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.
