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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 July 2015
This article focuses on Karl Barth's mature doctrine of baptism, as it is developed in the final part-volume of the Church Dogmatics. Published in 1967 (English translation in 1969) as a fragment of the ethics of the doctrine of reconciliation, Barth's theology of baptism is not without its controversy. Among the critiques that the baptism fragment has generated, one of the most significant concerns is over its presentation of the relation between divine agency and human agency. The formal division in the baptism fragment (and its sharp distinction between ‘Spirit baptism’ and ‘water baptism’) is taken to imply an uncharacteristic separation of divine agency and human agency, which renders his doctrine of baptism inconsistent with other areas of his thought. The argument proposed in this article, however, is that better clarity as to what Barth is theologically up to in the baptism fragment can be gained by reading his mature theology of baptism in connection with his theology of prayer. Barth's theology of prayer is rich and extensive. Although very present across all of his writings, his thinking on prayer (and indeed the Church Dogmatics itself) culminates in an intriguing set of meditations on the petitions of the Lord's Prayer. Although unfinished, these lectures on prayer were published posthumously as The Christian Life in 1976 (English translation 1981). Together with his doctrine of baptism and his unwritten doctrine of the Lord's Supper, the finished lectures on prayer would have formed the ethics of reconciliation. Importantly, Barth insists that baptism and the Lord's Supper were to be understood not only in the context of prayer but actually as prayer, as ‘invocation’. Rooted in the motif of ‘correspondence’, which is deployed at a number of key points throughout the Church Dogmatics, Barth's theology of invocation is based on a highly participative account of the divine–human relation: divine agency and human agency ‘correspond’ in the crucible of prayer. From the perspective provided by his writings on prayer, invocation and the motif of the ‘correspondence’ of divine and human agency, this article revisits the critique that Barth unduly separates divine and human agency in the baptism fragment.
1 All references are to Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, 4 vols in 13 pts, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956–75), hereafter CD followed by volume, part and page number, and Die Kirchliche Dogmatik, 4 vols in 13 pts (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1932; and thereafter Zürich: EVZ, 1938–65), hereafter KD followed by volume, part and page number.
2 See Webster, John, Barth's Ethics of Reconciliation (Cambridge: CUP, 1995), pp. 125–32Google Scholar; Yocum, John, Ecclesial Mediation in Karl Barth (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 135–70Google Scholar; Hartwell, H., ‘Karl Barth on Baptism’, Scottish Journal of Theology 22/1 (1969), pp. 10–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Buckley, James J., ‘Christian Community, Baptism and Lord's Supper’, in Webster, John (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth (Cambridge: CUP, 2000), pp. 195–211CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Bryan D. Spinks helpfully traces the development of Barth's rejection of infant baptism from the 1943 Gwatt lecture (Karl Barth, The Teaching of the Church Regarding Baptism, trans. Ernest A. Payne (London: SCM Press, 1948)) into the baptism fragment and its reception by other major twentieth-century theologians. See his Reformation and Modern Rituals and Theologies of Baptism: From Luther to Contemporary Practices (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 137–63. Elsewhere Spinks also traces, in a number of key texts in the Barthian corpus, Barth's increasing difficulty with particular sacramental interpretations of baptism, see ‘Karl Barth's Teaching on Baptism: Its Development, Antecedents and the “Liturgical Factor”’, Ecclesia Oran 14 (1997), pp. 261–88. For the most thorough and recent treatment of Barth's theology of baptism, see McMaken, W. Travis, The Sign of the Gospel: Toward an Evangelical Doctrine of Infant Baptism After Karl Barth (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. McMaken rereads aspects of Barth's theology to articulate a new account of baptism which enables better provisions for the administration of infant baptism whilst remaining faithful to Barth's mature theological commitments.
3 See Yocum, Ecclesial Mediation, pp. 165–6.
4 CD IV/4, p. 30. For example, Barth seems to think that the ‘baptismal narratives of Acts, though instructive, obviously do not contribute to a doctrine of baptism’, CD IV/4, p. 111.
5 For a rejection of the consistency see, amongst others, Torrance, T. F., ‘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. 82–105Google Scholar; Macken, John, The Autonomy Theme in the Church Dogmatics: Karl Barth and his Critics (Cambridge: CUP, 1990), p. 86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hunsinger, George, ‘Baptized into Christ's Death: Karl Barth and the Future of Roman Catholic Theology’, in Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), pp. 253–78 (275)Google Scholar; and Yocum, Ecclesial Mediation, p. 97. For a defence of the consistency see, amongst others, Paul Nimmo, T., Being in Action: The Theological Shape of Barth's Ethical Vision (London: T&T Clark, 2007), pp. 126–30Google Scholar; Spencer, Archibald James, Clearing a Space for Human Action: Ethical Ontology in the Theology of Karl Barth (New York: Peter Lang, 2003), p. 286Google Scholar; Johnson, William Stacy, The Mystery of God: Karl Barth and the Postmodern Foundations of Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997), p. 170Google Scholar; Spinks, ‘Karl Barth's Teaching on Baptism’, p. 262; and Cochrane, Arthur C., ‘Markus Barth: An Un-Barthian Barthian – The Place of the Doctrine of Baptism in the Church Dogmatics’, in Hadidian, Dikran Y. (ed.), Intergerini Parietis Septum: Essays Presented to Markus Barth on his Sixty-Fifth Birthday (Pittsburgh, PA: Pickwork Press, 1981), pp. 39–50Google Scholar. Eberhard Jüngel's important analysis of Barth's doctrine of baptism drifts between these interpretative poles. On the one hand, he argues, CD IV/4 should be understood as a ‘Probe’, a test case, for all that has come before. It is thus a ‘Rekapitulation’ of dogmatic moves made over the course of the CD IV/1–3. See Jüngel, ‘Karl Barths Lehre von der Taufe: Ein Hinweis auf ihre Probleme’, in Barth-Studien (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Mohn, 1982), pp. 246–90 (286–7, 257). On the other hand, CD IV/4 represents significant revisions to the Prolegomena (particularly with respect to proclamation in the doctrine of the threefold Word of God in CD I/1) in light of Barth's doctrine of election in CD II/1. Suggestively, Jüngel argues that the high doctrine of proclamation in CD I/1 has been ‘entsakramentalisiert’ and replaced throughout the Dogmatics with nothing less than ‘der Begriff der Entsprechung’ – on this, more later. See Jüngel, ‘Karl Barths Lehre von der Taufe’, p. 277.
6 CD IV/4, p. 88.
7 Torrance, ‘The One Baptism’, p. 99.
8 Hunsinger, George, ‘Baptism and the Soteriology of Forgiveness’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 2/3 (2000), pp. 247–69 (256)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Yocum, Ecclesial Mediation, p. 146.
10 Webster, Barth's Ethics of Reconciliation, pp. 172–3. And later, Webster would go further to complain that there is ‘at times an almost Platonic distinction between water baptism (an exclusively human act) and baptism with the Spirit (an exclusively divine act)’. See Webster, John, Karl Barth (London: Continuum, 2004; 2nd edn), p. 157Google Scholar. The charge of agential Nestorianism has also been brought by Chauvet, Louis Marie, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Re-Interpretation of Christian Existence (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1995), p. 543Google Scholar.
11 See Macken, Autonomy Theme, p. 86. See also John Colwell, Living the Christian Story: The Distinctiveness of Christian Ethics (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001), pp. 150–2; Molnar, Paul D., Karl Barth and the Theology of the Lord's Supper: A Systematic Investigation (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), pp. 234 and 305Google Scholar; and Yocum, Ecclesial Mediation, pp. 97–8 and 146.
12 See CD III/3, pp. 90–154. The move was made initially by Nimmo (in Being in Action, pp. 126–30) and later by Keith Johnson (in ‘The Being and Act of the Church: Karl Barth and the Future of Evangelical Ecclesiology’, in McCormack, Bruce L. and Anderson, Clifford B. (eds), Karl Barth and American Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011), pp. 201–26)Google Scholar.
13 Although the overall aim of this article is to complement these existing approaches, there are certain benefits to responding to the critics with Barth's theology of invocation rather than with resources gathered from earlier in the Church Dogmatics. For example, because the sections on the concursus were composed years before Barth was delivering his lectures on the doctrine of baptism there is a risk of heavy-handedness in picking up concepts developed in the particular context (historical and theological) of CD III/3 and applying them onto Barth's most mature thought. (This critique has been raised previously by John C. McDowell, ‘“Openness to the World”: Barth's, KarlEvangelical Theology of Christ as the Pray-er’, Modern Theology 25/2 (2009), pp. 253–83Google Scholar (279, n. 78).) This article's principal justification for bringing these two mature texts into closer dialogue is simply that Barth's theology of invocation and his late baptismal thought were nearly exactly contemporaneous: the former was delivered in lecture form in the 1959/60 winter semester at the University of Basel, and the latter, just a few months later in the summer semester of 1960.
14 Barth, Karl, Das christliche Leben: Die Kirchliche Dogmatik, CD IV/4, Fragmente aus dem Nachlass: Vorlesungen 1959–1961, ed. Drewes, H.-A. and Jüngel, E.. Karl Barth-Gesamtausgabe. [7] II, Akademische Werke (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 1976)Google Scholar.
15 Karl Barth, The Christian Life: Church Dogmatics, CD IV/4, Lecture Fragments, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1981) – hereafter ChrL.
16 CD III/4, p. xii.
17 For more on the link between correspondence and invocation and Barth's theology of prayer in general, see Ashley Cocksworth, Karl Barth on Prayer (London: T&T Clark, 2015), pp. 107–16.
18 ChrL, p. 170.
19 See Webster, John, ‘“The Grammar of Doing”: Luther and Barth on Human Agency’, in Barth's Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth's Thought (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), pp. 151–78 (173)Google Scholar.
20 Jüngel, Eberhard, ‘Die Möglichkeit theologischer Anthropologie auf dem Grunde der Analogie: Eine Untersuchung zum Analogieverständnis Karl Barths’, in Barth-Studien (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Mohn, 1982), pp. 210–32 (226)Google Scholar and ChrL, p. 31 (rev.).
21 See Jüngel, Eberhard, 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. 36Google Scholar.
22 Although secondary literature on the theme of correspondence in terms of ethics and prayer is generally thin, the theme is fleshed out persuasively and in significant detail in the context of Barth's Christology. On this see Paul Jones, Dafydd, The Humanity of Christ: Christology in Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics (London: T&T Clark, 2008), pp. 150–69Google Scholar. The way in which correspondence is grounded in the particularity of the person of Jesus Christ, and specifically the Chalcedonian pattern of his two natures, is well argued in the secondary literature. See Hunsinger, George, How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of his Theology (Oxford: OUP, 1991), pp. 185–224Google Scholar and Haddorff, David W., Christian Ethics as Witness: Barth's Ethics for a World at Risk (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2010), pp. 211–19Google Scholar. However, it is worth bearing in mind Nimmo's perceptive qualifications of the familiar Chalcedonian pattern of double-agency when applied to the relation between divine and human agency. See Nimmo, Paul T., ‘Karl Barth and the concursus Dei: A Chalcedonianism Too Far?’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 9/1 (2007), pp. 58–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
23 ChrL, p. 38.
24 By reducing the content of God to one's own self-understanding Feuerbach reduced prayer to a conversation with the self – prayer simply becomes therapy to alter, in some cathartic incurvature, the inner state of the pray-er. See Feuerbach, Ludwig, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1957), pp. 162–9Google Scholar.
25 CD III/3, p. 111.
26 CD III/3, p. 105 = KD III/3, p. 119.
27 See ChrL, p. 103.
28 ChrL, p. 27.
29 ChrL, p. 153.
30 ChrL, p. 88.
31 ChrL, p. 28.
32 Jüngel, Eberhard, ‘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 (159)Google Scholar.
33 ChrL, p. 90.
34 ChrL, p. 53.
35 See ChrL, p. 214.
36 ChrL, p. 43.
37 See Torrance, James, Worship, Community and the Triune God of Grace (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1996)Google Scholar. For more on the christological mechanics involved in the practice of prayer see Cocksworth, Ashley, ‘Attending to the Sabbath: An Alternative Direction in Karl Barth's Theology of Prayer’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 13/3 (2011), pp. 251–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an exploration of how the mechanics of prayer are expressed in practice and some of their ethical consequences see Cocksworth, Ashley, ‘Being Moved in Sundry Places: Evensong, Transformation and the Theology of Prayer’, Theology 15/5 (2012), pp. 350–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
38 Barth, Karl, Letters 1961–1968, trans. Bromiley, Geoffrey W. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1981), p. 245Google Scholar.
39 See Jüngel, ‘Karl Barths Lehre von der Taufe’, p. 291.
40 ChrL, pp. 45–6.
41 ChrL, p. xi.
42 The link to prayer is well made by McMaken, Sign of the Gospel, pp. 199–202.
43 CD IV/4, p. x. Barth is referring to the 1943 Gwatt lecture on baptism (see n. 2) in which the sacramental status of baptism remains intact. Thus Cochrane suggests that Markus realised the implications of his father's theology long before Barth himself had. See ‘Markus Barth: An Un-Barthian Barthian’, pp. 39–50.
44 See Barth, Markus, Die Taufe – ein Sakrament? Ein exegetischer Beitrag zum Gespräch über die kirchliche Taufe (Zollikon-Zürich: Evangelischer Verlag, 1951), p. 524Google Scholar.
45 CD IV/4, p. 209.
46 CD IV/4, p. 212.
47 CD IV/4, p. 213.
48 CD IV/4, p. 210.
49 CD IV/4, p. 43.
50 See ChrL, p. 3.
51 CD IV/4, p. 42.
52 ChrL, p. 46.
53 CD IV/4, p. 128.
54 CD IV/4, p. 32.
55 CD IV/4, p. 19.
56 CD IV/4, p. 102.
57 CD IV/4, p. 101.
58 CD IV/4, p. 105.
59 Yocum rehearses the familiar factors contributing to Barth's anti-synergism: Roman Catholicism, Bultmannian existentialism and secularised European Christianity in the 1950s. See Yocum, Ecclesial Mediation, p. 124.
60 Webster, Barth's Ethics of Reconciliation, p. 132.
61 Barth, Karl, Fragments Grave and Gay, ed. Rumscheidt, Martin, trans. Mosbacher, Eric (London: Collins, 1971), p. 88Google Scholar. Although not strictly a quotation from the baptism fragment, this volume is a collection of articles which date mostly from the time after Barth's retirement from his Basel chair in 1962 and therefore can be said to reflect his mature revision of his understanding of baptism.
62 Ibid.
63 See Jüngel, ‘Karl Barths Lehre von der Taufe’, p. 268.
64 CD IV/4, p. 3 = KD IV/4, p. 3.
65 CD IV/4, 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.’ Mangina, Joseph L., Karl Barth: Theologian of Christian Witness (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 162Google Scholar. 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, John C., Hope in Barth's Eschatology: Interrogations and Transformations Beyond Tragedy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), p. 233Google Scholar.
66 CD IV/4, p. 106.
67 ChrL, p. 169.
68 ChrL, p. 266.
69 CD IV/4, p. 41.
70 Macken, Autonomy Theme, p. 86.
71 Yocum, Ecclesial Mediation, p. 138.
72 Macken, Autonomy Theme, p. 86.
73 See Tanner, Kathryn, God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), pp. 121–2Google Scholar. See also CD IV/2, p. 753: ‘God and man, the one as Creator and the other as His creature, do not exist on the same level. There is no rivalry between the divine freedom and the human.’
74 CD II/1, p. 512.
75 CD IV/4, p. 134.
76 CD IV/4, p. 41, emphases restored = KD IV/4, p. 45.
77 CD IV/4, p. 41 = KD IV/4, p. 45.
78 CD IV/4, p. 41 = KD IV/4, p. 45.
79 CD IV/4, p. 41 = KD IV/4, p. 45.
80 My thanks to Matthias Grebe, W. Travis McMaken, Samuel Ewell and Andrew Hayes for their helpful comments on parts of this article.