Karl Barth on the Christian Life: The Ethics of Reconciliation (Church Dogmatics 4.4)

This course is a 5000-level seminar focused on the final published volume of Barth's Church Dogmatics (CD 4.4, the doctrine of Baptism) as well as the posthumously published fragment titled The Christian Life. Together with an unwritten treatise on the Lord's Supper, these works would have crowned Barth's massive Doctrine of Reconciliation with a treatment on how Christians should live in light of Christ's achieved act of atonement. The seminar will consist primarily of close reading of the relevant texts, along with student presentations and occasional lectures. Topics to be discussed will include: Barth's ethics of divine command and its relation to other ethical models, e.g., virtue ethics; his changing views on sacraments, and his mature account on Baptism and the Lord's Supper as non-mediating human acts of witness; his teaching on the "principalities and powers," especially in light of the Church Struggle of the 1930s and post-World War II political developments, and his views on the church's responsibility to the nation-state; the theology of prayer, and Barth's specific exegesis of the Lord's Prayer as a framework for the Christian moral life.