leondumoulin.nl: Being in Action: The Theological Shape of Barth's Ethical Vision ( ): Paul T. Nimmo: Books.
Table of contents
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- Being in Action
- Being in Action: The Theological Shape of Barth's Ethical Vision: Paul T. Nimmo: T&T Clark
In the second section, the ontological import of ethical agency for Barth is considered in relation to the divine action and the divine command.
The final section of the book examines the teleological purpose envisaged in this theological ethics in terms of participation, witness, and glorification. At each stage of the book, the strong interconnectedness of theological ethics and actualistic ontology in the Church Dogmatics is drawn out.
The resultant appreciation of the actualistic dimension which underlies the theological ethics of Karl Barth feeds into a fruitful engagement with a variety of critiques of Barth's conception of ethical agency.
It is demonstrated that resources can be found within this actualistic ontology to answer some of the diverse criticisms, and that attempts to revise Barth's theological ethics at the margins would have catastrophic and irreversible consequences for his whole theological project. Noetic Aspects of Ethical Agency 2.
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The Discipline of Theological Ethics A - inappropriate theological ethics B - appropriate theological ethics C - theological ethics and casuistry 4. Ontic Aspects of Ethical Agency 5. The Ethical Agent A - the ethical agent in relation to Jesus Christ B - the ethical agent in distinction from Jesus Christ C - critical analysis of the ethical agent 6.
Human Action and Divine Action A - the freedom of the ethical agent B - the relationship between human action and divine action C - a case study of divine action and human action D - critical analysis of ethical action 7. Most notably among those motifs is Barth's "actualism.
In the history of Barth studies, "actualism" has been a term most typically used to designate Barth's theology as one that is oriented toward an event of revelation in which God encounters man. For Barth, revelation is an irreducibly personal affair and therefore cannot be contained or enclosed within creation but must always take place in a continually new event in which humanity is graciously encountered by the Living Word of God, Jesus Christ. By describing the relation between God and humankind in terms of an event , Barth's theology tends to focus its attention on the active relations between God and humankind.
Being in Action
This gives Barth's ethics a very distinct contour. In any particular circumstance, human moral action is normed by the event of God's revelation in the form of a divine command , which summons humankind to obedience. Barth thinks the idea that human action is normed by universal principles extracted from Scripture by some method of exegesis must entail a reduction of the particularity of God's command in the circumstance in which it is given. Furthermore, Barth thinks it would finally prove to be ineffectual, as sinners would certainly manipulate it to serve their own ends.
In the end, the faithful obedience of the Christian depends less on the skillful application of universal principles than on the guidance of the Spirit in each new moment.
Being in Action: The Theological Shape of Barth's Ethical Vision: Paul T. Nimmo: T&T Clark
While this "actualism" enables Barth to give an unusually powerful account of how ethics is driven by God's freedom and grace, it has often been criticized for containing an unnecessary phobia about creaturely media that diminishes or even completely eclipses human action. In Being in Action, Paul Nimmo contends that these criticisms fail to grasp the full scope of Barth's actualism.
Far from being merely a formal feature of Barth's theology of revelation that orients all knowledge of God, Barth's actualism is, in reality, a theological ontology -a way of describing the nature of divine and creaturely being-which forms "the context of all ethical action and of the human person" p.
If the event of revelation in Jesus Christ does not merely orient or direct the Christian but in fact makes a determination about her context and ontology, then Barth's command ethic can be seen as not an occlusion of her created nature, but her correspondence to it.
The goal of Being in Action is to trace the significance of an actualistic ontology in relation to the noetic, ontological, and teleological dimensions of Barth's ethics in an attempt to show its "structural significance" for his thought. Nimmo devotes relatively little space to discussing what actualistic ontology is , or the nature of Barth's understanding of and dissatisfaction with substance metaphysics.