but are understood; not only comprehend, but are grasped” (R I:7). We share in the immediacy of the knowledge that God knows Godself because “the concept of God is given us as immediately as our own being” (R I:14). However, this immediacy is not grounded on a human search for God but in God’s initiative grasping of human being. In other words, as Hermann Kutter had described it: von Gott aus, out from God.
Kutter takes a middle stance between Blumhardt and Barth. The social question in Kutter’s thought was anchored in the fundamental theological horizon of preaching. This is performed neither in terms of eschatological and christological-pneumatic proclamation of the kingdom of God (like Blumhardt’s) nor in terms of the Ritschlian concept of God’s kingdom-idea (like the young Naumann). For Kutter the Bible speaks of the living God. The Bible starts from God onward. This understanding of God is redefined idealistically as immediate life in his early writing, Das Unmittelbare (1902). This immediate life, appearing in Jesus Christ, stands against dead and rigid religion. In his writing Sie Müssen! the immediate life turns into a concept of the living God. For Kutter, “social democracy belongs to the gospel.”8
The living God is the redefinition of idealistic “immediacy” so that “God” is not present in the mediation of the Christian doctrine of God, such as ceremony, dogmas, religious consciousness, or religion in general, but present in life, especially in the immediacy of human deeds. Given this fact, social democracy is to be seen from God onward: “The social democrats are revolutionary, because God is revolutionary. They must move forward, because God’s kingdom must move forward. They are people who overthrow, because God is the great overthrower.”9 However, such an identity does not mean a strict identification, but an analogy: “Jesus had an eternal, unchangeable must: the must of God’s love. In just such a must the social democrats stand . . . What the gospel has in common with social democrats is . . . a great irresistible must, with which they announce a new condition of divine progress against the present age.”10
An organic relation between identity and analogy in Kutter’s thought-complex plays an important role in Barth’s understanding of God’s kingdom in relation to the world in Romans I. However, Barth’s way of expressing the immediacy of humanity in relation to God as Ursprung is accused of resulting in a pantheistic conception of the God/world relation. In Barth God is “the innermost but disarrayed nature of all things and all men in their height and depth” (R I:34). For humans in Christ the grace of God is natural, not alien. Being in Christ means one is transplanted into the tree of life. Being in Christ means the objective truth of divine love to the world. Being in Christ means the new or rather the most primordial nature of life. It is the natural foundation of all existence, our nature in God (R I:220). Given this statement, Hans Urs von Balthasar sees a platonic and oriental Christian concept of identity shaping Barth’s theology, and from that point the pantheistic concept of nature becomes necessarily dialectical.11
However, Barth’s standpoint is not inextricably tied to a philosophical unity of idealism but to christological universalism in light of the resurrection of Christ from the dead. The movement of God is not to be understood as a mechanical process or an immanent cultural history, but as the critical, actual, limiting, and justifying principle over the world.12
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