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OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 24/06/21, SPi
OX F O R D S T U D I E S I N T H E O L O G IC A L E T H IC S
General Editor
N IG E L B IG G A R
OX F O R D S T U D I E S I N T H E O L O G IC A L E T H IC S
General Editor
Nigel Biggar
The series presents discussions on topics of general concern to Christian Ethics,

as it is currently taught in universities and colleges, at the level demanded by a
serious student. The volumes will not be specialized monographs nor general
introductions or surveys. They aim to make a contribution worthy of notice in
its own right but also focused in such a way as to provide a suitable starting-
point for orientation.
The titles include studies in important contributors to the Christian Tradition
of moral thought; explorations of current moral and social questions; and
discussions of central concepts in Christian moral and political thought.
Authors treat their topics in a way that will show the relevance of the Christian
tradition, but with openness to neighboring traditions of thought which have
entered into dialog with it.
Karl Barth’s
Moral Thought
G E R A L D Mc K E N N Y
1
1
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ISBN 978–0–19–284552–8
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192845528.001.0001
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Preface
This book presents Karl Barth’s theological ethics as an account of morally

good action. For Barth, the norm of human action is the command of God
(Chapter 1). Barth understands the command of God as a moral norm,
which for him, following the neo-Kantian school of philosophy with which
he was familiar, means that it poses to human action the decisive question
of its validity; in doing so, it relates to moral philosophy, which also poses
this question (Chapter 2). Because the command of God is a moral norm,
theological ethics, as the doctrine of the command of God, is a “scientific”
(wissenschaftlicher) account of morally good action. As such, it answers
questions posed to any divine command theory: How does God’s command
determine the good of human action? Why are we bound to accept what it
determines (Chapter 3)? It also shows how God’s commands are rationally
intelligible and in what sense we can know them, reason about them, and
hold each other accountable with regard to them (Chapters 4 and 5). Finally,
it shows how the human subject or agent who is addressed by God’s com-
mands is a moral subject or agent (Chapters 6 and 7).
Why does it matter to read Barth’s theological ethics as an account of
morally good action, or indeed to read Barth’s theological ethics at all? The
answer to the first question begins with a difficulty many readers have with
Barth’s ethics. In his Church Dogmatics, Barth appears to introduce theolog-
ical ethics by setting it apart from all other ethics and demanding, as the
price for understanding it, the renunciation of all other conceptions of eth-
ics. The reader, it seems, is asked to relinquish all that is familiar and to
submit to Barth’s determination of what ethics is. That this is so seems to
follow from Barth’s understanding of the norm of human action as a
revealed norm that is inaccessible to reason. The norm of human action for
Barth is the command of God, but the command of God itself is the Word
of God. And the Word of God is the revelation and work of God’s grace to
human beings in Jesus Christ. The norm, then, is God’s grace in Jesus Christ
(gospel) addressed to human beings as a command to confirm grace in their
conduct (law). Human beings are to become in their own action what they
already are by the action of God’s grace. It is unclear whether or in what
sense the command of God, so understood, is a moral norm, at least as
vi Preface
moral norms are typically understood in moral philosophy. Accordingly, it

seems reasonable to suppose that Barth’s theological ethics is concerned
with something other than that which concerns moral philosophy—that it
is not an account of morally good action in the same sense as the latter is
but is intended as an alternative to it. And if this is so, it seems that we must
indeed relinquish what we know about ethics from other sources in order to
understand Barth’s ethics.
In fact, Barth’s theological ethics is not moral philosophy, and Barth
introduces the former by distinguishing it quite radically from the latter.
However, the relationship between the two disciplines—and thus between
his conception of ethics and more familiar conceptions—is more complex
than the radical distinction between them suggests. Barth holds that theo-
logical ethics and moral philosophy operate with the same formal concep-
tion of moral norms.1 Remarkably, he even insists that, in the last analysis,
they share the same moral content.2 Far from an alternative to moral philos-
ophy, Barth’s theological ethics is what he thinks moral philosophy would
look like if it, too, acknowledged the grace of God in Jesus Christ as the
norm of human action. It matters to read Barth’s theological ethics in this
way, namely, as an account of morally good action, because it is only when it
is read in this way that both its strangeness and its familiarity with respect
to standard conceptions of what ethics is can be appreciated. Barth does not
ask us to relinquish our conceptions of what ethics is; he instead invites us
to consider how these conceptions are re-positioned by theological ethics
when the norm of human action is taken to be God’s grace to human beings
in Jesus Christ.
This re-positioning of moral philosophy by theological ethics brings us to
the second question: Why does it matter to read Barth’s theological ethics at
all? A brief and admittedly oversimplified historical narrative of theological
ethics will facilitate an answer to this question. Until the modern period
there was no need to qualify the term “ethics” by the term “theological.”
Moral norms were taken to be rational, and thus accessible to reason, but it
was assumed that, due to sin and creaturely limitations, revelation was nec-
essary to clarify them, specify them, and direct them to the ultimate end of
human beings. For Aquinas and Calvin, for example, theology had the task
of articulating moral norms by drawing on a conception of rational moral
law to interpret Scripture and on Scripture to unfold the content of the
1 CD II/2, pp. 513–15. 2 CD II/2, p. 527.

Preface vii
rational moral law.3 By the eighteenth century, however, philosophical

approaches to ethics that were independent of theology had taken hold.
Then as now, these approaches were not necessarily independent of
Christian faith, and they often affirmed the necessity of belief in God. What
they did not affirm was the need for revelation to clarify or specify moral
norms. Kant is central to this development, not because of his allegedly rad-
ical departure from tradition but because of his subtle revision of it. In con-
tinuity with tradition, Kant argued that moral reason requires a historical
faith such as Christianity, with its Scripture and ecclesiastical statutes.
However, this faith is needed not to clarify or specify a moral law that is
obscure to us in our sinful nature but to render the moral law perceptible to
us in our sensuous nature. To ensure that it is the moral law, and not a per-
version of it, that is rendered perceptible, the philosopher interprets
Scripture in accordance with the rational moral law. But Scripture for its
part does not play any role in unfolding the content of that law. Reason is
sufficient for its articulation; historical faith merely renders it recognizable.
With no role for revelation in the articulation of the moral law, philosophy
can proceed with this task independently of theology, which is reduced to
establishing the reliability of Scripture, and with it the ecclesiastical faith
based on it, as a historical vehicle for the promotion and propagation of the
moral law.4
The distinctive enterprise of theological ethics that arose in the nine-
teenth century in Germany assigned itself the task of reclaiming ethics, or
rather something of it, for theology, on the premise that, contra Kant, his-
torical faith has its own proper ethical content which moral philosophy
either makes or leaves room for. Schleiermacher was influential in setting
the pattern for this program by envisioning theological ethics as a comple-
ment to an independent philosophical ethics. From the standpoint of theo-
logical ethics at least, both it and philosophical ethics were taken to be
necessary to a full account of the moral life, and each was taken to be legiti-
mate on its own terms.5 Within these parameters, Schleiermacher’s succes-
sors exhibited a range of opinions on what exactly each enterprise was and
3 See St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica i-ii, q. 99, art. 2, ad 2; q. 100, arts. 1, 3, 11; and
John Calvin, ICR 2.8.1–50, 4.20.16.
4 See Immanuel Kant, RWB, pp. 112–22 (6:102–14); and Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties,
7:36–48.
5 See Friedrich Schleiermacher, Selections from Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Christian Ethics,
ed. and tr. by James M. Brandt (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), pp. 19f. and
32–6; and Schleiermacher, Introduction to Christian Ethics, translated by John C. Shelley
(Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989), pp. 41–4.
viii Preface
how the two related to one another. But the two enterprises were typically
regarded as complementary, with philosophical ethics articulating formal
or universal aspects of morality and allotting or at least allowing theological
ethics its role of articulating a particular or historically embedded way of
acting or form of life.
Barth’s break with this complementarian approach is decisive. He baldly
asserts that “in a scientific form [in wissenschaftlicher Gestalt] there is only
one ethics, theological ethics.”6 Insofar as for Barth the Word of God is also
the command of God, there is no human action that is not claimed by the
Word of God from the outset. And insofar as theology is by definition the
scientific attestation of the Word of God, there is no discipline of ethics that
is independent of theology. On this view, other approaches to ethics, and in
particular, moral philosophy, are legitimate only insofar as they too bear
witness, albeit implicitly, to the norm (namely, the Word of God as God’s
command) theological ethics attests explicitly. In a kind of reversal of Kant,
Barth insists that theological ethics has the task of articulating the norm to
which both it and moral philosophy are accountable. At the same time,
because moral philosophy has to do with the same norm, albeit only implic-
itly, theological ethics is permitted and indeed obligated to avail itself of the
assistance moral philosophy offers it in its explicit articulation of the norm.
In short, it matters to read Barth’s theological ethics because the role of
articulating moral norms matters to theology, and because Barth reclaims
this role. In a context in which philosophy has declared its independence of
theology, Barth’s theological ethics reformulates the traditional position in
which theology articulates the norm of human conduct with the necessary
assistance of philosophy. It offers a bold alternative to the complementarian
approach of Schleiermacher and his successors, rejecting the positioning of
theological ethics by moral philosophy while recognizing the legitimacy of
the latter and demanding ongoing engagement with it. The complementar-
ian solution had succeeded in claiming a place for theological ethics, but at
the price of yielding its prerogative to articulate moral norms to moral phi-
losophy and constituting itself as something other than an account of mor-
ally good action. Theological ethics became instead the description of a
particularly Christian way of acting or form of life or an account of how
moral norms conceptually articulated by moral philosophy are concretely
actualized in a Christian way of acting or form of life. To the extent that the
6 CD II/2, p. 542/KD II/2, p. 603 [emphases in German original].

Preface ix
claim of moral philosophy to independence of theology is unlikely to be

reversed and the complementarian solution to that claim is likely to remain
unsatisfactory, Barth’s reclamation of a traditional role for theology in the
articulation of moral norms claims the attention of everyone who considers
theological ethics a worthwhile enterprise.
However, Barth’s alternative to the complementarian solution is not the
only live option today. There are at least two competing options. One option
begins by insisting that there is no ethics that is not qualified by an adjec-
tive. On this view, moral philosophy, too, occupies a particular place, and
theological ethics therefore stands at no relative disadvantage with respect
to it. Because every form of ethics is qualified by its location, theological
ethics can occupy its own proper place, which is the church, in the confi-
dence that it cannot be positioned by any other discipline, including moral
philosophy.7 Once these points are acknowledged, theological ethics and
moral philosophy can engage one another on non- hegemonic terms.
Another option is to formulate a Christian moral philosophy according to
which the perfection of natural moral capacities that are initially under-
stood in philosophical terms is ultimately to be understood in theological
terms, as conformity to Christ that is brought about by divine grace.8 With
respect to the first of these options, Barth’s theological ethics can claim the
advantage of recognizing the universality of philosophical ethics at a formal
level, on which the moral norm is understood, in neo-Kantian terms, as the
question of the good posed to human action. It thereby accepts moral phi-
losophy on its own terms, at least insofar as it takes itself to be a formal
inquiry, as it did in the neo-Kantian tradition with which Barth was famil-
iar, while it also allows for, and indeed requires, a constant engagement of
theological ethics with moral philosophy, insofar as the claim that the com-
mand of God is a moral norm presupposes a formal concept of the moral
norm as such. With respect to the second option, Barth’s theological ethics
can claim the advantage of allowing theological ethics as a distinctive
account of morally good action to stand on its own feet from the beginning
7 Stanley Hauerwas is the foremost exponent of this option. See Stanley Hauerwas, The
Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1983).
8 The foremost exponent of this option is Jennifer Herdt. See Jennifer A. Herdt, Putting on
Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); and
Herdt, Forming Humanity: Redeeming the German Bildung Tradition (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2019).
x Preface
of its account of morally good or right action and all the way through, albeit
never in isolation from moral philosophy.
At the same time, Barth’s theological ethics, and thus his account of mor-
ally good action, stands or falls on the viability of his claim that the norm of
human action is the grace of God to human beings in Jesus Christ. If the
claim that grace is the norm of human action is defensible, Barth’s account
of morally good action is a plausible alternative to the complementarian
solution and a promising option for theological ethics today. If it is not
defensible, theological ethics today will have to consider other alternatives
to the complementarian solution. This book argues that this claim poses
problems for Barth’s account of morally good action at nearly every junc-
ture. Its verdict is that while these problems do not invalidate Barth’s theo-
logical ethics, they do render it implausible. Nevertheless, the Conclusion to
the book proposes that its implausibility is not a reason for those who seek
direction for theological ethics today to ignore Barth’s ethics. For not only
does Barth offer one of the great answers to the question of how theology
should proceed in light of the claim of moral philosophy to independence
of theology. He also points the way to a more compelling answer than the
one he offered.
This book continues the focus of my earlier book on Barth’s claim that
God’s grace to human beings in Jesus Christ is the norm of human action.9
That book defended the claim as a salutary one, arguing that it enabled
theological ethics to resist the reduction of the good to human moral
achievements while also affirming the genuinely human character of life
lived in confirmation of grace. It commended Barth’s effort to formulate
moral concepts as theological concepts, arguing that he had returned ethics
to its proper place in dogmatics while also affirming the priority of the ethi-
cal. And on both counts it understood Barth’s ethics as a complex negation-
within-affirmation of modernity that serves as a model for theological
ethics today.
In contrast, this book holds that Barth was equally concerned to formu-
late theological concepts as moral concepts, presenting dogmatics as ethics.
It argues that his effort to do so failed due to insuperable problems with the
claim that grace is a moral norm. And it suggests that rather than taking
Barth’s engagement with modernity as its model, theological ethics would
do better to retrieve an approach to moral norms that Barth and his
9 Gerald McKenny, The Analogy of Grace: Karl Barth’s Moral Theology (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2010).
Preface xi
modern predecessors had left behind. Yet this book also credits Barth with
making the first move of the retrieval by reasserting the prerogative of the-
ology to articulate moral norms with the assistance of philosophy. In the
end, the retrieval may lead theological ethics away from Barth. But without
him it may never have been undertaken in the first place.
Acknowledgments
This book owes much to the individuals, institutions, and publishers that
have supported it and have provided occasions for me to present portions of
it. Special gratitude is due to Tom Perridge, an extraordinary editor whose
frequent words of encouragement over several years motivated me to per-
sist with the project, and to Nigel Biggar, who was willing to consider
another volume on Barth’s ethics for the Oxford Studies in Theological
Ethics series, which had already been graced by his own landmark study.
Gratitude is due also for the opportunities provided by the University of
Koblenz-Landau Conference on The Ethics of Responsibility, the University
of Chicago Divinity School Religion and Ethics Workshop, the Princeton
Theological Seminary Annual Barth Conference, the University of St
Andrews Ethics Seminar, the Karl Barth Society of North America, the
University of Aberdeen Conference on The Freedom of a Christian Ethicist,
and the University of Notre Dame Moral Theology Colloquium. I am grateful
to Jürgen Boomgaarden, Brian Brock, Layne Hancock, George Hunsinger,
Michael Le Chevallier, Martin Leiner, Michael Mawson, Bruce McCormack,
William Schweiker, Daniel Strand, and Alan Torrance for these opportunities
and to the members of the audiences whose questions and comments are too
many to recall but too considerable not to mention. I am also grateful to the
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. for permission to include in this book, as
Chapter 7, a revised version of “‘Freed by God for God’: Divine Action and
Human Action in Karl Barth’s Evangelical Theology and Other Late Works,” in
Karl Barth and the Making of Evangelical Theology: A Fifty-Year Perspective,
edited by Clifford B. Anderson and Bruce L. McCormack (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 2015), pp. 119–38. In this connection it is also appropriate to
acknowledge prior versions of material in this volume that has now been
substantially rewritten. An earlier version of the Introduction and first two
sections of Chapter 1 was published under the title of “Ethics” in The Oxford
Handbook of Karl Barth, edited by Paul Daffyd Jones and Paul T. Nimmo
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 482–95. An ancestral version of
Chapter 6 may be found in “Karl Barth’s Concept of Responsibility,” in ‘Kein
Mensch, der der Verantwortung entgehen könnte’. Verantwortungsethik in
theologischer, philosophischer und religionswissenschaftlicher Perspektive,
xiv Acknowledgments
edited by Jürgen Boomgaarden and Martin Leiner (Herder-Verlag, 2014),

pp. 67–93.
Gratitude is due as well to many people who have influenced the argu-
ments and interpretations of Barth that appear in this book. Layne Hancock
(who also prepared the index), Jimmy Haring, Jennifer Herdt, and Frederick
Simmons graciously read and commented on portions of the manuscript in
progress, and the final version benefited from their wise suggestions. The
book has also benefited from conversations with Matthew Anderson, Neil
Arner, Jesse Couenhoven, Carl Friesen, John Hare, George Hunsinger,
Willie James Jennings, Cambria Kaltwasser, Joseph Lim, Bruce McCormack,
Paul Nimmo, Jean Porter, Frederick Simmons, Jeffrey Skaff, Hans Ulrich,
William Werpehowski, Andrea White, and Derek Woodard-Lehman. I also
mention with gratitude the two anonymous Oxford University Press refer-
ees who carefully and thoughtfully read the penultimate version of the
manuscript. I should not neglect to invoke in this connection the standard
proviso that all remaining defects and deficiencies are to be charged to my
account.
Karl Barth’s Moral Thought is my second book on Barth’s ethics, and I
owe it to the reader to explain why I was not content to allow my first book,
The Analogy of Grace, to stand as my final word on the topic. One reason is
that, like any author, I regretted my failures of omission. Why had I not
provided a full account of the command of God in Barth’s ethics, as John
Hare gently asked me, or of Barth’s concept of responsibility? I am pleased
to report that this book has filled these gaping lacunae. But omissions alone
would not have necessitated another volume. A more adequate reason for
undertaking a second inquiry concerns an imbalance I now perceive in the
first one. In my determination to correct what I saw as a tendency in
Protestant thought and church life, whether on the right or the left, for ethi-
cal convictions to develop independently of theology and then to subject
theology to themselves, I focused in the first book on Barth’s re-inscription
of ethics in dogmatics. Yet ethics can be carried out from within dogmatics
only to the extent that dogmatics is capable of taking the form of ethics—a
capability which the first book simply presupposed. The viability of this
return move, from dogmatics to ethics, is the focus of this book, which thus
redresses the imbalance left by the first book. Striking the balance on such a
crucial aspect of Barth’s ethics seems to me to be a sufficient reason for con-
tributing another book to the topic. However, the major reason for not
remaining content with the first book is that in the ten or so years since its
publication I have changed my mind on the viability of the fundamental
Acknowledgments xv
claim of Barth’s ethics, which is that God’s grace in Jesus Christ is the norm
of human action. The Analogy of Grace endorsed this claim as a promising
one for theological ethics today. In contrast, Karl Barth’s Moral Thought
shows how this claim poses problems for Barth’s ethics at every turn and
concludes that it should not be taken up by the field today. This reassess-
ment implicates not only Barth’s ethics, but also his theology more gener-
ally, and it affects not only the interpretation of his ethics but also its
significance for the field of theological ethics, as he called it, or Christian
ethics or moral theology, as it is more commonly called today. It seemed,
therefore, to call for another book, and my final debt of gratitude is to the
University of Notre Dame for providing the intellectual and material setting
in which I have been able to devote a not insignificant portion of two
decades to the study of Barth’s ethics.
Contents
Abbreviations xix
1. Karl Barth’s Theological Ethics 1
2. The Command of God as a Moral Norm 25
3. The Command of God as a Morally Binding Norm 52
4. The Continuity of God’s Commands 78
5. Hearing God’s Command 108
6. Responsibility and the Moral Subject 126
7. Divine Action and Human Action 151
Conclusion 174
Bibliography 189
Index 195
Abbreviations
CCCC Karl Barth. “The Christian Community and the Civil Community.” In
Barth, Community, State and Church: Three Essays by Karl Barth with an
Introduction by David Haddorff. Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2004.
CD Karl Barth. Church Dogmatics, volumes I–IV. Edited by Geoffrey
M. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956–69.
CL Karl Barth. The Christian Life: Church Dogmatics IV/4, Lecture Fragments.
Translated by Geoffrey M. Bromiley. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981.
E Karl Barth. Ethics. Translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley. New York: Seabury
Press, 1981.
EET Karl Barth, Einführung in die evangelische Theologie. Zürich: Evangelischer
Verlag Zürich, 1962.
ET Karl Barth. Evangelical Theology: An Introduction. Translated by Grover
Foley. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1963.
GF Karl Barth. “The Gift of Freedom.” In Karl Barth, The Humanity of God.
Translated by Thomas Wieser. Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1960, pp. 69–96.
GL “Gospel and Law.” In Community, State, and Church: Three Essays by Karl
Barth with a New Introduction by David Haddorff (Eugene: Wipf and
Stock, 2004.
ICR John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion. Edited by John T. McNeill
and translated by Ford Lewis Battles. Library of Christian Classics, vol.
XX. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960.
KD Karl Barth. Die kirchliche Dogmatik, vier Bände. Zollikon-
Zürich:
Evangelischer Verlag Zürich, 1945–67.
PD Karl Barth. “Political Decisions in the Unity of Faith.” In Karl Barth,
Against the Stream: Shorter Post-War Writings, 1946–52. Edited and trans-
lated by Ronald Gregor Smith. London: SCM Press, 1954, pp. 147–64.
PET “The Problem of Ethics Today, 1922.” In Barth, The Word of God and
Theology. Translated by Amy Marga. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2011.
PTNC Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Its Background
and History. London: SCM Press, 1972.
RWB Immanuel Kant. Religion with the Boundaries of Mere Reason: And Other
Writings, 2nd edition. Edited and translated by Allen Wood and George di
Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
1
Karl Barth’s Theological Ethics
An account of Karl Barth’s moral thought must begin with the fact that
his theological ethics is a version of divine command ethics. From the 1920s
to the end of his career Barth consistently affirmed a version of the defining
thesis of divine command ethics, asserting that “[t]he good of human action
consists in the fact that it is determined by the divine command,”1 and he
introduces his theological ethics in the Church Dogmatics as “the doctrine
of the command of God.”2 However, an account of Barth’s moral thought
must also recognize the profound differences between his version of divine
command ethics and the versions that have been formulated by philosophers
such as Robert Adams, C. Stephen Evans, John Hare, and Philip Quinn, and
theologians such as Richard Mouw.3 What distinguishes his version from
theirs is his identification of the command of God with the Word of God,
which as Barth defines it is the revelation and work of God’s grace in Jesus
Christ. In the Word of God, God declares to those whom God addresses
what God does for them in Jesus Christ (gospel). Precisely as the work of
God’s grace, what God does for human beings in Jesus Christ is final,
requiring no supplemental act on the part of other humans, and it is suffi
cient, leaving nothing undone. However, grace would not be grace, and the
gospel would not be good news, if it merely terminated in what God does,
leaving its beneficiaries to passively receive God’s goodness to them rather
than inviting them to active participation in it. “As the one Word of God
which is the revelation and work of his grace reaches us, its aim is [ist es
1 CD II/2, p. 547; see also E, p. 50, and CL, p. 3. Most proponents of divine command ethics
would substitute the word ‘right’ for ‘good’ but for Barth, as we will see in Chapter 3, it is the
good that obligates us and thus confronts us as the right.
2 CD II/2, p. 509.
3 See Robert Merrihew Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999); C. Stephen Evans, God and Moral Obligation (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2013); John E. Hare, God’s Command (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2015); Philip Quinn, Divine Commands and Moral Requirements (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1978); Richard Mouw, The God Who Commands: A Study in Divine Command Ethics
(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990).
Karl Barth’s Moral Thought. Gerald McKenny, Oxford University Press. © Gerald McKenny 2021.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192845528.003.0001
2 Karl Barth ’ s Moral Thought
auf . . . abgesehen] the conformity of our being and action with his.”4 At every
point, therefore, the same Word of God that declares what God does also
claims its addressees as those for whom God so acts, summoning, directing,
and empowering them to be in their own conduct what they already are by
virtue of God’s conduct toward them (law). This claim made by the Word of
God is the command of God.
The claim that what God does for us in Jesus Christ is also what God
commands, that gospel takes the form of law, is the most distinctive feature
of Barth’s theological ethics. Typically in the Christian tradition, divine laws
or commandments reveal what is required of us while grace forgives our
failure to do what is required of us and assists us in doing what is pleasing to
God. Barth reverses this relationship of law and grace out of a conviction
that from eternity God has chosen human beings to be those to whom God
is gracious in Jesus Christ (grace) and claimed them to live as those so cho
sen (law). This chapter unpacks that conviction, first examining it as the
very subject matter of theological ethics, then turning to Barth’s distinction
between general and special ethics, and finally considering whether it is
adequate to our being as creatures.
Before turning to the subject matter of theological ethics, a preliminary
word is in order. This book claims that Barth’s theological ethics is an
account of morally good action. The purpose of this chapter is to establish
Barth’s claim that the norm of human action is God’s grace to us in Jesus
Christ—that the law is the form of the gospel, or that ethics is dogmatics.
The following chapters consider what it means to say that this norm is a
moral norm and that theological ethics is therefore an account of morally
good action—in other words, that dogmatics is ethics.
The Subject Matter of Theological Ethics
If the command of God is the Word of God, it is clear what work theological
ethics will undertake: “The task of theological ethics is to understand the
Word of God as the command of God.”5 But what exactly is the Word of
God that is to be understood as God’s command? And what exactly does
the Word of God, so understood, command? To begin with the Word of
God: Fundamentally and comprehensively, what God reveals in Jesus Christ
is that God is with us and for us. “God has given us himself. . . . He has made
4 CD II/2, p. 512/KD II/2, p. 567 (translation revised). See also CD II/2, pp. 566f.
5 CD III/4, p. 4.
Karl Barth ’ s Theological Ethics 3
himself ours . . . . He is for us in all his deity. Although he could be without

us—he did not and does not will to be without us. Although he has every
right to be against us—he did not and does not will to be against us.”6 This,
in a nutshell, is the Word of God that is also to be understood as God’s
command. To understand it as God’s command can only mean that God
commands us to conduct ourselves, toward God and toward other humans,
as those whom God is with and for. All that God commands will in some
way specify this basic requirement. “He is to know and accept the fact that
God is for him. He is to live as one whom God is for. Whatever the concrete
content of the command of God may be, this is what God will have of man.”7
God for Us
At this point three further questions arise. First, what does it mean to say
that God is for us in this radical sense (that is, in all God’s deity)? Second, if
the command of God confronts us with what God has done for us, and not
what we must do for ourselves, in what sense is it a genuine command?
Third, what does it mean to act as those whom God is with and for in this
way? Barth’s answer to the first question is indicated by the words that fill in
the second ellipsis in the quote above. “With his divine goodness,” Barth
writes, “he has taken our place and taken up our cause.” That God is for us
does not mean merely that God supports us and our cause, helping us along
and promoting it. That is, roughly speaking, what God does according to
theological ethicists who stress the role of God’s grace in bringing our natural
inclinations or capacities to fulfillment or perfection.8 By contrast, Barth holds
that God takes up our cause and makes it God’s own by acting in our place
in the human being, Jesus Christ. As God in Jesus Christ acts in our place in
this way, we are constituted as subjects in Jesus Christ, and not in ourselves.
“The man to whom the Word of God is directed and for whom the work of
God was done . . . does not exist by himself. He is not an independent sub
ject, to be considered independently . . . . He exists because Jesus Christ
exists. He exists as a predicate of this Subject, i.e., that which has been
6 CD II/2, p. 557. 7 CD II/2, p. 596.

8 For exemplary versions of this eudaimonist approach to grace, see especially Jennifer Herdt,
Putting on Virtue; Stephen J. Pope, The Evolution of Altruism and the Ordering of Love
(Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1994); Pope, Human Evolution and Christian
Ethics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Jean Porter, The Recovery of Virtue: The
Relevance of Aquinas for Christian Ethics (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1990); and
Porter, Nature as Reason: A Thomistic Theory of the Natural Law (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005).
decided and is real for man in this Subject is true for him.” As this holds for
us as addressees of the Word of God as such, it also holds for us as the same
Word of God addresses us as God’s command. “Therefore the divine com
mand as it is directed to him, as it applies to him, consists in his relationship
to this Subject. Therefore the action of this Subject for him is the right
action or conduct which we have to investigate.”9
Because theological ethics “understands man from the very outset as
addressed by God”—that is, “from the eternal grace of God as it has eventu
ated in time”10—Barth grounds this theme in the action of Jesus Christ for
us and in our place in the eternal and temporal event of God’s covenant
with humanity. As God both chooses us and claims us as God’s chosen, this
covenant consists of both election (choice) and sanctification (claim).
According to Barth, the covenant is decreed by God from eternity in Jesus
Christ and executed in time in him. From eternity and in time, then, Jesus
Christ is both (1) the electing God who determines to be God with and for
humanity and (2) the elected human whom God has determined to be the
one whom God is with and for, and he is both (1) the sanctifying God who
claims the elect as those whom God is with and for and (2) the sanctified
human who fulfills this claim by existing as one whom God is with and for
in all that he is and does. It is in this eternal and temporal act that God in
Jesus Christ takes the place and takes up the cause of other humans, who are
both elected and sanctified in him. In Barth’s words, “the Word and work of
divine election . . . has taken place and been revealed in Jesus Christ. This
Word and work of God as such is also the sanctification of man, the estab
lishment and revelation of the divine law. What right conduct is for man is
determined absolutely in the right conduct of God. It is determined in Jesus
Christ. He is the electing God and elected man in One. But he is also the
sanctifying God and sanctified man in One. In His person God has acted
rightly towards us. And in the same person man has also acted rightly for
us.”11 This is what it means to say that God is with and for us.
God’s Command as Requirement
This strong claim about what God has done for us in Jesus Christ poses the
second question: If Jesus Christ obeys God’s command for us and in our
9 CD II/2, pp. 539f. 10 CD II/2, p. 547. 11 CD II/2, pp. 538f.

place, in what sense is that command addressed to us, and what could it
legitimately require of us? It seems to speak only of what Jesus Christ has
done in our place. How, then, can it address us and require something of us?
Barth’s answer is that the command of God is addressed to us as having
already been fulfilled in our place by Jesus Christ, and it requires us to con
firm by our own conduct what we already are by virtue of its fulfillment.
With this claim we arrive at the subject matter (Sache) of theological ethics,
which is “the Word and work of God in Jesus Christ, in which the right
action of man has already been performed and therefore waits only to be
confirmed by our action.”12 To summarize: To understand the Word of God
as the command of God (the task of theological ethics) is to hold that what
God commands us to do is to confirm in our action the right human action
that has already been performed for us by Jesus Christ, who as the elect and
sanctified human takes our place and takes up our cause, fulfilling God’s
designation of the elect to be in their conduct those whom God is with and
for (the subject matter of theological ethics). We are therefore to be in our
own conduct—that is, in the actuality of our existence as acting subjects—
what we are by virtue of God’s conduct toward us in him—that is, in the
reality of our being in God’s grace.
Human Action as Correspondence to Grace
What exactly does it mean to confirm in our conduct what we are by virtue
of Jesus Christ’s conduct for us and in our place? This is our third question,
concerning what it means to act as those whom God is with and for. As we
saw in the opening paragraph, God’s grace to us in Jesus Christ has an aim,
which is the conformity of our actions to grace.13 But how do our actions
conform to grace? They conform to grace by corresponding to it. “God’s
action is that He is gracious, and man in his action is committed to corre
spondence with this action.”14 Barth’s “targum” on Matthew 5:48 clarifies
what is involved in the correspondence of our actions to grace: “Be ye (liter
ally, ye shall be) therefore perfect (literally, directed to your objective), even
as (i.e., corresponding to it in creaturely-human fashion) your Father which
is in heaven is perfect (directed to his objective).”15 On the one hand, in
view of the rest of Matthew 5–7, to confirm God’s conduct toward us in our
12 CD II/2, p. 543/KD II/2, p. 603. 13 CD II/2, pp. 512, 566f.

14 CD II/2, p. 576. 15 CD II/2, p. 512.
own conduct will mean acting toward others as God has acted toward us.
“Our aim must correspond to the distinctive aim of the Father in heaven . . . .”
God’s command will therefore require us to forgive one another, bear one
another’s burdens, look to the things of others rather than our own things,
love our enemies, and so forth.16 In these actions we confirm what God is
and does for us by exhibiting it in our conduct toward others. By virtue of
their direct correspondence to God’s grace toward us in Jesus Christ, actions
such as these may be said to enjoy a kind of paradigmatic status.17 And they
suggest that Barth’s doctrine of the command of God is a version of divine
exemplarist ethics according to which good human actions image God,
reflecting God’s actions towards human beings.18
On the other hand, however, Barth emphasizes that the required action
“will be our action, a human action,” and thus one that differs from God’s
action toward us. Our action corresponds to God’s action as a characteristi
cally human action; it is not itself a divine action in any sense. It will not try
to do again what God in Jesus Christ has already done for us and in our
place. “Neither for ourselves nor for others can we do the good which God
does for us.” The action God commands will therefore be a human analogue
of grace, similar to yet different from what Jesus Christ does for us and in
our place. “It will have to attest and confirm the great acts of God, but it will
not be able to continue or repeat them.”19 What God has done is final and
efficacious and needs no continuation or supplement. For Barth, Jesus
Christ acts for us and in our place; his conduct is therefore not a direct rule
or standard for our conduct.20 This point qualifies but does not nullify the
divine exemplarist character of Barth’s doctrine of the command of God.
16 CD II/2, p. 578.
17 Barth’s position thus resembles those of Stanley Hauerwas and John Yoder, for whom
ethics as ecclesial witness to Jesus is also paradigmatically expressed in actions like these—a
witness Yoder betrayed in his sexual violence against women. See Stanley Hauerwas, The
Peaceable Kingdom; and John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus: Vicit Agnus Noster (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972). On Yoder’s sexual violence, see Rachel Waltner Goosen, “Defanging
the Beast: Mennonite Responses to John Howard Yoder’s Sexual Abuse,” Mennonite Quarterly
Review 89 (2015): 7–80.
18 That we image God in our action is an important theme of John Calvin, who may also be
said to have affirmed a divine exemplarist account of ethics. See Calvin, ICR 2.8.51, p. 415. The
same theme appears in Philip Melanchthon’s Loci Communes of 1555. See Melanchthon,
Melanchthon on Christian Doctrine: Loci Communes 1555, Clyde L. Manschreck, tr. and ed.
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 84, 125.
19 CD II/2, pp. 577f.; see also pp. 696f.
20 In his insistence on this point, Barth differs from Hauerwas and Yoder and those who
follow them.
Barth’s understanding of our action as correspondence to God’s action in

which we confirm what God has done for us and in our place in Jesus Christ
may be described in characteristically Reformed terms: By our conduct in
analogy to what God has done for us, we image God, reflecting God’s action
in our own and thereby glorifying God; we exercise our designation as
God’s elect to be those whom God is with and for; and we give concrete
confirmation or proof of our election.21 However, while the account that
has just been given captures the core of the subject matter of Barth’s theo
logical ethics, it is far from complete. It has accounted only for those of our
actions that correspond to God’s grace to us in Jesus Christ in an especially
direct way, namely, those actions that have to do with our status as God’s
elect. But actions such as these do not exhaust the confirmation of grace in
our conduct. Those whom God elects from eternity in Jesus Christ, God
also brings into existence as creatures, reconciles to God as sinners, and
makes heirs of redemption. God is for us in Jesus Christ in a multitude of
ways that are not limited to election but encompass our entire being as crea
tures, reconciled sinners, and heirs of redemption, and the command of
God accordingly summons, directs, and empowers us to correspond to
God’s grace in all our actions as creatures, reconciled sinners, and heirs of
redemption. This point brings us to Barth’s distinction between general and
special ethics.
General and Special Ethics
The Word of God is also the command of God. Gospel is also law. God’s
grace to human beings in Jesus Christ is also the norm or standard of human
conduct. These equivalent expressions are the fundamental claim of Barth’s
ethics, and the foregoing account of the task and subject matter of theologi
cal ethics has clarified it. Barth establishes this claim in §36 of the Church
Dogmatics and elaborates its meaning and implications in the remaining
sections of the Church Dogmatics that are devoted to ethics: first as “general
ethics” in §§37–9 and then as “special ethics” in §§52–6 and §75 (to which
the unfinished §§74, 76–8, posthumously published as The Christian Life,
may be added). The task of general ethics is “to understand and present the
21 On our action as the image of God in which God recognizes God and God’s own action,
see CD II/2, p. 575. On our action as glorification of God’s grace to us in Jesus Christ, see CD
II/2, p. 540. And on our action as confirmation or proof of our election, see CD II/2, p. 512.
Word of God as the subject which claims us,” that is, “as the command
which sanctifies man.”22 General ethics examines “the fact and extent that
sanctification and therefore good human action are effected by God in His
command.”23 In particular, it examines the command of God as God’s claim
which has authority with regard to our conduct (§37), God’s decision which
decides concerning the right or wrong (or good or evil) of our conduct
(§38), and God’s judgment which confirms that we belong to God in our
conduct (§39). By contrast, special ethics inquires “concerning sanctifica
tion as it comes to man from the God who acts towards him in His com
mand, concerning the good which is real and recognisable in his action
under the command of God.”24 In short, while general ethics examines how
the command of God confronts human action, and human beings in their
action, as its norm or standard, special ethics examines what the same com
mand of God determines with regard to concrete human acts as it confronts
human beings as the command of the Creator to the creature, the Reconciler
to the reconciled sinner, and the Redeemer to the heir of redemption.
In both general and special ethics, what it means to say that the com
mand of God is the norm of human action is determined by its context in
the covenant of God with human beings in Jesus Christ.25 Fundamental to
Barth’s notion of God’s command is that it takes place in (and with election
constitutes) this covenant of grace in which God is God with and for human
beings and human beings are those whom God is with and for. In general
ethics this context is operative in Barth’s description of the command as an
encounter between God and the human being as the divine and human
partners in the covenant of grace. General ethics shows “that this command
22 CD II/2, p. 546. 23 CD III/4, p. 4. 24 CD III/4, p. 5.

25 Barth’s particular conception of this covenant and its central place in his theology mark
his distinctive place in the Reformed tradition of Protestantism, where a principal concern of
his was to assert the consistency of the priority and sufficiency of God’s grace in God’s dealings
with God’s people against the tendency of Reformed theology to distinguish covenants of grace
and of works. Barth’s conception of the covenant and its centrality to his theology involves
complexities and problems that fall outside the scope of this chapter. Among the problems are
that, like every Christian version of this biblical theme, it raises vexing (and historically not at
all innocent) questions regarding the validity of the Sinai covenant and the status of the Jewish
people. In lieu of the lengthy treatment this issue demands, I will simply assert as plausible the
view that, despite its many problems and ambiguities, Barth’s position denies that the covenant
with Israel has been superseded and recognizes the continued existence of the Jewish people as
a crucial sign of God’s providence. See especially CD III/3, 210–26; CD IV/1, 22–34. The vast
secondary literature on the topic includes Mark R. Lindsay, Barth, Israel, and Jesus: Karl Barth’s
Theology of Israel (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); and Katherine Sonderegger, That Jesus Christ
Was Born a Jew: Karl Barth’s “Doctrine of Israel” (University Park: The Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1992).
of God is an event,” not establishing that “there is [es gibt] a command of

God,” which would imply that what God commands has been given in a
moral law or in a created order, but rather “that God gives [Gott . . . gibt] His
command, that He gives Himself to be our Commander.” As we will see in
Chapter 4, Barth deviates from the historical mainstream of theological eth
ics by denying that God’s command is lodged in the permanence of the
moral law or the created order. Rather, in commanding and obeying, God
and human beings enact the covenant of grace as a living one in which the
human being who is addressed by God’s command is not simply provided
with the factual knowledge about good or right conduct that may be derived
from a moral law or created order but “is brought into that confrontation
and fellowship with Jesus Christ” that constitutes the covenant relationship
as the personal encounter of the God who is with and for humans and the
human whom God is with and for.26
The covenant context of God’s command is no less decisive for special
ethics. According to Barth, the covenant of grace unfolds as a history, with
creation as its presupposition which comprises the permanent conditions
under which the history will unfold, reconciliation as the fulfillment of the
covenant of grace in the face of its rejection by its human partner, and
redemption which brings the fellowship of human beings with God to com
pletion. These divine works of creation, reconciliation, and redemption
“have in view the institution, preservation, and execution of the covenant of
grace, for partnership in which [God] has predestined and called man.”27
The event in which God addresses God’s command is therefore not an iso
lated event but is an occurrence in a history, while this history is the unfold
ing of the event.28
The crucial point is that the encounter of the divine and human covenant
partners, in which, as described in general ethics, God’s command is
addressed and heard, is always at the same time an encounter of the Creator
and the creature, the Reconciler and the reconciled sinner, and the
Redeemer and the heir of redemption. Special ethics considers God’s com
mand as it determines the particular human acts that actualize the covenant
of grace in each of these three relationships or “spheres.” Thus, the norm
that governs all three spheres is the grace of God in Jesus Christ in its form
as God’s command, which is the encounter of the divine and human part
ners in the covenant of grace. Although it is differentiated into these three
26 CD II/2, p. 548. 27 CD III/1 p. 43. 28 CD III/4, pp. 26–31.

spheres with their distinctive relationships between the divine and human
partners in the covenant of grace, the command of God that addresses
human beings in these three spheres is the same command in three forms.
In each of these spheres it is always the case that the command of God is the
Word of God while the Word of God is the revelation and work of God’s
grace to us in Jesus Christ. We may therefore think of God’s commands in
the three spheres as non-identical repetitions of the one command of God’s
grace. They are non- identical insofar as creation, reconciliation, and
redemption are distinct works of God in which Jesus Christ is with and for
us in different ways. Yet in each of these ways he is with and for us, and the
actions God commands are actions by which we confirm in our conduct
what God has done for us and in our place in Jesus Christ. It follows that in
addition to the actions that directly correspond to God’s grace to us in Jesus
Christ, which were named in the previous section, there are actions that
correspond, respectively, to God’s grace to us as creatures, reconciled sin
ners, and heirs of redemption. These actions are the subject matter of the
command of God the Creator (Church Dogmatics §§53–6) and of God the
Reconciler (Church Dogmatics §75, along with the incomplete and posthu
mously published §§74, 76–8). Barth says surprisingly little about what God
actually commands as Creator and Reconciler. Instead he provides detailed
descriptions of the spheres of creation and reconciliation which serve as a
“reference,” “an ethical lead,” or “a series of directives” instructing us in what
actions God will command in each sphere.29
Grace, Command, and Creation
According to Barth, then, God’s grace to us in Jesus Christ is the norm of

our action as creatures, reconciled sinners, and heirs of redemption. But
here Barth’s departure from the mainstream of theological ethics poses a
momentous question: Is it plausible to claim that grace is the norm of our
action as creatures? That grace is the norm of our action as reconciled sin
ners is uncontroversial. The claim that Jesus Christ acts for us and in our
place as sinners who are incapable of acting for ourselves and in our own
place is a defensible one, as is the claim that as reconciled sinners we are to
conduct ourselves as those whom Jesus Christ has acted for and whose
29 CD III/4, pp. 30f.

place he has taken. But can we say the same thing of the creature as we say
of the sinner? Does Jesus Christ take the place of human beings not only as
sinners but also as creatures? Is the human being as creature in the same
condition as the human being as sinner, unable to act for herself and in her
own place? Does the insistence that God’s grace to us in Jesus Christ is the
norm of our action as creatures leave creation without any ethical content of
its own? These questions express the suspicion that Barth denies creation its
distinctive status as God’s work and in effect absorbs it into reconciliation. If
that is the result of his claim about grace as the norm of our action as creatures,
it surely disqualifies his theological ethics from serious consideration.
Any attempt to show how Barth avoids that result must begin by
acknowledging his insistence that God’s grace to us in Jesus Christ is indeed
the norm of our action as creatures, and not only as reconciled sinners. The
Leitsatz to §52 of the Church Dogmatics, which introduces the command of
God the Creator, announces that “the one command of the one God who is
gracious to man in Jesus Christ is also the command of his Creator and
therefore already the sanctification of the creaturely action and abstention
of man.”30 Elaborating this claim, Barth emphasizes that the grace of God to
us in Jesus Christ is both the ontological and the epistemological ground of
both the command of the Creator itself and the creaturely action and
abstention that is sanctified by this command.31 In other words, the content
of the ethics of creation is knowable from the grace of God to us in Jesus
Christ (epistemological ground) and is determined by God’s grace to us in
Jesus Christ (ontological ground). Ruled out is every attempt to formulate
norms of our conduct as creatures on the basis of something that is inde
pendent of God’s grace to us in Jesus Christ. In contrast to much of the his
tory of theological ethics, reason, human nature, and cosmic order are on
this principle all excluded as grounds of the norms of our conduct as
creatures.
How, then, does Barth avoid reducing the ethics of creation to the ethics
of reconciliation? The answer lies in his understanding of the relationship of
creation to the covenant of grace. Barth emphasizes that the covenant of
grace that has been realized by God in time in Jesus Christ was also resolved
by God from eternity in him. The covenant of grace therefore precedes cre
ation, and God brings creation into existence to realize the covenant. “It is
not, then, the case that God first determined Himself as Creator, then made
30 CD III/4, p. 3. 31 CD III/4, pp. 38–43.

man His creature, and only then in a later development and decision elected
man and instituted His covenant with him.”32 Rather, the covenant of grace
that God resolves from eternity and realizes in time is the reason there is a
creation at all. God’s grace to us in Jesus Christ, then, is not restricted to the
reconciliation of sinners. It is at the same time, and in the same act, the
realization of what God resolved from eternity and for which God brought
human creatures into existence. And if creation was brought into existence
in order for God to be gracious to human beings in Jesus Christ, it is clear
why grace must govern the ethics of creation just as it does the ethics of
reconciliation.
However, the answer is not yet complete. To establish the claim that grace
is the norm of the life of the creature as such, and not only of the reconciled
sinner, Barth must explain in what sense God’s grace to us in Jesus Christ is
the command of the Creator to the creature. In what sense is grace the con
tent of the command of God the Creator, and how does it sanctify creaturely
action and abstention? If what God commands as Creator is the grace of
God to us in Jesus Christ, what is it that marks this command as one that
issues from God as Creator and addresses us as the creatures we are? To
answer these questions Barth must (1) identify characteristics of our crea
turely being with respect to which commands of God the Creator address
us as creatures, and (2) explain how the commands that concern those char
acteristics are epistemologically and ontologically determined by God’s
grace to us in Jesus Christ, and not by anything inherent in those character
istics themselves. The remainder of this section explains how Barth meets
these two requisites by placing creation in the history of the covenant
of grace.
Creation as External Ground of the Covenant
The first requisite is met by Barth’s claim that the characteristics God brings
into existence with our creation are characteristics that equip us for the cov
enant of grace. According to Barth, what God brings into existence in the
work of creation is the presupposition of the history of the covenant of
grace; that is, the set of conditions under which God will realize the cove
nant in time.33 Among these conditions are the characteristics of the human
32 CD III/4, p. 39. 33 CD III/1, pp. 42, 44.

creature. The human being whom God brings into existence in creation is
the being whom God has chosen in Jesus Christ for covenant fellowship
with God, and God accordingly endows this being with characteristics that
suit it for this fellowship. Precisely as the creatures they are, human beings
are ordered to grace. The covenant of grace “does not start only with man’s
reconciliation and redemption, but already with his creation. As God in his
Son elected man from all eternity to fellowship with himself, he ordained
that he should be this being [Wesen], existing in this reality [Wesenheit].”34
“He created him as his covenant-partner,” Barth asserts; the human crea
ture, as the creature it is, is “determined by God for life with God.”35 The
characteristics that comprise our nature, then, are precisely those that equip
us to be God’s partner in the covenant of grace. “There is no existence of the
creature in which it can originally belong elsewhere than to this compact. It
has no attributes, no conditions of existence, no substantial or accidental
predicates of any kind, in virtue of which it can or may or must be alien to
the Founder of this covenant . . . . By its whole nature [Natur] the creature is
destined and disposed for this covenant . . . .”36 In short, our creaturely char
acteristics are created by God to equip us for the grace of God to us in Jesus
Christ that is God’s purpose in creating us. In Barth’s nomenclature, cre
ation is the external ground of the covenant of grace.
This point may be taken a step further. As we have seen, God has resolved
from eternity to be gracious to us in Jesus Christ, and in Jesus Christ God
has realized that resolution in time. The human creature, then, is brought
into existence not only as the creature that is determined from eternity for
covenant fellowship with God in Jesus Christ, but as the creature for whom
Jesus Christ fulfills this determination. We may now say more specifically
that the characteristics of the human creature are those that equip it for
34 CD III/4, pp. 42f./KD III/4, pp. 46f. (emphasis added). 35 CD III/2, p. 203.
36 CD III/1, pp. 96f./KD III/1, pp. 105f. A corollary of this view is that we live our covenant
fellowship with God and one another by exercising our creaturely characteristics and capacities
in their natural form, as God created them, without any need for a supernatural extension of
them. Because we are God’s covenant partners in our creaturely nature, God’s further works of
reconciliation and redemption do not impart new or different qualities that extend our human
capacities beyond their creaturely capabilities (see especially CD I/2, p. 375; CD IV/2, pp. 556f.;
CD IV/4, p. 5). Of course, covenant fellowship with God and other humans is constituted by
God’s grace and is thus established and maintained by God apart from our action. To possess
the capacities that equip us for fellowship with God is not to possess the capability of attaining
the latter. But it is in the active exercise of those created capacities that human beings enjoy
fellowship with God, as these capacities are enabled by the Holy Spirit without any supernatu
ral addition or extension. What God commands will always be a natural act in which our natu
ral characteristics and capacities are exercised, albeit in a manner that is possible only by the
working of grace.
Jesus Christ to act in its place.37 In his doctrine of the human creature, Barth
accordingly identifies three basic characteristics of our creaturely being—
namely, relationality, body- soul composition, and temporality—and
demonstrates how each characteristic enables God to be with and for us and
to act in our place in Jesus Christ.38 The characteristic of relationality most
readily illustrates this point. Relationality is the being-with-one-another of
human beings. It is because the being of humans is being-with-one-another
that Jesus Christ can be a human being with and for other human beings.39
Relationality is thus a characteristic of our creaturely being that equips us
for the covenant of grace by providing the creaturely condition for Jesus
Christ to be with us and for us. And as it is with relationality, so it is with the
other two basic characteristics: In their distinctive ways our body-soul com
position and our temporality also equip us for God to act in our place in
Jesus Christ.
A final step is taken with Barth’s claim that the creaturely characteristics
created by God to equip us for the covenant of grace bear a likeness or
resemblance to that covenant. “Even in his . . . human nature, man cannot be
man without being directed to and prepared for the fulfillment of his deter
mination, his being in the grace of God, by his correspondence and similar
ity to this determination for the covenant with God.”40 Once again, the
characteristic of relationality provides the most straightforward illustration
of this correspondence and similarity, though in this case the illustration is
unfortunately a problematic one. For Barth, relationality has as its paradig
matic form the relationship of man and woman in general and the marriage
relationship in particular. These relationships are said by Barth to be crea
turely reflections of the covenant of grace, as indeed they are often found to
be in Scripture, where they are taken to correspond to the relationships of
37 As such, anthropology is determined by Christology. Just as Jesus’ “being [Sein] as a man

is as such that which posits and therefore reveals and explains human nature with all its possi
bilities” (CD III/2, p. 59/KD III/2, p. 69) and “to be one with God in the accomplishment of
[his] work is the being [Sein] of this man” (CD III/2, p. 63/KD III/2, pp. 73f.), so it is analo
gously with other human beings: their being consists in being the ones for whom Jesus’ work is
done (which is to say that it consists in their being as partners in the covenant of grace), and
their being, so understood, reveals and explains their nature with all its possibilities, which are
revealed and explained as presuppositions of the covenant of grace. On its surface, at least, this
Christology, in which Jesus’ being as his oneness with God differs from our being as being with
Jesus, while his nature is identical to our nature, appears to be an Apollonarian Christology. A
critique of it is outside the scope of this chapter. But insofar as the Conclusion to this chapter
rejects the ontological priority of the covenant of grace to the creature, it also rejects this deter
mination of anthropology by Christology—or at least its determination by this Christology.
38 CD III/2, pp. 203–640. 39 CD III/2, pp. 222f. 40 CD III/2, p. 207.
God with Israel and Christ with the church.41 In general, to say that
creaturely characteristics equip us for the covenant grace is for Barth to say
that they bear a certain likeness to it. The grace of God in Jesus Christ
comes to a creature whose characteristics are analogues of grace, created as
creaturely likenesses of grace.
We have been considering how the command of God’s grace to us in
Jesus Christ can be the command of the Creator to the creature, and it is
now clear how Barth meets the first requisite, which calls for the identifica
tion of the creaturely characteristics with respect to which God commands
us. Those characteristics are the creaturely conditions of the covenant of
grace that equip us for that covenant. God’s command as Creator requires in
every case an action that instantiates one or more of these characteristics.
And because these characteristics equip us for grace by virtue of their simi
larity or correspondence to grace, the action God commands as the instan
tiation of these characteristics will be an action that corresponds to grace.
At the end of the first section of this chapter we saw in the case of general
ethics that what God’s command requires is an action that corresponds
directly to God’s grace to us in Jesus Christ. We now see in the case of the
ethics of creation that whatever God commands will be a characteristically
creaturely action that indirectly corresponds to grace by instantiating a
creaturely condition of grace. It is important to stress that the correspond
ence is indirect. The actions considered in the first section, which include
forgiving others and loving our enemies, are actions God also performs.
When we do the same actions in a characteristically human way, our actions
directly correspond to grace. By contrast, the actions that instantiate crea
turely characteristics such as relationality—the actions, for example, that
constitute a marriage—are not actions God also performs, and their corre
spondence to grace is therefore indirect. Yet they do correspond to grace,
and so grace is confirmed in the life of the creature and the analogy of grace
governs Barth’s special ethics just as it governs his general ethics.
41 See CD III/4, pp. 117, 149f., 197f., and especially 215f., where it is clear that the analogy
that links marriage with the covenant of grace is decisive for the normative significance of
marriage. To take the man-woman and marriage relationships as my example is not to endorse
what Barth says about God’s command regarding them. Here and in what follows I use them as
my example because of their clarity in exhibiting Barth’s understanding of the ethics of cre
ation. My understanding of the difficulties of this aspect of Barth’s doctrine of creation owes
much to a recent study by Faye Bodley-Dangelo. See her Sexual Difference, Gender, and Agency
in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (London: T&T Clark, 2019). On Barth’s troubling relation
ship with Charlotte von Kirschbaum, see Christiane Tietz, “Karl Barth and Charlotte von
Kirschbaum,” Theology Today 74 (2017): 86–111.
Covenant as Internal Ground of Creation
We are now ready to consider the second requisite, which calls for an expla
nation of how the commands of God regarding our creaturely characteris
tics are determined by the grace of God to us in Jesus Christ and not by
anything that is inherent in those characteristics themselves. We have just
seen that the human being is the creature who is determined by God for life
with God and that the relationality, body-soul composition, and temporal
ity that comprise its creaturely being are those characteristics that enable
Jesus Christ to be with and for this creature, having been created by God
precisely for that purpose.42 It is because these characteristics equip us for
grace that their normative content is not inherent in them but is determined
by grace. Covenant is the internal ground of creation. The norm of our life
as creatures is God’s grace to us in Jesus Christ; it is not to be found in these
characteristics themselves or in any feature of creation itself. Of course, our
created characteristics do have moral relevance insofar as they are that
about which God the Creator addresses commands to us. As we have just
seen, the actions God commands as Creator will always instantiate the rela
tional, body-soul, and temporal characteristics of our lives as creatures. But
no normative force inheres in these characteristics themselves, such that the
actions God commands as Creator may be identified with them or derived
from them.
This point brings us to one of the best-known and most controversial
aspects of Barth’s ethics, namely, his rejection of attempts to base special
ethics on so-called “orders of creation.” Orders of creation are permanent
forms or structures of creaturely life, typically taken to include marriage or
family, economy, government, and church, which were central to the
Lutheran and to some extent the Reformed theological ethics of Barth’s day.
Barth’s denial that the normative significance of our lives as creatures is
inherent in creaturely nature is a broad one which rules out every ethics of
creation that grounds moral norms in human characteristics or in a cosmic
or social order. But given his context, it is unsurprising that Barth singles
out for explicit criticism the appeal to orders of creation. Barth objects to
the claim that the norms that govern our lives as creatures are to be found in
42 To be precise, the being (Sein) of the human creature includes both the determination of
the human being for covenant partnership with God and the being of human beings with one
another (that is, their relationality). Body-soul composition and temporality are the constitu
tion (Beschaffenheit) of the being of the human, so understood; that is, its existence and nature
(Dasein and Sosein). See CD III/2, pp. 203–5, 325, 437/KD III/2, pp. 242–4, 391f., 524.
the alleged requisites of these forms or structures of human life in society.

The problem is that these forms or structures are held to have been estab
lished by God prior to and independent of God’s grace to us in Jesus Christ,
to be knowable by reason or experience apart from the self-revelation of
God in Jesus Christ, and to pertain to a creaturely life that is constituted
apart from the covenant of grace. Orders of creation have been criticized by
other theological ethicists for the ideological perversions to which they are
subject, insofar as they at least appear, and during Barth’s time were often
taken, to require unconditional obedience to existing forms of family life
and economic and political order, as well as for their tendency to naturalize
historically contingent social and political arrangements by identifying
them in their present forms with a permanent order created by God. Barth,
too, has these criticisms in view, but he focuses on what he takes to be the
theological mistake that underlies them. Orders of creation, he asserts,
imply “the familiar notion of a lex naturae which is immanent in reality and
inscribed upon the heart of man . . . .” That notion in turn implies, problem
atically, that there is a revelation of God and knowledge of God prior and in
addition to “that of [God’s] Word of grace” which, as we have seen, is the
content of the command of God the Creator.43 If we look to the orders of
creation for the norm of our creaturely life, we look away from God’s grace
to us in Jesus Christ.
As Barth sees it, to refer to aspects of our creaturely existence with regard
to which God issues commands as “orders” or (as Dietrich Bonhoeffer pre
ferred) “mandates” suggests that the norm of creaturely action is inherent in
those aspects.44 “Order” and “mandate” are normatively charged terms that
43 CD III/4, p. 20. Barth’s criticisms in his discussion of orders of creation are directed not at
the proponents of orders of creation whose accounts were implicated in German Christian
support for National Socialism, though he obviously rejects those accounts. His criticisms were
directed rather at Emil Brunner, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the Danish theologian, N. H. Søe
(see CD III/4, pp. 19–23), all of whom, and especially the latter two, held views that were close
to Barth’s. Of these, only Brunner explicitly endorsed the term ‘orders’ (Ordnungen), and Barth
acknowledges the greater affinities of the positions of Bonhoeffer and Søe with his own posi
tion. Barth’s reservations about even these attempts to salvage something of the notion of
orders of creation indicates the strength of his determination to avoid any formulation of his
own position that would leave it susceptible to what (as we have just seen) he regarded as the
fundamental mistake of that approach to the ethics of creation.
44 Barth credits Bonhoeffer with articulating a position that is close to his own: one in
which the normative force and content of the mandates is found in the command of God and
not in the mandates themselves as independent of the command. “Bonhoeffer’s ‘mandates’ are
not laws somehow immanent in reality . . . . They do not emerge from reality; they descend into
it” (CD III/4, p. 22). Barth’s interpretation has strong textual support (see especially Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, Ethics: Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 6, ed. by Clifford J. Green, tr. by Reinhard
Krauss, Charles C. West, and Douglas W. Stott [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005], pp. 390f.).
for Barth are all too easily identified with the command of God itself. To
avoid any such confusion, Barth refers to normatively relevant aspects of
our creaturely existence in normatively neutral terms, as “constants
[Konstante]” or “constant relationships [konstanter Verhältnisse].”45 These
constants include features of the human creature we have already encoun
tered, namely, the determination of human beings for life with God as God’s
covenant partner and the three basic characteristics that equip human
beings for this covenant partnership (i.e., relationality, body-soul composi
tion, and temporality). They also include various constituents of all these
features. Thus, for example, relationality, which as we have seen is the char
acteristic by virtue of which our being is by nature being with one another,
equipping us for Jesus Christ to be with us, includes as its constituents three
forms of relationship: those of man and woman (mentioned above), parents
and children, and near and distant neighbors. Once again, on Barth’s view
these constants are the conditions of our created nature which equip us for
grace and with respect to which God the Creator commands us.46 Unlike
orders or mandates, they are not themselves imperatives or sources of
imperatives. We do not, for example, find the norms that govern the rela
tionship of man and woman in any alleged biological or phenomenological
requisites of sexual difference. These constants are rather aspects of our
creaturely life in which God’s command encounters us, requiring an act that
in some way instantiates one or more of these constants. What Barth says
about the three “macrospheres” of creation, reconciliation, and redemption
applies also to these constants, which comprise what will now be referred to
as “microspheres” within the sphere of creation: “They are spheres in which
But Bonhoeffer also refers to “intrinsic laws” of natural and social entities, including the state,
as well as “necessities of human life” that may conflict with these intrinsic laws (Ethics pp.
271–3). These references suggest that Bonhoeffer may be closer to those whose positions Barth
rejected.
45 CD III/4, p. 22/KD III/4, p. 23 (Verhältnisse emphasized in the German original).
Robin W. Lovin makes a similar move, speaking of “contexts” where Brunner spoke of orders
and Bonhoeffer of mandates. The contexts are Bonhoeffer’s four (or five) mandates: family,
work, government, church (and culture). For Lovin, they are “settings in which . . . the com
mand of God can be received in its immediacy and directness and specific goods . . . can be
created and maintained” (Lovin, Christian Realism and the New Realities [Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008], pp. 100f.). Lovin differs from Barth in drawing his descrip
tions of the contexts from the various forms they take in history rather than from the Word of
God and in emphasizing the creating and maintaining of goods rather than the immediate and
direct command of God to instantiate them in particular actions.
46 The relationship to near and distant neighbors is a permanent condition only in a highly
qualified sense, as Barth is determined to break decisively with the tendency of early twentieth-
century proponents of orders of creation to include “people” (Volk) among these orders, which
had disastrous consequences in the 1930s and 1940s. See CD III/4, pp. 298–309.
God commands . . . but not laws according to which God commands . . . .”47
We cannot, then, expect to find what God commands by attending to the
relationships of, say, man and woman or parent and child themselves. Of
them we can only say that “the Word of God tells us that we exist in these
relationships and that it is in these very relationships that His command
always finds us . . . .”48 Living our creaturely life in these relationships, we
must hear what God commands regarding them in the event in which God
commands.
Barth is confident, however, that even though the particular action that
God commands with regard to these microspheres cannot be determined in
advance of the event in which God commands it, there is much that can be
known about what God will in fact command. We have already seen that
the actions God commands will correspond in a creaturely fashion to the
covenant of grace, providing analogues of grace. And we will see in
Chapter 4 how special ethics facilitates more precise determinations of what
God commands by articulating “the character” which God’s particular com
mands in the microspheres will always exhibit and “the standard” which
will always hold sway in the decisions made in them, thereby providing
“instructional preparation” for the event in which God’s actual command
regarding them is addressed.49 The point to stress in this chapter is that for
Barth, the source of knowledge of these microspheres, and of the character
and standards that always hold sway in them, is the Word of God rather
than any rational or experiential insight into those microspheres them
selves, which would lead us back to a norm that is inherent in them.
Barth accordingly presents his ethics of creation as an exposition of the
knowledge of the constants of creaturely life that is obtainable from the
Word of God. Chapter 4 develops this point further, but we may briefly con
sider it here, once again taking relationality as our example. Barth attempts
to state what can be known from the Word of God about the relationships
of man and woman, parent and child, and near and distant neighbors,
which together constitute relationality as a microsphere of the sphere of cre
ation. Knowledge of these and other microspheres is derived from the Word
of God in two senses. First, the mere fact that this microsphere is subject to
the command of God as its norm yields limited but significant knowledge of
its normative content. Thus, the fact that human beings are accountable to
God’s command in the relationships of man and woman or parent and child
47 CD III/4, pp. 29f. (italics added). 48 CD III/4, p. 22.

49 CD III/4, p. 18; see also p. 19.
has implications for their conduct in them. For example, the bare fact that
the relationship of man and woman stands under God’s command and is
accountable to it invalidates perspectives that divinize sexuality. From those
perspectives, the divine character of sexuality renders it unaccountable to
anything beyond itself. But insofar as sexuality is not divine but is rather
accountable to the divine command, it must be treated as an earthly reality
for which properly human responsibility must be taken.50 Second, although
the particular commands God addresses to us as creatures cannot be deter
mined in advance by special ethics or by any form of ethical inquiry, what
Scripture tells us about these microspheres enables us to know at a general
level what God the Creator will command. It tells us, for example, that mar
riage is permanent and that God will therefore command its dissolution
only in extraordinary cases.51 Both formally and materially, then, special
ethics derives knowledge of the character and standards that pertain to
these microspheres from the Word of God.52 The command of God the
Creator is knowable in its general contours, and Barth’s lengthy descriptions
of the microspheres of creation in Church Dogmatics §§53–6 provide
instructional preparation for hearing the particular commands God will
address to us regarding our conduct in these microspheres.
Summary
We may conclude this section with a concise statement of the sense in which
for Barth the grace of God to us in Jesus Christ is the norm of our action as
creatures. As the presupposition of the covenant of grace, creation consists
of the permanent conditions in which that covenant will unfold from cre
ation through reconciliation to redemption. These conditions are our crea
turely characteristics, created by God to equip us for the covenant of grace
(creation as the external ground of covenant), and their normative force
inheres not in them but in their determination by the covenant of grace
(covenant as the internal ground of creation). The constants of our life as
creatures are identified, and are to be understood, as our determination for
partnership with God in the covenant of grace, along with the characteristics
50 CD III/4, p. 129. 51 CD III/4, p. 211.

52 In the case of the relationship of man and woman, see CD III/4, pp. 119ff. for the formal
aspect (what can be known from the very fact that this relationship stands under the command
of God) and pp. 149ff. for the material aspect (what can be known in a general way about the
command of God regarding this relationship).
of our creaturely nature, namely, relationality, body-soul composition, and

temporality, that enable God to be with and for us in Jesus Christ. These
constants equip us for our covenant partnership as analogues of grace, and
it follows that the actions that instantiate them are themselves analogues of
grace. In obeying God’s commands that instantiate creaturely characteris
tics, we confirm God’s grace to us in Jesus Christ by performing creaturely
actions that indirectly correspond to grace.
It should now be clear that Barth does not absorb creation into reconcili
ation. As the presupposition of the covenant of grace, creation enjoys a sta
tus in that covenant that is distinct from that of the reconciliation of sinners.
It is also true, however, that as the presupposition of the covenant of grace,
creation is determined by the covenant of grace and has no normative status
independently of it. The question that remains is whether that determina
tion gives creation itself and the ethics of creation what is due to them. That
is a question for the Conclusion.
Conclusion
This chapter has clarified Barth’s fundamental claim that the norm of human
action is God’s grace to human beings in Jesus Christ—that the law is the
form of the gospel. It has also considered the most immediate challenge to
this claim, which is that it properly pertains to the ethics of reconciliation
but not to the ethics of creation. The following chapters will consider Barth’s
claim that the norm of human action, so understood, is a moral norm, and
that his theological ethics is accordingly an account of human moral action.
It remains for this Conclusion to consider the viability of the claim that the
norm of human action is God’s grace to us in Jesus Christ.
According to Barth, the “characteristic feature” of theological ethics is, as
we have seen, that “it understands man from the very outset as addressed by
God”; that is, “from the eternal grace of God as it has eventuated in time.”53
The command of God is resolved from eternity in Jesus Christ as the sancti
fying God and fulfilled in time by him as the sanctified human. It is
addressed to us from the site of its fulfillment in time, from where it
encounters us as the summons, direction, and empowerment to be in our
conduct what we already are in Jesus Christ, who has obeyed it in our place.
In this its characteristic feature, Barth’s theological ethics may be represented
53 CD II/2, p. 547.
as a vertical axis in which the command of God is settled upon from eter
nity in God’s eternal resolve, is realized in the heart of time as it is fulfilled
in our place by Jesus Christ, and is addressed to us in every moment of time,
in which its fulfillment in Jesus Christ calls for confirmation by our actions
in correspondence to it.54 In so confirming it, we become in our action what
we already are in God’s action for us in Jesus Christ. As we saw in the first
section above, these actions include forgiving one another, bearing one
another’s burdens, looking to the things of others rather than our own
things, and loving our enemies—actions in which there is a direct corre
spondence to God’s action for us in Jesus Christ. Yet in addition to its reso
lution from eternity, fulfillment in the heart of time, and address to human
beings at every moment of time, the command of God, as we have seen, is
also the sanctification of human action in the spheres of creation, reconcili
ation, and redemption. God’s commands in these three spheres enact the
history of the covenant of grace, which unfolds with creation as its presup
position, reconciliation as its fulfillment in the face of our sinful rejection of
it, and redemption as its final consummation. Here, Barth’s theological eth
ics may be represented as a horizontal line in which the one command of
God is addressed to us in the relationships of Creator and creature,
Reconciler and reconciled sinner, and Redeemer and heir of redemption
that form the structure of the history of the covenant of grace. And, as we
have seen, the microspheres of these three spheres are so structured that
they reflect the covenant of grace, as was noted in the controversial and in
many respects problematic cases of the man-woman and marriage relation
ships, so that the actions God the Creator commands in these microspheres
also correspond to grace, though indirectly.
Nothing is more distinctive of, or fateful for, Barth’s theological ethics
than the way the first two points on the vertical axis determine the horizon
tal axis. The command of God is established in its resolution from eternity
in Jesus Christ and its fulfillment in the heart of time in him. And it is the
command of God that is established in this way that addresses human
beings as creatures, reconciled sinners, and heirs of redemption, sanctifying
their action on the horizontal axis and thereby executing the history of the
covenant of grace. To say that the eternal resolve and temporal fulfillment of
God’s command determines the horizontal axis is to say three things. First,
it is to say that Jesus Christ has obeyed God’s command in our place in all
54 CD II/2, pp. 633, 634. See also CD III/4, p. 43, where Barth, along the same lines, refers to
“resolve, event, and revelation.”
three spheres and thus takes our place not only as reconciled sinners but
also as creatures and heirs of redemption. Second, it is to say that the com
mand that addresses us as creatures, reconciled sinners, and heirs of
redemption has as its content, in each sphere, the grace of God to us in Jesus
Christ. Third, it is to say that the human actions that are commanded by
God in all three spheres and their constituent microspheres will in a dis
tinctively human manner correspond to the grace of God to us in Jesus
Christ, as for example the actions that constitute the man-woman and mar
ital relationships will correspond to the actions of God and Israel and Christ
and the church.
It should now be apparent why the complaint that Barth absorbs creation
into reconciliation misses its target. Because it takes account only of the
horizontal axis, this complaint can be dismissed simply by pointing out that
the reconciliation of the sinner presupposes the creature whose created
characteristics are the permanent conditions under which the whole history
of the covenant of grace, including reconciliation, unfolds.55 The permanent
conditions of the covenant of grace are in place prior to reconciliation,
which presupposes them and therefore does not absorb them into itself. For
Barth as for any orthodox Christian theologian, the sinner who is recon
ciled is the good-but-fallen creature. Creation therefore cannot be absorbed
into reconciliation. However, for Barth the fulfillment of the covenant of
grace by Jesus Christ in the midst of time is not only the reconciliation of
sinners. Most fundamentally, it is the realization in time of what was
resolved by God from eternity. It is of course a matter of great significance
that the act that realizes the covenant of grace in time is also the act that
reconciles human beings to God as sinners who have rejected that cove
nant. But it is the act that reconciles the sinner only as it is most fundamen
tally the act that realizes in time what God has resolved from eternity.56
A more serious challenge is posed to Barth when the complaint about the
absorption of creation into reconciliation is instead directed at this determi
nation of the horizontal axis by the vertical axis. For Barth, creation and rec
onciliation alike are determined by the realization in time of the covenant of
grace that was resolved by God from eternity and that in the form of the
command of God addresses us, whether as creatures or as reconciled sin
ners, from the site of its realization. Directed in this way, the complaint aims
straight at the claim that creation is to be understood as the presupposition
55 CD III/2, pp. 40f. 56 CD IV/1, pp. 22–66 and especially pp. 47f.
of the covenant of grace. To say that creation is the presupposition of the

covenant of grace is not to say, with much of the Christian tradition, that
God creates a creature of a certain kind which is ordered to fellowship with
God in and with its distinctive characteristics and is enabled by grace to
attain fellowship with God. It is to say instead that God creates the creature
to whom God can be gracious—the creature for whom and in whose place
God can act—and whose characteristics are conditions for grace to do its
work. Rather than grace working in or on the creature, the creature itself is
the work of grace, brought into existence precisely so that grace may have
material for its work. In Karl Barth’s theology, the creature exists by and for
grace. It is not the case, then, that God acts for the creature God has created.
It is rather the case that God creates the creature for whom God can act. But
if this is so, we must ask whether Barth’s position is ultimately self-defeating.
Can God’s action truly be for the human creature as such if the human crea
ture as such is, and is what it is, solely so that God can be for it?57
The shadow of this question falls not only over Barth’s theological ethics
but over the whole of his theology. To question the determination of the
horizontal axis by the vertical axis is to strike at the heart of his theology.
With regard to his theological ethics in particular, it is to question the fun
damental thesis that the grace of God to us in Jesus Christ is the norm of
human conduct, that the law is the form of the gospel. This is indeed no
local but rather a global challenge to Barth’s ethics. Its implications will be
drawn out in the Conclusions to the chapters that follow and will culminate
in the Conclusion to the book. But for now it is important to emphasize that
the challenge is not directed at the claim that all theological ethics, includ
ing the ethics of creation, is ultimately grounded in Jesus Christ, nor does it
imply that grace is without normative significance. The fact that Jesus Christ
fulfills what God requires of us and that our moral accomplishments are
made possible by God’s grace to us in him has profound implications for
theological ethics. But it does not imply that grace itself is the norm of
human action or that the goodness of human action consists in its corre
spondence to grace.
57 The determination of the horizontal line by the vertical line is grounded in Barth’s
Christology, and as anticipated in n. 37 above, this criticism of the determination of the hori
zontal line by the vertical line implies the rejection of the determination of anthropology by
Christology. Just as the being of Jesus Christ as the one who realizes our covenant partnership
in our place determines his nature as the creaturely condition for covenant partnership, so our
being with him determines our nature, and the vertical line determines the horizontal line. A
problematic move in Christology thus results in a questionable anthropology, which in turn
gives rise to a problematic ethics of creation.
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own beds. Some of them even learned to cook some kinds of food,
generally “curry and rice.” But to sweep, or scrub a floor, or
thoroughly to clean a house, to wash or iron their own clothes, much
less the clothes of others, or to take up cooking or dish-washing as a
regular task, is not thought of. Those are “menial tasks;” a “servant
should do them.” What a lady of refinement and wealth in a Western
land often does from choice, even the destitute depending on
“charity” are ashamed to do in Asia. To be dependent or even to
“beg” is no disgrace; but to be a cook, a nurse for a lady, or
housekeeper, unless aided by servants, is considered a disgrace.
Indeed, these kinds of work are never done by any one unless under
great extremities. The boys and men are even less willing to do the
ordinary work of life. Clerkships and such like only are considered
“respectable” employment.
In all this it will be observed that the question is not one of
indolence or lack of energy, but one of a social system. The
individual is not so much to blame. He does not do differently from
his neighbors. In the matter of the children, the managers of the
Orphanages are responsible, in so far as they can resist the
enfeebling social conditions under which they work.
We then contemplated teaching the girls and boys under our
care to help themselves where others depended on servants; to do
this as a necessary part of a well-rounded education. Of course, we
recognized the fact that we were undertaking to modify the social
order, universal among an entire people. This was recognized as a
very difficult task, and nothing but a settled conviction that the old
order was fearfully defective led us to undertake it. Looking back
now, we have much interest in recalling the comments on this
undertaking. Many assured us that it was a work that should be
done, but would fail if undertaken. Others wanted the girls especially
trained for housekeepers, “so we can be released from dependence
on the Madrassi servants.” This suggestion was wholly philanthropic!
Another said several times: “What are you training those girls for?
For servants? I want some servants.” The author of the latter remark
has never made any other contribution to the Orphanage so far as I
can learn. People who had always received something for nothing, of
whom there were many, were opposed to the plan. The “prophets,”
of whom Asia has her share, were all against us. The “loquacious
oracles,” talking about what they did not know, as was their habit,
were all against us. But we had a few friends who gave unqualified
encouragement. These were of two classes; one a small company of
brave missionaries, of whom Bishop and Mrs. Thoburn were the
representatives. The other class were those who had done most for
and given most money to the Orphanage on the old basis. These
people who gave money and sympathy, while others gave poor
advice and criticism, said, “If you only teach these boys and girls to
care for themselves, it will be the greatest service to them.” We were
led to follow the advice of our friends, who really had the problem on
their hearts, and our own convictions, and so ventured on this
untried undertaking.
The first consideration was to find a more suitable location for
our Orphanage. To have undertaken to dispense with servants and
all native helpers, and to introduce an entirely new household order
in Rangoon, would have been to invite such a degree of
intermeddling by irresponsible people, as we did not care to be
annoyed with. Besides, the climate in the plains is very hot, and too
oppressive for foreigners to do the extent of physical labor required
to pioneer such an undertaking. The help that the boys and girls
could give at the beginning would be insignificant. We sought a
cooler climate. This could only be found in hills high enough to lift
you into a substantially cooler and less oppressive atmosphere.
I had been making investigation in the hills of Burma one
hundred and sixty miles north of Rangoon, for four years. The
original object of this investigation was to find a cool mountain retreat
to which our missionaries could go when worn with their labor in the
plains. Other parts of India had well-established hill stations, but
Burma had none. In my own case, when health failed, I had to go the
long journey to India, and to remain there many months. Had I been
acquainted with the hills of Burma, this could all have been avoided
by a change from the heat of the plains when I first began to decline.
After my return to Burma, I determined to find such a place in Burma,
if possible.
The first intimation of an accessible place came to me on a visit
to Tomgoo, where a member of my Church lived. His name was D.
Souza, a pensioner of the Indian Survey Department of the
Government. As this good brother was closing his work prior to
retiring from the service, he came to survey Thandaung, a hill
twenty-three miles northeast of Tomgoo, the head of the district and
a town on the railway. Thandaung had been an experimental garden
under the Forestry Department of the Government in the seventies,
where cinchona cultivation had been undertaken, also tea and coffee
had been planted. A school had been established at Tomgoo,
intended to teach the Karens how to grow these products. Later the
school was closed, and the cultivation on the hills abandoned. At that
time Tomgoo was the military outpost, and the authorities built a road
to Thandaung, and experiments with the place as a hill station for
their soldiers were made. When Upper Burma was annexed in 1885,
there was a great rush to Mandalay, and later to regions beyond,
where in the regions of Upper Burma various attempts to open
military hill stations were made. Thandaung was abandoned, but not
till records had been made very favorable to the place as a
sanitarium for Europeans. This record did good service for us when
we came to reinspect these hills.
Mr. D. Souza secured the most of the area of the old cantonment
and some of the buildings, with a view of making a large coffee
plantation. He had begun operations early in 1893, and I visited the
place first in June of that year. For four years I made frequent visits
during different months of the year to test the climate thoroughly. I
found the climate in delightful contrast with the plains at all times,
and surprisingly invigorating during most of the year. In this
investigation I was much aided by my former sojourn in three of the
hill stations of India—Almora, Naini Tal, and Mussoorie. It has the
altitude of the first and a cooler temperature during the hottest
weather than either of the three, while from November to May there
is no fog and no rain.
I was convinced that this most accessible hill in Burma would
serve admirably for our double need; a location for our industrial
plans, for our Orphanage, and a resort for tired missionaries.
By a vote of the Bengal-Burma Conference, I was instructed to
apply for land for the enterprise. This Conference authority was
sought because it was a good thing to be “regular” in a new
undertaking, and to have the moral support of the Conference when
the difficult places in working out the new scheme were reached. I
learned afterward that a good-natured brother remarked, “O yes,
vote him the authority to go ahead; he can only fail anyway.” The
Government gave us a lease of one hundred acres of land for the
new undertaking, and preparations were begun to move the
Orphanage, together with the superintendent and my own family, to
this hill. But positive authority to go to our new location was given at
the Conference session in February of 1897. It required much haste
to close up affairs in Rangoon connected with the Orphanage, and
make the move.
Before we actually took the train we allowed all the children
whose relations were unwilling to have them go with us into this new
location and untried plan to depart from the school. Nearly a dozen
left us. People whose children had been fed and clothed and
schooled for years for nothing were entirely unwilling to have them
go into the new location, where they were to learn to work as well as
to eat, and to a small extent work for what they ate. We yielded to
them, being conscious all the time of the ingratitude displayed for
years of care of their children. Indeed, it is the legitimate fruit of a
system that gives everything to dependent people and requires no
service in return, that they should come to take your service and
care as a right, without even a grateful acknowledgment for favors.
There are cases where recipients of free care have taken the
position that they were conferring a favor on the missionaries by
remaining under their protection and care.
The experimental cinchona garden had grown up in a young
forest during the years since the Forestry Department had
abandoned it. The roads were all overgrown with rank jungle. We
had a small space cleared and a hut erected, made of bamboo mats,
and supported on bamboo poles with split bamboo used as tiles
folded over each other for a roof. The floor was two feet from the
ground, and consisted of split bamboos spread out flat and laid on
bamboo poles. This hut was expected to protect us only during the
month of April, at the end of which the rains begin. We arrived at
Thandaung on March 24th, and took up our abode in the primitive
domicile. The whole structure cost thirty dollars, and thirty-five
people moved into it, Miss Perkins, the principal of the Orphanage,
and the writer and his family included. This furnished us house room
at a cost of less than a dollar each.
This frail shelter was only intended to serve as a camping-place
for five weeks at the longest. I had planned for a better house than
this, and a month earlier I had given the contract for the preliminary
work of cutting and dragging timber for the framework, thinking it
would be possible to secure some kind of permanent shelter early in
the rains. It is true this more substantial building would have to be
limited to what could be built for three hundred dollars, as that was
all we had in sight for this new enterprise.
When we arrived on the mountain I found the Karens, who had
agreed to do the work of cutting and dragging timber, had failed us
entirely. But the tropical rains did not fail. The monsoon is always on
time in Lower Burma. With the first downpour all hope of building
operations was at an end.
In consequence we went into the long monsoon in this
temporary inclosure, by courtesy called a house. We improved the
shelter by laying some sheets of corrugated iron on the roof, and
weighting them down with poles. In this house we kept school, had
our sleeping apartments, and did the cooking and baking for this
large family. At first boys and girls were rebellious against assisting
in household work, and one girl ran away twice, all the twenty-three
miles to the railway. The second time we sent her permanently to her
relatives. But in good time much advance in orderly housekeeping
was made. Had meddlesome people not followed us into even this
isolated place, the work of training would have been much easier.
Work for the boys was begun also. They cut the wood, carried the
water, and milked cows; also cultivated vegetables, and we planted
some eight thousand coffee trees the first year. It was the intention to
make coffee-growing a basis for self-support. The coffee the forestry
officers had planted twenty years before was growing finely, and was
of the best quality. As we did our own work, it would seem an easy
matter to secure our own support by this coffee cultivation alone.
There were other industries projected also.
During all the months of the first rains the health of our little
colony was excellent. There was not one but what received a toning
up by the cooler atmosphere, mountain air, and healthful work. This
was a great cheer to us all, and was the first step toward making
Thandaung known favorably for a hill station.
Thandaung itself is a charming locality. The mountain chain, or
ranges, “Karen hills,” as they are called, of which the ridge known as
“Thandaung” (iron mountain) is a part, cover a very large area,
running from the Malay peninsula to China, and from fifty to one
hundred and fifty miles wide. The highest elevations are nine or ten
thousand feet, but most of the ridges and plateaus rise no higher
than three to five thousand feet. The scenery is magnificent and
varied in character. Looking westward from our school, the mountain
drops away at an angle of about fifty-five degrees into a deep valley,
down which the Pa Thi Chang stream runs in a succession of
cataracts. Then the hills rise again, forming a vast amphitheater.
Standing on the site of our school, this splendid view is constantly
before us. Looking beyond the lower hills, the view widens until the
whole of the Sitiang Valley, with its winding river and broad lakes,
light up the scenery with life. Beyond this plain rise in succession
three ranges of the low Pegu Hills, the intervening valleys but dimly
defined, while beyond all these there is a smoky depression
indicating the great valley of the Irrawaddy River. Beyond this again,
on the farthest horizon, are seen the rounded ridges of the Arracan
Hills, about one hundred and twenty miles from Thandaung. In all
this vast expanse of mountain, valley, and plain there is not one
barren rood of earth. Mountains and plains, where not recently
cleared, are covered with a tropical forest. Where there are
cultivated fields, they are matted with luxuriant green of growing rice,
or yellow with the ripened crop. This stretch of deep-green verdure
under a tropical sun throws on the vision a combination of coloring
that gives the place a “charm all its own,” as one admiring visitor
declared. When the rains have washed the atmosphere clear of dust,
the view is very clear. Houses in Tomgoo, twenty-three miles away,
are very clearly seen. The great oil-trees on the plains, some
specimens of which are left standing where a great forest has been
cut away, lift their straight gray trunks a hundred and fifty feet to the
first limb, and above this hold a majestic crown. Often have I seen,
under the reflected rays of the morning sun, those trunks of trees
defined like so many giant pencils. Yet they are twelve to fourteen
miles away. To the north and south the view is over well-rounded
hills and ridges for sixty to seventy-five miles. But it is to the east we
turn for the sublimest scenery. A little over a mile from the school a
peak rises above the surrounding heights. It is called Thandaung
Ghyi, meaning the greatest Thandaung. Climbing up the forest path,
and finally scaling a sharp and rocky height, we stand on the top,
only a rod across. From here all the western view, also north and
south, is taken. Toward the east an entirely new arrangement of the
hills is made. From where you stand there is a precipitous descent of
nearly three thousand feet into a basin fifty miles across, rimmed on
the east by a great ridge with a culminating peak called Nattaung, or
Spirit Mountain, nine thousand feet high. The Bre Hills, where the
wild Karens live, join this ridge, and the two curve until they complete
the opposite border of the basin. Never have I been able to look on
the sublime ranges of mountains and picturesque plains over this
sweep of two hundred miles of Burma’s varied surface, without a
profound sense of awe and wonder. It is so wonderful that it grows
on one, though seen daily for years.
Miss Perkins and Group of Girls, Thandaung.
Once I went with a friend to Thandaung early on a January

morning. This is the season when fogs hang heavily over the plains
and reach high up the mountain valleys; but our mountain heights
are above the fogs, in perpetual sunshine. When we reached the top
of Thandaung Ghyi an unexpected view delighted our eyes. The
great basin to the east was filled with a dense fog, and we were
looking down upon it as it floated like a great gray sea three
thousand feet below. The lower mountains here and there lifted
above the fog, and their wooded tops made beautiful islands in the
sea of vapor. The sun was shining from the opposite side, and the
full flood of reflected glory fell upon our eyes.
At another time, accompanying a Government official, I went up
to get this view. The rains had not yet ceased, but were dying away.
We hoped to reach the top before the daily storm came on. We took
this chance, as the views are the most glorious after the rains have
swept the sky of every speck of dust. But the rains beat us, and we
were drenched, while the mountain was buried in the clouds. After
two hours we were growing cold, and were about to give up the
object for which we came. Lingering a last moment, I thought I saw a
rift in the clouds, and then the streak of light broadened, the rain
grew less, the darkness lifted, and a field of blue appeared, the sun
shone through the falling rain, and suddenly all the basin below, and
old Nattaung, rising above, appeared to our entranced vision! All the
heightened coloring was intensified by our position under the
shadow of the retreating cloud. Eyes may hardly hope to see a more
wonderful vision of mountain scenery than we beheld as this vision
was slowly borne from the rift in that retreating storm.
Our new enterprise was planted under such conditions and amid
such scenes as these. While it was a discouraging task, a daily view
of the mountains round about us drove away many an occasion of
low spirits. Taken all together, we in time became a happy family,
sharing a common task. During this first monsoon our frail house
several times gave way in floor, roof, or wall; but we suffered no
serious harm. In September, as the sun was occasionally breaking
through the clouds, and we were wondering what move we would
make for a better habitation, a telegram came from Bishop Thoburn,
which read, “God has sent you a thousand dollars for a house.” If the
heavens had opened suddenly, and the money had dropped into our
upturned hands, it could hardly have been more really a providential
gift in our extreme need. No wonder we all rejoiced aloud! Later a
letter came, telling us that a good woman who had come from
Scotland to India to visit missions, and having brought considerable
money with her to give to mission institutions, had been in
conference with Bishop and Mrs. Thoburn, and as a result of a
canvass of all the many worthy objects in which a great mission is
fostering, she chose this Thandaung school as the first to receive her
favor. She approved the undertaking, and gave a thousand dollars to
erect a building for the school. No wonder the bishop could telegraph
that God had sent the help. This was only the beginning of the
beneficence of this good woman; and the strange thing was that she
had no acquaintance with Methodists, and had been trained in a
Church of quite opposite teaching and polity from ours.
The building of our first house deserves mention. The logs were
cut from the forest and dragged to a sawpit and sawed by hand by
Burmese sawyers, in the old style of one man above and one man
under the log. This was slow and crude work; but it was the only way
to get building material. The framework was built on posts set in the
ground, as has been the universal custom in the construction of
wooden houses in Burma. The iron for the roof had to be brought
from Rangoon by rail to Tomgoo, and from there to the mountain top,
by carts and coolies. This pioneer work took time and the most
constant supervision. The number and character of men that the
missionary has to work with, as well as the mixed character of the
population of Burma, may be understood from the following account:
I bought the iron of a Scotchman, who imported it from Germany. It
was delivered to a Eurasian station master, aided by a Bengali clerk.
The railroad that carried it is owned by the Government, but
managed by the Rothschilds. The iron was delivered at Tomgoo by a
Eurasian station master, aided by a Hindu clerk from Madras, and
another a Mohammedan from Upper India. A Tamil cart-man carried
it to the Sitiang River, where a Bengali Mohammedan carried it over
the ferry. A Telegu cart man hauled it to the foot of the hills. Shan
coolies carried it up to Thandaung, where Burmese carpenters put it
on the house with nails that I bought of a Chinaman, who had
imported them from America. The logs of the house had been cut
from the forest by Karens, and drawn to the sawpit by a Siamese
elephant! The missionary had the simple duty of making all the
connections and keeping the iron moving to its destination.
But we were needing the new house badly before we got it. Part
of the roof was nailed on, the frame completed, but only a very little
of the plank walls begun, when our old hut collapsed entirely. We
had often patched the rotting bamboos, but as the monsoon passed
away the east wind, as usual on those hills, began to blow with great
force, and the frail walls repeatedly gave way before it, and finally
one morning the entire roof and sides were blown away. A very
wonderful providence was manifested, in that no one of our large
family was hurt. Most of the smaller children had been romping on
the east side of the house, and the gale of wind was blowing from
the east. In their play they suddenly ran down the path fifty yards or
so from the house. In that instant the roof and poles that held it down
were lifted and hurled upon the place where they had been playing
the moment before. The loose pieces of corrugated iron cut the air
like swords, and some of them were carried far down the mountain
side, which falls in precipitous descent from that point. Had the
children not been moved away for that moment by the unseen hand
of God, they must have been cruelly hurt. As it was they were out of
danger, while those of us that were in the collapsed house suffered
no harm. This is but one of many indications which we had of the
kindly Providence in all our pioneering. For nearly three years from
the beginning of this work, there was not a case of serious sickness
nor an injury of consequence by any accident suffered by any of our
little colony.
But as our old hut was gone beyond repair or reconstruction, and
as the wind was now cold, for it was November, the matter of
providing shelter became a serious matter. The frame of our new
house was completed, and a part of the roof was on, also a few
planks nailed upright at one corner. Taking this beginning as a
starting, we inclosed a part of the space of the building by bamboo
mats, laid a little flooring temporarily, and then, having divided this
into two rooms, we moved into our new quarters. The workmen went
right on with the construction of the house. We lived in the house
while it was being builded. When completed, though built of
unseasoned wood, poorly sawed and roughly put together, it was a
palace compared with what we had before, and indeed it continues
to this day to do very good service.
First Permanent Building on Thandaung
About the time the house was completed, Miss Bellingham, the
generous donor of the thousand dollars, came to Burma to see what
use we had made of the money. She spent a week on Thandaung, to
our great delight and hers. She consented that the building might
bear her name, and we have since called it “Bellingham Home.”
Shortly after we began operations on this hill, public interest in
the place began to be shown. I wrote some letters to the Rangoon
papers, and visitors did likewise. The advantages of the place were
laid before the Government. Officials began to come up on tours of
inspection. The place grew in favor, and it was planned to give
Government sanction to making it into a station. A new road up the
mountain, giving a better grade than the old road, and the cart road
across the plain was metalled. The old travelers’ bungalow on the
hill, that had fallen into decay since the military left the place, was
rebuilt. So the improvement goes on till now. The latest plan
contemplates a cart road running entirely up the mountain, and the
survey of the whole hill into building sites. There is every promise of
this becoming the favorite resort in Burma for the people who seek a
change from the heat of the plains.
In the meantime the scheme has had a good degree of
prosperity, in spite of the fact that it was pioneer in character and
location. The irresponsible gossips continue to attack it, the fearful in
heart who love their bondage to the old order still stand agape as
they see the school continue on its way. The people who have been
beating their way through the world still cry it down. But an
increasing number of people who believe in self-dependence, and
the character it develops, are in great sympathy with this work. Some
who can pay full boarding fees send their children to us. They have
adopted with us the theory that this self-help is to be accepted as a
necessary part of a well-appointed system of education.
There has been a specially significant growth in usefulness
among the girls. They have learned to bake excellent bread, cook
and serve a variety of food in a cleanly and orderly manner, and to
keep the entire house in good taste and comfort. This is realized as
a great accomplishment when one has seen the slovenly, untidy
houses commonly found where the woman in the house does not do
anything to keep the house in order herself, and counts it impossible
that she should do what she chooses to call “coolie’s work.” A
woman like this would not know enough even to instruct good
servants in keeping the house, much less the worthless servants she
can ill afford to keep, whose only qualification is that they are as
incompetent as servants as their mistress is as head of the
establishment. Yet almost universally such women would prefer to
exist in a hovel, and give orders to a miserable servant, rather than
have a decent abode, if they had to sweep, scrub, or dust it with their
own hands. In contrast to these are the girls trained in our industrial
school. They can do all things necessary to keeping a house, and
have almost forgotten that there are any servants in the world. They
have done all this, and at the same time they have been in school,
doing as good work as girls in other schools, where they depend on
servants for even buttoning their clothes.
Our girls are self-respecting young women, far beyond what they
could have been had they not received the advantages in character
that come from self-help in ordinary daily tasks.
The boys have generally profited by the outdoor work. Having
nothing to begin with, it has not been possible as yet to organize the
outdoor work as that within doors. Plans are under way, however, to
develop this branch of the school, hoping for a large industrial plant.
Enough has been done in these four years greatly to encourage
those of us who have sacrificed something in planning and carrying
forward this new feature of industrial mission work. There is to-day
more material advantage in this plant than can be shown in any
institution anywhere that I have been for the money invested. More
has been done in direct school work, for the money invested, than in
almost all the English schools with which I am acquainted. The effect
of the work on the boys and girls under our care has exceeded our
highest hopes. I am sure not one of us would be willing to go back to
the old order of Orphanages. The boys and girls themselves do not
want to return to the old order. The school has met with a degree of
favor from those whose judgment is counted of the highest value to
us, by reason of the fact that they have put money into the plant
under the old order and the new also, that we hardly dared to hope
for. We have also received a bequest of seventeen hundred dollars
with which we have put up a second building. The patronage of the
school by people of means and social standing is such as to
encourage us much. It reveals the fact that the school meets a want
felt most by the people who make a financial success of life, but see
that self-help should be taught to every child regardless of financial
circumstances. These people believe that indolence, dependence,
and slovenly habits are a disgrace, and honest work in all things is
honorable.
Miss Perkins, now in the eleventh year of her continuous service
on the field, has carried on this work for more than a year, being
aided by Miss Rigby, who went to her aid in 1900.
This industrial school was founded to reteach the truth long since
forgotten in Asia that all kinds of household and manual toil are
respectable. The Lord himself was a carpenter, and washed the feet
of his disciples, which many of those who bear his name would be
ashamed to do. The school has run four years without a servant, and
is stronger than when it began. In this it is the only institution among
Europeans in all Asia that is so managed. It is absolutely unique in
this. It promises much usefulness and a large growth. But if it were
closed up to-morrow, it would still have proved by four successful
years that such a plan is possible of successful operation even in
Asia.
While it is not directly a part of mission enterprise, it may be of
interest to some reader to have some account of experiences and
observations in a Burma forest. Some such experiences came to me
in connection with life on and about Thandaung. Nearly the entire
distance from Tomgoo to Thandaung is through a forest reserve of
the Government. Several miles of this forest are made up of the
great trees before mentioned. One variety produces an oil used in
Europe for making varnish. The method of extracting this oil is very
curious. A deep cut is made in the tree near the ground, and in this
cut a fire is built and kept burning until the tree is blackened ten feet
or more from the ground. Then the coals are taken out of the cut,
which has become a sort of cup, into which the oil oozes from the
wound made by the fire on the tender tree. It seems almost cruel to
treat the giant trees in this way. It is astonishing that they survive and
heal over the great blackened scars left on their sides.
Another remarkable thing observed in these forests is the growth
of notable vines and parasites. Here is to be seen a great vine, like
half a dozen grape-vines joined together, climbing high round and
into these splendid trees. The trunk is usually not large, though so
tall. Then high up on this tree a spore of the peepul-tree finds a
lodgment, and sprouts, the leaf upward, the root running downward,
hugging close to the tree as if drawing life from the trunk. Sometimes
the young growth starts a hundred feet from the ground. As its main
root descends it throws outside roots which encircle the tree, and
these roots branch again so the whole trunk is soon inclosed in a
great net, ever tightening. Here is seen a very strange thing. These
roots do not overlap, but grow right into each other when they come
in contact, and the union is made without a trace or scar. As these
meshes of the living net grow, they tighten into a hug that kills, first
the vine and then the tree. Each in turn is devoured by the great
parasite. Its net meantime becomes a solid wooden shell, reaching
to the ground and lifting its crown high among the other giants; a tree
made great by the death of two others; a tree and vine, each
seemingly having as much right to live as this parasite that preys on
other forest life.
Another singular circumstance annually occurs in the forest.
About the end of January a species of great bees, as large as the
American hornet, come from migrations, nobody knows where, and
rest upon the under side of the branches in the crowns of these great
monarchs of the forest, which sometimes rise two hundred feet from
the ground. About this time some varieties of these trees are in
heavy bloom, and no doubt it is this which brings the bees. They
locate on only one or two kinds of trees, and at once begin to build
honeycombs, suspending them from the under side of the limb. They
multiply rapidly, and by March there are sometimes as many as
twenty to thirty swarms on a tree. The honeycombs are sometimes
three feet long, and hang perpendicularly a foot and a half. The
study of these bees is very interesting. They build on the same trees
from year to year.
But the most impressive fact is to observe the method of
collecting the honey. The trees are perfectly smooth, and are often
without a limb for one hundred and fifty feet. The Karens usually
collect the honey, and the Burmese dealers come to the camps to
buy it when first secured, and take much of it away to the towns.
How do they get the honey? The Karens climb up these bare trunks.
But how? Some of them are seven feet thick, and can not be
grasped in a man’s arms so as to enable him to climb. The daring
man drives thin bamboo pegs into the bark of the tree, and goes up
on these. More, he drives in the pegs as he climbs! They are about
eight inches long outside of the small portion imbedded in the bark,
and twenty-two inches apart. So the climber, beginning at the
ground, can only place two or three pegs before he begins his
ascent. In all this perilous climb he never has the use of more than
two of these short projections at once. On these he clings with feet
and legs while he must use both hands in driving a new one. To get
the honey, he must wait till night, and then with material for a torch, a
vessel for the honey, and a rope to lower it, he climbs up into the
darkness and out onto the great branches, where with lighted torch
he drives the bees away and cuts off the well-filled honeycomb, and
lowers it to others on the ground. In this manner he takes all the
honey from a tree. A more daring feat for a small return can hardly
be imagined. And nerves of steadier poise are required to prevent
the destruction of the climber. He receives a dollar and a half for
clearing one tree. Surely a life is regarded of little value among these
people.
CHAPTER XVI
The Present Situation in Missions
T HE first century of modern missions has closed under

circumstances of great encouragement, not without its element
of deep solicitude. The last ten or fifteen years have brought to the
home Church the report of more triumphs of the gospel than any like
period since the days of the apostles. All lands are open, or are
being opened, to the missionary. Converts are coming by the tens of
thousands annually into our mission Churches, where even a quarter
of a century ago the same missions would have been content with
scores. Missionaries formerly had only those difficulties to adjust
which met the little band of converts, while to-day they have the
problem of the rapidly-growing Church, so recently gathered out of
heathenism.
China has had an upheaval; but all missionaries believe the
future of the Chinese missions is bright with hope. The martyrdom of
the missionaries and the Chinese converts has been as heroic as
any in Christian annals. Whatever the Chinaman may or may not be
generally, as a Christian he has proven himself worthy. The
persecuted young Church will be worthy of the millions of converts
that are to be gathered in when the country has been settled again.
In Southern Asia there has been the famine, far more terrible in
its consequences than the mobs and wars in China. But the famine
has been greatly relieved, and the impress of Christianity and
civilization relieving its worst distress has been wholly good. Many
thousands of converts are presenting themselves to the Church.
Baptisms were discontinued in the famine districts during the year of
greatest distress. But since the famine has ended, we hear of two
conservative brethren baptizing eighteen hundred in three days in
Gujarat, with the prospect of eight or ten thousand others coming
into the Christian community after them in that district alone.
All over the vast Indian field people hitherto counted difficult of
access are ready to listen to the gospel. The Burmese were counted,
until recently, so fortified in their Buddhism that they could not be
induced to accept the gospel; but we find it is not so now. One
missionary, new to the field too, baptized more than one hundred last
year, and he might easily have added many more if he had been
properly supported. What could not a mission, aggressive and large
enough to have momentum, do? It would be easy to add to the
young Church in Southern Asia, being gathered by Methodism,
twenty-five thousand converts annually, if we could be re-enforced
only slightly. Yet, as it is, we must keep accessible people waiting for
years till we can receive them.
There is just now an important movement going on in far away
Borneo, the Southern limit of this vast field. There has recently been
established a colony of Chinese Christian immigrants in the island.
Bishop Warne visited them, and placed a preacher in charge. They
are immigrants from Southern China. Other Christians will follow
these pioneers. They are in immediate contact with the Dyaks, head
hunters of the island, and must have much to do in influencing and
probably beginning a work of conversion among these savages of
the Borneo jungle.
All eyes are upon the Philippine Islands, where a new
reformation appears to be going on. Thousands of Catholics, who
have never known the comfort of a pure, simple faith, nor the joy of
reading the Word of God, are crying out for the full gospel light. They
are appealing to the Protestant missionaries for instruction, and they
are being led to a purer faith.
All this array of current mission facts declares that God is owning
his messengers in every land; that he is fairly crowding success on
to the missionaries, to cheer them and quicken the Church in home
lands into something of a true conception of the magnitude and
urgency of his plans for giving the gospel to every creature, and to lift
the age-long night from the Christless nations.
Thus success of missions throws a great burden of work and
responsibility upon the missionaries at the front. It can hardly be
understood in America. In the home land most pastors have
Churches, the whole machinery of which has long been in working
order, and they pursue that work along well-established lines. Their
entire surroundings are of, or are influenced by, the Christian
Church, and at least a Christianized civilization. The pastor is not
required to go outside of the well-known methods of carrying on our
Church work.
In the foreign field the contrary is the case. The missionary is
compelled to be a pioneer in methods of work. He is against a living
wall of idolatrous humanity, and he often feels very sorely the lack of
human support and sympathy. He has to carry the finances of the
mission as well. Oftentimes he is the only resource the mission
enterprise has. In the Methodist mission in Southern Asia more
property has been secured by the unaided missionary than through
Missionary Societies. In addition to all the burdens of a surrounding
heathenism and of mission business, the missionary has charge of
more Church members than the average pastor at home. In the
Methodist Episcopal Missions of Southern Asia the members of
Annual Conferences, including missionaries and native members,
have more than twice as many Church members to care for, per
man, than the pastors at home, the average being taken in both
cases.
The greatest need of every mission with which the writer is
acquainted, and pre-eminently so in the Methodist Episcopal
Mission, is more well-equipped missionaries. Yet this is exactly what
we can not get. We can only hope that we can maintain about the
number of missionaries on the whole field which we now have. This
means if there is any extension of the field so as to require
missionaries in new places, they must be thinned out in the older
parts of the mission. The Church has candidates for the foreign field,
but the Missionary Society has no money to send them. Recently
some of the finest candidates have been refused for the lack of
money for their support, while the missionaries on the field are fairly
staggering under the load they carry, hoping for delayed re-

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Karl Barth's Moral Thought 1st Edition

Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth Barth

Karl Barth: A Life in Conflict Christiane Tietz

The Concept of the Individual in the Thought of Karl

Escaping Valentine’s Day Barth

The Moral Foundations of Parenthood Joseph Millum

Venomous Karl Hill

Fury Karl Hill

Unleashed Karl Hill

The series presents discussions on topics of general concern to Christian Ethics,

This book presents Karl Barth’s theological ethics as an account of morally

moral norms are typically understood in moral philosophy. Accordingly, it

1 CD II/2, pp. 513–15. 2 CD II/2, p. 527.

rational moral law.3 By the eighteenth century, however, philosophical

6 CD II/2, p. 542/KD II/2, p. 603 [emphases in German original].

claim of moral philosophy to independence of theology is unlikely to be

edited by Jürgen Boomgaarden and Martin Leiner (Herder-­Verlag, 2014),

2 Karl Barth ’ s Moral Thought

The Subject Matter of Theological Ethics

Karl Barth ’ s Theological Ethics 3

himself ours . . . . He is for us in all his deity. Although he could be without

6 CD II/2, p. 557. 7 CD II/2, p. 596.

4 Karl Barth ’ s Moral Thought

God’s Command as Requirement

9 CD II/2, pp. 539f. 10 CD II/2, p. 547. 11 CD II/2, pp. 538f.

Karl Barth ’ s Theological Ethics 5

Human Action as Correspondence to Grace

12 CD II/2, p. 543/KD II/2, p. 603. 13 CD II/2, pp. 512, 566f.

6 Karl Barth ’ s Moral Thought

Karl Barth ’ s Theological Ethics 7

Barth’s understanding of our action as correspondence to God’s action in

General and Special Ethics

8 Karl Barth ’ s Moral Thought

22 CD II/2, p. 546. 23 CD III/4, p. 4. 24 CD III/4, p. 5.

Karl Barth ’ s Theological Ethics 9

of God is an event,” not establishing that “there is [es gibt] a command of

26 CD II/2, p. 548. 27 CD III/1 p. 43. 28 CD III/4, pp. 26–31.

10 Karl Barth ’ s Moral Thought

Grace, Command, and Creation

According to Barth, then, God’s grace to us in Jesus Christ is the norm of

29 CD III/4, pp. 30f.

Karl Barth ’ s Theological Ethics 11

30 CD III/4, p. 3. 31 CD III/4, pp. 38–43.

12 Karl Barth ’ s Moral Thought

Creation as External Ground of the Covenant

32 CD III/4, p. 39. 33 CD III/1, pp. 42, 44.

Karl Barth ’ s Theological Ethics 13

14 Karl Barth ’ s Moral Thought

37 As such, anthropology is determined by Christology. Just as Jesus’ “being [Sein] as a man

Karl Barth ’ s Theological Ethics 15

16 Karl Barth ’ s Moral Thought

Covenant as Internal Ground of Creation

Karl Barth ’ s Theological Ethics 17

the alleged requisites of these forms or structures of human life in society.

18 Karl Barth ’ s Moral Thought

Karl Barth ’ s Theological Ethics 19

47 CD III/4, pp. 29f. (italics added). 48 CD III/4, p. 22.

20 Karl Barth ’ s Moral Thought

50 CD III/4, p. 129. 51 CD III/4, p. 211.

Karl Barth ’ s Theological Ethics 21

of our creaturely nature, namely, relationality, body-­soul composition, and

22 Karl Barth ’ s Moral Thought

Karl Barth ’ s Theological Ethics 23

edited by Jürgen Boomgaarden and Martin Leiner (Herder-Verlag, 2014),

of our creaturely nature, namely, relationality, body-soul composition, and