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Turning to God in modern theology: with special reference to Karl Barth

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WakefieldWG_1976redux.pdf (93.50Mb)
Date
1976
Author
Wakefield, William George
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Abstract
 
 
Although there have been great advances since the Enlightenment in the understanding of the subjective dimension of man's existence, man has attempted to make his subjectivity the ground of his project in the world, and has thereby come to use others merely as a means toward self-realisation. He is for others only as a by-product of his being for himself. Dostoevsky saw that this makes man radically guilty and that he cannot pass sentence on himself, but it was the Scottish theologians, Edward Irving, Thomas Erskine and McLeod Campbell who saw that it is only in Christ's vicarious repentance that man can judge himself and repent. In contrast to existentialist theology, Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics gives a comprehensive account of what conversion in Christ means, but the formal accuracy of his work needs to be enriched with the insights of these Scottish theologians.
 
Barth holds that God elects man in and with Himself, i.e., in Christ. Because God is for His enemies with the same ultimate seriousness as He is for Himself, loving them as Himself, He can rescue them from the abyss of their selfisolation. Barth, however, fails fully to develop this liberating doctrine. He gives adequate recognition neither to the origin of election in the Father's will to create sons through His giving of His only Son, nor to the obedient electing work of the Spirit in carrying through to the subjectivity of other men Jesus* election of the Father. This slight tendency to Christomonism can be overcome by allowing the Spirit's interaction with the spirit of man to be the goal of God's self-giving on earth.
 
Again, although in his Christology Barth attempts to break through all impersonal notions of Christ's bringing others to share in Himself, he falls short of showing that Christ's loving His enemies as Himself consisted of the sorrow of His heart over them. His failure fully to allow the Spirit to be equal God with the Son leads him to under¬ value the victory Christ wrought over sin in our flesh by the Spirit, and this deprives his Christology of an adequate basis for a complete account of Christ's communication of His conversion to sinners. The failure fully to regard Pentecost as the goal of the divine economy on earth leads to a tendency to regard men as turned to God in their being prior to their active participation by the Spirit in Christ, and so to a constriction of his own profound insight into man's free turning to God as his correspondence to God's free turning to him. He thinks of man as already given to God apart from his own personal act and so robs God's grace of its goal of bringing men to turn to God with a freedom analogous to God's turning to them. Similarly, Earth's failure to allow the Spirit His full creative role with the Son leads to a circumscribed account both of the content of man's participation in Christ's repentance and also of his recreation by the Spirit in faith. He speaks of man's small conversion rather than of Christ giving him all that is His through His Spirit. An element of impersonality enters his account of Christ's calling sinners to Himself, since for him they are His apart from their response to His supremely courteous appeal to them. Barth's fragment on baptism goes a long way toward developing a doctrine of the Spirit as called for in this study but His creative work in baptising men into Christ's vicarious humanity is still not fully recognised.
 
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/1842/30882
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