Barth in his continuing development of a Christian Ethic, in this section, has been discussing self-power versus real power, which is God’s. In this development he has arrived at a discussion on suicide. He is taking self-power, in abstraction from God’s power, to entail a pseudo-power (self-power), and reducing it to its logical conclusion; which ironically, is at the heights of illogicality. He refers to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s thinking on this, even as Barth goes on to paraphrase Bonhoeffer’s position.[1]
To the best of my knowledge, the Ethik of D. Bonhoeffer (1949, 111–116) gives us the most cautious statement so far written on this matter. We cannot expect every man at every moment to know from his own experience the meaning of real affliction and assault, “when we are in the greatest distress and do not know which way to turn.” A man assailed and afflicted is hid from all others and sometimes even from himself. He is alone with God, and tortured by the terrible question whether God is really with him and for him, or whether he must regard himself as an atheist, i.e., a man who God has rejected and abandoned. Many theologians and theological moralists do not in practice know properly what affliction is because exegetically, dogmatically and even pastorally they know only too well in theory. In all cases, however, suicide is consciously or unconsciously this final assault and affliction. Even the most confirmed theological moralist ought to see this, and therefore to remember that perhaps he does not finally now what takes place between God and the suicide, nor therefore what is the decision which drives him to this dubious act. Is he really a self-murderer? A readiness to recognise that he may not have been a self-murderer at all is required of all who know what it is to be assailed and afflicted, even if only in theory.[2]
So, a twist. Indeed, suicide represents a complexity. In order to actually go through with a suicide a person must be at such a point of travail, by whatever antecedent and present circumstances, that it seems like the only choice left; the one last choice to take control in the midst of the utter chaos, pain, tribulation of whatever the moment is presenting the person with, and end it all (at least on the side where the visibly and physically seen predominates). I have been at these points myself; whether that be in the years long spiritual battle I had with anxiety, depression, dark nights of the soul; or whether that be at the tail end of my incurable/terminal cancer treatment (being so worn down, in so much pain, that it was starting to seem like “ending it all” might be the way out).
Conversely, as Barth paraphrases and riffs Bonhoeffer, even though it starts to become understandable why someone might feel the ultimate desperation of ending it all, even so, this remains a matter of self-power. It is an appeal to the body of death we inhabit to muster all of its resources and conjure up a solution to the desperation; particularly in the absence of that, in regard to the pastors, the doctors, the psychologists, psychiatrists, so on and so forth. Our frames are but dust, and God in Christ knows that, even experientially; and at heights we cannot begin to imagine. And yet, there are seasons of life when God seems utterly absent, as if he has left us alone to travail the path without the Light of His Lamp for us. And again, like Job, it is at this point that we have come to despair of existence itself. Job’s resolve, even in the face of “curse God and die,” was “though You slay me, yet shall I praise You.” This is the resource, beyond our bodies of death, that God in Christ alone provides for us. It is as we come to realize that we are genuinely participatio Christi, that we are constantly being given over to Christ’s death for us, that the mortal members of our bodies might exemplify Christ’s body in us, that we can have the Jobian resolve. Even so, it is as if we are merely hanging on at that point. The enemy of our souls keeps pushing us to refer to the resource and reserve of our bodies of death, which, as we have noted, concludes in suicide. It is only when we have bought the lie of Deicide, that suicide seems to be the final solution for our personal and individual existences. When we have self-deified, and concluded that the body of death we inhabit, these dusty apparatuses, in the face of tribulation and despair, that the only way forward is self-deicide (as if our body of death is ultimately the only real deity left to turn to).
[1] It isn’t often that you get a Barth paraphrase on Bonhoeffer.
[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/4 §55 [404] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 77.