tendency and import of all of this—but of the cross, which becomes “the criterion of knowledge of God.”25
The next section (chapters 5–6) Barth depicts as offering an ethical criticism of the Corinthian church. Against the “unbridled human vitality” of the man who has married his mother-in-law, and of Christian believers who elect to have their cases decided by pagan judges, Paul preaches they have a Master. Men and women are indeed body, but the purpose of their corporeality is not to celebrate itself as an end in itself, but to await and testify to the new corporeality of the resurrection.26 Correlatively, the seventh chapter deals with precisely the opposite problem, that of the “radical-ethical group”27 that advocated sexual abstinence in marriage and the dissolution of marriages where one partner was not Christian. Barth argues that though Paul is in practical agreement with these radical extremists, he cannot fully espouse their position:
Above his own well-founded opinion on this matter, and against the enthusiasm of those who made the matter into a principle, Paul also employs here the words “from God.” … It is God who stands in the way of the licentious, but it is also God who stands in the way of the radical moralists.28
Paul’s discourse regarding the extent of the Christian’s freedom to eat meat which has been sacrificed to idols (chapters 8–10) is also characterized as a concrete situation to which Paul brings to bear the critical force of the higher viewpoint “of God.” Against excessive religious hubris, even against the best-intentioned individual ethicism, Paul places the glory of God as the standard of judgment. Barth discovers the same principle in the eleventh through fourteenth chapters of the epistle. The attention to order and subordination as concerns the relationship between men and women in the church, as well as the “shadow which Christ casts over the whole of life on this side of the grave”29 in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, serve as signposts to the resurrection—the real matter of concern.
With the emphasis of chapter 13 on the endurance of love Barth claims we are really already thinking about eschatology, though examined here from the human perspective. He regards this as “the secret theme of the Epistle” which reaches its highest expression in chapter 15.30 It is this love, the love that allows its object to be ever and only just what it is, the love that will not impose human limitations upon its divine object, the love of “the reality which exists beyond all the crises,” that endures.31
Barth’s interest in the unity of the epistle stems from his conviction concerning the unity of the subject matter to which Paul testifies. Barth’s is not merely a literary concern, but an epistemological one in the sense that he sees the text as bearing witness to one overarching cohesive truth, the character of which must have its effect in the gathering and shaping of the apparently disparate themes of the epistle. Barth holds that the reason Paul gives such attention to these (at times seemingly peripheral) matters has to do with the fact that they bear upon the central matter of the gospel. Thus, Barth assumes the integrity and cohesion of the subject matter—in this case, the resurrection of the dead—as a primary feature of the apostolic witness.
The Resurrection Chapter
The Resurrection as the Origin of Christian Faith
Unlike those who wish to understand resurrection language as a symbolic expression of some other reality, Barth here sees the apostolic account of the resurrection as something altogether fundamental, comprising the origin, reality, and end of the church’s faith. The Corinthian error, in Barth’s view, was to claim there was no resurrection of the dead, which they saw as an unnecessary Pauline accretion to the basic truth of the Christian gospel. Once freed from its bodily imprisonment, they held, the eternal blessing of the soul was guaranteed, thus rendering the notion of the resurrection of the body superfluous. The Corinthians preferred to think of the teaching of the resurrection of the dead as a curious, but wholly peripheral oddity of Paul’s message,32 not understanding it to be the bedrock and surety upon which they stood as Christian believers.33 By resurrection the Corinthians understood the bodily resurrection of Jesus, but only as a peculiar anomaly. For them death was no enemy, but just an inevitable moment in the stream of human existence, which included the survival of the soul through death as well as its continued existence after the death of the body. According to Barth, “for them the overcoming of sins is not inseparably connected with a victory over death, they do not perceive why this victory should be the victory.”34
Against this Corinthian threat of rejection of the primary matter, Paul, in vv. 1–11, argues the impossibility of escaping the embarrassment of this “extreme paradox.”35 The kerygma of the other apostles has no other meaning than the gospel preached by Paul from the beginning.36 As Barth sees it, Paul recounts the list of witnesses as demonstration that they all, without exception, testify to the same reality to which Paul testifies.37 Far from an apologetic effort to establish rational foundations for belief in the resurrection, Paul simply asserts the primordiality of the resurrection witness in the preaching of all the apostles. There is no way of getting behind the apostolic witness to something more original or substantive; without exception they testified that He who was dead now lives. The Corinthian Christians therefore could not escape the fact that the foundation on which they stood was the witness to the self-revelation of God in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
The Resurrection as the Meaning of Christian Faith
On Barth’s reading, vv. 12–34 of chapter 15 constitute a “work of destruction” in which Paul attacks the Corinthian notion of a “Christianity without … the Resurrection of the dead” as a thinly veiled “radical scepticism towards everything divine.”38 The Corinthians did not understand the “fundamental” and “vital significance” the resurrection held for them.39 Since the resurrection of Christ is a matter of the revelation of God to the whole of history—and not a “miracle or myth or psychic experience”—we must conclude that “the miracle of God to Christ is immediately and simultaneously the miracle of God to us, and not a miracle about which it may, at any rate, still be asked: what has it to do with us?”40 Precisely because this resurrection is God’s self-revelation the conclusion from Christ to all others is inescapable. Paul argues that the implications of what is believed by the Corinthians entails something strange to them, something that was neither anticipated nor admitted by them, namely, “the general resurrection of the dead.”41 If there is no resurrection then there are no last things, no crisis that puts the whole of human history into question:
If the world and the life that we know is endless, then the belief in the beyond is also only an expression in idealism, with which we affirm the endless progress of this man … Dying is pitilessly nothing but dying, only the expression of the corruptibility of all finite things, if there be no end of the finite, no perishing of the corruptible, no death of death.42
Following a quite technical engagement with the Greek text of vv. 20–28, Barth concludes that Paul offers, not an “eschatological mythology,” but the assertion that “Christ as the second Adam is the beginning of the resurrection of the dead,” which achieves its fullness or “perfection” in “the resurrection … of His own,” the very thing that was denied in Corinth.43 Thus, Christ’s parousia is not to be viewed as another reality distinct from his resurrection; it is “only the definite coming-to-the-surface of the same subterranean stream which in revelation for the first time became perceptible in time.”44 Christ’s parousia is of a piece with his resurrection, yet it can be grasped in time only as a promise, only in hope. The world in its present form and also our present relationship to God is a provisional state in the midst of transition. The Corinthians were mistaken to understand the resurrection of Christ “as something finished and satisfying in itself.”45 The Kingdom of God is not already established but is in the process of coming. The Kingdom of God arrives when the final enemy, death, is defeated. The Kingdom of Christ
is rather
