ENFOQUE DE LA TRANSFERENCIA DE LA INFORMACIÓN RESPECTO A LOS NIVELES DE COMPRENSIÓN LECTORA

O’Donovan expounds the connection between voluntarism and antinomianism in a recent essay where he takes up his “disagreement with Karl Barth” over divine command theory.171 This disagreement suggests one final direction from which a counter-argument to my thesis might emerge. Basically, O’Donovan objects to Barth’s “lack of any universal rules”, an alleged consequence of Barth’s desire to step back from Kantian universalism.172 Barth refutes the idea of universal rules, saying they are “not to be found” in the Bible:

For, as the Lord of this history, God seems hardly to be interested at all in general and universally valid rules, but properly only in certain particular actions and achievements and attitudes, and this in the extremely simple and direct way of desiring from man (as a father from his child, or a master from his servant) that this or that must or must not happen. Nothing can be made of these commands if we try to generalise and transform them into universally valid principles173

170

There is no cause for surprise in noticing that secular and Christian judgments of moral behavior often align well. Paul makes much the same observation in his admonition to refrain from judging other people’s behavior [Rom. 2:1f]; yet the point is that faith, not ‘ethics’, is the source of righteousness—“the one who is righteous will live by faith” [Rom. 1:17; cf. Habakkuk 2:4]. Rather than showing the uncircumcised to be exemplars of ethics, Paul shows that those who possess the law (Torah) are on a par with the uncircumcised, for all of them alike are under the power of sin—“there is no one who is righteous” [3:9-20]. This explains the imperative, “do not judge”, which occupies the entirety of Romans 2.

171

Oliver O’Donovan, ‘The Moral Authority of Scripture’, inScripture’s Doctrine and Theology’s Bible, eds. Markus Bockmuehl and Alan J. Torrance (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008) 165-175, 169.

172

O’Donovan, ‘The Moral Authority of Scripture’, 169. 173

Chapter 6: Transformation of Persons 176 The concern is that if we cannot explicitly endorse the concept of universally valid rules, then the ontological priority of the moral order is called into question, leaving us with only the vagaries of a sheer and individualistic human will as recourse to moral deliberation. In this vein, O’Donovan accuses Barth of espousing a form of theological ethics based not upon any divinely instilled order, but rather upon an existential “burning bush” mode of perception, with the result that

…the divine command in the Bible is, like the burning bush, a wonder that at certain unrepeatable points in history has unexpectedly invaded and taken control of the life of some agent, leaving only the choice to obey or to rebel.174

O’Donovan amplifies this idea of “invasion” of the moral agent’s mind by means of the example of a soldier trained into “implicit obedience”, in which there is no rationality, no reason, no deliberation, but only an unthinking response to command.175 This seems to me not to capture the deeper significance which Barth attaches to hearing and obeying in the context of a biblical witness which attests to the moral agent’s relationship with “God as the Father, or Lord” who orders or forbids “in the process of the revelation and embodiment of His grace,hic et nunc.”176 It is the concreteness of God’s being and the concreteness of relationship, which Barth here affirms as the context offides quaerens intellectumwithin which we may read the Bible as being “replete with ethics”.177 Barth is not espousing here a voluntarism which strips ethics of meaning, but rather he is affirming the concrete reality of the living God as being: (1) beyond the capability of any universally valid rules to contain; (2) more real than the precepts of any abstract moral code; and (3) prior to and above any human judgment or conception of any such moral code. To suggest that Barth’s ethics prescribes an “invasion” of the moral agent by a power that shuts down the individual person’s will and rationality, obviating moral thinking in the process, and denying human freedom of participation in the moral reality, is to side-step the evangelical affirmations of Barth’s doctrine by ascribing voluntaristic tendencies to them. Voluntarism is indeed a ghost, as O’Donovan has called it; it has no life of its own, and survives only as a shadow of the real life of the moral order. That real life from which light radiates, and from which the shadows run, is the personal relationship which is inextricable from the moral order. The 174

O’Donovan, ‘The Moral Authority of Scripture’, 169. 175

Cf. O’Donovan’s concern to not interpret “[m]oments of fear and trembling” in opposition to “reflective and considered thinking, the ‘rational worship’ … [of] Rom. 12:1-2”; ‘The Moral Authority of Scripture’, 175. 176

CDII/2, 673. 177

ontic reality of personal relationship will not be expunged without doing grievous damage to the affirmations of evangelical ethics regarding theological anthropology and the cosmology of faith.