331 - Response to Colin Gunton

Response to Colin Gunton
By Cynthia M. Campbell

PROFESSOR Gunton has done us a great favor with his essay in which he attacks two significant theological problems-problems both in Barth scholarship and for the entire theological undertaking. The issues are, as his title suggests, human freedom and the triune nature of God. What is interesting about his paper is the attempt to see how these ideas are related.

Gunton's thesis is that it is the transcendence of God, rather than God's identification with the human condition, which guarantees human freedom. It is because God is free in and within God's own self that humanity is free: unconditional lordship guarantees human autonomy.

In making his case, Gunton helpfully reviews Barth's contention that God is rightly understood in and through the history of election. It is this free, uncoerced, gratuitous act of God which is in fact the order or form of God's triunity. God is, to borrow Jüngel's helpful definition, a being structured as a relationship. And those relations may be characterized as the one who elects, the one who is elected, and the one through whom the benefits of election are made real in human lives.

There are several things that have long seemed helpful about this notion. Primarily, it provides an escape clause for Calvinists who wish to retain the notion of election but cannot in good conscience accept limited atonement. Barth did all Christendom a service by showing how God's triunity is integral to our understanding of how God relates to the world and how that triunity is something other than an arcane piece of dogmatic furniture.

But whenever the notion of election reaches center stage, the problem of human freedom rises as inevitably as ants to a summer picnic. If God determines, if the human will effects nothing in the relation between God and human, how is it not the case that something essential to the way humans are created is compromised beyond recognition?

Here Gunton accepts Barth's use of language: freedom is to will what God wills, to be obedient. Gunton characterizes his opponents as advocating a notion of freedom as "indeterminate choice" by which I assume he means the ability to choose (literally) anything. He points out, rightly, that all human choosing is determined to some extent by birth, culture, gender, etc. But all such determination does is to circumscribe the range of human choices. Within the range, there must be alternatives. Without alternatives, the words "choice" and "freedom" must be used in quotation marks. Gunton goes to great lengths to find passages in the Church Dogmatics which support a notion of real

Cynthia M. Campbell is Assistant Professor of Theology and Ministry at the Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. She is also the Director of the Seminary's Doctor of Ministry program.

332 - Response to Colin Gunton

human freedom. But in the end, Gunton affirms with Barth that there is for humanity only one choice. Freedom can only be actualized in obedience to the determination of God. Anything else is unfreedom.

Such a theological position is the result, in fact, of an interesting choice. It is the choice to protect the notion of God's freedom, God's autonomy, and God's power as authority at the expense of anything else, in this case at the expense of any coherent notion of human freedom.

Now, an obvious question to ask is whether this is necessary? Is this the only alternative? I think an answer can be found precisely where Gunton suggests-in the concept of God's triunity. Gunton rightly suggests that Barth's vision of triunity presents a view of God's dynamic nature and God's real freedom because it guarantees to God real relatedness. God's triunity is not a triangular positioning of inanimate objects. God's triunity suggests a dynamic activity in which God is presently creating, electing, and redeeming humanity. On this view, the so-called eternal decree is on-going; it is the contemporary reality. It is the community of divine relatedness that is the ground of God's contemporary as well as historical loving.

Gunton mentions this view of God's triunity and has given significant attention to it in other writings. Here, however, he locates the source of human freedom in the work of God's Holy Spirit. What he has to say is very well taken. Relocating the ground of human freedom from God's identification with humanity to God's transcendence has much to commend it. On traditional grounds, the role of the Spirit as God present with us and for us, empowering humanity, is correct indeed. In this way, Gunton suggests a direction for the completion of the Church Dogmatics itself. Finally, such a view is of great benefit to Presbyterian and Reformed persons for whom it is often difficult to name the Holy Spirit without either blushing or getting angry.

However, and this is a most friendly criticism, I think Gunton has passed up a fine opportunity to make more of the triunity of God as itself the source of human freedom, rather than looking to one Person alone. To return to the place where these remarks began, surely a major contribution of Karl Barth was his revival of the doctrine of the trinity in modern theology. But Central to that is his contention that humans are created in the image of that divine triunity. Barth's unique contribution is to see human relatedness as a reflection of the divine reality (itself relatedness).

For humans to be created in the image of God means that humans are created in and for relationship and as such reflect the relatedness of God. Herein we discover the reality and ground of both freedom and determination. Who God is, is the product of God's self-determination to be related as Father, Son, and Spirit. This determination, which consists of ordered relationships, is both the result of God's freedom and the arena within which freedom is lived out.

How much like the human reality! We are born into sets of relationships. We choose others. Indeed, as adults we choose either to affirm or

333 - Response to Colin Gunton

deny those relations into which we were born. These relationships indeed limit choices but they also provide an arena within which real choice, genuine freedom, is possible. The freedom of God, as we said above, is not abstract but rather a dynamic reality. As such, it suggests a model of human life that is at once accurate and salutary for human possibility.

The major problem with this scenario comes when the form of God's self- relatedness is defined by the doctrine of election--or at least as election as defined by Barth. The problem can be located in the characterization of the role of the elected one as obedient to the command of the one who elects. This sets the stage for what Barth himself admitted was kind of subordination of the elect one to the one who elects. This is a view which has disastrous consequences for christology, anthropology, and in particular for Barth's view of women.

All of this could be avoided-and with it much of the problem of explaining human freedom-if the view of God's triunity did not stress the power of God's decree and the obedience of the elect one and humanity. Rather, if the history of election which is the form of the trinity emphasized the freedom of the godhead in giving itself, in pouring itself out for humanity, a much different picture of the human condition would result. If the history of redemption is to be seen as the form or shape of the divine relatedness, then surely it is the free act of divine self-giving and the co-equal participation of the three realities of God's being which become manifest.

Such a view could be said to compromise God's power (seen as coercion) for the power of freely-chosen vulnerability. But such a view makes possible a notion of true human freedom-freedom to live such a life of self-giving in relationship. It remains necessary to conceive of God as transcendent, for only thus is the power to effect human tranformation possible. But divine power in this view operates not by compelling obedience (because there is no other alternative) but by empowering humans to realize the life in relatedness for which they were created.