Barth S Ontology Of Sin And Grace

In recent Barth studies it has been argued that a key to understanding the theologian’s opposition to natural theology is his rejection of substantialist ontology. While this is true to an extent, this book argues that it is a mistake to see Barth’s ‘actualistic ontology’ as diametrically opposed to traditional substantialism. Probing into Barth’s soteriological hamartiology in Church Dogmatics, III-IV, a largely neglected aspect of these volumes in recent debates on his understanding of being and act, it shows how his descriptions of sin, nature, and grace shed light on the precise manners in which his actualistic ontology operates on both a substance grammar of being and a process grammar of becoming, while rejecting the metaphysics underlying both grammars. Looking at issues such as original sin, universal salvation and human will, Barth is shown to be radically redefining the relationship between humans, their actions and the divine. This book argues that human ‘nature’ is the total determination of the human being ‘from above’ by God’s grace in Christ, while the existential dimension of the human being is also totally determined ‘from below’ by the Adamic history of sin. This serves to demonstrate Barth’s endeavours in eliminating the vestiges of natural theology within the Western tradition handed down from Augustine. By exploring these issues this book offers a fresh insight into Barth’s relationship with his theological forbears. As such, it will be vital reading for any scholar of Barth studies, the problem of evil, and theological ontology.

Matt Jenson argues that the image of being 'curved in on oneself' is the best paradigm for understanding sin relationally, that it has sufficient explanatory breadth and depth to be of service to contemporary Christian theology. He looks to Augustine as the Christian source for this image in his various references to humanity's turn to itself, though the threads of a relational account of sin are not drawn together with any systematic consequence until Martin Luther's description of 'homo incurvatus in se' in his commentary on Romans. Luther radicalizes Augustine's conception by applying this relational view of sin to the totus homo and by emphasizing its appearance, above all, in homo religiosus. The Western tradition of sin understood paradigmatically as pride has been recently called into question by feminist theologians. Daphne Hampson's critique of Luther on this front is considered and critiqued. Though she is right to call attention to the insufficiency of his and Augustine's myopic focus on pride, the question remains whether 'incurvatus in se' can operate paradigmatically as an umbrella concept covering a far wider range of sins. Karl Barth's extension of 'incurvatus in se' to apply more broadly to pride, sloth and falsehood suggests that incurvature can do just that.

This book provides the first comprehensive examination of Karl Barth’s view of beauty. For over fifty years, scholars have assumed Barth recovered traditional belief in God’s beauty but refused to entertain any relationship between this and more familiar natural and artistic beauties. Hans Urs von Balthasar was the first to offer this interpretation, and his conclusion has been echoed ever since, rendering Barth’s view of beauty irrelevant to work in theological aesthetics. This volume continues the late-twentieth-century revision of Balthasar’s interpretation of Barth by arguing that this too is a significant misunderstanding of his theology. Andrew Dunstan demonstrates that, through an encounter with fatalistic forms of Reformed theology, Brunner’s charges that his dogmatics were irrelevant and medieval thought, Barth gradually developed an analogy of divine, ecclesial and worldly beauty with all the theological, christocentric and actualistic hallmarks of his previous forms of analogy. This not only yields valuable new insight into Barth’s view of analogy but also provides a much-needed foundation for a distinctively Protestant and post-Barthian approach to theological aesthetics.

Challenging Bruce McCormack's paradigm of post-Kantian Barth scholarship, this book builds on the interpretative model that Sigurd Baark developed in 2018. This model interprets Barth's innovative adoption of an Anselmian mode of theological speculation, against the intellectual-historical background of the idealist tradition of speculative metaphysics that culminated in Hegel. This book argues that Barth adopted the Anselmian mode of speculation in which immediate self-identity between subject, object, and act is found in the triune God alone, while the speculative identity that enables human knowledge of God is none other than the identity between God-in-and-for-Godself and God-for-us. Exploring the nationalistic dimension of speculative metaphysics in 19th-century Germany, Tseng identifies this as an important aspect of the context of Barth's development of a Christocentric form of speculative theology.

Presenting a neo-Calvinist account of human moral experience, this book is an advance upon the tradition of Augustinian moral theology. The first two chapters are theological interpretations of Genesis 2:17 and 3:6 respectively. Chapter 3 approaches the neo-Calvinist notion of God as absolute person through a consideration of theologies of human reason and history. Chapter 4 considers the relationship between absolute person and classical trinitarianism, and the significance of absolute person for accommodation, hermeneutics, and the Creator/creature relation and distinction. The fifth chapter considers the role of the incarnation in Bavinck's thought, and thus provides a backdrop for reflection upon absolute person from a biblical theological point of view. Shannon concludes with the claim that, according to the Bavincks, Vos, and Van Til, human moral experience is the product of a divine self-expression primarily in the Son.

Did Christ assume a fallen human nature? "What is not assumed is not healed." So goes the Chalcedonian maxim articulated by Gregory of Nazianzus regarding the nature and extent of Christ's work in assuming a human nature. But what is the nature of that assumption? If Christ is to stand in solidarity with us, must he have assumed not merely a human nature, but specifically a fallen human nature? In Sinless Flesh: A Critique of Karl Barth's Fallen Christ, Rafael Bello argues against the assertion made by Karl Barth, T. F. Torrance, and those who follow them that Christ assumed a fallen nature. Through retrieval of patristic, medieval, and Reformed orthodox theologians, Bello argues that a proper understanding of human nature, trinitarian inseparable operations, and the habitual grace-grace of union distinction leads to the conclusion that the assertion that Christ assumed a fallen human nature is at odds with faithful theological and historical understandings of the incarnation. Readers interested in theological retrieval for issues in contemporary theology will find a faithful model and way forward for a thorny issue in modern dogmatics.

Karl Barth was a prolific theologian of the 20th century. This work places his theology in its social and political context from World War 1 to the Cold War.

The doctrine of the virgin birth is intricately woven within the texture of the liturgy, theology and piety of all branches of the Christian Church. In spite of its enduring influence, the doctrine has been dogged by criticism, particularly in the modern era. By the 20th century, the teaching of the virgin birth was rejected by the majority of Protestant theologians in Europe. Rejecting the conclusion of many of his contemporaries-including that of his own father-the Swiss theologian, Karl Barth (1886-1968), argued vehemently that, understood aright, the doctrine of the virgin birth plays a crucial role in Christian thought. Barth's legacy in this regard is widely regarded as providing the most influential rehabilitation of the doctrine among Protestants. This book offers a comprehensive account and analysis of Barth's interpretation of the doctrine of the virgin birth. Setting the doctrine in the context of the western Christian tradition, Resch examines it in relation to Barth's discussions in the Church Dogmatics of Christology, pneumatology and the interpretation of Scripture. The importance of this study lies in the way that it reveals Barth's continuity and discontinuity with both the classical Augustinian tradition of interpreting the virgin birth and the criticisms of the modern era, but especially in the way in which attention to Barth's doctrine of the virgin birth reveals his assumptions about the nature of history, humanity and the identity of Jesus Christ. As a 'fitting' sign of the mystery of the incarnation, Barth argued that the virgin birth expressed the dialectic of God's 'No' to sin and 'Yes' to humanity in his free act of revelation and reconciliation. As such, the doctrine of the virgin birth functioned for Barth as a paradigm through which to understand the fashion of God's work upon human beings and the suitable posture of the human being before God.