The Latin Heresy at Play and the Actuality of Our Salvation in Christ

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George Hunsinger’s book, How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology, is a wonderful summarizing and exploration of Barth’s momentous and huge theological opus, the Church Dogmatics. Recently I decided to take the plunge into the Dogmatics, but thought that before setting off I would benefit by reading a few prefatory works to prepare for the journey. In the past few years, I have read numerous anthologies of the Dogmatics – the best of which was recently published and can be found here – which is how my initial interest in and appreciation for Barth grew.

The blog post I wrote a few weeks ago related to T.F. Torrance and the Latin Heresy outlines Torrance’s (and Barth’s) conviction that the central cancer at the heart of the development of Western theology is what is called the “Latin Heresy.” The Latin Heresy refers to the dualistic, systematic tendency of Western theologians following Augustine to separate the Being and the Work of Christ, relying on NeoPlatonically-derived conceptual schemes to so theologize. How this has materially played out in Western theology in the past few millennia can be seen clearly in groups like the Westminster/Dort Reformed worlds, where, following Calvin (a substantive theological heir of Augustine), theologians have refused to accept the mysterious unity of Christ’s Person and Work as constitutive of and effective for the entirety of the human race and subsequently chosen to stipulate that in the program of salvation each individual person must therefore appropriate Christ’s work (and therefore complete, fulfill, or perfect “it,” i.e., Christ’s work for humanity). Now, at this point we must be careful, lest we ourselves fall into what Torrance is warning against. Our theological instinct, upon hearing such an analysis, is to think, “But doesn’t this lead to universalism? How can Christ’s Person and Work so be conceived so as to render his action and person effective on behalf of all? Does that not betray the Christian faith’s necessary emphatic charge to people to believe? If Christ’s work is effective ‘for all,’ what is the need for faith?” Let us turn, now, to how Hunsinger poses the problem.

He writes,

“Two points above all seemed essential to Barth about salvation. First, what took place in Jesus Christ for our salvation avails for all. Second, no one actively participates in him and therefore in his righteousness apart from faith. The first point constitutes the objective aspect, the second the existential aspect, of salvation… The human act of faith is in no way determinative or creative of salvation, and the divine act of grace is in no way responsive or receptive to some condition external to itself as necessarily imposed upon it by the human creature… Grace therefore confronts the creature as a sheer gift. The human act of faith, moreover, in no way conditions, contributes to, or constitutes the event of salvation. Faith therefore confronts the Savior in sheer gratitude and sheer receptivity (which is not the same as mere passivity), and is itself inexplicable except as a miracle of grace.”^[1]

The next portion, however, brings home the point:

“All these were axiomatic and nonnegotiable for Barth, because he took them to be the assured results of exegesis when the Bible was read christocentrically as a unified and differentiated whole… No possible tidier outcome could be achieved except at the expense of hermeneutical adequacy. Any gains in technical consistency at the conceptual or doctrinal level could be had only by suffering unacceptable losses of coherence with the subject matter of scripture. In such cases adequacy was to be regarded as a higher virtue than consistency. The sheer mystery and incomprehensibility of the subject matter (particularism), as attested in and through the biblical text (realism plus actualism), not only imposed important limits on the possibility of achieving technical consistency, but also established the very conditions for the possibility of any intelligibility in theological discourse worthy of the name (rationalism). All doctrinal construction, ordering, and testing, and all assimilation of extrabiblical conceptions, had to be done with a sure and uncompromising sense of the limits to conceptualization imposed by the subject matter. Otherwise the subject matter, whose mysteries as such fell into specifiable patterns, would no longer be comprehended in terms of its own intrinsic and indissoluble incomprehensibility.”^[2]

For those readers who have read St. Athanasius’s On the Incarnation: the similarities here with that text cannot be more clearly seen. In the same way that Athanasius pushes forward the salvific union of the Son of God’s sharing in humanity’s fallen flesh as the redemption of the human nature in which all share – i.e., how he unifies the Person and Work of Christ – so here the unity of the two cannot be more similar. Perhaps the biggest point to push here is that the question of the “possibility of universalism” is itself, claims Torrance and Barth, a symptom of the West’s dualistic thought form (which is a cancerous sore on the Western theological face). This is not to say, though, that Barth is positively arguing for the reality and orthodoxy of the idea of universal salvation; it is to say that a consistent reading of scripture yields a salvation picture where the two mysteriously-contradictory images of 1) no one being left out of the restorative union of the Son of God with human nature and 2) the act of miraculous divine grace is absolutely unconditioned and autonomously existent apart from any human’s recognition or appropriation of it, are nonnegotiable and cannot be systematized in such a way where one is given theological precedence and centrality over the other but where both must be held in a creative, mysterious, and simultaneous tension.

I tend to agree with this inherent tension, not because I am a universalist or a Barth fan boy, but because what I have seen in the Tradition would point to an absolutely christocentric picture of salvation, one where the systematic’s mind has no place or ground to theologize. For Barth, and hopefully for all of us, the reaction and form of life we should subsequently adopt upon coming to such a state of “sheer receptivity” towards the Triune God is one of wonder, love, grace, gratitude, and a readiness to tell the world how Christ has already loved it and given itself for it, even before it has come to realize it. The Person and Work of Christ are truly one, united in mysterious, salvific harmony. Jesus Christ is our Θεανθροπος.

Soli Deo Gloria

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^[1] George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press), 106.

^[2] George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press), 107.