Barth's Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth's Thought

Barth's Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth's Thought. By John Webster. Grand Rapids, ML Eerdmans, 1998. ix + 223 pp. $30.00 (cloth).

Barth's Moral Theology is best read as a sequel to Professor Webster's previous study, Barth's Ethics of Reconciliation, The earlier volume gave an overall account of Barth's ethics-one intended to show (contrary to a battery of scholarly opinion) that the ethical sections of the Church Dogmatics are integral rather than peripheral to the project and that Barth's insistence on the priority and sovereignty of God's command does not eclipse human agency as a meaningful aspect of the moral life. In Barth's Moral Theology, Webster, who holds the Lady Margaret Chair of Divinity at Oxford, continues this line of interpretation by a series of close readings of lesser-known and/or less frequently commented upon texts from Barth's corpus.

In providing the public with the results of his "close reading," Webster has more in mind than a careful presentation of the ethics of perhaps the most significant figure in twentieth-century theology. Close reading of classical texts, he believes, "is a necessary prolegomenon both to understanding the traditions of Christian culture and to the articulation of constructive theological statements" (p. 7). So in presenting these essays, Webster pursues a dual purpose, namely, to correct some common misinterpretations of Barth's ethics and to provide an example of a much neglected theological art. In my mind, he succeeds admirably on both counts.

His initial essay gives careful scrutiny to four early texts: the 1919 Tambach lecture, the second edition of The Epistle to the Romans, the 1922 lectures on Calvin, and an address delivered in the same year entitled "The Problem of Ethics Today." Analysis of these early texts shows conclusively that from the beginning it was not part of Barth's project to deny the significance of human action in the name of divine sovereignty. Rather, his intention was to undermine the authority of a moral culture that rested upon the self-authorized and self-initiated process of human self-realization.

In a second essay, Prof.Webster focuses his attention on Barth's lectures in Munster (1928-9) and Bonn (1930-1). In these lectures (published in English under the title Ethics) Barth sought to define Christian ethics as primarily a descriptive enterprise that, negatively, displaces conscience as an autonomous human power and, positively, finds its proper foundation in the themes of divine calling, justification and divinely formed conscience. The following four essays continue the argument by treating various portions of the Church Dogmatics. The last two bring these aspects of Barth's thought into dialogue with the ethics of Martin Luther and Eberhard Jungel.

By far the easiest part of Webster's project is to show that, from its inception, Barth's theology was a moral one. Barth's Christology,, his way of linking gospel and law, his discussion of vocation and a host of other factors make it clear that Barth's intention was not to do away with the ethical concerns of theological liberalism but to rest them on theological rather than purely anthropological foundations. The more difficult claim to establish is that Barth's emphasis on the freedom and sovereignty of God does not reduce human freedom to a chimera.

Everything depends upon accepting Barth's view that human freedom can rightly be understood only in relation to God's freedom-that real freedom is not self-authorizing will but freedom to will and act in ways that correspond to the will and purposes of God. Webster rightly insists that such a view does not eliminate the significance of human agency. Rather it recasts our understanding of what it means to be an agent in a Christian sense of the term. Human agency understood from within Christian forms of speech and life is free insofar as it loses its freedom through willful disobedience and free insofar as it gains freedom to do God's will through God's call, justification and instruction.

Professor Webster, I believe, successfully defends Barth against the charge that his account of divine sovereignty and human freedom merely restates the problem in other words. This defense alone makes Barth's Moral Theology worth reading and I can add only the minor qualification that the defense would have been even more effective had Webster included in this collection a more detailed account of Barth's special ethics and an examination, like that provided by Nigel Bigger in The Hastening that Waits, of the way in which Barth links hearing God's command to participation in the common life of the Church. These two exercises would have provided a more detailed and compelling descriptive (not theoretical) account of the wav in which divine sovereignty and human freedom are linked rather than contrary notions and so also made his defense of the significance of human agency in Barth's thought even more convinving.

PHILIP TURNER

Austin, Texas

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