Lutheran responses to Barth

This is a rather rushed attempt to share some thoughts on part of what Dan is saying in this post. I thought I ought to sum what I understand as the Lutheran response to Barth. My knowledge of such a weight of theological wisdom on both sides is hilariously small, but I thought I should try. Why, these things are important to Lutherans would take a lot of time and energy, so sorry for not being able to give that. There's more important things to do for a Christian layman.

1. We should give up worrying that we cannot force our knowledge of God into a unity

I believe it is good if in our present age we cannot imagine how the Creator God could also be Christ crucified, but have to stand amazed at God's unfathomable wisdom and love. To force all our knowledge of God into a unity by starting with one event, rather than one person revealed through a story full of twists and turns is to walk by sight instead of faith. It is to over-realise our eschatology as we do not yet see Christ face-to-face. Contrary to what some say, death is not equal to life and glory is not shame. Life is revealed through death, glory through shame, strength through weakness but that is a story of a surprise and not a neatly tied system. Death seems to go in an opposite direction to life, but by faith in Christ crucified and risen we believe that they don’t, even if we cannot see how that is the case.

2. The tension is often between ‘God’ and ‘God for us’, not false and true

Often when people see a tension between God known through experience, reason, creation etc and the God who loves the world so much that he sends his Son to die for us, they assume that this is because the former must be a false knowledge. Of course all our knowledge of God is a mixture of truth and lies to a different extent, but I would suggest that at its core the tension is actually between a knowledge of ‘God’ and ‘God for us’ (or 'law' and 'Gospel'). God owes us nothing, and as sinful beings we are due only wrath. So knowledge of ‘God’ is a terrifying thing on its own. It can be a true knowledge, but given God’s promises it is a strange knowledge and not proper knowledge.

The knowledge of ‘God for us’ seems to contradict the knowledge of ‘God’ we may have apart from his revelation of his love for the unlovely in Christ. But by faith we believe (i) that they resolve in the mystery of Christ who is both divine and future, even if we cannot understand how, and (ii) that ‘God for us’ is the proper knowledge of God, and ‘God’ is him hidden from us.

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Here are some Lutheran quotes to chew over:

Everyone naturally has a general idea that there is a God [...] But someone may object: "If all people know God, why does Paul say that before the proclamation of the gospel the Galatians did not know God?" I reply that there is a twofold knowledge of God [duplex est cognitio Dei], general and particular. All people have the general knowledge, namely that God exists, that he has created heaven and earth, that he is righteous, that he punishes the wicked, etc. But people do not know what God proposes concerning us, what he wants to give and to do, so that he might deliver us from sin and death, and to save us - which is the proper and true knowledge of God [propria et vera est cognitio Dei]. Thus it can happen that someone's face may be familiar to me but I do not really know him, because I do not know his intentions.

(from 1535 Lectures on Galatians, in p.99, The Christian Theology Reader ed by A McGrath)

If the cross and the resurrection are to retain their New Testament position at the centre of the message, then a revision of the opposition between transcendence and immanence must be brought about. The Lutheran dualism of law and Gospel in the Word performs just that very revising, anti-speculative function. God's work meets us, sub contraria specie ["under contrary appearances"], hidden under the work of death. It must be so, since we are in thrall to sin; when our sin, which insists on ruling in our being, is killed, we receive life but it seems as though it were death. The lifegiving function of the Gospel is indissolubly bound up with the condemnatory and punitive function of the law; the cross is fast bound with the resurrection. If this intrinsic duality of law and Gospel is abandoned and replaced, as in Barth, by a single 'Word' above the law and the Gospel, then there follows also a new metaphysical cleavage, so that within the single Word we discover a higher, transcendent sphere, the Word of God (Gottes Wort) and a lower sphere, the word of man (Menschenswort). Thereby the Platonic doctrine of two worlds becomes supreme in theology. What is specifically theological and Christian is introduced later in the thesis that 'God' and 'man' meet and are brought together in the Incarnation. But in that case the mere meeting between God and man becomes the centre of the New Testament, while struggle and victory in the death and resurrection have lost their place as the centre of the kerygma. This is the chief accusation that must be brought against Karl Barth's theology.

(p. 92, 1949, Gustaf Wingren, The Living Word)

[the law] must foster a proclamation which points to Christ…It must realize that the unity of law and gospel- that is , that the God of the law and the God of the gospel are one and the same-is something which can be grasped in the final sense only by faith…Theology, of course, asserts this unity, but faith does not consist ultimately in believing the assertions of theology, but rather in trusting in the Christ who alone makes it possible to believe the unity.”

(Gerhard Forde, The Law-Gospel Debate)

We cannot therefore accept a monistic doctrine of the word of God, as advocated by Karl Barth. In the midst of the contradictory and complementary ways in which God encounters us, which are laden with tension and conflict, the gospel stands out in its uniqueness as God’s decisive final word.

(p. 125, Oswald Bayer, Theology the Lutheran Way)

While the distinction between Schleiermacher and Barth may be ever so great, they agree with each other in their thinking about unity. While Schleiermacher, of course, thinks of unity anthropologically, as the one fundamental state, Barth approaches it Christologically, by holding that Jesus Christ is the one Word of God. If we criticize Barth’s thinking about unity, we will have to ask ourselves whether the unity of God is something that we can only confess, as when we confess Jesus to be the one and only Lord, or whether it is something that we can conceive with our minds. But this can happen only in the sense of 1 Corinthians 9:4-6 and of the prayer of the Isaiah Apocalypse: “O Lord our God, other lords besides you have ruled over us, but we acknowledge your name alone” (Isa. 26:13; cf. Micah 4:5)…

The unity of God that we confess can only be believed. It cannot be conceived… If we speak of a "unity" in connection with law and gospel, life and death, judgment and grace, it must be clear that this is meant in a strictly eschatological sense"

(pp.197-198, Oswald Bayer, Theology the Lutheran Way)

The distinction between what is involved in the teaching about the Trinity and "general" teaching about God [...] is encountered in faith and in the hope that this distinction will be removed, along with the distinction between law and gospel, in the eschaton. The the triune God - he alone - will be all in all (1 Cor. 15:28). Then we also will no longer be assailed by the oppressive, incomprehensible hiddenness that weighs us down even to the point of our death. It will be consumed by open love which itself cannot be comprehended, which will free us from its power and which comes to us conclusively already now in the gospel.

The end that we believe in and hope for, because of the love that has come to us and has been promised to us - the consummation of the work of creation by the triune God - is misinterpreted with regard to its true character when it is claimed that it exists as a timeless principle of knowledge and existence. Its universality cannot be demonstrated in the abstract, not even with theoretical means linked to the Trinity; one cannot apply its truths to every circumstance one can postulate and treat it as an a priori.

(pp.339-340, Oswald Bayer, Martin Luther‘s Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation)

"For Bayer, theology is not done to integrate all knowledge, either theoretical or practical, into an abstract unity, but to limit reason to its proper fields. It is the art of discerning what God is saying to us, not peering into the divine"

(p.149, Mark Mattes, The Role of Justification in Contemporary Lutheran Theology)