Karl Barth on Prayer 9780567655608, 9780567664549, 9780567655585

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
1. Introduction
2. Contemplation
3. Petition
4. Invocation
5. Pneumatology
6. Revolt
7. Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

T&T Clark Studies in Systematic Theology Edited by John Webster Ian A. McFarland Ivor Davidson

Volume 26

Karl Barth on Prayer Ashley Cocksworth

T&T CLARK Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the T&T Clark logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2015 Paperback edition first published 2018 © Ashley Cocksworth, 2015 Ashley Cocksworth has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identifi ed as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-0-5676-5560-8 PB: 978-0-5676-8212-3 ePDF: 978-0-5676-5558-5 ePub: 978-0-5676-5559-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cocksworth, Ashley. Karl Barth on prayer / by Ashley Cocksworth. pages cm. – (T&T Clark studies in systematic theology ; volume 26) ISBN 978-0-567-65560-8 (hbk) – ISBN 978-0-567-65558-5 (epdf) – ISBN 978-0-567-65559-2 (epub) 1. Prayer–Christianity. 2. Barth, Karl, 1886-1968. I. Title. BV210.3.C627 2015 248.3’2092 – dc23 2014048284 Series: T&T Clark Studies in Systematic Theology, volume 26 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

… for Hannah

Contents Acknowledgements Abbreviations 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Introduction Contemplation Petition Invocation Pneumatology Revolt Conclusion

Bibliography Index

viii x 1 25 61 83 121 147 169 183 198

Acknowledgements The giving of thanks is an important part of prayer, as it is of writing a book. I have accumulated a great debt of thanks over the years of this book’s writing. Particular thanks to David Ford for his ongoing support, for supervising the doctoral dissertation that this book has lightly revised and for directing me through the theology of Karl Barth and the traditions of Christian prayer with characteristic enthusiasm and wisdom. Many others, in one way or another, have invested time and energy in this project and deserve thanks: Tom Greggs, Mark McIntosh, John C. McDowell, Paul Nimmo, David Grumett, Mike Higton, Sarah Coakley, Bruce McCormack, Jeffrey Bailey, Janet Soskice, Oliver Davies, Michael Banner, Eberhard Jüngel, Hans-Anton Drewes, Robert Leigh, Matthias Grebe, Andrew Hayes and Samuel Ewell. Several groups who have heard parts of my argument have been encouraging, and I am grateful to them. They include: the Society for the Study of Theology; the Ford Home Seminar; the Christian Theology Seminar at the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge; the Systematic Theology Research Seminar at King’s College, London and the Research Seminar at the Queen’s Foundation, Birmingham. Much of the research for this book was undertaken as a doctoral student at Trinity College, Cambridge (2009–13). I am indebted to the College for the generous studentship without which those studies would not have been possible. The Dean of Chapel, Michael Banner, remains constantly supportive, for which I am very grateful. I would also like to register my thanks to the College Chaplains (particularly to Christopher Stoltz and Paul Dominiak) for their friendship and kindness and to the Chapel community for providing a happy liturgical home in which to write on the topic of prayer. Further financial support was gratefully received from the Faculty of Divinity for research trips to the American Academy of Religion Annual Meetings, the Annual Conferences of the Society for the Study of Theology, the Center for Barth Studies at Princeton Theological Seminary, the Evangelisch-theologische Fakultät of the Eberhard Karls Universität, Tübingen and the Barth-Archiv, Basel. More recently, I have had the pleasure of working at the Queen’s Foundation, Birmingham. I owe a great deal of thanks to the Principal, David Hewlett, and to Mark Earey, who not only offered a doctoral student that most precious

Acknowledgements

ix

commodity: a first job but also a stimulating place to write on prayer, in which theological activity and a daily pattern of prayer are practiced together in community. I also thank my colleagues at Queen’s for their good humour and support and the students for bearing much of the brunt of the ideas developed in this book with patience and goodwill. Gratitude is also due to my father, Christopher Cocksworth, for reading a version of this book in its entirety and for all his wise counsel. His own writings on prayer and theology have helped me to form and develop many of the ideas that are present in this book. Thanks also to two friendships that have emerged out of studying theology and in particular the writings of Karl Barth – Robert Leigh and Matthias Grebe. I cherish their friendship. Their comments on various drafts of this book have been perceptive and challenging and have made the book better. In respect of the publication, I am indebted to Anna Turton and Miriam Cantwell at Bloomsbury for all their hard work and to the editors of the ‘T&T Clark Studies in Systematic Theology Series’ for accepting this book into their series. Earlier versions of some of the material that makes up Chapter 2 have appeared in sections of ‘Attending to the Sabbath: An Alternative Direction in Karl Barth’s Theology of Prayer’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 13.3 (2011), pp. 251–71. I gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to use that material. David Babbington also deserves special acknowledgement for his proofreading labours. The responsibility for any remaining faults is mine. It is Hannah, my wife, however, to whom I am most greatly indebted and for whom I give my greatest thanks; and it is to her that this book is dedicated. AC The Queen’s Foundation, Birmingham 2014

Abbreviations The works of Karl Barth are abbreviated as follows: I/1; I/2; etc.

refer to individual volumes of CD and KD (see below)

CD

Church Dogmatics, 4 volumes in 13 parts, (eds) Geoffrey W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1936–77).

ChrL

The Christian Life: Church Dogmatics IV/4 – Lecture Fragments (trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1981).

DcL

Das christliche Leben: Die Kirchliche Dogmatik IV/4 – Fragmente aus dem Nachlass, Karl Barth-Gesamtausgabe 7, (eds) H.-A. Drewes and E. Jüngel (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 1976).

GD

The Göttingen Dogmatics: Instruction in the Christian Religion (trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley; Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1991).

ET

Evangelical Theology: An Introduction (trans. Grover Foley; Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1963).

Ethics

Ethics (trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1981).

KD

Die Kirchliche Dogmatik, 4 volumes in 13 parts (Zürich: Evangelischer Verlag, 1947–67).

Prayer

Prayer: 50th Anniversary Edition (trans. Sara F. Terrier; Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002).

Romans (II)

The Epistle to the Romans (trans. Edward C. Hoskyns; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968).

1

Introduction

This is a book about prayer. Writing about prayer, it has been said, is more difficult than prayer itself. Parodying Augustine’s struggle to describe time in Book 11 of the Confessions, D. Z. Phillips says, ‘I understand when I pray; I understand also when I hear another praying. What then is prayer? If no one asks me I know; if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not.’1 Prayer is something done rather than written about. Yet even then, there is something fundamentally problematic about ‘doing’ prayer. The problem of prayer, which leads ultimately back to Paul, has to do with the paradox of being unable to pray as we ought (Rom. 8.26) and yet at the same time being commanded to pray without ceasing (1 Thess. 5.16). What to make of this paradox will be a major theme of this book. Karl Barth, the twentieth-century Swiss Reformed theologian, is someone who did write about prayer. In fact, surprisingly perhaps, he wrote a great deal on the subject and worked prayer into the very heart of his dogmatic enterprise. The entire project of Christian theology, for Barth, must be undergirded by the practice of prayer for it to count as Christian theology. His theology, like Balthasar’s, is a ‘kneeling-theology’. This book aims to make more perspicuous some aspects of the strong and vibrant theology of prayer that lies at the heart of Barth’s theological convictions. Along the way, it will reveal Barth’s lifelong fascination with prayer. The subject seized his attention at a number of key points in his theology and, as we shall see, came to occupy a position of unrivalled importance in his most mature theological and ethical writings. As well as investigating his theology of prayer, a more subtle aim of this book is to rethink, through his writings on prayer, Barth’s theology as a spiritual theology. 1

D. Z. Phillips, The Concept of Prayer (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), p. 3.

2

Karl Barth on Prayer

It is not always customary to read Barth as a spiritual writer.2 While his contribution to Christian dogmatics is justly celebrated, his contribution to Christian spirituality is less well known. One of the distinctive features of theological writings from the Christian spiritual traditions is a commitment to what has been called the ‘integrity’ of prayer and theology.3 However, Barth was writing in both a time and a tradition that reputedly downplayed the significance of the complex inseparability of prayer and theology that had been taken for granted in older theology.4 It has been well rehearsed that from roughly the modern period onwards, doctrinal discourse has suffered from a troubling dislocation of prayer and theology – a dislocation that was certainly pronounced by the time Barth was writing.5 Practiced readers of Barth will know well, however, that despite these factors the dogmatic activity he gets up to across all his writings is undertaken in the ongoing practice of prayer. ‘It is imperative’, Barth argues, ‘to recognize the essence of theology as lying in the liturgical action of adoration, thanksgiving, and petition. The old saying, lex orandi, lex credendi, far from being a pious statement, is one of the most

2

3

4

5

As Stephen Sykes writes, it is ‘perhaps a strange thought that we might, in the long run, be able to treat this formidable Calvinist dogmatician as a spiritual writer’, in ‘Authority and Openness in the Church’, in S. W. Sykes (ed.), Karl Barth: Centenary Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 69–86 (83). I am borrowing the term ‘integrity’ from Mark A. McIntosh, Mystical Theology: The Integrity of Spirituality and Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). On the breakdown and repair of theology and prayer, see, among many others, Gavin D’Costa, Theology in the Public Square: Church, Academy and Nation (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 112–44; McIntosh, Mystical Theology, pp. 3–38; Rowan Williams, ‘ Theological Integrity’, in On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 3–15; Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge: Christian Spirituality from the New Testament to St John of the Cross (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1990; second edition); and A. N. Williams, ‘Mystical Theology Redux: The Pattern of Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae’, Modern Theology 13.1 (1997), pp. 53–74. A good example of the recent attempts to reinstate ‘spirituality’ (and within this, ‘mystical theology’) is reflected in the 2005 edition of The Modern Theologians. This third edition includes for the first time a section on ‘Theology, Prayer and Practice’ and makes the claim that in order for theological work to count as genuinely theological it must take place in prayer. Of particular interest is McIntosh’s contribution: Mark A. McIntosh, ‘ Theology and Spirituality’, in David F. Ford and Rachel Muers (eds), The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology Since 1918 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005; third edition), pp. 392–407. Indeed, some have also argued that the Reformed tradition and the German liberalism in which Barth was schooled did not help to address sufficiently the prayer-theology breakdown, see Geoffrey Wainwright, Doxology: The Praise of God in Worship, Doctrine and Life (London: Epworth Press, 1980), pp. 251–52 and S. W. Sykes, ‘Barth on the Centre of Theology’, in S. W. Sykes (ed.), Karl Barth: Studies of his Theological Method (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 17–54 (51–52). For Harnack’s rejection of the role of prayer in doctrinal development, see History of Dogma, vol. 1, (trans. Neil Buchanan; London: Williams & Norgate, 1898), pp. 332–34. It is worth noting, however, the new wave of research on Calvin that rightly questions the downplaying of spiritual concerns in some of the dominant readings of Calvin’s theology, see J. Todd Billings, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift: The Activity of Believers in Union with Christ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) and Julie Canlis, Calvin’s Ladder: A Spiritual Theology of Ascent and Ascension (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2010).

Introduction

3

profound descriptions of theological method’.6 The deliberate recovery of the ‘integrity’ of prayer and theology was forged early in Barth’s writings. On the opening pages of the Church Dogmatics, for example, he insists that prayer is the ‘attitude without which there can be no dogmatic work’.7 The task of knowing God or saying anything about that knowing is impossible without prayer. Indeed, this integral relation of prayer and theology was destined to live long and even to the very end when it is reported that Barth died with his hands gently folded from his night prayers after an evening of lecture writing.8 More will be said about what it means to read Barth as a spiritual writer and how his theology is rooted in prayer in the conclusion to this book. In the remainder of this introductory chapter, an overview of the most relevant texts in Barth’s writings in which prayer claims a particularly important role is provided. This is followed by a brief summary of the structure of this book and its overall arguments.

Overview ‘No other theologian of the twentieth century took prayer more seriously or developed a more extensive theology of prayer than did Barth’, so Daniel Migliore lauds.9 The aim of this section is not to produce an exhaustive catalogue of all the references to prayer in Barth’s oeuvre but simply to identify some of the main texts in which prayer was taken particularly seriously and introduce some of the key themes that will be taken up in more detail in other parts of this book. There is evidence to suggest that prayer claimed Barth’s theological attention from the very beginning. In the April of his second year at the University of Berne, at the age of twenty, Barth gave his first academic paper to the Protestant Theological Society on the theme of prayer, bearing the title ‘The Original Form of the Lord’s Prayer’.10 A few years later, in a 1911 letter to his friend Otto Lauterburg, Barth revealed that options for the aborted licentiate dissertation 6

7 8

9

10

Karl Barth, ‘The Gift of Freedom: Foundation of Evangelical Ethics’, in The Humanity of God (trans. John Newton Thomas and Thomas Wieser; Richmond: Westminster John Knox Press, 1960), pp. 69–96 (90). I/1, p. 23. See Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts (trans. John Bowden; London: SCM Press, 1976), p. 498. Daniel L. Migliore, ‘Freedom to Pray: Karl Barth’s Theology of Prayer’, in Karl Barth, Prayer: 50th Anniversary Edition (trans. Sara F. Terrien; Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), pp. 95–113 (95). Busch, Karl Barth, p. 37.

4

Karl Barth on Prayer

he planned but never began at the University of Marburg under the supervision of Hermann included research into Schleiermacher’s doctrine of prayer.11 His doctoral plans were scuppered by his call to pastoral ministry first as an assistant pastor in Geneva (1909–11) and then to Safenwil where he would spend a decade.12 Of the five hundred or so sermons that it is thought Barth delivered during his time in Safenwil, the first series was on the topic of the Lord’s Prayer.13 The theme of prayer would also feature regularly in his confirmation classes, of course.14 Beyond these casual engagements with the theology of prayer, Barth would be led into thinking more formally about prayer during the writing of his commentaries on Paul’s letter to the Romans. In the second edition of his commentary, one of the first significant references to prayer occurs in his exegesis of Paul’s discussion of the law in Romans 7. This is an odd place to encounter a reference to prayer. Indeed, in this section Barth makes the counter-intuitive move of implicating prayer (and, more broadly, worship and piety) in his notorious critique of ‘religion’ unfolded under Paul’s discussion of the law in Romans 7.15 Barth ‘names … worship “religion” ’.16 Prayer, as presented as a human achievement, stands under the radical judgement of God. ‘What seemed to us pure and upright and unbroken was shown to be for that very reason impure and crooked and crippled.’17 From the seventh chapter’s formidable assault on its inevitable religiosity, prayer features again in Barth’s interpretation of those tantalizingly suggestive verses on prayer in Romans 8. ‘Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words’ (Rom. 8.26). Barth would be drawn time and again in his writings on prayer to this particular verse. Indeed, one of the curious and most persistent features of his overall understanding of prayer has to do with the ‘paradox of prayer’, which is rooted in the iconoclastically significant notion of 11

12

13 14

15

16 17

See Karl Barth, Vorträge und kleinere Arbeiten: 1909–1914, Karl Barth-Gesamtausgabe 22, (eds) H.-A. Drewes and H. Stoevesandt (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 1993), p. 50. Note, though, that at the end of his lecturing career, Barth returned to Schleiermacher’s doctrine of prayer to reject it as ‘the supreme and most intimate act of self-help’, ChrL, p. 103. For some of the reasons contributing to Barth’s misgivings about pursuing doctoral work, which included his passion for ministry and his growing sense of frustration with contemporary academic theology, see Karl Barth-Rudolf Bultmann Letters: 1922–1966 (trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley ; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1982), p. 154. Busch, Karl Barth, p. 61. For example, see Karl Barth, Konfirmandenunterricht: 1909–1921, Karl Barth-Gesamtausgabe 18, (eds.) J. Fangmeier (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 1987), pp. 19–22 and 90–92. On the theme of worship as religion, see Matthew Myer Boulton, God against Religion: Rethinking Christian Theology through Worship (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2008), pp. 25–62. Romans (II), p. 253. Ibid., p. 238.

Introduction

5

being unable to pray as we ought. For Barth, Paul’s very act of letter writing was an act of prayer, composed in the paradoxical posture of being unable to pray. ‘Are these words aught else but one precise prayer? Yet, even while writing these words he knew that he did not know what he should pray for as he ought.’18 Barth’s exegesis of Romans 8 is largely dominated by the ground-clearing exercise of determining what prayer is not. It is not the mystical ‘way of denial’, for this is a ‘blind alley’; it is not a Feuerbachian projectionism, as that leads to the same place; it is not the ‘prayer of the Ama-Xosa and the “Kekchi-Indians” ’;19 and it is not in any way ‘a human achievement’.20 After determining what prayer is not, Barth makes a very brief move to a more positive understanding of prayer. If Barth’s problem with religion is that the ethical agent steps out in a bold bid for autonomy and independence, and masquerades prayer as ‘a human achievement’, his interaction with Romans 8 under the title the ‘Truth of the Spirit’ suggests that human action, and therefore human prayer, gains its truth by taking place in absolute dependence on the prior work of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is revealed as the one who not only judges the religiosity of prayer but also transforms it from within. The Spirit is the one who raises human prayer from the ashes of religion and gives it new life; the very same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead. ‘And who am I? Well, I am the man who possesses the firstfruits of the Spirit, … who is invisibly redeemed by the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, who is seized, driven, dedicated by the Truth, a free man, a child of God. Were this not so, how could … I cry, Abba, Father?’21 Barth continues, ‘I am transformed, renewed, purified and made a participator of the divine nature and of the divine life, with God, by His side, and in Him. This is adoption.’22 There is, then, a spiritual transformation of prayer that is described here in a rather sketchy and condensed way but is developed in more detail in later texts on prayer. Prayer, in all its religiosity, is transformed from within to participate in the one true prayer: Christ’s prayer, that is being prayed on our behalf. Hence there is a christological, as well as pneumatological, dimension to Barth’s early understanding of prayer. ‘The justification of our prayer and the reality of our communion with God are grounded upon the truth that Another, the Eternal, the Second Man from Heaven (1 Cor. 15.47), stands before God pre-eminent in power and – in our place.’23 18 19 20 21 22 23

Ibid., p. 316. Ibid. Ibid., p. 253. Ibid., p. 311. Ibid., p. 313. Ibid., p. 317.

6

Karl Barth on Prayer

Barth’s engagement with prayer in the second edition of the Romans commentary anticipates much of that which will be developed later as he settles into thinking more deeply about prayer: the link between prayer and ethics, the need to resist Feuerbach as much as the way of the ‘mystic’,24 the unavoidable religiosity of prayer, the role of the Holy Spirit in prayer’s transformation and Christ’s vicarious action as the true ‘pray-er’. Now occupying his first academic post in Göttingen, and therefore out of the swing of full-time ministry, preaching became less than frequent. Nevertheless, one of the first sermons Barth gave in Göttingen was on ‘The Name of the Lord’ (Prov. 18.10).25 This sermon is worth noting as it introduces other key themes in Barth’s theology of prayer: that the Lord’s Prayer is central, that prayer is sui generis (‘praying is not a work like other works’, he writes) and that prayer is fundamentally difficult.26 ‘To speak honestly, we stumble, as it were, into the Lord’s Prayer … and, if we are not to sink like Peter into the waves of the sea, we must begin anew with the cry, “Lord, help us!”. ’27 The solution to the difficulty of

24

25

26 27

Given that I will refer to Feuerbach rather loosely throughout this book, it is probably helpful to explain in more detail something of his approach to prayer. It is well known that Barth was fond of Ludwig Feuerbach’s scathing critique of religion. Feuerbach rather helpfully for Barth let the Schleiermacherian cat out of the bag for all to see: the ‘God’ of which German liberalism spoke with that loud voice was revealed by Feuerbach to be a projection of the self, an idol, a ‘No-God’. He turned ‘theology, which seemed half-inclined towards the same goal, completely and finally into anthropology’, Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Its Background and History (trans. Brian Cozens and John Bowden; London: SCM Press, 2001), pp. 520–26 (520). For Feuerbach’s treatment of prayer, see Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (trans. George Eliot; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 119–24. Under these projectionist conditions, and reducing the content of God to one’s own self-understanding, it is unsurprising that Feuerbach would understand prayer to be ‘a dialogue of man with himself, with his heart’, Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, p. 122. Prayer becomes therapy to alter, in some cathartic incurvature, the inner state of the pray-er. Feuerbach was not entirely wrong with this: he was right to associate prayer with bringing about a change from within but he was also mistaken (at least on Barth’s reasoning) for assuming that this work is not the work of the divine and that prayer does not also bring about a change in the divine. Thus Feuerbach argues that the ‘ultimate essence of religion is revealed by the simplest act of religion – prayer … In prayer, man … declares articulately that God is his alter ego … Thus what is prayer but the wish of the heart expressed with confidence in its fulfilment?’, Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, p. 121. In this sense, prayer involves not the transformation of desire but its affirmation and on that basis (and only on that basis) is worth doing. In other words, Feuerbach retains a space for prayer but only so that in ‘prayer man turns to the Omnipotence of Goodness; – which simply means, that in prayer man adores his own heart’, Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, p. 124. Despite Barth’s agreement with Feuerbach’s pushing of Schleiermacher and his heirs to their logical completion, the fear of the reduction of prayer to monological therapeutics often bore the brunt of Barth’s concern and no doubt contributed to his allergy to the more contemplative aspects of prayer (to be discussed later). Indeed, for Barth, Feuerbach represents all that can go wrong with theology in general and prayer in particular. Busch, Karl Barth, p. 127. The sermon is published as ‘The Name of the Lord’ in Karl Barth and Eduard Thurneysen, Come Holy Spirit (trans. G. W. Richards, E. G. Homrighausen and K. J. Ernst; Oxford: A. R. Mowbray, 1967), pp. 24–35. Barth, ‘The Name of the Lord’, p. 26. Ibid., p. 25.

Introduction

7

prayer, rather paradoxically, is nothing less than prayer itself: ‘Pray that you may pray aright’.28 Most of Barth’s time in Göttingen, however, was taken up with the task of lecturing. And lecture he did. The 1920s was a decade of remarkable productivity in Barth’s life. A thorough immersion in historical theological exegesis and accompanying lectures was complemented by the delivery of his first (and indeed only) full cycle of dogmatic and ethical lectures.29 In the lectures on Calvin delivered during this period, Barth can be found for one of the first times prioritizing petitionary prayer over other forms of prayer, particularly forms of silent prayer and worship. ‘Prayer now becomes what it ought to be: petition’.30 He cites with approval Calvin’s aversion to the silent worship that is at the ‘climax of piety’ – ‘mystical waiting, silence, and absorption seemed to him to be simply indolence, sleepiness, and intoxication’.31 Furthermore, the Göttingen Dogmatics (delivered between 1924 and 1925), begins by citing a prayer that Aquinas put at head of the Summa: ‘Merciful God, I ask that thou wilt grant me, as thou pleasest, to seek earnestly, to investigate carefully, to know truthfully, and to present perfectly, to the glory of thy name, Amen.’32 While for Thomas (as Barth reads him), prayer makes dogmatics a ‘holy, lofty, beautiful, and joyful work of art’, for Barth, prayer performs the penitential purpose of bringing theologians to their knees.33 Theology is a messy business ‘and studying dogmatics is a burden, a burden that we cannot and may not and will not avoid, but still a burden’.34 With prayer, however, comes bold humility to pursue the burdened task of theology despite its difficulty – Christians dare to speak about God because God has dared to address them first. Continuing the pace of Göttingen’s rather rapid lecture regime, the winter semester of 1923–24 also saw lectures on Schleiermacher.35 In later writings, Barth would become highly critical of what he considered to be the slippery 28

29

30

31 32 33 34 35

Barth, ‘The Name of the Lord’, p. 26. This ‘ought-cannot’ dialectic is reminiscent of his earlier statement about the task of theology, see Karl Barth, ‘The Word of God and the Task of Ministry’, in The Word of God and the Word of Man (trans. Douglas Horton; New York: Harper, 1957), pp. 183–217 (186). The productivity of the Göttingen years is drawn out well in Christopher Asprey, Eschatological Presence in Karl Barth’s Göttingen Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Karl Barth, The Theology of John Calvin (trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley ; Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1995), p. 280. Barth, The Theology of John Calvin, p. 152. His distaste for silent worship is repeated in III/4, p. 112. GD, pp. 3–4. Ibid., p. 4. Ibid. Karl Barth, The Theology of Schleiermacher: Lectures at Göttingen (trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley ; Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1982), pp. 31–39. For a helpful discussion of Barth’s relation to the nineteenth-century’s thinking on prayer, see JinHyok Kim, The Spirit of God and the Christian Life: Reconstructing Karl Barth’s Pneumatology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014), pp. 46–54.

8

Karl Barth on Prayer

slope from Schleiermacher’s de-personalization of the addressee of prayer (the ‘Father’ becomes ‘a neuter, an original “It” or “Something” ’) to monological therapeutics.36 Doing away with the vocative of the Lord’s Prayer, for Barth, compromises prayer’s basis in the command of God and risks mistaking ‘self-help’ for prayer to God.37 In the Göttingen lectures, however, Barth is more generous about the ‘dialectic of prayer’ he detects in Schleiermacher. The dialectic comprises a yearning for the divine on the one hand, and on the other, a strong ethical concern and social awareness. The ‘dialectic of prayer constantly calls the individual to stillness but then directs him to the active life, so Christianity as a whole has to be something distinctive in the world but then at once it must seek out and permeate the world’.38 This appreciation of Schleiermacher’s attention to the ethical implications of prayer helps to complicate dominant readings that assume that Barth found in Schleiermacher no more than an obsession with inner religious consciousness. Schleiermacher’s consequent broadening out of prayer from ‘an individual act’ to ‘a general and ongoing situation of man before God’ has very obvious parallels in Barth’s subsequent writings on the ethics of prayer.39 Furthermore, although Barth thought he saw in Schleiermacher’s removal of the ‘personal address “Father” ’ a tendency towards therapeutics, in that same mature text on prayer Barth himself also comes to use distinctively Schleiermacherian language to describe how the pray-er is ‘absolutely dependent’ on the grace of God for prayer itself.40 The move to Münster in 1925 saw lectures on ethics (delivered over the course of two whole semesters in 1928), partly in response to some of the early criticisms that the topic was receiving too little attention in Barth’s early writings.41 Notable for the trinitarian arrangement and the corresponding threefold structuring around the command of God the creator, reconciler and redeemer, these early lectures on ethics supply the only complete cycle of ethical lectures in Barth’s writings. Barth, of course, left the ethics of the command of God the reconciler

36

37 38 39 40 41

ChrL, p. 57. Schleiermacher’s principal treatment of prayer in the Glaubenslehre can be found at The Christian Faith (trans. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956), pp. 668–75. ChrL, p. 103. Barth, The Theology of Schleiermacher, p. 47. Ibid., p. 31. ChrL, p. 57. Busch, Karl Barth, p. 181. A slightly revised version of these lectures was delivered at the University of Bonn in 1930. The secondary literature on these early lectures on ethics is generally scant, though the exceptions are excellent: Nigel Biggar, The Hastening that Waits: Karl Barth’s Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 46–88 and John Webster, Barth’s Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth’s Thought (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), pp. 41–64.

Introduction

9

in the Church Dogmatics unfinished and the projected ethics of the doctrine of redemption unplanned. In the final part of these early ethical lectures, in respect to the ethics of redemption and the doctrine of the third article, Barth produces his most articulated theology of prayer to date. Given the threefold unfolding of the Münster ethics, the third ‘sphere’ is an obvious location for prayer. In the first ‘sphere’ of ethics, the command of God the creator encounters the ethical agent as a creature; in the second, the ethical agent is encountered by the command of God the reconciler as a pardoned sinner; and in the third, the command of God the redeemer encounters the ethical agent as God’s child. And what do children of God do? They call upon God as their Father, ‘Our Father’. The organizing theme of the Münster ethics of redemption, therefore, is ‘promise’, the eschatological promise that God is our redeemer and we are redeemed. It is also significant that in these lectures prayer is defined as ‘talking’ to God.42 In other words, prayer must be verbal and directed to God. ‘Where this purpose is not present, where we talk to ourselves and or talk about God to our own edification and strengthening, we do not pray’ – notice again here Barth’s recurrent fear of Feuerbach’s ‘anti-prayer’.43 Two things should be emphasized about the structural decision to locate prayer in the ethics of redemption. First, a clear link between the doctrine of the Holy Spirit and prayer arises. ‘Not for nothing is “Come, Creator Spirit” the prayer that includes within itself all prayer’, Barth writes. 44 Second, a connection is made patent between eschatology and prayer. The ‘promise’ (to use the language of redemption) of praying ‘is held out before us, pledged to us, and allotted to us in advance’, on earth as it is in heaven.45 The possibility of prayer, Barth argues, ‘can be understood only if we humans are more than God’s creatures and more than sinners saved by grace. Prayer is the actualization of our eschatological reality that is possible here and now.’46 Barth’s eschatological interpretation of prayer is startling, disruptive and throws the pray-ers into unrest as they ‘wait and hasten towards the future of the Lord’.47 Indeed, those who pray ‘cannot be content with things as they are’ 42 43 44

45 46 47

For example, Ethics, pp. 472–73. Ibid., p. 473. Ibid., p. 478. The centrality of the role of the Holy Spirit in prayer also can be found in the lectures on the Reformed confessions Barth gave in the summer semester of 1923. ‘The true prayer’, Barth writes, ‘is solely the Holy Spirit in us with its inexpressible sighs’, Karl Barth, The Theology of the Reformed Confessions (trans. Darrell L. Guder and Judith J. Guder; Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), p. 102. Ethics, p. 56. Ibid., pp. 472–73. Ibid., pp. 475.

10

Karl Barth on Prayer

but are ‘to march out, become pilgrims and strangers, and in these kingdoms move boldly toward the coming kingdom of glory’.48 The political implications of Barth’s linking of prayer and eschatology will also be drawn out at a later stage of this book. Barth would develop this pneumatological and eschatological interpretation of prayer in a long lecture on ‘The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life’ delivered at a conference for pastors and students in Elberfeld in October 1929. In this lecture, Barth expounds his theology of prayer along the same lines as his ethical lectures with the same threefold division of creation, reconciliation and redemption – but makes good on his earlier claim that there is a perichoretic logic that runs through these divisions by focusing exclusively on the role of the Spirit across all three spheres. Like the fuller version of the ethical lectures, the themes of the final structural division include the eschatological themes of hope, promise and prayer. ‘It must be said that it [prayer] can only be made intelligible from the point of view of eschatology.’49 The promise of being remade as God’s children to partake in the divine nature (2 Pet. 1.4) remains a promise because ‘we are, as yet, not the children of God’.50 Thus, the ethical position is one of waiting and hoping for the fulfilment of this promise. This expectant hope is actualized, for Barth, in gratitude (‘God’s children are grateful, and therefore are free’) and then in prayer.51 Even here he is quite clear that prayer has nothing ‘to do with a helpless mourner who prays with a performance composed of finished, polished, deepest concentration, and so forth. But it has to do with one who is simply and solely nothing else but a “groaner” ’.52 He continues: ‘the Holy Spirit makes a person who actually, really prays’.53 This is quite a way to conclude his lecture. Moreover, it introduces some suggestive themes that invite further reflection: that prayer involves a complex union of agency – at once divine but also, Barth writes, ‘in our mouth’, that the response to someone like Feuerbach’s reduction of prayer to praying ‘in himself and to himself ’ is a robust pneumatology and that the ethical agent is remade, by the Spirit, to pray.54 48 49

50 51 52 53 54

Ibid., pp. 487–88. Karl Barth, The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life: The Theological Basis of Ethics (trans. R. Birch Hoyle; Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993), p. 67. Barth, The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life, p. 62. Ibid., p. 66. Ibid., p. 67. Ibid., p. 68. Ibid.

Introduction

11

Barth accepted an invitation to succeed Otto Ritschl in early 1930 as the chair of systematic theology in Bonn, a position he would occupy until his expulsion from both his professorial chair and Germany in 1935 for beginning his lectures with prayer rather than the requisite German salute.55 In the summer and winter semesters of 1930–31, Barth repeated a slightly revised version of his Münster lectures on ethics. It was not until the end of the 1940s, however, during Barth’s exile to his hometown of Basel, that developments in his theology of prayer gained serious momentum. With the Church Dogmatics well underway, a period of intensive engagement with the issue of prayer began. In a few short years, Barth had included significant treatments on prayer in three of the four part-volumes of the doctrine of creation in the Church Dogmatics (III/2, III/3 and III/4) and had delivered seminars on the Lord’s Prayer in the Swiss town of Neuchâtel.56 Barth’s discussion of prayer in the second part-volume of the doctrine of creation forms part of a broader account of the characteristics of the creature’s true humanity. Chiefly, the ‘creature of God’ exists as a being in gratitude. For Barth, receiving grace demands response and responsibility before God. This responsibility includes: knowledge of God, obedience to God, invocation of God and freedom for God. Together these characteristics determine that the creature is not an object but a subject of God called to respond actively to the grace of God. The reference to ‘invocation’ is significant given that, as we shall see, it will become the controlling theme of not only Barth’s theology of prayer but also his entire mature ethical vision as presented in the ethics of reconciliation. Barth begins this section on invocational prayer by repeating the ‘special problem of creatureliness, and therefore … the supreme disparity between human being and divine’.57 However, he goes on to suggest that the limitations of creatureliness are ‘transcended’ in the act of prayer. ‘Offering and disposing himself to go to God and to be obedient to the divine call: “Come”, he pushes open the gate and steps out into freedom. As he does so, he is a creature which transcends the limits of the creature.’58 55

56

57 58

See Jørgen Johannes Glenthøj, ‘Karl Barth and the German Salute’, Journal of Church and State 32.2 (1990), pp. 309–23. The three main sections in the doctrine of creation occur at III/2, pp. 186–92, III/3, pp. 265–88 and III/4, pp. 87–115. The seminars on the Lord’s Prayer according to the catechisms of the Reformation given in Neuchâtel in January 1947, 1948, and September 1949 were first published in French from André Perret’s shorthand transcription, then translated into English in 1952 and finally reprinted by Westminster John Knox Press in 2002 as Prayer: 50th Anniversary Edition. III/2, pp. 187–88. Ibid., p. 189.

12

Karl Barth on Prayer

Under Barth’s doctrine of providence, as articulated in III/3, prayer gains further precision and clarification.59 In the crucial paragraph that investigates ‘God the Father as Lord of His Creature’ (§49), Barth turns his attention from considering the ‘supreme disparity’ between God and humanity to how they might relate and in what ways, then, might human agency contribute to the mystery of the divine governance. God’s providential action in the world works, for Barth, in three ways: God preserves, accompanies and rules over humanity. The final section of the paragraph (§49.4) examines what the Christian ‘attitude’ looks like ‘under’ this divine preservation, accompaniment and rule. The Christian attitude, conforming to divine action, takes particular form in three ways: human faith, obedience and prayer. Although Barth insists that believing, obeying and praying should be understood ‘perichoretically’, as it were, as three ways of saying the same ‘Yes’ to one’s creaturely existence, the practice of prayer is singled out as claiming particular importance: ‘everything else is included in this one thing’, Barth claims.60 Continuing the theme that the Christian is called by God’s providential agency into an active existence, Barth determines that prayer is not some ‘inward empowering of the Christian, a breathing of the soul and so forth’ (the type of prayer rejected as early as his commentary on Romans).61 Instead, 59

60 61

There is a tendency in many of the existing reflections on Barth’s theology of prayer to focus attention chiefly on the formal, concentrated sections on prayer in the doctrine of creation. For example, see: Michael Meyer-Blanck, ‘Gottesdienst und Gebet bei Karl Barth’, Zeitschrift für dialektische Theologie 24.2 (2008), pp. 131–40; Christopher C. Green, Doxological Theology: Karl Barth on Divine Providence, Evil and the Angels (London: T&T Clark, 2011); Eva Harasta, ‘Petition and Subordination: Karl Barth’s Interpretation of Prayer’, Sino-Christian Studies 8 (2009), pp. 9–30; I. John Hesselink, ‘Karl Barth on Prayer’, in Karl Barth, Prayer: 50th Anniversary Edition (trans. Sara F. Terrien; Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), pp. 74–94; John Kelsay, ‘Prayer and Ethics: Reflections on Calvin and Barth’, The Harvard Theological Review 82.2 (1989), pp. 169– 84; John McIntyre, Theology after the Storm: Reflections on the Upheavals in Modern Theology and Culture (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1997), pp. 181–87; Migliore, ‘Freedom to Pray’, pp. 96–102; Matthew Rose, Ethics with Barth: God, Metaphysics and Morals (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 145–50; Lou Shapiro, ‘Karl Barth’s Understanding of Prayer’, Crux 42.1 (1988), pp. 26–33 and K. F. Wiggermann, ‘ “Im Gebet aber sollen und dürfen wir aus der Rolle fallen”: Zur Praktischen Theologie des Bittgebets im Anschluss an Karl Barths Kirchliche Dogmatik’, Zeitschrift für dialektische Theologie 15.2 (1999), pp. 179–90. Although both Webster and Husbands attend more to the ethics of reconciliation they also include overviews of Barth’s theology of prayer as it appears in the doctrine of creation, see John Webster, Barth’s Ethics of Reconciliation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 76–80; Mark A. Husbands, ‘Barth’s Ethics of Prayer: A Study in Moral Ontology and Action’ (Doctoral thesis of the University of Toronto, 2005), pp. 264–76. In an exception to the rule, however, McDowell reads Barth’s theology of prayer through other areas of his theology, including his chapter on prayer in Evangelical Theology and his early trinitarian theology in I/1, see respectively, John C. McDowell ‘ “Openness to the World”: Karl Barth’s Evangelical Theology of Christ as the Pray-er’, Modern Theology 25.2 (2009), pp. 253–83 and John C. McDowell, ‘Prayer, Particularity and the Subject of Divine Personhood: Who Are Brümmer and Barth Invoking When They Pray?’, in Myk Habets and Phillip Tolliday (eds), Trinitarian Theology after Barth (Eugene: Pickwick, 2011), pp. 255–83. III/3, pp. 265–88 (265). Ibid., p. 265.

Introduction

13

he wants to reconceive prayer as ‘the most intimate and effective form of Christian action’.62 Prayer is the most basic form of both faith and obedience and although includes praise, thanksgiving, confession, penitence and intercession, it has its centre decisively in ‘petition’. Through this prioritization of petition, Barth brings precision to his understanding of what has, up until now, been a rather general account of what constitutes prayer. In petition, prayer has ‘a centre, one specific act which constitutes the whole, from which all the rest proceeds and to which it returns, from which alone it receives its meaning and power’.63 For Barth, being Barth, petition is christologically disciplined. ‘Something has happened in Jesus Christ’ that means ‘the Christian is able to ask’.64 Prayer is best understood, therefore, in terms of gift. ‘It does not derive from the self-will of the Christian himself ’ but ‘from what the Christian receives from God, and from the command which is given with this gift.’65 Indeed, Christ is the ‘one great gift’.66 Conceiving prayer in terms of gift does interesting things to the theology of prayer. In a very Barthian way, it means that the ‘first and proper suppliant is none other than Jesus Christ Himself ’.67 This is of ‘decisive practical importance for the meaning and character of Christian prayer’.68 As we shall see later, Christ is the teacher, leader, intercessor, representative and suppliant of prayer. It is because of Christ’s activity as pray-er that we too can pray. In a complex christological move, that can only be paraphrased here, Barth writes that as ‘He [Christ] prays with it, it can now pray with Him’.69 On this christological basis, the section on prayer in III/3 climaxes with a rather unexpected but pregnant claim that in prayer Christians are taken up to ‘the seat of government, the very heart of the mystery and purpose of all occurrence’.70 This is a ‘genuine and actual share in the universal lordship of God’.71 In prayer, Barth writes, ‘he is the friend of God, called to the side of God and at the side of God, living and ruling and reigning with Him’.72 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

Ibid., p. 264, emphasis added. Ibid., p. 266. Ibid., p. 269. Ibid., p. 270. Ibid., p. 273. Ibid., p. 274. Ibid. Ibid., p. 277. Ibid., p. 288. Ibid., p. 285. Ibid., p. 286.

14

Karl Barth on Prayer

Barth continues to develop his theology of prayer in an active direction by returning to prayer in the context of ethics, this time in the ethics of creation (III/4). He is again thinking more expansively about prayer as the ‘underlying note and basis of all human activity’ and also ‘continually exercised in [the] particular’, and by the particular Barth means ‘petition’.73 In III/4, petition is described as the climax and defining act of the three actions of human freedom before God (§53.3), the other two are observing the ‘holy day’ and ‘confession’ (§53.1–2). The section on prayer begins with a sustained reflection on petition’s elegant simplicity. It is ‘free from all care. It does not have to be beautiful or edifying, logically coherent or theologically correct. Neither formally, materially nor methodologically does it have to display any kind of art … It may well be that he can only sigh, stammer and mutter.’ 74 Five points bring further clarity to Barth’s understanding of prayer as the quintessential act of human freedom before God. First, our freedom to pray is not grounded in any need to pray. Instead, prayer, for Barth, is a commanded activity. ‘The real basis of prayer is man’s freedom before God, the God-given permission to pray which, because it is given by God, becomes a command and order and therefore a necessity.’75 Second, Barth restates his prioritization of petition and repeats his earlier claim that even though prayer includes adoration, thanksgiving, praise and confession, it is ‘decisively’ petition.76 Third, prayer, even as petition, is always the work of the community. Petition is ‘common prayer’ and this ‘is what liberates his asking and makes it a genuinely human action’.77 Fourth, by praying in the name of Jesus Christ, through which the pray-er participates in Christ’s own prayer, one has the confidence and assurance that prayers are heard. ‘By “hearing” is to be understood the reception and adoption of the human request into God’s plan and will, and therefore the divine and speech and action which correspond to the human request.’78 Throughout this section, and indeed others, Barth remains confidently untroubled by issue concerning the efficacy of prayer – reconfigured christologically and pneumatologically, the answering of prayer is a (trinitarian) given. Fifth, Barth concludes with some practical advice for true prayer, including the recommendation for ‘grace at meals’ and the insistence that prayer should ‘not be a state but an

73 74 75 76 77 78

III/4, p. 89. Ibid., p. 88. Ibid., p. 92. Ibid., p. 97. Ibid., p. 103. Ibid., p. 106.

Introduction

15

act’: vocal, short and regular.79 ‘It has thus no reason to spin itself out in the form of meditations.’80 In beginning to articulate the distinctiveness of his own theology of prayer, the small-print sections on prayer in III/4 are dominated by references to prayer in the theology of Calvin, Luther and the Heidelberg Catechism. It is of no coincidence that around the same time as composing these sections of the Church Dogmatics, Barth was delivering seminars on the Lord’s Prayer in conversation with these same three Reformation sources at Neuchâtel.81 The result is the single most sustained treatment of prayer to be undertaken by Barth outside of the Church Dogmatics and serves to root Barth in a long and rich tradition of interpretation of the Lord’s Prayer. The seminars fall into two chapters: the first is a constructive engagement with prayer consisting of subsections on (i) the problem of prayer, (ii) the gift of prayer and (iii) prayer as a human act; the second chapter is a petition-by-petition exegesis of the Lord’s Prayer, through which the prioritization of petition secured in the formal sections on prayer in the doctrine of creation is reinforced. Barth divides the Lord’s Prayer into two sections. The first three petitions concern the glory of God; the last three ‘concern us’. The division of the Lord’s Prayer emphasizes the priority of divine action but also, Barth notes, is analogous to the ordering of the Ten Commandments.82 ‘The first three correspond to the first four Commandments, and the last three to Commandments five through ten.’83

79 80 81

82 83

Ibid., p. 111. Ibid., p. 112. The Neuchâtel material is roughly contemporaneous with the drafting of the third part-volume of the doctrine of creation. Therefore, some cross-fertilization between these tests should be expected, see Busch, Karl Barth, pp. 342–43. However, the influence of the Neuchâtel seminars on the unfolding of III/3 is perhaps overstated by Green who argues that ‘Barth orchestrates his volume on divine providence according to the pattern of the Lord’s Prayer itself ’, Green, Doxological Theology, p. 4. For Green, the Neuchâtel seminars reveal the hermeneutical key to the entire part-volume and provide conceptual cohesion to an otherwise rather incoherent and disintegrated text. There are two main problems, however, with Green’s smoothing out of the structural tensions of the part-volume – one historical, the other textual. First, other than the reference to the seminars in Busch’s biography, there is little historical evidence to support Green’s claim that the Neuchâtel seminars in particular or the Lord’s Prayer in general influenced the doctrinal organization of III/3. In addition to this stretching of historical evidence, there is a second, textual, problem – that is, it is quite difficult to see how the third, fourth and fifth petitions of the Lord’s Prayer fit into Green’s schema. In the broadest and most implicit terms, it could be conceived that the first half of the volume coincidentally reflects the first half of the Lord’s Prayer and §§ 50 and 51 the sixth petition and the doxology. However, the absence of any clear reference to the middle part of the Lord’s Prayer in III/3 causes major difficulties to Green’s defence of the internal consistency of the volume. For my review of Green’s book, see Colloquium 44.2 (2012), pp. 261–64. Prayer, p. 27. Ibid., p. 26.

16

Karl Barth on Prayer

At this point in its development, Barth’s theology of prayer can be seen to toggle quite successfully between Luther, Calvin and the Heidelberg Catechism. For example, he borrows Luther’s emphasis on prayer as ‘obedience to the command of God’; in Calvin he finds rich resources for his own christological interpretation of prayer and to consider in further detail ‘the part played by the Holy Spirit in prayer’; from Heidelberg he learns of the importance of the theme of ‘gratitude’ in prayer; and from all three, Barth fi nds ways of overcoming the distinction between private and communal prayer.84 However, he also considers ‘the restraint with which they [Luther, Calvin and the Heidelberg Catechism] understand prayer centrally as petition’ rather puzzling, so too are their respective failures to discern ‘here or elsewhere the eschatological character’ of the second petition.85 The next time Barth would turn to a petition-by-petition analysis of the Lord’s Prayer, would be late in life in the (eschatologically rich) ethics of reconciliation – but those lectures, unlike these, remain unfinished. Before Barth arrives at his most extensive treatment of prayer in the ethics of reconciliation, the topic features briefly in both IV/2 and IV/3. In the second part-volume of the doctrine of reconciliation, he includes prayer (alongside confession, baptism and the Lord’s Supper) in the fourfold occurrence of what he terms ‘divine service’, in which community is to be found.86 ‘The community is constituted as it prays’, Barth writes.87 In IV/3, prayer is discussed as one of twelve ‘special’ forms of the Church’s ministry.88 Included in this inventory of public witness is praise, preaching, instruction, evangelization, mission, theology, prayer (notice prayer’s central position), care of the souls, personal examples of Christian life and action, diaconal service, prophetic action and fellowship. In that section Barth repeats in nuce much of what had been articulated in the prayer-sections of the doctrine of creation. ‘Prayer is not just an occasional breathing of the soul, nor it is merely an individual elevation of the heart. It is a movement in which Christians jointly and persistently engage. It is absolutely indispensable in the accomplishment of the action required of the community. It cannot possibly be separated from this action.’89 The arrangement of the inventory of public witness is also suggestive in the

84 85 86 87 88 89

Ibid., pp. 4–5. III/4, p. 97; Prayer, p. 35. See IV/2, pp. 704–6. IV/3, p. 705. See IV/3, pp. 865–901 (for prayer, see pp. 882–85). Ibid., p. 882.

Introduction

17

close relation it forges between prayer and theology: ‘theological work is surely inconceivable and impossible at any time without prayer’, he writes.90 As noted, Barth’s thinking about prayer received its most sustained and pronounced attention in the lectures and seminars with which he ended the Church Dogmatics. Published as a fragment in 1976 as the seventh volume of the Swiss Gesamtausgabe under the title Das christliche Leben (and in English a few years later as The Christian Life), the lectures would have formed the final ethical part-volume of the doctrine of reconciliation.91 In contrast to the arrangement of the Münster ethics, Barth arranges his mature ethical thought around the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer; and in contrast to the earlier treatments of prayer as petition, and following Psalm 50.15, Barth turns to the invocation (Anrufung) of God as the ‘controlling concept’ of his vision of the Christian life – hereafter, referred to as the ‘turn to invocation’. Without pre-empting too much of what is to follow, the writings on invocation, it will be argued, contain Barth’s most insightful reflections on prayer: they are pneumatologically as well as christologically rich, claim significant political import and are underpinned by a highly participative grammar of agential relations. Moreover, this mature exposition of the Lord’s Prayer, if completed, would have been massive, even by standards set by the rest of the Church Dogmatics: as it stands, the literary remains amount to several hundred pages of typescript and weigh in at nearly five-hundred pages of the published Gesamtausgabe. And this is without counting the baptism fragment, which, along with his unwritten theology of the Lord’s Supper, would have been part of the invocational vision. Had the lectures progressed at the same rapid pace, Barth might well have produced a treatment of prayer unrivalled in its size in the Christian tradition and certainly well surpassing even that long twentieth chapter on prayer in book three of Calvin’s Institutes.92 Various issues, however, prevented Barth from developing his theology of invocation beyond the first two petitions of the Lord’s Prayer. Most notably, the momentum for the Church Dogmatics was lost on his retirement from his lecturing responsibilities at the University of Basel. Further distractions included his seven-week trip to America, his involvement in the Second Vatican Council, 90 91

92

Ibid., p. 882. Karl Barth, Das christliche Leben: Die Kirchliche Dogmatik IV/4 – Fragmente aus dem Nachlass, Karl Barth-Gesamtausgabe 7, (eds) H.-A. Drewes and E. Jüngel (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 1976) = The Christian Life: Church Dogmatics IV/4 – Lecture Fragments (trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley ; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1981). John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (ed. John T. McNeill and trans. Ford Lewis Battles; Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1960), pp. 850–920.

18

Karl Barth on Prayer

that illness was now more regular for him and that by now Barth was an old man.93 Breaking off after the second petition, the drafts remain unfinished with little indication as to how the remaining petitions were to be interpreted. In fact, Barth did not even work the drafts up to a publishable standard himself (that work fell to Eberhard Jüngel and Hans-Anton Drewes). Because the ethical drafts will dominate later chapters of this book, just an overview of the volume will suffice here. In accordance with III/4, the ethics of reconciliation begins with a paragraph on the particular task of ethics in the context of the command of God the reconciler (§74). The paragraph also includes a discussion of ‘invocation’, why Barth thinks it should be the chief ethical theme of the Christian life, how it relates to other practices of prayer and its role within wider ethical movements in Barth’s writings. From there, Barth discusses the foundation of the Christian life, baptism (§75), which he revised and published as a separate fragment in 1967 (as IV/4). Thereafter, each petition of the Lord’s Prayer would occupy an independent paragraph. He begins with a discussion of the significance of the vocative ‘Our Father’, the type of moral ontology implied by the divine name and what it means, as children, to call upon God as ‘Our Father’ (§76). The exegesis of the first petition, understood as the ‘Zeal for the Honor of God’ (§77), contains material on the priority of the self-hallowing of the divine name and the ‘passion’ of the Christian to be ‘caught up’ into the self-hallowing of that name.94 This ‘catching up’ into the divine self-hallowing is not passive but active. For Barth, ‘the law of prayer is the law of action.’95 And the lex orandi determines that praying the first petition ‘demands a movement analogous to that which we ask and expect from God’.96 In fact, ‘we cannot possibly refrain from rising up ourselves with zeal and burning passion’.97 What this ‘zeal and burning passion’ for the hallowing of the divine name looks like is considered in the next and final paragraph of The Christian Life, which is on the second petition of the Lord’s Prayer. Barth’s exegesis of the second petition is entitled ‘The Struggle for Human Righteousness’ (§78). In these exciting and fast-paced reflections, Barth argues that righteousness and justice will reign but only after struggle and ‘revolt’ against the disorder of the world. This, for Barth, involves the active rebellion against the ‘lordless powers’ and the coming of the kingdom 93 94 95 96 97

On this, see IV/4, pp. vii–viii; ChrL, p. vii. ChrL, p. 168. Ibid. Ibid., p. 169. Ibid.

Introduction

19

of God. His hope was for the volume to be ‘crowned’ with an account of the Lord’s Supper as the ‘renewal’ of the Christian life.98 Barth died, however, before he could finish his interpretation of the Lord’s Prayer and begin his theology of the Lord’s Supper. In addition to the central position of prayer in the ethics of reconciliation, there is further evidence to suggest that Barth’s thinking on prayer was gathering pace in this late period. Around the same time as the composition of the ethical lectures, in 1962, Barth rather reluctantly permitted a series of his pastoral prayers to be collected and published.99 This was not the first time Barth’s prayers had appeared in print, but it was the first time that the prayers had been published in isolation from their accompanying sermons.100 Barth’s reluctance at seeing them in print was in part because of the admission he makes in the foreword of the volume of his liturgical awkwardness. He recalls that he ‘did not know how to act in front of the “altars” except in a clumsy manner’.101 After one particular service, feedback was received that went along the lines: ‘You get A for the sermon, but F for the liturgy.’102 But part of Barth’s reluctance was also theological: his fear was that these prayers would be repeated verbatim in churches, which would clearly ruffle his actualistic feathers. Prayer necessities a certain ‘freshness’ that a simple repetition of old prayers (written for a particular context and congregation) risks stifling. Despite Barth’s admitted reluctance, if the reciprocity between prayer and theology is to be reached then these prayers should be allowed to exercise as much theological import as the more doctrinally explicit material on prayer. Indeed, many of the prayers are prayed versions of vintage Barthian doctrine – expect a strong Christology, lots of references to sin (as pride, sloth and falsehood), the prior hearing of prayer, the giftedness of salvation and, interestingly, a strong sociopolitical emphasis.103 It is suggestive that one of the most politically charged prayers is his prayer set for Pentecost – this link between prayer, politics and the Holy Spirit will be developed in a later chapter of this book.104 There are at least two other texts of this period in which prayer claims an important role: a sermon delivered to the inmates of Basel Prison during his 98

IV/4, p. ix. Karl Barth, Gebete (München: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1963) = Selected Prayers (trans. Keith R. Crim; London: Epworth Press, 1966). 100 For the accompanying sermons, see Predigten: 1954–1967, Karl Barth-Gesamtausgabe 12, (eds.) Hinrich Stoevesandt (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 2003). 101 Barth, Selected Prayers, p. 5, rev. 102 Ibid., p. 5. 103 There are references to the Cold War, for example, in Barth, Selected Prayers, pp. 16, 20. 104 Ibid., p. 46 99

20

Karl Barth on Prayer

professorial tenure and his swansong lectures of the early 1960s that marked the ending of that tenure.105 It is notable that prayer bookends each of the sermons published in the volume of prison sermons, thus raising important questions concerning the relation between prayer and preaching. Each sermon also begins with a reading from Holy Scripture. One sermon published in this volume begins with a short but very relevant (given the structure of the ethics of reconciliation) biblical text: Psalm 50.15 – ‘Call me in the day of trouble, I will deliver you, and you shall praise me’. In addition to ‘invocation’, a key theme in this sermon is the otherness of God. ‘The one who calls us is the one who is different.’106 It is suggestive that the dialectics of difference that so defined his early work remains just as strong here in the old man’s pastoral work in Basel. Another prevalent thematic feature of the sermon, which is also a central concern of his theology of prayer, is that our calling upon God is preceded by God’s call to ‘call me’. And the ‘me’ is also significant as it serves to emphasize that although God is indeed qualitatively different, prayer is about the addressing of God in personal terms. The final theme in this sermon that says something about Barth’s overall understanding of prayer is the idea that we cannot pray without first being taught to pray – and this, of course, is a lesson of grace. Barth was due to retire from his public teaching position at the University of Basel in the summer semester of 1961 (at which point he was lecturing on the second petition of the Lord’s Prayer as part of the cycle of ethical lectures on the doctrine of reconciliation). However, the unexpectedly prolonged process of securing the appointment of Barth’s successor meant that his lecturing commitments showed no sign of abatement.107 Accordingly, he continued lecturing into the winter semester of 1961–62 but rather than picking up where the Church Dogmatics left off (with the lectures on the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer), his final lecture series as Professor Ordinarius at Basel ‘began anew again at the beginning’ and took as its theme an introduction to Christian theology.108 When the dispute over his successor had been resolved and Barth finally had been released into retirement (if you can call it that), the first five of these lectures were repeated at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago and at Princeton Theological Seminary

105

The sermon is published as ‘Call Me: Psalm 50.15’ in Karl Barth, Call for God: New Sermons from Basel Prison (trans. A. T. Mackay ; London: SCM Press, 1967), pp. 29–37. 106 Barth, ‘Call Me’, p. 31. 107 Busch, Karl Barth, p. 454. 108 See ET, p. 165.

Introduction

21

during his seven-week America trip. The complete lectures were published in English as Evangelical Theology: An Introduction in 1963.109 By this point, free from the polemics that had defined his explosive entry onto the theological scene, the mature Barth had mellowed into a theology that was altogether more positive. As part of his positive vision for theology in these farewell lectures, Barth devoted a lecture to the topic of prayer in which he reflected at length on his long-held commitment to the essential ‘unity of prayer and theology’.110 The chapter on prayer headlines the fourth and final part of the lecture series, which he entitled ‘theological work’. For Barth, ‘the first and basic act of theological work is prayer’.111 Theological work, he writes, ‘must really and truly take place in the form of a liturgical act, as invocation of God, and as prayer’.112 In other words, Barth’s final reflections on the nature of the theological task ended where it began, with prayer. This brief and incomplete survey has hoped to reveal something of Barth’s lifelong fascination with prayer. Kindled during his own education, carried through into his pastoral work, prayer would gradually gather pace until it occupied a position of centrality in his most mature writings. The texts mentioned in this chapter invite careful interpretation to reveal the distinctiveness of Barth’s theology of prayer and also its strengths and weaknesses. From the overview above, a major strength of Barth’s theology of prayer to be noted at this point and to be developed at a later stage in this book is how it consciously works, with considerable skill and eloquence, at the intersection of the theological, the spiritual, the ethical as well as the political to produce a thoroughly integrated theology of prayer. A weakness should also be apparent: what has happened to the tradition of contemplative prayer in Barth’s theology? Petition is clearly dominant throughout the doctrine of creation and invocation throughout the ethics of reconciliation but what about contemplation, meditation and the more receptive practices of prayer that are fundamental in so much of the Christian tradition of prayer yet remain curiously overlooked in Barth’s engagement with the topic? One of the aims of this book is to investigate this issue.

109

For the German, see Karl Barth, Einführung in die Evangelische Theologie (Zürich: Evangelischer Verlag, 1962). 110 See ET, p. 161. 111 Ibid., p. 160. 112 Ibid., p. 164.

22

Karl Barth on Prayer

Structure Having demonstrated something of Barth’s lifelong interest in the theology of prayer and identified the areas of the Barthian corpus in which prayer is accorded a particularly privileged place, the final task of this introduction is to sketch out the structure of this book and some of its other aims and arguments. Broadly speaking, this book identifies and considers three major aspects of prayer in Barth’s theology: contemplation (in Chapter 2), petition (in Chapter  3) and invocation (in Chapters 4, 5 and 6). Chapter 2 argues the rather unusual idea that Barth has a theology of contemplative prayer. It might well be (as it is for Balthasar) that it is in his investment in the lex orandi, lex credendi (to be reflected on in the concluding chapter) that critical connections can be made between Barth and the scores of spiritual writers who have gone before him and likewise speak of theology as contemplation.113 This is not, however, a relation that emerges particularly naturally in the ethics of Barth’s theology of prayer. It is well known that Barth ‘was at best reserved and at times suspicious’ of this strand of the Christian tradition of prayer and that nearly always there is a polemical edge to the references to ‘mystical theology’ in the Church Dogmatics.114 The general allusions he makes to ‘mysticism’, and his rather cavalier condemnation that the mystics are up to something that is diametrically opposed to the concerns of true evangelical faith, cast serious doubt on the veracity of his reading of the mystical traditions. Although he does not dabble explicitly in the formative texts of the tradition, the argument that unfolds in Chapter 2 is that there is more to Barth than a grouchy enforcer of an instinctive dislike of all things mystical. Despite Barth’s reservations, he announced that we ‘must not be fanatically anti-mystical’.115 As Barth does not have much to say about contemplative prayer in the more formal sections on prayer in the Church Dogmatics, some creativity needs to be exercised in order to locate and develop a positive space for contemplation in Barth’s theology. 113

Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 1: Seeing the Form (trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1982), p. 56. McIntosh similarly argues that ‘Barth can be read fairly and indeed profitably in connection with mystical theology, not as himself a mystic, but as one whose theology is truly designed to be transformative, to be truthful in orienting the reader towards the abiding mystery of God’s love’, in Mark A. McIntosh, ‘Humanity in God: On Reading Karl Barth in Relation to Mystical Theology’, Heythrop Journal 34.1 (1993), pp. 22–40 (22–23). 114 See David F. Ford, Christian Wisdom: Desiring God and Learning in Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 248. 115 IV/1, p. 104.

Introduction

23

The chapter tests a thesis that space for contemplation might well be located and developed in his theology of the Sabbath. The subsequent chapters turn more directly to Barth’s writings on prayer. Chapter 3 returns to the familiar territory of petitionary prayer and draws mainly from the doctrine of creation in the Church Dogmatics and the broadly concurrent seminars Barth was delivering in Neuchâtel. The chapter considers Barth’s theology of petition in light of his doctrine of the command of God, the christological dynamics of prayer and his treatment of sin as pride. Questions over the propriety of prioritizing petitionary prayer so strongly are asked and concerns over the type of participation assumed by a theology of petitionary prayer are expressed before work on invocation can begin. The final leg of this book, on invocation, unfolds in three chapters. Chapter 4 considers the turn from a prioritization of petitionary prayer in the doctrine of creation to an understanding of prayer as centrally invocation in the ethics of reconciliation. After examining who is invoked and Barth’s reflections on the naming of God as ‘Father’, the chapter asks the same questions which were asked of petition and demonstrates that, precisely through its grounding in pneumatology and commitment to the motif of the ‘correspondence’ of divine and human agency in prayer, the newly conceived theology of invocation resists the questions and concerns raised at the end of Chapter 3. It also revisits the issue of contemplation to consider what happens in the invocational turn to the type of contemplative prayer developed in Chapter 2 and makes some critical connections between Barth’s mature writings on prayer and his late theology of baptism. The next two chapters continue to unpack the claim that the invocational turn opens up new avenues in the interpretation of aspects of Barth’s theology. Chapter 5 tests more explicitly the relation between prayer, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit and the logic of participation through a close reading of a particularly pneumatologically lively subsection of the ethics of reconciliation (§76.3). Chapter 6 presses Barth’s theology of invocation to reveal some political dimensions of prayer. Finally, the concluding chapter returns to some of the themes on the relation between prayer and theology that have been raised in this introduction.

2

Contemplation

We need not be fanatically anti-mystical … there may be a place for a feeling of enjoyable contemplation of God. –Karl Barth1 In 1919, just before his conversion from Roman Catholicism to Lutheranism, the young Marburg theologian Friedrich Heiler published what was to become a hugely influential study on the phenomenology and theology of prayer.2 Entitled Das Gebet: Eine Religionsgeschichtliche und Religionspsychologische Untersuchung and running into several editions, Heiler popularized a typology that dichotomized between two types of prayer: the ‘mystical’ and the ‘prophetic’. The Hebrew prophets, Christ and the Reformers represent the prophetic tradition (which exalts the petitionary and active aspects of prayer), while the mystical (which exalts the contemplative dimensions) is associated with Roman Catholicism, the medieval Church and the patristic traditions that were influenced by the theology’s great wrong turn to neo-Platonism. In short, ‘mysticism is passive, quietist, resigned, contemplative; the prophetic religion is active, challenging, desiring, ethical’.3 There is a clear favouring of the prophetic type over the mystical in Heiler’s study and therefore of the petitionary over the contemplative.4 The impact of the book was

1 2

3 4

IV/1, p. 104. Friedrich Heiler, Das Gebet: Eine Religionsgeschichtliche und Religionspsychologische Untersuchung (München: E. Reinhardt, 1923, 5. Aufl.); for the abridged English translation, see Prayer: A Study in the History and Psychology of Religion (trans. Samuel McComb; London: Oxford University Press, 1932). Ibid., p. 142. In a later essay of 1933, however, Heiler writes more positively of contemplation. Backtracking on his earlier heavy distinction between the prophet and the mystical he suggests that ‘Christianity is a contemplative religion in the full sense of the word’. He even discredits Barth for viewing contemplation as ‘nothing but a “sea of mischief ” ’, Friedrich Heiler, ‘Contemplation in Christian Mysticism’, in Rudolf Bernoulli and Joseph Campbell (eds), Spiritual Disciplines: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks (trans. Ralph Manheim; New York: Pantheon, 1960), pp. 186–238 (186, 202).

26

Karl Barth on Prayer

considerable.5 Barth, for example, read the book in May and June 1920, spoke publicly on it in the same year and referenced the work in the 1922 revision of his commentary on Romans.6 More suggestively, Heiler’s fingerprints can be seen all over Barth’s own critique of contemplative prayer and engagement with ‘mysticism’; though it must be said that Heiler’s critique is considerably more attentive to the actual texts and writers of the mystical strands of the Christian tradition than is Barth’s. Heiler (as Rowan Williams has argued) and Barth (as many have argued) were, of course, by no means alone in their bad readings of the contemplative traditions of prayer.7 The two are implicated in what Bernard McGinn has rejected as the modern ‘theories’ of mysticism, which are historically as well as theologically unsure.8 These bad readings, according to McGinn, owe something to the giants of liberal Protestantism, Albrecht Ritschl and Adolf von Harnack, and their unhelpful tendency to distinguish sharply between mysticism and ‘true evangelical faith’, and something to the towering influence of the psychologist-come-philosopher, William James, and his reduction of all religious experience to a private, amorphous one.9 To purge fully these question-begging readings of the mystical traditions of prayer would require more extensive work than is possible in this book.10 The principal aim of this chapter is therefore more modest. It aims first to gather Barth’s critique of contemplative prayer and point out where he might have gone wrong in his reading of the contemplative traditions. Operating within the bounds of his critique, it then seeks to investigate what a Barthian form of contemplative prayer might look like by attending to neglected areas of the Church Dogmatics. 5

6

7

8

9

10

For more on the reception of Heiler’s typology by Barth and others, see my ‘Soborny Spirituality: Spirit and Spirituality in Berdyaev and Barth’, in John C. McDowell, Ashley John Moyse and Scott A. Kirkland (eds), Correlating Sobornost: Conversations Between Karl Barth and the Russian Orthodox Tradition (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, forthcoming). See Karl Barth, Karl Barth-Eduard Thurneysen Briefwechsel: 1913–1921, Karl Barth-Gesamtausgabe 3, (eds), Eduard Thurneysen (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 1973), pp. 368, 386, 395 and Romans (II), p. 316. Though it must be said that Barth was very critical of the broader experientialist conclusions that Heiler reached in his book and suspicious of his methodological commitment to phenomenology, psychology, sociology and so on, see Karl Barth-Eduard Thurneysen Briefwechsel: 1913–1921, pp. 368, 395 and Okko Herlyn, Religion oder Gebet. Karl Barths Bedeutung für ein ‘religionsloses Christentum’ (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1979), pp. 86–8. Rowan Williams, ‘The Prophetic and the Mystical: Heiler Revisited’, New Blackfriars 64.1 (1983), pp. 330–47. Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century (London: SCM Press, 1991), pp. 265–343. See Albrecht Ritschl, Theologie und Metaphysik: Zur Verständigung und Abwehr (Bonn: Marcus, 1887, 2. Aufl.), pp. 27–8; Harnack, History of Dogma, vol. 1, p. 251 and William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (London: Fontana, 1960). The most thoroughgoing treatment of Barth’s engagement with mysticism is Nicolaus Klimek, Der Begriff ‘Mystik’ in der Theologie Karl Barths (Paderborn: Bonifatius, 1990).

Contemplation

27

Contemplative prayer in Barth The attention Barth’s ethics has received of late has gone a long way in dispelling the old myth that the ethical agent is denied any substantive space in Barth’s theology.11 It is now a truism to state that the human agent claims a decidedly active role in Barth’s ‘actualistic’ construal of the Christian life; and it has become commonplace to cite prayer as one of the chief human actions through which a place for human agency is secured and protected in Barth’s thought.12 A convention has been set, then, to emphasise the active side of Barth’s theology of prayer, and there is certainly a mass of textual evidence to support such a move: ‘prayer is the most intimate and effective form of Christian action’, he writes, through which the ethical agent actively responds to her reconciliation in Christ.13 Being active means being-in-prayer, being in ‘a never-resting striding’, he writes elsewhere.14 The formal sections on prayer in the doctrine of creation reinforce this active trajectory in their unflinching exaltation of a very active type of prayer: petitionary prayer. And by petition Barth means an asking that is accompanied with human action. ‘To pray for someone or something means the most intensive participation possible. I cannot pray for something if I am not at the same time ready to participate in it and to – where the possibility arises for me – commit myself to it.’15 Although there are important iconoclastic reasons that inform the strong prioritization of petition (more on this in the next chapter), a casualty of the privileging of the active dimensions is the neglect of the more contemplative side of prayer.16 Barth admits that although ‘other theories of prayer may be richly

11

12

13 14 15

16

Robert E. Willis, for example, famously complained that in that Barth’s ethics ‘it is impossible that man could contribute anything to the ethical situation’, The Ethics of Karl Barth (Leiden: Brill, 1971), p. 183. It is customary to cite the wealth of material that corrects the early reception of Barth’s ethics. Since the material is now too numerous to cite in detail I refer the reader to one of the most comprehensive and systematic analyses of Barth’s ethics in recent years and to a useful overview of some of the other significant publications on the topic: see respectively, Paul T. Nimmo, Being in Action: The Theological Shape of Barth’s Ethical Vision (London: T&T Clark, 2007) and David Clough and Michael Leyden, ‘Claiming Barth for Ethics: The Last Two Decades’, Ecclesiology 6.2 (2010), pp. 166–82. See Webster, Barth’s Ethics of Reconciliation, p. 76; Paul D. Matheny, Dogmatics and Ethics: The Theological Realism and Ethics of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1990); Archibald James Spencer, Clearing a Space for Human Action: Ethical Ontology in the Theology of Karl Barth (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2003), pp. 296–300 and Nimmo, Being in Action, pp. 147–50. III/3, p. 264. IV/4, p. 39. Frank Jehle, Ever Against the Stream: The Politics of Karl Barth, 1906–1968 (trans. Richard and Martha Burnett; Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2002), p. 108. The omission has been well noted by Barth’s commentators, see Shapiro, ‘Karl Barth’s Understanding of Prayer’, p. 30 and Wiggermann, ‘Zur Praktischen Theologie’, p. 184.

28

Karl Barth on Prayer

and profoundly thought out and may sound very well, … they all suffer from a certain artificiality because they miss this simple and concrete fact, losing themselves in heights and depths where there is no place for the man who really prays, who is simply making a request’.17 Ignatian spiritual exercises are swiftly dismissed as having ‘nothing whatever to do with the prayer … required of us’, and the tradition of silent prayer is rejected as ‘embarrassing’.18 Moreover, for Barth, ‘the idea of wordless prayer … cannot be regarded as true prayer’.19 True prayer, instead ‘begins where this kind of exercise leaves off ’.20 Gaining purchase on Barth’s critique of contemplative prayer is not straightforward. In place of direct textual engagement with the topic as it appears in the history of theology, Barth’s critique of contemplation is indirect and unfolds by way of implication and incorporation. He implicates and incorporates contemplation within his critiques of mysticism, religion, natural theology, dualism, asceticism and others.21 This is rather out of character for the one for whom careful dogmatic argumentation often played a decisive role in his ideational formation.22 Working with Barth’s engagement with contemplative prayer is difficult, then, because there are only scattered references to contemplation here and there in the Church Dogmatics and not where one might expect. For example, in surveying how he arrives at his massive affirmation of petition in III/3, Barth discusses in considerable detail the way the different dimensions of prayer (penitence, praise, thanksgiving, worship and so on) find their basis in petition without once considering how those other dimensions in the Christian tradition of prayer (contemplation, meditation, reflection and so on) relate to petition.23 To muddy matters further, despite its presence in so much of Christian spirituality, the very term ‘contemplation’ is resistant to easy definition. Precision might be gained by considering the context in which contemplation is most frequently discussed. As mentioned above, the term often occurs in the Church Dogmatics in the company of discussions about ‘mysticism’. 17 18

19 20

21 22

23

III/3, p. 268. III/4, pp. 98, 112. That Barth gave over some of the winter seminar cycle of 1938 to the study of Ignatian spirituality (as reported in Busch, Karl Barth, p. 286) suggests that he might once have had a more positive appreciation for Ignatian practices. III/4, p. 98. Ibid. There is historical precedence to Barth’s insistence on the vocality of prayer, see Gabriel Bunge’s classic work on prayer in the patristic tradition: Earthen Vessels: The Practice of Personal Prayer According to the Patristic Tradition (trans. Michael J. Miller; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2002), p. 123. For example: I/1, p. 337; III/4, p. 560; IV/1, p. 104 and IV/2, p. 284. As McDowell and Higton argue, see ‘Introduction: Barth as Conversationalist’, in John C. McDowell and Mike Higton (eds), Conversing with Barth (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 1–13 (6). III/3, pp. 265–7.

Contemplation

29

However, as Andrew Louth has argued, the neologism ‘mysticism’ is as slippery and shifting a term as contemplation.24 Barth himself exercises a twofold attitude to ‘mysticism’ in the Church Dogmatics.25 In a signature move, then, there are positive glances to what he calls a ‘Christ-mysticism’.26 Since everything in this model depends on participation in Christ, this type of mysticism is celebrated as an ‘indispensable part of the Christian faith’.27 In III/4, Barth identifies Paul (in Gal. 2.20), Bernard of Clairvaux and Calvin (particularly in his Sabbath-mysticism – this will become important later) as proponents of this tradition.28 ‘Bernard’s mysticism’, he concludes, ‘with its strongly christological character, is not to be regarded as mysticism in the more dubious sense’.29 If this makes Barth seem companionable to some aspects of the mystical traditions and a certain form of contemplation (as it does for Balthasar),30 other features of his work point in a quite different direction. These features lead McGinn to conclude that Barth ‘saw little good in mysticism’ and Alfons Kemmer that, despite even the most favourable of interpretations, he had a ‘strongly negative’ conception of mysticism.31 For Barth, mysticism is ‘dubious’ because it ‘includes a technique and craft in virtue of which man thinks he can bring about union with God quite apart from the biblical history of salvation’.32 Contemplation is the ‘first step on the mystic way … which [is] then followed by reflection or meditation … as the second step, absorption into it as the third, and union as the fourth’.33 The ethical agent supposedly progresses from each state of consciousness to the next by withdrawing into the self through disciplined spiritual exercises, gradual interior cleansing, the purification of consciousness and so on, with the aim 24

25

26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33

Note that Barth generally uses the noun ‘mysticism’ over its much older adjectival cognate: ‘mystical theology’. For a discussion on the distinctions between ‘mysticism’ and ‘mystical theology’, see Andrew Louth, ‘Mysticism’, in Gordon S. Wakefield (ed.), A Dictionary of Christian Spirituality (London: SCM Press, 1983), pp. 272–4. This two-sidedness has been exposed by Alfons Kemmer, ‘Die Mystik in Karl Barths “Kirchlicher Dogmatik” ’, Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie 7.1 (1960), pp. 3–25 and McIntosh, ‘Humanity in God’, p. 24. IV/3, p. 540. III/4, p. 59. Ibid., pp. 58–9. Ibid., p. 59. Indeed, Balthasar found in Barth’s theology ‘a welcome home for the dimension of contemplation’, Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation (trans. Edward T. Oakes; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), p. 400. Less sympathetically, Oepke hailed the early Barth a disguised, closet mystic: a mystic in prophetic clothing, see Albrecht Oepke, Karl Barth und die Mystik (Leipzig: Dörffling und Franke, 1928), pp. 23–5, 54. McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism, p. 269 and Kemmer, ‘Die Mystik in Karl Barth’, p. 16. III/4, p. 59. Ibid., p. 560.

30

Karl Barth on Prayer

of achieving an inner experience of sustained mystical union with God. This is branded by Barth as the ‘absolute religious self-consciousness’ and smacks, therefore, of the natural theology that he so despised.34 An important difference between faith and mysticism is that the mystic … ceases to be aware of the veiling; he regards proclamation, Bible and Christ in their secularity as mere symbols of the Godhead now unveiled to him, which have now become dispensable and which he can basically discard; henceforth he sees his future only in ever fuller unveilings which lead him more and more into the depths or the heights.35

The contemplative pray-er attempts, it would seem, to vault past God’s selfrevelation into the unmapped inner being of God (exactly the type of ‘God behind God’ that is ruled out by Barth’s actualistic theology of revelation).36 Earlier he had concluded, as had Ritschl and Harnack before him, that this sort of mysticism is a ‘blind alley’ that is diametrically opposed to the truth of the gospel.37 As a result, Barth decides that all mystical terminology, even Christmysticism and associated terms such as contemplation, should be avoided, since all this is too misleading to be of any help.38 As ‘there is no precedence … for a “contemplating” of God, and since contemplatio of this kind obviously forms part of the mystical technique for all peoples, ages, and religions, [it] is not specifically Christian’.39

Contemplative prayer and inner experience Given even this brief investigation, it is unsurprising that Barth would find in contemplative prayer an unimpressive emphasis on inner experience. At one point Barth lists mysticism and Schleiermacherian subjectivism as ‘associated movements’.40 This would suggest, as it does to Klimek, that Barth’s critique of contemplative prayer is only a very thinly disguised version of his critique of Protestant liberalism.41 That being so, the way of contemplation leaves open clear avenues to the flattening of prayer into the type of monological therapeutics 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41

IV/2, p. 57. I/1, p. 178. See I/2, p. 319. Romans (II), p. 316; see also, pp. 59, 109, 211, 241, 316, 388, 423; I/1, p. 178; II/1, pp. 57, 309, 432 and III/4, p. 560. IV/3, p. 540. III/4, p. 560. IV/2, p. 11. Klimek, Der Begriff ‘Mystik’ in der Theologie Karl Barths, pp. 128–34.

Contemplation

31

that Barth believes culminates in Feuerbach. In attempting to overcome the self and reach God, the contemplative arrives at the now aggrandized self and at a vision of an anti-god, one that is indistinguishable in its properties from the mystics themselves; cathartic maybe, this is not ‘true prayer’. As Barth sees it, contemplation attempts to induce a union with God (unio mystica) by way of ‘psychical and intellectual concentration, a deepening and elevating of the human self-consciousness’.42 It is simply unthinkable for Barth, however, to be able to ‘stumble’ upon God through a contemplative progression.43 In contrast, he goes on to argue that the union with God is freely given by grace. The ethical agent discovers her own humanity caught up in Christ’s and therefore already exalted into participation in the divine. Consequently, there are no stages to pass through or steps to take so that the ethical agents can be or become more than who they already are in Christ. Whatever is meant by sanctification, Barth writes, ‘it does not take place in stages’.44 This union is not ‘the climax of Christian experience and development’ but is always given in Christ, ‘the Subject who initiates and acts decisively in this union’.45 It is important to appreciate, however, that Barth ‘does not actually rule out the unio mystica’, as McIntosh argues.46 He does, as I have hinted, recast the mystical union in an explicitly christological mould. Christ is ‘alone the true unio mystica’, the unrepeatable and totally sufficient ground of our union with God.47 ‘The Christian does not claim the fulness of the union of God with man for his own experience and self-consciousness, but professes that other, the Mediator, in whom it has taken place for him.’48 This renders the creature’s union with God through Christ a ‘representation, reflection and correspondence [Entsprechung]’ of the Son’s union with the Father but crucially not the repetition of that which has already been achieved.49 An iconoclastic buffer is placed against the union of ‘representation, reflection and correspondence’ to prevent it eventuating in the deification of the human agent, which, for Barth, represents everything misguided about the mystical 42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49

IV/3, p. 539. III/4, p. 561. IV/2, p. 557. IV/3, pp. 548, 541. McIntosh argues that Barth’s real anxiety is that the unio mystica comes too close to ‘ “the secret via regia of all Neo-Protestant Christology … . And somewhere along this way the question can and will always arise whether the relationship between the unio hypostatica and the unio mystica may not be reversed” so that the hypostatic union becomes merely the “mythological copy” of the “religious happening as it takes place in us” ’, McIntosh, ‘Humanity in God’, pp. 30–1 (citing IV/2, p. 56). IV/2, p. 57. Ibid. Ibid., p. 346 = KD IV/2, p. 387.

32

Karl Barth on Prayer

traditions. Barth is unconvinced by what he considers to be the rather exotic idea of deification because it seems to elide the radical distinction between divine and human agency, remove the need for the ongoing transformative work of grace and risks subsuming Christology into a ‘ “high-pitched” anthropology’ – at which point, the veritable Feuerbach would rear his head once more.50 Most damagingly, under these conditions, the hypostatic union becomes ‘merely a hard shell which conceals the sweet kernel of the divinity of humanity as a whole and as such, a shell which we can confidentially discard and throw away once it has performed this service’.51 If this union is gifted to us then what comes of contemplation? For Barth, contemplative prayer digresses into an indulgent exercise in the cultivation of the self. In contemplation, the ethical agent is ‘forcefully preoccupied with himself ’.52 The practice is self-incurving, ‘abstract and basically unchurchly’.53 Contemplation, as read by Barth, ‘can only be a cul-de-sac’ and the prayers become cartographers of the self, mapping the contours of their inner experience.54 This comprises the first element of Barth’s critique. There is also a second aspect that has been mentioned but requires specification.

Contemplative prayer and ethical indolence For Barth, contemplation, with all its introspection and concern with inner experience, fails to generate anything like an adequate account of the ethical action that shakes the human agent out of the ‘indolence condemned in Scripture’.55 The distinction between the active life and the contemplative life is strong in Barth’s reasoning so that the preoccupation with a contemplative sort of prayer amounts to an apolitical retreat into the interior piety of the ethical agent and a flight from worldly responsibilities. The ladder of prayer, Barth concludes, leads precisely away from action and paves the way to ‘worldrenunciation’.56 In Evangelical Theology, he associates ‘high-flown contemplation’ with ‘living in a private world which is like a snail’s shell, … deeply and invisibly hidden beneath and behind all externals’.57 Contemplation, reflection  and 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

Ibid., p. 82. Ibid. III/4, p. 561. I/1, p. 85. III/4, p. 563. Ibid., p. 474. IV/2, p. 545. ET, p. 83.

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meditation  (in fact, the entire mystical and contemplative inventory) are all unprofitable as ethical categories as they appear too bland to carry the full command of the Christian life. If the first part of Barth’s critique might have something to do with the pride that rejects God’s free gift and attempts to contemplate God apart from revelation then the charge of ethical indolence has something to do with the sloth that disables the human agent from responding actively.58 Contemplation dwells in the interval of sloth that Barth’s theology of prayer is designed to ‘overcome’, as Wolf Krötke argues.59 While pride represents a Promethean over-reaching, sloth, by comparison, is ‘quite unheroic and trivial’ in which the sinner under-reaches or even fails to bother to reach at all.60 For Barth, the spiritual life is precisely not about retreating into ‘the indolent passivity of mere reflection and contemplation’.61 This is a restatement of the older Protestant ethic of work that sensed in ‘contemplation … the indolence of Proverbs in which man on a sublime basis and in a sublime way seeks to be free only in and for himself, to live only to himself, not to transcend himself nor to let himself be unrolled or opened up, not to embark upon the venture of action’.62 The critique of contemplative prayer as ethical indolence goes back further. It is an outworking of the actualistic ontology through which his doctrine of God and understanding of the divine and human relation is unfolded. The actualistic character of Barth’s theology denotes that God’s being is beingin-act, characterized by self-giving. ‘God withdraws from every kind of contemplation. For God acts.’63 Therefore, for Barth, God is not ‘a being with which man can ultimately be united … in some kind of passive enjoyment or adoring contemplation [Betrachtung]’.64 Similarly, in his Christology there is a privileging of active christological categories: Christ is the active one who ‘journeys’ into the far country. As the addressee of God’s communicative Word and as a creature before God in ethical correspondence with Christ, the ethical agent is (in an analogous way) constituted with an actualistic ontology as a being-in-act: being human means human acting. To ‘exist as a man means to act’.65 The Christian ‘is the creature which not merely contemplates the work of 58 59

60 61 62 63 64 65

Barth implicates contemplation in his treatment of sin as sloth, see IV/2, p. 474. Wolf Krötke, Sin and Nothingness in the Theology of Karl Barth (trans. Philip G. Ziegler and Christina-Maria Bammel; Princeton: Princeton Theological Seminary, 2005), p. 83. IV/2, p. 403. I/1, p. 202. III/4, p. 473. Ibid., p. 563. IV/1, p. 112 = KD IV/1, p. 122. II/2, p. 535.

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the divine providence and lordship from without, but co-operates in it from within’.66 The whole idea of contemplation, therefore, enjoys a sort of ‘peacetime luxury’ and until that time it is an avoidance of the human responsibility to bring about the peace it contemplates.67 It is ‘high time we realised’, Barth concludes, that with practices such as contemplation, ‘not merely have we not even begun to pray or prepared ourselves for prayer, but that we have actually turned away from what is commanded of us in prayer’.68

Some concerns There are reasons to suggest that Barth and the contemplative traditions might well have been heading towards a happy marriage over their shared commitment to the integrity of theology and spirituality.69 Regarding the ethics of contemplation, there is less potential for agreement. However, there are some concerns with Barth’s understanding of contemplative prayer that should be aired. It is well beyond the scope of this book to investigate exactly how and why Barth gets contemplation so wrong (such a project would, among other things, require careful source criticism to work out which versions of ‘mysticism’ influenced Barth’s generation of theologians, and where those versions might need repair). What follows, then, is not a full redress but some prefatory thoughts on some of the most obvious underlying issues and problems. Barth’s engagement with contemplative prayer risks appearing anachronistic, largely unsubstantiated, unrefined and inattentive to the particularities of the tradition. Indeed, the recent renewed fascination with mystical theology,70 which involves a strong affirmation of the theological propriety of contemplative practices, suggests that Barth’s criticisms are directed more at old typologies and myths of contemplative prayer than at what contemplation is about in its historical sense – and clearly Heiler is an unreliable guide here.71 The worry is that Barth’s simplistic assumptions, his slack criticisms and the reductionist tendencies in his reading have made a caricature out of the contemplative 66 67 68 69

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III/3, p. 254. I/1, p. 77. III/4, p. 97. On lamenting the Western separation of dogmatic and mystical theology Louth notes the fact that ‘this divorce need not be permanent can be seen from the achievement of such modern theologians as Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar’, Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. xi. Among others, see McIntosh, Mystical Theology and various publications, now too numerous to cite, by Sarah Coakley and Rowan Williams. See Williams, ‘The Prophetic and the Mystical’, pp. 330–4.

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traditions, which renders, as with all caricatures, these rich traditions of Christian prayer, and their extraordinary panoply of texts, too easily dismissible. To a certain extent, it is appropriate for Barth to make the connection between mystical theology and contemplative prayer. The connection becomes problematic, however, when the fate of contemplative prayer comes to rest squarely in the hands of his understanding of mysticism. As suggested above, it is well documented that Barth exercises an almost cultural prejudice against all things mystical. In §17 of the Church Dogmatics, for example, mysticism ends up on the wrong side of Barth’s dichotomy between revelation and religion and therefore, like atheism, is condemned as a human construct. There are signs that Harnack’s fall-into-hellenism thesis is propping up this distinction.72 In the face of such critique, prayer of a contemplative sort does not stand much of a chance: and Barth is too willing to make contemplation guilty by association. Barth perpetuates this hermeneutical irresponsibility by making very little effort to check the accuracy of his reductionist reading of contemplation against the canon of writings associated with the tradition.73 Whether the mysticism Barth has in mind in his critique of religion in §17, for example, is present in the traditions of Christian spirituality is really quite questionable. A lack of due attention to the actual texts has meant that Barth has fallen head first into what Denys Turner has identified as the ‘positivism’ of mystical metaphors and 72

73

For example, McGinn implicates Barth in a tradition that ‘has denied any connection between Christian origins and mysticism and has viewed the introduction of Greek mysticism into Christianity as an unfortunate infection’, McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism, p. 65. This is Jantzen’s critique of Barth, see Grace Jantzen, ‘ “Where Two Are to Become One”: Mysticism and Monism’, in Godfrey Vesey (ed.), The Philosophy in Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 147–66 (147). With much closer attention to the historical texts of the mystical traditions, McIntosh demonstrates a surprising continuity between Barth’s theology of the exaltation of Christ’s humanity and similar christological movements at the heart of the mystical theology of Maximus the Confessor and Bonaventure, see McIntosh, ‘Humanity in God’, p. 26. Klimek also exposes conformity between Barth and a canon of patristic and medieval mystical theologians and their ‘christozentrisch’ appreciation of mysticism, including Pseudo-Dionysius, Bernard of Clairvaux, Bonaventure, Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa. In dialogue with these thinkers, on the issue of self-justification and subjectivism, Klimek concludes that ‘the mystical way should not be understood as a magical technique but is dependent on God’s movement. Talk of mysticism is always talk about the grace of God’. On the issue of deification in mysticism, he argues that Barth ‘misunderstands’ the ontological claims made by the mystical traditions and on world renunciation Klimek demonstrates that mystical theology is ‘not necessarily apolitical’, see Klimek, Der Begriff ‘Mystik’ in der Theologie Karl Barths, pp. 252–5. The mention above of Dionysius is also instructive to expose Barth’s rendition of the ‘mystic way’ as historically muddled. The way of purgation, illumination and perfection (or union), described by Dionysius in The Celestial Hierarchy, which was to resound throughout much of medieval theology, suggests that contemplation is not at all the entry point into the divine (as Barth has it in III/4, p. 560) but is at the summit of ascent at which the pray-er ‘experiences’ most fully union with God, see The Celestial Hierarchy in PseudoDionysius, The Complete Works, Classics of Western Spirituality (trans. Colm Luibheid; New York: Paulist Press, 1987), pp. 143–91.

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language.74 This positivism has led, according to McIntosh, to the problematical attachment of an experientialist criterion to ‘mysticism’ that focuses attention ‘very narrowly on the progressive states of the individual soul’ quite detached from the concrete liturgical action of the Church.75 This is very far from the historical understandings of contemplation and, if Turner and McIntosh are right, the complex ‘apophatic anthropology’ that stems from the Dionysian tradition of contemplation, for example, was designed to negate the type of excessive concentration on individual experience that Barth thought he saw in contemplative prayer. The metaphors of interiority and inwardness in their historical usage are significantly more complexly ‘self-subverting’ than Barth has appreciated.76 Barth’s critique that the inner experience of graduated mystical ascent is expressive of a positive experientialism that is both subjective and private is rendered exactly wrong.77 According to Turner, the apophatic tradition of spirituality exercised ‘a theological critique of individual religious experience’.78 As Balthasar argues in his account of the ‘experience’ of faith, mysticism will be a deeper entering into the ‘non-experience’ of faith, into the loving renunciation of experience, all the way into the depths of the ‘Dark Nights’ of John of the Cross, which constitute the real mystical training for the ultimate renunciations. But these ‘nights’ are precisely an ‘experience of non-experience’, or an experience of the negative, privative mode of experience.79

Conceived in this way, a contemplative sort of prayer is not only entirely dependent on the grace of God but is also undertaken in community and therefore is inseparable from the liturgical cycle of scriptural reading, prayer and sacramental worship. As Louth argues, Dionysius’ theology, for example, represents a certain kind of concentration on the self that is reflexive but not in a way that is uncommitted to community: it is a ‘liturgical’ and therefore 74

75 76 77

78 79

Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 259. McIntosh, ‘Theology and Spirituality’, p. 396. Turner, The Darkness of God, p. 69. The significant emphasis on the priory of divine agency articulated so carefully in The Dark Night, should also not go unmentioned as an intriguing corrective for the type of subjectivism Barth thinks he has found in the mystical traditions, see The Dark Knight in John of the Cross, Selected Writings, Classics of Western Spirituality (trans. Kieran Kavanaugh; New York: Paulist Press, 1987), pp. 155–210. Turner, The Darkness of God, p. 268. Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 1, pp. 412–13.

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public theology.80 His concerns are not with the inner state and private religious world of the ‘mystic’ but with the transcendent One whose praises one sings in the liturgy. As for the second part of Barth’s critique, then, and in a more modern vein, it is difficult to avoid the profoundly political implications of the deeply subversive type of contemplative prayer that Sarah Coakley describes.81 Indeed, surely the idea that contemplation suffers from a political quietism finds qualification in the highly politically charged contemplative theology of Thomas Merton.82 So far, this chapter has drawn together Barth’s occasional complaints to produce a more consolidated critique of contemplative prayer as an overemphasis on inner experience and an underemphasis on ethical action. However, it is not the accuracy of Barth’s reading of the contemplative and mystical traditions with which I want to take further issue. The more constructive question to be tested in the next stage of my argument is whether it is possible to move beyond Barth’s critique to locate and develop a form of contemplative prayer that moves within the contours of his theology despite not being thought through by Barth himself. What follows takes Barth at his word that all this ‘does not mean that the concept [of contemplation] is absolutely and in every sense useless in the context of Christian thinking’.83 But any talk of a positive valuation of a particular kind of contemplative prayer, Barth instructs, must be taken up ‘with some care’, and so the line of approach begs careful delineation.84

Sabbatical contemplation One approach would be to continue to test Barth’s assumptions about contemplative prayer against the texts of some of the great writers in the mystical traditions. Reference to some of the patristic writers or to someone

80 81

82

83 84

See Andrew Louth, Denys the Areopagite (London: Continuum, 2001), p. 31. Sarah Coakley, ‘Is There a Future for Gender and Theology? On Gender, Contemplation, and the Systematic Task’, Criterion 47.1 (2009), pp. 2–11. For an intriguing report on practicing contemplation with inmates of a Boston jail, see Sarah Coakley, ‘Jail Break: Meditation as a Subversive Activity’, The Christian Century (June 2004), pp. 18–21. For just one of many examples in the Merton corpus that overcomes the distinction between contemplation and (political) action, see Thomas Merton, Contemplation in a World of Action (London: Allen and Unwin, 1971). III/4, p. 560. Ibid.

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like Hans Urs von Balthasar might well present fascinating results.85 This recourse is certainly possible and potentially quite profitable. It would further dismantle the typologies operating in Barth’s reading of the tradition, might reveal some unusual results pertaining to the continuity between Barth and some strands of the contemplative and mystical traditions and could even shape an intriguing critique of various issues in Barth’s theology. The sort of contemplation Coakley has in mind, with its gendered dimension, provides an important critique of the perceived sexism in Barth’s anthropology and his masculinist Christology, for example.86 This type of work that seeks repair from outside, however, would not let Barth off the critics’ hook since it would have to concede that there really is little time for contemplation in the Church Dogmatics itself. Similarly, the reworking of contemplative themes from, say, early Christian writings or the middle ages into Barth’s theology would be very difficult without risking distortive conceptual stretching: Barth and the contemplative traditions are doing very different things, and those differences should be protected. It should be clear by now that the contemplative dimensions of prayer do not emerge at all clearly from Barth’s own specific writings on prayer. The next chapter will turn directly to the two formal sections on prayer to explore some of the reasons why Barth is drawn to accounting for prayer in active and not contemplative ways. However, since prayer, for Barth, is the ‘underlying note and basis’ of all human activity,87 an opportunity presents itself to broaden the interpretative scope away from the formal sections on prayer and attend to some of the human actions described in neglected corners of the Church Dogmatics in terms of prayer. The remainder of this chapter expands two hints as to where 85

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Balthasar, for a number of reasons, would be an excellent candidate for this type of comparative (and reparative) work. He is at once committed to the contemplative traditions, deepened through his relationship with Adrienne von Speyr, and alert to Barth’s ways of thinking and the questions that occupied his thoughts – both of whom he met in Basel, where he worked in the student chaplaincy. His involvement in the ressourcement movement also enables a more historically reliable affirmation of contemplation than is to be found in Barth. But most significantly, he and Barth were seized by the distinctiveness and particularity of God’s self-revelation in Christ – this is part the burden of Balthasar’s classic work on prayer, Das betrachtende Gebet (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1955). He would later describe himself as ‘a Barthian’ at the time of writing this book on contemplative prayer, see Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth, p. 400. For Balthasar, contemplative prayer is absolutely rooted in the humanity of Christ and his prayerful ascent and therefore the conclusions he reaches in his work on prayer provide a way of articulating christologically reconfigured practices of contemplation with which even Barth might be comfortable. For the English translation of Das betrachtende Gebet, see Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer (trans. Graham Harrison; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986). Paul Dafydd Jones also identifies Coakley as an unobvious but intriguing dialogue partner with Barth on this matter, in The Humanity of Christ: Christology in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (London: T&T Clark, 2008), p. 258. III/4, p. 89.

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one might look to find space for the contemplative in Barth’s theology.88 First, earlier it was noted that if there was anywhere in Calvin’s theology where Barth identified a positive mystical theology it was in the Reformer’s engagement with the fourth commandment.89 Randall Zachman also finds in Calvin a rich account of the contemplation of the divine powers and makes the suggestive comment that, for Calvin, God instituted the Sabbath as a time dedicated precisely for the contemplation of God.90 Second, Eberhard Jüngel complains that too often being human means being an active doer, in which our humanity is gained only when we are busy ‘doing’ something. What is missing here is the category of ‘personhood’ or more specifically ‘any sense of Sabbath rest in which we are persons, and nothing but persons’.91 In different ways, then, Calvin and Jüngel both point towards the Sabbath as a space for contemplation in the Christian life. Intriguingly, the Sabbath also receives a strong, though often neglected, emphasis in Church Dogmatics. At the very least, Barth’s engagement with the Sabbath cautions against reading his theology of prayer too restrictively, but more significantly, it is rich with implications for reassessing the role of contemplation in his theology. With the Sabbath as a guide, what I hope to do in the remainder of this chapter is to point out some clues as to how a Barthian form of contemplative prayer might be conceived.

Barth’s theology of the Sabbath Engagement with the Sabbath takes place in two main sections of the Church Dogmatics. The first section occurs in his heavily exegetical doctrine of 88

89 90

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Much of what follows parallels my ‘Attending to the Sabbath: An Alternative Direction in Karl Barth’s Theology of Prayer’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 13.3 (2011), pp. 251–71. See III/4, p. 59. Randall C. Zachman, Reconsidering John Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 12. Eberhard Jüngel, Justification: The Heart of the Christian Faith (trans. Jeffrey F. Cayzer; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001), p. 123. Jüngel detects two contrasting approaches to conceiving the nature of human agency. ‘On the one side’, he explains, ‘Luther’s understanding of the gospel requires human passivity and receptivity – a highly intensive and creative passivity, to be sure – which can then issue spontaneously in human activity and good works … . On the other side’, he continues, ‘Barth’s anthropology has an entirely different orientation. The human is understood by definition to be constituted by action and self-determination,’ Eberhard Jüngel, ‘Gospel and Law: The Relationship of Ethics to Dogmatics’, in Karl Barth: A Theological Legacy (trans. Garrett E. Paul; Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox Press, 1986), pp. 105–26 (123–4). This chapter is confronted with a similar problematic of how to reconcile the passive (contemplation) with the active (petition) but has a more positive appreciation for the role of the passive in Barth’s theology than does Jüngel, who turns to the anthropological implications of Luther’s doctrine of justification for an account of human passivity that he finds wanting in Barth.

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creation (III/1) where the first two chapters of Genesis are his focus.92 Notably, Barth begins his account of creation with the seventh and not the first day. The Sabbath, ‘at the supreme and final point of the first creation story, is revealed as the starting-point [Ausgangspunkt] for all else that follows’.93 What the Sabbath means for the ethical agent is taken up in the second major section, which forms an independent part of the special ethics of the doctrine of creation (III/4).94 His reflections are ordered around the bold claim that ‘the Sabbath commandment explains all the other commandments’.95 There the Sabbath begins Barth’s account of the shape of human freedom before God, after which follows confession and finally the command to pray (§53). In addition to these two main sections, there are references to the Sabbath in connection with his doctrines of God, revelation, time and eternity and there is also a suggestion that the Sabbath would have featured prominently in the unplanned fifth volume, the doctrine of redemption.96 That Barth begins his doctrine of creation with the seventh and not the first day and that he places the holy day at the head of his organization of Christian freedom before God indicates something of the importance of the doctrine of the Sabbath in Barth’s theological project. Just how important, however, remains relatively untested in current scholarship.97 This is representative of a broader ‘casualness and feebleness’ noted by Barth with which scholarship in general has handled the fourth commandment.98

92 93 94 95 96 97

98

III/1, pp. 98–9, 212–28. Ibid., p. 98 = KD III/1, p. 108. III/4, pp. 47–72. Ibid., p. 53. See IV/3, p. 903. For general and largely descriptive accounts of Barth’s theology of the Sabbath, see Francis Rice McCormick, ‘Sabbath Rest: A Theological Imperative According to Karl Barth’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 62.2 (1994), pp. 539–52; James Brown, ‘Karl Barth’s Doctrine of the Sabbath’, Scottish Journal of Theology 19.4 (1966), pp. 409–25 and James Brown, ‘ The Doctrine of the Sabbath in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics’, Scottish Journal of Theology 20.1 (1967), pp. 1–24. III/4, p. 50. Jürgen Moltmann joins Barth in his lament for the paucity of attention the Sabbath tends to receive, see God in Creation: An Ecological Doctrine of Creation (trans. Margaret Kohl; London: SCM Press, 1985), p. 276. To some extent, this has been softened by the emergence of various theologies of work – in these accounts the Sabbath is said to liberate our ‘enslavement to work’. In particular, see Miroslav Volf, Work in the Spirit: Toward a Theology of Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 140 and John Hughes, The End of Work: Theological Critiques of Capitalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 11–14. The Sabbath has also received attention in the context of political theology, see Bernd Wannenwetsch, Political Worship: Ethics for Christian Citizens (trans. Margaret Kohl; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 345–60 and in theological understandings of technology, see Brian Brock, Christian Ethics in a Technological Age (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2010), pp. 289–319.

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Moreover, the practice of rest itself, as commentators have argued, is in danger of becoming a lost art.99 The type of rest Barth is prescribing, however, is not rest in any ordinary sense.100 It is a very particular form of rest: it is a rest one is invited into by God – better, it is the invitation to share in God’s own rest. This particular form of rest is not vacation from work (Urlaub) or some sort of slothful resignation but rather is a holiday (Feiertag), as in a holy day. As the holy day, it is the day for ‘joy, rest and – it may be added – peace’.101 It is the sanctified space in which one can truly rest in peace. The significance of the day is betrothed to it in its very naming: while the other days of creation are referred to by their numerical position in the chronology of the creative event, the seventh day is set out from the rest as the only day worthy of being named. It might seem odd that in the late 1940s and early 1950s, in the aftermath of the Shoah, under the growing threat of the nuclear-age and with all the urgency of the programmatic rebuilding of a Europe ravished by war, Barth would begin his doctrine of creation and his ethics of creation with a declaration of the goodness of creation and an account of the virtue of rest. On the Sabbath God sees ‘the totality of created things and finds it very good’.102 Oliver O’Donovan claims that ‘Barth knew what he was doing when he placed a section on the Lord’s Day at the outset of his volume on the ethics of creation, not as one moral principle among others but as the ground and reason for all moral principles within the Church’.103 So what is Barth doing in this unconventional move and how is this related to his theology of prayer? The Sabbath makes crucial assumptions about the nature of the relation between divine and human agency. To begin with the Sabbath is to begin where all ethical reflection should begin for Barth, that is, with a celebration of the priority of divine agency. Theologically, the ethical celebration of the Sabbath rest is caught between the retrospective pull back to the seventh day of creation and to Christ’s resurrection (the anamnetic realization of the ethical agent’s participation in the freedom, rest and joy of God) and the prospective

99

On this, see Brock, Christian Ethics in a Technological Age, pp. 289–319. Barth is highly critical of the ‘leisure industry’, see III/4, p. 61, for example, and later names it as one of the ‘chthonic forces’ of lordlessness, see ChrL, p. 233. 101 III/1, p. 221. 102 Ibid., p. 98. 103 Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 186. 100

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push towards the final Sabbath (the epicletic foretaste of the sanctification of creation, when the whole of creation will find eternal rest).104 The Sabbath, therefore, is neither simply a remembered past nor a purely anticipated future, but rather it is to be understood as an ethical reality to be enjoyed in the here and now. Both the forward and backward references concern the sovereignty of divine agency: the hallowing of God’s name is divine work, as is the ultimate hallowing that is to come. The ‘monstrous range’ of the fourth commandment’s protection of the priority of divine agency extends over all human activity, including human conceptions of lordship.105 Hence, in Exodus 20.10 the Sabbath is said to question all conceptions of power and autonomy: the entire household, regardless of social and political status, is to rest together and participate equally in the sabbatical hallowing of the divine name. Similarly, the Priestly Laws of Holiness in Leviticus 25.2-4 dictate that even ‘the land shall observe a Sabbath for the Lord … [and] in the seventh year there shall be a Sabbath of complete rest for the land’ and the Year of Jubilee sees the return all land to God, freeing the enslaved.106 In addition to the primacy and sovereignty of divine agency, the Sabbath also reveals something very specific about God’s action in the world. Barth writes that ‘God is not exhausted in His action, as the institution of the Sabbath puts it with special beauty: He cannot only work, He can also rest from all His works’.107 However, Barth rejects the claim that God’s rest on the seventh day of creation and the declaration of the completion of the creative work represents

104

The significance of the Shabbat and Holy Saturday should not go unnoticed. The empty space between Good Friday and Easter Sunday – the space between the cross and the resurrection – is a space for rest and vigil, when even the liturgy rests. And to follow Balthasar, this is a Sabbath rest. ‘The cry [on Golgotha] is followed by the wordless Saturday, the great, silent Sabbath when the Word rests from its labours, following exactly in the footsteps of the Father. The body of the Word, wrapped in cloths and spices, rests in a cave in the rock’, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Man in History: A Theological Study (trans. W. Glen-Doepel; London: Sheed and Ward, 1968), p. 283. For Balthasar, this is the final Shabbat: Holy Saturday’s Shabbat of terror, abandonment, mourning and tragedy, is christically transformed into the ecclesial celebration of Easter Sunday’s Sabbath, which is a day of freedom, peace, love and joy – derived exactly from the peace, love and joy of the empty tomb. On this basis, Barth defends the relocation of the Saturday Shabbat to Sunday. He writes that ‘in the resurrection it recognised the fulfilment of the covenant between God and man which was established in creation and which no human Sabbath-breaking nor enmity against God can destroy. In the resurrection of Jesus it saw and understood that the seventh day of creation which is to be kept holy as the “Lord’s Day” – as the day of God’s resting and also of the resting in Him commanded to man – is not only the last but above all the first day of man, and is therefore to be kept as his holy day’, III/4, p. 53; for further reflections on the relation of the Sabbath to the Christian Sunday, see III/1, p. 228. 105 III/4, p. 57. 106 See Jonathan Sacks, Faith in the Future (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1995), p. 123. 107 I/1, p. 370. Or as Moltmann argues, the Sabbath ‘is not revelation through creative activity; it is a revelation through rest’, Moltmann, God in Creation, p. 287.

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the divine retreat from the world into the aseity of the inner glory of God and God’s self-hallowing. Barth argues that ‘God was not satisfied merely to create the world and man and set them before Him and then to leave them to their own being and purpose and course, to the development of an autonomous law, Himself retiring to the basically superfluous position of supreme regent’.108 Conversely, by resting on the seventh day, he claims that God is free to ‘bind Himself the more closely to it’ and to associate with God’s creatures in the ‘fullest possible’ way.109 This is why Barth begins his doctrine of creation with the Sabbath, for this day is not the end but the beginning of God’s covenantal relationship with creation. ‘This final act of creation’ is ‘obviously also the first act of a covenant history which commences between God and man’.110 Thus, ‘a definite divine attitude’ is disclosed on the Sabbath: in confronting the completed totality of creation the creator reveals God’s ‘supremely positive’, covenantal relationship to that creation.111 The Sabbath marks the movement from God’s action pro nobis to God’s activity with God’s creatures. God enters ‘into this relationship with this reality distinct from Himself, to be the Creator of this creature’ and invites this creature to co-exist in the ‘special sphere’ of divine freedom, rest and joy.112 The ethical agent is actually, according to Barth, ‘created to participate in this rest’.113 In Genesis, the Sabbath lies at the curious position between the first two chapters: it connects the conclusion of Genesis 1 to the beginning of Genesis 2. Although the seventh day was not defined by a material act of creation (the creation of light, sky and so on), the saga culminates therefore in the conditions and the freedom for ‘the corresponding [entsprechenden] reactions of His creatures’.114 As such, the Sabbath sets divine and human agency not only in an irreversible order of being that flows from creator to creature but also in a positive relationship of covenantal partnership. In other words, the Sabbath bestows the very conditions for prayer, in which, according to Barth, ‘we stand before the innermost centre’ of the covenant.115 One of the striking features of Barth’s engagement with the Sabbath is not only that the Sabbath protects a genuine space for rest in the Christian life 108

III/1, p. 216. Ibid., pp. 223, 216. 110 Ibid., p. 217. 111 Ibid., pp. 216, 223. 112 Ibid., pp. 214, 223. 113 Ibid., p. 98. 114 III/2, p. 438 = KD III/2, p. 525. 115 III/4, p. 93. 109

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but that rest, and not action, stands at the Ausgangspunkt of ethical existence. The last day of the seven days of creation is really the ethical agent’s first and the history of the covenant ‘really begins on Sunday and not a weekday’.116 On the seventh day, Barth writes, ‘everything now seems to be ready’ for the ethical agent to act, however, what takes place on the Sabbath is ‘a very different occurrence’: rest!117 Consequently, the active week does not culminate but begins in the joyous rest in God. The rest of the week is unavoidably restless. ‘Each week, instead of being a trying ascent, ought to have been a glad descent from the high-point of the Sabbath’, Barth argues.118 The reality of rest, then, does not belong to the problem of sin, as though because of sin one can no longer withstand their true agency as being-in-action and require respite to recuperate from the tiresome demands of the active life. On the contrary, the fall is not a fall into rest but is a fall from rest: in this sense, there really is no rest for the wicked. Barth writes, ‘creation, and supremely man, rested with God on the seventh day and shared His freedom, rest and joy, even though it had not as yet any work behind it from which to cease, and its Sabbath freedom, rest and joy could be grounded only in those of God and consist only in its response to the invitation to participate in them’.119 It is against this backdrop that Jüngel’s identification of the Sabbath with the doctrine of justification by faith is to be read. Just as the ethical agent does not effect her own justification but receives it gratefully, the rest is not brought about by a human achievement but is received gratefully as God’s gift.120 The Sabbath is clearly a significant, if too infrequently discussed, part of Barth’s account of human freedom before God. But how might Barth’s dealings with the doctrine of the Sabbath help to tease out the contemplative dimensions of his theology of prayer?

116

III/1, p. 219. Ibid., p. 98. 118 Ibid., p. 228. 119 Ibid., p. 217. 120 Jüngel, Justification, p. 267. Brock also detects a similar reasoning operating here noting that ‘Barth can be understood as fleshing out the ethical implications of the Reformation concept of justification by faith alone in his exegesis of the Sabbath command’, Brock, Christian Ethics in a Technological Age, p. 292. Note also the symmetrical arrangement of the two major sections on prayer in Barth’s doctrine of creation. In III/4, for example, prayer is treated as the finale of three practices: holy day, confession and prayer. This arrangement corresponds with the earlier section on prayer that is situated in a wider discussion of the Christian attitude under God’s providential lordship in III/3 as faith, obedience and prayer. Thus, working backwards, prayer (in III/3) obviously is to be connected with the prayer section (in III/4), obedience with confession and faith with the holy day. In both accounts of the Christian life, Barth begins with ‘passive’ aspects (justification by faith alone and contemplation of God on the holy day) and then moves into the active. Barth writes that faith, like the Sabbath, has to do with ‘the receiving of the Word of God’, III/3, p. 246. 117

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The Sabbath as contemplation In addition to the structural decision to locate his most developed theology of the Sabbath in the same paragraph as one of his principal treatments of prayer (§53), the argument for the Sabbath time as time for contemplative prayer can be strengthened by two further observations. First, the type of language Barth takes up to describe the Sabbath rest yields connections with the contemplative repertoire. Following Calvin he writes that the Sabbath rest signifies the ‘cedere, resignare, abdicare’ and ‘we celebrate it en renoncant à notre nature’, by renouncing our nature.121 Resting with God in the gift of the Sabbath, for Barth, means the dispossession of the self and at that moment of dispossession the ethical agent expresses her absolute dependence on God. According to Rowan Williams, dispossession means primarily ‘waiting on God’ and this, he suggests, is principally what contemplation is all about.122 Contemplation, although resistant to definition, is not, then, intended in any sense to be understood in an elitist way but instead covers those practices of prayer that simply aim to give ‘place to the prior actuality of God’.123 The themes of rest, waiting on God, silence, attentive stillness, dispossession, resignation of the self and openness to the prior actuality of God, are important themes in the traditions of contemplative prayer and are equally brought to expression in Barth’s theology as the Sabbath rest. Furthermore, it is not uncoincidental that Barth’s most positive comments on ‘mysticism’ should take place in the context of the Sabbath section in III/4. There he writes that if ‘this is mysticism, then mysticism is an indispensable part of the Christian faith’.124 The second observation that substantiates the argument for the Sabbath time as time for contemplative prayer is Barth’s brief but programmatic attempt at a ‘Christian description’ of contemplation, which brings to a close a lengthy paragraph on the active life (§55).125 In so doing, Barth’s account of the active life returns full circle to where it all began: to the sabbatical rest that precedes all human action. By properly ‘Christian’ he means, of course, a description of contemplation that is a necessary part of human ‘freedom for life’ but distinguished from its understanding in the ‘mystical sense’.126 Barth thinks he 121

III/4, pp. 65, 59. Williams, ‘Theological Integrity’, p. 11. 123 Ibid. 124 III/4, p. 59. 125 Ibid., pp. 559–64 (560). 126 Ibid., p. 560. Kemmer makes a similar point but does not fully connect Barth’s discussion of contemplative rest in §55.3 with his account of the Sabbath in §53.4, see Kemmer, ‘Die Mystik in Karl Barth’, pp. 10–11. Klimek does, though, and identifies (but does not develop) a mystical potential in Barth’s theology of the Sabbath rest, see Klimek, Der Begriff ‘Mystik’ in der Theologie Karl Barths, pp. 141–2. 122

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has parted ‘company with [contemplation in its] mystical usage’, by insisting that ‘God – this is the error of so much mysticism – is not a further object of contemplation’.127 His concern, as already discussed, with the idea of a mystical progression into union with God (of which contemplation is the ‘first step’) is that the ethical agent attempts ‘to stumble at once and per se upon God’ and stumble therefore into rest with God. Barth’s way of freeing contemplation of its mystical baggage is to reverse that logic of progression.128 For Barth, ‘the Christian’s unio cum Christo’ is not ‘the climax of Christian experience and development in the face of which the anxious question might well be raised whether we have reached the point, or will ever do so’.129 Instead, rest is an event that is given, ‘whatever our development or experience’.130 It is God’s utterly gracious ‘gift to man’.131 Whatever else contemplation might mean, he is clear that the ethical agent ‘cannot obtain it for himself at all. He can only receive it at the place to which he must indeed resort. His rest is in God. God Himself is his rest. Only God can give him rest’.132 Contemplation, therefore, has to do with a divine action upon the receiving human agent.133 This point is amplified by thinking of contemplation in terms of the Sabbath rest, which is the rest that one does not create but is invited into by the divine. The eventfulness of the Sabbath rules out the achievement of this rest through a laborious ascent or a (semi-Pelagian) mastering of a ‘mystical technique’.134 Being the first day of the week, the Sabbath precedes all else that one does, including any attempt to get there. It is this emphasis on the giftedness of sabbatical contemplation that Barth thinks he has skirted the pit of subjectivism into which he believes the mystical traditions have fallen. Contemplation configured in terms of the Sabbath therefore redresses the supposed elitism Barth finds in the mystical traditions so that now contemplation, like the Sabbath, is available to all – an ‘everyday mysticism’, as it were.135

127

III/4, pp. 560, 563. See Ibid., p. 560. 129 IV/3, p. 548. 130 Ibid. 131 III/1, p. 221. 132 III/4, p. 563. 133 On this, see Sarah Coakley, ‘Deepening Practices: Perspectives from Ascetical and Mystical Theology’, in Miroslav Volf and Dorothy C. Bass (eds), Practicing Theology: Beliefs and Practices in Christian Life (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2002), pp. 78–93 (80). 134 III/4, p. 560. 135 See Karl Rahner, The Practice of Faith: A Handbook of Contemporary Spirituality (London: SCM Press, 1985). 128

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The reconfiguring of contemplation in terms of gift and invitation is not incongruent with many of the concerns of the mystical traditions. McIntosh argues, for example, in words that could well have been Barth’s, ‘that the whole event of contemplation is not primarily something that one does but that one is invited into’.136 Moreover, the move to understand contemplation in terms of the Sabbath rest is not, of course, totally alien to some of the most significant writers in the mystical traditions. For example, the final rung of Bonaventure’s account of the sevenfold mystical ascent into God, which is the final resting place of the soul’s journey to God, is nothing less the Sabbath. Bonaventure vividly describes how the six steps through which the pray-er ascends are ‘like the first six days, in which the mind has been trained so that it may reach the Sabbath of rest’.137 It is worth noting that (contrary to Barth’s critique) this ‘ascent’ to sabbatical contemplation, in which the soul finally comes to rest in God, is contextualized by Bonaventure within the paschal mystery and therefore is entirely christologically disciplined: ‘Christ is the way and the door; Christ is the ladder and the vehicle’.138 This quest for sabbatical rest is also impressed into the ascending structure of Augustine’s Confessions, which culminates with a vision of the Sabbath that finally satisfies the restlessness of heart that is described at the beginning of the text.139 More generally, the movement from rest to rest is not unlike the neo-Platonic process of emanation and return that exercised such influence over the early Christian writers. Another way Barth thinks he has parted company with contemplation in its mystical usage is by rejecting the idea that contemplation provides ‘the essential or independent content’ of the Christian life. For Barth, contemplation is rightly understood when it is understood in terms of the Christian life’s ‘terminus a quo’.140 While it is the divine prerogative to hallow the divine name and dispel the fatal ambiguities of human existence and while it is on the Sabbath that we discover ourselves as those who first of all take and receive and rest, this resting does not issue in a policy of ethical laissez-faire. The Sabbath is manifestly not ‘mere inaction’.141 Indeed, following the train of Barth’s thought

136

McIntosh, Mystical Theology, p. 12. See Bonaventure, The Soul’s Journey into God, The Tree of Life and The Life of St Francis, Classics of Western Spirituality (trans. Ewert Cousins; New York: Paulist Press, 1978), pp. 51–116 (110). 138 Bonaventure, The Soul’s Journey into God, p. 111. 139 See Augustine, Confessions (trans. Henry Chadwick; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 304–5. 140 III/4, p. 560. 141 Ibid., p. 63. 137

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in the ethics of creation, sabbatical contemplation (§53.1) leads into the act of confession (§53.2). The ethical agent confesses that ‘he himself exists as, consciously or unconsciously, gratefully or ungratefully, he is a kind receipt for the creative Word of God’.142 From the silence of the Sabbath comes confession’s ‘decisive concern … with man’s mouth, tongue and lips, with his talking and speaking’.143 And from confession, the ethical agent is led into the final action of human freedom before God: petition (§53.3).144 Indeed, Barth insists that on the Sabbath ‘man cannot for a moment withdraw from his obligation to his neighbour by fleeing to a special religious sphere’.145 Rather, the participation in God’s own rest is generative of good human work; good, that is, not of its own accord but because it derives from the very goodness of the Sabbath. Put differently, for Barth, the Sabbath involves the ‘sanctification of human activity’.146 Out of this sanctified rest, which reorientates the ethical agent to the source of all goodness, the agent is able to orientate herself to the world rightly, act accordingly and therefore be what it is to be a holy person. As all activity is fashioned in light of the Sabbath rest the logic of some Marxist ideologies of time and work that tend to instrumentalize work is reversed: one works from rest, rather than rests from work.147

142

Ibid., p. 73. Ibid., p. 75. 144 This movement from Sabbath to confession to petition might even be reminiscent of the story of the threefold mystical ascent told by Dionysius in The Celestial Hierarchy. The triad of purification, illumination and union corresponds unobviously with the organization of §53: there is the purgative reordering of the self ’s desire on the Sabbath, in confession there is the illumination that the pray-er is ‘indebted [to God] for his existence and nature’, III/4, p. 74, and in prayer the pray-er experiences union with God as she is called to join Christ in his ongoing intercession. On the relation between confession and illumination, Dionysius expects that those who ‘receive the light’ of divine illumination should also ‘pass on what they acquire’, The Celestial Hierarchy, p. 155. This resonates with Barth’s idea that confession commits the pray-er to a ‘specific public action’, III/4, p. 84. Just as with Dionysius’ insistence that a ‘hierarchy has God as its leader’, The Celestial Hierarchy, p. 155, there is a strong sense throughout this intriguing paragraph of the Church Dogmatics that at every stage there is first and foremost a divine action upon the prayer: the Sabbath–confession–petition triad depends wholly on the priority of God’s gracious movement. Significantly, more than once in this paragraph Barth also deploys the metaphor of ascent. He writes that, ‘He climbs to a mountain peak above which there is only heaven’, III/4, p. 85, emphasis added; see also, III/4, pp. 87, 101. It is also significant that Barth would return to the metaphor of ascent (or ‘homecoming’) later in the Church Dogmatics in his massive reworking of the offices of Christ. However, one must be wary of pressing these parallels too hard. Barth’s version of events is similar but in no way identical to what is more traditionally expressed as the mystical ascent. Expressing the triad hierarchically as a gradual ascent, for example, might well be normative for someone like Dionysius, but it is not Barth’s way and neither is any assimilation of union to deification. 145 III/4, pp. 48–9. 146 Ibid., p. 50. 147 See here, Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, p. 346. 143

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For Barth, the Sabbath is thus the restful waiting that hastens towards something.148 Consequently, he writes, it ‘can only be a matter of transition’.149 Hence Barth’s more developed understanding of contemplation at the close of §55’s account of the active life ends with a discussion of how the human agent is to respond actively to this gift. It would ‘be terrible’, Barth writes, ‘if this [contemplation] were the essential thing’.150 Having received the gift of rest, he asks, what ‘else can our praise of this gift and Giver be … but a single petition and supplication, a spreading out of empty hands to the One who, so long as we are on our way, must always fill them afresh’.151 The one ‘who receives … rest can never cease to make petition and supplication’.152 The ethical agent does not live in restful times but rather is caught in the thick of the Zeit zwischen den Zeiten, the time suspended between the in-breaking of the new age and the passing away of the old, the interregnum between Sabbaths. In this meantime the ethical celebration of the Sabbath is always prefigurative, proleptic and strangely uncomfortable since ultimate rest is really something of times to come. The Sabbath rest, as we know it, ‘intervenes between six working days on the one side and six more on the other’ and therefore always arrives in the midst of restlessness.153

148

This is reminiscent of Barth’s 1915 interaction with the younger Blumhardt, in which he endorses the revolutionary character of his message of restful waiting: to wait ‘means just the opposite of sitting comfortably and going along with the order of things’, Karl Barth, ‘Afterword’, in Christoph Blumhardt, Action in Waiting (Robertsbridge: Plough, 2007), pp. 189–94 (193). 149 III/4, p. 562. 150 Ibid. 151 Ibid., p. 564. 152 Ibid. 153 IV/2, p. 697. Matthew Myer Boulton is one of the few to gesture in the direction of the Sabbath in connection with Barth’s theology of prayer. He writes that ‘the work of people, and indeed the work of people-with-God, will give way to rest, Sabbath, celebration, shalom. Invocation will end. “Some sweet day” will dawn. The call, at the last, will give way to the kiss’, Boulton, God against Religion, p. 20. However, there are some problems with the implication that the Sabbath marks the ending of prayer: why, exactly, should prayer end? A further problem is that, on Boulton’s reading, the Sabbath is confined to the eschaton, as the projected end of prayer, and less the ethical priority to be practiced here and now. This sits rather awkwardly with the material on the Sabbath that begins Barth’s doctrine of creation (in III/3) and his account of human freedom before God (in III/4). There, Barth is quite clear that sabbatical contemplation is the terminus a quo of the active life and that the ethical agent returns to this dedicated space for rest weekly. ‘As Heb. 4.1–8 explains, the Sabbath day has dawned. Because we now have not only the weekly recurring sign of the seventh day, but the fulfilment of this sign, the reality to which it had pointed so long. The day of rest has arrived for God and His people, and none must neglect to enter into it today’, III/2, p. 469. There can be ‘no avoiding’ an eschatological explanation of this rest, Barth insists, III/1, p. 222. This means that the Sabbath is the living in the now of that end, as this world and this life are flooded with the eschatological light of hope, with the light of the final Sabbath, which brings into present reality the promised future.

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At root, the fourth commandment makes the claim that rest is as important to the Christian life as action. An unusual space for the sustained practice of silence is opened up by the Sabbath in Barth’s otherwise very loud account of the Christian life. The holy day is ‘an interruption, a rest, a deliberate noncontinuation, a temporal pause, to reflect on God and His work’.154 The quieting, stilling and resting of the self that takes place on the Sabbath leads to an intensified awareness that on entering the sanctity of God’s own rest one finds oneself known and loved by God and already in an ‘indestructible relationship’ with God.155 This willingness to be interrupted by the Sabbath also overturns familiar conceptions of human autonomy defined by an unencumbered power to choose, for example. In complex ways the Sabbath presents the self as absolutely dependent on God and existing in the space where self-determination and divine-determination coincide with neither confusion nor competition.156 ‘The Sabbath is a sign of the freedom which God the Creator has assumed to be gracious to His creature … [and] also the sign of the freedom which he has given to His creature’.157

Contemplative listening To help along this chapter’s argument that lurking in Barth’s engagement with the Sabbath might be found a way of thinking about contemplation, what follows is a brief consideration of the type of practices that might occur in the ‘special time’ of the Sabbath rest. One of the chief practices associated with the Sabbath that could be considered contemplative is the practice of listening. As Franz Rosenzweig writes, ‘for six days he has spoken many useful and un-useful words, as the weekday called upon him to do, but on the seventh he follows the bidding of the prophet to rest his tongue from the everyday chit-chat and learns silence and listening’.158 Indeed, the practice of listening arises naturally from Barth’s understanding of prayer: it is only after hearing the divine command that one responds to God with prayer. On this basis, the contemplative dimension has a pervasive, if not always explicit, presence in Barth’s account of the Christian life. This already rather long chapter will be 154

III/4, p. 50. See here, Klimek, Der Begriff ‘Mystik’ in der Theologie Karl Barths, p. 132. III/4, p. 561. 156 On contemplative prayer and submission, see Sarah Coakley, Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). 157 III/4, p. 52. 158 Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption (trans. Barbara E. Galli; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), p. 333. 155

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brought to a close, then, with a consideration of two (categorically) different but intriguing listening practices that are singled out by Barth as claiming particular importance: listening to the revelation of God in Holy Scripture and listening to the music of Mozart.

Holy Scripture The perceived cultural demise of our willingness to rest has already been noted in this chapter. Carol Harrison detects a similar demise of the ‘art of listening’ as a primary means of communication.159 ‘We live’, Harrison writes, ‘in a culture which is primarily visual rather than auditory, or, at least, in which the auditory is almost always subservient to the visual’.160 However, for Barth, listening does take priority. In an important way, Barth’s own theology was intended primarily for the ear rather than the eye: most of his writings began as lectures and were meant, then, to be heard.161 More than this, the very discipline of listening derives from the good news of the spoken Word. For Barth, whatever else God does ‘not keep silent but says something to man, telling him what he wants from him’, and speaks in the incarnate Word, in Holy Scripture and in the words of the preacher.162 Being human ‘consists in listening to the Word of God’.163 The people of God are a listening people, who are informed and transformed in their hearing of the Word in its threefold form. The Church, therefore, is an ecclesia audiens and must ‘seize the weapon’ of listening.164 159

Carol Harrison, The Art of Listening in the Early Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 2. 160 Ibid. 161 Barth’s relatively light editorial touch means that some of his writings betray the signs of their original verbal form; for example, see Prayer, p. 38. 162 ChrL, p. 33. 163 III/2, p. 147. 164 I/2, p. 804. This emphasis on the practice of listening is consistent with Barth’s rejection of two forms of ethics that, on his reading, remain somewhat ‘deaf ’ to the Word of God: casuistry and naturalistic ethics. As Biggar argues, ‘the crucial and most distinguishing feature of the legitimate form of ethics, as Barth presents it, is that it conceives human apprehension of the good in terms of hearing a command of God’, Biggar, The Hastening that Waits, p. 14. In terms of the first form of ethics Barth rules out, casuistry, the task of Christian ethics is not to apply some kind of autonomous and universally accessible set of dos and don’ts to particular ethical situations – this is the systematization of ethics into general governing laws that fail to remain open to hearing the command of God as it is given in the particularities of the here and now, always afresh and ever new. Barth writes that ‘God in his command … tells him very concretely what he is to do or not to do here and now in these or those particular circumstances’, ChrL, p. 33. Over against the notion of ‘law’, which is given apart from the concrete situation of a particular hearer, Barth’s choice of the term ‘command’ is revealing since it implies spontaneity and utterance. Hearing the command of God emphasises that God is a living God who freely elects Godself to encounter humanity in a personal and relational way and in particular moments in the life of the individual ethical agent. For an extensive discussion of casuistry in Barth’s ethics see Nimmo, Being in Action, pp. 52–60. In terms of the second ‘illegitimate’ form of ethics, naturalistic ethics, the ethical corollary to Barth’s

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The commitment to the practice of listening and hearing is consistent with this chapter’s claim that ethical existence, for Barth, is not all about an active sort of action but begins with alternative forms of existence: rest and reception. There is no other way for the ethical agent to be but to be first an agent of listening, assuming the posture of Mary of Bethany, of pure hearing (Lk. 10.3842). More than this, though, the commitment to the virtue of listening brings Barth into contact with some aspects of the contemplative tradition. In the reception of Luke 10, Mary, ‘who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying’ (Lk. 10.39), is often celebrated as exemplifying the contemplative life.165 Following this, Balthasar develops his theology of contemplative prayer through the motif of listening. The particular form of contemplative listening developed by Balthasar is neither passive ‘listening in’ on the mysterious triunedialogue nor ends in listening but finally is an act of dialogue, orientated towards conversation with God and the other.166 For Barth, a special time is allotted in the Christian life for listening attentively to the Word of God: it is the Sabbath that ‘makes him free for God in a special way, giving him space to attest and hear the Word of God’.167 It is a day that is ‘given to man … to hear’ God’s command.168 The sort of listening Barth has in mind is not, however, some free-floating listening where anything goes. On the contrary, for Barth, God speaks through and the ethical agent listens to something specific: Christ, to which Holy Scripture and the preached rejection of natural theology is a rejection of any natural, intrinsic capacity to know what to do. Here a moral system is constructed from the fragments of one’s distorted moral reasoning. The deafening Krisis that ran throughout the second edition of his commentary on Romans resounds here once more against all religious and moral assumptions – in particular, see ‘The Problem of Ethics’ in Romans (II), pp. 424–38. Instead, then, Barth speaks of the moral complexity of the ethical situation and of the actualistically realized divine command – actualistically, that is, because the command of God neither falls into human possession nor is domesticated into human ideals (in rules and laws) but must be realized afresh in each new moment and in each new ethical situation. Consequently, knowing what to do depends entirely on the grace of God. The refusal to listen to the Word of God, therefore, is a refusal of our very humanity and thus a matter of sin: we are too proud to hear any other voice than our own, too lazy to be bothered to listen and too dishonest to accept the particular divine command spoken to us. Barth writes that evasion of the gospel ‘commences, with all the ineluctable consequences, when the community ceases to hear it afresh each new day’, IV/3, p. 822. The ethical action that must follow God’s command is very specific: ‘either specific obedience insofar as it proceeds from right hearing of the divine order … or disobedience insofar as it does not proceed from such hearing’, ChrL, p. 34. If remaining deaf to God’s speech amounts to a loss of the self, then one genuinely inhabits one’s creatureliness by becoming open to and entering into the shattering and disturbing Krisis that takes place in the hearing of the Word of God. 165 On this, see Balthasar, Prayer, p. 88. 166 Ibid., p. 14. 167 III/4, p. 60. 168 III/1, p. 218.

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word witness. But God’s speech in its threefold form requires interpretation. In Barth’s account of the activity of the interpretation of God’s speech in Holy Scripture, which is the focus of the remainder of this section, the practice of hearing claims priority over the secondary tasks of ‘understanding’ and ‘exposition.’ It is important to emphasise that for Barth the interpretation of Holy Scripture is not simply a matter of the mind but also of the heart. It is a spiritual activity that transforms as much as informs. He insists that all interpretative activity must therefore take place ‘within the framework of prayer’.169 Barth’s use of the Benedictine ora et labora determines that prayer is not the thing that sits piously either side of the ‘labora’ of the interpretative task (as if prayer just begins and ends the interpretative act, for example). Instead, for Barth, the ‘labora’ is the ‘ora’: prayer is work and work is prayer.170 Because ‘it is the decisive activity prayer must take precedence even of exegesis, and in no circumstances must it be suspended’.171 There are two further, more specific, aspects to emphasize in considering what work prayer does in Barth’s account of scriptural interpretation. First, it is through the practice of prayer that the Bible, as a ‘being in becoming’, becomes the Word of God.172 That is to say, in this event the human prophetic and apostolic word is a representative of God’s Word in the same way as the word of the modern preacher is to be in the event of real proclamation: a human word which has God’s commission to us behind it, a human word to which God has given Himself as object, a human word which is recognised and accepted by God as good, a human word in which God’s own address to us is an event.173

However, the Bible does not become the Word of God because of prayer. ‘The fact that God’s own address becomes an event in the human word of the Bible is … God’s affair and not ours.’174 Anything else would compromise 169

I/2, p. 699. On this, see Mark Gignilliat, ‘Ora et Labora: Barth’s Forgotten Hermeneutical Principle’, The Expository Times 120.6 (2009), pp. 277–81. 170 See ET, p. 160. 171 I/2, p. 695. 172 Bruce L. McCormack, ‘The Being of Holy Scripture is in Becoming: Karl Barth in Conversation with American Evangelical Criticism’, in Dennis L. Okholm, Laura C. Miguelez and Vincent Bacote (eds), Evangelicals and Scripture: Tradition, Authority and Hermeneutics (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2004), pp. 55–75. 173 I/1, p. 109. 174 Ibid.

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the freedom of the divine decision for the actualization of revelation. It can, however, be said that Holy Scripture becomes the Word of God through and in the event of prayer. One prays for the distinctively human words of the text to bear ‘witness’ (in the technical sense of Zeugnis) to the self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Barth writes that the Church ‘prays that the Bible may be the Word of God here and now’.175 Although the form of prayer Barth has in mind here is of a petitionary sort, in which the ethical agent asks God for the Bible first to ‘become’ the Word of God and then for right understanding of the Word, there is another dimension to the role of prayer that moves in a more contemplative direction. Second, then, it is through prayer of a more contemplative sort that the ethical agent ‘becomes’ not simply a reader of the text but a participant in the text. For Barth, it is precisely because the Bible witnesses to the Word of God, that Holy Scripture is not to be consulted externalistically and read as if one is a spectator from afar. Barth’s ethics of biblical hermeneutics implies a strong sense of ethical participation in the Sache of the text, in nothing less than the Word of God. Reading Holy Scripture (and the subsequent interpretation of the text), therefore, is a deeply participative event and requires us ‘really to be open and ready, really to give ourselves to it’.176 The strange world of the Bible becomes our own and the drama ‘our drama’, not ‘a drama played out in front of us’, Barth writes.177 The practice of prayerful listening to and participation in the Sache of the text means that one cannot hear the Word of God without somehow being changed by that hearing. As Donald Wood argues, to ‘ “hear” an utterance is to encounter the object intended by it, to so encounter it that one is fundamentally implicated by it. A relationship is established by the object of witness, and the hearer can no longer exist as she did before. In hearing an utterance, one is necessarily transformed’.178 Indeed, Barth writes, the Church ‘must listen in such a way that its whole life is put in question. It must listen in readiness that its whole life should be assailed, convulsed, revolutionised and reshaped’.179 There is a form of epistemic stripping and purgation implied here in which the ethical agent is made open to the movement of the Sache, which shatters, recasts and shatters again. It is important to emphasize that this is a process that is done unto the ethical agent by the interruptive work of grace, 175

I/2, p. 514. Ibid., p. 470. 177 Ibid., p. 498. 178 Donald Wood, Barth’s Theology of Interpretation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 143. 179 I/2, p. 804. 176

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upon which one waits in the space carved out by contemplative listening. ‘We cannot perform this service for ourselves, but only allow it to be performed by the Bible.’180 For Barth, it is an issue of theological honesty to begin with the practice of listening. The interpretation of Holy Scripture ‘does not lie … in our power but only in God’.181 This is part of the reason for developing his account of scriptural interpretation in the context of human ‘obedience’ before God. From this position of obedient receptivity and humble listening to the prior actuality of God’s Word, the task of interpretation can begin. And more specifically, for Barth, the interpretation of Holy Scripture takes place in three stages: explanation, subordination and interpretation.182 The first stage involves taking responsibility for the explanation of Holy Scripture, of the proclamation heard.183 ‘As the Word of God it needs no explanation, of course, since as such it is clear in itself … . But this Word in Scripture assumes the form of human words. Human words need interpretation because as such they are ambiguous.’184 This stage is about establishing the sense of Scripture and then conveying that meaning to others. The second involves the subordination (but not the abandonment) of all human ideas, thoughts and convictions that obscure the clarity of God’s Word.185 When the Word of God meets us, we are laden with the images, ideas and certainties which we ourselves have formed about God, the world and ourselves. In the fog of this intellectual life of ours the Word of God, which is clear in itself, always becomes obscure. It can become clear to us only when this fog breaks and dissolves. This is what is meant by the subordination of our ideas, thoughts and convictions.186

This is a delicate process. ‘It is not as though we had simply to abandon and forget our ideas, thoughts and convictions. We certainly cannot do that, just as little as we can free ourselves from our own shadow.’187 It is about giving priority 180

Ibid., p. 719. There is something dispossessive, then, about our obedience to the strange world of the Bible. This process of dispossession, through the attentive listening to the scriptural text that brings about a reshaping of presuppositions, is not without some spiritual pain (or at least discomfort). Although much less acute, the sort of discomfort that ‘strips’ (or removes the ‘masks and camouflages’, to use Barth’s language, III/4, p. 98) in order to transform and redirect desire towards God might not be all that dissimilar from John of the Cross’s description of the purgative progress (expressed in The Dark Night, for example) to the higher stages of contemplative prayer. 181 I/2, p. 531. 182 Ibid., pp. 710–40. 183 Ibid., pp. 710–15. 184 Ibid., p. 712. 185 See Ibid., pp. 715–22. 186 Ibid., p. 716. 187 Ibid., p. 718.

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to that which is heard in Scripture over against all other ideas, thoughts and convictions in order for them to be transformed from within. The third and final stage is a highly compressed account of the mechanics of interpretation that can be expanded into three further ‘individual phases’ consisting of observation, meditation and appropriation. The first phase (observation) in this final stage of scriptural interpretation involves the literary-historical investigation of the text; the third (appropriation) involves the acting out of the text in the world itself. Barth’s argument, however, turns on the crucial middle phase (meditation) through which the ethical agent begins to imbibe the strange new world of the Bible. Notice that in this pivotal middle phase, Barth gestures towards something of a theology of meditation, of scriptural meditation. It is a ‘transitional’ phase, as is the Sabbath a transitional day, in which what is said by the text becomes what is thought by the hearer and what is thought by the hearer is acted out in the world. A vulnerable space therefore is opened up by this meditative phase in which a transition takes place from reading the Word of God to what might be called ‘being read’ by Holy Scripture.188 This is a kind of reading that is not only about extracting as much information as possible from the text than the slow, attentive, meditation on the text; not only about mastering the text than being mastered by that text; not only about reading the text but allowing that reading to be absorbed until it becomes prayer itself. From there meditatio (which is not unlike a version of lectio divina, though Barth does not use that term himself) flows straight into appropriation. What is heard must now be shared and proclaimed. ‘The Word of God wills always to be newly and more widely heard in the Church, and beyond the Church lies the world, where by the Church it also wills to be heard.’189 In fact, it is ‘intrinsically impossible’, Barth insists, that the hearing of the Word of God ‘should not lead to activity on the part of the Church’.190

Mozart Barth’s commitment to the theme of listening can also be evidenced by his extraordinary devotion to the music of Mozart.191 Although listening to the music of Mozart for Barth is a categorical different type of listening than the 188

See I/1, p. 110. Ibid., p. 711. 190 I/2, p. 845. 191 On Barth and Mozart, see Jeremy Begbie, Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), pp. 152–6 and Philip Edward Stoltzfus, Theology as Performance: Music, Aesthetics, and God in Western Thought (London: T&T Clark, 2006), pp. 145–57. 189

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listening of God’s revelatory voice in Holy Scripture, his relationship with Mozart nevertheless provides a way of amplifying the essential features of what a sabbatical sort of contemplation looks like.192 In agreement with this chapter’s attempt to locate and develop a theology of contemplation from within the context of the Sabbath, and therefore to position contemplation as the terminus a quo of human action, it is well known that Barth began each day in the company of Mozart’s music.193 Suggestively, this listening rarely stretched beyond its designated place in Barth’s day: the day did not typically end with Mozart as a reward for theological productivity, for example. It was, however, the Ausgangspunkt. He heard in Mozart ‘a sign that a new day in the time allotted to [him] had begun’.194 In other words, like sabbatical contemplation, this contemplative listening does not end in listening but expands the potential for action: ‘without it [Mozart’s music] I could not think of what moves me personally in theology or politics’.195 This sort of contemplation also resists falling into the subjectivism Barth found so intolerable in his reading of the mystical traditions. On the contrary, his music, Barth writes, invites the listener ‘to venture … out of the snail’s shell of his own subjectivity’.196 The music is parabolic, pointing away from the self and to God. It is a practice of ‘pure receiving’ and the vision at the centre of Barth’s adoration of the music of Mozart is the freedom, love and joy of God.197 Mozart ‘has heard, and causes those with ears to hear, even today, what we shall not see until the end of time’.198 This is a time when the whole of creation will resound in the liberating and heavenly sounds of Jubilate. He heard in Mozart an echo of the beautiful, pitch-perfect sound of the heavenly hallowing of God’s name that is to come. Mozartian contemplation signalled the terminus a quo and also, 192

It is not coincidental that two contemporary contemplatives, Balthasar and Merton, were drawn to Barth’s theology through his love for Mozart, see Thomas Merton, ‘Barth’s Dream and Other Conjectures’, The Sewanee Review 73.1 (1965), pp. 1–18. It is reported that Balthasar and Barth regularly met to listen to Mozart and were joined at least on one occasion by Speyr for a full day of Mozart listening, see Busch, Karl Barth, p. 362. It is also of interest that perhaps the only quasimystical experience Barth feels comfortable to report was during the bicentenary celebrations at a recital of Mozart’s piano concerto in F Major (K.413): ‘I even had a sudden vision of [Mozart] standing there in front of the piano, so clear I almost began to cry. That’s quite a story, isn’t it – such a story that even Balthasar with his mystical experiences listened respectfully when I told him’, Busch, Karl Barth, p. 409. 193 See Busch, Karl Barth, pp. 362–3. 194 Ibid., p. 363. 195 Karl Barth, How I Changed my Mind (ed. John D. Godsey ; Edinburgh: Saint Andrews Press, 1969), p. 72. 196 Karl Barth, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (trans. Clarence K. Pott; Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2003), p. 50. 197 III/4, p. 564. 198 III/3, p. 298.

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then, the terminus ad quem, that is, the end of all work, the end of theology. He heard in Mozart ‘a prayer, but a prayer already answered’.199 Thus, in his famous dream, Barth recounts how Mozart remained confidently silent in response to his theological examinieren.200 Mozart, in a sense, witnesses to the proleptic end of theology, where no such theological lesson is necessary and all questioning is overcome with rest, joy and peace.201 However, Barth heard in Mozart the beauty of creation but also a second, contrasting melody, this one haunted and darkened by the shadow side of creation. As he writes in Romans (II), when ‘a human work or production sings to us a theme of supreme beauty – Mozart! – then, precisely then, it strikes the chords of deep distress’.202 Mozart’s music, like the ethical celebration of the Sabbath, like contemplation, is only transitory and not yet permanent.203 It occurs in the very midst of the messiness of creation. ‘What he translated into music was real life in all its discord.’204 Hence Barth locates his eulogy to Mozart within a discussion of the Schattenseite of creation, which describes how the light of creation is blackened by shadows. Barth was writing this section of the Church Dogmatics in the early 1950s, in a Europe still darkened by war. But, for Barth, Mozart’s music provided an eschatological light in the midst of this shadowiness and a sense of the sound to come. The Sabbath keeps coming, relentlessly. Consequently, this listening does not end in listening: it is generative of an active response and engagement in the world to hasten towards that sound, the sound of the Sabbath. ‘All that he has to do is to listen. But as he does listen, and to the extent that he does, he has his function in the divine world-strategy, doing at some point the duty which is allotted to him as a soldier and servant.’205

Summary This chapter has developed neglected aspects of Barth’s writings to help to alleviate at least some of the concern that the more contemplative dimensions 199

Barth, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, p. 56. Ibid., p. 20. 201 For more on Barth’s dream, see Rowan Williams, ‘ “Not Being Serious”: Thomas Merton and Karl Barth’, in A Silent Action: Engagements with Thomas Merton (London: SPCK, 2013), pp. 69–82. 202 Romans (II), p. 434. 203 It is worth noting that in Barth’s Münster lectures on ethics art (including music) belonged to the ethics of redemption, see Ethics, pp. 508–9. 204 Barth, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, p. 33. 205 III/3, p. 260. 200

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of prayer have no role in Barth’s theology of prayer. The Sabbath gives this Barthian form of contemplative prayer a distinctive quality and provides a way of identifying what sort of work contemplation should perform in his theology of prayer. Just as with the Sabbath rest so too with the practice of hearing the Word of God in Holy Scripture and listening to the sounds of the Sabbath in the music of Mozart, contemplation is something that the ethical agent is invited into rather than that which one attempts to ‘achieve’ (and therefore resists Barth’s charge of subjectivism) and claims no immediate finality but is the terminus a quo for all else that follows (and therefore resists Barth’s second charge that contemplation stops short of action). In his account of the Christian attitude under the universal lordship of God, Barth therefore speaks positively of the Christian life consisting of ‘contemplation [Betrachtung] and activity’, and notably in that order.206 Locating a space for a revealing form of contemplative prayer that can appropriately be called Barthian, however, also generates a further set of problems. Is the binary distinction that formally distinguishes contemplation from action too heavy-handed in the ethics of creation? Should contemplation be more than just the starting point of all human action? Is there any way to hold together the contemplative and petitionary more successfully and less competitively? These questions will be taken up in the final three chapters of this book in its discussion of invocation. For now, though, the trajectory of prayer’s movement from the prior act of contemplation to the active response in petition will be followed by turning to the prioritization of petition as it unfolds in the doctrine of creation.

206

Ibid., p. 243 = KD III/3, p. 275.

3

Petition

Asking is the only thing that he can do. –Karl Barth1 The third volume of the Church Dogmatics contains two sustained and lengthy treatments of prayer. The first appears in the doctrine of providence (§49.4.3) and the second in the ethics of creation (§53.3). Throughout both of these sections Barth has a very clear idea of what constitutes prayer: prayer is petition. ‘The only possible status of the creature is that of one who asks,’ he writes.2 The aim of this chapter is to analyse some of the reasons why an understanding of prayer as principally petition came to dominate Barth’s thinking on the topic in the doctrine of creation. It unfolds by setting Barth’s prioritization of petition against the context of other important areas of his thought, including: the doctrines of the divine command and election, the christological movements later developed in the doctrine of reconciliation (but hinted at here) and his treatment of sin as pride; but first, to petition itself.

The prioritization of petition There is no avoiding the prioritization of petition in the third volume of the Church Dogmatics. Petition ‘controls and includes everything else one might say about prayer’, Barth argues.3 Prayer is ‘decisively’ and ‘simply’ petition, a ‘frank asking’.4 ‘It is the fact that he comes before God with his petition which makes him a praying man.’5 Why is Barth drawn to exalting prayer as petition? Given 1 2 3 4 5

III/3, p. 274. Ibid. Ibid., p. 268. III/4, pp. 97, 102. III/3, p. 268.

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the reputation Barth never fully shakes off for posing divine and human agency as so radically distinguished that the type of agential arrangement required by a theology of petition is potentially undercut, one could be forgiven for thinking that his theological programme makes petition to be an odd sort of prayer to prioritize so ferociously.6 The emphasis gratitude, as the ‘chief end’ of human work, receives in the Reformed tradition makes Barth’s prioritization of petition across these writings doubly curious. There are good reasons for defining prayer in the way Barth does, however. ‘The first and decisive argument against the subordination or equality of petition is the actual text of the Lord’s Prayer, the substance of which is quite clearly and simply a string of petitions, pure petitions.’7 In addition to the centrality of petition in the biblical material on Christ’s teaching on prayer and the connections between the words ‘prayer’ and ‘petition’,8 a further reason for Barth’s prioritization of petition has to do with the profound sense of the ‘neediness’ of the ethical agent that characterizes his writings on prayer in this period.9 Although these factors certainly contribute to the exaltation of petition, the primary reason for its prioritization, however, lies elsewhere: in the divine command. ‘The real basis of prayer is man’s freedom before God, the God-given permission to pray which, because it is given by God, becomes a command and an order and therefore a necessity.’10 With a nod to Luther’s linking of prayer and command, the two independent sections on prayer in the Church Dogmatics take place in the context of the divine command: first in III/4, under the command of God the creator, and then again in The Christian Life, under the command of God the reconciler; and the other major section, in III/3, ties 6

7

8

9 10

For such a critique, see Stephen H. Webb, The Gifting God: A Trinitarian Ethics of Excess (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 103. III/3, p. 268. Some also argue that Barth was recovering the petitionary aspect of prayer in direct response to the rather muted attention it received in the neo-Protestantism in which he was schooled. According to Meyer-Blanck, Barth ‘breaks with the position of neo-Protestantism with his claim: “It is true that to pray is to ask” ’, Meyer-Blanck, ‘Gottesdienst und Gebet bei Karl Barth’, p. 133 (citing III/4, p. 91). Herlyn argues in further detail how Barth’s theology of petition directly counters Schleiermacher’s and Ritschl’s accounts of prayer, claiming that Schleiermacher disallowed the possibility of influencing God, thus rendering the practice of petition superfluous, see Herlyn, Religion oder Gebet, pp. 106–9. On this connection, see Simon Tugwell, ‘Prayer, Humpty Dumpty and Thomas Aquinas’, in Brian Davies (ed.), Language, Meaning and God (London: Chapman, 1987), pp. 24–50. Barth advances a similar argument in claiming that in ‘all languages the word prayer … speaks only of petition as the constitutive element in what takes place in prayer’, III/3, p. 267. Despite this, as we have mentioned, Barth laments the restraint with which Luther, Calvin and the Heidelberg Catechism understood prayer as petition, see III/4, p. 97. For example: III/3, pp. 267–9, 273, 281; III/4, pp. 91, 93, 95. III/4, p. 92.

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prayer to obedience.11 The Christian prays ‘simply because he is commanded to pray’, Barth concludes.12 Prayer (Gebet) is the most appropriate response to the hearing of God’s command (Gebot). The divine command is also a command to pray in a very specific way. When the disciples asked Christ to teach them how to pray, he said ‘pray, then, like this’ (Matt. 6.9) and prayed a ‘string of petitions’.13 Since we cannot pray as we ought our prayer is patterned on Christ’s own prayer, which provides an apprenticeship in prayer. We ask because we are asked to ask. Although Barth’s theology of prayer as petition is most accentuated in the doctrine of creation, crucial dogmatic moves made much earlier in the Church Dogmatics paved its way. Since the practice of prayer and the doctrine of God are linked in complex and inextricable ways (prayer is prayer to God by God), the prioritization of petition leads deep into Barth’s doctrine of God. In II/2, Barth writes that God ‘elects Himself to be gracious toward man, to be his Lord and Helper’.14 This is the elected mode of God’s action. God has elected to draw so near to humanity that ‘man now finds himself in the nearness of child and Father’ – a nearness that is expressed in petition.15 Already in his doctrine of election, then, Barth had laid the dogmatic groundwork for God to be unremittingly and permanently in covenantal relations with humanity, to be graciously and intimately involved in all the concerns of human life, to turn to humanity in all the compassion of God’s being; to be, in a word, the creature’s ‘Helper’.16 Consequently, Barth’s account of the divine perfections includes a description of God’s freedom to be our helper.17 It is because of God’s perfect lack of need that God overflows with the help that is free, unconditional and unmerited. This help is exemplified in Christ. In Christ, Barth writes, ‘God has constituted Himself personally the Lord and Guardian and Helper and 11

12 13 14 15 16 17

Barth insists that prayer is understood rightly as ‘a commanded activity’, III/4, p. 93. In the Neuchâtel seminars Barth acknowledges his surprise that Luther and not Calvin ‘holds this rigid, almost military idea’, Prayer, p. 4; see also, III/4, p. 93. However, although Barth follows Luther in speaking of prayer in terms of obedience to the divine command (see Luther’s ‘Large Catechism’ of 1530, for example), it must be stressed that he retains a characteristically Reformed emphasis on beginning with the creed and then turning to the commandments and not vice versa. Calvin, of course, spoke of prayer as the ‘chief exercise of faith’, in the long twentieth chapter on prayer in Book III of the Institutes, pp. 850–920. Hence §49.4 begins with faith (creed), then obedience (command) and finally prayer. III/4, p. 96. III/3, p. 268. II/2, p. 510. III/3, p. 268. See Ibid., p. 273; III/4, pp. 106–14 and Prayer, p. 13. See II/1, pp. 510, 676.

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hope of the world and man.’18 The logic of election, therefore, is both the good news that God elects Godself to be our helper and also that the community is elected to be helped. God calls God’s people to a particular existence and to a particular kind of response; that is, to be a petitionary people, to be a people who ask for help in the confidence that God will help. This leads not only to the implication that prayer is always an ecclesial event and is the community’s ‘decisive action’, but also that there is no option for this community to decide whether or not to obey the divine command to pray (for this would exert some human mastery over the command).19 There is only one freedom, for Barth, and that is the freedom for prayer. Barth insists that prayer ‘is literally the archetypal form of all human acts of freedom in the Church, and as such it must be continually repeated in all other acts of freedom’.20 On this basis, petition is the primary means of responding to the hearing of the dominical command to pray. It is ‘a need, a kind of breathing necessary to life’ that must not cease.21 As the ethical agent prays, ‘he pushes open the gate and steps out into freedom. As he does so, he is a creature which transcends the limits of the creature. And in this way he is the human creature … . If he did not do this … he would not be man’.22 Not to pray, then, is to forfeit one’s very humanity and become something less than human. One result of the strong theology of petition is the stripping of prayer to its bare bones and therefore of anything that distracts from what Barth calls prayer’s ‘objective bearing’.23 There is something elegantly uncomplicated and ordinarily homely about the way Barth renders prayer as petition. He has distilled Christian existence to that ‘most natural and necessary’ expression of life, that most primitive act of calling out to God by the ones whose hands are empty.24 The word he uses for petition is simply ‘Bitte’, literally, ‘please’: this is the language of the everyday, the vernacular of human living. He writes that the ethical agent’s ‘vocation is a vocation to prayer: not to particularly pious, fervent or beautiful prayer … but simply to prayer’.25 In subsequent chapters, it is argued that prayer is in the business of iconoclasm: in the kneeling work of prayer, idolatries of thought are 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

III/3, p. 271. I/2, p. 695. Ibid., p. 698. Prayer, p. 15. III/2, p. 189. III/3, p. 284, emphasis restored = KD III/3, p. 321. III/3, p. 270. IV/3, p. 673.

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stripped, faculties of thought are reordered and the possibilities for divine knowing are expanded and enlarged. Prayer is also complexly concerned with the smashing of idolatrous conceptions of the self. With petition in particular, Barth writes, ‘all masks and camouflages’ fall away.26 The dispossessive striping of the camouflages of apparent power and mastery that happens through petition, for example, might involve discomfort and sometimes distress. It leads the pray-er on a darkly difficult path of unlearning all that one has been schooled, or socialized, into thinking about the good life (based on potentially distorted ideologies of power and unjust power relations) and a relearning, in the darkness of Gethsemane, what it means to be prayerfully reshaped as a creature of God.27 A petitionary sort of prayer is tasked with the reframing of what it means to speak of human freedom. ‘What remains when every mask falls? … Obviously all that remains is his need in relation to God.’28 Part of petition’s reframing of human freedom involves an unmasking of the assumption that the origins of prayer are to be found in an autonomously willed human action. For Barth, it is the divine command that interrupts the ethical moment, calling the pray-er into prayer. Thus, in petition, Barth continues, ‘he is doing that which corresponds and answers to the situation in which he finds himself placed by the Word of God’.29 Barth is uncompromising in his insistence that of all the things that we are commanded to do, we petition God ‘not by our own initiative, but because we are invited, called to do so. We have the freedom to come to him. This freedom is given to us; it is not of ourselves, it is not natural’.30 When prayer masquerades as a self-initiated, self-standing human venture, the ethical agent appeals to a self-determinative agency that Barth would reject and, consequently, makes an idol out of the self and invents another to which to pray. Here, under the hope of securing the full agency of the praying agent, Christian worship is conceived as something that the worshipping agent does.31 Under the conditions of assuming that prayer is the work of the autonomous self, what is lost (to follow James Torrance’s important argument) is the grounding of prayer in the mediation of the priestly 26 27

28 29 30 31

III/4, p. 98. On being socialized into unjust power relations, see Alistair McFadyen, Bound to Sin: Abuse, Holocaust and the Christian Doctrine of Sin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 151–2. III/4, p. 98. III/3, p. 270. Prayer, p. 26. For example: Vincent Brümmer, What Are We Doing When We Pray?: On Prayer and the Nature of Faith (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).

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work of Christ.32 We pray, in effect, in our own name. Understood as human achievement, our attempts at prayer reverberate against the compound of the self and amount to the type of self-conversation that would confirm Feuerbach’s suspicion of prayer as monological therapeutics. Barth hopes, however, that the possibility of sole-causality (in either agential direction) is excluded by prioritizing petition so strongly. Conceived as a verbal exchange between two acting subjects, as a response to the prior divine initiative and precisely not as a human achievement, petition protects against prayer falling into the murky subjectivism of self-conversation.33 Throughout Barth’s writings on petition, there is a strong iconoclastic grounding of human prayer in Christology, and in particular in the priestly office of Christ. To prevent human prayer from slipping into some murky subjectivism in which one speaks only with oneself, Barth speaks first and foremost of the objectivity of Christ’s own prayer. Therefore, the ‘Yes’ with which the ethical agent answers the divine ‘Yes’ can never amount to more than the ‘force and reach of an echo’ of Christ’s prior ‘Yes’.34 Petition is the ‘repetition [nachbeten]’ of Christ’s own petition, an asking that is ‘enclosed’ in Christ’s asking and a return to the prayer that was uttered and continues to be uttered by Jesus, the logos incarnate, who is constantly interceding on our behalf at the right hand of the Father.35 This ethical model is not unfamiliar to the Church Dogmatics. The imperative of what is to be done is phrased from within the context of a prior indicative, that is, of what God has already done and continues to do for us in the Spirit. For example, in Barth’s doctrine of providence God fulfils God’s fatherly lordship by preserving, accompanying and ruling (§49.1–3) over creation in a way that is generative of the human response in an attitude of faith, obedience and above all petition (§49.4). Later it will be suggested that one of the prime reasons that Barth is suspicious of speaking of prayer in terms of an autonomously willed human action is because of his commitment to the ‘failure of prayer’. This contradiction

32

33

34 35

James Torrance, Worship, Community and the Triune God of Grace (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1996), p. 7. However, Torrance’s subsequent reassessment of Christian worship risks going too far in the opposite direction by overstating the priestly office of Christ. His strong priestly proposals need balancing by equally strong assertions of Christ’s kingly office. This delicate balance, as we shall see, is exactly what Barth achieves in his theology of prayer. As Kelsay argues, this turns Kant (and indeed Feuerbach), on his head, see Kelsay, ‘Prayer and Ethics’, p. 182. Kant appears scathing of practices of prayer and Christian worship. He complains that prayer is a ‘superstitious delusion’ in which (much like Feuerbach would go on to say) one simply ‘converse[s] within oneself and in fact with oneself ’, see Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Other Writings (trans. and eds Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 186–8 (188). III/2, p. 188. III/3, p. 277 = KD III/3, p. 314. See also, III/3, pp. 278, 279 and Prayer, p. 14.

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(expressed in terms of being commanded to pray yet being unable to pray) leads to the very heart of what Christian prayer is all about, for Barth. Being unable to pray is not a lack or a deficiency but precisely the paradoxical ground on which one can really and actually pray and indeed flourish in prayer. The failure of prayer leads, therefore, to a much more intensive participation in the life of the divine. While in the ethics of reconciliation Barth would rethink these themes from a pneumatological perspective, in the sections on prayer in the doctrine of creation, and in a provocative move that is pregnant with something of Luther’s Anfechtung, Barth insists that at the point of struggling to pray the ethical agent turns to the one who really can pray as he ought: Christ. Barth cites with approval Calvin’s claim that Jesus Christ is ‘properly and really the One who prays’.36 This makes the ethical agent at once, with an appeal this time to something of Luther’s simul, a saint and a sinner. In prayer ‘we experience at once a certain sadness and a certain joy’, Barth writes.37 The next section explores in further detail the christological mechanics of prayer.

Christ the pray-er ‘Something has happened in Jesus Christ’, Barth writes, so that ‘the Christian is able to ask’.38 In these sections on prayer, Barth does with prayer what he does best and refracts everything through the lens of Christ. It is Christ ‘who makes good that which we of ourselves cannot make good, who brings our prayer before God and therefore makes it possible as prayer’.39 Moreover, for Barth, Christ is not only the teacher of prayer who leads by example and the one constantly praying for us and in our stead, but Christ is the very embodiment of prayer: Christ is prayer. To parse fully this loaded christological statement would require, among other things, a comprehensive reading of Barth’s theology of prayer through the fourth volume’s reworking of the munus triplex. In other words, a full investigation into what it really means for Barth to state that in prayer there is a ‘participation’ in Christ’s prophetic, high-priestly and kingly office would be needed.40 All this

36 37 38 39 40

III/4, p. 94. Prayer, p. 18. Boulton addresses this ‘simul’ dialectic throughout God against Religion. III/3, p. 269. III/4, p. 94. III/3, p. 287. For a more thorough account of the role of the priestly and kingly offices of Christ in Barth’s account of prayer in III/3, see Hans Theodor Goebel, ‘Struktur und Aussageabsicht der Vorsehungslehre K. Barths. Historische und dogmatische Analyse von KD III/3’, Zeitschrift für dialektische Theologie 10.2 (1994), pp. 135–57.

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lies well beyond the confines of this particular chapter, however. Nevertheless, clarity can be gained by reading the strong Christology of prayer that is funding the prioritization of petition in these sections of the doctrine of creation through the double-movement that broadly corresponds with the structure of the doctrine of reconciliation described later in IV/1 and IV/2. The particular movement of prayer can be mapped onto the larger narrative of reconciliation: first and foremost, Christ, the great high priest, prays before and for us and then (and only then) the pray-er is ‘exalted’ into that prayer, praying alongside Christ the king. In the first instance, then, prayer is that which Christ does for us, and ‘we should do well to hold fast to this rule’.41 Christ led by example. He withdrew many times to pray, Simon Peter found Christ praying in a desert place, Jesus prayed through the night before the appointment of the disciples, there was prayer on the mountain at the transfiguration, he prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane and then at Calvary. ‘This man prayed’, Barth writes.42 In III/3 Barth uses the language of Christ as the great high priest who, as the ‘Representative and Substitute [Stelle] for all others’, vicariously prays in our stead.43 This aspect of the Deus pro nobis is taken up again in his priestly theology described in IV/1, where Barth writes: ‘Jesus Christ for us’ means that as this one true man Jesus Christ has taken the place of us men, of many, in all the authority and omnipotence and competence of the one true God, in order to act in our name and therefore validly and effectively for us in all matters of reconciliation with God and therefore of our redemption and salvation, representing us without any co-operation on our part.44

The first part-volume of the doctrine of reconciliation also contains Barth’s excursus on Christ’s prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. The physical circumstances of Gethsemane are particularly revealing of this aspect of Christ’s vicarious action. 45 The circumstances serve to emphasize that there, in the Garden, Christ ‘alone … prayed in their place’.46 The prayer takes place in a garden, located outside the city walls and even then, when they 41 42 43 44 45

46

Prayer, p. 6. III/3, p. 276. Ibid. = KD III/3, p. 313. See also, Prayer, p. 14. IV/1, p. 230. Ibid., pp. 259–73. On the Gethsemane excursus, see Paul Dafydd Jones, ‘Karl Barth on Gethsemane’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 9.2 (2007), pp. 148–71. IV/1, p. 268, emphasis added.

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arrive in the garden, it is said that Jesus commands the disciples to ‘remain here’ while he goes ‘a little farther’ (Mk 14.34-35) thus emphasizing Christ’s withdrawal from the vicinity of others. The Church, represented by the disciples, ‘is present’, Barth writes, but ‘has no part at all in that prayer to God. Jesus makes it alone. There is no one there to bear the burden with Him. There is none to help’.47 This ‘notorious non-participation’ is reinforced by the disciples’ disobedience at Christ’s command for them to ‘stay awake’.48 The disciples fell asleep not once but thrice. Again and again he found them sleeping, each time lacking the obedience to pray as they ought (Mt. 26.4045 and Mk 14.37-40). Barth writes that the narrative records ‘the frightful loneliness in which they left Him, and in which quite alone – not with them but without them and therefore for them – He had to do and did what had to be done’.49 The first move in Barth’s Christology of prayer is a strong affirmation of Christ’s vicarious action. The Son is the ‘first and proper suppliant’.50 The creature ‘will always be aware that it cannot do anything without Him, that it cannot pray unless He prays with it’.51 In the prayer-sections of the doctrine of creation, it is undoubtedly the case that Barth’s concern is with the ‘objective’ basis of prayer. In fact, ‘we can never rate too highly the objective significance’ of prayer.52 Barth is quite clear, therefore, that prayer should not be regarded as the creature’s ‘own work, as a human achievement’.53 There is a temptation to read, however, as some have, that the particularity of Christ’s vicarious action is scandalous and overwhelms the agency of the praying ethical agent to the point of (docetical) occlusion. Philip Clements-Jewery argues that Barth leaves open the possibility for a rude incursion of a christological monism in his theology of prayer that excludes any true ‘space’ for human agency. The central place that Barth gives to Jesus Christ, turning his prayer into a Christological argument, means … that not enough justice is given to human 47 48 49 50 51

52 53

Ibid., p. 267. Ibid., p. 268. Ibid. III/3, p. 274. Ibid., p. 277. Similarly, in the Neuchâtel seminars Barth insists that ‘Jesus Christ has prayed, and he is praying still’, Prayer, p. 14, and in the ethics of creation he claims that Christ ‘still utters at God’s right hand’, III/4, p. 108. It is notable that, despite this strong sense of the priesthood of Christ in his theology of prayer, Barth has been seen to neglect the priestly office in other areas of his thought. For example, see Alan J. Torrance, Persons in Communion: An Essay on Trinitarian Description and Human Participation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), p. 117 and Migliore, ‘Freedom to Pray’, p. 112. III/3, p. 288. Ibid., p. 277.

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Karl Barth on Prayer freedom. It also means risking making prayer too much of a conversation of God with God’s own self.54

The question as to whether Barth allows enough room for human involvement in that divine prayer is a version of the now rather tired critique that his theology tends towards a soteriological objectivism.55 If correct, Barth’s theology of prayer would derail and fall into the christomonism that his late baptismal theology so notoriously aimed to avoid.56 Has Barth gone too far, then, and in turning Feuerbach on his head flattened prayer into a monologue in the other direction, a conversation that God holds with Godself? This line of critique is misconceived on at least two fundamental levels. First, is not the very thing for which Barth is criticized exactly what prayer is said to be in so many of the Christian traditions of spirituality? What else is prayer than being caught up into the conversation God has with Godself? We do not pray because God prays in us. Second, there seems to be a highly (and problematically) competitive understanding of divine and human agency underpinning the critique that prayer is so much the work of God that it cannot possibly be the work of humanity.57 For Barth, because divine and human agencies are not the same kind of agency and are not in competition for the same kind of space, there is not a like-for-like cancelling out of the humanity of prayer by the priority of divine grace. The more prayer is divine does not mean prayer is any less the work of the ethical agent. On the contrary, the divine work maximizes the possibility for genuine human prayer. To complain that prayer is all God’s work, therefore, is to see just one side of the dialectical complexity of Barth’s theology of prayer; on the other side is a remarkably strong affirmation of the humanity of prayer. After all, there is a reason why Barth’s writings on prayer tend to occur in ethical contexts. Whether there are certain tensions in Barth’s grammar of participation is a question to which we will return later, however. For now, the complex christological moves Barth makes in the prayer-sections (which receive 54

55

56 57

Philip Clements-Jewery, Intercessory Prayer: Modern Theology, Biblical Teaching and Philosophical Thought (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 96. To complain that Barth has turned ‘his account of prayer into a Christological argument’ is to miss some of the most basic theological principles of the Church Dogmatics. How this puzzling conclusion is reached lies in Clement-Jewery’s sole-reliance on a clearly misguided account of Barth’s doctrine of providence: Charles Duthie, ‘Providence in the Theology of Karl Barth’, in Maurice F. Wiles (ed.), Providence (London: SPCK, 1969), pp. 62–76. For example, G. C. Berkouwer, The Triumph of Grace in the Theology of Karl Barth (trans. Harry Boer; Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1956), pp. 52–88. See IV/4, pp. 19–23. On the issue of agential non-competitiveness, see Kathryn Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), pp. 120–62.

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substantiation in the doctrine of reconciliation’s Doppelbewegung) do not amount to the destruction of the humanity of prayer but its foundation. Christ the priest prays for us, passing through the ‘narrow archway of asking’, so as to open a way for others to follow and to become one with Christ in his kingly office.58 This is what Barth calls the ‘evangelical imperative’, that is, the exemplary aspect of Christ’s prayer: we can pray when we are first taught how to pray.59 The Lord’s Prayer is prayed initially by Christ, as an example of prayer, but is also the prayer Christ commanded his disciples to pray with him. ‘He is not alone in doing this’, Barth writes, but we stand where he stands, before the Father saying with Christ, ‘Our Father’.60 ‘The Son of Man teaches it to pray, and therefore to ask. It allows itself to be taught by Him. And as He prays with it, it can now pray with Him.’61 Indeed, it becomes part of the Christian vocation to follow Christ’s example in the fullest sense and therefore to take on the responsibility of praying for others, just as Christ had prayed for us. ‘For this reason its asking [Bitte], too, is at the deepest level intercession [Fürbitte].’62 The Gethsemane episode also signals this kingly aspect in the doublet of prayer. As Luke reports, when Jesus finds his disciples asleep in the garden he wakes and shakes them out of their sloth and invites them to join him in his prayer (Lk. 22.40, 46). Christ’s ‘intercession with God on behalf of His people’ is ‘also a prayer which he teaches His people and places on [their] lips’, Barth writes.63 Furthermore, Luke’s description of Christ withdrawing a ‘stone’s throw’ signals both distance and nearness. This strong affirmation of the ethical participation in Christ’s kingly office accords with IV/2, which describes the Son of Man’s homecoming as the ‘Royal Man’ from his journeying into the far country. This has totally transformative consequences: the Christ event fundamentally alters the human situation by overcoming the sloth and misery of sin to reopen humanity for partnership, thereby sanctifying the 58

59 60 61 62

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Note that the Neuchâtel seminars on prayer include a specific section entitled ‘Prayer as a human act’ in Prayer, pp. 18–21. For more on the humanity of Christ in prayer, see J. A. Jungmann, The Place of Christ in Liturgical Prayer (trans. A. Peeler; London: Chapman, 1989; second edition). It is worth noting that Jungmann has been criticized for overplaying the humanity of Christ at the expense of both Christ’s priestly office and the Holy Spirit, see Bryan D. Spinks, ‘The Place of Christ in Liturgical Prayer: What Jungmann Omitted to Say’, in Bryan D. Spinks (ed.), The Place of Christ in Liturgical Prayer: Trinity, Christology, and Liturgical Theology (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2008), pp. 1–19. Webster, Barth’s Ethics of Reconciliation, p. 186. III/3, p. 276. Ibid., p. 277. Ibid., p. 278 = KD III/3, p. 315. See also, Prayer, p. 23. On how this is expressed liturgically, albeit from a different liturgical perspective from Barth’s own, see my ‘Being Moved in Sundry Places: Evensong, Transformation and the Theology of Prayer’, Theology 115.5 (2012), pp. 350–6. II/2, p. 126.

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otherwise impossible act of the human response in petition.64 Barth claims that it is precisely through the restorative work of both the Son and the Holy Spirit that ‘although what we do is in itself very unholy, even when we pray, it will not fail to be sanctified’.65 However, Barth is critical of any attempt to codify reconciliation into separate stages, as he saw in ‘older’ theology. Reconciliation, instead, is the actualization of one movement, one event, one act, yet told from different angles.66 ‘In and with His humiliation (as the Son of God) there took place also His exaltation (as the Son of Man).’67 Likewise, the movement of prayer is one movement: Christ prays for us as we pray with him. Therefore in his own prayer he cannot disregard or deny or crowd out the true and proper Subject of prayer who recites the prayer before him. In his own prayer he can desire only to serve and follow Him. In his own prayer he will leave the initiative to this first and proper Subject of true prayer, of prayer which is heard and answered even as it is offered. And as the Christian follows his Lord with his own most personal and individual petitions, they become holy petitions, petitions which are heard and answered, petitions in which the divine fulness is grasped and received as they are presented to God.68

The agent of prayer participates in the priestly and kingly offices of Christ and in the prophetic work of Christ simultaneously.69 It is suggestive, then, that after having spent so much time on prayer in the doctrine of creation, the next major treatment of prayer should take place sometime later in IV/3, in the partvolume in which Barth unfolds his doctrine of the prophetic ministry of Christ. For Barth, it is from the perspective on the prophetic office (Christ as Godhuman) that the priestly (Christ as God) and kingly (Christ as human) offices should be understood. These christological movements mean, for Barth, that the Christian life of prayer is one of absolute dependence on God. ‘To pray in the Christian sense means to renounce all illusions about ourselves, and openly to admit to ourselves our utter need.’70 If petition determines that the ethical agent is in need, petition

64 65 66 67 68 69

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See IV/2, p. 548. III/4, p. 101. See IV/1, pp. 132–3. IV/2, p. 19. III/3, pp. 280–1. This ‘christologischen Simultaneität’ is drawn out well in Christine Svinth-Værge Põder, Doxologische Entzogenheit: Die fundamentaltheologische Bedeutung des Gebets bei Karl Barth (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 2009), p. 162. III/3, p. 267.

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is also a confession that God is our helper. Precisely because Christ acts in prayer (as the leader but also the saviour of prayer), the ethical agent is qualified as an agent capable not only of praying to God but also of being heard by God. Barth begins his account of prayer in III/3 with an affirmation of ‘the hearing [that] really precedes the asking’.71 We will look in further detail at Barth’s handling of the efficacy of prayer in Chapter 5. For now, the point to be noted is that petition, and God’s answering of prayer, involves a questioning of our propensity to be our own helpers. Self-help: this, it will be argued, is for Barth the prayer of pride.

Petition against pride Prayer, as a commanded activity, is a matter of obedience. ‘When the Christian wishes to act obediently, what else can he do but that which he does in prayer?’72 Constituted by prayer and undertaken in obedience, covenantal relations are ‘corrected, … in order’ and the ethical agent is set to flourish.73 However, alongside this story of the good life the stage is set for a perverse parody that is played out when the Christian strays from obedience. Once constituted by obedience, the orderliness of agential relations has now fallen into disorder, into relations-gone-wrong – into idolatry. For Barth, thinking ahead to his threefold treatment of sin in the doctrine of reconciliation, this sin ‘in its totality is pride [Hochmut]’.74 The connection between Barth’s account of petition and his treatment of pride is an important one. Reading this aspect of his theology of petition through his treatment of sin as pride reveals that petition is far more radical than expected: by inhabiting our true agency in responsive and humble petition, petition mounts a radical attack against pride’s ‘misdirected worship’.75 Each part-volume of the doctrine of reconciliation contains a treatment of sin. The christological movement of the Son of God into the far country reported in IV/1, which brings about the justification of the sinner and gathers the community as one, counteracts humanity’s bid for an alternative way of living – which Barth calls the life of pride. This alternative life is a rejection of God’s prevenient action and an attempt to take charge of one’s own reconciliation. ‘We want to be as God is, we want to be God’, Barth writes.76 On a quest for power 71 72 73 74 75 76

Ibid., p. 270. Ibid., p. 264. IV/4, p. 210. IV/1, p. 414 = KD IV/1, p. 459. For an intriguing account of pride as ‘misdirected worship’, see McFadyen, Bound to Sin, pp. 216–19. IV/1, p. 418.

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and self-aggrandizement, the ethical agent attempts to usurp the initiative of God and ‘madly exchange’ it with her own action.77 If pride is the refusal of the help that is freely given by God, the alternative is for the ethical agent to be her own helper: thus pride is the turning from divine help to self-help. It is suggestive that ‘self-help’ is a subsection of Barth’s treatment of pride, within which ‘self-worship’, the most misdirected worship of all, is an important category.78 In pride the ethical agent attempts to arrogate past one’s limits and rejects out of unbelief the divine help that is already given. Rather than freeing humanity in this life of self-sufficiency, sin shuts the sinner up in the self; hence, Barth’s application of the homo incurvatus in se metaphor.79 Relations are breached and set into disorder in this incurvature into self-help, including the reversal of the particular order and movement of prayer. Therefore, the ethical agent attempts the impossible and no longer prays in the name of Jesus but is deceived into thinking that there is a better way of praying or that one does not need Christ to pray. An agential rivalry unfolds in which the ethical agent begins to pray in a rival name and mimics that of God’s. ‘All this is pure delusion’, Barth concludes.80 The implication of Calvin’s notion that ‘we ask comme par sa bouche’, which Barth endorses more than once, is the negative command that we cannot pray by our own mouths.81 The refusal to actualize our true covenantal agency by languishing in our own name is not simply a case of liturgical bad manners, though it is that too. It is something far more serious. It is to let ‘hell loose’, Barth claims.82 It is a theological blunder of the highest order; a grotesque, even demonic parody of what prayer is really about and amounts to the undoing of our very creatureliness. To pray in any other name than the name of Jesus promises only calamity and renders prayer a ‘shot in the dark’ that fumbles around in the darkness of sin.83 But puzzlingly, ‘he wants it all the same’.84 The ethical agent cannot help but want to help herself. This is why, for Barth, an acknowledgement of human need, in itself, cannot issue in petition. ‘It is not the case that need teaches us to pray’ because our first instinct is to help ourselves.85 Hence, a command is 77 78 79

80 81 82 83 84 85

Ibid., p. 422; see also, III/4, pp. 91, 95. For Barth’s account of sin as self-help, see IV/1, pp. 458–78. On this, see Matt Jenson, The Gravity of Sin: Augustine, Luther and Barth on homo incurvatus in se (London: T&T Clark, 2006), pp. 130–87. IV/1, p. 459. III/4, pp. 94, 108. See also, Prayer, p. 14. IV/1, p. 450. ChrL, p. 104. IV/1, p. 433. III/4, p. 91.

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needed to jolt us out of our propensity to locate help in the self and to turn instead to God in humble petition. For Barth, this is a liturgical repetition of the fall in Eden and all its tragic consequences. Eden was where the first acts of self-help took place. Adam and Eve helped themselves to the forbidden fruit and then fashioned for themselves fig leaves to cover their nakedness (Gen. 3.7). They did ‘not need to help themselves’ but, in a Promethean case of over-reaching, they sought for themselves when they should have relied on the bounties that were freely given.86 Instead of rejoicing in their God-given helplessness, they attempted to overcome their helplessness with a bold but illusionary bid for self-help. The ethical agent is likewise deceived in thinking that ‘he can help himself ’: but Babel’s tower (Gen. 11) looms just east of Eden.87 The hopeless task of self-help is repeated yet again in the golden calf incident (Ex. 32). Aaron constructs and allows the Israelites to worship an image of their own helplessness. Its ‘stupid and helpless and ridiculous’ mockery is disguised only by a shiny veneer, Barth writes.88 All these attempts at self-help, which culminate in the attempt to pray in any other name than the name of Jesus, lead precisely nowhere, to nothing, that is, to the propagation of Nothingness. Heavy with irony, then, ‘in his flight from an imaginary need he brings himself into real need’.89 The attempt to help oneself is a complete failure: it is a fall into becoming ‘catastrophically helpless’.90 After all, it was only in exile from Eden that ‘people began to invoke the name of the Lord’ (Gen. 4.26), as Boulton argues.91 Insofar as we seek to pray in the assurance of our own name, the original sin of pride is re-enacted. This is one form of sin, but there are others. Barth also understands sin as sloth (Trägheit), which is treated in IV/2 under the christological movement of the homecoming of the Son of Man and the sanctification of humanity. The more we try to help ourselves, the more we fail, and the more we fail, the lazier and more miserable we grow, and so pride sinks into sloth. Sloth is ‘evil inaction’, not merely praying in the wrong name but stubbornly failing to pray, and act on the prayers, altogether. 92 Here I simply want to be left alone with myself, twisted and curved in on myself, to do nothing. The slothful one ‘turns his back on God, rolling himself 86 87 88 89 90 91 92

IV/1, p. 463. Ibid., p. 458. Ibid., p. 427. Ibid., p. 465. Ibid., p. 466. See Boulton, God against Religion, pp. 41, 167. IV/2, p. 403.

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into a ball like a hedgehog with prickly spikes’.93 Yet the problem persists, still. If sloth is the lazy opposite of pride, Barth’s final treatment of sin in IV/3 is the culmination of both: falsehood (Lüge), which perverts the truth of my reconciliation thus proving myself ‘to be a liar’.94 I continue to evade the truth of my calling and give in to the deceit that claims that my true being is in myself and not in Christ. ‘He tries to hide himself from God, his fellows and not least himself.’95 The liar, for Barth, who converts all truth to demonic lies, ‘worships in the dust’.96 This is the most foolish rejection of God’s invitation possible and the paragon act of stupidity. It is against this distorted background of disobedience (our limitless capacity for pride, sloth and falsehood) that the prioritization of petition in obedience to the divine command comes concretely into view. From the contorted posture of sin, in which we are against ourselves, our humanity is opened out into a posture of prayer.97 By reading Barth’s later treatment of pride alongside his earlier account of petition a more complete vision as to why prayer is prioritized in terms of petition is forming. If a failure to pray is the sinful failure of our very humanity, then prayer, and particularly petition, directly counters sin in each of its three forms. First, petition counters the falsehood that denies that we are helped by Christ. To the lie of falsehood, Barth writes, is prayer: ‘this direct expression of the truth of the situation in which the Christian finds himself as a Christian’.98 Second, petition disturbs our slothful complacency. The relentless downward drag that imprisons us in an enclosed circle of intractable sluggishness and renders us unable to pray as we ought is met by the counter-movement of the uplifting grace of God, in which we are lifted up into the superabundant life of the triune God. Prayer is, after all, human action. Most obviously of all, third, petition is the overcoming of pride. Petition constantly removes the illusion of self-mastery. ‘We do not need to help ourselves because God is for us and our cause is his cause,’ Barth writes.99 By conceiving of prayer as petition for divine help, in which the ethical agent needs God’s help ‘as a fish needs water’, Barth 93 94 95 96 97

98 99

Ibid., p. 405. IV/3, p. 368. Ibid., p. 372. Ibid., p. 450. On the ‘stretching’ posture of prayer, see Origen, On Prayer in An Exhortation to Martyrdom, Prayer and Selected Works, The Classics of Western Spirituality (trans. Rowan A. Greer; New York: Paulist Press, 1979), pp. 81–170 (164–65). III/3, p. 265. IV/1, p. 347.

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claims that he has ‘parted company’ with theories that understand prayer as an isolated act of self-help.100 Petitionary prayer, for Barth, is precisely ‘not the application of a technique of self-help’.101 On this basis, accounts of prayer are rejected in which the point of calling upon God is to be found only in the kind of alleviation, uplift, and purification that a person might achieve on his own when engaging in a lofty monologue as though he were speaking with God as another. It is in this way, as the supreme and most intimate act of self-help, that Schleiermacher and others understand prayer.102

For Barth, the ethical agent can live only ‘by the fact that God is his living helper, by the providence and election and calling of God’.103 And the ethical agent can pray only in this one, particular, unsubstitutable name: the ethical agent ‘will never ask except “in His name” ’.104

Some questions Having examined some of the dogmatic reasons that contributed to the prioritization of petition in the doctrine of creation, this chapter concludes by raising a couple of questions about Barth’s decision to specify prayer so uncompromisingly in terms of petition. There are good iconoclastic reasons for tethering prayer to petition, some of which have been discussed above, and this needs to be acknowledged and affirmed. There remain, however, at least two questions (to which subsequent chapters will respond) to be asked concerning Barth’s reduction of prayer to the singularity of petition. The first has to do with petition’s relation to other forms of prayer and the second with the participative grammar petition implies. First, for all the rich benefits that the prioritization of a petitionary sort of prayer brings, the obvious trade-off is an under appreciation of the other practices of prayer in the Christian tradition. Barth’s prioritization of petition is often too strong and ends up exercising an unhelpful hegemony over other dimensions of prayer. Although the various dimensions of Christian prayer 100

III/2, p. 263 and III/3, p. 284. ChrL, p. 80. 102 Ibid., p. 103. 103 IV/1, p. 459. 104 III/3, p. 277. 101

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have a (very qualified) place within Barth’s description of prayer as petition, he manages to demonstrate how all forms of prayer are meaningful only on the basis that they are somehow petitionary: praise, thanksgiving and penitence are ‘elements of petitionary prayer’, rather than prayer on their own terms and in their own right.105 For this reductionism and homogenization of the varied practices of prayer, Barth is criticized heavily.106 This is the case not only in terms of the more contemplative and reflective dimensions of prayer, which one might expect from Barth’s historical biases, but also in terms of praise, thanksgiving, repentance and worship. Consider these statements: How can we honour, prize and praise Him, except as we come to Him with requests, expecting everything from Him and therefore applying to Him for everything?107 To thank God is obviously to act as He so kindly and liberally invites and demands, and therefore simply to come to Him as suppliants with our needs.108 Penitential prayers … do not remain mere expressions of shame, contrition and repentance, but they always issue in asking.109

Even the Reformed emphasis on glorifying God, as ‘the chief aim’ of the Christian life, is now thought to masquerade as petition. How can we understand this properly without perceiving at once that perhaps the very highest honour that God claims from man and man can pay Him is that man should seek and ask and accept at His hands, not just something, but everything he needs.110

There is also a ‘costly loss of lament’ in this singular commitment to one form of prayer.111 At best, then, the various dimensions of prayer sequentially flow into each other and at worst the distinction between the different forms of prayer is 105

III/4, p. 100. See Migliore, ‘Freedom to Pray’, pp. 110–11; Shapiro, ‘Karl Barth’s Understanding of Prayer’, p. 31; McIntyre, Theology after the Storm, p. 183 and Eva Harasta, Lob und Bitte. Eine systematischtheologische Untersuchung über das Gebet (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2005), p. 214. 107 III/4, p. 100. 108 Ibid., p. 99. 109 Ibid. 110 Ibid., p. 87. 111 I borrow this phrase from Walter Brueggemann, ‘The Costly Loss of Lament’, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 36 (1986), pp. 57–71. Migliore levies a similar charge: ‘While there are some advantages to this centering of prayer [in petition], the hazards become especially evident in relation to the wide range of biblical prayers that include prayers of lament. Biblical laments are not adequately described as petition’, Migliore, ‘Freedom to Pray’, p. 111. However, I am in agreement with Jones’ proposal that Barth’s reflections on Gethsemane point in the direction of a theology of lament, in ‘Karl Barth on Gethsemane’, p. 166. 106

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collapsed entirely. In either case, the concept of petition appears overburdened and implies that, in the end, different practices of prayer are really doing the same thing. What about petition and participation? This is, of course, a rather odd concern to raise given that the very act of petitioning God assumes some sense of divine–human participation. Similarly, the grounding of prayer in Christ’s prayer-performance is predicated on the basis of a participation in the work of Christ. The concern is more of an oddity given that the first major treatment of prayer in the Church Dogmatics is located in the doctrine of providence, which involves the Christian as ‘the friend of God, called to the side of God and at the side of God, living and ruling and reigning with Him’.112 The concern, then, is less whether Barth is proposing an agential arrangement that is non-participative and more a questioning of the type of participation on offer in these sections and whether these sections provide enough clarification of the mechanics of that participation. Despite clear hints towards a highly developed doctrine of divine–human participation (in particular, towards the end of the section in III/3),113 the dominant mode of relation throughout Barth’s prioritization of petition is primarily of a responsive sort. Barth is mostly after the faithful and obedient human response to the divine command to pray. Consequently, human petition is always a ‘repetition [Nachbeten] of His petition’.114 It would be wrong to say that an ethic of imitation has no precedence in the history of spirituality; it clearly does.115 But this is not the only model of participation available. Without complementation from other models of participation, the language of ‘response’, ‘echo’, ‘reflection’, ‘repetition’, ‘following’, ‘witness’ and actingafter (Nachahmen), which all feature in Barth’s writings on petition, seems to present human action as a step away from divine action. Although a strong sense of the responsive nature of human agency attends to the Realdialektik between God and humanity and forms a doxological statement about the priority of divine agency, the motif of response suffers from something of an agential externalism. There is not enough clarity of the analogy between the acts of God and the acts of the human subject. There is not enough clarity of the Holy Spirit’s movement in and through the pray-er that catches human 112

III/3, p. 286. Barth writes that ‘God participates in the creature, and enables it to participate in Himself ’, III/3 p. 286. 114 III/3, p. 277 = KD III/3, p. 314. 115 For example, Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ (trans. Robert Jeffrey ; London: Penguin, 2013); for Barth’s critique, see IV/2, p. 553. 113

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prayer up into the praying activity of the divine. In fact, conspicuous by its absence is any reference to ‘analogy’ in the prayer-sections of the doctrine of creation: the ‘correspondence’ motif, which is so strong in other areas of the Church Dogmatics, is not particularly present in these sections. And neither is pneumatology, for that matter. This line of enquiry is connected to Rowan Williams’ critique of Barth’s early theology of the Holy Spirit. For Williams, working from the first volumes of the Church Dogmatics, the dominance of revelation-language problematically restricts the work of the Holy Spirit to matters pertaining to epistemology.116 In these early sections, the Holy Spirit ‘is not the Spirit as such, but the Spirit as making the Word present’.117 The Spirit subjectively mediates (and guarantees) that which has been objectively revealed in the Christ event. The result is a rather sequential model of salvation history, the production of an oppositional account of the God–world relation (God up there, the world down here) and a hierarchically linear understanding of trinitarian relations (‘the Spirit is “nearest” to us; the Father … is furthest from us’).118 Although the critique that the ‘Spirit is the seal of epistemological security’ is unsustainable through the rich pneumatological achievements of the fourth volume, there is a sense that Williams’ critique lingers in the prayer-sections of the doctrine of creation.119 It is at least possible that a petition-dominated account of prayer would partially fit this model: it assumes a God–world distinction and a space between the two that is momentarily bridgeable by the petition that runs perpendicularly from us ‘down here’ to God ‘up there’. Barth’s use of spatial metaphors in the title of §49.4 further commits the Christian to an existence ‘under the universal lordship of God the Father’. The danger of this model, if pushed to its extreme, is caricatured by Herbert McCabe: ‘Behind it lurks the image of a great power up there whom we can shout at and who, if we are lucky, will hear us and provide us with magical help.’120 The dialecticism operating in Barth’s Christology of prayer is in no way so crude. Nevertheless, in these prayer-sections the Spirit takes on sort of a bridge-crossing role to impart information (of Christ’s activity as the pray-er, for example) to the community and to bridge the gap between Christ’s intercessions at the right hand of the Father up ‘above’ in heaven and 116

Rowan Williams, ‘Word and Spirit’, in On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 107–27 (116–21). 117 Ibid., p. 117. 118 Ibid., p. 115. 119 Ibid., p. 118. 120 Herbert McCabe, God Matters (London: Chapman, 1987), p. 221; cited also in McDowell, ‘ “Openness to the World” ’, p. 261.

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the praying activity that occurs ‘under’ this activity.121 The adequacy of this linear tendency is questioned by Williams through a rather elusive alternative that works not from Luke but from John (and Paul). ‘If Luke invariably sees the Spirit as acting “in a straight line”, so to speak, from God and Jesus towards the human world, John sees the Paraclete as active in and with the disciples, moving them towards Father and Son, as well as acting simply upon them.’122 A more satisfying pneumatology, Williams continues, therefore creates ‘in the human subject response to, and conformation to, the Son’.123 In this sense, God is not a very long way off but actively wills to be so close to us and with us (Immanuel) that God prays ‘in’ us, and we pray on that basis. In the prayersections of the doctrine of creation, which is principally considering prayer from a christological perspective, Barth is not at his most pneumatologically satisfying (especially in III/2 and III/3).124 This contributes to a commitment to an over-privileging of the language of response. Whether the pneumatology that is developed in his mature writings on invocation produces a richer theology of ‘conformation’ as well as response is a question that will be taken up in Chapter 5. A further (related) line of critique, this time forwarded by Robert Jenson, is also relevant. This critique suggests that Barth’s heavily christological account of revelation is primarily ‘past orientated’ and therefore leaves only a limited space for futurity in the life of the divine. Indeed, in his writings on prayer, Barth claims that ‘the world is already helped, and everything that the creation needs … is already provided’.125 The foreclosure of the future, Jenson suggests, is again due to an attenuated doctrine of the third article. Under these conditions, Barth’s Christology produces a vision of Christian existence as ‘a gathering to the past, to the Beginning in which all has already been decided’.126 The temporal orientation of the Christian life is backwards, facing the past event 121

III/3, p. 276. This line of critique is pushed further by Alan Torrance who complains that Barth’s ‘exclusive use of a “revelation model” rather than a “worship model” obscures the concept of communion in God’, Torrance, Persons in Communion, p. 59. Torrance then attempts to offer a doxological repair of Barth that places a ‘greater emphasis on the grounds of human participation in the intra-divine life’, Torrance, Persons in Communion, p. 308. However, since he is working principally with the first volume of the Church Dogmatics, what is so obviously missing in Torrance’s critique is that Barth does go much further in achieving this doxological model of participation in the late ethical drafts of the doctrine of reconciliation. 122 Williams, ‘Word and Spirit’, p. 119. 123 Ibid., p. 120. 124 In the brief section on prayer in III/2 there is not one direct reference to the Holy Spirit and in III/3 there are less than ten. 125 III/3, p. 271. 126 Robert W. Jenson, God after God: The God of the Past and the God of the Future, Seen in the Work of Karl Barth (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), p. 173.

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that has already been completed in Christ: the present moment is determined by an endless repetition of the completed life of Jesus. Again, it is possible that a petition-dominated account of prayer would partially fit this model. Barth understands petition as ‘simply the taking and receiving of the divine gift and answer as it is already present and near to hand in Jesus Christ’.127 Although, as a number of studies have argued, this line of critique is also difficult to sustain, there remain moments in Barth’s theology of petition which appear to be moving in such a direction.128

Summary This chapter has sought to expose some of the dogmatic moves that informed Barth’s affirmation of the priority of petition. It considered how petition is rooted in the doctrine of election, the ways petition is framed christologically and how petition is related to Barth’s thinking on sin as pride. However, the prayer-sections in the doctrine of creation are not the last words on prayer in the Church Dogmatics. With fascinating results, Barth takes up the concept of prayer one last time at the very end of his university career in the lectures on the ethics of the doctrine of reconciliation. Here the concept of petition is opened out into a new, expansive vision for the Christian life that is grounded in Barth’s turn to a new leading concept: invocation.

127 128

III/3, p. 274. The best and most substantial is John C. McDowell, Hope in Barth’s Eschatology: Interrogations and Transformations Beyond Tragedy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000).

4

Invocation

Call on me. –Psalm 50.15 As with many aspects of his theology, Barth’s understanding of prayer was constantly developing. Having spent a significant amount of time with the topic in the doctrine of creation and then again briefly in the doctrine of reconciliation, Barth returned to the theology of prayer in the final set of lectures he delivered on the Church Dogmatics. These lectures mark the resting place of Barth’s theology of prayer. The drafts, notes and typescripts of those lectures and seminars, which were delivered just prior to his retirement from his chair at Basel between 1959 and 1961, were assembled and published posthumously as a 1976 volume of the Gesamtausgabe and translated into English four years later as The Christian Life. The main body of the volume is elegantly and unusually structured as an exposition of the ‘optatives’ contained in the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer.1 As suggested in the introductory chapter, despite breaking off after the second petition, leaving just a fragment of his overall vision, the ethical drafts form the most extensive and theologically creative treatment of prayer in all of Barth’s writings and might well provide one of the longest experiments in the theology of prayer in the Christian tradition. The ethical drafts also contain an expansion, recapitulation and deepening of the ideas developed in the earlier sections on prayer in the Church Dogmatics. 1

Describing the grammatical mood of the petitions is perplexing. Although Barth describes the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer as a series of ‘imperatives’, III/4, p. 94, perhaps it is more accurate to speak of the petitions in terms of a series of ‘optatives’, which is the mood of desire (or in §76’s term: passion, Leidenschaft). To pray the Lord’s Prayer is an eschatologically conditioned act of desiring and longing for change and transformation, for the fulfilment of the petitions – the ‘Fiat iustitia’ of §78.4, for example. Better still, the Lord’s Prayer is the intermingling of the imperative and the optative: it is prayed by Christ in the imperative and repeated by the ethical agent in the optative. In fact, as Barth writes, the ethical agent ‘is filled, impelled, guided, and ruled by this hot desire’, ChrL, p. 113 = DcL, p. 184. For further discussion on the optative as a mood of faith, see Ford, Christian Wisdom, pp. 49–50.

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It will be argued over the course of the next three chapters that the various features of these expansions and recapitulations can be expressed in terms of the change in the leading concept through which Barth’s most sustained treatment of prayer is unfolded: the turn from petition (Bitte) to invocation (Anrufung). Explaining the circumstances of the invocational turn is this chapter’s initial concern. After establishing how Barth settles on the concept of invocation and the importance placed on the invocation of the name of God, I will suggest some of the ways that invocation builds on the theology of prayer developed in earlier sections. While the previous chapter exercised some concern that the prioritization of petition risks question-begging claims about both its construal of the divine–human relation and its reductionist tendencies, this chapter argues that the concept of invocation avoids these risks in at least three ways. First, while petition risks reducing other forms of prayer to one, invocation provides an understanding of prayer that more successfully protects the distinctiveness of other prayer practices. Second, the turn to invocation sees an incorporation of his earlier understanding of petitionary prayer, which was understood chiefly in terms of the human response to the divine command, into a more participative account of the agential situation. This participation in the divine life is expressed in terms of the concept that is very present throughout his mature writings on prayer: the divine–human ‘correspondence’ (Entsprechung). Third, invocation is distinctively a pneumatological concept, with a long pneumatological history. Indeed, the developments and stabilizations in his theology of prayer take place alongside the wider transitions in each successive part-volume of the Church Dogmatics. A lot of dogmatic ground has been covered and new resources have been made available since the earlier reflections on prayer as petition in the doctrine of creation: most notably, a much more developed doctrine of the third article. This turn to invocation, as will be argued in Chapter 5, is part of a broader movement in Barth’s theology of prayer that occurs in the ethics of reconciliation. While petition is dominantly conceived from a christological perspective, which gives petition its characteristic shape and content as a repetition of Christ’s petition, here Barth’s theology of prayer takes on a new pneumatological dimension. It is the work of the Holy Spirit that allows the objective work of Christ’s prayer to reach the ethical agent in her community and, from the other direction, it is the work of the Holy Spirit that ‘incorporates’ the ethical agent into participation in that prayer. Having hinted at some of the novelty of invocation, some caution must now be exercised to avoid over-interpreting and, consequently, exaggerating the

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transition from petition to invocation. The delicacy of Barth’s thought means that there are instances of participation (response is a form of participation, of course), conceptual spaciousness and pneumatology in the formal sections on prayer in volume three of the Church Dogmatics and likewise examples of Barth prioritizing a more responsive sort of participation in the ethics of reconciliation. The complex christological movement of Christ’s action ‘for us’ and ‘with us’, which was clarified in the previous chapter, also remains strong in the ethical fragment. My point is not that ‘petition’ and ‘invocation’ should be presented in unhelpfully competitive terms but that the themes of participation and consolidation are stated more boldly and pursued with a far greater degree of clarity and amplification here than in the other prayer sections of the Church Dogmatics. Invocation does not ‘replace’ Barth’s theology of petition. Instead, there is a recapitulation, and in that process a clarification, of his early writings into these mature reflections on prayer. Furthermore, just as in other aspects of his theology, Barth’s thinking on prayer differs in content and context across his writings. Because the questions and concerns that drive his account of petition are not the same as those that inform his writing on prayer in the ethics of reconciliation, direct comparisons of these two texts composed decades apart should be broached judiciously. However, despite these qualifications, it is worth noting Barth’s own instruction that the ethics of reconciliation, as ‘the main statement’, should claim ‘primacy’ over all other ethical material of the Church Dogmatics.2 Further care should be exercised when approaching this general area of Barth’s theology. The ethics of reconciliation remained unfinished at the time of his death and had not been worked up into publishable form by Barth himself.3 The text contains a certain looseness of thought that one would expect from unrevised lecture drafts. However, working with unrevised lecture drafts also brings some benefits: the fragmentary and open-ended character of the drafts balances the more exacting and tightly constructed areas 2 3

ChrL, p. 9. For focused attention on the ethics of reconciliation, see Eberhard Jüngel, ‘Invocation of God as the Ethical Ground of Christian Action: Introductory Remarks on the Posthumous Fragments of Karl Barth’s Ethics of the Doctrine of Reconciliation’, in Theological Essays I (trans. John Webster; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989), pp. 154–72; Webster, Barth’s Ethics of Reconciliation, pp. 174–213; Joseph L. Mangina, Karl Barth on the Christian Life: The Practical Knowledge of God (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), pp. 165–97; Donald K. McKim, ‘Karl Barth on the Lord’s Prayer’, in Karl Barth, Prayer: 50th Anniversary Edition (trans. Sara F. Terrien; Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), pp. 114–34; Matthew Myer Boulton, ‘ “We Pray by His Mouth”: Karl Barth, Erving Goffman, and a Theology of Invocation’, Modern Theology 17.1 (2001), pp. 67–83 and Garrit W. Nevin, ‘Just a Little: The Christian Life in the Context of Reconciliation’, Zeitschrift für dialektische Theologie 18.3 (2002), pp. 353–63.

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of the Church Dogmatics that precede these drafts; the drafts accommodate greater interpretative freedom to pursue hints apparent in the text but not fully developed by Barth himself and the drafts give a rare insight into the construction of Barth’s thought. For example, as discussed below, a portion of an earlier draft of the introductory paragraph, as it appeared in lecture form just prior to the ‘radical revision’, is published as an appendix to the volume.4 The present chapter unfolds accordingly. The first section explores how Barth arrives at the concept of invocation in the ethics of reconciliation and makes use of that earlier version of the opening paragraph of The Christian Life. The second interacts with Barth’s rich meditation on the name that is invoked when one prays: Vater! The third and fourth sections bring to particular expression the innovations in Barth’s turn to invocation – in terms of the descriptive range of the concept and its participative grammar. Finally, a brief section tests these two claims against Barth’s mature doctrine of baptism.

The turn to invocation The turn to invocation occurs late in Barth’s theology. The history of salvation, for Barth, is distinguished but not separated as the work of creation (expounded in volume III), reconciliation (in volume IV, which was unfinished) and redemption (in volume V, which was unwritten). Each volume of the Church Dogmatics was to conclude with an ethical part-volume that would correspond with its theological topos; thus, the doctrine of reconciliation concludes with an account of the command of God the reconciler (IV/4). The ethics of reconciliation is an exercise in what Barth calls ‘special ethics’. In distinction from general ethics, which deals with the divine command itself, attention in special ethics is focused on how the ethical agent responds and, crucially, corresponds to the divine command. This ethical correspondence is the basis of Barth’s imagining of the good life. It is in these drafts, on the ethics of the doctrine of reconciliation, that the turn to invocation is made. The Christian Life begins with an introductory paragraph on ‘Ethics as a Task of the Doctrine of Reconciliation’ (§74). These prefatory reflections record Barth’s account of the distinctively theological character of Christian ethics, what constitutes ‘good’ human action and, suggestively, his search for a sufficiently weighty guiding concept (a Schlüsselbegriff) to structure his elaborations on the 4

ChrL, p. x.

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theological shape of this good human action. At first glance, the guiding concept to describe the Christian life appears elusive and considerable hesitation over its appointment is detectable. As an appendix to the volume, the editors include an earlier draft (which was delivered in lecture form during the 1959–60 winter semester) of this crucial section of §74.5 And there, the exacting burden Barth places on the role of the leading concept gives reason to the hesitation. The leading concept, he insists, needs to characterize ‘the matter at issue’ in special ethics, ‘embrace it in all its multiplicity … with … the greatest clarity’, claim ‘sufficient depth and comprehensiveness’ and must involve the ethical agent ‘in the totality of his relationship to God and therefore in his relationship, as to God, so also to his brother, himself, and the world’.6 In this first version of the paragraph, he wrestles with the appropriateness of a number of conceptual candidates to perform this burdened theological work, including: ‘freedom’, ‘repentance’, ‘decision’, ‘faith’, ‘thanksgiving’, ‘the Christian life’ and ‘faithfulness [Treue]’.7 This final term, ‘faithfulness’, is singled out as best describing Christian ethical existence. The steadfast faithfulness of God enacted in the reconciliation of the world in Jesus Christ ‘requires of man … that he be faithful in return’.8 This is ‘what he [God] wills’ of humanity, Barth concludes.9 The entire ethics of reconciliation would be arranged around the concept of faithfulness: baptism becomes the foundation of Christian faithfulness, the Lord’s Supper is its renewal and, in between, a discussion of faithfulness to the Holy Spirit, the community, the self and the world.10 Sometime in the summer vacation of 1960, however, while undergoing the usual process of revising his lecture manuscripts for publication, Barth undertook major revisions to the introductory paragraph. In the published version of the final section of §74, which unlike the draft version had not been delivered in lecture form, Barth follows a near identical canvassing of concepts but he decides against keeping faithfulness as the leading concept around which the ethics of reconciliation would unfold.11 In short, he had changed his mind and sought, then, to rewrite the lecture manuscript in light of the new direction in which his thinking was leading. Barth could have 5

6 7 8 9 10 11

For the first draft, see ‘First Version of the Conclusion of §74’, ChrL, pp. 275–88, which corresponds broadly with ChrL, pp. 36–46. ChrL, pp. 277, 280. See Ibid., p. 276. Ibid., p. 280. Ibid., p. 283. Ibid., p. 288. In the final version, the order runs: ‘the Christian life’, ‘freedom’, ‘repentance’, ‘faith’, ‘thanksgiving’ and ‘faithfulness’.

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replaced faithfulness with one of the concepts prominent in other areas of his thought: freedom, for instance, which enjoyed so much attention in the ethics of creation and is cherished in both versions of §74 as that ‘rich and beautiful and fruitful concept’.12 An obvious candidate might also have been petition (especially given the volume’s organizing text). Despite acknowledging their potential, the concepts previously in contention, faithfulness and freedom included, are reviewed but rejected on the grounds that they fail to express adequately the particularity of what is commanded of the ethical agent and ‘the fact that some human action is at issue’.13 Special ethics, after all, ‘looks at man as this particular man at this particular time and place’.14 The Christian life does not end with the reconciliation accomplished by Christ but the ethical agent is summoned to participate in this reconciliation as an active subject in the particularities of the here and now. Although faithfulness is clearly a ‘disposition or attitude’ that corresponds to the accomplished reconciliation, the concept is materially imprecise and does not tell us much about the Christian life itself.15 Indeed, in this text, Barth is after the ‘one total thing’ that encompasses that existence but dodges the two perceived pitfalls of ethical thought: overly prescriptive legalistic and casuistic ethics on the one hand, and, on the other, fuzzy ethical generalizations. In a word, then, the ethics of reconciliation seek to describe an action that ‘actualises’ the freedom expressed in III/4. Barth writes: As this particular human action, this action must have central significance and import for all man’s other being and acts. It must precede, accompany, and follow the whole of his life’s work. For all its particularity, it must be representative of all he does and give it meaning, direction, and character. 16

If not faithfulness, then what? Barth had a blueprint for the architectonics of the ethics of reconciliation in hand in the form of the complete cycle of lectures on ethics he delivered between 1928 and 1929 at Münster. It is clear that the three-dimensional format of ethics in the Church Dogmatics was worked out in Münster. Both are structured around the same divisions of creation, reconciliation and redemption, which accord respectively with the work of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.17 In the Münster version of the ethics of 12 13 14 15 16 17

ChrL, pp. 37 and 277. Ibid., p. 42. Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 42. Ibid. See Ethics, p. 512. See also, I/1, pp. 448–89, II/2, p. 549 and III/4, p. 24.

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reconciliation, the text is governed by the concept of the ‘law’ that addresses the ethical agent as a sinner in relation to God’s reconciliatory activity in Jesus Christ. The ethical attitudes of humility and love (particularly to the neighbour) are therefore emphasized strongly. However, by the time Barth returned to the ethics of the doctrine of reconciliation in Basel they are not considered (nor the wider concept of ‘law’) as candidates for the elusive guiding concept. There are at least two reasons why Barth might have abandoned ‘law’ as the Schlüsselbegriff of the ethics of reconciliation in the Church Dogmatics.18 First, the later ethics of reconciliation reflect the restructuring of the Lutheran treatment of law and gospel that had characterized Barth’s thinking since the 1930s.19 The Basel ethics of reconciliation is eminently an ethics of grace and what is required by such an ethics is a governing concept that emphasizes not so much the ethical agent’s sinful condition as God’s reconciling forgiveness. Second, and following this, the Basel lectures on reconciliation actually draw much more liberally on the themes described in Münster’s ethics of redemption. As Biggar writes, ‘much of what Barth decided to treat there [in Basel] under the rubric of the command of God the Reconciler he treats here [in Münster] under the rubric of the command of God the Redeemer’.20 As mentioned earlier, the emphasis in the 1928–29 version of the ethics of redemption is on the command of ‘promise’, in which the Holy Spirit guarantees and brings contemporaneity to God’s promise to be our God in Christ and for us to be God’s children. In the Basel lecture cycle, however, this material is delivered under the ethics of reconciliation. Therefore, the emphasis in the ethics of reconciliation has shifted away from issues of law and sin and onto the redemptive ‘presence of the future’.21 This transition can be felt most clearly in Barth seeing the Christian not as a pardoned sinner but as a child of God, as presented by the Lord’s Prayer. In particular, then, the alteration brings three things into the centre of the arrangement of the ethics of reconciliation: eschatology, pneumatology and prayer. An eschatological yearning (and corresponding political dissonance, to be explored later) for the realization of the kingdom of God is placed front and centre in the mature ethics of reconciliation. Alongside the eschatological category of ‘divine sonship’, the reassignment of eschatology from Münster’s ethics of redemption to the here and now of Basel’s 18

19

20 21

See the detailed comparison between the two cycles of lectures in Biggar, The Hastening that Waits, pp. 62–88. For example, Karl Barth, ‘Gospel and Law’, in God, Grace and Gospel (trans. James Strathearn McNab; Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1959), pp. 1–27. Biggar, The Hastening that Waits, p. 81. Ibid., p. 86.

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ethics of reconciliation also brings pneumatology to the centre of the Christian life. The trinitarianly conceived framework of the Münster ethics had attributed the ethics of redemption to the work of the redeeming Spirit. In addition to pneumatology and eschatology, a final significant aspect of the earlier ethics of redemption that has made its way into the later ethics of reconciliation is the theme of prayer. In Münster, prayer is celebrated as the chief eschatological activity. ‘Prayer is the actualization of our eschatological reality that is possible here and now,’ Barth argues.22 Through prayer, the eschatologically conditioned relation of Father-child is expressed most fully. In his second attempt at the introductory paragraph to the Basel lectures, then, Barth finally settles on the concept that will both guide him through his mature understanding of the ethics of reconciliation and bring precision to his theology of prayer. At long last, the Schlüsselbegriff is revealed as the ‘humble and resolute, the frightened and joyful invocation [Anrufung] of the gracious God in gratitude, praise, and above all petition [der dankbaren, lobpreisenden und vor allem bittenden]’.23 The entire Christian life is now conceived in terms of the command of Psalm 50.15: ‘Call upon me.’24 In it [invocation] man in his whole humanity takes his proper place over against God. In it he does the central thing that precedes, accompanies, and follows all else he does … . We thus understand calling upon God – in all the richness of the action included in it – as the one thing in the many that the God who has reconciled the world to himself in Jesus Christ demands of man as he permits it to him. It is, therefore, the general key with which we may enter upon the task that is before us.25

It is difficult to overestimate Barth’s turn to invocation. The editorial decision to reproduce the alternative introduction in the volume’s appendix emphasizes that the move to invocation was both well considered and marks something quite new in Barth’s theology. Jüngel and Drewes, who had editorial oversight of the drafts in their transition to publication, lend further weight to this argument in their assessment of invocation as a ‘radical revision’ in the way Barth understands prayer.26 They even liken this ‘self-correction’ to the two watershed moments in Barth’s theology: the 1922 complete revision of his 22 23 24

25 26

Ethics, pp. 472–73. ChrL, p. 43 = DcL, p. 67. The turn to invocation also occupied Barth’s sermons, see his 1960 sermon to inmates at Basel Prison, ‘Call Me’, in Barth, Call for God, pp. 29–37. ChrL, p. 43. Ibid., p. x.

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commentary on Romans and the aborted Christliche Dogmatik im Entwurf of 1927, the famous ‘false-start’ that precedes the Church Dogmatics.27 Indeed, despite the presence of prayer in the third part of the Münster ethics, its specification in terms of invocation is not featured in the early cycle of ethical lectures and it is not mentioned in either the first draft of §74 or the two main sections on prayer in the doctrine of creation. No stone was left unturned in the revision of the ethics of reconciliation. The material decision to turn to invocation presented an opportunity to organize the text around the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer. This instigated a complete rearrangement of the formal construction of the volume. While baptism and the Lord’s Supper were to remain respectively as the foundation and the ‘conclusion and crown’ of the volume (but reinterpreted as ‘invocation’), the original plan to organize the ethics of reconciliation around a discussion of faithfulness in terms of the Holy Spirit (thereby suggesting that from the outset, pneumatology was to play a crucial role), the community, individual and world was replaced with a petition-by-petition exposition of the Lord’s Prayer. The newly revised three parts of the ethics of reconciliation (the doctrine of baptism, the exposition of the Lord’s Prayer and the doctrine of the Lord’s Supper) ‘come together’, therefore, as a whole under the guiding concept of invocation.28 In sum, the turn to invocation introduces two things: alongside the general turn from faithfulness to prayer as the leading concept of the ethics of reconciliation, which pushes prayer deep into the structure of Barth’s mature ethical thought, the drafts also reveal a particular turn in his theology of prayer (and therefore in his overall description of the Christian life). The leading concept of Barth’s theology of prayer is no longer petition but now invocation. This double turn to invocation brings to the fore the next question this chapter will consider: what name do we invoke in prayer?

The name above all names There is often a connection in Christian spiritual writing between prayer and the tradition of the divine names. At the beginning of the Confessions, Augustine asks, ‘How shall I call upon my God?’29 It is suggestive, if somewhat paradoxical, that Augustine’s answer to the question is not only given in the 27

28 29

Ibid. Elsewhere Jüngel argues that the invocational turn ‘is hardly foreseen’, Jüngel, ‘Invocation of God’, p. 164. ChrL, p. ix. See ChrL, pp. 45–6. Augustine, Confessions, p. 1.

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context of prayer but is prayer itself.30 The search for the name of God, then, is not strictly an epistemological concern but a doxological one.31 Like all good things, Augustine continues, the name of God ‘is your gift to me’.32 Similarly, for Barth, God’s name has to do with gift. It concerns ‘the inconceivable and uncontrollable grace of God’.33 If calling upon God by name finds its foundation in gift, it depends on listening to the prior actuality of the divine self-naming and requires ‘total and exclusive openness to God’s self-declaration’.34 Given the results of Chapter 2, it is at least conceivable that the listening to the divine naming is the resurfacing of a Barthian version of a contemplative form of prayer here in the ethics of reconciliation. For Barth as for Augustine, the divine naming is a christological issue. God has given Godself to be named in Jesus Christ. If prayer is about a deep sort of participation in the prayer of Christ, then the name of God is given, as it were, as one joins in Christ’s own calling: and the name the Son uses is ‘Abba’. Our ‘freedom to call upon God as Father’, Barth writes, ‘is grounded absolutely in the way in which Jesus Christ called upon him, and still does so, when he turns to him’.35 In short, we ‘are called upon to call upon’ God as ‘Father’.36 This paraphrases a complex movement of prayer described over the course of Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation: God calls (Berufung) us by name to call upon (Anrufung) God by name in the name of Jesus. Our vocation, our calling, for Barth, is a life of invocation, of calling upon God as ‘Father’.37 Barth’s interpretation of the petitions 30

31

32 33 34 35 36 37

On this, see Janet Martin Soskice, ‘The Gift of the Name: Moses and the Burning Bush’, in Oliver Davies and Denys Turner (eds.), Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and Incarnation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 61–75. The theology of the divine names asks fundamental questions concerning the nature of language and how it works theologically. It is significant that Thomas, then, at the beginning of the Summa discusses the divine names within the wider context of theological language – the companion section to the divine names is on ‘knowing’, see Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, vol. 3 (1a. 12– 13): Knowing and Naming God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964). For Thomas, and many writers in the names tradition, the knowing of the divine names is a darkened sort of knowing. In this sense, the avalanche and almost riotous profusion of names Pseudo-Dionysius applies to God in (the long) The Divine Names, a text Thomas cites, only makes sense when read alongside the hesitant apophaticism of (the comparably very short) The Mystical Theology that ‘plunges’ the reader into an epistemic darkness and speechlessness, see The Mystical Theology, p. 137. In other words, Pseudo-Dionysius is affirming an over-naming of God (if God is the cause of all then the name of God can be derived from ‘all the things caused’, see The Divine Names, p. 55), an apophatic non-naming of God (if God is truly to be ‘beyond naming’) and even, in characteristic Dionysian paradox, a negation of the contradiction that exists between the over- and non-naming of God, see The Mystical Theology, p. 141. Augustine, Confessions, p. 1. ChrL, p. 75. See also, III/4, p. 76. ChrL, p. 144. Ibid., pp. 66, 65. Ibid., p. 85. See IV/3, pp. 491–92. See also, William Stacy Johnson, The Mystery of God: Karl Barth and the Postmodern Foundations of Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997), p. 90.

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of the Lord’s Prayer begins with a remarkable meditation on the name ‘Father’ (§76.1).38 For all he had said about God throughout the Church Dogmatics, for all the bombardment of words and concepts, here in the context of writing on prayer, Barth verges on the cusp of an apophatic sort of silence that reduces him to just one word, ‘Father’. What is in a name? A lot, for Barth. ‘Father’, Barth writes, fills the word ‘God’, that is otherwise ‘indefinite, empty, and ambivalent’, with the deepest possible meaning and significance.39 As gift, the vocative reveals ‘something specific in his being and action’ and claims, therefore, an astonishing capacity to convey God’s life.40 God ‘really is the one he declares himself to be.’41 The vocative is not simply descriptive but representative – the name ‘is’ God. The concept ‘name’ … while intended as a term to denote this or that god, has in biblical usage a dimension and dynamic that it has lost in our modern Western languages. In this usage no one and nothing is named accidentally or arbitrarily. No one and nothing might just as well bear some other name. A person is what and how he is called; a person is called what and how he is. The name is not just appended to the one who bears it. It is his external selfoutworking and self-expression in relation to all other beings. One might say, then, that the name is the being itself as it acts and expresses and declares itself toward others. All this applies in a preeminent sense to God.42

The name ‘Father’, then, is not a figure of speech, nor simply a matter of liturgical etiquette. Barth would also reject the assumption that the name is the product of some Feuerbachian projection of certain characteristics onto that which we call ‘Father’.43 God the Father of Jesus Christ is not another fatherly item in the universe, only larger and even more paternal, but is ‘above every name that is named’.44 The vocative, it could be said, operates as something of an apophatic regulator that protects the God to whom we pray as utterly unlike any other nameable item in the universe.45 The ‘something specific in his being and action’ that is revealed in the divine self-naming iconoclastically clears away conceptions of God that have resulted from our propensity to misname God. 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

45

On this, see Webster, Barth’s Ethics of Reconciliation, pp. 175–91. ChrL, p. 53. Ibid., p. 57. Ibid., p. 158. Ibid., p. 154. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, pp. 123–24. Elsewhere (in a sermon prepared sometime between 1920–24), Barth argues that the name of God ‘is the mark of God’s separateness and otherness over against everything that is not God’, in ‘The name of the Lord: Proverbs 18.10’ in Barth and Thurneysen, Come Holy Spirit, pp. 24–35. On this, see Herlyn, Religion oder Gebet, p. 92.

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One such misnaming is more of a mistaking in which the paternal imagery associated with the positive affirmation of the vocative of the Lord’s Prayer is mistaken for concept of ‘father’ that underscores a repressive patriarchy.46 To help to release the term from its conceptual (patriarchal) baggage, Barth qualifies the affirmation of the paternity of God through a series of negations. Christians call upon God as Father ‘not on the basis of their own opinion, thought, or speculation, not in the form of an image projected by them’.47 Moreover, ‘they will not think that he becomes the Father in virtue of their address’.48 Barth’s christologically conceived account of the naming of God means that God is Father before the ethical agent calls upon God as Father. ‘In relation to Him and therefore as the Father of this Son God is antecedently Father in Himself.’49 The mention of projectionism above is important as it suggests that the possibility of an account of the divine Fatherhood beyond patriarchy is vintage Barth: it is the resurfacing of a version of his critique of natural theology, driven by a recurrent fear of Feuerbach. More than this, Barth’s investment in the lex orandi, lex credendi in these meditations on the vocative is suggestive of the idolatry-assaulting importance of a theology done on the knees. ‘Seriously, properly, and strictly Christians cannot speak about the Father but only to him’ and speaking to God in prayer brings about a transformation in the way one talks about that God.50 It is in prayer that, as Coakley argues, ‘our presuppositions about “Fatherhood” strangely start to change … and at last we follow Jesus into an exploration of the meaning of “Fatherhood” beyond all human formulations’.51 Barth implies a similar christic transformation of the meaning of the divine Fatherhood as one participates in the prayer of Christ. As ‘they have been liberated and empowered to follow him and join with him as his brethren in calling upon his Father’, the idolatries of thought that impose those repressive patriarchies are addressed and deconstructed on the deepest of levels: that is, by reaching into the very roots of human desire.52 As the pray-er

46

47 48 49 50 51

52

For an assessment of some of the difficulties the name ‘Father’ brings, see Janet Martin Soskice, The Kindness of God: Metaphor, Gender, and Religious Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 66–83. ChrL, p. 93, emphasis added. Ibid., p. 51, emphasis added. I/1, p. 392. ChrL, p. 51. Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay ‘On the Trinity’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 326. ChrL, p. 100.

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ascends into the prayer of the praying Son and, therefore, into divine knowing, the presuppositions that accompany one’s notion of the divine Fatherhood are broken open, reordered, expanded and refilled with meaning derived from (and only from) the knowledge of the divine Sonship, into which the pray-er is incorporated, and the knowledge of the divine Fatherhood that is beyond all accounts of fatherhood. One of the reasons Barth is keen to rehabilitate the vocative is that the christologically conceived notion of God as Father implies at once the divine otherness (God is almighty Father) and God’s precious intimacy (God is the Father of the Son who elects to be our Father and we have, from the very beginning, been elected to be the Father’s children). ‘The vocative signifies the “dear” Father’ and ‘has a familiar and intimate character,’ Barth writes.53 It is here that prayer begins to gain its meaning: it is about being drawn into the life of the triune God and participating in the precious intimacy the Son shares with the Father. In this sense, the name of God is an ethical event because in calling upon God as ‘Father’ the ethical agent is likewise named as a child of God, or better, taken up into the sonship of Christ. Jesus does not command them to pray in their own name but in his name, in the name of God’s Son, their Brother, Jesus Christ (Jn 14.13f.; 16.23f.), that in him they have access to the Father, that they are adopted into fellowship with his praying.54

In finding a way of speaking about (by speaking to) God, we arrive at a way of talking about ourselves as children of that God. The vocative implies, in other words, a particular moral ontology and brings to expression the antecedent priority of divine agency (§76.1), the subsequent following-after of the child in response to the self-initiating agency of the Father (§76.2) and, most significantly, their mutual correspondence (§76.3). This ‘correspondence’ is elaborated in the third and final section of §76 in which Barth takes up the theme of invocation in further detail. Invocation, therefore, can be seen to combine his unqualified insistence on the priority of divine agency with the subsequent human participatory response in a mysterious reciprocity of divine and human agencies, united in Christ’s own invocation of God as Father. 53 54

Ibid., pp. 58 and 70. Ibid., p. 108.

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However, following the trajectory of the Lord’s Prayer, the Christian life does not end with calling upon the name of God. The ethical agent asks for that name to be hallowed, for God ‘himself … to sanctify his name’.55 What Barth means by the sanctification of the divine name, undertaken and accomplished by God as we ask of God in the first petition, is for God to ‘glorify his name’.56 These meditations on the vocative resonate once again with Barth’s earlier theology of the divine perfections, which culminates in his justly celebrated account of divine glory (in II/1). In that celebrated section Barth argues that the principal act that testifies to God’s glory is nothing other than prayer. It is as the Church ‘presents itself before God [in] prayer’, Barth writes, ‘that we really glorify God and therefore share in His self-glorification’.57 In his return to these themes in the context of the ethics of reconciliation, Barth repeats the claim that in prayer the ethical agent is called to an ‘active participation in the hallowing of God’s name’.58 The leading petition of Lord’s Prayer does not imply human passivity at an act of divine self-glorification but is a call for the children of the Father to ‘actualize’ their prayer. ‘They have to actualize the partnership in this history. They have to express in word and deed his fatherhood and their sonship. This is why he calls upon them and commands them to call upon him.’59 Given the vocative is the very glory of God, ‘it is a fearful thing when God’s name is denied, blasphemed, or dishonored’ because by dishonouring the name of God, for Barth, the very glory of God is denied.60 A particular form of human action, then, characterizes this life in the vocative: namely, the active and costly revolt against all that denies, blasphemes or dishonours the holy name. This emphasis on revolt radicalizes Barth’s theology of prayer and qualifies his rather persistent insistence on the apparent spiritual immaturity of the ethical agent. His account of the ‘children of God’ does not produce an ethic of infantile irresponsibility but rather a call to courageous resistance to the dishonouring of the divine name. And in the active participation in the Son’s glorification of the Father, actualized in invocational revolt, the ethical agent is glorified in a different though analogous way (Rom. 8.14-17). This strong theology of revolt, which punctuates his mature theology of prayer, is discussed further in Chapter 6. 55 56 57 58 59 60

Ibid., p. 158. Ibid., p. 161. II/1, p. 676. ChrL, p. 170. Ibid., p. 85. Ibid., p. 155.

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An invocational existence The task for the rest of this chapter is to ascertain how Barth’s theology of invocation builds on his earlier writings on prayer. On the one hand, a lot of thinking contained in his theology of invocation nuances and enhances ideas already prominent in earlier sections of the Church Dogmatics. The basic theological instinct and patterns of ethical themes are recapitulations of ideas generated in previous parts of Barth’s writings – not least the retention of the primacy of petition within the invocational context. There are reasons, then, to suggest that the turn to invocation did not involve much innovation at all and was little more than a change in nomenclature. On the other hand, however, and this is the contention of this chapter, Barth’s turn to invocation, which is described in the preface to the volume as a ‘self-correction’, constitutes a significant development in his understanding of prayer.61 For example, Chapter 3 questioned whether the concept of petition risks narrowing prayer too stringently. Praise, thanksgiving, confession and glorification seem to be homogenized into the one totalizing concept of petition and the particularity of each is made alike. Departicularizing the various practices of prayer implies that, in the end, the different practices of prayer are really doing the same thing. By the time Barth returns to the theology of prayer in the ethics of reconciliation, however, his understanding of prayer is opened out into something much more expansive. The first point to be made in respect to the novelty of invocation, therefore, pertains to the descriptive range of the concept. The argument that will be pushed in this section is that invocation is a movement beyond the earlier one-dimensional stress on petition as the ‘constitutive element’ of prayer to something more encompassing of all the dimensions of Christian existence.62 Or better, and expressed less competitively, in the ethics of reconciliation there is an incorporation of his earlier emphasis on petition into the practice of invocation.63 Here Barth is producing an account of prayer in which the invocation of God is not a discrete moment of occasional liturgical performance that is consigned to an area sometimes called one’s 61

62 63

Hartmut Ruddies is one of the few alert to the ‘substantive change’ that the invocational turn brings about in Barth’s doctrine of prayer, in ‘Anrufung Gottes. Das Gebet als Grundakt des christlichen Lebens bei Karl Barth’, Zeitschrift für dialektische Theologie 17.1 (2001), pp. 8–24 (8). Similarly, Herlyn takes Barth’s admission to Markus (in a letter dated 24th December 1960, cited in ChrL, p. xi) that because IV/4 is now very different from an earlier manuscript his son had read, the new introduction must now reflect much more than an ‘Änderung der Nomenklatur’, Herlyn, Religion oder Gebet, p. 75. III/3, p. 267. For the place of petition in invocation, see ChrL, pp. 50, 80, 81 and 112.

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‘prayer life’. He would reject the dualism that sometimes operates in theologies of spirituality that separates the private from the public self. He would also take issue with a vision of the Christian life as anything less than being ‘constant in prayer’ (Rom. 12.12). The ‘spiritual life in invocation … is not just a matter of a single moment, or a number of exalted moments, in the life of these people; it is a matter of their life-history’.64 This represents a shift in the doctrinal context of Barth’s writings on prayer. The ethical fragment is now concerned with what to do in correspondence to the divine work of reconciliation, which totally and not partially alters the ethical agent, counters the sin that characterizes one’s whole existence and consequently claims an action from the ‘whole’ person.65 Therefore, it is crucial to understand invocation in the broadest possible sense. It is the homecoming, the return of ‘the whole man’ to God.66 All human activity should be understood, then, precisely as prayer. And because of this, as Boulton argues, at ‘every moment, in every thought and word and act, human life is always invocational’.67 In addition to demonstrating how invocation both holds together and guards the distinction of thanksgiving and praise and petition, this section will also revisit some of the themes of earlier chapters of this book to test whether the concept of invocation can recapture some of what was lost in petition’s dismissal of the contemplative aspects of prayer. The first task, therefore, is to return briefly to Barth’s earlier writings on prayer, from the doctrine of creation onwards, to show how prayer develops from an action alongside other actions to become the ‘one thing’ the Christian is called to do. We begin in III/2 where, we recall, Barth develops a description of ‘real’ humanity in terms of gratitude and responsibility, the latter of which is parsed as knowledge of God, obedience, invocation and freedom (§44.3).68 Responsibility before God, he writes, has the ‘character of an invocation of God’ in which the ethical agent ‘has nothing to bring before God’ but prayer and supplication and therefore is made responsible in her obedient invocational response.69 It is notable that this is the first time in the Church Dogmatics that prayer is described specifically in terms of invocation. Although this suggests that the later turn to invocation in the ethics of reconciliation is not unannounced, it is important to emphasize that, at least at this point in its 64 65 66 67 68 69

ChrL, p. 94. IV/2, p. 556. ChrL, p. 44. Boulton, God against Religion, p. 168. III/2, pp. 176–202. Ibid., pp. 190–1.

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conceptual development, the term had a very narrow range and certainly lacks the density and nuance it enjoys in its re-emergence in the ethics of reconciliation. Invocation, at this stage, is one action in a quartet of actions (not even the primary or culminating action) on the list of things to do as responsible creatures before their creator. As noted in the previous chapter, the subsequent two part-volumes of the doctrine of creation contain formal treatments of prayer. In both III/3 and in the ethics of creation, prayer is now elevated from a position alongside other actions to the climax of a series of other actions. For example, in the formal section on prayer in III/3, prayer is the climactic component of the three-fold attitude of the Christian under the universal lordship of God – the other two attitudes are faith and obedience. This threefold approach to the Christian life is repeated in the ethics of creation in which Barth considers the holy day, confession and then prayer in terms of characterizing human freedom before God. In both instances the final element is accorded the greatest weight and in both Barth has a particular form of prayer in mind: ‘to pray is to ask’ (the pun is revealed in the German: ‘beten heißt bitten’).70 The threefold approach is even clearer in the ethics of creation since here the structure of holy day, confession and prayer as the constitutive ingredients of human freedom is folded into a much wider exploration of how human freedom is actualized that spans the entire volume: freedom takes place before God, in fellowship, for life and in limitation (§§53–56). Although prayer is beginning to accumulate conceptual weight in the doctrine of creation, it is clear that prayer is not yet the ‘one thing’ to do. It is also difficult to avoid the preference for the concept of freedom (and not prayer) as the structuring ethical motif of the ethics of the doctrine of creation. As Barth himself reports, ‘the basic concept in CD III/4 … was the concept of “freedom” ’.71 And it is worth repeating that the term Anrufung is not mentioned once in either of the main prayer-sections in the doctrine of creation. Turning briefly to the doctrine of reconciliation, prayer continues to receive attention as one of the constitutive elements of the Christian life. In the second part-volume, Barth identifies prayer as one of the four elements of Christian worship alongside confession, baptism and the Lord’s Supper.72 Similarly, in IV/3, prayer is discussed as one action in that long inventory of the ministry of the community.73 70 71 72 73

III/4, p. 91 = KD III/4, p. 99. ChrL, p. 37. See IV/2, pp. 704–6. See IV/3, pp. 859–901 (for prayer, see pp. 882–85).

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In each case, and this is my point, prayer is distinguished as an activity alongside other activities and subsumed into wider discussions on the shape of human agency. Although all these actions of the Christian life are conceived in dynamic terms (which disallows any crude divisions between the various activities and practices), even with a strong theology of petition in hand it is clear that what is lacking is an organizing motif that gathers all dimensions of prayer and all practices of the Christian life identified throughout the course of the Church Dogmatics precisely in their particularity to form one action that takes place in responsive correspondence to God’s reconciliatory action in Christ. Matters change, however, when Barth turns to the concept of the invocation of God. While he never relinquishes a strong emphasis on petition, something quite different is happening by the time Barth turns from petition to invocation in the ethical fragment. In distinction from his other reflections on ethics, where Barth was content to describe the Christian life through a plurality of terms and concepts (petition alongside faith and obedience in III/3, alongside rest and confession in III/4 and so on), in the ethics of reconciliation he has settled on the ‘most relevant term’ and the ‘most appropriate concept’ that incorporates all these actions, the entirety of ethical existence and all human practices into a consolidated whole.74 His question ‘what is the one thing in the midst of the truly and not just apparently many things that the gracious God commands man’ finds its answer in the invocation of God.75 As Joseph Mangina argues, ‘rather than appearing as one (albeit crucial) activity of the agent among others, invocation serves as the basic category for focusing what Barth wants to say about the moral life’.76 It has ‘central significance and import for all man’s other being and acts’, Barth writes.77 Invocation is: for and to which his [God’s] children are liberated and invited and summoned, and which must become an event in the lives of Christians as thanksgiving, praise, and petition [Danken, Loben und Bitten], and therefore as the primal and basic form of the whole Christian ethos.78

In turning to invocation, Barth is building on a concept with a long history. The term ‘invocation’ is traditionally used in quite a different context, however. Barth has taken a concept that is often discussed within sacramental 74 75 76 77 78

ChrL, p. 36 = DcL, p. 55. Ibid., p. 36, emphasis restored = DcL, p. 56. Mangina, Karl Barth on the Christian Life, p. 173. ChrL, p. 42. Ibid., p. 89, rev. = DcL, p. 144.

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theology where the epiclesis is that part of the eucharistic prayer when the Holy Spirit is invoked to consecrate, in some way or another, the gifts of bread and wine so that they may be sanctified as the body and blood of Jesus Christ. Invocation already has, then, a deeply pneumatological history. Given his ‘demythologization’ of the sacramental status of the Lord’s Supper, it is unlikely that Barth is drawing attention to the consecratory side of epiclesis.79 In the epicletic tradition, however, there is another (indeed, more ancient) side to the invocation of the Holy Spirit: the Spirit is called upon not only for the sanctification of the elements but also for the sanctification of the community. There is a double meaning to epiclesis. As well as the particular, consecratory epiclesis, there is a general ‘epiclesis upon the people’.80 It is this secondary, gathering character of epiclesis that helps to illumine what Barth is theologically up to in his theology of invocation. Just as the Holy Spirit assembles the scattered participants into a gathered community and unites them as the one Body of Christ as they partake in the Eucharist, in the act of invocation the Holy Spirit draws and holds together the distinct practices of the ethical agents and makes them into ‘one’ integrated and consolidated ecclesial action. The Holy Spirit, Barth writes, gathers together ‘their experience, perception, contemplation, and resolve’ and brings all things together in Christ.81 In fact, Barth’s entire vision for the Christian life can be summed up in terms of a thoroughgoing epiclesis. It is about a concrete call for the Holy Spirit to come and dwell among us: the community is an epicletic community and the ethical agent an epicletic being called to lead an epicletic existence. As Barth writes, the Christian life ‘is a life which as calling upon God the Father will always consist very simply … in the prayer for the Holy Spirit’.82 Indeed, the Holy Spirit is in the very business of crossing boundaries, overcoming competitive divisions and drawing the diaspora into an ecclesial koinonia, but in such a way that deepens and protects rather than destroys and denies particularity.83 The novelty and distinctiveness of invocation, to emphasize, is less about the prioritization of another form of prayer in petition’s place. Here, the 79

80

81 82 83

For further material on Barth’s interaction with the liturgical traditions, see Meyer-Blanck, ‘Gottesdienst und Gebet bei Karl Barth’, pp. 136–38. John H. McKenna, ‘The Epiclesis Revisited’, in Frank C. Senn (ed.), New Eucharistic Prayers: An Ecumenical Study of their Development and Structure (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), pp. 314–36. ChrL, p. 90. Ibid., p. 92. The point is well made by Colin Gunton, ‘The Lord who is the Spirit: Towards a Theology of the Particular’, in The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 180–209 and by Tom Greggs, Barth, Origen, and Universal Salvation: Restoring Particularity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 191.

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reductionist tendencies identified at the end of the chapter on petition, with its undermining of particularity, would simply recur under a different conceptual guise. Its novelty concerns more, then, the introduction of a much more coherent way of holding together the particularities of different types of prayer in the Holy Spirit, as one basic act, one ‘Grundakt’.84 At this point there presses on us the question of whether Barth exploits the full potential of the conceptual viscosity of invocation. Any answer to this question is frustrated by two issues: first, the fact that the primary text is a torso of his overall vision of the ethics of reconciliation means that Barth’s theology of invocation is far from the finished article; and second, at a number of points, there is a deliberate dodging of any systematic foreclosure of prayer that tries to see too clearly through what he calls the inherently ‘misty territory’ of invocation.85 Only with great surprise, profound amazement, and even consternation and fright can one speak of the fact that there may and should be this calling upon God by Christians as his children … [for] we stand before the mystery of the covenant – in its own way no less a mystery than that of the incarnation and resurrection of the Lord.86

The conceptual re-description of prayer as invocation, therefore, does not produce a particularly tidy definition of prayer and this unsettles the earlier clean-cut account of prayer as petition. Invocation is something mysterious and cannot easily be pinned down to one precise meaning in the way that petition can only really mean to ask. It is more like trying to depict a ‘bird in flight’, full of movement, to borrow one of Barth’s expressions.87 Despite the protection of the ‘mistiness’ of invocation, it is clear that invocation carefully and sophisticatedly integrates thanksgiving, praise and petition (Danken, Loben and Bitten): that great invocational triplet which recurs time and time again in the ethics of reconciliation.88 Barth is unprepared 84 85 86 87 88

DcL, p. 167. ChrL, p. 54. Ibid., p. 89. See ET, p. 10. Some of this impression is lost in the English translation of Barth’s familiar parsing of invocation as ‘Danken, Loben und Bitten’. The translation is often in error and the triplet is culpably rendered as ‘thanksgiving, praise and prayer’ instead of specifying Bitten more precisely as ‘petition’. This slight imprecision loses much of the delicacy of Barth’s thought and sets thanksgiving and praise as something external to prayer. Harasta attempts to demonstrate that the complex relation between the various forms of prayer should be understood in terms of a skilful Aufhebung, in which praise, thanksgiving and petition are taken up into the one act of invocation, see Harasta, Lob und Bitte, pp. 213–32. However, the term should be avoided in this context since the concept of Aufhebung is not generally used in Das christliche Leben, perhaps because it implies that the distinction of thanksgiving, praise and petition as particular forms of prayer is lost in the ‘sublation’ into the single act of invocation.

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to renege on his earlier commitments to thanksgiving, praise or petition. Because the invocational approach is about trying to protect the distinctiveness of all aspects of prayer, the opportunity does not arise to choose one form of prayer over another. Take thanksgiving as a test case. In the ethical fragment there is a strong insistence that invocational agents are those who owe God ‘thanks and can and may and should thank him’.89 The one who invokes God is the ‘grateful man’, thankful for the possibility of invocation. Since invocation is not something strictly possessed by the human agent but is only ever pure gift, invocation already always includes gratitude for gifting the ethical agent with the freedom to call upon God as Father. ‘We are to thank God and to thank him again and again – from this angle already invocation is a never-ending action’, Barth writes.90 Furthermore, the third main section of the ethics of reconciliation, his famously unwritten exposition of the Lord’s Supper, would have been arranged around the ‘thanksgiving which responds to the presence of Jesus Christ in His self-sacrifice and which looks forward to His future’.91 Just as for thanksgiving, there is space in invocation for praise and, of course, for petition. Barth writes that only ‘in this turn to unselfish praise of God does invocation of the Father become what it is, the work of people who are free because they are freed by God for God’.92 Invocation is also, then, ‘petition: asking for something that only God can do and give and that is thus to be expected only, but very definitely, from him’.93 All this is very much associated with the theology of epiclesis. Epiclesis is ‘basically an appeal for unity’.94 But at the very same time, as Barth writes, the Holy Spirit is also the protector of distinction. ‘The Holy Spirit does not enforce a flat uniformity’.95 Praise, thanksgiving and petition, therefore, can be seen to form an integrated, and pneumatologically grounded, ‘choreography’ of invocation – full of dance, full of movement.96 Consequently, the components of the familiar triplet of thanksgiving, praise and petition are neither held together as ‘elements’ of one type of prayer nor sequentially flow into each other (one leading to the other to their fulfilment in petition). Rather, they are held together as fully prayer, in complete distinction and integration. 89 90 91 92 93 94

95 96

ChrL, p. 86. Ibid., p. 86. IV/4, p. ix. ChrL, p. 88. Ibid., p. 112. John H. McKenna, Eucharist and Holy Spirit: The Eucharistic Epiclesis in Twentieth Century Theology (Great Wakering: Mayhew-McCrimmon, 1975), p. 133. IV/3, p. 855. See Boulton, God against Religion, p. 100.

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The logic of invocation can be pushed further. It is not only about protecting the distinctiveness of various forms of prayer but becomes a means of gathering up, through the Holy Spirit, all responses to God so that ‘man in his whole humanity takes his proper place over against God’.97 The Holy Spirit is the one in whom and by whom a systematic coordination is brought to the Christian life: from the emergent picture of thanksgiving, praise and petition, the faith and obedience of III/3, the holy day and confession of III/4, the entire inventory of Christian existence reported in IV/3, baptism, Lord’s Supper and all other dispositions, attitudes and actions of ‘his heart and soul and mind’.98 All these practices are caught up in the invocational dance. Accordingly, ‘we thus understand calling upon God – in all the richness of the action included in it – as the one thing … [God] demands of man’.99 However, can the concept of invocation be pushed further still to include the more contemplative dimensions of prayer uncovered in the earlier chapters of this book? Is there a space for contemplation in invocation? If invocation really is ‘representative of all he does’, as Barth insists, and seriously the meaning of all commands, then this must, in a complex way, include the Sabbath command, the command that rest is as important to the Christian life as action.100 The exact ways the contemplative dimensions of prayer can be seen to be included in the invocational turn is a perplexing issue. On the one hand, it could seem that in the ethical fragment the careful balance between the prior activity of contemplation and the subsequent activity of petitionary prayer runs aground with a clear privileging of the active over the contemplative. Barth claims that the Christian life is about resisting the ‘evil reality of … resting’.101 On the other, however, Barth hints that ‘there is also, of course, a resting of the Christian life in God’ and promises that this contemplative theme would be explored ‘in connection with the third petition’.102 The ethics of reconciliation, of course, tantalizingly stops just short of the petition that God’s will is done on earth. Although full disclosure of what this contemplative ‘resting’ actually looks like is left hanging, the admission suggests that Barth does at least recognize that the concept of invocation is sufficiently elastic to contain the contemplative dimensions of prayer. Indeed, on closer inspection, the balance between

97

ChrL, p. 43. IV/2, p. 556. 99 ChrL, p. 43. 100 Ibid., p. 42. 101 Ibid., p. 86. 102 Ibid., p. 115. 98

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contemplation and action is not lost in the ethics of reconciliation but is reconceived in a careful and subtle way. It is even inscribed into the structure of the fragment. While in Barth’s earlier writings on prayer there was a movement from contemplation to active petition, here the distinction is less clear. Moreover, there is boycott of the type of binaries that, for example, separate the vita activa from the vita contemplativa: invocation is neither ‘just contemplative’ nor, by implication, just active.103 As with the sequential movement from thanksgiving to praise to petition, the contemplation/action stalemate has been ‘actualized’ in the freedom of the Holy Spirit. Barth can be seen to achieve this relaxation in the formal arrangement of the fragment itself, which describes a complex dialectical interplay between the contemplative and the active. For example, in his investigation of the first petition, the ethical agent is invited first and foremost to participate in God’s own self-sanctification, which ‘is not our work but God’s’.104 This is the contemplative aspect (as described in §77.3). At the very same time, the divine self-sanctification also carries a command for us to do something about it, that is, to stand against all that desecrates the holy name. And this is the active aspect (described in §77.4). In the ethical drafts, it is less that contemplation sequentially flows into petition and more that the contemplative and active dimensions of the Christian life are held together in the one petition. Thus Webster is quite right in noticing that in the ethical drafts Barth offers ‘rich descriptions of hope as both waiting and hastening, a mode of rest and a form of strenuous activity’.105 Contemplation and action appear as two complementary rather than competitive modes of Christian living. It is here, finally, that Barth has the conceptual resources to make good on his earlier claim that the Christian attitude is a dynamic attitude, in which the Christian, being totally claimed, participates in the operation of God and creaturely operation: contemplating to be sure, but active as well … and both in such a way that it is quite impossible to separate the one from the other, because proceeding from the one he is always leaping along the way to the other.106

In fact, ‘to dispute … the more contemplative or active nature of Christianity, or the respective merits of waiting or hastening … is superfluous’.107 103

Ibid., p. 68. See also, III/2, p. 408. ChrL, p. 158. 105 Webster, Barth’s Moral Theology, p. 92. 106 III/3, p. 244. 107 Ibid., p. 245. 104

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Perhaps, however, the contemplative side of invocation is most clearly felt in the text’s material concerns rather than the formal ways that it ruptures binary ways of thinking. For example, a significantly contemplative theme in the ethics of reconciliation is, of course, the unavoidable priority of listening. Barth’s entire account of the reception of the divine command depends on a strong theology of listening. Related to this is a rethinking of wordless prayer. The earlier exaltation of petition, which was rigorously pursued from a christological perspective, produces a decidedly wordy account of prayer. The ethical agent ‘shall speak and not be silent’, Barth writes.108 It is clear that contemplative prayer of a non-discursive sort jars with the verbal, wordiness of petition: hence his earlier rejection of silent prayer as ‘embarrassing’.109 In the invocational turn, however, Barth’s critique of wordless prayer mellows, which goes hand-in-hand with a much stronger and refined sense of the role of the Holy Spirit. Now Barth can be found describing the Spirit-filled act of invocation in terms of ‘crying, sighing’ as well as ‘singing, and rejoicing’.110 In the developing pneumatology of the ethical drafts, a further connection to contemplation can be found. Indeed, for Barth, the very act of invocation depends on ‘a special movement and act of God’ through which God gives the ethical agent the ‘right and ability and also the will’ to pray.111 This ‘special movement’ that makes possible the event of prayer is a pneumatological one. The highly astonishing event that has to take place, and must continue to take place if there is to be invocation of God the Father by humans as his children, is that of the fruitful meeting and the living fellowship of the Holy Spirit with them and with their spirits.112

Put differently, in order for invocation to take place, the pray-er must ‘desire’ prayer but in order for one to desire prayer the pray-er’s disordered desire (that distracts one from praying) needs to be transformed through the re-ordering work of the Spirit, the one who desires us fully. The Spirit’s gentle tugging at human desire to enable the capacity for right desire occurs on such a deep level that it may well be felt that one’s desire to pray is an autonomously owned action – in which case the obsession to assume that prayer is something that we do makes a lot of more sense. But it is not, for Barth. To arrive at prayer is to be taken by God into a position of prayer and depends on the obscurely 108

III/4, p. 90. Ibid., p. 112. 110 ChrL, p. 54. 111 Ibid., p. 90. 112 Ibid., p. 90. 109

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prior interruptive work of the Spirit who works within to incorporate the human pray-er into the divine. ‘Therefore it will never regard it [prayer] as its own work, as a human achievement … . It will never regard its asking except as the gift and work of His Holy Spirit’.113 Here human desire is brought into such complex conformity with divine desire that they are rendered (almost) indistinguishable. As has been stressed throughout this book, this cannot occlude the genuineness of human agency or shut down the possibility of a distinctively human response to the prior ‘special movement’. On the contrary, conceptions of human ‘autonomy’ are prized open to be graciously reimagined. As Rahner puts it: in prayer ‘dependence and autonomy are two qualities which increase in equal and not inverse proportion’.114 Indeed, from this pneumatological perspective, Barth’s earlier ethic of response gains clarity. Th e movement that enables one to desire to follow Christ the pray-er in the first place is the work of the Holy Spirit working within, on the deepest levels. To the prior work of the Holy Spirit, which redirects desire and therefore makes prayer possible, the ethical posture is one of pure reception, a quiet contemplative waiting on the prior divine intervention in the ethical agent. This takes us conveniently to my second point concerning the novelty of invocation.

Correspondence The second way invocation can be seen to develop Barth’s theology of prayer has to do with a concept already mentioned but as yet unpacked: ‘Entsprechung’ (correspondence, analogy). Chapter 3 noticed that the dominant motif of participation in Barth’s earlier theology of petition is mostly ‘response’. Petition is the reactive ‘repetition’ of Christ’s petition and being human means ‘being in the act of response to the Word of God’.115 Despite its important iconoclastic responsibility, concerns were raised as to whether the model of petition-as-response might need to be complemented by something more participative to avoid its constriction by a problematical agential externalism. In the invocational turn Barth’s theology of prayer achieves exactly this complementation. In what follows, I unpack the correspondence-motif and suggest three ways in which the motif takes distinctive shape. At points,

113

III/3, p. 277. Rahner, The Practice of Faith, p. 72. 115 III/3, pp. 277, 174. 114

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allusions will be made to the (already hinted at) ‘incorporative logic’ that underpins and clarifies the pneumatological movements through which correspondence is achieved – the next chapter will consider the incorporative pneumatology in further detail. Given the complex form the doctrine of reconciliation takes it is worth citing Jüngel’s analysis of the relevant portion of the fourth volume and its systematic connections to invocation more fully. To the Christological movement of the Son of Man in the second chapter, which considers the Servant as Lord and sets him fourth as royal man, there corresponds the soteriological movement (which opposes the countermovement of sin as sloth and misery) as it is portrayed in the sanctification of humanity, the upbuilding of the community and in the love of the individual. In close analogy to this, the Christian life (understood as invocation of God) is brought to speech in the ethical context from the point of view of its accomplishment in the act in which we lift up our hearts – sursum corda! – to invoke God as ‘Our Father’, by an exposition of the Lord’s Prayer.116

Among the many connections between the second part-volume and the ethics of the doctrine of reconciliation, the formal link Jüngel exposes between invocation and ‘homecoming’ is most suggestive. Invocation is revealed not only as a calling upon God from below but also an ethical movement upwards.117 Connecting the invocation of God to the royal office of Christ reaffirms that for Barth the ethical ascent is not journeyed alone but is a participation in Christ’s homecoming and, on that basis, an incorporation into the trinitarian life of God. At a material level, the formal sense of participation is expressed through Barth’s intriguing use of the term ‘correspondence’.118 The motif holds pride of place in the ethics of reconciliation. The correspondence-motif does not relinquish the earlier emphasis on prayer as response to God’s command but picks up that language, contains it within itself and recasts it in a distinctively participative mould: the ethical agent is invited to correspond to divine agency. Consequently, the ‘response’ and ‘correspondence’ motifs are not mutually exclusive and do not therefore competitively cancel each other out. Instead, human action responds to the prior divine initiative and precisely in this response the agent of that action is brought by the Holy Spirit into the closest possible correspondence with divine agency. 116

Jüngel, ‘Invocation of God’, pp. 159–60. For more on the link between ascent and participation, see Canlis, Calvin’s Ladder. 118 Jüngel draws out the correspondence-motif in Barth-Studien (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Mohn, 1982), p. 226. 117

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The correspondence-motif is not unique to the ethics of reconciliation. Barth employs term in his doctrine of God to prevent any severing of God’s being from God’s act.119 Correspondence is also used by Barth to describe the uniquely realized concurrence of the divine and human in the person of Jesus Christ.120 Further, the structuring of ethics around the three movements of salvation history (creation, reconciliation and redemption) indicates that the very notion of ethics takes place in some form of correspondence with the movement of God’s own being.121 However, what Barth attempts in the ethical fragment is to provide a way of answering the question of how the promise of divine–human correspondence is concretely actualized. ‘What we want is not just a formally clear concept but also one that tells us what is the conversion that is according to God’s will, what is the decision to which man is summoned by it’.122 For Barth, the divine– human correspondence of agency is expressed most fully in the practice of the invocation of God. By making the invocation of God the controlling category of the ethics of reconciliation the motif of correspondence is expressed with ‘greater force’, as Webster argues.123 Given the work the motif has already done at other crucial points in the Church Dogmatics, it is rather suggestive to use that same term to describe what is going on agentially in the act of invocation. In an analogous way, then, to the complex agential make-up of the agency of Christ, invocation also is to be understood as complexly fully divine and fully human. In other words, if the correspondence-motif is participative enough to describe the union of the divine and human in the person of Christ and dominate Barth’s technical christological discussions (in §64, for example) then it is surely participative enough to describe the relation of human to divine agency in the act of invocation.124 What more by way of participation could critics of Barth on this matter want?125 119

See Eberhard Jüngel, God’s Being is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology of Karl Barth. A Paraphrase (trans. John Webster; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001), p. 36. 120 See IV/2, pp. 154–264. For an account of the role of correspondence in Barth’s Christology, see Jones, The Humanity of Christ, pp. 150–69. 121 See Jüngel, ‘Invocation of God’, pp. 159–60. 122 ChrL, p. 38. 123 Webster, Barth’s Moral Theology, p. 173. Spencer follows Webster by arguing that in these drafts ‘Barth’s concept of correspondence finds its most advanced expression thus far’, Spencer, Clearing a Space for Human Action, p. 299. 124 I also explore the correspondence-motif in connection with Barth’s doctrine of baptism here: ‘Revisiting Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Baptism from the Perspective on Prayer’, Scottish Journal of Theology (forthcoming). 125 Although I agree with McDowell’s identification of a ‘certain externalizing sensibility’ in many of Barth’s ethical models (most notably the model of ‘response’), for the reasons outlined above, I have a more positive appreciation for the potential of the particular model of correspondence as a mode of participation than does McDowell, who concludes that even correspondence is not participative enough, having ‘all too little sense of the divine movement in and through the human’, see McDowell, ‘ “Openness to the World” ’, p. 276.

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As with petition, therefore, the linking of invocation with correspondence excludes the possibility of sole-causality, pace Feuerbach, in either agential direction. The mystery of invocation also implies a pneumatological movement in and through the pray-er that prevents the allocation of agency along clear lines. It is not simply that there are some divine actions and some human actions or that God acts then we act. As mentioned earlier, the rather anxious concern that the more something can be of God the less it can be fully human is based on a fall into unnecessarily competitive (all-or-nothing) conceptions of the divine– human relation. This type of neat agential allocation is excluded by Barth’s understanding of correspondence and its incorporative logic. The issue turns instead on how these two acting subjects non-competitively occupy the shared invocational space. The mysterious event of the divine–human correspondence can be profitably described through an appeal to an ‘asymmetrical framework’ of differentiated unity. This framework runs throughout the Church Dogmatics and follows a broadly ‘Chalcedonian pattern’, to use Hunsinger’s term.126 Even in the almost audacious intimacy of invocation, then, Barth is reluctant to relax his uncompromising commitment to the radical distinction between the divine and human agent who encounter each other ‘without confusion’. The divine agent and human agent, he writes, are ‘two partners of different kinds, acting differently, so that they cannot be exchanged or equated. God cannot be compared, confused, or intermingled with man, nor man with God. They are totally unlike … . Any reversal of the distinction between the two is impossible.’127 Accordingly, the ethical agent invokes ‘directly from below’ as a child of God for that which the Father alone can bring about, vertically from above.128 There can be neither commingling nor confusing of agencies. Any confusion would make invocation something more or less than a genuinely ‘human action’.129 By distinguishing human action from God’s action, a sobering Krisis is pronounced on the ethical agent’s vaunted assessment of her apparently unbounded potential. Barth argues that ‘the limits of the creature are guarded when we understand the being of man as an invocation of God’.130 Restating 126

See George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 185–224. Note, though, Nimmo’s important caution against using the familiar Chalcedonian pattern of double-agency too liberally: Paul T. Nimmo, ‘Karl Barth and the concursus Dei – A Chalcedonianism Too Far?’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 9.1 (2007), pp. 58–72. 127 ChrL, p. 27. 128 Ibid., p. 153. 129 ChrL, p. 103, emphasis added. 130 III/2, pp. 191–92.

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his longstanding refusal to endorse the immediate identification of Religious Socialism (or any other human enterprise) with the kingdom of God, he writes that those ‘who know the reality of the kingdom, Christians, can never have anything to do with the arrogant and foolhardy enterprise of trying to bring in and build up by human hands a religious, cultic, moral or political kingdom on earth’.131 As a genuinely human action, invocation is necessarily curbed ‘within the painful limits’ of the ethical agent’s childlike humanity.132 It is important to pause briefly to pre-empt two tempting but erroneous implications of Barth’s reasoning. First, it would be a considerable misreading to pursue the rather predicable argument that this profound awareness of finitude lulls into a scuppering of any consistent affirmation of human action. Limitation is not a negative concept for Barth (see III/4, §56). The categorical distinction between divine and human agency does not displace human action, restrict human flourishing or regress into helpless passivity. It does, however, qualify human action. Barth is after the formation not the obliteration of human agency. To recall a point made earlier in the Church Dogmatics, we ‘must divest ourselves of the idea that limitation implies something derogatory, or even a curse or affliction. When the reference is to the limitation which comes from God, limitation is not a negation but the most positive affirmation’.133 On the contrary, then, limitation affirms the particular shape of genuinely human action thus prompting the ethical agent to venture forth with hope and confidence on the very basis of that finitude.134 Second, it is an error to mistake this careful distinction between divine and human agency for the separation of the human act of invocation from its prior context in grace. In other words, if a sacramental reading of ethical action risks a synergistic (Eutychian-like) confusion, the agential distinction risks a danger from the opposite direction, that of pushing the careful distinction into a sharp (Nestorian-like) separation of divine and human agency. This is unthinkable in Barth’s theology. As is so often elsewhere, then, his argument here should be grasped dialectically: in correspondence there is a dialectical emphasis on both the distinction between divine and human agency (there is always a vertical, top-down qualitative difference between divine and 131

ChrL, p. 264. On this, see also, George Hunsinger, ‘Toward a Radical Barth’, in George Hunsinger (ed.), Karl Barth and Radical Politics (Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox Press, 1976), pp. 181– 233 (209–11). 132 ChrL, p. 88. 133 III/4, p. 567. 134 On moral space as ‘limited’ space, see Trevor A. Hart, Regarding Karl Barth: Essays Toward a Reading of His Theology (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1999), pp. 88–92.

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human being and action) and the union of divine and human agency (the top-down vertical theology gives way to a horizontal encounter of the divine and human agent). The human act of invocation, Barth writes, is unassuming but ‘if this action is to be more than unassuming, it will not be by the depth of their prayer but solely by the holiness of the Spirit of God who helps their weakness and glorifies not them, but himself in them’.135 There is an intriguing pneumatological dimension in this statement (of God glorifying ‘himself in them’) that is to be noted here but explored later. The strong concern to protect the agential distinction therefore is qualified by a comparably strong affirmation of the union of agencies involved in the divine–human correspondence. This is the ‘without separation’ side of Hunsinger’s appeal to the pattern of Chalcedon. Barth’s entire theology of prayer moves dialectically back and forth between the pneumatologically grounded union and distinction of divine and human agency; between, that is, the ‘without confusion’ and ‘without separation’ and without settling on either. The dialectic can be seen at work in this statement: ‘We must add at once that any identification, comparison, or interchange of God and man is ruled out, so is any separation between them. In the covenant of grace they are distinct partners, but precisely in their distinction they are partners who are inseparably bound to one another.’136 Consequently, invocation does not refer to two separate actions, one creaturely, the other divine, but rather to one simple and singular act. The logic of pneumatological incorporation can be felt here in the sense of the Spirit’s working from within to ‘incorporate’ the creaturely act of invocation into the divine life of prayer. ‘In the Holy Spirit God comes together with these people in such a way that for the ongoing distinction there arises fellowship, a common life, between him and them and them and him.’137 The model of invocation expresses divine and human agency as unmixed in their distinction, inseparable in their unity and also carefully ordered. Invocation involves the reassigning of priority to divine agency and the remaking of human agency by its reordering into a ‘totally new’ type of subject.138 Barth writes, The fellowship of God with man … is fellowship in a specific and irreversible order of before and after, above and below. God unconditionally precedes and man can only follow. The free God elects and wills. The free man must elect 135

ChrL, p. 262. Ibid., p. 28. 137 Ibid., p. 90. 138 See ChrL, p. 16. 136

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and will what God elects and wills. God is the giver and man is the recipient. Man is active, not an inactive recipient, yet even in his activity he is still a recipient.139

The order flows irreversibly from creator to creature, from Father to child. The reversal of the agential ordering, however, is nothing short of sin. Since the agential order is irreversible, the ethical agent does not possess the possibility to pray but is rather ‘empowered for this, and obligated to it’ by a prior movement of divine grace.140 The remainder of this section examines three ways that correspondence takes particular shape: there is correspondence between human prayer and human action, between prayerful human action and divine action, and, finally, between divine action and human prayer. First, although the ethical agent leads an invocational existence and finds her fulfilment in the particular act of invocation, the Christian life does not end in this act of calling upon God. Through the language of correspondence Barth can maintain that invocation is more than a momentary act of piety. Instead, it involves the pray-er in a formed relation to the world in which she prays. There is no easy compartmentalizing of the ethical agent into a ‘religious’ self that prays and a ‘public’ self that engages the affairs of the world. As the chapter on contemplative prayer argued, an account of prayer that attempts to escape the world and move into some purely devotional realm renders prayer ‘no more than idle chatter in his hearts and on his lips’.141 To pray for something means the most intensive correspondence with that prayer possible: concrete actions resonate with the prayers one prays. ‘Caught up by what they pray, their whole life and thought and word and deed are set in motion, oriented to the point to which they look in their petition,’ Barth writes.142 There is a performative dimension here in which the act of invocation commits the pray-er to act and to do something in correspondence with that prayer in a more than verbal way. Subsequent chapters will explore in further detail the political import of Barth’s theology of prayer. For now, it is suffices to say that, for Barth, invocation is ‘the most authentic, powerful, and effective’ weapon in the Christian arsenal of revolt against disorder.143 If one is to have the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other, then the two meet as those hands are 139

Ibid., p. 29. Ibid., p. 43. 141 Ibid., p. 181. 142 Ibid., p. 262. 143 Ibid., p. 261. 140

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brought together in prayer, which, for Barth, is ‘the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world’.144 Second, as suggested above, the ethical agent is not only ‘summoned and impelled’ to act on the prayers she prays but is summoned to an action that corresponds to God’s action, life and mission.145 Although Barth writes that ‘by Jesus Christ and through his Spirit they have been taken up into his invocation of God as his Father’, in her invocational ascent, however, the ethical agent is not removed from the messy realities of worldly existence but participates in the affairs of the world more fully.146 Thus human action ‘will not just be unlike God’s act but also like it, … a modest but clear analogue’ to the work of God.147 An example of this divine–human correspondence occurs in Barth’s reflections on the first petition of the Lord’s Prayer. The first petition articulates a groaning for God to bring a definitive end to the ambivalence that darkens the light of the Word of God in the world. The petition, therefore, looks ‘beyond all present and future human zeal, volition, ability, and achievement to a work whose subject God alone can be and which will be that of his own volition, ability and achievement’.148 However, although human action is utterly unlike divine action, and takes place within the limitations of all things human, the petition nevertheless calls forth ‘thoughts and words and works’ of resistance that correspond with God’s own revolt against the desecration of the divine name.149 It is on this basis that human prayerful action becomes, in Barth’s term, ‘kingdom-like’.150 This is the actualization of what Barth calls geistliches Leben in which the ethical agent is called out of and beyond her enclosed circle of pride, sloth and falsehood and into an openly ekzentrisch, God-centred existence.151 A result of Barth’s understanding of spiritual ec-centricity is not merely that one’s true identity is found outside of the self but that the Holy Spirit also dwells deep inside the self. To anticipate a line of enquiry that will be pursued in further detail in the next chapter, the Holy Spirit not only leads the pray-er outwards but also intervenes and enters into the pray-er, dwelling in the 144

Regrettably, I have yet to find the source of this oft-cited remark. ChrL, p. 32. 146 Ibid., p. 100. 147 Ibid., p. 175. 148 Ibid., p. 156. 149 Ibid., p. 169. 150 Ibid., p. 266. 151 For an overview of how this ‘ec-centric’ existence unfolds in the doctrine of reconciliation, see Johnson, The Mystery of God, pp. 176–83. It is surprising, however, that Johnson does not reference the ethics of reconciliation in his assessment. 145

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prayer, altering and transforming it from within so that the ethical agent is incorporated into Christ’s prayer and human prayerful action corresponds with divine action. Despite these strong statements concerning the ethical agent’s ascent into deep participation in God, Barth remains consistently guarded to avoid what he believes is a considerable danger in theologies of participation: deification. His anti-synergistic tendencies, which are secured christologically, means that Barth’s participation is ‘participation without divinization’, as Nimmo argues.152 ‘Even in their unity in Jesus Christ himself, God does not cease to be God nor man to be man. Their distinction even in their unity in Jesus Christ typifies the qualitative and definitive distinction between God and every other man.’153 The sanctified life, therefore, ‘has nothing whatever to do with deification’.154 There is only so far the grammar of correspondence can be pushed without entangling divine and human agency to such an extent that there is nothing left to distinguish human from divine. Yet there remains a third level to the model of the divine–human correspondence, which presses the grammar of the concept to its limits. The use of the correspondence-motif in the context of prayer determines first that human actions correspond with the prayers we pray, second that these human actions correspond with divine action and now third and most mysteriously (and daringly for Barth), the direction of the logic of correspondence is reversed to describe a full-blown (but carefully guarded) reciprocity of divine and human agency. It is not simply the case that God elects the ethical agent to correspond in some secondary way to divine agency but that precisely in the mysterious act of invoking the name of God in the name of Jesus Christ and through the Holy Spirit our humanity is incorporated into the life of God on such a deep level that our correspondence with God is met, Barth writes, with the mysterious ‘promise of his corresponding [entsprechenden] action’.155 As Webster argues, The boldest feature of Barth’s account here is the further refinement of the language of ‘correspondence’. Earlier, he talked of the activity of God as that which evokes human correspondences; now he reverses the direction, 152

Nimmo, Being in Action, pp. 176–79; see also, Bruce L. McCormack, ‘Participation in God, Yes; Deification, No: Two Modern Protestant Responses to an Ancient Question’, in Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), pp. 235–60 and Jüngel, Barth-Studien, pp. 24–42 and 345. 153 ChrL, pp. 27–28. 154 IV/2, p. 377. 155 ChrL, p. 104 = DcL, p. 171.

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suggesting that to the human act of invocation there corresponds the divine act of hearing.156

More than Webster lets on, though, in addition to the divine act of hearing Barth describes the divine answering and the determination of God’s very being and acting in correspondence with human prayer. This understanding of the two-way correspondence of divine and human agency, coupled with the emergence of a rich pneumatology that renders true prayer as being caught up in the ceaseless movement of divine prayer that proceeds from God and returns to God, might well bring Barth closer to the tradition of theosis than he expects. As Eugene Rogers argues, ‘Barth sees the human response to God primarily, although he does not put it this way, in terms of deification. That is, only God can properly respond to God’.157 These issues will also be picked up again in the next chapter. The final task of this chapter is to test some of the claims made above against a controversial aspect of Barth’s mature theology: his account of baptism.158

Baptism Barth’s dissatisfaction with being unable to finish his treatment of the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer contributed to his decision to withhold the publication of these eagerly anticipated lectures.159 He did, though, publish as a fragment of the ethics of reconciliation his thinking on baptism, which forms the final selfcontained instalment of the Church Dogmatics. His theology of baptism is unfolded under a note of hesitancy. In the preface to the volume Barth fears that the conclusions he will reach in his theology of baptism will lead him into theological and ecclesiological ‘isolation’.160 And to a certain extent, they have. Like his writings on prayer, the text evidences significant shifts in Barth’s 156

Webster, Barth’s Ethics of Reconciliation, p. 188. Eugene F. Rogers, ‘The Eclipse of the Spirit in Karl Barth’, in John C. McDowell and Mike Higton (eds.), Conversing with Barth (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 173–90 (176). There is a lack of consensus over the issue of deification in Barth’s theology. While Nimmo, McCormack and Jüngel argue, with good reason and textual support, that ‘Barth remains adamant that the ethical agent participates in Jesus Christ without being divinized’, Nimmo, Being in Action, p. 176, a minority voice (including Rogers) suggest otherwise. For example, Hunsinger argues that Barth ‘comes within a hair of the traditional Eastern Orthodox understanding of salvation as “divinization” (theosis)’, see Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth, p. 175. 158 What follows is explored more fully in my ‘Revisiting Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Baptism from the Perspective on Prayer’. 159 For further reasons contributing to Barth’s misgivings about seeing these lectures in print, see Barth, How I Changed my Mind, p. 75 and Busch, Karl Barth, pp. 443–45. 160 IV/4, p. xii. 157

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thinking: most notably, a change of mind over both the propriety of infant baptism and baptism’s sacramental status.161 Both of these shifts have made his mature baptismal theology rather controversial. Another area of controversy concerns the grammar of participation assumed by Barth in the baptism fragment. There is a very prevalent risk that the strong distinction Barth sets up between baptism in the Spirit (§75.1) and the subsequent human action of water baptism (§75.2), exaggerated by the sharpness of the formal division of the volume, compromises the carefully arranged divine–human relation that Barth laboured to protect throughout the rest of the ethics of reconciliation.162 Baptism with the Holy Spirit and water baptism, he argues, ‘are two very different things as man’s free work on the one side and God’s free work on the other’.163 If proved right, the complaint that Barth sets up an ‘axiomatic disjunction’, as one critic writes, between the prior action of God and the subsequent human response could do damage to this chapter’s claim that in the ethics of reconciliation Barth is moving in an interestingly participative direction.164 The final task of this chapter is to test the two claims developed above – regarding the flexibility of invocation and its participative grammar – against Barth’s mature doctrine of baptism and examine whether clarification of what Barth gets up to in his doctrine of baptism can be gained through insights from his writings on prayer. It is argued below that his writings on prayer help to reframe in new ways the debates concerning Barth’s presentation of the agential situation in his doctrine of baptism. One of the claims made in this chapter is that invocation has enough conceptual flexibility to hold together the three main forms of prayer Barth

161

His late thinking on the sacramental status of baptism, therefore, is a departure from his earlier treatment of baptism as presented in the 1943 Gwatt lecture. In this lecture, Barth does, though, question the propriety of infant baptism, arguing that baptism requires from the ethical agent an active, public confession of faith, see Karl Barth, The Teaching of the Church Regarding Baptism (trans. Ernest Payne; London: SCM Press, 1948), p. 41. 162 The queue of critics who argue along these lines include: John Macken, The Autonomy Theme in the Church Dogmatics: Karl Barth and His Critics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 86; Mangina, Karl Barth on the Christian Life, p. 87; Paul D. Molnar, Karl Barth and the Theology of the Lord’s Supper: A Systematic Investigation (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), pp. 234, 305; John Yocum, Ecclesial Mediation in Karl Barth (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 97–8, 146; George Hunsinger, ‘Baptism and the Soteriology of Forgiveness’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 2.3 (2000), pp. 247–69 (256); T. F. Torrance, ‘The One Baptism Common to Christ and His Church’, in Theology in Reconciliation: Essays Towards Evangelical and Catholic Unity in East and West (London: Chapman, 1975), pp. 82–105, p. 99 and John Webster, Karl Barth (London: Continuum, 2004; second edition), p. 157. 163 IV/4, p. 88. 164 Macken, The Autonomy Theme, p. 86.

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prioritizes in the ethics of reconciliation – praise, thanksgiving and petition. There is also a contemplative dimension that can be assumed, though is insufficiently drawn out by Barth. But can invocation also be seen to contain the human action of water baptism? In the preface to the baptism fragment, Barth records his gratitude to his son Markus and his 1951 book on baptism, which gives his rethinking of the sacramental status of baptism a more secure exegetical footing.165 Part of Markus’s argument is that in the New Testament baptism has no sacramental instrumentality whatsoever but is simply a human action in response to the saving work of God. Markus concludes, rather suggestively, that baptism is best understood in terms of ‘prayer’.166 Barth tows his son’s line of argument in the baptism fragment by also concluding that the ‘final thing to be said is that the meaning of the act of baptism consists in prayer’.167 Given this, it would seem that Barth imagined baptism (understood not as sacrament but as prayer) to be very much included in the invocational dance. Indeed, under the revised arrangement of the fourth part-volume of the doctrine of reconciliation, Barth is very explicit in his argument that baptism and the Lord’s Supper are to be reconceived precisely as invocation. The foundation of the Christian life, its renewal and the diversity of all that takes place in between ‘come together’ under the guiding concept of invocation.168 So he writes: In this regard baptism relates especially to the beginning of the history, to man’s entry into a life determined by calling upon God, while the Lord’s Supper relates especially to the continuance of the history, the sustaining of man in the fellowship of that life and therefore in calling upon God.169

The baptism fragment, then, should be read not as a fragment but as a ‘constitutive element’ of a much wider vision of the ethics of reconciliation, ordered around prayer.170 In other words, Barth’s theology of baptism (§75) is read rightly when it is read contextually and that means reading it in its original context as following the introductory section on invocation (§74) and preceding the interpretation of the first petition of the Lord’s Prayer (§76). Baptism, as prayer, then, provides ‘a model for all that follows’.171 165

IV/4, p. x. Markus Barth, Die Taufe – ein Sakrament? Ein exegetischer Beitrag zum Gespräch über die kirchliche Taufe (Zollikon-Zürich: Evangelischer Verlag, 1951), p. 514. 167 IV/4, p. 209 = KD IV/4, p. 231 168 ChrL, p. ix. 169 Ibid., pp. 45–46. 170 Jüngel, Barth-Studien, p. 291. 171 IV/4, p. 213. 166

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Regarding the second of this chapter’s two main claims (on invocation’s sense of participation), what happens to the charge of agential separation if we take Barth at his word that baptism should not only be understood in the context of an invocational framework but also precisely as invocation, as prayer?172 ‘Baptism is a calling on the name of the Lord. It is not just accompanied by epiclesis; in itself and as such it is epiclesis.’173 By describing baptism as invocation (epiclesis), Barth is making a number of claims regarding the relation between divine and human agency in the act of water baptism. Baptism with water, like prayer, is an action in response to a prior work of grace (in this case, Spirit baptism). ‘Where there is prayer, man’s relationship to God is corrected and it is in order. Because and to the degree that baptism is prayer, the participants act in this order.’174 Baptism with water, like prayer, is an action that properly befits the limitations of human agency. It is a ‘true and genuine human action which responds to the divine act and word’, and therefore is not, on Barth’s reading, in any way sacramental.175 Baptism with water, like prayer, like all genuinely human action, should be properly distinguished from divine action. ‘God and man [act] as two different partners’, Barth writes, infinitely and qualitatively distinguished from one another.176 However, baptism with water, like prayer, if it is to count as ‘truly human’, does not take place in separation from but in the closest possible ‘correspondence’ with divine action. Therefore, everything said above about the correspondence-motif applies to the human action of baptism with water.177 ‘How could [water] baptism … be a true answer if the action of God were not present’, Barth asks.178 Barth is quite clear that water baptism is a ‘human action which corresponds [entsprechende] to the divine action’.179 The very first statement Barth makes in the baptism fragment is: ‘We ask concerning the origin, beginning and initiation of the faithfulness of man which replies 172

The link to prayer is well made by W. Travis McMaken, The Sign of the Gospel: Toward an Evangelical Doctrine of Infant Baptism after Karl Barth (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), pp. 199–202. 173 IV/4, p. 212. 174 Ibid., p. 210. 175 Ibid., p. 128. 176 Ibid., p. 19. 177 See Jüngel, Barth-Studien, pp. 259, 281. 178 IV/4, p. 106. 179 Ibid., p. 105 = KD IV/4, p. 116. As Mangina argues, while ‘the theme of correspondence between divine and human action runs throughout The Christian Life, it is most clearly exemplified in the fragment on baptism’, Joseph L. Mangina, Karl Barth: Theologian of Christian Witness (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 162. McDowell is correct to argue that ‘Barth maintains humanity’s agency in distinction from the divine, but also in asymmetrical unity with it in the sense that one acts in baptism in correspondence to the one’s prior constitution in having been baptised with the Spirit’, McDowell, Hope in Barth’s Eschatology, p. 233.

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and corresponds [entsprechenden] to the faithfulness of God.’180 The charge of agential separation is difficult to sustain once baptism is understood to be prayer and therefore to take place in correspondence with God. Moreover, it should not be missed that because Barth understands prayer not as a human work but as an experience of being ‘prayed in’ (explored in the next chapter), when Barth says that ‘baptism is prayer’, he is actually saying that ‘baptism is [a divine work of] prayer’ into which one is incorporated. Although Barth had good reasons for publishing his doctrine of baptism as a standalone fragment,181 abstracting the text from its intended context within the ethics of reconciliation leads to hermeneutical mistakes. Barth’s mature doctrine of baptism should be read within the context of his writings of invocation as one expansive and intricate vision of Christian existence ordered around the practice of prayer; and therefore, precisely as prayer, baptism should be understood as an event of divine–human correspondence.

Summary This chapter has argued that the invocational turn is more textured and theologically interesting than a nomenclatural change in terminology. In the turn to invocation, Barth’s theology of prayer undergoes refinement, development and expansion in at least two ways: in terms of holding together the endless particularities of prayer more convincingly than petition (invocation ‘characterizes their whole being, life, and action’) and in terms of a greater clarity of the divine–human participation (invocation goes hand-in-hand with the correspondence-motif in the ethical drafts).182 Both of these issues are connected with the gathering pace of Barth’s pneumatology; and it is to this rather intriguing pneumatology that we now turn.

180

IV/4, p. 3 = KD IV/4, p. 3. Busch reports two reasons for Barth’s decision to publish his doctrine of baptism as a fragment. The first ‘was that he wanted to give some support to the people who were pressing for a revision of baptismal practice’ (including the issue of infant baptism) in the Protestant churches of Germany and Switzerland; the second was ‘Barth’s concern to speak “once again”, by means of his explanation of baptism as responsible baptism, of the “responsibility which is laid on Christians and the Church more fully” ’, Busch, Karl Barth, pp. 485–86 (citing IV/4, p. x). 182 ChrL, p. 113. 181

5

Pneumatology

See Romans 8! –Karl Barth1 You have been introduced to my theology when you heard this sigh. –Karl Barth2 It is well known that some of Barth’s most formidable critics find pneumatology to be the least developed area of his thought.3 There will always be a danger that because Christology is given so much to do in Barth’s theology, the Holy Spirit could disappear from view. As Robert Jenson has exposed, sizable chunks of Barth’s writings appear more binitarian than trinitarian.4 Given the strong Christology of prayer already discussed in this book, is there anything distinctive left for the Holy Spirit to do or does the Spirit simply recapitulate that which has already been expressed christologically? It is argued below that the pneumatology developed in his writings on prayer has the potential to 1 2

3

4

Karl Barth, Karl Barth’s Table Talk, (ed.) John D. Godsey (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1963), p. 53. Karl Barth, ‘The Need and Promise of Christian Preaching’, in The Word of God and the Word of Man (trans. Douglas Horton; New York: Harper, 1957), pp. 97–135 (134). For monograph-length treatments of Barth’s pneumatology, see Philip J. Rosato, The Spirit as Lord: The Pneumatology of Karl Barth (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1981) and John Thompson, The Holy Spirit in the Theology of Karl Barth (Allison Park: Pickwick, 1991). Rosato counters the accusation that Barth lacks a pneumatology but questions the overall success of his doctrine of the third article, partly due to a perceived lack of a developed eschatology, Rosato, The Spirit as Lord, pp. 134–41. Although generally more sympathetic, Thompson nevertheless concludes that Barth reduces the Spirit to the priority of the Son. At points, he even describes the Spirit as the Son’s ‘other self ’, Thompson, The Holy Spirit in the Theology of Karl Barth, p. 189. For a more interesting engagement with Barth’s doctrine of the Spirit as it relates to his theology of prayer, see Kim, The Spirit of God and the Christian Life. My approach is clearly in significant agreement with the approach pursued by Kim, particularly our shared commitment to finding in Barth a Romans 8 based pneumatology. Robert W. Jenson, ‘You Wonder Where the Spirit Went’, Pro Ecclesia 2 (1993), pp. 296–304.

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regenerate Barth’s thinking on the doctrine the Spirit.5 And as the quotations above imply, Barth directs his readers to Romans 8, for it is in those elusive verses that one is ‘introduced’ to his theology in general and his ‘prayer-based’ pneumatology in particular.6 It has been suggested already that Barth’s rendition of prayer in the ethical fragment is shaped by broader pneumatological movements in his mature thought. The relocation of eschatology from Münster’s ethics of redemption to the here and now of Basel’s ethics of reconciliation brings both prayer and, given the trinitarianly conceived structure of the volume, pneumatology to the centre of the ethical fragment.7 Moreover, the pace of Barth’s pneumatology has clearly been gathering throughout the doctrine of reconciliation, with each partvolume containing long paragraphs on the topic (the Spirit’s work of gathering, upbuilding and sending of the community as described in IV/1-3). These pneumatological developments are supported and indeed intensified by Barth’s choice term for describing the spiritual life, invocation, which we have already noted is a pneumatological concept with a significant pneumatological history.8 Indeed, the entire Christian life of prayer is to be understood as ‘a spiritual one, that is, a life which in its distinctiveness is from first to last conditioned and determined by … the Holy Spirit’.9 What is offered in this chapter is not a comprehensive reconstruction of Barth’s thinking on the third article, a thoroughgoing response to the significant critiques that his pneumatology has attracted (though the christomonist caricatures will be questioned) or an assessment of the consistency of the pneumatology brought to expression at this late stage in Barth’s theological

5

6

7

8

9

Although critical of Barth’s doctrine of the Spirit, Rogers admits that the ethics of reconciliation contains some of ‘the most promising pneumatological insights’ not only in Barth’s writings but also in ‘the history of theology’, see Rogers, ‘The Eclipse of the Spirit in Karl Barth’, p. 174. For further evidence of the intensification of Barth’s pneumatology, see the 1968 essay, ‘Concluding Unscientific Postscript on Schleiermacher’, in The Theology of Schleiermacher: Lectures at Göttingen (trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley ; Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1982), pp. 261–79 (278). Barth, Karl Barth’s Table Talk, p. 53 and Barth, ‘The Need and Promise of Christian Preaching’, p. 134. The term ‘prayer-based’ is Sarah Coakley’s. See Ethics, pp. 487–88. It is worth noting again that the lecture on ethics delivered by Barth at Elberfeld in October 1929 also treats prayer as part of the ethics of redemption, see Barth, The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life, pp. 59–68. On the pneumatological history of invocation, see Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (London: Dacre Press, 1945; second edition), pp. 281–302. ChrL, p. 92. This surely answers Mangina’s question that ‘one might ask whether the pneumatology he offers isn’t after all a bit too abstract. Might not talk about the Spirit and participation be related in a more straightforward way to the life and practices of the church?’, Mangina, Karl Barth on the Christian Life, p. 200.

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career against other areas of his thought. It does, however, offer a close textual engagement with a very short but remarkable subsection of the ethics of reconciliation in which the Holy Spirit is according a fascinating role (§76.3, that takes the title ‘Invocation’).10 The question remains, then, as to what kind of pneumatology is being developed in the subsection on invocation. Admittedly, there is a sketchiness about his mature writings on the Holy Spirit that prevents us from pressing his pneumatological insights too far or giving them too neat a systematic shape.11 Despite the sketchiness, the emerging pneumatology has a distinctive feel. In close dialogue with that short but illustrative section of the ethical fragment, an intriguing thesis arises that will be unpacked and discussed in this chapter: the Holy Spirit meets the ethical agent in the (religious) failure of prayer with ‘sighs too deep for words’, intervenes in that prayer, transforms the prayer (and therefore the pray-er) from within and, in so doing, incorporates the ethical agent into a correspondence of conformity with the divine life and mission. The fundamental features of this thesis should be familiar not only because they have been mentioned in lesser detail elsewhere in this book but also because the movement from failure to incorporation follows a logic of pneumatological inclusion that is made paradigmatic in Romans 8. Barth makes special and repeated reference to Romans 8 in these sections on prayer and, as the introductory chapter noted, it is one of the most frequently cited chapters in the text.12 This textual commitment to Romans 8 brings Barth into a long but not always dominant trinitarian tradition that prioritizes the Spirit in prayer. However, this ‘prayer-based’ trinitarian tradition has been recovered in contemporary expressions of pneumatology through the work of

10

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12

It is not to be assumed that the earlier sections on prayer lack a pneumatology (though it has already been noted that the sections III/2 and III/3 are pneumatologically quite thin). III/4 in particular contains a rough description of the Spirit’s work in prayer that will be unpacked in this chapter. For example, Barth writes that the ‘intervention of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit which makes our asking a movement in the cycle which goes out from God and returns to God … . There may indeed by an influx of that which is human, perverted and limited into our petitions … . But as our asking follows His command and is addressed to Him, it is necessarily ordered and purified’, III/4, p. 101, rev. = KD, III/4, p. 111. With a reference to Romans 8 Barth also writes that there is a spiritual ‘translation [Übersetzung]’ of the prayer ‘in which it is said [by the Holy Spirit] aright before Him’, III/4, p. 90 = KD III/4, p. 99. Indeed, Florensky suggests that such ‘apophaticism’ of the Spirit is right and proper to a good pneumatology, see Pavel Florensky,‘Letter Five: The Comforter’ in The Pillar and Ground of the Truth (trans. Boris Jakim; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 80–105. As well as drawing on Calvin’s strong Christology, Barth is also appealing to Calvin’s pneumatology of prayer, which is developed with explicit reference to Romans 8, see Institutes, pp. 855–86.

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Sarah Coakley, Rowan Williams, Eugene Rogers and others.13 What is rather curious, though, is that the proponents of this new wave of pneumatology tend to be highly critical of Barth’s thinking on the Holy Spirit. However, a close attention to §76.3, it is argued below, reveals that there might be more agreement between Barth and the pneumatological convictions of this new wave of Romans 8 pneumatology than is initially expected. Indeed, Coakley’s ‘foraging raid’ into the alleged pneumatic dark ages of the early Christian period to retrieve (chiefly via Origen but also Athanasius) an ‘alternative vision’ of a Spirit-led, incorporative trinitarian theology bears surprising connections with the story of prayer’s transformation into incorporation in the triune life of God described by Barth in §76.3.14 This chapter covers a lot of ground. It begins with some scene setting and rehearses some of the more prominent critiques of Barth’s pneumatology. Thereafter, it will attempt its own ‘foraging’ into an earlier but related area of the Church Dogmatics in which the Holy Spirit is said to claim a distinctive role: ‘Revelation as the Abolition of Religion’ (§17), which is situated in a broader chapter on ‘The Outpouring of the Holy Spirit’. From there, it will journey through prayer’s ‘failure’ and into its spiritual transformation and incorporation. As a significant aside, this chapter also tests the implications of this type of incorporative pneumatology against some of the thorny issues surrounding the divine answering of prayer.

Rehearsing the critiques Barth’s pneumatology has faced much criticism. A very brief rehearsal of three of the more influential critiques of Barth’s pneumatology and how they feature in the ethical drafts will help to set the scene. First, it is often said that by rejecting  the classical trinitarian language of ‘person’ in formal doctrinal reflections on the Trinity, Barth leaves the Spirit in a precariously

13

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For a collection of texts on the Spirit (many of which pursue a broadly Romans 8 logic), see Eugene F. Rogers (ed.), The Holy Spirit: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). See also, Coakley, God, Sexuality and the Self, pp. 100–51; Williams, ‘Word and Spirit’, pp. 107–27; Eugene F. Rogers, After the Spirit: A Constructive Pneumatology from Resources Outside the Modern West (London: SCM Press, 2005); McIntosh, Mystical Theology, p. 156 and Robert W. Jenson, Triune Identity: God According to the Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982), p. 55. Note that these writers are also deeply invested in the recovery of the integrity of theology and spirituality, rooted in prayer and pneumatology. Coakley, God, Sexuality and the Self, pp. 126–41.

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impersonal position. His concern is that the temptation to read anachronistically conceptions of personhood conditioned by troubling assumptions of ‘autonomy’ back onto the traditional term renders ‘person’ too misleading to be of any use in trinitarian discourse. In place of ‘person’ is ‘Seinsweise’, which clearly comes with its own (potentially modalistic) baggage.15 Susceptible to a de-personalization, the Holy Spirit is in danger of being reduced to the bond between the two other (more important) modes of God’s being.16 Barth locates this ‘bond’ in the filioque. He writes that ‘the filioque expresses our knowledge of the fellowship between the Father and the Son: the Holy Spirit is the love that is the essence of the relation between these two modes of God’s being.’17 By the time Barth reaches the ethics of reconciliation, the Augustinian reference to the bonding work of the Holy Spirit remains very much in place and could be seen to frustrate his ability to define the Spirit’s work as doing much more than effecting the union between two other parties, whether between the Father and the Son or between God and humanity.18 The second complaint also concerns Barth’s commitment to the filioque clause. The Spirit’s filioque procession, so it is argued, helps to secure the Holy Spirit firmly in the divine life. If loosed from its anchoring in the procession from the Son it is feared that the Spirit will become indistinguishable from some sort of generalized divine presence in the world. The filioque risks, though, as does classical trinitarianism (intensified at 325), the loss of the Spirit’s distinctive identity or at least the subordination of the work of the Spirit to the Son.19 In the ethical fragment, questions can be asked as to whether Barth allows enough distinctiveness of the Spirit’s work within his christological reading of pneumatology. He writes of ‘the Spirit of God’s Son (Gal. 4.6), the Spirit of Jesus Christ (Rom. 8.29; Phil. 1.19), the Spirit of the Kyrios (2 Cor. 3.17)’.20 Third, the Spirit’s distinctive identity is further compromised by Barth’s habit of correlating the work of the Holy Spirit to the impartation of certain salvific information. This aspect more than any other has ruffled the feathers 15

16 17 18 19

20

For charges of modalism, see Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom of God: The Doctrine of God (trans. Margaret Kohl; London: SCM Press, 1981), pp. 139–44 and Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life (San Francisco: Harper, 1993), p. 252. On this, see Rogers, After the Spirit, p. 32. I/1, p. 504. See ChrL, p. 90. See George S. Hendry, The Holy Spirit in Christian Theology (London: SCM Press, 1965), p. 48. For an extensive engage with Barth on the filioque, see David Guretzki, Karl Barth on the Filioque (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). ChrL, p. 91.

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of those in the Romans 8 camp. Coakley, for example, finds Barth’s doctrine of the Holy Spirit little more than the secondary communicator of revelation. Commenting on Barth, she writes: One senses a slightly desperate search for something distinctive for the Spirit to do. This is perhaps primarily because the controlling vision of the ‘linear’ revelation of the economy (first the Father, then the Son, then the Spirit) in which it remains for the Spirit only to recapitulate, unfold, or at best enable the recognition of what has already been achieved in the Son. Thus in the early Barth the Spirit becomes the means of God’s ‘meeting Himself from man’s end’, the ‘subjective side of revelation’.21

Similarly, as noted in an earlier chapter, Williams sees in the early Barth a doctrine of the Spirit as the ‘seal of epistemological security’ – pneumatology becomes rather an exercise in the communication of information about the Father-Son relationship than about the relationship itself.22 As Williams argues, the Spirit’s role is ‘not simply to instruct or to inform but to transform’.23 Here, Barth would be seen to follow a broadly Lukan model of the unfolding of salvation history – first Father, then Son and finally Spirit as the continuer of Christ’s revelatory work; or as Barth has it, first revealer, then revelation and finally revealedness (§§10–12). The Spirit is also said to perform the other side of this revelatory work by securing the reception of the salvific information. This has a knock on effect concerning the status of human involvement in the reception of revelation. It also calls into question the very ways divine and human agency can be said to relate and suggests a residual dualism that frustrates the possibility of creaturely participation in the life of the divine. While these critiques are based mainly on the early paragraphs on pneumatology (where Barth, it must be admitted, is dealing with epistemological concerns), they occasionally ring true of the ethical drafts in which the Spirit is said to act noetically in disclosing ‘to them objectively the truth that God is the Father and is their Father, and what this means’.24 In Coakley’s ‘foraging raids’ (into both classical theology and, indeed, contemporary charismatic practice), an alternative model of the Trinity  is 21

22

23 24

Sarah Coakley, ‘Why Three? Some Further Reflections on the Origins of the Doctrine of the Trinity’, in Sarah Coakley and David A. Pailin (eds.), The Making and Remaking of Christian Doctrine: Essays in Honour of Maurice Wiles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 29–56 (33, citing I/1, p. 516). Williams, ‘Word and Spirit’, p. 118. See also, Rowan Williams, ‘Barth on the Triune God’, in S. W. Sykes (ed.), Karl Barth: Studies of His Theological Method (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 147–93. Williams, ‘Word and Spirit’, p. 116. ChrL, p. 52.

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found to the one that became dominant in Christian orthodoxy.25 The ‘prayerbased’ model is rooted textually in Romans 8 (where the pray-er experiences simultaneously Father, Son and Spirit in an incorporative rather than hierarchical way). The implications are that a more rounded trinitarian theology must take seriously this doxological trinitarian tradition and that the doctrine of pneumatology in particular is impoverished if one does not attend to the role of the Spirit in prayer. However, in these critiques of Barth’s pneumatology, the alternative doxological material to the dominant sections on pneumatology in the Church Dogmatics (somewhat ironically) is not at all taken seriously. The late lectures on prayer represent a shift in pneumatological context from the early volumes on epistemology to the fourth volume on ecclesiology and now to these ethical drafts where the focus is neither on knowing nor on the Church but on the individual agent and her desires, passions (Leidenschaft) and prayer life. The overall question this chapter seeks to address, then, is what happens to Barth’s pneumatology when these writings on prayer are no longer neglected from the debates but taken seriously – before that, some more groundwork.

Religion One of the reasons for turning back to earlier sections of the Church Dogmatics, in which Barth interacts with the category of religion (§17), at this late stage is to demonstrate how some of the moves Barth makes in his critique of religion are both intensified and clarified in the crucible of invocation. More than this, Barth’s engagement with the category of religion poses a fundamental and pressing question regarding the practice of prayer that demands a more detailed response than has been possible so far in this book: how does invocation, the paradigmatic religious activity, survive his blistering critique of religion? In short, prayer does not survive; nothing does.26 Before unpacking how prayer comes to be the primary target of Barth’s critique of religion, it is worth turning back even further to his dealings with religion in Romans (II), which is undertaken in his exegesis of the seventh 25

26

See Coakley’s fieldwork on charismatic Anglicans for the Church of England Doctrine Commission (1991), republished in God, Sexuality and the Self, pp. 163–86. The most relevant secondary literature on the subject of religion in Barth includes Tom Greggs, Theology against Religion: Constructive Dialogues with Bonhoeffer and Barth (London: T&T Clark, 2011); Boulton, God against Religion, chap. 2; Garrett Green, ‘Barth as Theorist of Religion’, in Karl Barth, On Religion: The Revelation of God as the Sublimation of Religion (trans. Garrett Green; London: T&T Clark, 2006), pp. 1–29 (11–22) and Herlyn, Religion oder Gebet, pp. 13–65.

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chapter of Paul’s letter under the title ‘Freedom’.27 For Barth, religion, in both Romans (II) and §17, is the unavoidable consequence of human activity. ‘Living in the world, and being what we are, we cannot hope to escape the possibility of religion.’28 Although religiosity pervades all that one does, it takes particular form in beliefs, practices, ethics, politics, morals and, above all else, prayer and worship. Barth calls on the religious despisers of his day, Feuerbach and his disciple Marx, to out religion as a work of the inner consciousness that makes ‘human thought and will and act to be the thought and will and act of God’.29 The result is catastrophic: a puffed up conception of the self (in which creatures of God ‘become to themselves what God ought to be to them’) and the exchange of the truth of God for a lie (in which God is fashioned into ‘a thing in this world’).30 In other words, religion and its accompanying religious activities stand ‘within the bracket which is defined by the all-embracing word sin’.31 Interrupting otherwise dense commentary on Romans 7.8 is a revealing reference to Michelangelo’s frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Barth calls his reader to ‘look how Michelangelo has depicted the “Creation of Eve”: in the fullness of her charm and beauty she rises slowly, posing herself in the fatal attitude of – worship. Notice the Creator’s warning arm and careworn, saddened eyes, as He replies to Eve’s gesture of adoration.’32 With allusions surely to Romans 8.26, Barth continues: She is manifestly behaving as she ought not. Eve – and we must honour her as the first ‘religious personality’ – was the first to set herself over against God, the first to worship Him; but, inasmuch as she worshipped Him, she was separated from Him in a manner at once terrible and presumptuous.33

In this particularly suggestive set of claims, the paradigmatic act of religion is revealed to be the very ‘gesture of adoration’. Eve kneels before her creator, hands poised in prayer – a gesture met by God not with open, outstretched 27

28 29 30 31 32

33

It is worth noting that Barth’s interpretation of Romans 8 directly follows his account of religion discussed in Romans 7. A connection is made in Romans (II), then, between the Holy Spirit and religion – in fact, the Spirit is described as ‘the solution of the insoluble problem … proposed by the possibility of religion’, Romans (II), p. 283. Romans (II), p. 230. Ibid., p. 236. Ibid., p. 244. Ibid., p. 236. Ibid., p. 247. For further discussion on Barth’s interpretation of the frescoes in light of his critique of religion, see Boulton, God against Religion, pp. 35–56. Ibid.

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arms but eyes ‘careworn, saddened’.34 That a depiction of the first act of religious worship adorns the central section of the ceiling of one of the Christian religion’s most sacred sites, the very location of Papal conclaves, is a provocative move indeed. But for Barth, precisely at the height of piety, prayer is in the most precarious position possible: the higher up the rung of religion, the further there is to fall. While religion aims to recover the ‘equality of friendship’ lost with God, its consequences are nothing short of tragic.35 It results in ‘the most radical dividing of men from God’.36 The religiosity of Eve, ‘by which men are removed from direct union with God and thrust into disunion’, is contrasted with the fresco of the ‘Creation of Adam’. Here Michelangelo ‘depicts God and Adam looking one another straight in the face, their hands stretched out towards one another in a delicious freedom of intercourse’.37 In other words, ‘it portrays the relation in which religion plays no part’.38 Prayer gains its religiosity when it quenches too uncritically the modern thirst for autonomy and when, therefore, it is offered to God as an independent action of the pray-er. Religion ‘presents piety as a human achievement’.39 In doing what ‘seemed to us as pure and upright and unbroken was shown to be for that very reason impure and crooked and crippled’.40 Barth’s response to the audacity of religion is not, however, to stop praying; more religious enterprises would quickly fill the void left by prayer. Instead, he suggests that religion requires transformation. It requires transformation from a ‘human achievement’ to an event of divine-human participation.41 And the ‘transformation of the “No” of religion into the divine “Yes” ’ is the work of the Holy Spirit.42 Citing Romans 8 again, Barth writes that in ‘religion the Spirit veritably enters in on our behalf with groanings which cannot be uttered’.43 When Barth returns to the concept of religion in §17 of the Church Dogmatics, the same uncompromising implication of prayer within the bounds of religion takes place but this time the (positive) process of transformation gains greater clarity. The paragraph on religion unfolds in three sections: the first determines 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Ibid. Ibid., p. 241. Ibid. Ibid., p. 249. Ibid. Ibid., p. 253. Ibid., p. 238. Ibid., p. 249. Ibid., p. 242. Ibid., p. 240.

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the pervasive reach of religion, which again announces Christianity as the premier religious instantiation, the second defines religion as the attempt to deny God’s self-revelation and the third concerns the conditions on which Christianity can be positively named ‘the true religion’. In §17 Barth goes on to describe, much more successfully than he does in Romans (II), the other side of his critique of religion – which is funded by and hangs on the term Aufhebung. The notorious ambiguity of the term Aufhebung, which has its roots in the dialectics of Hegel, generates a wide range of meaning. Barth exploits these ambiguities so that alongside meaning to cancel and to abolish, the ‘abolition’ of religion also carries the positive meaning to exalt, to lift up or even to transform. The paragraph trades on this double meaning.44 Barth writes that: The abolishing [Aufhebung] of religion by revelation need not mean only its negation: the judgment that religion is unbelief. Religion can just as well be exalted [aufgehoben] in revelation, even though the judgment still stands. It can be upheld by it and concealed in it. It can be justified by it, and – we must at once add – sanctified.45 Revelation in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit is the judging [richtende] but also reconciling presence [versöhnende Gegenwart] of God in the world of human religion.46

Revelation breaks into the self-perpetuating cycle of religion, judges it and does not sweep away the old but transforms it from within. What emerges, then, from the ruins of Barth’s critique of religion is not a religionless Christianity but a religion, the ‘true religion’ – at once abolished and at the same time transformed through the work of the Holy Spirit.47 ‘That there is a true religion is an event in the act of the grace of God in Jesus Christ. To be more precise, it is an event in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.’48 There is clearly an incorporative logic at work in the paragraph on religion, even though Barth does not use that term. Religion is reworked from within and incorporated into the true religion of Christ. And the structure of his treatment of religion in his Romans commentary (in which religion is considered in light of Romans 7, entitled ‘Freedom’, and the ‘solution’ to religion in light of Romans 8, entitled ‘Spirit’) suggests that the agent of this incorporative work is the Holy Spirit. But this pneumatological connection is not made any more explicit 44 45 46 47 48

For an account of the history of the term, see Green, ‘Barth as Theorist of Religion’, pp. 5–6. I/2, p. 326 = KD I/2, p. 357. Ibid., p. 280 = KD I/2, p. 304. See I/2, pp. 325–61. Ibid., p. 344.

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in §17. The critique of religion articulated in §17, therefore, only nudges us in the right direction: regarding the pneumatological mechanics, the Holy Spirit appears mainly in name only. There is little actual clarification of the role of the Holy Spirit in the paragraph itself and references to the Spirit rarely give more detail of the Spirit’s role beyond what is offered in the paragraph’s bold-type thesis. In fact, when Barth comes to explicate his thesis, he does so not with reference to the Holy Spirit but to the Son: it is in the Son’s name that religion is abolished (hence the culminating meditation on the ‘name of Jesus’).49 Precisely ‘because it was and is and shall be through the name of Jesus Christ … the worship of God … is not alone in defiance of God, but walks before God in peace with God.’50 The Spirit, to support Rogers’ argument, risks being ‘eclipsed’ in this paragraph and ‘pneumatological statements are reduced to christological ones’.51 For clarification of the role of the Holy Spirit in the transformation of ‘piety as a human achievement’ into ‘true prayer’, we are to look elsewhere, to the ethical drafts in which the critique of religion is also intensified.52

Prayer’s failure When Barth’s mature theology of invocation is fed into his critique of religion, it is intensified through the added complexity that the problem with prayer is not so much that it is religious as that it is not religious enough. Prayer fails at the first hurdle to be religious. Prayer’s failure is grounded in Barth’s extreme insistence that we ‘do not know how to pray as we ought’.53 Citing Romans 8.26, Barth writes that the ‘whole of human egoism, the whole of human anxiety, cupidity, desire and passion, or at least the whole of human shortsightedness, unreasonableness and stupidity, might flow into prayer (and that by divine commandment!), as the effluent from the chemical factories of Basel is discharged into the Rhine’.54 The human violence in prayer is intractable and cannot be undone, as this would also undo the humanity of the prayer itself. It is with this emphasis on the fallenness of prayer that Barth resists a host of semi-Pelagian assumptions about prayer’s role in the inculcation of the good 49 50 51 52

53 54

Ibid., pp. 346–61. Ibid., p. 347. Rogers, ‘The Eclipse of the Spirit in Karl Barth’, p. 175. As Herlyn argues, Barth’s critique of religion is very much assumed in his writings on prayer, see Religion oder Gebet. ChrL, p. 91. See also, III/4, p. 90. III/4, pp. 100–1.

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life. Any technique to improve the so-called ‘success’ of prayer or market the improvement of prayer by intensifying the piety of the pray-er would, therefore, also miss Barth’s (anti-Pelagian) point. The emphasis would problematically fall on what I am doing when I pray rather than on what Christ has done for us and continues to do for us and our incorporation by the Spirit into that ongoing work. By the time of the turn to invocation, prayer is not only expressed as an inability but in terms of an impossibility. It is ‘totally inconceivable’.55 The repeated likening of prayer to the work of a ‘newly registered pupil’ seems to suggest that the ethical agent is not expected to mature into a position of praying as she ought.56 ‘On no account, however, can man take it upon himself to cease speaking with God because of his incapacity for what God wants of him.’57 Therefore, in addition to Romans 8, Barth’s account of prayer is also rooted in another biblical text. The other text he returns to time and time again is, of course, the Lord’s Prayer. What we have, then, is a theology of prayer that is as extreme in its insistence that we cannot pray as we ought as its insistence that we must ‘pray, then, like this’. There is, in other words, something of an ‘impossible possibility’ to prayer.58 No sooner have the disciples received teaching on prayer (Lk. 11) than they show their incompetence at prayer not once but thrice in the Garden of Gethsemane (Lk. 22). What to do with this paradox? Barth does not attempt a resolution of this paradox, as the two are mutually implicated and entangled. In fact, being unable to pray is not a lack or a deficiency but precisely the paradoxical ground on which one can really and actually pray and indeed flourish in prayer. The failure of prayer leads, therefore, to a much deeper participation in the life of the trinitarian God. It is quite right for the paradox to be maintained as it determines that the possibility for flourishing in prayer is made real by an act of grace. More than once in this book, attempts have been made to reconceive prayer precisely not as an activity of the autonomous self, even as an action that imitates the praying activity of the Son. Prayer is to be understood instead as a divine activity within us that incorporates us into correspondence with the one true prayer of the divine. Prayer is ‘God’s breath in man’, as George Herbert memorably has it.59

55 56 57 58 59

ChrL, p. 89. Ibid., p. 79. III/4, p. 90. Barth uses this term in his interpretation of Romans 8, see Romans (II), p. 273. ‘Prayer (I)’ in George Herbert, The English Poems of George Herbert, (ed.) Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 176–81.

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Therefore, we cannot pray as we ought because prayer is not something that we, strictly speaking, ‘do’. As Coakley writes, to call prayer a human (let alone a ‘religious’) ‘experience’ … is to risk a serious misunderstanding; for the whole point is that it is a delicate ceding to something precisely not done by oneself. It is the sense (admittedly obscure) of an irreducibly dy-polar divine activity – a call and response of divine desire – into which the pray-er is drawn and incorporated.60

Previous chapters have noted how Barth describes this divine activity christologically. If we cannot pray as we ought, then it is ‘He, Jesus Christ, [who] is properly and really the One who prays.’61 The danger here, as has been mentioned, is that the divine activity of Christ’s prayer occurs externally to the human agent – it is something happening out there and something that provides a model for imitation.62 The ethical drafts, however, contain some of Barth’s most vivid descriptions of prayer’s ‘ceding’ to the prior actuality of the divine but this time the divine praying activity is linked to the work of the Holy Spirit who conforms us to the likeness of Christ’s ‘sonship’ (Rom. 8.15).63 ‘And because you are sons [after he sent his Son, v. 4], God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba, Father!” ’ and thus confirming that we are God’s children. We find a variation and extension of the same thought in Romans 8.14f.: those who are impelled (empowered, freed, and led) by the Spirit of God are the children of God, not in virtue of their own spirit rising up in and from them, but in virtue of God’s Spirit coming upon them as the Spirit of sonship. Moved and driven by him they cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ In Galatians 4.6 they really hear the Spirit make this cry. He does it, but as he does we are awakened by him and so it is the cry of our own hearts and lips.64 When we do not know how to pray, however, the Spirit intercedes for us (obviously in union with what Jesus Christ is doing for us at the right hand 60 61 62

63

64

Coakley, God, Sexuality and the Self, p. 113. III/4, p. 94. For this reason, Barth is critical of the tradition of imitatio Christi. On his reading, Christ is reduced to an external model for imitation and human agency is defined narrowly in terms of a repetition of Christ’s action. He writes that we could ‘try to copy everything that Jesus demanded and that [the disciples] did, and yet completely fail to be disciples, because we do not do it, as they did, at His particular call and command to us’, IV/2, p. 553. Rather than a bland repetition of Christ’s example, Barth sought something more dynamic: that is, becoming ‘conformable to Christ’, and this means that our lives should become ‘an analogy, a parallel to His own being’, IV/2, p. 553. Pannenberg’s treatment of prayer is worth noting here for its rich pneumatological achievements and emphasis on the ‘Spirit of Sonship enabling believers to invoke God as Father’, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994), pp. 201–11 (207). ChrL, p. 73.

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of God, Rom. 8.34), with his own better sighing, which we can never express, that is, adequately imitate in any form of the activity of the human spirit. The Lord who searches the hearts, however, knows the adequate meaning of the Spirit when he cries ‘Abba, Father’ (Gal. 4.6) or causes us to make that cry (Rom. 8.15).65

In these densely complex pneumatological moves, Barth describes how the Spirit is not an afterthought to the main event of Christ’s prayer but takes primacy and priority as the one praying for us (‘the Spirit intercedes for us’), the one praying in us (crying ‘in our hearts’ to the one called ‘Abba’) and the one who impels, empowers and indeed longs us into that divine activity by praying with us (by causing ‘us to make that cry’). Notice that this assumes a noncompetitive ontology of agential relations: no agential rivalry ensues between the praying activity of the divine and the human desire to pray. Part of the Spirit’s work is to protect the ‘particularity’ of human agency and therefore the distinctiveness of human prayer in its incorporation into the divine.66 ‘Above all’, Barth writes, ‘let us not begin by believing that humankind is passive, that we are in a sort of farniente [“do nothing”], in an armchair, and that we can say, “The Holy Spirit will pray for me.” Never! Humankind is impelled to pray. We must do it.’67

Prayer’s transformation and incorporation However, there remains in Barth’s writings an expected and cautious nervousness about the incorporation of human prayer into the divine. The fear is a valid one as the dangers are not insignificant: prayer could become self-serving. Some of this anxiety is relieved, however, by Barth’s argument that the spiritual incorporation of prayer into the trinitarian life of God is possible only on the basis of ‘the specific movement and act of the Holy Spirit’ through which prayer is transformed.68 Barth describes in some detail a series of transformations of the three representative practices of prayer – praise, thanksgiving and petition. And in ‘this way the impossible becomes possible’.69 The impossibility of partaking in the divine life is possible, then, but only after transformation. Romans 8 seems 65 66

67 68 69

Ibid., p. 91. For more on the Spirit’s work of protecting particularity, see Greggs, Barth, Origen, and Universal Salvation, pp. 123–50. Prayer, p. 20. ChrL, p. 102. Ibid., p. 91.

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to be funding this logic of transformation. In his earlier commentary on the chapter, Barth writes ‘I am transformed, renewed, purified made a participator of the divine nature of the divine life, with God, by His side, and in Him. This is adoption.’70 As prayer is shorthand for the entire Christian life, the transformation of prayer can be taken to mean the transformation of the pray-er. One cannot pray without somehow being transformed by that prayer. Everything is totally different in this new life in the Holy Spirit. There is, of course, a long tradition of prayer having a transformative effect on the pray-er, most notably on one’s desire. Given that we do not know what we ought to desire, human desire, which is otherwise disorderly, stands in need of transformation. For Barth, the disorder consists in desiring the very things that operate in rebellious alienation from order (he names these the ‘lordless powers’ – which include technology, transportation, fashion and even sport) rather than that which one ought properly desire: relationship with God. On Carol Harrison’s reading of some of the prayer practices of the early Church, the transformation of disordered desire into ordered desire is the primary purpose of prayer.71 Prayers ‘are not meant to inform or bring about any change in God, the hearer, but are intended to inform and thereby transform the speaker; the whole effect of the prayer is on the one who prays, not the one to whom it is addressed’.72 Barth’s account of prayer’s transformation developed in §76.3, however, differs from Harrison’s reading of prayer in the early Church on at least two counts: first, Barth describes not only the transformation of human desire but actually of the ‘prayer itself ’; second, following this, in Barth’s account, it is not only the prayer or even the pray-er that is changed but also the one to whom the prayers are addressed: God. The incorporation of the pray-er into the divine life brings about a very real ‘change’ in God – prayer is, as the previous chapter argued, an event of two-way ‘correspondence’. These two issues are complexly entangled, as we shall see below. But before that, a consideration of the transformation of the three representative invocational gestures of thanksgiving, praise and petition is required. Of thanksgiving, Barth writes that Christians ‘rarely enough thank him and never do so with anything like sufficient seriousness’.73 They neither sense nor know ‘what they are really saying when they give thanks’. 74 In 70 71 72 73 74

Romans (II), p. 313. Harrison, The Art of Listening in the Early Church, pp. 183–228. Ibid., pp. 195–96. ChrL, p. 106. Ibid.

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short: there is a failure to thank properly. Despite ‘its imperfection’ all is not lost, Barth writes.75 The thanksgiving that fails to be thankful is transformed from within to be incorporated into Christ’s ‘perfect thanksgiving’.76 There is a cleansing of the prayer and a making possible out of the impossibility of human thanksgiving. It is on this basis of transformation that Barth’s nerves are settled enough to claim that God ‘lets himself be moved by their giving of thanks because, as he hears it, their weak and dissonant voices are sustained by the one strong voice of the one by whose eucharist the inadequacy of theirs is covered and glorified in advance’.77 Of praise, Barth describes a similar process. From the failure of praise – in all its ‘self-satisfaction, defiance, and forgetfulness’ – God hears and is pleased by our praise.78 This is again because of the intervention of the Holy Spirit who transforms the prayer from within so that in ‘their doubtful praise he hears his voice, his “I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth” (Mt. 11.25). In this context their praise, for all its poverty, is praise that is heard.’79 Of petition, the climax of the invocational ‘choreography’, Barth describes the transformative event most fully.80 Human asking is ‘an empty, shortsighted, arbitrary, unreasonable, and even perverted and dangerous one’.81 Because of this, a petitionary sort of prayer stands in most need of transformation. ‘Already as a request it needs fulfi lment, that is, correction, amendment, and transformation by the one to whom it is directed and before whom it is brought.’82 Indeed: It would be wholly inappropriate and impossible for the children of God to expect and demand that the glory of the hearing should consist in the congruence of the divine fulfilling with the limited form of the asking, or even to accept as a hearing only a divine fulfilment that conforms to their own thought and intention. The rule is instead that they must accept already a fulfilment, that is, a transformation, of the prayer itself.83

This spiritual transformation, this reworking of the prayer (and the pray-er) from the inside out, is to incorporate the failure of prayer into the perfection of Christ’s praying. Barth writes: 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. ChrL, p. 107. Boulton, God against Religion, p. 120. ChrL, p. 107. Ibid. Ibid.

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In regard to their praying as God’s children as well as their thanksgiving and praise, the firmness of the connection and sequence of human invocation and divine hearing is unshakably guaranteed by the fact that Jesus does not command them to pray in their own name but in his name, in the name of God’s Son, their Brother, Jesus Christ (Jn 14.13f.; 16.23f.), that in him they have access to the Father, that they are adopted into fellowship with his praying. They cannot and will not pray in vain for that for which he has already prayed to the Father; for in their voices with all their false notes the Father hears his pure voice. As those who may and can and should pray together with him, they too pray with no doubt concerning God’s free and gracious but also powerful and dependable hearing.84

Human prayer is taken up by the Holy Spirit and participates in the melody of the prayer the Son prays before the Father. The Spirit helps us not to overcome our weakness but helps us precisely ‘in our weakness’, as Paul has it (Rom. 8.26), and in our ‘only too human humanity’, as Barth has it.85 In each case, the representative invocational gesture is prized open by the work of the Holy Spirit, reworked from within and caught up into the life of the divine. In the same way that Barth claims that ‘no religion is true. It can only become true … [and] it can become true only in the way in which man is justified, from without; i.e., not of its own nature and being’, there is likewise a becoming true of prayer.86 Curiously, there is a deep sort of (contemplative) waiting on the ‘prior movement’ of the divine implied here: ‘we wait’, Barth writes.87 Not once in §76.3 does Barth describe any resistance to this divine transformation. It is accepted without concern for the apparent loss of control, thus suggesting that this is where freedom, in all its ‘delicious’ intimacy, is to be found.88 However, questions might be asked as to whether this pattern of transformation still assumes a fairly linear (though not necessarily unincorporative) model of the Trinity. Under these conditions, the Spirit marks the transformative entry point into the divine and is there to bump the ethical agent one step up the hierarchy into ‘fellowship with his [that is, the Son’s] praying’ to the Father.89 The focus remains on the Father-Son paradigm and the Holy Spirit is that which allows the praying agent to be

84 85 86 87 88 89

ChrL, p. 108. Ibid., p. 210. I/2, p. 325. Romans (II), p. 317. Ibid., p. 249. Ibid., p. 108.

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‘taken up into his invocation of God as his Father’.90 At other points, however, Barth also riskily implies a more Spirit-leading (rather than Spirit-beginning) approach to prayer. For example, he claims that ‘since the Spirit is his Spirit and he himself is the Spirit, how can he [that is, the Father] fail to recognize his own voice in the cry’.91 In this subtle agential exchange, in which prayer is the hearing of God by God into which the human agent is caught up, the focus is shifted from the Father-Son relationship and onto the primacy of the Spirit’s action of prayer. To cite from the Elberfeld lecture, in the Holy Spirit ‘prayer is made’ and through the leading work of the Spirit the pray-er ‘acts as one entheos … [lit. “in God”]’.92 With echoes of Romans 8, Barth continues with this quite remarkable statement: ‘It is the Spirit’s sighing, which, to be sure, is in our mouth … the Holy Spirit makes a person who actually, really prays.’93 The Holy Spirit prays in us and God hears God’s own voice in that prayer. In either case, what is gained in prayer is a simultaneous experience of Father, Son and Spirit (albeit in a sketchy way) and therefore a trinitarian structuring of one’s conception of God. A trinitarian shaping of one’s knowing of God arises through prayer. The prayer-based trinitarian theology is helped along by the structure of the paragraph. It begins with Barth’s meditations on the name of the Father (§76.1), moves into a discussion on the Christian life as being conformed to the likeness of the Son’s sonship (§76.2) and climaxes in this pneumatologically pregnant section on invocation (§76.3). Here, the Holy Spirit is revealed as much more than a ‘third’ that resides below the priority of the other persons of the Trinity: the Spirit’s work of invocation (or invoking the Father in us) provides the distinctive shape to the movement of prayer ‘which goes out from God and returns to God’.94 Already a far more interesting doctrine of the third article is emerging from these reflections on the Spirit’s prayerful work than is commonly expected from the radically Christocentric Barth. Despite Coakley’s (and indeed Williams’) implication of the early Barth in a critique of versions of trinitarianism that reduce the Spirit’s work to the ‘completer and communicator’ of revelation, what can be accessed through Barth’s writings on prayer is an account of the Spirit that is more about incorporation, conformation and transformation (all Romans 8 themes) than information and communication. The vestiges of an 90 91 92 93 94

Ibid., p. 100. Ibid., p. 91. Barth, The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life, p. 67. Ibid., p. 68. III/4, p. 101.

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oppositional God-world relation are also qualified by the strong pneumatology of this section. Barth writes that in the crucible of invocation, the divine and human are ‘indissolubly related and united’ by the enacting work of the Spirit in us and that the Spirit is sent into the hearts of believers to bring ‘reciprocity between God and man’.95 The failure to secure adequately this incorporative work of the Holy Spirit leaves both his doctrine of God and his doctrine of prayer susceptible to massive distortions. Prayer would fall into auto-suggestion (a ‘lofty monologue’) and God would idolatrously be thought of as ‘an unchangeable, untouchable, and immutable deity whose divine nature condemns him to be the only one at work’.96 The action of the ‘Holy Spirit … does not let them talk to themselves – but only with the confidence that the Father … will hear and answer, corresponding to their action with his’.97 The vibrant pneumatology developed in this section means, therefore, that God genuinely and mysteriously ‘corresponds’ to human prayer. The divine life is not closed but open to human involvement. In the Holy Spirit God has dealings with these people in such a way that he cannot continue to act one-sidedly; he awakens and impels and enables them to receive him in return and makes their dealings with him the controlling element in their lives. In the Holy Spirit God comes together with these people in such a way that for all the ongoing distinction there arises fellowship, a common life, between him and them and them and him.98

For Barth, to think of prayer in any other way is, in a word, ‘blasphemy’.99 Indeed, the problem of idolatry is never far from sight, especially if Nicholas Lash’s observation about idolatry’s unexpectant pervasiveness is taken seriously. 95 96 97 98 99

ChrL, p. 103. Ibid., p. 102. Ibid., p. 105. Ibid., p. 90. Ibid., p. 105. Admittedly, as mentioned above on the names of God, much of Barth’s reasoning here has been worked out more systematically in II/1: it is part of the perfections of God that God not only hears but answers prayer. Further, there must be no doubt that Barth is picking up where his treatment of petition in the doctrine of creation ended, which concluded with hints towards a highly reciprocal understanding of divine and human agency, see in particular, III/3, p. 285 and III/4, p. 108. Further still, its roots lie in his earlier account of the concursus Dei, which described the intimate divine accompaniment of human agency, see III/3, pp. 90–154 and ChrL, p. 103. However, the type of incorporative pneumatology developed in §76.3 appears more radical than much of that which preceded the ethical fragment. In his reflections on the concursus, for example, Barth states that ‘God “concurs” with the creature, but the creature does not “concur” with God’, III/3, pp. 112–13. What is described in the ethical fragment is not merely a confession of the boundedness of human agency by God’s concursive grace, which precedes, accompanies and follows (§49.1-3) every aspect of ethical existence, however seamless this might be. Instead, the language of invocation describes a much stronger understanding of a carefully qualified and circumscribed but nevertheless two-way event of correspondence by the logic of an incorporative pneumatology.

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Part of the responsibility of ‘Christian doctrine’, according to Lash, is to ‘function … as a set of protocols against idolatry’.100 Because idolatry is a matter of misplaced practices of prayer as much as misdirected desire, iconoclasm is central to the concerns of prayer. It is about the smashing of worshipped images, concepts and ideas (Exod. 20.4-6; Deut. 5.8-10).101 Given the inextricable relation of prayer and theology, idolatrous conceptions of ‘God’ lead directly to misdirected practices of prayer (and vice versa). One such idolatrous conception of God, Barth writes, results from the category mistake of confusing the ‘living God’ with an ‘immovable idol’ that ‘rules out the possibility that God can let Himself be conditioned in this way or that by His creature’.102 This ‘thing’ is iconoclastically exposed as ‘a miserable anthropomorphism’, a figment of the mind’s ‘hallucination’.103 God is mistaken for a ‘comparable being’ that acts like things and responds to requests in the way other things might act or respond to requests.104 For Barth, ‘God is certainly immutable. But He is immutable as the living God and in the mercy in which He espouses the cause of the creature.’105 Again, Barth’s solution to countering the propensity of idol-making is not to stop praying but actually to pray more. The practice of prayer itself becomes, then, in Lash’s terms, a ‘protocol against idolatry’. The more one prays, the deeper one is led into a realization that the God to whom we pray is not simply unlike other things but is qualitatively different from all other things. This is an intriguing claim and it is important not to miss its achievement. Barth argues that human agency is taken so seriously by God that God elects to be ‘co-determined’ (albeit in a qualitatively different sort of way) by the prayers of the ethical agent.106 At this point, the logic of incorporation meets the correspondence-motif analysed in the previous chapter. The Holy Spirit incorporates human prayer (and the pray-er) into the trinitarian life of God and, in so doing, actualizes a ‘correspondence’ of agency between the divine and the human. The model of correspondence then, goes both ways: the ethical agent corresponds with God and God corresponds with the ethical agent. Barth writes 100

Nicholas Lash, The Beginning and the End of ‘Religion’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 194. 101 The link between idolatry and prayer is another area of potentially fruitful conversation between Barth and the traditions of Christian spirituality. Consider, for example, Evagrius’ championing of an imageless sort of prayer that was driven by a constant concern over the idolatry of concept and image. The eleventh kephalaia of his great treatise on prayer reads: ‘Fight to set your mind deaf and dumb at the hour of prayer, and you will be able to pray’, see ‘On Prayer’, in Evagrius Ponticus (trans. Augustine Casiday ; London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 185–201 (188). 102 III/4, p. 109. See also, III/3, pp. 285–86. 103 Ibid., p. 108. 104 Ibid., p. 92. 105 Ibid., p. 109. 106 ChrL, p. 104.

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that ‘occasioned by their invocation, he [God] again does something, something new, namely, that which corresponds [Entsprechende] to their invocation, their thanksgiving, praise, and petition’.107

The divine answering (and ‘open theism’) Barth’s commitment to the ‘correspondence’ of divine agency to human prayer has excited a number of contemporary evangelical writers who gather around the project of ‘open theism’.108 There are certainly connections to be made between Barth’s writings on prayer and the way prayer is handled by the so-called open theists: both prioritize strongly a petitionary sort of prayer; both levy considerable critiques against doctrines of divine determinism; and both insist that prayer, in some way or another, has an effect on God. It is unsurprising that the reciprocal relationality developed in the context of Barth’s writings on prayer is sometimes drafted in to support the open theism cause.109 But an open theist Barth is not. The straw man that is set to bear the brunt of the open theism critique is the so-called ‘classical’, highly deterministic doctrine of God to be found chiefly in the writings of Augustine, Aquinas and Calvin. Informing this reading of the development of Christian doctrine is the familiar thesis that early Christian doctrine departed from a vision of the emotional and involved God of the Bible and fell into Hellenistic philosophical assumptions that produced a deity of uncompromising sovereignty. The classical divine attribute that exercises the open theists more than any other when they turn their attention to prayer is what they think to be the classical notion of divine ‘foreordination’. God’s determination of all things produces a ‘no-risk model’ of the divine providential involvement (or lack thereof) in the world. Trapped within the restrictions of Greek philosophical categories, God is kept so far from the reach of the world that it becomes ‘presumptuous for humans to believe that their prayers may actually change God’s mind’.110 Therefore, ‘since divine foreordination of all 107

Ibid., p. 103, rev. = DcL, p. 168. See the movement’s flagship book, Clark H. Pinnock, Richard Rice, John Sanders, William Hasker and David Basinger, The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1994). For a considerably more thorough discussion of open theism in relation to Barth’s theology and a more sophisticated exposure of some of the movement’s problems, see the lengthy article by Bruce L. McCormack, ‘The Actuality of God: Karl Barth in Conversation with Open Theism’, in Bruce L. McCormack (ed.), Engaging the Doctrine of God: Contemporary Protestant Perspectives (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), pp. 185–242. 109 See John Sanders, The God Who Risks: A Theology of Divine Providence (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2007; second edition), pp. 164 and 171. 110 Sanders, The God who Risks, p. 269. 108

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things would rule out any divine response to our prayers, it must be rejected’.111 The alternative open theism proposes is the exact mirror image of the model they reject: the ‘risk model’. This model ‘asserts that God is genuinely responsive to us’.112 A roll call of biblical stories of God answering prayer in highly emotive ways cements the sharp distinction between the biblical model of ‘risk’ against the understandably deplorable ‘no-risk’ model of classical theism. This alone invites probing questions into the appropriateness of open theism’s reading of the development of early Christian doctrine: there is little evidence that the polemical category of ‘classical theism’ actually exists in the writings of the proponents they cite (chiefly Augustine, Aquinas and Calvin). More generally, the fall-into-Hellenism thesis appropriated by the open theists is now generally thought to be ‘fundamentally flawed and misleading’.113 A further issue presents itself regarding the replacement philosophical categories (probably a mixture of popular versions of Freudian trends in modern psychology and a fall-intoversions-of-Hegelian thought received via their process theology cousins) that are uncritically thought to fare better.114 Open theism’s commitment to a highly ‘relational’ doctrine of God and the consequent ‘open’ future has proved controversial to those wanting to protect God’s absolute ‘sovereignty’. However, one of the two broad issues with which I want to take issue is not that open theism is too relational in its understanding of the relation of divine and human agency but that it is not relational enough. Open theism depends on a highly mechanistic account of the divine and human relation: the human agent prays to God who then responds to the human prayer. As McDowell explains, the difficulty here lies in the sequentiality or successiveness involved in the agencies as here conceived. ‘God’ begins where the praying creature leaves off, and vice versa – prayer moves from the creature to the God who is purely hearer, and thus something of a passive spectator; God then acts in response to the now waiting one who had prayed … the image of the relay-race is most appropriately applicable.115 111

Ibid., pp. 268–69. Ibid., p. 280. 113 Paul L. Gavrilyuk, The Suffering of the Impassible God: The Dialectics of Patristic Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 1; see also Thomas Weinandy, Does God Suffer? (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000). 114 On this, see McDowell’s significantly more detailed engagement with open theism in conversation with Calvin’s doctrine of providence: John C. McDowell, ‘Idolaters at Providential Prayer: Calvin’s Praying Through the Divine Governance’, in Myk Habets and Bobby Grow (eds), Evangelical Calvinism: Essays Resourcing the Continuing Reformation of the Church (Eugene: Pickwick, 2012), pp. 353–403. 115 McDowell, ‘ “Openness to the World” ’, p. 265. 112

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What this implies is a seismic gap between God and humanity and prayer is used to bridge momentarily some of that gap. In other words, there is an insufficient sense of incorporation and a lack, therefore, of either a Christology or a pneumatology of prayer that dislodges the pray-ers from the assumption that they can pray as they ought. Indeed, once prayer is conceived as a divine work into which the pray-er is incorporated then the anxiety over the efficacy of prayer seems somewhat misplaced. The intimate unity of divine and human agency that is so elegantly expressed in Barth’s understanding of invocational correspondence (and its incorporative logic), in comparison, refuses the separation of agencies into these clear and bifurcated lines of action whereby the creature acts then God mechanistically responds. While open theism’s proposals rightly seek to counter certain versions of Calvinistic fundamentalism that produce inflated (and not unharmful) doctrines of God’s sovereignty, they risk a danger from the opposite direction in assuming that if God is to be involved in the affairs of the world, then God must operate just as things in the world operate. Under these conditions, God comes to answer prayer in a similar way to the way you or I might answer a request. Sanders, for example, even claims ‘that people can argue with God and win’ – as if God can be haggled with like any other.116 In either case (whether God is too sovereign to be in any conceivable way involved in the affairs of the world or too involved in the world to be in any conceivable way sovereign), there is an unhelpfully competitive logic that needs naming and rejecting. Divine agency and human agency are competing here to occupy the same agential space, eventuating in a zero-sum standoff: either God is sovereign or the human agent free but not both. As recent scholarship on the classical doctrine of the divine impassibility has exposed, far from eliminating God’s involvement in the world, the divine apatheia sought to protect God’s worldly involvement, precisely in terms of a different ‘kind’ of action.117 The divine foreknowledge, with which Sanders takes particular issue, was not so much about the foreclosure of history than part of a set of ‘apophatic qualifiers’, to use Paul Gavrilyuk’s term, that helped to distinguish the Christian God of the Bible from the mythological deities of the classical world. Similarly, the ‘apophatic qualifiers’ operating in Barth’s account (that work from the wholly otherness of God) do not eliminate God’s involvement but enable a better sense of God’s participation in the world. 116 117

Sanders, The God who Risks, p. 64. See Gavrilyuk, The Suffering of the Impassible God, pp. 21–46.

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That God’s acting is altogether different from human acting has testing implications for the thorny issue of how it can be said that God answers prayer. For all Barth has to say about prayer, he resists commenting on the mechanics of the efficacy of prayer. In fact, his thoroughgoing refusal to ‘domesticate’ God into a thing that acts like other things,118 his firm insistence on the priority of the Son’s prayer into which the Spirit incorporates the human pray-er and the apophaticism that informs his doctrine of God combine to prevent the question from presenting itself in his writings on prayer. The closest Barth does come to considering the efficacy of prayer is not in any of the formal prayer-sections but in his much earlier account of the divine perfections (§31.2). Here Barth rests in what he calls the ‘completely unambiguous’ promise that it is part of God’s perfection to hear and answer prayer more abundantly and mysteriously than can be imagined (see Eph. 3.20).119 Whatever is meant by the mysteries of the divine answering, however, Barth adds later that Christians ‘will not suffer from the delusion that God is in their hands or in their power, that with their action they can control him and his action’.120 Because God is not a ‘thing’ of the world, God can relate to the world, indeed be ‘codetermined’ by the prayers of the world, but in a way that does not cost God God’s sovereignty.121 He argues that the ‘codetermination of the divine action … implies no limitation of the divine sovereignty’.122 For the open theists, as we have seen, God is forced into an undialectical corner that assumes either God’s absolute determinist control over everything or no control whatsoever. Thus the embroilment of Barth to the open theism cause is an odd one given the statements attached to the other side of his dialectic that would surely brandish him, with the rest of doctrinal history, a theological determinist. ‘In fact he [God] never lets the reins slip from his fingers … . He, and not they, decides how and to what extent he does so.’123 Prayer’s meaning is not, then, for Barth, to be found in gaining this or that or indeed getting better at gaining this or that; hence the use of the language of ‘children’ to reinforce a coyness about any sense of human betterment in prayer (§76.2).124 Prayer does find its meaning, as this chapter has laboured to show, in being incorporated by the Spirit into 118

The term is from William C. Placher, The Domestication of Transcendence: How Modern Thinking about God Went Wrong (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996). 119 II/1, p. 511 = KD II/1, p. 574. 120 ChrL, p. 105. 121 See again, Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology, pp. 120–62. 122 ChrL, p. 105. 123 Ibid., p. 106. 124 Ibid., pp. 79–82.

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the trinitarian life of God – and this presents Barth as more relational than the relational theists. Funded by a Romans 8 logic, questions over the efficacy of prayer are reframed: the extent to which it can be said that God ‘answers’ prayer is rendered misplaced if God is the one ‘doing’ the praying into which the ethical agent is ‘incorporated’. ‘Since the Spirit is his Spirit and he himself is the Spirit, how can he fail to recognize his own voice … ?’, Barth asks.125 The second broad issue that is concerning about the open theism project is that not enough is said about how the pray-er, as well as God, is also affected by prayer. The open theists are generally insufficiently attentive to prayer’s role in the purgative re-ordering and transformation of the pray-er’s desires. There is an assumption in open theism that knows what to desire and what to pray for. Moreover, there is little suggestion that the call to prayer corresponds with a call to pick up the mantle of action (what Barth calls ‘revolt’) to be incorporated into God’s action in the world. Barth, on the contrary, is quite clear that: If it is true that we can only fold our hands when we pray ‘Hallowed be thy name,’ that we can expect the answer to it only from God, that we can commend it to him alone, this cannot mean that, this time with profound Christian piety, we may be content to rest quietly in a waiting room in face of the division of the present, intent on the great act for whose occurrence we pray, and leaving the world, the church, and ourselves to the state and course of the great twilight and vacillation. Those who really press and involve God with this petition in the expectation that he will answer it, as people who are seriously and fundamentally disquieted and startled, press and involve themselves too in their own place and manner as people and within the limits of their own human capabilities and possibilities. They declare, and within their limits take on responsibility, that in the matter about which they pray to God something will be done correspondingly by them.126

For Barth, the Holy Spirit works inwardly to incorporate the pray-er into the divine life in the fullest possible sense, which means that the Spirit also leads the ethical agent outwards, incorporating the ethical agent in the ongoing mission of God. The inward movement is simultaneously an outward movement. Christians ‘live spiritually as and to the extent that they live eccentrically’.127 As shall be argued in the next chapter of this book, the Spirit’s

125

Ibid., p. 91. ChrL, p. 169 127 Ibid., p. 94. 126

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assault on binary distinctions prevents the retreat of the pray-er behind the distinction that separates the public self from the private life of prayer. In the very act of praying, therefore, the ethical agent is already entangled in political matters: prayer makes the confrontation with all that rules ‘lordlessly’ unavoidable.

Summary This chapter has made a number of ‘forages’ into Barth’s writings to tell something of the story of prayer’s movement from failure to incorporation into the life of the trinitarian God. It could hardly be said that what is to be found here is a fully developed doctrine of the Trinity on the scale as say Barth’s early rendering of the Trinity in I/1. But what can be detected is a trinitarian logic that is rooted in prayer and complicates the dominant readings of Barth that find a pneumatological poverty in his writings. Attending to Barth’s writings on prayer, through the lens of Romans 8, reveals a vibrant and dynamic pneumatology of incorporation that celebrates the primacy of the Holy Spirit. In the delayedpneumatology of the ethics of reconciliation, the Holy Spirit is to be found working inwardly, gently transforming the prayer (and therefore the pray-er) from within to incorporate the pray-er into the trinitarian life of Father, Son and Spirit. The next chapter uncovers another side to this prayer-based pneumatology that celebrates not the inward and gentle side of the Spirit’s work but the outward and fiery work of tearing down the very ‘motors’ that are geared up to exercise oppression and disorder. It is into this urgent and revolutionary action that the ethical agent is incorporated.

6

Revolt

There is, however – and this is what concerns us here – a struggle that Christians cannot avoid, a revolt that is both permitted and also commanded. –Karl Barth1 One of the curious things about Barth’s writings on prayer, extensive as they are, is the lack of the use of a metaphor that is pervasive in the prayer traditions of the early Church and indeed in his own Reformed tradition: the likening of prayer to ‘conversation’.2 The conversation metaphor appears muted in Barth’s writings and when it is deployed it is accompanied with heavy qualifications. At the most, he writes, prayer is only ever ‘sort of conversation with the heavenly’.3 This otherwise well-worn metaphor for prayer appears problematic on two counts. First, the conversation of prayer lends itself too easily to the idolatrous mistaking of this conversation for any other conversation.4 A conversation with God, of course, is qualitatively different (to riff on the early Barth) from any other kind of conversation. ‘Let’s put it this way, the one who is calling me here and telling me to call him back is the one who is different: who is indeed utterly different from you or me, from us all, from the whole world.’5 God is unlike any other conversant and the conversation of prayer is qualitatively more agentially complex than other conversations – especially when prayer is understood to be a divine ‘praying 1 2

3 4

5

ChrL, p. 209. For the use of the conversation metaphor in the early Church, see Harrison, The Art of Listening in the Early Church, pp. 183–211 (for example, Evagrius, ‘On Prayer’, p. 188); for Calvin, see the Institutes, pp. 853–4. Prayer, p. 43. See Phillips, The Concept of Prayer, pp. 43–50 for an account of how, on this basis, the conversation metaphor breaks down when applied to prayer. Barth, ‘Call Me’, p. 30.

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in’ us. Under the messiness of prayer’s agential entanglements, the notion of prayer-as-conversation appears too unstable to be of any use. For Barth, it is rendered doubly dubious by Feuerbach’s application of the metaphor in his reduction of prayer to ‘self-conversation’.6 Second, given the political direction into which his theology of prayer is pushed in the ethical fragment (to be discussed now), thinking of prayer as conversation is too anaemic a metaphor to carry the radical demands Barth places on prayer. A cumulative case has been building throughout this book in favour of finding in the ethics of reconciliation Barth’s most successful treatment of prayer. Some of the success of these drafts has to do with the developing pneumatology that emerges with particular insight in the ethics of reconciliation. Some of its success has to do with the skill with which he awakens a new attention to the essential political dimensions of prayer, which is expressed so often in the ethical drafts by his explication of prayer as ‘revolt’ (Aufstand – literally, ‘up-stand’). And some of its success has to do with Barth’s understanding of the relation between prayer and ethics. An underlying aim of this book has been to illumine something of Barth’s commitment to the ‘integrity’ of theology and prayer, which is commonly expressed through an appeal to the lex orandi, lex credendi. The commitment to the integrity of prayer and theology accompanied Barth throughout his writings. However, in the ethics of reconciliation, the lex orandi is expanded to provide not only the lex credendi but also, fascinatingly, the lex agendi. The practice of prayer involves the transformation of moral action as well as doctrinal reasoning. This is a good example of Barth delivering on his promise that Christian dogmatics is always ethical dogmatics. If ‘there can be no dogmatic work’ without prayer then, likewise, there can be no ethical work without prayer. 7 The Lord’s Prayer, Barth writes, ‘invites us in a unique fashion to apply the old adage that the law of prayer is the law of faith. We shall here accept this invitation by understanding the law of faith that is implicit in the law of prayer, and is to be taken from it, as a law of life, a criterion by which to answer our question concerning the obedience required of Christians’.8

6 7

8

Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, p. 122. I/1, p. 23. This brings Barth into contact with various liturgical turns in contemporary political theology that seek to reaffirm the interconnectedness of worship and ethics. Two such examples include Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells (eds), The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 3–12 (4) and Wannenwetsch, Political Worship. ChrL, p. 50.

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Barth’s political thought has been debated heavily, however.9 Hauerwas’ complaint, for example, of ‘a peculiar “abstractness” to Barth’s ethics that gives his account of the moral life an aura of unreality’ is both well known and well contended.10 Earlier, Reinhold Niebuhr had found in Barth’s refusal to jump on the West’s anti-communist bandwagon a confirmation of the ineffectiveness of Barthian ethics when applied to the complexities of actual ethical situations. 11 In their own ways, both complaints are based on a perceived difficulty in Barth’s ‘actualistic’ approach to deliver on particular issues of political guidance and instruction. His actualistic method determines that the command of God cannot assume the character of ‘the timeless truth of a general principle, or a collection of such truths’.12 The divine command is encountered, Barth writes, in the moment of ‘what is always a special event between God and man’.13 Indeed, Barth’s consistent rejection of casuistry and meta-ethics, which is clearly felt in the ethical fragment, allows no recourse to a well-worn set of rules.14 What is feared here is the systematization of ethics. For Barth, the business of ethical decision-making is too complex to be summarily reduced to blanket statements aimed to cover all ethical eventualities. Barth’s ethics sets off in a different direction: one that privileges the space-making practice of prayer. By developing his mature ethical thought within the context of prayer, Barth’s familiar reservations at ethical systematization are reinforced. In prayer, the Church is given the freedom to ask God ‘what are we to do?’ and the openness to receive the guidance of the Holy Spirit in each new moment. In the openness (and contextuality) of prayer, the command of God, which is

9

10

11 12 13 14

Some have deemed Barth’s political judgements to be arbitrary and uninformed. Among his detractors, see Robin W. Lovin, Christian Faith and Public Choices: The Social Ethics of Barth, Brunner, and Bonhoeffer (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), pp. 41–2 and Charles C. West, Communism and the Theologians: Study of an Encounter (London: SCM Press, 1958), pp. 285–90. Among Barth’s defenders, see George Hunsinger, Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2000); Timothy Gorringe, Karl Barth: Against Hegemony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) and Jehle, Ever Against the Stream. For a constructive political engagement with Barth’s theology of prayer, see Luke Bretherton, Christianity and Contemporary Politics: The Conditions and Possibilities of Faithful Witness (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 126–74. Stanley Hauerwas, ‘On Honour: By Way of a Comparison of Barth and Trollope’, in Nigel Biggar (ed.), Reckoning with Barth: Essays in Commemoration of the Centenary of Karl Barth’s Birth (London: Mowbray, 1988), pp. 145–69 (149). This critique has been contended by, among others, David Clough, Ethics in Crisis: Interpreting Barth’s Ethics (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. 114 and Nimmo, Being in Action, pp. 74–9. Reinhold Niebuhr, Essays in Applied Christianity (New York: Meridian, 1959), pp. 141–93. ChrL, p. 4. Ibid. Ibid., p. 5.

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neither arbitrary nor specifiable in advance, interrupts each ethical situation in a unique and unrepeatable way. However, the political implications of prayer are far more fundamental than prayer’s role in the task of ethical decision-making and the protection of the particularity of the ethical moment. Because prayer gets to the very heart of issues of power relations and the complex ways in which the divine and the human can be said to exercise power, the practice of prayer itself is an unavoidably and fundamentally political event. The ways in which, for instance, the previous chapter described the incorporation of the human pray-er into the life of the trinitarian God has important consequences for understanding how God exercises power and how the ethical agent might correspondingly exercise power. Paradigms of power-as-domination, it can be seen, are undermined and reconfigured through prayer.15 Indeed, a conception of God as an ‘unchangeable, untouchable, and immutable deity’ that inflicts the divine command from above onto the obedient ethical agent below is ruled out by Barth’s account of prayer.16 Instead, through an appeal to the concept of ‘correspondence’, human agency is incorporated by the Holy Spirit into the life of the divine in a non-coercive way. For Barth, the ethical agent is most fully human (and therefore most fully free) precisely in prayer. Consequently, Barth’s opposition to a liner, hierarchically determined divine-human arrangement implies a rejection of all politics of domination, enslavement and coercion. In fact, as we shall see in the remainder of this chapter, for Barth, the Christian life is a life of ‘revolt’ against all that exercises power in harmfully dominating, oppressive and ‘lordless’ ways. This chapter, which unfolds in two sections, explores some of the implications of Barth’s insistence that invocation involves the ethical agent in a very public sort of human action. For Barth, this very public sort of action ‘means revolt’.17 It means standing up against all that exercises power in oppressive ways. In terms of structure, the first section of this chapter considers the relation between invocation and political action, introduces the notion of revolt and explores Barth’s account of evil as the lordless powers. The second section argues that the dominant action of revolt can be interestingly supplemented by incorporating a different sort of political action as suggested by the more contemplative dimensions of Barth’s theology of prayer.

15 16 17

On this, see Coakley, Powers and Submissions, pp. 3–39. ChrL, p. 102. Ibid., p. 174 = DcL, p. 293.

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Invocation, revolt and the lordless powers For Barth, when removed from the context of political and ethical activity, prayer simply ceases to be prayer. In a similar way to how an unhelpful division between prayer and dogmatics has crept into much of modern theological discourse, so too has a gradual disintegration of prayer and ethics. As Hauerwas and Wells complain, worship has been de-politicized, pushed onto the fringes of serious ethical deliberation and ‘relegated to the lower divisions of the academy, regarded as the realm of the “merely pious”, open to sociological and psychological investigation certainly, but remote from the frontiers of truth’.18 This ejection of prayer from any meaningful position within a moral ontology is evident in much of the moral tradition determined by Kant, so it is argued.19 However, Barth’s sustained lampooning of binary divisions (informed by his take on the lex orandi) renders problematic any firm distinction between two autonomously existing spheres: a religious sphere for prayer and another for political action. ‘Their invocation of God as Father, then, does not take place on an “island of the blessed” ’ but ‘has a publicly social character’, Barth writes.20 If the law of prayer and the law of belief are genuinely to be mutually informing then the lex agendi demands a commitment to the ‘integrity’ of prayer and ethics. For Barth, because prayer is the ‘basic form of the whole Christian ethos’,21 then it is less that political action springs from worship and more that the very act of prayer itself is in an important sense political. The ‘invocation of God’, Barth writes, is ‘as such a supremely social matter, publicly social, not to say political and even cosmic’.22 In prayer, usual patterns of relating to and acting in the world are subjected to a radical disruption. ‘Alternative repertoires or scripts for envisioning the world to those of the dominant hegemony’ are discovered in prayer, as Luke Bretherton argues.23 Whereas a non-invocational existence is to live deeply curved on in the self,24 in the invocation of God the ethical agent is opened out into a new life of ec-centricity and into a right relationship with God and with others. In other words, there is an overflowing of prayer’s renewal and 18

19 20 21 22 23 24

Hauerwas and Wells, ‘Christian Ethics as Informed Prayer’, in Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells (eds), The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 3–12 (4). See Ibid., p. 4. ChrL, p. 97. Ibid., p. 89. Ibid., p. 95. Bretherton, Christianity and Contemporary Politics, p. 145. It is notable that Barth deploys the incurvature metaphor in this context, see ChrL, p. 206.

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right ordering of divine and human agency into larger (even cosmic) patterns of relations. An active effacement takes place in prayer in which the ethical agent, having turned to Christ, the one who truly prays, now turns to face the other. As Timothy Gorringe writes, ‘to the believer vocation means a complex pattern of liberation, supremely realised in prayer, in which we are drawn out of solitariness into fellowship, delivered from the ocean of unlimited possibilities to the one necessity of Christ, and freed to rejoice in a true humanism, finding significance in the smallest details of human life’.25 The very act of prayer is a reorientation of human agency towards attention, fellowship and hospitality, towards welcoming the stranger, the hungry, the needy and the thirsty. These are all political priorities that had accompanied Barth’s social thought since the early Safenwil days. Indeed, human action ‘must in all circumstances takes place with a view to people, in address to people, and with the aim of helping people’.26 The Christian vocation, for Barth, is about more than helping people, however. Barth’s interpretation of the first two petitions of the Lord’s Prayer combine in a radical call for the ethical agent to confront head-on the very structures that enforce helplessness and oppression. Rowan Williams argues that ‘the cry of “Abba” in Gethsemane is surely part of a wider way in which Jesus’ own sonship is inseparable from conflict’.27 Given the attempts to reconceive prayer as the Spirit’s work in us that conforms us to the likeness of ‘divine sonship’, our incorporation into Jesus’ sonship likewise is ‘inseparable from conflict’. The pray-er, Barth writes, is ‘empowered, instructed, and summoned to fight against human unrighteousness’.28 The Christian life is a fight ‘with one another for their right to live, to live in freedom, peace, and joy’ and against the hegemonic forces under which their ‘human right and dignity’ is ‘constantly overlooked, forgotten, broken, and trampled’.29 Throughout these intriguing sections, therefore, Barth has a very specific idea of the shape of human action in the public sphere. The human hallowing that corresponds to divine hallowing is not only about the decrying oppression but the ‘rising up and revolting against its actualization’.30 In what is by now 25 26

27 28 29 30

Gorringe, Against Hegemony, p. 252. ChrL, p. 266. In particular, see the 1911 lecture ‘Jesus Christ and the Movement for Social Justice’, in George Hunsinger (ed.), Karl Barth and Radical Politics (Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox Press, 1976), pp. 19–37. Williams, ‘Word and Spirit’, p. 121. ChrL, p. 266, emphasis added. Ibid. Ibid., p. 207, emphasis added.

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a familiar move, Barth locates this radical human action in the prior activity of grace. Thus in his politically charged interpretation of the first petition, although, strictly speaking, God is the one who truly hallows the divine name and will finally establish the hallowing that has already occurred in Jesus Christ (§77.3), to this divine act there corresponds definite human acts of hallowing (hence, §77.4). As the previous chapter noted, while in Münster Barth dealt with eschatology, pneumatology and prayer under the ethics of redemption, the Basel cycle of lectures is unfolded along very different lines. These redemption themes are relocated to the here and now of the ethics of reconciliation. This restructuring helps to strengthen the case for finding a developing pneumatology in the ethical drafts. A further consequence of the flooding of these redemption themes into the present is that an eschatologically ordered account of human prayerful action in the Spirit brings a degree of urgency and hastening to the Christian life. This urgency gains expression in the ethical fragment through the motif of revolt. Barth’s eschatological reading of prayer and rejection of versions of eschatology that wait passively for the arrival of the future means that the ethical agent cannot simply sit around for God’s action to transform the world. The double-movement of the Holy Spirit both leads the ethical agent into deep participation in Christ and also mobilizes the ethical agent into public participation in God’s transforming mission in the world.31 ‘Impelled’ by the Holy Spirit, human action becomes ‘more restless than the most restless, more urgent than the most urgent revolutionaries’.32 Indeed, the pneumatology found in this section is a fiery, powerful and radical pneumatology – quite far from any reduction of the Spirit to a dove-like third. Barth writes that ‘the Holy Spirit is the forward which majestically awakens, enlightens, leads, pushes, and impels, which God has spoken in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, which he has spoken and still speaks to the world of humanity: forward to the new coming of Jesus and the kingdom’.33 This spirit of revolt is very present in Barth’s interpretation of the first petition. It also runs into the final paragraph of the ethics of reconciliation,

31 32 33

On this double-movement, see Greggs, Barth, Origen, and Universal Salvation, p. 134. IV/4, p. 201. ChrL, p. 256. To the critics, then, who find in Barth’s pneumatology an over-emphasized orientation to the past (reminding and guaranteeing the appropriation of the once-for-all salvific work of God – as noted in Chapter 3), these late drafts contain a strong connection between the Holy Spirit, the future and prayer. On this, see Stefan Peter Becker, Erkenntnis und Gebet: Die pneumatologische Grundstruktur von Karl Barths dogmatischer Arbeit (Bern: Peter Lang, 1995), pp. 12–13, 238.

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which focuses on the second petition of the Lord’s Prayer. Entitled ‘The Struggle for Human Righteousness’, the paragraph brings to a dramatic culmination Barth’s life’s work. As is customary in The Christian Life, the paragraph unfolds in four sections, each pregnant with political import: ‘revolt against disorder’, ‘the lordless powers’, ‘Thy kingdom come’ and ‘fiat iustitia’ (§78.1–4). It is suggestive that Barth begins the final section, on the fiat iustitia, with a reference to Jeremiah’s prophecy for the execution of justice and righteousness in the land (Jer. 25.5). The Church Dogmatics ends, therefore, with a desire for the ‘appearing of God’s righteousness on a new earth and under a new heaven’ based on ‘freedom, peace, and joy’ – but getting there is no easy ride.34 It involves struggle, it involves ‘a simultaneous and related revolt’ and it involves entering ‘into a conflict’.35 Barth writes: Praying the second petition bravely means following this movement and turning, having no other choice but to look ahead and also to live and think and speak and act ahead, to run from the beginning, the history of Jesus Christ first revealed in his resurrection, to the goal, its final manifestation, the coming kingdom of God – to run toward this with all one’s soul and all one’s powers like one who is running a race.36

It is only after the ‘battle against disorder’ that the kingdom comes, justice reigns and the divine name is most fully hallowed.37 The paragraph is dominated, therefore, by military rhetoric. Terms such as ‘militant revolt’, ‘warfare’, ‘battle’, ‘conflict’, ‘attack’, ‘assault’, ‘rising up’, ‘battling’ ‘rebellion’, ‘armed’ and ‘resistance’ punctuate the section.38 Against the repetitious deployment of militaristic tropes, the conversational metaphor does indeed appear rather soft. Given Barth’s earlier designation of sin as rebellion, however, such a promotion of the ethical priority of revolt is curious.39 The fact that these lectures were delivered as the American Civil Rights Movement was gathering pace (which Barth would encounter first hand a few years later on his American trip in the Spring of 1962) is revealing of the type of revolt he probably has in mind.40

34 35 36 37 38

39 40

ChrL, p. 263. Ibid., p. 206, rev. Ibid., p. 262. Ibid., p. 261. For example, Ibid., pp. 206, 207, 210. The deployment of the militaristic metaphor, to a certain extent, seems to seize on the provocative stock of battleground imagery Barth developed in his commentaries on Romans, see Paul Dafydd Jones, ‘The Rhetoric of War in Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans: A Theological Analysis’, Zeitschrift für Neuere Theologiegeschichte 17.1 (2010), pp. 90–111. For example, IV/1, p. 436. See Busch, Karl Barth, p. 460.

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The type of revolt is clarified further in the organization of the paragraph. That Barth develops his theology of revolt in the first subsection of the paragraph (§78.1, thus asserting the priority of divine action) implies that the revolt against disorder is principally God’s work. The revolt is already underway. This is God’s battle into which the human agent is enlisted. ‘Even today we still live in a world that has been basically dedemonized already by Jesus Christ, and will be so fully one day. But in the meantime it still needs a good deal of dedemonizing.’41 Whereas the sin of Adam was a disordered rebellion, the revolt into which the ethical agent is called is a rebellion against disorder. More specifically, the revolt into which the ethical agent is enlisted takes place on both an individual level (against the disordered desires that lie deep within the individual ethical agent) and a corporate level (against the structural forces that incite and enforce all types of oppression).42 In terms of the naming of the oppressive forces, Barth admits the ‘difficulty of finding clear and suitable names and concepts with which to denote them properly and describe them vividly’.43 Although the hegemonic forces are too complex to be pinpointed definitively, it is nevertheless theologically important for them to be named. The least inadequate name Barth gives to the forces that operate on this structural level is the ‘lordless powers’ (herrenlose Gewalten). They are the hidden wirepullers in man’s great and small enterprises, movements, achievements, and revolutions. They are not just the potencies but the real factors and agents of human progress, regress, and stagnation in politics, economics, scholarship, technology, and art, and also of the evolutions and retardations in all the personal life of the individual.44

The Christian life of invocation is revolt on a massive scale and against the very ‘motors’ and infrastructure of lordlessness.45 An adequate account of evil, then, for Barth, must be seen to operate on structural as well as individual levels. Describing the lordless powers, therefore, must involve some intuition of ‘the manner and nature of the evil which Christians call upon God to set aside in the 41 42

43 44 45

ChrL, p. 218. In this respect, Barth can be read profitably alongside some liberationist political spirituality, see Paul Dafydd Jones, ‘Liberation Theologies and “Democratic Futures” (by way of Karl Barth and Friedrich Schleiermacher)’, Political Theology 10.2 (2009), pp. 261–85. There is evidence to suggest that Barth had a direct influence on Boff ’s understanding of prayer – for example, Leonardo Boff, The Lord’s Prayer: The Prayer of Integral Liberation (trans. Theodore Morrow; Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1983), p. 134. ChrL, p. 216. Ibid. Ibid.

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second petition’.46 Precision can be gained, then, by reading Barth’s description of the lordless powers through his earlier treatment of the odd ‘manner and nature’ of evil as Nothingness in §50.47 Barth’s treatment of evil in §50 has a lot do with protecting the ontological peculiarity of evil and its problematic status within the created order. ‘Nothingness is that which God does not will. It lives only by the fact that it is that which God does not will. But it does live by this fact.’48 The refusal to indulge a want for conceptual tidiness (which would give evil the ontological shape of an independent reality that is needed to provide the conditions to explain evil as other than an absurdity) is for the protection of evil’s ‘evilness’.49 As soon as evil is ‘explained’ it is somehow integrated into the created order, and therefore ordered. Evil becomes systematized into a thing of the world – at which point the ‘evilness of evil’ is domesticated and even made good. To prevent the domestication of evil into part of the created order like other created parts, Barth develops a highly conflictual account of wickedness, in which evil is held in aggressive conflict with the goodness of creation. Evil is in ‘opposition and resistance to God’s world-dominion’, Barth writes, and fails to operate smoothly within a moral system.50 Barth’s anti-theodical tendencies surface again in the ethical fragment. Like §50, attention here is deflected away from any attempt to untie the knot of evil or unravel its origins. Unlike §50, however, closer attention falls in The Christian Life on the concrete manifestation of this evil in human affairs. Despite, then, ‘the obscurity, ambivalence, and unintelligibility of their reality’, Barth insists that ‘we have to speak about these powers’.51 And we have to speak about them not only because ‘they are before our own eyes’, existing as brute facts, but that by speaking about them the forces are ‘unmasked’, as it were, to be acted against.52

46 47

48 49

50

51 52

Ibid., p. 213, emphasis added. On the difficulties of carrying the implied destructiveness of the term das Nichtige in translation, see Matthias D. Wüthrich, Gott und das Nichtige: Eine Untersuchung zur Rede vom Nichtigen ausgehend von [Paragraph] 50 der Kirchlichen Dogmatik Karl Barths (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 2006), pp. 59–80, 212–55. III/3, p. 352. Rosemary Radford Ruether, ‘The Left Hand of God in the Theology of Karl Barth: Karl Barth as a Mythopoeic Theologian’, Journal of Religious Thought 25.1 (1969), pp. 3–26 (6). For an investigation of a particularly ‘evil’ representation of evil in popular culture, see my ‘The Dark Knight and the Evilness of Evil’, The Expository Times 120.11 (2009), pp. 541–3. III/3, p. 289. On the theme of the conceptual roughness of evil, see Charles T. Mathewes, ‘A Tale of Two Judgments: Bonhoeffer and Arendt on Evil, Understanding, and Limits, and the Limits of Understanding Evil’, The Journal of Religion 80.3 (2000), pp. 375–404 (378). ChrL, pp. 215, 216. Ibid., p. 219.

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It is suggestive that the two principal treatments of evil in Barth’s writings are situated in doxological contexts. Barth’s discussion of Nothingness (§50) is bounded by a discussion of prayer (§49.4) on the one side and praise (§51) on the other; and his account of the lordless powers (§78) similarly is undertaken in the context of prayer. This carries a number of implications: prayer can be seen to provide the ‘normative standard’ of the good – which is to say, it is against the rich conception of human flourishing that the full depths of the depravity of evil can be identified; subsuming evil’s depravity in the goodness of prayer refuses to think of evil as that which exists beyond its conflict with that ‘normative standard’; and the linking of prayer and evil says something about how the response to the identification of evil is actualized.53 As to why evil exists, one can never know. But this is the wrong type of question to ask.54 A more appropriate response to evil’s problematic is not theodical (that attempts to explain away evil or solve its problematic through some fancy conceptual footwork) but is ethical and therefore doxological.55 Barth’s concern in the ethical drafts at least is less with the explanation of the nullity of evil (and frequently disappoints those who expect him to deliver on answers to the problem of evil) than with a vivid description of its manifestation in order to illumine how we might appropriately act (that is, revolt) against evil.56 The action against evil par excellence is precisely the most orderly and good thing to do of all: the invocation of God. The lordless powers become Barth’s way of signifying (in the most qualified terms) the otherwise entirely odd reality of the Nothingness of §50 as historical phenomena. These powers are not unnameable nothings but take concrete and historical form; or better, to avoid making a thing of evil and investing with substance and ontology that which is insubstantial and non-being, the powers are described as being parasitic on the goodness of concrete and historical things, feeding on all that is good and just. Barth’s indebtedness to the Augustinian tradition of evil as privation can certainly be felt here.57 53 54

55

56

57

The term, ‘normative standard’ is borrowed from McFadyen, Bound to Sin, p. 216. For a thoroughgoing dismantling of the theodical project, see Kenneth Surin, Theology and the Problem of Evil (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). Webster and McDowell are both right to argue, therefore, that Barth offers an ethical account of wickedness, see Webster, Barth’s Moral Theology, p. 76 and John C. McDowell, ‘Much Ado about Nothing: Karl Barth’s Being Unable to Do Nothing about Nothingness’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 4.3 (2002), pp. 319–35 (334). John Hick is a good example of someone who misses Barth’s anti-theodical point: see his Evil and the God of Love (London: Macmillan, 1977; second edition), pp. 126–44. On the Augustinian tradition of evil in its many varieties, see Charles T. Mathewes, Evil and the Augustinian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). For a more historical engagement with Augustine’s treatment of evil, see G. R. Evans, Augustine on Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

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Just as Nothingness is an apparent rather than an ontological force, so too as ‘troublesome though they are’, the lordless powers ‘are only contingent and relative determinations … they do not and cannot have more than pseudoobjective reality’.58 Barth writes that ‘no matter how bad their effects may be, they cannot be ontologically godless forces’.59 At the root of the lordlessness of these structural powers, therefore, in a very Augustinian way, is disorder (Unordnung) and misshapen individual human desire. The ‘plight against which Christians are commanded to revolt and fight is the disorder which both inwardly and outwardly controls and penetrates and poisons and disrupts all human relations and interconnections’.60 The disorder begins with Adam’s disordered relationship with God and ‘the denaturalizing of [his] humanity’ but overflows into a systematic disordering of all other relations. The disordered life, as Barth suggests, is also a repetition of the sin of Cain, the one who murdered his brother.61 ‘As the powers tear apart the individual, so … they tear apart society also.’62 The lordless powers are unveiled as: political absolutisms (which, following Hobbes, Barth names ‘leviathan’); mammon and material goods (which Barth calls our ‘very mobile demon’); and, finally, ideologies and their monotonous slogans (which exercise their power sophisticatedly and subtly through the advertisement industry, for example).63 A further group of powers that seek to rule lordlessly and demonize the world are the ‘chthonic forces’. These forces masquerade ‘under the pretext and appearance of granting every kind of freedom’ and are therefore all the more dangerous.64 They include technology, fashion, sport and transportation, each of which fails to deliver on its promise for human flourishing.65 Like Goethe’s sorcerer’s apprentice, Barth observes, these were once forces full of (good) potential but became ‘spirits with a life and activity of their own, lordless indwelling forces’, thereby lordlessly revolting against God.66 ‘In reality, he does not control them but they him. They do

58 59 60 61 62 63

64 65 66

ChrL, p. 216. Ibid., p. 215. Ibid., p. 211, emphasis added. Ibid., pp. 212, 213. Ibid., p. 233. Ibid., p. 222. Arendt famously observed of Eichmann that ‘he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché’, Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Penguin, 1994; second edition), p. 48. The sloganism operated on such a deep level that he had been robbed of any capacity for imagination. ChrL, p. 229. Ibid., p. 214. Ibid.

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not serve him but he must serve them’ and, moreover, sequester all into their service.67 The powers that operate lordlessly fail expectations by producing absolutely nothing. They grind everything to a halt, just as ‘the increase in the number of vehicles now on the roads’, to use Barth’s example, grind the transportation system to a standstill.68 In each case, Barth is exercising the Augustinian in him by identifying evil not in the thing itself but in the thinggone-wrong. Technology in itself is no bad thing (let alone evil), for example, but it becomes evil as it is invested with the power that enables it to operate under the lie of lordless independence (and surely here, Barth had in mind the technologically aided genocide of the twentieth-century wars).69 In the act of naming the forces, Barth seeks to demythologize or ‘unmask’ the powers for what they really are: that which is not to be feared but revolted against.70 It is theologically important then that these forces are named and described in the fullest possible detail because, as McDowell argues, ‘this descriptiveness operates by way of focusing one’s prayerful attentions on the sources of evil in human affairs … and acting against them’.71 More than this, the unmasking of evil in historical phenomena unmasks the ethical agents not only as the victims of the demonic powers but also as those who enact what they will: here, there are possible connections to be made to some aspects of the Kantian tradition of ‘radical evil’ and its strong emphasis on human accountability.72 Like Kant, Barth is against any self-distancing moves, however tempting, that make evil that which the evil ‘other’ does. Instead, Barth contends, evil is very much that which we do: it ‘is man’s fault, since it is he who unleashes those powers’.73 Christians have ‘both a passive and an active share in the evil and corruption of this world, in the unchaining of those demonic factors in world occurrence, in the silent or gloriously tumultuous enterprise of their deification’.74 We have unleashed the lordless powers and therefore we, the ones who bow to the powers, have become the ‘servants of nothingness, sharing its nature and producing and extending it’.75 If the unruly lordless powers are that which we each somehow (perversely and absurdly) will, or infuse with  relative  though

67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

Ibid., p. 215. Ibid., p. 231. On this, see Brock, Christian Ethics in a Technological Age, p. 376. For the unmasking of prayer, see III/4, p. 98. McDowell, ‘Much Ado about Nothing’, p. 330. For example, Kant, Religion, p. 63; see also, ChrL, p. 149. ChrL, p. 232. Ibid., p. 277. III/3, p. 306.

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unfounded significance, then the onus of responsibility for the revolt against these powers also falls on us.76 The naively uncritical assumption that there is no space for human agency in Barth’s theology turns to dust in this subsection on the lordless powers. If anything, the danger is from the opposite direction: that Barth grants too much to human agency. If Barth is felt to cross the path of Pelagius here, it is important to expose the dialecticism at work throughout his theology of prayer. His theopolitical account of revolt makes little sense (without risking making salvation a human achievement) as long as prayer is understood to be something that ‘we’ do. When prayer is reconceived as something that God does in the ethical agent the claim that prayer is revolt against lordlessness gains meaning. Just as prayer is the entering into the prayer that has already begun, so too is revolt an entering into the divine revolt that is already underway. Barth emphasizes that prayerful revolt against evil ‘is a wholly human and therefore feeble action’ (thus helping to eliminate the propensity to idealize prayer) that gains its strength by virtue of its correspondence with God’s decisive revolt against disorder.77 In correspondence with God’s full-scale revolution, which is the fundamental overturning and complete reorientation of all this world’s lordless forces, the ‘provisional and very relative and modest’ human revolt gains strength and substance.78 It is precisely in the performative act of invocation in correspondence with God, in the open turning towards God in right and orderly relations, that the lordless powers are relativized, relations transformed, worldly good reordered and human relationships set to flourish. For Barth, then, invocation both lightens our way through the paths darkened by lordlessness and deploys the most effective revolt against the forces of disorder. Indeed, the basic action of invocation is ‘qualitatively more and better than the best that all other movements for the establishment of human righteousness can do’.79 Barth insists that for all Christians can do, ‘the decisive action of their revolt against disorder … is their calling upon God’.80 The very act of petitioning for our daily bread, for example, 76

77

78

79 80

ChrL, p. 218. This strong sense of human responsibility is also, contrary to some of the standard critiques of fatalism, thoroughly Augustinian. On this, see McFadyen, Bound to Sin, pp. 167–99. For Augustine as much as for Barth, there is a human complicity in the inherited structures of sin (‘the history of sinning’) as well as in the sins that are more obviously of our own doing. ChrL, 261. On the idealization or ‘politicization’ of worship, see Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, pp. 13–14. ChrL, p. 174. This echoes something of Donald MacKinnon’s point, made sometime earlier, that prayerful revolt ‘has its place in the abiding all-embracing work of Christ’, see ‘Prayer, Worship and Life’, in Donald M. MacKinnon (ed.), Christian Faith and Communist Faith: A Series of Studies by Members of the Anglican Communion (London: Macmillan, 1953), pp. 242–56 (247). ChrL, p. 261. Ibid., p. 212.

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counter-culturally revolts against any myth of human self-sufficiency. It calls the bluff of the lordless powers and dethrones their claim to mastery. Moreover, the alternative grammar of invocation replaces harmful notions of competition with a fundamentally non-competitive vision of divine-human relations. And this overflows into a complete rearrangement and reimagining of all other relations, including reconfiguring the ways in which we relate to the now dedemonized mammon (and by that I mean an account of mammon that takes seriously a common commitment to the curtailment of money’s ‘power’). Imagine economic systems no longer organized around the principle of scarcity but rather the noncompetitive sharing and distribution of property and wealth that proceeds on the assumption that personal identity is enhanced and satisfied rather than (competitively) endangered at the prospect of our neighbour’s flourishing.81 It is the inhabitation of the ‘normative standard’ set by invocation (embodying reconfigured relations between God, the world and the self) that hegemonic power structures are not only unmasked but actively revolted against. Placing the lordless powers within the wider context of invocation (and also the close proximity of prayer to das Nichtige in III/3) indicates something of the theological mood of Barth’s account of prayer. Prayer that takes the agony of Gethsemane seriously means that prayer cannot be but costly. In fact, the ethical agent is commanded to act ‘regardless of the cost or consequences’, Barth writes.82 There is no interval for sloth in this portrayal of invocational existence. The ethical agent ‘may and should be truly active’, the ethical agent may and should be up-standing (Aufstanden), the ethical agent may and should be constantly swimming against the tide of structural oppression in correspondence with God.83 There is even an almost anarchic element to this dimension of Barth’s theology of prayer; or, more qualifiedly, a ‘theological anarchism’ that is at once utterly anarchic in relation to the prevalent world order, endlessly uncomfortable with the way things are and intolerant of playing by the rules of the status quo, and yet at the same time totally ordered by its obedience to God’s command.84 81

82

83 84

On this non-competitive reimagining of economic structures, see Kathryn Tanner, ‘Barth and the Economy of Grace’, in Daniel L. Migliore (ed.), Commanding Grace: Studies in Karl Barth’s Ethics (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2010), pp. 176–97. ChrL, p. 267. McDowell has a good sense of what Barth is doing here with his designation of prayer as a ‘costly’ struggle, see McDowell, ‘ “Openness to the World” ’, p. 264. ChrL, p. 102. See Hunsinger, ‘Toward a Radical Barth’, p. 186. This is quite different from Marquardt’s thesis that Barth’s theology has an ‘anarchistic starting point’ and therefore is unpredictable and disorientating, see Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt, ‘Socialism in the Theology of Karl Barth’, in George Hunsinger (ed.), Karl Barth and Radical Politics (Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox Press, 1976), pp. 47–76 (57). For more on Barth as an anarchist, see Jacques Ellul, Anarchy and Christianity (trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley; Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1991), pp. 86–8.

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It should be  said  that however much the state, and its associated institutions and ideologies, are to be revolted against, the revolution is not for the sake of the abolition of the state but for its transformation from within into something distinctively Christian (according to the logic of religion described in Chapter 5). It must also be noted that the state is not the primary target of prayer’s revolt but something closer to home: the ideology that is incubated by and dwells deeply (and often unassumingly) in one’s desire. In Barth’s account of the complex relation between individual and structural disorder, it is in prayer that one’s desires are most fully ordered and this ordering ripples out into all other relations. The ‘little step’ of prayer has a disproportionately large impact in the world: ‘a supposedly little step might really be a very big one’.85 There is a danger, however, that Barth’s linking of prayer to revolt leads his theology of prayer into unhelpfully aggressive directions. The militaristic metaphors are sometimes in danger of being overstated in the ethics of reconciliation and risk closing down alternative – but no less radical – forms of political activity. The radically political rhetoric of the ethical fragment, its dependence on the theme of rebellion and its insatiable expectation for the ethical agent to enter into conflict against disorder (we must ‘run towards it as fast as our feet will carry us’) can be balanced, supplemented and stabilized by some aspects of Barth’s earlier theology of sabbatical contemplation, now to be discussed again.86

The beginning and ending of conflict This chapter has so far considered the character of invocational existence (life in revolt) and that which is to be revolted against (the lordless powers) but has not yet addressed the issues of the beginning of invocational rebellion and the telos of that revolt. Why, then, revolt against disorder, and to what end? Both the beginning and ending of revolt, it is suggested, can be understood in terms of the Sabbath rest. This takes us back to where this study of Barth’s theology of prayer began: the Sabbath, which is both the terminus a quo and the terminus ad quem of all prayerful action. However, the memory of the decisive emphasis on the Sabbath in the doctrine of creation sits rather uneasily alongside the ethics of reconciliation (in which there are just two references to the Sabbath).87 It would 85 86 87

ChrL, p. 172. Ibid., p. 263, rev. See Ibid., pp. 31, 168.

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seem that the earlier claim that ‘prayer as a particular act in some sense repeats and represents the Sabbath in the rest of the week’ is not sufficiently followed through in these late drafts.88 In the remainder of this chapter, I suggest two ways that the Sabbath could be profitably integrated into the ethical fragment, thereby introducing alternative models of political behaviour. The first concerns the terminus a quo of human action. The argument advanced in an earlier chapter of this book ran along the lines that, for Barth, human action, in order to count as human action, must flow from the prior activity of the sabbatical resting with God in the invited space of God’s own rest. As noted in Chapter 2, Barth writes that ‘each week, instead of being a trying ascent, ought to have been a glad descent from the high-point of the Sabbath’.89 The reframing of contemplation in light of the Sabbath means, for Barth, that sabbatical contemplation is distinguished from the type of ethical indolence that was found to be so intolerable in his reading of the mystical traditions of contemplative prayer. Understanding contemplation in non-apolitical ways presents an opportunity to apply some of these earlier insights to Barth’s thinking here in the ethical drafts in a way that complements the strong theology of revolt developed in the context of his writings on invocation. Indeed, for this revolt to count as human action, it needs to be understood in terms of beginning, or flowing from, the prior context of the Sabbath rest. One of the sabbatical practices identified in Chapter 2 was the practice of listening. The practice of listening in itself is a different form of political activity to the political activity that is prioritized in the ethical fragment as revolt but is nevertheless no less revolutionary. In his lecture on the theme of ‘The World’s Disorder and God’s Design’ at the 1948 World Council of Churches meeting, for example, Barth argues that political theology should begin not with the disorder of the world but with the peace and joy of God’s orderly design: Sabbatfreude even. In this instance, Barth suggests that political activity should begin not with action but with the (sabbatical) practices of listening and receiving, with God telling ‘us what he thinks of us and wishes for us’.90 Although this emphasis on the political priority of listening is somewhat muted by the time of the ethical drafts, Barth’s ethics nevertheless always assumes that the ethical agent must await divine speech in particular political situations and space must be made to hear the unexpected interruptions of the Word of God. From this act of listening to the command of God, the ethical agent learns how 88 89 90

III/4, p. 89. III/1, p. 228. Karl Barth, ‘No Christian Marshall Plan’, The Christian Century 65 (1948), pp. 1330–3 (133).

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to listen wisely to others.91 Barth argues that the Sabbath is not only the day for listening to God and for listening to God again but is also the day set apart from the rest of the week for making ‘closer contact with others and opening oneself more to them than on other days, listening to them’.92 Similarly, Bonhoeffer writes that: The first service one owes to others in the community involves listening to them. Just as our love of God begins with listening to God’s Word, the beginning of love for other Christians is learning to listen to them. God’s love for us is shown by the fact that God not only gives us God’s Word, but also lends us God’s ear. We do God’s work for our brothers and sisters when we learn to listen to them.93

Drawing on Bonhoeffer, Bretherton argues that ‘listening is the constitutive political act’ and later suggests, interestingly, that this listening is actually a process of ‘active contemplation’.94 It is through listening, primarily to the Word of God, that one is able ‘to make increasingly just, wise, and faithful political judgments’.95 This says something about the relation between contemplation and action: listening of a contemplative sort transforms action as well as gives rise to action. Moreover, it is in a particularly contemplative form of prayer that the idolatries of power lying at the very heart of Barth’s conception of the lordless powers are most deeply addressed. It is first in listening to the command of God, enabled by the space-making practice of contemplation, that the desires and devises of our own hearts are brought into correspondence with the divine desire. This is an ongoing process. The idolatries need to be identified and smashed one by one (leviathan, mammon, ideologies, each of the chthonic forces), which is perhaps why Barth is so descriptive in his account of the powers. It is in this deep sort of prayer, or contemplative waiting on the divine, that the idolatries of power are intercepted at their conception and transformed from within into that which is just, wise and faithful. ‘In the presupposition of the inner change of individual Christians, then, the kingdom of God comes in the event of the 91

92 93

94

95

For a more developed account of ‘wise listening’, see Rachel Muers, Keeping God’s Silence: Towards a Theological Ethics of Communication (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 124. III/4, p. 70. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together and Prayerbook of the Bible, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 5, Geffrey B. Kelly (eds), (trans. Daniel W. Bloesch and James Burtness; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), p. 98. As Bretherton puts it: ‘listening [as a political act] overcomes the antimony between the vita activa and the vita contemplativa’, Christianity and Contemporary Politics, pp. 100–1. Ibid., p. 145.

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establishment, increase, and order of the Church on the basis and under the direction of the Holy Spirit and his gifts, and then in a successive reordering of confused human relationships through the ministry of the Church.’96 Although to a certain extent the space for listening must be assumed by the fact that prayer (and therefore the hearing of the divine command) has taken place, here in the ethical drafts, Barth does not sufficiently draw out these aspects of the sabbatical terminus a quo.97 The second way the Sabbath might profitably be integrated into the ethical fragment concerns the terminus ad quem, the destination of prayerful action. In one of the two direct references to the Sabbath in these drafts, Barth writes that the ethical agent is ‘told to turn to God with longing for the great and final day … the Sabbath day of the light of God which abolishes all the division of the present’.98 The Sabbath determines that radical conflict and revolt is not conflict and revolt for the sake of conflict but for the sake of overcoming conflict, of getting beyond revolt. It means that human revolt is not unrestrained rebellion but is rebellion for God’s sake that will one day end. A sobering limitation (and limit, as we have said, is not a pejorative word for Barth) is imposed on an ethic of revolt by the Sabbath, which brings human action under an eschatological reservation. Part of this limitation is a refusal to identify liberation with a specific socio-political strategy or agenda; here political rebellion and action would succumb to exactly the type of ideology that Barth is revolting against and become itself a lordless power. For Barth, ‘God has fixed a goal, continually visible in the sign of this [Sabbath] day, to the working time of creation – a goal of its existence which cannot be attained by toil and conflict, marking the end of the way of toil and conflict.’99 The Sabbath therefore inserts a proleptic vision 96 97

98 99

ChrL, p. 242. The contemplative dimension might be assumed in Barth’s admission that Christians must ‘wait and hasten toward the dawn of God’s day’. But even here there is strong privileging of the hastening over the waiting: ‘They wait by hastening. Their waiting takes place in the hastening. Aiming at God’s kingdom, established on its coming and not on the status quo, they do not just look toward it but run toward it as fast as their feet will carry them’, ChrL, p. 263. ChrL, p. 168. III/1, p. 218. However, this concern for the end of political conflict is quite different to the way Boulton imagines the ending of invocation itself. Boulton’s notion of prayer as simultaneously sinful and reconciled, which is pursued throughout God against Religion (but especially pp. 184– 94), leads him to the assumption that there will be one day when the simul dialectic will cease. ‘Liturgy will end. Prayer and praise will end … and so will worship.’ In this view, ‘all work will end, giving away to rest, to play, to Sabbath’, Boulton, God against Religion, p. 184. The proposal is more of an implication of Boulton’s idiosyncratic interpretation of Luther’s simul than a close engagement with Barth’s texts – in fact, there is not one textual reference to the ethics of reconciliation in this section. While the revolt, rebellion and conflict of prayer will finally give way to something altogether different and in its place will be the pure and superabundant freedom, rest and joy – that great sabbatical triplet of Sabbatfreiheit, Sabbatfeier und Sabbatfreude – invocation itself will

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of the end of conflict in the midst of active revolt. There can be no rebellion for the sake of rebellion, no revolt for the sake of revolt, no conflict for the sake of conflict but rebellion, revolt and conflict ‘for the actualization of a very different possibility’: the possibility of Sabbatfeier.100 Indeed, Barth’s Jeremian vision of human righteousness told in the section on fiat iustitia (§78.4) is very much described in sabbatical terms. It is based on ‘freedom, peace, and joy’, the freedom, peace and joy of the Sabbath.101

Summary Barth’s theology of prayer is both lived and written. Barth was led by prayer into a life of prophetic resistance that swam constantly against the stream (ecclesiastically and theologically as well as politically). It is unsurprising that an ethic of revolt would feature in his mature writings on prayer just as it had been lived throughout his life. If prayer does not amount to public action in revolt against that which causes oppression, then it amounts to nothing (in fact, Nothingness). This poses a prophetic and deeply relevant critique of any easy acquiescence the Church might have to the status quo. However, given the pervasiveness of the theme, some critical questions might be raised regarding the appropriateness of so strong a prioritization of an ethic of revolt in the ethics of reconciliation. Although there should be no removal of political rebellion as an effective mode of Christian action, the rhetoric of revolt should also be balanced by an appreciation of other, less muscular modes of action: modes of action drawn, perhaps, from another passage from Jeremiah, this time the plea to the Babylonian diaspora to bring about revolution slowly and from within existing structures of powers (Jer. 29.5). Barth’s insistence, which is fuelled by his repetitious deployment of militaristic rhetoric, that ‘in all circumstances the Christian is summoned and is in a position to rebel against this plight, to rise up against it, [and] to enter into conflict against it’ and that all Christians exist under ‘a binding requirement to engage in specific uprising’

surely never end. Whatever else invocation is, Barth insists that it is an eschatological event and, according to such a view, the eschatological future is anticipated here in the present. Invocation, then, is understood precisely as the stuff of the end times: heaven will abound in invocation. The ‘completely changed conditions of the last time’, IV/1, p. 32, will finally be a time when we invoke God face-to-face, finally praying as we ought. 100 ChrL, p. 207. 101 Ibid., p. 266 = DcL, p. 461. See III/1, p. 221 for Barth’s discussion of the Sabbath as ‘blessedness, freedom, joy, rest and – it may be added – peace’.

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of revolt might be too one-sided.102 However, despite these quibbles, there is something of considerable significance in the Church Dogmatics ending on this politically charged, if sometimes exaggerated, note. More than anything else, it makes the claim that the Christian life of prayer is demanding, costly and difficult.

102

ChrL, pp. 207, 211.

7

Conclusion

Human thought and speech cannot be about God, but must be directed toward God. –Karl Barth1 Through a close reading of some of the key texts in the Barthian corpus, this book has sought to reveal something of the centrality of prayer in Karl Barth’s theological and ethical vision and some of the complex ways in which he holds to the ‘integrity’ of prayer and theology. ‘Human thought and speech’, Barth insists, ‘cannot be about God, but must be directed toward God’ in prayer. Along the way, this book has presented a number of closely intertwined arguments: the common accusation of a contemplative poverty in Barth’s writings can be reassessed through a novel reading of his theology of the Sabbath – which involved asking probing questions concerning the validity of his handling of the mystical traditions; although petition is prioritized strongly, it is not without its own set of problems; and the turn to invocation contains an extremely rich and suggestive experiment in the theology of prayer. The turn to invocation shed new light on old debates. For example, it helped to alleviate some of the agential tensions that have clouded the reception of his mature doctrine of baptism and it helped to respond to some of the longstanding (related) charges that his account of divine-human participation is unsatisfying and his pneumatology weak. This exposed common ground between the pneumatological turn in Barth’s mature writings and some exciting developments in contemporary writings on pneumatology that likewise emphasize the priority of the Spirit in prayer. Developing the political implications of invocation, I hope, helped to secure my argument

1

ET, p. 164. Similarly, in 1956 Barth wrote that ‘the fundamental form of theology is … prayer’, see Karl Barth, ‘The Humanity of God’, in The Humanity of God (trans. John Newton Thomas and Thomas Wieser; Richmond: Westminster John Knox Press, 1960), pp. 37–65 (57).

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that the ethics of reconciliation contains Barth’s most articulated account of prayer: it is prayer’s final resting place in the Church Dogmatics. Without detracting from the rich achievements of his theology of prayer, it is important to point to a final, pressing issue on which Barth might not fully deliver. A question that remains is whether Barth specifies a suitably secure place for issues of human continuity, growth and development. This is not to say that the concept of spiritual growth is eliminated altogether in Barth’s theology (in the way that Hauerwas thinks it is, for example) but rather that it should have held a more prominent position in the specific context of his theology of prayer.2 The failure to examine more precisely how the gradual, spiritual sanctification of the ethical agent takes place remains a weakness, or at least an unresolved issue, in Barth’s presentation of Christian discipleship as suggested in his theology of prayer. At a number of points in this book, Barth’s thought has made it difficult to speak in terms of human development and maturity. An eschatological Krisis is positioned against any note of ethical triumphalism so that human prayer before God is rendered fragile and tentative. For Barth, prayer is prayed only by ‘beginners’ and the ethical agent never more than a ‘child’ of God. ‘What Christians do becomes a self-contradiction when it takes the form of a trained and mastered routine, of a learned and practised art.’3 The previous chapter also noted that Barth’s politics of prayer says lots about revolt but less about the ongoing, deepening and long-term spiritual transformation of all things. Involved here is too complex a set of issues to think through in close detail how Barth might cater better for the ‘more and more’ aspects in his presentation of the Christian life. It would require careful attention not only on the actualistic way he develops the doctrine of sanctification but also on the type of theological ontology with which Barth is working, an ontology that is controlled by his doctrine of election.4 My response to this set of issues

2

3 4

For such a critique, see Stanley Hauerwas, Character and the Christian Life: A Study in Theological Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994) and Hauerwas, ‘On Honour’, p. 149; see also, George Hunsinger, ‘A Tale of Two Simultaneities: Justification and Sanctification in Calvin and Barth’, in John C. McDowell and Mike Higton (eds), Conversing with Barth (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 68–89. For a defence of Barth on this issue, see William Werpehowski, ‘Command and History in the Ethics of Karl Barth’, The Journal of Religious Ethics 9.2 (1981), pp. 298–320; Biggar, The Hastening that Waits, pp. 123–45; Nimmo, Being in Action, pp. 163–7 and Daniel L. Migliore, ‘Participatio Christi: The Central Theme in Barth’s Doctrine of Sanctification’, Zeitschrift für dialektische Theologie 18.3 (2002), pp. 286–307 (298–300) – none of these commentators refer specifically to Barth’s theology of prayer, however. ChrL, p. 79. See Bruce L. McCormack, ‘Afterword’, Zeitschrift für dialektische Theologie 18.3 (2001), pp. 364– 78 (369).

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therefore can be no more than suggestive – and I propose three potential lines of enquiry. First, ending where we began, fruitful reparative connections could be made with the mystical traditions of spirituality, in which sanctification tends to be much more of a gradual and developmental process. There is an emphasis in these traditions on progress over act. Second, a more pronounced pneumatology – and Barth’s account of invocation is certainly moving in this direction – could provide the resources needed to develop a more articulated account of the full complexity of the Christian life. And third, a better sense of the deepening aspects of the Christian life might be found in Barth’s reflections on the very task of theology. It is on this point and others relating to his commitment to the integrity of theology and prayer that this book will end.

The integrity of prayer and theology Throughout Barth’s writings, there is an unavoidable and inextricable connection between prayer and theological thinking. It is in the crucible of prayer that the mind is formed towards its proper end: knowing and loving God.5 Barth should, then, be emerging as an able resource to help in the ongoing task of dispelling the lamentable distinction that is so often drawn between formal academic theological discourse and prayerful practices. That Barth is seized by the mesmeric hold of the lex orandi, lex credendi and committed to the essential ‘unity of prayer and theological work’ is particularly evident in the very final lecture series that marked the end of his distinguished academic career – published in 1963 as Evangelical Theology.6 As noted in the introductory chapter, Barth’s point in the swansong lectures is that the theologian and the pray-er do not occupy two separate (or even concentric) spaces but rather a space in which the theologian’s talking about God, if it is to count as theology, is made real only in the event of it being addressed to God in prayer. I want to reflect briefly on the chapter on prayer in Evangelical Theology to reveal something of Barth’s take on the riches of the prayer-theology relation. Four interrelated themes guide what follows – prayer as ‘bold humility’, ‘openness’, ‘disruption’ and ‘transformation’.7

5

6 7

On the theme of the liturgy (particularly Common Worship’s liturgy of Holy Communion) as a ‘school’ of formation, see Mike Higton, A Theology of Higher Education (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 143–69. ET, p. 161. For a stimulating engagement with the chapter on prayer in Evangelical Theology, see McDowell, ‘ “Openness to the World” ’.

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Modelling a theology that ‘begins again at the beginning’, in these lectures Barth returns to someone who had contributed to the clarification of his own theological thinking over thirty years earlier: Anselm of Canterbury. Barth gave a lecture on Anselm’s ontological proofs as found in Chapters 2–4 of the Proslogion in the summer of 1930 and in the same summer semester repeated his 1926 Göttingen seminars on Anselm’s Cur Deus homo to his new students at Bonn. The fruit of these studies was the publication of his (hotly debated) Anselm book and the further refinement of a theological methodology that would go on to fund his thinking in the Church Dogmatics. Whatever else Barth learned from Anselm, he found in him an example of doing theology where theological thinking is at the very same time prayer.8 For Barth, the fact that Anselm begins his Proslogion with prayer, which forms the first and longest chapter of the text, gives the so-called ‘proofs’ for the existence of God a fundamentally different meaning. Under the conditions of prayer, Anselm does not at all set out to prove God’s existence but seeks an understanding of God based on a prior position of the faith that is expressed primarily in prayer. The first chapter of the Proslogion, then, expresses the theologian’s dependence on and longing for the divine: ‘Come then, Lord my God, teach my heart where and how to seek You, where and how to find You.’9 It is God who teaches how to seek God and it is God who leads the theologian to the site of revelation on which all understanding is based. Indeed, as his biographer Eadmer reports, the very argument Anselm pursues in the Proslogion was revealed to him as a divine gift during Matins.10 To this divine teaching and leading that precedes all theological thinking, the theologian responds, like thunder follows lightning, with gratitude. ‘I give thanks, good Lord, I give thanks to You, since what I believed before through Your free gift I now so understand through Your illumination, that if I did not want to believe that You existed, I should nevertheless be unable to understand it.’11 8

9

10

11

If there is a ‘vital key’ to Anselm’s theology then it is here, in prayer. Anselm’s role in the development of Barth’s dogmatic project, and specifically the extent to which it brings about a shift from a dialectical to an analogical way of theology, is highly contested, of course. Since the publication of McCormack’s landmark study, it is generally accepted that Balthasar (and indeed Barth) overestimated the novelty of the Anselm book in terms of his theological method – see Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth and Bruce L. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909–1936 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). Anselm, ‘Proslogion’, in Brian Davies and G. R. Evans (eds), Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 82–104 (84–5). See Eadmer, The Life of St Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury (trans. R. W. Southern; London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. xix. Anselm, ‘Proslogion’, p. 89.

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For Barth, Anselm’s prayerful theological methodology was more complex than a simple bookending of doctrine with prayer. He writes that Anselm ‘actually unfolded all that he had to say concerning God’s existence and essence in the form of direct address to God, as a single prayer from beginning to end’.12 The result is the fusing of prayer and theology to such an integrated extent that the distinction between the two modes of discourse is lost altogether: where prayer ends and theology begins in Anselm’s writings is never altogether clear. Prayer is the very language of theology for Anselm, as it was for Barth also. Following his teacher, Barth writes, ‘implicitly and explicitly, proper theology will have to be … prayer’.13 These Anselmian themes of longing, dependency, gratitude and grace bring us back to Barth’s theology of prayer. In his writings on prayer, these themes come together as what might be called the ‘bold humility’ of the theological task; a task marked by precarious fragility and an audacious confidence in equal measure. Theology is undertaken, Barth writes in these lectures, ‘amid great distress’, undertaken on one’s knees in an obviously penitential way.14 Yet ‘precisely in humility … courage [is] taken’.15 In other words, prayer is about the realization that the brokenness of theological thinking brings one to their knees in a prayer that is humble confession of the incompleteness of all human language and, simultaneously, courageous petition for that human language to be made real by the grace of God. In this sense, Barth writes, ‘theological work does not merely begin with prayer and is not merely accompanied by it; in its totality it is peculiar and characteristic of theology that it can be performed only in the act of prayer’.16 It is suggestive that at this point Barth draws on another staple of the tradition of Christian spirituality, this time the Benedictine rule, ora et labora, to help him think through more carefully the idea of theology as prayerperformance. Where theology is concerned, the rule Ora et labora! is valid under all circumstances – pray and work! And the gist of this rule is not merely that orare, although should be the beginning, would afterward be only incidental 12

13 14 15 16

ET, pp. 164–5. See also, Karl Barth, Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum (trans. Ian W. Robertson; London: SCM Press, 1960). ET, p. 165. Ibid., p. 159. Ibid. Ibid., p. 160. I have explored this theme elsewhere, see my ‘Prayer’, in Kent Eilers and Kyle H. Strobel (eds), Sanctified by Grace: A Theology of the Christian Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 187–201.

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to the execution of the laborare. The rule means, moreover, that the laborare itself, and as such, is essentially an orare. Work must be that sort of act that has the manner and meaning of a prayer in all its dimensions, relationships, and movements.17

On Barth’s reading, the ‘et’ takes on an important qualifying role so that the ways of ‘prayer’ and theological ‘work’ are not imagined to be independent or sequential but one and the same.18 In other words, the conjunction insists on a reordering of theological work through the practice of prayer so that prayer is not some sort of liturgical prefix or addendum tacked on before or after the more important business of dogmatic work but is in fact the very stuff of theology and, likewise, theology is the stuff of prayer. An understanding of the theological task that takes seriously the ora et labora also prevents prayer from slipping into an anti-intellectual devotional realm. Prayer is not in any sense anti-intellectual but is that which expands the capacity for the mind to respond to the trinitarian God – we have already noted the trinitarian structure prayer brings (admittedly in obscure ways) to one’s conception of God. Indeed, this account of knowing is very much compatible with the type of pneumatology developed in Chapter 5: to know the triune God is to be led into the truth of that knowledge by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of truth. But that knowing, which is always darkly difficult, is dependent on a ‘special movement’ that prayerfully reorders one’s desires and loosens the mind from the grip of the idolatries of thought that subtly distort one’s reasoning.19 In prayer, the mind is ineluctably expanded to perceive new vistas of thought. In addition to the theme of bold humility, the idea of theological ‘openness’ is key in Barth’s final reflections on prayer. Theology’s openness (to the Church, to the world and to the interruptive priority of God) resonates with an important theme in Barth’s account of prayer: ‘ec-centricity’, that prayer takes the pray-er beyond the self. Without prayer, the theologian is left in a ‘closed, barred, stuffy, and unlit room’, as Barth describes, and may well be performing hard work but ‘exists basically alone’ – an incubator that breeds idolatries of thought.20 The theological openness founded in prayer, and on which Barth insists the project of theology depends, is an openness that is unsettling, disruptive and destabilizing. Prayer in this sense protects against

17 18 19 20

ET, p. 160. See McDowell, ‘ “Openness to the World” ’, p. 257. ChrL, p. 90. ET, pp. 161, 162.

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theology’s systematic closure and finality. There is clearly a connection to be made here between the idea of prayer’s role in securing theology’s openness and his rejection of certain forms of natural theology. Just as Barth’s suspicion of forms of natural theology aimed to disrupt self-enclosed theologies and expose the danger of thinking we can ‘know’ God, so too prayer disrupts the theologian’s propensity to find a way to God apart from the special revelation of that God. Barth’s ‘critically realistic’ starting-point, to use McCormack’s important term, is the self-positing God who objectively places humanity in relation to Godself; and this is a relation of prayer.21 In the place of prolegomena is prayer. Theology does not arrive at faith, then, but is always already an act of faith, or better, an exercise in faithful thinking-after (Nachdenken) the revelation of the radically uncontainable God undertaken in the openness, freedom and fragility of prayer. The very practice of theology is absolutely dependent, therefore, upon being addressed by the reality of a prior agency in such a way that does not extinguish but invites a subsequent human response in the form of a faith that seeks not only understanding but also holiness, love and wisdom.22 For Barth, it is simply inconceivable to arrive at an understanding of God apart from a real encounter with the divine in prayer. Thus all theology worthy of the name, as mentioned above, is all about divine teaching and begins by beseeching God for instruction. Said differently, theology like prayer is gift. This book has made repeated pleas to reconceive prayer in terms of gift. Prayer is a movement of grace that, in a carefully qualified sense, ‘begins’ in God, ends in God and incorporates humanity along the way.23 As with prayer, so here: theological work originates in the gift of God and follows that same metaphor of movement. To know God is to participate in the divine knowing. To pray is to participate in the divine prayer. To begin at any point other than our being, as it were, in media res would surely be nonsense, just as it would be nonsensical to think of prayer as anything other than entering into a divine conversation already in play.24 If ‘the first and basic act of theological work is prayer’, the 21 22 23

24

See McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, p. 159. On this, see Ford, Christian Wisdom, pp. 3–4, 264–72. The word ‘begins’ is used is the loosest possible way since, as Speyr writes, ‘prayer has no beginning’ because the prayer of the Father, Son and Spirit is an eternal one, see Adrienne von Speyr, The World of Prayer (trans. Graham Harrison; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1985), p. 28. The idea of prayer as ‘gift’, again, finds historical precedence in Evagrius’ treatise on prayer: ‘If you want to pray, you need God who gives prayer to the one who prays’, see Evagrius, ‘On Prayer’, p. 192. On theology always beginning in the middle of things, see John Webster, ‘Principles of Systematic Theology’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 11.1 (2009), pp. 56–71 (66) and Williams, On Christian Theology, p. xii.

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first thing the theologian does in prayer is listen to the priority of the divine Word that stands over, against and before all that is said and done.25 For all the astonishing prolixity of a text like the Church Dogmatics, everything that Barth says about the God to whom he prays begins from this posture of attentive listening to the priority of God’s overwhelming speech. Third, then, prayer is disruptive. Just as the divine Word breaks into the world and radically announces a changed order, theology, Barth writes, ‘cannot proceed by building with complete confi dence on the foundation of questions that are already settled, results that are already achieved, or conclusions that are already arrived at’.26 Prayer unsettles familiar patterns of reasoning and forces the kneeling work done by theologians always to ‘begin anew at the beginning’.27 Much has been said, for example, about the importance of practices of prayer in disrupting ‘already achieved answers’ in the development of Christian doctrine: the eruption of thanks and praise to Jesus Christ in the early Church led to a radical rethinking of the doctrine of God.28 Rather than proceeding with the confidence of doctrinal security, practices of prayer provided the raw material for the subsequent creedal commitment to the divine status of the person of Jesus Christ.29 In an importance sense, doctrine is always playing catch-up with practices of prayer.30 Writing on the interpretations of the Lord’s Prayer from a period in the Church’s history during which doctrinal disagreement was more than rife, Barth insists that ‘if believers can pray together … doctrinal differences can only be of a secondary nature’.31 Thus prayer, for Barth, keeps the wax and wane of doctrinal disagreement in some sort of check. Although Barth might here be seen to lend weight to the argument that doctrine is to be subordinated to practices of prayer,32 his interpretation of the lex orandi, 25 26 27 28

29

30

31 32

ET, p. 160. Ibid., p. 165. Ibid. On this, see Maurice F. Wiles, The Making of Christian Doctrine: A Study in the Principles of Early Doctrinal Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 62–93; Daniel W. Hardy and David F. Ford, Living in Praise: Worshipping and Knowing God (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2005), pp. 155–72 and Wainwright, Doxology, pp. 218–83. For more on the humanity of Christ in prayer, see Jungmann, The Place of Christ in Liturgical Prayer. For example, Coakley’s argument on the emergence of trinitarian doctrine in Coakley, God, Sexuality and the Self, pp. 100–51. Prayer, p. 5. For these arguments, see Paul L. Gavrilyuk, ‘Canonical Liturgies: The Dialectic of Lex Orandi and Lex Credendi’, in William J. Abraham, Jason E. Vickers and Natalie B. Van Kirk (eds), Canonical Theism: A Proposal for Theology and the Church (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2008), pp. 61–72.

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lex credendi is not so one-sided. It was his doctrinal commitments, after all, that forced his eventual denial of the sacramental status of baptism and the Lord’s Supper and his related rejection of the practice of infant baptism. It follows that in an equally important sense, prayer makes little sense without doctrine. It is through doctrine that practices of prayer are described, interpreted and understood.33 The role of prayer, however, is more broadly disruptive than the unsettling effect it has on particular doctrines and their development. More generally, prayer’s disruptiveness serves to destabilize the neatness of our talk about God and to clear a space in which language is given to God to be returned with some sort of meaning and significance. Just as Barth is quite clear that there can be no ‘mastery’ of prayer,34 there can be no theological mastery, without a loss of what Williams calls ‘theological honesty’.35 For Barth, prayer is most disruptive when it brings about a realization that the object of theological work ‘is not some thing but some one’; and precisely because God ‘is not some thing’, our talking about God is not the same type of talking as the talking about ‘things’.36 I address God not as an object to be studied but as ‘Thou’, the inconceivable Other who has drawn inconceivably near to me, the one who speaks to me through the Church, the world and God’s Word and Spirit. Since divine speech ‘is no neutral announcement, but rather the critical moment of history and the communion between God and man’, it takes on iconoclastic significance.37 Being prayerfully led into a participation in Christ’s prayer involves a process of purgative assault on ongoing idolatries of thought – of patriarchy, of idolatries of lordless power and oppression, of conceptual finality, of the success of the very words we use to speak about God.38 33

34 35 36 37 38

Elsewhere, Wiles famously argued that practices of prayer sometimes had an inappropriate impact on the development of early Christian doctrine. For example, he argues that the lex orandi and early baptismal practices pushed thinking about the hypostatization of the Holy Spirit far beyond that which was warranted by Scripture, see Maurice F. Wiles, ‘Some Reflections on the Origins of the Doctrine of the Trinity’, Journal of Theological Studies 8.1 (1957), pp. 92–106. See ChrL, p. 105. Williams, ‘Theological Integrity’, p. 13. ET, p. 163. Ibid., pp. 163–4. There is a reason why, for example, Pseudo-Dionysius begins his exasperatingly apophatic The Mystical Theology in the brightness (albeit of a darkened sort) of prayer. This is no retreat into piety. Instead, by beginning with a prayer to the Trinity a connection is being made between his iconoclasm-project that questions and destabilizes the neatness of human speech about God and the way one prays to that God: idolatry is principally a doxological problem and therefore iconoclasm is for the purification of prayer as much as the purgation of idolatries of thought. Moreover, beginning in prayer sets the order of knowing. Speaking about God comes from God, it is gift and therefore it is undertaken in gift itself: prayer. On how these themes combine in Augustine’s Confessions, see Soskice, ‘The Gift of the Name’, p. 75.

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Despite the colossal verbosity of a text like the Church Dogmatics, the expansiveness of the text’s speech of God is nevertheless undergirded by something of a ‘failure of speech’.39 Speech’s failure can take the form of a reduction to some sort of apophatic silence under the heavy weight of negations piled on top of negations, when words will no longer do. It might also take the form, less recognizably, as McIntosh observes, of ‘an explosion of speech, a carnival of self-subverting discourse, language tripping over itself in paradox or fantastical repetition as it comes undone in the whirlwind of divine superabundance’.40 These apophatic signs are amply present in a text even as explosive in speech, paradox and repetition as the Church Dogmatics. The deluge of words that form the Church Dogmatics was constantly running away from him, which meant that Barth was only just beginning to scratch the surface of ‘divine superabundance’. However, the rapidity of the text, those many millions of words that draw so liberally on affirmative statements about God, does slow down, in fact, to a point of silence before the trinitarian God. That silence that is not the conclusion of all the things to be said about God, or even a silence that is silencing of further speech, but is the occasion for meditation about whom there is always more to be said. Indeed, Barth’s admission that he could have said all that he said in Church Dogmatics from the perspective of the third article suggests that Christian theology is tasked with saying one thing, three ways about a thing that is no thing at all but the trinitarian God.41 It is important that the Church Dogmatics grounds to a halt at the exact point at which he goes deepest into the theology of prayer because, for Barth, it is in prayer, and its ‘bold humility’ as detailed above, that the failure of speech simultaneously finds its possibility. It is in prayer that human words are given over to God to be transformed and therefore made able to say something true and positive about God.42 For Barth, then, human ‘thought and speech cannot be about God, but must be directed toward God, called into action by the divine thought and speech directed to men, and following and corresponding to this work of God’.43 This

39 40 41

42

43

See Turner, The Darkness of God, p. 20. McIntosh, Mystical Theology, p. 124. See Karl Barth, ‘Concluding Unscientific Postscript on Schleiermacher’, pp. 261–79, 278 and Nicholas Lash, Believing Three Ways in One God: A Reading of the Apostles’ Creed (London: SCM, 1992). As Lash writes: ‘In liturgy and attentive contemplation, praise and prayer, we may learn to give back our language, and our understanding, and ourselves; learn patience, the surrender of security, sometimes in darkness not unlike Gethsemane’, Lash, Believing Three Ways in One God, p. 81. ET, p. 164.

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reference to ‘correspondence’ should not go unnoticed given the results of Chapter 4. The motif is used in a variety of ways in Barth’s writings but here it is used to suggest that knowledge of God is never just knowing but is better understood as a deep sort of correspondence, or participation, through the Son, in the life of the triune God: by participating in Christ, we are taken up into ‘fellowship in His knowledge of God’.44 This sense of participation means that the very pursuit of theology is surely inseparable from a deepening in holiness. Theology as much as prayer is intended for pilgrimage people.45 This leads to the final theme to be considered: ‘transformation.’ These mature reflections on prayer, theology and their inseparability reveal what Barth assumed throughout his life: that his theology not only began, ended and was punctuated throughout with prayer but that all that Barth said about God was said first and foremost to God. His theology was prayer. In this light, the Church Dogmatics can be read as a spiritual text. One of the distinctive marks of a theology that takes spiritual concerns seriously is the significance of writing itself. The theological text is to be much more than a container of dogmatic information about the subject matter (‘God’). Instead, the text is to lead the reader somewhere, to a place of ‘being’ different. Told on a very grand scale, Barth’s theology is a story about being ‘led by the hand’, as it were, deeper into the divine life.46 There is detectable, then, in Barth’s writings on prayer a double-transformation: of idolatrous images of God and, simultaneously (as described in Chapter 5), a spiritual transformation of the one who prays.

44 45 46

II/1, p. 253. See ChrL, p. 8. On the idea of texts leading-by-the-hand into some sort of participation, see Peter M. Candler, Theology, Rhetoric, Manuduction, or Reading Scripture Together on the Path to God (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2006). Candler’s thesis, however, depends on an unhelpful and false opposition between pre- and modern texts. Pre-modern texts (such as Thomas’ Summa) are celebrated for their rhetorical skilfulness in ‘manducting’ the reader through a process of transformation into participating in the life of God. Somewhere along the line, texts became less participative and therefore less successful at leading the reader ‘by the hand’ into God. And Candler is particularly scathing of a text like the Church Dogmatics, which he likens to an encyclopaedia – a genre of text that represents just how devastatingly non-participative theological texts have become, see Candler, Theology, Rhetoric, Manuduction, p. 21. On this reading, the Church Dogmatics is simply a container of extractable information about God. For the reasons that will be identified below, Barth (who was well honoured for his rhetorical flair) employs certain rhetorical devices to propel the reader through a process of transformation. The famous recapitulations and even the construction of his argument into three complementary sections (of bold thesis, normal-print and small-print) serve as devices to propel the reader through the text. For a more nuanced account of the link between prayer, transformation and text (and one that is not propped up by an unhelpful unilateral reading of history), see McIntosh, Mystical Theology, pp. 119–48; for more on Barth’s investment in rhetoric, see Stephen H. Webb, Re-figuring Theology: The Rhetoric of Karl Barth (Albany : State University of New York Press, 1991).

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By the time the reader arrives at the fourth volume, all this is made very explicit. Framed around an improvisation of the parable of the prodigal son, the doctrine of reconciliation forms a curious play on those staples of the spiritual tradition: the metaphors of descent and ascent. The first part-volume of the Church Dogmatics, which considers the priestly office of Christ, is about the going-out of God from Godself; it is about the journeying (or the descent) of the Son of God into the depths of the far country. This is complemented by a description of the reverse of the movement, the coming-back to God, in the second part-volume, which considers the royal office of Christ; it is about the homecoming (or the ascent) of the Son of Man. Barth has taken a theme prevalent in the Christian spiritual traditions and not only made it explicitly christological but also articulated it narratively, through the biblical story of the prodigal son. Owing something to this narratival form, the fourth volume is written in such a way that invites the reader precisely into that story of reconciliation. In this sense, the reader finds herself participating in the very motion of ascent Barth is describing. The ethical agent interprets her life within this larger movement. Christ’s narrative becomes our narrative. This is part of the liturgical rhetoric of the text that carries the reader on a journey of transformation onwards and upwards, participating in Christ’s homecoming, to see as Christ sees, theoria, the vision of God.47 Given this, might it be that Barth did not feel the need to treat spiritual progress as an isolated theologoumenon because it is woven into the very structure of his writing? If so, the deepening aspects of the Christian life are implied on every page of his writings. Everything Barth writes is for the purpose of drawing the reader further and deeper into the mysteries of God. And it is simply unthinkable that one could seek a deeper theological understanding of God without that being exactly a growth in holiness. However, the endless possibilities of how that process of growth is ‘actualized’ in the particular lives of Christians is too unpredictable to be described at anything other than the highest levels of generality. Prayer is where the Church Dogmatics literally ends. It is also the overall implication of his theology. In the ethical fragment, this curious confusion of theology and prayer becomes explicit. One of the main arguments advanced in this book is that there is something of considerable significance in the incomplete lectures on the ethics of the doctrine of reconciliation. What can be found in these posthumously published lectures is an extraordinarily 47

This also accords with Balthasar’s idea that, ‘from volume to volume’, the polemical edge that defined the early volumes of the Church Dogmatics is soften by an edging ever closer to the ‘tranquil, attentive contemplation (theoria) of revelation’, see Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 1, p. 56.

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compelling, if incomplete, investigation of prayer. This is partly due to the descriptive range of the concept of invocation and the consummate skill with which Barth unfolds his understanding of prayer and partly because the ethics of reconciliation is not merely a set of dogmatic reflections on prayer, though it is that too, but at points bursts into the act of prayer itself in a way that is quite unlike Barth, though parallels how Anselm (and, of course, Augustine) played with the complex fusing of prayer and theology.48 The Christian Life is both a text on the petitions of Lord’s Prayer and also actually prayer. It integrates liturgical sources (mostly hymns but also prayer itself) into formal dogmatic prose and eavesdrops on an uncharacteristic shift from Barth speaking about prayer to Barth speaking to God in prayer.49 This curious genre-confusion gives an arresting and self-involving quality to these late drafts that is not always present in other areas of the Church Dogmatics. This complex interrelating of prayer and theology is also worked out in some of Barth’s other writings on prayer. For example, in the seminars on the Lord’s Prayer delivered in Neuchâtel, Barth effortlessly moves from talking about prayer into the actual act of prayer itself.50 One of the Reformation confessions from which Barth is drawing in his Neuchâtel seminars is the Heidelberg Catechism of 1563.51 The final, third part of that catechism, which suggestively corresponds with the third article of the creed, culminates in a remarkable series of answers to questions on the subject of prayer (Questions 116–129). Remarkable, that is, because unlike earlier parts, on the law of God and on grace in Christ (in which the catechumen addresses the catechist), here, the catechumen turns to address her answers to the questions on prayer directly to God. To the question, ‘What is the third petition?’ is the response in prayer: ‘grant that we and all

48

49 50 51

ChrL, pp. 115–16, 153. For Augustine, see Confessions; for Anselm, see the devotional counterpart to his Cur Deus Homo, the Meditation on Human Redemption in Anselm, The Prayers and Meditations of Saint Anselm (trans. Benedicta Ward; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), pp. 230–7. I have explored the difference the Meditation on Human Redemption makes to dominant readings of Anselm’s atonement theology in more detail here: ‘Prayer’, in Adam J. Johnson (ed.), T&T Clark Companion to the Atonement (New York: T&T Clark, forthcoming). For example, ChrL, pp. 38, 84, 151, 160, 213, 234, 235, 260. See Prayer, pp. 39, 46, 50, 57, 61, 62, 64. See The Heidelberg Catechism, in Mark A. Noll (ed.), Confessions and Catechisms of the Reformation (Leicester: Apollos, 1991), pp. 133–64. While on secondment in the summer semester of 1948 at his old stomping ground of Bonn, Barth delivered a series of lectures on the Heidelberg Catechism. The lectures were transcribed and later translated as Karl Barth, The Heidelberg Catechism for Today (trans. Shirley C. Guthrie; London: Epworth Press, 1964). It is worth noting that Barth sped through the crucial third part of the Catechism with some haste as the semester came to an end. Although Barth offers little more than summary paragraphs on the Catechism’s key questions on prayer, he assures his readers that he ‘intended to explain … the Lord’s Prayer in the context of the whole’ of the text, see Barth, The Heidelberg Catechism for Today, p. 9.

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men may renounce our own will and obey thy will’ (Question 48). Ending on the topic of prayer reminds the catechumen that the formation of Christian discipleship involves far more than learning the catechism. Christian teaching is nothing other than instruction in prayer. Barth’s ending on the topic of prayer reveals that same purpose. The point of the entire Church Dogmatics made in its simplest form is that theology is instruction in prayer. However, the effect of this working out of the relation between theology and prayer in the actual text of the Heidelberg Catechism as well as in Barth’s own writings is more than just providing information about prayer. The surprising result of Barth’s pursuit of prayer in theology is that the reader is led into the act of prayer itself. His theology draws one into a new world of understanding, restructures one’s perceptions and undoes familiar patterns of reasoning. One is drawn into a relationship of startling (and transformative) significance with the One Christ calls ‘Abba’. Barth’s theology leads deep into the mysteries of prayer and indeed to prayer itself – to the invocation of the name of God in thanksgiving, praise and petition. It is there, in prayer, that prayer is finally understood. Indeed, as Herbert McCabe aptly puts it: ‘prayer (like loving) is something you only begin to understand … if you do it’.52 And this plea for doing prayer seems to be a rather appropriate place to end this book on prayer.

52

McCabe, God Matters, p. 215.

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197

Index Note: The letter ‘n’ following locators refers to notes actualism 17, 27, 30, 33–34, 52, 149, 170 analogy, see correspondence anarchy 161 Anselm 172–173, 181 apophaticism 36, 92, 93, 123, 143–144, 177–178 Aquinas 7, 92n. 31, 141, 142 Arendt, H. 158n. 63 Asprey, C. 7n. 29 Athanasius 124 Augustine 1, 47, 91–92, 141, 142, 157–158, 159, 160n. 76, 177n. 38, 181 Balthasar, H. Urs von 1, 22, 29, 36, 38, 42n. 104, 52, 57n. 192, 172n. 8, 180n. 47 baptism 16, 17, 18, 23, 70, 87, 91, 99, 104, 116–120, 177 Barth, M. 97n. 61, 118 Becker, P. 153n. 33 Begbie, J. 56n. 191 Berkouwer, G. C. 70n. 55 Bernard of Clairvaux 29, 35n. 73 Biggar, N. 8n. 41, 51n. 164, 89, 170n. 2 Billings, J. T. 2n. 5 Blumhardt, C. 49n. 148 Boff, L. 155n. 42 Bonaventure 35n. 73, 47 Bonhoeffer, D. 164 Boulton, M. M. 4n. 15, 49n. 153, 67n. 37, 75n. 91, 85n. 3, 98, 103n. 96, 127n. 26, 136n. 80, 165n. 99 Bretherton, L. 149n. 9, 151, 164 Brock, B. 41n. 99, 44n. 120, 159n. 69 Brown, J. 40n. 97 Brueggemann, W. 78n. 111 Brümmer, V. 65n. 31 Bunge, G. 28n. 20 Busch, E. 3n. 8, 3n. 10, 4n. 13, 6n. 25, 8n. 41, 15n. 81, 20n. 107, 28n. 18, 57n. 192, 116n. 159, 120n. 181, 154n. 40

Calvin 7, 15–16, 17, 29, 39, 45, 62n. 8, 63n. 11, 67, 74, 123n. 12, 141, 142, 147n. 2 Candler, P. M. 179n. 46 Canlis, J. 2n. 5, 108n. 117 casuistry 51n. 164, 149 children of God 5, 9, 10, 18, 63, 89, 95–96, 111, 113, 133, 144, 170 Christology 5, 13, 31–33, 38, 47, 66, 67–73, 75, 80–81, 85, 92, 106, 108–109, 115, 121, 125, 133, 143, 190 christomonism 69–70, 122 Clements-Jewery, P. 69–70 Clough, D. 27n. 11, 149n. 10 Coakley, S. 34n. 70, 37, 38, 46n. 133, 50n. 156, 94, 124, 126–127, 133, 138, 150n. 15, 176n. 30 command 1, 8–9, 13–16, 34, 40, 51n. 164, 52, 61–64, 69, 73, 86, 88, 89, 90, 104, 106, 149–150, 165 competitive agency 70, 85, 97, 108, 110, 134, 143–145, 161 concursus Dei 120n. 110, 139n. 99 confession 13–14, 16, 40, 44n. 120, 48, 97, 99–100, 104, 173 conflict 152, 154, 162–167 contemplative prayer 6n. 24, 21, 22–23, 27–39, 45–58, 78, 92, 98, 104–107, 113, 118, 137, 150, 163–167 and listening 50–58, 163–165, 176 and meditation 21, 28, 29, 33, 56, 178 correspondence 14, 23, 31, 33, 43, 79–80, 84, 86, 95, 98, 100, 107–116, 119–120, 123, 132, 135, 139–141, 150, 151–153, 160, 164, 178–179 das Nichtige 156, 161 D’Costa, G. 2n. 4 deification 31–32, 35n. 73, 48n. 144, 115–116

Index desire 6n. 24, 48n. 144, 55n. 180, 83n. 1, 94, 106–107, 127, 131, 133–135, 140, 145, 155, 158, 162, 164, 174 divine names 6, 18, 91–96, 115, 119, 138, 139n. 99, 174 hallowing of 18, 42–43, 47, 57, 96, 104, 114, 145, 152–154 see also Father divine perfections 63, 96, 139n. 99, 144 Dix, G. 122n. 8 Drewes, H.–A. 18, 90 Duthie, C. 70n. 54 Elberfeld Lecture 10, 122n. 7, 138 election 63–64, 77 Ellul, J. 161n. 84 Entsprechung, see correspondence epiclesis 101, 103, 119 epistemology 80, 92, 126 eschatology 9–10, 16, 42, 49n. 153, 58, 83n. 1, 89–90, 122, 153, 165 Evagrius of Ponticus 140n. 101, 147n. 2, 175n. 23 Evangelical Theology 21, 32, 171–182 Evans, G. R. 157n. 57 evil 155–160 faithfulness 87–88, 91, 119–120 falsehood 19, 76, 114 Father 5, 8–9, 31, 63, 66, 80, 90, 91–95, 103, 113, 114, 125–126, 133–134, 137–138 Feuerbach, L. 5, 6, 9, 10, 31–32, 66, 70, 93–94, 110, 128, 148 filioque 125–126 Florensky, P. 123n. 11 Ford, D. 22, 83n. 1, 175n. 22, 176n. 28 freedom 11, 14, 40, 44, 50, 62, 64–65, 87–88, 92, 99, 129 future 42, 81–82, 89, 103, 153 Gavrilyuk, P. L. 142n. 113, 143, 176n. 32 Gethsemane 65, 68–69, 71–72, 78n. 111, 132, 152, 161, 178n. 42 gift 13, 15, 32, 44–47, 49, 92–93, 103, 175, 177n. 38 Gignilliat, M. 53n. 169 Glenthøj, J. J. 11n. 55 Goebel, H. T. 67n. 40 Gorringe, T. 149n. 9, 152 Göttingen Dogmatics 6–8, 172

199

Green, C. 12n. 59, 15n. 81 Green, G. 127n. 26, 130n. 44 Greggs, T. 101n. 83, 127n. 26, 134n. 66, 153n. 31 Gunton, G. 101n. 83 Guretzki, D. 125n. 19 Harasta, E. 12n. 59, 78n. 106, 102n. 88 Harnack, A. von 2n. 5, 26, 30, 35 Harrison, C. 51, 135, 147n. 2 Hart, T. 111n. 134 Hauerwas, S. 148n. 7, 149–150, 151, 170 Heidelberg Catechism 15–16, 62n. 7, 181–182 Heiler, F. 25–26, 34 Hendry, G. S. 125n. 19 Herbert, G. 132n. 59 Herlyn, O. 26n. 6, 62n. 7, 93n. 45, 97n. 61, 127n. 26, 131n. 52 Hesselink, I. J. 12n. 59 Hick, J. 157n. 56 Higton, M. 28n. 22, 171n. 5 Holy Saturday 42n. 104 Holy Scripture 20, 32, 51–56 Holy Spirit 4–5, 9–10, 16, 19, 23, 66, 72, 79, 80–82, 84, 89–90, 101, 103, 104, 106–107, 112, 114–115, 117, 119, 121–146, 149, 150, 153, 174 critiques of 124–127 Hughes, J. 40n. 98 Hunsinger, G. 110–112, 116n. 157, 117n. 162, 149n. 9, 161n. 84, 170n. 2 Husbands, M. 12n. 59 iconoclasm 64–66, 140, 177n. 38 idolatry 6, 64–65, 73, 94, 139–140, 147–148, 164, 174, 177, 179 imitatio Christi 79, 133n. 62 incorporation 84, 95, 97, 107, 108, 110, 112, 115, 120, 123, 124, 126–127, 130, 132, 133, 134–145, 150, 152, 175 invocation 11, 17, 18, 20, 21, 23, 49n. 153, 81, 83–120, 122, 123, 127, 131, 135–141, 151–162, 165n. 99, 182 and baptism 116–120 and correspondence 107–116 of the name of God 91–96 turn to 86–91 see also epiclesis

200

Index

James, W. 26 Jantzen, G. 35n. 73 Jehle, F. 27n. 15, 149n. 9 Jenson, M. 74n. 79 Jenson, R. 81, 121, 124n. 13 Jesus Christ name of 14, 74–75, 77, 115, 131, 137 offices of 48n. 144, 66–68, 69n. 51, 71, 72, 108, 180 as pray-er 5, 6, 13, 67–73, 80, 95, 107, 114 as teacher 13, 62–63, 67, 70–71, 92, 132, 172 John of the Cross 36, 55n. 180 Johnson, W. S. 92n. 37, 114n. 151 Jones, P. D. 38n. 86, 68n. 45, 78n. 111, 109n. 120, 154n. 38 Jüngel, E. 18, 39, 44, 85n. 3, 90, 91n. 27, 108, 109n. 119, 109n. 121, 115n. 152, 116n. 157, 118n. 170, 119n. 177 Jungmann, J. 71n. 58, 176n. 29 Kant 66n. 33, 151, 159 Kelsay, J. 12n. 59, 66n. 33 Kemmer, A. 29, 45n. 126 Kempis, T. à. 79n. 115 Kim, J. 7n. 35, 121n. 3 Kingdom of God 18, 89, 111, 114, 154, 166 Klimek, N. 26n. 10, 30, 35n. 73, 45n. 126, 50n. 154 Krötke, W. 33 LaCugna, C. M. 125n. 15 lament 78 Lash, N. 139–140, 178 Lauterburg, O. 3–4 lectio divina 56 lex orandi, lex agendi 18, 148, 151 lex orandi, lex credendi 2–3, 18, 22, 94, 148, 151, 171–182 Lord’s Prayer 3, 4, 6, 8, 11, 15–16, 17–18, 20, 62, 71, 81, 89, 91, 93, 96, 114, 118, 132, 148, 152, 176, 181 Lord’s Supper 16, 19, 87, 91, 99, 101, 102, 103, 104, 118, 177 lordless powers 18, 41n. 100, 135, 146, 150, 151–162, 177 Louth, A. 29, 34n. 69, 36, 37n. 80

Lovin, R. W. 149n. 9 Luther 15–16, 39n. 91, 62, 63n. 11, 67, 89, 165n. 99 Macken, J. 117n. 162 MacKinnon, D. 160n. 78 Mangina, J. 85n. 3, 100, 117n. 162, 119n. 179, 122n. 9 Marx 128 Matheny, P. D. 27n. 12 Mathewes, C. 156n. 50, 157n. 57 McCabe, H. 80, 182 McCormack, B. 53n. 172, 115n. 152, 116n. 157, 141n. 108, 170n. 4, 172n. 8, 175 McCormick, F. R. 40n. 97 McDowell, J. C. 12n. 59, 28n. 22, 82n. 128, 109n. 125, 119n. 179, 142, 157n. 55, 159, 161n. 82, 171n. 7, 174n. 18 McFadyen, A. 65n. 27, 73n. 75, 157n. 53, 160n. 76 McGinn, B. 26, 29, 35n. 72 McIntosh, M. 2n. 3, 2n. 4, 22n. 113, 29n. 25, 31, 34n. 70, 35n. 73, 36, 47, 124n. 13, 178, 179n. 46 McIntyre, J. 12n. 59, 78n. 106 McKenna, J. H. 101n. 80, 103n. 94 McKim, D. K. 85n. 3 McMaken, W. T. 119n. 172 Merton, T. 37, 57n. 192, 58n. 201 Meyer-Blanck, M. 12n. 59, 62n. 7, 101n. 79 Milgiore, D. L. 3, 12n. 59, 69n. 51, 78n. 106, 78n. 111, 170n. 2 Molnar, P. D. 117n. 162 Moltmann, J. 40n. 98, 42n. 107, 125n. 15 Mozart 56–58 Muers, R. 164n. 91 Münster Ethics 8–9, 11, 17, 58n. 203, 88–90, 91, 122, 153, 163, 169, 171 mystical theology 5, 7, 22, 26–31, 33–39, 45–48, 57 mysticism 22, 25, 26, 28–30, 34, 35–36, 45–46 natural theology 28, 30, 51n. 164, 94 Neuchâtel Seminar 11, 15, 23, 63n. 11, 69n. 51, 71n. 58, 181 Nevin, G. W. 85n. 3 Niebuhr, R. 149

Index Nimmo, P. T. 27n. 11, 27n. 12, 51n. 164, 110n. 126, 115, 116n. 157, 149n. 10, 170n. 2 Nothingness 75, 156–159, 166 see also evil O’Donovan, O. 41 Oepke, A. 29n. 30 open theism 141–146 ora et labora 53, 173–174 Origen 76n. 97, 124 Pannenberg, W. 133n. 63 participation 17, 23, 31, 54–55, 62, 79–81, 84–85, 107–116, 134–141, 153, 179–180 patriarchy 94, 177 petition 2, 7, 13–16, 17–18, 23, 25, 27, 28, 48, 49, 54, 61–82, 84–85, 88, 91, 96, 97–98, 100, 103–106, 114, 136, 141, 153–154, 173, 182 prioritization of 61–67, 77–79, 101–102 Phillips, D. Z. 1, 147n. 4 Placher, W. C. 144n. 118 Põder, C. S.–V. 72n. 69 praise 13, 14, 16, 20, 28, 49, 78, 90, 97, 100, 102–103, 118, 134, 136, 141, 157, 176 prayer answering of 14, 116, 141–146 and community 14, 16, 36, 64, 73, 87, 99, 101 as conversation 70, 147–148, 154, 175 divine action 15, 41, 42, 46, 79, 95, 108–109, 110, 112–115, 119, 120, 141, 143, 145, 153, 155 and doctrinal development 176–177 and ec-centricity 114, 145, 151, 174 and exegesis 53–56 failure of 66–67, 123–124, 131–134, 178 as human achievement 4, 5, 69, 74, 107, 128–129, 131 and human action 13, 14, 16, 18, 27, 32, 38, 44, 52, 57–58, 76, 86–88, 98–99, 103, 108, 110–111, 113–114, 119–120, 150, 153, 163–166 impossibility of 132, 135, 136 limits of 11, 99, 110–111, 114, 119, 145, 165

201

and obedience 12–13, 16, 44n. 120, 55, 63, 66, 73, 79, 100, 161 order of 43, 73–74, 95, 112–113, 119, 157, 160–162, 165, 174 the paradox of 1, 4–5, 7, 67, 91, 132–133 politics of 19, 32, 37, 57, 89, 128, 147–167 posture of 76 and power 42, 50, 65, 150 and preaching 3, 6, 19–20 and progress 29–30, 45, 171, 180–182 and reading 170–182 and revolt 18, 96, 113–114, 145, 147–167, 170 and self-help 4n. 11, 8, 73–77 and silence 7, 28, 45, 50, 106, 178 and theology 1–3, 7, 17, 21, 34, 148, 169, 171–182 and transformation 5, 6, 22n. 113, 51, 53–56, 71, 94, 106, 115, 123, 126, 129, 134–141, 145, 148, 153, 162, 179–182 and the Trinity 126–127, 137–138, 150 see also contemplation; petition pride 19, 33, 73–77 providence 12, 34, 61, 66, 70n. 54, 79 Psalm 50.15, 17, 20, 81, 90 Pseudo-Dionysius 35n. 73, 36, 48n. 144, 92n. 31, 177 Rahner, K. 46n. 135, 107 redemption 5, 9–10, 40, 58n. 203, 86, 89, 90, 122, 153 religion 4–5, 6n. 24, 28, 35, 124, 127–131, 137, 162 response 11, 58, 63–64, 66, 72, 79–81, 84, 95, 107–108, 109n. 125, 117 Ritschl, A. 26, 30, 62n. 7 Rogers, E. F. 116, 122n. 5, 124, 125n. 16, 131n. 51 Romans 8, 1, 4–5, 96, 121–141, 145, 146 Rosato, P. J. 121n. 3 Rose, M. 12n. 59 Rosenzweig, F. 50 Ruddies, H. 97n. 61 Ruether, R. R. 156n. 49 sabbath 23, 29, 37–44, 45–52, 56, 57, 58–59, 104, 162–163, 165–166 and contemplative prayer 45–59

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Index

Sacks, J. 42n. 106 sanctification 31, 41–42, 48, 71, 72, 75, 96, 101, 105, 115–116, 144, 170–171 Sanders, J. 141n. 109, 141n. 110, 143n. 116 Schleiermacher, F. D. E. 4, 6n. 24, 7–8, 30, 62n. 7, 77 Shapiro, L. 12n. 59, 27n. 16, 78n. 106 sin 9, 19, 23, 33, 44, 52n. 164, 67, 73–77, 89, 113, 128, 155, 158, 160n. 76, 165n. 99 as homo incurvatus in se 74, 75, 151 see also pride; sloth; falsehood sloth 19, 33, 41, 71, 75–76, 108, 114, 161 Soskice, J. 92n. 30, 94n. 46, 177n. 38 Spencer, A. J. 27n. 12, 109n. 120 Speyr, A. von 38n. 85, 57n. 192, 175n. 23 Spinks, B. D. 71n. 58 spirituality 1–2, 28, 34, 35–36, 70, 79, 98, 114, 171, 173, 179–182 Stoltzfus, P. E. 56n. 191 Surin, K. 157n. 54 Sykes, S. 2n. 2, 2n. 5 Tanner, K. 70n. 57, 144n. 121, 161n. 81 thanksgiving 2, 13, 14, 28, 78, 87, 97, 98, 102–103, 105, 118, 134, 135–136, 137, 141, 182 Thompson, J. 121n. 3 Torrance, A. 69n. 51, 81n. 121 Torrance, J. 65–66, 117n. 162 Torrance, T. F. 117n. 162 Tugwell, S. 62n. 8 Turner, D. 35–36, 178n. 39

unio mystica 31 union 20, 29–32, 111–112, 125 vocation 64, 71, 92 Volf, M. 40n. 98 Wainwright, G. 2n. 5 waiting 7, 10, 45, 49n. 148, 105, 107, 137, 164, 165n. 97 Wannenwetsch, B. 40n. 98, 48n. 147, 148n. 7, 160n. 77 Webb, S. H. 62n. 6, 179n. 46 Webster, J. 8n. 41, 12n. 59, 27n. 12, 71n. 59, 85n. 3, 93n. 38, 105, 109, 115–116, 117n. 162, 157n. 55, 175n. 24 Weinandy, T. 142n. 113 Werpehowski, W. 170n. 2 West, C. C. 149n. 9 Wiggermann, K. F. 12n. 59, 27n. 16 Wiles, M. F. 176n. 28, 177n. 33 Williams, A. N. 2n. 4 Williams, R. 2n. 4, 26, 34n. 70, 34n. 71, 45, 58n. 201, 80–81, 124, 126, 138, 152, 177 Willis, R. E. 27n. 11 Wood, D. 54 work 40n. 98 Wüthrich, M. 156n. 47 Yocum, J. 117n. 162 Zachman, R. 39