The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life: The Theological Basis of Ethics by Karl Barth
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

It’s All About Other People, Karl

Karl Barth was arguably the most important Christian theoiogian of the 20th century. A Calvinist who felt that Protestantism had been distorted into a pernicious civil religion, and that Catholicism remained bogged down in its own self-justification, Barth tried to recover the meaning of divine revelation in a world bent on using it for other than divine ends.

The Theological Basis of Ethics is an attempt to demonstrate that Christian theology has teeth, as it were, in that the revelation of a Trinitarian God has implications for how human beings are meant to act with each other. This has become a somewhat persistent theme in theological ethics even into the 21st century.

The details of Barth’s argument are dense and complex, largely because of his highly refined, one might say tortuous, view of what constitutes revelation. It is not this argument that concerns me here but the rather more general logic of the relationship between revelation and ethics. It is at this level that I believe Barth becomes incomprehensible.

The problem that all ethicists face is that they must ultimately recognise something as The Good against which to evaluate correct behaviour. Once The Good is specified, however implicitly or indirectly, behavioural implications are usually obvious. So this choice is pivotal for ethical discussion.

Theological ethicists, that is theologians who claim to ‘derive’ ethics from ‘revealed truths’ about God, don’t approve of what might be called liberal sentiment as the basis for ethics. For them the mores and feelings of society at large are inadequate guarantees of the appropriateness of ethical standards. For the theologians these are mere conventions with no absolute claim on our consciences, laws or attitudes.

Rather the theologian starts with what he calls revelation, that divinely provided insight which, however inarticulate, demands to be heard and acted upon. Revelation is a gift, a dandum rather than a datum, according to Barth. The core of this gift is contained in sacred scriptures, but the message it gives is constantly adapted to our present circumstances. Even the Bible is an interpretation of the Word of God mainly appropriate to times in which it was written. It is static only for those who would make an idol of the human word.

The problem is, of course, the distinction that Barth and other theologians make between revelation and conventional ethical wisdom. Barth quotes St. Augustine on revelation as not being “…as if we believed something new, but having remembered it we approve of what has been said.” Just how such familiar thought can be distinguished from conventional wisdom that floats about the community we live in is a mystery. Indeed, what is the revelation he talks about other than slowly evolving thoughts about the divine passed down in the cultural gossip we call tradition?

It is just as valid therefore to argue from liberal ethics to theology as the other way round. Our ideas of God are generated by our feelings about what is important and how people should act with each other. We deduce God from what we think we should be like. Barth’s catalysing issue, as it were, was the fact that many theologians and fellow-churchmen cheered Germany’s initiation and continued participation in WWI. But the proposition that Barth saw what was being done and rejected it precisely because he himself was re-stating liberal bourgeois values is not a trivial possibility. From this conventional viewpoint he was correcting the profound error of trying to deduce ethics from religion, precisely what his colleagues were doing.

Carl Jung wrote contemporaneously with Barth. There are two principles of Jungian psychology: First that the Unconscious is indistinguishable from Reality. Second that the Self, consisting of The Conscious and Unconscious Mind, is indistinguishable from God. I don’t think that Barth would have argued with these. Surprisingly they are not inconsistent with Barth’s neo-Calvinism of the “radical externality” of the Word of God.

The “voice of the Living God” is indeed present in what we experience around us, as Bonaventure most famously insisted, particularly in other people. Jung’s theory has the great advantage of being immensely simpler than Barth’s theology. And it has a much sharper and tighter ethical import: It is other people who must be respected as the divine voice lest our own selves become idolised. What more could theological ethics want or need to say?

Postscript: For more on the theology of Barth, see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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