Luxury of Faith: Karl Barth and the Spirit's Gift of Healing

The ‘luxury of faith’ Karl Barth and the Spirit’s Gift of Healing1 In The Doctrine of Reconciliation, Karl Barth explores two ways of understanding faith: saving faith, which he deals with in the concluding paragraph of Vol IV/1, and healing faith, which he briefly touches upon in the opening paragraph of Vol IV/2.2 While Barth develops these two portraits of faith in broadly similar contexts and addresses similar questions through them, he makes no attempt to synthesis them into a single account of faith in spite of the obvious connections between them. He refuses to do this for the simple reason that he considers healing faith to be a ‘luxury’ of faith, given to a few by God but not to be expected by all. 3 This paper disagrees and argues that, far from being a ‘luxury’ for a few select Christians, the healing that comes form the Holy Spirit is to be hoped for by all believers for, according to Scripture, it is a foretaste of the Holy Spirit’s great re-creation of the cosmos and all humanity within it that will occur at the final return of Jesus Christ.

ON HEALING FAITH While Barth divides his treatment of the Biblical witness to faith into two parts - saving faith and healing faith - he approaches each in the same way.

Whether dealing with the faith that saves, or the faith that heals, Barth is clear that faith involves human knowledge of Jesus Christ, achieved only as the gift of the Holy Spirit, with knowledge defined as knowledge-in-relationship with the whole person of Jesus Christ and not just an acquaintance of a collection of historical sayings. Yet in spite of these connections, Barth makes no effort to combine the two discussions of faith: in these to portraits, in spite of similarities of context and content, he is in fact dealing with two different types of faith.

Saving faith, he argues, is that faith common to all Christians: ‘on this normal view faith is to put our whole trust in God for both time and eternity’.4 Healing faith, which he identifies as the faith of ‘those who had a part in the miracles of

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! This paper was originally presented at the 2012 Annual Conference of the Society for the Study of Theology: The Holy Spirit, 26-29 March 2012, University of York, England.

2 ! Barth’s treatment of healing faith can be found in CD IV/2, §64.3 ‘The Royal Man’, pp. 209-47.

3 ! CD IV/2, p. 245.

4 ! CD IV/2, p. 245.

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The ‘luxury of faith’ R McDonald

Jesus Christ’,5 he sees as possessing an extra quality over that of saving faith, what Barth calls a ‘surplus’ or ‘luxury’. 6 While extraordinarily brief by his standards, Barth’s account of the luxury of faith nevertheless introduces a number of important themes into The Doctrine of Reconciliation. The first is simply the fact that it engages with the healing miracles of Jesus Christ and does so not through a thinly-veiled scepticism but within an appreciation of ‘the extraordinary character of the freedom of the grace of God’.7 Barth expresses a remarkable humility in the face of this ‘superfluity of the grace of God’,8 even going so far as to ask: Can we really understand even the rule of faith if we refuse to know anything of this surplus?9 It is to the detriment of The Doctrine of Reconciliation that Barth had not the mind to express a firm No to this rhetorical question and recast his own understanding of the regula fidei from the perspective of this luxury of the grace of God. The second positive contribution that Barth’s treatment of healing faith makes to his theology is that it adds the element of material, concrete, embodiment to the existence of the Christian, an element that is lacking in the account of saving faith with which he ends Vol IV/1. In these few pages within ‘The Royal Man’, Barth finally articulates a fully embodied and not solely cognitive description of faith, writing of those who were healed by Jesus Christ: [Their faith] may be disparaged because it is simply a faith in Jesus, or God, as the One from whom men expect, or have already received, the healing of their infirmities. But this transition to the concrete and physical is the distinctive feature in the faith of these men; the additional element which it reveals.10 5

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CD IV/2, p. 243.

CD IV/2, p. 245.

CD IV/2, p. 247.

CD IV/2, p. 247.

CD IV/2, p. 247.

CD IV/2, p. 246.

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Furthermore, in this healing of the whole person Barth sees not just a restoration of personal health but also a sign of the coming kingdom of God, now manifest in the present through these ‘real deliverances’, 11 leading him to assert: ‘that even the physical deliverance of man is already present here and now. The truth of the promise, the truth of what will be (and will be revealed) in the future, shines out already.’ 12 Finally, in Barth’s description of the free grace of God through which the luxury of healing faith is bestowed upon certain believers as they encounter Jesus Christ, the reader can discern what David Ford calls a ‘surrogate’ of the Holy Spirit. One does not have to look too deeply to discern the Spirit when Barth writes of, ‘the element of surplus and luxury’ in faith; or when he speaks of ‘the remarkable particularity’ of the epiphany of Jesus Christ to those who are healed as ‘like a single ray of light focussed on one point and piercing at this point what is otherwise an abyss of darkness.’13 Barth’s pneumatology in these pages becomes explicit however in his description of the work of grace, here and now, that contains strong resonances with Paul’s paean to the Holy Spirit in Romans 8: Therefore, at the very heart of time, in restoration of the glory and peace of creation, and anticipation of the glory and peace of the final revelation of the will and kingdom of God, [grace] is free to accomplish deliverances which obviously and powerfully concern the whole man: man in his totality as the soul of his body and together with his body.14 This is the clearest indication that Barth’s treatment of the luxury of faith is, at its root, an explication of the Spirit’s re-creative work within creation, in that time before the final return of Jesus Christ and the longed for renewal of all things.

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CD IV/2, p. 246. ! CD IV/2, p. 246.

13 ! CD IV/2, p. 246.

14 ! CD IV/2, p. 246. See also Romans 8, especially vv18-28.

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Barth’s brief account of healing faith in ‘The Royal Man’ could helpfully inform his discussion of saving faith in Vol IV/1, not least by providing it with a much needed appreciation of the relationship between faith and the human body.

However, two factors prevent him from adequately integrating this small part of his thinking into his wider theological vision. The first of these concerns Barth’s understanding of the scope of healing faith. Of central importance to Barth’s work on healing faith is the notion that this concrete character of faith is not for everyone, for it is a distinctive element over and above that involved in saving faith.15 This is an assertion that warrants critical attention, for when it is viewed within the theology Barth has been developing in The Doctrine of Reconciliation it becomes apparent that there is no believer whose faith is not influenced and in fact based upon the miraculous work of Jesus Christ. For according to Barth’s account of the relationship of all believers, indeed all creation, to the life and activity of Jesus Christ, 16 all human faith is not just oriented towards Jesus Christ, it is based upon him: [The necessity of faith] is to be found [not in humanity but] rather in the object of faith. [...] This object is the living Lord Jesus Christ, in whom it took place, in whom it has taken place for every man, in whom it confronts man as an absolutely superior actuality, that his sin, and he himself as the actual sinner he is, and with his sin the possibility of his unbelief, is rejected, destroyed and set aside, that he is born again as a new man of obedience.17 Who then is the believer, or indeed the unbeliever, whose whole existence is not radically altered by this ‘miracly’ of Jesus Christ? Who then exists except in relation to this activity of Jesus Christ through which people are ‘born again’?

For Barth to speak as it there are some believers who exist solely through a purely cognitive faith in Jesus Christ and others who exist both in this saving faith and also in the renewed embodied existence that comes through the luxury of healing faith, it is incumbent upon him to prove that there are believers who belong to the first group who do not in fact belong to the second. That, on his 15

! CD IV/2, p. 245. ! CD IV/1, §63.1 ‘Faith and its Object’, pp. 740-57.

17 ! CD IV/1, p.747.

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own logic he is unable to do so compels the reader to conclude that there are in fact no believers who exist apart from participation in the miracles of Jesus Christ. Barth’s carefully maintained distinction between saving and healing faith is, when examined through the logic of his own theology, wholly artificial. In the end the distinction collapses and so Barth’s theology inadvertently and reluctantly corresponds to the witness of the New Testament: there is only one kind of faith in Jesus Christ and that is a gift of the Holy Spirit that saves and heals.18 The second weakness that is evident in Barth’s treatment of healing faith within his work on ‘The Royal Man’, is his failure to develop the implicit pneumatology of the luxury of faith. For all the potential of Barth’s theology in this paragraph to produce some constructive statements concerning the Holy Spirit’s presence and activity within the whole creation, in relation to both believers and non-believers alike, the possibilities afforded by his account of the luxury of faith remain un-tapped. Instead, Barth chooses largely to ignore the latent pneumatology in the superfluity of God’s grace, explicitly describing this transition of faith into the concrete and particular solely in terms of Jesus Christ, as ‘the freedom given to man [...] by Jesus for Jesus’.19 Consequently, in spite of his humble questioning of anyone’s ability to understand the regula fidei without dealing with the healing miracles of Jesus Christ, Barth’s overall account of the Spirit’s gift of faith still suffers from a bifurcation into its cognitive and concrete elements.

FAITH - THE GIFT OF THE SPIRIT THAT SAVES AND HEALS This paper has discerned, in the account of healing faith that Barth gives in his discussion of ‘The Royal Man’, a highly suggestive theological locus with a strong, if implicit, pneumatology. However, it has argued that Barth’s decision to 18

! It is perhaps worth pointing out that in his treatment of healing faith Barth adopts an approach and introduces an idea into his theology that he has explicitly rejected in his earlier work on ‘The Election of God’. In terms of his approach, Barth’s argument in ‘The Royal Man’ is based on the empirical observation that not all are healed. The is precisely the kind of reasoning that he rejects in his doctrine of election when he refuses to begin with the observation that ‘this one’ or ‘that one’ is saved.

Barth is in danger of introducing the same sort of decretum absolutum behind the healing miracles of Jesus Christ that he resisted in his account of God’s election. When the question of why some are healed and others are not is put to Barth, his answer, in pointing to the free grace of God, points the interrogator behind Jesus Christ, to an abstract idea of ‘freedom’ that itself determines the efficacy of the activity of the Royal Man. See CD II/2, §32.2 ‘The Foundation of the Doctrine’, pp. 44-93.

19 ! CD IV/2, p. 242.

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understand faith in terms of two distinct types, a saving faith that is given to all believers, and a healing faith that is a luxury for only some believers, is not consistent with the inner logic of his own theology, and nor does it adequately reflect the witness of Scripture. For the New Testament does not present a bifurcated account of faith, as can be seen in Luke’s account of the going up of Peter and John to the temple as recorded in Acts 3.

Faced with the need of the man who was born lame, Peter and John’s witness to him consists, not in giving him new information about Jesus Christ, but in offering him what they had: healing in the name of Jesus Christ. Here, faith can be found in the disciples’ intention to pray and in their recognition that through prayer Jesus Christ can bring healing and transform lives. Such is the nature of post-Pentecost, Spirit-empowered Christian existence, as described by Luke the Evangelist. It is a vision of the life of faith that deserves to be constantly before the eyes of all those with an interest in the movement of the Holy Spirit within the world.

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