My recent readings in Barth’s Church Dogmatics have me engaging with his development on a doctrine of nothingness (i.e., sin and evil). The particular section I am reading has been exceedingly edifying. The passage I am going to share from him is a summarizing type of statement of what he has been treating heretofore. As I was reading this section it gave me great hope to ponder the present and forthcoming realities, as those relate to Christ’s victory over nothingness-sin-evil, and all that entails eschatologically. It is hopeful to ruminate on the concrete victory of Christ vis-à-vis the despair and delirium the current (seen) world order suffers under. Without this blessed hope, and the soon to come, glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, this world surely has no ultimate meaning or purpose. Without the Logos ensarkos all the world can do is to make an attempt at self-generating some type of existential meaning in the face of the absurdum of the abyss of darkness that enshrouds this world system. But Christ! Barth writes,
What is nothingness? In the knowledge and confession of the Christian faith, i.e., looking retrospectively to the resurrection of Jesus Christ and prospectively to His coming again, there is only one possible answer. Nothingness is the past, the ancient menace, danger and destruction, the ancient non-being which obscured and defaced the divine creation of God but which is consigned to the past in Jesus Christ, in whose death it has received its deserts, being destroyed with the consummation of the positive will of God which is as such the end of His non-willing. Because Jesus is Victor, nothingness is routed and extirpated. It is that which in this One who was both very God and very man has been absolutely set behind, not only by God, but in unity with Him by man and therefore the creature. It is that from whose influence, dominion and power the relationship between Creator and creature was absolutely set free in Jesus Christ, so that it is no longer involved in their relationship as a third factor. This is what happened to nothingness once and for all in Jesus Christ. This is its status and appearance now that God has made His own and carried through the conflict with it in His Son. It is no longer to be feared. It can no longer “nihilate.” But obviously we may make these undoubtedly audacious statements only on the ground of one single presupposition. The aspect of creaturely activity both as a whole and in detail, our consciousness both of the world and of self, certainly do not bear them out. But what do we really know of it as taught by this consciousness? How can this teach us the truth that it is really past and done with? The only valid presupposition is a backward look to the resurrection of Jesus Christ and a forward look to His coming in glory, i.e., the look of Christian faith as rooted in and constantly nourished by the Word of God. The knowledge and confession of Christian faith, however, inevitably entails the affirmation that by the divine intervention nothingness has lost the perpetuity which it could and must and indeed did have apart from this intervention. It can no longer be validly regarded as possessing any claim or right power in relation to the creature, as though it were still before and above us, as though the world created by God were still subject to and dominated by it, as though Christians must hold it in awe, as though it were particularly Christian to hold it in the utmost awe and to summon the world to share in this awe. It is no longer legitimate to think of it as if real deliverance and release from it were still an event of the future. It is obvious that in point of fact we do constantly think of it in this way, with anxious, legalistic, tragic, hesitant, doleful, and basically pessimistic thoughts, and this inevitably where we are neither able nor prepared to think from the standpoint of Christian faith. But it is surely evident than when we think in this way it is not from a Christian standpoint, but in spite of it, in breach of the command imposed with our Christian faith. If our thought is conditioned by the obedience of Christian faith, we have only one freedom, namely, to regard nothingness as finally destroyed and to make a new beginning in remembrance of the One who has destroyed it. Only if our thought is thus conditioned by the obedience of Christian faith is it possible to proclaim the Gospel to the world as it really is, as the message of freedom for the One who has already come and acted as the Liberator, and therefore of the freedom which precludes the anxiety, legalism and pessimism so prevalent in the world. We need hardly describe how throughout the centuries the Christian Church has failed to shape its thought in the obedience of Christian faith, to proclaim it to the world in this obedience, to live in this freedom and to summon the world to it. For this reason and contrary to its true nature, so-called Christianity has become a sorry affair both within and without. It is shameful enough to have to admit that many of the interpretations of nothingness which we are forced to reject as non-Christian derive their power and cogency from the fact that for all their weakness and erroneousness they attest a Christian insight to the extent that they do at least offer a cheerful view and describe and treat nothingness as having no perpetuity. It ought to be the main characteristic of the Christian view that it can demonstrate this more surely because on surer ground, more boldly because in the exercise and proclamation of the freedom granted to do so, and more logically because not in a venture but in simple obedience. We must not imagine that we serve the seriousness of Christian knowledge, life and proclamation by retreating at this point and refusing to realise and admit that the apparently audacious is the norm, the only true possibility. The true seriousness of the matter, and we may emphasise this point in retrospect of the whole discussion, does not finally depend upon pessimistic but upon optimistic thought and speech. From a Christian standpoint “to be serious” can only mean to take seriously the fact that Jesus is Victor, the last word must always be secretly the first, namely, that nothingness has no perpetuity.[1]
Years ago, I read a book by Donald Bloesch called, Jesus is Victor!: Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Salvation. Bloesch was treating the very themes we have been reading about in Barth directly. Barth’s primary point (he has more than one) is that nothingness or sin or evil cannot be rightly known, but through the One who first stands against it for us. That God alone in Christ has the capacity to see what evil is, in light of His positive life of righteousness and holiness. For Barth, the world has no access to the concrete non-reality of nothingness. As such, they have no way of battling it. As an implication, this would be one reason, among many, that there is Victory alone in Christ alone. The world is ensnared by a trap that might seem like the Stoic fate of fatalism; but as Barth opines, in light of Christ, things are much worse than that. Which is why it takes all of God to be for all of us in the face of Jesus Christ. As Barth rightly emphasizes, there is no release from the anxiety, the dread, the tragic, the doom&gloom apart from the Light of Light of God piercing the darkness that we might come to more accurately understand what darkness, what nothingness actually entails. Not that we can grasp the inner-anatomy of nothingness, per se, but in Christ, we can finally, at the very least, recognize the depth dimensional reality that ensconces us within the binding of a dread-nothingness that God alone has the ability to know the depths of; indeed, as the Theanthropos, “. . . He does not will to be faithful to Himself except as He is faithful to His creature, adopting its cause and therefore constantly making the alien problem of nothingness His own.”[2]
Marantha!
[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3 §50–51 [364] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 74–5.
[2] Ibid., 68.