The Judge Judged by Karl Barth

I’m reading Barth with a couple of friends (Le Strange and the Rev) and I’ve just finished a big chunk of his fourth volume – on Reconciliation. For those of you who don’t know who Barth is, let alone why I might be reading him…well go here. If you can’t be bothered to click through – the brief summary…Barth (pronounced Bart) was and is one of the most important Christian theologians who have ever lived – author of more than 6million words in one sweeping (and incomplete) systematic theology and is a fine example of someone in whose work you can see a mind maturing, changing and developing.
 I have my issues with Barth, as I do with a number of early twentieth century theologians (get me!) and this chunk on “the Judge Judged” has not really addressed my prime concerns.
 I think Barth does not truly get to grips with the impact of God being outside of time but acting in it – I think he doesn’t consider the impact this state of affairs has on the incarnation and how much more coherent it becomes historically if one does think of time in a more modern fashion. I’m being highly technical here – I mean by  “more modern” that his thinking has not been exposed to modern philosophy of time (particularly as it has been influenced by physics) and hence remains fairly three dimensional. I can’t really complain – most of the real implications of what modern physics has helped us think about weren’t available to him during his lifetime. I don’t just mean quantum physics but network and number theory, information theory and cosmology. I also think a perspective based in the declining post colonial western Europe would have impacted his theology as would neuroscience. Maybe you have to be a polymath to collect all this together but I think Barth was a good candidate.
 I also don’t think he deals head on with the problem of evil. In some ways people like N T Wright have followed in his footsteps and have simply regarded evil and misfortune as givens. They make no attempt to address its genesis or role in creation. I, personally, don’t think a theology that doesn’t look evil steadily in the eye is worth having. All the fine words about God mean nothing if one can’t give me a reason for evil and why the idea of God might actually be good news.
 The problem I have in writing this post is that Barth is extremely dense, very verbose and quite repetitive. This makes addressing my thoughts about what I’ve just read hard – almost every page had me wishing to write something down which makes it difficult to come and write a meaningful summary.
So I’ll focus on a couple of things from the Judge Judged. Barth lays out the material in two proper sections, one on the nature of God as judge and one on how God judges himself. This is archaic language that I struggled with – I don’t tend to think in these terms and I actually hang back from them because I find them difficult, filled with baggage and hard to make sound neutral. I’m a child of my culture after all. Barth doesn’t establish WHY God is judge – we’re back to not dealing with the origin of good and evil – and that is a primary flaw in the argument. It’s not good enough to simply say God is Judge and stop there. For me at least there should be an argument about the why  - one that leads from origin to evil to defeat. I’ve written elsewhere about my view of evil being a potential that has to run its course and be shown, ultimately, to be powerless in the face of the divine community even when it’s allowed to do its very worst. If evil can do its worst then the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ is that much more compelling because it tells the story of Jesus, the Judge and author, who submits to the worst this thing can do because no one else can and still remain who they are. Everyone else falls before it. If nothing else you come away thinking – a god would die for me because he knew I couldn’t do it for myself. For me that is compelling. It’s a pretty strong message about how important I am in all my glorious cosmic insignificance…as I said to a friend once – it’s like the message is “everything is mucked up. Everything is wrong, but it’s ok.”
 Barth actually captures this nicely – he focuses on how just alone the man Jesus was as he considered the end of his course of action in the garden of Gethsemane. That like any man he wished it were otherwise. I often forget this aspect of the human in the Christian story – that Jesus was a man in a single moment at a single place in history.
 Barth also discusses the idea of the judge, and once we set aside the origin of the situation I found his thoughts on God having to be Judge very helpful. On God having to be the one who stands apart from creation as both exemplar of the gap between the created and the creator but also as the place where that gap must run out. I would say it differently – I would use a completely different idiom – but I think we’re saying exactly the same thing; “everything is mucked up. Everything is wrong, but it’s ok.”