The Eschatological Theology Of Karl Barth

We have seen, in our examination of his theology of Reconciliation, how confused and contradictory Barth can be at times. This seems inevitable when a man takes on every convention, advances abstract notions and tries to harmonize them with the skeleton of orthodoxy. One of the major problems, in trying to understand Barth and be fair to him, is that he uses orthodox terms but seldom has orthodox doctrines in mind. Barth’s theology of eschatology, while it is no less abstract and esoteric, does not seem to be as syncretic.

It is really Barth’s idea of where and how it will all end that has dominated his thinking from the beginning. His notions about creation are in a sense preludious to the things he has in mind to say about the end. This comes as no surprise since Barth has said all along that eschatology should not be an ending tacked onto a work, but that it should be indigenous to our whole meditation and conclusion about the gospel.

We will not try to explain how Barth’s eschatology came into being. But we do know that Barth did not set out with the eschatology that he ended up with. It was he himself who later disagreed with views that he had advanced in his earlier commentary on Romans[1]. In Romans, Barth resorted to the more conventional view that eternity had boundaries and limits and that somehow time was involved. Barth later felt that this mistaken notion had kept him from fully understanding and developing scriptures that stress an unending, undefined, timeless line into the future. It is possible to see here that Barth was reacting to some of the Platonic, Gnostic and Eastern elements that had found their way into the thinking of the Church through Origenism and Thomism. It is unfortunate that Barth could not escape the philosophical creation of an immortal soul in natural man without throwing the baby out with the bath water. His cryptic comment in his Romans commentary that Christianity which was not “absolutely” eschatological had “absolutely” nothing to do with Christianity, had some merit (Barth is commenting) in the light of history, psychology and immanence. But Barth later felt that he had laid too much stress on the notion of “supra-temporalness” and not enough on the idea of an actual “end.”[2] It is God’s eternity that gives meaning to time and history, and God’s eternity means an end, not a continuation. Here we see the heart of Barth’s eschatological theology — “end versus continuation” — begin to take shape. Time is not an empty, passing shell. God has condemned it and brought it into judgment, but that neither strips it of its meaning nor its content. “In terms of its beginning and its end, it is filled and meaningful because of the real and therefore comforting and commanding presence of God.”[3] No one should look at eternity as “a gray and monotonous sea.”[4] It is interconnected with God’s glory which, by the mandates of his eternal counsel, results in glorification.[5] This glory expresses itself by reacting to God’s action (a reacting which God Himself has called for), which is the praise of His creature.[6] This praise is for the salvation provided by God through Jesus Christ.[7] This praise presently is expressed “in the form of the Church, the proclamation, faith, confession, theology and prayer.”[8] Yet this “temporal form,” real and actual though it be now, must someday give way to a future model, “which we now await and must await here.”[9]

Thus the movement is from glory to glorification and from thanksgiving to praise as we go from time to eternity. In this methodology, God’s glory returns to Himself. Man’s destiny lies in praising the Creator. This is the work for which God purposed him.[10]

This is the uneasy theological ground beneath our feet when we walk with Barth through the field of his eschatology.

The question that we must ask is, how does Barth view man as to his beginning, his purpose and his future? In what form does Barth see future man when he talks about the triumph of life over death?[11] Is there a meaning here that has reality and substance, or is Barth dealing in abstractions altogether?

Barth tries to answer by saying that God reveals Jesus Christ as the Lord of time. This seems straightforward enough, but, with Barth, nothing is ever straightforward. He begins the discussion with a contrast between our time and other concepts of time that he calls the “given time,” the “limited time,” the “beginning time” and the “ending time.” It is on Barth’s remarks about the “ending time” that we want to focus to see his eschatology most clearly. Our attention does not go to a discussion of what time now means, what man’s limitations are in the present, or even what death means to natural man. What Barth is interested in is the supernatural appearance of Christ. Barth does not call this the incarnation, and we are eventually led to the unhappy conclusion that Barth does not believe that Christ was God incarnate. But he does call it the miracle of “God with us,” of reconciliation. This rather unconventional language is well suited for what Barth will come to in the end. What does this mean in terms of Barth’s eschatology? We shall see in a moment. But first, and necessarily so, we want to examine Barth’s notion of “ending time.”

To get, if possible, the understanding of what Barth means by “time,” we must review briefly the notion of how and when time began and how that relates to man and his existence, since eschatology and man’s destiny are inseparably related. To Barth, there was a time when we were not yet — just as there shall also be a time when we will not be any more. Natural man, mortality and human life exist between these boundaries — “being-not-yet” and “being-no-longer.” While it is the “being-no-longer” that bears on eschatology, we must look carefully at the beginning and the nature and form of our existence. Barth wants to clearly get the point across that we are not eternal. He feels that he has struck a strong blow by pointing out that we had a beginning time. We emerged from “non-being.” This in itself is not so curious. Was Barth reacting to neo-Platonism? Was he objecting to the notion of pre-existent souls? Was he simply trying to say that there was a day when we were born and came into existence and before that we did not exist? Was he taking issue with the questionable orthodox doctrine that natural man has an immortal soul? The answer is, no, Barth is not saying that, nor anything close to it. To Barth, the notion that there was a time when we were not-yet is abstract, philosophical evidence that there must be a time when we will be no-longer. Do not be lulled into believing that this has any relationship to Conditional Immortality and that we are discussing the fate of the wicked dead. There is no correlation between Barth’s theology and Conditionalism. Barth is talking about the fate of every man and the fact that death is part of the good creation of God and man was created to become extinct. Barth himself explains it this way: “. . . since my very origin I am threatened by nothingness; I stand designated, in a certain sense, as a being which is also able to move forward to nothingness.”[12]

After the event of our origin, or our becoming, we might think that we have entered into our time, or our “room” for existence. But this is not the case. This is not our time. This is the shadow that has been cast over us from the beginning of our being, that we talked about in Barth’s theology of Creation. We spend our life trying to remove this shadow, and this accounts for our preoccupation with an understanding of the past.[13] This preoccupation with history amounts to a “passionate storming of the gates of time as it has taken form in history,” in which man becomes a seeker into the things of the past, and, as a result, learns about “the abyss of the chaos which lies behind him.”[14]

The shadow can only be comprehended in connection with light. “When we ‘began,’ we did not emerge from nothingness and darkness. Our origin does not lie in the chaos. Our ‘beginning’ is from God. He, not the chaos, is the Creator.” Thus, even though our life is limited, we can receive it as a good gift from God. “We would not be creatures, but God Himself, if we were eternal.”[15]

Here we must pause to point out that while Barth may have made a statement concerning natural man that is in some ways acceptable, he apparently has no concept of the new birth where we are born of God, bone of His Bone and Flesh of His flesh from incorruptible seed which lives and abides forever. While we will never be God, in a certain sense we are on a level with God for we have come out of His bowels, children of the Second Adam, no longer the works of His hands, but sired children by the Creator. It is true that there is in the Church much Platonism, Gnosticism, humanism and other thinking by those who refuse to set aside reason and go to the Scriptures for answers. It is also true that Adam’s natural children had a beginning and, if they do not find immortality in Christ, there will come an end-time when they will be no more. But this, unhappily, is not the discussion that Barth is into. He sees no New Birth, no physical resurrection from the grave and no immortality through Christ. Nor does he see, and this is very crucial to Barth’s theological collapse, the depravity of a fallen humanity. To Barth, God never created anything that wasn’t good to begin with. It follows then, since God is God, that it has to stay good until the end. Death cannot be an evil that was never intended. It has to be something that God created with a good purpose. Barth is determined, through his strange and mystic arguments, to find that purpose and explain it.

It is just here that Barth quickens the pace of his efforts to bring his view into the open. The question that he poses puts his proposition in the balances for us. Is the ending time, “when we shall only have been,”[16] a catastrophic fate that falls upon us,” Barth asks, “or is this limitation a part of the good creation which is of God?” The first point of “not-being” is not as important as the “no-longer-being” in grasping this coming end! Does this coming end belong in the theology of the good creation of God, or is it syncretic to think that man, created in the image of God, where everything is very good, could, in the future time, come to an end? Is it permissible and possible, in light of the Scriptures, to view the ending of time as part of the good creation, or is it possible that the Bible is teaching us something wholly different from that which we have heretofore understood? Is there more to death than the inevitable anthropological limitation of natural man? Is it possible that our origin and our destiny are the same, not only in purpose but in kind, in the good plan of God? Can we view death as being given to us by the creative genius of the Good God, as an essential part of what man was and is to be? Must there be a dichotomy here? Does death have to be seen as an intrusive destroyer, an antithesis that has somehow found its way into the good creation?[17] Is death anything other than a menacing and grotesque irony? Does any other view of death have epistemological or noetical meaning that is real? What do words mean if we speak of death as anything other than anti or destructive to that which is good? Even though the Good God allowed death to exist, can it be viewed as anything other than the antithesis of good?[18] Is it in any wise honorable, in a biblical, ethical or intellectual sense, to come to any other conclusion than that death is not a part of the good creation of God? “Is the end of our existence in time not an unequivocal “No” spoken to our created existence, which can only be understood to mean that there is in no sense room for it in a doctrine of God’s creation?”[19]

It would be a mistake, in some ways misleading for those who would understand the man, to see Karl Barth as an explorer, an adventurer and a devil’s advocate, as Origen tried to represent himself in his theology. To comprehend the meaning of Barth’s tortured views, one must understand that Barth is in dead earnest. He is more than a bright student pedagogically contending for a theoretical theology of intrigue. He is in many ways a lost and frightened soul crying out for help. Barth is lost in the deepest and most remote abyss of all — the unbounded cavern of a brilliant, religious, brave, sincere, determined, stubborn, defiant and fruitful mind which has strayed from the simplicity that there is in Christ. It is just here that the real chaos of Barth exists. Barth’s questions may be unenlightened, but they are, so far as we can determine, honest. He argues that our earlier time when we were not-yet is different from our future being-no-longer. Our time of being-no-longer must be seen as different in kind than our never-having-been-as-yet. In that case we truly were-not. But in our ending-time we truly-will-be, though we are-not-any-longer. Empirical death as we observe it and as we know that it will one day enter our own experience is more than a neutral ending to our natural, temporal life. It is not a normal and “natural” going back to the not-being of the past. It is a “return to God!” We are not headed for a state of nothingness; to an empty and neutral[20] “not-being-any-longer.” Our journey is to the living God. In the limitation of our life, we see, symbolically, God’s judgment of our lives.[21] We cannot say that the empirical aspects of death belong to the good creation and to our good human nature. It is, admittedly, a negative, evil power and essence. We cannot be non-committal about this empirical death. It is not something that we just sit back and let happen because it is going to happen anyway. Death happens to us precisely because of our sin and guilt.

How then can we speak of death as a part of the good creation of God? If it is created by God for a good purpose, is it natural? If it is brought on by sin and guilt, isn’t it indeed the curse that brings torment? It is not natural, according to Barth, precisely because it is brought on by sin and guilt and brings misery. If it were natural, sin, and the curse and the judgment that it brings, would intrinsically be denied! Pier’s Plowman was wrong: death is not a gentle brother that brings friendly and kindly relief from misery.[22] Man’s empirical end is not the same as his natural end. In empirical death, man comes to the end of his “untruthful existence.” “Here we confront quite a different matter than when we ask about the meaning of the beginning of our life.”[23] Sin entered the world as an alien power, and death entered the world through sin, according to St. Paul.

Again we are forced to return to the question, how then is death to be viewed as intrinsic to a human nature that came forth from and is a part of the good creation of God? To answer this, Barth returns to his earlier statement that there is more to death than this negative side. There is this negative side, to be sure, but that is by no means all. Remember that Barth has said, empirical death is the sign of judgment. Does this mean that Barth does not believe that empirical death is a real judgment? Exactly so, and in this a great deal of Barth’s eschatology is exposed. Barth explains that Jesus Christ has, on our behalf, entered real judgment. This doctrine has nothing to do with the gospel appeal nor any need for individual decision and commitment, for though Barth denied it vigorously, he was in the truest sense, a Universalist. Christ did this, that is all. We have no vote in the matter as to its effectiveness on behalf of man. But do not get the idea that Barth is talking about a conventional or an orthodox concept of redemption and its results. Far from it. Barth has his own ideas as to what this means.

In terms of Christ and His work, we must go beyond the view of death as the sign of judgment. In His death, we see death as the real and complete judgment in an eternally final sense. Since the death of Christ, man no longer has to think of death in terms of real judgment, and he may not think of death in this way. The question is resolved. Death as real judgment no longer exists.

Empirical death continues to exist for man, but not in the sense of deserved judgment. It exists “only as its sign!”[24] Thus the death of Christ puts our ending-time in a completely new light. The empirical threat of death has been eliminated because Christ has undergone it.[25] Therefore empirical death continues to exist but the threat does not. In the death of Christ, judgment brought on by sin has been executed. In the Old Testament we see the judgment of man because of sin, hanging over the race. But in the midst of the darkness (this would be Barth’s chaos) the light has dawned. “No other man stands in this center and therefore no other stands really in the judgment of God.”[26] Therefore if the Christian sins knowingly, or if the non-Christian (this is Aesopian language for Barth comes fully to the position that the term “non-Christian” has no real content) sins unknowingly, he now stands only under the sign of judgment.[27] Real judgment simply does not exist anymore. Calvary has taken away the sufferings that we deserved and the judgment that would have meted them out. The real judgment that was executed upon Christ stands forever as an eternal and immutable fact.

The real judgment has been borne away by Christ, and this has forever changed the character and meaning of death. It is no longer a judgment, and it never will be again. Therefore it is fundamentally illogical that man should seek consolation in the normalness and the naturalness of death. When we think of death, we should see only the sign: “that utterly dangerous and painful nothingness of our reprobacy before God,” of the wrath and the fury of the law of God which was contrary to us and against us. But we can only do this when we see fully and understand fully the work and the meaning of the cross. Real judgment in all of its fullness was vented out against Him. Now God, who arranged it this way when we were not-yet-being, stands to receive us graciously when we die,[28] being no longer against us and truly for us in every sense of the word, because all judgment to be connected with our dying has forever gone away into nothingness. Now therefore grace, not judgment, characterizes our ending-time. The fact that empirical death is still our mortal boundary is not the significant thing. The light falls on the fact the God of all grace is the boundary of death.[29] Death may indeed be the revelation of the wrath of God. But we need to understand that revelation. It does not reveal the wrath of His judgment against us in death. It shows forth the wrath of His love as manifested in the cross of Christ, whereby, through our death, he takes us to Himself. God’s grace triumphs over death. But it is in this one and only grace — the taking of us into Himself in death — that death is triumphed over.[30] There is no triumph in any other way and there would be no triumph seen in any other understanding. There is no comfort in the sterile notion of immortality alone. The comfort lies in the understanding and realization of life in the midst of death, because the judgment lies behind us. Christ’s death was the reality of the real judgment. Through Christ, a higher Power has saved us from the judgment that we deserved.[31] Barth is focused on this triumph over death, and he wants to say on about it.[32] It became a reality in Christ and was manifested to us by His resurrection. In this way, our death has become part of the past. “When we regard this one Jesus Christ,” he says, “no conception is too bold, too high, too inclusive.”[33] Barth indeed becomes bold. He talks about “the triumphant existence and faithfulness of God.”[34] (If we had the time to digress to Barth’s doctrine of God we would see that he phrase “God’s triumphant existence” is indeed as worrisome as it sounds, but that is another subject.) “The declaration of this victory”[35] took place when God showed Himself during the forty days between the resurrection and the ascension. As inviting as it is, we will resist the temptation to take off down this trail.

Through the consummation of reconciliation and redemption that took place at the resurrection of Christ — this final victory over death as a matter of real judgment — the end of time, the last day, the end of the worlds, the midnight hour which brings in the last day (for individuals and man as a race) has been ushered in. Death has been “robbed of its power.”[36] The day of the revelation of the “conqueror of Golgotha,”[37] and judgment is still future, but it is nonetheless an eternal reality. The present time can be seen as nothing more than an opportunity for repentance and faith. Christ’s death, resurrection and second coming are the rock upon which all that can be said of man, his future, his end and purpose in God rests.[38] To us it is clear that Barth means something quite different from the orthodox doctrines when he speaks of faith and repentance. Again I remind you that Barth comes down on the position that all men will be reconciled (what Barth means by reconciliation) and that all men are good, not evil, because they are a part of the good creation of God.[39]

Barth speaks of an eschatological triumph; what does it mean? Will the Cross, and Christ’s place in the real judgment secure for us a place of continued existence in a real world of the New Creation? Will there be a new creation after the final judgment? Will there be a new life, nature and body for man after his empirical death?[40] Is that which we have received in Christ not an ending-time but a new, successful beginning to counteract the old beginning and succeed where it had failed? In answering this, we come face to face with Barth’s doctrine of eschatology. It consists in the meaning and the answer to the earlier question: is death, in and of itself, apart from the many ideas and avenues connected with it, a part of the good creation of God?

As with the other doctrinal divisions, i.e., Creation, Election and Reconciliation, when Barth reaches the crisis point, his words and thoughts grow vague and are hard to follow precisely, but we will do the best we can.

First of all, we must be clear that Barth sharply opposes the idea of continued existence of human life after death. On that he is not vague. He simply will not hear of it. When the victory that Christ has won ushers in that last day, God shall be all and in all. Then there comes into being a “present without an afterward.”[41] Nothing at all continues beyond that. Nothing more happens forever, once the last trump has sounded. “The hope of the New Testament concerning the beyond of human death is not some sort of changed life which is continued in some sort of unending future. Not this, but the ‘eternalizing’ of our ending life is the content of the New Testament hope.” Our blessed hope is not the extension of our life, it is our life as it has been. The limited life that has been, as we have known it, is eternalized. This is worked out by God in a way that does not result in a future continuation of our finite[42] existence. The limited, finite life that we have known finds its “room” in communion with God.[43] But this is not a communion of individual to individual. It is an internalized communion. We have gone back into God and we are a part of Him. Resurrection from the dead only has meaning and can only be understood in this way.

This notion of “eternalizing” of our “ending-life” and “ending-time” has no precedent or antecedent in any theology that may be called remotely Christian. It is doubtful that it has a close relative in any thought, religious or philosophical.

To understand the meaning and the impact and the startling effect (unorthodox though it is) of Barth’s position, we must again return to a view of man’s “ending-time” as a part of the good creation of God.[44] For all of his talk about “eternalizing,” Barth clearly wants to say that empirical death, finiteness and the limitations or boundaries of man’s human life are intricately interwoven with his theology of the goodness of human nature.[45]

Death is abnormal when seen empirically. Man was born to die, but not as a sinner. Therefore the empirical death of sinful man and the abnormalness of death stand in the same position. Death is “Unnatur”[46] and as such it is our enemy and our ending. But it is just here that the cross and its meaning step in and make their statement. This statement is decisive, conclusive, definitive and eternal. Death was an alien to Christ. His death was not a prearranged destiny (as to His humanity). There was no anthropological imperative in His “ending-time” as there was with other men. He carried this alien away into nothingness voluntarily. Christ revealed to us a humankind who was not subject to an empirical death that was “Unnatur.” That is because His being was not sinful. Therefore we see in Christ, who alone reveals true man to us, that the end of life and the judgment are not one and the same. But only in Christ do we see this. Yet this is not a dilemma because only in Christ do we see true man. It follows then that only in Him do we see what it truly means to be human being and thus the reality of being-human. We are now in a position not only to understand, but to be forced to confess that to view “human mortality as such as purely negative and evil”[47] is a wrong conclusion born of an anthropological misunderstanding. But that which was true of Christ, is not anthropologically true of the rest of us. And so, if we are to stand before God positionally in the grace of Christ, we must have an end. Therefore it is imperative for human beings that “we shall one day die and thus become only a having-been.”[48]

Here the unorthodox nature of Barth’s anthropology has caused him to seriously miss the point of Christ’s vicarious death. The truth is that because Christ stood before God in real judgment and did not have an end, the rest of us can stand before God in the grace of Christ without having an end. In fact, if we are in Christ, it is impossible for us to have an end.

Barth’s anthropology and his eschatology cannot exist apart from his theology of Christ. And it is his Christology that definitively establishes both and resolves them into one. Because of his Christology and soteriology, Barth declares that there is nothing self-evident in the end and the judgment.[49] There are many self-evident conclusions, contrasts and distinctions that we can make. We can easily observe the difference between end and curse; dying and punishment; death and judgment.[50] Barth is very sure that both end and mortality are a part of the good creation of God. “It belongs to the nature of man, it is God’s creation which determined, and to that extent made it good and right, that the existence of man in time should have an end; that man should be mortal. That we shall one day only have-been answers to a law by which we are not necessarily bound, imprisoned and condemned to destruction. Death is not in itself a judgment, nor is it in itself a sign of judgment. Factually, however, it is that.”[51]

Barth’s factual in this citation is empirical death. It has a hidden element which keeps the boundary from becoming threatening. It is the hidden element that belongs to the good creation of God. The boundary (death) is the transition from “being” to “not-being-any-longer.” In this connection, death (the boundary) is the parallel to beginning — the transition from “not-being-yet” to “being.”

From this strange declaration in which Barth thinks he has come down very hard and very clear, he wishes to argue a conclusion. “It is therefore not unnatural but natural for human life to move on to this terminus ad quem[52]. It is natural to ring life out as it was once rung in and therefore it is limited not only at its beginning, but also with respect to its future.”[53]

Thus we see that man does not have a “beyond” per se. But that is not a matter for concern, because he does not need one. “God is his beyond.” Earthly temporalness does not continue beyond death. But this must not be taken to mean that death means that man is finished and that there is no “room” for him or reason for earnest expectation and hope. In his “ending-time” as “having-been” and “not-being-any-longer”, man may not and cannot be seen as “nothing.” Man is indeed something. “He participates in the eternal life of God.”[54] In this participation, man’s “life on this side of death,” his “ending” and “dying life” is glorified.[55]

We are now in as good a position as we will ever be, in the mystical and illusive theology of Karl Barth, to examine the fatal flaw in Barth’s “eschatology.” Over and over again, Barth complains against the notion of “continuation.” He insists that we talk only of man’s life on the mortality side of death. The sum, and the result of man’s finite existence, “beside which and after which he has no other,” is gratitude to God for mercifully saving him from death.[56]

If anyone is inclined to doubt Barth’s commitment to this “non-continuation” doctrine, he has only to consider that Barth’s anthropology, which develops from it,[57] drives him to the conclusion that there is a great deontological issue here. Our lives often lack “urgency” because of our inability to grasp the finality and “not to be continued course” of our existence. This is because we are languishing in the false hope of being freed from the limitations of mortality and for a “beyond” of life. This is an escapist theology. We should have our hope placed solely in the eternal God.[58]

Is there any Biblical basis for this view of human life as a “non--continuation?” Barth claims that there is, but when pressed about it, admits that it only consists in a “narrow line.” The ordinary view of the Scriptures portrays empirical death as the death of fallen sinners under the curse. In that view, death is seen as an enemy, as judgment or as the sign of judgment. “This second aspect”[59] is the common way that the Bible depicts death. However there is another way in which the Bible presents death, that does not simply show the negative side.[60] The Bible does not always speak about the “second death.” There are times when the “sinister guest” is seen in a context which is not friendly but which is nevertheless a natural aspect.[61] Moses and Elijah are cases in point. There was no judgment involved in their transitions from the present time to the “ending-time.” In the end of life, instead of judgment, they found communion with God.[62] The ending of life is not in and of itself a condition of “disorder” but of order. It is not a “chaotic reign of terror,” but a good creation of God. Barth’s commitment to his view is so all pervasive that it colors his exegesis. In Hebrews 9:27, it is written “it is appointed unto all men once to die and after this the judgment” Barth interprets this to mean that dying in itself does not mean judgment. So far from judgment, death is described as a natural happening.[63]

According to Barth, the boundary is endemic to human life because it is a part of the good creation of God. In light of this, perpetuation not only will not but should not be. But Barth’s arcane formulas are so abstract that he not only contradicts himself, but he cannot speak normally without contradiction. Commenting on man’s end, he talks of coexistence with the eternal life of God.[64]

The New Testament Christian is fearless in his journey toward death because he hopes in God and because “in his end he expects to be with Him.” Man rejoices in the fact that he will “definitely be with Him.”[65] What difference Barth intends here between “The New Testament Christian” on the one hand and “man” on the other, or “Fearlessness” on the one hand and “rejoicing” on the other, is by no means clear. One is left with the feeling that Barth’s method here is to dramatize the superiority of his views over those of the Christian Church. But this kind of caprice does not help his position. It is indigenous to his argument that there can be no such divisions in mankind who is not fallen and who is part of the good creation of God.

Such conclusions give us pause, for we very much want to be fair with Barth. His great mind has plucked enough vibrant and harmonious chords that we ponder once again whether we have understood what he is trying to say. There are, distinctly, times when one senses with anticipation that something may be emerging from those dark shadows. But in the end it is Barth himself who puts orthodoxy back in the position of a pervasive skepticism and doubt where his theology is concerned. It is he who syncretically talks of “not-being-any-more” on the one hand and of hope, joy and definitely being with Him on the other. He uses the mystical and illusive term “eternalizing of our finite life” without giving an adequate definition (probably because it is impossible to do so). He talks about the “this-side-of-death,” its importance to ethics and how it would give as a sense of urgency about the life here and now. He talks about how those who believe in a beyond are lulled into complacency. He seems to feel that we should know why the one would be more urgent than the other and in our emotions perhaps we think we do see it, but when the powerful flow of his words subsides and we look at it reflectively, he has not given us a reason why.

If one looks for answers in Barth’s doctrine of providence, he is not helped. Indeed, the darkness thickens. Barth tells us that the hidden providence of God, by which he governs the world, contains certain constant elements. They do not prove that God governs the world, but they function as signs which give that indication. Barth discusses those signs. There is the history of the Sacred Scriptures, the history of the Church, the history of the Jewish Nation and — notice this definition by association — the limitation of our human life.[66] Barth’s “limitation” is epochal in nature. It has the advantage of presenting an “immediate perspicuity.”[67] In Barth’s limitation, finite time, that fixed period from birth to death,[68] is zoomed in and both fast-forwarded and fast-reversed. We then not only understand, but see because we are shown, that this is the “fundamental designation” of our time-of-being-now. This is the sign of God’s government. Notice that our particular period of time is not the real government of God, but the sign of God’s government. Remember that in his anthropology, Barth claims that our limited life is endemic to the good nature of man. Limited life, ending in death, is not an indication that something is wrong, it is a sign that all is well. It is a sign of God’s good government over good man and the good universe. Man’s life has a beginning and an end.[69] In this plan, this design, this good government of God, the two great acts of God are seen: creation and consummation.[70] Without consummation, creation would have neither meaning nor purpose; and without creation, consummation would have neither meaning nor purpose. Here again we are faced with Barth’s “parallel.” Human life is a once-for-all matter, and this once-for-allness has profound meaning: “the eternal oneness of God reflects itself in the small, creaturely once-for-allness of man’s once beginning and once ending life, and who knows whether this life is so small?”[71] So here is Barth, who has said that life came from nothing and is destined to go back to the nothingness of extinction, not as a matter of creation and judgment, but as an anthropological philosophical axiom, now syncretically proclaiming that life may be a lot bigger, more significant, more important and more enduring than you might think. Man in time and history is a drama where, out of decision and calling, we make decisions which are most significant. “An unending history would not be history. The lordship under which we live and the once-for-allness which this lordship gives to our life, see to it that our history remains a real, that it is a beginning and an ending, history.”[72]

This “non-continuation that is at once an eternal continuation” theme permeates all of Barth’s theology. In his doctrine of Preservation, it emerges again. God wills man into being, but permits him to be that for which he was made.[73] This means that man, within the limits that God has set for Him, will “really and actively be and remain before God.”[74] Again the contraction appears, or at least appears to appear. Barth has been toying with us after all and man is going to continue. Ah, but this is only a mirage. It is Barth’s penchant for Aesopian language.

In fact, Barth teaches that the time will come when the whole creation will “only have-been.”[75] When Jesus Christ appears, after time and history and the creation has achieved its assigned goals and reached it ending-time, there will be no more reason, need or excuse for continuation. This is because the meaning of creation will have been fully realized. This “meaning” is germane to Barth’s theology. “The things that have happened as history pursued its course will then happen in a totality as the comprehension of all individual happenings and become definite: the temporal end of the creature beyond which it will no longer be.”[76] And where the creature will no longer be, time as a form of existence will no longer be. But “its preservation by God does not thereby come to an end,” even though this preservation by God is “within the limits of the creature.” Preservation does not end with the end of the creature, even though God took little notice of the creature at the beginning of history, because before creation, when there were no real creatures or creation as yet, God, in His eternal counsels, through Christ, through grace and through His great faithfulness, envisioned the creature. In like manner “His faithfulness remains vouchsafed to the creature also when it has finished its destined course, also then when it will no longer be.”[77] In other words, man’s future is that he exists only in God’s awareness. This is not memory exactly for nothing with God is a looking back into the shadow. With God everything is now. This is not a continuation. It is not an existence. But it is an “eternalizing” and it is a “preservation.”

This parallel that Barth draws between God’s knowledge of what would be in His eternal counsels before He created and God’s knowledge of what has been after the creature is not-any-longer makes it impossible to misunderstand what Barth means, though we would perhaps like to. But Barth would not approve of that. He wants to be taken seriously. He wants us to know where he is coming from and where he is going. He does not want charity from orthodoxy. He wants to be heard and understood (although “understood” may be an inappropriate term to apply Barth’s abstract, mystic, paradoxical visions). There is no continuation beyond this life, but there is standing with God. “Eternal preservation does not mean that a continuation lies before him.”[78] Why should anyone be concerned about this, seeing that it is no longer necessary or meaningful. What would existence be without meaning? The eternal preservation means “positively this — no other possibility remains — that he will eternally be and remain before God.”[79] When everything shall have been, “then he will, in totality of his temporal duration be present before God and for God, so he will be eternally preserved. He will be seen in his greatness and in his lowliness, he will be judged according to his right and according to his wrong, according to his merit and demerit in God’s eyes, but he will also openly participate in the love which God has for him.”[80]

With God, nothing is ever lost, whether it is the color of the sunset, the drum of a hummingbird’s wings, an insect that lives only a few hours or the earliest time in the history of the universe. Most importantly and decisively, nothing in the life of man is ever lost to God. God, who loved and created, will not be solitary in a lonely eternity. He will be together with His creation in its limited duration. “Present before God — in this way the creature will remain.” This is the way it will all come out, come up and come down in the “great rest of God.” This is how the creature is preserved. It is not a preservation in addition to or after our preservation in time. Barth finds this “mystery of preservation” spelled out 26 times in the 136th Psalm, “For His mercy endureth forever.”[81] But the true mystery is how Barth can possibly conclude that this simple call to praise has anything at all to do with his abstract, mystic notions of preservation.

In a manner and temperament which could be defiance, hurt, resentment, revenge or desperation, Barth is fiercely dogmatic that it is his doctrine and his alone which shines with a brighter hope of immortality than all others in “Christendom.” Concerning his vision of the future, he asks, “Cannot the jubilation of the resurrection already now be heard above all the sepulchers and urns and faded memories, wherever the Word that proceeds from this light, the Word of our God, sounds forth and is heard?”[82]

It is not possible to come to a final evaluation of Barth’s theology of Eschatology without taking into account Barth’s theology of the triumph of the end. An analysis of that part of his doctrine was neither contemplated nor included in this series, which was limited in scope and confined to four articles: Barths doctrine of Creation, Barth’s Doctrine of Election, Barth’s Doctrine of Reconciliation and this one on eschatology. But we will attempt a brief summary for the benefit of those who have been expecting it and possibly looking forward to it.

Barth stands in sharp contrast to the majority view of Orthodox Anthropology that the natural soul of man is immortal. For that he is not to be faulted. If one looked for a solid contribution from Barth this might be it. He has taken on the Platonic, Gnostic, Thomistic notions of natural immortality and, if he had confined himself to that, might well have dealt them a fatal blow. But the unfortunate part is that Barth has done this en route to an eschatology, inseparably entwined with his whole theololgy, that is so thoroughly unorthodox as to be worse than Platonism and Thomism. It is eastern mysticism and even partakes of some Hindu thought. Why has this happened to Barth? It is because he has done the very thing that the eastern mystics have done. His thirst for the arcane has driven him along the same dark, vine-covered paths that lead down to murky pools whose banks are strewn with the bones of centuries. These are the stagnant and poisonous waters of the Old Garden, not the Fountain of Life in the New. The leaves of the trees are not for the “healing of the nations,” but the vain attempt to “cover the nakedness” of the mortal soul. He has tried to come to an intellectual, philosophical, mystical solution which limits itself to natural man, mortal life and that which exists between birth and death; or as Barth has often put it, our beginning time when we were being-not-yet and our ending-time when were being-not-any-more. Nor has he relied upon the Bible, though he has made some meek claims at having done so. Clearly Barth has not relied upon the Holy Spirit, since he does not believe in the new birth and the new creation. Barth has tried to build a theology of end time-events, the end itself and that which is beyond death, though Barth refuses to call it “beyond,” with material, information, thought and theology that is limited exclusively, narrowly and deliberately to mortal man and our mortal experiences. His perception of eternal life as being the “eternalizing” of our here and now and God keeping our now in his memory is not only unbiblical and unchristian but it is so abstract that it is illogical and irrational, and it is epistemologically, noetically, ontologically, metaphysically and philosophically dishonest and nonsensical. It is a stretch to call it “of the Christian world of religious thought.” To call it orthodox or Christian is nonsensical and adventuristic at best and downright dishonest and reprehensible at worst.

Barth’s pleas to be regarded as “still orthodox” because of his frail attempts to give the impression of believing in eternal life, while at the same time denying it with his abstract doctrines of “eternalization” and “preservation,” must go unheeded. One can pity Barth, and I personally do, but one cannot excuse him. Unlike the eastern mystics and those from the river cultures, Barth was once orthodox enough to know what he has departed from and what the consequences for the Church are, such as when young men like Dave Hubbard and Dan Fuller are caught in his web.

Barth’s conception of “limitation” is taken fully into his eschatology. This is forbidden territory for orthodox theologians. To try to find a correlation between this doctrine and the orthodox confession of the Church is to deny what Barth has consistently said in all of his doctrines. The “limitation” is central to Barth’s mystic, eastern belief that man, and perhaps God, for all we know, will become extinct and be no more. The tension here with orthodoxy simply cannot be overlooked by anyone who wishes to remain orthodox.

Barth’s anthropology does not, as it sometime would appear, make man out to be central. Like Hinduism, it reduces man to nothingness. It even led Barth himself to cry out one time, “God is everything, man is nothing!” This is not a Christian way of speaking. Anyone who has followed the Bill Moyers series with the depraved and villainous Joseph Campbell will have observed that this mystic abstractionism eventually leads to the conclusion that Kantian phenomenalism is the only truth. Both man and God are nothing, because they exist only in the aggregate of the sensory perceptions of those who believe in them. But the philosophy and religion of parallelism — man’s never-having-been and his-being-not-any-more are identical, God is everywhere so he is nowhere, God is ultimate good so he is ultimate evil, God is everything so He is nothing — can only lead to this phenomenological conclusion. In that regard, Barth stands closer to Campbell than to Augustine.

Anyone who regards Barth’s theology as in any orthodox sense “Christian” simply does not understand the man. It is not possible, for those who follow the biblical testimony, to allow Barth’s shadow of limitation, in the sense of “having-been,” to obscure the truth of communion with God, a physical resurrection in immortality on a new earth in physical, albeit immortal bodies.

And what Bible-believing person with his senses about him can in any small way be convinced that Barth’s strange, confused, contradictory and abstract doctrine of the “eternalized,” “preserved” having-been and is-not-being-any-more is eternal life in any sense, let alone the eternal life of the Bible? Karl Barth stands as an infamous testimony to the truth of I Corinthians 1 and 2: God takes the wise in their own craftiness; the wisdom of man is foolishness with God; when God in His wisdom saw that man in his wisdom was never going to come to know Him, it pleased Him by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe; you see your own calling brethren, how that not many wise, not many noble, not many great men after the flesh are called, so that your faith should not stand in the wisdom of man but the power of God; we teach wisdom to them that are maturing, but it is not the wisdom of this world; the eye has not seen it, the ear has not heard it, the mind has not thought it, but God has revealed it unto us by His Spirit.

Unfortunately for Karl Barth, his great mind (in the eyes of men) never allowed him to see himself as God saw him, to humble himself, to put to death the old mind with its religious education and anything that a man might glory in, as St. Paul did, and with meekness and thanksgiving, seek the wisdom of God by faith. It was this same Paul who warned Timothy not to be moved away from the simplicity that there is in Christ: Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the rudiments of this world after the commandments of men and not after Christ; for in him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily and you are complete in Him which is the head of all principality and power. In Him are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. If you are indeed risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sits on the right hand of God; for you are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ who is our life shall appear, then shall you appear with Him in glory. The things of God are not known by anyone but the Spirit of God. Now, we have received the Spirit of God, so that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. We have the mind of Christ.

The Church does not much need great minds. But it very much needs men of simple faith. Christ has abounded unto them in all wisdom and intellectual power. That is the wisdom which is from above. There have been thousands like Barth in the history of the world, and the Church has never missed any of them. It is an argument that is not settled whether the Church is better off with or without men like him, but there is some real consolation in the fact that he was so far astray, only those who wanted very much to be, were taken in by him. It is not satisfactory to refer to men like Barth as “unorthodox.” He must be labeled what he was, a heretic of the plainest sort.

But for his own his own need — his contribution to his “having-been” and the consequences of his facing a judgment that it real, not a sign — our lamentation consists in that Karl Barth did not make his pilgrimage in the light and the eternal wisdom of the mind of Christ instead of casting precipitously about in the chasm of his own myopic and eccentric mind, metaphysically obsessed with fey, a spectral and surrealistic nether region, a place that can never know joy, though desperate and terrified men laugh deliriously; a world that belongs in the Handbook of New Age Religion, not the theology books of Christian orthodoxy. If Barth’s confidence lay in his theology of eschatology, his fate is in an eternity that has no life in it, because it draws from the dead power of religious myth.

But the eschatology of Orthodox Christianity and the Bible is not at all like that. Because He lives, we too shall live! The eternity of Orthodoxy is filled with resurrection, continuation, external existence that is real in bodies that are resurrected, immortal and real, as indeed are those that will inhabit it, because they are resurrected in a condition of physical immortality. They live in a world where death, sorrow, pain, tears and the morbid prospect of the end of existence does not exist again forever. They tabernacle with God, they walk with Him and talk with Him and see His face. They intercourse with Him in ways which the relationship between man and woman, in its, highest, purest and best state, could only dimly foreshadow. They feed on the fruit of the Tree of Life and drink from the River of Life, that fountain opened in Zion by the resurrection reality and power of the living, risen Christ. The dark glass is removed and they see face to face, they know as they are now known by Him, they live in dwelling places, eternal in their quality as well as their quantity, that He has prepared for them. And so shall we ever be with the Lord! No one will ever stop to ask the question: is Karl Barth’s “whither” the same as his “whence?” And for those who are not there, of which there shall be many, they will not be eternalized in his memory, for He shall not remember them again forever. Of those it can be said, they had a mortal, empirical beginning, and a mortal, empirical ending. They have been destroyed by the wrath of God because they did not stand under the efficacy of Jesus Christ who stood in real judgment for them. They have, in the ultimate, most complete and truest sense, ceased to be and are no more. Their death and destruction is “eternalized” but they “be” not, neither do they “stand before God” in his memory. They are gone from among the living.

I do not say that Karl Barth will not be there,[83] for that is for God to determine. But if he is there, it will be from believing some theology other than his own, for the doctrines of Barth comprise a theology of the dead, the doomed and the damned. A few simple statements of Jesus put the lie to it and shatter it into a million slivers:

“For as the Father hath life in himself; so hath He given to the Son to have life in Himself; and hath given Him authority to execute judgment also, because He is the Son of man. Marvel not at this: for the hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life: and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation[84]." (John 5:26-29)

"I AM the Resurrection and the life. He that believes in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?" (John 11:25-26)

[1]. Barth, Karl, Der Rˆmerbrief, 2nd ed. (C. Kaiser Verlag, Munchen, 1932). (The Epsitle to the Romans, [Oxford University Press, London, England, 1933]).

[2]. Barth, Karl,, Church Dogmatics, (Zollikon Verlag, Z¸rich,1940) Vol. II, Part 1, p. 715 ff.

[3]. Ibid., p. 719.

[4]. Ibid., p. 721.

[5]. Ibid., p. 753.

[6]. Ibid.

[7]. Ibid., p. 755.

[8]. Ibid., p. 762.

[9]. Ibid., p. 763.

[10]. Ibid.

[11]. CD III/2, 1948, pp. 714 - 780.

[12]. Ibid., p. 698.

[13]. Ibid., pp. 699-701.

[14]. Ibid., p. 701.

[15]. Ibid.

[16]. Ibid., p. 722ff.

[17]. Ibid., p. 723.

[18]. Ibid.

[19]. Ibid., p. 724.

[20]. Remember, from Barth’s Doctrine of Creation, that the chaos is evil precisely because it is neutral.

[21]. CD III/2, p. 275.

[22]. Ibid., p. 727.

[23]. Ibid., p. 728.

[24]. Ibid., p. 730.

[25]. Ibid., p. 733.

[26]. Ibid., p. 736.

[27]. Ibid., p. 737.

[28]. Ibid., p. 741.

[29]. Ibid., p. 742.

[30]. Ibid., p. 741.

[31]. Ibid., p. 746.

[32]. Ibid., p. 747.

[33]. Ibid.

[34]. Ibid., p. 756.

[35]. Ibid., p. 757.

[36]. Ibid.

[37]. Ibid.

[38]. Ibid., p. 759.

[39]. Cf. my paper, Barth’s Doctrine of Reconciliation.

[40]. CD III/2, p. 759.

[41]. Ibid.

[42]. I emphasize finite for a future point that I will make about why and where Barth went wrong.

[43]. CD III/2, p. 760.

[44]. Ibid., p. 761ff.

[45]. Ibid., p. 764.

[46]. Ibid., p. 765.

[47]. Ibid., p. 767.

[48]. Ibid., p. 768.

[49]. Ibid., p. 769.

[50]. Ibid.

[51]. Ibid., p. 770.

[52]. My footnote. “Terminus ad quo is the point of beginning or departure; the terminus ad quem, the end of the period or point of arrival.” Black, Henry C., Black’s Law Dictionary, (West Publishing Co., St. Paul, Minn., 1979, 5th edition), p. 46. In this context, Barth means the arrival by man at the intended and destined ending-time. Death, the extinction for which man was created by the Good God, is a part of His good creation.

[53]. Ibid., (emphasis his.)

[54]. Ibid.

[55]. Ibid., p. 771.

[56]. Ibid.

[57]. Ibid.

[58]. Ibid., p. 772.

[59]. Ibid.

[60]. Ibid.

[61]. Ibid., p. 773.

[62]. Ibid., p. 776.

[63]. Ibid., p. 777.

[64]. Ibid., p. 779.

[65]. Ibid., p. 780.

[66]. CD III/3, 1950, p. 256ff.

[67]. Ibid., p. 257.

[68]. Ibid.

[69]. Ibid., p. 260.

[70]. Ibid.

[71]. Ibid., p. 263.

[72]. Ibid., p. 264.

[73]. Ibid., p. 99.

[74]. Ibid.

[75]. Ibid.

[76]. Ibid., (emphasis mine)

[77]. Ibid., p. 100.

[78]. Ibid.

[79]. Ibid., p. 101.

[80]. Ibid.

[81]. Ibid., pp. 102, 103.

[82]. CD III/2, p. 744.

[83]. What may be said of Barth in this regard, may also be said of Moyers. These men once regarded the orthodox doctrines of Christianity, though Barth did not in his Church Dogmatics, and Moyers does not in his public programs. Orthodoxy leaves open the proposition that these may be children of God gone wrong. But the same may not be said of the Joseph Campbell. To allow that this wicked, corrupt disciple of the devil could possibly be Christian is to completely destroy the Christian gospel. Campbell is as clear a case of an antichrist and a messenger of Satan as one may see in this or any other age. Bill Moyers has much to answer for in the day of judgment for his part in loosing this imp of darkness upon the people.

[84]. The Greek word is krisis (krisis), kree’-sis; and means the process of investigation, the act of distinguishing and separating, i.e. a judging or a passing of judgment.