Does The Son Elect? A Partial Response to Daniel Kirk

Daniel Kirk is reading through Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics and asking some interesting critical questions.  Regarding §33.2,”The Eternal Will of God in the Election of Jesus Christ,” he asks, “Question 1:  Is it faithful to Scripture to say that the Son, Jesus Christ, elects, such that in the God-man the one who elects and the one who is elected are one?”

The article makes several good points.  The NT writers tend to mean the Father when they use the word “God,” and “when election is assigned to a person, it is most often the Father (e.g., 1 Peter 1:1-2) rather than the Son.”  Ephesians, as he says, presents election as the action of the Father.  He says,

I don’t think that John 1:1, “the Word was God,” provides the kind of leverage Barth demands of it to assign to the son what is clearly assigned to the Father throughout scripture.

Dr. Kirk treats Barth’s doctrine of election as a re-reading of the New Testament documents through somewhat anachronistic Trinitarian lenses: 

It’s all well and good for us, in our more developed Trinitarian Theology, to think “Father, Son, and Spirit” when we think “God.” However, this is not what the NT writers were thinking. For them, when they say “God” they mean the one to whom we refer to as “Father.”

Certainly the use of these or any other anachronistic lenses, whatever they might reveal, would obscure the first century context of the texts and produce a lopsided exegesis.  Wrenching the texts from their own era does them no service.

But Barth does not, as it were, funnel 4^th century Trinitarian formulations through John 1 to deconstruct traditional doctrines of election and then construct his own.  He starts, instead, with the New Testament’s own pervasive view of Jesus as the full revelation of God, asking whether the traditional doctrines of election departed from this view as their starting point.  That is, if Jesus Christ is the revelation of who God is, then is he not also the revelation of the electing God?  If he is God incarnate, is he not also the incarnation of the electing God?

If it is not the biggest question in Barth’s theology, then there is at least none bigger than this:  Is there some other Word of God besides Jesus of Nazareth?  Barth’s consistent answer is:  No!  (emphasis his, repeatedly through his works)

The very best of the older theologians have taught us that in the word which calls and justifies and sanctifies us, the word which forms the content of the biblical witness, we must recognize in all seriousness the Word of God.  Beside and above and behind this Word there is no other.  … Again, they have warned us most seriously that in respect of the knowledge of god and man we must not turn aside in the slightest degree from the knowledge of Jesus Christ, either to the right hand or to the left.  (C.D. II/2, 150)

And yet, when it came to the doctrine of election,

Suddenly there seemed to be some other eternity apart fro the eternity of the eternal life whose revelation and promise and gift in the promised and temporally incarnate Word they elsewhere attest loudly and impressively enough.  And in this eternity there seemed to be some other mystery apart from the mystery whose proclamation and disclosure they can confirm elsewhere with clear texts from the New Testament.  … In the sphere of predestination there arose all at once a different order, even though it had appeared elsewhere that according to the biblical testimony upon which the Church is founded there can be no question of the recognition of any such order. (C.D. II/2, 151)

It is not by beginning with a Trinitarian structure in which Jesus is the Son, but with the claim that Jesus is the full and only Word, i.e., Revelation, of God that Barth argues for the view of Jesus Christ as electing God as well as elect man.

Barth is not imposing 4^th century Christology on the NT but using the Christology of the NT itself.  In addition to John 1:1 f., Barth could well have cited John 1:18, John 14:6 (interpreted not only as a soteriological claim, but also an epistemic one), Col. 1:15-19, Heb. 1:3, and Mt. 11:27.

Still, given that the doctrine of Revelation, and not per se the doctrine of the Trinity, is Barth’s starting point, we are left with a multitude of perplexing questions, not least of which is:  Even if we grant that Jesus is the electing God, what are the relations within the Trinity in the action of election?  Dr. Kirk continues to give insightful discussion regarding such matters.