Dr. Eric W. Gritsch

Brach Jennings
24 July 2019 

Reading Karl Barth’s Erwählungslehre as theologia crucis 

Karl Barth’s doctrine of election in Volume 2.2 of the Church Dogmatics emphasizes the Triune God’s goodness, freedom, overflowing glory, grace, and love for God’s people.  Jesus Christ is the electing God and elected human being.  Since God is free, God has freely chosen to be the electing God (Jesus Christ) and to elect human beings through the elected human being Jesus Christ.  This decision for, in, and through Jesus Christ is a “gracious decision,”  showing God’s lovingkindness for human beings.[1]  Barth’s understanding of divine election takes the sting and anxiety out of this theological doctrine, revealing instead the “kind, paternal heart of God” to use Martin Luther’s language from A Meditation on Christ’s Passion.[2] This essay interprets  Barth’s Erwählungslehre in relation to Luther’s theologia crucis, drawing especially from Barth’s insights on God’s overflowing glory to emphasize God’s nature as goodness, seen in God’s grace and love in the gift of Jesus Christ.  The goal is to show the necessity of Karl Barth’s understanding of election for bringing Martin Luther’s theologia crucis to the contemporary world. 

Election as the Triune God’s Free Decision

            Election is the heart of the Gospel for Barth.  Paragraph 32 of the Church Dogmatics begins: “The doctrine of election is the sum of the Gospel because of all words that can be said or heard it is the best: that God elects humankind; that God is for humankind too the One who loves in freedom.”[3] God’s free love is the source of God’s electing, predestinating grace in Jesus Christ, re-framing this doctrine from an abstract principle to focusing on the Triune God as manifest in the person of Jesus Christ.  Through Barth’s interpretation of this doctrine, election is a testimony to God’s faithfulness.  “What takes place in this election is always that God is for us; for us, and therefore for the world which was created by him, which is distinct from him, but which is yet maintained by him.”[4] This free decision is a decision for Christ and, shows God’s love for humankind in that Jesus Christ is both the electing God and the elected human being.  For Barth, predestination is not be a terrifying doctrine about God’s absolute will predestinating some people to heaven and others to hell, but instead a testament to God’s promises for humankind in Christ.  Predestination thus no longer warrants John Milton’s famous protest, “I may go to hell, but such a God will never command my respect.”[5] Barth’s Erwählungslehre shows God’s election of God’s self and humankind as an election of deepest love through Christ, and one need look no farther than God’s election in and through Jesus Christ to find God’s grace.  “This love of God is his grace.”[6]

When one focuses on Jesus Christ and him crucified, one’s election is certain.  As Martin Luther states in A Sermon on Preparing to Die (1519):

So then, gaze at the heavenly picture of Christ, who descended into hell [1 Pet. 3:19] for your sake and was forsaken by God as one eternally damned when he spoke the words on the cross, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani!”—“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” [Matt. 27:46]. In that picture your hell is defeated and your uncertain election is made sure. If you concern yourself solely with   that and believe that it was done for you, you will surely be preserved in this same faith. Never, therefore, let this be erased from your vision. Seek yourself only in Christ and not in yourself and you will find yourself in him eternally.^[7]

God’s free election in Jesus Christ is a source of profound Seelsorge.  Indeed, why has God given the Gospel if not to console the weak, lift up the lowly, and proclaim the world’s future in, through, and because of the Triune God’s faithfulness in Jesus Christ? By focusing on Jesus Christ as the electing God and elected human being, Barth’s presentation of this doctrine becomes concrete and embodied, rather than a principle in abstracto.  Here is, perhaps, the most heartening aspect of Barth’s Christocentrism: emphasizing the person of Jesus Christ as the source of the Erwählungslehre.[8]

God freely chooses to elect humankind through the elected human being, Jesus Christ.  There is nothing humankind can do to earn God’s election.  This is a matter of God’s self-autonomy (Selbstbestimmung).  While at first, God’s free decision as author of the covenant could seem to be problematic (the question of “could God have chosen otherwise?” comes to mind), when looked at from Barth’s perspective, God’s Selbstbestimmung is related to the consolation of the Gospel.  Barth emphasizes God’s ultimate freedom in order to stress God’s goodness.  To ask if God could have chosen otherwise would be to probe into the hiddenness of God, where no consolation is to be found.  Conversely, Barth stresses the Triune God’s self-revelation for humankind in Jesus Christ.  God’s election is not to be feared, but to be celebrated and proclaimed. 

He constitutes himself the Lord of the covenant. He is, therefore, its free author. He gives it its content and determines its order. He maintains it. He directs it to its goal. He governs it in every respect. It is his decision that there is a covenant-partner. It is also his decision who this partner is, and what must befall [that partner]. It is only as he wills it that the covenant arises at all. The covenant-member is the one whom he ordains…It is a question of grace, and that means the love of God.  It is a question of freedom, and that means the election of God.[9]

Stressing election as God’s decision means to proclaim God’s grace in all matters related to salvation.  Surely this is a scandal to human notions of autonomy and decision.  Human will has no role to play in this election; election is solely a matter of God’s freedom and is a testimony to God’s goodness.  “God’s decision in Jesus Christ is a gracious decision.  In making it, God stoops down from above.  In it, he does something which he has no need to do, which he is not constrained to do.  He does something which he alone can constrain himself, and has in fact constrained himself, to do.  In entering into this covenant, he freely makes himself both benefactor and benefit”[10]   

God’s Nature as Goodness in Relation to Election

            According to the Scriptures, God’s nature is goodness.  2 Tim. 2:13 emphasizes this point: “If we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself.”[11]  God’s trustworthiness, faithfulness, and dependability relate to the Erwählungslehre, since God demonstrates God’s goodness in the Gospel through God’s free decision to elect Jesus Christ, and to freely elect humankind because of Jesus Christ.  In the Hebrew Scriptures, Jeremiah 31 proclaims God’s nature as goodness as well: “They shall come and sing aloud on the height of Zion, and they shall be radiant over the goodness of the LORD, over the grain, the wine, and the oil, and over the young of the flock and the herd; their life shall become like a watered garden, and they shall never languish again” (Jer. 31:12, NRSV).[12]    

The centrality of God’s nature as goodness is shown in God’s love for the world in the gift of Jesus Christ (John 3:16).  Emphasizing God’s nature as goodness does not mandate God to be loving (then the Gospel would be turned into Law in the negative sense), but focuses rather on the center of Barth’s understanding of election – Jesus Christ as the electing God and elected human being.  If God is for the world in Jesus Christ as the Gospel of John states, then this pro mundis means God would not have chosen otherwise than to give God’s self in the most profound way possible – by becoming one with human beings and creation in Jesus Christ.  God remains the free author and executor of God’s covenant, but God’s freedom is a freedom for the world in grace, love, and divine joy.  God’s love reveals God’s glory as the One who loves the entirety of God’s good creation in freedom.[13] 

The goodness of the world created by and belonging to God (Deut. 10:14; Ps. 24) means the lover (God) and the beloved (the entirety of creation) are interrelated while distinct.  The Triune God needs the entirety of creation, because the lover desires reciprocity from the beloved. God’s overflowing glory-in-love wants to go out of itself for the beloved, and be loved in return by the beloved.  The decision for election belongs to God alone, giving God the appropriate glory due to God.  God’s self-decision must be emphasized in order to avoid the protests of the Old Adam/Eve who do not want a God so deeply gracious as the God revealed and proclaimed in the gift of Jesus Christ.  Barth writes, “According to the Christian perception the true God is what he is only in this movement, in the movement toward this human being, and in him and through him toward other human beings in their unity as his people.”[14]

God revealed in the hiddenness of Christ is the center of Barth’s understanding of election.  For God to decide otherwise than for God’s self in Jesus Christ and for humankind through the elected human being Jesus Christ would go against the revealed God that Barth proclaims throughout his work on election.  God would then become the terrifying deus absconditus, rather than God as clothed in God’s Word on the cross (Luther, On Bound Choice).  Therefore, stressing God’s overflowing grace and love is warranted.  There is deep consolation here, when one realizes the extent of God’s goodness in the doctrine of election. 

Silence as True Hearing

One must be silent in order to truly hear the good news of Predestination (Schweigen um zu hören).  God’s good news of Jesus Christ is contrary to the world’s expectations.  Those thought to be unworthy or unloved are declared worthy and loved because of Jesus Christ.  Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation (1518) is helpful here, stressing God’s action in loving those who were thought to be unlovable.  “[T]he love of God which lives in man loves sinners, evil persons, fools, and weaklings in order to make them righteous, good, wise, and strong. Rather than seeking its own good, the love of God flows forth and bestows good. Therefore sinners are attractive because they are loved; they are not loved because they are attractive.”^[15]  All protests of the unworthiness of one’s self or others before God are put to an end by God’s revelatory “Yes” in the hiddenness of Golgotha.  As Barth powerfully states, “the crucified Jesus is the image of the invisible God.” [16]  God’s “no” is the divine “no” to sin, death, the devil, and hell (Luther) which are contrary to God as love, grace, wholeness, and liberation incarnate in Christ.  This “no” is overcome on Golgotha, when Christ takes the sin of the world onto himself. 

Both yes and no need to be heard, in order that the decisive and final Yes of the Gospel retains its radicality and awe.  “The Yes cannot be heard unless the No is also heard. But the No is said for the sake of the Yes and not for its own sake. In substance, therefore, the first and last word is Yes and not No.”[17]  Election is thus the greatest of mysteries, attesting to God’s goodness, grace, freedom, glory, and love in Jesus Christ through God’s actions alone, not through any actions on the part of elected sinners other than the passive, silent reception (vita passiva) of God’s grace.[18] 

Exploring Seelsorge in Relation to Luther’s Theologia Crucis 

Since I have repeatedly emphasized the consoling nature of Barth’s understanding of election, it is appropriate now to examine the meaning of Luther’s understanding of Seelsorge, in order to see how this concept is developed in Barth’s doctrine of election.  The incarnate, crucified, and risen Christ is the source for what Luther termed Seelsorge, the care of souls.  This cross-centered consolation offered to believers occurs through the hearing and receiving of the Gospel.  Consolation for the terrified conscience because of humankind’s justification by grace alone through faith alone in Jesus the Christ alone remains the focus from which everything else stems.  A key component to examining the consolation offered by the theology of the cross occurs in Luther’s 1520 treatise, Freedom of a Christian.  Luther writes,

To preach Christ means to feed the soul, make it righteous, set it free, and save it, provided it believes the preaching. Faith alone is the saving and efficacious use of the Word of God, according to Rom. 10[:9]: “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” Furthermore, “Christ is the end of the law, that every one who has faith may be justified” [Rom. 10:4]. Again, in Rom. 1[:17], “He who through faith is righteous shall live.” The Word of God cannot be received and cherished by any works whatever but only by faith. Therefore it is clear that, as the soul needs only the Word of God for its life and righteousness, so it is justified by faith alone and not any works; for if it could be justified by anything else, it would not need the Word, and consequently it would not need faith.^[19] 

For Luther, the principal pastoral use of the Gospel was as consolation for the terrified conscience.  The terrified conscience is anxiety over sin and wrongdoing, and therefore anxiety over one’s relationship with, and acceptance by, God.  There is strong appeal in Luther’s hermeneutic of the Gospel for the terrified conscience, in that those who are tormented by past misdeeds or over how God could possibly love them find relief and solace. 

In Luther’s understanding, the cross of Christ reveals who God is, who humanity is in relationship to God, and consoles humanity for Christ’s sake alone.  This consolation is seen especially in the ending of Luther’s A Meditation on Christ’s Passion:

[Y]ou must no longer contemplate the suffering of Christ (for this has already done its work and terrified you), but pass beyond that and see his friendly heart and how this heart beats with such love for you that it impels him to bear with pain your conscience and your sin. Then your heart will be filled with love for him, and the confidence of your faith will be strengthened. Now continue and rise beyond Christ’s heart to God’s heart and you will see that Christ would not have shown this love for you if God in his eternal love had not wanted this, for Christ’s love for you is due to his obedience to God. Thus you will find the divine and kind paternal heart, and, as Christ says, you will be drawn to the Father through him. Then you will understand the words of Christ, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, etc.” [John 3:16]. We know God aright when we grasp him not in his might or wisdom (for then he proves terrifying), but in his kindness and love. Then faith and confidence are able to exist, and then man is truly born anew in God.^[20]   

The crucified Christ, at first a terror to the guilty sinner, becomes the source of greatest consolation.  God’s goodness and kindness are seen in the paradoxical event of God’s utter hiddenness on Golgotha.  When one learns not to trust in one’s own works in any way in relation to salvation, one then begins to discover the meaning of new birth through the life of faith.  Luther is clear, though, that one must not backslide into trusting in one’s own works or achievements to earn God’s favor.  This is the scandalous nature of justification by grace through faith alone: learning to passively accept one’s acceptance by the Triune God as seen in Jesus Christ.  The old Adam who delights in works must be daily drowned through remembrance of Holy Baptism, but, when this is accomplished, there is sheer consolation and joy, because we are “truly born anew in God.”

If the theology of the cross is inseparable from the Gospel that it reveals, then the theology of the cross exists for the care of the terrified conscience.  The operating assumption of this theology is that people are hurting on the deepest spiritual and emotional level, and seek, whether knowingly or not, a consolation that fills our deepest longings, anguish, and hurt.  One can rightly ask if such an understanding of the human condition resonates with contemporary society today, but it does not change the fact that the primary function of the theology of the cross is consolation to the Christian believer, assuring the soul that she or he has been made unconditionally right with God, because of who God is in Jesus Christ.  It is inherently pastoral in nature, because it is based on God’s unconditional care of souls through Jesus Christ.

Reading Barth’s Erwählungslehre through the lens of Seelsorge means stressing how Barth’s understanding of election is rooted in the consolation of the Gospel.  A particular passage from the Church Dogmatics is of primary importance:

He elected our suffering (what we as sinners must suffer towards him and before him and from him). He elected it as his own suffering. This is the extent to which his election is an election of grace, an election of love. an election to give himself, an election to empty and abase himself for the sake of the elect. Judas who betrays him he elects as an apostle. The sentence of Pilate He elects as a revelation of his judgment on the world. He elects the cross of Golgotha as his kingly throne. He elects the tomb in the garden as the scene of his being as the living God. That is how God loved the world. That is how from all eternity his love was so selfless and genuine.”[21]    

This passage shows Barth exploring God’s revelation in the hiddenness of Golgotha to the fullest extent, as well as Barth’s development of Luther’s hermeneutic.  What for Luther was the seedbed of justification becomes for Barth the doctrine of election as happy exchange, revealed in the crucified Christ.  Both approaches stress God’s goodness, Luther with the language of “kind, paternal heart of God” and Barth through the notion of God’s “selfless and genuine” eternal love.  Here is good news for anyone with a weary heart over past or current misdeeds. 

George Hunsinger helpfully describes Barth’s incorporation of Luther’s theology of the cross, which we can see is a profound form of Seelsorge, as the revelation of God’s suffering love.  “The cross, Barth constantly stressed, was the deepest revelation of God’s being, not its contradiction.  Moreover, the cross bore its saving significance not in the placating of divine wrath, but in the divine judgment which in mercy assumed the whole burden of the world’s sin and removed it through suffering love.”[22]  Jesus Christ stands in where sin once ruled and shows the superfluous, overflowing nature of God’s grace in spite of sin (cf. Rom. 5).  God is steadfast, faithful, and trustworthy.  For Barth, in the event of Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection, “God is here set up as the consummation towards which all God’s ways and works are moving.”[23]  This is the realistic consequence of  the happy exchange; Christ takes on the sin of the world and bestows his righteousness on sinners for new, resurrected life.  

Questions Needing Answering about Predestination 

Referring to predestination, it is important to answer the question, “does God elect God’s self, or Jesus Christ?” Barth answers by emphasizing Jesus Christ as both the electing God and elected human being.  Thus, the Triune God elects Jesus Christ, and by so doing elects both God’s self and humankind through Jesus Christ as the electing God and elected human being.  This paradoxical solution is rooted in the Chalcedonian formula of Jesus Christ as one person in two natures.  Since Jesus Christ is fully human and fully divine, election within the Triune Godhead and election of humankind becomes possible through the Logos becoming flesh in the elected human being from Nazareth.  “But the concept of election has a double reference—to the elector and to the elected…Thus the simplest form of the dogma may be divided at once into the two assertions that Jesus Christ is the electing God, and that he is also elected [human being].”[24]  Jesus Christ reveals God’s goodness; in the Triune God’s self-autonomy, God elects God’s self in Jesus Christ and elects humankind through Jesus Christ.  A lengthy excerpt from Paragraph 33 of Volume 2.2 of Barth’s Church Dogmatics is a useful elaboration on this point: 

The election of Jesus Christ is the eternal choice and decision of God. And our first assertion tells us that Jesus Christ is the electing God. We must not ask concerning any other but him. In no depth of the Godhead shall we encounter any other but him. There is no such thing as Godhead in itself. Godhead is always the Godhead of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. But the Father is the Father of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the Father and the Spirit of Jesus Christ. There is no such thing as a decretum absolutum. There is no such thing as a will of God apart from the will of Jesus Christ. Thus Jesus Christ is not only the manifestatio and speculum nostrae praedestinationis…Jesus Christ is elected [human being]. In making this second assertion we are again at one with the traditional teaching. But the christological assertion of tradition tells us no more than that in his humanity Jesus Christ was one of the elect. It was in virtue of his divinity that he was ordained and appointed Lord and Head of all others, the organ and instrument of the whole election of God and the revelation and reflection of the election of those who were elected with him.[25]

In this example, Barth re-emphasizes his outline at the beginning of Paragraph 33, that “The election of grace is the eternal beginning of all the ways and works of God in Jesus Christ. In Jesus Christ God in His free grace determines himself for sinful [humankind] and sinful [humankind] for himself. He therefore takes upon himself the rejection of [humankind] with all its consequences, and elects [humankind] to participation in his own glory.”[26] Through the Triune God’s election of God’s self in Jesus Christ, and the election of humankind through Jesus Christ as the elected human being, the doctrine of predestination loses its terror, and the full extent of God’s goodness is seen. 

The next question about predestination to address is the problem of single or double predestination.  The answer is paradoxical.  There is a double predestination for Jesus Christ, and a single predestination for humankind.  Crucially, Barth rejects the dualism of some elected and some condemned from before eternity.  “In the sharpest contrast to this view our thesis that the eternal will of God is the election of Jesus Christ means that we deny the existence of any such twofold mystery.”[27]  Instead, Jesus Christ as the electing God and elected human being means human beings are elected into fellowship with God because of Christ, who stands in their stead and takes their sin onto himself.  “Where humankind stands only to gain, God stands only to lose. And because the eternal divine predestination is identical with the election of Jesus Christ, its twofold content is that God wills to lose in order that man may gain. There is a sure and certain salvation for humankind, and a sure and certain risk for God.”[28]    

Barth also addresses the radicality of sin, so as to stress the even greater radicality of grace (Rom. 5).  Here is Martin Luther’s notion of the happy exchange interpreted as the focus of predestination.  Incarnation is thus not a principle in abstracto but a concrete reality on which Barth’s understanding of the doctrine of election of hinges.  “[Jesus Christ] is the Lamb slain, and the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. For this reason, the crucified Jesus is the ‘image of the invisible God.’ If, then, there is an election of others on the basis of the election of this [human being] Jesus, we can see that that election is to be understood only as free grace, and we can also see why this is so.”[29] 

Is everyone saved in Barth’s understanding of election? Although Barth does not explicitly argue for universal salvation through Jesus Christ, this position is a logical outcome of his doctrine of election as we have explored it thus far. 

If the teachers of predestination were right when they spoke always of a duality, of election and reprobation, of predestination to salvation or perdition, to life or death, then we may say already that in the election of Jesus Christ which is the eternal will of God, God has ascribed to [humankind] the former, election, salvation and life; and to himself he has ascribed the latter, reprobation, perdition and death.[30]    

It is important here to say that Barth avoids what Bonhoeffer terms “cheap grace” in the latter’s Discipleship.  In Barth’s telling, Grace is not cheap, but free.  By being free, grace is the costliest thing God can give - God’s Son Jesus Christ, stretched out on the cross for the life of the world as the “image of the invisible God.”

Since Jesus Christ is the electing God and the elected human being, the Word “en-fleshed,” he is able to overcome death once for all by his resurrection from the dead.  The scandal of particularity seen in the Gospel then is actually the Gospel’s greatest gift.  The Creator of the universe is so overflowing with love as to become one with humanity and creation for the sake of humankind and creation’s flourishing.  “God is love” (1 John 4:8) and therefore God is life, wholeness, liberation, and abundant possibility.  The Christian understanding of life abundantly overflowing in God’s grace is a life of scandal, in that God is decisively known in the incarnate, crucified, and risen Christ.  However, the scandal remains a scandal of and for true life.  “That we know God and have God only in Jesus Christ means that we can know him and have him only with the human being Jesus of Nazareth and with the people which he represents. Apart from this human being and apart from this people God would be a different, an alien God.”[31] [32]

Importantly, this understanding does not lessen or condone the reality of sin and evil.  Instead, sin, death, the devil, and hell in all their forms have been crushed under foot because of Jesus Christ.  The crucified, entombed God lives and is the hope of the world’s future.[33]  Here is hope against hope for the life of the world anchored in God’s promises seen decisively in Jesus Christ, and first in the God of Israel (cf. Rom. 4:13-25).  Therefore, it is faithful to Barth to express the hope of universal salvation decisively through Jesus Christ, even though Barth himself does not explicitly advocate this position in the material we have examined. 

The Particularity of Christ in Relation to Israel 

To see the full extent of the “kind, paternal heart of God,” one need only focus on the doctrine of predestination as interpreted by Karl Barth.   It is theologia crucis to the fullest.  Unfortunately, Barth falls short of his profound theologia crucis in his understanding of the relationship between the Christian church and Israel.  We turn now to this controversial aspect in Barth’s thinking related to election, in order to re-read it biblically in light of the theologia crucis we have seen thus far.    

For Barth, Jesus Christ is the particularity of the Triune God’s action and being for universal humanity, because Jesus Christ is both the electing God and the elected human being.  Therefore, theology begins and ends with Jesus Christ.  Barth states, “In the person of his eternal Son [God] has united himself with the human being Jesus of Nazareth, and in him and through him with this people. He is the Father of Jesus Christ. He is not only the Father of the eternal Son, but as such he is the eternal Father of this temporal human being. He is, then, the eternal Father, the Possessor, the Lord and the Saviour of the people which this human being represents as King and Head.”[34]

  This assessment leads Barth to a supercessionist understanding of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity.  “But Israel as the Jewish people resisting the divine election is at the same time the secret origin of the Church in which alone God’s mercy can be praised only by faith in God alone, in which faith itself is simply obedience, the perfect hearing, in which the coming of the new man becomes true only in the passing of the old.”[35]  Here we must immediately critique and correct Barth.  Barth’s understanding portrays Israel in a negative light, so as to showcase Christ’s redemption of sinful humanity.  This position should not be held today, but instead be shifted to focus on the relationship and dialogue between Jews and Christians.  Israel should not be thought of as “old” in any sense, but as the people who first heard God’s promises to humankind and the world and who hear and receive God’s promises today.    

Christian theologians must dialogue with Jewish partners in order to avoid the sin of anti-semitism.  It is not enough to say that Jesus Christ is the crucified Messiah of Israel, and as such, is the Lord of the church.  One must press beyond Christ’s messiahship to the fact that he and his followers were Jewish.  The apostle Paul was also Jewish, and stressing the apostle’s Jewish roots helps us to re-hear Romans 9-11 as a story about the goodness and faithfulness of God to both Jews and Christians.  Importantly, Paul praises the Israelites, his “kindred according to the flesh” (Rom. 9:3) as the people to whom “belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises” (Rom. 9:5).  For Paul, then, the Messiah comes “in the flesh” as a Jew and in relationship to the Israelite covenant in the Hebrew Scriptures (Rom. 9:5). 

Paul’s seemingly harsh sentences about the people of Israel in Rom. 9:30-10:21 is a harshness for the sake of proclamation.  Paul the Jew firmly trusts that Jesus Christ is his Lord and Lord of the world.  Most importantly, this proclamation does not ultimately exclude Israel.  Paul’s polemical point about the hardening of Israel’s heart (Rom. 10:1-4) is an exhortation to proclaim the Gospel to the world (Rom. 10:14-15).  From a contemporary standpoint, Paul is establishing a theological particularity in relationship to the Israelite tradition he is descended from.  Particularity of religious faith can be honored without supercessionism or overconfidence that one group of human beings possesses the ultimate truth rather than another. 

All children of the promise are counted descendants of Israel.  In a sense, then, Christians hear the story of God’s good news as “honorary Jews.”[36]  We have been grafted in to the faith of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  This is not a fact to be haughty about, but a fact that should cause awe and wonder.  The God of promise who revealed God’s self to the Israelites has also elected the gentiles.  “If you do boast, remember that it is not you that support the root, but the root that supports you” (Rom. 11:18).  Any and all supercessionism must be avoided at this point.  To be “grafted in” means to stand in a line that does not originate with the Gentiles, but with the God of the Exodus who has revealed God’s self in the resurrection of the crucified Christ.  From a scriptural perspective, the Jewish people are the first to receive God’s promises, and they must be honored as such. 

Paul scandalously proclaims salvation for all people, Jew and Gentile, at the end of his discourse in Rom. 9-11.   

 As regards the gospel they are enemies of God for your sake; but as regards election they are beloved, for the sake of their ancestors;  for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. Just as you were once disobedient to God but have now received mercy because of their disobedience,  so they have now been disobedient in order that, by the mercy shown to you, they too may nowreceive mercy.  For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all” (Rom. 11: 28-32, NRSV).

Here is a theology of the cross par excellence.  The Triune God appears hidden in God’s revelation, even to the extent of appearing to cast some of God’s people away, in order that God may show God’s mercy to and election of the entirety of humankind.  This is a scandal to legalists of all persuasions, because Paul proclaims God will be who God will be (cf. Exod. 3:14) in spite of any human efforts to frustrate God’s plans or to turn away from God’s promises. 

If God’s promises are unfailing, then Barth is incorrect when he asserts, “Where Israel apprehends and believes its own election in Jesus Christ it lives on in the Church and is maintained in it as its secret origin, as the hidden substance which makes the Church the community of God.”[37]  God’s promises to Israel exist regardless of the contemporary Christian church.  Since the Jewish people were the first to hear God’s promises, they must be honored independently of the Christian church.  If God will be “all in all” at the last day (1 Cor. 15:28), then the Triune God’s eschatological consummation of the universe does not depend on all people’s coming to the Christian church.  Rather, at the final Parousia, those who follow Christ see their Messiah again, and those who eagerly await the coming of the Messiah for the first time shall finally have their hopes realized.  This does not mean Jews will or should become Christians, but that the world’s future rests decisively in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, whom Christians see revealed in the crucified, entombed, and resurrected Christ of Golgotha.  Here, again, Karl Barth has veered off course in the Church Dogmatics when he writes, “It leads from Israel to the Church. Only in this movement, i.e., in practice only from the standpoint of the Church, can it be perceived, described and understood as the living way of the one elect community of God.”[38] 

There is no need to place the church in such a supercessionist place of power in eschatological matters as Barth does.  Instead, one can faithfully follow Barth’s understanding of election by focusing decisively on Jesus Christ as the electing God and elected human being, realizing Christ’s Jewish particularities, and leaving the ultimate mystery of the salvation of non-Christians to the saving, electing grace of the God of promise.  Using this approach is faithful to a theologia crucis, which both proclaims God’s decisive revelation in Jesus Christ, but also has the humility to realize God is God and human beings are human beings.  There is too much anti-semitism and bigotry in Christian history to think otherwise, and the Christian church must now seek to honor our Jewish neighbors as decisively Jewish without seeking to convert them, and instead learning from them while witnessing to our own faith in word and deed. 

Such dialogue is especially crucial in the post-Holocaust world.  It is of the utmost importance to stress that without Israel’s scriptures, there would be no Jesus Christ or Christian church.  Again, this is not to promote supercessionism, but to express gratitude for the Hebrew scriptures that are the root of the Christian New Testament.  To hijack a narrative originally belonging to the Israelites for Christian exclusivism does deep damage to the original integrity of this narrative.  Christians would do well to hear the narrative of the Hebrew scriptures in a twofold, stereophonic sense: first, as stories of Israel’s relationship with YHWH, and expectant recipient of YHWH’s promises, and second, as the foundational narrative with which the Christian story bases its own narrative of redemption on.[39]  The first approach honors the unresolved narrative tension involved when someone hears a story for the first time.  That person cannot know the ending in advance if one is hearing it for the first time!  For Christians, the second approach honors the entire biblical narrative (Hebrew Scriptures and New Covenant) as a testimony to the God of the Exodus who has chosen out of God’s free self-autonomy to dwell with human beings in the incarnate Word.  Neither approach should be considered superior to the other, but as an opportunity for interaction with a narrative that has decisive spiritual, social, and political importance for Jews and Christians alike.  Religious particularities of Jews and Christians can and should be maintained as these two Abrahamic faiths dialogue with and learn from one another in common love for the Creator of the universe. 

All of this seeks to demonstrate that the uniqueness of Christian faith can still be maintained while being open to insights from other religious traditions, including, most importantly in light of the twentieth century’s catastrophes, the Jewish tradition.[40]  The question of particularity for Christians then becomes, “why is Jesus Christ the electing God and the elected human being, and not another religious figure such as the Buddha?” For Barth, “If we would know who God is, and what is the meaning and purpose of his election, and in what respect he is the electing God, then we must look away from all others, and excluding all side-glances or secondary thoughts, we must look only upon and to the name of Jesus Christ, and the existence and history of the people of God enclosed within him. We must look only upon the divine mystery of this name and this history, of this Head and this body.”[41]

Jesus Christ is the Son of God from all eternity.  This Word who became flesh (John 1:17) is uniquely fully human and fully divine.  Only as uniquely fully human and fully divine can Christ defeat sin, death, the devil, and hell definitively.  If Christ is merely one option among a myriad of other religious options, then he cannot be said to truly be God in the flesh for the redemption of the world.  This confessional particularity must then be held in tension with the insights of the Jewish tradition, from which Christians gratefully receive the promises of God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and to whom Christians are connected in common witness to God.

Conclusion

            This paper argued for the connection between Karl Barth’s Erwählungslehre and Martin Luther’s theologia crucis.  By reading Barth’s understanding of election in this way, we discover helpful ways for bringing Luther’s theology to the contemporary world.  At times it has been necessary to deviate from Barth’s exact formulations (chiefly on the question of the relationship of the Christian church to the Jewish people), precisely to be true to the heart of his doctrinal project: the christological re-framing of the doctrine of election, in order that predestination is not something to be feared, but seen as humankind’s passive trust in the active, electing Triune God.  Barth’s understanding of election thus re-frames Martin Luther’s theologia crucis, and the stage is set to show the contemporary relevance of Luther’s theology through the Barthian tradition. 

Brach's Log From Germany

Brach's Dissertaion Proposal

Thomas Santa Maria's Reports from Rome (2018)