New Explorations in Theology

Karl Barth on Forgiveness and the Church

Jon Coutts

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780830893447
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Systematic Theology & Ethics

Christians regularly ask God to "forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors, " but tend to focus on the first half and ignore the second.Something is missing if Christians think of mission only in terms of proclamation or social justice and discipleship only in terms of personal growth and renewal—leaving the relational implications of the gospel almost to chance. It is vital both to spiritual life and mission to think of the church as both invitation and witness to a particularly merciful social dynamic in the world.As a work of constructive practical theology and a critical commentary on the ecclesiology of Karl Barth's unfinished Church Dogmatics, A Shared Mercy explains the place and meaning of interpersonal forgiveness and embeds it within an account of Christ's ongoing ministry of reconciliation. A theologian well-practiced in church ministry, Jon Coutts aims to understand what it means to forgive and reconcile in the context of the Christ-confessing community. In the process he appropriates an area of Barth's theology that has yet to be fully explored for its practical ramifications and that promises to be of interest to both seasoned scholars and newcomers to Barth alike. The result is a re-envisioning of the church in terms of a mercy that is crucially and definitively shared.Featuring new monographs with cutting-edge research, New Explorations in Theology provides a platform for constructive, creative work in the areas of systematic, historical, philosophical, biblical, and practical theology.

1

What Is It About Forgiveness?

TENSIONS IN THE STUDY OF FORGIVENESS

In recent decades the topic of forgiveness has seen increased attention in the fields of philosophy, psychology, sociology and political science, owing largely to the prevalence of complex interpersonal and geopolitical conflict in the twentieth century. In these studies one often sees Christian theology mined for illustrative and effective content but underutilized in forming premises and reaching conclusions. This shortcoming applies often enough within practical theology as well. Given the centrality of forgiveness to Christianity, it should be of utmost concern to understand and appropriate this rightly.

One of the landmarks in contemporary forgiveness studies came in Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, where she rather famously labeled Jesus the “discoverer” of the human “faculty” of forgiveness, and thereby offered a qualified recommendation of its usefulness in social progress.1 Building on this in his book Before Forgiveness: The Origins of a Moral Idea, David Konstan explores examples of pre-Christian forgiveness and argues that, actually, not even Jesus had the same moral action in view that modern Westerners have today. Tracing back to “differences in the ancient and modern conceptions of the self,” Konstan claims that before Immanuel Kant the “ideology of forgiveness” was more general—concerned more with “assuaging anger” than initiating or sealing a reconciliatory exchange.2

It would seem that Konstan underappreciates both the New Testament’s influence on and its resonance with contemporary concerns, but his distinction of modern from premodern and ancient emphases is apropos. According to Charles Griswold’s analysis, “forgiveness is not seen as a virtue by the ancient Greek philosophers,” mainly because their “perfectionist views” of the moral field obscured the possibility of naming something virtuous that depended upon the presence of imperfection in order to be enacted.3 In the classic period, John Milbank observes “no real recommendation of forgiveness in a post-Christian sense,” noting instead the predominance of “a gesture of pure negative cancellation”—a gesture that could easily succumb merely to “a pragmatic ignoring of [faults] for self-interested reasons, or else to the taking into account of mitigating circumstances and involuntary motions.”4 Such generalizations and gestures are certainly not foreign to the hyperindividualized interpersonal encounters of today. Perhaps the more things change the more they stay the same.

When it comes to the appropriation of forgiveness in church history, Rodney Petersen succinctly relays the mixed legacy we inherit in that regard:

In the history of the church the practice of forgiveness has been clearly tied to penitence, most often privatized as a part of individual religious practice since the early medieval period. Throughout what became recognized as “Christendom,” the public significance of forgiveness often languished as more retributive conceptions of justice dominated social theory, power politics, and practice. Forgiveness was often “spiritualized” and removed from the practice of everyday life. While forgiveness might happen between God and an individual penitent, among persons and groups in society only some lesser form of condoning, dismissal, or forgetting appeared possible. The recovery of particular patterns of religious behavior and theology in the Protestant reforms caused Christians to rethink the topic.5

The difficulty has always been to find the right relation of forgiveness to repentance and reparation. In the face of lethargy toward the imperatives of grace, the tendency has been to motivate repentance by fear of punishment; in the face of oppressive legalism the tendency has been to emphasize the freedom of God’s love. As Carl Bråkenhielm reports, Peter Lombard called for contrition as the perfect repentance that arose from the love of God, while seventeenth century Pope Alexander VII declared fear-induced attrition acceptable as well, reckoning “imperfect repentance” nonetheless apt for God’s gracious appropriation.6 On either side of this tension lies the possibility for abuse.

As will be seen in this book, Karl Barth sought both to retain emphasis on divine mercy and to resist the descent of grace-invoking penitence into self-serving penance. This is no mere Protestant polemic: Barth vociferously warns against the assumption that the Reformation made anyone immune to the temptation to self-manage grace. Indeed, the similarities between pre- and post-Reformation impulses are not difficult to trace. Anachronistic caricatures of the sacrament of penance should not obscure the nuances of grace and accountability that, at the best of times, it aimed to observe. Despite the rise of indulgences and the threats of purgatory, pastoral handbooks show that good intentions and ideas coexisted with and preceded those more infamous church practices. For instance, medieval pastoral advisor Guido of Monte Rochen called penance a God-given way to mend the scars of sins already forgiven, promoting both the meritorious nature of contrition and the belief that it must take place within the activity of God.7 No doubt looking to retrieve some premodern impulses, John Milbank argues that for thinkers like Aquinas divine forgiveness was freely given but “realized through repentance,” thus when “mediated by the Church through the sacrament of penance, it was to some extent the case that. . . to forgive someone was actively to bring about reconciliation through the provision to the other of a positive means of recompense.”8 One must be careful not to overstate retrieval at the expense of the gains of reform, but it is worth noting that, for all the abuses, the proper impulse was to embed forgiveness within Christ’s ongoing work of reconciliation via the church.

Indeed, Christians overreacting to institutionalized forms of penance may take it up again in individualistic forms instead. This reality was felt early on in Martin Bucer’s attempt to replace priestly mediation with the establishment of Christlichen Gemeinschaften. By all accounts the post-Reformation attempts at thriving mutual accountability ran into obstacles and faltered as people found themselves still caught up not only in the power struggles of church and state but also the tensions of personal and corporate interest.9 As time wore on, these tensions would only be exacerbated by the fragmentations implicit in Enlightenment notions of freedom and the resultant heightening of individuality. Whether institutionalized or privatized, the temptation remains to try to manage grace by manipulating penitence.

Of course, the modern focus on individuality has not been entirely negative. It has also had the advantage of spurring new reflection on the personal and interpersonal implications of divine forgiveness and reconciliation. The most prominently recognized example of this turn has become a pair of sermons preached by Bishop Joseph Butler in 1718 at Rolls Chapel, London, titled “Upon Resentment” and “Upon Forgiveness of Injuries.”10 As explained by Griswold, Butler previewed the way “resentment and forgiveness are routinely linked in modern discussions,” signaling an emphasis on inner and interpersonal dynamics that would resound in the social sciences for centuries to come.11 This focus would only intensify in the twentieth century as the rise of global transport and communication coincided with the fallout of colonial injustices and surges in violence the scope of which the world had never seen.12 Concurrent with this was also an increased sensitivity to psychology and personal healing, which brought questions of forgiveness and reconciliation close to home. In this regard Everett Worthington considers Lewis Smedes’s 1984 Forgive and Forget to have been a formative influence: it triggered the interest of psychotherapists with its compelling depiction of forgiveness as a benefit to forgivers.13

In the developments of the last century, what Anthony Bash finds most notable is the fact that forgiveness garnered a wide range of attention apart from religious conviction. Desperate for alternate modes of conflict resolution in light of the visibly downward spiral of violence and retribution, more and more people have found the idea of forgiveness profoundly pertinent to interpersonal and sociopolitical affairs.14

What should be clear from this brief sketch is that forgiveness is at the same time both elemental and complicated. The notions and practices of forgiveness found in any time or place may present parables (or forgeries) of Christian forgiveness. In any case, one must understand forgiveness Christianly in order to see where the similarities begin and end. When George Soares-Prabhu observes analogies to Christian forgiveness in the Buddhist tradition, he rightly maintains that even if mercy and compassion “are not exclusively Christian attitudes, the importance given to them in the teaching of Jesus, and the concrete forms they assume in the New Testament, give them a specifically Christian significance.”15 With Barth, our goal is to better understand forgiveness within Christ’s mission of reconciliation.

THE FOREGROUNDING OF FORGIVENESS IN BARTH’S THEOLOGY

More than a decade before Barth began the fourth volume of his Church Dogmatics, Paul Lehmann wrote a book called Forgiveness: Decisive Issue in Protestant Thought, which spent a considerable portion of its latter half tracing the trajectory of Barth’s thought. Without really delving into practical matters, it certainly promoted serious study of forgiveness in Barth’s theology. In Lehmann’s view, if Roman Catholics thought forgiveness to be available to humanity naturally, then Reformers had taken the opposite view—only to let the far-reaching implications of this fundamental conviction get temporarily pressed out by other matters.16 Attending to its retrieval, Lehmann pointed to the assertion of Albrecht Ritschl, who said, “The immediate object of theological cognition. . . is the community’s faith that it stands to God in a relation essentially conditioned by the forgiveness of sins.”17 With Barth, Lehmann detected both a renewal and a sharpening of focus. What Barth highlights for us, he observed, is that Ritschl’s object of theological reflection is not the God revealed in Christ, but the faith of the community and the “consciousness of those who believe in Him.”18 This distorts the picture considerably, turning us from apprehension of Christ’s mercy to the practice of “self-forgiveness.”19

As Lehmann saw it, Barth posed a powerful question to Roman Catholics and liberal Protestants alike—namely, “Is forgiveness fundamentally an unheard-of miracle, or is it something other, something...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Foreword by John Webster
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 What Is It About Forgiveness?
• 2 Forgiveness in Church Dogmatics IV
• 3 Forgiveness Shared: The Church of Church Dogmatics IV
• 4 Forgive Us: The Meaning of Christian Forgiveness
• 5 As We Forgive: Forgiveness in the Ministry of Reconciliation
• 6 New Every Morning: The Life of a Confessing Church
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• New Explorations in Theology
• Praise for A Shared Mercy
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright Page