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Neediness: the anthropology of Karl Barth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 June 2018

David A. Dorman
David A. Dorman*
Affiliation:
Azusa Pacific University, Azusa, CA 91702davedorman@verizon.net
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Abstract

The article argues that Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics presents human ‘neediness’ as the constitutive element of his theological anthropology. Since this element has had little notice in Barth scholarship, the article focuses on describing the consistent reiteration of this theme in theologically substantive locations throughout the Dogmatics. It begins with Barth's observation that the emergence of humanity on the sixth day discloses humans to be ‘the neediest of all creation’. Barth elaborates the dimensions of human neediness in his discussion of ‘the readiness of humanity for God’, propounding the human need for God as the precondition of knowledge of God that is in actuality undercut by the sin that denies any such neediness. Barth thus describes a potential ‘blessed neediness’ and an actual ‘wretched neediness’ that together define the glory and the tragedy of all that is human, and which inform not only Barth's epistemology and hamartiology, but also his accounts of christology, forgiveness, redemption, worship and Christian witness.

Keywords

anthropologyKarl Barthchristologycreationneedinessneighbour
Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 71 , Issue 2 , May 2018 , pp. 195 - 211
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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References

1 Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics (hereafter CD), 13 vols, ed. Bromiley, G. W. and Torrance, T. F. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956–75)Google Scholar, III/1, p. 143 (trans. emended). Eberhard Busch cites the passage and comments briefly on its relation to human responsibility toward creation, in The Great Passion: An Introduction to Karl Barth's Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2004), p. 191. I find no other notice taken of it in the literature.

2 Hunsinger, George, ‘Barth on What it Means to Be Human: A Christian Scholar Confronts the Options’, in Evangelical, Catholic, and Reformed: Doctrinal Essays on Barth and Related Themes (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2015), pp. 145–6Google Scholar.

3 Robinson, Dominic, Understanding the ‘Imago Dei’: The Thought of Karl Barth, von Balthasar, and Moltmann (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), p. 47Google Scholar.

4 McConville, J. Gordon, Being Human in God's World: An Old Testament Theology of Humanity (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2016), pp. 24–5Google Scholar.

5 CD III/1, p. 143.

6 Ibid., pp. 143–4 (trans. emended).

7 Ibid., p. 144.

8 Ibid., p. 177. See also (in the same volume) the human ‘need’ of provision for plants and animals (p. 150); the ‘need’ for light (p. 57); and the ‘creaturely necessity’ addressed by the order of all creation, including humanity as male and female (p. 212). Barth notes that Calvin saw in God's gift of creation as provision to humanity in Gen 1:29–30 ‘a modification of man's dominant position on the earth’ (p. 210).

9 CD II/1, pp. 63–178.

10 Ibid., p. 67.

11 Ibid., p. 68.

12 Ibid., p. 74.

13 Ibid., p. 129.

14 Barth, Karl, Kirchliche Dogmatik (hereafter KD), 13 vols (Zurich: EVZ, 1952–67), II/1, p. 143Google Scholar.

15 CD II/1, p. 130.

16 Ibid., p. 131.

17 Ibid., pp. 130–4.

18 Ibid., p. 150.

19 Ibid., p. 152.

20 Ibid., p. 94.

21 CD I/2, pp. 414–50.

22 Ibid., p. 416.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid, p. 420.

27 Ibid.

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid, p. 440. Barth reiterates these themes, in connection with the Samaritan and the neighbour, in CD IV/3, §72, pp. 778–83, ‘The Holy Spirit and the Sending of the Christian Community’, subsection 2, ‘The Community for the World’ (especially p. 778).

30 CD I/2, p. 424.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid., p. 428.

33 CD III/2, p. 58.

34 Ibid., p. 135.

35 Ibid., p. 139.

36 Ibid., p. 149.

37 KD III/2, p. 167.

38 CD III/2, p. 165.

39 E.g. CD III/2, p. 140; KD III/2, pp. 167–8.

40 CD III/2, p. 169.

41 Ibid., p. 208.

42 Ibid., pp. 214–15; KD III/2, p. 256.

43 CD III/2, p. 219.

44 Ibid., p. 264.

45 Ibid., p. 412 (emphasis added).

46 Hunsinger, ‘Barth on What it Means to Be Human’, pp. 145–6.

47 CD III/2, p. 133. Cf. Webster, John, Karl Barth (London: Continuum, 2000), pp. 100–1Google Scholar.

48 CD III/2, p. 147; Webster, Karl Barth, p. 103.

49 E.g. Robinson, Understanding the ‘Imago Dei’, p. 47: ‘For Barth we must understand our relationship with God from the perspective of how God has placed us in partnership with him, not from the standpoint of our searching for God. Our searching for God is always in vain. . . . The fallen human being is human in that he simply stands before the mystery of the hidden God who in Jesus Christ has reconstituted him in faith. . . . [This is] what seems to be a theology of relationship understood as passive.’

50 E.g. Sonderegger, Katherine, ‘Barth and Feminism’, in Webster, John (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth (Cambridge: CUP, 2000), pp. 258–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 268–71.

51 See the review by Jenkins, Willis, ‘Karl Barth and Environmental Theology’, in Jones, Paul and Nimmo, Paul (eds), The Oxford Handbook to Karl Barth (London: OUP, forthcoming)Google Scholar, retrieved Nov. 2016: http://www.academia.edu/22997297/Karl_Barth_and_Environmental_Theology.

52 McConville, J. Gordon, Being Human in God's World: An Old Testament Theology of Humanity (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2016), pp. 24–5Google Scholar.

53 Jenkins, Willis, Ecologies of Grace: Environmental Ethics and Christian Theology (Oxford: OUP, 2008), pp. 7–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and passim.

54 CD IV/1, p. 214.

55 Ibid.

56 Katherine Sonderegger mentions, but does not develop, Christ's assumption of human need in an essay on ‘The Sinlessness of Christ’. Referring to CD IV §59, she describes how for Barth Christ is sinner ‘not in some region of his person’ but in the wholeness of his integrated humanity, so that ‘He enters into the baptism of John . . . as the One who stands in need of it’; in Nelson, David R., Sarinsky, Darren and Stratis, Justin (eds), Theological Theology: Essays in Honour of John Webster (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015), pp. 273–4Google Scholar.

57 CD IV/1, p. 201; cf. pp. 212–13: ‘But the world had radical need of His work as Creator, to which it owes no less than its very being. And, again, it has radical need that He should take up its cause in the work of atonement. . . . But God reveals and increases His own glory in the world in the incarnation of His Son by taking to Himself the radical neediness of the world, i.e., by undertaking to do Himself what the world cannot do, arresting and reversing its course to the abyss.’

58 Of course there has been debate whether Barth is truly Chalcedonian in his christology; see the review by Hunsinger, ‘Karl Barth's Christology: Its Basic Chalcedonian Pattern’, in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, pp. 127–42. If we grant with Hunsinger that a Chalcedonian christology is one that depicts one person complete in deity and complete in humanity, without separation or division, with an interest that is primarily soteriological (pp. 127–9), these passages in the Dogmatics which take up incarnation from the perspective of need are remarkably satisfying in their incisiveness.

59 CD IV/1, p. 215. The English trans. is emended here in view of the German radikale Bedürftigkeit, KD IV/1, pp. 236–7.

60 CD IV/1, p. 405.

61 Ibid., p. 596.

62 Ibid., p. 658.

63 CD IV/2, p. 387.

64 Ibid., p. 705.

65 CD IV/3/1, p. 125.

66 CD IV/3/2, p. 125

67 CD IV/Fragment, p. 125.

68 CD IV/2, p. 587; trans. emended.

69 My comments on the possible shape of a such a theology of ecology are echoes of Richard Bauckham's discussions in The Bible and Ecology: Rediscovering the Community of Creation (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2010) – though he does not reference Barth.