Few issues have been as divisive for the contemporary church as the doctrine of irresistible grace. In the debates surrounding this doctrine, there has been an overwhelming tendency for theologies of grace to focus on the effects that grace has on particular human beings. Alongside this tendency, there has arisen a danger that we forget that God’s grace is God’s grace; that it is God’s free, personal, and beneficent disposition and action. In this article, I turn to Karl Barth to consider a way forward for interpreting the irresistible nature of grace that does not focus on its effectuality but on its theocentric, participative, and covenantal character.
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Donald McKim, Introducing the Reformed Faith (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 183.
See William Den Boer, “Defense or Deviation?,” in Revisiting the Synod of Dordt, ed. Aza Goudriaan and Fred van Lieberg (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 43.
John Barclay, “ ‘By the Grace of God I am What I am:’ Grace and agency in Philo and Paul,” in Divine and Human Agency in Paul and his Cultural Environment, ed. John Barclay and Simon Gathercole (London: T&T Clark, 2007), 150.
John Macken, The Autonomy Theme in the ‘Church Dogmatics’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 157. Von Balthasar also suggests, “Barth ends up talking about Christ so much as the true human being that it seems as if all other human beings are mere epiphenomena.” Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth, trans. E.T. Oakes (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1992), 243; see also Terry Wright “Reconsidering Concursus,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 2:2, (2002), 210.
See Jesse Couenhoven, “Karl Barth’s Conception(s) of Human and Divine Freedom(s),” in Commanding Grace, ed. Daniel Migliore (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 246–251; David Fergusson, ‘Will the Love of God Finally Triumph?’ in Nothing Greater, Nothing Better: Theological Essays on the Love of God, ed. Kevin J. Vanhoozer (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 195); and Oliver Crisp, Retrieving Doctrine (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2010), 123–126.
Nigel Biggar, The Hastening that Waits (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 5.
Nigel Biggar, The Hastening that Waits, 5. This passage is also critiqued by John Webster in Barth’s Ethics of Reconciliation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 226–227.
Barth, ‘The Sovereignty of God’s Word and the Decision of Faith,’ in God Here and Now, trans. P.M. van Buren (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), 22.
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Few issues have been as divisive for the contemporary church as the doctrine of irresistible grace. In the debates surrounding this doctrine, there has been an overwhelming tendency for theologies of grace to focus on the effects that grace has on particular human beings. Alongside this tendency, there has arisen a danger that we forget that God’s grace is God’s grace; that it is God’s free, personal, and beneficent disposition and action. In this article, I turn to Karl Barth to consider a way forward for interpreting the irresistible nature of grace that does not focus on its effectuality but on its theocentric, participative, and covenantal character.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 731 | 94 | 8 |
| Full Text Views | 395 | 4 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 578 | 8 | 0 |