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INTRODUCTION by Gabriel Vahanian

Seldom has Barth been so close to Calvin, and Calvin so close to us, as in the present work, now translated and published in English for the first time. Of course, it is not surprising that Barth should echo Calvin; or that he chose as the framework of his lectures delivered before an audience of Swiss reformed• ministers, to use Calvin’s Catechism of the Church of Geneva of 1545. Everyone acknowledges that Barth has been the leader of the so-called revival of the spirit of Reformation theology in the present day, and that this means for him primarily reformed theology.

What perhaps is surprising is that never has Calvin himself so compelled us to tread other paths than his own as when he is heard through Barth’s interpretation. It will be seen that, for the sake of an equal and common fidelity to the living reality of God, Barth can be marvelously free from Calvin. He can reject him without any feeling of disobedience. But he can also uphold him without reservation. Unlike lesser minds today, he does not have to make Calvin a “Barthian” in order to believe what he says. Nor must he always find some oblique reason in Calvin himself for departing from him in order to write theology in a manner that is truly faithful to the intentions and structure of the rediscovery of the gospel that took place in the period of the Reformation.

The significant characteristic of Barth’s approach, however, is that its concern is not at all merely to reveal to us where Calvin was right and where he was wrong; but it reveals to us, through the reformer’s teaching, the truth exhibited by the Person, the Word and Work, i.e., by the whole event of Jesus the Christ. This common allegiance, and this alone, accounts for the degree of subjection of Barth’s thought to that of Calvin, and at the same time his extraordinary freedom to disagree where he must. This living reality of the Christ-event neither Calvin nor Barth intend to incarcerate in a theological system, as if neatly to conserve the faith forever. Barth’s approach reveals to us that the purpose of Calvin’s teaching is to let its eternal subject, i.e., the Word become flesh, confront the individual, and perchance the disciple, ever anew.

What this means is that a reformed theologian never writes for posterity. He exhibits the living Word today. Only in this manner can what he has to say to his contemporaries have any relevance for their descendants. He is not a master or a doctor as are Augustine and Thomas Aquinas in the Roman Catholic Church. The reformed theologian is at his best when he strives after the description which Barth, in another context, applied to the author of the Institutes “Calvin est pour nous un maître dans l’art d’écouter.”• Calvin teaches us how to listen to the Word of God proclaimed, not to himself, but in the Church.

The foregoing should make evident that it is peculiar good fortune—shall we say, providence?—that this book combines Barth’s commentary, Calvin’s commentary, and the Apostles’ Creed. The Creed, or the truth to which the Creed as a symbol refers, is what binds them together.•• Aside from being well-known, the preeminence of the Apostles’ Creed as the most universally accepted statement of the Christian faith in all ages suggests that what Calvin and Barth individually say about it, and what Barth says about Calvin’s commentary upon it, needs careful consideration. This volume may therefore serve many readers as the most readily available introduction to the thought of Karl Barth, and to the Reformation’s rediscovery both of the gospel and of the “Catholic” faith enshrined in the Creed.

Barth’s theology is in fact contained in the liminal statements of Calvin’s catechism. It is no exaggeration to say that there is a similarity between the inner structure of Barth’s thought and that of Calvin, for both are related to the Creed. As a matter of fact, it would be wrong to expect less than this, since Barth’s systematic theology, like the Creed, consists chiefly in Christological concentration. For this reason, the first article of the Creed (on God as Creator) and the third (on the Holy Spirit and the Church) as well as the second (on the Son) are all interpreted in the sense of God’s work of reconciliation, of which the Christ-event (i.e. the love of God for man) constitutes the cornerstone. On this point, Barth finds himself in agreement with Calvin, who “clearly indicates the origin of our knowledge of God’s love. Note well: it is not a question of a general and abstract and philosophical knowledge, not a question of a treatise on the love of God in nature or on love in general; all this, all these abstract ideas are a piece of paper, a great noise, only ideas. The Gospel, on the contrary, tells us about realities. The task of theological reflection and of preaching does not begin at all with abstract ideas, but with the reality of God’s action. The love of God is not an abstract quality of God’s; it is an act: God takes to heart our misery. In Jesus Christ, he declares his mercy unto us and puts this mercy to work, and there is no mercy towards us outside Jesus Christ.”

To be sure, it is not our intention to suggest only how wonderful a coincidence there is in this case between the Reformer’s and Barth’s views. Actually, more than once Barth will have to part company; for example, on the issue of predestination and the resurrection of the flesh. But what is more interesting is the way in which certain doctrines, under Barth’s analysis of Calvin’s statements, yield a fresher meaning, sometimes fully daring, sometimes vigorously paradoxical. The reader has but to be referred to the passage where Barth interprets the doctrine of the ascension as implying the ultimate refutation of all dictatorships, or where his understanding of the virgin birth or the empty tomb is both in strict conformity with orthodoxy and—we must admit—wholly unorthodox.

Doubtless some readers may need help in understanding what they will find in this volume. In a brief introduction only a few points can, in any case, be selected for comment. Three points in particular seem to the translator to require further discussion; and they are chosen because they will help to show the originality of Barth’s thought by setting this volume in a larger framework and, generally, in relation to his unique contribution to systematic theology as a whole. These points are: (1) theology as corrective and world-facing and, by implication, man-honoring; (2) theology and ethics; and (3) Barth’s unorthodox orthodoxy, as, for example, in his treatment of the virgin birth. All three have been greatly misunderstood—the first two due mainly to the inability of English-speaking theologians to perceive the true nature of Barth’s enterprise, and their consequent precipitous rejection of it; the third, due more to Barth’s own statement.

A theology of the Word, according to the tradition of the Reformation, is always essentially a corrective theology. Like a teacher, it attempts to inform and transform by confronting the student, not by indoctrinating him. Only thus can the teaching of the Church become an event that stands witness to the grace of God, instead of a rigid instrument of propaganda. The task of the theologian is constantly to awaken the Church to this responsibility which alone is hers. And this does not always mean maintaining the tradition or a specific doctrine, however hallowed they may be. It means also criticism, that is to say, correction. For this reason some twenty years ago, reviewing in The Christian Century the development of his thinking, Barth could write: “My new task was to take all that has been said before and to think it through once more and freshly and to articulate it anew as a theology of the grace of God in Jesus Christ. I cannot pass over in silence the fact that in working at this task—I should like to call it a Christological concentration—I have been led to a critical (in a better sense of the word) discussion of church tradition, and as well of the Reformers, and especially of Calvin.”• Of such an aim, this book offers the reader a concise and vivid realization.

However, it is from the standpoint of the Church that Barth conceives and conducts his theological task of correction, as is evidenced by the fact that he altered the title of his (nearly completed) magnum opus from Christliche (Christian) to Kirchliche Dogmatik (Church Dogmatics). But for him the Church is the world-facing reality which is brought about by the Word of God proclaimed and heard. She is not a world-denying sphere of hygienic righteousness. Only as a theologian of the Word, therefore, is Barth a theologian of the Church, that is, a man who took his “glorious liberty” seriously when he declared that he had been impelled to become “simultaneously very much more churchly and very much more worldly.”

It is time to dispel the erroneous conception that Barth has no use for the things of this world and that like Tertullian he finds nothing in common between Athens and Jerusalem. Similarly, we must resist the widespread opinion, based on misinterpreted and extrapolated utterances from his earlier theological writings, that the lapidary formula “God is all, man is nothing” gives the real measure of his thinking. To be sure, these misreadings were further strengthened by Barth’s categorical rejection of general revelation (i.e. his rejection of the idea that God apart from Jesus Christ reveals himself also in nature and this, therefore, implies innate in man a “point of contact” or natural reciprocity between him and God). Strange as it may seem, in Barth’s view, any attempt to establish a degree of similitude or resemblance between the Creator and the creature amounts to an implicit attitude of contempt for the creature. In preserving the radical otherness between God and man, Barth’s intention indeed is to assert and preserve the inalienable condition of freedom and necessity which properly is man’s. And in hinging his interpretation of this otherness on the Christ-event, he is led to the biblical conclusion that in Christ this otherness stands revealed as only one side of the coin, the other side being the fundamental mutuality between the Creator and the creature. Which means that God is not God without man; and were man nothing, God would not be all.

Thus there is, in Barth’s theology, a point of contact between God and man. It is Jesus Christ. And there is also a point of contact between Athens and Jerusalem. Again, it is Jesus Christ. As Barth himself puts it, when the pagan, or, if you will, natural man hears about Jesus Christ it is of his own Lord that he hears.

All this goes to show that the “Christological concentration” which has governed Barth’s theological method has led him, far from irrational fideism or anthropological pessimism, to the constant theme of God’s own consistency with himself, i.e. with his intention and purpose as Creator, and to the theme that here and now the life-abundant is a possibility. “We must—even if it seems ‘dangerous’—affirm that the glory of God and the glory of man, although different, actually coincide. There is no other glory of God (this is a free decision of his will) than that which comes about in man’s existence. And there is no other glory of man than that which he may and can have in glorifying God. Likewise God’s beatitude coincides with man’s happiness. Man’s happiness is to make God’s beatitude appear in his life, and God’s beatitude consists in giving himself to man in the form of human happiness.” The virtue of this “Christological concentration” is to show also that the ecclesiastical frame of reference of his Dogmatics, instead of calling for withdrawal from the world, actually constitutes a potent antidote to all forms of monasticism, asceticism, pietism, or perfectionism.

If any proof should be required in support of these assertions, it is to be found in the significance Barth attaches to the fact that, contrary to the traditional methods of dogmatics, he does not begin with general and epistemological considerations about the existence of a supreme being and a general knowledge of God. Right off, Barth begins with the reality of God which precedes and founds the reality of man, including man’s charismatic (i.e. created by grace) capacity to know God and serve him.

Another evidence is furnished by the fact that Barth has treated ethics as part and parcel of his systematic theology, more exactly as the logical and Christological extreme point of his Church-centered dogmatic inquiry. Not only did this surprise everybody, but even more especially it caught unawares all those who had predicted that Barthianism and ethics would not mix. The inclusion of his ethical teaching within his theological teaching means for Barth nothing other than the exclusion of anthropological pessimism and cultural obscurantism, although it does not mean either one-sided optimism or unconditional surrender to automatic progress. This inclusion means that in the Christ-event God is God for man and that his faithfulness to his creation includes and grounds the possibility of human existence, not unlike the sun which shines on the just and on the unjust. Finally it means that a theologian’s responsibility with regard to the ethical problem does not represent some concession—in the form of an afterthought—to the necessities and predicament of life in this world, as if faith required a chasm between certain sacred aspirations of man and his more realistic appraisal of secular and corrupt realities. This amounts to saying that Barth’s view of man is not dichotomous. Nor is there for him a necessary antimony between that which is Christian and that which is not. The manner in which Barth exhibits this is itself very illuminating. In his Dogmatics, his first discussion of ethics occurs even before he has discussed anthropology. This points to two things. On the one hand, it implies that every kind of dichotomous view of the nature of man is based on the assumption of a golden age prior to the fall of Adam. Barth does not believe in any golden age. There was a sinner as soon as there was a man. On the other hand, this implies that the fundamental and only distinction is to be drawn between the Creator and the creature. Therefore, to say that there was a sinner as soon as there was a man means not to uphold a pessimistic view of man so much as to avoid all dichotomies such as Christian and non-Christian, the Church and the World, sacred and secular. In fact, Barth himself wrote in the forementioned article published in The Christian Century: “The abstract transcendent God, who does not take care of the real man (‘God is all, man is nothing!’), the abstract eschatological awaiting, without significance for the present, and the just as abstract Church, occupied only with this transcendent God, and separated from state and society by an abyss—all that existed, not in my head, but only in the heads of my readers and especially in the heads of those who have written reviews and even books about me.”

It was pointed out above that Barth’s creativity partly consists in his ability to disclose bold, new meaning in ancient doctrines, and in his boldness—or, rather, theological and existential humility—in sticking to these doctrines. A striking example of this is his discussion of the virgin birth.

In connection with this doctrine, first of all Barth distinguishes (a) the mystery of the incarnation from (b) the miracle of the virgin birth, which is “the sign of that mystery.” Once again, it is not surprising that he should start with the mystery of the incarnation and then only proceed to the miracle itself. This is in keeping with his theological method of speaking, for example, first of God’s reality and revelation and then secondly of the possibility of his presence in his creation and of his availability to cognition.

What this mystery means is that “it guarantees the efficacy of revelation.” That is to say, it is God who takes the initiative and seeks man—not the other way round. It is God who becomes man: the basic distinction between Creator and creature nevertheless is here maintained, and no confusion is effected between them. But in the mystery of the incarnation it is their unity or mutuality which is equally stressed, because it is God who becomes man. The reality of the former statement is, so to speak, confirmed and sealed by the latter. As W. H. Auden says, “the Unknown seeks the known,” and now God is no longer to be sought after.

But it is when we come to the second consideration, the miracle itself as sign of the mystery that Barth seems to lean too conspicuously towards orthodoxy (despite his warnings) and ultimately to deny his own premises, whereby the encounter between the Creator and the creature is initiated always by the Creator and is ever independent of the merit or demerit of the creature; whereby, through the Christ-event there is unity without confusion between them; and whereby the transcendence of the Creator upholds both the finiteness and transitory preeminence of the creature without ever implying contempt for him.

Barth puts this by saying that the action of the Holy Spirit means exclusion of human sin. Not that, he writes, “the sexual realm is the receptacle of sin. Such an interpretation, so characteristic of the Christian culture smacks of the cloister, the monks. Sexual asceticism is a pagan and not a biblical idea.” That is to say, here again, the precedence of God is established both in his distinction from and his unity with man. “God excludes man, the fallen sovereign. For it was he, Adam, who was called a sinner, although in the history of sin the woman played no little role, since she was the first who discussed theology! It is Adam, the glorious man and maker of history, who is deemed improper for God’s designs. God steps into the act in Adam’s place. Not that he becomes husband to the woman, but through the action of his Holy Spirit he renders Joseph useless” (italics ours). So far, to use Barth’s categories, it is as if he were saying that the virgin birth is to the mystery of the incarnation what the sign is to that which is signified; and in this sense the exclusion of man as only the exclusion of sin, and a sign that all depends on grace, might be accepted.

But that the exclusion of sin necessitates the exclusion of the male specifically, is a distortion of the relation between sign and that which is signified, especially as Barth adds that God is not to be regarded as husband to the woman. Indeed, on Barth’s own theory, only charismatically is there any concurrence between the sign and that which is signified: “the sign does not prove the thing signified, it communicates it. In other words, this miracle was not necessary for the incarnation. God could have chosen another process, even as Jesus could have done other miracles to signify the same Word. Hence the distinction between sign and the thing signified must be maintained” (italics ours). Our question is: Why, if Joseph is rendered useless, although God does not become husband to the woman, is not the miracle also rendered useless, since it is not necessary for the incarnation? The point is, in other words, that Barth does not sufficiently account for the charismatic character of the sign, namely that the sign is not to be confused with that which is signified, and that it may (on Barth’s own view) point to that which is signified whether it has or has not any aptitude of its own for this. To be sure, there is “the danger that, by eliminating the sign, we thereby eliminate the thing signified.” But Barth seems, on the other hand, to surrender the thing signified wholly to the sign, and to make the former dependent on the latter. One must wonder whether at this point there is not a tinge of opus operatum in Barth’s understanding of God’s grace. The tradition of the Reformation has always affirmed the relation between Creator and creature, or between the sign and that which is signified, in such a fashion as to reject explicitly every opus operatum, and the analogia entis (i.e. analogy of being between God and man) which this presupposes. It is therefore all the more strange that despite the existentially relevant illuminations of his theological interpretation, Barth should be compelled to uphold the exegetically defective traditional dogma of the virgin birth. From our vantage point, it appears that for Barth the miracle is to the Christ-event what the Garden of Eden is to the Fall, namely a golden age. Why does Barth reject one and seek refuge in another, especially since he implies that in their Eden Adam no less than Eve was discussing bad theology? The answer probably lies in his fear of natural theology.

Barth excised natural theology. He should now excise his fear of it and allow full expression of the motif of grace in which his theology has otherwise been so triumphant.

Finally, one of the pleasant tasks of a translator is to extend his gratefulness to those whose help has contributed to a richer and faithful rendering of the text. This was all the more difficult because Barth was expressing himself, not in his native German, but in French, which though grammatically correct is nevertheless idiomatically as Barthian as his Dogmatik. I am indebted to Mr. Robert Matthews for many suggestions at the stage of the first draft. I am more than indebted to my colleague Mr. Paul Ramsey, Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton: always available, his assistance was all the more needed because of his knowledge of Calvin and Barth, and because of his friendship for myself. Thanks are also due to Mr. Arthur A. Cohen, publisher, for his careful reading of the manuscript and his many corrections. Grateful acknowledgment is, finally, extended to the Westminster Press for permission to quote the Catechism from Calvin’s Theological Treatises, volume 22 of the Library of Christian Classics.

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

April, 1958