Christ, History and Apocalyptic: A Symposium, part 3

Today's engagement with Nathan Kerr's Christ, History and Apocalyptic focuses on chapter 3 entitled "Karl Barth: Foundations for an Apocalyptic Christology."  [Part 1, Part 2]  Interacting with this chapter is John McDowell, a professor and chair of theology in a new post at the University of Newcastle. He is the author of Hope in Barth's Eschatology: Interrogations and Transformations Beyond Tragedy and is co-editor along with Mike A. Higton of Conversing With Barth.  Be sure to click the 'continue reading' link at the bottom for the remainder of the post, and of course, to click on the comment link to offer your thoughts, questions, and comments!

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How Not to End Things: A Symposium on Nathan Kerr’s Christ, History and Apocalyptic

It is a delight to be able to participate in conversing about Nathan Kerr's interesting book.  I have found the piece to have been a pleasure to read, informed as it is by a promising basic thesis, and densely presented both with no little eloquence and some evident sophisticated reasoning concerning its main interlocutors. 

      There are several questions that in another context I would want to ask of the study in general (for instance, to develop in more detail what it means to claim transcendental meaning consciously from a perspective; to put more critical pressure on Lessing's dualistic approach to history and Truth; and what the relationship between apocalyptic, as stressing novum, and history, as stressing continuities, can look like when conceived well).  Nonetheless, the invitation has enjoined me to focus on chapter 3, the critical engagement with the contribution of Karl Barth's theo-ontology. 

      The thesis of this chapter is relatively simple:  on the one hand, Barth's work helpfully develops an apocalyptic perspective on 'history', and yet, on the other, his thought is insufficient for doing the job well precisely because it has failed to subject a certain idealist frame to properly rigorous criticism and been unwittingly shaped by these "prior ontologico-metaphysical commitments" [89].  Here Nathan joins the ranks of those who feel that not all's quite right with Barth.  There is a growing dissatisfaction that suggests the symptoms are most identifiable in a failure to develop his theology in a more, perhaps for want of a better word (although it is certainly ideologically loaded), contextual fashion, reasoning concretely about the various particularities and contingencies involving Jesus' own history, and even more substantially, about the multiplicity of creatures' histories.  The trouble is that this is where the agreement, and it is very far from a universal sense among Barth commentators, tends to end in the main.  Identifying the reasons for this failure to be more specific are manifold, and in many ways are as yet relatively unsatisfactory. 

      It was Hans Frei who claimed that when Barth is tied to a mast (of criticism) he tends to slip free.  Nathan has attempted to tie Barth to the mast of idealism, something which is exhibited in "the unfolding of a certain 'obscure metaphysics'" in Barth's work [89].  In this Nathan is significantly following suggestions made by others.  Rowan Williams is someone who worries that Barth's 'disclosure' model or metaphysics of revelation circumvents our 'learning about learning' and thus returns us to the sphere of ideology.  More fully Richard H. Roberts advances that Barth's residual idealism forces him to provide an account of eternity which generates a Christologically constrained conception of time that renders revelation somewhat isolated from the contingencies of history.  Both, in their own and quite different ways echo something of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's earlier accusation that Barth's is a 'revelatory positivism'. 

      The influence of Roberts' thesis is perhaps most evident on Nathan's reading of Barth, although the latter develops this to different effect (Roberts desires not merely more particularity, but arguably something more akin to a natural theology that will, apparently, aid in conversation, and he subsequently provides a critique that has had critics wondering whether he has, in the end, mitigated the radicality of talk of the eschatological uniqueness of Jesus Christ.  The nature of Roberts' work since then suggests that the latter may indeed have been an astute observation).  Talk of eternity and time pervades the chapter, and not merely in relation to the section on the second edition of Der Römerbrief.

      However, before I raise a few queries about this reading, I need to ask for some clarity over what may be a potential conceptual confusion, and a serious one at that, and I may admit that these may well be the fruit of a lack of attention to the depth of Nathan's book.  Above, under queries about the study in general I mentioned the relation between apocalyptic and the historical.  The suspicion that something is not entirely clear surfaces in the chapter on Barth.  Nathan argues that Barth's theology is basically actualistic (hence the sense of apocalyptic), but also that Barth's approach to history is rooted in the Urgeschichte ('primal history').  Now, leaving aside for now the question of whether this is a fair representation of Barth, there is at least an important conceptual pull here that Nathan does not identify and address.  Actualism provides a sense of provisionality, of the ongoing, of the gift that is never given but is always being given (the real worry among commentators is over the 'occasionalism' this suggests); yet the theme of the historical Ursprung provides a sense of pastness, or realisation.  It seems to me that here is a confusion of two different types of criticisms of Barth, the first broadly echoing something of the thesis of Richard Roberts, and the second articulated by, for example, Colin Gunton. 

      Assuming my concern here is real concerns and not a phantom one (one generated through lack of attention to the flow of Nathan's theological argument), the question then becomes that of whether Barth is guilty of what he has been accused of.  There are two sets of comments I would like to make, one which offers a general stylistic suggestion, and the other being more substantively conceptual.  When pinning of Barth to a conceptually idealist mast, I would like Nathan to explore his thesis in considerably more detail.  This could, for example, take the form of providing a more concrete and textually specific tracing of Barth's relation to, and use of, Hegel.  Idealism becomes something too easily used for making sweeping (which is not to say, or at least not yet, erroneous) judgments about Barth's theology in this chapter. 

      The second set of comments involve me asking just how far I recognise the reading of Barth Nathan provides - or rather as being recognisably true to Barth, as I read him, rather than recognisably true to the likes of Roberts and others.  My comments echo the material presented more fully in Hope in Barth's Eschatology:  Interrogations and Transformations Beyond Tragedy (Ashgate, 2000) and a couple of more recent articles (available http://www.geocities.com/johnnymcdowell/Barth_papers.html). 

      Firstly, the suggestion that in Barth Christ's work has been completed needs to deal substantively, in particular, with CD IV.3 and the 'prophetic office of Christ'.  Several commentators have read this as involving the ministry of noetic realisation, but that insufficiently grasps Barth's more theologically inclusive, and ontologically dynamic, use of noetic categories.  A late essay of Barth's made the dialectical differentiation between 'for us', 'with us' and 'in us', and assessing the relation of these complex categories cannot be done too quickly (unfortunately Nathan has not attended to this essay, and its conceptual underpinnings in the CD).  I would recommend Ingolf Dalferth as a useful general guide here. 

      Secondly, there is a significant danger in emphasising the apocalyptic elements of Barth's theology of irruption/interruption without appreciating what he is doing with this as theologically rhetorical hyperbole, and one the critic's reading of should be heavily chastened by Barth's ontologically protological approach to eschatology and thus by the unfolding history of the covenant, as well as by what Graham Ward calls 'the trace' (for the CD this is particularly Scripture, although we could add church proclamation, among other things, which are "tokens of revelation").  Hence it is important to underline and unpack more fully Nathan's claim that "God's ongoing presence in Christ, properly conceived, is not a mechanistic operation to be read off from a single isolated occurrence." [78] 

      Thirdly, again one needs to be aware of the function of Barth's language of time and eternity, operating in order to depict God's freedom for us and God's freedom from us respectively without pressing these too hard ontologically (since that is not how Barth uses the terms).  Moreover, it is simply a mistake to claim that Barth depicts eternity as atemporal, especially since he is at pains to dialectically integrate the themes of simultaneity and successiveness.  Of course, God's history is not ours, and there's something odd about post-Hegelian theologies that empty God into temporal process in some form or another (Process theologies, Moltmannian panentheism, and Open Theism, for example), but that is not to say that it is defined competitively as different from our time - Barth generally has little time in the CD for ontologically competitive categories when speaking about God's relation to the creature (the material on providence in CD III.3 is a good example). 

      This chapter is a demanding and highly enjoyable read, and it is true that Barth's turn to the particular can oddly often get lost in his work.  It may even be that Hegel does lie in the background, directing Barth's theological imagination to painting rather grand pictures (albeit, usually with quite a light touch).  Yet the relationship between these elements may well be much more complex than Nathan suggests.  After all, one would need to consider the 'Alexandrian character' of much of Barth's imagination, and the ontological imagination of the Reformers, among other matters.  I would strongly urge much more hesitancy in reading Barth than unsatisfyingly characterises this chapter - Barth can slip free from the 'idealist' chains. 

John McDowell
Morpeth Professor of Theology
University of Newcastle

Comments

[ken oakes]

Prof. McDowell has raised a question that I have been wondering about too: the issue of Barth's account of Christ's continuing prophetic office or heavenly session. I guess that I am unsure as to where this part of Barth's thought, or any account of Christ's heavenly session, would fit in with Nate's fears of the residual idealism in Barth.

[Dave Belcher]

Ken (and Prof. McDowell),

I realize that this has to do with the problems that arise from Christ's work being "completed" in resurrection and ascension (that the shortcut of Christ's continuing history leaves our own on-going histories cut-off or at least abstracted), and that the retort here is that Barth gives space for a continuing work in Christ's prophetic office at the right hand of the Father....I get that....but could you say more? Of course, Nate's movement towards any sort of "completion" of Christ's historicity is towards the new heaven and the new earth, the dynamic fulfillment of all history...this is thoroughly eschatological, in other words...I think we could discuss the hermeneutics of IV/3, but I'm curious as to how this would completely alleviate any fears of residual Idealism. peace.

[ken oakes]

Dave,

Thanks for the response.

I don't really have a horse in the race as resides Barth and idealism, as I fear this question would swell beyond manageable and useful bounds fairly quickly, and so I'm not too concerned with accusations or defenses regarding idealism in Barth per se.

I guess that my own question would be what Nate makes of this Barth material (IV/3) or this doctrine more generally (Christ's heavenly session) given his emphasis upon Christ's "singular history."

If I am understanding what Nate is attempting, and I must immediately admit my own intellectual slowness here, and if the history we are to be following is Christ's own, then my own hunch is that this would seem to lead us quite naturally to the right hand of God, from which Christ rules the Church and the world by his Spirit, in obedience to the Father. Here Barth and his revivial of Christ's prophetic office would seem to be quite a useful allay in Nate's project, for whatever criticisms regarding "idealism" that may still be on the table.

[Dave Belcher]

Thanks, Ken...that helps me to know a bit better where your concerns lie. And yes, I think that Nate would find Christ's prophetic office (and its continuing in Christ's session) to be a helpful ally...I believe Nate in the book (though this could be from personal conversation, I can't quite remember), would want to say that Christ's "history" does not end at ascension, but that session and second coming are integral to his historicity. This is what it would mean, I would think, for all of history itself to find its significance only in light of the singular apocalyptic historicity of Jesus Christ (otherwise not only are our on-going histories abstracted from, or cut off, but Jesus is no longer "Lord" over those on-going histories). The question I would wager Nate would raise is over how Barth is interpreting, specifically, ascension (well, also incarnation). Whether, that is, there isn't a sort of Hegelian understanding of ascension (and perhaps also incarnation -- despite Barth's best intentions), where Christ's ascension, session, and second coming are sort of "epiphenomenal," especially in light of the resurrection (that is, what Nate calls Barth's "eternalizing of temporality")...perhaps Barth does not go as far as Hegel, where we cause Christ to ascend by our own self-abnegation (that is, by our own glorying in the cross) -- as Doug Farrow argues -- but these seem not to have any real influence on the particular identity of Jesus' historicity for Nate's reading of Barth. So, I suppose attention would need to be paid to IV/3 to get a handle on whether Barth evades this move or not.

But, enough of that...I can let Nate respond to this...hopefully I have neither spoken out of turn nor misrepresented him too horribly! Thanks again. Peace.

[Dave Belcher]

Sorry, that was just a bit unclear...

"but these -- ascension, session, and second coming -- seem not to have any real influence on the particular identity of Jesus' historicity for Nate's reading of Barth."

[Nate Kerr]

No, Dave, you have not spoken out of turn at all. In fact, your comments are very helpful in beginning to respond to the question as I might. And Ken, thanks for the question. It is a helpful clarifying question which will help me also to get at some of Prof. McDowell's concerns as well. I will post on that this evening -- I am sorry I cannot do so straightaway, but I have a sick daughter on my hands. Thank you for this discussion though; and this comment is only to say that I benefit from you carrying on the conversation even without me, and am nevertheless listening in. And I will certainly respond later this evening (though I can't be sure exactly when).

[Nate Kerr]

Okay -- I have some time to address the question of CD IV/3 and Christ's prophetic office, as well as some other issues along the way. Dave has already indicated why it is that I don't need necessarily to treat IV/3 in depth, and especially the questions regarding Jesus' ascension and heavenly session, with regards to the point I am making about Barth in the chapter. And this is because, for Barth, the ascension and session (as also the second coming) are treated there for Barth as three "forms" of "modes" of the single event of parousia, which is defined for Barth as the "effective presence" of the resurrected Christ to us. And so the only point I really need to make is that Barth's treatment of the resurrected Christ abstracts at key points from Christ's concrete historicity, so as to make Christ's presence to us in our historicities itself functionally abstract. That was my real aim in the critical section of the chapter on the resurrection, and so far as that point is established (a point not disputed as such by Prof. McDowell), I have made the case I need to make as regards the role that Barth plays in the genealogy I am telling. And that point is simply that Barth here averts from his own best insights as to the apocalyptic character of Jesus Christ's singular historicity. Barth laid the foundations for articulating a kind of "apocalyptic actualism," and indeed himself articulates just such an actualism insofar as the motive force of his actualism is a refusal to abstract from the singular historicity of Jesus as definitive of God's eternal being-in-act. But the moves which Barth makes that mitigate against this apocalyptic dimension -- his reading of the cross as teleologically oriented to resurrection, his interpretation of the resurrection as a movement from particularity to universality, and thus as constitutive of Christ as the "concrete universal," his account of our contemporaneity with the resurrected Christ as being contemporaneous with the protological Urgeschichte of God's eternal duration, which turns out to be Jesus Christ's own true and genuine history -- are so determinative that one wonders if Christ himself is left to speak in the starkness of his concretely singular historicity. The irony of this is that the great dogmatic upshot of Barth's actualism -- the identity of Jesus of Nazareth's concrete historicity with God's being-in-act -- is lost by the way in which it gets articulated according to the conceptual apparatus of a certain "obscure metaphysics." I am not concerned (nor need I necessarily be) to prove that Barth himself is a full-fledged Idealist; I do not desire to tie him to an Idealist "mast" as such. Whether it can be proven or not that Barth is finally Idealist does not in any way eschew the fact that Barth's actualism at key points forces him into conceptual articulations of Jesus' history that work at cross-purposes to his own best dogmatic insights concerning the nature and reality of that history. If I may here borrow a sentence from an essay of Prof. McDowell himself: "Perhaps the recognition that Barth 'was always the champion of the concrete against, for instance, the abstract or merely possible' (MacKinnon) needs to be revised by the claim that he betrayed himself by undetermining the specificity of the cross, instinctively, and perhaps Hegelianly, providing a certain rhetorical kind of narratable legibility with attendant eschatological implications beyond the bounds of any unstructurable nescience over the futural." What I would add is that any "undetermination" of the specificity of the cross in Barth is at once an undetermination of apocalyptic -- for it is precisely at the point of the cross that Barth's thinking is irreducibly apocalyptic (as Doug Harink, Joseph Mangina, and my own mentor Craig Keen have taught me). As such, I read Barth's struggle to keep before himself the concreteness of the cross throughout CD IV as his own struggle to wriggle free of the conceptual mast that he had unwittingly tied himself to with his actualism, by means of the apocalyptic insight which that actualism had afforded him.

Now, having said all that, let me try to iterate what I take to be the critical import of Christ's prophetic office, as Barth articulates it in IV/3. The important point of Christ's heavenly session, for Barth, is that in Christ's completed identity as the crucified and resurrected one, he is living and active as that one who is now free to draw us in our histories (and so to draw history itself) into participation in his own perfect and victorious history. And here I want to say, "yes." In fact, it is part of the point of apocalyptic, for me, that it is only by way of such participation in Jesus Christ's singular historicity that the "apocalypticization of history" occurs by which our own contingent and singular histories are transformed as lived signs of the free and independent reality of God's coming Kingdom. And it is this prophetic office that constitutes the church as irreducibly missionary for Barth, as it witnesses to Christ's Lordship precisely by way of her participation, by the power of the Spirit, in Christ's outgoing love for other, in her particular reality, "here and now" as also "there and then." (On this point of Christ's prophetic office and the missionary reality of the Church's participation in Christ, we will learn much from John G. Flett's forthcoming book God Is a Missionary God: Missio Dei, Karl Barth, and the Doctrine of the Trinity, which is a revised version of his Princeton dissertation.) To all of this I would only want to add what I have already stated above, which is that the conceptual apparatus with which Barth mostly articulates this missionary movement of Christ and the church -- that of an historically teleological movement from the particular to the universal -- needs to be reworked in light of the apocalyptic logics of singularity and excess that I articulate in chapter 5 of the book. In this sense, Christ's prophetic office is the function of a uniquely "catholic singularity" (my term) as opposed to a mere "concrete universal." So in one sense one could read chapters five and six of my book as a kind of reworking of Barth's key insights as regards Christ's prophetic office -- the "finality" of Christ's singular history as constitutive of his lived relation to ongoing history; the idea that "mission makes the church" -- in light of a more thoroughgoingly apocalyptic construal of God's act in Christ.

If you will, allow me to conclude this (already too long!) comment with a reiteration of a point I made above. The argument of my chapter does not hinge on whether or not Barth is finally an Idealist or not, whether or not he can finally be tied to that "mast," as Prof. McDowell puts it. The argument of my chapter hinges on the fact that a certain apocalyptic logic regarding Christ's relation to history arises from within Barth's oeuvre as a whole, and especially from within CD IV as read against the backdrop of Der Romerbrief. But my point is that if we take this apocalyptic logic seriously it will require the articulation of an account of Christ's person, as also the account of history and the relation of time to eternity that Christ's person embodies, that in significant ways looks and sounds quite different in its conceptuality than that of Barth's account at many of the critical junctures of CD IV. Not to wrestle with this as the key upshot of this chapter (and so to reduce the chapter merely to a question of whether or not Barth is an idealist) is to miss not only the sense in which it is precisely at the point of apocalyptic that Barth himself most clearly slips free of the idealist mast, but also the sense in which, precisely thereby, Barth is for me the real hero (if a tragic hero) of the genealogy I'm tracing.

[Thesis Writing]

it's quit a long post, i spent lots of time to read and understand your post as it's have valued information. Thanks

[ken oakes]

Nate,

Many thanks for taking the time to respond, and especially for giving such a clear and (extremely) impressive response. I think that I have a much better grasp of what it is you are up to.

I still have a question regarding thelist of moves that you that "Barth makes that mitigate against this apocalyptic dimension". You rightly list "his account of our contemporaneity with the resurrected Christ as being contemporaneous with the protological Urgeschichte of God's eternal duration, which turns out to be Jesus Christ's own true and genuine history" as something that would seem to destroy any account of Jesus' concrete history.

However, I'm still unsure as whether these moves lead to what you're afraid of:
"his reading of the cross as teleologically oriented to resurrection, his interpretation of the resurrection as a movement from particularity to universality, and thus as constitutive of Christ as the "concrete universal,"". While the language might be unsavory, which I think you have aptly pointed out, I think that what we have in these cases is the revelation that Jesus is the lord of history: for this one wandering Jewish man is now revealed and worshipped as the Lord of glory and of history because the Spirit of the Father has seen fit to raise him from the dead, and exalt him over all creatures. Hence we know, as the Father has wrought and declared, that this one life is signficant for all, and this one history for all histories. I am probably repeating exactly the error you see in Barth, but I think that there is a way of preserving these insights, which I think actually are trying to follow Jesus' own history, against the damaging conceptual apparatus you see at work.

I also think that we need to speak of some teleology from the cross to the resurrection even if it is only that Christ's obeident life "beckons forth" or "solicits" (some might even want to argue "demands", but this may be pushing it) such a response from the Father, in such a way that we can see it as "fitting," a posteriori. This beckoning forth that is Jesus' obedience is what allows us, I think, to speak of the resurrection as the vindication and consecrating of Jesus's life by the Father.

Many thanks again for the response Nate, and know that I have already learned much from you.

[Joshua Davis]

Ken Oakes,

Far be it for me to speak on Nate's behalf, but I believe he would respond that the affirmation of Jesus' lordship of history is betrayed precisely inasmuch as it is transcendentalized. Jesus rules now, at the right hand of the Father, as one who still yet has a history -- and it is ours that is included in his.

I should also like to register -- I do see this connected with the previous point -- my objection to this language of Christ's life "beckoning forth" or "soliciting" the Father's response. It seems to me this way of framing matters sets up a kind of dialectical relation between the Father's fidelity and Jesus' obedience that is finally unhelpful, and may indeed implicitly collude with an idealist sensibility. (I will not go so far as to say a Pelagian soteriology and an Arian Christology, which are not so far apart, and seem to loom in the background here.) For, I do not know how to think Jesus' obedience as anything other than the self-communication of God's own faithfulness. This does not "demand" a response for the simple reason that it simply is that fidelity.

[Lucy]

Perhaps another way to draw out what Nate sees problematic in Barth is to ask this question: in what way is Barth's depiction of the missionary nature of the church lacking due to his "obscure metaphysics"? Does Nate think Barth's depiction of the missionary act of the church flirts with ideology? If so, how?

[Nate Kerr]

Lucy:

This is an excellent question, and I really do think that it is also a way of addressing what I am critical of in Barth's articulation of Christ's lordship. Let me try to say a couple of brief things in response to your questions.

First of all, I think one of the most important and underappreciated of Barth's insights in the CD is his insight developed especially in CD IV/3 that the prophetic office of Christ is constitutive of the Christian church as a missionary community. As Barth understands it, the Christian community is missionary or it is not the Christian community. Furthermore, the prophetic office of Christ is central to this point, for the Christian community is missionary precisely in its witness to and proclamation of Christ's lordship. In fact, the Christian community is irreducibly missionary because of the reality of Christ's resurrection: "The real goal and end of the resurrection of Jesus and its attestation was His going out in the world, into all the world" (CD IV/3.1, 303). And so it is Christ's movement out into the world as its Lord that is constitutive of the church-as-missionary. In that respect, I really want to affirm much of what Ken articulates in his previous post as to the intent of Barth in his articulation of Christ's prophetic office as the site for the outworking of his ecclesiology.

And yet, as Josh has pointed up, everything turns on how we conceive the nature of that lordship -- and so this is a thread that I have made to run throughout the book and in my treatment particularly of the four thinkers with which I deal. And for me the problem comes in as Barth articulates Christ's lordship in terms of his movement from particularity to universality in the resurrection, whereby he is established as Lord as the "concrete universal" in relation to history. My worry indeed is precisely that this transcendentalizes the nature of Christ's ongoing presence to us in our own contingent historicities. My concern here is that in witnessing to Christ's lordship as a kind of "universal presence" as such the church is once again missionary as representative of the "universality" of the gospel, and the visible instantiation of this is its purported existence as a "universal people" (see CD IV/3.2, 741-42). Thus Barth associates the visibility of the church with its representation of a certain "universality" (ibid., 728). As a result of this, and because the universality it represents is the eternal presence of Jesus Christ to all people as such, and because this universal presence is articulated according to a certain transcendental construction of eternity's relation to time, the missionary work of the church takes the form of a kind of "integration" (CD IV/2, 635). Elsewhere, he associates it with a kind of "recruitment" (CD III/4, 504-5). Of course, Barth is clear that this recruitment is to the living and embodied proclamation of Christ's lordship, and that the integration that occurs here has to do with our participation in Christ's prophetic office and not with our conformity to any given visible church-form. It is a direct participation in Christ's own missionary movement into the world, and in this sense the recruitment is the recruitment to discipleship, to the following after Christ in the world, which is the motive force of the church's ec-centric missionary existence. None of that is at issue for me; and in this I want to affirm Barth's intent.

What I am wary of, and the way in which this tends to work out for Barth, is that "Christianity," via the existence of the visible Christian community as functionally representative of Christ's universal presence, becomes a kind of universal qualification of "humanity" as such (see, e.g., CD IV/1, 665; and Gunton and Farrow are both helpful on this point). And so, were I to articulate it in such terms, what would appear to be "ideological" about the Christian community as a missionary community is that the missionary form of the church would seem to exist to serve and represent the ideal of a universal humanum, whose unity lies in its common "contemporaneity" with the risen Christ. This ideal would tend to determine the nature and existence of the Christian mission, as opposed to the singularly embodied act of love for the singular other, and for every other in her singularity, that I would suggest is precisely the missionary movement that "makes the church." In this sense, I would stress the missionary movement as a movement of agape, of charity, which is determinative of the church's unity as an event of catholicity. Here I am indeed refusing the equation of "catholicity" with "universality." "Universality" does not "happen" as such; it is not an event. Despite Badiou's protestations to the contrary, I am convinced that "universality" cannot but in the end function as a concept meant to mediate a transcendental identity. Genuine catholicity, on the other hand, is perhaps an inherently anti-ideological work -- and so irreducibly a liturgy.

All of that is not as worked out as it needs to be; and it is certainly not where I'd like finally to leave things with Barth. But it does demonstrate in some sense what it is that is behind my own apocalyptic reworking of what I take to be the genuinely Barthian insight that "mission makes the church." It must be remembered that what I do with mission and the liturgy of diaspora in the last chapter is dependent upon the foundations Barth laid for a more thoroughgoing apocalyptic account of Christ's relation to history, and so it is even here still yet Barth who makes it possible for us to conceive of the church's apocalyptically missionary existence.

I'd still like to say something about Ken's point regarding the teleological ordering of cross to resurrection, but I'll save that for a later comment.

[ken oakes]

Josh,

I am glad that you brought up the claim that Jesus' lordship is evaporated once he is transcendentalized. I am in complete agreement with this point, and think that Nate's last response is helpful for precisely this reason: that he is articulating the difference between the risen, ascended, and continually active Jesus Christ, who was and is and will be this person with this history, and some transcendentalized Jesus.

As for your second comment, I don't know how helpful quick recourse to labels such as "Arianism," Pelagianism," "Idealism" is.

And when you note:

"For, I do not know how to think Jesus' obedience as anything other than the self-communication of God's own faithfulness."

I think that you're entirely correct, but this needs to be developed further in order to account for the concrete history of God's own faithfulness in Jesus' life and death, especially in terms of Jesus as the faithful servant who fulfills the covenant. Equally, inasmuch as there are Jewish precedents for "the raising of the just" that still seem to float around in the NT (on this see Ulrich Wilckens, Resurrection), then this line of thought deserves reflection alongside the more "apocalyptic" accounts of resurrection present in the NT as well.

Nate,

Many thanks again for your responses.

Peace.

[Joshua Davis]

Mr. Oakes,

I am glad to see you are happy with my anticipation of Nate's response to you.

As regards Arianism and Pelagianism, you will recall that I said I was not accusing you of them. I was simply making note (in an aside) of what I thought was an interesting point of convergence. Perhaps I should have been more explicit. What I think is interesting is that both Arianism and Pelagianism proceed from within a conceptual scheme that in some sense begins with the Father's "obligation" to the Son's obedience. This is what I meant by suggesting that these “loomed” in the background. It was simply a point of note, and if you took it as an accusation, you are right to protest. However, it is a point that, in a different context, I should like to discuss.

My point was not, and is not now, that the traditions to which you refer in this last comment -- Jesus as faithful servant, the raising of the just -- are not to be accounted for. I was only taking issue with the manner in which you framed them: namely, as "beckoning forth," "soliciting," or "demanding" the Father's response. Since you did not repeat this language, perhaps you agree with my objections? If so, I am not sure I understand the nature of your response, since it would appear we are in agreement.

But I should reiterate my point. What I find “unhelpful” in all of this is the specifically Hegelian dialectic it trades upon. And I think it is a very, very problematic gesture, especially in the context of this present issue. This is because I am unable to see how these sorts of moves -- made by Balthasar and Jenson, in particular -- do not render the covenant that Jesus fulfills somehow dialectically internal to the "content" or "substance" of God's life. Now, this does not mean for me precisely what it means for others. It is not the inscription of “tragedy” into God’s life that bothers me. It is the logic. On the one hand, if the fulfillment of the covenant is viewed as a transaction between the Father and the Son in and as the human being Jesus Christ, then it seems to me that the transcendentalizing of Jesus is the very premise of the argument. It assumes that there is some purely formal, eternal content of which the man Jesus Christ is the concrete realization i.e., the concrete universal. This at least has to defend itself against Nate’ s critique. But, on the other hand, the point goes much deeper for me. This is because such a logic does not merely trade on the notion of some eternally actualized content that is historically manifested; it also, in its assumption of pure formalism, requires such a mediating moment to function as a dialectical negation of that formality, of which the unity achieved in the covenant is itself the negation. This is the obverse of the previous point, but it is equally problematic since it assumes that God’s “content” is historically “achieved” as covenant. (This is where I find the overlap with Arianism and Pelagianism to be interesting, not only with one another, but with Absolute Idealism itself.)

I think the problem only arises, however, precisely when a distinction is drawn, as you have here, between accounts of Jesus' fidelity and apocalyptic. At the very least, I do not think such distinctions are there in Paul, as I believe is Martyn's point, at least in part, in translating dikaiosis and its cognates as "rectification."

[ken oakes]

Josh,

Many thanks for the clarifications and for your response.

As regards my language of Jesus' obedience, as beckoning forth, soliciting, demanding, etc, this is actually a rather mild way of putting the issue. For the Jewish predecents regarding resurrection seemed primarily to grow out of a concern with theodicy, namely where is our just God? Here language such as "crying out" or "wailing for" would be more appropriate, and this crying out for God's justice and judgment is one of the primary motifs of the Psalms, as well as with the slain followers of the Lamb in John's Apocalpyse. Language aside, this comment was originally to think of a "teleology" (not a very happy term anyways) from the cross to resurrection that avoids the issues that Nate is wary about. It seems to me, that it is difficult to avoid at least something resembling this within an account of the cross and the resurrection, at least if we still want to speak of the vindication of the life and mission of Jesus by the Father in the resurrection.

As for your worry about the "Hegelian dialectic" that informs such accounts, I am not able to say very much for a couple of reasons. One is that I am not able to see how we go from the comments in the above paragraph to what you were describing. I can't quite follow how saying that the man Jesus' fulfills, as the perfectly obedient one, the covenant, or the law, or the commands of God, reverses Adam's disobedience, etc., turns into some full-blown form of idealism in the way that you are describing; it certainly can, but need not to. It shave statements like this off of an account of reconciliation would, it seems to me, destroy the typologies between Christ and Adam, and Christ and Moses within the NT.

Equally, it is b/c of the variety of ideas of resurrection in the OT and Apocrypha that I distinguished between resurrection and apocalypse.

Thanks again for the response, it gives me much to think about.

peace

[Joshua Davis]

Your comment helps me to be a bit more precise. My concern is not solely with this idea of solicitation, beckoning, etc.; I think you are right to note its importance. I would draw upon it liberally in my own treatment of the same matter.

My objection is to a way of thinking this solicitation that would make of it a mediating "transaction" between the Father and the Son.

[ken oakes]

That helps a lot Josh.

Once again many thanks for the comments and for the theological stimulation .

[Lucy]

Nate, your comment is very helpful. It helps me to understand what you mean when you say that Barth doesn't allow Jesus to relate to the world in its plural particularity and contingency. What you mean is that, for Barth, Jesus does not have an ongoing history of contingent encounter with the singular other. Rather, what is most true about each person is not that Jesus encounters us each in our unique histories but that we are summoned to an IDEAL humanity that floats above history. Thus, very simply, Barth has a hard time articulating how Jesus loves ME, that is, the ME who lives a particular contingent history. Do I have you right?

This raises a question for me: is there room in your thought for the concept of ecclesial mediation? I know you want to emphasize that the Spirit mediates Jesus' singular presence in history, but how does the Spirit do this? If you want to de-idealize/transcendentalize Jesus, then somehow you have to get him back into the contingencies of history. For Barth, the Spirit mediates Christ by awakening us to the knowledge of Jesus as "ideal" humanity. For you, how does the Spirit mediate Jesus?

[Nate Kerr]

Lucy:

I am sorry to have been so long in getting to your questions, and even now I am afraid that my response is going to have to be too brief and inadequate, and will probably mostly just repeat some things I have said elsewhere in similar venues. Perhaps I will have a chance to revisit some of the themes I raise here in comments to later posts or in my own response post.

Part of the difficulty here has to do with the ambiguity of the term "mediation." If by "ecclesial mediation" we mean that the church is some kind of "place" -- a "middle point," as it were -- whereby we get to Christ and Christ gets to us, I don't think that the idea is very helpful at all. However, if we think "church" as a kind of "open space" -- a diasporic "non-place," to use Certeau's imagery -- that occurs simultaneously as the opening of the world onto, as one's moving out into, the life of God, and with God as the opening out onto love for the other, then I think perhaps we are given a more sacramentally "iconic" way of thinking the church's relation to Christ in history -- that is, as a sign of that which it "is not" in-itself. Thought in this way, the church is the sacrament of Christ's transformation of the world insofar as it united by the Spirit to the transformation of the world in its "otherness." This is to answer most directly your question of how the Spirit "mediates" Jesus. Jesus gives himself over to the "more," the "excess" of history as to be given over to us ever-anew as an other, in the giving of another (the Spirit). The church happens, we might say, as the perpetual receiving of this other (Jesus) through the receiving of an-other (the ever-new gift of the Spirit that is occurs as the faces of the innumberable others). The trinitarian dynamic is of vital importance here: God loves us as other through Jesus only in the Holy Spirit, by whose power we are given in turn to love the other as other through Jesus. In short, Jesus’ singular historicity is the excessive, ever-new reoccurrence of that love through which we are given to love each other as other. Here I will continue to follow Barth in saying that Jesus is the mediator, without reserve, but he is this by the power (or work) of the Spirit that binds us ever anew to one another as other in and through Christ. But what this means is that Jesus, precisely by way of his singular, contingent historicity, is now present in and to the ongoing contingencies of history insofar as he is only ever present in that love by which we are united to the other as other within the contingent diversity of history itself -- and this precisely because Jesus only ever is in his singular, contingent historicity by the power of the Holy Spirit itself. So Jesus is in history as the concreteness of that love by which we are united to the other as other in the power of the Spirit, but only insofar as it is through Christ himself that we are so united. And so I can also say with Barth that Jesus Christ would not be who he is in history if the existence of the church as such were lacking, and this precisely because the church defined as such is genuinely a predicate of Jesus Christ's living, singular historicity, and not vice versa. And all of this has to do with who Jesus Christ is in his singularity as the mediator, and who the church is as sign and sacrament of that mediation, via its ongoing missionary reception of the other by whom Jesus is given to us ever-anew as our way into the mystery of God's eternal life (the Father).

Now, I recognize I have said a lot here without sufficient clarification. And I have not taken the time to sort the ideas out in as careful and systematic a fashion as I would like. But I'll leave it at that for now. Suffice it to say that there is one thing in particular (among many things) that I am convinced my own conception of the church-as-mission requires, and that is a rethinking of sacramentality and specifically of the church as sacrament of Christ. For what it's worth, I am committing a whole section of my next book to precisely such a rethinking.

[Erin]

This is really a treat, thanks!