74 - The Christian Life: Church Dogmatics IV/4, Lecture Fragments

The Christian Life:
Church Dogmatics IV/4, Lecture Fragments
By Karl Barth
Translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley
Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1981. 3 10 pp. $17.95.

When Barth died in 1968, he left behind a considerable amount of material intended for eventual inclusion in the Dogmatics. This volume is his treatment of the Christian life, first presented in a lecture course (all the Dogmatics originated in class lectures, a fact which may account in part for its prolixity). From his own manuscript, a typescript containing his hand-written corrections and a tape-recording of the lectures, the Swiss editors have put together a reliable text, with a skillful English translation.

The part of the course about baptism was already published, because Barth attached special importance to this theme. But a variety of circumstances, including age and ill health, prevented him from revising the rest. Baptism, something that must be requested by the Christian in response to baptism by the Spirit, is treated as the foundation of the Christian life, and the plan was to finish with the Lord's Supper as its renewal. But the problem was to find the link between them.

Barth held that the God of grace commands one thing, and so he sought for a single concept to express it. He considered various possibilities and actually made a start with "faithfulness," but came to the conclusion that this concept, like the thankfulness of the Heidelberg Catechism, might be taken as a more or less passive disposition or attitude, and that it did not adequately express the fact that what God requires of those whom he has reconciled in Jesus Christ is action. He finally settle on "invocation"; he held that the law of prayer is not only the law of faith, according to the old adage, but also the law of life, and he proceeded to spell this out on the basis of the Lord's Prayer. His aim was to bring out the actions which correspond to the various petitions. Unfortunately he was able to cover only the first two petitions, but nonetheless he produced a great wealth of material from them. Readers may marvel that these two petitions, which amount in all to seven words, should have yielded more than 200 large and closely printed pages of counsel and direction.

Though the book is entitled The Christian Life, and the avowed theme is the action of Christians, Barth shows an overriding concern with the "situation" of Christians, as that has been determined by the action of God in Christ,-the Christian ethos he sometimes calls it, and he understands it objectively. No reference is made to any change in the disposition of Christians that may have been brought about by that act

75 - The Christian Life: Church Dogmatics IV/4, Lecture Fragments

or to any mediating role it may have in the translation from ethos to ethic.

Barth's adoption of "invocation" as the guiding concept for the understanding of the Christian life is accompanied by an intensification of the "actualism" which was noted early as a feature of his thought. He is averse to any thought of being Christian as a state; the posture of the Christian life, as he puts it, is standing, not sitting or lying (except, perhaps, for the old). Leaving aside the question whether the author may have created the Christian in his own image, one may ask whether this view takes adequate account of the covenantal relation between God and people. Barth made much of the covenant in earlier volumes, but in this one it is barely mentioned, and the relation between God and people is poised on an unstructured grace, which robs the Christian life of that confidence and peace and rest, which are attributed to it in the New Testament.

In this connection, Barth's use of Scripture merits scrutiny. He is quoted as having said that before preparing these lectures he had "read the New Testament again from A to Z and word by word," and this volume, like its predecessors, abounds in passages of exegesis, much of it illuminating and suggestive. The reader, however, should be careful to ask whether all the texts that are relevant to the theme have been considered.

Those who have followed Barth's work over the years may also discern in this volume a recurrence of certain emphases. The new note that was sounded in The Humanity of God is muted, and in its place we find an emphasis on the diastasis, the apartness of the human and the divine. Though the book deals with the life of Christians who are reconciled to God by grace, their situation in relation to God is portrayed as precarious, not only in the literal, but also in the debased, popular sense of that word. And their situation in the world, likewise, suggests a standing conflict between opposing forces (knowledge of God and ignorance of God, light and darkness, order and disorder). Barth repeatedly describes this as "ambivalence," a word with which he seems to have fallen in love, but which he uses in a sense different from that given it by its inventor.

There is also a return to the eschatologism of the earlier writings. The prayer for the coming of the kingdom of God is, he says, a "pure" prayer, because it is for something that only God can do. Christians, of course, are commanded to act, but always in the knowledge that the little human righteousness they may achieve may be "kingdom-like," but no more. It is "the heart of the Christian ethos to live with a view to the coming kingdom," but the view is always beyond the horizon. Barth's eagerness to restrain presumptuous claims for Christian action is, in effect, discouraging, if not disarming.

George S. Hendry
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey