The Ascension in Karl Barth

Andrew Burgess

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351894371
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión

This book explores the doctrine of ascension, and Barth's ascension thought in particular. First, it examines the doctrine of Jesus Christ's ascension into heaven, presenting a sustained discussion of Karl Barth's approach to this doctrine and the significance of the doctrine within his theology as a whole. Secondly, through examining Barth's ascension thought and dialoguing with three other theologians (Torrance, Farrow and Jenson), a clearer understanding of Barth and his theology is achieved. The treatment of issues related to Christ's ascension across a broader (protestant) perspective increases the relevance and usefulness of this unique study. Andrew Burgess presents the doctrine of the ascension as an important and undervalued doctrine and encourages Christians to see how, like Barth, they might benefit in their ability to think coherently about the present age and about Jesus in relation to this age, enabling further thought about the work of the Holy Spirit, the church, and Christian ethics.

PART I
KARL BARTH
ON
JESUS’ ASCENSION
AND
HEAVENLY SESSION

Chapter 1

The Shape of Barth’s Theology

Karl Barth’s theological achievement is very impressive. Attention can be drawn to the sheer size of his mammoth work in the Church Dogmatics,¹ but the volume of his writing alone is not enough to indicate greatness. At the heart of Barth’s achievement are some fundamental commitments, for instance, to the creed of Chalcedon, to the Lordship and agency of God, to the claim that God alone reveals God, and that the absolute reality of the gospel profoundly relativises human knowledge apart from the enlightening power of God. These fundamental commitments are worked out in such a fashion as to yield a theology which expresses utter faithfulness to Jesus Christ, and to the good news about Him. The Church Dogmatics is a large scale reworking of the theological tradition, in which the various doctrines of the church interweave with each other, and mutually condition one another – it is a thoroughly theological work, in which the church’s proclamation of Jesus Christ taken up, critiqued and measured through extended reflection upon Jesus Christ. So great is Barth’s emphasis upon Christ that he has been accused of christomonism, that is, of making Christ the sum total and measure of God, and of reducing the Father and the Spirit to the vanishing point. While it is not true that Barth loses sight of God’s tri-unity – indeed Barth’s ascension theology will help explicate his theology of the Spirit, for instance – Douglas Farrow is correct when he notes that the ‘works of Barth breathe a loyalty to the Man of Nazareth that none can mistake’.²

Because of the thoroughly interlinked nature of Barth’s theology we cannot isolate out the ascension from the achievement as a whole. Any attempt to examine the treatment of one doctrine in isolation from its larger context will fail to do justice to the material. However, it is not possible to offer a full introduction to Barth’s thought in this brief chapter. Other authors offer excellent introductions to Barth, and a more general account may be found in their works.³ What can be achieved in this chapter is an outline of several key aspects of Barth’s theological project – particularly where his thought is more distinctive – so that the focus upon the ascension which follows is not abstracted from its ground in his particular thought. The brief interaction with aspects of Barth’s thought below is therefore not intended to be representative of his theology as a whole, so much as to prepare the ground for a discussion of the ascension. Some key aspects of Barth’s work which impinge particularly forcefully on his ascension thought – such as his reworking of the themes of humiliation and exaltation in the light of Chalcedon – will be examined in depth within the discussion of the ascension, and so are not treated here.

Introduction to Key Themes

The Lordship and Agency of God

That ‘God reveals Himself as the Lord’ is the central claim of Barth’s prolegomena with which he introduced (in two large ‘tomes’!) his Church Dogmatics. Indeed, God’s lordship is central to the entire Dogmatics. Barth knew – the gospel ever impressed upon him – the wonderful authority and majesty that belong to God as Creator and Redeemer. The rule of God is vital to the matter of revelation, which lies at the heart of so much of Church Dogmatics. In the prolegomena, with its focus upon the self-revealing power of God there is a tremendous emphasis upon the authority of God exercised in the act of self-revelation. God does not simply reveal the fact of lordship, rather revelation is God acting – acting in lordship, in rule and authority. As the promulgation of the kingdom of God

revelation is simply God the Lord acting as Lord in relation to humans. That is, to be Lord is to act as God does in acting upon humans in self-revelation.⁴ God’s lordship is revealed in His freedom for His creatures, the power of His grace to reconcile and redeem, even when those creatures have destroyed their own capacity for relationship with God. At issue is God’s freedom to reveal Himself to His creature, and further, God’s freedom in His creature to make redemption the reality of the creature’s being and act. The reality of this freedom is the basis of all Christian theology, all dogmatics. Nothing can or will deny God this freedom – the freedom of lordship. Any disjunction between God’s deity and our humanity, or even between God’s holiness and our sin, is not adequate – on any basis – to limit the freedom of God to be for us, and even to be free ‘in us’. Both christ ology and pneumatology speak clearly of this.⁵

This freedom, which we call lordship, is God’s ability to achieve what God wills, to act and have God’s action agree perfectly with God’s being and intention. ‘Lordship means freedom’.⁶ God in freedom is unconditioned and autonomous, and this freedom is exercised in such a manner that in God’s decisions (which is the same as to say ‘in God’s act’) such things as righteousness, holiness, mercy, and truth, are revealed as the realities they are in God.⁷ These notions of freedom are therefore not to be taken abstractly. Their basis is not an idea of lordship, or of freedom, or even creaturely experience of what we call lordship and freedom. Rather, all is founded upon the concrete and particular reality of God’s action toward us in Jesus Christ. God reveals Godself as the Lord: ‘All else we know as lordship can only be a copy, and is in reality a sad caricature of this lordship’.⁸

To recognise the lordship of God in all dealings with creation is therefore to affirm, in the strongest fashion, God’s agency – God is Lord in action. In all his work Barth is deeply concerned with God’s agency: in elucidating the reality of God’s self-revelation he is at pains to emphasise that God is the all – sufficient agent. Self-revelation is an act of the Lord, who in sovereignty becomes revelation in the Word. God in freedom decides, and decision means actualisation, the exercise of God’s freedom. God’s Word is therefore not ‘mere possibility’ but God’s decision for humanity, ‘a choice taking place’.⁹ The freedom of God, God’s free agency, is therefore manifest in the Word. This is what Barth calls the ‘root of the doctrine of the Trinity’: that the lordship of God is manifest in the second person of the Trinity, God in God’s Word, God the Son. ‘God’s freedom for us men is a fact in Jesus Christ, according to the witness of Holy Scripture’.¹⁰ Thus the first part of Christology, the doctrine of the Word of God, is ‘the part which answers the question: How does the encounter of His revelation with man become real in the freedom of God?’,¹¹ and this Christological centre is the axle upon which Barth’s entire theology turns.

The Doctrine of Revelation

So we see that Barth understands revelation doctrinally, from a centre in Christology and with further elaboration in the doctrine of the Trinity, rather than from any anthropological centre. Jesus Christ as the incarnate Son of God is the one reality of revelation, attested in the New Testament, and His reality alone is the matter with which we are confronted, and which determines all our thought of God. No prior anthropology or philosophy can offer us an understanding of God’s revelation in Jesus of Nazareth. There is no ‘general idea’ which can shed light on the New Testament’s naming of the Son of God as this man of Galilee. It is the reality which the New Testament attests that sheds light upon itself – that is, the reality of Jesus Christ can only be understood only from the perspective of the witness to Him.¹²

We may well expect a modern theologian to show an epistemological interest in revelation, (given the doubt cast upon knowledge of God in the modern period), but although revelation is necessarily a matter of knowledge of God, Barth’s concern is not to develop an epistemology, or even address epistemological issues as such. Rather he claims to be driven by the nature of God’s self-disclosive activity itself, as God in lordship and authority takes hold of fallen humans, addressing them in the one Word of life. What this means is that epistemology is not a necessary prolegomena to theology proper – it is not a piece of independent philosophical work which must be undertaken before theology can begin. Rather, theology itself offers the grounds upon which it proceeds – the knowledge of God itself reveals how God may be known. If the doctrine of revelation offers an epistemology, and provides a prolegomena, then in doing so it is already theology. It is as God takes hold of humans in the power of divine self-revelation that speech about God becomes possible – not upon the basis of a prior epistemological enquiry. Barth is renowned for the ‘actualism’ of this approach, as he describes God’s being as in God’s act, and God’s act as the straight-forward reality of God’s being. Revelation occurs as the event, the act, of God’s acting in order to become manifest, and revelation is therefore neither a datum of our experience, nor a deposit of knowledge we have received. In fact, revelation is the very being of God toward us – God’s being in God’s act of reconciliation. Barth’s prolegomena is thus founded upon his description of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ, and this is simply based upon the assertion that this is how God has and will be revealed.

Within the Trinitarian dynamic of all of God’s work, Jesus Christ and Jesus alone is the revelation of God – He is the objective reality to whom we attend if we are to know God, even as the Spirit realises that knowledge in us. ‘The content of the New Testament is solely the name Jesus Christ, which, of course, also and above all things involves the truth of His God-manhood. Quite by itself this name signifies the objective reality of revelation’.¹³ Thus all knowledge of God is to be understood as knowledge of Jesus Christ. It is in relation to Jesus Christ that we can think and speak under the aegis of God’s truth, and no other source of knowledge or relationship can stand next to Him.

What is more, it is only within this revelation of God in Jesus, the Word of God, that we learn that we are sinners and fallen, that we are lost and ignorant of God, and that reconciliation in Jesus is our one hope of life. It is the same revelation of Jesus Christ as the forgiveness of our sins which also reveals our status as enemies of God – the Word of God reveals that humans have placed themselves outside of fellowship with God.¹⁴ As the Word become flesh Jesus is the living bridge between God and lost humanity, recreating in Himself a whole new humanity, even a whole new creation. It is here that we learn that we are not privileged with a prior competence for knowledge of God, even God in the person of the Word, but that all is grace. All claims that humans are unable to know God apart from God’s grace are not made a priori (before) but a posteriori (after), in the light of the grace received in Jesus Christ, within whose ‘Yes’ to us and to human knowledge and speech of God we must recognise a preceding ‘No’.

So we must attend to the considerable emphasis Barth places upon the living and personal character of Jesus Christ as the objective content of revelation. We do not have to do with an inanimate object within our world, within creation, which we can appropriate and possess like any other fact. If for a moment we look ahead to Chapter Three, even the church as His body does not simply ‘have’ Jesus, and knowledge of the truth in Jesus is not a donation that can be held and maintained. Church proclamation cannot claim immediacy with the Word of God in Christ. The human impossibility of the church’s proclamation consists simply in the impossibility of the attempt to speak of God’.¹⁵ But, in the agency of Jesus Christ, this inadequacy is not the end of the story. Jesus Himself can and does speak in and through inadequate human words. Grace is therefore revealed as grace indeed, and Jesus Christ is known to be present in the power of His risen l...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Karl Barth on jesus’ Ascension and Heavenly Session
• Chapter 1 The Shape of Barth’s Theology
• Chapter 2 The Doctrine of the Ascension
• Chapter 3 Ascension and the Church
• Chapter 4 Ascension and the Christian
• Chapter 5 Conclusion to Part I
• Part II: Dialogues
• Chapter 6 Thomas F. Torrance
• Chapter 7 Douglas Farrow: Ascension, Church, and Karl Barth
• Chapter 8 Robert Jenson: Trinity, Ascension, and Ecclesiology
• Chapter 9 Conclusion: The Ascended Lord
• Bibiliography
• Index