2.2 ACTIVIDAD AGRARIA

For Barth, this covenant is not an abstract concept, but the concrete, actual relationship between God and humanity in the person of Jesus Christ, Emmanuel.33_{In him}

theology finds the freedom to be “the science and doctrine of the commerce and communion between God and man” (HG, 11).34 _{In himis “not only the ontic but also}

the noetic basis of the whole of Christian truth and the Christian message” (ChrL, 9).In him, “[w]ho the commanding God is and who responsible man is—God in the mystery of his commanding and man in the mystery of his obedience or disobedience—is not hidden from us but is revealed and may be known” (ChrL, 5).35 _{As Barth says in}

retrospect, “[M]y own concern in my long life has been increasingly to emphasize this name and to say: ‘In him’.... In him is all that I have attempted in my life in weakness and folly. It is there in him” (FT, 30*).36 _{Christology, thedoctrine about Jesus Christ, is}

not the center of Barth’s theology; the center is Jesus Christ: “It’s not a matter of christology, nor even of christocentricity and a christological orientation, but of,” Barth ———————————

33. “The last word that I have to say as a theologian or politician is not a concept like grace but a name: Jesus Christ” (FT, 29*). On Barth’s particularism and

personalism, see Hunsinger (How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology, 32–35 and 40–42). Although Hunsinger does acknowledge that “Barth wants to keep everything under the control of a single particular,” and “[t]hat control is fatally lost... when the mystery of the particular is allowed to disappear into a mere metaphysic of the particular” (19), he does not sufficiently coordinate his “motifs” or “-isms” to the actual, particular, objective, real, logical, person ofJesus Christ.

34. Webster recognizes that this emphasis (which he traces back to the Calvin lecture cycle [1922]) means that “the mutuality of God and humanity as agents is for Barth a matter of description rather than for theoretical resolution” (Moral, 34 and quote at 91).

35. Especially fascinating in relation to Zizioulas’s theology, Barth continues, “God and man, if not in their essence, at least in their work and therefore in their manner....”

36. Cf. Hunsinger’s perceptive comments regarding the importance in Barth’s theology of “in” (n. 21 above).

says, “Jesus Christ himself (vivit! regnat! triumphat!)” (Barth, 411 and 380).37_{Jesus Christ,}

the personal history and the historical person of God with us, embodies the covenant relationship, for in him God and humanity are united.38 _{In looking at Jesus Christ one}

sees true God and true humanity—never in abstraction, but only in their union in this particular person whoisatonement—God with usandwe with God:

The atonement [Versöhnung] as the fulfilment of the covenant is.... the one thing from which neither the God who turns to humanity nor humanity converted to God can be abstracted, in which and by which both are what they are, in which and to which they stand in that mutual relationship.... But that one thing in the middle is one person, Jesus Christ. He is the atonement as the fulfilment of the covenant.... We hasten to explain that the being of Jesus Christ, the unity of being of the living God and this living human, takes place in the event of the concrete existence of this human. It is a being, but a being in a history.... And what takes place in this history, and therefore in the being of Jesus Christ as such, is atonement. Jesus Christ is not what He is—very God, very human, very God-human—in order as such to mean and do and accomplish something else which is atonement. But His being as God and human and God-human consists in the completed act of the reconciliation of humanity with God (CD

IV/1, 122Rand 126–27R).39

This particular, historical person, Jesus Christ, stands as “the model of all that takes place between God and humanity.... the point where this encounter may be seen as an event in the covenant of grace set up between God and humanity, and therefore in its primal form” (ChrL, 12).

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37. In this regard, Barth said, “I am very attracted to a remark by Hilary of Poitiers: Non sermoni res sed rei sermo subjectus est[De Trinitate, I.14].” Unfortunately, this note is rather muted in Marc Cortez’s otherwise fine discussion (“What Does It Mean to Call Karl Barth a ‘Christocentric’ Theologian?”). It was this focus that allowed Barth the freedom to “think through and develop everything anew, from a center which [he] considered the right one” (How I Changed My Mind, 60); cf. Jüngel (Karl Barth: A Theological Legacy, 15).

38. In Barth’s christology, argues McCormack, “the nineteenth-century distinction between Christologies ‘from above’ and ‘from below’ has been effectively set aside—notovercome by mediating between them but set aside as irrelevant to what the New Testament witness has to say about Jesus Christ” (Orthodox and Modern, 221, n. 51).

39. With regard to the centrality Jesus Christ’s history, see McCormack’s helpful discussion of “essence” and “actualism” in Barth’s thought, wherein he describes “essence” as “not something that is fixed and immovable in itself, a metaphysical substructure of ‘substance’ that guarantees to God or to the human Jesus identity with himself,” but rather “a description of a person or thingin its entirety, in the sum total of its existence, in all of its acts and relations—above all, where the question of that which differentiates the person or entity from others is in view” (Orthodox and Modern, 239).