Chapter 21

Karl Barth and the Triumph of Grace

"We have no theological right to set any sort of limits to the loving-kindness of God."

A. The Question America Wanted Answered

In the spring of 1962, Karl Barth came to America. He was seventy-five years old, recently retired from the chair of theology at Basel, and weary in body but not in voice. It would be his only visit. He delivered five lectures at the University of Chicago Divinity School and repeated them at Princeton Theological Seminary — lectures that would shortly appear as Evangelical Theology: An Introduction. The crowds were enormous. Around two thousand people packed Rockefeller Memorial Chapel in Chicago for each session. Princeton University Chapel filled its 2,200-seat sanctuary. Busloads of pastors and students drove in from as far as California and New Mexico. Barth said he had never lectured to so many people in his life.¹

And at almost every stop, someone wanted to know: Are you a universalist? American Protestants — conservative Reformed pastors especially — had been wrestling with that question for more than two decades. They had read his doctrine of election in Church Dogmatics II/2 and concluded that Barth had blown a hole through the floor of the Westminster Confession. They were not entirely wrong. But Barth's answers, on the lecture circuit and in print, were famously elliptical. He would not say yes. He would not, quite, say no. He spoke of the freedom of God. He spoke of the breadth of grace. He spoke of the duty to hope. He smiled. He moved on.

It is tempting to read those answers as evasion. They were not. They were the careful working-out of a theology that had refused, for forty years, to be pinned to either of the two Protestant defaults: the strict Augustinian-Calvinist limitation of grace, or the soft liberal Protestantism that had collapsed into ethical universalism in his teachers' generation. Barth wanted neither. What he wanted — and what he gave the twentieth century — was a Christological recasting of election so thorough that, in his own words, the church had "no theological right to set any sort of limits to the loving-kindness of God which has appeared in Jesus Christ."² Whether that recasting is "universalism" depends on what one means by the word. The reception history we will trace in this chapter is a story of theologians arguing about exactly that.

B. From Safenwil to Basel: A Life

Karl Barth was born in Basel on May 10, 1886, into a family of Swiss Reformed pastors and academics. His father, Fritz, taught New Testament at Bern. Young Karl studied theology at Bern, then Berlin, then Tübingen, then Marburg — sitting under the giants of late-nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism: Adolf von Harnack on church history, Wilhelm Herrmann on dogmatics, the whole cultural-Protestant world of Schleiermacher's heirs. He absorbed it and seemed destined to continue it.³

The break came in August 1914. Ninety-three German intellectuals, including most of Barth's revered teachers, signed a manifesto endorsing Kaiser Wilhelm's war policy. Barth, then a country pastor at Safenwil in the canton of Aargau, was stunned. "I suddenly realized that I could not any longer follow either their ethics and dogmatics or their understanding of the Bible and of history," he later wrote. "For me at least, nineteenth-century theology no longer held any future."⁴ He turned to the New Testament with what he called terrifying freshness. The result was the first edition of his commentary on Romans (Römerbrief, 1919), and then, more famously, the wholly rewritten second edition of 1922 — the book that, in Karl Adam's memorable phrase, "fell like a bombshell on the playground of the theologians."⁵

From there the academic career unfolded: Göttingen (1921–1925), Münster (1925–1930), Bonn (1930–1935). At Bonn the political crisis reached him. In May 1934, with the rise of the German Christians and Hitler's tightening grip on the churches, Barth drafted (with revisions from Hans Asmussen and Thomas Breit) the Barmen Declaration, the confessional manifesto of the Confessing Church. The following year he refused the loyalty oath to the Führer that all German civil servants were required to swear. He was expelled from his chair. He returned to Basel, where he taught until 1968.⁶

And from his Basel chair, beginning in 1932 and continuing for the rest of his life, Barth wrote the Church Dogmatics — the largest sustained project of Protestant systematic theology since the Reformation. Thirteen part-volumes. Roughly nine thousand pages. Unfinished at his death in December 1968. Within those pages, the doctrine of election — the volume that would change everything — appeared in 1942 as Church Dogmatics II/2.

C. The Doctrine of Election Reconfigured

Christ as the Subject and the Object of Election

To understand why Barth's eschatology has felt, to so many readers, to lean inexorably toward universal salvation, one has to begin where Barth himself began: with the doctrine of election. The Reformed tradition Barth inherited — from Calvin through Beza through Westminster — had located election in a hidden eternal decree by which God chose particular individuals for salvation and passed others over for damnation. Calvin had called the latter decree decretum horribile, a "dreadful decree," and admitted it was a hard saying.⁷ The whole Reformed structure of pastoral certainty — the syllogismus practicus, the marks of election, assurance through sanctification — rested on this hidden decree about individuals.

Barth rejected the whole structure. Not the doctrine of election itself — he insisted it was the heart of the gospel. But the framing was wrong, he argued. Election is not a hidden decree about millions of individual cases. Election is a single decision, made in eternity, about God Himself. God elects Himself, in Jesus Christ, to be God-for-us. As Barth wrote in the famous opening to CD II/2 §33: "In its simplest and most comprehensive form the dogma of predestination consists, then, in the assertion that the divine predestination is the election of Jesus Christ."⁸

From this starting point, everything moves. Jesus Christ is the subject of election — God in His freedom electing Himself for us. But Jesus Christ is also the object of election — the human one who is elected in our place. And here Barth makes the move that has defined the conversation ever since: Jesus Christ is both the elect human and the reprobate human. He is the one chosen for blessing, and He is the one who bears the rejection that, in any honest reading of the human situation, ought to have fallen on us.

The implication is hard to miss, even if Barth refuses to spell it out as a doctrine. If Jesus Christ has borne the rejection that should have fallen on me, then I am not under rejection — I am under the election worked out in His life, death, and resurrection. And what is true of me is true, on the same grounds, of every human being. There is no second decree, alongside the decree of election in Christ, by which some are eternally consigned to damnation. The decree of rejection has been exhausted in Christ's cross. What remains is the working-out, in time, of the one decree of election.⁹

The Careful Refusal at §35.4

Anyone who has read CD II/2 to its end has felt the force of that implication. Many readers, Barth's friends and critics alike, drew the explicit conclusion: surely this is universalism. Surely if all are elect in Christ, all will finally be saved. Barth saw it coming. In the closing subsection of his treatment of election (§35.4, "The Determination of the Rejected"), he addressed the question directly.

His answer is one of the most carefully worded passages in twentieth-century theology — and one of the most contested. He refused to draw the conclusion. He insisted that the church had no warrant to teach apokatastasis as a doctrine. The freedom of God, he argued, includes the freedom to save whom God will save; to make universal salvation a "given," a system, an entailment, would be to instrumentalize that freedom and lose the very gospel of grace that the doctrine of election was meant to protect.

Notice what Barth has done. He has refused universalism as a doctrine, but he has also refused its denial. He has not said the church may teach that some will finally be lost. He has said that the church may not teach that none will, and may not teach that any will. He has placed the question in the freedom of God, where Barth thought it belonged. The theologian's duty is not to settle the question one way or the other; it is to see God's loving-kindness in Christ as being always greater than we had previously seen.

Barth presses the point with a striking image. He compares God's grace to a river, and the sinner's resistance to a dam erected in the middle of that river. The dam is not nothing — the sinner's rebellion is real, and the church must take it seriously, must preach against it, must call sinners to repentance. But, Barth writes, "the stream is too strong and the dam too weak for us to be able reasonably to expect anything but the collapse of the dam and the onrush of the waters." This is what James Beilby has aptly called "sovereignty universalism" — a hopeful universalism grounded not in divine patience outlasting human resistance (Pinnock's "non-Augustinian path") but in the sheer Christological breadth of God's electing love.¹¹

The Doctrine of Reconciliation: CD IV

What CD II/2 sketched, the four part-volumes of CD IV (1953–1967) developed. The doctrine of reconciliation — Barth's mature Christology and soteriology — works out the implications of the election decision in the actual history of Jesus Christ. In CD IV/1 (§§57–59) the focus is the obedience of the Son going into the far country, bearing the judgment of God on sin in His own person, returning to the Father in resurrection. In IV/2 the focus is the exaltation of the Son of Man, the lifting up of humanity in Christ. In IV/3 the focus is Christ as the True Witness, the prophet whose word goes out to all.¹²

Three things in the IV-volumes are worth lingering on for the long-hope question. First, the scope of Christ's reconciling work in IV/1 is unambiguously universal. The judgment has fallen on Christ for all. The reconciliation has been accomplished for all. Whatever else is to be said about the situation of those who do not yet believe, it cannot be said that Christ's work was not for them. Second, in CD IV/3.1 §69.2 Barth famously developed what he called the "secular parables of the kingdom" — an account of how Christ's truth shines also outside the visible church, including, sometimes, in unexpected places.¹³ Many readers (Jürgen Moltmann among them) noted that this looked uncomfortably like the natural theology Barth had thundered against in 1934. Third, in CD IV/3.1 §70 Barth returned to the apokatastasis question one more time, and again refused to settle it — but in language that, if anything, leaned further toward hope. If anyone is finally lost, he wrote, "it can only be a matter of the unexpected work of grace and its revelation on which we cannot count but for which we can only hope as an undeserved and inconceivable overflowing of the significance, operation and outreach of the reality of God and man in Jesus Christ."¹⁴

That sentence is doing a great deal of work. Read one way, it is a denial that we may teach universal salvation as doctrine. Read another way, it is an affirmation that the only thing that could prevent universal salvation is an "unexpected" overflowing of grace beyond what we already know in Christ — which is to say, almost nothing. Both readings are honest. Both have their advocates.

The 1956 Lecture: The Humanity of God

Between the early Romans Barth, who thundered against the religion of cultural-Protestantism with the language of crisis and the "infinite qualitative distinction" between God and humanity, and the late Barth of CD IV, something shifts in tone. The 1956 lecture Die Menschlichkeit Gottes ("The Humanity of God"), delivered at a conference of Swiss Reformed pastors, is the gentlest statement of the late Barth's mood. God's deity, Barth said, is not a "no" to humanity; it is the foundation of God's "yes" to humanity in Jesus Christ. The whole point of dialectical theology, properly understood, is not to put humanity at a distance from God but to grasp that God has put Himself, in Christ, at the closest possible nearness to humanity.¹⁵

Whether this represents a real shift or just a change of emphasis is a long-running scholarly question. Bruce McCormack has argued, persuasively to my mind, that the development is continuous: the late warmth is the working-out of what was always implicit in the Christological recasting of election.¹⁶ Either way, the 1956 lecture is part of the reason Barth is read so widely as having moved, by the end of his life, into something close to a "hopeful universalism" — even if he never abandoned the careful refusals of CD II/2 §35.4.

The Brunner Exchange and the Question of Natural Theology

One controversy from the middle years bears directly on the long-hope question, even though Barth and his interlocutors did not always see it that way. In 1934 Emil Brunner published Natur und Gnade ("Nature and Grace"), arguing that fallen humanity retains a formal "point of contact" (Anknüpfungspunkt) for the gospel — some residual imago Dei in the human creature that makes evangelism possible at all. Barth's response was the famous Nein! Antwort an Emil Brunner (1934), with its "Angry Introduction" and its uncompromising rejection of any natural theology.¹⁷

The political stakes were high. 1934 was the year of the Barmen Declaration. Barth feared that any "point of contact" in human nature would be exploited by the German Christians to baptize the racial-volkish ideology of the Third Reich. The refusal of natural theology was, in part, a refusal of the religious nationalism that was overtaking the German churches.

For the long-hope question, the consequence cuts in an interesting direction. If there is no Anknüpfungspunkt in fallen humanity — no natural capacity for the gospel apart from God's gracious initiative — then the whole weight of salvation falls on God's electing decision in Christ. Salvation is not a matter of the human creature making the right response from a reserve of natural capacity; it is the working-out of what God has already done in the elect human, Jesus Christ. Once that move is made, the door to any limited-atonement structure begins to close: the rejection of natural theology, paradoxically, makes the universal scope of election structurally easier to defend. That is part of why Barth's universalist readers (Greggs, Parry, Hart) have generally been more sympathetic to Nein! than have those who want Barth read as preserving the Reformed orthodoxy.

The Blumhardt Inheritance

A final piece of context is often missed in American treatments of Barth. He did not invent his sense that the kingdom of God is breaking into the world with universal scope. He inherited it. Christoph Blumhardt the elder (1805–1880) and his son Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt (1842–1919) were Württemberg Pietist pastors whose ministries combined healing, social-democratic political engagement, and a deeply expectant eschatology. They taught what the older Bengel-Petersen-Oetinger Pietist line had taught: that God's apokatastasis, the final restoration of all things, was the horizon of Christian hope.¹⁸

Barth's father had ties to the Blumhardt circle, and Karl himself visited Bad Boll, the younger Blumhardt's center, several times. He named the Blumhardts as decisive influences on his early development. The Pietist universalism we touched on in our chapter on the Anabaptist and Pietist traditions is, in this sense, the soil in which Barth's later mature eschatology was planted. He transformed it — the Pietist sentimentality and revivalism are largely absent from Barth — but he did not invent its central conviction. That conviction is older than him, and has roots that reach all the way back through Bengel to the patristic universalist tradition.

D. The Reception: A Field of Contested Readings

Within months of CD II/2's publication, the question began: is Barth a universalist? Eighty years on, the question has not been settled, and almost certainly never will be. Different readers, working in good faith with the same texts, have read Barth differently — and the diversity of readings is itself part of his theological legacy.

The earliest sustained engagement from the Dutch Reformed side came from G. C. Berkouwer, whose 1956 study The Triumph of Grace in the Theology of Karl Barth gave us the phrase that titles this chapter.¹⁹ Berkouwer argued, sympathetically but critically, that the single organizing motif of Barth's theology is the triumph of God's grace in Christ — and that this motif, however orthodox in intent, threatens to swallow up the genuine seriousness of human rejection and the eschatological "no" of God to sin. Barth read Berkouwer's book with care and responded at length in CD IV/3 (pp. 173–180), insisting that the "triumph of grace" was not the right summary of his work because it suggested a system in which everything was settled in advance, whereas Barth wanted to preserve the freedom of God to be God in each new moment.

The German-language Barthian reception was carried by his immediate students. Eberhard Jüngel's God's Being Is in Becoming (1965) treated the implications of the election doctrine for the doctrine of the Trinity. Helmut Gollwitzer and Heinrich Vogel held to Barth's careful balance against more confident interpreters. Hans Urs von Balthasar, on the Catholic side, produced in 1951 the major Catholic engagement with Barth — Karl Barth: Darstellung und Deutung seiner Theologie, translated in 1971 as The Theology of Karl Barth — in which Balthasar perceived a deep affinity between his own emerging "hope without knowledge" position and Barth's careful refusals. As we will see in the next chapter, Balthasar's Dare We Hope? would not have taken the form it did without Barth.²⁰

The English-speaking reception is itself a field of contested readings. Thomas F. Torrance, Barth's principal Scottish translator and student, held that Barth was not a universalist but that his Christological universalism in atonement (Christ died for all) made the question of subjective appropriation a real but secondary matter.²¹ Bruce McCormack has read Barth's later trajectory as moving toward something close to a universalist conclusion that Barth himself, for prudential reasons, declined to draw. George Hunsinger has been more cautious, reading Barth's refusals as theologically meant. John Webster, in his many works on Barth, has read the careful balance as the point: Barth refuses to settle the question because the question is, properly, God's to settle.

The neo-Reformed critique — R. C. Sproul, Cornelius Van Til, Cornelis Venema in The Promise of the Future — has been more polemical. From this side, Barth's reconfiguration of election is read as a kind of crypto-universalism that should be rejected as un-Reformed and ultimately destructive of the seriousness of judgment. Van Til's Christianity and Barthianism (1962) is the locus classicus, and the line of critique has continued in confessional Reformed circles ever since.²²

The "evangelical universalist" reception — we will meet these figures fully in Chapter 25 — reads Barth as having said, as clearly as he could without explicitly affirming the doctrine, that universal salvation is the theologically obligatory conclusion. Robin Parry, in The Evangelical Universalist, notes Tom Greggs's Barth, Origen, and Universal Salvation (Oxford, 2009) as the most rigorous recent monograph showing how Barth and Origen converge from quite different starting points on the same Christologically-grounded hope.²³ Thomas Talbott and David Bentley Hart have made similar claims more polemically. James Beilby, writing from a postmortem-opportunity position rather than a confident universalism, also locates Barth on what he calls the "sovereignty universalism" path — while noting carefully that Barth himself rejected the inference, since to make universalism doctrinally certain would be, in Barth's terms, to violate the freedom of God in salvation.²⁴

Worth a brief note: Geoffrey Bromiley, the principal English translator of the Church Dogmatics, has occasionally been criticized for translation choices that either soften or sharpen Barth's universalist edge in particular passages. Some of these criticisms are fair; many are overstated. The substantive theological conversation can largely be conducted in either German or English without the translation being decisive. Readers interested in checking specific passages can compare Bromiley's renderings against the Kirchliche Dogmatik in the standard Theologischer Verlag Zürich editions.

E. What Was He, in the End?

I want to be careful here, because this is precisely the kind of question on which the historical record does not by itself settle the matter. So let me distinguish what I think we can say with confidence from what we cannot.

We can say with confidence that Barth was not, by his own description, a universalist. He said so repeatedly. In CD II/2 §35.4 he rejected the teaching of universal restoration as a doctrine, on the grounds that it would compromise God's freedom in salvation. In CD IV/3.1 §70 he repeated the refusal in slightly different terms. In his 1962 American lectures and in the letters of his last years, he continued to decline the label. The reader who wants Barth to come out and say "yes, all will be saved" will not find that text. It does not exist.

We can also say with confidence that the doctrine of election in CD II/2 has struck nearly every serious reader as having universalist implications. Berkouwer thought so in 1956. Balthasar thought so in 1951. Jüngel, McCormack, Greggs, Parry, Hart, Talbott, Beilby all think so today, though with very different evaluations of whether that is a feature or a bug. Even Barth's Reformed critics — Van Til, Venema, Sproul — agree that the trajectory of his election doctrine is universalist, which is why they reject it.

The honest summary, I think, is this: Barth held an "objective universalism" without a corresponding "subjective universalism."²⁵ Objectively, all human beings are elect in Jesus Christ. Christ has borne the rejection that would otherwise have been theirs. There is no second decree by which some are eternally reprobate. In that sense Barth was a universalist, and a more thoroughgoing one than Origen or Gregory of Nyssa, because his universalism is built into the doctrine of election itself, not added on as a hopeful eschatological speculation. Subjectively, however — in the order of the actual appropriation of that election by faith in the time of history and at the last judgment — Barth refused to claim that all will subjectively come into what is objectively theirs. He left that question in God's freedom.

Is this an unstable position? Yes — it is unstable in the precise sense that almost every careful reader has had to take a further step to make sense of it. Some take the step toward explicit universalism (Greggs, Parry, Hart). Some take the step toward a more cautious "hopeful universalism" that refuses the doctrinal conclusion but treats hope-for-all as a Christian duty (Balthasar, Webster). Some take the step backward and say Barth has fundamentally compromised the Reformed inheritance and should be rejected (Van Til, Sproul). Very few readers, in my experience, are able simply to leave Barth's position where Barth left it.

This may be exactly what Barth intended. He wanted, I think, to refuse the false comforts of both confident universalism and confident particularism, and to leave the church standing under the gospel rather than in possession of a system. Whether that posture can be sustained in pastoral practice is a separate question. The history of the Barthian school suggests it cannot, quite — but the failure of his successors to hold his balance does not by itself show that the balance was wrong.

F. Why Barth Matters for the Long Hope

Of all the figures in this volume, Barth is the one I find it hardest to summarize fairly. He is too big, too disciplined, too patient with paradox. But for the long-hope tradition I am tracing, his significance is unmistakable.

Before Barth, the magisterial Reformed tradition had been — for nearly four centuries — firmly committed to the doctrine of double predestination, with its strict limitation of saving grace and its corresponding doctrine of eternal conscious torment for the non-elect. The dissenting voices we have traced — the Cambridge Platonists, the Pietists, the Wesleyans, the American Universalists, the conditionalists — had been marginal voices in or outside Reformed Protestantism, never in the magisterial center.

Barth changed that. After CD II/2, the question of universal salvation was open within Reformed theology in a way it had not been since the Synod of Dort in 1619. That fact alone — whatever one thinks of Barth's particular conclusions — is a watershed event. The conversation that we will trace through the next several chapters — Balthasar, Moltmann, the modern Catholic and Orthodox recoveries, the contemporary evangelical universalists and postmortem-opportunity scholars — would not have its present shape without Barth.

And I find his pastoral instinct, finally, more attractive than the more confident positions on either side. The church is not the executive of God's decrees, distributing the elect to heaven and the reprobate to hell from the pulpit. The church is the witness to what God has done in Christ. Its preaching is the announcement of grace; its prayer is the prayer for all; its hope, as Paul wrote to Timothy, rests on "God our Savior, who wills all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth" (1 Tim. 2:3–4). What lies beyond death, what God will do at the last judgment, what the final shape of the new creation will be — these are God's to determine, not ours. Barth's instinct, throughout the Church Dogmatics, was that the church speaks faithfully when it preaches the breadth of grace and refuses to set limits to it. That instinct, I think, is right.

From here we turn to the figure who took up Barth's careful balance and gave it perhaps its most influential pastoral form. Hans Urs von Balthasar — Catholic theologian, friend and reader of Barth, author of Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved? — is the next stop on our journey.