“Responsibility in Karl Barth and Modern Ethics”
Gerald McKenny (University of Notre Dame)
Religion and Ethics Workshop
University of Chicago Divinity School
March 1, 2012
Introduction
Karl Barth’s ethic is usually thought to be some kind of divine command ethic, and of course, Barth himself presents it as such in his Church Dogmatics and elsewhere. But precisely as an ethic of divine command it is also an ethic of responsibility. Barth makes this identification explicit in a somewhat enigmatic attempt to say what his ethics is about.“The subject matter (Sache) of theological ethics is the responsibility (Verantwortung) which God has assumed for us in the fact that He has made us responsible by His command.”[1] This claim strikes us as an odd one, as it draws our attention to the responsibility God assumes for us and seems to take the fact of our responsibility almost for granted. The oddity is only magnified when Barth tells us exactly what responsibility God has assumed for us, which turns out to be astonishingly comprehensive. “The fact that He gives man His command … means that He makes Himself responsible not only for its authority but also for its fulfillment.”[2] In giving God’s command, God not only establishes its legitimacy (Recht) and effectiveness (Kraft), that is, its authority; God also fulfills its demand in our place.[3] For Barth, of course, it is by becoming human in Jesus Christ, who fulfills the command in our place, that God assumes this responsibility for us.[4] This reference to Christ’s substitution indicates that Barth places ethics under the same logic, and indeed within the same act, as soteriology, a point we will return to below. On this very point, however, Barth’s formulation of the subject matter of his theological ethics presents us with a problem. If in making us responsible God takes responsibility for us, to the point of fulfilling in our place the very command that makes us responsible, then in what sense can we be said to have been made responsible at all? To take our place in this way seems to violate the very essence of responsibility, which is that no one can take my place. The responsibility God assumes for us, as Barth describes it, thus appears to absolve human beings of responsibility altogether.
Yet there can be no doubt as to Barth’s insistence that human beings are genuinely responsible. Indeed, he goes so far as to claim that “human being [Menschsein] consists in responsibility [Verantwortung],”[5] thus identifying responsibility as a definitive ontological feature of humanity. Perhaps, then, we can gain clarity from a statement Barth makes in introducing his theological ethics, which is pithy enough to serve us as a formula: “It is as He makes Himself responsible for man that God makes man, too, responsible.”[6] This formula focuses again on what God does, but it stresses that as God takes responsibility for us, God also makes us responsible. It suggests that the very point of God’s taking responsibility for us (though not necessarily the only point) is to make us, too, responsible. It also suggests that we are responsible in a certain way or that our responsibility takes a certain form, namely, that it is precisely the responsibility of those for whom God has taken responsibility. These two suggestions lead us to a third one: that responsibility is an analogous concept for Barth. By taking responsibility for us God makes us, too, responsible, so that we resemble God in this respect. However, it is God, and not we ourselves, who takes responsibility for us; we are not even responsible for ourselves, much less in a position to take responsibility for God. So, whatever our responsibility is, it is not identical to God’s responsibility and we do not exercise it by identifying ourselves with God. Our responsibility is analogous to God’s; or to use the term Barth prefers, our responsibility corresponds to God’s responsibility for us. It is, again, the responsibility of those for whom God has taken responsibility.
The following paper examines Barth’s concept of responsibility in light of these three suggestions, and in one sense it is a paper on Barth’s theological ethics. However, the topic is not only of relevance to Barth’s theology or those who are interested in the latter. The reason for making this paper the topic of a workshop such as this one is its larger relevance for the ethics of responsibility in theological ethics. That relevance can be described fairly concisely, as follows. The concept of responsibility and the role this concept often plays in modern ethical thought and practice express an element of modern self-understanding that is perhaps best captured in a colloquial expression: “It is up to us” or “It is up to me.” On the one hand, one posits oneself as a unique subject with this expression, which designates one as singular and irreplaceable.[7] In this sense the expression indicates how the ethical has been a key (though not the only) form of the subject in modern Western thought and practice. That we continue to give responsibility a central place in our moral self-understanding indicates the persistence of our commitment to acting and thinking of ourselves as moral subjects notwithstanding bold proclamations of the end of the subject. This is one aspect of modernity that seems likely to endure. At the same time, however, this expression conveys a presumption. It implies that it really is up to me or to us: that the cause of the good or right lies with me or with us and that I am or we are up to the task, capable of knowing what it demands and carrying it out and authorized to do so. Here, our commitment is less secure and the future of responsibility less certain. We are now all too well aware of how this presumption undergirds dangerous delusions regarding our ability and our authority to re-shape lives and societies in accordance with moral demands and ideals.
At the risk of sounding melodramatic, we may describe this circumstance as a contemporary crisis of responsibility: How do we maintain and cultivate the earnestness and urgency captured in the expression, “It is up to me” or “It is up to us,” while knowing full well that we are neither able nor authorized to bring human lives and societies into conformity with the right and the good? We (or many of us, at least) seem to be caught between cynicism and ambition, neither willing to give up the sense that it is up to us (as moral conservatism would have us do) nor able to find an object that is adequate to that sense. The premise of this paper is that Karl Barth’s ethic of responsibility offers a way, at least for Christians, to understand this crisis of responsibility and to overcome it not by evading it but precisely by embracing it. For Barth, the sense that it is up to me, that I am a genuine subject in this sense, may be a modern discovery or invention, but once discovered or invented it becomes indispensable in conveying the incomparable dignity bestowed on humanity by God in making human beings God’s covenant partner. At the same time, for Barth, the presumption that the cause of the right or good depends on me or us imperils humanity, not only because we as humans are not able or authorized to take up this cause but chiefly because we were never meant to do so: because our very humanity, our being as God’s covenant partner, consists in our being the ones for whom God has already intervened in this way.
It is, in short, as God has made Godself responsible for us (taking up the human cause, the cause of the right or good, in our place) that God makes us responsible. To explain what Barth thought it means for God to do this and what he thought it means for us to be those for whom God does this is the task of this paper. Section one below shows why Barth found it necessary for his distinctive theological purposes to appropriate the concept of responsibility, and what that appropriation implies about his theological ethics. Section two is more technical in nature; it shows what exactly Barth meant by his claim that in taking responsibility for us God makes us, too, responsible and how that claim is coherent. It will become clear in this section that Barth understands responsibility first and foremost in terms of accountability. However, he by no means neglects the two other major aspects of responsibility, namely, the imputability of actions to an agent and the liability of an agent for others or for the effects of her actions. The third and fourth sections show how Barth incorporated these features.
- Between the Reformation and Modernity
Throughout his Church Dogmatics Barth attempted to reformulate certain themes of the Protestant Reformation (which for him is almost exclusively represented by Luther and Calvin) with the aim of overcoming what he saw as the historical failure of Protestant theology to resist the enlistment of its themes in the cause of the self-constituted, self-enclosed, self-sufficient human subject (itself, as these features indicate, a sort of parody of divine aseity). Barth cast this subject as the lead character in the drama of modernity. Yet while he quite obviously opposed this subject as a Promethean usurper, his attitude toward it was surprisingly complex. By no means did it take the anti-modern form found in so many theologies today. Rather, Barth found in the self-assertion of this modern subject a distorted, misguided, and ultimately self-defeating, yet nonetheless unmistakable trace of the profound and unconditional affirmation of humanity which for him is inherent in God’s very being as God and which must therefore find its corresponding affirmation in human attitudes and conduct. Moreover, especially as Barth followed the dramatic progression of this self-asserting character from its noble confidence in the eighteenth century to its disillusionment and self-destruction in the first half of the twentieth century and beyond, it was clear to him that this subject could only be addressed by a negation that is contained within and follows from a more fundamental affirmation (which Barth argued was the relationship of divine grace and divine judgment).
From this perspective we can understand what Barth does when he identifies responsibility as the subject matter of ethics while also enclosing our responsibility within the responsibility God takes for us. In stressing that God takes responsibility for us to the point of fulfilling the command of God addressed to us, Barth identifies the subject matter of theological ethics with the Lutheran and Calvinist conception of divine grace, according to which God acts in our place—apart from our action—to save us, extending the range of this conception to encompass not only soteriology in the strict sense but also ethics or, in more classically Protestant terms, not only justification but also sanctification. In Barth’s view, Christ not only takes our place as sinners, thereby putting us in a right relationship with God; he also accomplishes in our place the holiness or goodness that is to characterize those who exist in a right relationship to God. In contrast to Luther and Calvin, both justification and sanctification—righteousness before God and holiness or goodness of conduct—are for Barth realized by the same working of divine grace. There is therefore no ground, as there was in the theologies of Luther and Calvin, for ethics to become disengaged from soteriology and to find its ground in a principle other than divine grace as what God has done in our place. Thus does Barth close the loophole Luther and Calvin left open for modern ethics to find its ground in the human subject, who is capable of fulfilling the moral demand and establishing its authority by reason and conscience, apart from divine grace.
Yet it is highly significant that Barth articulates his reformulation of this Reformation-era theme in the language of responsibility. As many observers have pointed out, responsibility—both the concept itself in the sense in which we usually understand it and the role it plays in our ethics—is a distinctively modern notion. As we noted in our introductory remarks, at least in its modern meaning it goes beyond the notion of rational agency (the capacity to act in accordance with reasons) to imply that “it is up to me.” “It is up to me”: This can mean that I am the one who is summoned to act. I am designated (by a command, by the moral law, by the Other), singled out and thus irreplaceable: I cannot delegate or abscond to someone else who will act in my place. In this respect one who is responsible is not only an agent (one who possesses the capacity to act) but also a subject.[8] And inherent in this status is both a degree of urgency and a kind of dignity that seem to be lacking in the status of a rational agent. It is not implausible to consider this urgency and this dignity to be among the defining characteristics of modern self-understanding. However, it is difficult, both conceptually and practically, to hold that “it is up to me” in this sense (namely, in terms of one’s singularity, irreplaceability, or non-substitutability) without also holding that “it is up to me” in the sense that the burden is on me to bring the good or right into a world that would otherwise be without it, or that the cause of the good or right in the world is dependent on me—that I cannot assume that the realization of the good or the right is ultimately underwritten by God, nature, or the cosmos. These two senses seem to be closely connected, if not inseparable, in the modern moral self-understanding. The very urgency and dignity that attaches to the status of the subject in the first sense seems to require the second sense as well.
We are now in a position to understand the significance of Barth’s formula and why he insisted on it. Let us recall this formula: “It is as He makes Himself responsible for man that God makes man, too, responsible.” As we will soon consider in more detail, at the very heart of Barth’s theology is the notion of the covenant relationship between God and humanity as distinct yet inseparable subjects bound together from eternity and in time in mutual yet asymmetrical relations of responsibility. Barth appropriated the notion of responsibility and identified it as the subject matter of ethics in part because he was convinced that the status of the responsible subject, with the urgency and dignity that attaches to it, properly expresses the status and the role of human beings as genuine partners in relationship with God. For Barth, human beings are not mere objects of divine dispositions and actions but genuine subjects. Yet the notion of responsibility could also be misleading. As we have seen, this notion can be taken to mean that the cause of the good or right or its very existence in the world is up to the human subject. But from Barth’s perspective, to take it in this way would be to presume that God’s human covenant partner has been abandoned by God and is left to herself. As we will see, Barth was convinced that this presumption is both theologically problematic and ethically dangerous. It also seems, given the connection of responsibility with the notion that “it is up to us,” to be inevitable—unless our responsibility can be shown to be grounded in the responsibility God has already taken for the cause of the good and its existence in the world. That is, of course, precisely what Barth attempts to do with his formula, while also establishing God’s responsibility for the cause of the right or good as that which constitutes us as responsible subjects in the first sense.
Many Christian theologians today would reject Barth’s attempt to appropriate the modern conception of responsibility and give it a central place in his theology. Like Barth, these theologians reject the presumption that it is up to us to bring the right or good into the world and realize it there. Unlike Barth, however, they consider it a mistake to incur the risk of this presumption in the first place by granting the subject the status it enjoys in Barth’s theology. From one side, opposition to Barth’s position can be expected from those who think that the subject must not only be constituted by divine grace but much more radically deconstructed. From another side, opposition can be expected from those who think that the good is in the world in the form of natural human ends or a cosmic order, and for whom there is therefore no need for a subject in the sense defined above but only for a rational agent who is capable (with the assistance of divine grace) of directing its inclinations to their proper ends or ordering its desires in accordance with reality.[9] In fact Barth’s position is much closer to these Aristotelian-Thomist and Platonist-Augustinian traditions than is usually supposed, but his insistence on defining God’s human covenant partner as above all a responsible subject marks an important distinction. Barth makes the concept of responsibility fundamental to his theological ethics because it is the concept that best expresses the status of human beings as genuine partners with God in God’s covenant. As partners, God and human beings are related as fellow subjects, and Barth recognizes in the concept of responsibility what it means to be a subject. From this perspective the close connection of the concept of responsibility with that of the subject is not its fatal liability but its greatest asset. The urgency and dignity that attach to the status of the subject express the incomparable divine affirmation of humanity Barth finds in God’s conferral of the status of covenant partner on human beings, and do so in a way or to a degree that the notion of rational agency alone is unable to do.