Few topics in Christian theology are as obscure as the extra Calvinisticum. In its most basic form, the extra is the teaching that during his incarnate life, the second person of the Trinity is ‘at one and the same time, completely within the flesh of Jesus (spatially circumscribed) and completely without the flesh of Jesus (not limited by space)’.Footnote 1 That is, even as Jesus Christ is the incarnate Son of God, we must speak of a way of being the Son that is enfleshed (Logos ensarkos) and a way of being whereby the Son simultaneously rules from heaven, not tied to his human body (Logos asarkos). The extra, so the common perception goes, is entirely conditioned by its polemical Reformational context and so metaphysically abstract that it is at best an artefact of a question that no longer needs to be asked and at worst an angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin question that never should have been asked in the first place.
Yet the endeavour to protect the implications of a theology of the cross from violating divine impassibility seems to be driving a number of theological projects that have resourced the extra Calvinisticum in creative and challenging ways. Most notably, T. F. Torrance has defended the extra by arguing that while the Lutheran position ‘had its extremely important truth in the insistence that a real and genuine incarnation took place’, it unwittingly presupposes a ‘receptacle’ view of space, in which the role of the human nature was ‘to contain the divine’.Footnote 2 Torrance connects this tendency to the more unsavoury fruits of Lutheran theology in modernity: ‘If we press that to mean that in the incarnation the Word was resolved into this Jesus without remainder, so to speak, then insuperable difficulties arise – and solutions such as a metaphysical kenōsis or demythologising have to be found’.Footnote 3 Yet a strongly Reformed interest in defending the extra as a means of safeguarding divine impassibility risks making the extra – God the Son ruling from above in heaven apart from the humanity of Christ – a justification for separating the being and activity of Jesus of Nazareth as the one who dies on the cross from that of God.
It is such a separation that troubled Karl Barth throughout his life and, as I will suggest, led to a seismic shift in his attitude towards the extra. Even a cursory reading of Barth’s theology reveals that the concerns of the extra are also Barth’s concerns; its questions are his questions. Indeed, I will contend that the question of the Son’s putative existence extra carnem drives Barth’s theology forward, chastens it, animates it, and focuses it in the end upon the divine-human reality of the God-human.
My thesis is simple: over the course of his career, Karl Barth changed his mind on the extra Calvinisticum, from wholeheartedly embracing it at the beginning of his career to rejecting it in the late volumes of the Church Dogmatics. The purpose of this paper is first to show what occasioned this change and, secondly, to affirm – against at least some current trajectories in contemporary systematic theology – that he had good reasons for doing so. Ultimately, I contend Barth changed his mind because developments in his own doctrine of revelation – specifically, his insistence that revelation is self-revelation – exerted increasing pressure on his theology, and most especially his Christology, requiring that he radically revise the scope of the extra Calvinisticum until it was unrecognisable. If God truly manifests himself through himself as himself in the God-human, then any doctrine that allows us to conceive of God’s being apart from his act in Jesus becomes untenable.
First, however, we must dedicate a significant amount of attention to what precisely is being claimed in the Calvinist extra and the obscurity that such a question yields. Only then can we appreciate Barth’s revision of the doctrine.
I
The extra Calvinisticum is, in the original expression, a highly polemical and rhetorical term, used by proponents of Lutheran orthodoxy against their Reformed counterparts.Footnote 4 Without exhaustively narrating the already well-documented history of Lutheran-Reformed eucharistic and christological debates, it will suffice to briefly articulate the more significant differences that emerged between the two schools in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
It has been justifiably argued that the ‘axle and motor’ of Martin Luther’s theology is a commitment to a particular formulation of the communicatio idiomatum, the idea that in the incarnation of the Son there is a real exchange (perichoresis) of properties between the divine and human natures, such that what can be properly spoken of one nature becomes true of the other as well.Footnote 5 Thus, ‘whatever is said of him as man must also be said of him as God, namely, Christ has died, and Christ is God; therefore God has died – not the separated God, but God united with humanity’.Footnote 6 It has long been the standard interpretation of Luther to see his full-throated affirmation of the communicatio as simultaneously a departure both from nominalist late medieval metaphysics and from an unquestioning fealty to divine impassibility. This narrative sees Luther as at least tacitly giving license for a real communication of the human attributes to the divine nature: He will speak even of ‘God’s martyrdom, God’s blood, and God’s death’.Footnote 7
But these formulations of the communicatio idiomatum do not in themselves mark Luther’s Christology as distinctive or controversial in the later debates between Lutheran and Reformed Scholasticism. Indeed, it is important to see Luther operating from within a thoroughly patristic, neo-Chalcedonian framework. By this I mean a pattern of speaking and thinking about the relation of divine and human natures that, at core, takes into account the Second Council of Constantinople’s (553) proclamation that ‘our Lord Jesus Christ, who was crucified in human flesh, is truly God and the Lord of glory and one of the members of the holy Trinity’.Footnote 8 Though nineteenth- and twentieth-century Lutheran theologians would look upon the Chalcedonian definition with suspicion for risking a dissolution of any inherent connection between the divine identity of the eternal Son and his economic suffering and obedience, the Reformer’s own attitudes towards the confession of the council evince no such hesitancy.Footnote 9 The burden of Luther’s Disputatio de divinitate et humanitate Christi (1540) was precisely that the Chalcedonian definition of Christ as two natures in one person conveys a theological mystery that is not expressible within the ordinary boundaries of philosophical predication.Footnote 10
The occasion of the 1540 Disputatio was Caspar Schwenckfeld’s claim that it is absolutely improper to refer to Christ as a ‘creature’ and Luther’s rejection of this claim on the basis that he misunderstands how Christ is predicated in his divinity and humanity. For our purposes, two points on Luther’s 1540 Disputatio bear worth mentioning: The first regards the Reformer’s disputed attitude towards the medieval theory of ‘suppositional carrying’. The second regards the effect of this attitude on how Luther sees the communicatio idiomatum. With respect to the first, suppositional carrying is an explanatory mechanism for how the hypostatic union occurs. In this model, the divine suppositum – the eternal Logos – carries or sustains the human nature, which has no independent concrete existence but is only actualised in the person of the Word.Footnote 11 In the act of assuming a fleshly nature, the person of the Word appropriates to himself a passable human nature without, however, the divine nature being compromised, changed, or affected by his becoming man. The dominant interpretation of Luther’s Christology was, until very recently, that the Reformer’s understanding of the hypostatic union and the communicatio idiomatum signals a divergence from this traditional model of a divine person assuming nature, seeing instead a symmetrical, mutually determinative, and composite relation between divinity and humanity.Footnote 12 This explanation has the advantage of making sense of Luther’s liberal use of theopaschite language: the divine nature takes on human suffering, mortality, and ignorance to the same degree that the human nature takes on divine attributes (most famously, that of omnipresence).
To be sure, Luther famously disparages the nominalists as speaking ‘monstrously’ (portentose) when they claimed the human nature was supposited by the divine nature.Footnote 13 But, as Luy has suggested, this line alone does not tell the full story of the complicated legacy of late medieval theology in Luther’s writings.Footnote 14 Luther aims this denunciation more to the ‘unintended resonances of meaning’ of such a vocabulary, that is, taking the language of a divine person merely ‘carrying’ a created nature to mean that same person cannot be called ‘creature’.Footnote 15 Such a mistake, Luther reasons, turns on a failure to distinguish between abstract and concrete modes of predication and, furthermore, an abstract philosophical logic and the new ‘grammar of the Holy Spirit’. Theology calls Christ ‘creature’ in the concrete (i.e., as he is a divine person who assumed a created human nature), yet the creature tout court is not the suppositum but rather that which is assumed by the person.Footnote 16 God is man concretely – and thus the object of reference in such theopaschite statements as ‘God’s death’ is always the one person and suppositum of Christ and not the divine nature abstractly.
The upshot of Luther’s accommodation of ‘suppositional carrying’ is found in how he understood the communicatio idiomatum. Namely, Luther seems committed to the doctrine in two distinct senses. First, there is the standard patristic use of the communicatio wherein the properties of divine and human nature are each communicated to the person of Christ in the concrete. ‘The Lord of glory was crucified’; ‘The Son of Mary created the world’; ‘One of the Holy Trinity was crucified in the flesh’; each of these represents a concrete predication of a quality belonging properly to one nature yet predicated of the whole person. This sense of the communicatio idiomatum – what Chemnitz and Gerhard would later regard as the genus idiomaticum – would remain uncontroversial in the Reformation period.
But then there is a second, distinct sense of the communication idiomatum which Luther seems to tacitly affirm, though his Protestant Scholastic successors would be the first to give determinate form to the idea. Because of the determinate divine identity of the person assuming, the assumed human nature really shares in the divine predicates of divinity. It is important to see that this communication (what the later Lutheran Scholastics would call the genus maiestaticum) flows from the asymmetrical character of predication outlined in the 1540 Disputatio. Even while it is correct to say ‘Christ is man’ concretely, it is erroneous to say ‘Christ is humanity’ in the abstract. However – and this is the point on which much of Luther’s Christology turns – it is proper to say ‘Christ is divinity’, because in the divine predicates there is no distinction between the concrete and the abstract.Footnote 17 It follows that every part of Christ – every aspect of his person – is suffused with and conditioned by the divine nature, so much so that Luther will even say that he who touches Christ ‘touches the divine nature itself’ and, moreover, that the humanity of Christ is to be worshipped along with his divinity.Footnote 18
It is not difficult to see how this formulation of a one-way communication of the divine attributes to Christ’s humanity (genus maiestaticum) makes sense of the Lutheran-Reformed controversy surrounding the presence of Christ in the Eucharist. The sacramental issue, for Luther, turns on whether the one person of the Christ may be divided into two, that is, whether it was possible to parse out in concreteo the divine and human natures.Footnote 19 Because the two natures are united in the person of the Word, it is impossible to imagine part of Christ being anywhere that the whole is not. ‘Where you place God for me,’ Luther writes, ‘you must also place the humanity for me. They simply will not let themselves be separated and divided from the other’.Footnote 20 Luther takes this fundamentally unitive principle as license to seemingly push the patristic teaching on the communication of attributes to its speculative breaking point.
At least, such was the charge of Ulrich Zwingli, who accused Luther’s doctrine of the ubiquity of Christ’s human body of indulging a speculative theology and thereby limiting the divine freedom by ‘enclosing’ him in the flesh. In response, Luther pointed out that to imagine the question in terms of ‘enclosure’ is to fundamentally misunderstand what God effects in the hypostatic union. ‘Rather’, Luther writes, ‘it is one person with God, so that wherever God is, there also is the man; what God does, the man also is said to do; what the man suffers God also is said to suffer’.Footnote 21 Ultimately, Luther turns Zwingli’s point on its head, arguing that the Son has inseparably bound himself to human flesh (and thereby communicated the divine property of omnipresence to the flesh) not in spite of his freedom as God, but precisely because of it. In the final analysis, it is Zwingli, Luther avers, who indulges in an overly speculative theology.
Thus, the position of Luther (and the touchstone for Lutheran orthodoxy in the centuries following) may be summarised as follows : 1) the hypostatic union entails a real perichoresis and communication of attributes of the divine nature to the human nature, which means that everything that belonged to God by nature belongs also to Christ’s human nature by virtue of the union; 2) to speak of ‘the Son’ after the incarnation, one simply has to speak of the human nature being affected by the divine nature (since to speak of one apart from the other is to endorse a two-subject Christology, at least tacitly); and 3) therefore, since Christ is omnipresent as God, after the incarnation he is also omnipresent as man.
It is to these christological assertions that John Calvin directly responds in his denial of the ubiquity of Christ’s presence qua human. Whether or not Calvin himself believed in the only doctrine named after him is, as we will soon see, dubious; but both loci classici for the extra Calvinisticum come from Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. Like Zwingli, Calvin accuses the Lutheran position of an improper understanding of the incarnation of the Son of God as a ‘confinement within the narrow prison of an earthly body’. Calvin writes,
For even if the Word in his immeasurable essence united with the nature of man into one person, we do not imagine that he was confined therein. Here is something marvelous: the Son of God descended from heaven in such a way that, without leaving heaven, he willed to be borne in the virgin’s womb, to go about the earth, and to hang upon the cross; yet he continuously filled the world even as he had done from the beginning!Footnote 22
Calvin’s impulse, it should be noted, is plainly not to blindly assert a Chalcedonian metaphysics of nature and hypostasis, much less (as Lutherans would charge) to facilitate a Nestorian separation of the natures. Rather, Calvin’s broader point is soteriological. For, if the descent of the Son entails his assuming an external (in this case, spatial) limitation or necessity (that is, if his assumption of flesh upon earth means that he truly evacuates heaven), then in what sense can he still be truly God? And if he is no longer God, then how can he save us? For Calvin, this must necessarily mean that the divine Son maintains a dual existence, beginning with his incarnation and confirmed in the ascension, simultaneously ruling from heaven etiam extra carnem, even as he empties himself in the flesh on the cross.
Although the significance of positing such a twofold (yet decidedly non-Nestorian) existence of the Word is open to debate, it is entirely possible to see Calvin’s insistence on a simultaneous divine existence extra carnem as an attempt to be faithful to the pre-Reformation legacy he sought to inherit and carry forward. In his book-length study of the extra Calvinisticum, E. David Willis argues that Calvin’s version of the extra is not a Reformation innovation at all but rather Calvin’s attempt to explicate and synthesise the ancient church’s teaching about the incarnation from Origen, Athanasius, and Augustine to Thomas Aquinas.Footnote 23 The patristic adage that after the incarnation, the divine Son ‘remained what he was’ leads Willis to conclude that the extra Calvinisticum is better termed the ‘extra Patristicum’, or even the ‘extra catholicum’.Footnote 24 After all, even Cyril of Alexandria, whose friendship with Reformed orthodoxy has been at best tenuous, seems to affirm something approaching Calvin’s position.Footnote 25
At this point, we may assert some common ground between Calvin and Luther. Both believe that there is a valid distinction between the Logos asarkos and Logos ensarkos before the descent of the divine Son into time; moreover, even while the Lutherans reject a Logos asarkos after the incarnation, Luther still believes that the Son remains God even as he is human. The disagreement emerges when we consider the implications that the communicatio idiomatum bears on this claim. Calvin affirms the traditional patristic sense of the communicatio, while rejecting Luther’s one-way transmission of the divine attributes to the human nature (the genus maiestaticum of later Lutheran orthodoxy). That is, Calvin affirms the properties of each nature to the single person of Christ without, however, cross-predicating the attributes that belong properly of one nature to the other.Footnote 26
The passage that stands as the second locus classicus for considering the extra is Institutes IV.xvii.30, and we should note here that Calvin’s divergence from Luther rests not on his insistence that the Son remains God, but on the particular way he remains God, namely by not communicating divine properties to Christ’s humanity. Calvin writes that in the incarnation, the Son’s divinity descends not as if it left heaven and ‘hid itself in the prison house of the body’, but even as Christ filled all things (Colossians 2), he dwelt in a circumscribed human body, both within and apart from a human body. To explain this difficult mystery, Calvin invokes a Scholastic distinction from Peter Lombard: ‘Although the whole Christ (totus Christus) is everywhere (ubique), still the whole of that which is in him (totum quod in eo est) is not everywhere’.Footnote 27 Thus, Calvin definitively rejects Luther’s insistence that because of the affinity (perichoresis) between the two natures after the union, whatever we predicate of Christ, we must predicate of both of his natures.
We must keep in mind that by positing a divine existence of the Son apart from the flesh – simultaneously the circumscribed and fleshly character of Jesus’ humanity – Calvin affirms a fundamentally soteriological principle that Christ must be ‘like us in every way, yet without sin’ (Heb. 4:15). Consequently, we find in Calvin’s own writings that the overall significance of the extra occupies at most a marginal place in his theology.Footnote 28 Yet, in the subsequent generations of the Lutheran-Reformed debates, the centrality of the extra steadily gave both sides more license to speculate metaphysically over the relation of the two natures. This particular trajectory is less the story of Calvin, as we have seen, than it is of Calvinism. Footnote 29 Questions 47–48 of the Heidelberg Catechism, which taught that the divinity of the Son ‘is indeed beyond the bounds of the manhood which it has assumed’ enshrined the extra as a tenet of Reformed Orthodoxy and thereby solidified the christological fault lines between the Reformed and Lutheran positions. The age of Protestant scholasticism further generated conceptually complex attempts of expressing a metaphysics of the extra or its non-existence.Footnote 30 Indeed, the term ‘extra Calvinisticum’ originates precisely in this scholastic context as a polemical jab by Theodor Thumm during a 1623 intra-Lutheran debate between the Universities of Giessen and Tübingen where Thumm pejoratively accused his counterparts of positing ‘illud ipsum extra Calvinisticum’.Footnote 31
On the Reformed side of scholasticism, we find a development of the extra motivated less by the soteriological interests of Calvin and more by a need for comprehensiveness in the metaphysics of the union. ‘Finitum non capax infiniti’ became an axiomatic catchphrase of the school of thought. We need to cite only one image to see the complex (and oftentimes Nestorianizing) tendencies seemingly licensed by this version of extra. At the Colloquy of Maulbronn the famous image of ‘Antwerp and the Ocean’ was introduced by Kaspar Olevianus against his Lutheran detractor Jakob Andreas. The image attempted to illustrate the superiority of Calvin’s totus/totum distinction over and against Luther’s enclosure of the divinity in the humanity. Olevianus saw a fault in Andreas’ reasoning that, because the human Christ was at the right hand of God, the humanity enjoyed all the same qualities as the right hand of God (which is omnipresent). Andreas’s reasoning, Olevianus argued, resembled the claim because the island Antwerp is wholly in the ocean and the ocean encircles the whole world, Antwerp itself encircles the globe.Footnote 32 Just because Antwerp (the humanity) is surrounded and sustained by the ocean (the divinity) does not thereby grant the island the same magnitude or absolute relation as the ocean. As Willis notes, ‘Antwerp is merely tangential to the ocean’, and likewise the real humanity of Jesus by necessity entailed humanity’s irreducible finitude. Footnote 33 To communicate the properties from the divinity to the humanity – to insist that Antwerp becomes the ocean – is to risk the absolute contingency of created human nature on the divine.
The problem with the trajectory illustrated by the image of Antwerp on the ocean is twofold. First, though it was originally intended to distinguish between the human presence of Christ in heaven (Antwerp) with the divine omnipresence of Christ (the ocean), it seems to posit the human Jesus as a kind of second economic agent at least conceptually distinct from the divinity of the Logos that encircles him. Calvin himself clearly did not intend to posit ‘two Sons’, one on earth and the other in heaven. Yet, we can see in this example why in their polemics the Lutherans labelled the extra Calvinisticum as what Isaak Dorner called a ‘double Logos theory’, where one Logos is circumscribed by human limitation, and another, more metaphysically obscure Logos reigns from above.Footnote 34
But second and more crucially, the development of the extra after Calvin construed the kenosis in terms of divine concealment. Whether the Reformed scholastics intended to or not, the extra ended up protecting the Logos asarkos from any full disclosure in the event of his revelation in time. Therefore, Turretin can write that the Son in himself is not ‘lessened in the humiliation, nor increased in the exaltation. But emptying is ascribed to it as concealment and restraining of glory and majesty under the form of a servant’.Footnote 35 The self-emptying, in other words, is an epiphanic ‘concealment’ of the Son in time. The doctrine protected, as we will soon see the early Barth thought, a reserve of revelation from coming to be seen.
II
I have attempted thus far to trace the development of the concept of the extra Calvinisticum in the period after the Reformation, showing the basic christological commitments and metaphysical prejudgments, as well as the fruits that the doctrine produces. The foregoing narrative is significant because without it, it is very difficult to appreciate the extent to which Barth’s doctrine of revelation puts conceptual pressure on his own retrieval of Reformed dogmatics. By the time Barth emerged on the German theological scene, mainstream Protestant liberalism had largely cast the extra Calvinisticum to the ash-heap of extraneous metaphysical dogmas disposed of with the rise of historical-critical inquiry into the life of Jesus. A new grammar for Christology, distinct from the classical concerns of both Reformed and Lutheran orthodoxy, became dominant. For Schleiermacher, the problem of Christology lay in the question of how the Redeemer could bring together in himself the ideal universal and the concrete particular. The mode of such a unity – and therefore the distinction between Jesus and the rest of humanity – lies in the constant potency of the God-consciousness of the Redeemer, something which, by virtue of a ‘direct existential relationship’ between Jesus and the church, could effectuate the believer’s own sense of inner vitality and sense of dependence on God.Footnote 36 The kenoticism of Gottfried Thomasius and the anti-metaphysical approach of Albrecht Ritschl had likewise shown little sympathy for the Reformation-era debates.Footnote 37 It was into this theological context that Barth intervened. Der Römerbrief (1918) subjected the normative religiosity of Protestant liberalism – its accommodation to secular ideologies and political movements, its naïve commitment to an anthropology predicated on human progress, its implicit identification of God with creaturely reality, and above all the minor role it assigned to eschatology – to the most intense theological scrutiny.
After the second edition of Römerbrief (1922), Barth turned his attention to Christian past, publishing lecture notes from a 1923 Göttingen course on the Reformed confessions.Footnote 38 The lectures read as if Barth is uncovering an ancient, foreign, and long-forgotten confessional way of thinking theologically – as if he has discovered his own tradition for the first time and is offering an apologia for the confessions to his students.Footnote 39 As such, Barth comes off as a loyalist of the newly discovered Reformed tradition, though he is not by any measure blind to its potential shortcomings.
It is here that Barth engages with the question of the extra Calvinisticum for the first time, initially rehearsing a number of typically anti-Lutheran polemical points. The genus maiestaticum ‘results in the unending confusion of all the articles of our Christian faith, makes the true humanity of Christ into a phantom … puts the body of Christ on the cross and simultaneously invisibly in Rome and Jerusalem, inside and outside the maternal body of Mary, in every apple and pear, even in every beer and wine cask!’Footnote 40 Moreover, the enclosure of the Logos within the flesh of Jesus and the doctrine of ubiquity together render the ascension unintelligible, since it would seem to make Christ equally present in heaven as he was on earth and indeed even in hell.Footnote 41
The novelty of Barth’s critique does not rest in any one of these polemical contentions, all of which were ensconced in the history of Reformed orthodoxy. What makes the early Barth’s full-throated affirmation of the extra uniquely his own is how deeply it is tied to a particular (yet still developing) construal of the doctrine of revelation and a correlative suspicion of natural theology. One can see in Barth’s treatment of Reformed-Lutheran debates here, as John Webster has pointed out, that ‘the doctrines are handled instrumentally rather than descriptively’, that is, Christology is indexed into a more general set of concerns around what we might label theological epistemology.Footnote 42 The extra is yet another way to safeguard the otherness between the Revealer and the recipients of revelation, between Creator and creation. For God to continue to be God and the creature the creature, there must be an irreducibly non-given reserve to revelation, ‘a concealment of revelation’.Footnote 43 The Lutheran unio naturarum, which Barth seems to believe belongs more to the ‘speculative idealist’ system of Hegel and Schelling than to the reformer himself, endangers this non-given and indirect aspect of revelation. ‘By accepting the direct givenness and presence of contingent revelation’, it ultimately merges revelation with creation, compromises the Creator/creature distinction, turns Christ into an omnipresent phantom (i.e., Docetism), and materialises God such that he ceases to be God.Footnote 44 From this perspective, the existence of the Son of God beyond the flesh functions as the epistemological guardrail against a view of ‘contingency as revelation’.Footnote 45
This same epistemological concern reverberates in Barth’s first attempt at a comprehensive work of dogmatic theology, the 1924–1925 Göttingen Dogmatics. Here, Barth offers three reasons for a strong affirmation of the extra. First, to the Lutheran concern that the extra prohibits the whole Christ from being revealed in the incarnation, Barth responds with Calvin’s totus/totum distinction, namely, that the Logos ensarkos and the Logos asarkos are ‘naturally not two different entities’, one part hidden and the other revealed, but rather ‘they are the same totality’.Footnote 46 They are one God, and God’s existence outside the flesh simply assures us that it is the transcendent God we are dealing with in the incarnation. Second, Barth invokes the same soteriological principle as Calvin, insisting that the doctrine of ubiquity destroys Christ’s likeness with us. And third, Barth once again points to the dialectical tension inherent in the extra as safeguarding the mysterious and gratuitous character of revelation. That the Son is both ensarkos and asarkos means he is ‘wholly in his revelation and without subtraction a perceptible object’, yet at the same time ‘also wholly not an object … but the immutable divine subject’.Footnote 47
Clearly, Barth does not appropriate the reformers neutrally. Instead, he does so as someone who brings to them the questions of his own day, with the expectation that their texts will continue to speak. That he does this is not a problem. All good readers do. Yet it is worth noting two things about how Barth poses his own questions to the doctrine of the reformers: First, the doctrine of revelation exercises a regulative function over the other mysteries of the Christian faith. It has been well-documented that Barth’s early theology is predicated on a dialectic of veiling and unveiling, a dialectic that, Barth believed, protects theology from becoming beholden to anything other than its subject matter, the God disclosed in Jesus Christ.Footnote 48 The extra Calvinisticum functions to sustain that key insight: God is both in and beyond his revelation, given to us in the revelation of Jesus Christ while remaining non-given in his transcendence. It is worth asking whether, despite Barth’s insistence that the method of theology should not determine its content, the dynamics of the non-given reserve of revelation here functions as something pre-given, something that conditions what can and cannot be true of the fullness of God given in Christ Jesus.
A second point follows from the first. As Barth will come to see, an appeal to revelation in a purely formal sense proves to be a shaky starting place for theology. Put positively, the what of revelation is inextricable from its how; its content is part and parcel with its mode of disclosure, its phenomenality. Few commentators have proven to be more generative here than Jean-Luc Marion, who points out that revelatio emerged as a distinctive concept only in the thirteenth century, where, in Marion’s reading, it took on a basically epistemological valence. Even if revelatio occupies the highest tier in a hierarchy of human knowing, the formulation of sacra doctrina as a quasi-science alongside the natural light of reason opened the door for revelation to be submitted to the conditions of human knowing, as it did later in the Enlightenment.Footnote 49 The point being that, for much of the theological history of the West, revelation was a concept the function of which was to make God known through propositions and predicative statements.
It is precisely this formal concept of revelation that had become sedimented in western theology, and which Barth calls into question in the opening paragraphs of the Church Dogmatics. The central insight can be put thus: God is not only the subject and object of revelation, but he is also the mode of his revelation, its phenomenality. Revelation is always self-revelation, the self-manifestation of God: ‘God reveals Himself. He reveals Himself through Himself. He reveals Himself. If we wish really to regard the revelation from the side of its subject, God, then above all we must understand that this subject, God, the Revealer, is identical with His act in revelation, identical also with its effect’.Footnote 50 Whereas previously Barth had subordinated his Christology to a formal concept of revelation, we can now see that the vere deus and vere homo is beginning to condition how he imagines revelation at work in theology: revelation shows itself as the Word, a speaking of God that is identical with God. Moreover, the being of the Word is accomplished as an act in the world of creatures, such that the self-disclosure of Jesus Christ discloses nothing other than the Word as he is in himself: God is his self-manifestation since Jesus is the manifestation of God.
If it is injudicious to say that the whole of the Church Dogmatics turns on the insight that revelation is self-revelation, a more modest claim may be staked here: the seismic shift in Barth’s doctrine of revelation began to build pressure that would be felt in the whole system of the Dogmatics. Indeed, whether or not we affirm the extra Calvinisticum depends, in part, on whether we agree with Barth that revelation is self-revelation. By 1938, with the publication of the section ‘The Mystery of Revelation’ (§15), in Church Dogmatics I/2, the fault lines begin to visibly crack. There, Barth comes to terms with a Christology taken in light of the claim that revelation is self-revelation. The larger question at issue in §15 is in what sense God ‘became’ (ἐγένϵτο) flesh while still remaining God: Is the becoming in question transitive? Does the event of becoming entail a real ontic change? And, moreover, is the becoming something that ‘befalls’ the Word, an event of ‘action and reaction’, activity and passivity alike?Footnote 51
On the one hand, Barth gives voice to many of the same concerns he had already expressed: Does the Lutheran ‘real spatial limiting’ of the Word properly take into account the ‘freedom, majesty, and glory of the Word of God’ so that they are not ‘submerged in His becoming flesh?’Footnote 52 Moreover, Barth has reoriented Protestant Christology in Church Dogmatics I/2 towards a recovery (by way of the Scholastic compendia of the Reformed Heppe and the Lutheran Schmid) of the ancient doctrine of enhypostasis/anhypostasis, that is, that the human nature of Jesus has, in itself, no concrete subsistence but is only ever individuated and active in the divine mode of being of the Word.Footnote 53 The question would then be whether the assertion that the Word is ‘solely’ in the flesh not simply the ‘reversal’ of the doctrine of enhypostasis. That is, is it not a limiting of the Word to its subsistence in the person of the man, and not vice versa?
It is important to take note here of how Barth appropriates the doctrine of enhypostasis and how its use builds upon the scaffolding of revelation as self-manifestation. On the one hand, to say that the humanity is only ever actualised in the person of the Word permits the Swiss theologian to refer every action of the human Jesus in the Gospel narratives as a self-manifestation of the divine Son. But – and this is where Barth’s appropriation is simultaneously a development of the doctrine – the inverse is also true: any action predicated of the divine Son must also refer to the human Jesus, for it is the God-man who gives himself to us in the event of revelation. Indeed, Barth here comes close to affirming the Lutheran point that any statement after the union cannot parse out the divinity and humanity: ‘Every question concerning the Word which is directed away from Jesus of Nazareth, the human being of Christ, is necessarily and wholly directed away from Himself, the Word, and therefore from God Himself, because the Word, and therefore God Himself, does not exist for us apart from the human being of Christ’.Footnote 54 Likewise, the miracle of the incarnation discloses that ‘there is no other manifestation in heaven or on earth save the one child in the stable, the one Man on the cross’.Footnote 55
The above rule lends itself to a further question: Is this not simultaneously a prohibition against any speculation about the existence of the Son of God extra carnem? Does the extra not fall within the crosshairs of Barth’s critique? Apparently not – or at the very least Barth is willing to qualify and truncate the Reformed view to accommodate his new doctrine of revelation as self-revelation in two conceptual moves. First, the Lutheran-Reformed debates are recast as two poles in a dialectical scheme – the thesis and antithesis through which Barth attempts to produce, if not a synthesis, at least a rapprochement. Christology contains ‘dynamic’ and ‘static’ elements, ‘ontic’ (Lutheran) and ‘noetic’ (Reformed) principles, each constantly chastening the other, even if the Reformed formulation of the question is ‘more comprehensive and to that extent superior’. Not so much a call for mutual conciliation, this is simply the mode of theology conforming to its subject matter, which lies beyond the grasp of any ‘unitary theology’.Footnote 56 The irenic tone should be read against the earlier claim that the extra functions as an epistemological protective: whereas before the extra proved feasible as a mean of safeguarding the reserve of God’s majesty in revelation, now ‘the Reformed totus ad intra et extra offers at least as many as difficulties of characteristic the Lutheran totus intra’.Footnote 57
Yet Barth maintains hope of rehabilitating the Son’s existence etiam extra carnem as a grammar for the continued lordship of the God-human even in his earthly humiliation. The Reformed doctors, in Barth’s view, use the extra not as a ‘separative’ concept but rather as a ‘distinctive’ concept, by which he means the intent in maintaining the extra is chastened to signify the continuity of a single subject and agency across the Son’s pre- and post-incarnate existence.Footnote 58 The Logos asarkos is not the epistemological reserve of revelation, that which remains obscured and veiled, it is now the ‘terminus a quo’ of the incarnation, whereas the Logos ensarkos is the ‘terminus ad quem’.Footnote 59 By Church Dogmatics I/2, the force of the extra Calvinisticum in Barth’s theology has therefore become destabilised from its initial epistemological footing. Rather than serving as a definitive safeguard for the otherness of God in a doctrine of revelation, the extra has here been chastened to signify the continuity of existence between pre- and post-incarnate life of the Son. Even on this point, though, Barth expresses hesitation, arguing that the Reformed position is ‘afflicted by its own doubtfulness’, for it presupposes ‘a static element in the ἐγένϵτο’.Footnote 60 That is, it presents a vision of divine revelation and ontology that fails to obtain to the unity of being and act that Barth sees as a fundamental theological principle of the triune God’s self-disclosure. Now, the doctrine of God’s definitive revelation in Jesus Christ is beginning to condition Barth’s use of the extra, rather than the other way around.
The dénouement on the extra in the Church Dogmatics is found in IV/1 (§59). In his doctrine of reconciliation, Barth returns yet again to Christology, this time with reference to the question ‘How can God be the kind of God who is definitively known through the atonement, that is, an act of perfect obedience?’ It is worth quoting him in full:
We must concede that there is something unsatisfactory about the theory [of the extra Calvinisticum], in that right up to our own day it has led to fatal speculation about the being and work of the logos asarkos, or a God whom we think we can know elsewhere, and whose divine being we can define from elsewhere than in and from the contemplation of His presence and activity as the Word made flesh. And it cannot be denied that Calvin himself (and with particularly serious consequences in his doctrine of predestination) does go a good way towards trying to reckon with this ‘other’ god.Footnote 61
Though the term ‘something unsatisfactory’ might at first blush seem irenic, it ought to be weighed against Barth’s accusation that the Logos asarkos amounts to an ‘“other” God’. This is serious language, as it insinuates that the extra Calvinisticum leaves open the possibility for the worship of another God behind or before the God revealed in Christ, which is to say, an idol. Barth’s rationale for this conclusion was charted by himself when he established the ‘basic rule’ that ‘statements about the divine mode of being antecedently in themselves cannot be different in content from those that are to be made about their reality in revelation’.Footnote 62 The ultimate question of the matter falls upon the doctrine of revelation: If His revelation in the incarnate Christ ‘is distinguished from his proper being as worldly, does it bring us into touch with God Himself or not?’Footnote 63 In other words, when we ask, ‘Is Jesus the Son?’, is there room for an economic qualification, relegating Jesus as the Son in the economy alone?
The question pressures Barth throughout his whole career, leading him ultimately to judge that there cannot, in fact, be such an economic qualification, for reasons that are ultimately soteriological. ‘If God is not truly and completely in Christ’, Barth writes, ‘what sense can there be in talking about the reconciliation of the world with God in him?’Footnote 64 Jesus is, without evasion or metaphysical qualification, the divine Son of the Father, for this is who he gives himself to be in revelation. If he were not identified as such, if God were not always already God with us, we could not be saved. Therefore, as Barth would say as he returned to the Reformed confessions at the end of his career, the Calvinist extra as expressed in Questions 47–48 of the Heidelberg Catechism was nothing short of a ‘theological disaster’ and ‘a statement of unbelief’.Footnote 65
Even after this seismic shift in Barth’s thought, he remains conscious that the previous affirmation generates a number of conceptual difficulties. If, given the singular existence of Jesus the Son, how can ‘ὁ Λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένϵτο’ not designate an immanent change in the eternal life of the Godhead? And moreover, if we say that Jesus empties himself as the divine Son of God, then how do we get around also affirming that there is a real diminution that happens to the deity of the Godhead, that God ceases to be God? These, of course, are not new questions; they are the same questions that animate the earliest Christian debates around the identity of Jesus as the Christ. What is new is just how deeply Barth reframes the terms of the debate, thereby sublating the Lutheran-Reformed oppositions.
Darren O. Sumner has very convincingly argued that Barth’s reversal on the extra is supported by a coincident revision of the Protestant doctrine of the status duplex, Christ’s dual states of humiliation and exaltation, the forma dei and the forma servi.Footnote 66 The Lutherans, because they believed that the Word did not exist as asarkos during the incarnate life of the Son, consigned the status duplex to a chronological series of events. The Logos enters into ‘a temporary state’ of humiliation and then takes his exalted humanity with himself into glory. The Reformed, for their part, tended to index the ensarkos and asarkos distinction to the patristic distinction between theology and economy, rather than to the two states. Therefore, the Reformed radically truncate the sense in which the Logos empties himself in the kenosis, consigning the humiliation not to the Logos in se, but to the Logos become man.Footnote 67
Barth’s intervention into this question radically disrupts and thus surpasses the logic of classical Christology. Sumner points out that Barth’s insistence that the Logos ensarkos and Logos asarkos are one coterminous subject must mean that the one Logos is always simultaneously both humble and exalted. Whereas the Protestant traditions had parsed the status exinanitionis and status exaltationis – assigning each to a temporal moment in the Son’s life, or to the eternal/economic modes of God’s being – Barth sees them dialectically, as ‘a single event and being’.Footnote 68 Thus, Barth can say that
It is not, therefore, a matter of two different and successive actions, but of a single action in which each of the two elements is related to the other and can be known and understood only in this relationship: the going out of God only as it aims at the coming in of man; the coming in of man only as the reach and outworking of the going out of God; and the whole in its original and proper form only as the being and history of the one Jesus Christ.Footnote 69
By dialectically uniting the humility and exaltation of the one Son, Jesus Christ, Barth has definitively raised the stakes of the extra Calvinisticum. No longer a matter of abstract theologoumena or an indulgent speculative exercise, how we receive the extra has far-reaching reverberations for the identity of the God we worship in Jesus Christ. I will therefore close by identifying two decisive implications of Barth’s inextricable union of exaltation and humiliation in the single subject of Jesus Christ.
First, Barth’s rejection of the extra conditions how he imagines the shape of reconciliation. It is no coincidence that lively debate emerged in the twentieth century regarding the role of medieval mysticism, including the question of divinisation soteriology, in Luther’s theology.Footnote 70 The communicatio idiomatum introduced the vocabulary of ‘divinised humanity’, and it was not a stretch of the imagination for disciples of Luther to apply the same logic to humanity. As a Reformed theologian, Barth is consistently wary of the language of deification. And yet, he is equally wary of the Reformed inclination to keep the divine and human at a distance from one another. His critical reception of the extra allows Barth to find a third way. As Sumner has put it brilliantly, ‘where Lutheran Christology suggested that the Word crosses the gap between Creator and creature, and Reformed Christology that the Word bridges the gap (remaining on both sides), Barth’s actualist Christology suggests instead in his person Jesus Christ closes the gap. God and humanity remain distinct, but are unequivocally reconciled in the event of the Son’s incarnate life’.Footnote 71
Second, and more importantly, to say that the one Word of God is always simultaneously humble and exalted necessitates a reconfiguration of the ontology of the Godhead. No commentator on Barth has seen this with more acuity than Bruce McCormack, who has pointed out that Barth’s rejection of the extra led him to reconsider the ‘essentialist’ metaphysical constitution of God as the western church had received it, locating the inner constitution of the Godhead in the doctrine of divine election.Footnote 72 Indeed, for McCormack the most pressing reason that Barth rejects the extra is that Barth, unlike Calvin, believed that God’s action is constitutive of his essence. Thus, after Barth’s turn away from the extra, the decisive question is no longer, ‘Given what we know about the metaphysical structure of the Godhead, how can we possibly make sense of the claim that Jesus of Nazareth died on the cross and was raised on the third day?’ After Barth, the question theology must ask is rather, ‘Given who this Jesus of Nazareth is and what he has done, namely dying and being raised, what must be true of Israel’s God?’Footnote 73 The upshot of rejecting the extra is, in the final analysis, not an imperative against metaphysical speculation, but the first step in a new kind of divine ontology that is, at its heart, christological.
The external action of God is therefore his immanent life: His relation with Israel is not mere ‘role-play’ for God, but his eternal election to be Jesus Christ, to be God-with-us ‘is the event in God’s life in which he assigns to himself the being he will have for all eternity’.Footnote 74 To say that there is no God behind Jesus of Nazareth – to say that the one subject is always already humble and exalted – allows us to read the cry of divine abandonment, indeed the human death of Jesus, as a decisive event in God’s immanent life.Footnote 75 To this claim, we might hear the contemporary defenders of the extra Calvinisticum assert that such a claim would compromise the always divine character of the Godhead, to which we might hear Barth respond that such a claim presumes an antecedent idea of what ‘divine’ actually means, an idea that necessarily excludes lowliness, obedience, and even willing himself to undergo suffering. Barth himself hypostatised this notion into his doctrine of God in the closing volumes of the Church Dogmatics. Barth writes that the incarnation
reveals to us that for God it is just as natural to be lowly as to be high, to be near as to be far, to be little as to be great, to be abroad as to be at home … He is amongst us in humility, our God, God for us, as that which he is in himself, in the most inward depth of his Godhead. He does not become another God. In the condescension in which he gives himself to us in Jesus Christ, he exists and speaks and acts as the One he was from all eternity and will be to all eternity.Footnote 76
Open access
