]. Jones, GCF, p. 632; emphasis his.
[111]. Jones, GCF, p. 633; emphasis his.
[112]. “Creaturely” reconciliation with Christ in teleological-eschatological
destiny does not refer to humans alone. In this sense, “creature”
refers to all that is created. In other words, it refers to all that is
created by God, both seen and unseen.
[113]. In doing so, it relates to the world in transformative works of
agapic love towards “justice and peace in the world” which
remain as faithful as humanely possible to God’s shalom and fullness
of life.
[114]. Barth, CD, IV. 3.2, p. 749.
[115]. Barth, CD, IV.3.2, p. 694.
[116]. Barth, CD, IV.3.2, p. 708.
[117]. Barth, CD, IV.3.2, p. 711.
[118]. Barth, CD, IV.3.2, p. 720.
[119]. Jones, GCF, p. 47; emphasis his.
[120]. It is the human-divine nature of Christ, which prefigures God’s
communion with us and our transformation, which allows the human nature
to desire and will as one with God. Rather than the submission of one
will to the other in Christ, both the human and divine will are in harmony
as all is for the glory of God—and here I affirm the two wills in
Christ, one human and the other divine. At the same time this affirms
the limited freedom which the human will is created with, negating the
idea of the autonomous self which was the original sin.
[121]. Jones, GCF, p. 27.
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