Being in Action: The Theological Shape of His Ethical Vision
Written by Paul T. Nimmo Reviewed By Timothy BaylorThe recent resurgence of interest in Barth studies has furnished us with several publications examining the theological dimensions of Barth's ethics. It is no exaggeration to say that this topic has long been regarded one of the most problematic and difficult dimensions of Barth's thought, and it is typically fixed within the cross hairs of his most vigorous critics. Several of the major motifs of Barth's theological program cause him to give a unique account of human moral action. Most notably among those motifs is Barth's “actualism.”
In the history of Barth studies, “actualism” has been a term most typically used to designate Barth's theology as one that is oriented toward an event of revelation in which God encounters man. For Barth, revelation is an irreducibly personal affair and therefore cannot be contained or enclosed within creation but must always take place in a continually new event in which humanity is graciously encountered by the Living Word of God, Jesus Christ. By describing the relation between God and humankind in terms of an event, Barth's theology tends to focus its attention on the active relations between God and humankind.
This gives Barth's ethics a very distinct contour. In any particular circumstance, human moral action is normed by the event of God's revelation in the form of a divine command, which summons humankind to obedience. Barth thinks the idea that human action is normed by universal principles extracted from Scripture by some method of exegesis must entail a reduction of the particularity of God's command in the circumstance in which it is given. Furthermore, Barth thinks it would finally prove to be ineffectual, as sinners would certainly manipulate it to serve their own ends. In the end, the faithful obedience of the Christian depends less on the skillful application of universal principles than on the guidance of the Spirit in each new moment.
While this “actualism” enables Barth to give an unusually powerful account of how ethics is driven by God's freedom and grace, it has often been criticized for containing an unnecessary phobia about creaturely media that diminishes or even completely eclipses human action. In Being in Action, Paul Nimmo contends that these criticisms fail to grasp the full scope of Barth's actualism. Far from being merely a formal feature of Barth's theology of revelation that orients all knowledge of God, Barth's actualism is, in reality, a theological ontology-a way of describing the nature of divine and creaturely being-which forms “the context of all ethical action and of the human person” (p. 2). If the event of revelation in Jesus Christ does not merely orient or direct the Christian but in fact makes a determination about her context and ontology, then Barth's command ethic can be seen as not an occlusion of her created nature, but her correspondence to it.
The goal of Being in Action is to trace the significance of an actualistic ontology in relation to the noetic, ontological, and teleological dimensions of Barth's ethics in an attempt to show its “structural significance” for his thought. Nimmo devotes relatively little space to discussing what actualistic ontology is, or the nature of Barth's understanding of and dissatisfaction with substance metaphysics. For the most part he takes these points as given in the work of Bruce McCormack. Consequently, he reads Barth's actualism as a properly theological alternative to the ontology of substance, which Nimmo thinks tends to deal with the human agent as self-contained and abstract-a historically remote entity (p. 10). By contrast, an actualistic ontology prioritizes history, not merely as a sign that refers to God as its principle, but as what is truly constitutive of God (pp. 10-11). The putative benefits of such an ontology are its generally non-speculative character and its responsiveness to the particulars of the drama of redemption, particularly the incarnation and atonement.
Nimmo's reading of the material generally succeeds in demonstrating the structural importance of actualism for Barth's ethics, making him more resilient against the charges of his critics. The primary benefit of this course of interpretation appears to be that it maximizes Barth's atonement theology from the outset, ensuring that there can be no fundamental disparity between the work of Christ and the ethical agent. This enables Nimmo to render a richly textured, non-competitive reading of the divine-human relation in both providence and union with Christ.
But this move also tends to further relativize Barth's doctrine of creation to his Christology, which in a sense renders Barth's notion of the ethical agent even more illusory. This can become problematic in those passages where Barth appears to speak of moral action as an enactment of or a defection from one's created nature. This is why Nimmo expresses surprise at Biggar's suggestion that Barth's ethic might include a non-formal version of natural law (p. 52) or why he finds trouble with the suggestion that Barth prioritizes union with Christ over ethical correspondence (p. 179)-because, for Nimmo, the order and ontology of nature is primarily a function of Christology rather than creation.
This notwithstanding, Being in Action is an important book in the ongoing discussion concerning Barth's ontology and a very helpful treatment of Barth's ethical theology. Nimmo shows a tremendous grasp of the secondary literature and is able to convey a sense of the dimensions, not only of Barth's thought, but also of his interpreters. For the Barth specialist, the bibliography and footnotes will prove invaluable, but Nimmo's balanced exposition, his attentiveness to the proportion of Barth's overall thought, and his careful interaction with the secondary literature make this book of considerable use to an audience that is interested in theological ethics or soteriology more generally.
Timothy Baylor
Timothy Baylor
King’s College
University of Aberdeen, Scotland, UK
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