Extra-Augustinisticum

Barth provides a flurry of quotations to demonstrate that Calvin’s Christology was perfectly catholic. Augustine wrote, “Quando in forma servi et mediator esset, infra angelos esse voluit in forma Dei supra angelos mansit; idem in inferioribus via vitae qui in superioribus vita.”

It could also be called the extra-Thomasisticum: Christ came from heaven “non ita quod natura divina in coelo esse desierit; sed quia in infirmis novo modo esse coepit scil. secundum naturam assumptam.”

Even, surprisingly, an extra-Lutheranisticum: “Neque enim tum verbo suo definivit sese, sed liberum sese reservavit super omnia.”

But Barth admits that the Reformed position had problems as well as the Lutheran:

“the Reformed theologians asserted – and asserted in harmony with tradition – that this end [of the unity of divine and human] is made quite clear without the Lutheran innovation, that the hypostatic union is quite beyond question without this innovation. But as the Lutherans failed to show how far, by their elimination of the extra , the vere Deus is, as they allege, preserved to the same extent as the vere homo , so now the Reformed too failed to show convincingly how far the extra does not involve the assumption of a twofold Christ, of a logos ensarkos alongside a logos asarkos , and therefore a dissolution of the unity of natures and hypostatic union, and therefore a destruction of the unequivocal Emmanuel and the certainty of faith and salvation based thereon. In short it cannot be denied that the Reformed totus intra et extra offers at least as many difficulties as the Lutheran totus intra .”

Barth offers no solution, and speculates that Evangelical theology needs both: Perhaps “there must be Lutherans and Reformed: not in the shadow of a unitary theology, but as a twofold theological school – for the sake of the truth about the reality of Jesus Christ, which does not admit of being grasped by any unitary theology.”