ZDTh Pe ee er Cd SUPPLEMENT SERIES 4 published by the Committee for the Advancement of the Study of Dialectical Theology responsible editors of this edition Gerrit Neven (Kampen) & Bruce L. McCormack (Princeton) ISSN 0169-7536 © 2010 Protestantse Theologische Universiteit. in | Kampen. | The contents of this journal may not be distributed or reproduced i in any form without prior written approval of the editor. i fJesus as the Lord of Time According to Karl Barth + Zeitschrift fir Dialektische Theologie + Supplement Series 4 + George Hunsinger Karl Barth’s understanding of how time and eternity are related may some day be regarded as one of his finest achievements. No other theologian in history has ever tried to think these matters through in such a thorough- going christocentric and trinitarian way. The enormous subtlety and complexity of his ideas, however, have prevented them from being well most sympathetic interpreters. Nowhere understood, even by some of hi are the intricacies of Barth’s dialectical imagination more in evidence, and nowhere are they more demanding, than precisely at this seminal point. ‘At least two background ideas may be helpful to keep in mind in order to make sense of Barth's views. One might be called the principle of complex indivisibility, and the other that of the Trinitarian pattern. An exploration of these ideas will be used to set the stage for an examination of section 47, part 1 in Barth's Church Dogmatics, “Jesus, Lord of Time”. THE PRINCIPLE OF COMPLEX INDIVISIBILITY ‘The paradoxical idea of complex indivisibility arguably places Barth in of Athanasius, Cyril of Alexandria, and Luther. What these theologians all seem a distinguished historical series that includes the nam to have in common is a deep intuition about what it means to think theologically. Each in his own historical period faced a crisis in theological understanding, and each proceeded to meet it, in one way or another, by resorting to that most counter-intuitive of devices, namely, the idea of an indivisibility which, by a dialectical twist, included real complexity within itself. Athanasius and the Arian Crisis ‘The Arian crisis in the fourth century about the doctrine of God is a case in point. Arianism can be interpreted as the assertion of a divine114 indivisibility without any internal complexity. Either the being of God was simple, indivisible and non-composite, or else it was divisible, composite and hopelessly diverse. To the Arians, who were very good philosophical theologians, the doctrine of the Trinity seemed to involve the intolerable idea that God’s being was made up of three separate parts. ‘A God whose being was partitive, composite and diverse, they insisted, would be a God whose being was really creaturely rather than properly divine. The otherness of God required the idea of the divine simplicity, and divine simplicity meant that God's being was not composed of parts. What the Arian crisis demanded of orthodoxy was the apparent impossibility of a doctrine of the Trinity in which God's being could not be factored out into parts. To make a long story short, the orthodox solution as proposed by Nicaea and explained by Athanasius involved a move that ran counter to common sense. Athanasius completely agreed that God's being or ousia was indivisible, but he brilliantly disagreed that internal complexity or differentiation meant that God's being was necessarily composite. Simplicity and tri-personal complexity in the being of God were ideas that needed to be held together — not by way of rational intelligibility but rather by a strategy of dialectical juxtaposition which remained in unresolved tension. God’s oneness did not exclude God’s threeness, nor did God’s threeness exclude God’s oneness. The divine persons, each of whom was completely God, were one God. The one complete God was each person individually and yet also the several together. Both affirmations were necessary, but there could be no higher synthesis, That was what it meant to think theologically, and that was the revealed mystery of the Holy Trinity. One can see why Augustine once quipped that not to think about the Trinity risked heresy but to think about it risked lunacy. Consequently, there has always been a tendency in the history of theology to cordon off the mind-boggling Athanasian dialectical mode of thought so that the rest of Christian doctrine could return to normalcy and common sense. But alas it was not to be. Gyril and the Nestorian Crisis ‘The Nestorian crisis of the fifth century presented similar conceptual problems but this time in a new key, and if possible with greater difficulties. It was now Cyril who stepped forward to assume the mantle of his great forbear Athanasius. It seemed — and this was the crisis — that the person of Christ had to be defined either as a union of full deity with