Creation and Reconciliation

Barth’s problems with natural revelation and with creation seem to have a root in his trinitarian theology.  The reconciling Son, he says, comes onto the field that has been created by the Father, yet “we must obviously distinguish them in such a way that we perceive and acknowledge the relation of subordination that is present here.  We must say, then, that the Reconciler is not the Creator, and that as the Reconciler He follows the Creator, that He accomplishes, as it were, a second divine act – not an act which we can deduce from the first, whose sequence from the first we can survey and see to be necessary, but still a second act which for all its newness and inconceivability is related to the first.”

Of course, the two are related: “If He were not first Creator and Father who is Lord of our being, against whom we have sinned, whose wrath is thus upon us, but whose wrath is but the reverse side of His love as Creator and Father, how then could He be the Reconciler, the Peacemaker?”

Barth is not talking about any “distinction of being” but only in “mode of being.”  And, of course, Barth affirms the biblical and creedal “all things were made by Him.”  Reconciliation and revelation, he says, are “appropriated” to the Son, yet just as these are also works of the Father so creation is a work of the Son: “Jesus Christ is the Word by which God created the world out of nothing.”  Indeed, the Son is not only the image of the Father but “the original of the world.”  Thus, the Son is not a stranger or even a “semi-stranger”; when He comes, He comes “to His own possession” and “to the world, to us whom he Himself created, who are from the first His very own, and he theirs.”

Still, this distribution of acts among Father and Son doesn’t reflect the biblical portrait.  Barth perhaps wants to emphasize the instrumentality of “by” and “through”; even in the opera ad extra , the Persons remain distinct and work according to their personal particularities.  Still, it is entirely appropriate to call the Son “Creator,” and not simply “instrument” of creation, and the identity of Creator and Reconciler was a big theme of Athanasius’ On the Incarnation .

By distinguishing in the way he does between Creator and Reconciler, Barth can also distinguish between creation and revelation, nature and grace.  Once we say that the Word is Creator, how can the creation be speechless?  How can it fail to reveal the Father whose Word created?

Even with what Barth says, it is hard to see how the creation can fail to reveal.  If the Son is the “original of the world,” how can the world be anything but a “copy” of the Son?  If the world is made “log-ically” then how can the Logos fail to be evident in what is made?  At that point, how can one still say “Nein”?