New Blog

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Karl Barth and Election

I wrote a research paper on Karl Barth's Doctrine of Election for Theology class this Fall. Barth's doctrine of election is significant because he understood election to be essential to who God is. Election is not about a predetermined number of individuals who will be saved, but rather it is about the God who has eternally elected to be God in Jesus and therefore God has eternally identified God's self with all of humanity in this election. Election is the free and gracious movement of God to make room within the Godhead for humanity. Here is a snippet of my paper for your reading pleasure:

For Barth, the existence of Jesus, God in flesh, demonstrates God’s eternal election of humanity.

In the person of His eternal Son he has united Himself with the man 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 the temporal man.*

God wills to be God in relation to Jesus; therefore election is central to the doctrine of God because God has eternally willed to be God in Christ.* This predestination of God and of humanity fundamentally orients the ontological status of God and humanity. Election “determines the being of God and of humanity.”* This is because in election God has determined to be an electing God and God has determined humanity to be the elect.* This is known in Jesus: the electing God and the elected human.

Everything that is, is because of God’s election. Because God chose to be God in Jesus, God who was divine and human; God who was God and not God, God decided to bind God’s self to everything that was not God. Barth writes,

In the beginning, before time and space as we know them…God anticipated and determined within Himself that the goal and meaning of all His dealings with the as yet non-existent universe should be the fact that in His Son He would be gracious towards man, uniting Himself with him.*

This would ultimately result in the Son offering himself in sacrifice for humanity in order that God’s covenant with humanity would be a reality.

Jesus is the electing God and the elected human. Jesus is God’s electing movement towards humanity and humanity’s subsequent movement towards God.* “For it is God’s free grace that in Him He elects to be man and to have dealings with man and to join Himself to man.”* What Barth is doing is reorienting the doctrine of election so that it is not an afterthought. It is not an improvisation that occurred due to the fall of the created order. Rather, “God, as essentially the electing God, makes the universe in order that it may be the arena on which his gracious purposes may come to pass. It is therefore the presupposition of all God’s works.”* In Barth’s own words, he writes, “This decree is really the first of all things…It is the decision which is the basis of all that follows.”*



References

Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II.2, eds. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (Edinburg: T. & T. Clark, 1957).

Eberhard Jungel, God's Being Is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology of Karl Barth, trans. John Webster (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2001).

Colin E. Gunton, "Karl Barth's doctrine of election as part of his doctrine of God", Journal of Theological Studies 25.2 (1974): 381-392.

Why Episcopal?

As many of you know Kate and I have been attending an Episcopal Church since we arrived in Seattle. Many people have asked me "What drew you there?" This is a normal question considering I grew up in the Evangelical church, spending time in its many different streams: holiness, methodist, pentecostal, and independent. The easy answer to the question is, the church was right up the street and our friends were going there. But as I have reflected upon my time at the church and as I have looked back on where I have come from, in many ways it makes sense to me why I, at this moment in time, find myself in an Episcopal Church.

I plan to share a few of these reasons with you in a series of blog posts beginning with this one. Keep in mind that due to the nature of a blog these descriptions are brief, often poorly nuanced, and do not do justice to the complexity of the story I am sharing. One other disclaimer, I am not speaking of my brief experience in the Episcopal Church in order to say that I have finally arrived and here is where I will stay. But rather to simply reflect on where I find myself now. Furthermore, I not an expert on anything Episcopalian, so my interpretation of things Episcopal, may be simply that.

1. Encounter with the Holy. The ecclesial settings that I have found myself in have been places where I have encountered God. Due to particularities of my own story and aspects of the Evangelical tradition that gave form to my spiritual makeup, early on in my journey I sought intense intimate union with God. This happened through scripture reading, prayer (private and corporate) and worship experiences, at times these were highly emotional and charismatic in nature. I believed that God was near to me and able to guide every aspect of my life. However, this nearness was conditioned by my diligence to maintain it. This required an incredible amount of expended energy on scripture reading, prayer and worship. The payoff was the presence of God in my life who filled the deep holes of my wounded heart.

To make a long story short(i.e. Africa), my body and soul eventually caved under the pressure of maintaining a relationship with God. Church became to me a place of disappointment and isolation. Singing praise to God was laborious and painful. Prayer was confusing and accompanied with silence. Scripture became nothing but dead letters. Sermons were manipulative and demanding. Ultimately I was no longer able to join in with the worship experience. Too much was dependent upon me.

Needless to say I carried all of this emotion, confusion, and frustration with me as I entered St. Paul's Episcopal Church, an Anglo-Catholic parish. Being in a church still put me at unease. I continued to wonder if I would ever experience anything besides anxiety. However, after several visits I was feeling more comfortable with the liturgy. I knew the flow of the service: stand, bow, cross, sing, silence now, come forward, kneel, receive, exit here, etc... I soon began to develop the sense that I was being held and carried along by the worship experience. Not in some supernatural, otherworldly sense, but in the actions, prayers, praise, and silence of a physically gathered community.

Encounter with the Holy came in participating with a body in praise, word and sacrament. The liturgy is not sustained by my emotional output, the charisma of a worship leader, nor the verbosity of the preacher; rather it is in the mysterious encounter of the divine through the flesh and blood movement of the gathered community, culminating in the meal of Christ's flesh and blood.

Coming soon: Liturgical worship as Divine Drama.

Mars Hill Graduate School

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