“Responsibility in Karl Barth and Modern Ethics”
Gerald McKenny (University of Notre Dame)
Religion and Ethics Workshop
University of Chicago Divinity School
March 1, 2012
Introduction
Karl Barth’s ethic is usually thought to be some kind of divine command ethic, and of course,
Barth himself presents it as such in his Church Dogmatics and elsewhere. But precisely as an
ethic of divine command it is also an ethic of responsibility. Barth makes this identification
explicit in a somewhat enigmatic attempt to say what his ethics is about. “The subject matter
(Sache) of theological ethics is the responsibility (Verantwortung) which God has assumed for us
in the fact that He has made us responsible by His command.”1 This claim strikes us as an odd
one, as it draws our attention to the responsibility God assumes for us and seems to take the fact
of our responsibility almost for granted. The oddity is only magnified when Barth tells us exactly
what responsibility God has assumed for us, which turns out to be astonishingly comprehensive.
“The fact that He gives man His command … means that He makes Himself responsible not only
for its authority but also for its fulfillment.”2 In giving God’s command, God not only establishes
its legitimacy (Recht) and effectiveness (Kraft), that is, its authority; God also fulfills its demand
in our place.3 For Barth, of course, it is by becoming human in Jesus Christ, who fulfills the
command in our place, that God assumes this responsibility for us.4 This reference to Christ’s
substitution indicates that Barth places ethics under the same logic, and indeed within the same
act, as soteriology, a point we will return to below. On this very point, however, Barth’s
formulation of the subject matter of his theological ethics presents us with a problem. If in
making us responsible God takes responsibility for us, to the point of fulfilling in our place the
very command that makes us responsible, then in what sense can we be said to have been made
responsible at all? To take our place in this way seems to violate the very essence of
responsibility, which is that no one can take my place. The responsibility God assumes for us, as
Barth describes it, thus appears to absolve human beings of responsibility altogether.
1
Barth, CD II/2, 543/603 (revised).
Barth, CD II/2, 543/603.
3
In Barth’s exposition it will become clear that it is most fundamentally God’s fulfillment of the command in our
place that establishes its authority. We have already referred to legitimacy (Recht) and effectiveness (Kraft) as the
two elements that for Barth comprise the authority of God’s command, which thus consists in its right to bind us and
its power to bind us. It is only to the command of a God who is so radically and thoroughly for us, even to the point
of accomplishing the right or good in our place, that we are bound, and it is only a command that addresses us from
the site of its fulfillment that is truly effective.
4
Specifically, then, the subject matter of theological ethics “is the Word and work of God in Jesus Christ, in which
the right action of man has already been performed and therefore waits only to be confirmed by our action.” (Barth,
CD II/2, 543.)
2
Yet there can be no doubt as to Barth’s insistence that human beings are genuinely responsible.
Indeed, he goes so far as to claim that “human being [Menschsein] consists in responsibility
[Verantwortung],”5 thus identifying responsibility as a definitive ontological feature of humanity.
Perhaps, then, we can gain clarity from a statement Barth makes in introducing his theological
ethics, which is pithy enough to serve us as a formula: “It is as He makes Himself responsible for
man that God makes man, too, responsible.”6 This formula focuses again on what God does, but
it stresses that as God takes responsibility for us, God also makes us responsible. It suggests that
the very point of God’s taking responsibility for us (though not necessarily the only point) is to
make us, too, responsible. It also suggests that we are responsible in a certain way or that our
responsibility takes a certain form, namely, that it is precisely the responsibility of those for
whom God has taken responsibility. These two suggestions lead us to a third one: that
responsibility is an analogous concept for Barth. By taking responsibility for us God makes us,
too, responsible, so that we resemble God in this respect. However, it is God, and not we
ourselves, who takes responsibility for us; we are not even responsible for ourselves, much less
in a position to take responsibility for God. So, whatever our responsibility is, it is not identical
to God’s responsibility and we do not exercise it by identifying ourselves with God. Our
responsibility is analogous to God’s; or to use the term Barth prefers, our responsibility
corresponds to God’s responsibility for us. It is, again, the responsibility of those for whom God
has taken responsibility.
The following paper examines Barth’s concept of responsibility in light of these three
suggestions, and in one sense it is a paper on Barth’s theological ethics. However, the topic is not
only of relevance to Barth’s theology or those who are interested in the latter. The reason for
making this paper the topic of a workshop such as this one is its larger relevance for the ethics of
responsibility in theological ethics. That relevance can be described fairly concisely, as follows.
The concept of responsibility and the role this concept often plays in modern ethical thought and
practice express an element of modern self-understanding that is perhaps best captured in a
colloquial expression: “It is up to us” or “It is up to me.” On the one hand, one posits oneself as a
unique subject with this expression, which designates one as singular and irreplaceable.7 In this
sense the expression indicates how the ethical has been a key (though not the only) form of the
subject in modern Western thought and practice. That we continue to give responsibility a central
place in our moral self-understanding indicates the persistence of our commitment to acting and
thinking of ourselves as moral subjects notwithstanding bold proclamations of the end of the
subject. This is one aspect of modernity that seems likely to endure. At the same time, however,
this expression conveys a presumption. It implies that it really is up to me or to us: that the cause
of the good or right lies with me or with us and that I am or we are up to the task, capable of
knowing what it demands and carrying it out and authorized to do so. Here, our commitment is
less secure and the future of responsibility less certain. We are now all too well aware of how
this presumption undergirds dangerous delusions regarding our ability and our authority to reshape lives and societies in accordance with moral demands and ideals.
At the risk of sounding melodramatic, we may describe this circumstance as a contemporary
crisis of responsibility: How do we maintain and cultivate the earnestness and urgency captured
5
Barth, CD III/2, 175/209.
Barth, CD II/2, 511/567.
7
The articulation of this aspect of responsibility is of course deeply indebted to the work of Emmanuel Lévinas.
6
in the expression, “It is up to me” or “It is up to us,” while knowing full well that we are neither
able nor authorized to bring human lives and societies into conformity with the right and the
good? We (or many of us, at least) seem to be caught between cynicism and ambition, neither
willing to give up the sense that it is up to us (as moral conservatism would have us do) nor able
to find an object that is adequate to that sense. The premise of this paper is that Karl Barth’s ethic
of responsibility offers a way, at least for Christians, to understand this crisis of responsibility
and to overcome it not by evading it but precisely by embracing it. For Barth, the sense that it is
up to me, that I am a genuine subject in this sense, may be a modern discovery or invention, but
once discovered or invented it becomes indispensable in conveying the incomparable dignity
bestowed on humanity by God in making human beings God’s covenant partner. At the same
time, for Barth, the presumption that the cause of the right or good depends on me or us imperils
humanity, not only because we as humans are not able or authorized to take up this cause but
chiefly because we were never meant to do so: because our very humanity, our being as God’s
covenant partner, consists in our being the ones for whom God has already intervened in this
way.
It is, in short, as God has made Godself responsible for us (taking up the human cause, the cause
of the right or good, in our place) that God makes us responsible. To explain what Barth thought
it means for God to do this and what he thought it means for us to be those for whom God does
this is the task of this paper. Section one below shows why Barth found it necessary for his
distinctive theological purposes to appropriate the concept of responsibility, and what that
appropriation implies about his theological ethics. Section two is more technical in nature; it
shows what exactly Barth meant by his claim that in taking responsibility for us God makes us,
too, responsible and how that claim is coherent. It will become clear in this section that Barth
understands responsibility first and foremost in terms of accountability. However, he by no
means neglects the two other major aspects of responsibility, namely, the imputability of actions
to an agent and the liability of an agent for others or for the effects of her actions. The third and
fourth sections show how Barth incorporated these features.
1. Between the Reformation and Modernity
Throughout his Church Dogmatics Barth attempted to reformulate certain themes of the
Protestant Reformation (which for him is almost exclusively represented by Luther and Calvin)
with the aim of overcoming what he saw as the historical failure of Protestant theology to resist
the enlistment of its themes in the cause of the self-constituted, self-enclosed, self-sufficient
human subject (itself, as these features indicate, a sort of parody of divine aseity). Barth cast this
subject as the lead character in the drama of modernity. Yet while he quite obviously opposed
this subject as a Promethean usurper, his attitude toward it was surprisingly complex. By no
means did it take the anti-modern form found in so many theologies today. Rather, Barth found
in the self-assertion of this modern subject a distorted, misguided, and ultimately self-defeating,
yet nonetheless unmistakable trace of the profound and unconditional affirmation of humanity
which for him is inherent in God’s very being as God and which must therefore find its
corresponding affirmation in human attitudes and conduct. Moreover, especially as Barth
followed the dramatic progression of this self-asserting character from its noble confidence in the
eighteenth century to its disillusionment and self-destruction in the first half of the twentieth
century and beyond, it was clear to him that this subject could only be addressed by a negation
that is contained within and follows from a more fundamental affirmation (which Barth argued
was the relationship of divine grace and divine judgment).
From this perspective we can understand what Barth does when he identifies responsibility as the
subject matter of ethics while also enclosing our responsibility within the responsibility God
takes for us. In stressing that God takes responsibility for us to the point of fulfilling the
command of God addressed to us, Barth identifies the subject matter of theological ethics with
the Lutheran and Calvinist conception of divine grace, according to which God acts in our
place—apart from our action—to save us, extending the range of this conception to encompass
not only soteriology in the strict sense but also ethics or, in more classically Protestant terms, not
only justification but also sanctification. In Barth’s view, Christ not only takes our place as
sinners, thereby putting us in a right relationship with God; he also accomplishes in our place the
holiness or goodness that is to characterize those who exist in a right relationship to God. In
contrast to Luther and Calvin, both justification and sanctification—righteousness before God
and holiness or goodness of conduct—are for Barth realized by the same working of divine
grace. There is therefore no ground, as there was in the theologies of Luther and Calvin, for
ethics to become disengaged from soteriology and to find its ground in a principle other than
divine grace as what God has done in our place. Thus does Barth close the loophole Luther and
Calvin left open for modern ethics to find its ground in the human subject, who is capable of
fulfilling the moral demand and establishing its authority by reason and conscience, apart from
divine grace.
Yet it is highly significant that Barth articulates his reformulation of this Reformation-era theme
in the language of responsibility. As many observers have pointed out, responsibility—both the
concept itself in the sense in which we usually understand it and the role it plays in our ethics—is
a distinctively modern notion. As we noted in our introductory remarks, at least in its modern
meaning it goes beyond the notion of rational agency (the capacity to act in accordance with
reasons) to imply that “it is up to me.” “It is up to me”: This can mean that I am the one who is
summoned to act. I am designated (by a command, by the moral law, by the Other), singled out
and thus irreplaceable: I cannot delegate or abscond to someone else who will act in my place. In
this respect one who is responsible is not only an agent (one who possesses the capacity to act)
but also a subject.8 And inherent in this status is both a degree of urgency and a kind of dignity
that seem to be lacking in the status of a rational agent. It is not implausible to consider this
urgency and this dignity to be among the defining characteristics of modern self-understanding.
However, it is difficult, both conceptually and practically, to hold that “it is up to me” in this
sense (namely, in terms of one’s singularity, irreplaceability, or non-substitutability) without also
holding that “it is up to me” in the sense that the burden is on me to bring the good or right into a
world that would otherwise be without it, or that the cause of the good or right in the world is
dependent on me—that I cannot assume that the realization of the good or the right is ultimately
underwritten by God, nature, or the cosmos. These two senses seem to be closely connected, if
not inseparable, in the modern moral self-understanding. The very urgency and dignity that
attaches to the status of the subject in the first sense seems to require the second sense as well.
8
Barth identified the subject in this sense with the concept of the ethical as such. See Barth, CD III/2, 91-93/106108.
We are now in a position to understand the significance of Barth’s formula and why he insisted
on it. Let us recall this formula: “It is as He makes Himself responsible for man that God makes
man, too, responsible.” As we will soon consider in more detail, at the very heart of Barth’s
theology is the notion of the covenant relationship between God and humanity as distinct yet
inseparable subjects bound together from eternity and in time in mutual yet asymmetrical
relations of responsibility. Barth appropriated the notion of responsibility and identified it as the
subject matter of ethics in part because he was convinced that the status of the responsible
subject, with the urgency and dignity that attaches to it, properly expresses the status and the role
of human beings as genuine partners in relationship with God. For Barth, human beings are not
mere objects of divine dispositions and actions but genuine subjects. Yet the notion of
responsibility could also be misleading. As we have seen, this notion can be taken to mean that
the cause of the good or right or its very existence in the world is up to the human subject. But
from Barth’s perspective, to take it in this way would be to presume that God’s human covenant
partner has been abandoned by God and is left to herself. As we will see, Barth was convinced
that this presumption is both theologically problematic and ethically dangerous. It also seems,
given the connection of responsibility with the notion that “it is up to us,” to be inevitable—
unless our responsibility can be shown to be grounded in the responsibility God has already
taken for the cause of the good and its existence in the world. That is, of course, precisely what
Barth attempts to do with his formula, while also establishing God’s responsibility for the cause
of the right or good as that which constitutes us as responsible subjects in the first sense.
Many Christian theologians today would reject Barth’s attempt to appropriate the modern
conception of responsibility and give it a central place in his theology. Like Barth, these
theologians reject the presumption that it is up to us to bring the right or good into the world and
realize it there. Unlike Barth, however, they consider it a mistake to incur the risk of this
presumption in the first place by granting the subject the status it enjoys in Barth’s theology.
From one side, opposition to Barth’s position can be expected from those who think that the
subject must not only be constituted by divine grace but much more radically deconstructed.
From another side, opposition can be expected from those who think that the good is in the world
in the form of natural human ends or a cosmic order, and for whom there is therefore no need for
a subject in the sense defined above but only for a rational agent who is capable (with the
assistance of divine grace) of directing its inclinations to their proper ends or ordering its desires
in accordance with reality.9 In fact Barth’s position is much closer to these Aristotelian-Thomist
and Platonist-Augustinian traditions than is usually supposed, but his insistence on defining
God’s human covenant partner as above all a responsible subject marks an important distinction.
Barth makes the concept of responsibility fundamental to his theological ethics because it is the
concept that best expresses the status of human beings as genuine partners with God in God’s
covenant. As partners, God and human beings are related as fellow subjects, and Barth
recognizes in the concept of responsibility what it means to be a subject. From this perspective
the close connection of the concept of responsibility with that of the subject is not its fatal
liability but its greatest asset. The urgency and dignity that attach to the status of the subject
express the incomparable divine affirmation of humanity Barth finds in God’s conferral of the
The best representatives of these influential positions are, respectively, Jean Porter and Oliver O’Donovan. See
Porter, Nature as Reason (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), and O’Donovan: Resurrection and Moral Order, second
edition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994).
9
status of covenant partner on human beings, and do so in a way or to a degree that the notion of
rational agency alone is unable to do.
2. Covenant and Responsibility
We have already anticipated the claim of this section, namely, that at the center of Barth’s
theological ethics, and indeed of his theology as a whole, is the relationship of God and humanity
as two distinct yet inseparable subjects bound together in relations of mutual yet asymmetrical
responsibility. We have also seen that Barth’s term for this divine-human fellowship is
“covenant.” His particular conception of this covenant and its central place in his theology mark
his distinctive place in the Reformed tradition of Protestantism, where a principal concern of his
was to assert the consistency of God’s grace in God’s dealings with God’s people against the
tendency of Reformed theology to distinguish covenants of grace and covenants of works. As
with every Christian version of this biblical theme, however, we are faced with vexed (and
historically not at all innocent) questions concerning what Barth’s position implies regarding the
validity of the Sinai covenant and the status of the Jewish people. These questions cannot be
adequately answered without a lengthy treatment, in lieu of which we will simply assert as
plausible the view that, while not without significant problems, and in spite of many ambiguities,
Barth’s position denies that the covenant with Israel has been superseded and recognizes the
continued existence of the Jewish people as a crucial sign of God’s providence.10
We can describe the covenant as Barth understands it by referring to the three determinations
(Bestimmungen) that constitute it. It is important to keep in mind that this covenant is not
constituted merely by the will of the two partners but is ontological. The three determinations,
then, are not merely determinations of will but of being. First, from eternity God has determined
freely yet unalterably not to be God alone and in Godself but rather to be God with and for a
genuine other or counterpart (Gegenüber). In the divine freedom God could have chosen to be
God in Godself alone, apart from any other who is not God, but God’s actual choice to be God
with and for humanity instead is an ontological choice. In this choice God freely determines
God’s very being. It follows that theology cannot adequately speak of God alone without also
speaking about God’s human partner. “God is God in the very fact, and in such a way, that He
does stand … in a definite relationship with this other.”11 Second, in making this selfdetermination God also determines this other to be the one whom God is with and for. Once
again, this is an ontological determination: that God is with and for humanity in this sense is
constitutive of human being itself. Human beings are not independent, self-constituting beings
who may or may not stand in this relation to God. They are in their very being God’s partners.
“Basically and comprehensively … to be a man is to be with God…. [T]he fact that we are with
God is not merely one of many determinations of our being, derivative and mutable, but the basic
determination, original and immutable.”12
10
See especially CD IV/1, 34/34. There is a vast secondary literature on the topic. See especially Mark R. Lindsay,
Barth, Israel, and Jesus: Karl Barth’s Theology of Israel (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); Katherine Sonderegger, That
Jesus Christ was Born a Jew: Karl Barth’s “Doctrine of Israel” (University Park: The Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1992).
11
Barth, CD II/2, 6/4.
12
Barth, CD III/2, 135f./161f.
This twofold determination comprises Barth’s doctrine of election: God elects Godself to be God
with and for this other and elects this other to be the one whom God is with and for. However, in
the third place, this other would not be a genuine counterpart if she were merely the object of the
divine determination and not also a subject, that is, one for whom her divine determination (to be
the one whom God is with and for) is a summons to an act of self-determination in accordance
with it. In Barth’s words, “As election is ultimately the determination of man, the question arises
as to the self-determination which corresponds to this determination.” Precisely as the one
determined by God to be a genuine partner in God’s covenant, I am questioned regarding this
determination and am thus answerable (verantwortlich) to it, summoned to respond to it with my
own self-determination. This question or summons is the most primitive form of the command of
God, and it is in precisely this sense that God makes one responsible by giving God’s command.
It is as one is answerable to this question or summons that one is constituted a responsible
subject. Thus, Barth’s claim is that one’s status as a moral subject originates in God’s
determination to have one as a genuine partner in God’s covenant. “God cannot draw him to
Himself without involving him in responsibility (Verantwortung).”13 Moreover, as this divine
determination is not merely a determination of one’s being in general or in the abstract but rather
one that is operative at each moment of one’s existence, one is faced at each moment with the
question of whether one’s own self-determination corresponds to God’s determination. In
Barth’s words, “He is subjected to the divine will, Word and command, and called to realize the
true purpose of his existence as the covenant-partner with God. As a man, he is objectively tested
by this determination and objectively questioned as to its fulfillment. This is the essence of his
responsibility [Verantwortlichkeit].” As objectively answerable to one’s determination in this
way, one renders in one’s conduct an account to God of one’s fulfillment of this determination.
“And with what he is and wills, does and does not do, he is ineluctably caught up in one
continuing responsibility [Verantwortung], in the constant need to render an account
[Rechenschaftsablage]. How far is he really God’s covenant partner? How far does he actualize
his original and proper status?”14
It is in this way that the address of God’s command to us constitutes us as genuine subjects, not
just objects of our divine determination, and thus as genuine partners in God’s covenant. But that
covenant is a covenant of grace. God’s ontological self-determination is to be God with and for
humanity. “God has given us Himself. . . . With His divine goodness He has taken our place and
taken up our cause. He is for us in all His deity.”15 Our cause, the cause of humanity, the cause of
the right or good—this cause is God’s cause; God has taken it up, assumed it in our place.
Correlatively, God’s ontological determination of humanity is to be the one whom God is with
and for in precisely this sense. It follows that we violate our very being when, instead of existing
as those whom God is with and for, we exist as if we are in and for ourselves—as if we were on
our own or left to ourselves with regard to our cause. God would not be the one who is for us in
all God’s deity, who has taken up our cause, if God had issued God’s command (making us
responsible) and left it to us to fulfill it. This brings us back to our formula: “It is as He makes
Himself responsible for man that God makes man, too, responsible.” That God takes
responsibility for us means that God fulfills the good in our place and summons us to exist as
13
Barth, CD II/2, 510-11/566.
Barth, CD II/2, 641/713f.
15
Barth, CD II/2, 557/618.
14
those for whom this has been accomplished. God’s human partner is therefore not left to herself
to secure her cause and maintain it. Rather, God secures her cause and maintains it and thus takes
responsibility for her. It follows that the very command of God that establishes her as a genuine,
self-determining partner (and not a mere object of the divine determination), thereby making her
responsible, is a command that summons her to exist, to conduct herself, precisely as one for
whom God has taken responsibility in this way.
In short, humanity is the causa Dei and God takes responsibility for it as God’s own cause.
Problems will arise when humans take this causa Dei as one for which they are responsible,
identifying their own responsibility with God’s (ambition). But they will also arise when humans
simply acquiesce in God’s responsibility, denying or forgetting that God’s assumption of their
cause is also a summons to responsibility (cynicism). But what is this cause of humanity that
God has taken up as God’s own cause, to the point of identifying God’s very deity with it? At
this point, we have introduced it only from the standpoint of God’s election of humanity, and in
this sense it simply refers to the status of human beings as elected by God for fellowship with
God (and thus with one another as well) as fellow subjects—a status that God resolves on from
eternity in the election of Christ from eternity and realizes in time in the incarnate Christ, and
which human beings are summoned to make actual in their lives at every moment of time. A
complete account would also have to consider creation, in which God takes up the cause of the
creature against the forces of chaos and disorder that God rejected in creating the world God
created; reconciliation, in which God intervenes again to take up the cause of humanity against
humanity’s sinful and self-destructive attempt to take up its own cause, thus courting the very
forces of chaos and disorder God has rejected; and redemption, in which God’s defense of the
cause of humanity is finally victorious. In all of these dimensions God’s responsibility for the
cause of humanity and the human responsibility that corresponds to the latter undergo detailed
specification which of course we cannot investigate here.
We will instead focus on a potential problem. We have seen that for Barth the moral subject does
not constitute herself but is rather constituted by her answerability to her determination as God’s
covenant partner, an answerability that is concretely exercised in her accountability to this
determination in her conduct. While it should now be clear that humans are genuinely
responsible in this answerability or accountability, it is not clear how the responsibility of
humans for their actions themselves, for the effects of those actions, and for other human beings
follows from it. And without imputability and liability, it is not clear how there can be any
responsibility at all.
3. The Priority of Accountability to Imputability
Theories of responsibility often focus on imputability, which has to do with the condition(s)
under which an action may be attributed to someone as its author.
With the rise of natural scientific and social scientific explanations of human behavior which
challenged the notion that agency could be found in the causal order, the emphasis on
imputability becomes associated with the claim that it is up to the subject to bring morality into
the world. Whereas it was once sufficient to show that an action originates in the agent rather
than in an external force it now becomes necessary either to show how an action originates in a
spontaneous act that abstracts from desires and inclinations or to show how actions can be
attributed to agents despite their causal determination.16 Barth, whose view of this matter, as in
other matters of moral philosophy, was shaped almost entirely by his understanding of Kant and
Fichte, seems to have seriously entertained only the position that spontaneity, that is, the freedom
of actions from empirical causality, is (at least) a necessary condition for their imputability.17
Taking this position for granted, the question for Barth was whether this spontaneity is thought to
be entirely self-posited by a subject whose agency is thus the product of its self-assertion (the
answer Barth found in Fichte’s Die Bestimmung des Menschens) or whether, to the contrary, it is
self-posited only as it is posited from outside as one is addressed as a subject (the answer Barth
found in Kant’s second critique but which can also be found in the second essay of Nietzche’s
Genealogy of Morality).18
Yet insofar as the one who addresses me from outside is a genuine other and not (as with Kant) a
moral law with which, at least at the level of the transcendent, I am ultimately identifiable, it is
not the imputability of an action to me as its author that constitutes me as a subject, but rather my
answerability or accountability to the other who addresses me. Thus, for Barth I am constituted
as a moral subject not by virtue of the imputability of actions to me as their cause or origin but in
my accountability to God in regard to my determination to be God’s covenant partner. I posit
myself as responsible not by designating myself as the cause of some occurrence(s) in the world
but by acknowledging my answerability to the summons that designates me to conform, in all my
activity, to my determination. Accountability, not imputability, constitutes me as a moral subject.
It is crucial for Barth that my moral identity be constituted by my being as God’s covenant
partner and not self-constituted, by virtue of a capacity I possess in myself. If the latter were the
case then “it is up to me” would mean that I am left to myself, alone in this most fundamental
aspect of my being. At the same time, however, Barth by no means denies or ignores
imputability. My actions are indeed imputed to me, but they are imputed to me precisely as one
who is accountable in my conduct to the divine determination of my being. Thus, while it is in
being questioned as to my determination and giving answer by rendering an account of it in my
conduct (Verantwortung) that I am constituted as a subject, this very act presupposes that I have
the capacity to render the account (Verantwortlichkeit), that is, that I have the capacity for
spontaneous action.19 As God created me to be a genuine partner with God, God also created me
with the capacity to be such. Without such a capacity the command of God that summons me to
account for my divine determination would be an absurdity. As it would be one mistake to
suppose that I am constituted as a subject by virtue of my capacity for agency (so that my being
as a subject is self-grounded and independent), so it would be another mistake to suppose that
God had constituted me as a subject without equipping me with the capacity to be one.20
16
In recent decades there has been a major debate over whether an action can be attributed to an agent as its author
only if the agent has not been causally determined to do that action, with “compatibilists” arguing that in at least
some cases an action can be attributed to an agent even if it has been causally determined and “incompatibilists”
arguing that an action cannot be attributed to an agent if it has been causally determined. There is an enormous
literature on this topic, but as it is marginal to Barth’s concerns it will not be discussed here.
17
See Barth, CD III/2, 92/107, 173/206.
18
See especially Barth, “The Problem of Ethics Today, 1922,” in Barth, The Word of God and Theology, translated
by Amy Marga (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2011), pp. 148-149 [translation of Barth, “Das Problem der Ethik in der
Gegenwart, 1922,” in Barth, Vorträge und Kleinere Arbeiten, 1922-1925, herausgegeben von Holger Finze
(Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 1990), S. 118-119].
19
Barth, CD III/2, 174f./208f.
20
Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality has also been mentioned, and it is worth comparing Barth’s position on
accountability and imputability with the one set out there. Like Nietzsche, Barth does not think that responsibility
This relationship between accountability and imputability indicates that Barth’s concept of
responsibility can account for the attribution of actions. It also indicates how he understood our
responsibility in relation to God’s taking up our cause as creatures. As creator, God does not
bring into being a creature who is responsible for establishing and maintaining itself as a
responsible being (hence the priority of accountability), yet God endows the creature with the
natural capacity to be a responsible being. Humans wrongly and self-destructively take up their
own cause when they exercise this capacity to posit themselves as responsible beings and thereby
assert themselves as neutral and solitary subjects for whom “it is up to me” will inevitably bring
anxiety
4. Limited Liability
Just as there has been a tendency toward the intensification of imputability in modern ethics,
there has also been a tendency toward the expansion of liability. And just as Barth attempted to
reject the notion that the moral subject constitutes itself without rejecting the notion of the
subject as such, as one for whom “it is up to me,” so he attempted to do with the notion that the
moral subject is burdened with the cause of the good or right, its realization in the world.
Liability has to do with what one is responsible for, what can be charged to one’s account, as it
were. It includes one’s responsibility for who or what comes under one’s care—children in the
case of parents, the nation and its citizenry in the case of statesmen, to refer to two classic
examples. Liability also includes one’s responsibility for the effects of one’s actions. Here, a
trend toward the expansion of liability is manifest in the growing tendency to hold individuals as
well as corporate entities responsible, whether morally or legally, for remote and unforeseen (and
perhaps also for unforeseeable) risks that accompany their actions.21 Finally, liability includes
the blame or guilt one may incur for the actions of others; a corporate officer, for example, may
be liable for actions of employees under her authority. Here, the trend toward expansion of
liability is paradigmatically expressed in Hannah Arendt’s insistence that the very idea of
humanity entails “that in one form or another men must assume responsibility for all crimes
committed by men and that all nations share the onus of evil committed by all others.”
In all of these respects the range of what is up to me extends well beyond what I can foresee (to
say nothing of what I intend) and what I have authority over. It is doubtful that Barth would
object to these extensions, and given his strong conviction of human solidarity we may presume
that he would heartily endorse Arendt’s claim. However, there is another sense in which liability
has expanded in modern ethics. This sense is partially captured by the effects of what Charles
Taylor describes as “Reform” in his narrative of secularity. Reform refers to what Taylor sees as
originates in a “doer behind the deed” but instead locates its origin in the address of another before whom I must
render an account of myself, on the basis of which rests imputability. However, there are significant differences.
First, for Niezsche the scene of address is one of punishment; I am called to account for an occurrence and respond
by positing myself as the cause of it. For Barth, as we have seen, I am addressed as one whose cause God has taken
as God’s own cause and summoned to posit myself as one for whom God has thus intervened. Second, for Nietzsche
responsibility, so understood, is a fiction (though one that is productive of very real effects) it has ontological status.
21
See Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); and Paul
Ricoeur, “The Concept of Responsibility,” in Ricoeur, The Just (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp.
11-35.
the effort, beginning in late medieval western Christendom, to bring the whole of society into
conformity with norms and ideals that were previously thought to be attainable only by a
segment of society. According to Taylor, the success of this endeavor led to increased confidence
in the unaided capacities of humans to reshape society, and also to a conviction that the meaning
and purpose of human life, and the legitimacy of human existence, are found above all in the
vocation to bring all of human life into conformity with moral requirements and ideals—a task
with which human beings not only consider themselves to be charged but which they also
consider themselves to be in principle capable of fulfilling.22
The point in invoking Taylor is not to endorse his lengthy and intricate story of modernity but
only to offer his discussion of Reform as an illuminating description of the notion that the cause
of the good or right in the world is up to us and a plausible account of how that notion came to
comprise an important part of the modern self-understanding. It is precisely this liability for
conforming human life to the good or the right that Barth rejects in his effort to derive our
responsibility from the responsibility God has taken for us. In assuming this liability, “man wants
to stand at God’s side in defense of the cosmos great and small against the invasion of chaos and
disorder and wrong. . . . He wants to step into the breach, . . . successfully maintaining the causa
Dei and the cause of man.” The problem Barth finds in this presumptuous stance is immediately
apparent; as we have seen, it is for God to maintain God’s cause, which is itself the cause of
humanity. To usurp God’s role by attempting to maintain this cause ourselves is therefore to
threaten it: “he is not the man to cut this figure, and if he thinks that he is, then he is well on the
way to creating the very opposite of all that he intends to create in his godless goodness—
unleashing chaos and disorder and wrong.”23 This tragic condition results not only from the
limits of human knowledge of the good and power to realize it but also because to assume
responsibility for God’s cause is to set oneself against one’s fellow human beings. “I am already
choosing wrong when I think that I know and ought to decide what is right, and I am doing
wrong when I try to accomplish that which I have chosen as right. I am already putting myself in
the wrong with others . . . when . . . I confront them as the one who is right. . . .”24
In denying that human beings are liable for the cause of good or right in the world in this way,
Barth seems to be denying human liability altogether, asserting that God’s responsibility for
God’s own cause is exercised by God alone, altogether apart from human conduct. This
impression gains plausibility when we consider that Barth wrote these words during a period
when he was much occupied with the situation of Europe in the face of the Cold War. His denial
of human liability here seems of a piece with his refusal to accept the terms he felt were dictated
by the hegemony of the two superpowers, each of which had indeed presumed to stand at God’s
side and to maintain the cause of humanity against the other. Barth’s words here seem to reflect
the quietism some see, rightly or wrongly, in his essay on “The Church between East and West.”
However, it is implausible to suppose that Barth wished to deny human liability altogether. For
him, as we have seen, human beings are in their very being, and therefore at all times, covenant
partners of God, and thus genuine subjects, and as we have also seen, the responsibility God
takes for us makes us, too, responsible. If God’s Word to us addresses us as those who must
answer, and if our answer is given as we render an account of our conduct, then it follows “that
22
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).
Barth, CD IV/1, 450/500.
24
Barth, CD IV/1, 451/500.
23
as the people we are we have to participate in that work of the Word.” Our responsibility,
however, is the responsibility to exist as those for whom God has taken responsibility, and our
liability is accordingly limited: “Not as those who have to finish the work, to reach the goal, to
bring in the results.”25 Yet, human beings are genuine participants in God’s liability for God’s
cause. “They do not really aim to do what God does. They aim only to participate [dabei sein].
They do not do the work [operieren nicht]: they assist [assistieren].”26
To what extent does this participation or assistance entail liability? The answer depends on what
Barth thinks is their content and the magnitude of involvement they entail. However, these
matters are left unclear, and it would take a long investigation to clarify them. Perhaps it can
only be said that for Barth, human beings participate in God’s liability without actually taking it
on themselves. In any case, what is clear is that liability can be rightly exercised by human
beings only when it, too, is subordinated to answerability or accountability. “I can only live in
unity with myself, and we can only live in fellowship with one another, when I and we subject
ourselves to the right which does not dwell in us and is not manifested by us, but which is over
me and us as the right of God above, and manifested to me and us only from God. . . .”27
Conclusion
Barth’s theology can be described as a declaration of Christian humanism. In it, human beings
have the status of fellow subjects with God and are invested with the dignity that attaches to that
status. Yet that status is not something that human beings must attain for themselves, having
been equipped by God only with the potential for it. It is a rather a gift of God—not a gift that
God might or might not give, but a gift that constitutes their very being as humans, and thus their
status as subjects. For humans to attempt to seize this status for themselves is therefore to violate
it. They do not thereby destroy it—they cannot undo their very being as created—but they do
exist in violation of it, and violation has severe ontic effects even if it has no ontological effect.
What Barth believes, then, is that God is radically (ontologically) for us in a way that we cannot
be for ourselves, except in tragic violation of ourselves. For him, when humans lose their trust
that God is for us, they are no longer able to accept that they are merely human but instead strive
to play the role that God seems unwilling or unable to play or to fill the place left by God’s
absence. However, in this very effort to achieve and secure their humanity they imperil it.
Barth’s response was not to reassert divine power or authority against Promethean usurpation but
to rearticulate God’s being for humanity in a way that makes it possible for us to be genuinely
yet merely human. As answerable to God, I am designed as a unique and irreplaceable subject,
and as such a participant in God’s defense of the cause of humanity against chaos, disorder, and
wrong. Yet precisely as such, I am also merely human, aware that I have neither the power nor
the authority to realize that cause in the world. Such is Barth’s ethic of responsibility.
25
Barth, CD I/2, 275/300.
Barth, CD I/2, 276/301.
27
Barth, CD IV/1, 451/501.
26