(Barth Studies Series) Professor William Werpehowski - Karl Barth and Christian Ethics - Living in Truth-Ashgate Publishing (2013)

Karl Barth and Christian Ethics
This critical study of Karl Barth’s Christian theological ethics discusses Barth’s
controversial and characteristically misunderstood ethics of divine command.
The surprising relation of his ‘divine command ethics’ to contemporary ‘narrative
theology’ and ‘virtue ethics’ and specific moral themes concerning bonds between
parents and children, the nature of truth telling, and the meaning of Christian love
of God and neighbour are all discussed. This book reveals Barth’s richness, depth
and insight, and places his work in constructive connection with salient themes in
both Catholic and Protestant ethics.
Barth Studies
Series Editors
John Webster, University of Aberdeen, UK
George Hunsinger, Princeton Theological Seminary, USA
Hans-Anton Drewes, Karl Barth Archive, Switzerland
The work of Barth is central to the history of modern western theology and
remains a major voice in contemporary constructive theology. His writings have
been the subject of intensive scrutiny and re-evaluation over the past two decades,
notably on the part of English-language Barth scholars who have often been at the
forefront of fresh interpretation and creative appropriation of his theology. Study
of Barth, both by graduate students and by established scholars, is a significant
enterprise; literature on him and conferences devoted to his work abound; the Karl
Barth Archive in Switzerland and the Center for Barth Studies at Princeton give
institutional profile to these interests. Barth’s work is also considered by many to
be a significant resource for the intellectual life of the churches.
Drawing from the wide pool of Barth scholarship, and including translations of
Barth’s works, this series aims to function as a means by which writing on Barth,
of the highest scholarly calibre, can find publication. The series builds upon and
furthers the interest in Barth’s work in the theological academy and the church.
Barth’s Interpretation of the Virgin Birth

A Sign of Mystery
Dustin Resch
Ethics with Barth: God, Metaphysics and Morals

Matthew Rose
Karl Barth on the Filioque

David Guretzki
Karl Barth and the Fifth Gospel

Barth’s Theological Exegesis of Isaiah
Mark S. Gignilliat
A Shorter Commentary on Romans by Karl Barth

With an Introductory Essay by Maico Michielin
Maico M. Michielin
Karl Barth and Christian Ethics
Living in Truth
William Werpehowski
Georgetown University, USA
© William Werpehowski 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
William Werpehowski has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Werpehowski, William.
Karl Barth and Christian Ethics: Living in Truth / by William Werpehowski.
pages cm. – (Barth Studies)
Includes index.
1. Barth, Karl, 1886-1968. 2. Christian ethics. I. Title.
BX4827.B3W44 2013
241–dc23 2013020872
ISBN 9781409438755 (hbk)

ISBN 9781409438762 (ebk-PDF)
ISBN 9781472400505 (ebk-ePUB)
IV
For
Robert W. Jenson
who helped get me started and then, quietly, kept me going
This page has been left blank intentionally
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Preface xi
Part One: Divine Command, Narrative, and Ethics
1 Divine Commands and Philosophical Dilemmas 3
2 Command and History 15
3 Narrative and Ethics 37
4 Realism and Discernment 57
Part Two: Virtue, Moral Practices, and Discernment
5 What Shall Parents Teach Their Children? 73
6 In Search of Real Children: Innocence, Absence and

Becoming a Self 85
7 Love of God and the Moral Meaning of Joy 105
8 Hiddenness, Disclosure, and the Reality of God:

The Practice of Truth Telling 119
9 Practical Wisdom and Integrity 135
10 Desire, Reverence, and Friendship 151
Index 169
Acknowledgments
For more than three decades, the Yale-Princeton Theology Group has been a
standing help and inspiration to me. I am particularly indebted to the members
who came together at Princeton Theological Seminary in June 2012 to discuss
a draft of this book—James Buckley, Joseph Mangina, Michael Root, Katherine
Sonderegger, Kathryn Tanner, Thomas Tracy, and our host, George Hunsinger.
George, along with John Webster, continue to be especially supportive of my work
on Karl Barth’s theology and ethics, and their critical influence on much of what I
have to say here is enormous.
I also want to thank the following colleagues and friends for their generosity
and guidance: Patrick Brennan, Lisa Sowle Cahill, Jesse Couenhoven, Kathryn
Getek Soltis, Eric Gregory, Anthony Godzieba, James M. Gustafson, Amy Laura
Hall, Stanley Hauerwas, Kevin Hughes, Mark Husbands, Mary Jo Iozzio, Patricia
Beattie Jung, James Keenan, Aryeh Kosman, Robin Lovin, Eugene McCarraher,
Bruce McCormack, Anne McGuire, Gerald McKenny, Gilbert Meilaender, Anna
Moreland, Michael Moreland, Fran O’Brien, Douglas Ottati, Gene Outka, Stephen
Pope, Jean Porter, Deborah Roberts, Matthew Rose, Edmund N. Santurri, Douglas
Schuurman, William Schweiker, Thomas W. Smith, Jeffrey Stout, Darlene Fozard
Weaver, Sondra Wheeler, and Diane Yeager.
In the last stages of writing, I was happy and grateful to receive the support
of the Robert L. McDevitt, K.S.G., K.C.H.S and Catherine H. McDevitt L.C.H.S.
Professorship in Catholic Theology at Georgetown University.
Robert Jenson has been more important to me in my vocation as a Christian
ethicist than he knows. But he should know, and so I dedicate this book to him.
***
Chapters 1 through 6 as well as Chapter 9 are revisions of essays previously in

print. I gratefully acknowledge the following presses and periodicals for their
permission to republish: Dialog, for “Divine Commands and Philosophical
Dilemmas,” Dialog (Winter 1981), 25–30; the Journal of Religious Ethics, for
“Command and History in the Ethics of Karl Barth,” 9/2 (Fall 1981), 298–320;
Theology Today, for “Narrative and Ethics in Barth,” 43/3 (October 1986), 334–53;
Zeitschrift fur dialektische Theologie, for “Hearing the Divine Command: Realism
and Discernment in Barth’s Ethics,” (1999), 64–74; Continuum International
Publishing Group, a Bloomsbury Company, for “What Shall Parents Teach Their
Children?,” in Why Are We Here? Christian Answers to Everyday Questions,
ed. Ronald F. Thiemann and William C. Placher (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press
x Karl Barth and Christian Ethics
International, 1998), 112–29; William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, for “In

Search of Real Children: Innocence, Absence, and Becoming a Self in Christ,” in
The Vocation of the Child, ed. Patrick Brennan and John Coons (2008), 53–74; the
Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, for “Practical Wisdom and the Integrity
of Christian Life,” 27/2 (Fall/Winter 2007), 55–72.
Preface
This book is the product of many years of studying and thinking about the character
and value of Karl Barth’s Christian ethics. I have tried throughout that time and in
these pages to be true to Barth’s fundamental theological vision while relating his
work to other accounts of the Christian life and a variety of specific moral issues. I
would be pleased if my readers, whatever their expertise in Barth may be, will come
away with a deeper comprehension of his ethics and a greater readiness to think
critically with him in conversations about what Christians ought to be and to do.
Four salient themes in Barth’s theology are particularly relevant to this study.
The first and most fundamental is that the Christian Gospel is God’s joyful news,
freely given to us, of God’s sovereign decision to be for us in Jesus Christ. Indeed,
“the existence of Jesus Christ is the sovereign decision upon the existence” of
every woman and man.1
In this one man God sees every man, all of us, as through a glass. Through this
medium, through this Mediator, we are known and seen by God. And we may,
and should, understand ourselves as men made known to Him in this way. Before
his eyes from eternity God keeps men, each man, in Him, in this One; and not
only before His eyes but loved and elect and called and made His possession. In
Him he has from eternity bound Himself to each, to all. Along the entire line it
holds, from the creatureliness of man, through the misery of man, to the glory
promised to man.2
Second, both the subject and the object of the Gospel, the Word of God given
to humanity, are rooted in freedom. The good news is a free gift, and for Barth
this means that “without any possibility on our side God’s great possibility comes
into view, making possible what was impossible from our side,” i.e., the joyful,
reconciling and redeeming meeting between God and God’s wayward human
creatures. The gift comes to us unearned and unexacted, and “it is grace all over
again if our eyes and ears are opened to this grace.”3 Thus the freedom “in which
God has come to me and adopted me” is that in which I may in Jesus Christ
faithfully hear and hold to God. A life lived in faith, the trust “in which a man
may hold on to the faithfulness of another,”4 is, moreover, a history that permits
our authentic flourishing. The freedom for the final goal of our well-being is at the
1
Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 88, first italics mine.
2
Ibid., 91.
3
Ibid., 17
4
Ibid., 18.
xii Karl Barth and Christian Ethics
same time a freedom from the vain and futile burden of trusting in ourselves and
the goals of our making.
The implications of both themes for theological ethics are straightforward and
considerable.
To hold to God is to rely on the fact that God is there for me, and to live in this
certainty. This is the promise God gives us: I am there for you. But this promise
at once means guidance too. I am not left to my waywardness and my own ideas;
but I have His commandment, to which I may hold in everything, in my entire
earthly existence.5
In Chapters 1, 2, and 3, I offer my critical understanding of this standpoint while

addressing Barth’s approach to the nature and source of the good, the divine
command in its relation to the personal history of a moral agent, and the place of
narrative in Christian ethics.
The third salient theme is what I will call dynamic realism. As John Webster
has stressed, for Barth the “reality-constituting acts of God” establish the world
we inhabit.6 These acts situate the reality of human freedom within “the history of
the covenant between the triune God and his human partners. That history simply
is, anterior to all human choosing; it is a condition in which we find ourselves,
and not something which we bring about through an act of will.”7 Barth’s ethics
presuppose a “moral ontology” that objectively orients human actors within a
“moral space” constituted by a “creative agency which is the origin, substance and
fulfillment of their own acts.”8
I highlight this feature not only because, as I allow in Chapter 4, it stands at the
heart of Barth’s thought, but also for the reason that my efforts in Part 2 critically
develop it in the area of theological ethics. The analyses of parental responsibilities
and the vocation of the child in Chapters 5 and 6 consider how these moral topics
make sense in a world that belongs from first to last to God in Christ—not, say, to
“the family” or commercial culture or to powers that prompt us to various sorts of
self-defense or despair. The chapter on vocation also launches my setting Barth’s
thought more explicitly in dialogue with other ideas and figures, theological and
non-theological. The idea is to promote the liveliness of Barth’s ethics for such
engagement and with that to contribute to a more adequate, compelling, and
fruitful Christian moral vision. Chapter 7 attends to the moral meaning of joy, an
emotion and attitude constitutive of existence in the midst of abundant and abiding
grace, through the work of Barth, Julian of Norwich, and Thomas Aquinas. Telling
Ibid., 19.
5
John Webster, Barth’s Ethics of Reconciliation (Cambridge: Cambridge University

6
Press, 1995), 223.

7
John Webster, Barth’s Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth’s Thought
(Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1998), 123.
8
Ibid., 152–53.
Preface xiii
the truth and being truthful in the real world is the subject of the following chapter,
with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s brief but profound later reflections standing as a critical
complement to Barth’s theology of sin as falsehood. Chapters 9 and 10 study the
virtues of practical wisdom and neighbor love with a continuing commitment to
theological exchange in service of “the firmest grasp of the real.”9
John Webster and I are not alone, of course, in taking up Barth’s realism.
Two excellent recent monographs on Barth’s ethics also focus on his claim that
the good and the real are ontologically inseparable, but proceed to advance it in
different directions.10 Gerald McKenny begins from the proposition that “God has
established the good and accomplished it in our place.” As a consequence grace on
one side “interrupts all of our striving for the good and calls it into question,” and,
on the other, “summons us and, by the Holy Spirit, empowers and directs us to exist
in a human analogy to grace, and thereby to glorify the God who glorifies us.”11
A “Reformation-era conception of grace … never ceases to determine”12 Barth’s
ethics; thus it stands against forms of theological eudaimonism or naturalism often
associated with Roman Catholic moral theology. For example, a “notion of grace
as working in us to bring about a perfection of our natural capacities which they
are incapable of accomplishing” is rejected in favor of one “as bringing about our
good apart from our activity and summoning us … to active participation in it.”13
In contrast, Matthew Rose presents Barth’s ethics as “congenial to Catholic
conceptions of morality” by aligning it with an “Augustinian and Thomistic view
that right living is in accord with created nature. To be good is to live in the truth
about ourselves, to live in conformity with God’s intentions for created order.”14
Rose finds a “strand of ethical naturalism in Barth.”15 He is a “sort of eudaemonist”16
in that he takes seriously and as a matter of fact answers the question of the end or
good to which all human activity aspires.
The authors qualify their respective interpretations in ways that bring them closer
together. McKenny acknowledges that for Barth “God does satisfy the deepest and
most genuine human desires,” though “what these desires are is apparent only in
9
“To know oneself in the world (as part of it, subject to it, connected with it) is to
have the firmest grasp of the real.” Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on
Philosophy and Literature (London: Penguin, 1999), 459. Cf. John Webster, “’The Firmest
Grasp of the Real’: Karl Barth on Original Sin,” in Barth’s Moral Theology, 65–76.
10
See also David Clough and Michael Leyden, “Claiming Barth for Ethics: The Last
Two Decades,” Ecclesiology 6 (2010): 166–82.
11
Gerald McKenny, The Analogy of Grace: Karl Barth’s Moral Theology (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2010), 21.
12
Ibid., 294.
13
Ibid., 28.
14
Matthew Rose, Ethics with Barth: God, Metaphysics, and Morals (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2010), 6, 10.
15
Ibid., 66.
16
Ibid., 114.
xiv Karl Barth and Christian Ethics
light of the command of God, not in advance of it.”17 Rose makes clear that in
Barth’s theology “our being-for-God cannot be regarded simply as the unaided,
organic continuation of creaturely nature itself.”18 As for eudaimonism, Rose and
McKenny both are aware of Barth’s Kantian turn against a morality of happiness
and desire and his outright rejection of an immanent teleology that may of itself, in
one way or another, bring human subjects to an awareness and embrace of God.19
What remains of the disagreement between the two is a question I cannot
answer here. What is germane in the present context is that the disagreement and
the convergence demonstrate how both authors are reckoning with the dialectical
thoroughness or completeness of Barth’s theological realism. The ontological
inseparability of the good and the real means that the human good accomplished
once and for all on our behalf “is a reality in which we exist by virtue of our
participation in Christ and in which we are summoned to remain.”20 In that reality,
McKenny shows, we are graciously addressed, called out and called away from
our fruitless and finally fantastic search for the good within the simple or elaborate
circles of our own self-enclosure. Yet we are “summoned to remain” within the
reality of covenant partnership in which we already exist de jure. We already exist
in it because the Word and work of grace “not only confronts us with what God has
done for us but also claims us in our concrete existence as acting subjects.”21 Rose,
we might say, is above all interested in the fact of the claiming and the gravity of the
concreteness. Because of God’s election of humanity in Jesus Christ, we are claimed
all the way down; hence in our being and agency we are creatures—fallen, blind,
and needy creatures, to be sure—who are made and fulfilled and therefore who
may be joyful from and for the love of God. “The statement that the human spirit
is naturally Christian may also be valid as an obstinately joyful proclamation.”22
Fourth, Christian theological inquiry is distinctively faithful, free, and rational.
Regarding knowledge of God it is faithful to its object; “in Anselm’s terms, the
ratio and the necessitas of theological knowledge must be directed by the ratio
and the necessitas of the object.”23 Theology is a free science by “making use of
every human capacity for perception, judgment, and speech, without being bound
to any presupposed epistemology.” “Naturally,” it “constantly and universally
employs the viewpoints, concepts, images, and linguistic media that have been
McKenny, The Analogy of Grace, 183.

17
Rose, Ethics with Barth, 82. Nor would Barth countenance, as McKenny shows,
18
a being-for-God that is simply the aided organic continuation of creaturely nature “itself.”
19
Ibid., 124, 127; McKenny, The Analogy of Grace, 15, 91–92.
20
McKenny, The Analogy of Grace, 193.
21
Ibid., 164.
22
Karl Barth, The Humanity of God (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press,
1996), 60. Rose quotes this remark in Ethics with Barth, 1.
23
Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans,
1963), 90.
Preface xv
handed down or have newly arisen in its time and situation.”24 While it is free
from any “general regulation as a binding law for its viewpoints, conceptions,
images, and speech,” it is also free for confident and “eclectic” use of any or
all non-theological and non-Christian materials. Theology’s rationality emerges
in its search for “the logic, dialectic, and rhetoric that stem from … the divine
Logos.”25 These characteristics are addressed in Part 1 of the book. There Barth’s
practice of “conceptual redescription” of the first order language of faith, a
practice incorporating all three of them, carries a certain prominence. The issues
and questions I explore in Part 2 raise for me and I hope for readers the possibility
of reimagining, freely and faithfully and for good theological reasons, how
Christian virtues might sometimes line up with classical Aristotelian and Thomist
conceptions, and sometimes not.
Thus Karl Barth’s Christian ethics is about “living in truth” in several
interlaced senses. We may live within the truth that is God’s decision for us in
Jesus Christ. Our life is authentically or truthfully human as we freely participate
in His living reality, which encompasses and gives meaning to all that is.
“Theological existence” is practically a form of such a life in its fidelity, freedom,
and “surpassing reasonableness.”26
No vision of Christian morality can constructively proceed without honoring
these terms. Barth shows us one way to do so. His work commends itself
especially because, from first to last, it refuses let go of them and challenges us
not to let go of them either.
24
Ibid.
25
Ibid., 91.
26
See Chapter 9.
Part One
Divine Command, Narrative,
and Ethics
Chapter 1
Divine Commands and
Philosophical Dilemmas
Why ought we to obey the command of God? A Christian might say that we ought
to obey the command because what God commands is good or right. But what
makes God’s commands good or right? A classic response to this question is to
pose another question in the form of a dilemma. The Platonic (or Socratic) version
of the dilemma goes as follows: Does God command certain actions because they
are good or right in themselves, or does their goodness or rightness consist simply
in the fact that God commands them? If actions are good only by virtue of the fact
that God commands them, then God’s command, since no reason is given for it,
must be seen to be arbitrary, and obedience to it would seem to have no basis other
than the acknowledgment that divine caprice is backed by divine constraining
power. But if actions are good or right independently of God’s will, then it appears
that there is some standard of goodness or rightness, independent of God’s will
and commandment, to which God’s will and commandment must conform if they
are to be called “good” or “right.”1 Now perhaps the second horn of the dilemma
is less problematic than the first for Christian ethical traditions; yet it does seem
to be the case that many believers hold that what is normative for human behavior
originates and is justified with reference to God’s will.2
In its Kantian version, the dilemma has to do with the problem of human
autonomy. If we obey God’s command because we believe that it specifies what
is right, then we are either 1) heteronomously assenting to an arbitrary will out
of fear or some other prudential motive, or 2) autonomously assenting to a will
which is deemed to be genuinely normative or moral in terms our own free and
rational moral capacity. So we are able to understand Kant’s concerns when he
says of Jesus Christ: “Even the Holy One of the Gospels must first be compared
with our ideal of moral perfection before He is recognized as such.”3 But the
same remark may also help us to understand how this dilemma haunts certain
accounts of obedience to God; for many believers want to say both that they are
not heteronomously assenting to the will of God, and that they are assenting to a
form of revealed willing constituted by properties with which our “independent
1
I am using Hugo Meynell’s formulation in “The Euthyphro Dilemma,” Aristotelian
Society Supplemental Volume 46 (1972): 223–34.
2
Ibid., p. 224.
3
Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Lewis White
Beck (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), 29.
4 Karl Barth and Christian Ethics
moral capacity” cannot itself and as such reckon. God’s revelation, according to
this view, tells us something that we cannot tell ourselves.
What I want to do in this chapter is make a case for the coherence of such
a believer’s point of view, one which denies that the options posed by either or
both of our dilemmas exhaust the possible responses to the question of obedience
to the will or command of God. I develop my argument through an examination
of Karl Barth’s ethics of divine command and his account of the knowability
of God. My proposals concerning the latter account rely in part on the notion
of the “open texture” of concepts. This idea will help us with the problem of
preserving obedience to divine willings without conceding that the basis of our
free obedience is a normative position which must be conceived to be independent
of those willings themselves.
Election and Command
Consider first, by way of summary, the relevant features of Barth’s doctrines of

election and divine command. From all eternity God has freely determined to turn
to human beings, to be responsible to them, and to share covenant partnership
with them. He has determined to do this in, through, and with the God-man
Jesus Christ, who decisively accomplishes the work of reconciliation through his
perfect obedience. The gift of God in Christ to human persons is nothing other
than Himself, nothing other than God’s relating Himself to them. But given the
goal of covenant partnership, there corresponds to God’s self-determination a
“determination of the elect.” “The particular meaning and order of [the elect’s]
being are based upon and will also be actualised and revealed in the fact that Jesus
Christ is for him. As Jesus Christ is for him, the goal and content of his own life
are foreordained. The purpose for which he is chosen is to be the kind of man for
whom Jesus Christ is.”4
What does it mean to be such a person? She allows herself to be loved by God,
so that thereupon she “may be joyful in time and eternity as the beloved of God,
and as a partner in the covenant.” This is the blessedness of the elect. It cannot be
merely a matter of “receiving, acceptance, and possession;” rather it puts persons
actively in the service of God’s self-glorification through an “active participation
in His love, His act, His work.” “It is not as an immanent but as a transitional
blessedness … that [she] may receive and accept and possess it.” Concretely,
service consists in gratitude for the self-offering of God. “God chooses [the elect]
in order that his existence may become simply gratitude.” As “the response to a
kindness which cannot be repeated or returned,” gratitude can “only be recognised
4
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, ed. T.F. Torrance and G.W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T.
& T. Clark, 1956–75), II/2, 410. Hereafter the Church Dogmatics will be cited by volume
and page numbers only.
Divine Commands and Philosophical Dilemmas 5
and confirmed as such by an answer that corresponds to it and reflects it.” 5 The
earthly life of Christians is to be “a human life and history in which there occurs a
visible representation of God’s life and history.”6 Insofar as participation in God’s
love, act and work crucially includes witness—“to attest, represent and portray
that which God really is and does”—the emphasis is on “the acknowledgment
of the giver and the gift and the subordination of the recipient to the giver in
accordance with the very nature of thanks”7 For Barth, then, imitatio dei stems
from our determination to exist as grateful.
The fact that God has determined persons to grateful partnership makes for
a related and distinct problem from the perspective of the doctrine of election.
“As election is ultimately the determination of man, the question arises as to the
human self-determination which corresponds to this determination.”8 As free and
responsible moral agents, persons are confronted with the question of the specific
normative source and basis, the “law,” of their action. “That God has determined
[one] for service clearly means that He claims him for Himself, and he is therefore
asked whether he will satisfy this claim.”9 It is in this way that ethics becomes a
task of the Doctrine of God. Now given the basis of God’s free and loving election
of humanity in the God-man Jesus Christ, there can be no doubt about the nature
of the solution to the “ethical question,” “the question as to the value which gives
any action the claim to be the true expression of a mode of action, the fulfillment
of a law.”10 The law of human life and action, proceeding from that basis, is the
gracious will of God in Christ; therefore, we “cannot act as if we had to ask and
decide of ourselves what the good is and how we can achieve it, as if we were
free to make this or that answer as the one that appears to us to be right.”11 This
conclusion is not an argument for Christian obedience posed from outside the
realm of Christian concepts; it is rather an inference from within that realm as
Barth understands it, one which descriptively secures a fuller understanding of the
logic of these concepts. Hence it is central to theological ethics that it retain what
Barth calls its “offensiveness,” its refusal to submit to a general principle outside
and independent of itself.
For the man who obediently hears the command of God is not in any position
to consider why he must obey it. He is not in any position, therefore, from the
vantage point of a higher principle to try to show either himself or others how
this law of human volition and action is reached. He knows that the command
5
II/2, 412–13.
6
Robert Jenson, Alpha and Omega: A Study in the Theology of Karl Barth (Edinburgh:
Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1963), 109.
7
II/1, 217.
8
II/2, 510.
9
Ibid., 511.
10
Ibid., 513.
11
Ibid., 518.
of God is not founded on any other command, and cannot therefore be derived
from any other, or measured by any other, or have its validity tested by any other.
He knows that man cannot say this command to himself, but can only have it
said to him.12
In fact, it is in the light of God’s original self-declaration to be for humanity that

we may understand His sovereign authority. It is in and with His grace that God
has proved really to be the Lord. God has maintained Himself as the Creator of
persons who aims at their completion, the fulfillment of the divine determination
that they be the “mirror and therefore the reflection” of God’s being. But He so
maintains Himself by reconciling persons to Himself, leading them in spite of
everything to their completion, which acquires the quality of redemption.13 God in
Christ is humanity’s Lord and Master precisely to the extent that He is humanity’s
Saviour, “the God in whom we may believe.” The man Jesus of Nazareth in his
perfect obedience recognized that in God’s command “there is no question of an
arbitrary and purposeless control which God can exercise just because He is God
and therefore superior to man. On the contrary, what God wills from and for man
stands or falls with, and is revealed and revealed only in, what the same God will
do and has already done for us and in us.”14 In God’s grace we are shown that God
will not be mocked. God’s claim has authority over persons because His grace
removes the possibility of taking up any attitude of reserve toward Him through
appeals to human freedom (for in becoming a human being God has claimed and
perfected it), human weakness (because Jesus Christ, God incarnate, renders on
our behalf the obedience divinely demanded), or the alleged human identity with
the good (as God’s No to any such identity is in service of God’s gracious Yes, for
us). Thus is the Gospel the power of the Law.
God claims humanity for obedience, rightly, in Jesus Christ. And humanity’s
obedience to God, as the expression of its determination to its history of fellowship
with God, must always be obedience to and conformity with Jesus Christ. He is the
“concrete form of the teleological power of grace,” and therefore He is the criterion
by which is measured all demands on our behavior. “The criterion by which all
other demands are to be measured is whether they, too, proclaim indirectly the
life and rule and victory of Jesus.”15 In “accepting God’s action as right,” persons
understand their action as reflecting or analogically correlating with God’s own
action.16 They lay aside all hostility, willfulness, and indifference to that action.17
Barth means to make a start at explaining the human side of the life of covenant
12
Ibid., 522.
13
Ibid., 560.
14
Ibid., 562.
15
Ibid., 567–68.
16
Ibid., 575f.
17
Ibid., 582.
partnership through this description of the way in which a Christian may place her
own historical life-act at the disposal of God’s own historical life-act.
This summary demonstrates an important feature of Barth’s theological
method. As I noted earlier, it is not his intention to present arguments for Christian
obedience from some postulated neutral ground of rationality. Barth rather attempts
to demonstrate the internal coherence of Christian beliefs through a process of
arguing to postulated “unknown” points of doctrine from various presumed “fixed
points” of doctrine, which points derive from reflection on Christian Scriptures,
creeds, and traditions.18 Given that his theological task is primarily this sort of
critical, holistic redescription,19 Barth would say that the particular shape that
gratitude takes in one’s response to God’s grace and which constitutes one’s
existence as covenant partner is not bound to any general (and just so “abstract”)
rational rule that requires that one should repay or reciprocate or respond to gifts in
this or that way. He characterizes the relationship of covenant partnership between
God and persons as constituted by God’s gracious love, on the one hand, and by
human existence in gratitude, on the other. When one confesses the truth that is
Jesus Christ, one affirms the relationship in which one stands to Him which He
has established. The behavioral expression of that affirmation is freely to live the
life of a “grateful existent.”
Dilemmas Redux
For Karl Barth, are God’s commands right because He commands them? As an
answer to our first philosophical dilemma, the answer is neither no nor yes. On
the one hand, God’s will is the source of all value, not only the causal originator
and the perfect exemplar of such value, but also the material normative source, the
“criterion-setter.” God’s eternal will is for humanity in Jesus Christ; the normative
criterion is identical to God’s will and the history it accomplishes. On the other hand,
and because of the concrete, determinate character of God’s self-determining will,
we are not talking about an arbitrary “rightness” which accrues to God’s will as a
mere result of His power.20 Yet we are not then required to say that God commands
18
Karl Barth, Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum (New York: World Publishing
Company, 1962), 55.
19
See Hans W. Frei, “Eberhard Busch’s Biography of Karl Barth,” in Hans W. Frei,
Types of Christian Theology (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 158–59.
20
“Power as power does not have any divine claim, no matter how imposing or
effective it might be. To maintain himself against power as power, even to his own undoing,
is not merely a possibility for man. It is not merely the assertion of his right and dignity. It
is the duty which he has to fulfill with his existence as man. The very man who is claimed,
for whom God has become too strong, who is overcome by God, is distinguished from the
falling stone by the fact that it is in his own most proper freedom that he has been determined
by God, in his own most proper freedom that he has decided for God. By deciding for God
what He does (both proximately, to individual creatures, and ultimately, with

respect to His self-determination to be for persons) because it is right independently
of His will. Barth wishes to deny this proposition unequivocally.
Consider the second dilemma and its question about moral autonomy. Do
Christians assent heteronomously to God’s will? They do not, since “heteronomy”
introduces motives of fear or prudential self-interest which are hardly in keeping
with acceptance of the basis the divine claim, the grace of Christ. Yet their assent
to the one who establishes what is normative for their behavior, i.e., Jesus Christ
in His obedient love, does not involve their “autonomous” moral capacity; for
that person and the character of His love are revealed to them. Barth holds both
that God’s will or command is the ultimate standard of right and wrong behavior,
and that there are distinctive and definite features, captured in the person of
Jesus Christ whom we may follow in the way of His obedient love, which for us
authorize and qualify a command to be the divine command. To do God’s will as
it is revealed in Christ does not presuppose that Christians in a significant sense
already know, prior to and independent of that revelation, what it is that they are
assenting to and why. “Heteronomy” implies one or another sort of slavish assent
to “revelation,” and “autonomous,” non-slavish assent implies that “revelation” is
impossible. Barth in effect argues for free, authentic, fully human assent to God’s
self-disclosure. Can we make clearer sense of the conclusion? We can, I think, by
reflecting on what it might mean for a person to come to “love” in obedience and
conformity to Jesus Christ, and hence to the will or command of God.
Christian Love Revealed
How can we talk of “love” as it applies to God? For Barth, human words, as such,
do not tell us anything about what God is about. Such words may, however, give
us a real knowledge of God when God Himself “bestows truth” on them.21 The
twofold claim in effect becomes one in Barth’s proposal about analogy, the “partial
correspondence and agreement” between our words as such and the being of God.
The “partial,” the limit, in the concept of similarity, and therefore the forward
limit of our knowledge of God is this: that when we know God, we must not and
will not leave the grace of His revelation. We must not dispense with it. Nor will it
become superfluous to us. Each step that we take as we come from the hiddenness
of God must, and will, consist in a new reception of the grace of revelation.22
he has definitely decided not to be obedient to power as power … Power as power cannot
possibly be the basis for his obedience.” II/2, 553.
21
II/1, 179–254.
22
Ibid., 235.
The claim is that predicates applying to God are to be understood in terms of the
revelation of the history of God in Jesus Christ. That history, revealed and attested
in Scripture, carries an irreducible logic and integrity.23 Apart from it our human
words as such cannot even give us a reliable “provisional understanding” of the
reality of God because they are not contextually rooted in the logic appropriate to
it. 24 God’s being as Creator or Lord, for example, is not captured by our notions
of “creation” or “lordship.”25 The same is true of the quality and act of “love” as
it is applied to God.
To speak of God’s love would involve understanding Jesus Christ’s manner and
purpose of loving in the context of salvation history. The Christian disciple who
gratefully lives as the reflection of God’s love arrives at the paradigmatic shape of
loving through attention to an irreducibly Christian and above all Christological
framework of belief and practice. The point holds even for prominent specifications
of the disciple’s love.
A realisation of what is meant by taking up one’s cross, denying oneself, leaving

all, loving one’s enemies, etc., cannot lead us to the realisation of what is meant
by following Jesus. On the contrary, it is only as we realise what following Jesus
means that we can go on to realise the meaning of those concretions as well.26
But how are we to speak of the epistemological transition from our many
different human notions of love, considered in themselves, to the normative
Christian paradigm?
A word like love, as it applies to actions and dispositions, has an “open texture”
in that one cannot state the necessary and sufficient conditions for its correct
application; thus its application is liable to significant degrees of extension and
revision.27 “A term is open-textured if the set of combinations of features which
must be present to justify the use of that term is an open set.”28 It is this feature of a
concept like “love,” for example, that makes conceptually possible its application,
whether or not the application is finally justified, to cases of “mercy killing” by
supporters of euthanasia.29
That said, to say further that we have the concept “loving action” is to say,
in part, that we are able to use the concept to pick out this or that loving action.
23
Frei, “Eberhard Busch’s Biography of Karl Barth,” 167–68.
24
II/1, 230.
25
Ibid., 75.
26
II/2, 569–70.
27
Friedrich Waismann, “Verifiability,” in A. G. N. Flew, ed., Logic and Language,
Volume I (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963), 117–44.
28
J. M. Brennan, The Open Texture of Moral Concepts (London: Macmillan, 1977), 116.
29
Jean Porter develops the point in her Moral Action and Christian Ethics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), 22–40.
We have an idea, by way of “paradigmatic exemplifications,”30 of what it is we

are commending when we tell others and ourselves, say, to love our neighbor;
they present to us some working terms of resemblance or similarity which more
or less help us to grasp the extension of the concept, or the range of cases to
which the concept applies. These working terms are not so rigid or exhaustive
that questions can or will never arise over whether or not this or that putatively
loving deed is really loving. The terms of similarity are also liable to revision,
since they depend on, and here I follow the analysis of J. M. Brennan, a particular
and similarly open-ended “rationale” which lends intelligibility to our concept
by indicating its purpose or role in the light of other of our beliefs and concepts.
A statement of the rationale of the concept of “murder,” for instance, would be
the answer to the question, “Why does the taking of human life require a special
justification?” What would follow from that answer would be an appropriately
related set of properties, perhaps having to do with the value of life and the dignity
of human beings, which set the concept’s “paradigm” or operative features of
similarity that make possible the use of the concept “murder.”31 As the rationale is
liable to refinement and adjustment, so are the features which we use analogously
in employing the concept. If our beliefs change so radically that the rationale is
overturned in favor of a new one, then a new paradigm and its associated features
will have to be employed in our future uses of the concept.
Take the case of Phil, a moral agent who understands loving actions to be those
which maximize the rational desire-satisfaction of all parties who are affected by
such actions. He has a basic “paradigm” which operates in his discernment of
the loving thing to do which supplies the moral content and sensibility requisite
to make judgments about loving actions as such, between more or less loving
actions, and so on. We can to some extent think of this paradigm in terms of
rules, but only with the allowance that the rules themselves are expressed in open-
textured terms and cannot be framed to meet all possible contingencies.32 The
paradigm provides an acquired perception of analogy, and not a rule for applying
the rules encompassing all situations. Lying behind the paradigm, again, is the
rationale which lends intelligibility to it in the light of Phil’s background beliefs
about persons, their societies, and the needs of both. We will assume that, whatever
the rationale of Phil’s concept of loving or beneficent action, it does not include
belief in the Christian God.
Suppose that Phil encounters some Christians who perform what Phil
understands to be loving or beneficent actions. They are intent on serving others,
and on providing for them what Barth calls “a measure of creaturely freedom, of
psychological freedom, of space to breathe and move, of joy, of opportunity for
expression and development.”33 Yet the Christians do not characterize their deeds,
30
Ibid., 37.
31
Brennan, The Open Texture of Moral Concepts, 122–24.
32
Ibid., 124.
33
III/4, 500.
as he would, in terms of utilitarian beneficence. They identify them as being a

matter of faithful “interposition,” in which a humble but sturdy self-giving love
pledges and guarantees to the beloved that God, Creator and Redeemer, loves
him or her, and that he or she is free to love God as well.34 They view themselves
as pursuing a ministry of witness, representing in their lives an imitation and
reflection of the event of God’s love in Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, many of these
Christomorphic actions are part of the extension of Phil’s concept of loving or
beneficent actions.
If Phil tries to make sense of the loving acts as these Christians make sense of
them, he will turn to the paradigm of their concepts of love and “loving action.”
But to comprehend that, he would eventually be directed to the story of Jesus Christ
recounted in the Gospels. In that story he would encounter one who stood with the
poor and the lowly, and who renounced certain traditional ways of expressing and
exercising authority for the sake of establishing a distinctive and radically inverted
form of it. In the story of Jesus Christ he may take note, that is, of how power is
made manifest in vulnerability, self-giving, non-retaliation, and mercy.
Yet the paradigm of Jesus’ self-giving love cannot be grasped if we isolate acts
of loving in this way. For Jesus’ love was, as the story indicates, above all obedience
to the one he called “Father.” “His love—enacting the good of men on their behalf—
is not to be discerned simply and directly as predominant personal deportment,
but as the specific vocation entailed by his mission of obedience to God.”35 This
unification of obedience and love is not only central to Phil’s understanding of
the Christians’ paradigm (for they too see their love as a matter of obedience), but
it also points beyond the paradigm of “loving action” to its rationale. For Jesus’
love, coincident with the love of God, is finally a reconciling work that maintains
the divine Lordship against creaturely rebellion and flight. The love of Jesus may
not only suggest itself to Phil as an inspiring and powerful expression of love—
understood in terms of his own or some other human paradigm—but it may also
present itself as challenging all other (“merely”) human modes of loving, precisely
because it presents itself as communicating the self-giving love of the Lord of life,
enacted for the purposes of reconciliation with Him. One may come in this way
to see how loving acts find their purpose as witness, as gratitude, and above all as
obedient mission to God in Jesus Christ. If one assents in faith to that God, his or
her paradigm of love and its embodiment in action will be transformed.
A “paradigm shift” of this sort, the change in the implicit or explicit measures
by which persons discern patterns of similarity by which to locate works of love,
is comprehensible in the light of a transformation of beliefs which effectively
transform the rationale of the relevant concept. The open texture of both paradigm
and rationale makes the transition possible. But if such a transition, as I have
described it, is possible, then it appears that assent to a revealed paradigm of love
34
IV/2, 819–20.
35
Hans W. Frei, The Identity of Jesus Christ (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1975),
110.
in action is possible. The possibility challenges a Kantian assumption of autonomy;

we do not need to presuppose in this case any preexistent or otherwise privileged
ideal of ethical perfection which serves, once and for all, as a basis for assent to
and as the final judge of all answers to the “ethical question,” “By what law shall I
live my life?” Human words are exhausted neither by their explicit and delineated
human meanings nor by the scope of their human meanings simpliciter.
For Barth, as we have seen, a response to the “ethical question” is one
which does not separate the question of obedience to God from the question of
assent to a paradigm of normative behavior; rather, it unites the two. It is not
as if the Christian moral agent 1) obeys God’s commands, and 2) would assent
to the requirements which God’s commands prescribe in the event that there
were not such a commanding God.36 The question of obedience to God carries
along with it the question of the adoption of authoritative measures of ethical
behavior. To review, summarize, and clarify, God’s commands are right because
God commands them; but what God commands is always bound to the divine
decision that is Jesus Christ. Any charge of arbitrariness is vitiated through an
identification of a normative standard in Jesus Christ. Yet the standards are not
“independent,” but “revealed” through and through. Finally, the last remark,
especially with its “through and through,” prompts the necessary qualification
that any and all attention to “measures” or “standards” of ethical behavior remain
humble, searching, and cognizant of our own ignorance regarding the good and
the right. The “paradigm shift” I describe above never involves release from our
fundamental need to be instructed..
This position does not imply let alone require any radical denial of the validity
of other ethical visions and paradigms of action that are not explicitly Christian.
First, they may have their place in a theological ethic to the extent that they foster
or make possible, e.g., expressions of a Christologically determined “basic form
of humanity” as fellow humanity, the joyful mutual assistance between persons
which Barth vigorously discusses in his doctrine of Creation.37 Second and more
generally, they may be welcomed insofar as they continue to serve the goal of
theological ethics, even while serving it implicitly and without strict or thorough
specification of their presuppositions or what I have called, following Brennan,
their rationale. So there is a place for a non-theological ethics that is, as Barth puts
it, “Christian” in a loose sense because “it has heard the Word of God attested in
Scripture and in the preaching of the Christian Church, or it shows actual traces
of the dominion of that Word over all men. It is, therefore, occupied with it” as “it
puts this understanding into effect in a definite interpretation and representation
of human life.”38 Present in literature, political movements, and philosophy, such
a vision would challenge ideals of human self-sufficiency; it “would call a man
36
See Robert Merrihew Adams, “Autonomy and Theological Ethics,” Religious
Studies 15 (1979): 191–94.
37
III/2, 222–85.
38
II/2, 542.
away from himself” and “from the attempt to become master of the claim that is
made upon him.”39 Third, because it is indeed the case that there are “actual traces
of the dominion of the Word over all men,” members of the Christian community
have every reason to hear, heed, and learn from “true words” or “secular parables
of the kingdom” outside its walls. One especially telling illustration is “the warm
readiness to understand and forgive which is not so frequently encountered even
in the Evangelical world just because it has too good a knowledge of good and evil
and in spite of its acknowledgment that justification is by faith alone.”40
To conclude, I want to anticipate an objection which, while not directed at my
substantive argument, concerns my reading of Barth. In short, one might suppose
that the philosophical apparatus of “open texture” is not in keeping with the method
and substance of his theology. I do not think this is true. A clue here is Barth’s
characterization of human words as entities which God has created.41 As such,
then, these human words, open-textured as they are, are quite simply the external
basis, the formal presupposition, of truthful, “covenantal,” knowledge of God. At
the same time, this knowledge is the internal basis, the material presupposition
and the goal, of this example of God’s creation. The notion of open-texture points
to the relevance in this case of a dialectic central to all of Barth’s discussions
regarding the relation between creation and covenant.42 The quality of open-texture,
moreover, does not appear to involve a commitment to any (merely) human “pre-
understanding” of the way human words apply to God that would undermine the
claim that in God in Jesus Christ the good is revealed. It rather supports what Barth
calls “the proper use of our views and concepts,” which “consists in the fact that
they point away and beyond themselves, taking on a new pregnancy, referring to
that which they cannot refer at all as our views and concepts.”43
39
Ibid., 541.
40
IV/3.1, 125.
41
II/1, 229.
42
III/1, 94–329.
43
11/1, 230, as a commentary to Matt. 7:11: “If you, then, being evil, know how to
give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven
give good things to them that ask him?”
Chapter 2
Command and History
There have appeared in the contemporary literature of Christian ethics a number

of criticisms of Karl Barth’s ethics of divine command claiming, in effect,
that Barth’s theological ethics cannot account for certain important features of
human moral agency. I want to address these criticisms with special reference
to the representative complaints and questions of James Gustafson and Stanley
Hauerwas. I will suggest that these complaints are established on readings of Barth
which are too restrictive both with respect to the portions of the ethical writings
considered or emphasized, and with respect to the general style of interpreting
these and other of his writings. I hope that in doing this I will supply a basis upon
which we may understand Barth more fairly and, I suspect, more provocatively.
The Criticisms
In Gustafson’s judgment, Barth’s ethics of command, treated as part of the

Doctrine of God in the Church Dogmatics, “short-circuits the rational processes”
of moral agents in its commendation of a “passive conformity of human activity
to God’s activity.”1 The moral agent is called upon merely to accept obediently
God’s determination in his command. To the extent that he considers human
agency at all, Barth proposes a moral epistemology of “intuitionism” or “instant
discernment,” rather than commending the acquisition of moral knowledge
through “rational inference from religious belief.” The intuitionism is grounded
on Barth’s “occasionalism” which “emphasizes the uniqueness of each moment of
serious moral choice in contrast to a view that emphasizes the persistent, perduring
order of moral life and the continuities of human experience.”2 The stress on the
uniqueness of the moment of moral decision-making reflects Barth’s belief that
autonomous human reason cannot attain real knowledge of a moral order to the
universe. Since humanity is so dependent on the command of God, who has
graciously chosen in the election of Jesus Christ to be in covenant partnership
with humanity, it is difficult to find a place for reasons for action in the moral
lives of human beings. “Radical occasionalism in theological ethics is based upon
the premise that God’s ‘freedom,’ while bound to his choice, still might erupt in
1
James M. Gustafson, Can Ethics Be Christian? (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1975), 156–57.
2
James M. Gustafson, Protestant and Roman Catholic Ethics: Prospects for
Rapprochement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 71, 73–74.
actions that could not be anticipated by the exercise of human rational capacities.”3
The autonomy of the moral agent is thus compromised, and the possibilities for
moral discourse between Christians and non-Christians are jeopardized.
Hauerwas’s difficulty with Barth is that his “command-obedience model” tends
to characterize God’s determination of each person’s moral life strictly in terms of
discrete acts, excluding an account of an ongoing dialectic of growth-in-continuity,
a “deepening of the self’s determination through the testing of [one’s] current
posture against [one’s] central orientation and loyalty.”4 This idea of “deepening”
or growth-in-continuity fits poorly into an ethical context which allows only the
consideration of isolated decisions and acts wherein the individual conforms in the
moment to God’s gracious activity. Although Barth does recognize the importance
of “growth” and “deepening” in his treatment of Christian existence, he is unable
to demonstrate how it can be effected, given the overriding emphasis on command
and decision.5 The inability to handle what I have called “growth- in-continuity”
and what Hauerwas calls “deepening” points to Barth’s prior failure to make a
place for the idea of character in his theological ethics, i.e., “the qualification of
a man’s self- agency through his beliefs, intentions, and actions, by which a man
acquires a moral history befitting his nature as a self-determining being.”6 This
criticism relates to Gustafson’s in that “our character is dependent on the fact that
we are disposed to have a range of reasons for our actions rather than others, for
it is by having reasons and forming our actions accordingly that our character
is at once formed and revealed.”7 Reasons for action, character, and growth-in-
continuity or “deepening” are, therefore, notions that mutually imply one another.
Barth’s alleged failure to account for any would entail a failure to account for all.
What appears to lie behind both criticisms is an interpretation of Barth’s view of
the person as a “free self undetermined by its phenomenal history,” a self which is
understood “not so much from its past to its present as the end-product of a historical
life-process, but as a being with radical freedom, with discontinuities between
moments, events, and decisions.”8 There is no view of the self “in a continuous
relation between Christ and man that is naturally interpreted;” the “transformation”
of the believer is not a “transformation of experiences and the life-process.”9
What links this interpretation to the specific criticisms is the claim that the
Barthian self is unable to express itself as shaped through a history. This history,
as such, would provide an explanation of the changes that take place in and
Gustafson, Can Ethics Be Christian?, 160.

3
Stanley Hauerwas, Character and the Christian Life (San Antonio, CA: Trinity
4
University Press, 1975), 220.

5
Ibid., 176.
6
Ibid., 11.
7
Ibid., 1975, my italics.
8
James M. Gustafson, Christ and the Moral Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 93–94.
9
Ibid., 96.
Command and History 17
through the actions of a continuous subject.10 As self-identical or continuous,

i.e., maintaining an identity over time, the subject can be seen to have something
similar to what Hauerwas calls “character,” a central orientation or loyalty. As
changed but still retaining that central orientation, she can be understood to have
effected “deepening” or “growth-in-continuity.” And as changing, she would have
a “range of reasons” through which change takes place in personal actions. An
historical vision of the self appears, therefore, to be necessary to account for those
essential and interrelated components of human moral agency: having and giving
reasons for action, growth-in continuity, and character.
Barth and the Logic of Divine Command Ethics
I want to argue that Barth can and does account for these components, and that
he does so with a view of the self’s “personal history” which does not deny the
force of his language about “obeying divine commands.” In order to understand
how he does that, we need first to consider the way in which Barth conceives of
the business of theology generally, and how that conception governs his approach
to theological ethics.
My point of departure is the following statement by Hans Frei:
Barth was about the business of conceptual description: He took the classical
themes of communal Christian language moulded by the Bible, tradition and
constant usage in worship, practice, instruction and controversy, and he restated
or redescribed them, rather than evolving arguments on their behalf. It was of the
utmost importance to him that this communal language, especially its biblical
fons et origo, had an integrity of its own: It was irreducible.11
The conceptual description of Christian linguistic activity, an activity possessing its

own sources and concerning a very particular telos, has for Barth a distinctive logic
that cannot simply be reduced into a description of some autonomous and generally
conceived “human” linguistic activity. The theologian’s job is to take “fixed points
of doctrine” and formulate from them the resolution of a postulated “unknown”
point of doctrine, making use of the elucidation of the fixed points themselves and
formal principles such as the law of non-contradiction.12 Now in light of this insight
about Barth’s task of conceptual description, we can apprehend the logic of Barth’s
ethics of divine command. The following points are directly important.
First, Barth seeks to locate the doctrine of divine command contextually. The
notion of command finds its meaning within the framework of what he calls the
10
Arthur Danto, Analytical Philosophy of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1965), 233–66.
11
Frei, “Eberhard Busch’s Biography of Karl Barth,” 158.
12
Barth, Anselm, 55.
“Whence?” and the “Whither?” of theological ethics, i.e., the sovereign grace of
the electing God in Jesus Christ on behalf of humanity and the radical need of
His rebellious creature. Given these “fixed points of doctrine,” Barth proceeds to
account for the further claim that God’s command is absolutely binding. Arguing
from the doctrine of election and the “determination of the elect” to its implications
for ethics, he can say that the question of obedience to the electing God’s command
must coincide entirely with the problem of human behavior in its totality.13 God
has chosen human beings before all creation to be His covenant partners, and that
sovereign choice normatively establishes them to be just that de jure. The a quo
and ad quem of their activity must, therefore, be nothing other than God Himself.
There can be no human action which does not stand under the divine command.
Barth’s criticism of what he takes to be Roman Catholic ethical method at least
partially arises out of concerns which his task of conceptual location generates. The
problem is that the “great distraction” of a metaphysics of being makes it impossible
for the God of Roman Catholic thought truly to command and, just so, truly to
be gracious. Linking the human person to a principle of being that harmonizes
“nature and super-nature, reason and revelation, man and God,”14 itself establishes
the imperative nature of morality; but because this “disposition” to participate in
being, and to that extent to know the good, is conceived independently of divine
election in Jesus Christ, it belongs properly to (and is in a sense the property of) the
human person. On that presupposition, the doctrine of divine command cannot be
an implication of the doctrine of election, and thereby, according to Barth, cannot
accommodate an understanding of God’s command as total gift and total demand.
It follows that any theological ethical account which coherently preserves this
crucial feature, the binding power of God’s complete graciousness, cannot involve
the “acceptance of independent principles which compromise the theonomy of
human existence and action.”15 This criticism, whether or not we agree with it,16
usefully displays Barth’s careful attention to the appropriate location of the idea of
divine command within a context of other related Christian theological concepts.
Second, Barth dialectically specifies the meaning of concepts central to his
ethics of divine command through further specification of other related concepts
that intelligibly situate them. In so doing, he will tend to use ordinary words in
seemingly peculiar but still coherent ways by assimilating them to his distinctively
Christian conceptual scheme. He “reforms” or “annexes” these terms. We can see
how by considering his elaboration of the notion of “command” in terms of its
relation to the “Whence?” and the “Whither?” of theological ethics.
13
II/2, 535. Recall my discussion of this theme in Chapter 1.
14
Ibid., 530.
15
Ibid., 527.
16
John Bowlin gives a good account of how and why Barth is mistaken about the
Catholic stance, at least from the perspective of the ethics of Thomas Aquinas. See his
“Contemporary Protestant Thomism,” in Aquinas as Authority, ed. Paul Van Geest, Harm
Goris, and Carlo Leget (Leuven: Peeters, 2002), 235–51.
As noted above, there is no human action that does not stand under the divine
command. Human beings may accept God’s action as right.17 But that acceptance,
as we saw in Chapter 1, is neither a decision to obey power for power’s sake,
nor one that takes God to be the “essence of the good” as one “independently”
understands it. God claims our obedience, rather, because of what God has
graciously done for us in Jesus Christ, because He is “the God in whom we may
believe.” “God “has graciously turned to us. He has made Himself ours … And it
is from the fact that He is this God that there derives the superiority and authority,
basis and justice of His claim, the validity of His command, the vanity of all other
commands, the freedom in which we are bound to Him, to His command, the
absolutely distinctive imperative of obedience to His will.”18
All of this reforms our intuitions about the divine command accordingly.
The command takes on the character of permission and liberation. It stirs human
power to obedient action in its form as “divine refreshment.”19 Using Barth’s
own formulation, we conclude that he “annexes” terms such as “command” and
“obedience,” albeit legally, and puts them to a use determined by reflection which
is bound to the history of God’s dealings with humanity in Jesus Christ as depicted
in Scripture. The sense of these terms so bound is not completely reducible to any
other sense generated by or in any other depicted world of discourse and activity.
Moreover, if we look closely at Barth’s discussion of the “Whither?” of
theological ethics, the rebellious creature needful of divine grace, we recognize that
the method of “reformation” or “annexation” is directly relevant to the problem
of reconciling the ethics of command with an ethics of reasons, character, and
growth-in-continuity. In his theological anthropology Barth makes the twofold
assertion that individual people have their being in a pattern of action, and that that
pattern, as it is constitutive of “real man,” is a particular sort of history—a history
of relationship with God in Christ:
The new and other which God is directly for the man Jesus, Jesus Himself is
for all other men, and therefore He is the basis which makes their being history,
a being which is transcended in its limitations from without and transcends its
limitation outwards. Man is what he is as a creature, as the man Jesus, and in
him God Himself, moves towards him, and as he moves towards the man Jesus
and therefore towards God.20
The person is nothing before or behind or alongside this history—he or she is

this history as it takes place. I noted earlier that the idea of “history” is pivotal for
Gustafson and Hauerwas in that it establishes the descriptive basis for a theory of
personal existence which can accommodate the three significant components of
17
II/2, 575.
18
II/2, 557.
19
II/2, 579.
20
III/2, 159.
moral agency just mentioned. But Barth retains a “reformed” notion of history,
and juxtaposes it with the seemingly incompatible (and also reformed) category
of command.
What about the relation between history and concrete obedience to divine
command? Can Barth intelligibly hold these together? We see the beginning of an
answer in a brief statement of what I have called here growth-in-continuity. Here
Barth is consistent in providing a description of growth which makes sense within
the logic of Christian concepts, and not outside it.
The principle of necessary repetition and renewal, and not a law of stability, is
the law of the spiritual growth and continuity of our life. It is when we observe
this law that we practice perseverance in the biblical meaning of the term, a
perseverance corresponding to the steadfastness of God Himself, which does
not signify the suspension, but the continuing and indestructible possession and
use of this freedom.21
I hope that some of the meaning of this passage will be unraveled by the end
of the essay.22 By now at least we can comprehend the shape our interpretive
unraveling must take. One important task in reading Barth’s ethics is to try to
comprehend “annexed” or “reformed” notions such as “command,” “history,” and
“continuity.” This requires looking at these concepts in their appropriate contexts,
and analyzing how each borders and qualifies the others. One of the problems with
Gustafson’s and Hauerwas’s analyses of Barth’s ethics of command is that they
fail to perform this hermeneutic task thoroughly or carefully enough. Although
they do at times show an awareness of its importance, they stop short of actually
confronting problems concerning the mutual reconciliation of concepts as Barth
himself wants to pose them.23
Barth and the Everyday World
The critic of Barth’s ethics may still be unsatisfied; for to speak of conceptual
relations and their mutual modification and specification is not yet to talk about
the real world which we all share. This, it might be claimed, Barth simply does
21
II/2, 647.
22
And I will return to this statement about perseverance in Chapter 9.
23
In Character and the Christian Life, 140–41, 144–46, and especially 174–76,
Hauerwas recognizes that Barth wants to make room in his anthropology for the idea of
character, but does not allow for any reconciliation of this idea with Barth’s “command-
obedience model.” In Christ and the Moral Life, 37ff., Gustafson seems to acknowledge
that the method of “reformation” or “annexation” of concepts is relevant to Barth’s ethics;
nevertheless, he is too swift to deny that Barth’s anthropology can consistently include the
idea of a personal history.
not do. Imagine the critic arguing as follows. “Granting the point about conceptual
description and Barth’s interest in the depiction of a peculiarly Christian world of
discourse and activity, I still protest over the splendid isolation of that world. No
matter how the depiction takes place, we are left with commands that assault us
explosively and which, as such, cannot be reconciled with situations in which we
generally find ourselves; we are left with an idea of personal history which has its
basis in a relationship with God, with no social relations or structures interposing
themselves so as to show us how that history can ever be our history. Barth’s
conceptual description does indeed depict a world, but it is a world entirely alien
to our everyday world.”
Our imagined critic has overlooked Barth’s attempts to commend the Christian
world as the one world which we all do in fact share.24 To be sure, Barth does not
show how Christian concepts “really signify” this or that non-Christian everyday
reality; he wants to say both that the world of Christian discourse is “descriptively
accessible” and that “the appropriate ruled language use for the description is
irreducibly its own.”25 Instead, Barth demonstrates the congruence between the
Christian world and the “everyday” simply by locating the latter within the former
in and through his description of the former. In this way, he avoids the perspective
by which Christian faith is viewed systematically as one interpretation of the
“world” (understood as an independent thing-in-itself) among others.26
Barth shows how the divine command coheres with the manifest everyday
world in at least three ways. First, he explicitly addresses mistaken interpretations
of the command which would, if they were correct, count against coherence. So
he clearly denies that the theory of the divine command amounts “in practice to
a direction to let oneself be governed from moment to moment and situation to
situation by a kind of direct and particular divine inspiration and guidance, and to
prepare oneself, to make and keep oneself fit and ready, for the reception of such
guidance, perhaps by ‘quiet times’ or similar exercises.”27 He also makes the point
that the divine command is in many respects just like any other command, but with
24
As Hans Frei puts it, Barth indicates two things simultaneously in the course of
his conceptual descriptions and redescriptions “of the temporal world of eternal grace”:
“(1) that this world is a world with its own linguistic integrity—much as a literary art
work is a consistent world in its own right, one that we have only under a depiction, under
its particular depiction and not any other, and certainly not in pre-linguistic immediacy
or experience without depiction; but (2) that unlike any other depicted world, it is the
one common world in which we all live and move and have our being.” Frei, “Eberhard
Busch’s Biography of Karl Barth,” 161.
25
Ibid.
26
On “alternative conceptual frameworks,” see Donald Davidson, “On the Very
Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical
Association (1973–74): 5–20, and Richard Rorty, “The World Well Lost,” Journal of
Philosophy 69 (1972): 649–66.
27
III/4, 15.
an important difference. All commands ask us a question, demand our acceptance

with a categorical seriousness, and aim at corresponding decisions of will. The
difference is that the divine command liberates us and grants us permission as
it confronts us. Commands which bring as well “the granting of a very definite
freedom” are the commands of God incarnate in and with the everyday.28
Second, Barth, anxious to deny claims about the opacity of revelation, places
his description of the command as part of a history of a relationship with Christ in
a comprehensible context. This history is, in fact, constituted by two overlapping
histories, those of the creature and of God in the enactment of the covenant of
grace. The command “is an event which forms a particular step in the nexus
of the history of divine grace, and which in fact can be understood only in this
context.”29 Essentially determined by the election of Jesus Christ, the history
of the obedient creature is placed within the framework of God’s own “self-
qualification,” concretely revealed in the Ten Commandments and the Sermon
on the Mount. They represent “the delimitation of the sphere in which the life of
the divine community will be fulfilled under the control of the Holy Spirit.”30 In
addition to this limitation, the command will always ultimately affirm and never
ultimately deny the unity of oneself with one’s fellows, as well as the unification
proper to oneself.31 Most important, the history of relationship is tied concretely to
the divine commands attested in Holy Scripture. The concrete invitation is freely
and actively to conform one’s personal history or “narrative” to the “narratives”
of the creatures portrayed in Scripture, who themselves are depicted as constituted
by a history of relationship with God. One is not only to ally oneself with them
formally, in the awareness of having been given a commission, but one must
also, in one’s different time and situation, make the command and the mission
given to them one’s own, “not as something new and special, but as the renewal
and confirmation of the task laid upon them.”32 Theological ethics is grounded
in biblical ethics which, in turn, has as its grounding principle the understanding
of the narrative shape and unity of the whole of the biblical witness. Barth thus
relates the divine command to a straightforward and accessible account of the
Christian life and of the mode of Christian ethical inquiry.
Third, Barth’s discussion of vocation extends the logic of the divine command
to include the “givens” of our life— our age, our special situation, our personal
aptitudes, and our specific “field of ordinary everyday activity.” Vocation as “the
place of responsibility,” as “the terminus a quo of all recognition and fulfillment
of the command,” is a base from which the newness of the divine command
cannot ultimately depart.33 Our responsibility before God is therefore described
28
II/2, 584–85.
29
II/2, 681.
30
II/2, 699.
31
II/2, 717.
32
II/2, 706.
33
III/4, 595–647.
in a way which allows a critical assimilation of our everyday situations to the

theory of the divine command.
Answering the Criticisms
We are now in a position to address the specific criticisms of Barth’s ethics

mentioned earlier. Can Barth, as I have interpreted him, answer them through a
coherent proposal on the historical character of moral agency? More specifically,
does Barth’s idea of a history of relationship with God include that everyday
“historical” dimension which explains the changes that take place in and through
the actions of a continuous subject?
My lengthy discussion of intuitionism below anticipates the shorter treatments
of character and growth-in-continuity.
Reasons and Instant Discernment
Two related points are contained in the charge that Barth’s ethics are “intuitionist.”
One is that knowledge of what ought to be done is immediate, a matter of “instant
discernment” in the moral situation. The other is that no determinate reasons can
be offered by the agent for an action, beyond claiming that the action is right
because commanded by God, or that the action is right because, in some unspecific
way, it is a reflection of God’s gracious action. It appears to follow that past action
has no relevance to present action; one always stands before the command anew,
being determined by that command alone.34
Barth’s claims about “the sovereignty of the divine decision” may be thought
to support this intuitionist reading. He insists that the agent must always have a
“complete openness” to the command of God, since one’s past pattern of action
does not in itself place one in harmony with God’s decision about a present action.
Not to ask seriously in every situation what it is we ought to do is to be complacent
about ourselves and our works; it is to deny our need to be confirmed by God at
34
This “intuitionism” approaches William Frankena’s category of “act-
deontologism,” which “presents a kind of method for determining what is right, namely, by
becoming clear about the facts in the case and then forming a judgment about what is to be
done, either by some kind of ‘intuition’ … or by a ‘decision’ of the kind that existentialists
talk about. Act-deontologism, however, offers no criterion or guiding principle, but at most
only rules of thumb.” Insofar as some exceedingly broad norm is applied to a situation, e.g.,
conformity to God’s graciousness, the moral theory resembles what Frankena calls act-
agapism: “we are to tell what we should do in a particular situation simply by getting clear
about the facts of that situation and then asking what is the loving or most loving thing to
do in it. In other words, we are to apply the law of love directly and separately in each case
with which we are confronted.” William Frankena, Ethics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-
Hall, 1973), 23, 57.
every moment. “We can never look back upon a genuine previous conversion and
instruction without its necessarily compelling us to be more serious than ever in
our present circumstances, to prepare ourselves for fuller openness to truth, to
inquire more searchingly than ever before: What ought we to do?”35 He is also
concerned to stress the alien quality of the “ought” in his discussion of criteria for
“the genuineness of our preparation for our encounter with the divine command.”
The command owes its authority and power not to our approval but always and
only to itself. The validity of the ought
must consist in the fact that the very question of its validity is quite outside the
sphere of my own thinking and feeling; that I can no longer entertain the idea of
making sure of its authority and power by seeking its basis in what I myself have
understood or seen or felt or experienced; that I can no longer consider how it
may best be proved or demonstrated.36
These remarks do not require the intuitionist interpretation to be intelligible.

Concerning the relativization of past moral decisions and the demand always to
ask anew, I note that a claim about the way we should prepare for our encounter
with the divine command is not identical to a claim about the nature or manner of
the “hearing” itself. Past decisions are, moreover, irrelevant to the hearing of the
command, in the terms of Barth’s commendations, only to the degree that reliance
upon them points to a denial of the person’s absolute need for God’s absolute gift,
and to an affirmation that the continuity of one’s own past actions with the present
determines the rightness of the present action. “It is not the effacement but the
questioning of all our previous answers which takes place when we begin to put
seriously the What? of the ethical question.”37
The defender of the intuitionist account, however, can still argue that Barth
refuses any discernible or describable link between anything we know or can think
about before the hearing of the command, save some overbroad and unhelpful
generalization about God’s graciousness, and the hearing of the command itself.
Nothing that we have felt or understood or experienced can be of any help in the
final instance of hearing. Rational processes are “short-circuited” in this event, since
the believer cannot entertain any idea of making sure of the command’s authority or
power by seeking its basis in anything which he or she has seen or felt or experienced.
But in claiming that the validity of the command is alien to us, Barth is
just saying that human moral sensibilities cannot be considered autonomously,
independently of the revelation of God’s gracious command. Those sensibilities
or capacities are not negated; rather, they are being afforded their properly ordered
role. Barth holds that human “capacities” can be Christianly affirmed as real
symptoms of the really human, so long as such capacities are not given any neutral
35
II/2, 647.
36
II/2, 651.
37
II/2, 646.
and independent status.38 To say that we must not address the divine command as
something which we need to validate, given our autonomous understanding, is not
to say that we are unable to apprehend through a “theonomous” understanding and
judgment that command of the gracious God which applies to our situation and
which is deemed by the theonomous conscience to claim one precisely because
it is already validated outside oneself. Nor is that to say that human beings as
obedient creatures cannot understand and provide an explanation for the action
commanded in terms of a reason that would display salient features which work to
identify this or that requirement as willed or commanded by God.
Thus the God whose command we are to obey, again, claims our obedience
through the singular and unrepeatable event of His gracious election of humanity in
Jesus Christ. Since the command is the command of this God, the only appropriate
response is unqualified obedience. But precisely because the command is the
command of the gracious God who has revealed Himself to his creation in Jesus
Christ, our acceptance of the command as the divine command may include
understanding it in terms of God’s graciousness as He has revealed it to us. Neither
social utility nor the categorical imperative nor the sum of pleasure over pain
makes what God commands the right thing to do; the command possesses its own
authority. Nevertheless, our acceptance of and assent to this or that command as
being the command of the gracious and electing God may well refer to material
conditions which mark the command distinctively. Those conditions, which may
indicate for us that a particular command is of divine origin, would help us to
grasp the ways in which our unqualified obedience is obedience to the living God.
They would also be the basis for the reasons we would give to explain why this or
that particular action is believed to be divinely required.
I believe that Barth’s theology allows for such divinely revealed conditions,
which provide for the sort of epistemological connection denied by the defenders
of the intuitionist interpretation. The conditions are found in Barth’s descriptions
of the horizontal quality of the divine command and of the “spheres” in which
God’s horizontal activity always takes place. The vertical dimension of a particular
command must always intersect the horizontal, the “constancy and continuity” of
the divine command which “persists in all the differentiations of individual cases.”39
This continuity is the “form peculiar to all ethical events as such, irrespective
of their singularity and uniqueness.” The horizontal dimension provides us with
a “formed reference” to the ethical event. Barth’s “special ethics” is, then, a
commentary on the histories of relationship between God and persons as depicted
in Scripture and ordered through the theological loci of creation, reconciliation,
and redemption; it is a commentary which situates particular ethical events in the
broader divinely initiated pattern of action within which the events themselves
may be understood and made concrete. The history in which God is Creator,
Reconciler, and Redeemer, and in which the person is a creature, accepted in grace
38
III/2, 198–202.
39
III/4, 17.
and sharing in promise, is “the reality in which the ethical event takes place, to
which we look from the event, and from which we must look back to the event
to see it in its concreteness.”40 For Barth, moreover, the historically articulated
and differentiated reality which is the ethical event involves not only reference to
histories of relationship narrated in Scripture, but also reference to the history of
relationship between God commanding now and the person obediently hearing
now. Hence he includes a discussion of vocation or “the place of responsibility”
in his ethics of the Doctrine of Creation. The individual’s life-story is to be seen
as overlapping with those of Jesus’ disciples and, accordingly, with that of Jesus
Christ himself. In any case, knowledge of the spheres of divine activity discerned
in Scripture provides “knowledge of the character which is always peculiar to this
event, and of the standards which are always valid in the decisions made in it.”
These standards serve as “an instructional preparation for the ethical event.”41
Barth’s account of the spheres makes possible a description of God’s activity
which is liable in principle to extensive specification. The existence of relevant
differences between projected situations (“relevance” being determined always
with respect to theological/Christological considerations) may indicate that
abortion, for example, is commanded; this is possible even though a “definite No”
must be the presupposition of any Christian consideration of abortion.42 Barth is
committed to making his descriptions of the ethical situations ever more concrete
through specification and further specification of the spheres of God’s activity.
This requirement is simply a correlate in theological ethics to Barth’s claims in the
realm of dogmatic theology about the concrete nature of God’s (electing) freedom
vis-à-vis creation.43
The defender of the intuitionist interpretation may remain unconvinced. First,
reflecting on Barth’s assertion that knowledge of the spheres is an “instructional
preparation for the ethical event,” she might cite Barth’s claim that even the
“ideal case” of full knowledge of the spheres gives no answer to the question of
40
III/4, 28.
41
III/4, 18.
42
III/4, 415ff.
43
To say that Barth is so committed is not to say that he makes good on the
commitment clearly and consistently all of the time. For example, at times it appears Barth
will make ethical claims based on an abstract conception of God’s freedom. In this regard
John Howard Yoder fairly suggests that Barth’s allowance for the possibility of an exception
to the divine “No” asserted against Christian participation in war sometimes seems to be
based more on a conception of God’s inscrutability than upon an understanding of His
concrete, gracious freedom. John Howard Yoder, Karl Barth and the Problem of War (New
York: Abingdon Press, 1970), 64-67. For responses to this suggestion, see Nigel Biggar,
The Hastening That Waits (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 38–40, 92–96, 167–75. While
Biggar argues that there are sources in Barth that go far in challenging Yoder’s analysis of
the question of war, he shares the latter’s concern on other fronts such as the nature of God’s
command to protect life. Ibid., 119.
what is commanded—even though it, that is the question, “gains a sharpness in

which the question almost acquires the character of an answer”.44 A qualitative
epistemological gap still seems to be assumed. Second, she might also want to
know how Barth imagines he can reconcile the assertion that there is a “definite
connection” between different ethical events and their corresponding commands
in the history of grace with an emphasis on the “singularity and uniqueness” of the
ethical event the resolution of which cannot be anticipated. Third, the critic could
hold that adherence to the spheres of divine activity amounts to a moral theory
where guides to moral action are inferred from religious beliefs; but this is a model
which Barth clearly wants to avoid, as is evidenced in his attack on casuistical
ethics and in his insistence that the “mystery of the ethical event” be preserved.
So in light of Barth’s analysis of the horizontal dimension of the divine command,
the defender of the intuitionist interpretation can respond in one of three ways:
1) Barth is an intuitionist; he cannot account for the movement in human moral
reflection from knowledge of the spheres to knowledge of the command; 2) Barth
is a pseudo-intuitionist; in his theory of the spheres he in fact adopts a model of
rational inference from belief; 3) Barth contradicts himself, and it is impossible to
understand what he finally means to say about divine command ethics.
All of these responses are, I think, mistaken. Barth’s ethics require no
commitment either to intuitionism or to the model of rationally inferring moral
prescriptions from religiously grounded beliefs. He can retain the mystery of the
ethical event without loss to the seriousness of his remarks about the guidance or
instruction which knowledge of the spheres brings.45
Recall that Barth conceives the being of “real man” to be the pattern of action
constituted by the history of relationship between that person and God in Jesus
Christ. How can this idea of “history” relate to the problem of the “ethical event”?
44
III/4, 31. In anticipation of my discussion below, consider what Barth says next: “It
obviously cannot pretend to be an answer. For the most concrete sphere of the individual
ethical case to which an answer must always relate will have escaped ethics. Ethics will
still have to leave the final judgment to God. And our knowledge of these general spheres
and relationships will never actually be full, so that the question of what is commanded and
forbidden will always naturally retain a certain breadth and openness. On the other hand,
there can be no doubt that the question gains in precision, and therefore the directives
and directions to be given by ethics gain an urgency and compulsion, in proportion as the
knowledge of these spheres and relationships becomes broader and deeper.”
45
“But more than guidance will not be expected from even the most particular ethics,
just as more than guidance to a knowledge of Christian truth, more than an Institutio religionis
christianae, will not be expected from even the most precise and detailed dogmatics. In
both cases what is more than guidance will be either arbitrary human assertion, or the event
of the revelation of which only God Himself can be the subject. True dogmatics and true
ethics steer a middle course—between what they must not be and what they cannot be.
They do what can and should be done by man in the light of revelation. They give well-
founded and legitimate witness, therefore training in Christianity, and in the particular case
of ethics training in keeping the command.” Ibid.
One way in which that event can have a historical quality is that particular hearings
of the divine command may be understood after the fact but can never be definitely
anticipated before it. In addition, what constitutes the movement between “before”
and “after” is a faithful and responsible activity of asking after the command, an
activity which Barth comprehends to be part of a lived history of relationship with
God. The post facto “understanding,” is not unlike the understanding which one
attains when one is “following” a story. One is “pulled along” towards “a promised
yet always open conclusion, across any number of contingent, surprising events,
but always on the understanding that these will not divert us hopelessly from the
vaguely promised end.”46 As in understanding appropriate to a story, however,
the knowledge and understanding of the divine command does not appear ex
nihilo: for “almost every incident in a story requires, as a necessary condition of
its intelligibility, its acceptability, some indication of the kind of event or context
which occasioned or evoked it, or, at the very least, made it possible.”47 Although
the hearing cannot be definitely anticipated, furthermore, the commanded act may
be patient of explanation in terms of reasons; for the agent realizes that he or
she is determined by a continuity of grace, that he or she belongs completely to
Jesus Christ, that, therefore, his or her “vocation” and destiny are implicated in
and with God’s history, and that the specific spheres of divine activity have as a
whole a “pattern quality” leading to a particular sort of consummation. The agent
can understand the meaning of his or her action (i.e., the answer to the question
“What are you doing?”) only in the light of the historical context of relationship
with God in Christ. The agent can also explain the action (i.e., give an answer to
the question “Why are you doing that?”) as obedience to a divine command, in
terms of a reason which describes where God has placed, and is now sending,
him or her. This meaning and explanation, grounded in the sort of understanding
appropriate to following a story, can be imparted to a spectator. With appropriate
qualifications, Lewis White Beck achieves the sort of view I have in mind.
The spectator sees the sense, meaning, or purpose of the action, which is
adumbrated in the synecdochic perception he has of the action as an episode in
a larger story that includes bits and pieces of the actor’s history, his situation,
and idiosyncratic orientation … Given a complete picture of the world as it
appears to him (an admittedly unattainable knowledge), the reasons given for
his actions are reasons that could be as truly given for anyone just like him in
a world just like his.48
W. B. Gallie, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (New York: Schocken

46
Books, 1968), 64–65.

47
Ibid., 26.
48
Lewis White Beck, The Actor and the Spectator (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1975), 86, 89. The qualifications, of course, are 1) that any account of
reasons that may be shared by parties “just like” one another must not in Barth’s terms
undermine the Christian agent’s appreciation of the “singularity and uniqueness” of the
But how does Barth make this historical character of the relationship with God
intelligible? If we cannot understand that, then we cannot understand how it might
leave a place for understanding and explaining divinely required actions. Barth
answers this question by describing how the creature is to understand his or her
right action as correlating analogically with God’s action, as it has been revealed
to God’s creation. Barth thereby shows how the normative Christian life-story is
actively involved with the story of the loving and gracious God. For example, his
characterization of Christian love for neighbors as an “interposition” derives from
his belief that the act of love must be “an answer and correspondence, an imitation
of the love of God.”49 The act of love is a “self-giving which reflects and therefore
guarantees to the other the love of God and the freedom to love him.”50 This love
in analogical correspondence is also and especially an act of witness to the divine
love. So although the ultimate justification for performing this or that loving act is
God’s command that it be done, the meaning and the explanation of the act may
be available to the agent. In performing acts of love and kindness, she understands
herself to be glorifying God by reflecting the divine love in her own. One knows
what one is doing in this obedient reflection, in this witness and service. She may
also be able in principle to explain, at least in part and as a matter of faithful
witness to what God is doing in the world (i.e., the “spheres”), why she accepts
this or that particular action as that which she trusts and ventures that the loving
God has required.51
ethical event in relation to God; and, accordingly, 2) that the “spectator’s” understanding
can never be the basis of the “actor’s” judgment regarding what she or he ought to do.
49
IV/2, 801.
50
Ibid., 820.
51
Gerald McKenny has challenged an earlier statement of this view for failing to
recognize 1) that for Barth we can never have “full knowledge of the goodness or rightness
of our conduct” this side of the eschaton, and 2) that hearing the command will include,
in Barth’s words, “embarrassments and misunderstandings” regarding it. II/2, 709. Gerald
McKenny, The Analogy of Grace: Karl Barth’s Moral Theology (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2010), 284. I have tried to modify and moderate my account here to avoid the idea
that the Christian may count on any “easy” hearing from which the divine command
may become fully perspicuous—and to that extent our own human possession. We can
never have nor should we seek the kind of security that either leads us to an arbitrary self-
reliance, or that evades or rejects the possibility, or even likelihood, of error on this or that
front. Hence, I am in agreement when McKenny writes with reference to Barth: “Ethical
reflection can and must proceed in the confidence that the asking is not in vain, that God’s
specific command will be given. But this is not a confidence that the command will be heard
clearly or rightly, either in deliberation or in testing a retrospective judgment. The human
decision involves an insurmountable risk.” Ibid. However, I resist McKenny’s charge that
my interpretation is simply in error. I let my arguments and uses of Barth’s writings speak
for themselves, and suggest that McKenny’s (correct!) case for humility and risk itself risks
movement toward a kind of agnosticism about hearing God’s command that is unpersuasive
both as an interpretation of Barth and more generally for theological ethics. For the older
The Christian moral actor may therefore be able to specify features of his or
her action which, by making primary reference to God’s action, would display the
shape obedience is to take. The recognition of the spheres of God’s activity in their
impinging upon and making concrete this ethical event involving these particular
circumstances and requiring this particular person’s obedience serves as the basis
for understanding and explanation. Precisely this activity of recognition, I think, is
part of what it means to live one’s life as a history of relationship with God. The
features we are considering are never to be considered in themselves as dictating
the course of future ethical decisions. One must in each case ask after the command
anew. But an understanding of the particular ways in which one may reflect God’s
activity in the past, as they bear more or less of a resemblance to the present
possibilities for obedience, will contribute to the discovery of new requirements.
Barth still can avoid a model of rational inference from belief here because
he insists that the history in which persons are constituted is the history of a
relationship, wherein the agent can find no “neutral ground” from which to stand
above the sovereign decision of God and abstractly infer moral propositions from
religious propositions. The model of rational inference abstracts claims or beliefs
about God from the relationship with God himself as revealed in Jesus Christ.52
version, see William Werpehowski, “Command and History in the Ethics of Karl Barth,”
Journal of Religious Ethics 9/2 (Fall 1981), 298–320.
52
The meaning of the model of “rational inference from belief” is not entirely clear.
On the one hand, Gustafson sees the process as involving discerning “what the dynamic
of God’s presence and purposes are.” Can Ethics Be Christian?, 160. This seems to deny
a distancing from the relationship with God. On the other hand, Gustafson affirms that in
the process “the theologian moves from the particular Christian beliefs to a statement of
their moral import in a more universal language … Christian ethics (in terms not only of
action-guiding principles, but also in terms of justification for these) can in large measure
be converted into ‘natural’ or ‘rational’ ethics.” Ibid., 163–64. These remarks are at odds
with Barth’s conception of theological ethics.
Gustafson commends this “conversion” in part on theological grounds. “Since the
intention of the divine power for human well-being is universal in scope, the historically
particular medium through which that power is clarified for Christians also has universal
significance.” What Christians learn about human well-being applies to non-Christians as
well, and that must be made clear to the latter through arguments showing that the event
of Jesus Christ “sheds light on principles and values that other serious moral persons
also perceive and also ought to adhere to.” This sequence of moral authority seems to
subordinate Christian ethics to some vague and putatively neutral idea of what “serious
moral persons” ought to believe. Barth in contrast subordinates general ethical inquiry to
Christian ethical inquiry, while at the same time 1) welcoming clarificatory contributions
from the subordinated inquiry, and 2) preserving the relevance of “the Church” for “the
world” through principles that are grounded in the revelation of Jesus Christ (e.g., that
fellow humanity is the basic form of humanity, that there may be “correspondences” to
the Kingdom of God in the secular political realm, etc.). This relevance can be maintained
without loss of theocentricity, and avoids Gustafson’s ambiguous category of “general
human moral experience.”
Beliefs as such and apart from relatedness never become, and should never
be considered to be, the source of judgments about good and evil. The precise
criticism which Barth levels against casuistical ethics confirms this conclusion.
Casuistry violates the integrity of the ethical event because it removes or distances
one from historical relationship, leading instead to a mode of decision-making
which negates the creaturely freedom to be truly obedient. If an action means
not only to choose or realize this or that, but also to choose or realize oneself in
this or that, as Barth claims, then obedient action ought also be the agent’s self-
offering to God. Casuistry destroys the freedom of this obedience by interposing
between the gracious commander and the “living sacrifice” that is the creature an
“interpretation and application … of a universal moral truth fixed and proclaimed
with supreme arbitrariness.”
Not only what God will command him to do here and how, but also what he
himself must choose and realise here and now, is supplemented by this other and
alien thing which is neither of God nor of himself. He may now judge himself
by this pattern … In this process he himself necessarily has no place. He is not
asked whether he himself participates or whether he could not or would not have
done otherwise.53
“Practical casuistry,” in contrast, seeks to hear the command of God through an

involved activity of faithful attention to the “formed reference” of the ethical event,
and not merely through a process of ratiocination abstracted from and independent
of that involved creaturely activity.
As an account of how the Christian discovers what she ought to do, the model
of rational inference from belief prescinds from the relational historical context of
the ethical event, and is thereby descriptively inappropriate. Within the relational
historical context, as we have seen, processes of examining and comprehending the
spheres of God’s activity are fitting and necessary. I do not take Barth to say that the
spheres and their broad normative implications are unintelligible outside the self-
consciousness of standing in relationship to God in Christ; nor do I think that the
nonbeliever has absolutely no epistemic access to the description of “hearing the
command” in that relational context. The point is just that the Christian’s activity
of discovering what God requires of her needs to be described in a certain way. For
Barth that description is normative for Christian performance; Christians who are to
be determined by the divine command must seek that determination appropriately.
An emphasis on relationship with God is also connected to one of the most
challenging aspects of Barth’s ethics, the “mystery of the ethical event.” Barth
wants to talk about a real hearing of God’s command. His account of real hearing
(which is as such still “refracted in the prism of our own life and understanding”)
concerns both a description of the logic of the concepts of theological ethics
and a description of the logic of one’s coming to hear the command; for Barth,
53
III/4, 113–14.
however, the latter is materially tied to the former, and is not given systematic
prominence over the former. What matters is that the Christian “ask seriously,” and
this means asking with the realization of the sovereignty of the divine decision,
which depends, in turn, on the knowledge of what God graciously has done for
us in Jesus Christ. It means not depending upon our past decisions or past pattern
of action, not putting first what we want or desire, not understanding ourselves
apart from our determination in Jesus Christ, and not abstracting ourselves from
a living history of relationship in which we are implicated at every moment.54 If
we ask, that is, in such a way that our asking reflects our understanding of the
Whence? and Whither? of theological ethics, then “in the very fact that we desire
this knowledge, what we are and will and do and do not do will be directed by the
command of God and obedient to it and sanctified by it—and the more profoundly,
the more seriously our question implies our realisation of the sovereignty of
the divine decision.”55 Another way of putting this is to say that we are concretely
and actively concerned with God and his command when we properly situate our
own personal life-story at His disposal, having it determined completely by the
story of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ.56
Asking is concrete. The situation which presents the ethical question is
historically differentiated and articulated. In asking after the command, we look
to the biblical witness for the spheres and for the commands to which we, in our
own time and place, are subject. Our “ethical reflection” consists of our attempt to
discover how particularly to instantiate our commission to glorify God. So long as
we “ask seriously,” our ethical reflection need not be in vain. The mystery of the
ethical event lies in this possibility of real hearing. Casuistry denies that mystery,
for Barth, because it reflects a misapprehension of what it means to ask of God,
“What ought we to do?” and betrays an ignorance of the historical context of
relatedness which establishes the meaning of the question.
Growth-in-Continuity
The basis for a response to Hauerwas’s criticisms about growth-in-continuity

has been established. We start, as does Barth, with the continuity of God’s action
for individuals in the election of Jesus Christ, a continuity affirmed through
creation, reconciliation, and redemption. The human correlate to this divine work
54
II/2, 645–61.
55
II/2, 648–49.
56
It is not surprising to find Barth writing that the commandment to keep the Sabbath
explains all the rest of God’s commandments. “By demanding man’s abstention and resting
from his own works, it explains that the commanding God who has created man and
enabled and commissioned him to do his own work is the God who is gracious to man in
Jesus Christ. Thus it points him away from everything that he himself can will and achieve
and back to what God is for him and will do for him.” III/4, 53. The Sabbath commandment
is a direction and a reminder regarding the Whence? and the Whither? of theological ethics.
is persons’ temporal and provisional realizations of the purpose and meaning of

human life, the glorification of God. It is in this analogical correlate that we may
find a broadly considered idea of “character,” a central orientation or loyalty which
distinctively qualifies a person’s agency through time. The idea can be made more
specific in the context of the work of reconciliation. Barth describes the effect of
sanctification as making the sanctified “disturbed sinners” who are pointed in a
particular direction. The response to the call of Jesus has the paradoxical quality
of self-denial; it is the annulment of an existing relationship of obedience and
loyalty in favor of a new orientation wherein one stands before Jesus Christ, one’s
Lord and Savior.57 This character makes for continuity of purpose and action; the
continuity is constituted by that pattern of action which displays the enactment of
the intentions of disturbed sinners who desire to belong wholly to Jesus Christ and
who freely will to be obedient to him.58
What of growth-in-continuity? For Barth such growth is a possibility only as
it reflects “repetition and renewal.” In part this means that growth involves the
reaffirmation of oneself in the new ethical event as one who belongs to God. There
is growth (a deepening of the self’s determination through the testing of one’s
current posture against one’s central orientation and loyalty) in that one has the
opportunity to apprehend more deeply who God is and what he has done. “To live
a holy life is to be raised and driven with increasing definiteness from the center of
the revealed truth [that God is for the person and the person for God] and therefore
to live in conversion with growing sincerity, depth, and precision.”59 Conversion
is a “falling out with oneself,” and is renewed day by day. The outcome is an
existence simul justus et peccator. But in the recognition that this is the quality of
existence as one lives it in and through decision and action, one is able ever more
concretely to learn how that existence is claimed by the gracious God.60 A more
specific example of what such growth amounts to is provided by Barth when he
discusses the dignity of the cross which the Christian is called upon to bear. When,
in the midst of hardship, pain, and brokenness, a disciple is thrown back upon God
in utter dependence, she may become more deeply aware of the way in which her
existence is constituted, and where allegiance must always lie. The cross really
taken and carried by the Christian
is a powerful force to discipline and strengthen his faith and obedience and
love. In this respect it makes common cause with the impulsion of the Holy
Spirit. When this is translated into the impulsion of his own spirit, even in the
man seriously engaged in sanctification it may easily happen that he falls into
what he thinks to be a spiritual roving and wandering and marauding and even
plundering, or perhaps into a higher or lower form of pious idling. He is not
57
IV/2, 539.
58
For a discussion of character relating to the Doctrine of Creation, see III/4, 389.
59
IV/2, 566.
60
I say more about the simul, and about “repetition and renewal,” in Chapter 9.
aware of this himself. But it is noted by others, especially by the sharp eyes
of worldlings. And they have good reason to shake their heads, to laugh or be
annoyed, and in any case to dismiss Christianity as valueless. When the cross
comes, he is given the opportunity, and even forced, to see it himself. As it sets
for him and shows him his own limit, it causes him to be startled at himself. It
forcibly teaches him to think of the one necessary thing, to focus and concentrate
all his attention upon it … When the cross comes, man’s own spirit is rightly
directed by the Holy Spirit as it previously refused to be—although pretending
to be full of the Spirit.61
In all faithful Christian action, there is for Barth the possibility for an enrichment
of the comprehension of oneself as living in a relationship with God. This
enrichment or growth-in-continuity is necessarily a repetition of conversion and a
renewal of commitment in new circumstances; for in ethical action the Christian
agent must genuinely realize oneself as well as realize this or that state of affairs in
the world. Each concrete action brings with it a new possibility for the self-denial
which is the Christian’s self-expression. This possibility is also “new” with respect
to what one did with oneself in one’s action immediately prior. Every action of
Christian self-expression and self-understanding itself creates “a new condition
and possibility” for further self-expression and deeper self-understanding.62 The
Christian must continually rediscover and reaffirm oneself as belonging to God in
each ethical encounter; moreover, owing to the abiding “place of responsibility”
from where one stands to hear the command, the Christian’s growth in repetition
and renewal is a real “growth-in-continuity.”
In every case there will be a continuity, a positive relationship, between what

God has caused man to be and become as Creator and Lord and what He will
now have of him. The special intention with which He now calls him is directed
to this being especially determined by God Himself. Therefore, although man
cannot simply read off God’s command from what he has so far been and
become on the basis of the creation and providence of God, yet in that which
God wills of him according to His command he will recognize himself as the
one he already has been and become by the will of the same God. To the new
divine choice which meets him in the command of God he will have to bring in
his own choice, not a blind obedience devoid of understanding, but an obedience
which sees and understands. That he specifically is meant and called will not be
unknowable to him but knowable. He will find the new purpose of God for him
sketched at least in the limitation already given him by the same God. He will
thus be able at least to orientate himself by what he has already been and become
as he is all ears for what is now, today, demanded of him.63
61
IV/2, 608.
62
III/4, 5.
63
III/4, 596.
Barth’s ethics do not fall to the criticisms of Gustafson and Hauerwas in the
name of moral agency. He incorporates a conception of “history” which grounds
reasons for action, character, and growth-in-continuity in his category of “history
of relationship with God.” As continuous, Barth’s Christian stands loyal to the
cause of Jesus Christ. As changed through his or her actions, he or she comes to a
deeper self-understanding through a deeper understanding of God’s plans for him
or her. And as changing, he or she approaches concrete ethical events armed with
a range of theonomous reasons which help to frame and limit the possibilities of
obedient action. All the conditions are met for characterizing the Christian as one
who does indeed express herself through her history.
I have spoken only about the Christian individual. This was necessary in order to
restrict attention to the relevant problems of moral agency. The Christian’s concrete
location within the church, however and of course, remains enormously important.
As a community of belief, the church is crucially a place where Christian character
is developed and nurtured. As a community of interpretation, it is where normative
reasons are forged through reflection on God’s activity on behalf of human creatures.
And as a community of witness and service, it is a place where character is deepened,
and where self-understanding is enhanced through self-denial and self-giving.
Chapter 3
Narrative and Ethics
Karl Barth often wrote with profound lightness. A good example is his expression
of indebtedness to Abel Burckhardt, a pastor from Basel who “composed and
edited a collection of songs for children in the local dialect. This was the text-book
in which, at the beginning of the last decade of the [nineteenth] century, I received
my first theological instruction in a form appropriate to my then immaturity.”
And what made an indelible impression on me was the homely naturalness

with which these very modest compositions spoke of the events of Christmas,
Palm Sunday, Good Friday, Easter, the Ascension, and Pentecost as things
which might take place any day in Basel or its environs like any other important
happenings. History? Doctrine? Dogma? Myth? No—but things actually taking
place, so that we could see and hear and lay up in our hearts. For as these songs
were sung in the everyday language we were then beginning to hear and speak,
and as we joined in singing, we took our mother’s hand, as it were, and went to
the stall at Bethlehem, and to the streets of Jerusalem where, greeted by children
of a similar age, the Savior made His entry, and to the dark hill of Golgotha, and
as the sun rose to the garden of Joseph … It was all present without needing to
be made present.1
Barth’s tribute appears at the conclusion of an argument proposing: 1) that the

manifold activities of the Christian life tacitly presuppose that the Savior whom
we remember in these activities “is Himself in action now, today, and here;” and
2) that this action of Jesus Christ is of a piece with the history of his life, death,
and resurrection as attested in the New Testament. These theological proposals
are complex, of course, and they are certainly relevant to the themes of this
chapter. Still, we ought not to run past Barth’s simple witness to Burckhardt’s wise
simplicity, for that is relevant, too.
We find something similar as well as, perhaps, a distant reflection of Barth’s
early instruction, in one of his later addresses on Christian ethics.
God became, was, and is a man. And it happened that God as this man was not a
success, but had to suffer and died as a condemned criminal on the gallows. And
it happened, further, that this man who was God was raised from the dead. But
1
IV/2, 112–13. On the significance of this passage, see D. F. Ford, “Barth’s
Interpretation of the Bible,” in Karl Barth: Studies of his Theological Method, ed. S. W.
Sykes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 57.
thereby it happened that every man in Him and all men by Him were exalted to
the glory of God … The conclusion of this history consists in this: that it will
happen, it will be revealed for all and to all, that our guilt and need is taken
away by the person of this man, and that we are called in the person of this
man to the glory of God. Thus it happened, and therein happened that God was
and is and will be gracious to us. That is the history between God and man,
the history of Jesus Christ, God’s covenant and mercy. It is to this history that
Christian ethics is related.
Christian ethics is the fruit that grows on this tree. Christian ethics cannot be
understood if this story is omitted or misinterpreted. For it is just this history
which calls out continually to the activity of men.2
In the Bible, Barth adds, we find the “indispensable documents” by which we may
call to remembrance the history of Jesus Christ; there we also find an account of
that “condition of life” created among us by the grace of God. “From the Bible we
learn to submit to such a condition of life.”3
In what follows, I try to develop this summary statement of Christian ethics in
its relation to that particular history which is described biblically. The dialectical
complexity of Barth’s own elaboration, which I intend to follow and evaluate,
should not have us lose sight of the basic theological commitment underlying the
form and content of the passages already cited—a commitment simply to follow
that very particular God who precedes and authorizes and encompasses all of our
talk about God.
Narrative
Barth’s interest in the history of God in Jesus Christ warrants our interest in the
category of narrative; for narrative is a literary category appropriate to the task of
depicting it in its biblical attestation. The history in question is that of an agent.
The identity of that agent is fittingly depicted in a story that may “characterize”
God through the patterned description of God’s action and passion, as found
within the movement of biblical plot.4
It is clear from Barth’s account of God’s being as a being-in-act,5 and of the
being of Jesus Christ as constituted by this action6, that this kind of narrative
interpretation is at work in his theology, and it offers a helpful example of how
2
Karl Barth, God Here and Now (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 88.
3
Ibid., 90.
4
Ronald F. Thiemann, Revelation and Theology: The Gospel as Narrated Promise
(Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), 86–91.
5
II/1, 257–72.
6
III/2, 55–61.
Narrative and Ethics 39
one may construe the canon as a whole, i.e., by following the story of God in
His relation to Israel and Jesus Christ. It also focuses attention away from
philosophical anthropology as a theological foundation and toward “the centrality
of God’s agency within biblical narrative and Christian community”7 As we have
seen, moreover, Barth thinks that “Christian ethics cannot be understood if this
story is omitted or misinterpreted” because “it is just this history which calls out
continually” to human beings in their activity. Humanity is determined to be with
God in Jesus Christ, and is addressed and summoned as such. This summons, this
continual calling out, constitutes human being itself as history.
The history of a being begins, continues, and is completed when something

other than itself and transcending its own nature encounters it, approaches it, and
determines its being in a nature proper to it, so that it is compelled and enabled
to transcend itself in response and in relation to this new factor. The history of a
being occurs when it is caught up in this movement, change and relation, when
the circular movement is broken from without by a movement towards it and the
corresponding movement from it, when it is transcended from without so that it
must and can transcend itself outwards.8
In light of this analysis, the next two sections consider how biblical narrative
figures in Barth’s theological ethics. First, it is used to show how the God who
transcends us in Jesus Christ remains free from us, so that our corresponding
self-transcendence in response and relation may be a genuinely revolutionary
discipleship. Secondly, biblical narrative depicts the way in which the God who
relates to us in Jesus Christ remains, in and as the basis of transcendence, free
for us. Our corresponding response as determined in the nature proper to us may,
therefore, be a discipleship that is genuinely faithful service.
Freedom Extra Nos
Consider the revolutionary character of the “Royal Man,” Jesus Christ. As a man
who exists analogously to the mode of existence of God, Jesus is not only “the
one who is ignored and forgotten and despised and discounted by men”; nor is he
merely the one who, “in fellowship and conformity with this God who is poor in
the world, is also poor … acknowledging those who … are in different ways poor
men as this world counts poverty.”9 In his biblical depiction Jesus corresponds to
the being of God in the display of a “remarkable freedom” in relation to the “orders
of life and value current in the world about Him.” This freedom is unclassifiable
from the standpoint of these orders.
7
Thiemann, Revelation and Theology, 84.
8
III/2, 158.
9
IV/2, 167, 169.
He had need of none of them in the sense of an absolute authority which was vitally
necessary for Him, and which He could prescribe and defend as vitally necessary
for others because it was an absolute authority. On the other hand, He had no need
consistently to break any of them, to try to overthrow them altogether, to work
for their replacement or amendment. He could live in these orders … He simply
revealed the limit and frontier of all these things—the freedom of the kingdom
of God … Inevitably, then, He clashed with these orders in the interpretation
commonly placed on them in the world in which He lived. Inevitably their
provisional and relative character … were all occasionally disclosed—not in
principle, only occasionally, but on these occasions quite unmistakably.10
Barth defends the validity of this account in a startling excursus which

illustrates Jesus’ royal freedom in Gospel narratives.11 He describes, on the one
hand, the “passive conservatism” of Jesus—his clear acceptance of the temple
as his Father’s house, his respect for the order of family, his honoring of the law.
There is also no direct and principled repudiation of existing economic and political
arrangements. On the other hand, the narratives about Jesus show “no trace of any
consistent recognition in principle.” His acceptance was of one who stood superior
to them, in the freedom of the Kingdom of God. So he witnesses to a reality higher
than the temple, and he sets himself and his family of followers over against his
conventional family. There is the assault on the law in his attitude toward the
Sabbath. His parables strikingly challenge existing economic relationships, and
his stance toward the state includes a clear vision of how its authority is severely
limited and relativized.
The juxtaposition of seemingly conflicting patterns of acceptance and challenge
both conceals and reveals the “indissoluble antithesis” of God’s kingdom to all human
kingdoms, along with the denial that here there may be no neutral compatibility
between the old and the new. Indeed, Jesus’ most radical assault on the old is
established by his “ignoring and transcending” of it, and by “the alien presence
with which he confronted it in its own sphere.” Thus in the economic and political
spheres, we find in Jesus’ life and teachings “a questioning of the very presuppositions
which is all the more powerful in its lack of any direct aggressiveness.” In his and
his followers’ accepting of the insecurity of dispossession, and in their rejection of
violence, we find the “incommensurable factor” which reflects how it is that “the
world is concretely violated by God Himself.”
Jesus’ freedom from us is depicted as being in correspondence with the
freedom of God. Barth warns that if we do not know Jesus as this revolutionary,
then what we would know instead, “in a mild or wild transcendence,” is only
ourselves. Positively, the account illuminates one side of Christian discipleship.
Inasmuch as the disciple is a witness to Jesus and the radically new thing Jesus
brings, her life and activity must reflect a “break” with the orders of the world
Ibid., 172.
10
Ibid., 173–79.
11
and their false dominion. “The world which sighs under these powers must hear
and receive and rejoice that their lordship is broken. But this declaration cannot
be made by the existence of those who are merely free inwardly. If the message
is to be given, the world must see and hear at least an indication, or sign, of what
has taken place. The break made by God in Jesus must become history.”12 No
particular or general principle set over against the “lordless powers” can intervene
between the one calling and the disciple called, or between the one called and the
world which may hear. Any principle of this kind jeopardizes the freedom which
must not be bound by the world, even and especially as the world remains the basis
by which its negation is apprehended. It confuses the break which must “ignore
and transcend” worldly orders with one that may still validate the world by (only)
relatively overcoming it.
The command of Jesus as found in the Gospel accounts does, nevertheless,
proceed along certain clear lines which are always relevant. In the case of worldly
possessions, worldly honor, the use of violent force, the authority of family, and
the structures of the world of piety, the disciple may be commanded to act in ways
that, again, do not so much reverse as ignore the presuppositions of these spheres.
Not merely in support of a more egalitarian form of attachment to possessions,
but in a freedom from possession (which may still be expressed egalitarianly);
not just in a non-violent approach to the relationship between friend and foe, but
in witness to the invalidation of that relationship (which may still be expressed
non-violently); not in a form of service which may win honor among men and
women, but in the ignoring and transcending of these canons of honor (which
hardly overrules the disciple’s proper service); in these and other ways, too, the
disciple may follow in freedom.
For Barth, this statement of Jesus’ radical freedom can never be the last or even
the first word to be said about the royal man Jesus and his call to discipleship. The
first and last word is that Jesus, with God, is for humanity in love and faithfulness.
Jesus’ freedom from us, including his freedom to say No to us, is finally secondary
to and based upon his Yes, which the biblical stories depict in his being the deliverer
of joy and comfort, the compassionate servant of human need.13 He casts the light
of the kingdom, with its promise of release from the ills that burden suffering
humanity. In his reading of the stories of Jesus’ miracles, Barth proposes that the
aim of these acts is to help the sufferer to live again as a creature; we find in them
“manifestations of the kingdom drawn near.” “Freedom from” is based on “freedom
for.” God’s No, as revealed in Jesus Christ, is founded on God’s gracious Yes. We
move, accordingly, to an elaboration of the second theme summarized above.
12
Ibid., 544.
13
Ibid., 173–92.
Freedom Pro Nobis
Barth develops the ethical ramification of God’s Yes in part through narrative
interpretations of biblical materials. His interpretations serve at least three purposes.
First, he establishes what he calls the basis of biblical ethics. Second, he provides a
vision of the obedience of the disciple. Third, he accounts for the spheres of God’s
activity in the world as they pertain to a number of specific moral issues.
The basis of biblical ethics is the order and pattern of indicative and
imperative illustrated in Deut. 6:20ff.
When your son asks you in time to come, “what is the meaning of the testimonies
and statutes and the ordinances which the Lord our God has commanded you?”
then you shall say to your son, “we were Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt; and the
Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand; and the Lord showed signs
and wonders, great and gracious, against Egypt and against Pharaoh and all his
household before our eyes; and he brought us out from there, that he might
bring us in and give us the land which he swore to give to our fathers. And
the Lord commanded us to do all these statutes, to fear the Lord our God, for
our good always, that he might preserve us alive, as at this day. And it will be
righteousness for us, if we are careful to do all this commitment before the Lord
our God, as he has commanded us.
This text and others like it stand as “the answer of the Bible to the question of the
legitimacy of the divine claim.”14 God’s command is warranted by the story of
what God has done for us. The command, therefore, is never abstract. It is never
preliminary or subsequent to the grace of God. It is always “the form, or shape, or
garment of grace.”
Christian obedience, it follows, is a matter of witnessing appropriately to the
story of what God has done for us. Since that action amounts to a “liberation and
loosing”15 the divine command always has the form of a permission to be one who
belongs to Jesus Christ as a covenant-partner. One may belong to and share in the
history of the covenant of grace which Jesus enacts, a history “to which the interest
of the whole Bible, in both its parts, is indissolubly directed.” Obedience cannot
consist in mere conformity to general rules or principles, as such, for
[i]t is just in the course of this history that there arises the commanding and
forbidding … If we are to understand this, we may as little think of abstracting
from this story as from the person of the God who commands. On the contrary,
we must continually keep before us and therefore understand the person in the
history and the history in the person … How strangely would the Bible deviate
from its proper theme and content if it presented matters otherwise than it actually
II/2, 562.
14
Ibid., 602.
15
does in the shape of this, so to speak, historical ethics, if it were to describe the
will of God as the establishment and proclamation of general precepts and rules
which can be filled out only on the basis of the reflection and decision of man.16
The Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount do not set out any
general law, negatively or positively. They only delimit the definite sphere of God’s
action. Barth interprets the giving of the Commandments and the preaching of the
Sermon as moments in a larger story that opposes the notion that here we have
general commands and prohibitions given to us here and now. The revealing of the
Commandments reveals a certain sort of God and a certain sort of people. God will
command and forbid within the framework of the Commandments, but we err if
we confuse the framework with the picture of commanding and forbidding itself.
The picture is governed by Israel’s success or failure in heeding the voice of the
“angel” referred to in Ex. 23:20f., the angel sent by God whom the people must
heed in their history with God.
The pattern of framework and picture, of delimitation of sphere and lived history,
corresponds to the New Testament depiction of the Sermon on the Mount and its
aftermath. Here also a definite history is disclosed in condensation, as it were. It is
the history of the Kingdom of the new humanity. Here also the framework is not
identified with the picture, for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and the new life it
inspires is distinguished from the proclamation itself. Yet that life will always involve
a series of events that repeat and confirm the event proclaimed in the Sermon.17
Barth’s reading of the biblical texts is open to challenge; but here it is most
important to recognize what he is trying to do. He is trying to show that these
prescriptions play a role in the biblical presentation of the covenant of grace that
exposes how obedience is not to be frozen in the former. Obedience is historically
concrete and just so bound to its biblical depiction, as discovered in the stories of
Abraham, Peter, the centurion at Capernaum, and so forth. At the same time, the
commands given there by God concern us directly, becoming also God’s command
to us, in that they are the commands of Jesus Christ as he speaks “to us, calling us
in the particular situation of obedience determined by His Word.”18 That situation
is not mere application or translation of these stories to the “right” situation as
we determine it; for “we have to realize that the command of Jesus given us itself
creates the situation and all the conditions of the situation in which we have to
obey … In obedience we are not about to leap. We are already leaping.”19 We
are concretely and currently implicated in a moral universe constituted by the
history of God in Christ. Because Jesus lives, we may confirm and renew, but
never copy, the biblically storied commands. Because Jesus lives, the life and
death and victory of Jesus Christ as attested in the New Testament “takes place
16
Ibid., 678.
17
Ibid., 688.
18
IV/2, 553.
19
Ibid., 542.
today and will again take place tomorrow, in the course of which He is the living
Jesus Christ,” and in which “we now, today, and here are invited to participate with
supreme realism.”20 The discipleship that correlates with this view of obedience
includes faithful service of the neighbor. As those who can look only where they
see God looking, Christians are called to concern themselves with human beings
beloved of God. They may offer the assistance by which suffering people may be
more able to live as creatures again, and that assistance, as it stands in continuity
with God the Creator, will also bear the marks of that “break” with the orders of
the world which any witness to God’s Kingdom may and must manifest. They may
serve their fellow creatures without validating the worldly norms of mammon,
honor, and violent force. The help by which we may provide for the other a
measure of creaturely freedom is decisively a witness to the Kingdom as it ignores
and transcends these norms for the sake of the other. It may express in fitting
fashion both the secondary “No” to the orders of the world (and to the human
presumption to assimilate God’s Kingdom to these orders), and the primary “Yes”
to the neighbor as he or she stands in that world.
The history of God in Christ may also be more specifically described in
reference to particular moral problems. As we saw in Chapter 2, Barth will describe
the spheres in which God’s activity for us always takes place; this “horizontal”
dimension of the divine command establishes a “constancy and continuity” which
“persists in all the differentiations of individual cases.”21 “Special ethics” amounts
to a commentary on the history of relationship between God and persons, and it is
not surprising that Barth will turn to biblical narratives in his attempt to offer the
commentary. What is surprising is that he does not always, or even often, turn to
them explicitly. When discussing the ethics of suicide, however, he does. Deeper
insight into both the character and possibilities of Barth’s ethics will repay careful
scrutiny of his discussion.
Suicide
Barth’s treatment of suicide specifies his more general position concerning the
respect owed to human life. Our freedom for life is a freedom to treat it as a
benefit and loan given by God.22 While not a second god, it remains “good and
worthwhile because [it is] the one great opportunity of meeting God and rejoicing
in His praise.” The birth of Christ, in which God takes on human life, stands as the
great revelation of the respect owed to it in correspondence with God’s valuing of
it. So besides treating life with astonishment, humility, and awe, one must simply
will to live in response to God’s showing us this favor, entrusting us with this
20
Ibid., 112; cf. IV/1, 224–28.
21
III/4, 17.
22
Ibid., 327–35.
divine possession, and offering us this opportunity. Indifferent, willful, or wanton

destruction of life, including one’s own, is met with an unqualified No.23
In the case of suicide, or “self-murder,” Barth focuses on the kind of act in
which self-destruction in the face of affliction represents an exercise of a supposed
sovereignty of the self over itself. In this act, one stands as one’s own judge,
and rules that life is too obvious a failure, or too intolerable a burden, or all too
dishonorable, and therefore fit for extinction. The unauthorized and rebellious
will to judge oneself in this way is based on a tragically mistaken supposition. As
afflicted and assaulted, the would-be suicide finds God hidden as one’s own God.
One is thus tempted to declare total sovereignty in light of this “dreadful void,” and,
correspondingly, conceive continued life as a compulsion, a necessity conforming
to some law of virtue or social or individual responsibility. Suicide is that “last and
supreme act of sovereignty” to liberate oneself from the necessity of living. It is an
act, moreover, which will not be stayed by the counterforce of these laws.
But to will life before God is to will that we are permitted to live. The despair
that anticipates and accompanies self-judgment is possible and necessary only if
we must live; they “are necessary only if we are charged to help ourselves, if
pressure is extended from some quarter to take life into our own hands, to be our
own masters, to make something significant of ourselves, to justify, sanctify, save
and glorify ourselves, and … to have to recognize at some point and in some way
that we cannot really succeed in doing this.”24
The supposition is false. God is gracious, and we may live by the fact that it
is the gracious God who justifies, sanctifies, and glorifies. These activities are not
required of us. All there is for us to do is receive and acknowledge that grace,
that light that shines in the darkness of affliction. It contains the corrective that
undercuts the “impatient revolt against the supposed necessity.” The gracious God
in Jesus Christ would speak the word that “there is for us inexhaustible, illimitable,
and unfailing forgiveness, help, and hope.”25
The biblical correlate for this theological analysis can be found in the three
great cases of suicide discovered in the Bible. In Saul, the first king of Israel,
Ahithophel, David’s turncoat adviser, and, above all in Judas, we find figures
who stand deeply in the shadow of the biblical narrative. They are depicted as
judged for sinning against the free grace of God. Saul wishes to be a king in the
manner of the world. The clever Ahithophel, in going over to Absalom, reveals
his foolishness in not recognizing David as the elect of God. Judas, an apostle and
disciple chosen by Jesus, reserves for his own decision the terms of his obedience.
For these three in their effort to be sovereign in face of the fidelity and mercy of
God, suicide is their “logical end.”26 Nevertheless, this resistance is resisted and
defeated by the mercy of God in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
23
Ibid., 403.
24
Ibid., 407.
25
Ibid., 408.
26
Ibid., 409.
This summary captures, I think, the terse and synthetic manner in which Barth
will draw general conclusions from his reading of a number of different and
complex biblical tests; however, it is inadequate to the extent that it does not attend
to the richness of Barth’s biblical reading. So let me try to reconstruct in greater
detail how his extended interpretations of the stories of Saul and Judas develop in
connection with our moral question.
According to I Sam. 8:5, the elders of Israel come together in Ramah and
say to Samuel, the last of the Judges, “appoint for us a king to govern us like
all the nations.” The Lord tells Samuel to grant the request, “for they have not
rejected you, but they have rejected me from being over them” (8:7). The Israelites
appear dissatisfied with the lordship of God and the leaders appointed by God;
they would expect security from another source of authority and power (8:19-20).
Yet the narrative makes clear that God will give them up to their king with the
intention that that king remains a servant elected and called by God. The double-
sided character emerges more clearly in the surprising election of Saul, who comes
from the smallest of the families of the smallest of the tribes of Israel. He is told
by Samuel that God has appointed him prince, not king, over Israel, whatever the
people may call him (10:1). In his encounter with the prophets and his falling into
ecstasy, both promised him by Samuel as a sign and confirmation of God’s favor,
Saul is in effect counted as still belonging to the order of the prophet. In the fact
that he cannot be found when the people seek him, and that Yahweh must lead
them to him, we have again a nagging reminder that Israel is, and is not, getting
what it wants. It may get its lord, but only as the Lord’s servant.
Saul fails in the latter commission. The story in I Samuel recounts a pair of
sins by which Saul’s kingship is lost. In advance of war with the Philistines,
and fearing his people would leave him given Samuel’s delay in coming to the
host, Saul takes the prerogative of offering the sacrifice (I Sam. 13:8). Samuel’s
subsequent rebuke indicates for Barth that in this act Saul simply sets before the
people “the false image upon which the people had fed in their perverted demand”
for a king. He sought to lead the people in their relationship to God, rather than
waiting for God to direct and lead. The second fault (15:8) consists in not fulfilling
God’s command totally to destroy the Amalekites (!?). Saul spares King Agag
(along with the better cattle). Again, he fears the people and wishes to please them.
In these rather small compromises with the way of other kings and nations and
gods, Saul gives his lordship precedence over his servant status. Fear governs his
actions, but this binds him to a worldly Law that cannot support him. Quite the
contrary, such fear and its aftermath remain the basis for all his other wickedness,
culminating in his suicide. Saul refuses to stand faithfully before God, however
mild the refusal. He finds himself under the compulsion to live in the light, or in
the darkness, of a rule of self-justification. As that rule convicts him, so he is free
to convict himself. Poignantly, the suicide continues to reflect the fear, though now
in terms of the ignominy that the approach of the Philistines promises him after
their final military victory. He would kill himself “lest these uncircumcised come
and thrust me through, and make sport of me.” (31:4) He thus “dies well,” but only
as a man who would be king.27
Judas is genuinely one of the twelve, and is perhaps distinguished by belonging
to the tribe of Judah, the seed of David. Barth sees him as guilty, like Saul, of
a minimum; he leads the high-priests to Jesus at a time and in a place suitable
for avoiding a ruckus. He just delivers Jesus into their hands, a delivery which
continues after his own onto the cross. Barth takes the Johannine account of the
anointing at Bethany to provide the clue to Judas’ fault (John 12:1-8). Mary’s act
of complete and extravagant devotion is rejected by Judas, who, seemingly on
behalf of the needy poor, reserves for himself the right to decide how to obey and
follow. Yet this way of making the point is too weak; for “reserving for himself”
amounts to the freedom to “interrupt” in his relationship to Jesus in his own
name and on his own behalf: “not the good work, but his own work; not the help
that he will bring to others, but his own initiative in this work.” 28 In Matthew’s
version, it is not Judas but “the disciples” who complain of the extravagance:
“they were indignant, saying ‘Why this waste?’” (Matt. 26:8). Relating this scene
to the disciples’ collective uncertainty later about which of them would hand Jesus
over (Matt. 26:21–22), Barth concludes that the situation between Jesus and Judas
is “only a heightened form of the situation between Jesus and all other men,”
including and especially the men and women who would follow him.29 Note
that the posture of “reservation” and self-serving “interruption” is powerfully
confirmed in Gospel accounts of the price paid for Jesus. “This obviously means
that for Judas Jesus was for sale. He had his own freedom in face of Him that he
was resolved to maintain. He had indeed turned to Him. But he had not bound
himself to Him. He had not yielded himself to Him. He could surrender Him for
something else which appeared better to Him.”30
The Gospel of Matthew states that the price was thirty pieces of silver, and
that detail prompts Barth to develop his reading through consideration of an Old
Testament parallel.The prophet Zechariah had for a time protected a flock of sheep,
a faithless Israel “doomed to slaughter” at the hands of its wicked shepherds,
i.e., the selfish leaders whom the people, as a matter of fact, image and deserve.
Zechariah became impatient with the sheep, and they, after all, detested him. So
the relation is severed. For his services he is paid a wage of thirty pieces of silver
by the “traffickers in the sheep.” Once paid, at the Lord’s command he casts “them
into the treasury of the house of the Lord” (Zech. 11: 4–12). In the text of the
New Testament, Judas takes the place of the prophet, and the situation is reversed.
Payment is made not for protecting sheep who would be slaughtered by wicked
shepherds, but for handing over the Good Shepherd for slaughter. Judas stands
as but one of the flock withdrawing himself from the shepherd while seeking to
27
IV/1, 437–45.
28
II/2, 463.
29
Ibid., 476.
30
Ibid., 463.
buy God off with the self-reserving devotion that contrasts so sharply with that of
Mary at Bethany. He just does what God’s people would always do. Thus he is
handed back what he, as the representative of God’s people, dares to offer God in
place of what is truly owed.31
Judas does repent of his handing over when he finds that Jesus, an innocent, is
condemned and handed over to Pilate. There is no reason not to take seriously his
repentance and his effort, in returning the thirty pieces of silver, to make restitution
for his deed; for Judas, like all the disciples, is not absolutely opposed to Jesus. But
according to the witness of the New Testament, Judas cannot make restitution, for
by his action he begins and hence is only on this side of a movement the goal of
which is the restitution which Jesus “perfected by His death for the sin of the whole
world, and therefore for Israel’s sin, and therefore for the sin of Judas as well.”32
Judas, and his penitence, stood on this side of the event—dependent on his own
work, his own freedom of choice and decision, which in contrast to Mary he had
kept for himself in the face of Jesus. He had refused to accept Jesus unreservedly
as his Lord, wholly to surrender himself to the glorifying of His death. He
wanted to be an apostle with this reservation. The incompleteness and therefore
the unreality of his repentance correspond necessarily to this incompleteness of
his surrender, to this inward duplicity of his apostleship.33
Judas can only see to the matter himself, as the high-priests tell him. He can
only act on his own, in accord with what he bargained for. His hanging himself
discloses that Judas has no future as a disciple; the life of discipleship can only
continue in following the crucified Jesus, raised from the dead. As before, and now
in his suicide, Judas acts as his own judge, taking to himself the final judgment
of his act. We may contrast this expression of repentance with Barth’s reading
of Jesus’ penitence in the Gethsemane narratives. He develops the way in which
Jesus’ prayer to the Father reflects his understanding that the dreadful thing
approaching him “was the coming concealment of the Lordship of God under the
31
Ibid., 464.
32
Ibid., 467.
33
Ibid., 467. Barth is very careful in this passage and its sequel not to say that in virtue
of his reservation and his guilt Judas is finally rejected by God. He goes on: “Judas, then,
is guilty only at the beginning of the movement which reached its conclusion in the death
of Jesus. He does not participate in the promise which reaches out from that conclusion to
him also” (my emphasis). Barth proceeds in detail to account for how Judas, as “one of the
twelve” to whom the concept of divine election is “expressly applied,” may according to
the biblical witness be subject to the saving action of Jesus Christ. Ibid., 471–506. For an
excellent analysis of Barth’s “reverent agnosticism” on the question of universal salvation,
see George Hunsinger, “Hellfire and Damnation: Four Ancient and Modern Views,” in his
Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans,
2000), 226–49.
lordship of evil and evil men.” He “prays that, directed by God’s providence, the
facts might speak a different language from that which they are about to speak,
that in their end and consequence they should not be against Him, just as He had
decided for God and not against Him in the wilderness.”34 Barth’s sense of contrast
with Judas is reflected in the very language he uses to describe what Jesus does
and does not do. “He does not demand. He does not advance any claims. He does
not lay upon God any conditions. He does not reserve his future obedience. He
does not abandon his status as a penitent. He does not cease to allow that God is
in the right, even against Himself. He does not try to anticipate his justification
by Him in any form, or to determine it Himself. He does not think of trying to be
judge in His own cause and in God’s cause.”35 He says, with increasing conviction,
“Thy will be done.”
In light of the contrast, disciples of Jesus may, in communal practices of hearing
God’s Word, prayer, and worship, be able to see both how they are delivered up to
the world in and with the crucified and risen Lord, and how they, as those for whom
Jesus was delivered up, would hold in reserve their devotion. They may see the
affliction which the first delivery can involve, bearing as it does the dignity of the
cross, in their witness of good news to the suffering. They may grasp the suicidal
logic of the reservation, and they may learn that they, too, would be suicides. They
may pray to God in their own affliction, and they may give themselves in works of
love to people who believe that they must live, uncovering by their revolutionary
fellowship a portion of a different picture. Serving others in their need, disciples
may recall that such also is their own need. As suicide is rejected, testimony to its
rejection may be given in word and deed, a testimony that becomes history in the
love that stands surety for the neighbor. They may understand that they ought not
take their own lives because they are free to live. The resurrection of Jesus Christ,
which for Barth discloses the meaning of the answer given to Jesus’ prayer in
Gethsemane, gives them permission to do so.
Four Theses
From this lengthier rendition of Barth’s interpretation of biblical narrative, we

can see that he tries, in George Lindbeck’s words, to show how the scriptural
world is able to absorb the universe, how it “supplies the interpretive framework
within which believers live their lives and understand reality.”36 The task of
Christian ethics is to argue from what that scriptural world depicts, the history
of God in relation to Israel and Jesus, to conclusions about the spheres of God’s
activity relevant to the Christian’s conforming action and behavior. However
34
IV/1, 269.
35
Ibid., 270.
36
George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press,
1984), 117.
successfully or unsuccessfully Barth executes this task, it does relate in interesting

and important ways to interesting and important contemporary work being done
in Christian ethics. Let me try, in conclusion, to evaluate Barth’s ethical vision in
light of some of this work in the form of theses, with commentary.
(1) Because it is based on the history of the God gracious to us in Jesus Christ,
Barth’s Christian ethic is, qualifiedly but genuinely, an ethic of virtue
I argued in Chapter 2 that Barth’s ethic of divine command is not liable to
the charge of “intuitionism” or “occasionalism.” On the contrary, Barth can well
account for the way in which the hearer of the command is shaped in and by
a history that provides the basis for the development and growth of character.
As we have seen, Stanley Hauerwas is one Christian ethicist who has made the
wrongful charge; subsequently, he has appeared to have withdrawn it. In some of
his later work, he adopts a position toward the status of moral rules and the basis
of biblical ethics that appears rather similar to Barth’s own. 37 Correspondingly,
he seems to have come to share Barth’s notion, as I read him, that “we know who
we are only when we place ourselves … within God’s story;”38 The “placing”
of which Hauerwas speaks includes undertaking the life of a covenant partner
and disciple whose attitudes, dispositions, and virtues enable corresponding in
his or her pattern of faithful action to God’s own. Barth’s biblical interpretation
concerning moral questions can be seen to impart a sense of these moral skills
and perspectives. One may come to learn of penitence when contrasting the
narrative expressions in Judas and Jesus; one may learn something more of the
joy one is permitted to live by in its contrast with the fear of Saul or the reserve of
Judas. That we may learn these things and come to be a human creature grateful
and faithful to God is finally made possible, however, by the gift of God’s self-
manifestation, through Jesus Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit, and
hence by the gracious faithfulness that God displays across the course of our lives.
Since, moreover, the history of the gracious God is also a history of the sovereign
God who in Christ “laid the axe at the root of the trees,” one must not conclude that
the disciple’s history with God is an easy continuity. On the contrary, the disciple
for Barth lives simul justus et peccator; therefore, he or she is always only “falling
out with oneself.”39 The falling out is with the old one who may be lifted up out
of identifications with the orders of life judged by God. The disciple shares these
identifications with non-Christians, and the work of Christian ethics must include
Christians’ loving witness to the world and to one another of the new freedom that
stands for us over against the current spheres of politics, economics, recognition,
family, etc. While Hauerwas may be correct in his claim that the primary task
of the Christian community is to maintain its particular identity, he may require
the continuing reminder that that community is free to be itself in active witness
37
Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1983), 23–24.
38
Ibid., 27.
39
IV/2, 570–74.
to and for the world of suffering creatures. He might recall Barth’s arguments,
derived in part from the narratives of Jesus, that the world of piety also stands
judged as the “pious world with its continual need to publicize itself,” even in its
radical contrast to liberal individualism.40 Repeatedly falling out with oneself in
the Christian community and for suffering creatures through prayer and righteous
action in the world, the Christian disciple may be, in Barth’s terms, virtuous.
(2) Because it is based on the history of the sovereign God present to us in
Jesus Christ, Barth’s Christian ethic is a theocentric ethic
In his relentless attack on anthropocentrism in Christian theology and ethics,
James Gustafson laments that “religion and God have been put in the service of
human needs.”41 This implies the denial of God as God, as the powers and ordering
that sustain and bear down upon us. A theocentric ethic must reverse this tendency,
especially, for Gustafson, through a focus on finite humanity in its continuity with
the natural world which God also sustains and limits. Karl Barth’s ethics, he says,
“are as theocentric as any in this century;” yet Barth, too, remains anthropocentric
in his conviction that “the commands of God are primarily in the service of the
needs of man.”42
What Gustafson rejects, in large part, is Barth’s theological ordering of all of
the acts of God ad extra to covenant partnership with humanity in Jesus Christ.
But these acts correspond to the being of God, not to us and our needs, and in Jesus
Christ we discover a thoroughgoing No to any effort to use God as an instrument
of our needs. That effort only yields a reflection of ourselves. There is great value
in Gustafson’s theological plea to relativize radically humanity’s importance
and possibility in light of its connections with the natural world; but for Barth
the change in human life accomplished by God in Jesus Christ overcomes the
dichotomy between anthropocentrism and theocentrism upon which Gustafson
relies.43 Consequently, Barth’s ethic becomes so theocentric as to rule out as
impossible theological attention to human needs, except as they are measured and
transfigured in the light of God.
(3) For Barth, God’s sovereign freedom apart from us is the external basis of
God’s freedom for us; thus Barth’s ethic of virtue can never be identified with a
theological ethic of idea
In his 1929 essay “Fate and Idea in Theology,” Barth questions the adequacy
of what he calls theological idealism. That view involves “the self-reflection of
spirit over against nature. It discovers a correlation between thinking and truth,”
and properly understands theology as “a matter of rendering to ourselves an
account of God in the form of human concepts, in other words, in the form of
40
Ibid., 552.
41
James M. Gustafson, Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective. Volume One: Theology
and Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 83.
42
Ibid., 95.
43
Consider Richard McCormick’s use of Barth in “Gustafson’s God: Who? What?
Where? (Etc.),” Journal of Religious Ethics (Spring 1985): 56–62.
intellectual work, by abstracting from the given and interpreting the given.”44 The
challenge here, however, is to be sure that the idealist’s “critical view of reality
as the context where truth is found has nothing to do with a general way to God
open and accessible at all times to everyone. That,” Barth comments, “is the
idealist’s peculiar pride.”45 If any particular Christian theology is to be adequate,
it must allow that its criterion of truth is a possibility specific to God and not to
us; moreover, the transcendence to which it points must never be just the self-
transcendence of our created and fallen spirits. The condition of the possibility of
the knowledge of God belongs to God alone.
There is at least a hint of a problematic theology of idea in some of Stanley
Hauerwas’s writings on virtue. While his uses of biblical narrative often yield rich
theological insight, he often will forego these uses in favor of a general category
of narrative that expresses the particular, historical, and social bases of human
existence. The story of the Christian community is correlated with this category,
and then almost systematically set over against the destructive vision of liberalism,
with its suspicion of tradition and its praise of individualism.46 These different
uses of different senses of “narrative” sometimes emerge in the consideration of a
single issue. In his treatment of suicide, for example, Hauerwas refers to a biblically
derived understanding of life as a divine gift. Then he proceeds to an account of
the way suicides reflect and prepare for the erosion of trust necessary to sustain
community life. Poignantly, he notes how suicides may point to a community’s
abandonment of its members. It may also undermine trust because our will to live
must include the recognition of our need and obligation to be counted on and trusted
in by others, even in the midst of suffering. Finally, Hauerwas sets the claims of
this second approach in critical relation to the community-eroding forces of
liberalism, with its stress on an ideal of autonomy that only deceives and isolates.47
These last two moves appear to derive theological claims from the framework
of a general philosophical anthropology, and/or from the dialectical negation of
contemporary cultural expressions of meaning and value. In short, they seem to
engage characteristic maneuvers of Protestant liberalism and/or its continuing if
“dialectical” expression in the second edition of Barth’s Romans commentary.
Karl Barth, “Fate and Idea in Theology,” in The Way of Theology in Karl Barth, ed.
44
H. Martin Rumscheidt (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications, 1986), 43, 45.
45
Ibid., 47.
46
Cf. Thiemann, Revelation and Theology, 175–76, n. 19.
47
Here I rely on Stanley Hauerwas and Richard Bondi, “Memory, Community and
the Reasons for Living: Reflections on Suicide and Euthanasia,” in Stanley Hauerwas,
Truthfulness and Tragedy: Further Investigations in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), 101–15; and on Hauerwas, “Rational Suicide and
Reasons for Living,” in his Suffering Presence: Theological Reflections on Medicine, the
Mentally Handicapped, and the Church (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,
1986), 100–13.
To overcome the dangers of a theology of idea, the gracious God must be

understood to be sovereign, free apart from us and our dialectical positings of
transcendence. Following this understanding, Christian ethics will still have to say
much of what Hauerwas says; but it may say it differently, as it may also say some
other and better things. In the light of biblical narratives,48 it may be better able
to address the depth of affliction that overcomes people, Christian and otherwise.
It may need to qualify or even reject as unhelpful talk about obligations to go on
living as it applies to the afflicted. It may even be able to say good things to and
for liberal culture, in the name of the Kingdom and its promise that one may live.
(4) For Barth, God’s triune freedom for us is the internal basis of God’s
sovereignty apart from us; hence Barth’s theocentric ethic can never be a
theological ethic of fate
Barth also expresses hesitation in “Fate and Idea” toward a theological realism
which would discover God in fate—”a fate that befalls human beings inwardly-
outwardly, subjectively-objectively, something which becomes all too powerful
for them and takes them prisoner, setting them in absolute dependence.” This God
“must represent the one reality present in all other reality, hidden but not entirely
hidden there.”49 Characteristically, he worries because this approach makes God
“accessible apart from God as the performer of his work—which is the Word that
comes to us … God distinguishes himself from fate by the fact that he is not so
much there as rather that he comes.”50
There is a suggestion of a problematic theology of fate in Gustafson’s theocentric
ethic. It involves a correlation between a phenomenology of religious consciousness
and the order of nature. The powers of God are given or made manifest to the
pious consciousness in experiences of relations in that order (including its human
dimensions). Gustafson repudiates the idea of divine revelation because it “seems
to suggest we can speak of God in se,” apart from our construals of God, as acting
48
Note Hauerwas’ very Barth-like assertion that “God has revealed himself narratively
in the history of Israel and in the life of Jesus … Scripture as a whole tells the story of the
covenant with Israel, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and the ongoing history
of the church as the recapitulation of that life.” The Peaceable Kingdom, 28–29. Then
consider how Hauerwas continues the passage: “This empirical observation is not merely
an interesting one; this notion of the essential nature of narrative as the form of God’s
salvation is why we rightly attribute to Scripture the truth necessary for our salvation”
(author’s emphasis). This sentence is not so Barth-like. In his seeming use of narrative as
a general category correlating human historical being with God’s salvific work, Hauerwas
here stands apart from a theologian who would insist that the form, as well as the content,
of God’s salvation is Jesus Christ.
49
Barth, “Fate and Idea in Theology,” 35, 37.
50
Ibid., 40.
like a person.”51 In addition, he questions the appropriateness of depicting God as

a personal agent, since they seem to jeopardize theocentricity in various ways.52
Barth’s theology of revelation, however, challenges the distinction between
our construals of divinity and divinity “in itself.” It warrants, in fact, a construal
of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit so that God may be, in God’s very self,
possible for or capable of revelation. The description of God as triune is authorized
insofar as it means to follow God’s self-construal, depicted biblically. In arguing
from actuality to possibility in God, Barth shows how the doctrine of the Trinity
“should prevent the being of God being understood as a human construction,” and
hence as a servant of human needs.53 The resurrection promise in Jesus Christ is
delivered for us by one who is able to do so apart from us, who is already “ours in
advance.” So for Barth, God’s being for us makes ethics all the more theocentric.
He is thus disposed to ask the theologian of fate: “Wouldn’t it perhaps be better for
this God to be called simply nature?”54
The most important issue between Gustafson and Barth is not the moral status
of the natural order, nor anthropocentrism, nor Gustafson’s charge that Barth’s
Christological reading of Scripture is too simple and neat. The most important
issue is whether God can be understood as a historical agent who graciously comes
to us with the good news of the resurrection promise in Jesus Christ. Without
that possibility, a theocentric ethic is left with Gustafson’s conviction that God
does not guarantee human good. While the powers of God can offer the afflicted
opportunities for movement out of despair, they do not always do so. The powers
of God may make life an unbearable burden. In such cases, one must consent to
one’s own or another’s suicide, and make room for enmity toward God; “one has
to consent to the reality that the powers that bring life into being do not always
sustain it but can lead to its untimely and tragic destruction.”55
The same question, posed from different sides of Barth’s dialectical view of
God’s historical being, may be asked of Hauerwas and Gustafson. It is whether or
not their work makes way for the grace of the self-revealing God in Jesus Christ.
The counter-questions that can be asked of Barth are several. In what sense is God
an agent? How can a doctrine of revelation be defended? How are covenantal
ethics related to the structures of nature? Is resurrection finally an exceedingly
anthropocentric and indefensible notion? What is the proper relation between
church and world? How illuminating is an approach to suffering and tragedy that
speaks of suicide as already rejected? How workable and coherent is an ethic based
on correspondence to the being of God depicted in Scripture? These issues are as
51
James M. Gustafson, “A Response to Critics,” Journal of Religious Ethics (Fall
1985): 197–98.
52
Gustafson, Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective, Volume I, 179–80, 264–71.
53
Eberhard Jungel, The Doctrine of the Trinity: God’s Being is in Becoming (Grand
Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1976), 25.
54
Barth, “Fate and Idea in Theology,” 42.
55
Gustafson, Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective, Vol. II, 216.
difficult as they are important, and require careful theological and philosophical
attention. But we must not forget that they may be counter-questions to a question
that remains wise in its simplicity, and that has to do with the possibility of the
good of redemption delivered to us, unexacted, by the prevenient God.
Those of us who would work on all of these matters will continue to profit
from reading Barth in all his dialectical richness and power. But we should also
read carefully his simple words: the words praising Abel Burckhardt, the words
of the first article of the Barmen Confession, the words of tribute to Mozart, or
maybe the words with which I will close: “God … is free grace. And therefore
because free grace is a joyous thing, the proclamation for which God commanded
the prophets and the apostles, the proclamation of the Christian church, is Gospel,
joyous news.”56
56
Barth, God Here and Now, 28–29.
Chapter 4
Realism and Discernment
… Barth secures the Lordship (“mastery”) of God … by insisting on its actualistic

character. It is not the case that God unveils Himself through the veil once-and-for-
all, as a completed act. If it were so, then God would have ceased to act; nothing
more would need to be done … The epistemic relation between God and the human
knower would have become fixed, stabilized. Having begun in a relation of absolute
epistemic dependency, the human knower would once again have attained mastery
in this relation. To all of this, Barth said no.1
Bruce L. McCormack
Barth was about the business of conceptual description … [He] had as it were
to recreate a universe of discourse, and he had to put the reader in the middle of
that world, instructing him in the use of that language by showing him how—
extensively, and not only by stating the rules or principles of the discourse.2
Hans Frei
Among theologians and interpreters of Karl Barth, I am often associated with the so-
called “Yale school,” a set of scholars distinguished, in part, by their preoccupation
with “reading skills and internal logic.”3 This tendency, critics such as Bruce
McCormack and John Webster contend, insufficiently emphasizes what should be
at the heart of both theological reflection and Barth studies: the “reality-constituting
acts of God”4 whose being “is something complete, whole and entire in itself, apart
from and prior to all human knowledge of it.”5 Indeed, the “preoccupation” that Frei
expresses is seriously misleading because it risks breaking the dialectic indicating
that God alone is the subject of the knowledge of God.
1
Bruce L. McCormack, “Beyond Nonfoundational and Postmodern Readings
of Barth: Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, Part I,” Zeitschrift fur dialektische
Theologie 13/1 (997): 69.
2
Hans W. Frei, Types of Christian Theology, 158f.
3
Bruce L. McCormack, “Beyond Foundational and Postmodern Readings of Barth:
Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, Part II,” Zeitschrift fur dialektische Theologie
13/2 (1997): 190.
4
John Webster, Barth’s Ethics of Reconciliation (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995), 223.
5
McCormack, “Beyond Nonfoundational and Postmodern Readings of Barth, Part
II,” 188.
If there is a “Yale School,” and if its preoccupation is as described, and if I am

a member of it who is accordingly missing the mark, then, it is safe to say, I accept
correction. In fact, George Hunsinger cautioned me along related lines with the
suggestion that a focus on “narrative interpretation” in Barth may endanger full
recognition of Barth’s “realism” (in McCormack’s sense).
I simply want to raise a warning flag. Is there not a genuine danger that we will
assume we already know what narrative is and how narrative functions, and
that we will then apply this category both to Barth and to the Scripture he seeks
to interpret in such a way that we will merely find confirmed what we already
knew, or thought we knew, on general grounds?6
While I believe that I have typically affirmed and even developed Barth’s
ontological priorities in all three chapters above, it is true enough that a stress on
“conceptual description” may tend to float free of these priorities.
In this chapter I venture an account that may work to correct any imbalance
at the same time as I try to explore a little further the significance of Barth’s
“conceptual redescription” for theological ethics. The latter may support and not
undermine affirmation of the Lordship of God. Barth acknowledges that Lordship
through a style of moral inquiry which corresponds to it and resists reduction to
alternative sources of authority. I consider examples of this ethics of “realistic
discernment” in Part II below and raise a warning flag of my own concerning
interpretations that might lose focus on the basis of moral governance.
Divine Sovereignty and Conceptual Redescription
“From first to last,” John Webster writes, “Barth is profoundly perturbed by one
of modernity’s primary images of the human person: that of the self as a centre of
judgment, creating value by its acts of allegiance or choice, organising the moral
world around its consciousness of itself as the ethical fundamentum.”7 One source
of this image is Immanuel Kant, and one way it is articulated famously involves the
call to moral autonomy. Thus our obedience to a “divine command” is grounded
either in heteronomous assent to a morally arbitrary will or in autonomous assent
to a rational norm that the command but expresses.
As we have seen, Barth’s response to this all-encompassing claim is to
encompass and subvert it. Corresponding to God’s decision from all eternity to be
for each person as their covenant partner in Jesus Christ, there is a “determination
of the elect,” a determination to be the sort of human creature for whom Jesus
Christ is. And that sort of creature exists in grateful witness, “to attest, represent
6
George Hunsinger, “A Response to William Werpehowski,” Theology Today 43/3
(1986): 354.
7
Webster, Barth’s Ethics of Reconciliation, 18.
Realism and Discernment 59
and portray that which God really is and does.” The emphasis here is on “the
acknowledgment of the giver and the gift and the subordination of the recipient to
the giver in accordance with the very nature of thanks.”8
Kant’s “self as a centre of judgment” is met with an account of God’s election of
human creatures and the implication that in that place and position they may witness
gratefully to their center in Jesus Christ. Human self-determination is effectively
de-centered, and the consequences for ethics, we may recall, are remarkable; for
“the man who obediently hears the command of God is not in any position, from the
vantage point of a higher principle to try to show either himself or others how this
law of human volition and action is reached.”9 Barth therefore explicitly opposes
any “picture of human subjectivity” that “as it were projects the moral self into a
neutral space, from which it can survey the ethical question from the viewpoint of
spectators.”10 What is more, the reality of election and its meaning for normative
human agency establishes not mere divine power but divine authority because
God’s Lordship in Jesus Christ is established in and through his being humanity’s
Saviour. To know God’s grace is to know God’s sovereignty.
No conception of His power, no thought of Him as the idea of the good or the
all-sufficient being, can lead to this. But the knowledge of his grace does so. It
obviously does so because here we have to do with his original self-declaration
… As against all our ideas about Him, all our arbitrariness and self-will in face
of Him, He actually comes as the Almighty, as goodness in person …11
We may add, with Hans Frei: “That God related himself to us means that it was
possible, that he must be himself eternally in a way that is congruent with his relating
himself to us contingently.”12 The ontological force of these claims—what they say
about what is real— grounds Barth’s approach to the question: what are we to do?
It is important to add that, as Gerald McKenny has shown, Barth’s ethics can
be understood formally to assimilate “notions that find canonical expression in
Kant,” i.e., that “ethical claims are binding only in the form of an ought that is
unconditioned by any desire and that the claims made on us by objects of desire are
ultimately subjective (because they depend on person-relative apprehensions of
them as desirable).”13 The ethics of divine command carries forward these notions
insofar as the human agent finds his or her normative ground in being addressed
by an “other” standing “outside” oneself and one’s own desires and judgments as
8
II/2, 410, 427.
9
Ibid., 522, my italics.
10
John Webster, Barth’s Moral Theology (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1998), 36.
11
II/2, 560f.
12
Hans W. Frei, Theology and Narrative, ed. George Hunsinger and William C.
Placher (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 171.
13
Gerald McKenny, The Analogy of Grace: Karl Barth’s Moral Theology (Oxford:
such. In keeping with my discussion above, however, it is clear that “apart from
Christological grounds the Kantian ethic, as [Barth] understands it, was powerless
to prevent the move to Fichte, the first step towards nihilism.”14
On such bases, Barth’s proceeds with his theological ethics in a manner that
crucially incorporates two features. First, he often construes its biblical basis in
terms of a realistic narrative of God’s covenant with Israel and Jesus that implicates
entirely humanity and its understanding of itself and the world it inhabits. I have
discussed this feature in the last chapter and will not dwell on it here. Second, Barth
as a matter of fact was “about the business of conceptual description.” He critically
relates, mutually qualifies, and applies to experience morally relevant notions that
emerge from the Bible and the language of Christian tradition. The upshot is that
Christians may comprehend more and more expansively the implications of their
faith for responsible moral identity and action before God. Here are two examples
that display the second feature.
Sickness and Illusion. In Barth’s writings on “respect for life,” he criticizes
Mary Baker Eddy’s proposal that evil, and hence illness, are illusions rooted in
the fear evoked by forgetfulness of God; these illusions are exposed with the self’s
immersion in God through prayer. He claims instead that “sickness is real,” both
as a forerunner and messenger of death as the judgment of God and as an aspect of
human limitation in its created goodness. Eddy’s mistake is a monism which takes
God, the basis of all reality, also to be the only reality such that “the whole creation
is only a reflection of His spiritual essence.” But God loves an other reality whose
true being and transgression are not mere reflection and illusion. Redemption is
not just a matter of human “submergence in God” but faithful response to the work
of reconciliation performed, extra nobis, pro nobis, in Jesus Christ.15
Against the background of these critical reminders regarding the reality and
meaning of creation, fall, and redemption. Barth proceeds to consider in greater
detail the biblical and theological understanding of ill health. But what kind of
reality is illness? If sickness does relate to the judgment of God “and the merited
subjection of man to the power of nothingness in virtue of his sin,”16 then why
is it not true, after all but apart from Eddy’s monism, that faith and prayer are in
fact the only defenses against it to preserve and attain our “health,” our strength
to be human before God? Barth answers that this is “defeatist thinking;” for the
command of the gracious God that we will to be healthy and not to be sick is still
in force. It is not revoked for the sinner. To capitulate before “the realm of death
which afflicts man in the form of sickness” can only be disobedience. One ought
in obedience to render in this connection “final resistance,” for God is also and
especially gracious and faithful in His righteous judgment. So a little resolution
in saying (even our little) No with God to illness (by, say, trying to get better as
14
Ibid., 92.
15
III/4, 364–65.
16
Ibid., 366.
the embodied creatures we are) is far better than some acquiescent “pretended
Christian humility.”
All of this is possible for the Christian because God is God, who says “Thou
mayest” to and for our embodied self-affirmation and resistance to illness. Without
God there is nothing we can do in this matter. So while prayer and faith must not
replace our efforts to be healthy through “hygiene, sport, and medicine,” they
surely do establish their conditio sine qua non.17
Yet recall that for Barth sickness has another aspect. Apart from matters of
transgression, nothingness, and judgment, it must be remembered that according
to God’s will as creator, human life, “and therefore … health as the strength to
be as man in the exercise of the powers of all his vital functions of life,” “begins
and ends and is therefore limited.” We may see the divine goodness of the creator
in that fact. It reminds us that within our limits and at their limit, God stands for
us and is our hope. Just so we may recall that we are freed “from the intolerable
destiny of having to give sense, duration, and completeness to [our] existence by
[our] own exertions and achievements, and therefore in obvious exclusion of the
view that [we] must and may and can by [our] own strength and powers eternally
maintain, assert and confirm [ourselves], attaining for [ourselves our] own dignity
and honor.” Hence the fact that our allotted temporal life is limited cannot be an
object of “complaint, protest or rebellion, nor can the fact that man must make
the concrete discovery that his life and therefore his health and strength and
powers are not an unlimited reality, but that he is impeded in their possession and
exercise, that there is weakness as well as real strength, that there is destruction
as well as construction, obstruction as well as development.” Sickness, therefore,
may occasion for the Christian the “genuinely liberating insight” that “genuine
freedom to live can and must be concretely realized in the fact that in the impeding
and impairing of his life he is shown that neither his life nor he himself is in his
own hand, but that he is in God’s hand, that he is surrounded by Him on all sides,
that he is referred wholly to Him, but also that he is reliably upheld by Him.”18
To summarize, Barth’s critical exposition of themes and their implications for
faithful response and action goes this way: 1) in sickness we flee to God’s mercy;
but 2) mercy includes a summons to “hope and courage and conflict” in the effort to
preserve health: and yet 3) this summons may be modulated by a note accepting of
limits, a sort of creaturely relinquishment that brings with it creaturely freedom.19
Honoring Bad Parents. Barth holds that the Fourth Commandment bids
children to honor and obey their parents not because of biological generation
or their age or (questionable) wisdom, but only in virtue of their standing as
representatives and mediators of divine promise. The “decisive action for which
parents are responsible in relation to their children, and which the latter must
be content to accept, is primarily and properly God’s action, which their human
17
Ibid., 367–69.
18
Ibid., 372.
19
Ibid., 371–74.
action can only attest … They are charged to imitate God’s action, and in so far as
they do so in all honesty, the children are summoned to honor God by honoring
their parents, by being content to accept this action of their parents.”20 Yet since the
authority of parents is based in the fatherhood of God, the Fourth Commandment
is limited (not weakened) by the First; for a child “the essential thing is that God
should occupy a firm and independent position, that he should be a figure distinct
from that of his parents, that he should learn to obey Him rather than his parents,
and that through this relationship he should then come to obey them.”21
What, then, of “weak, foolish, self-seeking, flippant and tyrannical parents?”
Does the command to honor apply to them, and if so, how? Barth answers that
parents can neither resign nor establish their office as “ambassadors of God”
through the wickedness or excellence of their parenting, and, hence, neither can
their children dismiss them with a judgment rendering filial duty inoperative.
Living with their parents on the presupposition of God’s forgiving grace and in
this solidarity, they may yet keep the divine command.
Still we must ask all the more strongly: for children who cannot rid themselves
of the conviction that their parents have failed miserably in their duties, and who
therefore cannot recognize in them “teachers and counsellors set over them by
God,” how may they keep it? They may do this by refusing to imitate parental
failures, by avoiding self-righteous condemnation of them, and by resisting any
temptation to transfer their filial disillusionment to God. Finally, they may seek
to honor their parents by exercising patience toward them under the patience of
God, “in the sense of continually taking them with fresh seriousness in spite of
everything, and therefore not ceasing to question them and to try to hear from them
what a child should hear from its parents.”22
We find in this analysis a theologically informed account of the kinds of moral
discriminations appropriate to the parent-child bond, an account that enables
distinguishing between filial resistance and filial arrogance, or between an honest,
humble assessment of failure and damning dismissal, or between slavishness and
patience. To be able to identify and explicate these distinctions is part of a faithful
sensibility to features of God’s world. One need not agree with all of Barth’s
specific analysis here or in the first example to appreciate the depth of these efforts
at critically describing convictions, relations, virtues, and emotions constitutive
of Christian living. The descriptions, to be sure, refer to the moral landscape of
God’s world, and we must beware not to subordinate what the Christian tradition
confesses to the language of tradition itself.23 Nonetheless, a practice of pursuing a
coherent normative account of Christian existence through testing and revision of
the language of faith, forged in Bible and tradition, is an essential aspect of Barth’s
theological work and, I think, one of his great contributions to Christian ethics today.
20
Ibid., 247.
21
Ibid., 252.
22
Ibid., 256f.
23
Webster, Barth’s Ethics of Reconciliation, 219.
Divine Grace and Reasons for Action
Hans Frei read Barth to show that the “temporal world of eternal grace” possessed
an irreducible linguistic integrity and that “unlike any other depicted world it is the
one common world in which we all live and move and have our being.” Accordingly,
Barth “will do ethics to indicate that this narrated, narratable world is at the same
time the ordinary world in which we are responsible for our actions …”24 A good way
to test Barth’s success is to study his treatment of “hearing the divine command.”
Nigel Biggar holds, in effect, that the ethics of divine command, if it is to
fit with Frei’s analysis, needs to be revised, though the revision may draw from
resources that are already present or anticipated in many of Barth’s moral writings.
His spirited attack on moral casuistry stems, Biggar says, from the conviction
that this method epitomizes ethical rationalism, and, in particular, a systematic
reliance on rules and their strictly deductive application. These features jeopardize
any account of the historical event in which the human creature stands before the
divine agent who commands here and now. Indeed, the actualism captured in the
passage from McCormack that introduces this chapter is rendered impossible: for
strict reliance on rational faculties and moral rules that they “work over” turns
God’s moral truth into a possession that breaks the dialectic of “indirect identity.”
Biggar argues that actualism may be purchased at the price of intelligibility
unless human reason plays more of a role in theological ethics than Barth appears
to allow. The latter’s conception of casuistry, for instance, is unacceptably narrow.
Casuistry is not strictly deductive and rationalistic; it is compatible with critical
openness to the revision of moral rules. Barth is also friendly to the idea that
moral actions are intelligible in terms of justifying reasons both in principle and in
practice. Commitment to the concreteness of the command in Jesus Christ displays
the former, and the execution of the special ethics of creation bears real evidence,
though “haphazard,” of the latter. The commands of God must not be arbitrary on
either the divine or human side of the “ethical event.”25
The proposal, then, appears to be that the temporal world of eternal grace
may be depicted as our one common world only if creaturely rationality and non-
arbitrary moral justification are prominently affirmed. The uniqueness of the event
of hearing the divine command, furthermore, is (non-arbitrarily) preserved by way
of a doctrine of personal vocation. Persons may be called to courses of action that
may resist full and decisive interpersonal or generic justification. Biggar’s effort
to save Barth by reference to Barth “at his best” guarantees the intelligibility of
God’s freedom through a comprehensible description of human moral agency and
its vicissitudes.
24
Frei, Types of Christian Theology, 161.
25
Nigel Biggar, The Hastening That Waits: Karl Barth’s Ethics (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1993), 33–45, 176f. For a more recent statement, see Nigel Biggar, “Karl
Barth’s Ethics Revisited,” in Commanding Grace: Studies in Karl Barth’s Ethics, ed. Daniel
L. Migliore (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), 40–41.
Biggar is on solid ground when he brings attention to these themes, and his
helpful revision does appear to align theological ethics with a sensible vision of
moral responsibility. He does so, moreover, with a sound and welcome general
awareness of the realistically relational (i.e., divine-human) character of Barth’s
ethics, as evidenced especially in the significance of prayer for the moral life.26 Yet
his treatment, as a correction to Barth, is in danger of being an overcorrection that
finally undermines Barth’s actualism and his demand for concrete encounter in the
ethical event—unless, that is, certain qualifications are made and certain Barthian
emphases are reestablished.27
I believe that Biggar tends to place moral justification, a requirement that agents
have reasons for actions they ought to perform, somewhat too close to the center of
Barth’s ethics. There are signs of what Bernard Williams has called a rationalistic
conception of rationality, which “requires in principle every decision to be based
on grounds that can be discursively explained.”28 Now it is true that Biggar wants
to turn away from this conception when he appeals to the uniqueness of personal
vocation before God. But in the context of his larger discussion, that appeal can
seem either anomalous because subjectivistic, or but another example of “hyper-
rationalism,” since a particular individual moral decision may certainly remain liable
to an analysis that establishes its publicly accessible rational intelligibility. In either
instance the stress would be placed too much on the human side of the ethical event.
The justification requirement, though essential, belongs somewhat more to the
periphery of the ethics of divine command. Properly located, it must be governed
by the central significance of the gracious God who commands in the reality of
the ethical event. This center deepens, extends, and particularizes a theological
understanding of moral life before God without jettisoning a proper reference to
common moral existence.
For Barth one’s discernment of what is morally required of him or her—and hence
the hearing of the divine command29—depends upon an apprehension of the reality
Biggar, “Karl Barth’s Ethics Revisited,” 27–28.

26
H. Richard Niebuhr analyzes forward movement in theology in terms of corrective

27
response in his Cole Lectures. See H. Richard Niebuhr, Theology, History, and Culture,
William Stacy Johnson ed. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), 8.
28
Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985), 18. The original published version of Chapter 2 above may have
also been liable to this criticism. I have tried to improve my account in response to the
criticism of Gerald McKenny, and what follows here would serve that purpose as well.
29
I think that Biggar may go wrong in continuing to stress, though qualifiedly, the
“military” character of Barth’s understanding of “command,” a character which “implies
that receiving or hearing a divine command takes the place of reflecting and reasoning—that
it is a substitute for ethics.” “Karl Barth’s Ethics Revisited,” 30. I prefer to see “command,”
in Barth’s full, contextual presentation of it, as indicating how the Christian’s answer to
the question “What ought I to do?” presumes that what is required of her is thoroughly
binding, thoroughly concrete, and realized in and through one’s being addressed by a
of God’s Yes relative to the specific moral issue at hand, and as it encounters finite,
fallen humanity. That apprehension may warrant subordinating the importance of
even offering or classifying reasons for action. It may result in discovering grounds
and directions for action not otherwise available for our hearing. And it may reform
or reverse the use of reasons otherwise present to hand. In the remainder of this
chapter I will present an example of each of these possibilities.
Consider again Barth’s analysis of suicide. God’s word of grace that “thou
mayest live” is a source of comfort and freedom to the afflicted, especially as the
affliction itself is rooted in law, or the belief that one must live, must do or be this
or that for the sake of one’s very existence. The stricture against an act of willful
self-destruction is therefore considerable; but one cannot rule out once and for all
the exceptional case, when a person afflicted may be commanded to give his or
her life back to God in joy and gratitude. At this point Barth makes a pair of claims
that Biggar seeks to adjust. The first is that it is not the force of reasons which
determines the rightness or wrongness of an act of intentional self-destruction,
but only the judgment of God.30 Biggar’s recourse to the possible uniqueness of
personal vocation is intended in part to make more sense of that point. It also
covers, however, the second Barthian recommendation that one must never classify
or codify exceptions to the divine rejection of suicide. The recommendation seems
to reflect Barth’s overly narrow view of casuistry, and risks a more thoroughgoing
irrationalism at odds with the broader view that Biggar defends.31
There can be no question about the importance for Barth of interpersonal
justification and commendation of human actions. The “particular truth” of the
casuistry he otherwise rejects is that such acts are part and parcel of the moral life. “It
can please the Holy Spirit—and it continually pleases him—that not merely ethical
advice and direction but the very command of God should be given in a very concrete
form immediately from one man to another or to many others.”32 But Barth’s resistance
to this possibility in the case of the exception of commanded suicide involves more
than affirming the mystery of an individual uniquely hearing this command, and
more than opposing the threat of autonomous rationalism. I think it hinges on his
belief that the prophetic ethos in which moral advice is given and received must in
this case guard against the idea that exceptions are not uncommon.33 This belief does
not imply an abstract view of divine freedom; God’s freedom in Jesus Christ remains
decisive. But defense of that freedom requires a practice of witnessing to the fact that
“one may live” in all the ways that care and comfort and solace to the afflicted may be
expressed. “Codifying and classifying” the exceptional case would perhaps impede
this witness, especially if and when some of us come to feel afflicted by the afflictions
word, and, ultimately, a word of grace. All of that may fit an account of moral deliberation,
discernment, and action that involves “reflecting and reasoning.”
30
III/4, 412.
31
Biggar, The Hastening That Waits, 33–38.
32
III/4, 9.
33
Ibid., 411.
of fellow creatures entrusted to us. Realistic discernment of what we ought to do, in

the moral landscape of God’s world, presupposes a practical readiness to suspend
the search for reasons publicly warranting this or that (commanded) exceptional act
of suicide. The force of this readiness is to stress the gracious support of life, to
oppose evasions of this support, and to curb extension of this exception beyond the
genuinely extraordinary case. I am not sure that this is a perfectly coherent position.
I am convinced, however, that it belongs to Barth, and that Biggar’s revision does
not take note of it. In truth, it is one example of the “practical casuistry” that Barth
actively endorses in his theological ethics.
Let us next consider marriage and divorce. Barth takes lifelong, permanent
partnership to be constitutive of marital love and marriage itself under the divine
command. “What is mirrored and reflected in them, and thus constitutes their
norm, is the faithfulness (in the sense of constancy) of the gracious God to his
covenant-partner, and the firmness with which the latter remains united to Him.”34
The “most literal and most substantial expression” of the divine command in this
regard is Jesus’ saying, “What God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.”
And what God has joined together is “[u]ndoubtedly a life-partnership in marriage
which is rooted in a choice of love made under and according to His command
and which is resolved, concluded and lived out in correspondence with the same
command. The marriage which rests upon the command of God and therefore
upon His calling and gift cannot be dissolved by man even if he wishes.”35
Then may the dissolution of marriage be commanded by God in the specific
sense that the command speaks a word of judgment to the effect that the bond
has “no divine basis?” Barth answers affirmatively. No spouse on his or her own
authority and no couple of itself knows for certain whether that basis is present in
any event. In such a light the mere presence of “positive” or “terrible” indications
is not decisive. Even and especially as these indications figure in one’s faithful
response to Word of God, husbands and wives can claim for themselves no
absolute certainty either way. In fact, the disciple must renounce such certainty all
the more to seek in prayer and hope from the divine mercy the “measure of help
and comfort” that brings the seemingly more “favored” to become more “grateful,
humble, and careful” on the one hand, and the seemingly less “favored” “to avoid
the worst, to mitigate the worse, and to make a relatively best even out of the
unavoidably bad,” on the other.36 Since, moreover, “the believer is summoned
primarily to cling to the Yes of God and not His No,” “it must be inferred that a
conviction engendered by the Word of God concerning the ultimate condemnation
of marriage will always be far more remote than the conviction engendered by
the Word concerning the divine promise which is valid for it too.”37 Still, faithful
response to the Word of God cannot exclude discovering and accepting “that there
34
Ibid., 204.
35
Ibid., 207.
36
Ibid., 209–10.
37
Ibid., 211.
may be circumstances in which it is not only legitimate but obligatory for [one] to
recognize that [one’s] marriage is condemned by God and therefore dissoluble.”38
Barth, one should suppose, will not spell out specific criteria that identify such
circumstances. He is intent not to support any kind of “rational” task of tallying,
as if with a ledger and at a distance, the “pros” and “cons” of this or that marriage.
That works to undermine faithful reliance on and response to God’s grace and risks
vainly to gain control over a bond and its meaning that is neither to be wished nor
attained. Still, Barth writes that although “God calls and equips for marriage,” “he
does it by joining together.”39 And thus the divine basis of marriage may and must
have a “human aspect, in the best sense of the word” in which there is a mutual
recognition, choice, and love between a man and a woman that most particularly
aims at the faithful life partnership of spouses (not just, e.g., “friends”).40 Marital
love, in addition, involves “the free decision in which a man and woman may
engage in mutual understanding, self-giving, and desire as they are joined together
by God in the life-partnership of marriage and therefore called and endowed to
live for one another.” Such love is to be distinguished from mere “sympathy,”
“physical desire,” “affection,” or one-sidedness. The decision to love maritally
cannot be more before God than “an intention, aim, and venture.” But love’s
actualization “is essential,” even if it “may perhaps be very obscure and uncertain
… If it is not there at all as a root of the whole, marriage is rotten at the root.”41
Does it not appear that we have been given “criteria” after all, or the sorts
of reasons to which we may repair in seeking to discern the divine command
regarding the basis of marriage? Does it not also appear that there is even a kind
of “casuistry” at work, what with the careful threefold account of marital love and
the distinctions drawn between it and “sympathy,” “affection,” and the like? I will
not quarrel with anyone who concludes that to each question the answer is yes.
What I find is striking in this context, however, is how Barth displaces without
denying or excluding appeal to any such “criteria” or reasons in his concluding
account of how spouses may reckon with the full meaning of living together
by free grace. He begins by stating that the whole command of God regarding
marriage (and male-female relations generally) is astonishingly challenging.
Given our clear sense that we fail and fail again before the challenges, “what
does it mean … to keep the command? Who is really free and righteous in this
sphere?”42 The answer is that he or she keeps the command who accepts it and
will not evade it and in fact rejoices in it because it is the command of the grace
of God in Jesus Christ. But also he or she keeps the command who acknowledges
transgression as “an adulterer in the strict biblical sense of the term” (i.e., any and
all “thinking and speaking, action and conduct, which is inconsistent with and
38
Ibid., 213.
39
Ibid., 215.
40
Ibid., 213–14.
41
Ibid., 218–19.
42
Ibid., 231.
destructive of marriage, and beyond this all perversion, depletion, falsification

and corruption, all unreason, laziness and wickedness in the life and relation of
the sexes generally, whether within or without marriage, and either way in evil
thoughts, words, and deeds”). The acknowledgment accepts the judgment of God,
but in so doing it relies on “the mercy and also the severity of the One who has
so loved transgressors, even transgressors in this sphere.”43 Therefore and finally,
one keeps the command in permitting oneself “to be raised up and directed by the
wonderful judgment of grace to a sincere willing of that which even as transgressor
he can will, to a resolute performance of that which even as transgressor he can
perform, according to the direction of the command.”44
Realistic discernment of the divine command in a world of free grace means, in
this context, having disclosed to one those “small, individual, yet not contemptible
possibilities of loosening or tightening, of progress or restraint, of intensification
or alleviation.” There are possibilities of “relative amendment” which make
for marriages that are carried through “not without promise of joyfulness.” In
these ways, even if we realize that we do not and cannot keep the command, the
command which reaches us as not just judgment but mercy and comfort keeps
us. The center of Barth’s ethics, the command of God in Jesus Christ, functions
in this area not so much to suspend the search for reasons (though there is to
be a suspension of the desire for certainty about “divine basis”); rather, it opens
opportunities for actions and reasons for them that undergird new and otherwise
unforeseen possibilities of relative amendment.45 There is here, too, an approach
to the moral life that gives pride of place to the divine prevenience and that orders
moral “rationality” (though not the “rationalism” of principled casuistry) to it.
Barth’s writings on war and the protection of life make up my third example.
Biggar thinks that Barth’s quest to protect the freedom of the divine command
leaves his (properly!) casuistical analysis “covert” and thus “shielded from critical
scrutiny.” It turns out that “the exceptional case” may be rendered intelligible by
a number of rational criteria, including even classic “just war” norms requiring
that wars be fought for a “just cause” and as a “last resort.” This is true enough;46
but unfortunately, Biggar gives virtually no attention to the “practical pacifism”
present in these pages. A powerful emphasis is on exposing self-congratulatory
ideologies of nation and statecraft that tend to render war ordinary, inevitable,
righteous without qualification and, crucially, not utterly horrible.
So we ought to stress how killing in war challenges “not merely for individuals
but for millions of men, the whole of morality, or better, obedience to the command
of God in all its dimensions.”47 Christians ought to give no aid and comfort to the
state with assurances that it “may do gaily and confidently whatever it thinks is
43
Ibid., 231f.
44
Ibid., 236.
45
Ibid., 237–40.
46
Ibid.
47
Ibid., 454.
right.” They can in this context only make a “detached and delaying movement”
and that is one that calls for peace up to the last moment, that toils to fashion
peace (in the direction of social democracy) more vigorously than states typically
fashion war. Never counseling that war is always absolutely avoidable, the Church
nevertheless opposes as “satanic” that crude “realism” which deems war inevitable
and therefore justified, as unavoidable and therefore right. By refusing to howl with
the pack, by seeking peaceably to keep war at bay, and more generally by trying
in political life to construct true peace in international relations in conformity with
normative humanity, Christians act also to enable discernment of when war is,
tragically, morally necessary.48
The Christian is to unmask false and inadequate reasons for war. He or she
should contribute to a peace which does not lead to war, and to peaceable measures
to restrain recourse to war when it threatens. Within this moral landscape, and
finally only within it, the Christian may well hear the divine command requiring
a nation’s recourse to war and one’s own participation in it. Strategically the
Christian community refuses to rule out war in principle yet incessantly poses
critical questions supporting genuine peace and opposing the ideology of war.
Realistic discernment of moral value in this last instance is not primarily
about suspending the search for reasons or about sparking a sense for new ones;
it is about using the reasons available and maybe all too available—“just war
criteria”— in a manner that is faithful to the God whose command of grace is
“Thou shall not kill.” The ideologies which practical pacifism contest, moreover,
include “just war theory” as it is co-opted by the idolatrous nation-state. The fair
and gracious use of this “theory” includes a challenge to idolatrous misuse, in
keeping with the Church’s witness to peace.49
To live in the world of free grace in Jesus Christ promises opportunities for
action that are new and surprising.50 One cannot treat these opportunities, given
by the God who loves in freedom, as given once and for all. But, just so, Barth’s
descriptions of that world do not fail to comport with the one common world in
which we all “live and more and have our being.” We find a sort of “realism” in
these descriptions. And affirming realism in these theological ethics means that
moral analysis and moral suasion should not be reduced to autonomously human
perspectives or sensibilities or, we must add, to the simple “rule” of the communal
language of Christian tradition. Even if that language is inescapable and essential
in any treatment of hearing the divine command, it must not be supposed that it is
the source of our trust and the foundation of our hope.
48
Ibid., 453–60.
49
I say more about Barth and war in “Karl Barth and Just War: A Conversation with
Roman Catholicism,” in Commanding Grace: Studies in Karl Barth’s Ethics, ed. Daniel L.
Migliore (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans 2010), 60–82.
50
Generally speaking, Biggar recognizes this. See The Hastening That Waits, 34.
Part Two
Virtue, Moral Practices,
and Discernment
Chapter 5
What Shall Parents Teach Their Children?
Once I became a parent, my first-time answer to this question was pretty

conventional. Parents should teach their children to care about others, to know the
difference between right and wrong, to learn the value of hard work, and to think
for and be true to themselves, rather than merely conform to the pressures of the
group. Whatever its merits, the response undoubtedly had much to do with my
fears as a father. I was afraid that my sons would become selfish oafs or never learn
to play by the rules—or that they might never land a (good!) job, and/or cave in
to this or that improper or dangerous behavior just because it is authorized by the
crowd. On reflection, I had to ponder whether I was working with conceptions of
success and the rules of life that were themselves an accommodation to the temper
of the times that I seemed in many ways to dread. Beginning with apprehensions
about my children’s safety, wasn’t I coming up with ideas about training them that
would place them safely within the framework of our commercial culture? Not
wanting them bought and sold, I wondered whether my first impressions were
about teaching my sons how to sell themselves as dependable, rule-abiding, civil
commodities in the workplace. After all, what was I doing leaving God out of the
answer? What kind of safety was I really desiring for the boys?
My effort here intends to correct my tendency spontaneously to prefer status-
quo solutions to the dangers posed by the status quo. And to that end a theological
response is required. If I would focus on “what it takes“ for children to grow in a
world created and redeemed by God, I must also be attuned to rethinking “what it
takes” in terms of the call to love God and neighbor. Making a living, getting along
with others, and being your own person cannot be certified uncritically as signs of
the maturity that parental instruction should strive to foster; for Christians believe
that a particular kind of maturity is at stake for human creatures who may come
freely to stand in the devoted service of God. That has to be the measure of the
meaning and significance of goods like work, sociability, and self-responsibility.
“Honor Your Father and Mother”
There is a divine commandment that relates to our theme, but at first glance it
appears not to be very useful. Consider the injunction that children shall honor
their mother and father. Commentators have lamented its asymmetrical status
in the Decalogue. Stephen Post writes: “If one additional commandment could
be added to the Decalogue, ‘Love thy children’ would be a prime candidate.
That the Decalogue omits a commandment to love and honor one’s children is
unfortunate, since in various instances it appears that parental love requires such
encouragement. The authoritarian notion that parents have a right to respect or
to love simply because they are parents is as erroneous as it is desperate.” Post
contends that filial love is the child of parental love and that honoring parents
should be “the expression of a filial love that is a response to parental love.”1
It would be tyrannical to answer the question, “What shall parents teach their
children?” merely with “To honor their mother and father.”
There is much to be said for Post’s line of thinking. It is true that parents
ought to love their children. Statements of parental authority that do not include
this requirement are mistaken. Certainly an important moral issue arises about
the possibilities for or necessity of filial piety where, for example, biological
parenthood is not complemented by care and nurturance or when a parent neglects
or abuses his children. One does not respond effectively or decently to that issue
just by recalling the words of the fourth commandment. It also makes sense to
realize that in many ways parental love shapes and qualifies the love and confidence
in others, including parents, that children develop and express.
There is a danger, however, in pushing too far the case for making parental love
the condition for honoring one’s mother and father. Post sees one side of it when
he says that a demand for reciprocity may tempt children to calculate how much
filial love to give back. They might even hastily dismiss filial honor altogether,
given their parents’ failures. Another problem is this. If it is to be the basis of
filial piety, the moral requirement of parental love still vests in parents enormous
authority. Anxious to promote their children’s well-being, mothers and fathers
may need to battle with fantasies of control over and excessive identification with
their children. In the one case they could simply impose desires and disciplines
of their own making for the sake of the child; in the second they would project
them. Innocent parental strategies, like your trying to attend to a child’s needs, can
include an intense investment leading to preoccupation with his or her well-being
as it reflects your own or to damaging expectations about how he or she should,
given your sacrifice, come to love and honor you.2
Both dangers share in the human urge for self-justification. Thus filial love
is conditioned by children’s judgment of parents who will fail and fail again.
Parental love is bedeviled by a possessiveness that correlates with the massive
responsibility of caring for children. The prospect of suffering judgment tightens
the parents’ grip; the tighter the grip, the more judgment is necessary for a child
to liberate herself from her parents. Alternatively, the demands of parents who
love their children judge them, so that the latter, who also fail and fail again, will
manage this burden either by succumbing to self-doubt or through exercises of
presumption and isolated independence.
1
Stephen G. Post, Spheres of Love (Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press,
1994), 79.
2
Cf. Stanley Hauerwas, Truthfulness and Tragedy (Notre Dame and London:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), 149-51.
What Shall Parents Teach Their Children? 75
But God finally measures and judges the work of parents. And children do
not belong finally to parents, but to God. Honoring mother and father must be a
response to a divine authority to which parents can only witness.
Try to think of the commandment of filial honor in light of the following passage.3
Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. “Honor your father
and mother” (this is the first commandment with a promise), “that it may be
well with you and that you may live long on the earth.” Fathers, do not provoke
your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the
Lord.” (Eph. 6:1–4)
The injunction to obedience “in the Lord” is immediately interpreted in terms of

a promise. To adhere to the command is not a means to the promise’s fulfillment,
but a form of the fulfillment itself. The point is not that if you obey mom and dad,
then you are sure to become a success in the world. It is instead that obedience to
mom and dad “in the Lord” may be a constitutive feature of living well and long
on the earth the Lord has made. The command to filial honor in this passage refers
at once to what children may hope for in their obedience and to what their elder
parents have received: the divine assurance that keeping covenant with the Lord
is our highest good. The promise for children is also a reminder to parents of their
commission to be faithful to God and to do this, not less, but more than ever in
bringing them up. Parents are to be honored, as Karl Barth puts it, “as the bearer
and mediator of the promise given to the people.”4 Their authority may and shall
bear promise of God’s goodness, and it has validity for no other purpose than this.
Recall a theme briefly mentioned in the last chapter. Filial respect and obedience
are not grounded in the fact of biological generation or in mere seniority or in the
fine traditions they may embody or in their moral rectitude. Children ought to
honor their parents because parents are most fundamentally their teachers who
lovingly instruct them by word, deed, and example in the practice of living before
God. Generation, seniority, tradition, and character serve this central mission. One
cannot permit any of these qualities to stand on its own for the sake of granting
parental authority its own self-supporting worth. Even the image of teachers is
misleading if it is interpreted as either a distanced imparting of knowledge or as
a self-styled shaping of the ignorant in the teacher’s own image. No, the lived
knowledge of the Word and work of God may be given in a kind of intimate
apprenticeship by the apprentice parents themselves. Children heed their parents
and give them the respect they are due in this context.
What shall parents teach their children? A good preliminary answer, after all,
is that they may teach their children to honor their mother and father. The answer
gives no title to authoritarianism or self-congratulation, nor is it conditioned by the
3
Here and throughout the remainder of this section, I am indebted to Barth’s
discussion in III/4, 242–57.
4
III/4, 242.
requirement of an abstract, independent parental love. Parents may teach children

to be children, eager and attentive learners about the good, created world in which
they live. To that end they might nurture in them a confident neediness and a self-
limiting assertiveness that enables good questions, vivid imaginings, and honest
assessments of people and things. Good teaching elicits these virtues by example
and by a gracious care that entertains vulnerability with hope, not crippling fear.
Above all parents establish their authority and teach these virtues by giving their
children instruction in the Lord, enthusiastically taking up their vocation as elders
yet humbly refusing to grasp privileges and a manner of devotion for themselves
that is owed only to God.
On the one hand, if parental authority ever requires, as it does with young
children, unreflective obedience, that obedience must be for the purpose of teaching
children the way of free responsibility to God. If parents would insist on adjustment
to the norms of this or that group (e.g., the scout pack or school or team), that must
be because conformity supports and does not encumber the child’s maturation as
a creature and child of God. Instruction in the moral verities—tell the truth, play
fair, the Golden Rule—should enable the capacity to look up to but also beyond
instruction and the verities themselves, to their source in the divine call to love
one’s fellows. On the other hand, when we encourage youngsters to think for
themselves, we do it in the hope that they will affirm their own insights and powers
in fundamental loyalty to God and the neighbor. Should we implore them to stand
up for their rights or not to buckle under to peer pressures, we do this to engage a
skill that stands fast against corruptions of one’s creaturely good and responsibility.
Finally, when there is tension and disagreement between parents and children,
parents inspire honor and teach its meaning by intending the hard words or the
reconciling gestures or the negotiated reciprocal disciplines for children’s better
understanding of the divine ordering under which both disputing parties stand.
It is not easy for a parent at once to embody authority and to refer it away from
oneself. An obvious temptation is to identify completely with authority, given that
before our kids’ eyes we are endowed (at least for a time) with a great deal of
power. Another temptation is a slothful kind of self-removal. Fitting a cultural
situation in which people care very much about personal autonomy, one tends to
escape real instruction by merely pointing to a variety of commodified options
and letting the kids decide. You want them to be “exposed to religion” or “to learn
right from wrong”; but all the time you evade your own living relationship to your
children and the goods you are bound to share with them. Teaching children to be
children and before God to honor their mother and father demands neither tyranny
nor high-minded disengagement.
It is not easy for children, moreover, really to honor their parents while and
after parents are exposed to be destructive, faithless, and phony. When I was
growing up in the 1960s, the charge of “hypocrite” was a personal and generational
favorite. Our parents were not spared it, and the charge was not always wrong.
Now I stand before my children in the dock, awaiting their inevitable naming
of my shortcomings as a Christian, a father, a teacher, mom’s husband, and so
forth. Here is a test for parent and child alike. I hesitate to address the matter
since there are extreme and all too common examples of parental wickedness
that seem to render the following inappropriate. The point remains that since the
authority of parents is based on the grace of the sovereign God, their failures are
finally to be referred to God’s grace and rule. If weak and sinful parents have
been able at all to teach their children what honoring mother and father means,
there may be hope that these children will hold them accountable but with at
least a touch of patience and gentleness, and without self-righteousness. Parents
also cannot wander from their mission and therefore may catch themselves
up penitently and redirect their energies to the source of goodness. They
will not deny the harm they do, but they also will not despair of the authority
entrusted to them.5 Children will not look past the vicious ways of their parents,
but neither will they abandon their responsibility still to listen and learn, if they
can, from them. In both cases there will be a faithful forgetting and recovery of
self that is permitted by a mutual understanding of the source and character of the
honor that parents are due.
Parents ought to teach children to be children and, as such, to honor their
parents as teachers and mediators of a divine promise of redemption in Jesus
Christ. But parents should not and cannot do this if they presume to be to their
children divine representatives. Their authority is exercised only as children come
to realize that both parents and children stand under divine authority. Parents,
therefore, may bear witness to God’s primacy by teaching and embodying for
their children virtues, dispositions, beliefs, and a way of life that fit the fact that
the world is God’s world. They teach the love of God and their neighbor by loving
God and their neighbor and by imaginatively sharing and explaining this love with
their sons and daughters. They teach the way of the world by seeing and reading it
with their children in light of the biblical witness and the practices of the Christian
community. My reflections in this section would be an example of such seeing and
reading of the world given the subject matter of the parent-child relation itself. In
the remainder of this essay, I will present four basic dispositions and virtues that
parents may learn and learn to teach their children.
Joy
Parents shall teach their children to be joyful.6 No attitude better reflects the good
news of God’s reconciling fellowship with us in Jesus Christ. And I fear that no
other attitude so readily gets lost in the shuffle of interactions between parents
and children. We suppose there may be great joy present with the receiving and
welcoming of a newborn child into the world, as well as in so much early nurturing.
But in time the joyful love may recede in the face of all the many things we are to
5
See my remarks on honoring bad parents in Chapter 4.
6
Here see III/4, 374–79, and my discussion of Barth in Chapter 7.
do in the world. There is so much to do, such as schoolwork, popcorn sales, music
lessons, soccer practice, the school play. There is so very much to do: like making
a living, doing the shopping, raking the leaves, bravely struggling for a decent
home, a living wage, a good enough school, a peaceful neighborhood. How can we
find the space and the time to be good parents and to be joyful?
If we cannot find the space and the time, we cannot effectively teach our
children the experience of joy, which is to know and feel some specific fulfillment
in our lives as creatures made by and restored to God. It is to take a deep breath in
grateful acknowledgment that we have received some good that properly ennobles
us. We may have prepared for this fulfillment through study, toil, and careful
deliberation; yet if our preparation was joyful, if it anticipated the fulfillment
properly, then it was constituted by a readiness for receiving the completion as
a gift. If parents have received their lives as a divine gift and, more to the point,
welcomed their children as wondrous and astonishing gifts, then their readiness
for gratitude should not be an alien disposition.
Gratitude often seems to be alien, however, and we can make it something odd
and strange to our kids. Two connected messages, communicated by our words and
our lives, contribute to this. First, there is the idea that through hard work we must
make something of ourselves, must do something significant with our lives. The
trouble here is the suggestion that we are of our own making and that, apart from
successful self-making in this or that area, we are, and perhaps should be, nothing.
This stance orders life to a law of achievement and independence. It afflicts some
of my college students with a blindness about how dependent and uncontrollable
their life situations are and leaves their hearts unready for joy and ready only
for the “personal satisfaction” of clearing another hurdle. The second message is
put brilliantly by the capitalist restaurateur Pascal in the film Big Night. He tells
struggling Secondo, with a line that sets him up for a devastating betrayal, “Bite
your teeth into the ass of life and drag it to you!” Apparently intended to inspire
courage and confidence, the advice warrants a grasping, aggressive orientation.
The world is apprehended, not joyfully, but at best with confidence in domination.
Parents, looking at life not as a gift but as seductive and threatening, might teach
children these things in order to protect them.
Nevertheless, parents shall teach their children to be joyful. They are sustained
by God’s grace at every moment. They may trust in God’s love and mercy as it
is given in Jesus Christ. In the satisfaction of their needs, in their fellowship with
others, in the exercise of talents that were enabled and nurtured by others, parents
should be ready to pause to give thanks and help their kids do likewise. One way to
learn this is by keeping the Sabbath holy, for on this day human creatures are called
not just to rest from toil but to rest for the sake of thanksgiving. Far from demanding
we make something of ourselves, the Sabbath commandment demands we depart
from independent reliance on our own work. Far from encouraging or idealizing a
predator’s grasp of the world, it calls us to renounce our anxious “clutchiness.”
Within the life of the family, parents may teach their children to be joyful
by making time together more expansive and less strictly programmed. There is
something a bit odd about scheduling time to “stop and smell the roses;” instead
parents may sometimes simply be ready to linger with and luxuriate in a four-
year-old’s endless recounting of his daytime activities or to welcome, not just put
up with, a pair of last-minute dinner guests that a child has invited without the
parents’ knowledge. Finally, we can teach joy in work and service to the neighbor
by helping our children see that the other is a gift and not a threat and by enacting
the stubbornly hopeful conviction that by grace the unpleasant chore or tense
encounter or vicious injustice may be transformed and redeemed.
Keeping Faith
As first of all joyful, children may be summoned to make something of themselves

for the sake of God and God’s creation and reign. Thus parents shall teach their
children to be faithful, to be loyal to God’s cause and the cause of the neighbor.
Children shall be taught to develop their talents as an expression of this loyalty, to
discipline themselves, to understand the joys but also the costs of attaining some
excellence in the communities of social practice that answers to human needs and
serve the common good.
I want to suggest a contrast with a different proposal that, however well-
meaning and insightful, needs some correction. The proposal starts, simply and
wisely enough, with the claim that children should know themselves to be valuable,
special, loved, and at home in the world apart from anything that they do or achieve
or fail to achieve. Young people need to have self-esteem and to feel good about
themselves. In fact, self-esteem turns out to be the condition of their trusting
themselves enough to venture to attain their special abilities in the world. So far, so
good. These ideas present important social and psychological truths, especially that
children need to possess a sense of fundamental trust in the world and in themselves
as actors in it. They must accept themselves as able to establish a secure identity
and not be hampered by severe self-doubt. The message also exposes the harm
that continual ridicule, harassment, and degradation can inflict on a child. It even
touches the field of social criticism, should we join the late John Rawls in holding
that a person’s self-worth depends on the responses of others and that, therefore,
the justice or injustice of democratic institutions can be evaluated for the way they
do or do not reflect a citizenry’s support for one’s reasonable goals and aspirations.7
The difficulty is that an emphasis on prior self-esteem and self-acceptance
is often tied to an abstract and atomistic view of the human self in which self-
esteeming desires, whatever they are, become the independent foundation for all
other projects. Human self-understanding, in turn, is based on effectively pursuing
and realizing one’s preferences, on the one hand, while remaining ultimately
unencumbered by them, on the other. The common advice becomes “You have
7
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971),
348, 388–90.
to love yourself before you can love someone else,” “You gotta do what you
gotta do,” or “God wants [here, place your name in the third person] to be happy”
(typically stated in explanation for some broken commitment). A modest plea for
realistic self-acceptance devolves into an apology for selfishness or at least for a
standpoint that gauges human pursuits in terms of the satisfaction they bring to the
desires of a socially unmoored individual.
Nevertheless, parents may teach their children to be faithful, loyal to God and the
neighbor God loves. Loyalty is living in the Lord’s presence and under God’s ordering
will. A selfish partiality toward oneself or one’s preferred group or ideals is excluded.
But irresponsible flight from freedom in presenting to God one’s particular life and
talents is ruled out, too. The human creature stands before God as an individual,
yet the identity of the individual is crucially comprised of promises that are made
and fidelities assumed in human communities. Social life is not something added
on to this identity, nor is there any neutral point of desire or choice from which we
may choose to be or not to be with our fellow human being in fellowship. Life as
an individual is a matter of responsible fidelity. I do not think that this means that
our identities are “swallowed up” in our commitments to others, but it does mean
that, however we preserve ourselves or describe ourselves as individuals before
God, preservation and description are always of persons who are to be with others
faithfully in community. We cannot completely tease apart our commitment to
ourselves from our steadfast commitments to others in the practices of church,
family, neighborhood, school, work, play, and so on.
Children shall be taught that a promise is a promise, but also that not all loyalties
are voluntarily chosen but can be assumed and discovered in the course of life. They
may learn such things in fitting response to the cause of the family and the needs
of its members. Parents should make the home a school for love and justice in the
way they honor and renew their own marital vows, in seeing that household labor
is fairly shared and welcomed by all, in the practice of hospitality toward friends
and strangers in need, and in the way family conflicts arc resolved in a peaceable
spirit and with reconciling will. There must be a continuing development of a
sense of responsibility for the good of all human beings who claim our allegiance
as brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ. We are to be loyal to him by our fidelity
to them, and often that will mean keeping our loyalty to other causes as such in a
proper order. In addition, the skills for just complaint should include discerning
when human need is bypassed in the name of some other good improperly loved.
After I scolded my younger son for climbing dangerously atop a counter to
reach for a snack, his big brother (understanding and not merely noticing that by
his fall he had hurt himself) scolded me: “Dad, the first thing you should have
said is, ‘Are you all right?’”
In their study, play, and self-development, children can learn to see the connections
between their budding dreams, abilities, and individuality and the communal
practices, practitioners, and fellows they serve and are served by in turn. Learning abou
whales says something about being a creature and steward of creation. Playing
baseball invites a sense of the history and communal integrity of the game.
Vocational training must keep in full view the persons one is to help and the
colleagues with and from whom one learns to practice his or her work well. I do not
want to advise a tedious and self-defeating moralism whereby every deed begets
some lesson and every lesson delivers some law of “right” communal identity.
Yet part of the challenge of teaching our children is to elicit comprehension that
personal discipline, excellence, and care for others in community are opportunities
for a life of freedom. Self-betrayal is betrayal of that freedom, but betrayal of that
freedom is being unfaithful to the causes that give us life and to which we adhere.
Teaching children that they may flourish and be free by keeping faith with God
and neighbor sometimes strikes me (faithlessly) as being an impossible task. Just
like my inability to hit a curve ball with any success, my record of keeping faith, and
of finding it liberating, hardly inspires self-confidence. In this context the bromide
that “those who can’t do, teach” convicts. How really do parents teach the love
of God by way of the virtues of humility, trust, and gratitude? How do they help
their children understand that blessing may be known in sorrowing over suffering,
in gentleness, mercy, peace, and the love of righteousness? Maybe a way to take
up these tasks is through participation in the life of the Christian community and
particularly in the celebration of the Eucharist. Joined with one another in sharing
in the life of Jesus Christ, members of the community gathered for worship share
their embodied commitment to the nonviolent and self-giving peace he gave to
us and all humanity. To give thanks for God’s creative and redeeming work, to
prayerfully hear and reflect on God’s Word, and to witness and conform ourselves
to Christ’s faithful love for the vulnerable and the lost may indicate directions for
learning of fidelity that turn wonderful and inspiring.
Patience
“Life,” John Lennon sang to his son Sean, “is what happens to you while you’re
busy making other plans.” There is a religious version of this idea in a well-known
joke that, depending on the delivery and the audience, comes across as either
marvelous or mean: “Know how to make God laugh? Tell him your plans.” To
be joyful means to trust that the world will manifest itself as God’s gift, and an
implication of this readiness is to sit loose to our designs or to loosen our grip on
our “life plan” or deftly to elude the grip it has on us. To be faithful means, among
other things, to keep covenant with persons to whom one is bound, not only by
choice but also by circumstances, history, and nature. The unexpectedly sick child
or parent, or the student who tries but does not yet quite “get it”—these individuals
may fittingly claim our faithful response, disrupting our timetables and programs.
To be joyful, however, does not mean to overlook evil, and real fidelity will often
bring us face to face with human suffering and wickedness. Enduring joyfully and
faithfully demands patience, the disposition to wait attentively for the good in the
wake of difficulty and hardship.
The patient person abides vigilantly in the presence of suffering, injustice, and
the many other ways in which the good is vitiated. People are tempted either to be
overcome by evil or blithely to discount its threats. Perhaps we get into the habit
of losing our kindly equanimity, replacing it with choleric and damning judgment;
or maybe we try to guarantee equanimity through an ersatz “tolerance” amounting
to a refusal to render and act on moral judgments concerning the good. Christians
fail to witness to God by seeking good results through unfitting, unfaithful means;
or they might abandon the redemptive universality of their commitments by
despairingly removing themselves from the arena of the world, just leaving it
to its own evil devices. In the first instance the problem is deepened by what
Thomas Merton called the “fetishism of immediate visible results,” whereby a
consumerist reluctance to defer satisfaction over moral success works against
social transformation by encouraging a sense of futility when easy expectations
are dashed.8 The second alternative replaces easy expectations about good results
in the world with an excessively earnest acquiescence about their unlikeliness.
So we find that people lose their vision of the emergence of the good in time
or that they are not able to wait with integrity for the good they see and hope
for. Yet Christians may be patient, and parents shall teach their children to be
patient. When a boy’s or girl’s best efforts do not bear good fruit, instruction
in patience answers the penchant to have a fit or to languish in disappointment.
When childhood friendships turn sour or cruel, teaching patience, not indifference
or forgiveness on the cheap, enables the chance of their restoration in time. To
teach revulsion at sin and injustice without the self-righteous embrace of unjust
remedies permits a more timeful understanding of the good that we desire. The
injunction not to provoke our children to anger but to instruct them in the Lord
encompasses forbearing from ridicule, undue harshness, and excessive demands
for perfection. Parental wrath can give rise to an anger that refuses to give and
to accept the time to learn and to love, as the Lord patiently wills. In learning as
teachers to avoid both punitive judgments and moral indifference, parents also
hope that they may help their children see that the time they are given should itself
give others time that is gracious. So they should neither oppose nor contemn, for
themselves or others, the attainment of any creaturely good; nor may they refuse
to measure that good by the fullness of human maturity. If, for example, being
popular is important for our children, we should not deny their understanding that
recognition and appreciation by others can be a wonderful sign of the achievement
of the good. Yet we should add that the good for which we may justly be recognized
is of a certain sort. Parents give children time to learn this when they map both the
good turn they made and the route they need still to take. And children may learn
to be patient by waiting and working expectantly for their destination without
presumption or loss of heart.
I have impatiently answered the impatient question, “How long ’til we get
there?” a lot. And I have asked that question impatiently under many guises: “How
Thomas Merton, Passion for Peace (New York: Crossroad, 2006), 98–100.
8
long before I’m promoted?” “How long before the kids grow up?” “How long
before these people see the error of their ways (and come around to my way of
thinking)?” Even the life of prayer can be an opportunity for impatience: “How
long before these distractions get out of my head?” “How long before my prayers
are answered?” “How long before I get rid of my bad habits?” “How long before
I understand what God is up to?” Still I think the practice of prayer, on one’s
own and with others, can be a kind of schooling in patience. It could be the locus
of a tension between sorts of creaturely desires before God—“Father, if you are
willing, remove this cup from me; nevertheless not my will, but yours, be done”—
that helps us learn how we are located by God and God’s ongoing story for us. The
distractions that fill us up as we pray afford opportunities, as do the frustration and
bafflement, that sense of getting nowhere that can accompany our prayers. When
we do not despair and do not succumb to the distractions, or when our confusion
reminds us of a helplessness that prompts us further to love God and know God’s
ways for us, we are getting at something important. Asking God’s help in times of
trial is also a form of patience. Parents shall teach their children to be patient, and
to that end parents shall teach their children to pray.
Wisdom
Finally, parents shall teach their children to be wise. We must distinguish wisdom
from the “prudent” skill to determine the most efficient means to assure one’s goals.
The virtue of wisdom refers, instead, to the ability to draw certain conclusions from
experience about the concrete manner in which we may live well as creatures. It has
two related dimensions. There is, first, the habit of discerning the fitting presence
and order of goods in specific situations; second, there is the accompanying
lived understanding of certain basic truths of our creaturely existence that enable
and, in turn, are enabled by the habit of discernment. Age and experience do not
automatically make someone wise. Stephen’s gentle scolding about my response to
James’s injury was a lesson taught by a boy who wisely saw the order of the good
through an understanding of the claims of human need and vulnerability. But as
elders, parents hope to teach their children something about the art of living, given
their own stumbling and wavering longevity in adherence to God’s cause. Perhaps
by way of their realizing that joy does not cast a blind eye on suffering or that
fidelity to friends and lovers must not be idolatrous or that patience does not fail
to hasten but rather includes a sense of urgency about witnessing to God’s reign,
parents can meet their responsibility to their children in this regard.
I close with two stories. Years ago, when Anne and I were beginning to think
about day-care arrangements for our son, I had a chat with my mother about
raising children. I noted, probably with a touch of defensiveness, that our placing
Steve in day care would not interfere with our giving him lots of “quality time.”
Mom quickly replied, “Remember that children just need time.” She was not
decrying day care or our career choices. She was pointing out that “quality time”
talk and thinking could impede discovering how raising our kids may be more
integral to everyday life, and therefore less compartmentalized and idealized.
She clinched the point by recalling how, when she was studying long hours for
her college degree, she took the time to give me time by including me in her
time, in her dreams and ideas about her work and her life. At its best, this was
an exciting disclosure of subjects that I, only seven or eight years old, could not
understand—philosophy, sociology, Cervantes, Shakespeare. Sometimes I spent
time with her waiting for her to help me with some problem. Always, I was able to
witness devotion to the cause of education. Being let in on the details of her busy
life in these ways was different from being given “quality time” after the details
were covered. So in recalling this story, Mom took the truism that “children need
time with their parents” and showed how it requires caution about not deceiving
ourselves as to the way the time we give does and does not properly share our lives
with our children.
A few years earlier, my father called me to report that his dad, my eighty-
seven-year-old grandfather, had been moved to a nursing home. Racked with
severe arthritis, Grandpop could no longer walk on his own. He had also become
incontinent. The latter fact made my father confused and angry. His father was a
remarkably independent and proud man, and if the first indignity was troubling,
the second was cruel. I did not know what to say to help Dad cope with his sadness
and irritation. But two weeks later, when we were visiting Grandpop in the nursing
home, this is what happened. In the course of a pleasant conversation, Dad noticed
that Gramps had “wet his pants.” He said, “Pop, we gotta clean you up.” His tone
was upbeat, and matter of fact. My father had me help him by retrieving clean
pants, lifting Gramps out of his wheelchair, taking him to the toilet, getting him
redressed, and sitting him back in the chair. Throughout Dad was cheerful and
competent. I saw no traces of anxiety or pity or revulsion; but I did, I am sorry to
say, experience these emotions, only to learn better from him in the course of our
work. When we sat my grandfather down, he smiled at me, pointed to his son, my
father, and said, “He’s a good boy.”
My mother taught me wisely about the time our children need by recalling a
story about care. My father taught me about the meaning of filial love by embodying
it in actions that wisely fit the circumstances of parental need. And in doing so, he
carried forward a story—his story—about the nature of love for a parent through
the seasons of human life. Wisdom has something to do with recalling stories and
carrying them forward, grafting ourselves to them and growing out from them. In
the Christian community, the full wisdom of God would be apprehended in a story
of creation and fall, covenant, incarnation, self-giving love, suffering unto death,
and new life. It is a story that identifies God through the life and ministry of Jesus
Christ and in the folly of the cross that he bore for our sakes. If parents are to teach
their children what it means to live more humanly and more wisely, they shall
teach their children God’s story and seek by God’s grace to carry it forward with
them throughout the time they share together.
Chapter 6
In Search of Real Children: Innocence,
Absence and Becoming a Self
For in truth we are not called once only, but many times; all through our life
Christ is calling us. He called us first in Baptism; but afterwards also; whether we
obey His voice or not, He graciously calls us still. If we fall from our Baptism,
He calls us to repent; if we are striving to fulfill our calling, He calls us on from
grace to grace, and from holiness to holiness, while life is given us.1
These words are taken from a sermon preached by John Henry Newman in the
1830s. They bear on scriptural instances of a divine call, as to Paul, to Peter,
Andrew, James and John, and, significantly for my purposes, to the child Samuel.
“And the Lord came, and stood, and called as at other times, Samuel, Samuel. Then
Samuel answered, Speak, for Thy servant heareth” (1 Sam. 3:10). The sermon
vividly depicts the “accidents and events” in which we may be called “all through
our life,” such as in circumstances of loss, or in the course of worldly temptation,
or through the light of exemplars we may not fully appreciate or understand. We
can imagine such accidents and events occurring in the lives of adults, like Paul,
and of children, like Samuel; indeed, Newman’s sermon may be understood to
take up a version of the Kierkegaardian question of what it means for us to be
contemporary with Jesus Christ.
There is, however, a related issue about the nature not of “divine calls” such
as these, but of “divine callings” or vocations that display a certain social texture
and historical continuity, and that track, as it were, particular persons with respect
to a specific activity or status or situated area of responsibility. With this issue and
the parallels noted above, we may take pause. We can and should talk about and
ponder “vocations” as they concern adults, be they young or old. But does it make
sense to speak of the vocation of the child?
I believe that the idea of “the vocation of the child,” as applied to young
people up to, shall we say, their early adolescence, is dangerous because of the
self-deception it can foster among those who care for children in societies like our
own, and who may thus inflict damage in its name. Yet it is dangerous in a second,
salutary sense; for the notion properly considered imperils that same partly willed,
partial blindness through its challenge, through its calling us out, truthfully to see
1
John Henry Newman, “Divine Calls,” in Callings: Twenty Centuries of Christian
Wisdom on Vocation, ed. William C. Placher (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), 346.
real children as they may be called by God. In this chapter I will try to explain
both the problem and the promise, following a brief investigation of “vocation” as
a Christian theological category.
Vocations
Everyday Christian uses of “vocation” include, centrally, being called by God to

love and serve him. A people may be so called by name, and called out, as is Israel
and the Christian community. A Christian individual’s calling can and should be
taken to mean membership in such a community, with personal responsibilities
appropriate to disciples of Jesus Christ. But “vocation” indicates not just “generic”
responsibilities, as if they can and do apply to “anyone” of the people of God.
Particular persons are called, and their specific callings reflect their particularity,
including the limits and opportunities they discover in and around themselves
under God’s ruling grace. In the American Catholic environment I knew as a child,
a significant case in point concerned “religious vocation,” and firstborn sons like
me inevitably faced the question whether I myself was called to the priesthood.
Later, and analogously, there were other inquiries, about education, employment,
state of life, parenthood, and more.
The “I myself,” an engaged, individualizing discernment, seems to me to be a
constitutive feature of the idea of Christian vocation. It is a complex and ramified
conception, and there are at least three reasons for this complexity. First, the self
one is is a creature. He or she is finite and dependent, limited in space and time
and by virtue of a host of relations that order and enable one’s existence in the
creative providence of God. This or that human creature’s vocation must reflect
this finitude, contingency, and sociality. Second, “one oneself” is, yet is finally no
longer, a sinner, whose lingering tendencies to deny one’s creatureliness may issue
in following, not God’s call, but self-securing designs of one’s own making. Our
awareness that we are sinners cautions us against reaching eagerly for a “calling”
that “makes us happy” without testing its fidelity in service to the One in whom
we live and move and have our being. Third, the self we are and are promised to
be is an adopted child of God, reconciled to God in Jesus Christ; so our particular
freedom in and for our vocation is not only finite, social, repentant, and vigilant,
but also loyal in hope to God and the cause of universal community to which God
is loyal.2 Our particular callings to serve God and neighbor are limited but, as
This loyalty is also to the church, which is a “pioneer and representative” of such a
2
community. See H. Richard Niebuhr, “The Responsibility of the Church for Society,” in The
Gospel, the Church, and the World, ed. K. S. Latourette (New York: Harper and Brothers,
1946), and William Werpehowski, American Protestant Ethics and the Legacy of H. Richard
Niebuhr (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2002), 119–22, 203–21.
In Search of Real Children 87
such, comprehensive, too, given God’s will to make a new heaven and a new earth
under God’s dominion.3
These descriptions of human identity conspire in the consideration of who “I
myself” am summoned to be. One’s calling would concern one’s given talents
in some important way; nevertheless, one should be on guard about giving
these, as supposed paths to one’s self-designed self-fulfillment, an exclusively
determining importance. A person’s creaturely vocation in his or her specific time,
place, and relationships should not be understood so narrowly as to exclude a
more universal, reconciling loyalty; nor should that loyalty overwhelm our more
“local” commitments. “Our vocation will call for our love to participate in both the
universality and the particularity of the divine love, though not in the same way.”4
Hence one’s vocation involves oneself as summoned in one’s own history
before God. Now to what specific forms of existence does the summons refer?
Christian theological traditions offer a number of answers.
VI. The human creature may be called to a sort of “public” work. The
Reformation doctrine of vocation affirmed that our worldly employment and the
good we do in it may be sanctified. “Forth in thy name, O Lord, I go, / My daily
labor to pursue, / Thee, only thee resolved to know / In all I think or speak, or do.”5
Limited, “intraprofessional” norms that would govern customary service to the
neighbor may be subject to reconsideration in terms of how a certain vocational
sphere does or does not in fact serve the common good of society at large.6
V2. Vocation may also refer broadly to one’s service within relational contexts
of authority, mutuality, and need, and thus to human bonds that fall outside
“employment.” “God not only calls people into a given form of paid work; family
relations, friendships, extracurricular commitments—indeed, all significant social
relations are places into which God calls us to serve God and neighbor.”7 From this
perspective the vocation of the child at least is intelligible in terms of the child’s
“place” in his or her family, but also, perhaps, with regard to “adults” in general,
and/or to adults in their roles as teachers, pastors, etc.
Indeed, “vocation’s tendency to insist upon larger moral contexts”8 can alert us
as to how a social practice of “childhood,” constructed within and for some social
body, may or may not advance a “common good” that well serves God, neighbors,
3
Douglas J. Schuurrnan, Vocation: Discerning Our Callings in Life (Grand Rapids,
MI: Eerdmans, 2004), 50–51.
4
Robert Merrihew Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 302.
5
Charles Wesley, “Forth in Thy Name, O Lord, I Go,” in Working: Its Meaning and Limits,
ed. Gilbert C. Meilaender (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), 116.
6
William Werpehowski, “The Professions: Vocations to Justice and Love,” in
Proceedings of the Theology Institute of Villanova University, ed. Francis A. Eigo, O.S.A.,
vol. 18 (Villanova, PA: Villanova University Press, 1986), 1–24.
7
Schuurman, xi.
8
Ibid., 11.
and children themselves. When Martin Luther preached to parents to keep their
children in school rather than removing them “and turning them to the making of a
living and the caring for their bellies,” he was alert to the importance of maintaining
the office of ministry, as well as, we can imagine, to the excesses to which his
own “doctrine of vocation” may have tended. He was also attacking a particular
practice of childhood, an organization of children’s spaces, time, relations, and
aspirations that presupposes a certain view of who they are and what they ought
to be in themselves and in and for the social body. A lesson he would teach in this
regard to parents is that “your children are not so wholly yours that you need give
nothing of them to God … and they are more his than yours!”9 George Orwell’s
scary account of his school days in England also describes a social practice in
which the education of children becomes a “commercial venture” directed toward
filling slots in a stratified workplace, gaining prestige for his school, and enforcing
wider social norms.
That was the pattern of school life - a continuous pattern of the strong over
the weak. Virtue consisted in winning: it consisted in being bigger, stronger,
handsomer, richer, more popular, more elegant, more unscrupulous than other
people - in dominating them, bullying them, making them suffer pain, making
them look foolish, getting the better of them in every way. Life was hierarchical
and whatever happened was right.10
V3. There is also the “relational context” of the Christian community and the
“varieties of gifts, services, and activities” employed to serve the needs of the
body of Christ. “They are not the same as the call to be a Christian, but they
do designate specific ways members of the church express their response to that
call.”11 They can be taken to be “offices” to which Christians are called, and these
surely may be identified in overlap with the sorts of human bonds identified in V2.
Consider, for example, Vigen Guroian’s reflections on the office of being a good
son or daughter, in parallel with other of his writings on the office of husband
and wife who in their mutual fidelity give embodied testimony, in and for church
and world, to the faithful love of God in Jesus Christ.12 The more specifically
Martin Luther, “A Sermon on Keeping Children in School,” in Callings, 222, 224.

9
George Orwell, “Such, Such Were the Joys …,” in A Collection of Essays (New
10
York and London: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1946), 36. Cf. my discussion in “Reading Karl
Barth on Children,” in The Child in Christian Thought, ed. Marcia J. Bunge (Grand Rapids,
MI: Eerdmans, 2001), 389–90, 402.
11
Schuurman, 30.
12
Vigen Guroian, “On the Office of Being a Good Son or Daughter,” in Rallying
the Really Human Things (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005), 91–99, and “An Ethic of
Marriage and Family,” in From Christ to the World, ed. Wayne G. Boulton, Thomas D.
Kennedy, and Allen Verhey (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 322–30.
ecclesial dimension of this notion of vocation, however, presents an opportunity

to reflect on a Christian theological vision that evidently celebrates children in
their paradigmatic fitness for the kingdom of God, as well as on the concrete
implications of that vision for the life of the church. The kingdom of God belongs
to children, and those who do not receive it “like a child” shall not enter it (Mark
10:14–15; cf. Matt. 18:2–4; 19:13–14). Receiving one such child in Jesus’ name,
moreover, receives Jesus, and equally weighty but opposite consequences attach
to causing “one of those little ones who believe” in him to sin. Here children
may become (and are even authorized to become) “privileged media for giving
substance to religious meaning, for making the sacred present and material, not
only for children but through them, too, for adults in relation to them.”13
V4· Vocation may refer to the entirety of “the particularity, limitation and
restriction in which every man meets the divine call and command.”14 It is what
Karl Barth, following Dietrich Bonhoeffer, calls “the place of responsibility,”
“the terminus a quo of all recognition and fulfillment” of the divine summons.
The latter, in its turn, “will always mean something materially new for man, a
broadening, lengthening, alteration or more precise definition of the frontiers
within which he already has his being,”15 Calling as vocation is distinct (but not
separate) from calling as divine summons. The features of creaturely vocation in
this sense include not only one’s age, historical and social location, and personal
aptitude, but also the “field of his ordinary everyday activity, the place in which
he is in his own way an active member of human society.”16 So introducing
personal volition into the account at this point (insofar as we choose our sphere
of operation) also puts “vocation” and “summons,” place and (new) movement,
in close interrelation. We partly but really place ourselves in free obedience, ready
for free obedience from that place. In fact, there is throughout this approach an
appeal to human agency. It encompasses more or less fitting answers or responses
within and toward one’s situation in the world before God.
V5. While Barth reserves “vocation” to where one stands awaiting God’s call,
Robert Merrihew Adams applies the term to the self God calls us to become and
be. We have “to distinguish clearly between the situation in which we are called
and to which we must respond in our vocation, and the projects to which we are
called.”17 Barth keeps this distinction, too, and places “vocation” on the other end
of it, so to speak. He does so, I imagine, out of suspicion that the alternative risks
giving some independent interpretation of “one’s calling,” a more or less fixed
or frozen normative status that intrudes upon a divine freedom that beckons and
13
Robert A. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make
and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press,
2005), 77.
14
III/4, 599.
15
Ibid., 598.
16
Ibid., 630.
17
Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods, 309.
a human freedom that hears and heeds. Adams, in contrast, wants to explore the
“new” moral claims that can emerge with the “singular judgment” that there are
some tasks in the universe that are “mine in a morally valid way.”18 Still, Adams
understands that singular judgment in terms of a divine summons, command, or
invitation. The self to whom and to which God calls, rather than the place from
which one moves, is decisive.
Throughout the analysis of VI–V5, but in this last case especially, we must
keep in sight a central Christological qualification. Thomas Merton makes the
point well: “Every man has a vocation to be someone: but he must understand
clearly that in order to fulfill this vocation he can only be one person: himself.
Yet … baptism gives us a sacramental character, defining our vocation in a very
particular way since it tells us we must become ourselves in Christ.”19
Children and Innocence
Considering a child’s vocation, one ought not to disregard the “I myself.” What I
described as “an engaged, individualizing discernment” may appear to apply precisely
to human persons who are not children; but such a reading too quickly passes by the
sorts of agency and self-relation children may and do possess and develop.
For the purposes of this study, however, I will disregard (or, better, “bracket”)
the relevance of V1 to children, while recognizing that there remain important and
complicated questions to pose and answer.20
Again, V2 invites attention to children as members of a family: sons and daughters,
brothers and sisters, and so forth. The fourth commandment’s injunction to honor
mother and father is especially germane. V3 permits a variety of applications,
especially given the overlap with V2. Hence the “office” of son or daughter may
Ibid., 294, 292.

18
Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2003),
19
133–34.
20
For example, in personal correspondence Robert Orsi rightly notes that for
early twentieth-century immigrant families in America, “children’s earnings were a key
component not only of family survival but of how ethical responsibility was defined …
The Catholic Church even offered an odd defense of working children—or perhaps this
was an argument against the progressive state—on the grounds of family expectations and
authority.” And in his own letter Douglas Schuurman admits that the claim that V1was
irrelevant to children “gave me pause. Though children may not be directly active in ‘paid’
or ‘public’ work, they may be preparing for it. My youngest daughter, for example, knew
she wanted to be an elementary teacher since she was in the fourth grade. That sense of
calling guided many of her decisions (e.g., the kinds of summer work, etc.) as she grew up.
Perhaps we may see the child’s V1 as a time of preparation for a ‘public’ work that may
or may not be known to the child at earlier ages.” See also Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore,
“Children, Chores, and Vocation: A Social and Theological Lacuna,” in The Vocation of
the Child, ed. Patrick McKinley Brennan (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 295–323.
be a sign of trust or hope in and for the Christian community, as the “office” of
spouse witnesses analogously to God’s fidelity in Jesus Christ. But I am particularly
interested in the formal or informal station that children keep as learners in and just
so bearers of the faith that is taught to them. Barth’s reflections, under V4, on the
vocation of “youth” as a stage of life, and Adams’s explicit observation that a version
of V5, i.e., “becoming a self,” constitutes the child’s primary vocation21 order the
remainder of my critical and constructive discussions below.
Each of these applications is liable to corruption. The responsibilities of the
good son or daughter can be construed and accordingly demanded as unquestioning
obedience. They may also be articulated to enforce adherence to a familial “inner
ring” that exists for the sake of exclusion22 or to an image of “one’s self” that is
dictated by parentally “given” readings of the “givens” of a child’s existence, e.g.,
her abilities, social circumstances, and sex. In the first case, the “good son” keeps
himself to the moral and insularly self-identifying terms set by his family, taking
himself to be summoned by the magic of the surname x; in the second, the “good
daughter” takes to heart and makes her heart into mother’s or father’s descriptions
of her as “good at” this and “right for” that, given her background as the woman
she is. A child’s vocation to learn and to bring forward the Christian faith may
reflect not so much hope but rather the fear that “without such instruction children
will be bereft and alienated on the deepest levels.” Children, moreover, “represent
among other things the future of the faith standing there in front of oneself”;
and the apprehension of the vulnerability of that faith in vulnerable children can
augment adults’ attempt “to realize the meaningfulness of their religious worlds in
their children.”23 Since the stakes are so high, adult expectations might presume
upon the independence, and independent reality, of the young. Within this strategy
of fear, a blurring of boundaries between adult and child by way of the religious
meanings constitutive of adult lives is a consequence of kids’ “knowing their
place.” In his analysis of the figure of the guardian angel in mid-twentieth-century
American Catholic life, Robert Orsi points out that children were taught that their
guardian accompanied them everywhere, and “felt children’s behaviors in their
own angelic beings.” Poor behavior brought your angel sorrow, and kindness made
your angel happy. “The angels thus contributed to the dissolution of children’s
boundaries,” since everything about and inside of them was “under guard.”
21
“The call to become and to be oneself will plausibly be a part of each person’s
vocation, the self in each case being different. This is a peculiarly fundamental part of
our vocation. It cannot be taken away from us by any misfortune that leaves us able to
deliberate intelligently at all; in hard circumstances it may be virtually our whole vocation.
It is probably the main vocation of children; and we never outgrow it, for we have never
finished becoming ourselves. And this is not a merely personal project; it is to be our
project, but it is also a responsibility.” Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods, 312.
22
C. S. Lewis, “The Inner Ring,” in The Weight of Glory (Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans, 1965), 55–66.
23
Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth, 77.
In this way … the angels guarded against children’s autonomy: angel lore cast
children as fundamentally in need of constant supervision, moral scrutiny, and
accompaniment, a need endorsed by the fear of (or the threat of) harm and death.
When children moved over to make room for their angels on the seat next to
them in church or in school, they were moving themselves ever more securely
into the moral and cosmic world that adults were making for and with them in
the media of Catholic devotionalism.24
In addition, to focus on youth or childhood itself as a morally or religiously

relevant—or even decisive—vocation may carry the temptation to require of
children a kind of otherworldly “purity” or “spontaneity” they cannot and should
not possess. A sentimentalization of children distorts our vision of them; they
come to bear virtues and values serving, preferred, and protected by adults, and
which are selective of only some young people after all. For example, visions of
children’s beauty, tied both to their “purity” or “innocence” and to their desirability
as such, may give young people a market niche” for adults who buy their clothes
or enjoy their adorable cuteness in movies. Doing that, of course, commodifies
them, renders them predicates of adult desire immunized from self-criticism, and
generates questionable cultural understandings of “childhood” to which children
are to conform. Those who do not and cannot conform (and there will be these,
for these visions are particular and typically culturally dominant) are removed
from view, or, in some cases (e.g., those where youngsters commit terrible acts of
violence), are removed from the category of “children” altogether. That last self-
protective move may further immunize grown-ups from considering the general
social circumstances and conditions that do and do not support children’s lives,
and their responsibility for them.25
The appeal to the vocation to become and be a self, finally, can simply reiterate
and then advance all the difficulties we have just surveyed, whereupon adults who
make the appeal, as Natalia Ginzburg writes, ironically
cling to our children as a shipwrecked mariner clings to a tree trunk; we eagerly

demand that they give us back everything we have given them, that they be
absolutely and inescapably what we wish them to be, that they get out of life
everything we have missed; we end up asking them for all the things which can
only be given us by our own vocation; we want them to be entirely our creation,
as if having once created them we could continue to create them throughout their
24
Ibid., 106. More generally on the theme of the surveillance of the child, see Chris
Jenks, Childhood (London: Routledge, 1996), 73–80.
25
James R. Kincaid, Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting (Durham, NC,
and London: Duke University Press, 1998), 51–72, 111–64. I am indebted to Robert Orsi
for alerting me to the importance of Kincaid’s work. See also Henry A. Giroux, Stealing
Innocence: Youth, Corporate Power, and the Politics of Culture (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 2000), 1–64; Jenks, Childhood, 116–39.
whole lives. We want them to be entirely our creation, as if we were not dealing
with human beings but with products of the spirit.26
I realize that abuse of some moral or religious notion or practice does not bar
proper use, and that Christian theological traditions contain resources that resist
these corruptions. I rely on some of them, in fact, in the next section. It may
be true that the greatest good of the idea of the vocation of the child is to root
out the tendencies I have just described. Nevertheless, we should not rest in
these comforts; for the imposters of vocation ought not to be authorized by the
compliment of the title.
More importantly, there is the peril of self-deception in the way we conceive and
employ the idea that our children are summoned to some behavior or responsibility.
“Childhood” represents in manifold ways “the projections, aspirations, longings
and altruism contained within the adult experience;”27 hence our relation to it and
its “embodiments” inevitably prompt anxiety about our individual identities and
the identity of our social world. We are at risk of mistaking the embodiments of
childhood we need and want (as parents, people of faith, teachers, citizens, and
so on) for real children with their own needs and wants. To the extent that we
are conscientious moral actors, meaning to do right by children, the danger of
self-deception increases; we just must think of ourselves (vocationally!) as good
parents and such, and to that degree may resist all the more “spelling out” our
engagements with children. The persistent refusal fully to describe to ourselves
what it is we are doing for the sake of preserving our particular identity is a
hallmark of self-deception.28
A work of diagnosis and, following that, theological discrimination is therefore
in order. My diagnosis begins with James Kincaid’s proposal that a certain account
of children’s innocence opens a “hollow” space into which may speed a variety
of adult desires, fantasies, imaginings, and evasions.29 Consider, for example, the
evasions of the poet Billy Collins’s “History Teacher,” who, “trying to protect his
students’ innocence,” tells them that the Spanish Inquisition “was nothing more
than an outbreak of questions such as ‘How far is it from here to Madrid?’” Here
innocence “of the world” presents the child through vague ideals of generic goodness
that are unquestioned, closely guarded, and mistaken30. Significantly, the notion
seems for the most part simply to express what the child is not—not experienced,
26
Natalia Ginzburg, The Little Virtues (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1989), 109–
10, emphasis added.
27
Jenks, Childhood, 136.
28
Herbert Fingarette, Self-Deception (New York: Humanities Press, 1969); Stanley
Hauerwas and David Burrell, C.S.C., “Self-Deception and Autobiography: Theological
and Ethical Reflections on Speer’s Inside the Third Reich,” Journal of Religious Ethics 2
(Spring 1974): 99–117.
29
Kincaid, Erotic Innocence, 15–16, 53–54.
30
Billy Collins, Sailing Alone around the Room (New York: Random House, 2001), 38.
not corrupted, not able to fend for herself, not an adult. Innocence in this sense tends
to deny children any status other than their need to be protected as utterly vulnerable
and malleable creatures. So it renders them, in their own reality, absent.
“The discourse of innocence precludes children from having their own wants,
needs, and desires, and their own understandings of things different from what
adults propose for them … Ironically, the discourse of innocence puts children at
the greatest risk because the emptiness of innocence creates a space into which adult
desire can be projected.”31 If and when that “hollow” category is filled with content
specific to children, it may still, as I mentioned above, insidiously select and valorize
features and characteristics without regard to how they reflect matters of social
location and adult preference. Even a vision of children as naturally and ideally
“open” to the divine can rob them of their agency; their blessed privilege of being
an instance of “childhood” is purchased at the cost of their real being in the world.32
If one rejects this notion of innocence, one may still remain bound to its
consequences in a reflex flight to accounts of children’s fearful otherness, their
need, not now for consuming protection, but for adult control and order given
their unruliness and threatening disorder. No longer present (and therefore absent)
in their purity, children are made present (and therefore absent) in their depravity.
The Vocation of the Child
The task of theological discrimination has to do with critically describing the

vocation of the child in a manner that responds to and attempts to remove these
dangers. The description relies on comprehending how it is that children are, after
31
Robert A. Orsi, “A Crisis about the Theology of Children,” Harvard Divinity School
Bulletin 6 November 2007: http://www.hds.harvard.edu/news/bulletin/articles/orsi.html.
32
Robert Orsi argues that the modern era in Roman Catholic culture can well be
dubbed “the age of children,” and that in that age “childhood—or ‘childhood,’ meaning the
qualities presumed by adults to belong to children—became the model of adult faith.” Orsi,
Between Heaven and Earth, 79, 81. Although he clearly wants to avoid the consequence
of substituting “childhood“ for children, I sometimes think that some of what Hans Urs
von Balthasar says about children moves toward it. He writes, for example, that “the ways
of the child … open up an original dimension in which everything unfolds within the
bounds of the right, the true, the good … That zone or dimension in which the child lives
… reveals itself as a sphere of original wholeness and health, and it may be even said
to contain an element of holiness, since at first the child cannot yet distinguish between
parental and divine love.” Hans Urs von Balthasar, Unless You Become Like This Child
(San Francisco: Ignatius, 1991), 12. Karl Rahner’s identification of children’s “infinite
openness to the infinite” explicitly avoids appeals to “innocence” in “Ideas for a Theology
of Childhood,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 8 (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971),
33–51. For a fine study, see Mary Ann Hinsdale, “‘Infinite Openness to the Infinite’: Karl
Rahner’s Contribution to Modern Catholic Thought on the Child,” in Bunge, ed. The Child
in Christian Thought, 406–45.
all, summoned by God, and how their reality, which includes their independence
from the beings adults would make and take them to be, is recognized, protected,
and advanced. The idea is to envision relations in which caregivers may consent to
a child’s freedom for God, and in which the child may respond to the opportunities
for it in ways that are fittingly and creatively one’s own.
Corresponding to the four going senses of vocation I presented earlier—V2
through V5—I want to work out theological understandings of (a) the good son or
daughter, who (b) calling upon God as an eager learner of the life of faith in Jesus
Christ, (c) may step into freedom with a “youthful objectivity.” All of this serves
the purpose (d) of becoming and being a self in Christ, i.e., becoming and being
oneself as constituted by projects of committed self-giving to God and neighbor.
a. A child is summoned to be a good son or daughter, who is to honor mother and
father “in the Lord, for this is right.” The child’s vocation in this sense, however,
is not entailed simply by an act of subordination to one’s parents. Their authority
is based on their being witnesses to a divine measure, and with that a moral law,
to which they are subordinate as well.33 Consider Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio. The
wooden puppet in this famous tale is a sort of scoffer, which the book of Proverbs
defines as “the name of the proud, haughty man who acts with arrogant pride”
(21:24). He does not heed advice, presumes to have far more self-control than he
possesses in fact, and flies into rages when he does not get his way. But while a
scoffer does not listen to rebuke, “a wise son hears his father’s instruction” (Prov.
13:1), and Collodi’s narrative tells of the manner in which Pinocchio does so.
In contrast to the Disney feature, Pinocchio’s transformation is not based
on attaining a basically generic goodness, by being, shall we say, simply “brave
and honest and true.” He is brought to life by his good fairy mother as she says:
“Children who love their parents and help them when they are sick and poor, are
worthy of praise and love, even if they are not models of obedience and good
behavior.”34 So he becomes a real boy by being a good son, who honors more
general moral precepts regarding prudence, studiousness, hard work, and the
golden rule within the context of honoring his father and mother. The precepts
temper and orient his “good heart.” More to the point, the puppet’s transformation
involves a double movement. It happens as a consequence of the moral precepts
being ordered to and by filial piety, while, at the same time, the piety becomes
identified with adherence to the precepts themselves. Pinocchio serves and honors
his parents by doing what they taught him, now for them. He will, for instance,
give up two shillings for his mother as this reminds him of his father’s own
sacrifice of his coat for him. Filial piety is directed toward authorities who teach
a moral law that in a deep way authorizes them35 Conformity to it goes hand in
33
See my discussion in Chapter 5 on this theme.
34
Carlo Collodi, Pinocchio (New York and London: Puffin Books, 1974), 229.
35
“The Book of Proverbs, which can be read as a large-scale commentary on the fifth
commandment, is not in any sense an unspiritual book. In it we are not prescribed, ordered,
or commanded, but persuaded and advised and invited to make a personal trial and well-
hand with a proper ordering of the child-scoffer to the parent. The embodied act
of subordination appears to enable adherence to the law, while adherence to the
moral law relativizes the subordination.
There is, of course, a special responsibility to honor one’s very own mother
and father. But the divine commandment may attain its fullness of purpose as a
central moment in a history of learning to honor every human being, to sense the
“sacredness of the person who is its object.” Reverend John Ames, the protagonist
and voice of Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead, takes the Ten Commandments
in their sequence to retell the story of creation. Their injunctions “set apart,” for
the sake of right understanding, the Lord God, God’s Word, the seventh day, and
(fourth) “the Universal Father and Mother, the Lord’s dear Adam and His beloved
Eve.” The son and daughter begin and continue to perceive “essential humankind
as it came from [God’s] hand,” “from this setting apart of mother and father, who
usually labor and are heavy-laden, and may be cranky or stingy or ignorant or
overbearing.”36 Freedom opens out to broader forms of faithfulness that clarify
and also contain the claims parents may make on their children with reference to
their rightful place.
b. A child is called to learn by asking, inquiring, calling upon God and upon
those elders whose authority is grounded finally by their own vocation to bear
witness to a gracious God for the child in the manifold ways they can. To be
summoned to learn refers generally to the way that children of God are and always
will be, even when they are no longer “children,” needy beginners. A certain
sort of readiness is what matters in part. That is itself a discipline in attention
(which elders are duty bound to display and encourage) that would be free of self-
preoccupation, which waits on its subject, and that, as Simone Weil has shown,
is analogous to and preparatory for prayer in the love of God. Led by desire and
accomplished, when it is, in joy, our learning happens in beholding rather than in
controlling, through a patient readiness for the truth of the matter at hand, “setting
our hearts upon it, yet not allowing ourselves to go out in search of it.”37 As the
trajectory of honoring our mother and father may extend to heeding the beauty
of every human being, so the faculty of attention may make possible seeing the
neighbor in need rightly, “not only as a unit in a collection … but as a man, exactly
like us … This way of looking is first of all attentive. The soul empties itself
of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at,
just as he is, in all his truth.”38 Moreover, while attention, “directed toward God,
is the very substance of prayer,”39 it is also, when prayerfully directed toward
considered decision, and this always with an appeal to the court (‘Wisdom’) which stands
above the fatherly teacher and adviser.” III/4, 249.
36
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 138–39.
37
Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the
Love of God,” in Waiting for God (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), 63.
38
Ibid., 64–65.
39
Ibid., 58.
one’s life in relation with God, the substance of vocational discernment, which
“is yielding, not fighting … yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of
single necessity.”40 Freedom in this instance and others (for truth, for God and
neighbor) exists always in a becoming that waits and receives in the beginning that
is kenosis, self-emptying.
Children may readily learn the Christian faith in the manner and for the purpose
of their calling upon God for new life and nourishment. They are therefore to
comprehend, out of Scripture, tradition, ritual, and moral practice, the “Christian
story,” i.e., the identity of God in God’s history of grace in Jesus Christ. As
“beginners” in the faith, they may come to understand their place in that history as
God’s children, and in that sense, again, as never not beginners, never not in the
deepest need for divine guidance and tutelage. But as bearers of this faith these
“unproved pupils” may also be called out to call upon their Father over against the
pretensions of their caregiving elders to play the role of “tested masters.”41 They
may and should be welcomed to inquire about their faith and the way it is lived in
their midst. They should be encouraged to pose challenging, truthful questions that
could well stir up dust because they stir movements of repentance and conversion
in the Holy Spirit. “What distinguishes disciples is the ability to accept the radical
new beginning that is made with men, apart from any enterprise of their own, in the
gospel of the Father and the Son, in the Word of the cross. What distinguishes them
is the willingness to begin at this new beginning. Note that it is not to the outside
children of the world, to unbelieving Jews, proud Gentiles, idealists, materialists,
and atheists, but to Christians that all these things are said and applied; it is they
who obviously need to experience the call to begin again at this beginning and to
take the place they precisely are assigned as the children of God.”42
Without the revolutionary proviso that the place of children in the Christian
community can and must include its overtly or covertly calling to that community
to “start over” and anew in this or that dimension of the Christian life, the
proposal that “docility” or “obedience” or “vulnerability” or even “openness”
marks children’s fitness for the kingdom is dangerously misleading and faithless.
Nevertheless, with this qualification, we may say that in the life of the church
and other of their communities children may learn, and teach in their learning,
that we may be companions in joy, reconciled to God, as the creatures we are, in
Jesus Christ. It follows from our earlier discussion that this is a calling to see more
thoroughly how one may live in one’s interdependence as humbly, vigilantly, and
hopefully loyal to God.
c. Calling upon God marks a human need that is never satisfied; resting in our
need, we can make sense of the idea that the faithful may be “open” to divine grace.
40
Annie Dillard, “Living Like Weasels,” http://www.courses.vcu.edu/ENG200-lad/
dillard.htm
41
Karl Barth, The Christian Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1981), 81.
42
Ibid., 82.
For the wholly new thing that has come in Jesus is open only to those people who
are an adequate match, who are open to it, because they have nothing behind
them, because they are not stopped or blocked up against it by any intellectual,
moral, aesthetic, or religious a priori that they have brought with them, because
they are empty pages.43
Young people have a special opportunity for movement into the reality of God’s
world without the encumbrances of custom, habit, and an established past. Karl
Barth refers to this as a “youthful objectivity” that in “fruitful astonishment” may
hear God’s call removed from any loaded representations that subjectively burden
a human subject. One’s relative lack of experience removes one from the dangers
of being “traditionalistic, sophisticated, relativistic or skeptical … He should have
little cause to be seriously disillusioned, to be disappointed or even angry at far too
many of his fellows. He should not be the victim of boredom because everything
is so familiar. The thought of impotence in face of a blind fate should be far from
him.” There is a chance to step into freedom “with the serious aim of rivaling the
objectivity of those who are older.”44
In Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, nine-year-old Dill breaks into tears
over the prosecution’s cross-examination of the accused Tom Robinson. It is a
brutal and cruel line of questioning. Eight-year-old Scout, daughter of defending
attorney Atticus Finch, takes Dill out of the courtroom.
“It was just him I couldn’t stand,” Dill said.
“Who, Tom?”
“That old Mr. Gilmer doin’ him thataway, talking so hateful to him—”
“Dill, that’s his job …”
Ibid., 81. Cf. Rahner on “openness” in “Ideas,” esp. 42. The parallels are instructive.
43
III/4, 612, 609. Darlene Fozard Weaver alerts us to a danger in approaching this
44
account when she asks, in the face of all those “shoulds” in the passage above, what we
are to say about children whose “youthful objectivity” is damaged? Gilbert Meilaender has
raised a related concern with particular reference to the cruelty children can display. I do
not at all deny that there is such wounding and such cruelty, and I agree that things need
to be said about each that I cannot say in this limited space. I also note that, of course, the
proposal here falls to pieces if this special call to youthful objectivity (which in principle
applies to all) is made into a law that burdens or convicts, or that otherwise obscures or
evades the fact that this may be good news, a gracious call and opportunity. It cannot be
so, to take what may be a crude example, if we simply isolate a wounded youngster by
telling and expecting him or her (in one way or another) to “just lighten up.” It may be so,
in contrast, in the case of Maime Trotter’s (and, in time, Gilly Hopkins’s) regard for the
wounded William Ernest Teague. See my discussion of The Great Gilly Hopkins, below.
Dill exhaled patiently. “I know all that, Scout. It was the way he said it made me sick,
plain sick.”
“He’s supposed to act that way, Dill, he was cross—”
“He didn’t act that way when—”
“Dill, those were his own witnesses.”
“Well, Mr. Finch didn’t act that way to Mayella and old man Ewell when he cross-
examined them. The way that man called him ‘boy’ all the time and sneered at him,
an’ looked around at the jury every time he answered—”
“Well, Dill, after all he’s just a Negro.”
“I don’t care one speck. It ain’t right, somehow it ain’t right to do ’em that way. Hasn’t
anybody got any business talkin’ like that—it just makes me sick.”45
Dill’s response, in striking contrast to the “older and wiser” explanations of

the younger counselor’s child, displays a moral depth unencumbered by racist
habits and the experience of customary prosecutorial practices. It clearly is not
intrinsically “natural” to or automatic for children. Witness, again, Scout’s replies,
and add to that how that “evil man,” town drunk, and general object of ridicule,
Mr. Dolphus Raymond, concurs with Dill. This type of response is an opportunity
that it makes sense to highlight, given simply the understanding of childhood as
an early stage of living. Dill’s insight and judgment hardly rule out the importance
of an education in fairness and human decency; nevertheless, they get at a kind of
freedom or “openness” that childhood may permit, and that persons, at any stage
of life, ought never entirely to lose. Atticus Finch knows this, and his pointed
remark about Tom’s unjust conviction for the rape of Mayella Ewell brings this
knowledge to a point: “They’ve done it before and they did it tonight and they’ll
do it again and when they do it—seems that only children weep.”46
d. This particular sort of openness is for the sake of becoming a self, and
becoming a self calls for awareness that who one is may be rooted graciously
in projects of fidelity and service that are one’s own. “Projects are characterized
by some level of ongoing personal commitment;” and as vocations, they are
invitations to play a part in God’s love that are received as “commissions with
which one will be entrusted” and not just “an opportunity to do as one likes.”47
They are constitutive of who we are and ought to be by way of the goods we are
called ourselves to love.
45
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (New York: Popular Library, 1962), 201–202.
46
Ibid., 215.
47
Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods, 303–304.
A child, then, needs to be aware of worthy projects that are not merely
candidates for choice; they are gifts and tasks given to some and perhaps to
“me, myself;” for we “learn to be a self by acquiring, and learning to value,
the ongoing, self-referential projects of being a person of a certain kind and
living a life of a certain kind. And we learn this by being taught to value and
pursue such projects.”48 Thus a child ought to have teachers and exemplars of
integrity who make present the blessings and challenges of a life so gifted and
so bound. Atticus Finch is famously such an exemplar in the projects he assumes
as attorney, father, neighbor, and citizen. His care for his children addresses
them in intimacy and distance both, or with an intimate distance (Scout calls it
“courteous detachment”) that knows the importance of their reckoning, in their
own time, with his own wholeness, in which “he’s the same in the courtroom
as he is on the public streets,” and the same on the public streets as he is in his
own home. Interestingly, a proof of Atticus’s integrity and its parental power is
in his appearing to relinquish it for the sake of Boo Radley; for it is vindicated
by Scout’s observation that disclosing the truth about his killing Tom Ewell in
defense of the Finch children would be “like killing a mockingbird.” With that
remark and then later from Boo Radley’s porch, she proves that she has learned
well from her father the meaning of walking around in somebody else’s shoes.49
Being a self who finally sees others with compassionate respect50 includes the
courage to stand with and for others in its name, even when prospects are dim, and
children should learn that, too. They can learn it in surprising and unsuspected
ways. In anticipation of his own legal stand with and for Tom Robinson, Atticus
tries to teach it to his son Jem, but through the example of mean and miserable
Mrs. Dubose’s struggle to overcome her morphine addiction. “I wanted you to
see something about her—I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of
getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know
you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through
no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do. Mrs. DuBose won; all
ninety-eight pounds of her.”51
Katherine Paterson’s The Great Gilly Hopkins, a novel for children, offers a
good example of how a youngster’s vocation to become a self can incorporate the
kind of “engaged, individualizing discernment” that I named the “me, myself.”
Vulgar and manipulative, eleven-year-old Galadriel Hopkins has spent her life
moving from one foster home to another. Having dared to trust the false promises
of security that foster parents made when she was very young, she now prides
herself on being tough and in control, in order, as it were, to beat her caretakers to
the punch. She won’t be “had” again, and so she will not be kept. Having been used
48
Ibid., 312.
49
Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, 278–82.
50
See Margaret A. Farley, Compassionate Respect: A Feminist Approach to Medical
Ethics and Other Questions (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 2002).
51
Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, 116.
and disposed of, she is content angrily and self-protectively to use and dispose of
others. Gilly makes trouble wherever she goes, and has been in three homes in less
than three years. She also harbors a hopeful reverence for her biological mother,
who has written Gilly expressing timeless love and wishes for their reunion.
Paterson’s novel tells of Gilly’s last foster care stop, with the enormous, and
enormously loving, Maime Trotter; her shy, sweet, and scarred first-grade foster
son, William Ernest Teague; and their blind friend, neighbor, and standing dinner
companion, Mr. Randolph. Gilly resists entering into this poor, eccentric, and
thoroughly welcoming environment, but finds herself, in spite of herself, taken in
by Trotter’s fearless and cheerful nurturance of her and William Ernest. But then
again, no: the great Gilly Hopkins will not be taken in. While playing with William
Ernest and cheering on his talent in throwing paper kites, she hears Trotter softly
thank her. “For a moment Gilly looked at her, then quickly turned away as a person
turns from bright sunlight.” Then guiding Mr. Randolph home, she took “care not
to look back over her shoulder because the look on Trotter’s face was the one Gilly
had, in some deep part of her, longed to see all her life, but not from someone like
Trotter. That was not part of the plan.”52
The plan is to leave Trotter in Thompson Park, Maryland, catch a bus, and
travel to California to find her mother Courtney. Gilly tries to find her way to the
fare by robbing Mr. Randolph, and her failure to get enough money from that
source prompts her, enraged, to write a letter to Courtney with a plea to fetch her
from her awful, desperate situation. Later, she is able to filch Trotter’s welfare
check and heads out, only to be detained by police as she tries to buy a ticket at the
station. Trotter retrieves her from the police, and she and William Ernest make it
clear to one and all (including the foster care agency) that they will not give her up.
Returning to Thompson Park, Gilly works off her debt with housework and
tutoring William Ernest. Needed and wanted, she cares for her gang of three when
they all fall ill. But Gilly’s scurrilous letter brings her grandmother, at Courtney’s
request, to Thompson Park. Grandmother wants to take her to her home in Virginia,
permanently, and Gilly is horrified. She “never meant to hurt them … what had
she wanted? A home—but Trotter had tried to give her that. Permanence—Trotter
had wanted to give her that as well. No, what she wanted was something Trotter
had no power over. To stop being a ‘foster child,’ the quotation marks dragging
the phrase down, almost drowning it. To be real without any quotation marks. To
belong and to possess. To be herself, to be the swan, to be the ugly duckling no
longer … Galadriel Hopkins, come into her own.”53
Gilly moves to Virginia and, at first “for Trotter’s sake,” tries to take up life
with her grandmother “Nonnie” with patience and compassion. The two of them
eagerly await a visit from Courtney; but Gilly discovers within moments of their
airport reunion that her mother’s trip was exacted by Nonnie’s cash, that she has
52
Katherine Paterson, The Great Gilly Hopkins (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co.,
1978), 52.
53
Ibid., 124.
no intention to take her with her, and that she “had thrown away her whole life for
a stinking lie.” Excusing herself, she calls Trotter. Trotter tells her that as far as
the “dream of Courtney” is concerned, “you just fool yourself if you expect good
things all the time.” Gilly protests, “If life is so bad, how come you’re so happy?”
“Did I say bad? I said it was tough. Nothing to make you happy like doing good on a
tough job, now is there?”
“Trotter, stop preaching at me. I want to come home.”
“You’re home, baby. Your grandma is home.”
“I want to be with you and William Ernest and Mr. Randolph.”
“And leave her all alone? Could you do that?”
“Dammit, Trotter. Don’t try to make a stinking Christian out of me.”
“I wouldn’t try to make nothing out of you.” There was a quiet at the other end of
the line. “Me and William Ernest and Mr. Randolph kinda like you the way you are.”
Gilly Hopkins returns to her family. “‘Sorry to make you wait … I’m ready to go
home now.’ No clouds of glory, perhaps, but Trotter would be proud.”54
Gilly read aloud Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections
of Early Childhood” her first evening in Thompson Park, in unison with Mr.
Randolph. “But trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home,”
and “the music of the words rolled up and burst upon Gilly like waves upon a
beach.” Later she wondered, “was that God with the huge lap smelling of baby
powder? Or was that home?” However we or she might answer that question, it
is clear that Maime Trotter’s love for Gilly “without any quotation marks” helped
give her, herself, leave to lose them (any of them—including “Gilly the Great”)
and go home now. Here a real child is really seen in the real world she inhabits.
The child is thus empowered to discover herself her vocation to be herself, bravely
and generously, in the “project” of membership in her family (“Trotter would be
proud.”). No longer disposable and thus trapped in this or that “unity of a collection”
of “their” or her own choosing, Gilly Hopkins may come into her own.55
Ibid., 148.
54
Cf. Katherine Paterson, “Are You There, God?” Harvard Divinity School Bulletin
55
(Spring 2005), 50–58.

Conclusion
Being a good son or daughter in the Lord, learning as a needy beginner in attentive
inquiry, and “being a child” in youthful objectivity are all ordered to becoming
and being a self that is constituted by projects fit for disciples of Jesus Christ.
Recalling the passage from Merton above, we should note that baptism is itself
an individualizing act.56 Caught up in their self-identifying relation with God,
children may be themselves as they are summoned to their particular history in
hope and reconciliation.
We could see this conclusion as one more instance of lack or absence. The
child who is not (yet) a self is called to become one, and just so subject to all
our ventures on her behalf.57 Adults have to take this possibility with great
seriousness. Yet must we view matters in this way? In the first place, if we adults
have a vocation that we have lived and served, we may be better able “to keep
all sense of ownership out of our love for our children.” Then we “can let them
develop quietly and away from us, surrounded by the shadows and space that
the development of a vocation needs.”58 Second, we can and should apprehend
a child’s vocation, articulated in these ways, as being now what it always is: an
engaged, individualizing discernment of who one is really, in belonging to God,
and in ready movement to one’s own selfhood from one’s grateful and trusting
readiness for it. This movement, we can finally say now if not sooner, marks the
eternal dignity of the human creature, “who must become a child … who only
becomes a sharer in God’s interior life in that [one] becomes that child which [one]
only begins to be in [one’s] own childhood.”59
56
Cf. Gilbert Meilaender, Letters to Ellen (Grand Rapid, MI: Eerdrmans, 1996), 32.
57
Cf. Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods, 312.
58
Ginzburg. The Little Virtues, 109–110.
59
Rahner, “Ideas,” 50.
Chapter 7
Love of God and the Moral Meaning of Joy
Christian faith holds God to be our highest good. The work of Christian theological
ethics includes the effort to chart, illumine, and criticize various relations between
the love of God, self-love, and the love of neighbor.1 I intend to contribute to this
effort through an analysis of the affection of joy and the dispositions or virtues
that enable us to feel joy, and particularly joy in God, well. From that point I
propose the way in which these virtues can offer a basis for an account of personal
integrity in the Christian life. This is a good way, I think, to show how the love
of God and right self-love are linked.2 The excellences enabling joy also have
noteworthy implications for the meaning of Christian neighbor love, and these
will be addressed at chapter’s end.
Four specific connections make my inquiry possible and reasonable. One
concerns the virtues and human emotions. The latter involve both cognitive and
behavioral features, matters of belief (about, say, what sorts of things count as
threats to my good) and activity (regarding, for instance, a characteristic movement
of flight from what threatens). This fact suggests the way in which habitual
dispositions for the good, or virtues, may afford “the power to have and to avoid
certain emotions, the ability to discriminate in what one feels.”3 One becomes in
the course of one’s life a person liable to be affected in various ways, and life is
good insofar as one is well disposed to be properly affected. The courageous man
or woman is one “who is frightened by the right things, in the right way, in the
right circumstances, and so on, and who is not frightened when it is appropriate
not to be.” Although one may have no direct control over one’s feelings, one
does have control “over the activities that establish the dispositions, the virtues,
which are the source of our feeling in appropriate ways at appropriate times and
in appropriate circumstances.”4 So it would be, even with significant theological
qualifications, with virtues such as love (of God, self, and neighbor), gratitude,
hope, patience, humility, and the feeling of joy.
1
Cf. Gene Outka, “Universal Love and Impartiality,” in The Love Commandments,
ed. Edmund N. Santurri and William Werpehowski (Washington, DC: Georgetown
University Press, 1992), 2–3.
2
Darlene Fozard Weaver, Christian Ethics and Self-Love (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), 91–92.
3
L. A. Kosman, “Being Properly Affected: Virtues and Feelings in Aristotle’s Ethics,”
in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1980), 101.
4
Ibid., 108, 112.
Another connection has to do with joy and proper self-love before God. We
might say that a person’s search for his or her good or final end finds its completion
in a happy life, where the “happy life is joy born of the truth.” Servais Pinckaers
takes this Augustinian definition of happiness to be essential for the renewal of
moral theology, and we can say that an aspect of this renewal is to explore more
directly how the self’s pursuit of its well-being is rooted in a spiritual yearning for
the truth, goodness, and beauty in which we may rejoice.5 There is, moreover, a kind
of informal but palpable correspondence between genuine joy and clarity of vision.
Joylessness, both as a vice and a mood, is dark and dreary. We can imagine that the
eyes of one so disposed turn downward or are otherwise unseeing as they are lost in
gloomy anxiety, acquisitiveness, or untempered sorrow. There is also an excessive,
blinding jubilation or static repose that overshoots the mark and reflects a mistaken
or disordered estimation of what fulfills us. Here, if you will, the eyes stare too
fixedly, or close, or close in on a “rest” which finally offers no peace. Proper joy
implies seeing the world and one’s good within it objectively, unobscured by self-
preoccupation or distracting allurements. In addition to these mediations of self-
love and joy in the self’s happiness and sharp vision, Alasdair McFadyen describes
a third that stresses a form of individuality. Joy is “expressive of and constitutive
for personal identity and integrity.” “Intensely particularizing,” our joys make up
our personhood: “It is our life which lives from our enjoyment; it is our life which is
given shape by such joy: the things we most desire and enjoy become foundational
for our being-in-the-world.” But individuality emerges from dependence in this
case. “That I may have joy in that on which I depend indicates that I live my own
life in relation to this reality; indeed, in relation to this dependence my joy marks
out a kind of independence or, better, personal integrity of living.”6
The third linkage involves our moral life with others, our neighbors. Pinckaers
notes joy’s compatibility with moral excellence in its being a sign of this excellence
that also contributes to its perfection. It refines and orders pleasure, is born of
trials, and “grows by being shared” with others. His line of thought highlights
how it is that the relation between the virtues and the affection of joy moves in
both directions from one to the other. We affirm that the virtues enable with regard
to this affection, as with others, skills of discrimination in what one feels. But it
is also true that joy is a “sign of virtue’s authenticity,” “the effect in us of truth
understood and goodness loved.”7
The truth understood and the goodness loved, in and beyond the moral life,
is none other than the God in whom we may rejoice. Thus, and fourth, joy issues
from and expresses the love of God. We shout with joy to the Rock who saves us
(Ps. 95), we rejoice in the shadow of the Lord’s wings (Ps. 63), we pray out of our
5
Servais Pinckaers, Morality: The Catholic View (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s
Press, 2001), 77–81.
6
Alasdair McFadyen, Bound to Sin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000),
212–13.
7
Pinckaers, Morality, 78.
Love of God and the Moral Meaning of Joy 107
need that God give joy to us as we lift up our souls to Him (Ps. 86), we hear the
divine Word so that joy may be in us completely (John 15:11). It is “astonishing
… how many references there are in the Old and New Testaments to delight,
joy, bliss, exultation, merry-making and rejoicing, and how emphatically these
are demanded from the Book of Psalms to the Epistle to the Philippians.”8 We
need not tarry over the preliminary case. What follows intends to advance our
understanding of these points of contact.
Karl Barth and Joy
In this and the following section, I discuss three approaches to joy that correspond,
respectively, to a human being’s status as creature, redeemed sinner, and promised
sharer in eternal life.
Karl Barth represents the first approach. Correcting his early protest against the
idea that persons can authentically love God, Barth in the Church Dogmatics not
only acknowledges this gracious (and miraculous) possibility, but also explicitly
rejects any ethico-religious “Puritanism” that collapses love into obedience or
service to our neighbor.9 He calls instead for risking a certain “religious eroticism”
rather than leave a zone of silence about the matter. “As truly as God loves us we
may love him in return. It is quite incomprehensible, but we may do it. Let us
therefore do it.”10
Barth’s commendation is chastened. There is no danger of confusing him with
the “mystics, pietists, and romantics” he railed against in his Romans commentary.
Nevertheless, his remains a distinctive position in which the human creature’s love
of God is closely related to gratitude, trust, and hope, and which manifests in this
relation joy and the will to be joyful. We can begin to comprehend this position
by seeing how it is grounded in the divine command to rest on the Sabbath—what
Barth calls “a true day of joy.”11 The day sets a limit to human striving and allows
a human action consisting in rest from one’s works and readiness for the Gospel.
“Thus it points [the human creature] away from everything that he himself can will
and achieve and back to what God is for him and will do for him.”12 The Sabbath
command permits a “renouncing faith” that frees persons from all that they believe
they can think and will and achieve so that they may celebrate a time without
compulsion and steeped in joy in God. A dimension of this activity—one which, by
the way, gives up on the impossible project of trying to be joyful—is an openness to
fellowship with others. Another is prayer. Like the Sabbath itself, prayer should be
“free from all care,” and “in the supreme sense to pray is to observe a Sabbath rest
8
III/4, 375.
9
IV/2, 795.
10
Ibid., 791.
11
III/4, 69.
12
Ibid., 53.
from all one’s cares, even the best.”13 As prayer is hardly limited to the Sabbath day,
so the Sabbath rest is not exclusively restricted to the specific day but “must radiate
from it to the week-day … and therefore there must also stream from it the joy and
openness for others without which the week-day is not really thinkable.”14 On the
working day one may simultaneously “grasp completely and let go completely,”
meeting duties with renouncing faith absent anxiety.
An application of the command to observe the Holy Day, then, is that the
human creature may live a life that wills and is ready for joy. Barth’s treatment
sets a pattern, already noted, which distinguishes “movement” (worldly striving,
limits, cares, planning) and “rest.” We will the latter and dispose ourselves to it
(without trying) in the former.
Our starting point is that life is movement in time—the movement of continual

striving and desire for small or great ends, for new and distant goals, as guided
by specific ideas, wishes, relationships, obligations, and hopes. Joy is one of
the forms in which this movement is arrested for a moment or a few moments,
not on its objective but on its subjective side, in the awareness in which man
experiences himself in the fulfillment of this movement … 15
Neither quiet resignation nor serene satisfaction in one’s existence and its
circumstances, the “inner arrest” of joy involves some large or little fulfillment of
desires and strivings, when life as movement in time gives one “no more trouble
but presents and offers itself as a gift, and indeed as a gift of that which he has
conceived of, or at least grasped after or dreamed of, as genuine life.” The “simplest
form of gratitude,” joy stills or quiets time, and the joyful creature desires only the
duration of this fulfillment “of life in the form of a gift, and therefore of the joyful
moment.” Its perfection, needless to say, is “eternal joy and felicity in perfect
fellowship with God.”16
Most joy is anticipatory in that the affection may be present in our welcoming
readiness for fulfillment. Even the fulfillments themselves quickly turn this way.
In contrast to a slothful busyness or a despondent overseriousness that closes
ourselves to joy, readiness (which, again, is a form of joy in anticipation) is “to
look out for opportunities for gratitude” in confidence that life will reveal itself as
a divine gift.17 Necessary discriminations are crucial: Barth writes of “the hope for
a receiving” and opposes to it the “covetous glance at a grasping.” Our readiness
cannot be a making or planning for joy, which by the Holy Spirit comes and is
13
Ibid., 88.
14
Ibid., 71.
15
Ibid., 376.
16
Ibid.
17
Ibid., 378.
present as it lists. It cannot be induced by any labor at all, as “fulfillments” so

projected turn out to be but “restless confirmations of life as toil and striving.”18
Barth gives five other “criteria” for genuine joy in addition to proper readiness.
It is a social matter; joy may be shared with and communicated to others. It also
possesses a sovereignty from any particular expression; creatures “are capable
of manifold joys,” including the smallest, and whether their source be material,
aesthetic, natural, social, or vocational. We would be “simply grateful for what
comes and for the way it comes,” rejecting any exclusiveness or totalitarian
temptation. A third criterion is that the inner arrest of joy is “an intensification,
strengthening, deepening, and elevation of the whole awareness of life which
as such is necessarily more than joy.”19 “Constant sunshine … is not desirable.”
Refreshing, encouraging, and consoling us, our joy may not be had at the cost of
our health or work or our fellows or, ultimately, our conscience. Still another test is
that we stand, ready and persevering before God, to be taught what really affords
us joy. Barth gives this alert perseverance a Christological basis with the reminder
that “the true test of our joy is that we do not evade the shadow of the cross of
Jesus Christ and are not unwilling to be genuinely joyful even as we bear the
sorrows laid upon us. It is a matter not of resignation but the continuation of joy
even in sorrow.”20 Last, joy is provisional. It points away, beyond itself, to eternal
joy and felicity in God, and expresses trust and hope in God as the gracious source
of every good thing. Note that the last four measures of authentic joy appear to
warn against a kind of “excess.” “Too much” joy has to do with its being fixed on
a single kind or measured magnitude, with too soaring a flight from the persisting
responsibilities and limits of life including its sorrows, burdens, and suffering, or
with confusing a provisional fulfillment with our final end. Running in parallel, the
account locates in the failure to be ready for a joy a “defect,” a “too little.”
To summarize, Karl Barth interprets joy to be an affection and experience that
ought to determine the life act of the human creature before God. It is opposed on
one side to a dismal, anxious cheerlessness, and on the other to an irresponsible
repose or an inattentive, scurrying from creaturely limits and possibilities. It is the
fruit of gratitude as that virtue is ordered to the inescapable love and desire for
God, to trust in divine graciousness, and to hope for the eternal future yet gifting
in every present. We could say that gratitude thus conceived hits the mark between
the vices of joylessness and what I will call disordered exultancy. The one vice
fails to look out for opportunities for gratitude because gracious gifts are neither
understood nor sought. The other takes in what is given but grasps, or holds too
hard, without treasuring. The root of both vices, it seems, is unbelief, a failure to
trust and hope in the grace for which we may be thankful, and in its Giver whom
we may gratefully love.
18
Ibid., 379.
19
Ibid., 382.
20
Ibid., 383.
More Approaches
The second approach considers the human subject as a redeemed sinner. It relies
on themes present in Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love. The book is,
among other things, a portrayal of meeting between the author and Jesus Christ
in his Passion in which she is shown how she and all other sinful creatures are in
fact God’s love and delight. “God wishes us to take true pleasure with him in our
salvation, and in this he wishes us to be greatly comforted and strengthened, and so
he wants our souls to be happily filled with this, through his grace; for we are his
delight, he takes pleasure in us eternally, and so we in him, through his grace.”21
One’s “heart could be ravished,” one could be beside oneself with joy at the great
divine friendliness. In the course of her insights and reflections on them, Julian
considers joy in several ways we have already noted. It is a sort of peaceful rest. It is
related to gratitude for God’s gifts, and for the generous giver “who thinks nothing
of all his hardship and the price he had to pay, because of the joy and delight that
he feels at having pleased and comforted the one he loves.” Julian also is alert to
the significance of prayer as “a true understanding of that fullness of joy which is to
come, with sure trust and great longing for it.”22 But there are particular themes in
Julian that help further articulate love for God and its mark in joy.
Her conception of the relation between God and humanity characteristically
appears in images of enclosure.23 God is “our clothing, wrapping us for love,
embracing and enclosing us for tender love so that he can never leave us, being
himself everything that is good for us.” Julian locates this idea directly to the
goodness of creation and the ongoing work of its maker in loving and caring for
it. Again, God
has enclosed us in himself … for as the body is clad in the cloth, and the flesh in
the skin, and the bones in the flesh, and the heart in the chest, so are we, soul and
body, clad in the goodness of God and enclosed in it; yes, and more inwardly,
because all these may waste and wear away, but God’s goodness is always
strong, and incomparably near to us; for truly our loving God wants our souls to
cling to him with all their might, and wants us to cling to his goodness for ever.24
This text extends the enclosure theme from creation to incarnation in light of
Julian’s reading of the revelation of a parable of a lord who has a servant. The lord
lovingly sends the servant off to do his will, and in response “the servant does not
just walk, but leaps forward and runs in great haste, in loving anxiety to do the
21
Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (London: Penguin, 1998), 74.
22
Ibid., 51, 63, 75, 102.
23
For development of this theme as crucial to the fourteenth century anchoress
Julian’s “anchoritic” theology, see Denys Turner’s splendid study, Julian of Norwich,
Theologian (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 197–202.
24
Ibid., 47, 49; cf. 112, 130.
lord’s will. And he falls immediately into a slough and is very badly hurt.” Unable
to help himself in any way, the servant suffers mightily, relies too much on his
senses, can no longer see his lord, and is so stunned and blinded that he very nearly
forgets his love for the lord.25 But the lord continues to love his servant, in whom
we see Adam, and provides a noble remedy in which both lord and servant may
rejoice. “When Adam fell, God’s son fell … Adam fell from life to death into the
valley of this wretched world, and after that into hell. God’s son fell with Adam
into the valley of the Virgin’s womb (and she was the fairest daughter of Adam)
in order to free Adam from guilt in heaven and earth; and with his great power
he fetched him out of hell.”26 My summary of this parable and commentary is far
too selective and condensed, and surely a host of important questions are tied up
with Julian’s theology that I cannot take up here (e.g., what do we make of sin’s
specific emergence, such that the lord, viewing the suffering servant grievously,
finds no fault in him for the original fall?).27 My one point is that this identification
of God incarnate and Adam in the parable effectively encloses, clads, covers over,
protects Adam’s fall with the loving goodness of God for the sake of humanity’s
sharing in God’s goodness and love.
The decisive image of God’s enclosing love as it refers to the joy of saved
sinners is in Julian’s tenth revelation. In order to proceed to it, we should first step
back. Julian receives her revelations out of a wish to know God, and specifically
Jesus Christ in his Passion. She asks for God to give her three “wounds”: contrition,
compassion, especially for the sufferings of Christ, and an earnest longing for
God. She understands that seeking to behold God is pleasing to God, and that
“God himself will teach how a soul may behold him, and that most honors and
benefits you, leading you to receive the greatest humility and strength by means of
the grace and guidance of the Holy Ghost.”28
Here is how God teaches a soul. Out of contrition for one’s blindness to and
forgetfulness of God, and out of compassion for the Lord’s unsurpassed suffering
in his Passion, Julian expects in her vision of Christ to see him draw his last
breath; but then his “blessed expression” changes. “The changing of his blessed
expression changed mine, and I was as glad and happy as it was possible to be.
Then my Lord made me think happily, “Where is there now one jot of your pain or
your sorrow?” She sees that we are now dying with Christ on his cross in our pain
and passion, that our falling from him does not prevent him from loving us, and
that the sorrow and suffering that accompany our blindness and forgetfulness will
give way to our eternal happiness.29
25
Ibid., 115–16.
26
Ibid., 121.
27
See Turner for a thorough and largely persuasive response to these questions, 103–134.
28
Ibid., 57.
29
Ibid., 71.
Our Lord takes tender care of us when we feel that we are almost forsaken and
cast away because of our sin and because we have deserved it. And because of
the humility which we gain through this, we are raised by God’s grace right up
high in his sight, with great contrition, with compassion and with a true longing
for God. Then we are immediately freed from sin and suffering and taken up
into bliss and even made exalted saints. By contrition we are made pure, by
compassion we are made ready and by true longing for God we are made worthy.
As I understand it, these three are the means by which all souls come to heaven
… for every soul needs to be healed by these medicines.30
The wounds that Julian requests promise to heal. Our contrition, by the touch of
the Holy Ghost, replaces our bitter misery with prayers in humble hope for divine
mercy.31 Our compassion readies us not for despair and death, but for a freedom
from sin and suffering even in their midst, in identification with the Passion of
Jesus Christ. Our longing for God follows in virtue of a transformed attention to or
beholding of the Lord who on his cross “thirsts” “to have us all together, wholly in
himself for his delight,” and to bring us to the fullness of joy. And this is a longing
that conforms to his own for us, in accord with the will of the Father.32
Against this background, the image of enclosure works to make sense of the
joy we may know as redeemed sinners. Thus the tenth revelation:
Then, with a glad face, our Lord looked into his side, and gazed, rejoicing; and
with his dear gaze he led his creature’s understanding through the same wound
into his side. And then he revealed a beautiful and delightful place which was
large enough for all mankind to rest there in peace and love … And in this clear
vision he showed his sacred heart quite riven in two … And with this our good
Lord said most blessedly, “Look how much I loved you”; as if he had said, “My
darling, look and see your Lord, your God, who is your maker and your eternal
joy. See what pleasure and delight I take in your salvation, and for my love
rejoice with me now.”33
Joy answers to the gracious fact that our wounds, our suffering, our sins, are joined
with, enclosed in, and contained by the wounds of Christ. Those wounds now
cover and protect ours and us, keeping us safe, and marking us so that even in
our self-accusation we reckon our failure and the divine love both together.34 The
30
Ibid., 95–96.
31
Ibid., 95, 97.
32
Ibid., 83, 84, 97, 122. Cf. the strong discussion in Grace Jantzen, Julian of Norwich:
Mystic and Theologian, New Edition (New York: Paulist Press, 2000), 53–73, 203–19.
33
Julian of Norwich, Revelations, 76.
34
Ibid., 127.
wounds of our sin and suffering, indeed, will be turned to honors as they may give
rise to the healing wounds of contrition, compassion and longing for God.35
Julian develops this idea of joy in an application of the tenth revelation to her
identification of Jesus as our mother. “The mother can lay the child tenderly to
her breast, but our tender mother Jesus, he can familiarly lead us into his blessed
breast through his sweet open side, and show within part of the Godhead and the
joys of heaven, with spiritual certainty of endless bliss.”36 So although this place is
a prison and this life a penance, our mother Jesus wishes us to find true joy in the
remedy, who is our Lord with us, wrapping us up and covering our wounds with
his in his love and delight for us, “protecting us and leading us into the fullness of
joy; for it is an endless joy to us … that he who will be our bliss when we are there
is our protector while we are here.”37
Joy is the reception of and response to the arresting presence of one’s fulfillment
in the sanctuary of divine comfort, protection, safe harbor. Rejoicing, the sinner
who loves God is set on her way with the assurance that all shall be well. Her
doubtful fear about God’s love and her impatience with her own sufferings are
met with the patience exhibited in the Passion and the divine love and delight in
us which made that possible. Thus the love of God which disposes one to joy is
love de-centered from the self and its blind ignorance of God’s all-encompassing
goodness. It responds to the divine pleasure in us, sinners all, with reverent fear and
the sure trust. It longs, in the midst of continuing suffering, sorrow, and failure, to
please God precisely by rejoicing in the joy at our salvation that is present within
the Holy Trinity.38
In Christian vision, the human subject is not only a creature of God whose sin
and suffering are redeemed in Jesus Christ. She is also an intended companion
in beatitude, a promised sharer in eternal life. For Thomas Aquinas this third
designation has much to do the good of charity or friendship with God, and his
account of joy in that connection may be instructively compared with what we
have just found in Julian. Generally, joy is a specific form of delight peculiar
to rational animals, and is accredited according to reason properly ordered.39
Delights may apply more broadly to irrational animals, and certain of our delights
may not make for our rejoicing. Thomas also takes joy (and delight) to be “not in
time,” where time is construed as pertaining to succession or movement. So joy
“regards good already gained which is, as it were, the term of movement.”40 It is
to desire as rest is to movement.41 Our spiritual joy is an effect of charity, marking
35
Jantzen, Julian of Norwich, 167–202.
36
37
Ibid., 168–69.
38
Ibid., 131, 161–64.
39
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, trans. by Fathers of the English Dominican
Province (New York: Benziger Bros., 1948), I–II, q. 31, a. 3.
40
Ibid., I–II, q. 31, a. 2.
41
Ibid., II–II, q. 28, a. 3.
fulfillment in loving friendship with God; in that eternal completion desire will
be fully at rest. In this mortal life, joy proceeds from hope as well as from charity
“whereby we look forward to enjoy the Divine Good, although the enjoyment
itself, whether perfect or imperfect, is obtained according to the measure of one’s
charity.”42 While joy, as it is proper to charity, is not compatible with an admixture
of sorrow, in our worldly participation in the joy of charity we may and do grieve
over what hinders our participation in the divine good. In any case, charity renders
us capable of and effects joy just as the former is a kind of spiritual union which
is the sharing of a life, i.e., a real participation in the divine good and the divine
happiness graciously communicated to us. These themes may resonate with our
previous analysis, and the last with particular reference to Julian’s discussion of
joy rooted in God’s rejoicing in our redeemed communion with God.
But there seems to be a difference insofar as for Thomas the communication
of the divine happiness is not just “soteriological” in the sense of God’s delight
over the sinner’s salvation. It is a happiness constitutive of the very being and life
of God. It is being taken up into the love between the Father and the Son, into that
happiness and just so that joy. Herbert McCabe puts it this way.
Jesus says to his faithful disciples: “I have said these things to you so that my joy
may be in you, and that your joy may be complete” (John 15:11). The joy Jesus
refers to here is not just the human reassurance, that all things will be well, that
the suffering and death of Christ will be life-giving for the whole world, a joy in
the fulfillment of God’s loving design for humankind, the joy that comes from
hearing the word of the gospel. No, not just that: this joy is the eternal joy which
is the Holy Spirit, the joy that God has; not just his joy in loving us but the joy
he has in being God. That’s what we share.43
United in friendship with God in Christ, our happiness is sheer grace, and “we are
ourselves only as we incorporate what is God’s very own within ourselves; our
acts are perfected only as we act along with and under the direction of God, whose
powers become a kind of principle of our own, now compound operation, through
the gift of Christ’s Spirit.”44
Joy and Well-Being
My study allows for a number of ways to construe proper self-love before God.
One could attend to the unity of the virtues as making for a character that, in its love
of God, displays dispositions of trust, hope, gratitude, courage, and humility in the
42
Ibid., II–II, q. 28, a. 1 ad. 3.
43
Herbert McCabe, O.P., God, Christ, and Us (London: Continuum, 2003), 51–52.
44
Kathryn Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress
Press, 2001), 92–93.
joyful pursuit of personal well-being. A description of that pursuit may include

discriminating between such a life and one more characterized by vices of excess
and deficiency, joylessness and delighting too much. Another possible route could
be to take up in more detail how the self’s happiness may be reconciled with the
moral life, such that one’s integrity may come at the cost of genuine human goods
but not at the cost of joy. Self-affirmation would involve acknowledging and
accepting these costs for the sake of one’s final end, and hence for one’s own sake.
Let me try a third angle. It places in the foreground how it is that joy, as a
kind of rest or stilling of labor or term of desire, is both crystallized in human
experience, on the one hand, and an enduring and defining constituent of a good
human life, on the other. We see this in Barth’s identifying joy in those moments of
inner arrest received but not grasped, while also prescribing a will for joy even in
sorrow’s midst. There is also the appeal to the Sabbath rest that is authenticated by
its continuing presence in the working day. Julian’s insights into the love of God
appear located in the redeemed sinner’s awareness that he or she is forever at risk of
falling away from God in blindness, impatience, or slothful despair. Encompassing
divine love may in those moments comfort and encourage us, and we will find
joy therein. We are not told we will not be troubled, but only that we will not be
overcome. Just so, however, this life is a profitable penance45 in which we may
proceed with the Lord protecting and leading us into the fullness of joy. “Our way
and our heaven are true love and sure trust.”46 Thomas Aquinas is clear about joy
realized “not in time” but still sustained according to the measure of one’s charity.
We love ourselves truly before God, then, as the individuals we are, in knitting
together from our experiences of and hope for joy a sanctified and therefore joyful
life through practices of prayer, confession, worship, service, and praise. Caught
up in those moments of joy from which we live, we reach to receive an enduring
joyfulness in which we may live with all our sorrows and burdens. Joyfulness is an
effect of our love of God and hence also of trust, hope, and gratitude. It demands
a humble sense of our need and brokenness and creaturely possibility as that sense
is itself expressed and nourished in practices that refer us in all of our relations
to God. Neither joyless self-withholding nor self-absorbed exultancy (in which
we still throw ourselves away) honors our embodied creatureliness, our saving
consolation, or our intended union.
A poem by Robert Frost with the unwieldy title, “Happiness Makes Up in Height
What It Lacks in Length,” begins, if only so, to approach this theological idea.
Oh, stormy stormy world,

The days you were not swirled
Around with mist and cloud,
Or wrapped as in a shroud,
And the sun’s brilliant ball
45
46
Ibid., 168.
Was not in part or all

Obscured from mortal view—
Were days so very few
I can but wonder whence
I get the lasting sense
Of so much warmth and light.
If my mistrust is right
It may be altogether
From one day’s perfect weather,
When starting clear at dawn,
The day swept clearly on
To finish clear at eve.
I verily believe
My fair impression
Be all from that one day
No shadow crossed but ours
As through its blazing flowers
We went from house to wood
For change of solitude.47
Despite a misty darkness that seems the rule, we find in the poet a lasting sense
of warmth and light emerging from a day of clear and perfect brightness that is
received in a turn from one’s own house to the wood “for change of solitude.”
Companions move out from a solitude of self-enclosure to another sort of solitude
that orients them to a larger reality. There is no knitting together here; one past
event suffices, and hence there is no set of practices employed for receiving and
extending that enduring sense of warmth and light. And there seems to be no
(eschatological) warmth and light ahead of us, for which we wait in joyful hope,
to help us bind time. Still and all, I read this poem to indicate the presence of
enduring joy from its arresting crystallization, received and kept through an act
of welcoming, attentive, self-disposal. And I am saying that living out and in and
toward our own well-being in integrity is living out of and in and toward joy in
God, trustingly projected but not and never our project.
Joy and Neighbor Love
Finally, what is the significance of my three versions of joy for the way we love
our neighbors?
First, the trust that life will reveal itself as God’s gift applies to our lives
with our fellow human creatures. Gratitude and alertness to opportunities for it
47
The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Edward C. Lathem (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin,
1969), 333.
in readiness for joy apply here, too. Our neighbors may be welcomed in their
otherness, and our responses to them may anticipate grateful wonder and surprise
instead of presupposing some essential threat to our well-being. Joy’s objectivity
permits seeing one’s neighbor in his or her individuality, given possibility, and
creaturely dependence. Receiving and not covetously grasping at the beloved, we
may attain a kind and cheerful attention unclouded by troubled anxiety. There is
more to this matter, however, than welcoming otherness with generous attention.
Our neighbor should not fearfully or joylessly be ignored or held at arm’s length;
but neither ought she to be enthusiastically consumed or burdened with a clinging,
exclusive solicitude. Neighbor love also must be just, not blind, regarding failures
and limits, and it should persevere in regarding others’ well-being through their
and our inescapable sadness.
Second, a trusting love that rejoices in God’s delight in us while we are
yet sinners may prompt or elicit a stance of solidarity with neighbors in their
suffering. They share with us a need and desire for a resting place that consoles
and gives peace. Love seeks to comfort, refresh, and encourage others with deeds
that make present God’s enclosing goodness, and to join with them humbly and
self-critically. As impatience with suffering and slothful despair afflict the moral
agent, so too with the moral patient; since patience may emerge in joyful hope as
it depends on the love of God in God’s suffering love, so may we inspire hope in
one another through self-giving service.
Third, our joy as intended friends or partners or sharers in eternal life with God
spills over into a love desiring communion with our neighbors. We will not just
see the other as God’s good creation and gift in which our well-being is implicated.
We seek not only to take and share responsibility in acts that enable us to rest a
while together in our suffering. We would also desire what Kathryn Tanner calls
a community of mutual fulfillment. Its fundamental meaning is that “in every
case, ideally, persons sharing their gifts with others benefit in community from
the effects of those gifts’ employment.”48 We would be one another’s own only
in virtue of each giving to the other. Others “‘own’ you, you are theirs, only as
they give to you for your own good, only as they make you the recipients of their
loving concern, not in virtue of powers to restrict you, take from you, or do with
you as they will.”49 Having received gifts is the condition of our giving to others,
and the “giving up” to others from those resources is an enrichment rather than
impoverishing.
Acts of open seeing, service that offers hope, and self-giving for mutuality are
rooted in the love of God through practices of prayer, confession, and Eucharist.
Out of prayer’s “renouncing faith,” thanksgiving, and unanxious but needy
petition, we may learn to view ourselves and others really and soberly, but really
with joyous objectivity that anticipates fellowship with the neighbor. Julian’s
conception of confession as “humble self-accusation” in which we acknowledge
48
Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity, 92.
49
Ibid., 93.
both that “we can never make it good” and that God’s merciful love is abundant
and everlasting50 may tutor us to take up common cause modestly, critically, and
rejoicing in the peace we share. As for Eucharist, consider again Tanner: “We can
only give back gifts received. All our gifts to God take on the character of then
of Eucharist offerings; we offer up to God the bread and wine that are already
God’s gifts to us as creator, empowered to do so by the gifts already received by
humanity in Christ.”51 A community of mutual fulfillment follows this pattern, as it
also invites us festively to nourish one another, to incorporate into our very being
the gifts we receive and then offer them in and from the founding love of Christ.

50
Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity, 85.

51
Chapter 8
Hiddenness, Disclosure, and the Reality of
God: The Practice of Truth Telling
The Problem
The idea of truth telling is as commonplace as it is complicated. That we ought

to tell the truth is one of the first injunctions we learn as children, and one of the
first we teach our own. But the teaching and the learning across a life is far from
being the categorical, strictly rule based affair that I, at least, seem to remember as
a youngster. Since lying concerns “speech acts,” acts in which we do something
with our talk, we need to place the norm that forbids it in a network of practices.
People come to understand that “[e]xaggeration, politeness, tact, reserve in self-
expression, omitting to say certain things, and so on, all have to do with honest
expression.” Thus “[c]hildren are decidedly not taught that it is right, or even
good, to be honest in the expression of all the matters that one could be honest
about.”1 One is often stuck, not with a straightforward rule to apply, but with a
call to practical wisdom in recognizing when and how to tell the truth to the right
person, at the right time, with the right motive, and in the right way. Of course,
there are cases where “the whole truth and nothing but the truth” is categorically
required. The commonplace stricture has its place—but it is a place. We are, and
should be, always inquiring into what it means to tell the truth in the circumstances
and contingencies of our lives.
So “telling the truth” looks easy but also looks hard. Surely it is a matter of
importance for social existence. Consider George Orwell’s magnificent essay,
“Politics and the English Language.” He argues that in the twentieth century
political language increasingly “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder
respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Since so much
political speech presupposes insincerity and defense of the indefensible, it cannot
be clear, but must “consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer
cloudy vagueness.” The trick is to devise a way to say things without conjuring up
mental pictures of them. Thus Orwell tells us in 1946, the “comfortable English
professor” defending Soviet totalitarianism cannot say, “I believe in killing off
your opponents when you get good results by doing so.” He must say instead:
“While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which
the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain
1
Owen Flanagan, Self-Expressions: Mind Morals, and the Meaning of Life (Oxford:
curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of

transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called
to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.”2 The
example may be dated. Orwell’s point is not. Suffice it to say that the question of
what it means to tell the truth hovers around and informs other questions about the
demands of humanly just and decent societies.
This paper develops in a few ways the theological and moral insights of
Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer into the meaning of telling the truth. Their
approaches to the subject are in different ways incomplete, but we have enough
from each to show that they often run parallel, may even converge, and, in their
differences, could complement one another powerfully. Bonhoeffer ponders the
sorts of hiddenness necessary for revealing in speech what is true. Barth writes
about the concealment constitutive of falsehood and the “pious lie,” on the one
hand, and the nature of truthful witness to God in Jesus Christ, on the other. Both
theologians affirm that the truth that ought to be told relates to the reality of the
world that God has created and redeemed in Christ. Before I turn explicitly to their
perspectives, however, I want to introduce an exchange that took place over forty
years ago that is itself an instance of the Barth/Bonhoeffer legacy. That theological
conversation sets the stage for what will follow.
Paul Lehmann’s book Ethics in a Christian Context appeared in 1963 and
promptly fueled the so-called “situation ethics controversy.” His theological
contextualism was in various ways thoughtful and provocative, though it suffered
from short-sighted misreadings and unhelpful associations with Joseph Fletcher’s
“situationism.” These problems were pushed along by Lehmann’s own penchant
for elusiveness, which forestalled appreciation of the richness of a theological
program informed by Barth and Bonhoeffer alike. Christian ethics for Lehmann
starts with and from the Christian koinonia. There “one comes in sight of and finds
oneself involved in what God is doing in the world,” i.e., “setting up and carrying
out the conditions for what it takes to keep human life human.” The fruit of this
divine activity is human maturity, “the wholeness grounded in the new humanity
inaugurated and fulfilled by Jesus Christ in the world .”3 Within this frame, he
takes up the question: “Is it wrong to tell a lie?”
Lehmann’s answer is directed against “absolutist ethics,” “a standard of
conduct that can be and must be applied to all people in all situations in exactly
the same way.”4 Absolutism abstracts from “the actual situation out of which
the ethical problem arises.” Kant is the greatest proponent of this view, but his
case, Lehmann reports, is “impressively and instructively countered” in Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, who holds that the living word of truth ought to express the wholeness
of the concrete situation at hand. Situations differ, and not least given the variety of
relationships that make up our lives. The embodied reality of these circumstances
2
George Orwell, A Collection of Essays (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1981), 166–67.
3
Paul Lehmann, Ethics in a Christian Context (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 124.
4
Ibid., 125.
Hiddenness, Disclosure, and the Reality of God 121
ought to be heeded on the ground that God became incarnate in Jesus Christ.
Lehmann concluded that “what holds the concrete situation together” ethically is
“that which makes it possible for human beings to be open for one another and to
another. In so far as the right word, or the living word, is instrumental to such an
openness [of human beings to each other] telling the truth is ethically real.”5
One of Lehmann’s central examples of “contextual behavior” concerns the dying
of a woman in middle age “who had become virtually a second mother” to him.
She was stricken … quite suddenly, with a particularly virulent form of carcinoma
and died under this ghastly, body-wasting disease. When I saw her for the last
time, as she lay upon her hospital bed, she said to me, “What do the doctors
say? Is there anything that can be done?” … What should I have replied to her
question? How white is a lie? And how black can the truth, the whole truth, and
nothing but the truth be? What in such a situation is the truth? . . . Is it telling the
truth to say in as sympathetic and tactful away as possible, “There is no hope!”
Or should one say, “Don’t worry! Everything will come out all right!”?6
Granted that his friend is entitled to the truth that is due her, what does a koinonia
ethic require? Again Lehmann:
My own attempt ran something like this: “The doctors are doing all that they
can. But you and I have always been Christians … We have said in our prayers
and confessed in our faith that Jesus Christ is Savior and Lord. I do not claim
to understand all that this involves. But if it means anything at all, it seems to
me to mean at least this—when in the next days and weeks the going gets hard,
remember you are not alone! Jesus Christ has been there before!”7
Paul Ramsey, with characteristic sting and substance, criticized this

contextualism for a number of reasons. He questions the definition of absolutism
as too narrow, the accounts of the normatively human as too vague, and contrasts
Karl Barth’s ethics of divine command as preferable, since it is connected both to
a full theological anthropology and to explicit, spelled out continuities in “what
God is doing in the world” (i.e., Barth’s spheres of divine agency). He takes
out after the case study I describe above. Allowing that Lehmann may have in
fact communicated the truth his friend wanted to know non-verbally (“by tone
or gesture or countenance”), he expresses astonishment over Lehmann’s written
claim that (Ramsey’s words) “he avoided her question and changed the subject.”8
5
Ibid., 130.
6
Ibid., 132.
7
Ibid., 133.
8
Paul Ramsey, Deeds and Rules in Christian Ethics (New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1967), 83.
The criticism depends on a distinction between “upper case” and “lower case”
notions of truth.
Thus [Lehmann] brought up the Truth when the truth was asked. He spoke of the
“truth situation” all Christians know they are in, or the ultimates of the Christian
context … This was, of course, the most important thing to speak of in that hour,
or at any hour! However, on the supposition that Lehmann left her little question
unanswered (and did not answer it non-verbally) as he turned to the most
important matter, it would seem that he … withheld the truth from someone
to whom the truth belonged—that little truth as well as Christ the Truth. That
respect, that truth, he still owed her in her mortality … She was the (small letter)
subject of that dying and the honor owed her … ought not to have been avoided
in their common devotion to the subject of all Christian living and dying.9
Ramsey’s point is that “correspondence between speech and thought” pertains to

the Truth of God in Christ to which Christians witness; he takes Lehmann’s case
to suggest that “Truth-telling goes on above the situations—the hospital rooms,
courts, and marketplaces—in which small letter truths must be told, and … has no
stated or proven relevance to them.”10 The same sort of charge may apply to what
Lehmann says about the bearing of verbal veracity on mutual human openness, or
fellow humanity. “The problem is whether to communicate with my neighbor and
in this sense to be true to him, I must tell him the truth in the sense that my words
will need to match my thoughts and the facts.”11 But Lehmann evades this problem
with the announcement that whenever fellow humanity is advanced, “whatever is
told is the truth.” On Lehmann’s own terms, that identification is too simple.
Ramsey’s analysis is a partial guide to our exploration of what it means to tell
the truth. Lehmann locates the “moral good” of truth telling in fellow humanity,
and the challenge, first, is to chart the relationship between these two matters
further. Second, Ramsey calls for a closer look at the connection between the Truth
that Jesus Christ is Lord and its reflection or concealment in the details of Christian
faith and life. An adequate theological ethic of truth telling, thirdly, should relate
these relationships, displaying 1) how “speaking truth” and “not lying” may lead
to more fully human bonds between human creatures in its witness to the reality
of God, and 2) how speaking falsely with and to our neighbor is rooted in a false
witness to God. Bonhoeffer focuses more on the first issue, and Barth looks harder
at the second. Neither ignores the third, but their attention to it is limited. Also,
their attention is not generally focused on the “lie” that straightforwardly amounts
to a false signification spoken with the intention to deceive. Such a definition
seems to be presupposed in their accounts, but it is not clear how stringent their
respective views are. Be that as it may, my aim is to consider these positions,
9
Ibid., 83–84.
10
Ibid.
11
Ibid., 80.
and draw from them what I can for thinking about the practice of truth telling in
connection with the great commandment to love God and neighbor.
Bonhoeffer
Bonhoeffer begins “What is Meant by Telling the Truth?” with the observation that
differences in human situations and relations make for different kinds of speech, as,
say, between parent and child, husband and wife, friends, and the teacher and his
or her pupil. As kinds of speech may be distinct, so may the truth to be conveyed
in these varieties be distinct as well. Bonhoeffer is always referring to specific
bonds, rather than to undifferentiated notions of human “openness” or “mutual
discovery.” Nevertheless, a common requirement emerges when he writes:
Every word I utter is subject to the requirement that it be true. Quite apart from
the veracity of its contents, the relation between myself and another man which is
expressed in it is in itself true or untrue. I speak flatteringly or presumptuously or
hypocritically without uttering a material untruth; yet my words are nevertheless
untrue, because I am disruptive and destroying the reality of the relationship
between man and wife, superior and subordinate, etc. An individual utterance is
always part of the total reality which seeks expression in this utterance … The
truthful word is not in itself constant; it is as much alive as life itself.12
Bonhoeffer’s comment clarifies what was obscure in his friend Lehmann’s

discussion. Imagine rhapsodizing to an acquaintance about his beauty and wit in a
way that tends to discredit or degrade these same qualities in your spouse. Perhaps
no material untruth is uttered, but damage is done to a marriage jeopardized by
inconstancy. Or consider being confronted by your son who arrogantly judges some
endeavor of yours as trifling or inferior. Well, it may well be trifling or inferior. That’s
not the problem. The hurtful, disrespectful talk is. Turn the tables and think about
informing your son of the moral necessity of telling the truth about your misdeeds
rather than covering them up—hours after you have lied to a student about why you
missed an appointment. You simply forgot, but you cough your way through an
excuse about not feeling well. The “moral necessity” may be just so. Your relation to
your child as a teacher and witness to the truth is impaired. In these cases Bonhoeffer
holds that words saying what is true (about the beauty, the work, and the morally
right) are nevertheless untrue, and that the “living word” is attentive to the demands
of relational context. Note here that, unlike Lehmann, he does not say that if these
demands are met, then “whatever is told is the truth.” He maintains a distinction
between true and false utterance and truthful presence to the other.
12
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 365.
Evaluation of both, however, depends upon how the “real” is appreciated and
expressed “in God and through God and for God.”13 When “one speaks of God one
must not simply disregard the actual given world in which one lives; for if one does
that one is not speaking of the God who entered into the world in Jesus Christ, but
rather of some metaphysical idol … the truthfulness which we owe to God must
assume a concrete form in the world.”14 Bonhoeffer contrasts this socially concrete
“living truth” in and for God with the cynic’s “static and lifeless devotion to truth.”
The cynic claims to speak the truth “at all times and in all places to all men in the
same way,” but can “make no allowance for human weakness.” He
[i]n fact … has destroyed the living truth between men. He wounds shame,
desecrates mystery, breaks confidence, betrays the community in which he
lives, and laughs arrogantly at the devastation he has wrought and at the human
weakness which “cannot bear the truth.”
Such “truth” is “of Satan.” It lives “upon hatred of the real and of the world which
is created and loved by God and “pretends to be executing the judgment of God
upon the fall of the real.”15
Bonhoeffer explicitly acknowledges that the idea of “living truth” is dangerous,
since it is liable “to the suspicion that the truth can and may be adapted to each
particular situation in a way which completely destroys the idea of truth and narrows
the gap between truth and falsehood, so that the two become indistinguishable.”
He adds that his category of “discerning the real” “may be mistakenly understood
as meaning that it is by adopting a calculating or schoolmasterly attitude toward
the other … that I shall decide what proportion of the truth I am prepared to tell
him.” These dangers can only be countered “by means of attentive discernment
of the particular contents and limits which the real imposes on one’s utterance in
order to make it a truthful one.”16 This plea for practical wisdom reminds us that
“[e]very utterance or word lives and has its home in a particular environment …
And when the limits of the various words are obliterated, when words become
rootless and homeless, then the word loses truth … When the various orders of life
no longer respect one another, words become untrue.”17
The moral demand of truth telling is thus rendered intelligible through the
idea that moral agency is involved with integral human bonds that, indeed, make
human life more fully human. These bonds (e.g., friendship, work, familial love)
are pursued in part through “attentive discernment” and sound judgment about the
goods at stake in them, including trust, loyalty, and a secrecy that may be protective
of others; such is unavoidable because there is no rule that forever directly applies
13
Ibid., 365.
14
Ibid., 364.
15
Ibid., 366.
16
Ibid.
17
Ibid., 367.
to human experience within which words have their particular “homes.” Words
lose their truth when they fall outside the practices in which they live, when their
proper limits are transgressed, or when one social sphere dominates another in its
demand for strict correspondence between belief and speech.
Some have argued, for instance, that there is something untruthful about
understanding the familial bond in terms of “rights.” A political conception of just
entitlement does not readily apply to relationships more fittingly grasped in terms
of kinship and intergenerational mutual love and service. There’s also something
deceptive about a teacher who harps about his “love” for his students as with “one
big happy family.” At least, this emphasis conceals a stricter and more impersonal
meritarian dimension. And the cynic’s exposure of a colleague’s painful home life
to fellow workers, perhaps under the guise of sympathetic solidarity, is dishonest,
not “living truth,” because in this case “the various orders of life,” their limits and
purposes, are not respected.
The last example is a pale reflection of Bonhoeffer’s remarks on the case of a
teacher asking a child in front of their class whether it is true that his father comes
home drunk.
It is true, but the child denies it. The teacher’s question has placed him in a
situation for which he is not yet prepared. He feels only that what is taking place
is an unjust interference in the order of the family and that he must oppose it.
What goes on in the family is not for the ears of the class in school. The family
has its own secret and must preserve it. The teacher has failed to respect the
reality of the institution.18
The child’s denial “can indeed be called a lie.” Yet it expresses the truth “that the
family is an institution sui generis and that the teacher has no right to interfere in
it.”19 It “accords with reality” more than betraying father’s weakness to the class.
And though according to the limits of his knowledge the child acted rightly, one
more experienced in the moral life would have been able to find the “right word” by
naming and challenging the teacher’s violation while avoiding a “formal untruth.”
Bonhoeffer proceeds to question what actually constitutes a lie, “meaning
something which is quite simple and utterly wrong.” He suggests that “a conscious
discrepancy between thought and speech” fails to fit the bill. Practical jokes aren’t
lies because of the absence of the intent to deceive. Also, we can lie while telling (a
misleading version of) the truth, or by a clever silence. He wonders whether “the
man who stands behind the word makes his word a lie or a truth,” only to reject the
proposal as insufficiently objective. He concludes that a lie is “the denial of God as
he has evidenced himself to the world, a contradiction of the word of God, which
God has spoken in Christ, and upon which creation is founded.” “The assigned
purpose of our words … is to express the real, as it exists in God; and the assigned
18
Ibid.
19
Ibid., 368.
purpose of our silence is to signify the limit which is imposed on our words by the
real as it exists in God.”20 The moral reality encompasses a world created, fallen
and reconciled:
We do not encounter [the real] as a consistent whole, but in a condition of

disruption and inner contradiction which has need of reconciliation and healing.
We find ourselves simultaneously embedded in various different orders of the
real, and our words, which strive toward the reconciliation and healing of the
real are repeatedly drawn into the prevalent disunion and conflict … If the words
of men are to be true they must deny neither the Fall nor God’s word of creation
and reconciliation, the word in which all disunion is overcome.21
In his prison letters Bonhoeffer also wrote of a “cynical frankness” that might
ground indiscriminate exhibitions and confessions of one’s fear (during, say, an
air raid in wartime). If this fright is something to be ashamed of and jeopardizes a
hard-tested solidarity, then one should be reticent about it. Thus “telling the truth”
shows respect for the disunion that prompts shame in consequence of our fallen
condition. A certain “false honesty” is analogous to talking openly about sexual
matters, and a fitting sense of concealment attests to “what is in the end the status
corruptionis of the world.” Silence responds, accordingly, to the limits imposed
upon our words by the real.22
I have reserved to the end of the exposition a last example, which perhaps should
have been the first. Eberhard Bethge writes that Bonhoeffer’s study is inescapably
the product of his struggles with his own evasions and deceptions during the period
of interrogation in prison between April and July 1943.23 We cannot doubt that he
found himself drawn into disunion and conflict via his commitments to the German
nation, to the resistance against Nazism, to his friends, and in all this to Jesus Christ.
“‘Betrayal’ is not truth,” he writes from prison; moreover, his own remarks on the
essay to Bethge stress his “sharp contrast” between “trust, loyalty, and secrecy on
the one hand, and the ‘cynical’ conception of truth, for which all these obligations
do not exist, on the other.” “Anyone who tells the truth cynically is lying”24
To review, Bonhoeffer is drawing special attention to the social activities that
truth telling inhabits. He finds reticence and tact to be features not just of our
fallen condition, but also of our created and redeemed sociability. He shows how
“honesty is a hard virtue” because it is developed not out of a natural tendency
of a disembodied faculty of speech to express accurately what one believes, but
20
Ibid., 370.
21
Ibid.
22
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (New York: Macmillan,
1972), 158.
23
Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, rev. ed. (Minneapolis, MN:
Fortress Press, 2000), 813.
24
Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 163, 158.
out of a host of colliding commitments and relationships in which concealment

and judgment about “what to disclose” are always in play. Lies have to do
with treachery, perjury, malice, vocational breaches, and/or disappointment of
reasonable expectations.25 The virtue of veracity is expressed in knowing what
these realities are concretely, and hence knowing “when it is one is bound to
speak one’s mind” to those to whom non-deceptive speech is due.26 It requires
discriminations between cynicism and disarming candor, unjustly hurtful talk and
just speech (even if it is hurtful), between shamelessness and confession, fearful
self-protectiveness and self-respect, a “schoolmasterly” patronizing of another
and considerate attention to him and her. The “place” of truth-telling or “not lying”
exists amid a crowded, bustling neighborhood of residences and roads. Our words
reside in that neighborhood. Bonhoeffer unfurls the map.
Barth
Karl Barth, directly and in detail, identifies the Creator of the terrain. John Webster
has shown that the core of Barth’s theology of the prophetic office of Jesus Christ,
“the glorious self-disclosure of the mediator,” is that his “perfect and unsurpassable
action”27 “displays and proclaims itself as truth, and indeed as the truth.”28 It follows
that Jesus Christ, the light of life, is himself the true witness of the reconciliation
of the world to God accomplished in Him.29 The sin of humanity, “as the darkness
resisting the light of life, as the contradiction of the truth,” accordingly appears
in the guise of falsehood.30 Jesus Christ “is the Law or norm of God confronted
and measured by which man is shown up to be a transgressor, and specifically
as a deceiver and liar.”31 Although all sin, including the works of pride and sloth,
necessarily involves evasion and concealment of the truth with regard to the
founding transgression, the sin shown up by Christ the True Witness “forms itself
into a word. If pride and sloth are the works, falsehood is the word of the man of
sin.”32 It emerges as “the counter-revelation to the divine revelation of grace.”
25
Annette C. Baier, “Why Honesty is a Hard Virtue,” in Identity, Character, and
Morality: Essays in Moral Psychology, ed. Owen Flanagan and Amelie Oksenberg Rorty
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 274.
26
Ibid., 270.
27
John Webster, Barth’s Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth’s Thought
(Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1998), 127.
28
IV/3, 7.
29
Ibid., 368.
30
Ibid., 369.
31
Ibid., 371.
32
Ibid., 373.
To disclose it in this form there is needed the situation of the era dominated and
determined by the prophecy of Jesus Christ, i.e., the Christian era, to which there
also belongs the time of the prophecy of the history of Israel. Epigrammatically
and to be taken cum grano salis, we might say that falsehood is the specifically
Christian form of sin.33
So what is that which is witnessed by the true witness in relation to which

“sin is falsehood or false witness?” In his “pure form,” Jesus Christ exists in an
unparallelled relationship to God and God to Him. He has turned to God freely,
choosing God alone as his good, and lives justly in God’s sight. God deals with
this man with loving-kindness and mercy. In the man’s self-offering and the Lord’s
crowning, there is, in fact, consummate freedom. Jesus Christ “does not undertake
it for the sake of the distinction promised by God and to be expected of Him, nor
with a view to the value and acceptability of this distinction, nor as a means to its
attainment, nor as the payment of the price for which it is to be had, nor obviously
for fear of the evils which might follow the neglect of this work or non-payment of
this price, nor in avoidance of the penalty which might be exacted on any omission
in this regard.”34 His self-offering is based on the knowledge of and delight in
God His Lord for His own sake. It is gratuitous (“for nothing”) apart from this
basis. God’s address to the man is also for nothing apart from “the sovereign
good-pleasure, which He has in Him and for the sake of this man Himself.” God’s
crowning act is “not a payment, a requital, a moral or legal obligation on the basis
of a higher law.35 The “conjunction or unity of true God free for man and true man
free for God constitutes the existence” of Jesus Christ the true witness.
Barth believes, however, that it would be “a kind of Docetism” to stop with this
description; for our knowledge of Jesus in this pure form is indirect, and appropriate
to the content, setting, and recipients of His prophetic word. He encounters us,
then, as the suffering Jesus Christ, and the content of his Word, after all, is his
victory over sin and death as the suffering Servant of God. The place where he
encounters us is the sphere of history between reconciliation and its completion “as
God’s consummating work for the redemption of His creation.”36 In this sphere,
sin is deprived of its right and power but remains active as a threat and temptation
bringing evil consequences. Here Christ the Victim is still “harassed and forsaken,
accused, and condemned, despised and smitten.”37 How, finally, can we receive
the saving word unless Christ is still today the “friend of publicans and sinners …
who is reckoned with malefactors and crucified with them, who is forsaken by his
disciples and our God.”38
33
Ibid., 374.
34
Ibid., 382.
35
Ibid.
36
Ibid., 391.
37
Ibid., 393.
38
Ibid., 396.
Present to us here and now in the form of suffering, the true witness actually
speaks in the promise of the Spirit. The truth speaks for itself as the Word of God—
out of the silence of death, and as a message of a divine act of reconciliation.
The sin of falsehood is the Christian’s untruth before the truth of Jesus Christ.
It is a “movement of evasion” that attempts “to avoid Jesus Christ as the true
Witness.” The sinner in this case turns away while pretending to face Him. A
mature liar will not deny the truth but will instead confess it solemnly at the same
time as he or she “canalizes and transforms” its power, rendering it “tolerable and
useful,” divesting it of its “distinctive menace,” and bringing it under one’s own
control.39 The themes we have just considered reveal the contours of what Barth
names the pious lie.
First, one may take offense at the strict identification of the truth with Jesus
Christ. There is no place for “distance or qualification” in such a case, and hence
no escaping “an attack” on us which would not be possible were the truth “the
mere notion of intercourse between God and man” and its Witness “its supreme
manifestation or most impressive symbol.”40
Second, offence and the accompanying evasion can consist in the fact that
“the true Witness is the man of Gethsemane and Golgotha, and therefore the truth
is the truth of his death and passion.” To hear it today “is to hear the sigh of this
one judged in our place,” and to learn that in order to win one’s life one “should
give it up for lost and really lose it.” In falsehood we endeavor to work this over
and to render it harmless, perhaps by ascribing to the cross “such a magical power
that there can hardly be conceived a surer way of sheltering the reality of one’s
existence against its claim and assault;” or maybe by distancing the Gospel “about
the fatherly goodness of God and the brotherly love demanded of men” from
Christ’s passion, which is understood as “the intrepid martyr-death of the Bearer
of the message”; or in any number of other ways that remove terror and the call
to new beginnings from the scene. We discover in these “agencies of mitigation”
all so much “passion music which is certainly gripping yet not finally disquieting
because so beautiful.”41
Third and fundamentally, we are shocked that our encounter with Jesus Christ
is one with God’s Word in the power of the Holy Spirit “which claims us as those
who are pledged to hear and obey.” We do not take kindly to being exposed as
lost and needing news, not of our making, given to us by One who, as our Lord,
permits our gratitude and requires our obedience. So in falsehood we obscure
“the meaning of this encounter as the coming together of two partners who are
from the very first unchangeably unequal.”42 We try to make God as much like
humanity as possible, and vice versa. We will construe the truth identified in and
with Jesus Christ to be something we already, in principle, have available. In short,
39
Ibid., 435–36.
40
Ibid., 441.
41
Ibid., 441–43.
42
Ibid., 444.
we project “the point where God has no longer to speak nor man to hear from a
distance,” “where God has no longer to give nor man to receive,” and “where
prayer is ultimately superfluous even as a monologue.”43 We do so to domesticate
the Lord and to tranquilize ourselves.
The root of falsehood is the Christian’s flight from freedom. God’s freedom
entails complete independence from presuppositions and standards distinct from
Himself. The identity of Truth with its Witness prevents us from using them to
object or resign. The Word of the cross by its grace delivers us from them. God’s
“sovereign grasp” of the creature leaves him or her “no normative conception
of goodness, truth, right, love, salvation, well-being, or peace, with which to”
accept or reject God. Human freedom is “liberation from all the presuppositions
conditioning and limiting God and himself … More positively, it means attraction
and activity in relation to the information and direction received from the One who
gives and requires his freedom … It is a matter of the freedom of God’s covenant-
partner, creature, child, and servant elected by him.”44 But in falsehood we flee.
What is the nature of the “pious lie” that issues from all of this? It is
systematizing the divine-human relation with a principle or order “overruling
and comprehending” it. Then God’s freedom is transformed into the “fact” of a
“supreme and therefore divine being.” We trade divine freedom for an abstract
majesty, and “respond” to that creation with humble reverence. The substitute God
leaves plenty of room for exercising the good-pleasure which we regard as our
“freedom.”45 For Barth, Job’s three friends are exemplars of the pious lie. They
contrast, even if subtly, with Job, a figure of Jesus Christ and therefore a type of
the True Witness. They are good people who wish him well, and surely “what they
say reads well in itself.” Their “theological propositions” are “right”, i.e., that God
is “always holy, righteous, and wise,” that “the pious may hope for mercy but the
godless will sooner or later be overtaken,” that in reality none are finally righteous
and hence should cling to God the more closely, and above all, that the majesty of
God’s wisdom and the limits of our knowledge indicate the need “to be converted
… and thus to learn afresh the goodness of God as one who is humbled by Him.”46
In the end Job is brought strikingly close to where they would lead him.
Still the three are all guilty of falsehood, and Job “sovereignly ignores” their
advice. Why? For one thing, they coolly rely on their experience and tradition
to “refer back” to God, “as an open book from which they have only to read to
their friend.”47 With this attitude and with the protection it affords they contend
against Job essentially by lording it over him, imagining that they are taking the
standpoint of God over against him.
43
Ibid., 445.
44
Ibid., 446–47.
45
Ibid., 449.
46
Ibid., 443–45.
47
Ibid., 456.
And so in relation to what he has to suffer at the hand of God they torture him
in the very worst fashion that one man can torture another, addressing him as
from God, for the sake of God and in the name of God. Let us make no mistake.
As Job himself said clearly enough, somewhere behind the laborious mildness
which controls their instructions there is already prepared an auto-da-fe to be
celebrated ad maiorem Dei gloriam. This is what disqualifies their speeches in
advance, however full of content they may be.48
A second, related feature of the friends’ “confused and indignant superiority”

may be discovered in the fact that they can only preach “timeless truths” which,
while having “something of the liveliness which is not lacking in the atmosphere of
the classroom,” ignore the lived event that is the concrete encounter between Job
and Job’s God. They “speak as those who are totally unaffected by the despairing
struggle for the knowledge of God into which Job finds himself plunged by what
has befallen him.”49
Third, the three friends effectively imprison both God and Job “in a fixed
and orderly structure” amounting to “a meaningful system of good and evil, of
salvation and judgment, of failure and restitution.” Each party is permitted only
to confirm it and thus stand subordinate to it. Contrast Job’s understanding of “a
living, active, and speaking God uniquely confronting a living man in his unique
existence and responsibility,” in which everything could be true only as it takes
place.50 So in summary, Job’s friends cannot understand and their words do not at
all account for the free God and the human person freed by and for God. “Yahweh
as the free God of the free man Job, and Job as the free man of this free God,
together in their divine and human freedom enter into the crisis in which God
becomes so incomprehensible to Job even though He will not let him go, and Job
becomes so angry against God even though he will not let Him go.”51 The friends’
speeches, to be sure, do not deny this two-fold freedom so much as suppress and
replace it with a counterfeit. This is what falsehood does.
Barth says that the “common lie” (or “falsehood in the moral sense”) has
“its origin, its corrupted essence and its temporary existence” around the pious
lie.52 The liar in encounter with the true witness becomes a liar at every point,
fearing peripheral and secondary truths along with the central and primary one.
He or she will attempt to control and channel what is the case accordingly. The
“public” utterances of the great human societies—in business, politics, parties,
and the media—massively deceive in concert with the private lies of individuals.
In “no historical sphere” has common lying of this sort “flourished so grandly as
in the Christian era.” The Christian churches have a hand in it all, and so they can
48
Ibid., 457.
49
Ibid., 457–58.
50
Ibid., 459.
51
Ibid., 460.
52
Ibid., 451.
finally have no ill-will toward such falsehood since responsibility for the central
falsehood lies with them.53
Analysis, Summary, and Conclusions
Bonhoeffer and Barth treat the practice of truth telling in a manner that is
contextual and concrete; but they understand theological concreteness differently.
Both accounts, it is true, identify concreteness with the “real.” The “real,” in turn,
is connected to the presence and power of Jesus Christ such that, for example, the
ends and activities of human persons are apprehended “abstractly” if separated
from these points of reference. Thus “the concreteness of theology is its calling
to make plain in and for the community of believers, which is the church, and in
and for the world, the reality of God disclosed in his humanness in Jesus Christ.”54
But in Barth’s case, as Paul Lehmann puts it, it was most urgent to protect the
concreteness of God in his revelation, as it were, on the giving end of the stick.” For
Bonhoeffer, what was essential was to protect “the concreteness of the revelation
of God, as it were, on the receiving end of the stick, that is, in the reality of faith”
embodied in the world whose own reality is in Jesus Christ. Barth’s discussion of
falsehood focuses on the culpable, distorting and finally abstract misidentification
of the revealing God. Bonhoeffer’s parallel work emphasizes the social forms and
human bonds in and through which the reality of Christ, who sets the terms for
truthful speech, is present.
Bonhoeffer’s approach to the practice of truth telling is always situated within
connections of loyalty, assistance, and expectation. Within these connections, the
practice includes a proper respect for silence and hiddenness. This requirement
is at least in part Christologically based. The reality of God in Christ is hidden in
these human forms; their mystery, in the sense of this hiddenness, is to be protected
insofar as it holds an unfathomable promise of a form of reconciliation. The
reality and power of the truth are apprehended through a self-emptying “attentive
discernment of the particular contents and limits which the real imposes” on our
words by way of the moral meaning of various bonds.
The cynic isolates oneself from these connections and rejects the fitting
hiddenness they entail for the causes of wounding, not healing, dominating, not
serving, or shamelessly revealing what ought to stay covered as a sign of our
fallenness. Cynical disclosures are not “telling the truth,” and proper protectiveness
is not “lying.” But lying is the negation and destruction of what is made by and
consists in God, and hence it is the denial of the reconciliation that our words
Ibid., 452–53.
53
Paul L. Lehmann, “The Concreteness of Theology: Reflections on the Conversation

54
Between Barth and Bonhoeffer,” in Footnotes to a Theology: The Karl Barth Colloquium
of 1972, ed. H. Martin Rumscheidt (Corporation for the Publication of Academic Studies of
Religion in Canada, 1974), 65.
before God in one way or other would mean. In this sense the truth serves our
humanity with and for others. From this perspective Ramsey’s concern that Truth
telling not go on above the situations in which (“lower case’) truths are told is
entirely apt, however much it may or may not be fair to Lehmann.
Christian truth telling will honor the totality of the real in that it will reflect the
creation, fallenness, and reconciliation of the world to God. Two of Bonhoeffer’s
examples of “cynicism,” the cruelly inquisitive teacher and the comrade who
shamelessly discloses his fears, nicely fit the way pride and sloth, respectively,
display as if in a “third dimension” the concealment and evasion characteristic of
the sin of falsehood. Here “playing God” and irresponsible self-exposure are both
offered up as necessary, righteous, and holy.55 Still Barth identifies the specifically
Christian sin of falsehood to be an evasion and concealment applying explicitly to
Christian witness itself. It is the attempt to channel and thereby control the truth
that is Jesus Christ so to rob it of its reach and power; thus it is a witness that seeks
to flee the truth in masking untruth as truth.
But how is it that what Barth calls “common lies” have their roots in Christian
“pious lies?” Let me try to answer the question in three ways.
First, the pious liar transforms God and himself into a relation in which he
seeks some sort of mastery rather than having a master. Hiding ourselves from
God to this end, we choose to hide God from ourselves, and in so doing Christians
render themselves bound instead of free. The lie systematizes the God relation in
terms of a fixed structure of constraint and conformity in which the truth is not
sought, but is rather frozen and perverted in constructions on which we, one might
say “religiously,” come to depend. Out of a scrambling dread of losing control, the
pious liar transforms the Gospel into an ideology, and comes under its grip.
False witness to God points out the path that pious liars and others may follow.
Barth’s description of the “lordless powers” in his ethics of reconciliation takes
up ideologies in social life, and it turns out that these fit the formal pattern of
the pious lie. While organizing human experience with ready-to-hand theoretical
and practical conceptions is all well and good, giving these ideas “a distinctive
numbness, rigidity, and inertia” and a “quasi-divine” status” creates an ideology.
It relies on slogans and catchwords that keep us from thinking, and demands
propaganda that glorifies the idol and demonizes its rivals. Among these ideologies
or “isms,” Barth includes, notably, Biblicism, confessionalism, pietism, theism,
and yes, Christocentrism! All of these, along with Marxism, Stalinism, liberalism,
and the like, are marked by the link between falsehood and the denial of freedom
we discussed above. An ideology “shows that one concept, one figure in the field of
human life, one possibility of outlook and action, has assumed the role of regulator
and dictator in relation to all the rest, and that round this principle a system has
developed in face of which man is more or less on the point of losing his freedom
or has already lost it.”56
55
IV/3, 372.
56
The Christian Life, 226.
Second, in hiding God from ourselves in the sin of falsehood, we also in

another way hide ourselves from God in that we initially refuse and then fail
to see the pardon and power of divine grace in Jesus Christ. To the degree that
Christians present untruth among themselves as truth, to that extent they choose
and imagine and draw upon themselves the judgment of God that has already
been set aside. So they live in this false image and communicate it to others in
the world. Common lies, understood now as that small or great currency of self-
justification or defensive self-protection, cannot but mount, and mount untested
and unchallenged.
Third, to witness to Jesus Christ, the reconciliation of the world, and to love God
in truth is to acknowledge and accept the mystery of God, the incomprehensible
intimacy and intimate incomprehensibility of divine love. One is summoned in this
way to gratitude and to service. The Christian readies herself to understand and to
forgive and to give voice to a healing word. This loving witness in correspondence
is also to attain “to a humanity which does not ask or weigh too long with whom
we are dealing in others, but in which we find a simple solidarity with them and
unreservedly take up their case.”57
Concealment of the truth in falsehood covers over this mystery in order to
exploit or calculate. It finds in creation only what is threatening or burdensome
or subject to domination. It understands harshly and calls in all debts. It confronts
the status corruptionis of the world with hopeless resignation, overreaching rage,
or isolated meanness. In falsehood simple human solidarity is handed over to a
neutral proximity (or distance) to be worked over for the sake of mutual advantage,
or ignored if there’s no profit in it.
To tell the pious lie is eventually to live a lie in these other ways as well, and to
deceive others from the source of one’s own dread and offense. The Christian finds
herself powerless, moreover, to see and name as true the good words and works
of creation in their presence outside the sphere of the Christian community and
for the sake of her fellow creatures. She is reduced to acquiescing in, and even to
giving aid, aim, and comfort to, the kinds of cynicism and untruth that Bonhoeffer
rightly believed violated the real in Jesus Christ.
IV/3, 125.
57
Chapter 9
Practical Wisdom and Integrity
Commending Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s readiness “to see divine immanence in the

world,” Marilynne Robinson observes that this seeing “is an act of faith, not a
matter to be interpreted in other than its own terms, if one grants the reasonableness
of the perceiver. And Dietrich Bonhoeffer thought and believed his way to a
surpassing reasonableness.”1 In this chapter I consider not so much Bonhoeffer
but rather a version of what Robinson takes him to exemplify: the skills of moral
perception, judgment and action as acts of Christian faith. My focus is the virtue
of prudence or practical wisdom and the sort of “surpassing reasonableness” to
which it disposes in the sanctified life of the justified sinner who is reconciled with
God in Jesus Christ. To see divine immanence in such a life, as Bonhoeffer did,
is to apprehend in the world that claims us morally an unfolding of God’s agency
in liberating pardon, sovereign judgment, creaturely blessing, and faithful love
over against the damage brought by sin, suffering, death, and hopelessness. In the
course of my account and with a particular ecumenical interest, I address some
traditional questions about the theological construal of human agency, “natural”
and “revealed” morality, one’s standing before God as at once sinfu1 and made
right, and about what on earth “growth in grace” can possibly mean.
My reflections intend to signal two projects that I think are important,
among several others, for Christian ethical inquiry. The first concerns the critical
theological description of the integrity or wholeness of the moral life, taken here
to be a truthful self-understanding that is embodied in one’s acts and relations
in the world.2 In this connection I think of H. Richard Niebuhr’s battle against
the polytheism and henotheism of modern existence; William Schweiker’s related
appeal to a more universal responsibility; Margaret Farley’s suggestions about the
way human commitments fragilely but really bind time; James Cone’s career-long
reflections on liberation, suffering and African-American Christian vision and
struggle; and Stanley Hauerwas’s charting connections between human actions,
personal narrative unity, and the story of God made present in the practices of the
church. Prudence may be invoked to account for a kind of unity, too, insofar as it
is held to perfect creaturely inclinations in the realization of virtue, to direct agents
substantively to the human good, and to integrate human powers and desires in
1
Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (New York:
Picador, 1998), 120.
2
Darlene Fozard Weaver, Self-Love and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), 91.
accordance with moral truth.3 Without wanting to deny the insights in each of
these proposals, here I imagine integrity to consist of a kind of self-renewing
perseverance before God in Jesus Christ.
The second project is thorough and honest attention to the “prospects for
rapprochement” between Christian communities in their ethics, and between
Protestant and Roman Catholic ethics in particular.4 Nobody wants cheap grace,
including the “grace” of a phony ecumenical unity. Nobody, either, should want a
phony separation, fueled by stances that are patient, were we patient, of fitting revision
or that confer an exclusively distinctive identity by way of oppositional definition.
For my purposes the two projects are linked, as I present, experiment with,
and improvise upon texts and themes in Catholic and Reformation theology and
ethics with a view to examining and understanding moral integrity. Following
an examination of the fundamental features of the virtue of prudence, I address
its location, as a perfection of moral agency, in the world that belongs to God
in Jesus Christ. Then I reflect on how prudence figures in the life of one who
stands before God as both justified and sinful. Finally, I offer an interpretation
of Christian moral integrity and growth that highlights practices of repentance,
renewal, and perseverance.
The Rudiments of Prudence
Following Thomas Aquinas, we can say that prudence or practical wisdom has
to do with the right use of reason regarding things to be done.5 Exercised for the
sake of human actions in the pursuit of the good, it involves universal principles of
practical reason but also and especially the “singulars” about which these actions
are invariably concerned (ST, II–II, q. 47, a. 3). As a human virtue, prudence
affords a certain rectitude not only to our power of reason, but also to our appetites
or desires as they are specifically placed in their proper course in the deeds the
prudent person performs. These deeds concern the ends of virtues pertaining to the
will and sensible desire. The ends are very generally “appointed” by natural reason
and refer to inclinations to the good that are constitutive of creaturely humanity
(ST, II–II, q. 47, a. 6). Prudence “prepares the way” to these ends by “disposing
the means” for attaining them, and prudence prepares the way by showing the way.
“It belongs to the ruling of prudence to decide in what manner and by what
means man shall obtain the mean of reason in his deeds” (ST, II–II, q. 47, a. 7).
An act that responds fittingly to a colleague who has aided you in your scholarship
James F. Keenan, S.J., “The Virtue of Prudence,” in The Ethics of Aquinas, ed.
3
Stephen J. Pope (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2002), 259–71.

4
See James Gustafson, Protestant and Roman Catholic Ethics: Prospects for
Rapprochement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
5
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II–II, q. 47. A. 2(Allen, TX: Christian
Classics, 1981). Hereafter references to the Summa appear in the text.
Practical Wisdom and Integrity 137
partly depends, according to the rule of justice, upon whether the benefit bespeaks
a kind of professional quid pro quo, some sort of intellectual friendship, or a gift
(cf. ST, II–II, q. 106, a. 5). Identifying the character and quality—the manner—of
the collegial relation, insofar as one or more of these descriptions may be accurate,
is a crucial feature of apprehending what the good, as a kind of justice generally
considered, requires. A successful identification prompts a second reflection on
the means to attaining that good in the particular case; and that reply, as it is to
be realized in action, is a finding of the mean, which must be neither too little nor
too much, neither ungrateful nor overweening toward our helpful colleague. Now
it is also the case that practical wisdom specifically orients or configures the ends
of the moral virtues, insofar as prudence in its apprehension of what is to be done
attunes the virtues, with their general ends, to their specific operation. Thus a
scholar may come to see and desire that an earlier kind of expression of justice or
gratitude to a mentor should now become less “formal” and more “friendly” with
the passage of time. It seems right to say that the will and the passions may need
to appreciate that gratitude and its point in this new and perhaps strange context.
The exercise of prudence requires a deliberative inquiry into the moral realities
present in a particular situation, an asking of questions about the sorts of goods
and evils to be discovered in it, and with which one as an agent is involved. Take
a father’s looking into what is going on with his teenaged son whose schoolwork
is in decline. What good is the schoolwork anyway, and for whom? Is the poor
performance due to boredom, a standing chronic illness, what parents cunningly
call “rebellion,” or intellectual capacity? How do these determinations bear on his
flourishing as the young man he is? And what is at stake in his father’s involvement?
The work of “counsel” involves a discriminating and generous memory of relevant
goods, persons, and relations; an ability to compare and contrast critically and
without flights of fantasy (as with the situation of your son, “other” young people,
and a father’s own youth); and a welcoming desire to accept the viewpoints of
others. Counsel goes wrong in stubborn refusals and premature conclusions that
betray failures of insight and misplaced desire (ST, II–II, q. 47, a. 8; II–II, q. 49, a.
1–3; II–II, q. 53, a. 3). The questions comprising reason’s discovery of the realities
in the situation anticipate and prepare for new questions about the about the moral
truth of the situation. Ideally having brought “to bear upon a situation the greatest
number of genuinely pertinent concerns and genuinely relevant considerations
commensurate with the importance of the deliberative context,”6 a prudent person
deliberates for the sake of rendering a judgment about what is to be done to
accomplish the good in the situation at hand. Wise judgment intends an adequate
appreciation of the order of goods and the morally salient characteristics that are
present in the particular case. Hence we may speak of situational discernment.7 In
6
David Wiggins, “Deliberation and Practical Reason,” in Practical Reasoning, ed.
Joseph Raz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 146–47.
7
See James Gustafson, “Moral Discernment in the Christian Life,” in Norm and
Context in Christian Ethics, ed. Gene H. Outka and Paul Ramsey (New York: Charles
consideration of alternative “readings” of the situation, one comes to understand

and clearly perceive how the highly general ends of the moral virtues contributing
to human flourishing are specifically, substantively, and objectively embodied. One
judges appropriately to act for those ends, accordingly. “Situational appreciation”
takes a keen view to specific circumstances, and it includes a cautious estimate
of the harm one may face in responding to them (ST, II–II, q. 49, a. 7–8). It may
include attention to moral rules that appear to have presumptive or even absolute
normative force in securing human well-being and the character of a good human
life; but for the prudent person moral experience seems more a matter of the world
pressing in on the rules, making the latter obey reality through human action, rather
than the other way around. Thus prudence disposes to judgments that adapt and
refine those working moral understandings as they might better fit and reflect the
impress of the world God has made and the goods afforded us, and this includes
the “world” and the “good” of the agent oneself.8
Inquiry, deliberation, and judgment reach forward to affect what Aquinas calls
“command,” which has to do with decisively generating action (ST, II–II, q. 47, a.
8). It is also true to say that command reaches back to affect these other activities
considered as an ongoing affair. The embodied, interdependent, and interacting
life of the human agent includes engagement with the world in action. In action
we have to do with singulars, and these become present to us by way of our own
personal and sensual involvement. Bonhoeffer’s interrogation at the hands of
the Nazis may understandably be viewed as a source of the insight that there is
a difference between the truthful word in the reality of the world that God has
entered in Jesus Christ, and a cynical “candor” that pretends to be executing the
judgment of God.9 James Gustafson’s well-known example of his colleague—a
“moral virtuoso” capable of decisive and supple response on behalf of a drunk
and exploited young soldier—also indicates the challenges of discerning action
within the situation as distinct from the process and moment of deliberative
and judging discernment about the moral truth of the situation.10 In light of the
lessons of enacted action, inquiries may be expanded, judgment may be enriched,
and decision about what is to be done may become more surely watchful about
what our actions do at the same time as our affections become better oriented to
the reality in which human ends are pursued. Prudence, in the act of command,
reaches back to inform and to instruct our historical agency. In its “watchfulness”
or “solicitousness,” it also reaches forward in its attention to future contingencies,
to what parties to a situation would be going through, and crafts acts in response
Scribner’s Sons, 1968), 17–36.

8
See Jean Porter, Nature as Reason: A Thomistic Theory of the Natural Law (Grand
Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), 309–24; and Josef Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues (Notre
Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966), 3–40.
9
See my discussion in Chapter 8.
10
James M. Gustafson, Can Ethics Be Christian? (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1975), 1–13.
to their implications and consequences. We ought also to say that wise action
reaches into the heart of the human agent. It rightly orders the “singular” that is
the human subject to its active self-disposal and self-relation in the world. Reason
and desire are constituted rightly thereby to express an individual’s embodied life
history in its response to the truth of things. And in this self-expression a human
subject would risk and venture to take part in that truth, and just so in the forms of
divine love that are immanent in the world. Prudence includes “clear-sightedness”
not just about the situation at hand bur also about oneself in the situation at hand,
in which one’s action is decisively one’s own, in which “what is on offer is a true
expression of who I am, a real continuation of the life-story which is myself.” One
finally discerns, decides, and acts for the good on one’s own because “nobody else
is my body, and it is only by my bodily presence that the concrete particularity of
my action can be grasped and judged.”11
The matter of how properly to describe and account for moral agency as
the concrete self-expression of a human individual’s embodied life history in
its response to the truth of things has been a characteristic concern in Christian
theological ethics.
Bonhoeffer’s consideration that there can be no possibility of being a Christian
outside the reality of the world that has been reconciled to God in Jesus Christ
brought him to a suspicion of ideologies and evasions that separated the world
into two spheres, one “holy” and the other “profane.”12 Karl Barth’s criticisms of
casuistical ethics, in contrast to the “practical casuistry” he commends, oppose
mistaking the good through adherence to norms that misdirect our seeking it, and
all for the sake of a false security and certainty of our own making.13 Bernard
Haring’s theological ethics developed the category of responsibility, the graced
power to make all of one’s moral aspirations and decisions a self-giving response
to the summons of God in Jesus Christ. Contrasting his vision with an isolated
stress on moral norms, discrete acts, and a static view of conscience, Haring drew
attention to the eschatological virtue of “vigilance,” which in its alliance with
prudence affords to conscience a delicate tact to appraise moral reality in light of
the present history of salvation and redemption.14
More recent work in theological ethics aims to place agents truthfully in the
contexts of their lives. Consider three distinct (and not necessarily exclusive)
examples (1) Moral actors are taken to be bearers of a tradition in a particular
kind of community of character, which forms their lives in practices of prayer and
worship that resist and indict political ideologies of liberalism and violence. (2)
They are understood to be caught up in patriarchal traditions that deny through
11
Herbert McCabe, O.P., God Still Matters (New York: Continuum, 2002), 196, 209–
10, emphasis in original.
12
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 196–207.
13
III/4, 6–19. Cf. Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues, 27–29.
14
Bernard Haring, Free and Faithful in Christ, Volume 2: The Truth Will Set You Free
(New York: Crossroad, 1979), 254.
their ethics of self-sacrifice, disembodiment, and disinterestedness the reality and

authenticity of women’s experience within and for relations of mutual love that
are just and empowering. (3) They are named by God to be agents of liberation
through solidarity with the suffering, marginalized, oppressed, and otherwise
disempowered.
These approaches intend to perceive what the world is and what is going on
within it. They attend to who moral actors are and are meant to be and address
the tasks of perception and self-expression in these terms, over against ideas,
categories, relations, and forces that tempt them to mis-sighting, presumption,
escape, and falsehood. They show a devotion to the discriminations that make
up and distinguish human actions. Though neither ignoring nor degrading the
general and ruled sources of human decency, they also concern themselves
with the differences between a playful joke and a hostile affront, fitting self-
protectiveness and chilly disregard, necessary concealment and damaging
deception, disinterested inquiry and timid non-involvement, honoring particular
commitments and neglecting widespread suffering “outside them,” fair criticism
and insidious bullying. Impediments accounting for failure in discrimination may
be hasty judgment, the neglect of circumstance, the disordering or mis-ordering
of goods present in a situation due to the weakness of reason or appetite or both,
a kind of self-blinding or sloth, an over-reliance on conventional rules or the
teachings of others for dictating action, an under-reliance on the collective wisdom
present in the traditions and practices of the Christian community, and so on.
The ability to act wisely and well as oneself before, in, and in response to the
love of God occasions reflection on the meaning of moral integrity. How may we
go on to describe the work and lineaments of practical wisdom within the Christian
life? I respond below with three theses that concern, respectively, the meaning and
value of Christological concreteness, the character of Christian existence as both
sinful and righteous, and the nature and measure of moral wholeness and “growth.”
Concreteness
The first thesis is that acts of practical wisdom, as acts in keeping with the reality of
things, are grounded in and communicate God’s decisive action in Jesus Christ in
his presence and power: “For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the
world, but that the world might be saved through him … And this is the judgment,
that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light,
because their deeds were evil … But he who does what is true comes to the light, that
it may be clearly seen that his deeds have been wrought in God” (Jn. 3:17, 19, 21).
Christian moral action may be true or real insofar as it is concrete. One sense
of “concreteness” in theological ethics refers to its basis in the revelation of God
in Jesus Christ. Moral life is measured and directed by this revelation contained in
the biblical narrative of God, Israel, and Jesus, as it applies to the divine activities
of creation, redemption, and consummation. It responds to and expresses the
will of God because all these activities have God’s faithful love in Christ at the
center. Though the news of God’s Word is heard in the form of address, it includes
the promise that this love may be “clearly seen,” insofar as moral actors “see
clearly” and so truthfully with and for the light that has come into the world apart
from us and, therefore, freely for us by God’s gracious initiative. The appeal to
concreteness stresses, in its implications for deliberation, judgment, and action,
the free and therefore obedient understanding of that initiative in the one Word of
God, in contrast to dark or shadowy sources of moral knowledge that claim our
allegiance in flight from light, whether these be abstract appeals to rational duty,
the general good, the happy life, or justice. Reasoning rightly about things to be
done thus involves adherence to the sovereign graciousness that breaks in, that
comes to us, and that as such we can never control.
Usually associated with Barth’s ethics, this case for concreteness emphasizes
the particularity and distinctiveness of theological ethics as a divine gift.15 But
the case in its reference to scripture, tradition, and worship, and relying on an
“act of faith … not to be interpreted in other than its own terms,” brings with it
two challenges. First—and to avoid an abstract “positivism of revelation” that
simply valorizes Christian particularity—moral judgment from a Christological
center must display the “surpassing reasonableness” of “seeing divine immanence
in the world” in and through human relations and the goods they may both
attain and corrupt.16 It is in these relations and practices—friendships, families,
work, citizenship, and life in the church—that Christ is present preserving and
reconciling the world to God. Returning to Bonhoeffer’s remarks about telling the
truth, we recall his appeal for “attentive discernment” of the limits and possibilities
of trust, fidelity, and the like within the bonds that make human life more fully
human. To this end, the best insights from other disciplines of inquiry such as
history, literature, and the sciences may be put in service for the sake of a fuller
understanding of real humanity.
The second challenge—for the sake of rejecting an abstract “positivism of
the church” that simply valorizes Christian distinctiveness—is to resist yoking
the revelation of God to communal identity in a way that tempts the faithful to
understand themselves as an irreducibly closed society, with its own special god
and destiny, away and separate from the “world.”17 On the contrary, the world has
received the light that Christ has brought in coming to it. Discernment is wrongly
solicitous if it is primarily about how the Christian community and its members
survive in self-defense.
15
See, e.g., II/2, 552–630.
16
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (New York: Macmillan, 1972),
280, 327–29. See also Andreas Pangritz, Karl Barth in the Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000); and Lehmann, “The Concreteness of Theology.”
17
H. Richard Niebuhr, The Responsible Self (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 150–
51. My appreciation of Niebuhr on this point does not extend to his apparent rejection of
Christocentric concreteness as I develop it here.
The position sketched above intends to oppose various forms of self-

justification in moral action. It commends faithfulness to reality undistracted by
the abstract foregrounding of moral norms, religious doctrine, or ecclesial need
that resists the sovereignty and the scope of divine grace. Now the truth of divine
justification and its central place in Reformation ethics has led some to what may
be yet another distracting abstraction. A denial that human works in any way
contribute to our salvation can remove from sight the Christian moral actor who
is acting wisely; for to the extent that she is doing so, she has heeded and learned
of the world claimed by God in the singular instance, has discerned something
of its moral truth, and has committed herself to action as a faithful servant. She
participates in a unilateral movement of grace and shares in the goodness and life
of God the Father, in the Holy Spirit and through the Son, as an adopted child of
God. As a creature, she moves toward her final end, the enjoyment of God in love,
as a free and responsible agent. Along this line, we arrive at a notion of merit that
for Aquinas names the fit between human agents and their end (ST, I–II, q. 114, a.
1). “That grace brings us to this end we never merit; but grace will bring us to this
end as ones who merit it.”18
In the case at hand, moreover, for Thomas the virtue of infused prudence that
accompanies the theological virtue of charity includes the gift of counsel whereby
the soul is rendered amenable to the motion of the Holy Spirit and directed in the
discernment of singular and contingent things; for the “thoughts of mortal men
are fearful, and our counsels uncertain” (ST, II–II, q. 52, a. 1, ad. 1). Counsel
particularly directs the wise to works of mercy (ST, II–II, q. 52, a. 4), and this
appears to presuppose “in the merciful one and in the one to be shown mercy a
common ‘defect,’ or at least vulnerability to defect,” in the sense of affliction or
neediness.19 That this life of virtue need not theologically or spiritually entail self-
justification comes clear in John Donne’s “Holy Sonnet”:
Thou hast made me, And shall thy worke decay?

Repaire me now, for now mine end doth haste,
I runne to death, and death meets me as fast,
And all my pleasures are like yesterday;
I dare not move my dimme eyes any way,
Despaire behind, and death before doth cast
Michael Root, “Aquinas, Merit, and Reformation Theology after the Joint
18
Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification,” Modern Theology 20, no. 1 (January

2004): 14. Contrast George Hunsinger. “Fides Christo Formata: Luther. Barth, and the
Joint Declaration,” in The Gospel of Justification in Christ: Where Does the Church Stand
Today? ed. Wayne C. Stumme (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 69–84.
19
Amy Laura Hall, “Love: A Kinship of Affliction and Redemption,” in The Oxford
Handbook of Theological Ethics, ed. Gilbert Meilaender and William Werpehowski (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005), 312. In this passage Hall is commenting specifically on
ST, II–II, q. 30, a. 2.
Such terror, and my feeble flesh doth waste

By sinne in it, which it t’wards hell doth weigh;
Onely thou art above, and when towards thee
By thy leave I can looke, I rise againe;
But our old subtle foe so tempteth me.
That not one houre my selfe I can sustaine;
Thy Grace may wing me to prevent his art,
And thou like Adamant draw mine iron heart.20
Christian practical wisdom is made concrete in one’s responsibility to God for

the world. In their conformity to Christ present, in judgment and reconciliation,
within the social bonds constitutive of human living, disciples may discover the
way they are uniquely called to their lives as the embodied singulars they are. In
coming to light as God’s adopted children, they bring God’s love to light in worship
and service. The tasks of virtue therefore both presuppose and anticipate a process
of responding to a calling, a vocation, a beckoning that makes possible, if you will,
discerning ourselves discerned “as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God”
(Rom. 12:1) For the individual human subject, the virtues without vocation are
blind, vocation without the virtues is empty, and prudence embraces both the self-
integration of the virtues and the ecstasis of vocation. One lives before God by
living outside that abstraction, “oneself,” in answering God’s call, oneself. Moral
deliberation, judgment, and action are thus made more complex, communally
and individually. For example, in “docility” one consults with the faithful and the
communion of saints at the same time as one may more fully grasp how one’s own
mission is a personal affair with a reference to God that is irreducible. Also consider
how the virtues of synesis and gnome, virtues that perfect our capacities to judge
well in the general and unique instances, respectively, play an interrelating role
in distinguishing expressions of vocation from idolatrous posturing or a refined
dismissal of general obligations (ST, II–II, q. 51, aa. 3–4).
What I have said about theological concreteness, it is important to add now, is
not only compatible with but demands affirmation of an objectively valid common
human morality that may be realized, even in the weakness of sin, through some
sort of “acquired virtue.” The peril of “natural theology,” and of “natural morality”
as an instance of it, is that it establishes a foundation for attention to the good from
which any Christological focus emerges merely as a reflection or projection. The
problem emerges also in defenses of humanity’s “natural” felicity that effectively
render its eternal life in God external, obscure, and finally subsidiary. Appeals to
natural and acquired moral virtue also may bring with them the trappings of self-
justification. All these important corrections, however, can turn into overcorrections
through one-sided employments of an ethic of divine command, critiques of
natural law that reduce it without remainder to its ideological employments (in,
20
John Donne, Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank J. Warnke (New York: Random House,
1967), 272. See also Root, “Aquinas, Merit, and Reformation Theology,” 16–18.
e.g., “liberal society”), and sweeping accounts of the “transcendental” that risk
collapsing nature into grace. Finally, worry over self-justification can lead to
refusing to countenance a properly human creaturely good in the announcement
of the Gospel.
If Jesus Christ is the “image of the invisible God, the first-born of creation,”
and if, indeed, “all things were created through him and for him” in whom “all
things hold together,” (Col. 1:15–17), then the human creature’s reality is in,
through, and for Jesus Christ. A theological ethic of what I am calling common
morality should generally but still concretely identify how the goods that human
creatures seek as such are in their distinction grounded in, ordered to, and hold
together with God’s sovereign, reconciling, and redeeming love. It must itself he
ordered to something like a creaturely end of just mutual relation, joyful fellow
humanity, “just generosity,” “dignity in solidarity,” or “the penultimate,” as each
and all of these “prepare the way” for God’s decisively gracious Word in whom
fallen creatures may discover themselves at once both “dead and risen” and “at
home.”21 When Christians honor humanity in these ways, they distinguish it
from its sinful perversion and its radically new perfection, and they take upon
themselves the work of making their message a word of hope to human beings in
their honest yearning and woeful suffering. When they do not, they tend to make
sin too massive or grace too sweeping, and thus present to the world an image of
itself that it finds either unrecognizable or utterly obvious. Consequently, they will
speak a dead letter word that is found to be, in this way or another, irrelevant.22
Writing of the “downward connection” of Christian love, by way of humanity’s
cheerful freedom in fellow humanity, to the presence of such freedom even in the
flights of pagan eros, Karl Barth puts the point precisely: “What we have here is
a relationship between the Church and world without which the Church cannot
discharge its function to the world because without it it would not be the Church,
the Church of Christian 1ove.”23
Sinner and Righteous
The second thesis is that in, from, and for the love of God, moral wisdom in
Christian existence is gained by persons who are at once both sinners and justified.
Because wisdom before God is marked by merciful attention, folly displays itself
in covetous evasion: “Let no one deceive himself. If anyone among you thinks that
he is wise, let him become a fool that he may become wise. For the wisdom of the
world is folly with God. For it is written, ‘He catches the wise in their craftiness’”
(I Cor. 3:18–19).
21
See Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 125–43.
22
III/2, 276–79.
23
Ibid., 285.
One can reasonably believe that no theological dictum does more to stop the
Christian moral life dead in its tracks than simul justus et peccator. If our complete
justice before God is exclusively eschatological, and hence is here and now
exclusively forensic, then our moral agency for the good—precisely in the sense
that it can be ours—is made into an insurmountable problem. But an effort to “save”
Christian ethics by rejecting the simul in favor of our responsible freedom from sin
risks evacuating the Gospel of its meaning, that “God shows his love for us in that
while we were yet sinners Christ died for us” (Rom: 5:8). The upshot would be to
stalk a moralism that leads to self-serving scrupulosity or failure of heart or both.
The claim that we are both sinner and justified gains its meaning in the context of
the love of God that is offered to us and which we are invited to share. We come to
know that love and its ever faithful acceptance most pointedly in the cross, and there
our sinfulness is also unmasked. “Whether we are sinners or not does not matter to
God, his love comes to us anyway, but because we are sinners it begins in us the
difficult and painful process of transforming us into saints.”24 It follows that the simul
is only a “state” or a “status” insofar as it sets the terms for a history of relation with
God. Our utterly unmerited justification names in its promise of forgiveness and new
life the point of departure for worship and service, Our existence in its entirety apart
from this promise has no future, and the ascription of our “simultaneous” sinfulness
locates the point of departure for our comprehending how it is that that is always
so; that is, how it is, in the evidence of our acts, omissions, motives, complicity, and
conspiracies, that we continue to exhibit in the face of God’s generous and gracious
love a hopeless resistance and reservation.
In this history of relation, an increase in love is promised to us, and our
sanctification is real; we may press on to make the righteousness from God that
depends on grace and faith our own, because Christ has made us his own (Phil.
3:12).25 So we are “sinners” in an analogous sense; what remains of the self’s
resistance to grace, its ignorance, fear, and self-loss through either encompassing
absorption or denigrating disintegration, both is and is not sin. It renders us in
one way or other always halting or reserved or otherwise shoddy lovers before
and within the love that keeps us; however, in that the divine love keeps us in its
circle, sin does not rule.26 An implication of simul justus et peccator must be that
Christian faith and hope may trust in God’s “promise of pardon to the disobedient
in their disobedience—a pardon that must sometimes be trusted in the face of
considerable evidence to the contrary in our lives.”27
24
Herbert McCabe, O.P., God Matters (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1987), 99.
25
Here and in what follows see Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth
(Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972), 254–60.
26
Michael Root, “Continuing the Conversation: Deeper Agreement on Justification
as Criterion and on the Christian Simul Justus et Peccator,” in The Gospel of Justification
in Christ, ed. Stumme, 54–59.
27
Gilbert Meilaender, The Freedom of a Christian: Grace, Vocation, and the Meaning
of Our Humanity (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2006), 34.
Within the circle of divine love, the Christian life may include mounting
awareness of dependence on the transforming power of grace in all that one
is, does, and seeks to do. This mark does not seem to be an accomplishment
of progressive self-awareness, as if what one first of all seeks is some settled
and empowered image of oneself, even as the bearer of the image of God. The
awareness is instead of the love of God, some turning to God, and, with both,
some healing and peace in the turning as well as a sort of fearless vulnerability or
vulnerable fearlessness. There is also an increasing comprehension of the power of
sin that grace opposes. One discovers that power personally in temptation and on
the occasions one succumbs to it. One finds it socially in one’s involvement in the
world, which structures an arena of fearful desires and constricted loyalties. That
involvement prompts a reminder of solidarity with others in the sin of the world,
and also the active perception that one may in service offer moments of peace to
one’s fellows. All this indicates that we may live as selves outside ourselves and in
response to the need of our neighbors, whose needs we share as the needy beings
we are. Such is the moral meaning of simul justus et peccator.
The freedom of God for humanity and humanity’s freedom for God are
encountered in a love that is known in the suffering Jesus Christ, The wise, guided
by the counsel of the Holy Spirit, will know and act on behalf of their sisters
and brothers whose wounds, suffering, and sin are joined with, enclosed in, and
contained by the wounds of Christ. Their power for and insight into the good issue
from that space of pardon and welcome. Hence pardon and welcome in answer to
need, in what Bonhoeffer calls “deputyship,” may characterize the judgments and
actions of those fools who are wise.
Wishing for his children’s well-being a father will act for them, “working
for them. caring for them, interceding, fighting, and suffering for them. Thus in
a real sense he is their deputy. He is not an isolated individual, but combines
in himself the selves of a number of human beings.”28 And he will act well by
responding compassionately to a child’s need out of self-giving readiness that
presupposes his own dependence, weakness, failures, and need. It is exactly
from this presupposition that his authority rather than his power may be properly
exercised. Still, we are tempted away from a merciful attention that acknowledges
our poverty and reliance on blessing, our fellowship in error, and our complicity
in the sin of the world. Coveting for our own security preconceived images of our
children (perfect or imperfect, innocent or guilty), of the “real world” and “what it
takes” to “make it” there, and of the nature and importance of our own experience,
we run away from the reality of our children, of what is necessary, and of just
how important (or not) are our experiences. As a result we ask for or demand
too much or too little; we confuse teen aged moodiness with serious illness; we
come close to making ourselves godlike to our children or making them godlike
to us. In these failures of prudence, failures built, as Aquinas has it, out of an
anxious covetousness that breeds failures in watchful and diligent attention to the
Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 224.

28
good (ST, II–II, q. 55, a. 78), we act on our children’s behalf falsely, craftily, or
cunningly, because they are not in fact who we see them to be.
So we may commend our children to God in prayer, in the hope of seeing them
aright, for God is “the great iconoclast,” whose shattering of our images of Him is
“one of the marks of His presence.” Just so “all reality is iconoclastic. The earthly
beloved … incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her,” and the neighbor
we are to love is not “the picture—almost the précis—we’ve made of him in our
own minds.”29 The discriminating work of prudence includes understanding these
illusions we build and harbor as well as the truth on which we rely.
Repetition, Renewal, and Perseverance
The third thesis is that the integrity and growth in the moral life that Christian
practical wisdom affords consist of an ongoing practice of repentance, renewal,
and perseverance: “Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock,
and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks
finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. Or what man of you, if his son asks
him for bread, will give him a stone?” (Matt. 7:7–9).
It would be not be difficult to draw from my reflections the following description
of moral integrity before God: Through a “spiral” in which will and desire direct
practical intelligence and practical intelligence instructs will and desire, a personal
subject achieves an integration of self that conforms to the truth of the good as
it is given by God, and in charity participates in divine love.30 Instruction in the
moral good will include learning the fundamental terms of a shared creaturely
morality that is ordered to and perfected by the grace of Christ. Moreover, the
clarity of vision about the good that practical wisdom perfected by charity enables
encompasses clear-sightedness about oneself in one’s specific vocation. While the
moral life forever involves sinful failures and struggles with temptation, it keeps
its direction, by the guidance of the Holy Spirit, toward healing and holiness and
therefore toward a growth in the virtues that renders us better able to delight in
God and love our neighbors. In all, our moral deliberations may become more
thorough and attentive; our judgments may turn more nuanced and thoughtful; and
our decisions for action may be more insightful, sure, and prompt.
Although we should generally affirm this description, we also ought to inflect
it toward some features of Christian vision that we lose at our peril. To that end, I
am interested in defending a proposal from Barth encountered earlier in Chapter 2:
“The principle of necessary repetition and renewal, and not a law of stability, is the
law of the spiritual growth and continuity of our life. It is when we observe this law
that we practice perseverance in the biblical meaning of the term; a perseverance
corresponding to the steadfastness of God Himself, which does not signify the
29
C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (New York: Bantam Books, 1976), 76–78.
30
Keenan, “The Virtue of Prudence,” 259.
suspension, but the continuing and indestructible possession of His freedom.”31

The proposal, of course, is part of Barth’s ethics of divine command. To several of
his interpreters, it mortally assaults a theological ethics of the virtues with accounts
of human and divine agency that are merely episodic and voluntarist.
In keeping with arguments I have made in other sections of this book, I believe
that this interpretation is incorrect. The passage in question is part of a description
of the “sincere humility” with which one “genuinely and indefatigably” asks: What
ought we to do? It is a part of that humility to acknowledge that we do learn God’s
will, that we are not tabula rasa, that we “always come from the school of the divine
command,” and not in vain. Nevertheless, we are not so complacent about the moral
course we have taken as secretly to ask: “How can I progress further on the right
path which I am, of course, already treading?” Instead, we repent of lapses and seek
from the goodness of God, which is a grace “new every morning,” an instruction and
guidance. Moral continuity and growth take place in the expansion of a readiness
to ask and seek, from each experience of instruction and conversion, another
opportunity for the same: “The continuity of a life which steadily affirms itself from
one decision to another, developing from within itself, can only be the continuity
of disobedience.”32 Now I have suggested that a discerning openness to reality as
God in Jesus Christ is present to and within it, and as guided by the Holy Spirit,
includes a parallel moral stance, one that develops from one’s own need and yet
stands outside oneself in conformity with the truth of things, including, crucially, the
needs of the neighbor. In alignment with Barth’s thinking, I would add that the skills
constituting practical wisdom, far from being possessions with which we defend
ourselves, enable a fervent and humble inquiry into the moral good, a desire to be
instructed concretely, and a disposition to see the world rightly that is precisely not a
matter of disobedience, arrogant self-imposition, or self-dispersing neglect.
Growth and wholeness may be accomplished in a repetition and renewal of
asking and seeking that do not erase but rather test our previous answers to the
ethical question in terms of what is now present and incumbent. This sort of
perseverance is a virtue that disposes one to “stand firm” in the good by resolutely
and readily releasing a hold on whatever may hinder clear vision, judgment, and
action. And clear vision confirms that “the individual is true to himself, and to the
history of the act of God from which he derives, when he allows his baptism to be
the sign which stands over every new day.”33
I said above that moral insight includes an awareness of the illusions we are
prone to keep, and that keep us in their grip, as well as of the truth on which we
depend. To allow one’s baptism to be the sign that stands over every new day
is to allow for a dying and rising in which there may be both an unmasking of
these false powers and our breaking with them in hope of and for the sake of the
Kingdom of God. It calls us to vigilance, as Augustine puts it, “lest a semblance
31
II/2, 647.
32
Ibid., 646–47.
33
Ibid., 647.
of truth mislead us; lest cunning speech deceive us; lest some error plunge us into
darkness; lest we believe good to be evil or evil good … and lest in this struggle,
filled as it is with hardship and peril, we either hope to win victory by our own
strength, or attribute it when won to our own strength, and not to the grace” of
God.34 In that struggle, which yields in our merits no integrity of which we can
boast, we may always be called perseverantly to make a break with our identities
as they are constituted by possessions, by worldly reputation, by structures of
relation that foster disregard and domination, or by maintaining ourselves either
violently over against our enemies or violently within the “inner ring” of this
or that special bond of smaller or greater extent.35 We attempt to break with the
powers of sin in the world in fidelity to God, who redeems us from them in a
history that we may by grace live into.36
Following scripture, Aquinas writes in connection with prudence of a kind of
disordered solicitousness about the circumstances of time, “for every time has its
own fitting proper solicitude” (ST, II–II, q. 55, a. 7). The time of our life, taken as a
whole, does, too, and formally speaking perseverance, again referring to Aquinas,
has to do with “standing firm against the difficulty arising from length of time”
(ST, II–II, q. 137, a. 2, ad. 1). Living into life before God, this “standing firm”
preserves against prematurely closing for oneself one’s own self-understanding. It
protects against that particular difficulty of length of time, anxiety, and then also
against securing and holding onto ourselves once and for all—“holding on” either
by ourselves or by way of others. Perseverance in repetition and renewal formally
makes for “growth” by making more possible a moral integrity that, consistent
with an understanding of one’s specific vocation, is given by God.
Substantively, perseverance contributes to an integrity into which we grow
and live as well. Shattering illusions about our identity, making a break with what
falsely claims to make it up, and acting in the world from our suffering and need
for the good of our needy and suffering neighbors, we may in a substantial way
see the world, and take on a “look,” that responds in moral action, whatever our
specific place of responsibility, with regard for the spiritual and corporal works of
mercy. These works of mercy are, Dorothy Day wrote, “a wonderful stimulus to
our growth in faith as well as love. Our faith is taxed to the utmost and so grows
through this strain put upon it. It is pruned again and again, and springs up bearing
much fruit.”37 Thomas Merton suggested the connection with perseverance in a
letter to Dorothy Day, when he reflected on God’s great love for those “who are so
beat and have so much nothing when they come to die that it is almost as if they
34
Augustine, The City of God, ed. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), 1158.
35
IV/2, 546-553; C. S. Lewis, “The Inner Ring,” in The Weight of Glory (Grand
Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1949), 55–66.
36
David H. Kelsey, Imagining Redemption (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox
Press, 2005), 38.
37
Dorothy Day, Selected Writings, ed. Robert Ellsberg (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1992), 99.
had persevered in nothing but had gradually lost everything, piece by piece, until
there was nothing left but God. Hence perseverance is not hanging on but letting
go. That of course is terrible. But … it is a question of [God’s] hanging on to us.”38
To see, again and again, a healing justice in the world that permits admonishing
the sinner; to discover a truth and a faithfulness through which the ignorant may
be instructed and the doubtful counseled; to discern a source of solace and mercy
by which the sad may be comforted and injuries may be forgiven; to locate a
basis for hope through which wrongs may be borne with patience, and from which
prayer may be said for the living and the dead; to find in the hungry, the thirsty, the
homeless, the naked, the prisoner, the sick, and the dead a neediness and a poverty
that we share, and the self-identification of Jesus Christ with them and with us—to
see again and again is a way of comprehending how moral vision, deliberation,
judgment, and action may attain a surpassing reasonableness.
38
Thomas Merton, The Hidden Ground of Love, ed. William H. Shannon (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993), 137.
Chapter 10
Desire, Reverence, and Friendship
Introduction
Love is rejoicing over the existence of the beloved one; it is the desire that
he be rather than not be; it is longing for his presence when he is absent; it
is happiness in the thought of him; it is profound satisfaction over everything
that makes him great and glorious. Love is gratitude: it is thankfulness for the
existence of the beloved; it is the happy acceptance of everything that he gives
without the jealous feeling that the self ought to be able to do as much; it is a
gratitude that does not seek equality; it is wonder over the other’s gift of himself
in companionship. Love is reverence: it keeps its distance even as it draws near;
it does not seek to absorb the other in the self or want to be absorbed by it; it
rejoices in the otherness of the other; it desires the beloved to be what he is and
does not seek to refashion him into a replica of the self or to make him a means to
the self’s advancement. As reverence love is and seeks knowledge of the other,
not by way of curiosity nor for the sake of gaining power but in rejoicing and in
wonder. In all such love there is an element of “holy fear” which is not a form of
flight but rather deep respect for the otherness of the beloved and the profound
unwillingness to violate his integrity. Love is loyalty; it is the willingness to let
the self be destroyed rather than that the other cease to be; it is the commitment
of the self by self-binding will to make the other great.1
Sixteen years after these words appeared in print, Gene Outka appealed to
them near the beginning of his magisterial analysis of Christian agape. He found
them to locate features of the kind of regard for the neighbor that one prominent
interpretation of agape commends. They accord to neighbor love “both an agent-
commitment and a recipient-evaluation … In short, one ought to be committed
to the other’s well-being independently and unalterably; and to view the other
as irreducibly valuable prior to his doing anything in particular”2 The themes of
reverence and loyalty loom large in envisioning agape as “equal” or “unqualified”
regard, the “universal love” that is fundamentally “God-derived.” “Worth is worth,
1
H. Richard Niebuhr, The Purpose of the Church and its Ministry (New York: Harper
& Brothers, 1956), 35.
2
Gene Outka, Agape: An Ethical Analysis (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1972), 10.
or, dignity is dignity in relation to God.”3 From that perspective, one can make
distinctions between a desiring love that seeks and discovers the lover’s own good
in loving the beloved (call that eros), and a love that constitutes the mutuality born
of friendship (name it philia).
The distinctions matter for Christian life, in part, because they make it possible
to realize how failures in our regard for others and ourselves may be remedied.
“Unqualified regard” corrects for self-deceiving pride or unfitting exclusivity in
one form or another. When “we have little appreciation for ourselves, the remedy
is self-love or eros,” which “increases our sense of our own goodness.” Should we
think that one of the deepest problems of human experience is a basic loneliness
or sense of separation, we find an answer in the union of philia.4 The distinctions
also lead us to recognize how the rhythm of a human life “includes attachment,
detachment, and new attachment” whereupon we may learn to love others for
their own sakes, ourselves with an integrity both bounded and open, and within
mutual relations of giving and receiving.5 For Christian existence, the rhythm is
intelligible in terms of the love of God given in Jesus Christ. God’s gift to us is
the gift of His life that we may in a real way share, and our “love to God is the
foundation of a gracious love to men [and women].” They are loved, in Jonathan
Edwards’s description, “because of their relation to God as his children, as his
creatures, as they who are beloved of God, or those to whom divine mercy is
offered, or in some other way from regard to God.”6
What I find particularly striking about Niebuhr’s statement, however, is that it
seems to present love’s meaning in a kind of differentiated unity. The reverence
and permanent loyalty of unqualified regard are certainly in play; yet the other
distinguishing features are also present, and they all seem to hang together as a
piece more than stand either in polar relation or timely, patterned sequence.
Love, first, is “rejoicing over the existence of the beloved,” a “longing” for her
or his presence, and “happiness in the thought” of her or him. On the face of it, the
affections and experiences of joy, longing, and happiness suggest a “satisfaction”
that fulfills the lover, and that matches a desire that we should not be afraid to
identify as eros. Love’s joy is at once nonpossessive and a form of felicity, for it is
an affirmation, an approval, of the sheer being of the beloved. We thus approach
Gene Outka, “Universal Love and Impartiality,” in The Love Commandments:

3
Essays in Christian Ethics and Moral Philosophy, ed. Edmund N. Santurri and William
Werpehowski (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1992), 9. “Equal regard” is
the term Outka uses in Agape. He adopts “unqualified regard” later, e.g., in “Theocentric
Agape and the Self: An Asymmetrical Affirmation in Response to Colin Grant’s Either/Or,”
Journal of Religious Ethics 26/1 (1996): 35–41.
4
Edward Vacek, Love, Human and Divine: The Heart of Christian Ethics (Washington,
DC: Georgetown University Press, 1994), 308.
5
Ibid., 309.
6
Jonathan Edwards, Ethical Writings, ed. Paul Ramsey (New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 1989), 133–34.
Desire, Reverence, and Friendship 153
what Josef Pieper claims to be the common element in all love, the communication
that “it’s good that you exist; it’s good that you are in this world!”7
The affirmation “it is good” confirms existence, the being of the beloved,
and it is this approval that brings satisfaction. Pieper reasons that in the act of
creation God “has already infused everything that human beings can love and
affirm, goodness along with existence, and that means lovability and affirmability.
Human love, therefore, is by its nature and must inevitably be always an imitation
and a kind of repetition of this perfected and, in the exact sense of the word,
creative love of God.”8 A creaturely repetition at root may be not so much, as
Pieper has it, a “making be” as it is a more modest and yielding (but all the while
active) “letting be” that readily gives the beloved herself in her created reality.9
This giving, however, as a creaturely repetition hints that “the first stirrings of love
contain an element of gratitude.” It is a reply that presupposes a sense “that one
has been referred to something prior.”10
Second, then, “love is gratitude,” “thankfulness for the existence of the
beloved” and “wonder over the other’s gift of himself in companionship.” We
must only think of “companionship” at this point as the shared bond of created
human beings. Now if joy and gratitude respond to the goodness of the gift of the
beloved himself, it must be the case, third, that love is reverence, rejoicing “in the
otherness of the other,” desiring the beloved “to be what he is” and renouncing
what would violate his integrity. Reverence “is a kind of awe, and awe is a kind
of humility,” and it demands active and humble attention in seeking knowledge
of the other “in rejoicing and wonder.”11 Reverence in its attentiveness gives rise
to loyalty, active commitment “to make the other great” and loyal to her “cause.”
But how, one must ask, can that solidarity and its conditions be enacted in a
way that is not readily identifiable as the love of a friend?
In summary, I have tried to show how Niebuhr’s hymn to Christian love
or agape presents eros, unqualified regard, and friendship as unified by way of
mutual implication or coinherence. Creaturely desire finds satisfaction in grateful
respect for the beloved in her irreducible being and value. We may understand
the passage, moreover, as conveying, at a remove from an active reciprocal
relation of friendship, “the kind of love one associates with a friend.”12 An implicit
anthropology of created human being operates such that one may find each of
the three loves anticipating and even containing the other two. Human desire for
the good finds a term in reverent and gracious regard for another human creature
recognized and welcomed as one’s fellow. The regard is that of a creature whose
7
Josef Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1997), 164.
8
Ibid., 171.
9
Herbert McCabe, O.P., God Matters (London and New York: Continuum, 1987), 108.
10
Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love, 171.
11
Marilynne Robinson, “Credo,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin (Spring 2008): 30.
12
Liz Carmichael, Friendship: Interpreting Christian Love (Edinburgh: T. & T.
Clark, 2004), 5.
good includes this companionship. The companionship cannot be understood

apart from the desire for it in the way of grateful reverence. The anthropology’s
foundation is a relation between Creator and the human person that it honors and
fittingly reiterates.
Niebuhr goes on to locate Christian love in its fuller theological context:
In the language of Christianity love of God and neighbor … is both the

requirement laid on man by the Determiner of all things and the gift given, albeit
in incompletion, by the self-giving of the Beloved. It is the demand inscribed
into infinitely aspiring human nature by the Creator; its perversion in idolatry,
hostility and self-centeredness is the heart of man’s tragedy; its reconstruction,
redirection and empowerment is redemption from evil. Love of God and neighbor
is the gift given through Jesus Christ by the demonstration in incarnation,
words, deeds, death and resurrection that God is love—a demonstration we but
partly apprehend yet sufficiently discern to be moved to a faltering response of
reciprocal love … Faith in God’s love toward man is perfected in man’s love to
God and neighbor. We love in incompleteness, not as redeemed but in the time
of redemption, not in attainment but in hope.13
This chapter considers the extent to which what I have called a logic of coinherence
can be discovered and defended within the broader framework that Niebuhr
describes. I focus on what it means to love one’s neighbor, albeit incompletely,
“in the time of redemption” and in hope” under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. My
approach to the question is to register and expound a variety of ways in which eros,
self-giving unqualified regard, and friendship are involved in Christian claims
about the nature of agape given the identity of the human person before God.
In the time of redemption, the human person is a creature. He or she is a brother
or sister for whom Christ died. She is a “possible companion in beatitude.” All of
these descriptions extend within and outside the community of faith which lives
professing Christ’s Lordship in worship and allegiance to the Father, through the
Son, and by the power of the Holy Spirit. How may these creatures, siblings,
and companions regard, esteem, and love one another? The answer, I shall argue,
confirms in distinctive ways mutual implication or coinherence. It also leads
to a way to think about Christian love of neighbor as a kind of friendship that
is distinguishable from the active mutuality of philia. Outka has proposed that
some such mutuality is agape’s “internal, ideal fruition.”14 My efforts here can
be taken to explicate or unpack how and why the fruition is “internal” in that
here the friendship of Christian love would be advanced and completed. The
friendship is a “will to communion”15 that presupposes, attests, and seeks the
13
Niebuhr, The Purpose of the Church and its Ministry, 32.
14
Outka, “Universal Love and Impartiality,” 89.
15
Outka, “Self and Other in a Theological Framework,” in A Just and True Love, ed. Maura
A. Ryan and Brian Linnane, S.J. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 154.
reciprocal confirmation of human bonds that are, in ontological, soteriological,

and eschatological terms, already in place.
Another Look at Human Creatures
A human being is contingent, dependent, vulnerable, and irreducibly other.

Contingency refers first to the fact that one did not and does not have to be. Our
lives have their source at every moment in God’s creative act. Dependence on God
is reflected in dependence upon conditions that give us our lives and upon other
human creatures who may advance our good or damage it. Human vulnerability
and neediness, however, do not imply that our existence can be reduced to an
extension or organ of some creaturely reality that encompasses or controls it as
“its own.” Creaturely human being logically is being established in relation to and
also as other than its Creator, not interchangeable with any other divine creations.
Otherness is further qualified by powers of rational agency through which persons
may reflect, deliberate, and make choices that are free and responsible.
Following Reinhold Niebuhr, contemporary Christian ethicists often
summarize these conditions with the names “finitude” and “freedom.”16 Neither a
beast (finite but not free) nor a god (free without the limits of finitude), a person’s
“human dignity” in Gilbert Meilaender’s definition may be gained or lost in
one’s discovering and responding properly to the limits and the self-transcending
possibilities of human life in their right balance and order. But the idea of “personal
dignity” is also “needed to make clear that, however different we may be in the
degree to which we possess some of the characteristically human capacities, we
are equal persons whose comparative ‘worth’ cannot and ought not be assessed.”17
In keeping with the latter concept, conditions of finitude and freedom identify
“generic characteristics” that Christian agape qua unqualified regard considers in
its loyalty to the good of the neighbor for her own sake—such as the needs of
“psycho-physical existence” (for “food, drink, shelter, clothing, health, liberty,
affection, and self-respect”) and a “moral agency” worthy of respect.18
The human creature is also destined for fellowship or friendship with God. Its
destiny can be said to be marked on his or her very being and activity or, as Karl
Barth puts it, “in its own sphere.” This is not to say that there is a natural ability
to take up fellowship or covenant partnership with God, for that is only enacted
by the divine grace that calls a person and “sets him in a position to respond.”19
The God who redeems, however, is also the Creator, and humanity’s “creaturely
16
Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man. Volume I. Human Nature (New
York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964), 167–77.
17
Gilbert Meilaender, Neither Beast Nor God: The Dignity of the Human Person
(New York and London: Encounter Books, 2009), 1.
18
Outka, Agape, 264–65.
19
III/2, 224.
essence cannot be opposed to this grace of God, but must confront it with a certain
familiarity.”20 Thus human persons are in essence constituted relationally; their
identity is both within and made for fellowship with others like them.
Humanity is “covenantal” and “covenanting” in the sense that it is realized in
a free and welcoming encounter between I and Thou. Human beings are made for
and flourish in bonds of mutual openness, communication, and assistance with one
another across the entire canvass of their life and its activity. Who human creatures
are and how they are to take themselves to be as such always already stands within
the reality of fellow humanity. Their irreducibly differentiated being is “in connection
with him who is one like me.”21 “My own being and positing takes place in and with
the fact that I am claimed by that of the other and occupied with it.”22 Not hostile,
indifferent, or neutral toward another, the creature’s being is realized in a movement
of openness to see, attend, know, and help one’s fellow, i.e., to offer “comfort,
encouragement, and alleviation” in reply to his “cry for help,” and to confirm one’s
need for the same movement in return. Creaturely life normatively understood
resides in a mutuality of giving and receiving, summoning and being summoned,
helping and being helped, each with the other in the mystery of creaturely freedom.
Man discovers the uniqueness and irreplaceability of the other man in his actuality
as the companion, associate, comrade, fellow and helpmate which he is given, and
in this way and this way alone, in all the necessity of the presence of this other,
he discovers his own uniqueness and irreplaceability, and therefore his own being
and actuality as a man. Or conversely, he discovers himself as this particular man
existing for himself, and in this way and this way alone, in all the necessity of
his own existence, he discovers the other man as the being which is with him and
to which he for his part has to give himself as a companion, associate, comrade,
fellow and helpmate. Humanity lives and moves and has its being in this freedom
to be oneself with the other, and oneself to be with the other.23
For Barth everything in this connection “is done on both sides with gladness,”
“in mutual joy” known precisely in each party freely giving to and welcoming the
gift of the other in the reciprocity of service and need. This joyful “being with,”
the “secret of humanity,” locates a similarity amidst all the dissimilarity between
20
Ibid.
21
Ibid., 244.
22
Ibid., 246.
23
Ibid., 272. I discuss the importance of fellow humanity for Barth’s political ethics
in “Justification and Justice in the Theology of Karl Barth,” The Thomist 50/4 (October
1986): 623–42; and “Karl Barth and Politics”, The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth,
ed. John Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 228–42.
the humanity of Jesus and our own, and establishes the continuity “of the human
subject as a creature, a sinner, and a sinner saved by grace.”24
In an analysis of the “doxological gratitude” constitutive of creaturely
flourishing that resonates in a number of ways with Barth’s account, David
Kelsey describes “practicing wonder” and “practicing delight” as two “ascetical
disciplines” that bear on the determination of creaturely fellow humanity. The first
practice involves learning to respect fellow creatures in their “sheer given otherness
to oneself and to each other.”25 Wonder attends not to others as stereotypes but in
their “unique concrete particularity.”26 Practicing delight is a matter of learning
to rejoice in the givenness of the other, as well as gaining the patience “to give
fellow creatures their own space and time in which to be themselves”27 rather than
making one’s fellow an extension of one’s space and time. Both practices include
coming to understand in gratitude oneself as God’s creative gift as well.
Practicing wonder and delight contribute finally to learning as a creature to
love one’s fellow creatures well. Kelsey sees such love as closer to eros—to this
extent he mirrors another Barthian theme28—than to what he takes to be agape’s
faithful love of sinners and philia’s reciprocal love between equals sharing some
common project. Surely it would be an error to jump to name “fellow humanity”
as the friendship or philia that involves deeper intimacies based on particular
preferences for companions and goods that restrict the reach of the bond (even
if this limitation need not be exclusive in principle). Still, it bears it very own
24
Ibid., 272, 275. “That there is a human nature created by God and therefore good
and not evil must be accepted as we see man against the background of the man Jesus. It is
not by nature, but by its denial and misuse, that man is as alien and opposed to the grace of
God as we see him to be in fact. But rightly to appreciate this corruption brought about by
man, and therefore the sin of man, we must quietly consider what is corrupted, and calmly
maintain that all the corruption of man cannot make evil by nature the good work of God.
It is because the secret of humanity remains even when it is shamed by man that sin is
always such an inconceivable revolt, and never loses the character of a crime, or becomes a
kind of second natural state that becomes excusable as such. But this enables us to see and
understand why the mercy of God to man is not an act of caprice but has its sure basis in the
fact that man is not a stranger or lost or lost to his Creator even as a sinner, but in respect
of his nature, of the secret of his humanity, still confronts him as he was created. Being
a sinner, he has not vanished as a man, or changed into a different being, but still stands
before God as the being as which he was created, and therefore as the being whose nature
consists in that freedom. And as God makes Himself his Deliverer, He merely exercises His
faithfulness as the Creator to His creature, which has not become lost to Him by its fall into
sin.” Ibid., 274–75. Barth immediately cautions that none of this implies any human power
to save oneself or to cooperate in his or her salvation.
25
David H. Kelsey, Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology (Louisville,
KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 346
26
Ibid., 347.
27
Ibid., 349.
28
III/2, 274–85.
reciprocity, recognition of commonality, and glad concern. From the standpoint of

the “shared truth”29 of creatureliness, one should say, regard for the other involves
a form of welcome, solicitude, and appreciation of individual agency and need on
both sides that is more than mere beneficence or benevolence. Even when one’s
bid for fellowship is rejected, one stands to the other as a kind of friend given
one’s normative creaturely determination. While this is not the same as love for
the sinner or the hostile or unattractive other, it concerns a respect for the other in
the other’s givenness that should never include hostility or indifference on one’s
own account. Here an irreducible valuing or unqualified regard appears. That one
so stands, in respect and gratitude and friendship, gladly suggests a desire and a
will for fellow humanity, for that kind of relation, which can fairly be described
as eros. Kelsey is right at this point; it is a desire for a bond with another in which
one may live as oneself and flourish joyfully.
Brothers and Sisters
Christians understand the human person as a sinner who has fallen away from
God, one’s neighbor, and oneself. In pride he or she advances a personal project
of self-mastery and self-sufficiency; or the sinner slothfully orders life to the rule
of another, or to family or nation or the “givens” of one’s embodied existence in
history. Sometimes the two movements are in play at the same time. We order
our agency and, if you will, bend the knee to some finite dimension of our lives,
and lord it over others with a sense of newly found power. Sin in this instance is
idolatry. We deceive ourselves about the idols that we worship, then wield them like
clubs, and finally go on to defend ourselves against challenges to these self-serving
loyalties, whether they are petty or grand, narrow or wide. Throughout, the sinner
denies the relatedness proper to her or him with regard to God, neighbor, and self.
Sinners are brothers and sisters for whom Christ died. On the basis of this
description, Christians’ love paradigmatically corresponds to the God “who shows
his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us … While we
were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son” (Rom. 5: 8,
10). “Correspondence” refers both to aligning oneself faithfully within the sphere
of God’s love for the enemy who is oneself, and, following from that, humbly
extending the pattern of that love in attitude and action to the human enemy-
beloved. The limitations of good will conditioned in self-interested demands for
reciprocity and the dangers of pride “thus fall away: because God forgave me
while I was still his enemy, I must also forgive my fellow men even when they are
enemies; because God has given to me without counting the costs, to the point of
wholly losing himself (Matt. 27:46), I must surrender any worldly calculation of
C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc., 1960), 97.
29
the relationship between almsgiving and compensation (Matt. 6:1–4, 6: 19–34).”30

A presumption and a challenge “which binds all Christians” is the fact that “how
we treat our enemy is the key test of whether we love our neighbor”.31
Anders Nygren’s classic study of agape and eros places the emphasis, if too
narrowly and exclusively, on this truth.32 His emphasis can lead naturally to a view
of neighbor love as unconditional, universal love, an agape of unqualified regard not
dependent upon particularizing differences that establish a “value” in the beloved
to which (“erotic”) love responds. Agape in this sense is also permanent in the
attention and loyalty it directs to the well-being of the neighbor for his or her own
sake.33 In addition, for Nygren “the sublimest conception of agape ever given or
capable of being given” is found in Paul’s identifying it with the cross of Christ. In
and with the cross God reconciles us to Himself with a love “that gives itself away,
that sacrifices itself, even to the uttermost.”34 In this light love of neighbor appears
to be rooted neither in a desire for some valued self-enrichment in the other, nor in
a “self-surrender … of ecstatic eros”35 As a love of sinners and even enemies, the
question of this being a love between friends appears to be excluded by definition.
Let us consider further how it is that human creatures, sinners all, are brothers
and sisters for whom Christ died. A twofold kinship is suggested by the depiction,
a solidarity in sin and a solidarity in the promise of redemption. The kinship is
based on the reality of living before and within the sovereign love of God. God’s
love is gracious, freely given not only in spite of sin but because of it, because,
that is, of sin’s threat, destructiveness, futility, and misery in being the rejection of
love. It answers to the plight of fallen creatures with a divine act of self-giving that
aims, as Barth puts it, “to separate and liberate man from his sin” by both grace
and the judgment that serves it.
Man can and should, therefore, rise up and rejoice thankfully in the
incomprehensible comfort and forgiveness of God, in all the assistance which he
is given … in short, in all the unmerited favors addressed to him by the love of
God. Yet he should also be prepared sooner or later to be recalled in some way to
30
Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Love Alone is Credible (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius
Press, 2004), 112–13.
31
National Conference of Catholic Bishops, The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise
and Our Response (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 1983), par. 80.
32
Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros (London: SPCK, 1953).
33
Of course, this feature forms only one crucial aspect of Nygren’s account. Agape is
“spontaneous,” “unmotivated,” “creates value” in the beloved, eschews “self-love,” etc. For
a critical analysis, see William Werpehowski, “Anders Nygren’s Agape and Eros,” in The
Oxford Handbook of Theological Ethics, ed. Gilbert Meilaender and William Werpehowski
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 433–48.
34
Nygren, 119–18.
35
Balthasar, 86.
his limits by this love, to find himself forcefully redirected to the humility which
he so easily forgets and loses when he basks in the divine sunshine.36
Life within the free and purifying love of God is, moreover, living within the
light and the shadow of the cross which exposes sin for what it is, bears it in self-
giving love, bears it away, and exchanges it with the righteousness of God.
The Christian encounters Christ in his neighbor, not beyond him or above him …
seeing human sin where it finally belongs, in the Son of Man, who “was made to
be sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21),
and thus by seeing Christ’s righteousness in this man himself, as the truth that has
been given to him and toward which his existence is ordered. In other words, this
twofold unity is in fact to be read “through the Cross.” But when we read it thus,
the Cross eliminates guilt by transforming it, through love, into love.37
Liberation from sin is also liberation for a love that participates in the love of
the Father for the Son and of the Son for the Father. “As God loves man, giving
Himself to him and for him, it comes about that the latter in his action can imitate
the love of God, responding and corresponding to it.”38 The elimination of guilt
by transforming it, through love, into love thus implies that love of neighbor,
including the enemy-neighbor, is a summons to personal fellowship that is already
within a form of fellowship participating in the bond that God in Christ has willed
to have with and for us as brothers and sisters for whom Christ died.
Specifically what sort of “fellowship” is the summons “within?” Given the
supreme test of love of enemies, it would be odd to suppose that it is manifestly
reciprocal or mutual in any ordinary sense. Then what can it be? At this juncture,
I want to propose that the double solidarity in kinship, solidarity in sin and in the
promise of redemption, involves the bearing of burdens in a pattern of exchange
that is, as “the law of Christ,” befriending.
Martin Luther’s 1519 commentary on Galatians 6: 2–3 addresses the proposal.
“Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.” One must bear the
errors and sins of the neighbor, instructing in one case, restoring in the other.
“Thus,” writes Luther, “everywhere love finds something to bear, something to
do. Moreover, love is the law of Christ. But to love means to wish from the heart
what is good for the other person, or to seek the other person’s advantage.” To
live otherwise is “to want to live, not on earth but in Paradise, not among sinners
but among angels, not in the world but in heaven, and making ‘the cross of Christ
36
IV/2, 773.
37
Balthasar, Love Alone is Credible, 114.
38
IV/2, 779.
of no effect.’”39 “For if anyone thinks he is something, when he is nothing, he

deceives himself.”
We are all equal, and we are all nothing. Why, then, does one man puff himself
up against the other, and why do we not rather help one another? Furthermore,
if there is anything in us, it is not our own; it is a gift of God. But if it is a gift of
God, then it is entirely a debt one owes to love, that is, to the law of Christ. And
if it is a debt owed to love, then I must serve others with it, not myself. Thus my
learning is not my own; it belongs to the unlearned and the debt I owe to them
… Thus my wisdom belongs to the foolish, my power to the oppressed. Thus
my wealth belongs to the poor, my righteousness to the sinners. For these are
the forms of God of which we must empty ourselves, in order that the form of a
servant may be in us (Phil. 2:6), because it is with all these qualities that we must
stand before God and intervene on behalf of those who do not have them …40
Following upon Christ’s saving work, one grieves “as if his neighbor’s weakness,
sin, and foolishness were his very own,”41 takes it upon oneself, and serves the
neighbor’s need. We are all equal and all nothing—such is our shared lot as needy
sinners. If there is anything “in us,” it is God’s gift given in love, and the debt
we owe to love, the law of Christ, is “made good” by communicating it in its
redeeming promise to neighbors like us, who in that promise are also “all equal,”
and “all nothing.” Neighbor love as Luther presents it is a form of friendship in
Christ that also attests to Christ, the neighbor’s brother, friend, and Lord.
In a 1949 column on “The Scandal of the Works of Mercy,” Dorothy Day takes
up related themes. She quotes from a letter sent to her at The Catholic Worker.
I took a gentleman seemingly in need of spiritual and temporal guidance into

my home on a Sunday afternoon. Let him have a nap on my bed, went through
the want ads with him, made coffee and sandwiches for him, and when he left, I
found my wallet had gone also.42
“Well,” Day reflects, “our friend has suffered from his experience and it is part
of the bitterness of the poor, who cheat each other, who exploit each other even
as they are exploited, who despise each other even as they despised.” Experiences
like this, which Day counts among the cruelest, are “agony … because we all want
to love, we desire with a great longing to love our fellows, and our hearts are often
39
Luther’s Works, Volume 27, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (St. Louis, MO: Concordia
Publishing House, 1964), 391–92.
40
Ibid., 393.
41
Martin Luther, “Two Kinds of Righteousness,” in Martin Luther: Selections from
His Writings, ed. John Dillenberger (Garden City, NJ: Anchor Books, 1961), 91.
42
Dorothy Day, Selected Writings, ed. Robert Ellsberg (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books,
1983), 99.
crushed at such rejections.” But the scandal of the works of mercy in the eyes of
the world is their folly, that “they all go together” for the destitute “who need so
much that we cannot take [them] apart and say I will do this one or that one Work
of Mercy.” 43 Hence the corporal works, to feed the hungry, harbor the harborless,
and so on, are of one piece with the spiritual works—and not merely to “comfort
the sorrowful” or “admonish the sinner” but also to “bear wrongs patiently” and
“forgive all injuries.”
Day asks that Christians foolishly bear the bitterness of the poor and express to
them the righteousness of Christ by “sowing the seed of love.” I cannot understand
the proposal in this particular context without viewing this love not only as a call to
friendship in reciprocity but also and perhaps more directly as a form of friendship
shared between brothers and sisters for whom Christ died. The bitterness and
cruelty of rejection can and should be accounted for in this way. Our desire to
love, our “great longing” which when unfulfilled crushes our hearts, is, moreover,
a kind of eros. It is a longing for loving relation within a loving relation that is not
only hoped for but is really present in hope. It is an eros inscribed on our being as
creatures of God and honored in the shape of its embodiment in faithful, suffering
love for the neighbor for his or her own sake.
Karl Barth’s perspective on Christian love is distinct from what we find in
Luther and Day, but it moves in parallel with them. He claims that Christian love
of neighbor is directed always and only to “the fellow-man who encounters and is
united with me in the context of the history of salvation.” The “neighbor,” strictly
speaking, is not every human being, even though the Christian may not withhold
to anyone “an attitude of openness, of expectation, of good hope, and therefore of
readiness to love.”44 This “readiness to love” or “anticipation” of neighbor love or
“friendliness” toward “the neighbor or brother of tomorrow”45 may be nothing more
than the “fellow humanity” we have already considered. But Barth is not clear on
the matter, especially in light of his discussion of 1 Thess. 3:12: “And may the Lord
make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all.”46 It seems to me
that he needs more than creaturely fellowship here, something along the lines of an
anticipatory form of witness to the redemptive love of God; for if that were not the
normative possibility, by Barth’s own account it would be “difficult to see what is
meant by the death of Jesus Christ for the sins of the whole world, and therefore of
all men, or by His lordship over all men as revealed in His resurrection.”47
Christian love as such, however, is specifically Christians’ mutual love, “their
love for one another because they are those who together are loved by God and
love Him in return.”48 I already have noted in past chapters that Barth sees this
43
Ibid., 99–100.
44
IV/2, 808.
45
45
Ibid., 809.
46
Ibid., 804–805, 808–809
47
Ibid., 808.
48
Ibid., 810.
love as a matter of witness, an interposition which truly and visibly reflects and
pledges God’s very own love. This act of self-giving to the neighbor for her own
sake within a mutual bond of being loved by God and loving Him in return is itself
a cause of rejoicing” for the lover.49
Companions
Creatures who made for God and kin brought together in sin and divine promise
are also “possible companions in beatitude.”
To introduce the idea and connect it with our preceding discussion, we turn
again to Dorothy Day and the “logic” of Works of Mercy. She tells of a priest who
had his catechism classes write “questions as to our work” after they had read her
memoir, The Long Loneliness.
The majority of them asked the same question: “How can you see Christ in
people?” And we can only say: It is an act of faith, constantly repeated. It is an
act of love, resulting from an act of faith. It is an act of hope, that we can awaken
these same acts in their hearts, too, with the help of God . . .
… How do we know we believe? How do we indeed have faith? Because we

have seen His hands and his feet in the poor around us. He has shown Himself
to us in them. We start by loving them for Him, and we soon love them for
themselves, each one a unique person, most special!50
I have already mentioned a sense in which the Christian sees Christ in the neighbor,
i.e., as one whose own sins are taken up by Christ in a mysterious exchange that
would transform guilt, through love, into love. Without inconsistency or distortion,
we can apply this meaning generally to what Day writes. That interpretation,
however, does not get to the heart of it. The heart of the matter has to do, first, with
recognizing in the need and suffering of the poor the need and suffering of Christ
in his mission to the Father for the salvation of the world through self-giving love.
Second, it concerns that love in union with the need and suffering of the poor, and
with them a love and union with all. “He has shown Himself to us in them,” and
with the eyes of faith we grasp what He reveals to us, and join in His mission and
solidarity. For Day, this is “the only way we have of knowing and believing in
our love. The mystery of poverty is that by sharing in it, making ourselves poor in
giving to others, we increase our knowledge of and belief in love.”51
In short, we share in Christ’s fellowship along the lines of my analysis above.
There is something more. “We start by loving them for Him, and we soon love
49
Ibid., 819–21.
50
Day, Selected Writings, 329–30.
51
Day, Selected Writings, 330.
them for themselves …” It is mistaken to think that the first sentence intends
instrumentalizing the neighbor, a “use” of her or him for the sake of finding our
end or good in Christ. The neighbor is loved for his or her own sake “for Christ,” in
communion with Him and loyal to His cause. But soon our love for them gives rise to
“loving them for themselves” in the way that we might say to a beloved, “I love you
for yourself, for who you are most truly.” Neighbor love may reach a point of seeing
and affirming what God takes the neighbor really to be, “a beloved child,” a possible
companion in beatitude.52 As Pieper puts it, following C. S. Lewis, we realize that
“there are no ordinary people.”53 Or with Day once more: “Each one a unique person,
so special!” Or as Thomas Aquinas holds, we may see in the neighbor a capacity for
eternal happiness which concretely is a form of glory, of one’s own coming to light
as illumined by and illuminating divine love.54 Day stresses as a condition for such
vision the freedom of voluntary poverty, the freedom that comes with not holding on
to anything that insulates us from the needs of others and impedes the movement of
self-giving love. One sort or another of this kind of freedom, I suggest, is a gift and
a task for Christian disciples across the board.55
The neighbor’s life and relations, therefore, may possess in themselves an
eternal, eschatological validity. In recognition of that, there is cause to love our
neighbors by persevering in one’s regard across the time we are given, watchful
of the many ways they may respectively manifest a unique, unsubstitutable glory
in what they do and what they suffer. Above all, love hopefully seeks, recognizes,
and elicits in the eschatological present, its “already,” the beloved’s essential
beauty in the world.
To love the neighbor as one’s brother or sister in Christ recasts and intensifies
the love of one’s creaturely fellow in wonder and delight. It is sustained by the
humility that eschews self-justification, the mercy born of knowing the need for
forgiveness in one’s own case, the fidelity that is long-suffering in refusing to
violate or dismiss the enemy, and the regard for the divine righteousness that will
confront wrongdoing. Similarly, to love the neighbor as a possible companion
in beatitude recasts and intensifies these other two perspectives. As noted above,
perseverance and hope seem to mark it, and so does a kind of engaged theocentric
52
Balthasar, Love Alone is Credible, 103.
53
Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love, 279.
54
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II–II, q. 25, aa. 6, 8 (Allen, TX: Christian
Classics, 1981).
55
“Voluntary poverty, Peter Maurin would say, is the answer. Through voluntary
poverty we will have the means to help our brothers. We cannot even see our brothers in
need without first stripping ourselves. It is the only way we have of showing our love.” But
this is hard this side of the Cross. “You can strip yourself, you can be stripped, but still you
will reach out like an octopus to seek your own comfort, your untroubled time, your ease,
your refreshment. It may mean books or music—the gratification of the inner senses—or it
may mean food and drink, coffee and cigarettes. The one kind of giving up is not easier than
the other.” Day, Selected Writings, 109, 110.
“objectivity” in human relations. Objectivity includes the “sense of an ending” of

which Gilbert Meilaender speaks in his recollection of Sally, a foster child raised
for eight months in his home.
She came to us at a very busy time, when I was already burdened with too much
work. Even so, I noticed how careful I was not to ignore her, to pay attention to
her no matter how busy I might be. Far more careful, I am afraid, than I have
sometimes been with my own children. Not fair to them? Perhaps. But I know
why. They—their future joined with mine—can all too easily be taken for granted,
as if stories never ended. She came on a day’s notice and would leave with little
more, as if in the middle of a chapter. We always knew that, and so each day had
to be savored, for we lived constantly with the sense of an ending near at hand.
Such a little teacher, but she made it clear that all our days and hours are equidistant
from eternity; none is merely preparatory for some future that may never come.56
The inclination to take the time and to savor it as we would savor others
companionably before God counters the temptation to pass them by because,
“their future joined with mine,” we think we can in some measure control our time
and our future together.57
Christian love for the neighbor as a possible companion in beatitude, or eternal
happiness, is the companionship of charity, which involves the communication of
divine love as our own happiness shared with God in the fellowship of His Son.58
The (erotic) desire to communicate that love and share that fellowship and find
the beauty of the beloved concretely elicited within it is expressed in a hopeful
reverence and loyalty that comes more and more to understand that “there are no
ordinary people.”
Conclusion
I have attempted to show that, in four distinct ways, Christian love of neighbor
is a reality within which three forms of love coinhere. Agape is the independent,
unalterable, and universal love of a friend for another human being for her or
his own sake. It desires a relation in which friendship in one or another of its
expressions is confirmed, advanced, and completed. This may be the friendship of
56
Gilbert Meilaender, The Limits of Love: Some Theological Explorations (University
Park and London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987), 16.
57
In this and the preceding paragraph I use and adapt material from my essay,
“Agape and Special Relations,” in Edmund N. Santurri and William Werpehowski, The
Love Commandments: Essays in Christian Ethics and Moral Philosophy (Washington, DC:
Georgetown University Press, 1992), 151.
58
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II–II, q. 23, a. 1.
creatureliness metaphysically or Christologically understood, that of sinners bound

together as both enemies and redeemed from that bondage, or a companionship in
anticipations of glory hoped for and realized. And the desiring for such a relation,
as Robert Merrihew Adams has persuasively argued, is erotic. “The central case
of Eros is a passionate desire for a personal relationship … It is the lover’s desire
for relationship with the beloved. It may be self-interested, but it need not be.”
So “Agape includes a sort of Eros—not every sort of Eros, for there are certainly
selfish, sick, and destructive forms of Eros that have no place in the Christian
ethical ideal. One of the distinguishing characteristics of Agape is the kind of
Eros that it includes: the kind of relationship that is desired in Agape.”59 Desire
for this or that kind of relationship expresses itself in a “God-derived,” self-giving
unqualified regard that aims at the neighbor’s good. The regard is an embodiment
of the desire and is and would be a moment in the relationship that is desired.
The relationship ineradicably and essentially includes the regard and amounts to a
fulfillment of the desire in the attainment of good.
Hence agape includes not only unqualified regard for the neighbor, but also
nonpossessive eros and friendship not necessarily dependent on “philia” as “a bond
of communication, understanding, and delight between people” made manifest in
mutuality.60 Nothing I say in this essay is meant to dissolve this specific distinction
between the two loves; nor does it fail to acknowledge and embrace, as a gift of
creation, “friendships based on a shared quest for the good [that] may take various
goods as their focus” and that “arise out of common insight and shared vision
that is unique or rare.”61 However, when Outka, in the course of insisting on the
specific distinction, considers “a response in kind” as the “internal, ideal fruition
of agape,” I discern that the “kind” of response that agape seeks “internally” is
the response of friends who are fellow creatures, kin in Christ, and companions in
promised glory. The “deepening” of friendships of shared vision, moreover, would
in my view of the matter include these other forms, forms that express in their
mutuality an ontological, soteriological, and eschatological basis.
Outka is right, moreover, is his claim that as unqualified regard “agape
promotes the realization of philia without guaranteeing it.”
59
Robert Merrihew Adams, The Virtue of Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1987), 187, 190.
60
Outka, “Self and Other in a Theological Framework,” 158. It is important to
stress at this point that Barth rejects reciprocal response as the purpose of self-giving
“interposition.” “That it may be the pledge of this great [divine] love is the presupposition
which marks it off from all the love which is based on liking and finds realisation in favours
because its aim is to be liked in return.” IV/2, 820.
61
Caroline J. Simon, The Disciplined Heart: Love, Destiny and Imagination (Grand
Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), 101.
It gives us independence from these anxieties: from not caring unless they care
and from caring unduly what others think of us and thus allowing them to set the
terms for the confirmation of ourselves we want, above all, to obtain. 62
But as friendship agape also seeks to overcome “fear, strangeness and

alienation, enmity and hostility, and indifference.”63 It promotes the realization
of philia by its practices of wonder and delight, befriending the sinner, hopeful
perseverance, and the objectivity that readies us for care and beauty both.
62
Outka, “Self and Other in a theological Framework,” 158–59, italics in original.
63
Carmichael, Friendship, 198.
Index
abortion 26 basis within Biblical narrative 42

Adams, Robert Merrihew 89–90, 99, 103, criticism of casuistry 31–32, 68,
166 139
St. Anselm xiv criticism of monism 60
Aquinas, St. Thomas xii–xv, 113–115, criticism of Roman Catholic ethical
136–138, 142–143, 146–147, 149, approaches 18
164 criticism of theological idealism
St. Augustine xiii, 148–149 51–52
attention 31, 127, 136, 143,147, 153 criticism of theological realism
53–54
baptism 148 growth–in–continuity 32–35, see
Barmen Confession 55 also divine command (Barth
Barth, Karl [personal history])
creation 9, 12–13, 22, 25–26, 31, 33, the mystery of the ethical event
60–61 31, 63
conceptual description as theological non–theological ethics 12–13
endeavor xv, 17–18, 20–21, 58, regard for the other 155–158
60–62, 130 spheres of divine activity/influence
divine command, see divine command 27, 41–44, 49–51, 68, 121,
election 127–128, 134, 155, 158
gratitude 4–5, 7, 78, 109, 128–129, virtue 48, 50–51, 148–150
157–158 obedience
of humanity in Jesus xi, 6–7, 18, of Jesus 11, see also election (of
22, 25, 32, 58–59 Jesus)
of Jesus 4, 11, 22, 58–59 of humanity 22, 25, 29, 42–44,
freedom xi–xii, 4–7, 11, 15–16, 19, 22, 129, see also divine command;
29, 39–55, 65, 86, 97, 99, 130–131, Barth (election)
146–150, 155–156 to parents 61–62, 76, 95–96, see
human subjectivity 58–59 also parenting
on ideologies 133 and vocation 89–90
joy xi, 41, 107–110, 115, 156 reconciliation, xi, 25, 33, 60
love 8, 9–11, 29, 67–68, 107, 162–163 revelation
and living as witness in light of the Biblical witness as grounds
Jesus 9, 11, see also Barth for Biblical and Theological
(election [gratitude]) ethics 22, 26, see also narrative
marital love 67–68 (Barth)
our ability to love God 107 concreteness of revelation 132
readiness to love 162–163 history of God 8–9, 19
moral knowledge and ethics, see also knowing God and remaining in the
divine command (Barth) grace of revelation 8
Trinity and revelation 53–54 sinner and justified 144–147

sanctification, 33 Kant, Immanuel 3, 12, 58–60
truth telling 120, 127–134 Plato 3
witness 11, 50–51, 58–59, 65–66, Socrates 3
129, 162–163, see also election
(gratitude) ecumenism 135–136
youthful objectivity 98 Eddy, Mary Baker 60
Beck, Lewis White 28 Edwards, Jonathan 152
Bethge, Eberhard 126
Biggar, Nigel 26, 63–68 falsehood, see truth telling
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich xiii, 89, 120–127, Farley, Margaret 135
132–135, 138–139, 141, 146 Fletcher, Joseph 120
moral perception 135, 138, 139, 141, Frei, Hans 17, 57, 59, 63
146 Frost, Robert 115–116
truth telling 120–127, 132–134, 138,
141 Ginzburg, Natalia 92–93
Brennan, J.M. 10 gratitude 4, 7, 114–115, 151, 153, 157–158,
Burckhardt, Abel 37, 55 see also Barth (election [gratitude])
Gustafson, James M.
character 16–17, 20, 33, 39, 50, 57 criticism of Barth’s divine command
Collins, Billy 93 ethics 15–16, 19–20, 35
Collodi, Carlo 95 on discernment 137–138
concreteness 22, 26, 63, 120, 124, 132, criticism of perceived
140–144 anthropocentrism in Barth’s ethics
Cone, James 135 51
on suicide 54
Day, Dorothy 149, 161–164 and theological realism 53–54
discernment 23, 57–69, 137–138, 142–143
divine command Haring, Bernard 139
Barth, Karl Hauerwas, Stanley
authority from God’s original self– criticism of Barth’s divine command
declaration 6–7, 12, 24–25, 42 ethics 16–17, 19–20, 32–33, 35
divine command ethics xii, 7, placing ourselves within God’s story
25–32, 63–69, 121, 143, 148 50–51, 135
and God’s freedom 41 on suicide 52
and intuitionism 15, 23–27, 50 see and theological idealism 52–54
also divine command (Barth on virtue 52
[occasionalism]) Hunsinger, George 48, 58
and occasionalism/casuistry 15–16,
50, 63, 65–67 idolatry 69, 158
and offensiveness 5–6, 129–130
perseverance 147–150 joy xii, 105–118, see also Barth (joy);
and “personal history” xi, 17–20, parenting (virtues [joy]); virtues
22–23, 50, 148–149 (joy)
and world history (the “everyday Aquinas, St. Thomas 113–115
world”) 21–23 and love of neighbor 116–118
and revelation 8, 22 of Norwich, St. Julian 110–113, 115,
and the sabbath 107–108 117–118
Index 171
and well–being 114–116 Orwell, George 88, 119

Judas 45, 47–50 Orsi, Robert 90–92, 94
just war theory 68–69 Outka, Gene 151, 154, 166–167
Kant, Immanuel 3, 12, 58–60, 120 pacifism 68–69, 81

Kelsey, David 157–158 parenting xii, 73–88, 146–147
Kierkegaard, Søren 85 filial love 73–76, 78, 84
the fourth commandment 73–77
Lee, Harper 98–100 virtues 76–84
Lehmann, Paul 120–123, 132–133 joy 77–79
Lewis, C.S. 164 faith 79–81
Lindbeck, George 49 patience 81–83
love 151–167; see also Barth (love); open prudence 146–147
textured moral concepts (love as wisdom 83–84
open textured moral concept); Paterson, Katherine 99–102
parenting (filial love); virtues personal history, see character; divine
(love) command (Barth [and personal
companions 163–165 history])
correspondence of human love to Pieper, Josef 153, 164
God’s love for humanity 158–162 Pinckaers, Servais 106
distinctive types of love 151–152, Post, Stephen 73–74
165–167 prayer 51, 83, 107–108, 110, 112, 115, 117,
gratitude 152–155 130, 150
regard for the other 155–158
Luther, Martin 88, 160–161 Ramsey, Paul 121–122, 133
Rawls, John 79
marriage and divorce 66–68 reverence 151–167
McCabe, Herbert 114 Robinson, Marilynne 96, 135
McCormack, Bruce L. 57–58 Rose, Matthew xiii–xiv
McFayden, Alasdair 106
McKenny, Gerald xiii–xiv, 59 sabbath 78, 107–108
Meilander, Gilbert 155, 165 Samuel 85
Merton, Thomas 82, 90, 102, 149 Saul 45–47, 50
Schweiker, William 135
narrative the Sermon on the Mount 43
Barth xii, 38–55, 60 sickness 60–61
Hauerwas 52 suicide 44–49, 52, 65–66
Hunsinger on Werpehowski 58
and the vocation of children 96–97 Tanner, Kathryn 117–118
natural theology xii–xiii, 143–144 the Ten Commandments 43
Newman, John Henry 85 truth telling xii, 119–134
Niebuhr, H. Richard 135, 151–155
of Norwich, Julian xii, 110–113 Webster, John xii–xiii, 58, 127–128
Nygren, Anders 159 Weil, Simone 96–97
Williams, Bernard 64
open textured moral concepts 9–13 wisdom, see virtues (prudence)
love as open textured moral concept
9–11
virtues xiii, 105–107, 127, 135, 148, see synesis 143

also parenting (virtues); Barth vigilance, see Haring
(moral knowledge and ethics vocations xii, 85–103, 143, 149
[virtue]); Hauerwas (on virtue) and children 90–103
charity 142 innocence 90–94
gnome 143
joy 105–107 the “Yale School” of theologians 57–58
love 105–106 Yoder, John Howard 26
mercy 142
prudence 135–150 Zechariah 47

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Karl Barth and Christian Ethics

Barth’s Interpretation of the Virgin Birth

Ethics with Barth: God, Metaphysics and Morals

Karl Barth on the Filioque

Karl Barth and the Fifth Gospel

A Shorter Commentary on Romans by Karl Barth

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 9781409438755 (hbk)

Part One: Divine Command, Narrative, and Ethics

1 Divine Commands and Philosophical Dilemmas  3

2 Command and History  15

3 Narrative and Ethics  37

4 Realism and Discernment  57

Part Two: Virtue, Moral Practices, and Discernment

5 What Shall Parents Teach Their Children?  73

6 In Search of Real Children: Innocence, Absence and

7 Love of God and the Moral Meaning of Joy  105

8 Hiddenness, Disclosure, and the Reality of God:

9 Practical Wisdom and Integrity  135

10 Desire, Reverence, and Friendship  151

Chapters 1 through 6 as well as Chapter 9 are revisions of essays previously in

International, 1998), 112–29; William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, for “In

In Chapters 1, 2, and 3, I offer my critical understanding of this standpoint while

John Webster, Barth’s Ethics of Reconciliation (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1995), 223.

McKenny, The Analogy of Grace, 183.

Election and Command

Consider first, by way of summary, the relevant features of Barth’s doctrines of

In fact, it is in the light of God’s original self-declaration to be for humanity that

what He does (both proximately, to individual creatures, and ultimately, with

Christian Love Revealed

A realisation of what is meant by taking up one’s cross, denying oneself, leaving

We have an idea, by way of “paradigmatic exemplifications,”30 of what it is we

as he would, in terms of utilitarian beneficence. They identify them as being a

in action is possible. The possibility challenges a Kantian assumption of autonomy;

There have appeared in the contemporary literature of Christian ethics a number

In Gustafson’s judgment, Barth’s ethics of command, treated as part of the

Gustafson, Can Ethics Be Christian?, 160.

University Press, 1975), 220.

through the actions of a continuous subject.10 As self-identical or continuous,

Barth and the Logic of Divine Command Ethics

The conceptual description of Christian linguistic activity, an activity possessing its

The person is nothing before or behind or alongside this history—he or she is

Barth and the Everyday World

an important difference. All commands ask us a question, demand our acceptance

in a way which allows a critical assimilation of our everyday situations to the

Answering the Criticisms

We are now in a position to address the specific criticisms of Barth’s ethics

Reasons and Instant Discernment

These remarks do not require the intuitionist interpretation to be intelligible.

what is commanded—even though it, that is the question, “gains a sharpness in

W. B. Gallie, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (New York: Schocken

Books, 1968), 64–65.

“Practical casuistry,” in contrast, seeks to hear the command of God through an

The basis for a response to Hauerwas’s criticisms about growth-in-continuity

is persons’ temporal and provisional realizations of the purpose and meaning of

In every case there will be a continuity, a positive relationship, between what

And what made an indelible impression on me was the homely naturalness

Barth’s tribute appears at the conclusion of an argument proposing: 1) that the

The history of a being begins, continues, and is completed when something

Freedom Extra Nos

Barth defends the validity of this account in a startling excursus which

1 Divine Commands and Philosophical Dilemmas 3

2 Command and History 15

3 Narrative and Ethics 37

4 Realism and Discernment 57

5 What Shall Parents Teach Their Children? 73

7 Love of God and the Moral Meaning of Joy 105

9 Practical Wisdom and Integrity 135

10 Desire, Reverence, and Friendship 151